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THE WALKING DEAD
JAMES BLAKE James Blake
Girl Talk M USIC James Blake
BOOKS Comic books are lame. You can try to
dress them up and call them graphic novels, but you know what? They are still very much not cool. Sorry to have to tell you. But here’s the thing: the fact that they’re so lame is totally perfect. It leaves them unchanged and raw for those of us who don’t mind reading an illustrated story under our covers late at night, or those of who slide back issues of the Green Lantern in between the open pages of much hipper books (just me?). Comic book fans get to sit and enjoy an incredibly powerful narrative form that, for the most part, has changed very little since its inception. It’s awesome. The Walking Dead is probably best known to most people as the recent AMC television, adapted for television by Shawshank Redemption director Frank Darabont. The show is exceedingly well written and the acting is even better and I’m not here to offer the well-worn pretension that “the original is so much better.” Rather I want to insist that the original, despite being drawn in pencil and being a little heavy-handed with Batman-esque sound effects, is worth your time. The comic was started in 2003 by Robert Kirkman and was published monthly by Image Comics. It quickly developed a rabid following online and was passed around via email and flash drives. I first encountered it over the summer, when someone who was aware of my undying (pun intended) affection
for zombies, slipped a few issues onto my computer. I was hooked. The Walking Dead proves the narrative worth of the comic effortlessly and continuously. Kirkman and his illustrators, Tony Moore and Charlie Adlard, develop a pathos that is indisputably tangible. The character’s facial expressions and body language is heartbreaking as they come to grips with the heinous reality of their new world. Walking Dead is so much more than a postapocalyptic zombie story, though. It is a story of how humans change and adapt. Kirkman chronicles the course of love in a broken world with real narrative talent, and then on top of that, every terror and triumph that our survivors experience is driven home with stunning visuals from Moore and Adlard. It’s not a book for the faint of heart. It can be gruesome and at times, genuinely scary. But no matter how awesome those moments may be, they are really just flourishes for a truly powerful story of survival and alienation in a new America – an America that may not be as united as it once was. The Walking Dead is a worthy read. It’s not going to impress your girlfriend or make that cute guy ask you out, but it’s going to consume your attention. You will open it one afternoon and three and a half hours later you will gasp and raise your head and come back to the real world, where there are no zombies, yet. Stuart Winchester
reaching number 2 on the BBC’s Sound of 2011 poll may have come as a much needed life-affirmation to those whose ears have been numbed by the brand of sentimental neo-pop that has taken over the charts in recent years. The BBC poll is really more about second-guessing the state of the mass market than promoting innovative music, which isn’t necessarily reprehensible in itself. But it seems possible that the compilers are using his 90s hip-hop influences to brand him as a kind of retro-chic, another symptom of the terrified nostalgia that has student club nights firmly in its stranglehold. This debut album has alleviated my fear. It is a record unmistakeably involved in reclaiming that space between the retro and the futuristic that has been so neglected for so long: the Now. The album is shaped by an awareness of this conflict. The songs move in two times: with the jumping fluorescent-legwarmer-clad 90s kid, and the static buzz of an iPod charger. These cultural tropes meet metrically and the beat is always being chased, or chastened, by another. Moreover, the album differs from Blake’s earlier releases - it is not a compiled production feat that runs on and on, but a collection of deeply personal and carefully structured songs. It is spacious, pensive music, and the space between and around the sounds is as important as the sounds themselves. Interestingly, silence seems to be a growing cultural voice at the moment. Each generation suffers accusation of mindlessness from its parents, but with the advent of reality TV and internet networking sites, ours has had it pretty bad. Perhaps the children of digitalisation are finally getting a chance to hear themselves think in the saturated, empty seconds of Blake’s music. This is genre bending, excessive hyphenation-inspiring stuff (retro-gospel-dubstepsoul? minimalist-electronica-hip-pop?) that you don’t have to wear skinny jeans or know what an oscillator does to listen to. It is boundary-breaking and it is beautiful. On I Never Learnt to Share, chord progressions that would be at home in a gospel chapel are played out on Gameboy-synths, and with calm confidence give way to bass heavy nurave-worthy electro-blare, as a choir of James Blakes mournfully chant a single line about familial dysfunction. Dance to it, cry to it, like to it, love to it. This is an album you cannot afford to miss. Anna Clifford 21