We never said you'd come back home

[sovay]

I started my day with a dentist's appointment and got home in the evening to discover three contradictory letters from our health insurance that I will have to call them about on Monday. The first congratulates us on being eligible for coverage. The second regrets to inform us that we're not. The third is a bill that ends by thinking it owes me four dollars. I am beginning to think we have blown through Kafka and into Beckett.

Fortunately, the mail had also brought the CD I had ordered last week of Zeal & Ardor's Stranger Fruit (2018), the full-length follow-up to last year's breathtaking Devil Is Fine (2017). Musically it's more wide-ranging than its predecessor, moving forward in time with its inspirations—gospel choirs, funk and soul—without losing the project's original anchor of blast beats and field hollers, not just black but Black metal; it's not an exercise in history or even in pastiche but the past's hands gripping the present by the throat, telling it to listen up. I did. It's worth it. Not all of the sixteen tracks on Stranger Fruit land with the same force, but even the less successful experiments have something to recommend them, if only that furious breakage of time. Songs like "Gravedigger's Chant," "Don't You Dare," "Row Row," "You Ain't Coming Back," "Stranger Fruit," and "Built on Ashes" are indispensable.

Reflex (1981) has a decent claim on being my favorite Dick Francis novel I've read so far and I am deeply disappointed there appears to be no fic for it on AO3.

Comments

[aurumcalendula]

Neat! (I was wracking my brain trying to remember their name the other day)

[sovay]

Neat! (I was wracking my brain trying to remember their name the other day)

I got them originally from handful_ofdust, who also alerted me to the new album. They may be my favorite new music of the last couple of years. (It's a close thing with Dana Falconberry.)