The Sounding Board
A weekly column where New Music Tuesdays live on. Conversation is encouraged in the comments.
Every Tuesday, the Sounding Board is a space for a short-ish review of a recent-ish release and conversations about new-to-you music. We’ll get things started with a write-up about a newer, likely under-heard album, and invite you to share your music musings in the comments.
Delights make good on their name on the Manchester band’s debut full-length album.
Every song on If Heaven Looks a Little Like This, released January 17 via Modern Sky, dares listeners to swim Scrooge McDuck-style through an embarrassment of ebullient ear candy or else drown beneath its stockpile of slick sounds.
Generally, these are borrowed baubles that owe something to a bygone era of indie rock. Huge harmonies, just-so jangle, a willingness to build around a catchy synth line, dance-y polyrhythms and Adam Maxwell’s emotive lead vocals all echo past Manchester music glories as well as dance rock’s mid-aughts glory days.1 While these influences are readily apparent, Delights avoid falling into the the tacky, hacky pitfall that snagged the likes of The Dare or Greta Van Fleet. That’s because the band is canny, confident and competent enough to mix-and-match elements from its predecessors and make something distinct with them.
“Two Times Over” starts with warbling synths nearly worthy of Gillian Gilbert, slides into a shimmering guitar part John Squire would probably be happy with, then hits a wood block-fueled dance groove that feels like “House of Jealous Lovers” at three-quarter speed. That song is a microcosm of the album as a whole in that it blatantly stands on the shoulders of giants, without becoming a straight soundalike that would come off as a paltry scale model in the image of genre titans.2
That ability to blend disparate familiar sounds is also a major testament to the young band’s versatility. Lead guitarist Ben Squires is particularly impressive whether he’s pseudo-chanking for a dance track, channeling Johnny Marr’s jangle or strumming like Noel Gallagher. The album’s production, credited to Michael Smith, also does some heavy lifting because no matter what genre Delights dabbles in, If Heaven Looks A Little Like This sounds fantastic. It’s clear, crisp and slick without being sterile or overproduced, even when tracks get busy.
However, there is some downside to that consistent clarity, especially when Delights succumb to their gentler impulses.
On If Heaven Looks a Little Like This‘ penultimate track “Say It Once,” that audio Teflon style meets a catchy, quivering vocal hook backed by music that doesn’t quite rock in a way that evokes a corporate coffee shop or VH1’s repertoire circa 2007 instead of the other better, cooler bands referenced above.3
But, the dull doldrums are handily outnumbered by hooks, harmonies and heartbeats of yesteryear’s parties.
About the writer
Ben Hohenstatt
Ben Hohenstatt is an Alaska-based dog owner who moonlights as a music writer and photographer.
For more information, consult your local library or with parental permission visit his website.
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The Sounding Board
A weekly column where New Music Tuesdays live on. Conversation is encouraged in the comments.
The Sounding Board
A weekly column where New Music Tuesdays live on. Conversation is encouraged in the comments.
The Sounding Board
A weekly column where New Music Tuesdays live on. Conversation is encouraged in the comments.
The Sounding Board
A weekly column where New Music Tuesdays live on. Conversation is encouraged in the comments.
The Sounding Board
A weekly column where New Music Tuesdays live on. Conversation is encouraged in the comments.
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Kids In The Hall, Season Two, Episode Eight
– “Requests!”
– “I was fired today.” / “Oh. Fr-from work?”
– “Soup in a bag, Fran?”
– “Oh god, it’s happening already, like Lord Of The Flies!”
– “How does a guy afford a nice duck like that on a cop’s salary?”
– “My only responsibility is to myself, to make sure I’m a healthy functional person who doesn’t live in a state of denial.”
– “How many people have been hit by lightning – oh, all of you.”
– “We were doing this seminar in Seattle, we do them around the world, but mostly in Seattle.” / “I love this story.”
– “No woman fantasises about a f*g. Well, unless she’s married to one.”
– “He’s not gay and never will be gay, even if he dies of AIDs.”
“How did he die?”
“Cancer.”
“I heard it was AIDS.”
“No, cancer.”
“Oh, no! You mean Dad’s gonna be around the house more?”
“I’m gonna show what a comma and three zeroes can do.”
“How many people here have bought a really bad used car? Uh-huh. All of you.”
I love the sleazy sales pitch guys.
The Avengers (British TV), “The Superlative Seven” – Steed and six people with very specific and very well developed martial or physical talents are kidnapped and dropped in a “And Then There Was One”/game of Werewolf situation. Nothing profound, but quite entertaining. Doesn’t hurt that the guests include Charlotte Rampling, just starting out but already quite skilled, Brian Blessed, John Hollis (later Lando’s cyborg sideman Lobot), and…hmm, that actor looks a lot like Donald Sutherland. And sure enough, before his Dirty Dozen breakthrough, he’s here and the bad guy and naturally is very good.
Frasier, “Beloved Infidel”/”Selling Out” – The former has the brothers Crane learn a starling secret about their dad, only the truth is even more starling. Well done episode that straddles comedy and family drama nicely. The latter has Frasier deciding it’s okay to do commercials, within ethical limits. This one introduces Fraiser’s aggressive agent Bebe Glazer, played with bite and charm by Tony winner Harriet Sansom Harris.
NBA on TNT, Wolves-Grizzlies – A good game but not very engaging for some reason. Neither of these teams does much for me even though both have great players.
College Football Playoff National Championship
I guess that wasn’t really a surprise, given the spread, although it was a little surprising in how it happened. Notre Dame started off by ripping off an 18-play, 10-minute TD drive. Then they didn’t get another first down on their next four drives, while Ohio State got TDs on their first four. It seemed over at 31-7… then Notre Dame scored and got a 2-point conversion and turnover and drove into the red zone. Then they missed a field goal and it seemed over. Then they forced a punt and scored another TD and two-pointer. Suddenly it’s 31-23, and Ohio State is facing 3rd-and-11. Notre Dame dials up a full blitz, and Will Howard hits Jeremiah Smith perfectly for a deep gain downfield. And then Ohio State just runs the clock down as much as possible and kicks a game-sealing field goal. 34-23 final.
So, congrats to Ohio State I guess. Third best in the Big Ten, best in the nation. Still wish Texas hadn’t made one of the worst play calls I’ve ever seen in the semifinals.
The Shield, “Coefficient of Drag”
Well, no reason to go through 4-6 all over again. Though I feel kind of stupid for not going in the proper order in the first place.
“Trust me, I could do worse.” Well, that’s a fun throw forward.
So that’s what la caja de pecado means.
“No, that’s not necessary.” Ice-cold Ronnie is the best Ronnie. And he’s a much better liar than Vic, too.
“I’ll add slander to my suit.” Ah, good to see Billings, the anti-Ronnie, in peak form here.
“Commissioner Nebel has taken an indefinite leave. Health reasons.” Noooo! Not Commissioner Nebel!
“You don’t give a shit about risking your future, that’s fine. Maybe you’ll think twice when it’s your friend’s.” Maybe!
Noooo! Not Commissioner Nebel!
I think it’s sweet that The Shield gave Grant a shout-out even before he’d officially become its Poet Laureate.
Me too. And it’s good to know that whatever’s wrong with him, it’s nothing three weeks in the Caribbean with his mistress can’t cure.
A Complete Unknown – James Mangold didn’t learn anything from Walk Hard, huh? This is still packed with biopic clichés to the point that it’s hard to watch without at least an occasional eye-roll. The live music performances are fantastic though and elevate it a fair bit. I liked Johnny Cash’s recurring role as an agent of chaos, Norton and Chalamet are both very good, but I think a biopic needs to do SOMETHING new now, which is my way of saying that I thought the Robbie Williams film was vastly better even if this was still quite enjoyable.
Only Connect – my friend’s run on this quiz show came to an end in the quarter finals. They got slightly unlucky with the order of play in one of the rounds, but the team that beat them were deserving winners. I still don’t like the actual format enough to watch it without a vested interest, although it’s difficult enough that it’s impressive to see played well.
“The Sixties are an important and excitin’ time.”
“Aren’t they? It’s like there’s something happening here, and what it is ain’t exactly…obvious.”
Haha, I dunno if you saw last week in the Discord, but I was pitching the idea of a Bob Dylan biopic that’s a mix of Walk Hard-style exaggerated clichés and Norm Macdonald Based on a True Story blatant lies. I’m calling it Bob Dylan’s 115th Unauthorized Biography.
Ah I think I skimmed over it because I wanted to see the real biopic first – will circle back for some Unauthorised Chuckles.
I didn’t actually see the movie, so you don’t have to worry about any spoilers from me, just some dumb jokes about well-known moments in Dylan’s history.
Mulholland Dr.
As gorgeous and unsettling and funny and powerful as ever. No matter how many times I see this, I can never steel myself enough for the scene behind Winkie’s, but that’s only the first tremendously dread-fueled sequence here: Betty and Rita’s heart-in-throat trip to Diane’s apartment is agonizing, too, as is Rita opening the box. The last is maybe the most apropos: waiting for the dream to fracture as the characters find out too late that the answers they were chasing weren’t really ones they wanted, but the answers eat them all the same. (I have a soft spot for these kinds of horror-infused anti-mysteries, a la Ghostwatch and The Blair Witch Project, where your investigation cannot give you the tools you need to escape, it can only tell you when you’re absolutely fucked; this is even more horrifying, because the search–the curiosity–is what fucks them, at least the Betty-and-Rita versions.) I’m sure this must come up in that Lynch/Oz documentary I haven’t seen, but I love how the reveal of Diane’s life gives us the bleakest “and you were there, and you, and you” sequence ever. Silencio.
Absolute masterpiece.
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies – Much like the dwarves before them, this is too many armies and I’m not sure I could name all five. The movie starts by resolving its cliffhanger within the first ten minutes. Then an hour of time disappears. Then a big noisy battle starts where you’re granted invulnerability if you’re center of frame. Then there’s a much more interesting series of one-on-one combats (Jackson’s facility with action framing remains strong even as his penchant for overstuffing those frames continues to grow). Then it ends and I guess Gandalf knows Bilbo has the ring but he forgets between this and Fellowship? I dunno and what’s worse, by the end I didn’t really care. On a technical level, this is on par with the LOTR trilogy, but it becomes a grand lesson in not going to the well too many times.
The greatest drama should be Bilbo’s arc from homebody isolationist to worldly person scarred by his adventures. Martin Freeman plays this wonderfully, but with his transformation happening across three movies we just have three discrete interpretations of Bilbo instead of a smooth ride.
I’m less baffled by the decision to extend the book to epic size and more by the decision to exactly replicate the tone of the other movies. When the actors delivered those somber speeches they were giving weight to fantasy events and themes that had yet to be taken seriously on the big screen. This time Jackson plays it like you could plug any words into classically-trained mouths and expect the same results. Well, you can’t.
Ghostlight – A drama with a too-familiar shape but with touching performances. These are good naturalistic performance in the midst of melodrama, sensing the touch of Thompson and O’Sullivan whose Saint Frances a few years ago similarly demonstrated a deft touch with actors. The script unfolds in a more artificial way – particularly needled by the slow trickle of details around the family tragedy, the old trick of simulating dramatic tension by hiding the source of the characters’ behaviors in plain sight, most un-Shakespearian – and so it’s the performances that must prop up an otherwise rote drama. Luckily, they do (although I’m also kind of bugged that there’s no way anybody in the audience would be able to hear our Romeo’s low-key line deliveries from the stage).
I don’t think I’m ever going to watch the Hobbit trilogy. I admit to an occasional curiosity, but life is short.
Anyway, in the books, Gandalf knew Bilbo had a magic ring, but it wasn’t until many years s later that he discovered is was *The* ring.
“Bilbo… did you find the magic ring?”
“I found a magic ring.”
Did all the rings make you disappear?
[pushes up glasses] No, the other rings did not make the wearer disappear. The Ring doesn’t so much make one invisible as pull one into the unseen world of shadow, one’s own shadow in the Jungian sense. Our shadow can’t be seen by others. “Invisibility” is more a consequence of wearing the Ring than a built-in feature. imho.
What makes the One Ring so different from the others is that it’s the only one made by Sauron alone, and the invisibility is a result of that, as Carl explains above. They don’t get into what each of the other rings do in the movies or the novels (I think Galadriel wears one in the movies but I never even noticed until a rewatch last December), but I think Tolkien does in the (undread by me, of course) Silmarillion.
These are some good videos on what the ring is and who made the others, hilariously getting the point across in ten minutes and with several fewer millions of dollars than the Amazon show:
https://youtu.be/YxgsxaFWWHQ?si=NTUWBrUQRj8GZ1jl
https://youtu.be/WKU0qDpu3AM?si=4EMsLT1efcMMZG61
I should have known there would be way more information available on this than I needed.
Deadpool & Wolverine — Finally got around to this and it was a lot of fun. But everything good about it (which is a lot) and everything bad about it (which isn’t much, but which also is *a lot*) stems from the same impulse — write the script that a 14 year old boy who is obsessed with Marvel Comics would write if somehow he had three hundred million dollars and 50 years of comics and comic movie knowledge. The scenes of ridiculous over the top violence are exciting and funny but also gross in their complete amorality. But the on the other hand, it’s pretty cool (hey, look, the 14 year old boy was me all along) to really watch an on-screen Wolvie let loose in a way that we’ve never before seen because it is, I think, his first R-rated film and also his primary opponent has a healing factor that allows him to survive a set of steak knives to the brain. Meanwhile the film treats its primary villain with some surprising sophistication and doesn’t just make them a cackling evildoer. (The movie does seem to misread an important page of Morrison & Quitely’s New X-Men, but who hasn’t?) And the inclusion of several other characters from Marvel’s (but not the MCU’s) cinematic past works well. Even I, no fan of meta jokes, laughed out loud at a very big meta joke swing. Finally, it’s great to see Jackman play this character again. It’s not an overstatement to say that, for good or ill, American cinema would be completely different today if he hadn’t been cast as Wolverine 25 years ago.
After Hours — Faulkner said the past is never dead. It isn’t even past. But watching Griffin Dunn’s $20 bill fly out a taxi cab window after midnight and realize he couldn’t just stop at an ATM to grab another makes me think this Faulkner guy was off his rocker.
This is a very funny movie about what a guy will do to get laid, and it escalates and escalates in a ridiculous way. There is one thing that happens which is entirely unexpected, but I think it’s a misstep in that it makes it hard to regain empathy for the main character. You can get over that he’s sort of unnecessarily mean to Teri Garr, but there’s a limit.
Logan already was an R-rated film, very much so.
Oh, yeah, of course.
What did we listen to?
The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, Pink Floyd
You can already see the roots of their later, more sophisticated work here – it’s pretty much the same ironic and satirical humour and languid, agonisingly frustrated instrumentals that move across genres. The main difference is that it’s not deliberately hooked together in a larger structure, either musically or lyrically.
Icky Mettle, Archers of Loaf
This band came up in the Discord so I decided to check them out. Pretty good rock, though like a lot of rock of its time it’s very anxiety-ridden.
Dirty Mind, Prince
It’s insane how disciplined Prince was.
Interrupted the Blank Check about Sugarland Express for the Blank Check on The Straight Story. The former meanders even by Blank Check standards but I will get back to it. The latter was remarkably short on any really good observations, if entertaining enough.
1001 Albums etc. – a really strong run of albums as I moved from ’71 to ’72. My favourites were two I’d heard before (Big Star’s excellently-titled debut #1 Record and Lou Reed’s Transformer) but there was more Neil Young (Harvest – not as great as After the Gold Rush for me, but still very good), Nilsson, Steely Dan, Deep Purple, Curtis Mayfield and also the rise of Glam Rock with some good T-Rex, Slade and of course Bowie. I’m a very casual Bowie fan, I’ve spent a lot of time with Ziggy Stardust and the Berlin albums but I hadn’t actually heard Hunky Dory in full before – it’s good, obviously, but with enough heavily-played hits stuffed into it that it didn’t feel like a revelation. Didn’t really get into Randy Newman and I question the decision to include a Deep Purple live album that rehashes songs from albums that anyone listening to the list in order has only just heard. Now I’m stuck on a two-page spread in the book where every album is over an hour long and it feels like a bit of a slog again.
Hahahaha, the list is apparently fully replicating the prog exhaustion-to-punk brevity of the time. But you have a weird typo, obviously even a list made by a lunatic would not have more than one Deep Purple album.
Not a fan? I never need to hear Smoke on the Water again in my life but I was surprised to find that most of their other stuff is really fun. Definitely pro the list including “In Rock” and “Machine Head”, but “Made in Japan” was just a bit exhausting even if it made the case for them being an impressive live band. In general the book seems to have an enthusiasm for live albums that I don’t share.
Hunky Dory is my favorite Bowie album pre-Berlin.
Also, Electric Warrior owns, and I’m not sure which Nilsson was this year, but Nilsson Schmilsson owns as well.
This came up in my feed the other day, seems like an odd combination of elements:
https://youtu.be/tNMhpZ7H9LE
Hmm, not much. January is slow on new stuff what with my working on all those damn year-end writeups.
I did hear a new Hamilton Leithauser single, “Knockin’ Heart.” Not too bad at all. I didn’t much keep up with the Walkmen post-Bows + Arrows, but I enjoyed this and it took me back to those days.
Might have to put some of The Band on later. Or watch The Last Waltz tonight… or sometime after I watch the Lynch movies I was meaning to.
Early-90s Madchester meets early-00s dancepunk? Well, you definitely have my attention.
RIP Garth Hudson, last surviving member of The Band.
https://variety.com/2025/music/news/garth-hudson-last-member-the-band-dead-1236280162/
Year of the Month update:
Coming in February, you can sign up to write about anything from 2016 along with these fine folks:
TBD: Bridgett Taylor: Rogue One
TBD: Cori Domschot: Ghostbusters, Hidden Figures, and/or Sing
Tentative: Sam Scott: The Neon Demon
Feb 7th: Gillian Nelson: Queen of Katwe
Feb. 11th: Lauren James: Inside
Feb. 14th: Gillian Nelson: Milo Murphy’s Law
Feb. 18th: JRoberts548: Silence
Feb. 21st: Gillian Nelson: Pete’s Dragon
And there’s still time to join this team for 1947:
TBD: John Anderson: T-Men
Tentative: John Anderson: Nightmare Alley
Jan. 23rd: Cori Domschot: Down to Earth
Jan. 27th: Cliffy73: Miracle on 34th Street
Jan. 31st: Pluto’s Blue Note
Oh no! The members of Slint are making aughts dance-punk! And have apparently created a tulpa?
The spiders are not what they seem.