2# - Tv Show Review

Season Three Poster feat Mahershala Ali 

True Detective returned to television this year which came as surprise to me, I hadn't seen any ads, articles, or other media that would tell me that it was coming back for a third season. This could be because I dont watch a standard TV, I really dont follow entertainment news that often, or it could be a bit of caution on the part of fans and critics to see if the show is going to turn a masterpiece like the first season or a mess like the second. So far I can say that True Detective season three is so far shaping up to be coherent enough so that you can follow it and remain mysterious enough so that you dont where you're going.

The cast for the third season are great with the the Oscar winner Marshalia Ali in the lead as Wayne Hays a Arkansas homicide detective and Vietnam War veteran who we follow thorough three different time periods. In 1980 Hays is early in his career as he and his partner Roland West played by Stephen Dorff respond one night to the disappearance of two children Will and Lucy in a small town in Arkansas. The two kids belong to the Purcell family which is made up of Tom Purcell played by Scoot McNairy and Lucy Purcell played by Mamie Gummer who upon the audience first meeting them show signs that their marriage is falling apart and may have never been stable. Lucy is a hard partyer who stays out most nights with her friends and other men and Tom unable to face the reality of their marriage still loves her and wants to make it work. Hays and West after searching the neighbor hood the night of the disappearance and creating search parties to look for them in the day, eventually go to the children school to try and learn more about them. This is where we meet Amelia Reardon Will's teacher played by Carmen Egjago who after some conversation with the detectives, Hays wants to try and have a relationship with her. Later in 1990 we see that Hays and Reardon are married with children, but Hays is no longer in a field position and is now riding a desk. Until he is questioned with something relation to the Purcell case and the he and West caught the wrong guy and maybe the children are still out there. The show also takes place in 2015 with a much older Hays being interviewed about the case and the book that his wife eventually wrote on the subject by a true crime television show, but it is clear that Hays is suffering from dementia and blackouts were he loses track of time. 

Show Creator Nic Pizzolato

This story on it's own is certainly ambitious and complicated, but that is what the series creator, writer, and director Nic Pizzolato has tried to do ever since the first and second season. He doesn't make what I would call the most easily digestible story even though it is on a medium like TV that goes out to masses of people. The investigation that is presented in any of the different stories that make up True Detective are more about the characters, what drives them to act and feel how they do. Just as important to the characters is the environment that they come from and how it played its role in shaping them. This time it is Arkansas and it feels like Arkansas in that everything is so isolated, every town while only being made up of 200 people is spread out from one another. That kind of isolation and distance can be in its way seen in the characters themselves, in their pauses between words and long silences. The importance of the "Landscape" is something Pizzolato has talked about before in reference to his characters in season one in that they "inhabit a poisoned dystopia" and that "apocalypse has already come and gone, and no one's quite woken up to that fact". The environment and the characters work together to create a feeling that everything is natural and fits within this world. The reality that the show creates makes the more philosophical and metaphysical musings that some characters in their own way have not feel jarring and forced. This combination of environment, believable characters, and much larger subjects is what I think make True Detective much more interesting than other show about detectives solving cases. 

1# - Music Review

Sophie Xeon or SOPHIE

SOPHIE or Sophie Xeon is a transgender musician originally from Scotland who ever since her solo
in 2013 has put out music that in her own words she would call "advertising" and everyone else would call art-pop or Avant-garde pop music. This can be seen in her music which in the grand scheme of the pop genre is very experimental, blending sounds various different types of music together create something different. For example influences from Industrial music, aggressive dance music, and even mainstream pop sounds just to name a few. Her appearance and overall aesthetic as an artist is artificial and unnatural with many of her songs featuring artwork that is made of plastic or even latex like on her songs BIPP and LEMONADE which was used in a McDonald's commercial at one point, making her music literary advertising.

Album art for LEMONADE

It is with her unique style that has led her to up until the release of her debut Album Oil of Every Pearls Un-Insides to be primarily known as a producer for many other pop artists like Madonna, Charli XCX, and even rapper Vince Staples. However after releasing her debut and it receiving positive reviews from most critics it has pushed her more into the limelight and now supposedly there might even be a collaboration with Lady Gaga coming the near future.

Album art for Oil of Every Pearls Un-Insides 

Sophie's Oil of Every Pearls Un-Insides only last's around 40 minutes with a total of nine tracks and
to be honest the album was a good length and did not over stay its welcome. It begins with the song "Its Okay To Cry" which is a comforting, understanding, and wanting to accepting what is inside a person. Which is a recurring theme throughout the album with the title Oil of Every Pearls Un-Insides being a strange way of saying "I Love Every Persons Insides". This song I think was a good way of letting the listener pull down their walls emotionally and also wards off those who might not care for the album as a whole. While this is not my favorite song on the album this came across an incredibly genuine and authentic show of compassion and not some generic "It's the inside that counts" platitude. This is because it is one of the few songs that Sophie actually sings in her own voice and was the first video to come out where she appeared as herself. A video that while I appreciate the the close and personal nature seems a little to cheap. The album art itself seems like a better and more appropriate place to have a visually interesting and personal video.

The second and third song on the album are the hedonistic and sex-fueled "Ponyboy" and the bizarre "Faceshopping" which while being about different topics lets say both feature a lot of the same elements. They both feature a female vocalist who is not Sophie and what sounds like what Satan himself would sound like if his voice was manipulated digitally to its own personal hell. Both these songs have a much a more aggressive, industrial, and odd feeling about them. While im pretty sure "Ponyboy" is a big favorite just for it's for outwardly and uncompromising sexuality, to me "Faceshopping" is much better for it ties much more in with her aesthetic of plastics and artificial things that represent something because we say that they do.

We change from that aggressive tone to a wary, sad, and surreal "Is It Cold In The Water?" which features the same female vocalist that sings the majority of these songs Cecil Believe. The song repeats the tracks title question throughout the song, that along with lyrics about time makes it feel like we are trapped in a time loop and are being warned by something or someone. Then Sophie does make her return vocally but only a little bit saying the tracks title "Infatuation" and "I wanna know" as it fades into distance. This song also features what sounds like a female voice with an almost cartoonishly high pitched voice signing certain parts and some wailing synths that sound like audible begging. This song also runs into the theme and alternate way of saying the Title of loving everyone's insides.

We then come right back into the much more aggressive sound with industrial-influenced "Not Okay" that only last around 2 minutes but certainly makes an impression. With this loud rumbling noise that hits incredibly hard, along with sounds like an alarm going off, and this digital noise. The only vocals are the cartoonish voice that has been lowered in volume and says something only occasionally. This song and the next one are some of my favorites on the album and blend so well together they sound like one song that was just split apart. That would that cavernous and loud "Pretending" that sounds like you are going so fast that the world and your body are about to be pulled apart. This ends with the manipulated what sounds like a motorcycle exhaust as it glitches put and speeds away.

We are then led into what I would like to call a song that really does not fit in the track listing and that is "Immaterial" which really the entire time is was listening sounding like a response to Madonna's "Material Girl". In that it talks about immaterial boys and immaterial girls which played more into the theme of things are what we see them as like in "Faceshopping" and that she loves the immaterial whatever it might be the boys, the girls, anything. While I think the song thematically plays into the broader theme of loving everyone's insides I completely dislike the songs bubblegum beat and the beat it self feels like it belongs in a Barbie and Ken commercial, which im sure was the intent.

What follows "Immaterial" is my favorite song on the album "Whole New World:Pretend World" which feels like it should have come right after "Pretending". "Whole New World:Pretend World" goes back to that industrial influenced sound, but this time Sophie has thrown everything into it as it becomes more and more crazy and off the wall as time goes on. The song has different sets of sounds that begin together and the near the end reconvene merge into this giant mix of noises that become one singular sound that sounds like hovering.

I for the most part really enjoyed this album I felt that the willingness to begin with a such a welcoming and sincere song could have been inauthentic played to pop album cliches. But after hearing the rest of the album, seeing how willing she was to go into strange places, how she was willing to have a varied style and still commit to her overall theme. It makes the emotion she tried to convey seem authentic, which is fitting since her aesthetic is plastic.