Weyes Blood, "Titanic Rising"

I get it, I really do.  It's rare to hear an album that sets out such a lush, gorgeous mood and can sustain it song after song.  The music billows and floats with a relaxed ambience that's found in peak Kate Bush and very little else.  Natalie Mering's vocals are a cross between Karen Carpenter and Joan Baez, soothing to the extreme, gentle above all else.  She has a voice you can listen to for hours, she can sing to an audience of thousands yet make person feel as though she is singing to them and them alone.   The album is usually classified as "baroque pop", which is the usual catchphrase for chanteuse-based music with string arrangements in a somewhat unconventional pop structure (i.e. beautiful, sweeping melodies but without obvious hooks and big choruses).  It definitely checks off all those boxes, but avoids the studio excesses that can alienate some listeners who prefer music that could have been conceivably been recorded in a studio apartment, rather than a big budget studio.

I think that Weyes Blood's music stirs the same emotions for her fans as Beach House's music does for me.  And this is where I get confused.  I don't hear what definitively separates "Titanic Rising" from many other vaguely lo-fi, ambitious-sounding indie pop records past and present.  Seeing how Lana Del Rey's album also finished near the top of many critics' lists, I sense a trend.  Both look for inspiration from classic song styles of yesteryear (when life was supposedly simpler) and project a contrarian mixture of optimism and cynicism. If they sing about love, are they being sincere or is all love simply doomed? It's a sign of the times, where life is fairly good overall but many people are convinced that we are on the inevitable downslope toward something immeasurably worse.  It's a good attitude to have for an artist in many genres.  But is the music really anything special? 

Peter Hook, "The Hacienda -- How Not to Run a Club"

This is the first book written by Peter Hook in his three part autobiographical series, albeit read by me in reverse order. 

The Joy Division book didn't add much to the mountain of literature already written about JD, but as a series of picture postcard memories of his time in the band, it was fine.

The New Order book is probably the only essential one of the series, not least because the band rarely gave interviews and hid behind their music for most of the 80's.  The book confirmed that all the rumours were true (nobody at Factory had a clue what they were doing, the members of New Order generally despised each other), but it was still surprising -- and engrossing -- to read about it in such detail. 

The first part of this book is true to the subtitle -- "how not to run a club".  Opening the Hacienda was a visionary act by a bunch of inspired, supremely talented people.  It was also an act of horrible mismanagement and astoundingly bad financial decisions.  Both sides of the coin are outlined by Hook, and I was under the impression that I was in for a downer of a read, full of spite and bitterness.
But once the club reaches the peak of its popularity, the tone of the book changes to one of pride.  It becomes a love letter to the club that Hook clearly still misses very much -- so much so that he opened a new club in 2010 after vowing never to get involved in one again.  Hook gets to brag about what the club meant to people, and how they helped reshape dance culture.  The Hacienda's final years were plagued by violence, shady dealings and dwindling attendance.  I never realized there wasn't a big closing party like the one depicted in "24 Hour Party People".  The club closed down pending a renewal of their licence that never came.  Nobody knew it would be their final night at the time it happened. 

In the end, the book's message is one of positivity -- the experience of running the club and being at the epicentre of an entire culture was worth it for him in the end.  Right before the club closed, Hook recalls a meeting with his accountant where he was asked if he was doing it for his ego or for his wallet.  Of course, it was for the ego -- being a club owner and having a place to go was meaningful for him.  He'd long since known that it was a titanic waste of money and any pretense of the Hacienda as an investment was long since gone.