Pampas Grass

Here we see the home
Of the suburban swinger
Marked by pampas grass

Street Signs by Ozomatli

This one was a little tricky to track down on streaming, but it was well worth the effort and I’ve put the cd on my to buy list. The opening track ‘Believe’ is a good example of the style, mixing bouncy Latin rhythms with Bollywood funk and rap, to produce an infectious bit of dance music. There are couple of skippable ballads on here which just knocks it down from being a five star for me. Definitely one where I’m going to check out more of their stuff

https://album.link/i/1440768611

Shell

One thing is now clear
They knew, they all bloody knew
Doomed us all to hell

Now I Got Worry by The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion

Sometimes you just want music to be an enjoyable racket, with a group thrashing around and having a good time, without overthinking anything. This album does exactly what it says on the tin. It’s a mix of blues, random screams, punk riffs, a bit of dub, weird shit and a very creditable Elvis impression. 

You really can’t go wrong with tracks like Fuck Shit Up and Chicken Dog which brings back veteran bluesman Rufus C Thomas to reprise his classic hits Funky Chicken and Walk the Dog, and apparently have a whale of a time doing it. 

https://album.link/gb/i/1100060926

Warbler

At first light we hear
The distinctive notes of the
Warbler’s overture

Pronounced Leh-Nerd Skin-Nerd by Lynyrd Skynyrd

Solid southern blues/rock and featuring the epic nine minute Freebird, this album should be up my street, but unfortunately it comes with a big red flag - literally in this case. Lynyrd Skynrd (probably the only band named after a strict PE teacher) made a thing of using a confederate flag as part of their stage set and on album covers. They also had a beef with Neil Young’s song ‘Alabama’ and wrote ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ as a response, saying it was unfair to blame the whole of the South for slavery. Given that their music owes a huge debt to the delta blues, this is a disingenuous stance to say the least.

A plane crash in 1977 killed lead singer and front man Ronnie Van Zant, two other band members, their roadie and the two pilots of their charter plane. The surviving members reformed the band 10 years later with Van Zant’s younger brother Johnny as singer, but carried on using the flag until 2012, dropping it for a while and cravenly restoring it for a while after ‘fans’ complained. 

Giving this two stars purely for memories of Freebird always being played at school discos that I went to as a kid.

https://album.link/gb/i/1440838012

One Battle After Another

I went into this film not knowing a great deal about it, other than it was this year's Oscar winner. It opens with an audacious raid by a rag tag left wing revolutionary group on an immigration camp on the Mexican border to free prisoners being held there. Whilst Pat (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) is seemingly in charge of little more than letting off some celebratory fireworks his partner, the marvellously named Perfida Beverley Hills (Teyanna Taylor) sexually humiliates the camp commandant Col. Lockjaw (Sean Penn). 

After an attempted bombing, Perfida is intercepted by Lockjaw who it seems has a fetishistic obsession with her and blackmails her into meeting for sex. She winds up pregnant, but this doesn't seem to quench her revolutionary fervour (one striking shot shows her heavily pregnant and joyfully firing an automatic rifle), and after giving birth to a daughter she returns to the fight and is finally arrested during a bank raid. 

Cut to 16 years later. Pat is now living off grid under an alias as Bob with daughter Willa (played by Chase Infiniti). Lockjaw has been invited to join a secretive White Supremacist group called the Christmas Adventurers Club so determines to hunt down Willa to hide any evidence that he might once have had an interracial relationship. Hijinks and ultra violence ensue.

I'm still not sure quite what to make of this film. There are obvious parallels with the current situation with right wing racist paramilitaries hunting down immigrants and carrying out summary executions of undesirables. However, the revolutionaries seem to be more rooted in the radical chic of the 1970s than contemporary movements like Antifa. The film was adapted from the novel Vineland by Thomas Pynchon which was set between the late 60s and 1984, which might explain this though.

There is an uneasy tension between the truly vile politics of the Christmas Adventurers and almost farcical/slapstick humour as acid casualty Pat tries and fails to remember his identifying passcodes, worries about charging his phone, and then falls off a roof to be tasered by the police whilst on the run. 

The film is also on the long side at over two and half hours, cramming an awful lot of stuff in there with some great action sequences and car chases that feel almost grafted in from a classic 70s style thriller. The score by Johnny Greenwood of Radiohead is also worthy of note and underpins the action nicely.

Not what I was expecting, but worth a watch.