Album Review: North Atlantic Oscillation - Grind Show

North Atlantic Oscillation - Grind Show

Release Date: November 16, 2018 on Vineland Music

This, from the official press release: “... a dramatic shift into more accessible territory: pop, electronica, rock & even folk elements ...”

I’ve been honoured and able to call Sam Healy my friend for a couple of years. This wasn’t the intention when I calmly suggested his first solo project Sand was the best album I’ve heard in the 21st century. When I finally met this talented man at a low-key North Atlantic Oscillation gig in Birmingham 3½ years ago, I soon learned that we had very similar senses of humour; he had an inventive, playful mind that wasn’t scared to juxtapose an obvious position. Or... he was quite mad.

I mention this, not because I want to be seen as a namedropper, or to shoehorn in the fact I still rate the first Sand album very highly, I mention it because Healy is a bit of a joker and I’m really not sure why the press release is worded that way... You see, I am a North Atlantic Oscillation champion and I believe they should have a far bigger audience than they have. The thing is NAO to me are pop, rock, folk electronica – that’s pretty much how I ‘sell’ them to people (and probably 50% of the reason those people never follow my advice). So reading a press release that suggests the band are moving into that direction sat uncomfortably with me, because, on initial listens, Grind Show is quite possibly the least accessible of their albums, so far.

North Atlantic Oscillation is now Healy alone. That also bothered me. I was a firm believer that former bassist Chris Howard grounded him and made him aware of real music. Sam once told me that Chris was the guy who introduced him to a lot of his later musical influences; introduced him to the classic rock and prog that I grew up with and hear in NAO’s work. I also believed Ben Martin’s drumming was one of the reasons they had such a unique sound; often described as sounding a bit like the Flaming Lips, I’d call that comparison bullshit, apart from the way Ben smashed his drum kit like there was no tomorrow. Armed with the knowledge that both had left the band to pursue other dreams also filled me with an uncertain dread.

Let’s get this out there: I thought the band would feel a little incomplete without the missing members – yet their influences are there to be heard, even if they were not there in recording. I listen to it and I’d argue with Sam until the coos come hame that Grind Show is actually a departure from more ‘accessible territory’; to me it’s more like a post-modern post-rock album. I still see those similar and familiar influences, but performed now in a more ‘personal’ way. It still has that ‘epic’ feel the last two albums particularly had, yet in many ways it feels as stripped back as Grappling Hooks, but now with the influence of age and experience. This really isn’t a bad thing because the brilliance of individual musicians (or musician) tends to be easier to detect.

My initial impression was it’s more like a follow-up to Sand’s 2^nd album A Sleeper Just Awake, probably down to the more electronic feel and the use of effects to conjure up uncertain atmospherics. However, Healy employs a lot of different vocal styles, testing his range, experimenting with new sounds. He really hits his stride with Sequoia, the 9^th track, it’s the first track that truly allows Healy to stretch those brilliant vocals... he has a brilliant voice – like a mix of Cat Stevens, Peter Gabriel, Mark Hollis, Art Garfunkle, Scott Walker and Jimmy Krankie – and this is the first time in the album that he really gets to belt one out. That’s not to say he doesn’t stretch his pipes sooner, it’s just the track that shows you how powerful his voice can be.

Apparently, doing breakdowns or track-by-track reviews is not du rigueur nowadays – which, just to digress for a moment, seems like a ‘rule’ introduced by people who got criticised for only reviewing the tracks off of albums they like. However, I feel that track-by-track reviews are for retrospectives rather than immediate snapshots of current stuff; and besides how boring is one man’s literary interpretation of his feelings towards songs he’s not familiar with, but wants to convey an illusion of knowledge? Yes, I’m aware I can usually make anything shine, but even I have limitations and to breakdown the entire album into individual items doesn’t necessarily lean itself to being good promotion and feels a little anal...

Sam tells me in an interview he did with me for The Progressive Aspect – music review site @ http://theprogressiveaspect.net/ - that many of the songs from this album were like, ‘Pulling teeth out of a larger tooth’ so it kind of makes writing mini reviews for each song almost trite and disrespectful considering the time a reviewer spends on a track compared to the relative time an artist can spend producing it for us. That said, the outstanding tracks on the first listens are maybe no longer the go-to tracks, but most all have one thing in common, they’re North Atlantic Oscillation songs. I have my reservations about opening the track with Low Earth Orbit; but in my head the track that sounds most like a leftover from the last Sand solo project could be perfectly placed – this was then, this is now!

I’d urge you to listen carefully to tracks like Weedkiller, Spinning Top, Sirens, Hymn and Fernweh – all showcase what is best about this band’s ability to create mini-opuses and I don’t mean in a 15 minute prog rock form, but inside 6 minutes (there are only 3 tracks over this mark and none by much). No band has the ability to create songs textured with both light and dark without jarring the listener. The Third Day showed us what subtleties were capable of NAO; it was an album shrouded in modern-prog rock songs you’d be hard pressed to categorise so pejoratively (which made it so stunningly refreshing), there are elements at work in this album, but reviewing this album [this review will appear in a much edited form] for a prog rock oriented site seems almost like an insult; it goes way beyond facile descriptions. But you have to give it time...

You know the expression, ‘It’s a grower’? Well, Grind Show is exactly that. It isn’t accessible; I believe it’s the least immediate album by the ‘band’ so far, but what it lacks in some areas it makes up in others by being wildly inventive, unexpected and quite beautiful and this becomes crystal clear as you grow more familiar with songs, leading me to wonder what my initial reaction to the album was all about. Parts of tracks that I found jarring on initial listens now make so much more sense; there’s a distinct Miles Davis jazziness to the album that makes the sometimes in-yer-face electronic bits fit in with the customary cushioned wall of sound you normally associate the band with.

When you produce music as complex and intense as this, Talk Talk can never be too far from creative comparisons. NAO might currently be just Sam, but he has had a lot of production help from Pete Meighan, the Dublin-based producer who has worked with the band before and was instrumental (literally) on Healy’s solo efforts. I hope their relationship more than just resembles the one between Talk Talk’s Mark Hollis and his producer friend Tim Freise-Greene – because look what music those two geniuses went on to create?

In conclusion; I’m in an unenviable position: what if I thought the album really was shit? I have a preview because I’m a fan [who writes great reviews] and a friend; does that put pressure on me to be kind? Would I be? Well, I did really think ‘WTF?’ the first time I heard it, but as stated above, more because it wasn’t what I expected and because I disagreed with the ‘accessible’ claim. Ask yourself this; what does a fan truly expect from a new album anyhow? I often wonder if aficionados and die-hard fans just want their favourite bands to do their favourite tracks – constantly repackaged or reworked so they don’t have to think about new songs, directions or ideas. I was the same; I approached this album with more dread than anticipation because... What if I didn’t like it?

If anything, in my mind NAO have become more uncategorisable than they were last week. If this album came out under the Radiohead banner there would be priapic rock DJs poking each others’ eyes out trying to be the most enthused about it; but it’s by a little known bloke in Edinburgh (originally from Ireland) who already has a back catalogue with more brilliance and invention than most rock stars can muster in their entire careers; so it’s probably never going to get the recognition it deserves (at least, not yet).

Grind Show is sublime. If The Third Day was velvet, this is felt – smooth but with a rougher edge. It’s full of atmospherics, feeling, diversity and invention. In many ways it’s haunting while being uplifting; happy while reflecting on sadness. And, I will concede it feels more like a rock album, but I don’t quite know why. I hope it’s going to attract many new fans, but if it doesn’t I feel sorry for all those people who don’t get what I do.

The test of a great album is how long it stays on your record player; The Third Day was played just last week (not even in anticipation of this new project); I don’t know if Grind Show will be played in 2022 as much as The Third Day has been since 2014, but at the moment I really hope so.                                   

9/10

Pre-order now on CD/MP3/WAV > http://bit.ly/GRINDSHOW and receive Low Earth Orbit as an immediate download.

Low Earth Orbit video on You Tube - https://youtu.be/gHRiCjB3mB8

Album Review - Hybrid/Light of the Fearless

Light of the Fearless
Hybrid

Nearly 20 years ago, my brother-in-law introduced me to an EDM combo who offered something a little different from all that shit dance stuff (IMHO) masquerading as music. What made Hybrid different was the use of massive soundscapes; orchestras and rock instruments added texture and cred to their style and I suggested Hybrid were more progressive than dance.

By the mid-noughties after a couple of almost uncategorisable albums working with prog rock musicians, and the likes of Perry Farrell and Julee Cruise, they seemed to settle on a new look and feel to their music. Disappear Here introduced Charlotte James (real name Truman) as the new front-woman of a rock-tinged EDM 'band'. That album seemed to cement Hybrid into a specific sub-genre and James certainly seemed like a great addition to their line-up. 'Disappear Here' was full of banging rock-tinged dance tunes that weren't quite so easily labelled.

Then nothing. For six years.

In the summer of 2015, it was announced that Chris Healings had left the band to explore a new career in sound design and to concentrate on being a DJ. My initial reaction was that Healings was obviously the EDM influence in the band, so his departure might mean a harder edge to Hybrid; more rock than dance. Especially as I saw James as a great recruit with a versatile voice...

I couldn't have been further from the truth...

For three years, the Hybrid website simply had an 'excerpt' from the forthcoming album. I've listened to the new album three times now and I can't hear it. The fact the 'excerpt' was head and shoulders better than the entire Light of the Fearless album suggests to me that they decided to change direction.

The new album isn't going to be a constant on my player; in fact it's probably not going to feature again. It's basically, to me, a bad pop album with a bit of clever production. The cinematic hugeness of Hybrid's music has disappeared and been replaced by jangly production, soulful choirs and there isn't enough of the Hybrid I've regarded as one of my favourite bands for the last 19 years to make it worth listening to again.

There are a few moments in it, but moments aren't enough - Beauty Queen being the closest thing to anything that came before. However, what there is a lot of is bland pop music, finished off with what can only be described as a woefully poor homage to Tom Petty with a truly awful cover of 'I Won't Back Down'.

I've banged on about Hybrid for years. I still recommend 'Morning Sci Fi' as possibly one of the best electronic rock albums of all time, but 'Light of the Fearless' is pretty much not in that league. I'm really glad I didn't waste my money on it.

2/10

Fixed

I have too much time on my hands. I know this. When I'm not farting about in the garden (project) or recording vlogs on the beach, I'm pretty much doing nothing practical apart from cooking - and to be fair, I've had so much time to practice cooking I'm even better now than I was! The thing is as I have still to find a job, I am filling my days with anything I can to procrastinate from doing something pertinent.

Anyone who knows me well will know that I love playing Scrabble and fancy myself a reasonable player. I used to play it a lot more than I do now, even though I have far more time. Games of Scrabble on a board were often like binge drinking; getting as much in because you don't know when the next session will be. Then I discovered an on-line community - long before Facebook - which had its own area to play; there were tournaments and your stats were all important. This was a place called the PixiePit and one day they started to charge players a subscription fee and being someone who suffered at the hands of people not subscribing to my own innovative on-line things, I was going to be fucked by a buffalo before I was giving anyone my money...

Anyone who knows me well will know that while I often have referred to myself as a journalist in the past, many people would argue the validity of that statement based on what I journalised in... Innit? The thing is, you don't regurgitate press releases for a decade without starting to see things - patterns, correlations, clues to something else. My role was both to regurgitate and to investigate and despite having not done much for a decade, the inherent ability is still there to spot something a bit off.

When I started having to play Scrabble on Facebook, it was being run by (I think) Mattel and was essentially a social media housed version of PixiePit. Then EA Sports bought Mattel, therefore bought the game and the uproar over it even made the mainstream press. People who had been playing the original version, far longer than as a Facebook game, were seeing a decade of stats wiped out; they were seeing a variety of things within games disappear (speed scrabble, force passing and the ability to choose who you played rather than randomly be assigned any Tom, Dick or Ahab) in favour of what appeared to be some chess rating system, adverts, paid for speed games and no way to reconnect with players who shared the app but not Facebook friend status. EA listened to all the complaints, and there were literally millions of them, and they did a massive fuck all (and there still are people who post to their page complaining today, who don't seem to realise that EA doesn't care about anything but profits).

As with all changes to the way we do things on line, there is no choice. You get changes foisted upon you that you simply have to accept or go without and these platform dealers know that for every person who gets pissed off with their changes, another two or three will emerge in the next few days to overfill the gap - it is the nature of having the world at your fingertips; fuck the non-conformers.

People who know me will also know that I have 'Bill' the legendary alter-ego based on a long story about mispronunciation which we don't need to obfuscate this any more by repeating. Bill is 'used' to play games because Bill's details - from friends to personal details - can be shared with Facebook because there's fuck all there apart from the people who think being friends with me and Bill is going to yield some insight or hilarity or even insanity...

I have never wanted to share my details with Facebook. I've known for yonks that Facebook is a data harvester and therefore I don't tend to have much information on it and quite wonderfully it thinks I live in a village just near Bassenthwaite Lake in Cumbria; so I'm kind of on the radar in a very pointless way. This was why Bill was created and Bill has played Scrabble for 9 years. He's got a 73% win rate and that makes him (me) a reasonable player. However, it wasn't until I moved up here that I started to notice something that kind of takes all the fun out of playing EA's on-line Scrabble...

The biggest complaint you hear from people is that people cheat and use word generators - yes that happens. I have used them. I sometimes use them to check the spelling of a word in my memory that won't quite appear and the EA Scrabble has a word checker so you don't just stick any old shit down; except it doesn't let you put any old shit down. If you put 'SPANGLEWANK' down, not only would you be a genius, but it would say 'Invalid word' and wouldn't let you do it; which of course takes challenging out of the equation - something you could and often had at the PixiePit. So people use word generators and the only skill that remains is how and where to place your go for maximum scores and future opportunities. It's a valid complaint, but you're not going to stop people and if, like me, you know obscure words, you're always going to be accused of being a cheat by whoever you're playing, even if you're not and especially if you're hammering someone obviously of sub-par intelligence.

So EA Scrabble is about positioning rather than skill; however it has a skill rating, which is called an ELO rating. Essentially, the higher that rating the better the player you are and that, theoretically, trumps everything. The problem is over the last six months I've grown to think that's bullshit. I think EA have turned Scrabble into a video game, or have tried to incorporate bits of 'playability' like Candy Crush has into it, albeit more surreptitiously rather than secretively, that won't bother good players, will infuriate not so good players, but will likely as not be picked up by anyone and because they are who they are; good players will think they have good games because they're good players; the same for average players and average players won't think why 99 times out of 100 they get stuffed when they play someone the ELO claims is better than them. The reason for this is both subconscious and also a case of if someone like me said, "They [EA] all fuck cats!" even if they do, you're not going to believe me; you're going to think it's a sour grapes issue, or I don't like changes EA have made or anything because I'm most likely a mad swivel-eyed conspiracy freak/Right/Left wing fake news bastard and EA are a large computer game conglomerate... What's not to believe about them? Eh? EH?

Because I've had a lot of time on my hands I started to play a bit more Scrabble and for the first couple of months I was here, Bill fluctuated between a 73 and 71% success rate and then something started to repeat itself and you could say that the law of averages, physics and games theory make this a non-story and it probably is unless you like playing scrabble on Facebook and don't mind being dicked about?

I was losing consistently to players with a higher rating. People with 75% or 80% ratings, or ELO ratings higher, weren't just beating me, they were crucifying me, much in the same way I would annihilate a player with a less than 50% rating. Now, these people who beat me had high ELO ratings as well, so theoretically they were much better than me and obviously had better vocabularies and could see words in jumbled letters better or ... um... word generators; you can't escape them, so word skill tends to go out of the window, as I said. Yet, these players with 10% high ratings than me weren't just butt-fucking me, they were doing it with 6 or 7 bingos (a 7 or 8 letter word) while I toiled trying to make fuck all out of 6 consonants and a U or an I...

So, back in July, I disconnected from and deactivated all of my bogus Facebook accounts, I mean, who doesn't have at least 15 each? But in December, I reactivated one of them - 'Barry' - and started playing Scrabble. This time I was doing it as research rather than fun and some of the things I discovered were very alarming to me. The first thing I did was have Barry play Bill 10 times. Bill (at the time) had a 2025 ELO rating and Barry had a 1800 (apparently where it starts... I dunno, go figure?). Bill annihilated Barry 10-0. I was playing myself, but one of me consistently had far better letters and combinations for TEN straight games - Barry never stood a chance; it was like I got to pick my letters from a plastic bag.

Barry then went into the big world and started playing others; all with piss poor ratings. Barry went from a 0% win percentage to 75% within 100 games. In fact at 100 games, Barry had only lost 18 games - 10 of those to myself and five because the internet was down for nearly a week and I'd been 'force forfeited', so in actual terms I'd only lost 3 games . I occasionally got beaten by a player with a similar ELO rating, but put that down, rather conceitedly, to bad moves or judgements by me rather than skill of my opponent.

Then Barry played Bill again and got thumped.

Over the last two months, Barry plays people of a much higher standard to his rating and 99 times out of 100 he gets his arse handed to him on a plate; once in a blue moon, he'll beat a player who is better, despite having shit letters, because *I* know how to play when someone is screwing you over and that is to shut them down as best you can. The thing is Bill and then Barry both get consistently shit letters when they're playing someone 'better'.

Barry has now played Bill 20 times. The score is Bill 20 to nil. I played two games yesterday, now that Barry's ELO rating is 1950 (Bill's is 2030) and Barry lost both games by over 150 points. Barry's letters have again consistently been shit when playing Bill; and Barry's letters are consistently shit when playing any one with a +2000 ELO rating. Bill's (2030) letters are always considerably better than someone with a less than 2000 ELO rating and constantly shit when playing someone with a higher than 2050 rating. Across 6 months of scrutiny, I have absolutely no doubt that the data I've accrued proves that EA on-line Scrabble is unfairly weighted towards the better players; the letters are not random; they're influenced by the game provider towards the player with the higher ELO.

You can't get a straightforward game like you can with a board and a bag of tiles; it can't do that because it wants to encourage people by helping them or hindering them depending on the standing of the opposition.

EA Scrabble is fixed and I have six months worth of data to back it up. The sad thing is it is neither important or likely to be discussed by anyone - stick a link to this blog in the Scrabble FB page comments section and if it isn't deleted by their rabid moderators, people won't bother or if they do... please see the comments above about my credibility against an honest and decent megacorporation like EA; which is fair enough, but it does show you how everyone has allowed themselves to be subtly manipulated by computer companies... To believe everything the screen tells you and to be so ... zoned out, that you accept it as normal so don't really see how you're being used to ensure your patronage and if just one percent of one percent of the 7 million users spends $25 then everyone gets to buy a house in Bali.

Pop Culture is Dead To Me 3: This Time It's Personal

A surprisingly thin-on-the-ground selection for this quarter; but this is probably down to having rediscovered 'a social life' and not dependent on a TV for entertainment...

Anyhow, you know when you really look forward to something and it turns out to be considerably less exciting than you could ever wish for? Well, the last time I actually looked forward to a film and enjoyed it was Arrival - the CE3K for the 21st Century, so I had vast expectations of Annihilation based purely on its premise (and its apparent similarity to an idea I had over five years ago).

Annihilation is based on the Jeff Van der Meer book of the same name - the first part of a trilogy about an area of the USA that becomes 'some other place' and it stars Natalie Portman and Oscar Issac (both with Star Wars connections) and is directed by Alex Garland, he of Ex Machina fame, so there's oodles of pedigree and potential. Yet, despite getting a limited cinematic release in the last country it should have been shown, the rest of the world got it on Netflix, based it seems on the idea that the studio behind it got cold feet about the ... subject matter and esoteric story line. I'm thinking they maybe realised it was just a heap of barely intelligible boredom. I don't need to be a half-wit Yank to dislike this film on a number of levels - it isn't weird enough; it isn't psychedelic enough and it's as exciting as watching your nan doing the ironing, while listening to repeats of The Archers... Yes, it's that good!

The other problem with Annihilation is its disjointedness - presumably deliberately done to attempt to convey the weirdness of Area X (where most of the film is set), there seems to be lots of time spent drawing allegory from the worlds the expedition team have left behind. I'm not overly convinced these allegories worked, regardless of the obvious or subtle execution; but this might be down to the bleak and humourless journey the viewer has to take.

Frankly, I think it's a mess that apparently takes so many liberties with the source material that someone else could adapt the book and this film would come out considerably differently.

I feel a little like the Americans who hated the end of the Shadow War in Babylon 5 because it wasn't exciting enough; but where I could see the necessity of that, this film needed something to actually happen in it, because aside from the mutated empathy bear and a few flowers, it felt decidedly like a dull road movie.

I also feel that when You Tube is flooded with seven minute films of nerds explaining to other nerds what the film or the ending meant then it maybe shouldn't have been released in the first place. This is intellectual snobbery, by the way, this is someone who fancies themselves as a pretty good writer conveying my belief that this was incoherently done and any subliminal message was lost; probably down the weirdly vaginal hole in the Lighthouse...

Regular readers will know I've grown utterly tired of the Marvel films, purely because they either don't live up to my expectations or I'm simply growing too old to appreciate a film genre that is now firmly directed at people younger than me. I was hoping that Thor: Ragnarok would buck a trend, especially as I've really enjoyed the other two Thor films.

The problem with it is it's simply too long, it's also too comedic and presumably Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) couldn't be in it because her film-star alter-ego was farting about in some vaguely psychedelic/delirious film purporting to be 'intelligent SF'. That aside, it was the most enjoyably daft Marvel film I've seen in a while, even if, like Annihilation I found it hollow and a little lifeless.

Would I be right in suggesting that 'solo' superhero films are no longer that? Take Spider-Man: Homecoming - it has Iron Man in it. The new Thor has the Hulk, Valkyrie and, at the end, the Guardians. I haven't seen Black Panther and I'm in no hurry to, but I wonder how many 'guest stars' are in it? Avengers: Infinity War (Part One) will have about 100 superheroes in it; I expect each of them will get less than 10 seconds air time; someone will die at the end and all will seem lost until Adam Warlock turns up at the end... Yawn...

I'm sure I've seen some other films since Christmas, but the failure of any of them to stick in my memory could simply be an indication that movies are in need of something new, especially when TV and streaming services seem to be cleaning up; or I simply might be suffering from dementia. In fact, I think part of the reason my viewing habits have declined has been down to too much choice. Not all that choice is going to be award-winning fodder either.

In terms of networked TV (you know the drill, I rarely talk about UK TV because most of it is bad and I don't really care if you really think [insert name here] was the best British [insert genre type here], I'm unlikely to watch it) I'm convinced I've missed out or forgotten half of what I've watched. The thing is I might not remember them because they're even less worth talking about than the following load of horse testicles...

Lucifer is a TV show in need of a show runner who understands how these kind of shows work, because it is fast becoming the genuine 21st century version of Columbo. One of the original charms of the series was the dull procedural shit you had to get through, almost as tiresomely as Lucifer, so we could have those juicy five to ten minutes of PLOT. The problem is that PLOT got so far and then ground to a halt and was replaced by a series of slightly irrelevant subplots that seem to go out of their way to portray Lucifer like some sheltered slightly twattish kid with a growing dose of Tourette's, who also, despite millennia of observing human behaviour still has absolutely no clue how to behave. It was fun for two series, but now it needs to move on.

Lucifer is also fast becoming the graveyard for washed up ex-fantasy show actors. Trish Helfer didn't do a bad job last series, but, honestly, does she need to be around now? And why is she more like the goddess who possessed her than the homely wife and family lawyer she was originally, but has been carelessly forgotten about?

The other problem is Tom Welling. He was head and shoulders the worst thing in Smallville (and he played Clark Kent) and now he's Kane, the first murderer, where he gets to flex all of his absolutely non-existent acting skill, while being allowed to sing very badly. No wonder some of the cast are beginning to look confused (or is that bemused?), all the time.

Meanwhile, torture and misery porn has advanced to new and even more controversial levels with (say it in a gruff US accent) Ay Em Cee's The Walking Dead... I thought making the Season eight story - All Out War - stretch out across the entire 16 episodes in what appeared, at first, to be continuous real time action seemed like a good idea, but after the opening four episodes (which appeared to cover the same time frame from several different perspectives) we appear to have settled back into another weirdly chronological mishmash of confusion.

If the show runner thought killing off Carl was a way of getting the series back on track and thoroughly confusing the comic readers, then the jury is out. Yes, the kid who played Carl in the series was as wooden as a yew tree, but in the comic he's become almost as important as his father, in the grand scheme of things. So they either look for a new 'Carl' one who can act and is interesting, or they go in a different direction to the comic - completely.

The problem with TWD now is it has become a shouty mess with no clear direction any more. The zombies are almost a distraction from the latest psychos and their crazy followers and once Negan and co are out of the way - by the end of this current series you can be sure - we've got the Whisperers waiting in the wings. Another bunch of randomly chaotic psychos intent on killing the living.

I don't know if this is true and frankly I don't like searching the internet for vague things, but the next series of sister show Fear Madison and her Family or whatever it's called is being fast forwarded FIVE years and Morgan from TWD is joining the cast, presumably in the hope that viewers will give a shit.

I addressed this before - if you had a series about living in a mountain retreat with solar and wind power and a mountain stream, it would get a little boring when each episode was about crop yields or fortifying the outer perimeter...

The new addition to our viewing pleasure was The Good Place. We watched Season One more on the recommendation of seeing others asking if people had seen it. It's essentially a 22 minute weekly comedy series about people who have died and gone to 'The Good Place'. It sounds like something that guy from Little House on the Prairie should be in with guest appearances from Aled (I never touched her, guv) Jones, but it is actually as odd as anything you will ever see on US TV. We have the entire season two to watch after binge watching the first series. The wife is undecided, I'm just hoping it doesn't turn into some weirdly bloated Groundhog Day.

The shock for me has been how surprisingly irreverent and enjoyable most of this, presumably final, season of The X-Files has been. With just a few more to go before Gillian Anderson quits the show for good, I'd hope it ties up as neatly as it can without trying to shag a bloated corpse any longer than necessary. This season has been blessed with some excellent stand alone episodes that have been head and shoulders above the now tired and balding main plot. Let's hope they manage to finally put it out of its misery on a high note.

Agents of SHIELD was going to join most of the other Marvel series - whether Fox, Netflix or ABC - on the scrap heap. After a season that was far too long stuck in a virtual world, this new (also possibly last) series went a little weird by setting pretty much the first half of it in the future where the Kree rule over the remaining rubble of the planet Earth. We're now back in their own time with the sword of Damacles hanging over their heads by virtue of knowing if they make the wrong decision they will forever be trapped in a paradoxical time loop.

It has gone from almost certain death to being back up there as one of the must watch things of the week; largely down to some cracking dialogue and a kind of Buffy-esque ability to be both deadly serious and slightly tongue-in-cheek. You just know it's going to get canned in May.

That brings us to what should have been something remarkable yet somehow empty and devoid of pleasure... Happy came in like a breath of fresh air and went out like a stale sequel waiting to happen. Based on an idea/comic Grant Morrison probably had while pished on Buckthorn and deep-fried Mars bars, it's about a former cop turned hit man who (for want of a better description) adopts his (unknown) daughter's imaginary friend. It's choc-a-bloc full of Three Stooges styled violence; pithy dialogue and thoroughly icky and creepy characters, yet despite only being eight episodes long, it felt like it was at least five too many.

In the end it was a slightly sordid and soiled example of why not every idea should be made into a TV series and this might have worked as a slightly low budget feature film. I won't be catching up with season two when it finally appears, because by the end of the first series I was waiting for it to conclude. it was also a SyFy series and, frankly, inserting molten needles in your urethra is better than watching anything from those 'lo quality charlatans'.

Star Trek: Discovery finished its inaugural run with an ultimately disappointing cop out conclusion to a slightly disjointed narrative. It was still a brilliant reboot with many things on its side. You just wonder if they can continue with the intensity and adult themes and if they can they're not frightened to advance it even further; I hope so, but... You know?

I do watch some British TV and I'd like to give you a quick comparison between The Grand Tour and BBC's Top Gear. GT is TG with more money, presented by three oafish bores who are also extremely good at what they do. TG is now a fairly dull car show with two genuinely likeable presenters fronting a largely dreary programme. I can't stand Clarkson as a human being, but I know he did appeal to a large group of people and it is arguable he was used as an initial scapegoat to test the waters of how offended people can be and once it was confirmed that a small percentage of social media users could influence the way the rest of the world thinks, we all got slightly shafted.

Still to watch: All of Fargo, Shameless US season 8, The Punisher, season two of Jessica Jones, season 3 of Mr Robot and The Twin Peaks reboot and have to find time to watch Altered Carbon, Feud, and Mr Mercedes. I also have about six things from the last couple of columns I still haven't watched and the longer it goes on the less likely I am to watch. 

I have a Star Wars film to get around to: a few cult films (Ingrid Goes West, Colossal, It Comes at Night and - still - the Mexican film The Untamed) to get through and that's before other films come out that I'm hoping I'll want to see. The weird thing is I look at someone like my mate Andy's film review site and realise that he'll watch 100 new films in a year, with ease, and I'm getting to the stage where I'm lucky if I can watch 10 that I'm remotely interested in - and when I do I'm as disappointed as a kid wanting a bike and getting a carrot at Christmas; it's no surprise my enthusiasm is waning, is it?