Got to catch up on some of my reviews! First the CDs:
I got Boris and Ian Astbury’s BXI at this time. For the review of that CD, see cialis ed pill.
Carnation, “12.21.12″ -
Carnation is a band from Melbourne, Australia, they are a shoegazer/Britpop-type band that sounds a lot like early “Love”-era Cult, but perhaps with Michael Stipe singing instead of Ian Astbury. They recently did a tour of Singapore, they’ve got a funky account of it here. As far as I know, this is the only band that has come to tour Singapore, playing six shows here, each at a different place. Bravo, guys!
“12.21.12″ is quite an improvement on the opening EP, and nearly every song is a good one. The production values are hot, and it sounds like a big release from a major label. “Coming Down” has all the right drums and screaming guitar chorus, with the vocals soothing their way in. “Gone” is their really amazing song, for which they have a really cool video. The song is a killer winner that makes you want to get up and dance, the soaring guitar sounds can’t help but force you to take note. I hope this song helped turn them into superstars wherever they are from. “Judas” is a funky number with some slide guitar, “The Future” pulses with strange energy and quick barre chords, while “2012″ is all about the cool licks, earning the guys some bonus points in the groove department.
Carnation, “Carnation” EP – Carnation’s first release is an EP of five songs, all of them quite good. The band has a sound that is a bit like early Cult, they start the first song “Up All Night Long” off with some funky drumming, then a killer riff, and immediately the vocals kick in six bars (or 12 seconds) into the song. Start it off smart. Being the first album, the production is a bit hollow, and they have one fewer members than “12.21.12″, but the songwriting is fantastic. “Priestess” is all about big splashy riffs, and the band jumps up with a very good Cult-like tune. It has a very ’80s alternative rock sound, I guess you could already call this retro. The other songs on the EP are quite nice, and the last one hides a hidden track at the end. Oooohhh… aaaaaaahhh…
CTEM
Cathedral, “The Ethereal Mirror” – This is Cathedral’s big label album, the one that they did after “Forest of Equilibrium”, which nearly invented doom metal. But already, on their second album, they sound completely different, with a more stoner sound that the doom fans derided as “disco doom.” Album opener “Velvet Vortex” is an instrumental number that is not bad, followed quickly by “Ride”, a nutty psychedelic thing, if a bit boring. “”Enter The Worms” is more my style, as it has that doom metal bite and plenty of growl. The band sounds great. As far as “disco doom” goes, “Magic Mountain” is a great number, with plenty of noise, groove, funk and all around heaviness, and a fantastic psychedelic solo! As Lee Dorrian himself says, “oooh… dy-no-mite!” Love this stuff. They have handclaps in the mix, but here it’s more ironic than over-produced, with Lee’s somewhat suicidal backlash at the macho grindcore/doom scene. Handclapping along to doom, ha ha ha… “Fountain of Innocence” is sort of pop-metal, sorta, but it is also very complex, and like “Magic Mountain” it has lots of parts – pop metal riff, heavy riff, psychedelic passage, and all sorts of fun. “Grim Luxuria” is a bit of horror metal, with lots of growling and frothing at the mouth and insane laughter from lead doomster Lee Dorrian, and a horrorshow guitar solo – great psychedelic blues. “Jaded Entity” is atonal and weird at first, but quickly becomes a nice grinder, also with growling and mincing of teeth aplenty. “Ashes You Leave” is a slow, boring droner. “Phantasmagoria” is true, plodding, head smashing on a tortoise shell sllllllloooooow-aaaaaassssss-mollllllllasssssses doom, a song that could have easily found a home on the first Cathedral album. It’s so beautiful. After 4.5 minutes of that, the song picks up for a few more minutes of mid-tempo rock. At the end the song just sort of grinds out into nothingness. Perfect. The album finishes with “Imprisoned In Flesh”, a strange near-acoustic number that seems pretty throwaway.
My version of the CD came with a great DVD, a documentary that is the companion to the version that is on the “Forest of Equilibrium” CD (clearly, it was filmed at the same time and released in two parts, i.e. there’s the pub interview scene that is the same across both DVDs).
Blokes sittin’ in pub, guys from the first two albums:
Lee Dorrian, vocals, sound effects (current member)
Garry Jennings (Gaz), guitars (current member)
Adam Lehan, guitars (past member)
Mark Griffiths (Griff), bass (past member)
Drummers Mike Smail (from Forest of Equilibriuim) and Mark Wharton (from the Ethereal Mirror) were absent.
There is a lot of discussion about the spirit of the times. The second album was a reaction to the people at the time of the first album shouting “faster, faster”, but then the second albums was a shock to the fans who had gotten used to the first album.
“Soul Sacrifice”, from the between-LPs release, was when they really changed. Lee only wanted to record slow. “Why can’t we write any slow songs like ‘Silent Rapture’, from the first album, he’d ask. Still says it for every album.
On this recording, the musicianship became very strong. “Gaz and Adam got better as guitar players, getter at songwriting as well.” On the DVD there is a great clip without sound of the band freaking out onstage in front of a sea of faces, and some great clips from Osaka castle, also toured Israel and went to the States to play CBGBs at a killer gig on Christmas 1992 with Napalm Death, Trouble, Cathedral The Obsessed and Crowbar – amazing!
Recording of album was not pleasurable, but they took the Sony/Columbia money;
Columbia sent him away to write lyrics, Lee stayed at a hotel next to a pub and got pissed, walking along the beach at night with a Dictaphone trying to write lyrics. Admirable because he was consciously trying to change styles and become a brilliant lyricist, which he did. Had supernatural experience with ghost in bedroom, then the pillow in staircase episode freaking him out. Reading esoteric literature, Nigel Fellows, psychadelic rock groups, progressive psychedelic influences came to front. Torturing himself by smoking lots of weed and reading lots of books by Leilel Wendel about death, the angel of death, reading magic books, having weird supernatural experiences to make the record vague and tripped out.
There was the experience of using the Sex Pistols studio. Talking to the groundsman about Paul Cook throwing the TV into the pool, eating totally deluxe vegan meals, nighttime action, producer got heavy, daunting studio, demos at Clive’s place, clear tone on guitar, Adam’s leads are cutting through and sounding nice, but it sounded like pop. “That’s what doom’s about.””No, you don’t want to be doing that.” Argued about the start of “Phantasagoria.”
- “We’ve compromised on some things, but this has got to stay.”
- “He said “Mick Jagger’s bass player wouldn’t play something like that.”
Lee: “what a cocksucker, what a nob.” “Please cut out ‘what a wanker’, because he produced the record – he might get the DVD.”
With the album artwork, the main focus was the wheel, the circular motion of life, the cruelty of religion, medieval cruelty, more abstract, Cathedral riding roughshod through all this madness; original title was “Ride through the Decay”, title changed two days before printing.
Drew only from the head and from visual cues, very naive stuff, which was difficult to do, very stylistic, no band photograph, incorporated the four musicians into the painting, the groups weren’t doing it any more, better than a posed photo, one of the group left, turned him into the grim reaper. Griff turned into Grim Reaper, Gaz played bass on album.
Dave Pratchett travelled to Nottingham with a little bag of art material to paint it at Earache office, he took a day to do it all. “Religion is very guilty of trying to smash the feminine, blaming Eve for all sin, which of course is nonsense, so we’ve made religion itself, and the apple itself is rotten here. Human society will be rotten as long as religion has a hold. It’s going to be a struggle.”
Mates broke up after a major label gig, it was tours that they didn’t want to do, they became the “ethereal two-piece”. Lee: “Maybe we compromised ourselves musically a bit, even though listening back it’s still quite a strong record. I think we did, in a way. I think in terms of production we did, at the time it felt like we were compromising. The songs are ours, the music was our music, he never did anything that drastic. He rearranged a few things, but he never wrote anything. All of the music was ours anyway.”
“There’s no denying that Dave Ecker is a fantastic producer, but we just were not ready to work with someone like that. We were underground kids recording in shitty studios, al of a sudden you’re in this deluxe luxury place owned by Richard Branson doing a record for Columbia, and it’s not what we were about.”
Photo shoots to look like the Black Crowes with a wardrobe assistant, Gaz wore lime green flares and a Black Sabbath Vol. 4 t-shirt to freak out the macho grindcore narrow-minded guys. Not pictures in Coventry with a hangover. $10,000 for photo session, rejected all pictures. Seven clips from “Magic Mountain” video, four clips from the “Ride” video.
Were fans of Mercyful Fate, but didn’t want to be on that tour, did meet and greet for winners of a competition. Got very disillusioned. Frustration got so far that the band was falling out with each other. Were inventing things in interviews dissing Columbia. “Ethereal Two-piece” joke. Something happened about merchandise and publishing and the band split in two, doing a tour with Fight.
Childish stuff going on, nobody was innocent except Scott. Close-knit group splitting up. Should have been fighting against what was tearing them apart, instead of each other. Lee went over the top with the fancy clothes to mess with the head of fans who were so macho, he went the other way. People talked about their clothes more than their music after a while, and it was called “disco doom.” The band went to disco clubs because they didn’t want to go to rock clubs.
Bootsy Collins was going to remix Magic Mountain. Columbia thought that they were taking the piss, and maybe they were because it was so close to the line. It would have alienated the audience even more. The band was too heavy for the mainstream yet too commercial for the underground.
Had their passports stolen, lost the photos with Rob Halford; Adam’s last gig, couldn’t communicate, didn’t want to leave. Within three years, two of the original members had left. Lack of money was a problem.
Band goes around the table talking about what they are doing now: Adam, a dogsbody for an electronics firm, an overblown office junior who is paid an extremely small amount of money; Lee loves running the record label, does it full time, most of the time, gets a buzz out of it even if there’s no wage, wants to do it for a long time. Collects expensive psychedelic records; Adam is an office worker for money, nothing exciting, doing no music except for a hobby. Is a father to two kids; Gaz still plays in Cathedral, part-owner of a major retail firm.
Lee: “I remember about 1992, walking from my flat in Illfields into town for a point somewhere, thinking ‘I don’t think it’s going to last much longer, give it a year or two and it’s all going to be over.’ But we didn’t expect, no way, to be here all these years later, absolutely no way. It’s almost 20 years.”
Gaz: Succeeded with everything they’ve done: done sound check with Trouble, played with Tony Iommi, toured with Black Sabbath, did things with Saint Vitus, met people from Witchfinder General and Angel Witch.
Old pictures of Griff. Lee could share lyrics ideas with Griff, now he’s on his own. Griff misses the times, Adam regrets leaving, doesn’t regret his life since leaving Cathedral. Misses it. Misses his mates more than touring.
Define doom: Griff says “It’s the feeling of power, the feeling of rain-soaked depression, when you’re feeling down – that’s doom. Doom is the end. The End.” Lee disagrees, says its indefinable.
Photographing Satan’s cock: It’s a metal statue, it’s Satan’s cock, it’s the most metal thing he’s ever seen.
Videos for :”Ride” and “Midnight Mountain”
“Ride” – mainly a performance of the band, lighting and psychedelic effects, including mirroring.
“Midnight Mountain” – a hodge-podge of crazy images.
Notes from sketch paper of album cover, by Dave Pratchett:
They play nice tunes on a harp fashioned from a cadaver, perhaps she’s taking twisted pleasure from a former lover
Pig-Monk sees it as his duty to destroy apples i.e. sex
The Black Angel looks superb in latex (god must be jealous) Bible in one hand he pulls down angel-cherubs with another and pushes the torture wheel with his third. Three hands symbolises supernatural power.
The ants form an arc of triumph. They alone will survive the holocaust.
Punch synonimous with cruelty and how to fascinate kids with the idea
The love birds have fallen out.
Three armed pig-monk takes the shape of wolf to sexually assult torture victim (shades of little red riding hood)
Once pretty girl about to be corrupted.
The artist, sickened by the cruelty of feudalism and his own imagination, revisits his own picture in the shape of a mythical monster to put it out of its misery with the aid of the C20 homage to man, the nuclear bomb.
Commenting on Religious bigotry I can’t let Muslim Fundamentalism off the hook.
Victim with painted smile
Punch synonimous with cruelty and how to facinate kids with the idea
Gods instrument? No, God is mans instrument to destroy the less powerful masses
Filigee border gets too near the centre
CCB
Cathedral, “Carnival Bizarre” – A truly wonderful Cathedral release. “Vampire Sun” starts off with “Are you high?” just like Ozzy did in live shows with Black Sabbath. The song stomps and writhes with a great freakin’ riff pileage, but eventually just drones on without hitting its rock. “Hopkins (The Witchfinder General)” is a song inspired by the Vincent Price film and samples him (Cathedral also adores an older band, who took their name from the film, called Witchfinder General); it’s true stoner insanity and has great riff, great vocals, it’s just all-around amazing. The song is fun with lots of dynamic vocals as interesting as the guitars. Lee Dorrian uses his voice like an instrument in the same way that Mike Patton of Faith No More does, only in a less theatrical fashion. “Utopian Blaster” is a cool-o song with a great title that the band did with one of the real rock greats, Tony Iommi, on guitar. The song has supreme riffage and a good groove and powerful presence, great mini-solos, long solos, and strange vocal passages. “Night of the Seagulls” is menacing and scary and just builds on very broad riffs and scary thoughts and images, including spooky guitar sounds and weird groanings at the end that don’t come from seagulls! “Carnival Bizarre” is a great rocker full of slashing riffs that just go all over the place, and Lee Dorrian is full of spit and venom. The song has interesting prog rock passages – a phaser guitar/vocal section, and a hockey arena organ-like verse, then the obligatory guitar solo. Beauty way to go, eh?!? “Intertias Cave” is a good ole rocker that incorporated the riff from Moby Dick (wise-asses) that has some sweet singalong melodies. “Fangalacticus Supergoria” is a truly freaked out song with mighty vocals, on top of a really screaming metal song. The shrieking and wailing is quite unholy. Wow!
The CD is accompanied with a DVD that has eight promo videos (two of which, “Ride” and “Magic Mountain” are also on the “The Ethereal Mirror” DVD), and a concert video from 1992. In the concert video, Lee says “The lyrics are a bit negative, but in a positive way.” There’s a strange stoned interlude between the videos, and it’s all good fun to see the boys looking young and energetic and with full heads of hair. The band plays “Soul Sacrifice”, “Equilibrium”, “Autumn Twilight”, “Frozen Rapture” and “A Funeral Request.” Each song is a bonanza of lights and freakouts, and there’s hair flying everywhere. We don’t see any audience shots, but it was probably a sea of people in the dark. There are lots of coloured stage lights, so although there were a lot of lights there’s not a lot of brightness and it was a spooky stage.
The Promo videos are great:
“Ebony Tears” in a graveyard, the band wearing crosses, Motorhead t-shirt, spider, treetops, a burial and a wedding.”
“Autumn Twilight” is just the band playing the song, pretty straight. Gaz plays a Gibson SG now.
“Cosmic Funeral” shows the band as monks in robes. It’s ballad-like, but then Lee shouts “Disco supernova!” and it gets better, the video is full of strobe.
“Stained Glass HOrizon” shows a road warrior climbing dusty hills in some sort of post-apocalyptic world. THere’s a crap solo that turns psychedelic, then becomes murderously good and heavy.
“Black Sunday” shows clips from the band’s touring up until that point, with all the various members, there’s toking, they feed beer to a horse, they are in Sydney, and they play on Motorhead’s stage. Very good psychedelic passage, it’s a great song.
“Hopkins (Witchfinder General)” is a fun video, with clips of the “Witchfinder General” movie of 1968, starring Vincent Price interspersed throughout. The band is wearing disco clothes and Lee is cavorting with a shapely black model in lingerie and a pentagram painted on her forehead. The band plays through Orange stacks.
By the way, if you want to see the movie, here it is:
CSM
Cathedral, “Statik Magik” EP – This is an EP with three songs that came out after the second album, when the band went through its major label hell and lost two of its original members. Lead singer Lee Dorrian and guitarist Gary Jennings got a new drummer and bassist and tried them out on this, a strange little venture that features two conventional songs (“Hypnos 164″ 5:46 and “Cosmic Funeral”, 7:03) and a crazy Beefheart-esque musical voyage (“The Voyage Of The Homeless Sapien”, 22:42). “Hypnos 164″ starts off with a single chord wailout with wild bass, before going into a crazy guitar and vocal washout that has to be heard to be believed. The song kicks in and is sinister and evil, it warps into a ripoff of Black Sabbath’s “Johnny Blade”, with some funky cowbell, Huge fun. “Cosmic Funeral” is a sort of singalong punk/doom ballad, it’s pretty scary and it’s quite freaky too – there’s a weird breakdown in the middle with a guitar and bass solo back-and-forth before Lee finishes it off with the declaration of “Disco supernova!” It finishes with a mighty groove stomp. “The Voyage Of The Homeless Sapien” is such a long song, it goes through many phases, and starts off with a weird psychedelic gloom-out, with washed out vocals, then it becomes some standard doom muck, then there’s some strange pluckings, a full-out metal session, then it becomes a bit like Yes with some airy gloomings, the sound of an owl, and more full on metal. Yoiks! The band goes crazy, and Lee does some James Hetfield “Yeah-hay”s. Then there’s some real jazz ploinking and plonkings and crazy hooting, mixed in with real thrash, goofing-around orchestrated balladry and mocking crap Britpop stuff; later there’s a stoned bass pondering that includes the riff from Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man”, followed by more killer riffs (I’m sure these have been used in Cathedral songs before – the band overflows with killer riffs. Big rock riffs fade out to psychedelic guitar and vocal groanings that sound like they came from the “Zabriskie Point” soundtrack, and insane mutterings about boobies. Sick garbage. But I love it.
My version came with the CD/DVD version of “The Carnival Bizarre”.
JNT
Jandek, “New Town” – It’s hard to review Jandek. He doesn’t have any real songs. From the sounds of it, it is Thurston Moore mumbling over a warped guitar plonk with some banging and percussion and harmonica. The cover shows a picture of a drum kit. The song titles are “New Town” (strangely, this song has snatches of Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne” in it), “Steal Away Home”, “Street Walk”, “You Standing There”, “Desert Voice”, “Let Me Hear THe Words You Say”, “The Real You”, “It WOuld ONly Be Action”, “Look At It”, “Time WIll Come” and “What You Are.” It sounds almost like traditional Japanese music – you know, the kind where a woman will pluck at a zither with a big wedge-shaped shingle and howl about something that you can’t understand. That’s what listening to Jandek is like. And it’s wonderful.
LD
Lunarin, “duae” – Lunarin is a sort-of shoegazer band from Singapore that combines strong songwriting with very good studio production and playing to create songs with a sort of Tool/Evanesence feel to it. The CD starts out with a piano piece, “For Apollo.” There are three piano pieces on the album, each of them just over a minute in length, and none of them do much for me, but nearly all of the songs are good, with the exception of “Saturn”, which is mopey and has all sorts of “Sorry” lyrics. The songs are often dominated by the expressive and emotional wailing of lead singer and bassist Linda Ong. “Midas” is a hearty rocker with groovy beats and guitar licks, “Zero Point Red” is darker with groovy riffs that builds up to some hefty rock ‘n’ roll. “Red” is long, fast and dark. and has a vaguely industrial drive that dissolves into an Indian drone before picking up again into a moody rocker. “Coralline” is a pretty song with a rousing chorus. “Icarus Rising” is a lusty near-ballad, while “Serpentine” starts off with moody dissonance before becoming a Rush-like rumbler. “The Sky (Algiers)” starts off with groovy, quiet guitars and drums, then builds up and becomes a very pretty song with cool riffs and a great drive. The band has made this song available on cialis suppliers for remixing as a Garageband track (a fan poll revealed that, of all the tracks on the album, this one was the right one for a remix project). They’ve also posted some of the results for a free download. The penultimate song, “The Inquisition”, is just over 10 minutes long and a very nice (near) closer (the actual closer is one of those not-so-great piano ditties.
The packaging of the CD is okay, with stylistic photos that have a very industrial feel to them. They also include a personal letter, that seems like it has been signed in pen by each member. The letter is a heartfelt outpouring that starts off “we would like to thank you for taking precious time and money to purchase this little of album of outs. It kills us to think that you are willing to spend time and effort to listen to what we have written and produced. We know you had a choice. We know that there is great music out there clamouring for your attention. So this is an honour, truly.” It’s a bit over the top – CD purchasing is a pretty casual experience, not something that requires a herculean effort, so this is a bit over the top, but it’s nice to see someone doing this sort of thing anyway.
The Void, The Sky, by Lunarin
Lunarin has already posted their remix project for “The Sky (Algiers)”, and they’ve got ten contributions available for cialis san francisco. Being remixes, many of them are quite boring, tech-heavy, droning, with sparkly ambient keyboards, perhaps stripped of drums with new ambient noises thrown into a bare soundscape that retains vocals, or maybe just wonking and plonking the elements of the song. But “Time of Apollo 2010″ by Ivan Chew uses elements from the song to create a whole new song, which incorporates interesting dialogue soundbites that sound like they come from a documentary on the Apollo moon launch, it’s definitely the best “remix” of the bunch. “The Sky (Cosmic Armchair Uplifting Sky Mix)” by Cosmic Armchair is also pretty good, as it has a dance floor feel to it that incorporates a lot of the catchier elements of the song. “The Sky (Shoegaze Mix)” by Kevin Mathews is also pretty good, with its washed-out guitars. It’s also generously long, at 7:40 the longest remix of the bunch (and maybe that’s a blessing…).
Book reviews:
CE RPR
Carlucci’s Edge, by Richard Paul Russo – I was given this book by my friend as one of three that he thought were better than The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. I don’t know what bone my friend had to pick with that book – I didn’t think it was perfect either, but I enjoyed it immensely anyway – but it must be pretty serious if he thinks this book is better than Stieg Larsson’s book.
The book is about Carlucci investigating a murder of a musician. The musician’s girlfriend is also investigating his murder. They travel around, they meet people who probably know why the murder was commissioned. The murderer is never caught, but the people behind the murder are exposed. It’s really hard to care, because the freakshow world that the people inhabit is not interesting or appealing, other than for the similarity it bears to to the New York of “Liquid Sky”.
To be fair, Carlucci is the character of several books, so this book might be more interesting to people who’ve read more than one of his adventures. But it is still very, very, very hard to care about any of the characters in the book, or to understand what they do except get caught, deer-like, in the headlights of an onrushing truck.
SB TST
The Simple Truth, by David Baldacci – I was given this book by my friend as one of three that he thought were better than The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. I don’t know what bone my friend had to pick with that book – I didn’t think it was perfect either, but I enjoyed it immensely anyway – but it must be pretty serious if he thinks this book is better than Stieg Larsson’s book.
David Carlucci is a very talented writer, the author of the book Absolute Power, which I haven’t read, but admire the movie that Clint Eastwood made of it. Carlucci is adapt at describing people and events and knows how to turn a phrase, how to mould characters, and how to set up a plot. I wasn’t so sure at the beginning of “The Simple Truth”, when I came across some pretty clunky dialogue; I was less sure when his plot called for one of the main characters from the first half of the book, who was described as intelligent, making one of the dumbest moves in the book: a Supreme House clerk breaks rules and takes evidence on that nearly nobody knows about, drives out into a dangerous spot in the middle of nowhere just to get an answer to something that had been bothering him… yeah, right. Dumb, dumb, dumb; and of course he gets himself killed; and of course that launches the whole book. As you read the book you get a sense of certain Hollywood types who had been pegged to play the lead roles: Bill Pullman as John Fiske, Pete Gallagher as Michael Fiske, Rebecca De Mornay as Sara Evans, Gene Hackman as John Marshall, etc. There’s a fun/preposterous series of events, and plenty of carnage. And about five bad guys.
Unfortunately, when the crime is solved it hardly seems like a crime at all. And it brings down the Supreme Court. And the sky cracks in two. How dramatic. Barf.
DW ITF
Into the Fire, by David Wiltse – I was given this book by my friend as one of three that he thought were better than The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. I don’t know what bone my friend had to pick with that book – I didn’t think it was perfect either, but I enjoyed it immensely anyway – but it must be pretty serious if he thinks this book is better than Stieg Larsson’s book.
I hate serial killer stories real/fictional, so enjoying this one was a bit of a long shot anyway. But I was quite disappointed when I read the first 185 pages and barely learned anything that wasn’t on the back cover of the book. Characters that were half interesting were introduced and quickly abandoned. Trained FBI investigators overlook what is blatant/screamingly obvious. We get to meet an interesting scamp, her pastor and his middle-aged temptress. Then, unfortunately, we get to spend time with the most uninteresting/unsuccessful serial killer ever, and the demented creep who works for the FBI who is trained to hunt him down. This is the first book that I’ve read that gets wrapped up “satisfactorily” in the last five pages. It’s almost like the author had been padding his text so efficiently all along that, when he realised he’d passed his word count quota, he simply wrapped it up as quickly as possible. And that’s not a great proposition for a reader.