The Windmill Scene is over

The Windmill in Brixton

I just listened to Eunuchs’ Harbour Century, and the entire time I was rather overwhelmed by the thought: thank goodness the Windmill “scene” is basically dead. For those who don’t know, the Windmill is a venue in south London that spawned a “rich” musical environment at the turn of the decade. Successful bands launched by the scene include Black Midi, Black Country New Road, and Squid, those three in descending order of critical and commercial success.

Black Midi started out somewhat impressively, with songs like “Near DT, MI” and “953” stylishly reviving Slint and 70s prog, and capable members (especially drummer Morgan Simpson) dazzling with complex chords and tight polyrhythmic passages. This band was the face of experimental English rock until their breakup this past year. And lo, they mostly sucked. They abandoned their hardcore pretenses after their first album to their peril, covering up the lazy, forgettable songs of Cavalcade and Hellfire with jazzy King Crimson-esque orchestration. Vocalist Geordie Greep boasts one of the worst voices in all of music: novel at first, it quickly becomes apparent that his singing is less Broadway and more Hollywood, or, even more accurately, children’s-cartoon-villain, worthy perhaps of a thirty-second tune but nothing more. His samba-inspired solo album The New Sound proves with insubstantial songs and terrible lyrics that he was indeed the heart of the band in its latter days; it moreover showed that he is not a performer, nor even a mere imitator, just a complete imposter.

Black Country New Road was (is, actually) somehow even worse. They’re like Black Midi but without the musical talent. While listening one cannot shake the image of some upper middle class liberal arts students, each of whom played his/her respective instrument for a few years in high school band, getting together to make something “artsy”. The Slint-esque “Sunglasses” kicked off their career, and what is interesting in the song is ruined by the “emotional” vocals and lyrics. Isaac Woods’ voice is “ugly crying” incarnate, conjuring a certain tightness in the listener, like being a guest at a stranger’s house while they’re in the middle of a fight. This group also quickly abandoned hardcore stylizations, crafting instead long and boring Godspeed You! Black Emperor-inspired tunes on Ants from Up There. Watch a video of them playing live; they look like they’re all strung out on Xanax and don’t want to be there, like they should be at group therapy instead, they look like they smell like a hospital.

Squid is the only worthwhile band of the whole enterprise. They are original, talented, with a distinct sound and purposeful songs. Commanding, zany, and hysterical vocals, funky and unpretentious grooves, the tight braiding and carouseling of the instruments, songs that successfully articulate neurosis and desperation all characterize Bright Green Field, the group's first album. Their material since has been substandard, but still far more listenable than the other bands. Why were they the least acclaimed, the least fawned over? Because they were clearly the best. The Windmill scene is emblematic of British “culture” and its tendency toward favouring the thing with more veneer than substance, more façade than face. From the Beatles to David Bowie, from Queen to Bauhaus, from Radiohead to Oasis, they have consistently raised the impersonator to the top, leaving the true acts off to the side (no small matter, since many of the world's greatest bands are from the UK). Americans, on the other hand, tend to like shittier artists, but they also like better ones.

For the record, the Eunuchs album was very much like Black Midi or BCNR because of similar inspirations and instrumentation, and because it contained mostly forgettable fluff, although the vocalist was much better than either Greep or Wood. But this album, released just last year, was mostly panned, by critics and audiences alike, indicating that this false and pretentious brand of rock is officially out of style. Thank goodness.

Self-Condemned: A Review

Lewis' portrait of T. S. Eliot; Eliot called him "the greatest prose writer of [his] generation"

Having read in some of Marshall McLuhan’s collected works that Wyndham Lewis was among the greatest thinkers of his time, I couldn’t resist picking up the first book I saw with his name on it at a small bookstore a few years ago. As I’d learn as soon after, Self Condemned is a more minor, semi-autobiographical satire of his, not even known enough among current readers to warrant a modest Wikipedia entry. That said, it was absolutely worth the read, for its own sake but also to understand Lewis’ art, as well as his life. The story follows Rene Harding, a renowned and respected history professor, as he resigns his position and moves to Canada with his wife Hester. The first part of the book covers his goodbyes to various characters of his life in England, simultaneously illuminating the over-abstract but unalterable motives for his self-exile. The second part, which makes up the body of the work, details the dreadful isolation he and Hester endure for years in their tiny room at the Hotel Blundell in Momaco (a fictional Ontarian city based on Toronto). The third and shortest part tells how their lives in Momaco develop after the Hotel burns down.

The most palpable quality of Lewis’ writing is the realism. Everything is recounted in an extraordinarily imaginative (in the Aristotelian sense, not the Einsteinian) light. The characters, places, and events proceed so sequentially and analytically that one can hardly distinguish the amateurism from the genius. If he ever waxes poetic, it is only to sharpen the mental image where forensic description does not suffice. Lewis joins his contemporaries T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound in the charge of anti-sentimentalism, but unlike those two great writers of poetry and plays, Lewis deals in the realm of full-length novels, where one follows characters with inner lives for three- or four-hundred pages. The disinterest combined with the penetrating insight therefore yields an off-putting atmosphere, like watching a surgery being performed upon oneself: however upsetting and disaffecting, the spectacle is too intriguing to look away.

Lewis himself is attributed the quote, “Art is life with all the humbug of life taken out of it”; here, that philosophy, indeed duly applied, has the opposite effect of what one might think: instead of a superb drama, the work describes laboriously things that would be soon forgotten under less anti-human conditions. Actually, the dwelling on insignificant events and people in torturous detail inflicts on the reader that same curse Momaco puts on the main characters. The encounters with Mr. Starr stand out as a prime example: such a laughably insignificant character, who has no bearing on their lives outside of a fruitless meeting or two, is impressed on the mind with a hot branding iron. Painful as these pointless moments become, the horror shines truest in the “humbug”, which is most often tidily abridged in a few short paragraphs. The terrifying limbo, full of degrading memory and withering intellect, is, by this technique of synopsis, stretched gruesomely into eternity by the reader’s imagination.

The same meticulous, “documentary” tone makes the central purpose of the book difficult to pin down: is it a criticism of American/Canadian culture, or a moral tale of intellectual heterodoxy and its consequences, or a portrait of a relationship spiraling under the stress of isolation? It is in fact all of them at the same time, and anyone could justifiably call this work “unfocused” for that reason. Regardless, this work is probably one of the most prescient and relevant works for anyone of the niche that I belong to: young, dissident conservatives who were at a key moment of maturation when Covid hit. Philosophical curiosity and subsequent discovery - resulting disillusionment with the whole modern franchise - living in misunderstanding and seclusion without a distinct end in sight - frictional relationships under these conditions - a little “death” that forms a discontinuity with, and alienation from, the self of the recent past. For someone like myself, this book is almost too close for comfort. 

McLuhan, in his description of Lewis’ project, seems to put it best: “Lewis pleases nobody because he is like an intruder at a feast who quietly explains that dinner must be temporarily abandoned since the food has been poisoned and the guests must be detached from their dinners by a stomach pump.”

Blarney Stone

A poem in the tradition of Joyce

Me own midder beclimbed by rigadoons
Develop inert vellow miscreation 
And I amidst the melt of marrow and wilk 
Quaffolded enter dicter castle clamber.
For to see and kiss to mouth and bruise
And ballow merry fingers to tender touch
Pilated under brass and castle specks
Pillowing riots of queued contemporaries
After glowing chambers took to valley.
And at the highest tower came the mulley 
Milky mellow madder making music
To pile file down down down into bedded
Posture, pink lips pursed to pillow a gift
That swell falee fallah fallingering child
To cave to come to clean to empty all
The flues of flack and flunging flannel
Flattery soon to sump and scump and jump
And chump to wafe and worf high in the sky,
Black arrow drenched with lunar blood
My gift, my gab, my garb, my gard, my gall
My call, my cowl, my keel, my peel, my heel.

The Walking Tour #2

A poem

At the town of Cashel
We make camp on our pilgrimage to the homeland
And ascend the mountain to the Rock there
To witness transfiguration

And at the summit we face the enemy:
Toll booths, rope barriers, profane historians in uniformity
Scrambling, their digital payment system went offline
And now tourlings huddle around the tour mother
Awaiting further directions; and here I breach from the flock,
To the welcome of a new day.

Wandering through the open chapel of ancient stone,
I am a friar lost in psalmody,
Among a hoarse and tottering choir, our voices thrown
Up into the whipping wind, wind peeling across 
My tonsured crown, here in this holy upper room;
And in a gated and pitted cell on the northern front, I am a prisoner
Hard wood heart staggering to breathe
Under the weight of intercessory prayers,
Angels’ wings like anvils betray judgement;
And strolling through the grounds pebbled with epitaphs
I am a vessel, a glowing conduit
Well-oiled in the currents of grace,
Whispered prayers most efficiently distributed, turning
Through a wheel of beads that chime against brown lapel.

And sinking back into sense knowledge,
The mob’s mutterings gathering into earshot,
I am a young man in the 21st century,
Descending from the mountain of transfiguration,
To a world far more brutal and pragmatic;
Yet I descend reassured, knowing again that this time is as the past
And that past is as present as ever, cycles upon cycles.

The sleeping plane

A poem

suspended in the dark entirely

the plane is a long exhale

deafening to the naked ear

and inside the cabin, dim lights

hover over packed sleeping bodies

wrapped in warm blankets 

some appear nearly dead, still and wrapped in the dark

others twitch about like electrified frog legs

and a queue of noises can be heard

though only with a bit of attention

the soft creak of a chair, then the quiet rustle of plastic wrap

then a soft cough, then two voices murmuring illiterately

how soft everything is, in how dark

and empty a place; this tube of white noise paste

throttling at unimaginable speed in the dark

and in this warm aluminum bath

brief and stilted from the back of the dim cabin

a child screams

Saint John #2

A poem

O Foghorn City,
It pains me to see that the melancholy
Reciprium I’d once prized in you
Has been as fleeting as it was within me,
And having sprinted from my bitter solipsism,
Emerging like a grotesque, slimy infant,
Now I see you in fullest colour:
A horrid gray.

O Vestige of the past and of the future,
Of Protestants and Catholics divided to natural conclusion
You can’t outpace with change your own substance, I think
As I pass through streets noticing the superficial changes:
A fresh coat on an old house on Orange Street,
New pavement on Sydney, a demolition lot
I’d seen before, now from a new angle;
Raze it, raze it, O Saint John, and intercede for us.

O Home of the Aryans no Aryan dares to remember,
Your blood has run thin and frail, such
That even the hopes of darker men spill over into my spirit,
A spark, flickering, quickly extinguished
By the overflowing Reversing Falls;
And my eyes are again left to swim
Over sidewalks scattered with shed skins, agitated statues,
Women hardly compelling enough to rape.

Yet this pilgrimage has lasted a day and a night;
Through places I’ve never known, I’ve travelled
To reach this shrine of identity,
This place where I will return again and again;
Is it possible that I may never see the rest?
That all loves and charities will find their apex here,
And the Lord will win, in this place I will one day lose?

I wonder, as the beckoning of some limp hand
A stranger croaking from his deathbed
Leads me back to my carriage, to move;
And I will drive over gray and saltless roads
To meet the old parish priest in the confessional
At Holy Family Church, and make my most pitiful confession,
Here in this destitute city: crimeless,
Weatherless, prideless, priceless, 
Saint John.

BoyTimeBand

A career-spanning review in the style of Piero Scaruffi

Larkin’s Classics (2016) – 6.5/10
Super Dusty (2017) – 5/10
Super Sweet (2017) – 6/10
Super Sexy (2018) – 6/10
Super Bouncy (2019) – 5/10
Super Lonely (2019) – 7/10
I’m Good How are You (2020) – 3/10

BoyTimeBand, a pop group formed in Victoria, British Colombia by vocalists Adonis Johnson and Larkin Wallbank-Hart (as well as the elusive producer Sam), debuted in 2017 with the awful single “Town Square”. At the time, Larkin has already released two excellent singles, collected on Larkin’s Classics (2016): the infectious, Caribbean-tinged swing of “Freaky Fresh”, and the ridiculous house-inspired “The Cat Fell Down”. Both songs unleash his extraordinary talent for pairing irresistible hooks with absurd lyrics to create maximal amusement.

Super Dusty (2017) feels exactly like what it is: a group of high schoolers fooling around with audio software. The production never achieves the styles it emulates, only hints at them; the lyrics are rarely funny, only eyebrow-raising. “Care Bear City” boasts a celestial hyper-pop beat but ends up going nowhere. “Love at First Fight” has its dreamy moments but can’t find a melody to settle on. Songs like “Gospel to My Car”, “Dance with Me” and “Deep Sea” reach new levels of vapidity, with the two “personalities” simply muttering random phrases over elementary instrumentals for several minutes. 

Occasionally the confusion transforms into accidental brilliance: “Grab my Cat” (with Adonis’ sensual vocals and a stomach-churning chorus) and “Big House” (club beat with a Captain Beefheart-esque accordion) are beyond puzzling, bordering on Lynchian horror. “I Feel So Close” is the exception to the rule, pairing a skittering, martial drum with a radiant, matutinal chorus; the song also features one of Larkin’s most evocative lines (“The cats are making out / In the alley tonight”). The piano ballad “Folded Mattress” offers some intrigue with its strange melody, and the closing track, “Move Your Hips”, premieres the band’s trademark multi-phase arrangement. But it’s too little, too late. The boys don’t really know how to make a proper song yet.

Later that year, the band released Super Sweet. With only four songs (including one cover), the group exchanges distracted quantity for focused quality. “10 I See”, despite its patently lame refrain, is nonetheless significantly more memorable and fluid than most of Dusty. “The Girls in the Country”, with its infernal banjo and goofy vocal manipulations, is pure foolishness. “Movie Star” is built on a single refrain (“I’m a movie star”), repeated ad nauseum over a stressful alternation between club beat and sinister ambience. For better or worse, this song effectively reinvents Pink Floyd’s “Bike” for the internet age.

Four more songs appear on Super Sexy (2018), where the band properly introduces their melancholy side (“Beautiful Flame”). “Young Love”, another schizophrenic song whose misty, tragic verse switches into an epileptic frenzy (“Yummy, yummy in my tummy!”) is perhaps the first towering achievement of the collective's career. The aggressive mumble-rap “Bad Boy” and the disgusting “Cheated on Your Wife” demonstrate how far they’ve come from their pointless debut.

Super Bouncy (2019) emulates the pop music of the day. “My Wife” parodies every radio hit of the late twenty-teens, while “Access” parodies Drake in particular. “Our First Time” features sitar and flute over an AWOLNATION “Sale”-esque beat. “Christmas Love” imitates Travis Scott’s trap with an eerie atmosphere. Unfortunately, in refining their songcraft they greatly dampen their charming, wacky energy; compared to the debut, the music is now eminently listenable but contains none of the highlights.

Super Lonely (2019), the band’s longest and most ambitious album, is their masterpiece. Not only has the production become far more polished, but the two charismatic vocalists manage to find an equilibrium of personality: by largely funneling Larkin’s role into the hooks (where he seems most comfortable), Adonis’ sincerer nature now adds a gravitas to the entire tracklist, contributing to an overall “professionalism” not present before.

With this new confidence, they lay down some of the strongest tracks of their career: the chilling and dreamy “Over the Harbour” soars like a drone above the city lights; the smooth, erotic, and shocking R&B of “Not Selfish” rivals Frank Ocean or D’Angelo; the nocturnal pulse and timeless refrain of “Marshgello” boasts Larkin’s most effortless rap verse; “Lonely Interlude” moves from a hazy, ambiguous ballad into a distorted and epileptic drop, from there morphing into nightmarish hallucinations. “Mine Games” harks back to the old days of Larkin’s domineering madness; a zany and stylish beat, mindless chatter, earth-shattering switch-ups, and a magnificent sax solo make this song more than worthy of Larkin’s Classics.

It is, however, Adonis whose persona now looms over the proceedings. His is an obsessive, loitering spirit, with a hint of tragedy – although always boyish enough to be dismissed for a laughable hook. He intones the celestial and moody “Stars” with the tremendously romantic line “I love you, forever” while the others make a ridiculous show; he brings down the house on the hard rocking “Cutie” and drones hypnotically over the intensely psychedelic “Recorded Overdose”. He pens his personal, tragic manifesto on the otherwise generic “What He Wants” (“Adonis wants to love”).

There are weak points, however: “On This Love Sack” regresses into the frustrating aimlessness of Dusty; “Little Old Sammy” never comes to fruition (its hilarious chorus notwithstanding); “High in Love” ranks among their most passable songs; and, despite its dramatic pretense and occasional catharsis, the closing track “I’ll Still Wait” does nothing to justify its fifteen-minute length. 

Between the band’s slow, taciturn soul and the number of minor tracks, the album is difficult to stomach in a single sitting. Nevertheless, its moments of convergence are worth replaying long after most other pop music has been forgotten.

Larkin is nowhere to be found on I’m Good, How Are You (2020), an aggressively boring album that consists of Adonis whining over leftover beats. It is an injustice to the name of BoyTimeBand, destined to be no-listener music.

Best songs:

1. Young Love
2. Lonely Interlude
3. Movie Star
4. Mine Games
5. Not Selfish
6. I Feel So Close
7. Grab My Cat
8. Marshgello
9. Stars
10. Care Bear City