fiction and creative non-fiction from Brennan Quenneville
We’re going to take a little break from our regular stream of weirdly introspective memoirs and utter nonsense to recognize the best albums from 2022. Are these albums definitively the best of the year? Yes. Because I write on the internet, where opinions are facts. Albums are presented in alphabetical order. 11:11 by Pinegrove At a very difficult time, I [...]
Presented in alphabetical order. 3 -- Envy on the Coast After the birth of Violent Joy, I thought Envy on the Coast was dead. Apparently, I was wrong. 3 is what it promises: a brief, three-song return, but that's enough. "FLASH BANG" is onomatopoeic, all big punches and explosive bombast; "GHOST" is lead-single material, hook-driven [...]
It’s fitting that Gates was the first band I saw in concert after the pandemic began. I’ve joked that they’re my musical spirit animal and it’s been so long since they passed The Dear Hunter to become the band I’ve seen the most that I can’t recall how long ago that shift happened or how [...]
“Fences” is, pretty transparently, about the misery of being a celebrity. “You’re always on display / for everyone to watch and learn from,” sings Hayley Williams in the first verse. It’s not lost on Williams that this is a privileged position and also that, because of that privilege, because fame is considered desirable, there will always [...]
Aimee Mann is not known for blistering guitar solos. Neither is Tim Heidecker, a comedian who is only barely known for music at all. Yet somehow these two wrote “Soon Enough,” the third single from Mann’s 2012 release Charmer, a song that, as far as I’m concerned, exists solely to give birth to a searing, scorching [...]
I don’t believe in God, so, as an academic pursuit, the fallibility of man has always been vastly more interesting to me than the proposed infallibility of God. As a result, I have a soft spot for songs that grapple with crises of faith—As Cities Burn has had their fair share of entries on that [...]
In a few short hours, I was going to board a plane that would take me first to New York and then to Senegal, where I would live for six weeks, but all I could do was keep refreshing Myspace. It was early in the summer of 2007 and technically I was a student majoring [...]
One day, someone explained the idea of happiness to me and I thought, Sure, I know what that feels like. The same can be said for sadness, anger, and, if I’m being honest, schadenfreude. But there are some emotions that entered my life as definitions first and experiences later and that feels so weird because, now [...]
We need to take a few steps to get caught up to the present. In 1976, Kiss released Rock and Roll All Over which featured “Calling Dr. Love,” a song about a “doctor” who suggests that he can cure his patients with the magical healing powers of his penis. Fascinated by the absurdity of this (excessively creepy) premise, alternative/temporarily-ska [...]
Marcus Sedgwick's Midwinterblood is one of those books that defies review because if you discuss any element of its plot, you start chipping away at the mystery and suspense that make it such a gripping read. Here's the most I'm comfortable relating: For its first few pages, Midwinterblood seems like it might be a romance [...]
Songs & Stories 