Mike76

As the years go by, it is inevitable that, little by little, the people who have always been present in our lives take their leave, leaving behind a burden of memories, regrets, and remorse for those who remain. The lost world is therefore the ideal one, with our loved ones, friends, and acquaintances all still alive, and it has crumbled away with the relentless passage of time, leaving us more alone and lost.
Musically, The Cure have returned to what they do best: atmospheric tracks with long instrumental intros in the style of "Disintegration." It won’t be a novelty—far from it—but it’s something they still manage to do well, or at least better in general than when they try to make straightforward songs (that vein seems to have completely dried up). It conveys more a sense of fatalism and resignation than mere gloom. As far as I’m concerned, it's their best work since "Wish."

A work that follows just a few months after the successful "Alles Ist Gut," identical to its predecessor in sound, only a bit more focused on sentimental and sexual themes, and just as successful for me. Delgado's voice and the dynamic and "circular" lines of sinth-bass are certainly their trademark, but upon closer listening, Görl's traditional drumming is a decisive ingredient that amplifies the human side of their music, almost like their heartbeat. With a drum machine or an electronic drum kit, they wouldn't have been the same.

Maybe it’s because expectations weren't very high, but the album is really not bad and the absence of Rankine isn't felt too much; whoever replaced him did a good job. "Breakfast" is a standout track (or should I say with cornflakes, as a joke). I even find myself preferring it to "Affectionate Punch."

I'm not racist, but I've never tolerated the Negrita.

Funny and enjoyable film. Although it is entertainment, the director again hints at a scandalous theme like pedophilia, as was the case with "Kikujiro's Summer."

Despite having re-evaluated them a long time ago, rediscovering the first two albums in the mid-'90s, I didn't find myself interested in continuing beyond "Rio," but maybe one day...
I do have "Greatest," although it's on VHS and collecting dust somewhere. Thinking about it, the DD videos would deserve a discussion as well.
At the height of their success, I was in elementary school and wasn't an active music listener, but I still detested them for the idolization surrounding them (the fact that my cousin was crazy about them was reason enough). Between an appearance at San Remo with collective hysteria and the paninaro from Drive In entering and exiting the scene singing "Wild Boys," the clearest “live” musical memory I have of them from that period is, in the end, the single "Notorious" (which I can't say whether I like or not).
The late Nikki Sudden revealed in his autobiography that "Rio" and "Hungry Like The Wolf" were the result of the plundering perpetrated by our guys against the local band TV Eye, of which a former member was the singer for the Durans for a while before Le Bon arrived.
Regardless, my judgment doesn't change; the DDs, with their personal blend of disco music and Japan, have produced admirable pop that is largely still enjoyable.

Never heard of them before, they're not even in the compilation "Verschwende Deine Jugend" which I thought was exhaustive. I'll make a note of them. Great review.

Let me out....let me ouuuut... As commented by Marciano above, Tovey was an artist who knew how to blend pop and experimentation with a great sense of humor and in an original and interesting way. I've always thought "Pedestrian" was a jab at Numan's "Cars," but I could be wrong.

A book that requires a good number of pages for "settling in" before the reader can make sense of the "disorienting" situations and the scattered pieces of the puzzle laid out by the author. At times, it reminded me of Ballard's "The Atrocity Exhibition" in style and language (highly technical and specialized terms, sometimes obscure, used to describe paradoxical and absurd situations) and in certain narrative devices (the college environment where the Miss Psycosis broadcast takes place, described with anatomical terminology as if it were a human brain, echoes Ballard's "fusion" of inner and outer spaces).
"Infinite Jest" is a book about depression, anhedonia, the difficulty of finding meaning in one's existence, and in reaction to this mental state, a book about various addictions to alcoholic substances and drugs aimed at overcoming it; the fall into the dead end of addiction, when the entirety of the individual's life is consumed by procuring the substance and finds themselves in a cage where it becomes impossible to live either with or without the substance; life in picturesque recovery communities where, for success, one must somewhat accept a sort of brainwashing, is the most vivid and expressive account I've ever read on this theme. It probably wasn't the author's intention, but from my point of view, this book can also be considered the most effective anti-drug and alcohol abuse advertisement ever.
"Infinite Jest" is also a book about incomprehensibility: Hal cannot communicate with the university admissions examiners, James Incandenza fails to communicate with Hal, which motivates him to create the film "Infinite Jest," Orin struggles to communicate directly with his father, or at least that's how it seems to him, and Don Gately, lying in a hospital bed, cannot communicate with the medical staff and those who visit him, pouring their monologues onto him. On several occasions, the dialogues between two characters seem for long stretches to be monologues of people who are not listening to each other and continue undeterred with their arguments.
More than a novel with several intertwined stories, "Infinite Jest" is a flow that goes in a thousand directions without a true beginning and without a real ending, so much so that details, which could not be given any weight in the first reading due to lack of information, emerge in the second, as carefully noted by the reviewer.
A very interesting book but perhaps a bit too cyclopean and self-indulgent.

A dark and dirty shroud that occasionally evokes Cabaret Voltaire but is not musically monolithic ("Jungle Song" is practically rap, albeit in a unique way, "Now I Want It All" has flashes of melodic rock) even though the overall atmosphere is as oppressive as a shroud. Tuxedomoon in the director's chair supporting the good Miller, who left this world in 2003 at just over fifty.