2024 Cultural Highlights
I don’t use Spotify (I don’t hate musicians) so I can’t do that Spotify wrapped thing. When I started thinking about the music I’ve been listening to this year I had to go old fashioned and just think about what has stuck in my head. As a result, there’s bound to be a certain amount of recency bias here. That said, in the last week or so I’ve been working in the garden almost every day and I tend to listen to Pearl Jam bootlegs while I’m doing that, and I haven’t included any of them here (although the Phoenix show from November 2014 is an awesome listen).
The two albums that really got a lot of action this year were Pearl Jam’s Dark Matter and Vampire Weekend’s Only God was Above Us. Dark Matter is a great album. It doesn’t reach the heights of PJ’s first run of records, Ten to Yield, but as an example of late-day Pearl Jam, it’s got some great tunes and really holds together as an album. I wasn’t overly enamoured with their last release, Gigaton (2020), and bands this far into their careers often trend downwards release by release, so I have been delighted at how good Dark Matter is.
It’s a similar story with Vampire Weekend. My favourite album of theirs is Modern Vampires of the City (2013), and the last one, Father of the Bride (2019) left me a bit cold: it’s too long, I think, so the diversity of styles becomes patchwork. Only God was Above Us may have replaced Modern Vampires of the City as my favourite album. May have. That’s certainly my 1-2, and the order depends on which one I’m currently listening to. Whatever, it’s excellent.
Other new music I enjoyed this year includes Speed of Light’s new single, Seance, Jack White’s No Name (got tickets to see him in Nagoya in March), Camera Obscura’s Look to the East, Look to the West, We Are the Animals in the Night by Afterlands, and Tori Amos’s live album Deep Diving Live. I also just discovered Suicidal Tendencies (I know, late to the party) so they are getting a lot of ear action.
As for books, I’ve read a lot of amazing things this year, and you can scroll back through my monthly posts to see it all. Honourable mentions go to Zoe Strachan’s Catch the Moments as They Fly, Flora Qian’s South of the Yangtze, Ted Chiang’s Stories of your Life and Others, Val McDermaid’s Queen Macbeth, Salman Rushdie’s Knife, Clare Kane’s Dragons in Shallow Waters, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s A Man of Two Faces, Yoko Morgenstern’s A Perfect Day to Die, and Michael Azerrad’s The Amplified Comes as You Are.
I also have to mention TL Huchu’s The Legacy of Arniston House which I read in an advance copy earlier in the year and is out now. It’s book four in his astounding Edinburgh Nights series. I got an advance copy because Tendai hired me to copy edit book five (the final part) before he submitted it to the publishers and I couldn’t very well edit part five without reading part four. Sometimes I love my job.
I thought about delving into some of the TV and film I watched this year but honestly, most of what I watched were old series like Brooklyn 99 and Blackadder. I tend to watch things in the evening after work when I’m exhausted and don’t have the brain power to concentrate. TV has always been a background thing for me, something playing while I cook or veg on the sofa. I need energy to watch the new series of The Rings of Power or The Diplomat and energy has been in short supply recently. Other things I have watched don’t really need my voice added to the clamour. That Slow Horses and Shogun are damn good is hardly a hot take. I enjoyed The Acolyte but that’s been cancelled so it hardly matters. Agatha All Along was good fun. The climax of The Umbrella Academy was worth the wait. Three Body Problem was surprisingly good. I tried watching How I Met Your Mother and holy shit that is some bad writing. I enjoyed Beatles ‘64 but it would be weird if I hadn’t. I think I watched The Beastie Boys Movie and Dirt four or five times each while drunk.
Finally, a shout out to some podcasts I relied on this year: Legacy, A History of Scottish Drama in Six Plays, The Plague Remedy Podcast, The Rest is Classified, We Have Ways of Making you Talk, The BBC History Extra Podcast, In Our Time, The Duncan and Coe History Show, McCartney: A Life in Lyrics, and, of course, Football Weekly.
I left out a bunch of stuff and have forgotten more. Most of my life revolves around books and I always have music or podcasts playing, but this round up is already far too long so I’ll wrap it up here. I hope I can add some of my own work to the pile in 2025 so I need to focus on that for a while. Publishers aren’t biting, our album recording has stalled, and I need to pull my finger out on that new project I keep trailing. Back to work.
Bye bye 2024:
