It’s a new year, and my only resolution is to shove more art into my brain holes. If that’s your resolution, too, you’ve come to a great place. Let’s find some stuff to shove into your brain holes. This is Cool Stuff For Cool Lifeforms January 2023!
Music
The Murder Capital – Gigi’s Recovery
This was already mentioned in another article on this site, but this album is so good I’m mentioning it again. Fuck it, right? In particular, the three-track stretch of Return My Head, Ethel, and The Stars Will Leave Their Stage is a sequence so masterful, it threatens to eclipse the rest of the album. And that is not a slight of what the other 9 tracks have to offer. There are some great songs among those tracks. It’s just that this stretch is songwriting perfection. Great isn’t the enemy of perfect, but it can sometimes be easy to overlook great when perfect is right there, sitting in the middle of this wonderful album. I would urge people to let the whole thing sit with them for a while. It’s worth it.
The Wrens – The Meadowlands
Hey, this album is a masterpiece. It’s a bunch of tired punk rockers who took forever off in between albums and came back with this kinda sad but melodic and moving album. It would probably be indebted to current Midwestern Emo if it hadn’t been made twenty years ago, and that somehow makes it feel more in tune with the now than it felt in 2003.
Books
N.K. Jemisin – The City We Became
The premise of this book sounds a little corny if you’re as cynical as I can be. There’s an evil force set out to destroy New York City. A person from each borough actually becomes that borough (with superpowers?) and fights the evil force alongside the person who became all of New York City. Just saying it out loud like that sounds insane, but Jemisin is such a brilliant author that this batshit premise comes across as natural and cool. Like all great world builders, she creates rules for this world that she sprinkles into her vivid prose in between honestly rad-as-shit action sequences. It’s a lot of fun, but it isn’t empty fun. Only the best authors can balance poignant and fun to this degree, and Jemisin is clearly among the best speculative fiction authors out there.
Christopher Priest – Inverted World
I waited long enough to push this book on everyone. It’s one of my favorite novels (from the author of The Prestige), and it’s mind-bending and cool. Most of the novel takes place in what is essentially a giant train city where they build the tracks in front of the train as they go. The protagonist comes of age and finds out in the opening chapter that they are doing this because if they stop moving, some force will kill them. The only way to stay alive is to move. And that’s all I’ll say because part of the joy of reading this novel is finding out more about the world as the book unfolds. This is a book that feels like discovering something hidden and dark and beautiful.
For more content for your brain holes, please check out previous installments of Cool Stuff For Cool Lifeforms.