It is never right to reduce an actor to a single role, but Sam Neill (who died last week) will always be about one little known film from 2008 I saw a while ago, in terrible quality, on a small computer screen. And yet it remains one of the most special cinematic experiences in my life.
Dean Spanley is that rare combination of charming and bizarre that, if done properly, will always leave a mark. The film is billed as "a surreal period comedic tale of canine reincarnation exploring the relationships between father and son and master and dog". And it is all that, too. Sam Neill plays a clergyman who has a weakness for Hungarian Imperial Tokay wine. Weakness, though, does not even begin to cover it. For when Dean Spanley drinks the wine (slowly, meditatively, with tiny sips), he starts to relive memories from his previous life. During which he was... a Welsh Spaniel.
There are moments in the films where the plot gets so eccentric it really should fall apart. But it doesn't. Instead, it inhabits its own strange world so comfortably, with such disarming commitment, that you simply get lost in its atmosphere. And at the heart of it all is Sam Neill who is clearly relishing the wine and the canine memories (both funny and sad). Relishing the role. When he is saying that you can't commit a bigger crime than to drag your dog from a lamppost with its complex mixture of odours... As a dog owner, this goes right through my heart.
As does this story, and this film. Dean Spanley is the epitome of 'special', like so many other brilliant but unflashy works of art I have discovered over the years (Good Things by Epic Soundtracks, Kafka Was The Rage by Anatole Broyard). It gets inside you and it stays there. It evokes something you never knew could be evoked. And it is all done through the absolutely magical performance of Sam Neill. The way he closes his eyes when he drinks Tokay... You wish you could taste just one sip of that, and God only knows what memories would follow.
It probably says something about this particular June (hot, sticky, infuriating) when the best album is Graham Coxon's archival release.
Castle Park was recorded back in 2011 while Coxon was working on A+E but for reasons not entirely clear it had remained unreleased for 15 years. Well, he did say something about this music being unfashionable, but come on. It's not like Graham Coxon has been in fashion at any point since the mid-90s (I'm saying this affectionately, of course). Castle Park is not much but it is a very tasteful, Britpop adjacent collection of pop rock tunes. I'm particularly fond of the short and snappy "When You Find Out" and the galloping "Dripping Soul" that oozes Coxon's effortless melodic charm. The whole thing ends in a somewhat inconsequential way, though, with a classical instrumental and a brittle lo-fi ballad, which betrays a certain lack of interest on Coxon's part.
Otherwise, it's been a drab month with new albums by indie veterans Death Cab For Cutie (boring!), Modest Mouse (mediocre!) and of Montreal (uninspired!). Really meek, toothless stuff, with the artists having so little to say you have to wonder why they even bothered. At the very least, Olivia Rodrigo's new album sounds like she cared. Not that I do - no, not even with a song called "The Cure" and Robert Smith himself guesting on "What's Wrong With Me" (at the very least, his feature is a lot more prominent than in the case of the new Rolling Stones single).
It just keeps happening. Each time that I finish another book by Ian McEwan, there is a thought I cannot get rid of: this might be his best work yet. I believed that when I finished Black Dogs all those years ago. Later, Amsterdam. Later, Saturday. Four years ago it happened with Lessons. And this is where I am now, having just finished his latest novel. The only difference this time is that What We Can Know got me into this state of mind two pages into the second part. Which is exactly the moment when you begin to get the sheer scope of what McEwan is about to accomplish here.
At its heart, What We Can Know has the sort of idea any writer would kill for. We are in 2119, the world has gone through wars, climate cataclysms and economic disasters (McEwan does not get into many details, but if anything, it only strengthens the effect), and the narrator is trying to piece together the past. The past is our present, our time, namely the beginning of the 21st century. The narrator is mostly interested in trying to find one legendary poem that was once written but has never been made public. It may have been called "A Corona for Vivien", and it was a birthday gift from the famous poet Francis Blundy to his wife Vivien. We get into many details about the circumstances of the gift and the birthday party during which the poem in question was recited.
The backdrop is dark, even harrowing. Much of the UK is submerged in water, life expectancy is sixty-two, University students don't care about the past ('the morons of long ago', as they call us at one point) and Nigeria seems to be the most powerful and technologically advanced country in the world. The money is scarce and so is the food. Your average diet includes eel pies, protein cakes and mushy apples. It is an unappealing world, but it keeps trudging along in the shadows of tragic delusions and decisions of the past. It is inhabited by people who keep going about their lives: they love, they cheat, they make plans.
What We Can Know is not about the present, though. It is about the past (or, basically, our present). The past has been analysed, dissected and 'robbed of its privacy'. And yet the past looks impossibly distant and unknowable (though admittedly, doesn't it seem sometimes that 2014 happened at least half a century ago?). You could dig around it for years but still there would be limits to what you can know. Sometimes time goes faster and sometimes it slows down almost to a halt. The past gets trapped in it, and the important circumstances are coloured in dark secrets and inevitable subjectivity. 'The past', writes McEwan, 'survives in its own special tense, a form of ahistorical present'.
It is not always easy to get into a McEwan novel. You need time to get your bearings and settle into the right rhythm. But do bear with What We Can Know. His prose is always rewarding, as are the details (as soon as you finish this book, you will want to read it all over again), as is the mood of uncertain and slightly compromised elation you get while reading. He does get across this idea that what we have now, every little thing, is a miracle. It may not feel that way, but waiting until 2119 to make sure is not a good option.
I remember that when I first saw the title of McEwan's new novel, I immediately thought of what Salman Rushdie once said about Christopher Hitchens's God Is Not Great: "It is one word too long". The reasons for Rushdie saying that were of course quite different, but it just felt to me that the title didn't seem right. Too many words. Too many short words. And yet some titles prove to you their inevitability once you start reading the book. And What We Can Knowis inevitable. If anything, he could have thrown another short word in there - 'not', for instance. Which, however, would slightly cheapen the effect.
"I want to fucking kiss you on your Polish forehead!"
There is a point at every Baxter Dury concert when all subtlety is gone, the man wraps his jacket around his head and gets into the full screaming mode. This happened when I first saw him in Berlin a few years ago. This happened at the OFF Festival in Katowice in 2024. And this definitely happened at Progresja in Warsaw last Wendesday. What I have noticed, however, is that these days he gets into that mode right from the very beginning.
This makes sense, of course. We are a long way away from sophisticated, downbeat albums like Len Parrot's Memorial Lift or even Prince Of Tears. Hell, even 2020's The Night Chancers was subtlety incarnate compared to the electropop onslaught of last year's Allbarone. A good album, granted, one that can make a dance club explode.
No wonder, then, that it is the Allbarone songs that work best at a 2026 Baxter Dury concert. There is no foreplay, and he does not even do "Leak At The Disco" anymore. He gets into it straight away, no-prisoners-taken style. "Alpha Dog", then "Hapsburg". There are many in the audience who have only just discovered Baxter Dury, and the propulsive "Kubla Khan" is what they are here for. The third song of the set, the synthwave classic "I'm Not Your Dog", sounds almost elegant by comparison.
He does mix the old with the new but it is the Allbarone album that is played in its entirety (well, almost). Again, it works well within the context of the venue and his latest musical mindset (the chorus of "Allbarone" is positively ecstatic). The old stuff sounds uneven. While the magic of "Prince Of Tears" simply cannot be denied, the hookline of "Aylesbury Boy" becomes a bit of a mess.
I still love him, of course, and I certainly don't want to say that he was only good when he played small Paris clubs and had 4000 monthly listens on Spotify. That said, it sounded a lot more effective when he squeezed the paint out slowly instead of splashing it all over your Polish forehead the moment he got on stage.
I've still not been able to detect the 'genius' in Aldous Harding's songwriting. Her latest, Train On The Island is generally proclaimed to be her best, but to my ears this is all pleasant foreplay with little payoff. The lyrics are quirky (or should I say self-consciously odd?) and the melodies occupy that slightly uncomfortable space between intricate and underwhelming. I don't mind artsy, I just need a little more substance in my music (which you would probably describe as chamber pop with folk-ish vibes). So what remains is a good album a little skimpy on hooks. "The Barrel" remains her best song, comfortably. 6/10
Speaking of underwhelming, Tori Amos certainly fits the bill. I did not mind her ripping off Kate Bush on her early 90s albums, but Times Of Dragons is just dull. The songs are endless (the whole thing goes on for 76 minutes) and melodically uninteresting. A few instrumental hooks aside (mostly courtesy of her piano playing), this is a little too close to adult contemporary for my liking. 4/10
There are not too many artists whose albums I anticipate as much as Alela Diane's. She never disappoints. No, I don't expect her to reach the same heights as she did on The Pirate's Gospel and About Farewell, but Who's Keeping Time? is another collection of charismatic, self-confident folk tunes that just sound timeless. While not her best work, the album features career highlights like the opening "California" (that whistling hook is divine) and "Dusty Roses" (Christ what a tune). All that said, the verse melody of "Spring Is A Fine Time" was definitely borrowed from an old song whose name escapes me at the moment. 7/10
My annual listen to a new Guided By Voices album yielded no revelations. Crawlspace Of The Pantheon (bizarrely, Robert Pollard hasn't used that title yet) is tastefully distorted power pop that many fans will probably view as GBV's best since Isolation Drills or something. It is not. But a good Guided By Voices it certainly is, whatever that even means at this point. The best is probably the single "We Outlast Them All". Who cares, though. 6/10
Oddly, we have to turn to the 84-year old Paul McCartney to provide us with the best album of the month. Lyrically, The Boys Of Dungeon Lane is clearly a nostalgic trip and melodically it is all over the place (in a good sense). It is all in here: his adventurousness ("As You Lie There"), his acoustic balladry ("Days We Left Behind"), his poppiness ("Ripples In A Pond"), his rocking-out spirit (the surprise ending of "Mountain Top"), his granny music ("Life Can Be Hard"), his sappiness ("Momma Gets By"), a little filler ("First Star Of The Night") and even a good old-fashioned duet with Ringo ("Home To Us"). So how does it stand against his latest output? I'd say it is his strongest set of songs since Memory Almost Full, and if it turns out to be his last, then it's an excellent farewell. 8/10
Steve Kilbey has never been as prolific as he is now (the new Church album is on its way). Things We Did On Earth is his latest collaboration with Martin Kennedy and was released under the Kilbey Kennedy moniker. As ever, the man has taste and one hell of a melodic gift. Some of his stuff can get a little too dreamy and spacy on occasion, but this collection is very tight and to the point. The guitars, too, sound incredible. 7/10
Also, American Football continues to put me to sleep and the guy from Bleachers keeps writing almost good songs that almost work.
Songs of the Month:
"Disobey" by Kilbey Kennedy
"Dusty Roses" by Alela Diane
"Blowin' Up" by Kiwi Jr.
"As You Lie There" by Paul McCartney
"A Hard Lesson" by Peter Gabriel
"The Beast" by Patrick Wolf
"You You You" by Arab Strap
"My Life In England Pt.1" by Dexys Midnight Runners
If there is anything that the psyop situation with Geese has proven to me, it is that the narrative culture has gone too far. I love a good story as much as anyone, but these latest accusations are the direct result of people having too much free time on their hands. It feels like this free time has to be filled with conspiracy theories and a bunch of far-fetched narratives that go nowhere at all.
Or maybe I have just gone soft and started to take this dangerously utilitarian approach when it comes to art. If there is a critic who murders my favourite films but then gives me one recommendation that will knock me off my feet, then the said critic is worth reading. Equally, if Grian Chatten wraps himself in a Palestinian flag at every Fontaines DC concert, that will not make me stop listening to the excellent Chaos For The Fly. Really, I'm happy that Hitler's art was terrible, or I could be in very dangerous waters here.
Now coming to Geese... I find the story of someone using a deliberate psychological operation to affect my appreciation of a band mildly intriguing but also somewhat irrelevant. Because the music is actually good. Because the narrative should never override the art, and Getting Killed is one of the most exciting albums in recent years.
I really do not know why I still bother with these Ringo Starr albums. A few songs aside ("It Don't Come Easy", "Vertical Man"), none of his music has ever appealed to me. His latest, Long Long Road, is country pop with zero personality attached to it. A few high-profile guests (Sheryl Crow, St. Vincent) can't save it either. It's okay, I guess, as a background listen on a long car ride. 4/10
My New Band Believe (has to be the worst band name I've seen in a long time) is adventurous chamber folk music which is both charming and a little unfocused. The self-titled album is the brainchild of Cameron Picton from black midi, and you can certainly feel the melodic and instrumental complexity associated with that band. There is a lot of orchestration here, whimsical lyrics and vaguely pretty melodies running awry. Sadly, the meandering nature of Cameron's songwriting prevents me from truly enjoying this. 6/10
They Might Be Giants return with their latest, The World Is To Dig, and it is 18 outbursts of nerdish vocals, quirky lyrics and terminally catchy melodies ("Character Flaw" will probably eat at your brain). I have never been a huge fan, but it is impressive how effortlessly they keep doing this. 7/10
There's a part of me that thinks Foo Fighters have never been good. I know they probably have, two or three times, but mostly their brand of alternative rock mush is just a few steps above Nickelback. "Window" is passable, I guess, but overall Your Favorite Toy is terribly mediocre. No subtlety, no charisma, no tunes. 3/10
Mercifully, there is a great album from the end of March that I missed one month ago. It is by the British band Memorials who specialise in beautifully sung post-punk that is well-written and just endlessly inventive. The way the melodies in the opening "Life Could Be A Cloud" flow and ebb should give you a good idea of the album's sound. There are powerful Stereolab vibes here, but the vocals are even more elegant, almost folk-tinged. All Clouds Bring Not Rain is a fascinating album that keeps getting better with each listen. 8/10
