Skummy

Dylan, too, is at his best when he got older and learned how to use his voice as an instrument more. Songs like "Lovesick", where he has a bit more bass and gravel in his voice compared to how reedy and nasally it used to be, don't sound anywhere near as good sung by anyone else.

Daniel Johnston is a rough one. Some absolute genius in there, but as I've got older I've found it harder and harder to listen to for all the same reasons I was initially drawn to him in the first place. It's all too raw and soul-baring for me these days. I saw him live once, at a festival curated by Matt Groening, who introduced him as his favourite artist. I don't think I made it through a single song before having to walk out, it was so clearly overwhelming for him to perform at that time, and it felt uncomfortable, almost voyeuristic or exploitative to watch him. Absolutely - I always think Kurt Cobain is the example of how you should behave if your band gets signed and makes it anything like as big as they did; he was constantly giving back, using his platform to help uplift the bands that had influenced him and that he loved - not just the Meat Puppets and Vaselines, but Daniel Johnston, The Melvins, Shonen Knife, so many others. How often do you hear bands like Coldplay or U2, or anyone else of that kind of stature, talk about obscure bands that helped them get where they are, or invite little known bands to tour with them? It feels like that should almost be your duty once you make it big. I struggle with Unplugged. I used to love it, but not so much any more, though I can still recognise why it's great. A big thing for me, and I struggle to explain exactly why, is that it very much feels like a "Kurt Cobain" album rather than a Nirvana album, like it's right at the pinnacle of making him and him alone the face of a scene, when Nirvana were a great band, not just a great frontman.

He appeared at AAA's first of three Triplemania shows this year, before going back to WWE, and seemed to set up a tag team match with him and Rey Escorpion against Latin Lover and Vampiro. So seeing if they pick that up again for Triplemania in October will be a good indication; though I don't think there's another match announcement press conference scheduled 'til September.

the new Black Midi album is superb, for sure. It reminds me of Mr. Bungle in terms of how readily it hops around between genres and moods, but with none of the slightly smug and "wacky" edge that's put me off them in recent years; it always feels consistent, even when it's taking some really weird left turns. Definitely one of my favourites of this year so far.

It could be that they wanted a certain number of female wrestlers in, and they made the cut while men with a similar track record in terms of making TV didn't. I'll be disappointed if they're in and Emi Sakura isn't, though, it'll make my year to be able to see Emi in a video game.

It depends - I like the little dopamine hit of seeing that I've got an achievement, and sometimes they can push me to do a little better, but I've hardly got any games at 100% because it's not enough motivation for me to grind away at stuff. There are achievements/trophies in Kingdom Hearts 3 that would drive me mental trying to get, like getting Sora up to level 99, even though I was able to finish the main game at a much lower level than that, so I'd just be grinding needlessly. Similarly, I'm doing a Final Fantasy 7 playthrough and one of the achievements is getting a date with Barret - a notoriously difficult thing to do, that I've never managed once in the countless times I've played this game, and as I've set myself the task of playing through with no recourse to hints or walkthroughs, I know I'm not going to get that. On the flipside, I always find it quite disappointing when an achievement is just reaching a certain point in the game. If I'm enjoying the game, then progressing through it is reward enough. I like when achievements are a bit more creative or silly - the Lego games are brilliant for using achievements for little in-jokes.

I hate the cover art, but those screenshots look a lot better than what's been released previously - still a weird middle ground between realism and arcade/cartoonish, but hopefully the gameplay leans into that too. Abadon being in there is promising, as it suggests it'll be a pretty deep roster to choose from, though I wonder what the cut-off point is. Kenny's alluded to Cody Rhodes being in the game, and the career mode beginning at AEW's inception, so I assume that's the "deep career mode". It's a pretty unique situation, to have a company so young that they can tell that story in-game.

Doink might be the most fun character to play as in one of these games in years. Just brilliant.

I'm only three episodes in, but my pet theory since the beginning has been;

yeah, I loved how randomly generated the season mode was - I used to try and customise stuff to fit the stories that were coming up; if the game was having my CAW team up with and help out Hardcore Holly, I guess that meant he was in a tag team with Hardcore Holly now, so I'd create that team, and so on. It was always a bit of a shame playing the later games that the season/story mode was so rigid and stuck in one story, even if that story was more complex than what came before. I will always have massive soft spots for the first two Smackdown games, because they were right at the start of my real hardcore wrestling fandom. In fact, the first game was basically the catalyst for me getting back into wrestling after drifting away from it as a kid.

My dad - who isn't particularly into punk in the first place - will bring up with alarming regularity that The Stranglers weren't a punk band, but just a pub rock/blues band made up of jobbing musicians, who had already been gigging for years and jumped on a bandwagon. I think he actually quite likes them, so I'm not sure why this is such a sore point for him. In terms of @Hobo being surprised they're still going, it's only JJ left from the original line-up, everyone else currently in the band joined within the last few years.

I get people being iffy about the Monkey Island art style - I'm not 100% sold on it yet myself, and people want it to look like they remember, not realising that Ron Gilbert isn't trying to make a nostalgia game that looks like games he made 30 years ago, he's making a game today, and nor will it look like Curse of Monkey Island or anything that came after that, because he had nothing to do with those games. But abusing him over it is preposterous. And besides, even if I'm not convinced yet, I'm pretty sure the game will win me over because it's fucking Ron Gilbert. I think he might know a thing or two about making Monkey Island games. I do like that he has such creative control over the project that he's able to just say, "well fuck you, no nice things for you" in the first place, though.

if you have run-ins turned on, sometimes an additional Doink will interfere, which is a brilliant touch.

Despite a few misgivings, I really enjoyed that series, even if it got a bit silly at times.

Battles last night. First time in many years, and first time seeing them as a two-piece. Better than ever, bloody lovely gig.

Those tracks are very much my jam, hope it all goes well! I went to see Nine Inch Nails in Brixton last night. They were one of my first "proper" gigs, and the first one I traveled from Jersey to London for, seventeen years ago, in the same venue, and I hadn't seen them since. It was a totally different vibe to last time, which was quite moody and very goth, this almost felt like Nine Inch Nails doing stadium rock at times - they even got people hand-clapping during an encore of Hurt, and somehow managed to turn that song into something almost hopeful; ending on a major key delivery of the line, "I will find a way...". The setlist was bonkers, stuff pulled from across their career, some of it played straight, some reinvented. They played The Perfect Drug, which they didn't play live at all for more than 20 years, so that was amazing. They played I'm Afraid of Americans, their David Bowie collaboration, which was a really fun surprise that I really enjoyed, and then did an even more surprising follow-up by covering Bowie's "Fashion", and basically playing it straight. The first song of the encore, if I remember correctly, was Reptile, one of my favourite NIN songs, and they turned into a really oppressively heavy dirge. That's very much a compliment.

Really fascinated what you make of this one - I loved it, but it's certainly unique. I feel I'd maybe have liked it more if I knew more Ted Hughes stuff, as I'm sure there's references in there that went over my head. Porter's second book, Lanny, stuck with me a lot more, in part because a lot of the rural village setting reminded me of my childhood, and there's a lot of (albeit very abstract) folk horror elements.

To be a little bleak about it, there were plenty of times when you'd never have guessed that Fletch would be the first one to go. He was basically the glue holding that band together at points, particularly when Gore and Gahan were far gone in drink and drugs.

I'm not sure - I think there's sort of two things going on;

I haven't watched the trailers, as we just finished watching the series to date - I'd seen it all before, my other half had only seen season one, so was seeing the subsequent seasons for the first time with me. She's a little less critical of the last two series than me - I thought maybe I'd warm to series three on repeat viewing, but aside from a couple of points, didn't really. Thoughts!:

yeah, nostalgia is one of the biggest driving forces in music, and that's no bad thing - it's rare that you'll ever find music that means as much to you as you did when you were, say, 15-21, as you get older, and that stuff will likely always still appeal in ways that newer music simply can't. And, of course, most of us just don't have the time as we get older to invest as much of our energy in finding new music to listen to. That's pretty much always been the case to some extent - it's why we have whole radio stations and TV channels dedicated to the music of the past - but what's changed is distribution methods and record sales no longer being the bedrock of the industry, so nostalgia is increasingly the predominant means of making money from music. Older songs are in the charts because streaming and downloads are factored in now, but that's a symptom of a wider problem, in music, and culturally in general. There's a paradox of choice thing in that there being so much music available at our fingertips now means it's actually quite daunting, and much easier to either just go back and keep listening to what you already know, or for people to fall down increasingly esoteric rabbit holes of finding music that really appeals to them but doesn't necessarily have mass appeal. Caught in the middle of that is established stuff still getting played, because it's safe and comforting. That's all happened in line with festival line-ups and big tours being far more skewed towards older artists, as bands that aren't making as much money from record sales are spending more time on the road, so newer bands rarely feel as "big" because they're not getting the big breakthrough performances that, say, Pulp had at Glastonbury in '95 or Nirvana at Reading '92. We're past the time where radio and the music press can act as tastemakers, which has its advantages, but also means there's probably never going to be bands that feel like the hot new thing, or the biggest band in the world, or genuinely exciting, in the way they used to.

it was that or Nagoya Grampus.

I gave FIFA 22 a game under much the same circumstances - I haven't been good at a football game since World Cup Italia '90 - and found the number of options completely overwhelming, then played one incredibly dull game as Wigan Athletic and got bored very quickly.