Hello!

Fall is here, the weather is getting colder and soup season is in full swing. Here’s what I was up to last month.

TV & Movies – Over the Garden Wall

At the start of the month, I rewatched Over the Garden Wall. I rewatch it every couple years in the fall—it can only be watched in the fall! Sorry, I don’t make the rules. I absolutely adore this mini series. I think it’s one of the best things Cartoon Network has ever produced, ever.

If, for some reason, you haven’t seen it (and really, you should!), it’s a story of two brothers who get lost in the woods. It’s a little bit creepy, but it’s mostly warm and incredibly whimsical. I highly, highly recommend anyone and everyone to watch it, especially if you like a heartfelt story and a relatable character. It’s ten episodes of around ten minutes each, so you can definitely just watch the whole thing in one afternoon. Make it your yearly fall viewing! I’ve seen it many times over and I still find new details on every rewatch. I cannot overstate how great it is.

Reading – The Secret History

For those of you who have been reading these for a while (thank you <3 !!!), you might have noticed that for months I’ve been writing “I’m still reading The Secret History by Donna Tartt” somewhere at the end of the post. Well, it is with great pleasure that I announce: I finished reading The Secret History by Donna Tartt. I kind of had to power my way through that last third of the book, but overall I did quite enjoy it.

It’s very dark academia, murder mystery (except not really because we know from the jump who did it), flawed characters. I might read it again at some point, but it kept me entertained for some time. There are definitely some heavy themes in there so I would not recommend it as a fun, light read, but I would recommend it in general, I thought it was pretty good (although I didn’t exactly fall in love with it).

Music –  Ca7riel & Paco Amoroso Tiny Desk, BRAT remix album, Bon Iver, Porter Robinson

Ca7riel & Paco Amoroso – Tiny Desk performance

This was a very unexpected but very welcome discovery at the start of October. I’ve seen it in my recommended a couple times but never clicked on it, and then, suddenly I am intrigued by the people in the thumbnail. What is this big blue hat one of them is wearing? What is this huge band behind them? I was not disappointed in the slightest. I didn’t understand like 99.9% of whatever they were singing about the first time around, but NPR has kindly provided subtitles with lyric translations!

So, it turns out that it’s an Argentinian experimental trap / hip-hop duo, now with full band renditions of their songs, and they came to Tiny Desk with a mission: bring nothing but vibes. And they absolutely delivered. There’s a good reason it’s the most viewed performances of this year, already surpassing pop music A-Listers such as Olivia Rodrigo, Justin Timberlake and Chappell Roan within one month of the upload. Me, personally, I contributed to around 20 of those views. I would highly, highly recommend!

Charli xcx – Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat

I said goodbye to BRAT summer in the last post, but that doesn’t mean Charli’s reign is over just yet. The remix album came out on October 11th and, well, what can I say? It’s really good. The new songs are mainly reimagined with guest verses and collaborators, and I really enjoyed that. They’re all still the same songs, kind of. Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat is extremely accurately named.

The list of features is absolutely immaculate, there’s artists you’d definitely expect as a Charli feature – A. G. Cook, Caroline Polachek and Troye Sivan. There’s some that maybe you wouldn’t think of right off the bat but they make sense – Yung Lean, Bladee, The Japanese House and The 1975. And then there’s a feature you’d never ever think would work on brat and then in the end it does – Bon Iver or Julian Casablancas of all people. And they all just work so damn well.

Current favourites: Club classics featuring bb trickz, I might say something stupid featuring the 1975 & jon hopkins, Everything is romantic featuring caroline polachek, So I featuring a. g. cook, girl so confusing featuring lorde, I think about it all the time featuring bon iver

Bon Iver – SABLE,

Speaking of Bon Iver, they released a new EP featuring three new, very stripped down, kind of a back-to-basics songs. Well, four songs, if you count the 12-second intro. They’re all very good, very classic Bon Iver songs, but my favourite one is probably AWARDS SEASON. Mostly because I’m currently going through a bit of a weird period in my life and I’m just extremely susceptible to crying to lyrics like “Oh how everything can change / In such a small time frame / You can be remade / You can live again”

Porter Robinson – SMILE!:D

In the last week of October I finally listened to SMILE!:D by Porter Robinson which has been just SO much fun! Videos from the US leg of his current tour made their way onto my twitter timeline a few weeks ago, so I decided to finally listen to the album (I was too busy listening to BRAT in July to listen to… pretty much anything else). But now it scratched my brain just the right way. So I played it again. And again. And again.

Like I mentioned with the Bon Iver song, I am currently very susceptible to getting emotional to songs with hope-maxxing lyrics, so after I heard that last Russian Roulette verse I was pretty hooked: “I wanna see my mom one more time / I wanna play my songs one more time / I wanna lose my phone one more time / I wanna play in the snow one more time / I wanna kiss my cat one more time / I wanna thank my dad one more time / I wanna marry her one more time / I wanna live, I don’t want die / I wanna try to change one more time / I wanna live, I don’t wanna die”

(The video below moves very quickly and there are some flashes so careful if you’re sensitive! Also the song is called Russian Roulette and it’s kind of about dying so also a warning if you maybe don’t want to listen to that right now)

And then I watched one of his live streams, and then another, and then I was looking up interviews and reading song lyrics analyses. I watched Porter break down every song on SMILE!:D, I watched the stream VOD of him reading the Pitchfork review live, I watched him nerd out over hardstyle for an hour and produce a (completely ridiculous, as in, i laughed out loud when I heard it) beat on stream.

On SMILE!:D, he dissects parasociality and the artists—audience relationship and it’s great. It also sounds very deeply nostalgic, and with Porter naming The Postal Service and Never Shout Never as influences, while also mentioning his love for boybands like One Direction and 5 Seconds of Summer, it just makes perfect sense. To me, it also sounds kind of like Dirty Work era All Time Low, but more modern, a bit more hyperpop, and a lot more maximalist.

I found it quite interesting that Porter spoke about these influences being novel influences to him and not nostalgic ones, as he didn’t grow up with much guitar music. He mainly comes from electronic music, EDM, festival and club DJ-ing, not from Warped Tour pop-emo. On the outro of Is There Really No Happiness?  he is acutely aware of succumbing to nostalgia: “You know, Porter / Some people die of nostalgia / So you better look out / Just kidding, ha ha ha ha / Good one!”

He also learned how to play the guitar for the first time, which influenced much of the writing. He embraces cliche, and explains his reasoning on the last part of Russian Roulette: “Cliches like this are beautiful, because they reflect us and we are beautiful.” The single Cheerleader is a total banger and so is Knock Yourself Out XD, and Perfect Pinterest Garden perhaps has the most of that early 2010s electronic-emo-warped-tour flavour. I’ve raked my brain for a couple hours trying to figure out what late 2000s radio pop hit the chorus of Is There Really No Happiness? sounds like, couldn’t figure it out, and then just accepted that Porter Robinson wrote an immaculate pop song.

Overall, SMILE!:D is a very maximalist, very fun, infectious, bubbly, sweet, shimmery pop album with an interesting underlying exploration of fame and the relationships that come with it. But above all else, it is very evident that Porter Robinson himself had great fun making it.

Current favourites: Russian Roulette, Kitsune Maison Freestyle, Is There Really No Happiness?, Knock Yourself Out XD, Cheerleader

(Addendum: I got completely and totally consumed by his music, but mainly by his previous album, Nurture, which I’m writing this huuuuuuge post about but it’s not quite finished yet but it will be soon and I’m very excited about it!)

That’s all!

This brings me to the end of October’s wrap up, then. I’m still knitting up some cool stuff and I’ll have to start planning Christmas gifts soon. I’m working on the big Nurture write-up. I’ve been thinking of also doing a huge BRAT summer retrospective but the more I think about it, the more it becomes an undertaking that might be a bit too big for me. However, I haven’t stopped thinking about it so it might be fun to do anyway.

As always, thank you for reading, I hope you are doing well, and I hope you maybe check any of the stuff from my list out!

Until next time,

Mia