SOUNDTRACK: KING GIZZARD AND THE LIZARD WIZARD-Fishing for Fishies (2019).
The first of two albums released by KGATLW in 2019, Fishing for Fishies is a bluesy, boogie-filled record.
It opens with with two false starts. There’s the briefest sound of a sound like they’d recorded over another track but left it, then there’s a drum beat that hits a few and stops only to resume a few seconds later and starts the title song. “Fishing for Fishies” is a soft shuffling song with delicately whispered vocals and a bouncy melody. It’s super catchy and is followed by “Boogieman Sam” with its bouncy staccato guitar and then Ambrose’s wailing harmonica.
“The Bird Song” is a favorite on the record. Fun gently whispered lyrics and a remarkably catchy jazzy song. “Plastic Boogie” is loose blues song with a lot of people talking throughout, giving the whole thing a party atmosphere.
“Cruel Millennial” is sung by Ambrose. It’s a swinging boogie with a catchy chorus and some wailing harmonica soloing at the end. “Real’s Not Real” starts as a potentially heavy rocker but as the song proper starts, it shifts abruptly to a kind of mellow Beatles-y piano-pop song.
“This Thing” is a harmonica-fueled blues song with great big bouncy bass line. “Acarine” is an unusual song on the disc. It’s slower and moodier slow moody with whispered vocals and piercing harmonica. Although the last two and a half minutes are an instrumental jam with looping synths that sound like a sci-fi soundtrack.
“Cyboogie” ends the disc. It was the first singe off the album and it’s as catchy as anything. Who knew it was so much fun singing “boogie, boogie, boogie, boogie, boogie, boogie, boogie.” The buzzy bouncing synth is a great sound for this song and the cyber voice prompts a return of Han-Tyumi who pops in after murdering the universe.
[READ: April 29, 2021] Manopause
I have no idea who Bernard O’Shea is. Well, he’s an Irish comedian, but I don’t know what kind. He could be Ireland’s Jeff Foxworthy for all I know. I doubt that he’s Ireland’s Dave Chapelle, anyway.
I read O’Shea’s first book when it came across my desk at work. When this one appeared a few days ago I thought it was the same guy. A little research confirmed it, and since I mostly enjoyed the first book, I thought I would read this one as well.
It’s tough playing the mid-life crisis card, especially for a successful male. And, honestly, for a bunch of the book I did think “oh, moan moan moan.” The key though is if you can make the moaning funny. O’Shea manages to do that for a time but then, unexpectedly, the book gets serious. O’Shea looks seriously into changing is life and he explores several ways to do so.
Manopause is a funny enough term, but I appreciate that O’Shea had the sensibility to include his mother’s comment about him using the word.
He told his mother he was going through “the manopause…the male menopause.” To which she replied
If you had any idea what the menopause was like, Bernard, believe me, you wouldn’t go through it. Sweating, hot flashes, no sleep–at times it feels like you are going mad…. You wouldn’t survive 30 seconds of it. No man would survive it. Jesus, if ye did go through it, we’d never hear the end of it. And if you went through it, you’d hospitalise yourself.
That might be the funniest thing in the book.
We met Bernard’s long-suffering wife Lorna in the first book. She is longer-suffering still.
In chapter one, Lorna gives him an amazing birthday present. She takes herself and their three kids away to her mother’s for five days. He has five days to himself, to do whatever he wants.
He talks about how he loves his kids, but boy are they ever a bit much. The book is full of lists, usually lists of five things. So the five top cries he hears: Daddy, I’m stuck; Daddy, I’m hungry; Daddy, Tadhg hit me or Daddy, Olivia hit me; I don’t want to; Daddy, wipe me.
Pretty standard kid behavior, but he gives some amusing examples. Especially when he’s at the soft toy climbing gym and
we look at a father who has had to get off the limited seating and propel himself into the giant padded universe to rescue his crying child. We don’t follow him or give any help. We just watch as he tries to squeeze through the multicoloured batons and tackle the grappling wall to pull his daughter’s fairy wings out of the ball-pit netting on the third floor. We look up and think, thank God that’s not me today.
On his free nights he gets drunk (which he can’t do anymore), watches grown up TV, and goes to the National Gallery–something he’s never done despite living in Dublin his whole life.
This proves significant because there is a tour in the Gallery (there’s always a tour) and one of the children says he looks just like one of the men in a panting. They are wearing the same color scheme, yes, but he also notices the man is very fat.
In an amusing piece of art criticism he concludes that the man in the painting, Joseph Leeson (by Pompeo Batoni) is grabbing his penis. But clearly, he is not (see picture); although what he’s doing is unclear.
Bernard talks about men of that time compensating for their size, but we know that men were proud of their girth back then.
Although I did chuckle at him saying that men were often painted holding the reins of a horse, “The equivalent of a picture of me standing beside a sports car while holding my stomach in.”
He decides to go to the gym on day 3 and gets angry at two swole Millennials who are talking loudly in the steam bath about their workouts and having “experiences” and using apps like Headspace and Calm.
Day 4 sees him uncovering a box of stuff from when he was a kid–notebooks full of song lyrics that he wrote. My two fave song titles; “You bomb, I destroy” and “I’m in love with pain, You are in love with the same.”
On day 5, he grabs a can of fake tan and puts some on, until he sees that the bottle says it will darken over time and he realizes just how dumb he looks.
his wife’s birthday is a little after his own. He is terrible at getting gifts for her. So he decides to give her comparable present–he will be at her beck and call for five days.
They have regular rows that he doesn’t do enough around the house. He argues that he does plenty (since he wrote this it sounds like he is correct). The next five days show Lorna taking full advantage of the gift and asking him to do all the things that she (and he) hates to do. He is crabby and exhausted by the end and while it’s no fun to hear a guy whine about doing housework, the section (exacerbated by his neuroses) is fairly amusing,
Part two is a bit funnier because he makes fun of himself for spending a ton of money on things that he doesn’t ever use.
He has a lengthy story about buying Birkenstocks (based on an ad of an older gentleman looking youthful while wearing them) and then wearing them with sandals to the beach (poor Loran). But that’s not as bad as when his arse was hanging out of his trunks.
All of this seems to consolidate into his telling himself that he needs to lose weight (again). The rest of the book gets fairly serious (with comic moments) as he looks at his life and decides he needs to make some changes.
He pledged to lose four stone. It amuses me that he talks a lot about how he uses Imperial measurements rather than the metric system and how much trouble this gets him in (no duh). But it’s amusing that he talks about his weight in stone (whatever the conversion is for that).
He decides to start running again. So he buys €556 worth of gear, including shoes that have been worn “by athletes who run a sub-two-hour marathon. I was planning on just over three miles in six weeks.”
He decides to use an app to do a couch to 5K and immediately overdoes it on the first day. He blows out his knee and winds up hunched over and moaning near a girls’ school.
Since slow and steady didn’t work, he decides to try to lose weight by doing radical, (ie, dumb) things. He decided to eat clay, drink a gallon of water a day and wear an 80lb vest. Having tried the gallon of water a day thing I totally concur that it makes you have to pee constantly–even after you’ve had only a pint, somehow your body knows–. You’re going to be peeing every twenty minutes. They clay eating? WTF. The 80lb vest is pretty darn funny–especially when he wears it to church.
My favorite part of the book was the section where his wife yells at him for lying too much. She says she can never trust him. Some of his wife’s most hated lies from him include
You lied about your age to the therapist the time we got a couples massage.
This one is pretty funny and involves him trying to be funny but failing
You lied about going hiking to that sales assistant.
This one is great because it spirals so far out of control and costs him €300 hiking boots that he winds up wearing once. It proves they are waterproof when the blood doesn’t leak out.
You lied about being able to gut a fish.
This story is not so much about fishing as it is about a family vacation that goes awry and consequently is quite funny.
The lie about meeting Nelson Mandela isn’t very funny but the punch line of the anecdote is quite good.
You lied about being able to speak German to a bunch of Germans.
This one spirals out of control n a rather amusing way.
The last chapter begins with COVID. It’s now been a year so COVID should be cropping up in places and here it is. But he doesn’t talk about COVID or lockdown, he just uses it as a frame of reference.
Whatever the ostensible topic is, he always deviates a bit, usually to include a list. Some lists are good, some are unnecessary. But I did enjoy when he complains about apps and how everything he has purchased suggests he get one. He lists all of the products that he can’t believe have an app: my favorite is potatoes.
This end section is about meditation. He scoffed at the mediation millennials in the beginning of the book. However, when his friend sand writing partner Dermot Whelan proves to know a thing or two about mediation, he takes it seriously and he learns a simple 16-second meditative technique–slow breathing–that he finds very beneficial.
Then he wound up reading a book by life coach Siobhan Murray (The Burnout Solution)–it was Lorna’s first. He read the book and went to a session with her and she helped him get to the bottom of why he eats a pint of Ben and Jerry’s a night.
It’s strangely comforting that he doesn’t succeed in losing four stone in a year. I mean, yes it would be nice for him, but it would be very intimidating and would make this less of a comedy book and more of a self-help book. But I am happy that he seems to have found some piece of mind nonetheless.
I’m also fascinated that he keeps running into people who think he’s going to “do a skit” with them. He must be reasonably famous if that happens. Maybe I’ll have to look for a clip.
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