Yet the pleasure we partake in; was caused by the fanged grin

I think there’s too many ‘pictures-only’ blog posts posted consecutively in my blog, and that is not a good thing, considering the type of person I am. Pictures are enjoyable to look and ponder upon over, but they bring about too many interpretations, and words crafted into elaborate scenes and scenarios or simply just stringed together to describe a scene of feeling is simply more enjoyable.

I would begin to say that life lately has been pretty dull and uneventful yet again, considering where I am now it is quite the usual routine to expect nothing extraordinary to happen. And this is my life, my beloved readers – nothing much to ponder upon anyway unless something happens that I deem exciting.

Ah, but maybe there is something interesting happening, and since I am one to create something out of nothing as a fiction writer – well, lately, my grades have been deteriorating, and it looks quite miserable each time I open my school’s online portal. It’s just sitting there and staring at me, taunting me with the severity of the situation. By saying that, now, maybe I do deserve this since I’m not that smart of a person anyway and I have been feeling out of my depth these past two weeks.

I am not myself. My physical state feels perfectly fine, I haven’t been falling ill that much, I have been sleeping dreamlessly which is a lovely change and I am not lacking in any area at all. I am alright in body, but I feel that I have been so distracted and that I can’t really be bothered anymore with many things. That’s why I’ve been under-performing in class, been so distant with so many people (not that they would notice anyway), been wanting so many things, but not being able to reach it. I’ve been a recluse.

Maybe by joining the writing competition this Saturday my frustrations would be finally vented out and I’d be able to feel better, and recover from whatever this thing I’m claiming to be ’suffering’ from, since writing has always been the outlet for me to bring my unshaped fantasies to life, make my characters suffer and love and feel everything I want them to feel. I am impatient for this to happen – there is a little hope in me that I might be able to become known for being ‘the writer’ in class, which I want, instead of being the silent student who occasionally speaks. It has always been my dream to have my fiction published ever since I was little, but my skills at writing was usually lacklustre until I took it upon myself to actually find books of my interest and improve it only when I was in Secondary Two. I want to be known, I lust it. I just wonder if I am good enough right now. There are others out there who are more articulate than I am, after all.

I, I, I. I keep talking about my boring life constantly and I dislike it, I dislike to enclose information about myself especially online, especially if it is about what happened in my life, little titbits you don’t really need to know. I don’t feel anyone wants to know about that – usually blogs that contain those type of content are the most mundane, in my opinion anyway.

I’m going to try a different approach now, and recommend some albums I’ve recently bought to listen to.

I keep listening to Massive Attack, the pioneers of trip hop, a practically obscure branch of music, which the band do confess to hate it as a label for their music. But I think it makes it easy to classify I think, not that I am being ignorant. I’ve listened to all of their albums and found it all to be really amazing – but I wondered whether there were other artistes other than the pioneers themselves who could do justice to this type of music.

I stumbled across two albums: Tricky’s Maxinquaye and Portishead’s Dummy.

The two albums respectively

Of course I had heard of these artistes before and even heard a song of two but I wasn’t so sure if it could meet up to Massive Attack’s high standards.

I am going to start with attempting to describe Dummy first. I didn’t really fancy the vocals (Beth Gibbons) because I felt they were out of place in certain songs, and it has this waver to it which kind of makes it unsure and has a vulnerable sound to it, but the atmosphere of sensuality commonly associated with trip hop was there. I adored quintessential sounding trip hop Mysterons, the harsh beat of Strangers, the sweetness of It Could Be Sweet. Roads shocked me the first time I listened to it, it was so depressing yet it drew me in like a vice – it is the kind of song which you must listen to because it is amazing, but if you listen to it too much it will affect your emotions because it just exudes ‘disturbing’. Glory Box has that little electronic bass loop near the end which is amazing. Despite this being a gem of an album, I still can’t help but to feel there is repetition in the songs – lack of variety and experimentation since the songs nearly all sounded the same.

Maxinquaye is totally different from Portishead and I liked it a lot, it sounded like Massive Attack on the first track Overcome. The lyrics are the same as Karmacoma, a Massive Attack song whose lyrics are credited to Tricky. I fell in love with Ponderosa because Martina Topley-Bird’s British accent becomes more pronounced in this song, and Tricky provides backing vocals, making it sound all mysterious. It develops a slightly frantic feel to it when the piano bits come in, which I adore. Black Steel manages to sound both punk-rocker/Eastern-influenced with its Indian tablas and electric guitars battling side by side at the same time. Pumpkin is sung by one of my favourite female singers Alison Goldfrapp, and it is so sensual, her voice manages to transcend that tranquil quality which is so rare to find in mainstream songs – one of the reasons I don’t listen to mainstream music. The debatably sexiest tune on the album could be Abbaon Fat Tracks – its lyrics are very, very sexual in nature (Fuck you in, tuck you in, suck you in…I fuck you in the ass, just for a laugh), a person I had listen to it even said it was sleazy-sounding, and again, the woman’s voice is so drop-dead sensual it gives the sleazy lyrics a very sexy feel to it.

There you go, my two short reviews of two cult trip hop albums – and if you fancy a ride on the sensual ‘dark’ feel of the alternative music, pick these two up, alongside the must have Mezzanine by Massive Attack, in which my review can be found here.