2024: consumption: a look at some stuff I liked

It’s the last day of 2024. I am tired, but I am also eleven years deep into screaming into the void about the things I liked during the year, so I’m armed with a vat of tea, a container of lollies and the burning desire to see whether the stuff I consumed throughout the year has a hidden message.

This one could be a bit wilder (and woollier?) than preceding iterations, so if you’re feeling like something’s missing, you can check through the previous versions (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here) for some more me-review action.

Or you could log off and go look at some fireworks. I dunno, I’m not your mother.

(Edit: I got too tired before the actual turn of the year and went to bed. This is a New Year’s Day post now, so I assume you are no longer wearing a party hat as you read this, which saddens me slightly. I did a psych! move and this post still appears to have been written in the dying minutes of the year, so it’s still on time, kinda-sorta.)

Music
I continued to purchase most of my music from Bandcamp this year, swelling my already ridiculous-sized library at a rate of knots. The amount of albums I’ve got living on my NAS (and thus available for remote streaming outside the Apple Music ecosystem) slowly increases, and I’m delighted by the fact that Plexamp, my remote-playing app of choice, has a setting that will play random albums in full. (I’m a stickler for full albums, what can I say? It also feels good to let raw chance dictate what I’m hearing, even if that results in a six-hour harsh noise wall marathon.) I’ll soon augment this – as soon as the long-promised (by me) office move occurs – with a Wiim streamer, as I had my old Rotel amp repaired by the excellent Tobes at Bad Moog Rising, and it would be a crime not to use it to output endless amounts of vaporwave for the edification of pets and Eve alike.

The number of tracks I’ve listened to this year (at least according to my Last.fm account) is about 16k, taking my total to around 240k tracks listened since I started keeping tabs. While I felt as if I didn’t listen to nearly as much music this year as I might’ve, the stats don’t lie: the amount is about the same as it was in 2023, which was an increase on preceding years.

Here’s how LastWave saw 2024.

(Speaking of Last.fm-related information, this link should send you to a scatterplot of my listening since 2006. It’ll let you see, in creepily granular detail, what I was listening to at what time. Knock yourself out!)

2024’s top 20 albums by tracks played:
Various Artists: Jazz in Polish Cinema: Out of the Underground 1958–1967; Various Artists: The In Crowd: The Ultimate Mod Collection from the Original Style Movement 1958–1967; Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe: Candyman (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack); Various Artists: Mighty Instrumentals R&B Style 1950–1960–1961; Various Artists: Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era 1965–1968; Various Artists: Chicago is Just That Way (1938–1954); Various Artists: Trash Box; Various Artists: Children of Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the Second Psychedelic Era 1976–1996; Various Artists: Diggin’ in the Carts: A Collection of Pioneering Japanese Video Game Music; Caleb R.K. Williams: Selected Works Volume 2; Various Artists: Jazz Noire: Darktown Sleaze from the Mean Streets of 1940s L.A.; András Schiff: J.S. Bach: Das wohltemperierte Clavier; Caleb R.K. Williams: Selected Works; Tangerine Dream: In Search of Hades: The Virgin Recordings 1973-1979; Various Artists:пикник; Various Artists: You Can Walk Across It on the Grass: The Boutique Sounds of Swinging London; Various Artists: Blastwave X: Ten Years of Crucial Blast; Various Artists: Nuggets II: Original Artyfacts from the British Empire and Beyond 1964–1969 and Bernard Herrmann/Joel McNeely: The Twilight Zone (Music from the Television Series).

If you’re a more visual person, cop this:

2024’s top 20 artists by tracks played:
Caleb R.K. Williams; Krysztof Komeda; Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe; Glenn Gould; Charles Mingus; Bill Frisell; Miles Davis; András Schiff; John Zorn; Tangerine Dream; The Smile; Lovett; Meitei; Mogwai; Bernard Herrmann; Ryoji Ikeda; Tim Hecker; Bohren & der Club of Gore; Ulaan Khol and Ed Kuepper.

Judging from that lot, the list of albums is becoming a bit more useless than before. The albums topping the list are either collections of songs by various artists (which tend to be much longer albums with higher track counts) or else classical albums with multiple short pieces. This skews the data a bit: it’s easier for one play-through of a v/a collection to easily outpace multiple plays of albums with fewer tracks. (Which, given that I listen to a lot of longform tracks, accentuates the disparity.) Still, it’s good to see some old favourites still showing up. Will I be free of Nuggets comps in 2025? Signs point to nah.

My only Cyclic Defrost contribution was, again, suggestions of Good Shit for the end-of-year wrap-up. You can find my thoughts (alongside other interesting bits and pieces to explore) over here. There’s only one title repeated across the brace of reviewers, so you’re bound to find something you like in there.

Below, I’ve listed albums that I really enjoyed in 2024. Not all of them (not many of them, likely) came out this year. But I liked ’em anyway. A few of these have longer write-ups over on that Cyclic best-of page, so check ’em out.

• Deathcomet: whichever of the three 2024 albums you like. They’re all great.
• Black Boned Angel: Supereclipse. Rediscovering my Campbell Kneale gateway album.
• Bongripper: Empty. Gloomy, lengthy stoner doom.
• The Grey Men: The Shape of Noise to Come. Sunn worship but what of it?
• id m theft table: A Tuba with a Microphone in it. Does what it says on the tin.
• Blood Incantation: Absolute Elsewhere. Metal with Pink Floyd interludes? Whatever, it rips balls.
• The Necks: Hanging Gardens. Revisiting university listens with longform, evolving jazz.
• Kompromat: end node estimation. Singing bowls, extended vocal techniques and a sense of ritual.
• Crawl & Wilt: Methamphetadrone. Gloomy, sludgy drone that sounds like it comes from an abattoir.
• Black Aleph: Apsides. Crushingly grim work but still somehow hopeful? Mysterious.

You’ll find something in there to thrill you or bum you the fuck out, depending on your current feelings. (Either hopeful or hung over: I assume this is being read on New Year’s Day.)

Gigs
I was a bit more quiet this year in terms of shows seen. I might have made it to only a handful of shows, but they were pretty fucking great.

On the local side of things, I caught a bowlo gig with both The Holy Soul and Gentle Ben & His Shimmering Hands which I enjoyed mightily despite there being a surfeit of exes there. Both bands are populated by excellent humans I got to catch up with, played blinders of sets, and keep improving with age. I was lucky enough to share the gig with some excellent friends (Jason and Gillian, visiting for the first time in ages, which was excellent).

In terms of international bands, the most recent show I saw was also a cracker: Pearl Jam at Olympic Park with support from Pixies and Teen Jesus & the Jean Teasers. I am resolutely not a large-gig kind of person, but seeing a band as road-ready as the headliners play a solid, end-of-tour set (in which the new songs were… great, actually?) which felt like fun was a great way of spending the time. Teen Jesus were happy just to be there (and played pretty well) while Pixies were both solid and curmudgeonly at the same time. (Frank did actually say something though, which was a surprise.)

The other standout show I caught locally had to be the Extasis night at the Art Gallery of NSW. A largely improv/ambient show, it featured performances from Gail Priest, Jim O’Rourke and Eiko Ishibashi, Chihei Hatakeyama and the inimitable Keiji Haino, who topped the night by deafening everyone inside the cavernous space. (Just as I’d hoped.) A lot of statement glasses and wan complexions, but man, what a line-up.

Other shows that blew my hair back included experimental tap-dancer Reona playing in a small bar in Tokyo (which doubled as someone’s front room) with accompaniment from reeds, and an Athens gig that included Ride, The Smile and Pulp, which was… something else. (Seriously, I cannot believe how good Pulp are each time I see them. Fingers crossed they’re down here soon.)

Podcasts
Honestly, my podcast listening was roughly the same as last year’s take: current affairs courtesy of Matt Bevan’s If You’re Listening, history from Behind the Bastards, Japanese spookiness from Kowabana, and literary bitchiness from If Books Could Kill. I did delete a bunch of “one day!” podcasts from my phone app as a) one day has never come and b) I’ve found other podcasts to obsess over (in theory) so I assume this is a net positive.

Books
Once more, I planned 2024’s reads on the first day of the year. Once more I kept my suggested book numbers in line with the year: 24 for 2023. I was somewhat less successful in terms of crossing stuff off the TBR, as you can see.

(As ever, what I didn’t get through now lives on my TBR page where they will be linked when reviewed. Eventually.)

Through the year I consumed a whopping 83 books (32% more!) covering about 27,000 pages. (Goodreads, oddly, suggests I’ve read almost 10,000 pages more than that, but I assume this is taking into account page counts for print versions of audiobooks – almost 300 hours of which I listened to – as I can’t think of any other way to cover the discrepancy.) This is another yearly increase of almost 3000 pages, which again I put down to reading enormous tomes. (The median book size was 431 pages.)

My average rating for books this year was again 3.8, so I’m holding steady in that regard.

Using data gleaned from Book Riot’s tracking spreadsheet, I can say that I read mostly physical books (37%, with digital just behind), I listened to 14 days’ worth of audiobooks, and I spent 11 days per book, on average. Fiction made up 63% of my intake – which is good as I am trying to read more nonfiction – and almost 20% of what I read was in translation. Five books on the list were read as buddy reads through TSG, though I did also read some books as a result of an in-person book club I joined this year.

(It’s excellent as books aren’t set: people literally get together and talk about what they’ve been reading, which is far more democratic and interesting than I would have expected.)

Here’s how the reading itself panned out:

The books that stuck with me – from those I read, at least – were, in no particular order:

• Marguerite Young: Miss Macintosh, My Darling
• Jon Savage: England’s Dreaming
• David Sodergren: Rotten Tommy and The Haar
• Tim Winton: Juice
• Richard Milward: Man-Eating Typewriter
• Robert A. Caro: The Power Broker
• José Donoso: The Obscene Bird of Night
• Adam Higginbotham: Chernobyl and Challenger
• Werner Herzog: Every Man for Himself and God Against All
• Stephen Markley: The Deluge.

Reviews for this year’s books can be found on my HBR page, or by following this tag. I had much more of a historical thread running through my reading this year, and it seemed to be largely military: reading about the development of the atomic bomb, WWII and the Cold War, the rise of Putin and the history of New York City planning. While I love fiction (including especially ridiculous fiction) I enjoy the feeling of brain-cell cultivation that’s resulted from the increased non-fiction from this year’s reading.

(While DNFing a book isn’t a thing I’ve often done, I think I’m done with Finnegans Wake for the time being. I love Ulysses but this one isn’t rewarding me in line with the amount of effort required to continue plodding through.)

2024 marks the last year I’ll be using GoodReads. I’m sick of the toxicity there, and the fact that it’s just a content mill for Amazon. I’m going all in on TheStoryGraph, which is full of nicer people (and far more useless statistics). Check it out if you’re looking for a way to track your books – and to get actually useful recommendations.

(If you wish to contribute to this part of the write-up, feel free to buy me something from here. Or raid it for things you might like.)

Movies
I didn’t have as much time for movies this year as I have previously. I didn’t prioritise them anywhere near as much as I have previously, but I did go to an actual cinema as a day-off treat for a double feature (Alien Romulus and one of the last local screenings of Longlegs) which was a pretty enjoyable experience, and something I would like to do more often.

Looking at the statistics from the year, I watched 57 films this year, or 1.1 per week. Of these, 15 were repeat viewings, while 10 were released in 2024. (That’s more than triple the amount of new releases I watched in the previous year, even though I saw fewer films overall.

Films that came out in 2024 that I really enjoyed included the goofy shark drama Under Paris and Alien Romulus (which nailed the work sucks vibe but leaned a little too hard into fan service by the end). I finally caught up with both Barbie and Oppenheimer (and loved both of them), and had a lot of time for The Iron Claw‘s ensemble work and the depth of the black-and-white version of Godzilla Minus One. (Yes, it’s a bit weird to apply depth to a fuckin’ Godzilla movie, but this one did it, I think.)

I was happy to catch up with Babylon, which was a lot more fun (and less woolly) than I had been led to believe. Also fun was the let’s get a series happening brio of The Pope’s Exorcist, even though the movie is demonstrably mid. I rewatched all the Jaws films after reading both the book and Quint, an estate-endorsed sequel, but really should’ve stopped after the second film. (Or even the first.) After reading Nightmare Alley earlier in the year, I was intrigued to watch both versions of the film, and have to give the prize to the one that doesn’t feature Bradley Cooper’s wang.

The thing that made me most furious? Shadow World which told me nothing new but made me irate once more.

The best thing I saw, though? Longlegs by a mile. As flawed as the film may be (hello, plot holes?) I couldn’t get over how effortlessly the vibe was created. The Silence of the Lambs feel to things. The neurodivergence/intuition crossover. The fact that a portrait of Bill Clinton deserved a supporting actor credit. Faustian vibes. The song in the car. All of it. What an incredible piece of work. (And what a killer soundtrack!)

If you’re looking to keep more granular tabs on my film inhalations, my diary at Letterboxd features some pithy (pissy?) reviews.

TV
As the reading went up, I think the TV consumption went down. We made it through all of Bob’s Burgers (well, all that’s available here anyway) and completed the third season of The Bear which I deeply enjoyed although people who didn’t like close portraiture apparently didn’t? (Whatever, their loss.)

Other than that, we consumed a bunch of crime docos (mostly about those Murdaughs) and caught up on season one of Top of the Lake (good) and Chernobyl (fucking brilliant) because I am, as noted, very behind on popular culture. I started watching Family Guy as a background exercise when I’m doing other stuff, and I can’t tell if I hate it or think it’s all right. Probably 50/50 at this point. I began the Amazon series based on the Yakuza series of games, and while I enjoyed the episodes I’d seen, I didn’t feel particularly drawn to it, which is curious given my slavish adoration of those games.

Speaking of games,

Games
Another year where I played games more than I wrote about them. Which I’d hope was the case as it seems I didn’t write anything about them at all. Looking over my list of stuff played, though, it seems there was a big chunk of time (almost four months?!) where I didn’t play anything at all, which feels a bit weird. Most of what I played this year were replays, it seems: something familiar and enjoyable. (He writes, while currently eyeing the Max Payne games for another go-round.)

I played (and completed):

• Assassin’s Creed Mirage: enjoyably short, though a bit of a curate’s egg in the series.
• Fingerbones: short, free horror with a decent story (though clunky mechanics).
• Still Wakes the Deep: Excellent Lovecraft/up the workers/fuck the man crossover set on a sweary 1970s oil rig.
• Interaction Isn’t Explicit: A lecture that thinks it’s a game.
• Dead Island: A replay to scratch a comfort itch.
• Dead Island Riptide: See above.
• Borderlands (GOTY Edition): See above.
• Borderlands The Pre-Sequel: See above.
• Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands: D&D themed loot/shoot does what’s expected.
• Close to the Sun: If Bioshock was a walking simulator featuring Nicola Tesla, it’d be this thing.

My pick for the year? It’s got to be Still Wakes the Deep, which combined my walking simulator obsession with deep sea ick.

And of course…
This year was a year where a bunch of working on myself (and making choices) paid off. I felt comfortable in myself and in my life, and was able to take advantage of my position and go back to the UK for the first time in almost a quarter of a century. I also took myself out of the toxic Twittersphere which is, I think, a good statement on how my mental health is going. (I can hear my psych nodding from here.)

The world is hard, and I know I’m privileged to have the space I do, and the life I do. The world continues to be terrible, on a global scale. On a macro scale, it’s been a pretty awful year: I lost two of my closest furred friends in 2024 and it fucking sucked, and while I know it’s insignificant in comparison to what others go through, it has made me glad to see the back of this year. Everyone I know has been scraping by in terms of Fucks To Give to reach the end of the year, so I hope in earnest that the next one will be better.

We’ll see. And I’ll see you back here, on my bullshit again, at the end of 2025.

If you made it this far, who the fuck are you?