So, yeah. It’s been a month since my last proper update here on NFI and this has given me plenty of time to think about what I want to do with the blog. I’m still not 100% sure; I’m a fickle man and I tend to drift between my hobbies, moving focus from one to another every few months. But all the same I think this short break has given me the confidence to accept something I’ve been deliberating over for a while.
I don’t find writing about music very fun any more.
Quite possibly I burned myself out by trying to pump out so many reviews. 172 reviews over the course of two and a bit years is a lot, especially when you consider that they tend to be 500-1,000 words each. Call it an average of 700 and that’s 120,000 words, which is the length of a fairly chunky novel. Most of those reviews were pretty hard to write, too. It usually takes me a while to figure out an angle to come at a record from.
This is not to rule out my writing about music ever again. PRs and bands are still sending me stuff and on the off chance that I’m struck by a desire to write about a particular thing, I will do so. In the future I may even get past my burnout and start enjoying it again, as I did with writing about books. Hell, if I ever find myself going the freelance writing route, it might even be a way to earn some money for my writing. But now we’re getting into pipe dream territory and there are plumbers and goombas everywhere.
NFI as a music site ain’t dead. Like old punks, it just smells that way.
I do have a few things coming up in the near future. I’ll be posting my picks from 2011′s fine crop of music soon and I should also have a short review of the late 70s punk rock doc’ Shellshock Rock for you too. I may dabble in quickfire shortform music roundup reviews; I still listen to loads of new records every month and I like to recommend things to people. I will continue to post things here, though they will be more intermittent.
For the most part, however, I’ve decided that I want to focus on what I find most fun, namely writing for Arcadian Rhythms and playing music with my band, Wrecktheplacefantastic. Writing about games has turned out to be an immense source of pleasure and has generated more interesting conversations than any of my writing about music ever has. Similarly playing music in front of people, getting up on stage, travelling around and meeting people, writing and learning new songs, hitting the studio – all of this is also a lot more enjoyable and creative than writing about records made by other people. So I’m going to focus on these things and get better at them… or at least that’s the plan.
Put another way, the route to happiness is to do what you enjoy most. Since I no longer particularly enjoy writing about music, I’m no longer going to force myself to do so. Since I enjoy doing other stuff instead, I’m going to go and do that. The only real source of sadness is firstly that this feels a bit like the end of an era, and secondly that I feel like I’m letting down the folks who read my reviews regularly (I know there are a few of you out there). I hope you find something to like in my other projects.
As I sit down to write this review in mid-August, 2011, the riots that have erupted across Britain over the past week have begun to subside, the energies that drove them dissipating in the face of a coherent police response and that most British of demotivators, the weather. But the anger, social exclusion, vanishing economic possibilities, lack of faith in police relations and sense of political betrayal that initially produced this eruption among Britain’s poorest urban communities remain.
Gary McMahon’s The Concrete Grove plumbs the fertile ground of such forgotten areas, its dark tale derived as much from the existential horror of hopeless or wasted lives as the natural and supernatural forces that prey upon them.
Lana and Hailey, single mother and daughter, have been forced into a life on an estate – the eponymous Concrete Grove – which surrounds the Needle, a derelict and sinister Brutalist block of flats. The Needle pierces the heart of a community racked with poverty, desperation and accompanying social issues like drug abuse, violence and entrenched petty criminals with a penchant for cruelty. One such ambitious thug is Monty Bright, a loan shark obsessed with the history of the Grove. Monty takes an interest in Lana and Hailey, using Lana’s debt to him as leverage while he tries to understand the growing connection between Hailey and the Grove.
A few roads over, just outside the estate, a middle-aged man named Tom supports and cares for his bed-bound and clinically obese wife. Tortured by his own demons and a sense of being trapped in his own life, Tom finds himself drawn to Lana and Hailey and by extension involved in whatever plans Bright and the Grove have in store.
The Concrete Grove’s most interesting conceit is its fusion of old mythologies with present realities. The backstory describes how the Needle and surrounding estate were built over an ancient Pagan site of nature-worship. The power of the old Grove remains but it has been corrupted by the pathologies of the human community that now surrounds it. Forces bleed out into our world, and not all of them are as ambivalent as those the Pagans once worshipped.
Although the actions of McMahon’s characters may not always convince – Hailey in particular makes a few leaps of faith and illogic that I struggled with – and Tom is one of those frustratingly frustrated middle-aged characters whose internal monologue is dominated by a desire to fuck anything with a blouse and a pulse, they are on the whole a sympathetic bunch who draw us into the worlds he has built around the iconic Needle. The thematic juxtaposition on which the novel is based is maintained throughout: England’s past and present, the powers produced by suburban sickness and health, all revolving around by the ambiguous forces of nature. The novel’s conclusion reflects this state of thematic balance well, although it’s also possible to read in a much more traditional horror motif.
The Concrete Grove itself clearly has more stories to tell. By the book’s close it remains a source of substantial mystery, and the desperate poverty and anti-social behaviour that surrounds it remains unaddressed and ignored by the wider world.
384pp paperback, published by Solaris Books.
[This review originally published in Vector #268, the critical journal of the British Science Fiction Association. This version of the review precedes the published version being reformatted for printing but is otherwise identical.]
I’ve not done one of these in a while and it looks like Postalicious hasn’t picked up all of the links I’ve saved since the last one. Sorry about that. The curious can always just go look at the saved links directly on delicious.com. :)
Del.icio.us links for January 20th through January 22nd:
Okay, that’s only, like, a part of it. A few well-deserved beers and whiskies will be involved, but actually now that I’ve run up to the end of the old era of reviewage I’d like to take a brief holiday from NFI. This will probably only last a week, perhaps two at the most. Once I’m back in action you can expect to see my favourite records of 2011, perhaps some of the usual introspective navel-gazing, and a state of the nation address in which I finally explain what I’d like to do with NFI in the coming year. SPOILER ALERT: it’ll probably be less posts overall, but they’ll be better quality or longer.
In the meantime, I hope yr 2012 has gotten off to a good start. It’s a year with a lot to live up to, huh? 2011 was such a nice, inoffensive, pleasant year all round.
* = 2/3 reviews a week, and towards the end I really started running out of ways to say effectively the same thing in a different, exciting way. I had fun trying, though!
For the most part, however, I’ve decided that I want to focus on what I find most fun, namely writing for Arcadian Rhythms and playing music with my band, Wrecktheplacefantastic. Writing about games has turned out to be an immense source of pleasure and has generated more interesting conversations than any of my writing about music ever has. Similarly playing music in front of people, getting up on stage, travelling around and meeting people, writing and learning new songs, hitting the studio – all of this is also a lot more enjoyable and creative than writing about records made by other people. So I’m going to focus on these things and get better at them… or at least that’s the plan.
As I sit down to write this review in mid-August, 2011, the riots that have erupted across Britain over the past week have begun to subside, the energies that drove them dissipating in the face of a coherent police response and that most British of demotivators, the weather. But the anger, social exclusion, vanishing economic possibilities, lack of faith in police relations and sense of political betrayal that initially produced this eruption among Britain’s poorest urban communities remain.