Five & Five on Friday, 7/7/2023

Godard, Twitter-killers, mind-boggling T-Swift facts and more

Happy Friday! Congratulations on making it to the end of the week. As you head into your weekend, here are five recommendations and then five micro reviews of albums from my high school CD collection. Maybe you’ll find something new to read, listen to, or do this weekend. See you next week!

1. The Human Instrumentality Podcast, which I co-host along with my buddy Joseph Schafer, finished off our Gamera mini-series this week with an episode about Shusuke Kaneko’s Gamera III: Revenge of Iris. While I didn’t enjoy this movie as much as its predecessor, I still found it fascinating and argued that it belongs in the same teen-girl horror category as The Craft and Jennifer’s Body. The Kaiju film, I’m learning, contains multitudes. I’m very grateful to Joseph for suggesting this trilogy and expanding my mind on this genre, and I hope you enjoyed riding along with us!

2. I found this long essay by Michael Rancic about Side Door, a Canadian tech start up trying to app-ify DIY live music, fascinating. Rancic, who, full disclosure, has been an exceedingly chill guy to hang out with both times I’ve met him, goes the extra mile in this piece by addressing how Toronto city policy has effected its local DIY scene. Informative and relatable, even down in the balmy south of New York.

3. Twitter has been on the steady decline for a few months now after an acquisition that you don’t need to read any more about. I finally hit my breaking point when the new update to the slightly more user friendly add-on app Tweetdeck made it functionally unusable on my laptop. Luckily my friend and bandmate Brooks Rocco swooped in to the rescue with an invitation to Bluesky. If you would like to keep up with me in a micro-blogging capacity, you can find me [at] lamniformes [dot] bsky [dot] social. I will not be on Threads.

4. This completely blew my mind, apparently Taylor Swift’s re-recorded versions of her old albums are stomping the originals all over streaming. This means that by re-recording her old material Swift is making the copyright to the originals less valuable. I’m not a Swiftie but this whole Eras-era has got to be the savviest way of turning disaster into opportunity I’ve lived to see in the music industry. Can someone from the Swift front office take over for the Bulls?

5. Last week I watched A Woman is a Woman by Jean-Luc Godard with ~*my girlfriend*~. I’d watched the movie once in college, back when Netflix had something other than anime and direct-to-dvd-quality original films in their library. At the time I didn’t get it at all. This time around I thought it was great! Sure it’s a bit fluffy and inconsequential, but that’s the point! I’d recommend the movie if you’re looking for something cute, funny, and visually striking (those scenes when they carry the lamp around the apartment are all three in one) but I’d also recommend revisiting a movie that you didn’t get in your twenties and haven’t seen since. Maybe you’ll like it more this time.

Now, onto the five micro reviews. Long time Lamniformes Instagram followers will recognize these from my stories back in late 2020, however they’ve been re-edited and spruced up with links so that you can actually hear the music instead of just taking my word for it.

Channel Orange by Frank Ocean (2012) - R&B

Ok technically, this album is not part of my teenage collection since I bought it after graduating from college. I remember spinning this for the first time during a thunderstorm while drinking a terribly mixed homemade gin & tonic. The album is really, really good. It sounds both retro and very of-its-moment, which I guess in hindsight makes it another kind of retro at this point. It’s an interesting record to revisit knowing how much further “out there” Ocean would go on Blonde.

Burn The Priest by Burn The Priest (1999) - Metal

Definitely not as refined as their later stuff released under the name Lamb of God. In fact I barely played this album when I first bought it. I thought of it mostly as a historical novelty. They really played their asses off on this record though. It’s not hard to imagine why they built up so much hype before the name change. It is a bit one note, but they play that note very well.

12:5 by Pain of Salvation (2004) - Progressive Rock

This acoustic live album is only for Pain of Salvation completists, which I certainly was in high school. Can’t say I’d recommend this to anyone not already equally as committed, but for fans it’s a treat to hear how the band reinterpret, rearrange and in some cases combine their songs in this new setting. I love it when bands have fun with their old material, keep it fresh!

Thirteenth Step by A Perfect Circle (2003) - Alternative Rock

I understand why I found this album cool as a dour, self-righteous teen that looked down on drug users, but as an adult I find it way too smarmy and condescending. Those drums sound good though.

Epic by Borknagar (2004) - Black Metal

I bought this based on the suggestion of The Mosh Pit, a MySpace metalhead forum. I dutifully picked it up, listened to it a bunch and then abruptly stopped caring about it. I’m not surprised that it didn’t have much staying power. It has some neat keyboard parts but the songs leave me cold, and not in the way you want from black metal.