Days 172 and 173

Aka Sat 22 and Sun 23 July

This weekend I listened to the new Moon Diagram LP, Sandal’s LP and EPs and a reissue of Suicide’s first album, which includes a couple of live concerts, watched some more Castle episodes and read some comics.

The Moon Diagramss album, Lifetime Of Love, is nice and dreamy and hypnotic electronic/house music, kinda like an aural bubblebath. Suicide's Suicide album (a two disc reissue, including Live at CBGB’S 1977 and 23 Minutes Over Brussels) is similar, but kinda opposite, hypnotic and trancey, but with lyrics that are set in real life and can be disturbing (especially on the second disc’s live concerts) and give some of the songs an edge. It’s not an album that you would just put on or have on in the background while during your hovering or homework or some other task, you do have to be in the right frame of mind/mood.

Listening to the Sandals album (Rite To Silence) and EPs (Nothing, Feet, We Wanna Live and Cracked) was areal trip down memory lane. I first listened to (most of) these tracks when they first came out in the early nineties, it was just at the time that Acid Jazz was morphing into Trip Hop (or at least the Bristol Sound, Mo’ Wax arm of Trip Hop, the others, like The Chemical Brothers, Death In Vegas, were going more upbeat/rocky and into Big Beat) a laidback, smoky, almost psychedelic/psyche sound. The album doesn’t entirely stand up, with a couple of weak tracks, but the Sandals wrote some great individual tracks (Nothing, Feet, We Wanna Live and Profound Dub) and picked some great names to remix them (The Chemical Brothers, Ashley Beedle and David Holmes aka The Disco Evangelists, and Leftfield).

Empowered is a great series and has really developed over the years, from a tongue in cheek, light hearted superhero spoof to a rom-com superhero story, with plenty of heart and emotions, character development, long-term arcs and great, weird sci-fi/superhero plots. While Empowered may seem to be just exploitative and titillating, it isn’t, its a proper comic for adults, covering all kind of everyday issues, such as friendships, body confidence, work relationship problems, sex and relationships. Vol. 10 find Emp in a really good place as she becomes a full-time Superhomey, although that doesn’t mean that everything is rosey – Emp still has problems with some fellow heroes thinking she doesn’t deserve to go full time or that she needs them to protect her, a weird medical check-up, involving a very alien scan and a close friends dark secret. Also, Vol. 10 ends on a massive cliffhanger, which is going to make the wait for Vol. 11 feel very long. Empowered is highly recommended and is an under-appreciated gem.

Lazarus +66 is an adjacent/stop-gap between Lazarus arcs and #1 tells the story of Dagger Selection and how Casey Solomon becomes a Dagger. It’s a pretty familiar story, but is told really well and shows a different side of the Lazarus world.

Aliens: Dead Orbit #3 continues to build tension, with the crew trying to survive and the aliens continue to keep on picking off crew members when they least expect it. This has been a great Aliens story, that keeps true to the spirit of the Alien and Aliens films and combines it with James Stokoe’s uniqueness, to make it fresh.

The Buffy: The High School Years - Parental Parasite TPB is set in the early day’s of Buffy and really capture’s that tone of voice, with some great quips/one-liners and a monster that represents a real-world issue (in this case sibling rivalry and parent-child bonds).

 

In The Wicked & The Divine #29 nothing ‘big’ happens, but you can feel that things are getting worse for the characters, that they are starting to lose control of the situation and are heading to a conclusion/showdown that isn’t going to be nice. You want to grab them and tell them to stop being idiots and get it together. 

In Shade, the Changing Girl #9 Shade explores being young vs being old (as well as subplots back on Meta and Shades new Earth friends figuring out how to help/find Shade), while #10 explores the impact of the past on the present, with Shade visiting an atomic bomb testing, which is also where the sitcom Life With Honey was filmed. Shade, The Changing Girl has a been a great series, exploring what it means to be human in the modern world, and has some great pieces of art, like the board game double page spread or the “All your secrets will belong to me, Earth!” page: