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Reviews (7)
06 June 2007
Every home should have one
I'd long been a fan of the song Monkey Dead (is it just me who finds it rather sordidly erotic? oh, it is...), but was finding it hard to track down anything else by the band - the CD was deleted and of course, they'd long disbanded. Would I like the CD anyway - what if they'd just been a one-song wonder, as some less kind reviews had suggested? Every band may have one good song in them, but a whole album's worth, well, that's a different matter.
All I can say is that the time I've spent hunting this album down was not wasted. Far from it - I wish I'd owned it for longer. It's a dark & moody gem with some unexpected, interesting musical arrangements to match its moments of stark lyrical beauty. That the lyrics are held in place by Gavin Clark's amazing rasp of a voice helps enormously - he turns out raw emotion from almost every line.
It's far from being loungey background music (more dank bedsit, really), but it will repay your efforts many times over if you take the time to listen. These are songs of love and despair that hit you in the gut, then work their way up to your brain & take up residence.
Elvenquest: The Journey So Far: Series 1,2,3 and 4 by Anil Gupta 9781910281260
14 February 2018
Very funny fantasy fiction spoof: well worth a listen
With a great cast and some very knowing references to Tolkein and D&D role-player games, this is a really funny series. By series 3, I'm starting to notice a bit of repetition in terms of jokes and ideas, with a bit of an over-reliance on fnerr-fnerr double entendres but it's still head and shoulders above a lot of this kind of comedy series.
Alistair McGowan's Lord Darkness is heavily Blackadder-influenced (not a criticism) and it's nice to hear Dave Lamb (Amis The Chosen One, formerly a dog) stretching himself beyond his Come Dine With Me sarcasm. As the reluctant Sam, Stephen Mangan is at his most archly bemused and sceptical, except when driven by lust for the amazonian princess Penthiselea, or just about any female, really. There have to be dwarves and elves, or it's not a proper fantasy (that's a rule, right there) so it's good to hear Kevin Eldon superbly filling two roles - as bullish Dean the Dwarf and the sublimely depraved Kreech - with Darren Boyd as the suitably dim-witted Vidar the Elf.
24 February 2018
Feels like a lecture, not a novel
The book had been recommended as part of the folk horror genre, which I love, so I thought it was worth a try.
Now, storytelling is a craft (go and see any of Adverse Camber's incredible performances and you'll see what I mean) and just churning out facts is not the same thing as delivering a compelling tale.
Unfortunately, this is one of those books where you can just sense the author showing off how clever they are and how much research they've done. Being academic and doing serious research are fine things, but shouldn't be so obvious to the reader, or come across quite so smugly (Robert Harris manages to do it very well, for instance). And it makes for a pretty awful reading experience, too.
The writing style is stilted, dialogue unrealistic and characters are ciphers rather than people. I didn't hear another 'voice' except the author's - and even that felt condescending, like I was being lectured at. For example, there's quite a lot about ancient Celtic language - a subject of interest to me - but it was presented in an awkwardly dry and repetitive way (with footnotes like an academic text!). There are some good descriptions of landscape but I simply couldn't detect any real heart in the writing, any passion for setting or story. My heart sank at page one (Hitler was not a vegetarian: let's just debunk that myth once and for all), but I persevered for 50 pages before giving up entirely.