My A-Side/B-Side distinction is, I admit, an arbitrary and at times a tenuous one. Sometimes whether a song is “positive” or “negative” is impossibly subjective, sometimes it depends from what angle I approach it. And so this time, I’ve gone for two edge cases, from a broadly similar
Many love songs are about a relationship, a specific connection between people, often a reciprocal one (although possibly one that’s come to an end). But there are some that are about a very different experience of love; that of yearning, daydreaming about the possibility of a relationship. Songs of
Two things I love are lists and spreading the word of cultural phenomena that I enjoy. So every year I like to combine those two into one beautiful whole. Let’s celebrate 2025 with all it brought us (well, me). Top 5 Games That I’ve Played This Year 1.
Apologies for the two-week delay on this one; I've been away for two successive weekends, and have forgotten to schedule the post on both occasions. In a way, it's fitting, though, given that the A-Side here in particular has to do with delay and deferment. This
Today we’re in a broadly indie sphere, in a genre sense rather than distribution etc. – the kinds of songs you might hear played on radio stations that devote themselves to the nostalgia of 30- and 40-somethings. Indie is stereotypically associated with sensitive young men (and the occasional woman) subjecting
One of the first creepypastas (creepypasta? Not a word I ever expected to pluralise) I can remember sticking with me is a lurid story about a person buying a strange-looking copy of the 2000 game The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, and slowly coming to realise, through a series
Some love songs, as we’ve seen, live on details, on specifics, about a particular scene or the way someone looks or similar. Others are more abstract, and that’s the case in different ways with these two. One is about a beginning, or even the space before a beginning,
The following will contain spoilers for both Hades and Hades 2 at least up to the end credits of both. Hades 2 is one of those sequels that is, at base, evolutionary rather than revolutionary, to use a critical cliché. Its basic gameplay loop is much the same as its
Here, two songs that came out within a year of each other, something that seems to happen more often than one might expect given that these songs are mostly chosen randomly. Both songs are from pivotal mid-90s albums, which were lauded at the time but have only grown in stature
Two artists we’ve already encountered here; in one case as part of a band, while the other slips between categories, offering us a B-Side where we’ve previously looked at an A-Side. So both sneaking past my “no repeated artists” rule in different ways, albeit without breaking it. Like
Performance is everything on all of these records, of course. These aren’t poems, they’re songs, and they demand to be experienced and analysed as such, as holistic pieces of art wherein the distinct parts come together. But this entry in particular capitalises on the distinct sounds and moods
This falls very much under the “other ephemera” category as far as this blog goes. As with popular music, and perhaps even more so, I like to make a case for video games as art, contra Roger Ebert’s famous assertion to the contrary (which, to be fair, he did