Tag: blogging

Album Review: Solar Power by Lorde

Solar Power by Lorde

We’ve waited four long years for another Lorde album. With Solar Power, Lorde has traded the bass and bombast that characterized both Pure Heroine and Melodrama for a more languorous sound, one that doesn’t care whether or not you like it as long as she vibes with it.

With Solar Power, Lorde had traded the bass and bombast that characterized both Pure Heroine and Melodrama for a more languorous sound, one that doesn’t care whether or not you like it as long as she vibes with it.

And vibe with it she does. The Atlantic’s Spencer Kornhaber calls Solar Power a “rock nostalgist’s dream,” and I can’t think of a more apt descriptor for Lorde’s junior record. Lorde co-produced the album with Jack Antonoff, who in addition to his work in fun. and Bleachers is also a frequent collaborator of Lana Del Rey and Taylor Swift. Some keyboard warriors on Twitter took to their phones first thing this morning to trash the album and Antonoff in particular, but in my opinion they’re way off-base.

For one thing, music doesn’t have to be radio-friendly to be worthy of praise. It may be a little early to call, but I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if Lorde takes home Album of the Year at the Grammy’s next year, which would be a glorious middle finger in the faces of her detractors.

It may be a little early to call, but I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if Lorde takes home Album of the Year at the Grammy’s next year, which would be a glorious middle finger in the faces of her detractors.

Lorde seems to have anticipated the criticism now coming her way, because in the title track she gives us this delicious double entendre: “Can you reach me? No, you can’t,” asserting both her self-prioritization and the fact that she doesn’t need to prove anything to her haters because she’s already beaten them.

All in all, Solar Power is a powerhouse of a record, if a subdued one. It’s not going to be everyone’s cup of tea, for sure, but then again I don’t think it’s meant to be. Lorde is just living her life and if you don’t like her, I don’t think she cares—she’ll just keep singing in the sand.

Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please follow, like, comment, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at thevoraciousbibliophile@yahoo.com or catch me on Twitter @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.

Poem for the Day: August 20th, 2021

Never by Stephen Dobyns 

The day I learned my wife was dying 
I went to read about volcanic eruptions,
earthquakes, fire, bloody war, and murder. 
I wanted to discover the most awful, because 

I knew her death would be worse than that;
and even crueler would be her absence, not 
for a day or a year. It meant not coming back.
That was what I couldn’t imagine. How many 

days in Never? How many times would we 
hear a car and think, That’s her, or hear 
the phone ring and feel suddenly happy, 
only to grasp it was basically nobody, 

and each burst of knowing would be one 
little death, and they will happen all day.

Original Poem: Flesh Theater

Flesh Theater by Fred Slusher 

The cliff’s edge,
a salty drink;
cerulean & white foam; 
home, love, & road all have four letters. 
Home, love, and road all have four letters &
I tore me apart: 
limbs, cells, sinew; all held together by so little, 
a little blood, oil, & water. 
Every scrap of paper shredded,
every thread unraveled.
Living in the empty 
in-between is easy when 
you’re unsure of your own tepid 
existence. How can you tell someone 
the truth which is that you feel nothing & 
everything at once?; a whole cosmos 
made corporeal, flesh theater. Applause, 
applause! Exeunt all. There was a summer 
I became obsessed with fragmentation, 
fading into the woods of autumn where 
I discovered restoration & took a job 
selling bundles of violets by the 
old movie house on the corner of 9th & Vine.
All the customers were wine-drunk & in love;
not necessarily with each other but with the idea 
of love itself, the feeling of a mouth & a neck &
decades-old spit on celluloid.

Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please follow, like, comment, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at thevoraciousbibliophile@yahoo.com or catch me on Twitter @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.

© 2021 Fred Slusher. All rights reserved.

Poem for the Day: August 19th, 2021

It Goes Away by Linda Gregg 

I give everything away and it goes away, 
into the dusty air, 
onto the face of the water 
that goes away beyond our seeing. 
I give everything away 
that has been given to me: 
the voices of children under clouds, 
the men in the parks at the chess tables, 
the women entering and leaving bakeries. 
God who came here by rock, by tree, by bird. 
All things silent in my seeing. 
All things believable in their leaving. 
Everything I have I give away 
and it goes away.

Poem for the Day: August 18th, 2021

Poem Beginning With a Retweet by Maggie Smith 

If you drive past horses and don’t say horses
you’re a psychopath. If you see an airplane 
but don’t point it out. A rainbow,
a cardinal, a butterfly. If you don’t 
whisper-shout albino squirrel! Deer! 
Red fox! If you hear a woodpecker 
and don’t shush everyone around you 
into silence. If you find an unbroken 
sand dollar in a tide pool. If you see 
a dorsal fun breaking the water. 
If you see the moon and don’t say 
oh my god look at the moon. If you smell 
smoke and don’t search for fire. 
If you feel yourself receding, receding,
and don’t tell anyone until you’re gone.

Poem for the Day: August 17th, 2021

I Was Minor by Olena Kalytiak Davis

Today’s poem is one of my favorites. I hope you love it as much as I do. 

In this life,
I was very minor.

I was a minor lover.
There was maybe a day, a night
or two, when I was on.

I was, would have been,
a minor daughter,
had my parents lived.

I was a minor runner. I was
a minor thinker. In the middle
distance, not too fast.

I was a minor mother: only
two, and sometimes,
I was mean to them.

I was a minor beauty.
I was a minor Buddhist.
There was a certain symmetry, but
it, too, was minor.

My poems were not major
enough to even make me
a “minor poet,”

but I did sit here
instead of getting up, getting
the gun, loading it.

Counting,
killing myself.

Copyright © 2016 Olena Kalytiak Davis. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 31, 2016, by the Academy of American Poets.

Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please follow, like, comment, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at thevoraciousbibliophile@yahoo.com or catch me on Twitter @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.