Night, Walnut

Night time by the fire
Carefully cracking walnut shells
Feasting on the fruits

Heavy Weather by Weather Report

Classic jazz funk fusion and the opening track Birdland is a genuine banger. After that, it’s very much a case of diminishing returns and a lot will depend on your tolerance for generic mid 70s synth sounds and fretless bass noodling. There is one oddly out of place live track for vocals and drums that sounds like it’s about to get interesting and is cut off - I would have liked more of that.

Cloudy with a chance of showers-tastic!

Dragonfly, Gusts

Gossamer wings beat
Caught up in a sudden gust
Swooping and soaring

Veckatimest by Grizzly Bear

A perfectly amiable folk pop record that sums up how it feels to be on an uninhabited island of the coast of Massachusetts. I imagine. Oddly enough, the track I enjoyed the most was the bonus piano only demo version of “All I Ask” on the end.

Sunbeam, Wind

Dad's Chrysler Sunbeam
Fast as the wind, till he got
A speeding ticket

2112 by Rush

Now, I’m partial to a bit of prog and I like sci-fi, so in theory I should fall into the same Venn diagram as Rush. However the reality doesn’t quite match up. Geddy Lee’s falsetto vocals leave me cold and drummer Neil Peart (technically brilliant as he was) obviously subscribes to the ‘more is more’ school of drumming. The rest is clever twiddly bits, sections of classical music thrown in to show how cultured they are and one too many improvised guitar solos.

The biggest problem though is the theme of the title track, inspired by the objectivist libertarian philosophy of Ayn Rand which is so appealing to teenage boys who think that billionaires shouldn’t have to pay taxes because they’re obviously so much cleverer than everybody else.

The actual story is some trite nonsense about an intergalactic war where the baddies who want to outlaw individualism and free will are represented by a red star (subtle, eh?). The hero of the piece discovers a mysterious ancient artefact in a cave which turns out to be an electric guitar and at that point I stopped caring and lost the will to live.

The second side of the album is a bit more fun, with a song about the relative merits of different varieties of hash from round the world. However, the final track returns to Ayn Randism with ‘Something for Nothing’ which might as well be called ‘Wake up Sheeple’.

Oh, and for anyone still reading it turns out that Ayn Rand did end up living on welfare towards the end of her life. Oh dear, how sad, never mind.

Ice by Anna Kavan

Well, this wasn’t quite what I was expecting. It opens conventionally enough with an unnamed narrator driving through an unseasonably harsh ice storm, looking for a remote house where he is anticipating meeting a girl that he his infatuated with and her controlling, possibly abusive, husband who is variously described as an artist or a warden.

From there, things get stranger and more dreamlike, with a series of vignettes that may or may not be dreams, with our narrator growing ever more obsessed in his pursuit of the girl through a series of war torn locales and threats from the enigmatic warden who now seems to be some sort of warlord or fascist leader, and all the time vast walls of ice are pressing ever closer.

The book is narrated in an appropriately cold and clinical style, reminiscent of the confident first person scientific narrative style of authors like HG Wells, but it quickly becomes clear that this is most definitely an unreliable account.

I had thought that this was a bit of climate sci-fi like Kim Stanley Robinson’s later work, but even though there are allusions to the ice being caused by some sort of apocalyptic war it’s an allegorical backdrop rather than any sort of hard science examination of a nuclear winter. The narrative moves through different countries, without explicitly mapping the geography, although at one point references to Norse history and fjords are made.

The main theme is rather the pursuit of this mythical girl, verging on the manic pixie archetype with silver hair, who always seems out of reach and continually rebuffs any attempts at a “rescue” from the clutches of the warden. Indeed, sometimes it’s suggested that the narrator and the warden are either the same person or identical in their violent, male urges to possess the girl, with some disturbing sections implying rape or other physical abuse.

The ending is somewhat abrupt and ambiguous, implying a grim conclusion and I’m still not entirely sure what to make of it. It’s been described as ’slipstream’ fiction rather than conventional sci-fi which seems as good a description as any.