I'm so curious to see how they ride this sincerity/taking-the-piss line in the next few years. It's such an artistic knife edge -- you can see how there's peril in falling too far to either side.

There's a kind of fear that one might do something beautiful, which the artist must sabotage within the art itself. With Geese, it feels like their talent & range of influences is pushing the tension to a breaking point they genuinely don't know how to resolve & that is so artistically exciting.

I once had a kooky visual arts professor who looked at my end-of-semester work, shook her head solemnly, and told me I had a "complicated relationship with beauty" and should "take a dance class".

I feel like that complicated relationship with beauty is such an endemic trait I see in Gen Z artists.

Then another question comes up: is the impulse to sing in this way an artistic virtue of the work or is it a limiting affectation that he'll eventually shed? Or is it possible that what makes the music so interesting is the very fact that this is currently unresolved?

That tension feels connected to another - which is that Winter pretty obviously has a conventionally beautiful voice and is a technically skilled singer but uses his instrument in some extremely *weird* ways. Once you realize that, you're left with a question: why is he choosing to sing this way?

Thanks, Luna! That's wonderful to hear. Truly made my day.

They make a wild contrast with the only other bird in the cemetery, jet black carrion crows

Apparently (at least according to the source I read) they've spread across most of Europe now but ALL of them originate from the two airport escapes in France which is bonkers

The key thing is the coherence of those yesses/nos. To me this is where my home city of Toronto really fails. While I dearly love it and there's much to recommend it, it's said yes and no to a lot of things over the past 60 years that don't really add up to a cohesive experience walking around it.

It's very good, but I bet almost every other season 6 and season 7 disc is in contention here.

11. Blizzard - Dove Ellis

Ellis' debut album; his voice is unbelievable. Like if an Irish Jeff Buckley fronted a folk rock band. I'm very interested to see what this guy does next. He could be huge.

youtu.be/HrWvDv4ESIo?...

10. Absolute Batman

This is not a comic book run that I expected to like, but something about how far it goes into being ridiculous and how unafraid it is to be dumb ended up appealing to me a lot. Honestly that's a theme with a lot of the stuff I loved this year.