SOUNDTRACK: beabadoobee-Loveworm (2019).
beabadoobee is Beatrice Kristi Laus, a 19 year-old singer-songwriter who was born in the Phillipines and lives in London. She has released some six EPs since 2018 and has been played on the radio on WXPN. I see she’s also headlining a small tour over here in the Spring.
Yesterday I listened to the bedroom version of this EP, and here is the original release in all of its glory. Interestingly, the sound isn’t all that much bigger, but there is a lot more instrumentation. And some of these songs definitely rock harder.
“Disappear” is played on a gentle electric guitar with swirling keys and a simple drum clicking sound. When the bass comes in after the first verse, the song feels really full (with a sprinkling of keyboard sounds added on top, too). The middle third has a nice little section with bells as everything else fades out for a moment.
“1999”s guitars sound a bit more downbeat, deeper. The middle has some lovely overdubbed guitar parts. I really like the repeated guitar melody that flows all the way to the end,
“Apple Cider” is wonderfully upbeat in this version. Bouncy guitars, more bells and her soft vocals make this sound like a perfect 90s alt-rock song. Just as I was about to say this song was perfect, it added some “oohh la las” which don’t quite fit. However, the crazy guitar solo(s) are very cool and more than make up for it.
“Ceilings” remains a quiet ballad with some nice falsetto vocals and trippy backing sounds that turn into a synthy solo.
“Angel” sounds different on this record too, with some staggered guitars and a fairly complex drum pattern. There’s some noisy electric guitar on this song too. I love the way this song rocks out at the end. The rocking continues on “You Lie All the Time” (which still sounds a bit like Juliana Hatfield). It rocks all the way through to the end,
The final song “Soren” is a slow ballad. With the two guitars it does actually sound quite different from the bedroom version, which is kind of cool since they are for the most part pretty similar.
I enjoyed both versions of this EP, but I like this one more. There’s more variety and the songs rock a bit more. I’m curious what her first full-length will sound like.
[READ: January 10, 2020] The Babysitters Coven
I don’t usually read books like this, but the cover caught my eye (I love judging a book by its cover) and I’m so glad I read it. It was fun and funny and mashed up ideas from existing stories into something all its own.
Esme Pearl is a babysitter. She and her best (and only) friend Janis started a Babysitter’s Club back in junior high. There were of course four of them in the club and each girl paralleled one of the girls in the original series. [I have never read those books, so I don’t know how much is taken from that series.]
I enjoyed Esme as a character for a number of reasons. She was a believable seventeen year old, but a shy and kind of solitary one. She uses some abbreviations, but the whole book is not littered with them. Lines like “the number one perk of babysitting is OPP–other people’s pantries” is a good example. Esme has a great tone of being above her school while still being unpopular (but not hugely so). She lives in Spring River Kansas home of the Bog Lemmings (“apparently by the time they’d gotten to Spring River all the good mascots had been taken”). About the cafeteria food: “I’d never seen a food that wasn’t brown.” Later she grabs what she things is curry but which turns out to be gravy.
She and Janis coordinate outfits every day. [I love the detail that Janis’ full name is Janis Jackson]. They don’t wear similar things at all, they just discuss the night before what their fashion choices will be and then show them off the next day, They both love going thrifting, so their outfits are unique. If I had one complaint about the book it’s that there’s no way a backwater town like Spring River would have such amazing thrift stores. Anyway, today “Janis was ‘Denise gets a step-daughter’ and I was “Sylvia Plath goes to prom.'”
Esme loves babysitting and she takes it very seriously–she does not wan any other kind of job, like where you wear a uniform–and she has built up a reliable collection of clientele. She and Janis really are the only game in town.
As the book opens, Esme is babysitting Kaitlyn, a demon baby. Not literally. She is just a wild girl who is high maintenance. But Esme thinks of her as baby Satan (Kaitlyn managed to get a Sharpie and draw all over the wall while Esme was peeing). But usually once Kaitlyn is asleep, she’s down. This night things are different. Esme heard a loud thunk and went upstairs, The door was locked–Esme would never lock the door. She somehow got the door open an saw that the bed was empty and the window was open. She looked out the window and saw Kaitlyn on the roof. Esme managed to get her back to safety. When Esme asked what happened, Kaitlyn described a guy who looked like David Bowie’s character in Labyrinth. She knew that Kaitlyn watched a lot of movies so she assumed it was a nightmare. But there was so much unexplained…. (more…)
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SOUNDTRACK: THE HANDSOME FAMILY-“Capitol City” (from WILCOvered, UNCUT Magazine November 2019).
The November 2019 issue of UNCUT magazine had a cover story about Wilco. It included a 17 track CD of bands covering Wilco (called WILcovered or WILCOvered). I really enjoyed this collection and knew most of the artists on it already, so I’m going through the songs one at a time.
I Just Read About That... 