What the Postman Brought

There’s something about a Zippo that exceeds the simple function of making fire. Everyone who went through a certain kind of adolescence knows the ritual—the practiced wrist-flick, the metallic clink, the way bad weather couldn’t stop it. You could light a cigarette with it, or theoretically the car of someone who had it coming. The point was its stubbornness: indifferent to wind, indifferent to rain, insisting on working regardless. A small American metal rectangle with strong opinions about its own purpose. That quality hasn’t aged.

Sweden’s The Sonnets put out Western Harbour Blue and it does what Swedish pop reliably does to me—arrives effortlessly, in the middle of an afternoon when I’ve got nothing particular to feel, and fills the space with something warm and faintly nostalgic. There’s a melodic quality here that sits between early sixties pop and clean contemporary production, built for lying on a floor and staring at a ceiling. Sweden keeps exporting this particular frequency and I keep accepting it without complaint.

The latest issue of Front delivered exactly what Front always delivers: Kayleigh and various gorgeous friends representing what the magazine insists are Britain’s hottest female students, a feature on social manipulation that reads like a sincere how-to for the chronically friendless, and a new column from redhead Alex Sim-Wise, who is exactly as compelling as she looks. Front operates on a specific register—lads’ mag that considers itself slightly more sophisticated than a lads’ mag—and I find that particular self-delusion genuinely endearing.