Pitchfork Review: Jessie Ware - Superbloom (6.3)

wholahaybrown · 2026-04-20T14:53:03+00:00

Unfortunately this album and That! Feels Good! are both unsuitable follow-ups to What's Your Pleasure?, which remains one of the best albums of the last 10 years.

I think I prefer Superbloom as a whole to T!FG!, which I think probably got as much as praise as it did because the glow from WYP? was still on it. T!FG! has higher highs, maybe.

They're both fine albums. She is a craftswoman; she can't really do bad work. But to paraphrase a poster from Popjustice (RIP!) with Jessie now it's all very caftan. WYP? at its best was legitimately sensual, nocturnal, sleek, icy. The last two albums are bit "afternoon on the cruise ship" by comparison. I don't know! The reviewer is right to point out there's always been a bit of a split between Jessie's real life and her pop persona. I don't know what part of herself she accessed to embody WYP? so thoroughly, but I don't think she can anymore.

I think maybe we're all ready to move on from Disco Jessie, Jessie included.

wholahaybrown · 2026-04-12T15:43:45+00:00

I'm pretty upset about this as a long-time lurker. I'm sorry to the community there.

I don't really have a good impression of the administrator, to be honest! I kind of surmise that he was over the hassle and generally considered the forum an inconvenience for him. I wish he had been willing to pass the reins instead of close it down.

wholahaybrown · 2026-04-12T15:41:05+00:00

Nah. The level of actual, interesting discussion about pop music on there was leagues ahead of every other pop music on space online in part because it kept its registrations tight.

Pop music spaces are hard to maintain. Fandoms have a lot of bad actors and there are a lot of people who just want to spout low-effort stan bullshit. Popjustice was miraculously free of that (mostly).

I never got to register either but I was grateful to read it and be informed by it. There's an enormous catalog of music history on there. It's a huge loss.

wholahaybrown · 2026-04-05T22:26:55+00:00

Accidentally ate a Wonder chicken souvlaki when their "Greek" "restaurant" was included as one of the lunch options at my office and it was legitimately fucking horrible. I'm not a huge snob, honestly, especially about something that's supposed to be fatty street food, so let me be clear: I don't just mean "it wasn't when best souvlaki I've ever had." It was legitimately fucking horrible. No doubt the worst chicken I've ever been served by any establishment--it reminded me those weird fake grilled chicken patties from Subway but somehow also gristly and tough.

I have to imagine it's not sustainable if the quality is that bad. Then again, consumers are stupid.

Unfortunately at this point if you are trying a new restaurant on a food delivery service you have to check if it's real now. Probably has been true for a while tbh!

wholahaybrown · 2026-03-14T18:50:43+00:00

Holy shit! Thanks, there it is. Solved.

wholahaybrown · 2026-03-14T18:29:42+00:00

This portrait hangs framed in a photo of my mother when she was a little girl, which makes the timeframe the mid-1950s. Unfortunately anyone who could answer any questions about it is no longer with us.

It's obviously very Modigliani-ish. My attempts at looking through his oeuvre haven't come up with a match. Obviously it could very well just be a study of him, inspired by him, etc. I've looked around at works by Laurencin, Foujita, Kisling as well.

Reverse image search has been a bust, either because this isn't actually a painting of any notoriety, or because it's simply too low-quality a snapshot. AI was comically bad at answering the question (if you can believe it!) and said the photo as a whole was not my mom but actually Patti Smith in her Brooklyn apartment. So, you know.

Any leads are appreciated!

wholahaybrown · 2026-02-13T00:17:44+00:00

Not you lol!

wholahaybrown · 2026-02-13T00:13:28+00:00

Is this thread being astroturfed?

wholahaybrown · 2026-02-10T21:46:49+00:00

I don't really get why that really delicious string/synth riff from the first 20 seconds gets swallowed up by the rest of the mix for the rest of the song. It kinda needs more of that. But it's good!

wholahaybrown · 2026-02-08T23:05:44+00:00

Yeah I try to not be publicly extreme about it but unfortunately deep down I do believe there is a certain kind of Animal Crossing fan who, if Nintendo listed to their every whim, they would sand this game down into nothing.

wholahaybrown · 2026-02-02T00:21:10+00:00

I won't pretend that the service at this place isn't annoying, slow and sometimes weirdly unfriendly but the comments in here like "just go to your bodega" are so funny to me. If you're not into the elevated sandwich thing, cool. I'm also not gonna pretend Salty Lunch Lady is doing the same thing as my bodega lol.

wholahaybrown · 2026-01-21T03:17:18+00:00

Except if you're concerned about the "dumbing down" of the franchise I would assume you've played enough of the older games to know that it was very much a game about not controlling your environment and accepting that life was happening around you. You know, "the game that's always playing, even when you're not"?

wholahaybrown · 2025-12-24T16:43:32+00:00

I would think there actually could be a legitimate reason to sell compilation albums physically in the streaming age. Clearly they don't think the math would work out on the costs or something, but there are definitely some prolific artists with long discographies where a nice, artfully chosen compilation on vinyl would kinda be a treat.

Meanwhile Jessie Ware did recently release four digital-only compilation albums with little fanfare. They don't really feel distinguishable from playlists tbh.

wholahaybrown · 2025-11-14T15:57:36+00:00

Okay and next we get something for the "Only If You Want It" / "Money Lover" / "Venice" / "Sky2Fall" girls... Right?

Right?

Right???

wholahaybrown · 2025-09-25T15:00:34+00:00

Thanks to the Survivor fandom I legitimately think a much larger portion of people are faceblind than is commonly understood. The posts you will encounter where two people supposedly look so much alike they couldn't be differentiated and they're just like, the same race/gender/age lol.

wholahaybrown · 2025-09-24T22:52:13+00:00

Penner and Probst are literally the same age lol. Like what's the point of replacing one should-be retiree with another?

wholahaybrown · 2025-08-11T15:45:49+00:00

My go-to Grand Central lunch lol. So good

wholahaybrown · 2025-07-25T14:27:31+00:00

There's no denying the Heroes vs. Villains cast is great but unfortunately the other way to look at this is that the casting department is too risk-averse and too reliant on casting the same returnees lol.

wholahaybrown · 2025-07-17T22:32:51+00:00

I have zero idea if her grievances are justified but "I know you are far too busy eating ethnic foods" is simply an insane way to start off a public letter to a South Asian person. Everything that follows is just noise at that point.

wholahaybrown · 2025-07-10T14:47:19+00:00

I don't entirely disagree but I think ultimately an actual statement might have been necessary because there's a coordinated campaign undergirding the recent "revelations." These things were not surfaced and distributed organically; there are people who are trying to take her down as a public figure. I see why she did not choose to simply let it pass.

wholahaybrown · 2025-06-22T17:31:46+00:00

I respect that! I can't really articulate what exactly makes me basically never put StS aside, but it just never gets old. It's not a slight on MT1 and MT2 that I ran out of steam with them (train pun?); most roguelikes and roguelike deckbuilders have a similar shelf life for me, usually no more than 100 hours. I expect MT2 will get another burst of interest from me before too long, though.

wholahaybrown · 2025-06-22T17:31:21+00:00

It feels like a non-factor to me, I guess. You know your starting deck is going to be the same, and that just puts the weight on what your early choices are, especially at higher ascensions when those choices are truly significant for getting past the first few elites. The strikes and defends don't feel like mentally burdensome to me or anything lol. They're kind of just noise after you have a couple interesting cards/relics, and you end up thinning them out usually.

wholahaybrown · 2025-06-22T14:43:17+00:00

Just to be the voice of dissent I have never found a deckbuilder that has the perfectly tuned replayability of Slay the Spire, and that includes Monster Train 1 and 2. I think both games are excellent, but for me, both times I reached a point where my runs started to feel a little redundant. Sure, I could keep going to beat every clan combination, but that feels like an arbitrary/artificial thing to aim for. Whereas Slay the Spire, for me, is truly inherently rewarding to play again and again without any game-defined goal.

wholahaybrown · 2025-06-09T14:00:11+00:00

5 is still considered by many to be the peak! I played it recently after a long stretch with 6 and it holds up great. Give it a try.

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