The fantastical worlds Chrystia Cabral creates as SPELLLING seem to grow and expand at an alarming rate, as if refusing to abide by the laws of nature. The Bay Area artist’s 2017 debut, Pantheon of Me, built dark, atmospheric soundscapes using loops of her voice, reverberating guitar, and synths; even at its most bare, her knack for worldbuilding was spectacular in its eeriness, and she brought it further into the forefront with 2019’s Mazy Fly, her first full-length for Sacred Bones. That record saw her floating above a wider array of experimental textures, but her work remained primarily synth-based. SPELLLING’s dazzling third album, The Turning Wheel, makes the cinematic scope of its predecessor feel formative and abstract by comparison: Cabral enlisted 31 ensemble musicians to bring the 1-hour opus to life, a strange universe exploding in Technicolor.
Yet even as it leans fully into the fairy tale qualities of her songwriting, the double album feels all but removed from matters of the Earth; if anything, the storytelling is more resonant than ever, rooted in the idea that all life is connected. On the tender opener ‘Little Deer’, inspired by the Frida Kahlo painting ‘The Wounded Deer’, the singer sees a part of herself in the titular subject, offering words of affection as well as uncanny self-awareness: “This world is cruel/ And you’re no fool/ You’re dancing with reality, my friend.” That just about describes what Cabal does throughout the LP: inhabiting characters who live their own internal fantasies while being all too conscious of the outside world – a tension that has always been at the heart of SPELLING’s music. The protagonist of ‘The Future’ travels through time to be closer to her lover, “Hiding inside my mind/ In a tower no one would climb,” before realizing she might have made a mistake: “Come and save me/ I’m floating in space/ Farther and farther away,” she pleads.
The cost of sinking into a daydream, Cabral suggests, is being unable to escape the throes of alienation. On a symbolic level, she evokes that duality by splitting the album into two halves, ‘Above’ and ‘Below’, its mood shifting from warm and whimsical to gothic and downcast. Musically, too, the ornate, ambitious instrumentation these songs employ build continuously upward until the synth-infused bedroom landscape and of SPELLLING’s earlier recordings seems like a distant reality. Following the phantasmagoric ‘Emperor with an Egg’ is the seven-minute centrepiece ‘Boys at School’, which acts out a drama so immediate and human it’s almost jarring. (It’s worth noting that Cabral has worked as an elementary school teacher.) For all its theatricality, there’s no attempt to cast the song’s bullies as mythical villains, instead focusing on the claustrophobic horror of growing old and into your own body in an unfair society. An electric guitar solo guides the song to its natural conclusion: “Shut out the sun until I’m small again/ I’m way too tired to climb out of bed/ Four walls is all I need of friends,” Cabral sings, before proclaiming, “I’m meaner than you think/ And I’m not afraid/ Of how lonely it’s going to be.”
Rather than veering into complete darkness, the album’s second half offers glimpses of light, tempting its characters to climb back up where “the law is in place still.” ‘Legacy’ is one of those bright promises, its appeal straightforward: “There’s a legacy that I wanna take over/ Out of my mind and into the daylight.” Though it might as well scan as an apt summary of Cabral’s vision, the artist complicates it by representing the journey as one filled with trepidation and doubt as much as desire and magic. The orchestral arrangements, though arguably less memorable than in the first half, are fittingly labyrinthine, from the jazz-inflected outro of ‘Revolution’ to another magnificent guitar solo on ‘Magic Wand’. Yet Cabral’s presence remains bewitching and dynamic, her ability to dramatize eternal conflicts anchoring you in the moment: “All we want is right here/ All we need and more/ Let your heart surrender/ Let your heart transform.”
Big Red Machine, aka Aaron Dessner and Justin Vernon, have shared a new song from their upcoming guest-filled album, How Long Do You Think It’s Gonna Last?. It’s called ‘Renegade’ and it’s one of two collaborations with Taylor Swift, who Dessner and Vernon both worked with on her own albums folklore and evermore. The track was recorded in Los Angeles the same week that Swift and Dessner won the Grammy for Album of the Year and features contributions from Bryce Dessner and Jason Treuting. Check out a Michael Brown-directed video for ‘Renegade’ below.
Aaron Dessner said in a statement about the new song:
While we were making folklore and evermore last year, Taylor and I sometimes talked about experimenting and writing songs together some day for Big Red Machine. Making music with your friends just to make it—that’s how Big Red Machine started and has grown—and that’s how Renegade came about too. This song was something we wrote after we finished evermore and it dawned on us that this was a BRM song. Taylor’s words hit me so hard when I heard her first voice memo and still do, every time. Justin lifted the song further into the heavens, and my brother [Bryce Dessner]’s strings and drummer Jason Treuting add so much. The feeling and sound of this song feel very much at the heart of How Long Do You Think It’s Gonna Last? I’m so grateful to Taylor for continuing to share her incredible talent with me and that we are still finding excuses to make music together.
How Long Do You Think It’s Gonna Last?, which arrives August 27, also includes guest contributions from Fleet Foxes’ Robin Pecknold, Sharon Van Etten, and more. Earlier this week, Big Red Machine unveiled the lead single ‘Latter Days’ featuring Anaïs Mitchell as well as ‘The Ghost of Cincinnati’.
Laura Mvula is back with a new album called Pink Noise. Marking her debut full-length on Atlantic, the album follows 2016’s The Dreaming Room as well as this year’s 1/f EP. Ahead of the LP’s release, the British singer-songwriter shared the singles ‘Safe Passage’ and ‘Church Girl’. “This is the album I always wanted make,” Mvula said in a statement. “Every corner is made warm with sunset tones of the ’80s. I was born in 1986. I came out of the womb wearing shoulder pads. I absorbed the dynamism of the ’80s aesthetic right from my first moments on this planet. Wrestling with identity seems to be one of the rites of passage of the established artist. Making Pink Noise felt like the most violent of emotional wrestling matches. It took three years of waiting and waiting and fighting and dying and nothingness and then finally an explosion of sound.”
The Go! Team have released their sixth album, Get Up Sequences Part One, out now via Memphis Industries. Arriving three years after the UK band’s 2018 album Semicircle, the 10-track LP was recorded around band member Ian Parton’s diagnosis with Meniere’s disease. “I lost hearing in my right ear halfway during the making of this record,” Parton explained. “I thought the hearing loss was from playing music too loud over the years but it turns out I was just unlucky and it was a rare condition called Menieres. It was traumatic to keep listening to songs I knew well but which suddenly sounded different and it was an odd juxtaposition to listen to upbeat music when I was on such a downer. The trauma of losing my hearing gave the music a different dimension for me and it transformed the album into more of a life raft.”
Izzy True have returned with their latest album, Our Beautiful Baby World, out now via Don Giovanni. The follow-up to 2018’s Sad Bad was preceded by the singles ‘New Fruit’, ‘You’re Mad at Me’, and ‘Big Natural’. “I ended up choosing the title Our Beautiful Baby World this year as a kind of prayer,” said guitarist/vocalist Izzy Reidy in a statement. “When I get very sad about the world, I find comfort in zooming out to the macro, universal level. On that scale, humanity is so young, so small, still learning, and full of possibility. When I think of it that way, I feel so tenderly towards humanity. All of the things it does to hurt itself are not its fixed nature, I have hope that it is (very slowly) learning to be gentle.”
Maximum Sorrow! is the fourth studio LP from London-based post-punk band Desperate Journalist. Out now via Fierce Panda, it marks their first album since 2019’s In Search Of The Miraculous and includes the singles ‘Fault’, ‘Personality Girlfriend’, and ‘Everything You Wanted’. Desperate Journalist are vocalist Jo Bevan, bassist Simon Drowner, guitarist Rob Hardy, and drummer Caroline Helbert.
Other albums out today:
At the Gates, The Nightmare of Being; Bobby Gillespie & Jehnny Beth, Utopian Ashes; Declaime & Madlib, In the Beginning (Vol. 1).
As Maple Glider, Melbourne-based singer-songwriter Tori Zietsch makes viscerally intimate, hypnotic folk music that attempts to find meaning in a world of emotional extremes. Written largely while Zietsch was staying in Brighton after a period of traveling in Europe and Asia, her stunning debut album, To Enjoy Is the Only Thing – released on June 25 via Partisan – is a reflection both on the immediate experience of a breakup as well as the artist’s religious upbringing, grappling with themes of loneliness, loss, and the fragility of human relationships. Produced alongside Tom Iansek, the record’s skeletal palette has touches of Sibylle Baier and Lana Del Rey, built on wistful finger-picking with subtle instrumental flourishes that gently elevate Zietsch’s ethereal delivery and poetic writing. Standouts include the haunting ‘Baby Tiger’ and the heartbreaking closer ‘Mama It’s Christmas’, but the biggest outlier in terms of production is ‘Good Thing’, where the album’s simmering tension is relieved with a strikingly cathartic chorus. “I guess that’s how we learn/ By setting fire to things that bring us life/ Before we’ve got to watch them burn,” she sings. “And so I’ll say goodbye/ Because I’d rather kill a good thing/ Than wait for it to die.”
We caught up with Tori Zietsch for this edition of our Artist Spotlight interview series to talk about her upbringing, the experiences that inspired her debut album, and more.
How do you look back on your upbringing?
There is definitely a lot that I’m still processing just in terms of the religious aspect of it. Only as an adult – and now, really, for the past couple of years of my life – have I been able to talk about the fact that I had a religious upbringing and acknowledge it, because I think I really like to separate it from my identity; I felt so distinct from the values and the ideas that were shared within that religion and that were ingrained in me as a young person. But I have a really remarkable mother – she’s not a part of the religion anymore, and she’s always been someone kind of nudging and saying how she really feels even throughout it all, even at times where I think she didn’t really feel free enough to live the life that she actually wanted to because she was also quite restricted for a lot of years. So, I’m lucky to have had that, because it’s really inspired a lot of my own thinking and helped me to be able to navigate my way out of that and form communities and new ideas and not be so narrow-minded in my thinking. It was weird, but I formed my love of music at that time as well, so that was pretty special.
I read that she was the one who was driving you around shows when you first started playing gigs around the age of 14. What do you remember about these shows?
I was so lucky – I had a really great music teacher, and she was like, “You should play this event that’s happening, just do it.” And I had friends and we had this band and we just started playing. We played in this one venue that was called The Tree House and it was this hip pizza bar place, and we were teenagers, like, “This is where all the older people come and eat dinner,” and it was so weird having 14-year-olds there [laughs]. I think also for my mom, that was a time when she could socialize and form a different kind of community as well. But I got very comfortable performing from a young age and started performing with other people before I really went into performing solo. It was really nice getting all of those shitty gig experiences out of the way early on. [laughs] I didn’t form that much of an attachment to it or anything.
How did that come later on? Why did you feel the need to express yourself musically and start writing your own songs?
Just like, not really having safe spaces, and not really having many people to communicate with, just in terms of – you know, Mom was different, but there was also a level of, like… Dad or people in the religion that, if you were to share how you really felt, they would kind of guide you in a different direction or not really listen but try and pull you back in. So, I don’t think I ever really connected or felt like I could be completely myself in that situation, and music was a really good way of being able to just get all of those feelings out. And then my parents were like, “Oh, she’s just writing silly songs,” but not actually trying to change those ideas. But also, it helped me to connect to people; it meant that I could play music with other people that were outside of that and have something that I could share with people that wasn’t – because there weren’t that many people that I could be like, “Hey, I’m part of this religion, what do you do?” [laughs] So that was a big part of it for me, just making friends.
There’s almost this degree of separation where you’re allowed to say things that maybe you wouldn’t otherwise. What was it that you felt the need to communicate?
It’s changed a lot over time. I think in the beginning there was a lot that came out about home life, actually, and my parents’ separation, navigating that world but still living together. Working out family dynamics and relationship dynamics with all kinds of people I think was the biggest one, and that, I think, has been a common thread throughout my writing: how to communicate through people and how to understand what it is that I’m feeling and feel comfortable to express that in a space where there’s almost this degree of it being like, I can say it’s not me, almost, even though it totally is. And then I can go on stage and I can play that song, and then I can be like, “This is me when I’m playing,” without having to be like, “These are my deep, personal, intimate thoughts.” These are the kinds of things that I don’t really feel uncomfortable often sharing with people, but music gives me that space to really kind of unravel, in a way, and let go of that pride and those things that hold me back from being able to have those conversations with people.
Was that part of the inspiration for creating this project? I know that you had been making music before going by Maple Glider, and I’m curious what you wanted to represent with this shift to the new moniker.
I had been playing in a project where it was a collaboration, and we were kind of veering off in different creative visions, and I think our personal goals were quite different. And I had started writing songs where I felt really connected to music really strongly, and it emotionally affected me to write and I wanted to keep doing that. Because that’s how I started writing, and I think I drifted into this other place of just playing with things and working with other people that I had missed this element of just letting stuff just fall out. And Maple Glider, I wanted it to be my own. I wanted it to be fun, and I wanted to be able to do whatever I wanted to do with it. I wanted it to be me, but I also like having a pseudonym because it’s a place where I can take myself to and absorb it and perform, and maybe not bear as much of the emotional weight of having it be your own name. Which sounds funny, but I liked the idea of having something else that was my music, and having my name for me as a person who encompasses more than just my music career.
With ToEnjoy Is the Only Thing, I understand that you wrote most of it while you staying in Brighton in the UK. What led to you moving there?
I actually had already moved from Melbourne; I was living north in Australia. And I was really craving travel, wanting to get out of Australia, and I had that feeling for quite a long time. But the music projects that I had before were sort of keeping me tied here for some time, so that kind of dissipated and I just had the freedom to do whatever I wanted, be wherever. I ended up really randomly falling in love and just going on this wild trip of just being like, “Okay, let’s just do this, let’s just take a break from music and see what happens with life.” And whilst I was traveling, I started feeling the need to come back to music and do some writing again, and that’s when I decided to move to Brighton. It was really random.
What are your memories of your time there?
It was winter when I moved, and I moved in with this beautiful woman and her son, actually, for the first couple of months. But it just was freezing and quiet and gray, and I spent most of the time inside – first I was looking for other work and more permanent accommodation, so I was just frantically in that zone, but at the same time just couldn’t stop writing music. And then after that, I have these beautiful memories of spending time riding my bike by the ocean pretty constantly, which was really beautiful, and picnics on the beach. Seeing bands, just going to heaps of gigs and seeing all this music that I hadn’t really had the opportunity to see in Australia. It was incredible how connected everyone was on that side of the world. [laughs]
It’s quite surreal thinking about it now, because it did take me a long time to wind down into it. But I did have a lot of beautiful memories there, amongst a lot of emotional experiences as well, because I was kind of coming out of a relationship and reflecting on a lot of experiences of my childhood and processing a heap of pain at the same time.
Before returning to Australia, you went through this breakup, and you also spent some time traveling through Portugal and Spain. How did these experiences make their way into the album?
Portugal was really beautiful but really intense. That was where my breakup happened, but I had such a beautiful time as well. I have a strong emotional attachment to that. And then I went to Spain and had a really beautiful time with one of my closest friends who was living there, so I had this intense elation at seeing her and then also this big grieving because I’d literally just come out of a breakup. [laughs] So it was really heightened happy experiences and really low sad points in the same space. And then after that I came home and did more writing, and that’s where ‘Baby Tiger’ and ‘Performer’ and other songs started coming out. So for me, the music starts before Brighton and journeys through all of that and then back to being in Melbourne at home and just before recording it.
Given that it comes from a very intense emotional place, what was it like opening up your process to collaboration?
You know what, it was just easy. Tom was so good. I really felt instantly comfortable with him and with sharing the songs. I think I had a lot of trepidation before working with him about my validity as a musician, and felt often like maybe I wasn’t a good enough musician or didn’t have as much knowledge as I needed to. I had this whole inadequacy sort of thing for a while, but working with Tom, he really just helps me to accept myself as a musician and accept that the work was good, and hand over these songs that I had written back to me and be like, “What do you want? Does this feel right to you? Am I allowed to play with this song in this way, or is this wrong?” And just having that open dialogue about, whatever decision I made was the right decision because it was my music, was so nice. Because I don’t think I’ve ever given myself that before, that I was allowed to just feel what I wanted and it didn’t really matter. And his arrangements, I think, are so considered and so thoughtful, and really gave these songs more depth, and I really appreciated that because I really love the album that we were able to make together.
Do you feel like your self-perception as an artist has shifted as a result of that collaboration?
I feel a lot better. I just love making music so much that it really doesn’t matter what the outcome is and what other people think of it. [laughs] And I think most of my apprehension was around working with other people and feeling like they would think I wasn’t a good musician, just these silly thoughts and anxieties that you can develop I think in any situation, whatever work you’re doing. And now I feel a lot more confident and comfortable in collaboration, which I think is something really beautiful that I’ve been able to take away from that experience. Recognizing that as a musician, I also have things to offer other people as much as they have to offer me, and that’s going to be I think a really important thing to take on in this career. Because people are such a big part of the human experience and, of course, a part of music and, and that’s what makes things so beautiful and enjoyable.
From all the songs you’d written, which I understand are a lot more than what ended up on the album, you chose the ones you felt best represented this period in your life. What were the most difficult ones to leave behind?
I don’t know if they were difficult to leave behind, because in my mind, I was like, “It’s fine, there’s a time for all of these songs. It might not be now, but there will be a time.” And I don’t know if I really believed that; it was just a way of making a decision. There were definitely songs that are a lot more personal – that sounds hilarious because I know there’s a lot of personal songs. [laughs] There are songs that are a lot more intimate, maybe, because I’m still very much working through them and those feelings. And there are probably more songs that are wrapped up in religion, my body shame, those sorts of feelings, that were songs that I decided to leave at least for now, because I wasn’t quite ready. I think I needed to do a bit more work with myself before getting to that to that point, in a recorded sense especially.
The final track, ‘Mama It’s Christmas’, is one of the most personal and heart-wrenching songs on the album. I love how the final line in the chorus goes from “I’ve got ribbons to wrap him in” to “I’ve got all my love to wrap him in,” which, to me, suggests that even as we age, the innocence of family love is never quite lost. Why did you decide to close the album with this song?
That song really set the tone for where I wanted to go with my songwriting, and is a song that is personal deeply and still feels like quite intense to share at times. I liked the idea of leaving the album on that note, because it sort of says to me, like, “This is it, this the music.” There’s been a heap of different feelings, but this is almost one of the hardest songs to be able to share, and I find it really difficult still sometimes to talk about this song in interviews. I think I haven’t collected all of my words yet for how to speak about it, because it is such a personal song, and it almost surmises itself, like it’s all there. I like to often open or end a show with that song, because it really gets me into that space that I need to get into to really perform.
The fact that I’ve been able to play it still and retain the same emotion and really have the same kind of release is really meaningful to me, because it drives me to keep pushing myself to those places in my writing, where it does provoke an emotional response, or it does get a heap of that out there. And I want to keep doing that because I love that about music. I love how it does that for me.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
Phillips, the renowned global platform for buying and selling 20th and 21st art and design, reached the highest total for a design auction in their company history — scoring £11.7 million.
Talking about the auction Domenico Raimondo, Head of Design, Europe and Senior International Specialist, said, “At £11.7 million, this result marks the highest total for a Design auction in Phillips’ history. It is a testament to the strength of the London market and hard work and commitment of the Design team. We were immensely proud to have been entrusted with the sale of Jean Dunand’s unrivalled masterpiece ‘Les Palmiers’ and are grateful to our clients who recognised its importance and committed themselves to it, which ultimately led to a world record result for this master of French Art Deco. The opportunity to reunite the original daybed designed by Katsu Hamanaka with ‘Les Palmiers’ was professionally rewarding for us but equally it allowed the work to be contextualised in such a way that attracted an exceptional level of interest from collectors. We continue to lead the market for Italian Design, with the Pair of vitrines achieving a world record for Carlo Scarpa, and other strong results across the field including Gio Ponti’s Unique pair of armchairs. We purposefully look at the design world with a critical eye to redefine the market by bringing new names to the fore and broadening our horizons by looking at present and past historical context.”
The biggest auction achiever Les Palmiers by Jean Dunand sold for £3.3 million at the auction, making it the most expensive item. Whilst works by Jean Royère from Oscar Majdalani’s family collection realised £2.3 Million.
New Auction Records
Lot
Description
Estimate
Price Achieved
8
Duilio (Dubé) Barnabé, Unique dining table, 1950s
£25,000 – 35,000
£63,000
$87,142/€73,282
*previous record price: €35,400 set in 2011
12
Carlo Scarpa, Pair of vitrines, designed 1957, executed circa 1963
£150,000 – 200,000
£352,800
$487,993/€410,377
*previous record price: £248,750 set in 2018
33
Jean Dunand, ‘Les Palmiers’ smoking room, from the residence of Mademoiselle Colette Aboucaya, Paris, 1930-1936
£1,500,000 – 2,000,000
£3,289,500
$4,550,036/€3,826,346
*previous record price: €3,089,000 set in 2009
34
Katsu Hamanaka, Daybed, from the residence of Mademoiselle Colette Aboucaya, Paris, circa 1935
£200,000 – 300,000
£403,200
$557,706/€469,002
*previous record price: €162,500 set in 2017
63
Ron Arad, Prototype ‘D-Sofa’, 1993
£80,000 – 120,000
£1,232,500
$1,704,794/€1,433,644
*previous record price: €373,800 set in 2014
77
Junzo Sakakura, Pair of lounge chairs, model no. 5016, designed 1957, produced 1970s
Although landmark titles like Godzilla and Mothra have been blessed with English-friendly releases on home video, plenty of Toho’s genre catalogue remains unreleased. With many also unavailable on Blu-ray in Japan, one such example is the collaborative effort of Daigoro vs. Goliath with Tsuburaya Productions, released to Japanese cinemas on 17 December 1972. This piece will explore the film’s production, almost non-existent releases on home video, and the relatable themes that arguably still echo to this day.
Tsuburaya Productions, creators of the Ultraman franchise, originally planned a historical drama series for their 10th anniversary production, but instead opted for a kaiju film with Toho, due to budget restrictions and the former genre being too bureaucratic in nature. The project was then taken on with Toshihiro Ijima to direct, known for directing a multitude of episodes of Ultra Q, Ultraman, and UltraSeven, and eventually writing episode 32 of Return of Ultraman (under the name Kitao Senzoku).
The first script drafts by director Ijima (also under the name of Kitao Senzoku) were that of a Godzilla adventure, originally planned allegedly as early as 1970, with the titular character facing off against another monster named “Redmoon”. This would eventually become the treatment for Daigoro vs. Goliath, with Godzilla instead being held off until Godzilla vs. Hedorah in 1971. No concept art has ever surfaced of the original story, aside from fan art later on produced by ‘Hurricane’ Ryu Hariken.
Daigoro vs. Goliath was also released as part of Toho’s Champion Festival, a twice-yearly cinema event marketed towards children that ran from 1969 to 1978. The festivals showcased new films primarily aimed at children, alongside re-cut versions of Toho SFX titles such as Destroy All Monsters and The Mysterians. These re-cut versions focused on action scenes and tended to remove filler dialogue as much as possible, shortening the films to just over an hour in length.
Billed as a “modern day fairytale” and comparable to a Walt Disney picture, Daigoro vs. Goliath revolves around an orphaned hippopotamus-like kaiju christened by its carers as “Daigoro”. This was different to the standard kaiju film at that time. While kaiju films of the period (like All Monsters Attack and classic-era Gamera) had featured human children as their heroes, Daigoro vs. Goliath has a monster child as its lead! Tense scenes involving destruction were, however, filmed with adults in mind. The film soon becomes a showcase of wild efforts made to raise money to keep Daigoro’s food shortages at bay. Meanwhile, a mysterious beast from the stars, named Goliath, ravages Japan, with Daigoro the only solution to the crisis.
The name “Daigoro” translates to “the great fifth son”, and is also the name of Itto Ogami’s child from the Lone Wolf and Cub series. The name is remarked in a flashback highlighting Daigoro’s discovery as a baby, after his mother is killed by the military. The name is then used as “atonement” for the matriarchal murder. There is further evidence of the name being taken from Lone Wolf and Cub, as the mother of the child character Daigoro in that series is also unjustly killed. Furthermore, four entries of Lone Wolf and Cub, and Daigoro vs. Goliath, were released the same year – and both by Toho.
As the film progresses, Daigoro struggles to keep his growth under control. In turn, this causes budget issues for his carer, Saito. Along with an “inventing uncle” referred to as “Ojisan”, and lager-lout carpenter Kumagoro, Saito tries in vain to keep Daigoro’s food problems at bay. Their desperate plans for money include bus campaigns and contest participations, with all schemes ending in almost complete failure and humiliation from the general public.
Wild schemes abound to try and save Daigoro.
Focusing on the character of Daigoro himself, he’s frequently referred to for his weight. He’s known for his large appetite, and his appearance is outlined by his bulging stomach – which isn’t round, even, or what some would consider ideal. And yet, it’s how a stomach realistically looks when we put on a lot of weight. It’s normal! Daigoro is still seen walking around his island on casual strolls, eating plenty of nutrient-rich food such as fruit and vegetables. As Golda Poretsky outlined in her TEDtalk from 2013 on “Why It’s Okay To Be Fat”, as long as we are benefitting from participating in such behaviours, weight doesn’t matter.
The human characters helping with Daigoro’s struggles range from the young to the old, skinny statures to the large-and-in-charge, and all radiate a fighting and inspiring attitude in the hopes that Daigoro doesn’t just finish off Goliath, but that he can be accepted into society – a unification of different backgrounds for a positive cause. One such example could be the duo dynamics of Ojisan and Kumagoro, both opposite in appearances and personalities, yet both co-operatively working towards the same goal of saving Daigoro’s bacon – quite literally.
Kumagoro also displays a beacon of progressiveness upon finding his wife being given a bottle of special spring water by a friend during a small gathering at the family home, in the superstitious hopes that it will make her skin whiter. Reacting angrily, he prepares to swipe at his friend, declaring that his wife’s skin colour is no business of anyone. The notion of whitening skin is a recurring colonialist issue in Asian countries, not to mention elsewhere. Kumagoro’s stand against such a practice is admirable.
When Daigoro’s food source is replaced by water or anti-growth serum by the government due to budget restrictions, he becomes powerless and inept. Daigoro, up until the appearance of space monster Goliath, is seen as a strain on resources. He’s also wanted by a government official (played by Akiji Kobayashi of Ultraman fame) who plans to turn him into a marketable attraction for eventual profit – if Daigoro can learn the Hula Dance, that is!
The disdain towards Daigoro is then suddenly flipped upon Goliath’s arrival, as the now energy-depleted and starved monster is Earth’s only hope of repelling the beast back into the depths of outer space. This can be read as touching on societal disdain towards those considered marginalised – minorities, those with disabilities, etc. – which is only turned around when they become beneficial to the majority.
Friendly, helpful, and very silly – Tsuburaya/Toho’s Daigoro.
Environmental themes had become a prevailing theme in many kaiju productions at the time, spearheaded by such efforts as P Productions’ Spectreman series. This is true of the ’70s Godzilla and Gamera titles, and Daigoro vs. Goliath is no exception. This time, there is a focus on preserving nature, as Goliath has been drawn to Earth due to an under-protected atmosphere, much like the titular antagonist in Godzilla vs. Hedorah, who is attracted to the planet’s pollution. Nuclear weapons remain out of the question, as this would escalate things further.
Daigoro vs. Goliath has yet to see a physical release beyond DVD in Japan, although it has seen an Amazon Video exclusive in high definition. This version of the film is showcased with a recent transfer, attaining an unsurprisingly higher image quality than most of the current HiVision transfers that the Godzilla films in current distribution circulation use. This is due to Toho adopting newer and more advanced approaches to scanning their films, compared to their rushed efforts from over ten years ago. Whether or not this will eventually translate to a blu-ray release – as film companies move more to digital – remains uncertain. An English export version has never been produced or made available for licensing, although a translation effort was completed in 2011 by Hi No Tori Fansubs. This translates all of the dialogue and relevant on-screen text.
While cliché in some elements, and niche in others, Daigoro vs. Goliath is a heartwarming and wholesome family adventure. Daigoro proves that no matter where our identities lie, there’s a strong fighter in everyone. We have to be fully supportive of one another from the start to unlock that potential, despite any negative societal perceptions encountered.
It can be easily stated that there’s a certain degree of positive divergence that makes this piece of Japanese cinema exceptional, no matter how obscure or overlooked it may be. Toshihiro Ijima’s beautifully-crafted Daigoro vs. Goliath requires more attention, not just for being a Toho or Tsuburaya production, but as a distinctive parable of respect for ourselves and the people around us. With labels such as Mill Creek and Eureka releasing Toho and Tsuburaya offerings in English-friendly formats, and the film’s 50th anniversary next year, maybe Daigoro will finally advance to a well-deserved international debut.
Brent Faiyaz and Drake have teamed up for a new song, ‘Wasting Time’, which was produced by the Neptunes. Take a listen below.
Faiyaz dropped a new album called Fuck the World last year. Earlier this year, he shared a collaborative single with Tyler, the Creator called ‘Gravity’. Drake released the three-song Scary Hours 2 EP back in March.
Magdalena Bay – the Los Angeles pop duo of Mica Tenenbaum and Matthew Lewin – have announced their debut album. It’s called Mercurial World and it’s out October 8 via Luminelle. They’ve also shared a new single, ‘Chaeri’, alongside an accompanying visual. Check it out below, and scroll down for the album art and tracklist.
“‘Chaeri’ muses on mental health, friendship, loneliness and control. It’s about the walls we put up and the walls we should tear down for the sake of authentic connection, and Mica’s own personal difficulties with that,” the band said of the new track in a statement. “We tried taking these themes and elevating them to build a big, dark world with unsettling undertones.”
Mercurial World Cover Artwork:
Mercurial World Tracklist:
1. The End
2. Mercurial World
3. Dawning of the Season
4. Secrets (Your Fire)
5. You Lose!
6. Something for 2
7. Chaeri
8. Halfway
9. Hysterical Us
10. Prophecy
11. Follow the Leader
12. Domino
13. Dreamcatching
14. The Beginning
On top of pushing his sound in bold new directions, Tyler, the Creator’s last two albums also moved into markedly conceptual territory. The California rapper’s 2017 LP Flower Boy was thoughtful and sincere, displaying a vulnerability that seemed antithetical to his old persona as shock-rap provocateur. 2019’s IGOR was more revealing still, a daring pop album that reimagined soul music to deliver both his most sensational and unsettling work to date (disconcertingly, it won the Grammy for Best Rap Album). If Flower Boy was an attempt to pare back some of the chaos of his prior output, IGOR offered a subtle glimpse back into the madness through a sleek, enticing veneer. CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST, the latest step in Tyler’s fascinating artistic evolution, might at first seem to be a pointed stylistic shift – one that proudly flaunts its status as a rap album – but it ultimately stands as yet another testament to the uncompromising complexity of his vision.
Dense and kaleidoscopic, Call Me revisits recurring themes from Tyler’s catalogue but takes a significantly more non-linear approach. Layered as they were, the narratives running through Flower Boy and IGOR were ones you could trace and decode with relative ease; they resonated precisely because its subjects were presented in such a direct yet refined fashion. In some ways, the new album – which spans 16 tracks and clocks in at almost an hour – could be seen as a natural progression, untangling the knots IGOR left dangerously tight and allowing Tyler more freedom to explore his experimental tendencies. But rather than veering further into the darkness suggested by that album’s rougher edges, Tyler utilizes the fluidity of the mixtape format to evoke the messiness of his own life with seemingly less concern as to how the songs are packaged.
But where his past efforts often came off as bloated and inconsistent, here Tyler infuses the tracks with the kind of cinematic grandeur and meticulous arrangements that have characterized his recent material. The sounds are as wondrously nostalgic as they were on Flower Boy while dipping into the genreless experiments of IGOR. ‘SWEET / I THOUGHT YOU WANTED TO DANCE’, one of the album’s two 10-minute epics, picks up almost exactly where its predecessor left off, building on the same retro-soul aesthetic until it morphs into a reggae-inflected daydream, accentuating the singer’s confused state. At the same time, Tyler’s undeniable pop flair animates tracks like the menacing ‘LEMONHEAD’.
It would seem that by loosening his focus Tyler is also taking some of the weight off him, and to an extent Call Me does, refreshingly, redirect the listener’s attention to his skills as a rapper and producer rather than the mythos of his persona (though he does invent a new one, Sir Tyler Baudelaire, presumably named after the decadent French poet). And his talent really does shine here: from his hard-hitting delivery on the single ‘LUMBERJACK’ to the nuanced monologue of ‘MASSA’, Tyler is a versatile performer who can switch from comic to candid in an instant. By enlisting DJ Drama to host the project and bringing in everyone from Lil Wayne and Pharrell to rising stars like 42 Dugg, Teezo Touchdown, and YoungBoy Never Broke Again as guests, he injects even more colour into what is a relatively relaxed affair. ‘BLESSED’ sees him listing off the things he’s grateful for, while on a previous interlude he lets his own mother do the talking. If the irreverence of his character is less pronounced, though, it’s more to do with the way he frames the project as a tribute to the traditions of the genre both in style and presentation.
Yet despite its overtly classicist, open-minded take on hip-hop, the album’s most striking moments find Tyler taking center stage, his sharp lyricism delving into the realm of the personal. Nowhere is this more evident than on the penultimate ‘WILSHIRE’, the album’s other sprawling epic, in which he details an affair with a friend’s partner. He alludes to the situation elsewhere on the album, but rather than letting us piece the narrative together, he takes on that analytical role himself, going back and forth in his own mind before landing on a sour note: “And I’m mad private with this side of my life ’cause people are weirdos, and/ I just try to keep anyone I care about in the shadows/ Safe from the commentary and spotlight and thoughts/ ‘Cause it’s just a story for the people outside of it/ But I guess you’re just another chapter in the book.” He seems intensely in tune with his own thoughts, but snaps out abruptly as soon as he realizes the implications of exorcising his demons on record, returning to the loose theme of travelling for the bright finale. The journey is as dazzling as it is disorienting, and no matter how much of himself Tyler chooses to show, there’s always a sense he’s one step ahead of everyone else.
Shygirl has teamed up with slowthai for a new song called ‘BDE’. The track appears on Shygirl BLU, a new “long-form live realization” of her ALIAS EP. Check it out below.
Shygirl will perform at Slowthai’s new one-day festival, Happyland, set to take place September 25 at Northampton Cricket Ground in England. Her Alias EP came out last year.
Laura Mvula
The Go! Team
Izzy True
