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Saturday 31 October 2015

Resurrected

Resurrected.

For me this is proving a year of resurrections, musically at least.  The musical highlight of the year has been an album and gigs from The Drays, led by one time Star of Heaven and Revenant Stephen Ryan. I have written about that album Look Away Down Collins Avenue at some length and am still listening to it months after its release. I have only managed to see them twice but hope to do so again next week. That would be more gigs than I went to in some recent years.

Probably the gigs I have enjoyed most over the last few years have been those of the revivified Blades, who I have also written about here. They also feature Conor Brady, a mainstay of The Drays. Jesus only brought one man back from the dead!

Friday 2 October 2015

Perfidia


Perfidia - James Ellroy

"The looming apocalypse is not of our doing. We have been good citizens and did not know it was coming."

I am sad to say that this book was a disappointment. I have been reading Ellroy with excitement since the late eighties, working backwards and looking forward to each new book but this is the first new book to disappoint me.

I'm not sure why. I will have to return to a favourite some time to see if it is just this book or if some spell cast by Ellroy's manic distillation of paranoia and gift for creating voices that carry the whiff of a genuinely authentic desperation has lifted.

I imagine the first, and as a reader all you can do is trust your own instincts.