bigmouth rides again

Every year, committing words to paper — or, well, keyboard — gets harder and harder for me as the eldrich tentacles of reality tighten their stranglehold around my executive functions and getting up from the couch begins to occasionally hurt. But for music, I’m willing to fight my worst impulses. Damn the writer’s blocks shackled around by ankles, I’m dragging myself out of this hole like Bruce…

It’s that time of the year again when all of the major blogs are putting out their lists of the best songs of the year, so I have no choice but to share my own — seeing as the Internet clearly needs one of these that doesn’t have six variations of the one Lana del Rey song on it. Last year, I wrote about three songs and three albums. This year, it’s a simple list of my favourite songs of 2023. It…

I fucking hate the way the Internet talks about anime, man. Stop calling things “lewd”. Stop joking about “truck-kun” or “NTR”. Stop arguing about who is “best girl” or about which shows are the new “big three”. Stop turning tired tropes into memes instead of critically engaging with them, otherwise we’ll all be complicit in normalizing paint-by-numbers power fantasies for entitled toxic nerds…

American Independence Day? No, no, the true reason for celebrating the 4th of July is the fact that it’s the birthday of one of the greatest to ever do it. There are very few voice actors in the anime industry who are universally and exclusively associated with a single performance so iconic it completely overshadows everything they’ve ever done, but Satomi Arai is one of them. Mind you, this is…

There would never be another game like Kingdom Hearts II. This became my conviction after the third flagship instalment in the series broke my heart into a thousand pieces by being a slapdash, watered-down slog, bringing the franchise’s infamously labyrinthine story arc to an underwhelming end with an apathetic death rattle. Kingdom Hearts III was a harsh reminder that no level of anticipation…

It’s not often that you come experience a truly new and unique sensation. Innovation often emerges from creative combination and manipulation of a set, but ultimately limited, number of building blocks — flavours, colours, tropes and sounds. The distinctive sound of Vampire Weekend’s 2013 album Modern Vampires of the City, one of my all-time favourite records, is a great example of this kind of…