Week of July 31
Music
Travis Scott-UTOPIA (2023)
UTOPIA by Travis Scott is an album in the same light as Kanye West's DONDA. With images of a dark, drugged-out often soulless twisted paradise. Utopia is diverse, bloated, and some of the songs stick. Though many songs have superfluous segways and the gimmick of beat switching can be tiresome, and Travis Scott is not the most interesting rapper, the album has some decent tracks, most notably, the jittery boom bap hellscape HYAENA, the dreamlike soothing ballad MY EYES whose additional crooning by Justin Vernon and Sampha weave more subtle beauty than any Travis Scott song has ever done. MELTDOWN, is a decent song that involves one of the many beat switches in the album. FE!N is a psychotic nocturnal nightmare appropriate for a cemetery rave.
Aphex Twin-Blackbox Life Recorder 21f (2023)
The song and video to this is quite the cerebral experience.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_Ue_P7vcRE&pp=ygUKYXBoZXggdHdpbg%3D%3D
Film and Television
Alfred Hitchcock-Psycho (1960)
What a marvelous feat in suspense.
