Lookouts (Visual novel)
By Patrick Totally
This is the kind of project that can only be described as 'obviously good.'
Lookouts follows the story of two star crossed transmasc outlaw lovers as they attempt to diffuse tensions between their rivaling gangs and arrange a better life for themselves.
It's got the right amount of bite. Hawky (the story's writer) really has a grasp on the loaded imagry they're playing with. The phrase 'queer cowboy' in itself is a challenge to prevailing myths regarding America's history. Fortunately, Hawky doesn't use this as an excuse to sit back on their laurels and let their story's iconography do the storytelling for them.
Lookouts is deeply invested in the well being of its leads, their histories, their scars. They're respected enough to be put in harm's way. This is to say that nothing about the story feels obligatory. Our cowboys' stories are never told with a wink or a nudge.
Coldoggo's artwork is what seals the deal for me. Every character's got a silhouette that could be recognized from a mile away. Their style feels perfectly at home both within the sphere of modern American Southwestern sculpture and the nicher space of domestic, dulcet, cartoon-y furry art that nobody's come up with a good name for yet. Love those sweet earth-y tones.
Truly never wanted it to end. I care about these boys so much. It's also shortish and free, and playable in browser
here.
Small Cruel Party - Do You Believe in a Pencil? (Album)
By Patrick Totally
Girl help I'm stuck in the pipe. Girl the pipe is constricting. I put my arms up over my head and I can't put them back down anymore. Girl help.
The worst part about
this record is that the first track is both better and half the length of the second. With that being said, I love the small narrative they form together. An interior view of the horrible machine transitions into a tour of the landscape surrounding it. How wide is this valley? How much of it is man made?
The Double Life of Wendique (Short film)
By Pete P.P
What impresses me the most, and certainly the main reason why i'm writting about this right now, is that this started as a joke. These random little videos of Wendy Williams making noises in an otherwise quiet stage were fun, but not much more than that. Credit where credit is due though, these are certainly very, very well edited. Impressive stuff, absolutely.
vernonator6497's "Wendy Williams except there's no talking" started a series of videos that slowly but surely added more and more of a plot with each installment, until one faithful day in August, we got a culmination to all those previous efforts, A 10 minute magnum opus: "The Double Life of Wendique". I don't want to talk about the plot of the short film or the intricacies of The WendCU (Wendy cinematic universe), as Vernonator calls it, but rather about something that i've been very interested in lately: "Hiding" genuinely good art behind a layer that serves as a common denominator for the audience. It's a "you must be this tall to ride" kind of approach that weeds out people who would otherwise dismiss art that's made for a niche. It makes things feel more important, like this is "for us". It feels personal and completely genuine, whether that's a heartshakingly amazing album with a My Little Pony character on the cover, a particularly dense introduction to a surreal book, or in this case, a genuinely interesting plot hidden in a YTP-esque edit of Wendy Williams clips.
The plot? it really is something that has to be seen to be understood fully. And the best part is that if you didn't like it, you were just not meant to watch it in the first place. This is for a specific kind of person with very specific ideals and interests, and that's the beauty behind it all. Goofy as all hell in its approach, but genuine. This? this is for the girls. Thank you vernonator6497.
Watch here.
Anita Velveeta - Biblically Accurate Fursona (Album)
By Felis Mors
Anita Velveeta is an artist I struggle to describe. I found out about her through my TikTok FYP, mostly because of a very popular comment I made about her mashup of Machine Girl and My Arms Are Your Cocoon being extremely transfeminine music. I didn’t find out about her original stuff until she published a single, titled Nothing Without You earlier this year. I thought it was something special from the second I heard it, it blended emo with use of synths and high-pitched vocals almost effortlessly, even though the mixing was a bit rough. The chorus was one of the best hooks I’d heard this year.
When I saw she was announcing this EP, I was immediately interested. It came out on streaming, and I was a bit wary when I saw the title of the first track, Don't Tread On Me Senpai, hoping it didn't mean that the project didn't really take itself seriously, but I was extremely thankful upon listening to it fully, with the EP even getting profoundly personal in the last track. It has an extremely special sound that I’m excited to hear about, and it isn’t scared to get a bit corny with the lyrics and presentation, something I appreciate a lot. The mixing still isn’t the greatest, but I’m definitely excited to see how Ms. Velveeta continues on her trajectory as an artist after this.
Best track: Honk!. It makes clever use of sampling, has an absolutely killer sax line and has a hook that has stuck with me since the second I heard it.
Listen Here.
Heccra - The Devil-Faces of My Old Friends, Beneath Me (Album)
By Felis Mors
Another project that blends emo and synths, this one feels like it was made especially for me in a way that really inspires me to eventually make something that sounds like it, because even after scrounging for hours and hours through RYM tags, I can’t find anything that sounds like it. It’s hard to believe this project was made by just one person purely through the amount of detail it has.
The mixing is strange in a way that feels like it was definitely a conscious choice. It feels cloudy and all-encompassing, it suits the high vocals and the loud instrumentation perfectly. The vocals are either screaming or on the verge of it for most of the record, until the last two tracks, which are a lot poppier than the early chunks of it.
It’s hard to believe this record was released in 2015, purely on how brand new its sound feels. The only thing I can think of that really dates it is the eternal emo tradition of sampling things (in the case of this record, Mario 64), for no apparent reason other than an aesthetic I’m not really a fan of, but I’m definitely willing to overlook in the case of a record this good.
Best track: The Mint That Grows Behind The Dumpster. The energy in this track is absolutely incredible. I was hooked on it from the second I heard the Cap'n Jazz interpolation.
Listen Here.
Shortparis - Яблонный сад (Album)
By Octa Möbius Sheffner
Now that I'm out of Russia, can I say Shortparis are good? Because Shortparis are good. Komyagin is a no-bullshit songwriter, suggestive but urgent, a favorite trick of mine being the inversion of lines. In the title track's 1st verse, wind rises over the Kremlin, in its equivalent line in the 2nd, ashes rise instead. An infantile conscript who's eating a sugary bun, always glad for sweet things, "your son and your brother too". "Apple orchard blooming with honey" turns into "Apple orchard blooming with blood". Turbulent guitars and oscillators, the roar of warplanes zipping overhead. Often acrobatic, dynamic percussion work, clever song structuring going from breezy and almost mischievous to the corrugated and beat down, first checking out the body of a woman, the next moment stating That's How Our Cause Rotted Away. A perpetual lack of outspokenness, the stillness of business as usual, "if there were servants, there'd be poison too", suggesting the barrage of shell companies, everybody not a begrudging subordinate capable of conscience, but actively in on it. Grass, tired of being trampled on by mute zombies, in an effort to show where strength really lies, somehow cuts itself. The sun doesn't roll from east to west, directionlessly, but now enlightened rolls from the beginning across to the end. Also, listen to those R rolls in Говорит Москва and tell me that isn't theatre at its finest, almost suggesting the grat-grat, ratatatat of a firearm, "the fear of a revolver / an eternal mark of our love". Some of their most graceful and cosmic moments are found here too, in the revelatory peacock tail of grand pianos and ethereal synths on Половина. Gorgeously ugly stuff.
Listen Here.
Beyond The Black Rainbow (Film)
By Octa Möbius Sheffner
A sentiment common among film crews is that movies are not made during shooting, but in the editing room. In this film, the editing is actively sabotaging the fabric of the film, threatening to burst through the false, symmetrical sanctity of the retrofuturistic, acid-casualty ESP research institute and into the boiling cauldron of the Cold War and the Reagan presidency, Reagan himself afforded his best film role as a setpiece on a CRT television. A film of barely any words, but of many (sub-/im-)mersions, filmed and recorded almost intrusively, a forcible no-cuts, no-surprises claustrophobia, always at risk of its subjects destroying both its perpetrators and its ability to represent events on the screen. Outstandingly icky and detailed sound recording too - nothing says far-gone villain quite like those fucking contact mic'd mouth sounds, the mind-expansion flower power aesthetics and mindset now revealing the production of dictators by narcotics, environments feeling like alcoves for imposing one's ego onto a world that refuses to remain the way you want it. I want that jacket, though.
