The most interesting listening right now is happening between categories. Indie records are borrowing the patience of ambient music, jazz players are leaning into club rhythms, and electronic producers are making tracks that feel more handmade than programmed. That middle ground is where a lot of the best music lives.
Indie music is getting quieter and stranger
The strongest indie songs at the moment are not always the biggest ones. Many of them work through restraint: dry drums, close vocals, guitars that sound like they were recorded in a room rather than polished into glass. That intimacy gives the songs character.
Jazz keeps moving outward
Modern jazz continues to thrive when it treats tradition as a starting point rather than a museum. Groove-led playing, electronic textures and shorter song forms can all sit comfortably beside improvisation. The result is music that feels serious without becoming sealed off from everyday listening.
Electronic music is embracing warmth
There is still plenty of maximal electronic music around, but the warmer end of the spectrum feels especially rewarding. Dusty percussion, imperfect synth tones and patient arrangements are giving producers more emotional range than the cleanest possible mix ever could.
For Music Boats, that combination feels like the right direction: thoughtful listening without losing energy, and genre coverage that follows the sound rather than the label.
The first warm nights of summer call for music that does not rush the moment. The best tracks for this part of the year tend to balance lift with ease: enough rhythm to make the evening move, enough softness to let the light fade slowly.
1. The opener with a soft pulse
Start with something that moves gently rather than announcing itself. A light drum pattern, warm keys and a vocal that leaves space can set the whole tone for the night.
2. The indie-pop reset
A bright guitar line still does a lot of work when the weather turns. The trick is avoiding songs that feel too polished. Slight looseness makes the track feel lived in.
3. The jazz-leaning groove
Late evenings suit rhythm sections that breathe. A bass line with swing and a drummer who leaves room around the snare can make a track feel relaxed without becoming passive.
4. The electronic slow-burn
Not every summer track needs a huge drop. Sometimes a patient synth pattern and a steady kick create more atmosphere than a chorus built for instant release.
5. The closer
End with something reflective. The best final track should feel like walking home after the noise has settled: still rhythmic, still alive, but already turning into memory.
The real ranking is less important than the shape. A good warm-night playlist should move from open-window brightness to late-hour calm without losing its sense of pulse.
Music culture moves quickly, but listening does not have to. The constant flow of new tracks can make everything feel disposable, even when the songs themselves are carefully made. Patient listening is a quiet refusal of that pressure. It means giving a record enough time to become familiar before asking whether it matters.
Discovery is not the same as attention
Streaming has made discovery easy. Attention remains difficult. Finding a song takes seconds; living with it takes longer. The difference matters because some music is designed for instant recognition, while other music works by slowly changing the listener’s sense of mood, rhythm or memory.
Patient listening does not require abandoning playlists. It simply asks for a different habit: return to the same album over a week, listen without skipping the middle tracks, notice how sequencing changes the meaning of individual songs. These small choices make music feel less like background and more like a conversation.
The slow listen is coming back
There are signs that listeners still want depth. Vinyl culture, album-listening clubs, long-form music podcasts and detailed fan essays all point to the same desire: people want to spend time with music, not just pass through it. The format may change, but the need is old.
Patient listening is not a purist stance. It is a practical one. Some songs give everything immediately. Others need room. The pleasure is learning which is which.
Every few years someone declares guitar bands finished, and every few years a loud room proves otherwise. The format keeps surviving because it does something very direct: it turns physical movement into sound. A drummer lifts the room, a bass player locks the centre, and guitars create pressure, colour and release in a way that still feels immediate.
The appeal is physical
Rock gigs work because the audience can read the performance almost instantly. You can see where the sound is coming from. You can feel when the band is pushing ahead of itself or pulling back into control. That visible effort matters. It gives the songs a body.
Modern rock bands do not need to pretend nothing has changed. The most interesting ones borrow from pop structure, electronic texture and post-punk repetition without losing the core appeal of a band on a stage. The point is not purity. The point is impact.
Small rooms keep the format honest
In a small venue, a guitar band cannot rely on distance. The sound either connects or it does not. Riffs need weight, choruses need shape, and slower songs need enough tension to stop the room drifting. When it works, the result is still one of the most reliable live music experiences available.
The reason guitar bands still make sense is not nostalgia. It is utility. They remain one of the simplest ways to convert shared attention into shared energy, and that still counts for a lot.
Some gigs feel bigger than the room that holds them. You can see the low ceiling, the scuffed floor and the cables taped down near the monitors, yet the sound seems to push past every physical limit. That kind of show is not only about volume. It is about compression: the crowd, the band and the room all sharing the same pocket of air.
Proximity changes everything
In a small venue, there is nowhere for the performance to hide. Mistakes feel human rather than catastrophic. A drummer adjusting the tempo, a singer laughing between songs, a guitarist stepping back from a pedalboard with relief after nailing a transition: these details become part of the night rather than interruptions to it.
That closeness also changes how songs land. A quiet bridge can hold the room still because everyone can feel the restraint. A chorus can feel explosive because the audience is not just hearing it through a system; they are physically inside the reaction. The best small-room gigs use that intimacy instead of fighting it.
Energy beats spectacle
Large shows often rely on production to create scale. Small shows have to find scale in momentum. A well-paced set can make a modest venue feel enormous by moving from tension to release with purpose. The opening song sets trust, the middle run builds heat, and the encore only works if the room has already become part of the performance.
That is why a small-room gig can stay with you longer than a polished arena date. It is not perfect, and it should not be. Its power comes from the sense that something temporary happened in exactly one place, with exactly those people, and could not be repeated in quite the same way.
The best electronic albums rarely explain themselves in the first ten minutes. They invite you in with texture, rhythm and movement, then reveal their real shape after the second or third listen. That is part of what keeps the format alive in a playlist-heavy era: a single track can introduce a mood, but an album lets that mood develop, fracture and return with more meaning.
Why patience matters
Electronic music is often judged by immediate impact. A bass line either hits or it does not; a hook either sticks or disappears. Albums ask for a slightly different kind of attention. The opener sets the palette, the middle stretch tests how far the artist can bend it, and the closing track usually tells you whether the idea had enough emotional weight to justify the journey.
That is especially true for records built around minimal percussion, ambient passages or slow harmonic shifts. On first listen, they can seem restrained. On repeat listens, small choices become central: a synth line that returns in a lower register, a kick pattern that disappears for a whole verse, a vocal sample that stops sounding decorative and starts sounding like the point of the song.
The album as a room
A strong electronic album feels less like a queue of tracks and more like a room you learn how to move through. The best ones create contrast without breaking their own atmosphere. They know when to make the floor shake, but also when to let the air thin out. That sense of space is what separates a good release from a collection of useful tracks.
For listeners, the reward is simple: give the record time before deciding what it is. Let the quieter transitions do their work. Let the repeated motifs become familiar. If the album is built well, the second listen will not simply confirm the first. It will change it.
You drop a Sim into a charming little farmhouse in Henford-on-Bagley, add the Simple Living lot trait, and then watch your Sim stand in front of a stove unable to cook anything. The fridge is empty. The recipes are grayed out. Nothing makes sense.
That confusion is almost a rite of passage. Simple Living is one of the most misunderstood lot traits in The Sims 4 — players either click with it immediately or abandon it after one frustrating session. Here is exactly how it works, where it performs best, and when to leave it off the lot entirely.
What the Simple Living Lot Trait Changes About Cooking
The core change is this: Sims living on a lot with Simple Living active can no longer cook meals from nothing. Every recipe that qualifies as a cooked meal now requires specific fresh ingredients to be present in the household — in the fridge, in a storage chest, or in the Sim’s personal inventory.
If the ingredients aren’t there, the meal doesn’t appear as an option. It grays out completely. Your Sim doesn’t fail to cook it — they simply cannot select it at all.
This sounds like pure punishment. In practice, it reshapes the entire rhythm of a household. Instead of treating the fridge as a magical portal that produces any meal on demand, you start thinking about what your Sim grows, raises, forages, or purchases. That shift in mindset is the point. Simple Living isn’t a difficulty slider — it’s a playstyle enforcer.
How the Ingredient System Actually Works
The game tracks which ingredients are available in real time. Each recipe has a hidden list of required items. A garden salad needs lettuce and tomatoes. Pancakes need milk and eggs. Eggs benedict needs eggs, cheese, and produce. When those specific items are present, the recipe unlocks.
The system checks the household fridge first, then storage items nearby, then the Sim’s personal inventory. Order of priority matters if you’re using off-the-grid lots or custom storage mods. On standard lots, keep the fridge stocked and you’re covered.
One important clarification: cooking skill is completely separate from this system. A Level 10 Chef Sim with an empty fridge is still locked out of complex recipes. The trait doesn’t cap skill growth — it limits what you can cook based on available resources. A high-skill Sim with a well-stocked garden will cook exceptional meals. A high-skill Sim with no ingredients is just frustrated.
Which Foods Are Not Affected
Not every food item in The Sims 4 requires ingredients under Simple Living. Quick snacks — things like chips, protein bars, and vending machine items — remain accessible regardless. Sims won’t hit a literal starvation wall just because the fridge is bare.
The meals most impacted are the sit-down cooked options: breakfast foods, lunch plates, dinner entrees. These fill the hunger bar most efficiently and are the backbone of a Sim’s daily eating routine. When those are unavailable, Sims survive on snacks — which work, but keep hunger dropping faster, creating constant low-level pressure on the household.
Pre-packaged grocery items and some café-style foods also bypass the restriction. The design intent is clear: Simple Living pressures you toward fresh cooking without making the game unplayable when resources are thin.
Which Pack Includes Simple Living
Simple Living is a Cottage Living exclusive. It shipped with the expansion pack released in July 2026 and does not exist in the base game or any other pack. If Cottage Living isn’t installed, the trait won’t appear in your lot menu at all.
No workaround exists through standard gameplay. Mods can replicate the mechanic, but the official lot trait requires the expansion. If you own Cottage Living, it’s available immediately — no unlock required. Open lot traits in Build/Buy mode, select the lot, and add it from the list.
Where Each Ingredient Comes From
The practical question with Simple Living isn’t whether you understand it — it’s whether you can sustain it. Here’s a breakdown of ingredient sources, what they produce, and how reliable they are as long-term supply chains for a Sim household.
Source
Ingredients Provided
Reliability
Home garden (Gardening skill)
Vegetables, fruit, herbs
High — consistent with daily maintenance
Chickens (Cottage Living)
Eggs, feathers
High — daily production
Cows (Cottage Living)
Milk, cheese, butter
High — daily production
Grocery delivery (phone order)
All categories
High — costs Simoleons per order
Henford-on-Bagley village market
Eggs, produce, dairy
Medium — requires travel time
Foraging (Henford-on-Bagley)
Mushrooms, berries, herbs
Medium — seasonal and random
Fishing (any water lot)
Fish varieties
Low to Medium — skill dependent
Wild rabbits and foxes (Cottage Living)
Vegetables (gifted occasionally)
Low — passive and unpredictable
The most sustainable setup for a Simple Living household: a mid-size garden with tomatoes, lettuce, and garlic; two to three chickens; and one cow. That combination covers roughly 80 to 85 percent of recipe requirements without any grocery spending.
Grocery delivery through the phone is the backup option. It costs around 200 to 500 Simoleons per order depending on what you select, which is manageable for most households but adds up on budget saves. The Henford-on-Bagley village market is cheaper but requires your Sim to physically travel there, which costs in-game time and energy.
When ingredients are consistently plentiful, Simple Living unlocks some of the most satisfying gameplay moments in Cottage Living. A Sim who raised the chickens, gathered the eggs, grew the tomatoes, and cooked an Eggs Florentine for the household is doing something no other lot trait produces. The chain from animal care to plate is genuinely rewarding once you’ve built the supply system to support it.
The Lot Types Where Simple Living Makes Sense
Simple Living does not work equally well on every lot. The trait was built with one specific playstyle in mind, and lots that don’t support that playstyle turn it into pure friction.
Here’s where it actually works:
Residential lots in Henford-on-Bagley — This is the natural home for Simple Living. The world was designed around ingredient sourcing. The village market, foraging zones, animal pen lots, and community garden are all accessible from any residential address. The entire map feeds into the Simple Living loop.
Large rural lots with outdoor space — Any world works if the lot has room for a garden and a small animal area. Lot size is a real constraint. Cramped starter lots rarely have enough space for both a vegetable garden and chickens, which is what you need to make Simple Living sustainable long-term.
Off-the-Grid builds — Simple Living and the Off-the-Grid lot trait are a natural pair. Both push toward self-sufficiency. Running them together on a large countryside lot creates a genuinely challenging survival-style gameplay loop that most Sims 4 content doesn’t replicate.
Challenge runs and legacy saves — Rags to Riches, Not So Berry, and Cottage Living-specific challenges often use Simple Living as a difficulty modifier. It forces resource planning in a way casual play doesn’t, and it makes early-game poverty feel meaningfully harder without becoming impossible.
Where it fails: apartments, high-rise city lots, and any build without outdoor planting space. Placing Simple Living on a San Myshuno penthouse is technically allowed and practically miserable. Your Sim ends up relying entirely on grocery deliveries with no farming loop to offset the cost or add gameplay texture.
Indoor planters exist and can partially offset the lack of outdoor space. You can grow herbs and some vegetables inside. But they won’t replace a full garden’s output for a household cooking three meals a day. If the lot doesn’t have room for meaningful growing space, the trait isn’t a good fit.
Questions Players Get Wrong About Simple Living
Does Simple Living Work Without the Cottage Living Expansion?
No. The trait requires Cottage Living to be installed. It won’t appear in the lot traits panel without the pack. Community mods — available through Mod the Sims or discussed on Carl’s Sims 4 Guide — can add similar cooking restrictions or expand the existing ingredient list, but the base game version of Simple Living is Cottage Living-only. There is no workaround in vanilla play.
Can Sims Starve If Ingredients Run Out?
Not easily. Sims fall back on snacks and quick meals when cooked food isn’t available, which means hunger depletes faster but not catastrophically. Death by starvation requires deliberate neglect — the game has enough fallback food options to prevent accidental death. That said, the gameplay quality drops noticeably when the fridge goes bare for more than a day or two. The urgency it creates is actually one of the trait’s more interesting effects: you find yourself checking the garden and planning grocery runs in a way standard Sims households never require.
Does It Affect Sims When They Visit Other Lots?
No. Simple Living is tied to the residential lot, not the Sim. When your Sim visits a restaurant, a neighbor’s house, or any community lot, the restriction doesn’t follow them. They can order or eat freely anywhere outside their home address. Sims in the Culinary career cooking at their workplace are also unaffected — the trait governs the home kitchen only.
Do Mods Change How It Behaves?
Some do. Gameplay overhaul mods frequently touch the cooking system, and if they adjust ingredient requirements or recipe availability, they can interact unexpectedly with Simple Living. Basemental Mods is focused on different systems but has been known to create lot trait conflicts in specific version combinations. If you’re running a heavily modded game, check mod compatibility threads before adding this trait. Vanilla play has no issues.
The Honest Verdict on Simple Living
Use it in Henford-on-Bagley with Cottage Living active. That’s the version of this trait that works. The ingredient loop — gardening, animal care, foraging, cooking — is what Cottage Living is actually about, and Simple Living is the mechanical glue that ties those systems together into a coherent daily routine. Ignoring it means leaving the most interesting part of the expansion unused.
Skip it anywhere else. On a city lot or any build without farming infrastructure, it’s just a meal restriction with no interesting gameplay attached to it.
One honest note: the trait has detection quirks. If recipes are graying out and you’re certain the ingredients are in the house, check where they’re stored. The game sometimes misses items in non-standard storage furniture or modded fridges. Moving the ingredients directly into the default fridge usually resolves it.
Most lot traits in The Sims 4 are invisible once applied — Convivial, Good Schools, Natural Light all nudge mood bars and you forget they’re on within an hour. Simple Living is different. It actively shapes how you play session to session, forces you to think ahead, and makes resource management feel like part of the story rather than a chore. As The Sims 4 keeps expanding, the mechanics worth paying attention to are the ones that change behavior rather than just buff a number. Simple Living is a clear example of what that looks like when it’s done right.
You picked up Dune, read forty pages, and set it down. The Fremen vocabulary felt like homework. The political intrigue between noble Houses felt borrowed from Game of Thrones — except Dune came out in 1965, sixty years before George R.R. Martin typed a first draft. That’s the entry problem with Frank Herbert’s novel: it demands something from you before it gives anything back.
Most readers never make it to the payoff. That’s their loss — and a measurable one.
Why Readers Quit Dune on Page 50 — And What They’re Actually Skipping
The first fifty pages of Dune contain roughly forty proper nouns you’ve never encountered. Gom jabbar. Kwisatz Haderach. Bene Gesserit. Sardaukar. Herbert does not pause to define them. He trusts you to catch up, the way you’d adapt to a new job or a foreign city. That’s a deliberate choice. And the wrong readers bounce off it immediately.
Here’s the problem: those readers are quitting in the overture. They never reach the actual argument.
What gets skipped by closing the book at page 50:
The revelation around page 150 that every political structure in the novel mirrors a documented historical empire
The deliberate subversion of the chosen-one narrative — Dune spends 400 pages setting up a messianic arc only to expose it as manufactured propaganda
Paul’s prescience plotline, which recontextualizes every scene you read before it once it pays off in the final act
The ecology of Arrakis as a direct allegory for petroleum geopolitics — Herbert was writing about 1965 oil dependency in science fiction clothing, eight years before the first OPEC embargo
The Appendix Is Not Optional Reading
Dune ships with five appendices: ecology, religion, the Bene Gesserit order, the Spacing Guild, and a map. Most first-time readers skip them. That’s like reading a history of the Ottoman Empire and skipping the chronology of sultans.
Herbert wrote the appendices as in-universe scholarly documents — academic texts authored by characters living thousands of years after Paul Atreides. Reading Appendix I, the ecology section, before Chapter 1 changes the entire first act. The Fremen water discipline stops being mysterious and becomes logically inevitable. The Bene Gesserit breeding program carries weight before you’ve met a single member.
Twelve pages. Read them first. The density of the opening chapters drops by half.
The Most Common Framing Mistake New Readers Make
Readers arriving from The Expanse or Star Wars expect Dune to function as space opera — a story built around space travel, military action, and advanced technology. Dune has almost none of that. There are no computers in the traditional sense. The starships barely appear on the page. The central tension is political maneuvering, internal monologue, and ecological observation.
Approach it instead the way you’d approach a historical epic. Think I, Claudius with faster camels and a better ecology department. That recalibration alone gets most readers past the first hundred pages.
The Worldbuilding Architecture That Science Fiction Still Hasn’t Replicated
Sixty years of science fiction publishing, and nothing has matched the internal consistency of Arrakis as a constructed world. That claim invites skepticism — so here’s the structural argument for it.
Herbert built Dune from the outside in. He started with a real-world study of Oregon sand dune stabilization and designed every political, religious, and economic system to emerge logically from the desert environment. Arrakis produces melange, a spice drug that enables faster-than-light navigation by giving Guild pilots limited prescience. No melange, no interstellar empire. That single resource creates the entire political conflict without Herbert having to invent villains from scratch. The villains exist because the economics require them.
Compare that to how most science fiction worlds are built: author invents a conflict, constructs scenery around it. Herbert did the inverse. He built the physics of the world first, then watched the conflict emerge from resource scarcity and monopoly control.
The Three-Layer Worldbuilding Architecture
Herbert’s world operates on three separate layers simultaneously, each one causally dependent on the layer beneath it.
Layer 1 — Physical ecology. Arrakis has specific atmospheric conditions, a unique water cycle, and a sandworm lifecycle that produces spice as a metabolic byproduct. Every detail cross-references every other detail. Stillsuits recapture 99.7% of body moisture. Fremen architecture reflects water scarcity down to the placement of windtraps. Burial practices center on fluid reclamation from corpses. The biology drives the culture drives the politics.
Layer 2 — Economic structure. Melange grows only on Arrakis, so control of the planet equals control of galactic civilization. The Spacing Guild monopolizes interstellar travel because their navigators depend on the spice to function. The Padishah Emperor uses the Sardaukar military to stay in power, but must share Arrakis revenue with the Great Houses to prevent a coalition forming against him. Every political tension in the 500-page novel traces back to this single resource bottleneck. Herbert never has to explain why people are fighting. The economics make it obvious.
Layer 3 — Religious manipulation. The Bene Gesserit order has spent centuries seeding Fremen religion with what Herbert calls the Missionaria Protectiva — prophecies deliberately engineered to protect any Bene Gesserit operative who reaches Arrakis. The Fremen have been pre-programmed to accept a specific type of messiah. Paul doesn’t organically become a religious leader. He steps into a slot that was manufactured for him before he was born, by women who calculated his usefulness decades in advance.
No other science fiction novel — not Isaac Asimov’s Foundation, not Dan Simmons’ Hyperion Cantos, not Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy — has constructed a world where ecology, economy, and religion form a single causal chain from one initial condition. That’s not a matter of taste. It’s a structural achievement, and it’s why sixty years hasn’t produced a legitimate challenger at the systemic level.
Where Herbert Got His Raw Material
The Fremen are modeled on Bedouin culture and early Islamic history — consciously and in documented detail. The spice economy maps directly onto the 1960s oil crisis. Shaddam IV, the Padishah Emperor, is structurally identical to late Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamid II: a monarch using religious legitimacy and mercenary military force to stay relevant while the real empire fractures around him.
Herbert wasn’t borrowing history for flavor. He was making an argument: that human political patterns repeat under any environmental conditions. Different physics. Identical feudalism.
Paul Atreides Is Not a Hero. Herbert Confirmed This Himself.
This is the most important thing to understand about Dune, and most adaptations miss it entirely.
Paul is a weapon. Engineered by the Bene Gesserit over eighty generations to function as a political and military force multiplier. When he leads the Fremen in holy war at the novel’s end, Herbert is not writing a triumph. He’s writing a warning. The appendices make this explicit: the jihad Paul Atreides unleashes kills an estimated 61 billion people across the galaxy over the following decades. The “hero’s victory” is the opening atrocity of a galactic catastrophe.
Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part One (2026) and Dune: Part Two (2026) build this ambiguity into Timothée Chalamet’s performance — uncertain, shaped by forces larger than himself, not triumphant. David Lynch’s 1984 version does not. Zendaya’s Chani in the Villeneuve films, skeptical of the messiah narrative throughout, adds a clarity that Herbert’s prose delivers through subtext. That single interpretive choice separates a serious adaptation from a shallow one.
Dune vs. Foundation vs. Hyperion: What Each Novel Actually Does Best
Every decade produces a new challenger for the top position in the science fiction canon. Here’s an honest structural comparison across the dimensions that actually matter for long-term reputation:
Dimension
Dune — Herbert, 1965
Foundation — Asimov, 1951
Hyperion — Simmons, 1989
Worldbuilding depth
Unmatched — ecology drives economy drives religion in one causal chain
Thin — psychohistory is a sociological concept, not a lived world
Strong — seven distinct worlds, each fully realized with unique cultures
Character work
Good — Paul, Lady Jessica, and Stilgar are fully dimensional
Weak — characters function as vehicles for intellectual propositions
Excellent — seven POV narrators, each psychologically distinct
Political complexity
Excellent — feudal, religious, and economic systems interlocked and causally dependent
Excellent — psychohistory as political theory, large-scale determinism
Moderate — political structures exist mostly as backdrop
Prose quality
Dense but precise — rewards close reading and rereading
Functional — efficient idea-delivery, not literary writing
Variable — some chapters exceptional, some mechanical
Thematic ambition
Highest — messianism, ecology, human potential as civilizational threat
High — historical determinism, the tension between fate and individual choice
High — time, religious faith, consciousness at civilizational scale
Entry difficulty
Hard — 60+ proper nouns in first 50 pages, no hand-holding
Easy — clean prose, minimal jargon, short chapters
Hard — requires tolerance for nested narrative structure
Bottom line: Foundation is more accessible and intellectually approachable. Hyperion has sharper individual characters and more narrative variety chapter to chapter. But Dune is the only one where the world itself is the argument — where removing any single layer of the worldbuilding causes the entire structure to collapse. That’s architectural achievement. Foundation and Hyperion are great novels. Dune is a functioning ecosystem.
How to Read Dune If You’ve Already Tried and Quit
These are the specific steps that consistently turn abandoned paperbacks into finished ones. Not general encouragement — actual mechanics.
Before You Open Chapter One
Read Appendix I first. It’s titled “Ecology and Environment of Arrakis” and runs twelve pages. Reading it before Chapter 1 makes the Fremen’s water rituals immediately logical instead of exotic. You’ll understand why a character cupping their hands to catch tears is a gesture of profound respect before that scene happens.
Keep the Terminology of the Imperium — the glossary at the back, approximately forty pages — open alongside the main text. Don’t read it front to back. Look up terms as they appear. By Chapter 3, you’ll stop needing to check.
Navigating the First Hundred Pages
Track three characters only for the first hundred pages: Paul, Lady Jessica, and Duncan Idaho. Don’t try to hold the full political map in your head. The other major players — Stilgar, Thufir Hawat, Gaius Helen Mohiam — will become distinct naturally through action, not through memorization.
The novel’s first act ends around page 150 with the fall of House Atreides on Arrakis. Everything before that is setup. Everything after is the actual story. Quitting at page 80 is quitting during the overture and concluding the opera isn’t worth your time.
The reader who set Dune down after forty pages — confused by the vocabulary, skeptical of the pacing — is the same reader who, with the right entry approach, makes it to page 200 in a single sitting. The barrier was never the book’s quality. It was the angle of approach.
Come in through the appendix. Track three characters. Hit page 150 before forming an opinion. That reader almost always finishes it. And almost always says it’s the best novel they’ve read.
Critically acclaimed punk rocker Jeff Rosenstock marked his return to the UK with an explosive, sweat-drenched performance in Leeds, packed with clever changes of pace, raucous singalongs and underlying anti-capitalist rage.
16 Undertone gig reviews deep, no act I’ve seen thus far has taken to a stage quite like Jeff Rosenstock did at Leeds’ Belgrave Music Hall. For most acts, their grand entrance onto the stage is hammed up as one of the most thrilling moments of the night. Be it dodie‘s gentle organ hum, Sam Fender‘s static fuzz or Jungle‘s interminable sirens, some sort of lavish musical fanfare usually marks the end of the hours-long wait for the artist on our tickets. Even less well-known artists like Larkins or The Beths dimmed the lights and donned facemasks to remain anonymous as they set up their own equipment onstage, attempting to save the big reveal for the giddy few seconds before the start of their first song. The Beths even had their own hoodies with words like “guitar tech” written on their backs in an attempt to fool the audience (stood right at the front and with prior knowledge of just how unusually tall guitarist Jonathan Pearce was, I wasn’t buying it).
It was a surprise, then, when Rosenstock and his band practically stumbled onto stage minutes after the phenomenal Fresh had wrapped up their supporting set. I once again found myself right at the front and within touching distance of the great man as he taped a scrawled set list to the monitor in front of me and wrestled with a mic stand that had become entangled in cables. When one of Rosenstock’s songs happened to come on as background music, him and his band even started briefly jamming along to the disbelieving delight of the crowd.
The lowkey start was indicative of punk music’s general lack of self-importance, and Rosenstock’s humility in particular. Before digging into furious thrash metal of opener NO TIME, Rosenstock announced that he was here just to play some songs. For a pop gig this might have sound like an admittance of creative laziness, but for Rosenstock’s endearingly homegrown brand of rock, “some songs” was all the performance we needed.
Rosenstock performing on his replacement guitar
It helped, of course, that Jeff Rosenstock happens to have one of the most lauded discographies in rock today. Since his solo debut in 2012, he’s released one outstanding project after another, peaking with 2016’s immaculately-paced WORRY., which gladly took up a significant chunk of the set list in Leeds. His latest effort, 2020’s bitter and cathartic NO DREAM, came to define the pandemic summer for me and close friend Ewan, who, just like me, was hardly able to contain his excitement as we waited near the front of the queue outside Belgrave Music Hall. I had donned my NO DREAM t-shirt whilst Ewan’s giant Rosenstock flag remained proudly hung up in his bedroom at home.
Despite the night being Rosenstock’s first UK performance in many years, he was in no mood for gentle reintroduction. Choppy Nikes (Alt) had fans pogoing early on, as we screamed about “staring down the barrel of our shitty future” and “looking for a dream that won’t morph into a nightmare”. Scram! – the finest single on NO DREAM – was just as thrilling, and there was something vaguely touching about a group of (mostly) millennial men coming together in a room to sing about how desperate they are to run away from all the myriad personal problems in their lives. Musically, the climax of Scram! is extraordinary, with a barrage of kick drum hits that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Slipknot track, before eventually giving way to a rollicking garage rock payoff.
Rosenstock held nothing back in his performance of every last song, convulsing and twitching towards the microphone during his most pointed lyrics, turning around and keeling over his guitar in the ecstatic pain typical of loud rock music during many vocal breaks. It was scarcely more than 15 minutes in by the time he started to get visibly sweaty, and another 15 minutes later I could feel the occasional speck of lukewarm sweat splatter onto me whenever Rosenstock got overly energetic in his dancing; such is the visceral experience of being at the very front of a Jeff Rosenstock gig. His poor guitar got so drenched that he had to swap to his ‘backup’ guitar halfway through, telling us a story about how he apparently sweats much more than the average person. We all believed him.
Fun and goofy-sounding up-tempo numbers like Hey Allison! and Monday at the Beach were even faster in the flesh, almost to a fault, although seeing Kevin Higuchi smack the snare drum at such a rapid tempo never got old. Festival Song was a clearer highlight of the night, with its bounty of singalong riffs and propulsive final chorus, elevated by the screech of Mike Huguenor’s guitar. Majestic You, In Weird Cities should really have closed the entire night, but it was still rapturously received much earlier in the set. Rosenstock’s saxophone antics of the song’s live version had Ewan and I excited, not least because keyboardist and guitarist Dan Potthast had been occasionally playing a tenor throughout the night. In the end we didn’t quite get the saxophone solo we had been hoping for, but an a capella singalong of the song’s awe-inspiring final hook nonetheless felt pretty special. f a m e, NO DREAM‘s grandest moment, was the only significant set list casualty of the night.
The hits continued with the restless N O D R E A M, which was a good excuse for Ewan’s first stagedive of the night to the ire of the Belgrave security guards and general approval of fellow revellers, although no one quite had the boldness to do any crowdsurfing of their own for the entire night. The absurd sight of my friend’s limbs coming in and out of view in the melee beside me enhanced the giddy excitement of Rosenstock’s noisiest tracks. After that first stagedive I wasn’t to see him for a good 30 minutes whilst I clung on to my spot at the very front, wary of crush injuries from the occasional mosh pit surge. I was close enough to Rosenstock for him to confer with me in bafflement when the inevitable “Yorkshire” chants arrived before the encore.
Rosenstock connected with the fans on the closing tracks
And what an encore. To the delight of Ewan and I, it was mostly devoted to the final five songs of WORRY., which are woven together beautifully into one remarkable ten-minute long rock opus. Every chorus set the mosh pit on fire, and in quieter moments Rosenstock was almost entirely drowned out by a crowd intent on screaming every last lyric. Exhausted, Rosenstock lay down on stage towards the end of the segment, dozens of hands pouring at his shoulders and willing him to push himself out above the heads of the audience.
It had been a show with little fanfare and little space for sentimentality, but at the very end Rosenstock gave us a morsel with the calming cooldown of We Begged 2 Explode. “All these magic moments are forgotten,” we all chanted as Rosenstock waved goodnight. If we had bothered to listen to the words we were screaming, we may have realised how fleeting emotional highs like these really are.
On a memorable warm summer’s night in Vienne, Herbie Hancock found himself a spectacular venue to deliver one remarkable rendition of his famous compositions after another. Jazz’s answer to Paul McCartney, the 82-year-old remains the unparalleled titan of his genre.
There was little to see onstage after Thomas de Pourquery wrapped up an impressive (if overly long) support slot, but the roar through Vienne’s magnificent Roman ampitheatre was as if a gladiator had just landed a fatal blow. An outlier in the multitude of paper airplanes had just been chucked stageward by the crowd from the upper reaches of the stands and was miraculously floating closer and closer to the stage, eventually plonking itself in front of a giant speaker stack before being scuttled away by a busy stagehand a few seconds later. It was a moment that ignited the match-ready buzz of anticipation in the crowd minutes before the great Herbie Hancock took to the stage, a man who can now quite reasonably claim to be the great living jazz musician on the planet. I had travelled to Vienne, near Lyon, with three friends and had already enjoyed one night of the festival (an improved, well-contained Cory Wong; a somewhat tired, cheese-laden George Benson). Tonight, however, was clearly the apex of the whole holiday – a reason for Fionn and I to crack out fresh, specially-bought shirts and douse ourselves in cologne for no particular reason other than “it’s for Herbie”. Now well informed about the dangers of sitting for two hours of more on unforgiving stone steps, I made my way uphill through Vienne carrying a pillow from our Airbnb, itself dressed in a fading Rex Orange County t-shirt to avoid stains. As we got comfortable in a spot high up in the ampitheatre – hardly a detraction as the view of the sunset over Vienne was remarkable – there was already a sense that nothing could ruin this night.
The sky had turned sapphire blue by the time Hancock strolled onto stage. “This place feels like home, I’ve been here so many times,” he told us as another paper airplane rudely made its way towards Hancock’s feet. It’s a phrase that may have sound like a boast from any other artist – the sheer number of people perched on the steep, curved stone steps around him was staggering – but from the mouth of Hancock it felt natural. Why should a man with such harmonic genius and jazz history (he was a crucial component of the Miles Davis Quintet, of course) ever feel overwhelmed by the occasion? A long opening medley – a bewildering tour of Hancock’s extensive discography including a journey through Textures performed with impressive attack and physicality considering Hancock’s old age – cemented the idea that Hancock has the ample experience required to play at the very highest standard in any venue he likes.
The nightly scene at Vienne’s Théâtre Antique during the festival
It helped that Hancock had populated his band with a cast of esteemed unsung heroes of the American jazz world. Guitarist Lionel Loueke was the easy standout performer, almost stealing the show on several occasions with dazzling solo works of wizardry, switching from gritty roar to silky smooth cantabile seemingly with the flick of a plectrum. His technically dazzling introduction to a somewhat disappointingly lightfooted Chameleon early on in the set was masterful. Trumpeter Terrence Blanchard, another extraordinary musician who could quite easily produce his very own sellout show of hits, took the spotlight for his own arrangement of the popular standard Footprints. Choppier than the original yet retaining the sense of nuanced constraint and control, the rendition was one of the many exquisite highlights of the night, not least thanks to Blanchard’s trumpet solo that soared up towards the highest ramparts of the Théâtre Antique like glorious morning birdsong.
It was hard to take in the occasion as, one by one, favourite tunes that me and my friends had played time and time again in youth jazz bands throughout our childhood were checked off. Cantaloupe Island, a song about as crowd pleasing as jazz gets, was one such moment with Hancock’s unforgettable chugging blues riff providing the first reason to those around me to get off their feet and get dancing. The rapid fusion of Actual Proof felt even more piercing when positioned directly after the relatively serene Footprints. The agitated basslines of James Genus found the perfect match in Justin Tyson’s dazzlingly busy and precise drumming, although the spontaneous harmonic whirlwind flowing out of Hancock’s Fender Rhodes inevitably, and deservedly, dominated proceedings. Oftentimes Hancock’s soloing felt like the stuff of legend, deserving to be plastered across YouTube as a viral video clip with a breathless, all-caps video title extolling Hancock’s general godliness. The extended, often wildly adventurous solos seemed to come and go distressingly quickly. It wasn’t that Hancock’s set was too short, but that his live, unrepeatable pianistic feats were simply too remarkable to hear once.
Dusk falls behind Herbie Hancock and his band
Hancock did well to resist the tempation to pack the setlist with somewhat overplayed greatest hits. Sublimely soulful deep cut Come Running to Me was an inspired song choice as dusk became nighttime and an excellent excuse for Hancock to take to the vocoder, an instrument he popularised singlehandedly during his period of technological boundary-pushing in the 1970s. A detour late on saw Hancock left entirely alone with his vocoder, repeating the crushing line “I’m not happy without you” through a cloud of dense, shape-shifting cluster chords. In a night of predictable, well-worn hits, it was a moment of striking sincerity and without doubt the evening’s emotive crux. Quite what emotion Hancock was unleashing was up to interpretation; an enlightening epiphany that could pave the way to happiness, or a grief-stricken realisation of love’s darkest consequences? The beauty of it all was the effortlessness in which Hancock moved from despair to hope and back again, each carefully chosen chord moving the piece forward in unexpected ways.
The absence of a proper, funky Chameleon aside, it had been a flawless evening. Thousands of raised hands clapped and cheered below us as the band took their bows, the time fast approaching midnight. The giddy feeling of being within eyeshot of such an indisputable living legend had not left me all night and 82-year-old Hancock was still triumphant and energetic as he made a final wave to the crowd following a blistering two hour set.
The roar continued right through to the encore, only stopping as Hancock arrived at the mic to speak. “Oh, one more thing,” he told us with a grin and faux nonchalence. Cue Chameleon once more, now with keytar and that stonking, immortal bassline. Hancock’s playing was stupendous: crunchy and risky synth slaps squashed up against virtuosic runs before fading almost to nothing in preparation for one last, showstopping buildup. With the pretty orange glow of the Rhône valley in view behind the stage and twinkling constellations now clearly in view, it felt like there was surely no better place in the world to be for those five minutes. If there was any doubt that Hancock could produce a set of music to live up to his staggering career in jazz, it had been well and truly put to bed. Who could possibly ask for more?
