The Music Box.
Entries about the music I like.
Mclusky – Mclusky Do Dallas
The components of a Mclusky track are simple: Falco’s shout-singing, supported by his hooky guitar and John Chapple’s crunchy, riffy bass, both distorted to the max, backed by Jack Egglestone’s four-bar metronomic battering of studio drums recorded in the natural, live-sound style of Steve Albini. Music like this is cathartic, a strange sort of meditation.
The Calm // Music of the Week / WS 28 Feb 2021
I’m about to take my next professional plunge, and am about to also take my next residential plunge, so this has been a week of planning, anticipation, and anxiety. As I sit down to write this week’s column, I’ve spent the last seven days running from house to house, furniture shop to furniture shop, and introduction to introduction. My mood is one of cautious excitement.
Evolution // Music of the Week / WS 21 Feb 2021
I know it isn't good to toot one's own horn, but I really love the new-look Music of the Week. I spend most of the week really looking forward to writing it. It feels like a cathartic outburst of untrammeled self-expression, and reminds me of the reason I started writing stories in the first place. Twelve years ago, I published my first story online.
H O P E // a mixtape to self
Some time in 2016, I clearly felt something intensely enough to make a neck-breaking playlist of punk, post-punk, and alternative songs running at a tempo of 150 bpm +. While I was 4 years younger then, my neck was not made of rubber; I have no idea what it was that I was so enraged by that it allowed me to a make this muscular a mix without suffering any serious whiplash.
The art of storytelling as expressed through playlisting
Playlist one consists of eight hits from the world after punk. It’s the soundtrack to my pacing around a room and worrying about the future. It’s a bunch of men like me stressing about the ‘kind of men’ they are and the ‘kind of world’ they inhabit. This transitions to playlist two, consisting mainly of hip-hop hits about bouncing back and ‘showing them’
Punk music
At the start of the covid crisis, I started sharing happy dispatches including a few of my favourite things to make it easier to get through the crisis. This dispatch includes a playlist of punk music and its several offshoots: post-punk, pop-punk, hardcore, post-hardcore & new wave.