Mustard Flowers

Mustard flowers bright
Reaching for the spring sunshine
A promise of warmth

Kick Out the Jams by MC5

This is easily the best 60s album that you’ve never heard before, mainly because there is not a radio station in the world that could play this unbleeped. Most record stores refused to stock this too. As well as the category A swearing, this feels genuinely revolutionary, somewhere between an evangelical revival and a political rally inciting the crowd to riot.

I’m not going to get into the arguments about whether this counts as the first punk record - it’s certainly loud and angry, and shambolic in places, but there’s no lack of musical skill in the guitars and rock solid drumming. The standout track is Kick Out the Jams which never fails to make the hairs stand up on the back of my neck and makes me want to punch the air (or a fascist goon). 

This is what music can be and should be. 

https://album.link/gb/i/1018383064

Spring Mist

Mist hangs like a shroud 
Spring sunshine on dewy grass
New day softly wakes

The Big Sleep

I’m currently reading this for the book club and spotted that this was available for streaming, so I picked it for Saturday night viewing.

It’s a classic tale of hard boiled detectives, blackmail, betrayal, vice and murder from 1946 starring Humphrey Bogart as private eye Philip Marlowe and Lauren Bacall as Mrs Rutledge, the object of both his investigation and affections.

Plotwise Marlowe is employed by the elderly Colonel Sternwood to investigate a letter from a rare book dealer called Geiger asking for money to cover gambling debts supposedly incurred by his younger daughter, the flirtatious and unpredictable Carmen. After accepting the job, Marlowe also encounters Sternwood’s elder daughter, the married but separated Mrs Rutledge who seems keen to know what her father is up to.

Marlowe soon discovers that Geiger’s bookshop is not quite what it seems and tracks him to his house in the Hollywood hills. As he keeps watch, a shot rings out and he breaks in to discover a drugged Carmen in a compromising position, a very dead Geiger and a secret camera with the film missing. Shenanigans ensue.

From this point, things get steadily more confusing and complicated with multiple murders and murky mysteries, explained with a hefty amount of dialogue and people pointing guns at each other. At some points I wished for a detective’s notebook or a murder board with pictures and bits of red string to keep track of who was double crossing who.

The sparky scenes with Bogart and Bacall keep things moving though with some unexpectedly funny bits of business thrown in to lighten the tone. Bogart was 25 years senior to Bacall, but that didn’t stop him from carrying on a very public affair with her whilst divorcing his third wife. The pair married in 1945 and were reportedly happy together until Bogart’s death some 12 years later.

Blossom

Sakura season
As fleeting as life itself
Moment of zanshin

Grass

A careless whisper
In the midst of the long grass
Deepest secrets shared

Yank Crime by Drive Like Jehu

Musical genres are funny things. I started listening to this album, knowing nothing about it, and initially assumed that it was hardcore punk of some variety. I then checked the track listing and saw that the first song was not far short of six minutes and the next two were even longer. The next clue was the vocal style which was that distracting screaming where the lyrics are pretty much incomprehensible. Fine if you like that sort of thing, but not really my cup of tea.

Vocals aside, I enjoyed the digressions into random noise and math rock guitar noodling, particularly the last track on the bonus version where the voice was way down in the mix and much more enjoyable as a result. 

A pretty solid 3 stars from me.

https://album.link/gb/i/321075318