‘We all doubt ourselves sometimes, we all experience change, and we all have people who mean a lot to us who we don’t see enough…’
I love James Acaster. I love his Netflix specials. I love the Off Menu podcast. I love it when he tries to do an impression and it’s terrible. All of this stuff is very much in my wheelhouse. I also love music (who doesn’t). But that love has begun to wane in recent years. I still return to the bands and artists that have been a constant soundtrack to my life. Springsteen. Waits. Weezer. All the big guns. But I don’t keep up with new music anywhere near as much as I did a few years ago. Well, Perfect Sounds Whatever combines James Acaster with some of the best music released in recent times (specifically from the year 2016), and it does so in a way that is informative, often hilarious and surprisingly touching.
In 2017, James Acaster had a breakdown. A difficult breakup combined with a bruising tour schedule and our old friend existential dread caught up with the Mash King (look it up), and came to a head when Acaster found himself eating cold lasagne and violently weeping to himself following a night of getting drunk on his own. Or ‘Tuesday’ as I call it. To help him through these tough times, the Kettering comedian found solace in trying to find the best albums released the year before, in 2016. What started out as a fun project to take his mind off things, eventually turned into a searing obsession. The result is Perfect Sound Whatever, a book that attempts to prove that 2016 really was the greatest year for music of all time.
I listened to the audio-book version read by Acaster himself, and this really added an emotional heft to the darker moments and a lighter touch to the many hilarious anecdotes liberally sprinkled throughout the text. One particular memory involving an embarrassing penis based trip to the doctors had me laughing so much that I had to stand behind a tree for a little while until I was composed enough to continue on my daily walk.
Whilst I will never be convinced that 2016 was the greatest year for music of all time (that would be 1994), I will admit that Acaster presents a strong case here, and that many of the artists and albums that he mentions in the book have become regular additions to my own listening habits – particularly Jeff Rosenstock, whose album Worry provided the title for this very book.
Books by comedians can often be hit and miss, but Perfect Sound Whatever joins the likes of Ayoade on Ayoade: A Cinematic Odyssey by Richard Ayoade (obviously) and How I Escaped My Certain Fate by Stewart Lee in being both hilarious, but also literary. Fine company indeed.