Colin Wessman

The Thirteenth Annual Mildly Pleased Awards

Perhaps it’s fitting to take this depressing inauguration day (and unfortunate MLK Jr. Day) to reflect on what an ill-fated year 2024 was. However, we here at Mildly Pleased sat down once again, like we do every year, to reflect on the things that were pretty good but not great from the past year. Sure, there was plenty to be disappointed with, but there were also things that somehow managed to not be as disappointing as they should have been (remember Beetlejuice’s return to the big screen?). So fret not. Even when the world feels like it’s lost its way, remember, there’s mild pleasure all around. You just have to know where to find it. Continue reading →

Colin’s Top Five Shows of 2024

In 2024, TV really got away from me. A lot of it was for reasons my colleagues have already mentioned — the 2023 strikes in the entertainment industry, the further erosion of television feeling distinct from other online content we consume, living in the post-peak TV era, etc. TV also just doesn’t serve as vital of a service to me in my day-to-day at the moment. Music is something I listen to at various times throughout the day in a way that feels very personal and full of limitless discovery. Movies are something I tend to watch in a theater, so they’re a bit of an event that I get to build my day around. TV has become… just something to put on to pass the time.

That said, there were a few TV shows that I watched this year that felt like a bit more than that, so I’m more than willing to recognize their ability to stand out from the content swill, even if it felt like there wasn’t quite as much of that as in years past. Continue reading →

Colin’s Top 10 Albums of 2024

Much like the rest of 2024, I’m still not quite sure what to make of the year in music, even though it is officially, entirely, completely over. Once again, we here at Mildly Pleased would like to take more of a moratorium approach to a year after it’s completely dead and gone. None of this posting a Best of the Year List in November nonsense. Or maybe we just increasingly need the extra time for list-making when our lives continue to make keeping engaged with new music, TV, and movies harder by the year.

Anyways, as usual, music was the easiest medium for me to feel like I was on top of, especially when this year had the most to offer in terms of rewarding releases, since TV and movies were still reeling from multiple industry-wide strikes that happened last year. Still, I sometimes felt a bit on the outside looking in on the year in music, just because this year felt so pop-dominant (thanks, the algorithm). And while I did appreciate pretty much all of the year’s big pop releases, not a ton of them will be making my list. Instead, a lot of it will once again be pretty indie-centric, even if this year didn’t feel quite as rewarding for releases just a bit below the radar. Continue reading →

The Pick: Red One

Before the holidays are upon us, we thought we’d drop a little bonus pod as a gift to anyone willing to hear us grumble about a half-baked Dwayne Johnson/Chris Evans vehicle. Here, we review the biggest Christmas movie of this holiday season, Red One, even if its bigness is by its own design and not really something anyone asked for. Maybe you could call us a bunch of grinches for not really getting into the holiday spirit with this movie, but it’s a little hard when it never fully commits to its yuletide potential and The Rock seems so checked out on this one.

2024 Music Regurgitated: My Light, My Destroyer

Cassandra Jenkins – My Light, My Destroyer

While it’s still an album I’m pretty fond of, it’s still a little strange to me that Cassandra Jenkins’ An Overview on Phenomenal Nature ended up being my number 1 album of 2021. Not only because it was also Sean’s number 1 album, which was a rarity despite us having a lot of new music overlap, but also because it just doesn’t reek of Album of Year status for me. But, chalk it up to 2021 being a pretty weird year, full of stops and starts and unwanted meditation, which matched the vibe of that album pretty nicely. Three years later, Jenkins returned this year with My Light, My Destroyer, an album that retains the peculiar, phenomenal nature of that album while building on the disparate sounds that Jenkins is bent on pulling together into one collection of songs. Continue reading →

2024 Music Regurgitated: Power

Illuminati Hotties – Power

Power by Illuminati Hotties felt like the most familiar album of the year for me, and I haven’t been entirely sure what to make of that. This isn’t to say that Sara Tudzin’s project is merely (ahem) regurgitating the sounds of the past in ways that bring few surprises. While I would say her lane of breezy indie-pop mixed with the occasional bratty punk freakout does bear a lot of lineage to various forms of rock music that have been popular the past 20 years, there’s still something fresh about her music. Maybe this familiarity more lies in the fact that her songs are just very catchy, so much so that after just a few listens, they feel like songs that’ve been around for years. Continue reading →

2024 Music Regurgitated: My Method Actor

Nilüfer Yanya – My Method Actor

For a long time, music publications releasing their Best of the Year lists has long driven the music conversation this time of year (or at least if you’re as nerdy about this stuff as we are at this blog). But now, that conversation has been swiftly supplanted by the populism of Spotify’s Wrapped arrival each December, and to a lesser extent Apple Music’s Yearly Replay. One artist that showed up pretty heavily on my Apple Replay this year was Nilüfer Yanya, who I’m pretty sure made a similar showing the last year she released an album, despite the fact that I rarely think of her as one of my favorite current artists. Perhaps it’s due to the fact that her albums have been “growers” for me, to the point where I thought she kind of whiffed with a real snoozer when My Method Actor first came out. Yet over time with many more listens, I’ve been proven to be so, so wrong. Continue reading →