All posts by Andy Todd

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Music 2025 (Andrew)

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Pulp, Oasis then to finish 1996, sorry 2025, Radiohead.

I mentioned last year that I like to pick a band and then listen to all their albums in order. Even better if I can read a book about them at the same time. For R.E.M., another band I loved in 1996, I read ‘The Name of this Band is R.E.M.’ and it reminded me that I’d never actually listened to their last two albums. They just drifted away until I didn’t even know the names of their last albums, which is fair with Accelerate, a forgettable album, but their final album, which they knew would be their last when they recorded it, had some of their best material since, well, 1996 too. A pleasant surprise even if re-listening to all their albums just reminded me that Murmur is their best, Automatic for the People is too famous to judge, and Out of Time is mostly awful.

But then I started listening to Radiohead and, just as I was finishing my re-listen, they announced a tour and I embarked on a re-relisten and re-re-relisten and re-re-re-relisten in preparation.

Album of the year was an easy one this year: In Rainbows by Radiohead, closely followed by A Moon Shaped Pool, Kid A and Hail to the Thief. But for something newer nothing came close to Lux by Rosalia

Rosalia: Berghain

Lily Allan: Pussy Palace

Pulp: Got To Have Love

Turnstile: Never Enough

Model Actriz: Cinderella

Getdown Services: Dog Dribble

Blood Orange: Mind Loaded

Tyler The Creator: Don’t Tap The Glass

The Horrors: Ariel

Djo: End of Beginning

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Film 2025 (Andrew)

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A simple goal this year: go to the cinema as much as possible. Since the COVID years I’ve taken the easier option of watching all but the biggest films on TV once I knew if they were any good or not. This year I wanted to take a chance on more films and watch them the weekend they open. A goal which paid off spectacularly by a Saturday lunchtime trip to watch 28 Years Later before I knew anything about it, beyond it being the sequel to 28 Days Later. I loved it, despite it being messy and all over the place and with an ending that, if it had been on TV, it would have made me wonder if someone had changed the channel. I loved it for it’s wild swings and for Ralph Fiennes and the Bone Temple sequence. I can’t wait for the next one in January, in, if I’ve time this blog post correctly, 28 days!

The best hour in the cinema this year was easily Tom Cruise hanging off a plane in MI: Final Reckoning, pity the first hour failed to take off. While Brad Pitt in F1 was going to be my most fun film watched until a late challenge from Companion saw Brad almost lapped at the finish line. Almost…. of course, he wins in the end. He’s Brad Pitt!

Speaking of endings, I watched all for four hours of the Brutalist and couldn’t help admire an ending that did make me laugh as it appeared to not just cap the film but also, break the fourth wall, and speak directly to anyone who watched all four hours of architecture, frowning and bad accents in America. It may have been the ‘best’ film I watched this year, but it definitely wasn’t one of the most fun.

Another contender for best film, and one that was lot more ‘fun’ was One Battle After Another, but for most fun, I enjoyed the nonsense of Twisters, the men on a mission of The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Conduct, Hugh Grant being evil, or not, in the Heretic, the twists of Companion and, finally, A Real Pain, a film which turned out to be more ‘fun’ than a film about two brothers on a holocaust tour might have been.