tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10485889101072907692024-02-06T21:02:33.461-08:00Seph From AboveSephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01223134482207910582noreply@blogger.comBlogger22125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1048588910107290769.post-36119274159908041722010-01-08T06:25:00.000-08:002010-01-08T06:48:52.849-08:00The Best 20 Tracks of 2009 (Part II)Now then, on to the serious business. The auditory sprinkles on the fairy cake of popular music, if you will. It’s part two of my musical year in review, the top ten, the big boys, the best of the best of the best. Have yourself a cup of tea/tumbler of brandy/speedball (delete where applicable), and listen to some tunes, stupid.<br /><br /><strong>10. Fuck Buttons – <em>The Lisbon Maru</em></strong><br /><br /><object width="425" height="25"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/wuX_hwyqDbE&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/wuX_hwyqDbE&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="25"></embed></object><br /><br />The epic centrepiece of by far and away the most exciting album of the year, ‘The Lisbon Maru’ showed Fuck Buttons delivering on the noisy promise of 2008’s debut <em>Street Horrrsing</em> tenfold. An exercise in suspense and release, every tiny development in its relentless march is plundered for maximum impact, from the gradual introduction of the drums, cymbal by cymbal, to the eventual heartstopping wall of feedback that drenches all before it in euphoric drone.<br /><br /><strong>9. HEALTH - <em>We Are Water</em></strong><br /><br /><object width="425" height="25"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/xrjmL7p23io&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/xrjmL7p23io&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="25"></embed></object><br /><br />A track that gives the impression HEALTH just want to liquefy your brain, by any means necessary. With no let up in the breakneck beat (I personally nominate BJ as one of the most technically gifted rock drummers around) and constant, shuddering screeches of pure noise jettisoned from mangled guitars and keyboards, the track plays itself out across three minutes of amphetamine-riddled lunacy to a point where you would expect most bands to call it a day, before going <em>even more</em> insanely furious and stepping things up still further. And <em>then</em> it does the most effective half-tempo shift you’ve ever heard, to give you a chance to digest the complete awesomeness of what you’ve just experienced.<br /><br /><strong>8. Yeah Yeah Yeahs – <em>Zero</em></strong><br /><br /><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/DxZGYGojPeE&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/DxZGYGojPeE&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object><br /><br />I’m leaving the video up for this one, partly because I love them for ripping it out of Jared Leto’s tremendously self-indulgent promo for ‘From Yesterday’, and partly because you need to look at Karen O in this video. Look at her. Isn’t she <em>brilliant</em>? And I want that jacket. Oh yes. Anyway, the song is three minutes of pop awesomeness better even than Blondie, and just goes to show that guitar bands ‘discovering’ synth doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing. Unless of course, the guitar band in question is Snow Patrol. Or The Editors. Or… okay, it’s only a good thing when Yeah Yeah Yeahs do it.<br /><br /><strong>7. The Big Pink – <em>Velvet</em></strong><br /><br /><object width="425" height="25"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/OA3twi3iSNQ&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/OA3twi3iSNQ&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="25"></embed></object><br /><br />‘Dominos’ may have got all the indie club airplay, but it was this, the first single from The Big Pink, that really grabbed the attention with its printer jam rhythms and layers of guitar squall. Okay, you might accuse them of doing epic-by-numbers rock, but since when was that a bad thing? Please, oh please, let this herald the start of a shoegaze revival. Then in a couple of years time, when all the scene kids are buying Fender Jaguars and stacks of FX units, we’ll be able to say “Thanks, Big Pink – you may have been insufferably over-hyped by your friends in the music press, but at least you fought the good fight against the landfill indie jangle.”<br /><br /><strong>6. DOOM – <em>Gazillion Ear (Thom Yorke Remix)</em> </strong><br /><br /><object width="560" height="25"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/u0lUI6NQynA&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/u0lUI6NQynA&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="560" height="25"></embed></object><br /><br />The accumulation of wealth has proven such fertile subject matter for hip-hop for so long, but ‘A Milli’ this most definitely is not. In retrospect, Thom Yorke’s wandering, skittish beats provide an ideal complement to DOOM’s labyrinthine, arrhythmic flow – loose, unsettling, never anything less than intense. Yorke opts to use a more frantic, ranting delivery than the original cut, serving only to heighten that sense of claustrophobia with its breathlessness. But nothing detracts from the lyrical dexterity of the man in the mask as he throws the thesaurus at the usual range of bizarre pop culture references from Jake the Snake, to ‘Ernest Goes to Camp’, to the Large Hadron Collider, throughout a third person verbal deconstruction of the “villain man” who “won’t stop rocking ‘til he’s clocked in a gazillion grand” and “had his PhD in indiscrete street haggling”. As usual, it would take a sharp ear, an encyclopaedia and a few hits of mescaline to pull out every double meaning and fractured reference in there, but then, that’s half the fun, isn’t it?<br /><br /><strong>5. La Roux – <em>In For The Kill (SKREAM’s Let’s Get Ravey Remix)</em> </strong><br /><br /><object width="425" height="25"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/_2XmLcnYSwQ&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/_2XmLcnYSwQ&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="25"></embed></object><br /><br />Bass! How low can you go, as a wise man once asked. The answer, if I’m any judge, is very low indeed, because it will sound awesome. I know I’ve put the youtube player above, but seriously, don’t waste this shit on laptop speakers, it’s just not right. The best thing to come out of the ‘girls with synths’ explosion of ’09 (well, apart from lots of girls suddenly owning synths, which is, obviously, brilliant) was the rich seam of remix-ready lady vocals, once the annoying casio tones were stripped away. La Roux became this year’s answer to The Gossip by following their lead and producing a string of pretty awful singles which magically became fantastic the second a good producer got their hands on them, the epitome of this trend being SKREAM’s take on ‘In For The Kill’. All huge dubstep growls and bravely isolated vocals, the track is almost nothing but anticipation, the point of release held off for as long as humanly possible, audaciously pausing, even, for a few seconds of complete silence before the drop finally arrives, authoritative and driving, bringing home the final rush of endorphins. <br /><br /><strong>4. The Horrors – <em>Sea Within A Sea</em></strong><br /><br /><object width="425" height="25"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/8Sse_UmiVDA&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/8Sse_UmiVDA&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="25"></embed></object><br /><br />Ah, krautrock. Is there any more nourishing morsel in the goth selection box? Easy to imitate, difficult to master, beloved of ‘difficult second album’ers everywhere, it’s one of those Marmite genres, not just because people tend to either love it or hate it, but because it almost seems to deliberately provoke that divide. It can be truly awful repetitive dreck, the rock equivalent of minimal techno, or, as here, manifest itself as a staggering work of genius. Brilliantly, seamlessly weaving its way across eight minutes, shifting moods and textures right across the spectrum, ‘Sea Within A Sea’ is first downcast, then hopeful, expectant, and finally, triumphant, as glorious arpeggiated trills and vocal chanting showers everything with unexpected revelation. Who cares if it’s a trick ripped straight out of producer Geoff Barrow’s Portishead how-to guide, when it works this well? Good on The Horrors. If you’re going to do art-rock cliché #1, then at least do it right. Incidentally, against all received wisdom, I’m actually pretty ambivalent towards Marmite. Gotta love that krautrock, though.<br /><br /><strong>3. HEALTH – <em>Die Slow</em></strong><br /><br /><object width="425" height="25"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/D4ygLYHKtCY&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/D4ygLYHKtCY&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="25"></embed></object><br /><br />Second entry in my top ten for HEALTH, and much of what I said above for ‘We Are Water’ goes for this track too, but it achieves a higher ranking purely by having a slightly catchier chorus and also by sounding more like several angry robots having cathartic group sex.<br /><br /><strong>2. Animal Collective – <em>My Girls</em></strong><br /><br /><object width="560" height="25"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/zol2MJf6XNE&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/zol2MJf6XNE&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="560" height="25"></embed></object><br /><br />The genius of Animal Collective is their ability to take digitally manipulated and synthesized sounds, and somehow make them sound completely organic. And of course their Beach Boys-esque harmonies and exuberantly joyful delivery don’t hurt either. Swelling from a primordial soup of noise, the good vibes are layered on top of each other thick and fast in an aural hug of swooping, cheering sound. The sentiment of the lyrics are no less slushy, as Panda Bear vows to build the “four walls and adobe slabs” of a house for his wife and children, his girls. Much like a good Spielberg film, it’d all be almost nauseatingly twee were it not for the craft, enthusiasm and sheer ecstasy of life displayed in the music, urging you constantly to join in with handclaps, harmonies and synchronised whoops of delight. Listen, experience, and be moved. It’s what music is all about.<br /><br /><strong>1. Fuck Buttons – <em>Surf Solar</em></strong><br /><br />7-inch Single Edit:<br /><object width="425" height="25"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/OFbE3lHTcuo&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/OFbE3lHTcuo&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="25"></embed></object><br /><br />The full ten-minute album version:<br /><object width="425" height="25"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/5hQXSsbQCMs&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/5hQXSsbQCMs&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="25"></embed></object><br /><br />EH eh-eh-eh eh-eh-EH!!!!! 2009 – The Year of Fuck Buttons. They made the best album, and with this cacophony of whirling loops, shrieks and good old-fashioned distortion, they made the best song. Listen to either the epically scaled album version, or the three-minute ‘pop single’ version above depending on how long you like your ears to be assaulted for - both are, simply put, total brilliance. It’s something of a tired line in music journalism to describe artists as ‘noise terrorists’, and it’s not a cliché that I would ever think of using, I’m just saying that if ever there were a song to soundtrack both the literal and metaphorical ‘fucking-up-of-shit’, this baby is it. Every time it comes on I lose all control and just start running into things, doing jumping jacks, smacking the floor with my outstretched hand over and over again – anything to express the relentless outpouring of energy that comes with hearing <em>that</em> cyclical, twisting beat and <em>those</em> huge blasts of depraved white noise. There was nothing else that sounded quite like this in 2009, but then there’s probably nothing else that sounds like this ever. 2010 better have something pretty special up its sleeve.Sephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01223134482207910582noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1048588910107290769.post-7208456601914046062009-12-31T05:39:00.000-08:002009-12-31T05:50:57.660-08:00The Best 20 Tracks of 2009 (Part I)Here it is then, my musical year in review. I was initially planning to do a top ten albums like last year, but when I started making a list I quickly realised what a truly awful year for albums this has been. The only two exceptional albums I’ve heard in the last twelve months were Fuck Buttons’ <em>Tarot Sport</em> and Animal Collective’s <em>Merriweather Post Pavillion</em>. If you have ears and £20 of Christmas money left to spend, I suggest you go and buy them now, or you will be shunned when I encounter you on my travels. Decent efforts like HEALTH’s <em>Get Color</em>, The Horrors’ <em>Primary Colours</em> and Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ <em>It’s Blitz</em> abounded, but somehow it doesn’t feel right to celebrate albums that I feel are merely good rather than transcendental. And as for The XX, sorry indie credibility, but I just don’t understand them and I fear that I never will. But this being the season of goodwill, I must shed my Grinch-like demeanour for at least a few hours. Regardless of my personal worries about the whole ‘death of the LP’ thing being heralded in music publications the world over, there have been plenty of fantastic standalone songs to concentrate on showering with hyperbole, so here without further ado are my top 20, starting today with 20-11 and continuing at some point next week with the eagerly anticipated 10-1 countdown. Eagerly anticipated, that is, if you are no good at forming subjective opinions of your own, or just feel like bitching me out for not including ‘Dominos’. Shit, that’s a spoiler, sorry.<br /><br /><strong>20. MSTRKRFT – <em>1000 Cigarettes</em></strong><br /><br /><object width="425" height="25"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/SqWOrL1oMtg&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/SqWOrL1oMtg&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="25"></embed></object><br /><br />Best one-sentence youtube review I’ve ever read: ‘This track really punches you in the balls’. I couldn’t have put it any better myself. MSTRKRFT have translated the gut-vibrating energy of their DFA1979 bass driven sucker punch into a yet more frenetic bass driven electro-skronk. And for those of you who didn’t know, I don’t ever use the term ‘skronk’ lightly. And that’s all that I have to say about that, apart from the fact that I have probably thrown my arms in the air and danced to this song more times this year than anything else.<br /><br /><strong>19. The Maccabees feat. Roots Manuva – <em>Empty Vessels</em></strong><br /><br /><object width="425" height="25"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/4GJ_vbiqSIw&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/4GJ_vbiqSIw&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="25"></embed></object> <br /><br />Bit of a late entry, this one. I heard this on the radio last week (6music really does perform a valuable public service by being the only vaguely tolerable radio station out there), and since then I must have listened to it about thirty times, which is usually a good sign. For me Roots Manuva is the forefather of what NME would call the ‘urban poet’ explosion (just FUCK off) of recent years, and Mike Skinner, Arctic Monkeys et al owe him a huge debt of wry, grittily humorous gratitude (Jamie T doesn’t get included in that list because he’s not an ‘urban poet’, just an urban twat). Anyway, it’s good to see him back kitchen-sink philosophising and cramming as many celebrated musical references as he can into his verses. The Maccabees, for their part, deliver a handful of pleasantly downbeat cooing hooks that make the whole thing entirely suitable for daytime, before going all ‘The Chain’ for the coda.<br /><br /><strong>18. Destroyer – <em>Bay Of Pigs</em></strong><br /><br /><object width="560" height="25"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/Lvz0R0KX_E4&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/Lvz0R0KX_E4&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="560" height="25"></embed></object><br /><br />So, instead of an album, Muse decided this year to put out a bloated wreck that somehow managed the neat trick of being impenetrably pretentious to even the most hardened Yes fan, whilst simultaneously containing some of their laziest, most insipid ballads yet (seriously, note to Matt Bellamy: you are a very, very good guitarist, but your lyrics are awful, so please stop forcing us to focus on them). Anyway, someone had to fly the flag for prog, and they came in the unexpected form of Destroyer, who went for a sort of ambient 9 minute take on ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ with lyrics by Neil Hannon. It takes a whole 5 minutes for the bass and the beat to come in, at first glitching before resolving themselves into a pleasant Flight of the Conchords style singalong which, just as it gets into its stride, fades out. I don’t care if you don’t think this is prog at all, it infuriates and amuses me like the most indulgent half hour gong solo ever, and I bloody well loved it.<br /><br /><strong>17. Manic Street Preachers – <em>Peeled Apples</em></strong><br /><br /><object width="425" height="25"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/wsliUmk2mA0&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/wsliUmk2mA0&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="25"></embed></object><br /><br />This is probably my equivalent of one of those best director gongs handed out for lifetime achievement rather than a particularly life-changing piece of cinema (I’m looking at you Marty Scorsese). But hey, Nicky Wire’s bass sounds filthier than it has done in years (now if we can just get him making inadvisable, unsolicited comments about famous people again we’ll be in business), and it’s the first Manics track to be blessed with Richey lyrics since ‘Kevin Carter’, plus there’s a really emo Christian Bale sample at the start, so let me have this one.<br /><br /><strong>16. Radiohead – <em>These Are My Twisted Words</em></strong><br /><br /><object width="425" height="25"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/F2ztWvuyXeU&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/F2ztWvuyXeU&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="25"></embed></object><br /><br />Radiohead decided this year to trade in their frankly ludicrous long-player conversion rates for a more scattershot flurry of download single releases, but if that means more regular doses of Radiohead, I guess I can’t complain to vehemently, right? This is far from the best thing they’ve ever done, but let’s face it, Thom Yorke farts out songs that most UK indie bands would be quite content to build an entire career around, and sometimes it’s just refreshing to hear Jonny hitting up the whammy pedal again, even if it is in a little more subdued manner than on 'Just'.<br /><br /><strong>15. Jay-Z feat. Alicia Keys – <em>Empire State Of Mind</em></strong><br /><br /><object width="425" height="25"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/bm61weFrK4c&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/bm61weFrK4c&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="25"></embed></object><br /><br />However fed up I am of Jay-Z’s increasingly targeted cross-promotional sales pitch flows (and it’s clear that he’s not really even trying here), there was no other hook this year more likely to make me pull diva-like vocal performances in my kitchen when it came on the radio than this one. So shut up.<br /><br /><strong>14. Fever Ray – <em>If I Had A Heart</em></strong><br /><br /><object width="560" height="25"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/EBAzlNJonO8&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/EBAzlNJonO8&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="560" height="25"></embed></object><br /><br />Criminally, I still haven’t heard the Fever Ray album, despite ‘kind of like Kate Bush produced by The Knife’ sounding like possibly the best musical elevator-pitch ever (actually, after writing that sentence I realised what a fool I’d been, took a break, walked into town and bought the thing). It was a toss-up between this, the lead track, and its Fuck Buttons, steam-powered remix for inclusion in the list, but the original wins out in the glacial lovely/creepiness stakes, assisted by the fact that otherwise I could be accused of going on about Fuck Buttons a tad too much.<br /><br /><strong>13. Yeah Yeah Yeahs – <em>Heads Will Roll (A-Trak remix)</em></strong><br /><br /><object width="425" height="25"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/Gq0Vz7HAY-8&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/Gq0Vz7HAY-8&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="25"></embed></object><br /><br />All the best bits of the original, but with more sexy Karen O yelping and a decent portion of squiggly bits that sound a bit like a synthesiser jizzing its pants. Also, mad love for being the only BIG HOUSE KEYS revival track that’s even vaguely listenable. Well, not just listenable, bloody brilliant, and with my favourite mentalist middle-eight break down ever.<br /><br /><strong>12. Shakira – <em>She Wolf</em></strong><br /><br /><object width="425" height="25"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/Jb8ZRDyXmBI&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/Jb8ZRDyXmBI&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="25"></embed></object><br /><br />First off, big English graduate props for creditable use of the word ‘lycanthropy’. But honestly, I was already addicted to the intoxicating blend of flamenco guitar, eighties synths, string breaks and husky vocals before I even saw <em>that</em> video, which needless to say only propelled the thing even further into the stratosphere of genius. Awoo!<br /><br /><strong>11. Thom Yorke – <em>Feeling Pulled Apart By Horses</em></strong><br /><br /><object width="425" height="25"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/kWt-Vw9VkAE&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/kWt-Vw9VkAE&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="25"></embed></object><br /><br />Isn’t life amusing? 2009 brought us the sheer ridiculous glee of witnessing Thom Yorke and Flea sharing a stage, surely the strangest musical personality mismatch since Morrisey teamed up with the fat one from Bowling For Soup (not really). Of course, with hindsight it all made a crazy kind of sense, when you consider the proportion of the Thomster’s basslines that really bring the funk. Like this here, created from an early version of the <em>In Rainbows</em> track ‘Reckoner’ (if you listen really carefully I think you can just about make out some of the chords), but warped into something like the most mental cut off The Eraser via skittery beats and one of those basslines that makes you pout like you’ve just smelt a bad smell (that’s why they call it ‘funk’, kids).Sephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01223134482207910582noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1048588910107290769.post-87675590143340899012009-06-12T10:37:00.000-07:002009-06-12T10:40:29.792-07:00Horror Show4th June 2009<br />Concorde 2<br />The Horrors (w/ support from Factory Floor and Disconcerts)<br /><br />Like a steady drip of mascara running down the plughole, they are converging. A mass of hairspray, pointy shoes and crushed black velvet, trickling inexorably south and east through the city of Brighton, to the doors of the Concorde 2. It’s eight in the evening on a bright summer’s night. The sun is still up, but something is awry. Among the picnicking families and sunbathing couples, they are there, everpresent, a steady tide heading east of the pier. There are scene kids on the beach. The Horrors are in town.<br /><br />I must confess I never really knew what to make of the Horrors. I’ve never been one of those people to shun a band just for having the temerity to dress up – for if David Bowie, Siouxsie Sioux and Nicky Wire have taught us anything (and they have), it is that outrageous sartorial posturing is an integral part of the (leopard print) fabric of rock and roll. So what if they got an outrageous springboard into the British music press before they’d even released their first single? The band can hardly be blamed for the hyperactive hype machine that is our music industry. If anything they are to be admired for playing the system to their advantage.<br /><br />What really matters, as always, is the tunes. Alright, so the ghost-train punk, Cramps stylings of their debut <em>Strange House</em> were hardly befitting any ‘saviours of British rock music’ tag that the Horrors were afforded, but the material they were producing was a damn sight more interesting than the Kooks of this world, and there was always an indication that they might have what it takes to justify at least some of the presumptuous fanfare. With their sophomore effort, overseen by the capable hands of Portishead’s Geoff Barrow, they seem to have done just that, with a leftfield turn into post punk and krautrock inspired territory that illustrates a desire in the band for a bit less style and a bit more substance.<br /><br />The support acts for tonight’s show are wholly representative of that shift. Openers Disconcerts do the whole ramalama angular punk riffs thing with unbridled energy and enthusiasm. Unfortunately they are also pretty terrible, showing that producing two-minute bursts of abrasive noise is actually an art form that is harder than it looks. They were followed by Factory Floor, who opted for the more ominous industrial approach, building gradual crescendos over creeping bass grooves. Both represent an element of the Horrors’ back catalogue, but neither manage to do it quite as well as the headliners, although Factory Floor at least possess some of that trademark theatricality.<br /><br />When the Horrors arrived it was to universal high-pitched myspace screams, proving that you can do what you like with the music as long as you still have those totally dreamy goth boys up on stage to make the tweenagers swoon. Relatively dressed down in an array of snappy black and white variations, they played a set almost entirely comprised of material from new album <em>Primary Colours</em>, only raiding the older stuff for the breathless encore of ‘Sheena Is A Parasite’ and ‘Count In Fives’. The standout was the less than obvious single ‘Sea Within A Sea’, eight minutes of pure Joy Division note-taking, interrupted by the sudden thrill halfway through of a neatly arpeggiated synth line that grew in stature until it consumed all before it. Whether they’re playing the old or the new, it is this intensity that is the common thread throughout their performance, and when the music swells, it is tough not to be drawn in by its impetuous volume. This is not to say that this was a perfect gig, far from it, but in live music, atmosphere is all, and the Horrors have that, at least, in spades.Sephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01223134482207910582noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1048588910107290769.post-10378575717801497162009-05-28T10:34:00.000-07:002009-05-28T10:38:44.313-07:00Up Pip Brown, Tommy Sparks Down19th May 2009<br />Digital, Brighton <br />Ladyhawke/Tommy Sparks<br /><br /><br />Any aspiring musician searching for the knack of how to ‘do’ pop whilst still retaining indie sensibilities and street cred would have done well to be at Ladyhawke’s packed out show at Digital Tuesday night. The evening was a veritable indie-pop 101 of ‘do’s’ and ‘do not’s’.<br /><br />Lesson one – It doesn’t matter how good the songs are, how tight the band is, however catchy the melodies, it will all be in vain if your frontman is a charisma vacuum as huge as Tommy Sparks. As he strode out onto stage, all hair gel and lycra, announcing “I’m Tommy Sparks, and this is my beautiful band”, I felt a genuine pang of sympathy for the talented musicians who have to share a stage with this giant, unfounded ego. Every intriguing piece of electropop noise was brought crashing down to earth by his Butlins holiday rep schtick, his insistence on leading into each song with a grating “Oi-Oi-Oi” exercise in vocal numbskullery. A cover of Stardust’s 1998 hit “The Music Sounds Better With You”, that could with a bit of personality have been turned into an intriguing track, instead became an exercise in bland karaoke from a preening black hole of a man. Message to ‘the beautiful band’: get out now, you don’t deserve this.<br /><br />Once Tommy had flounced off, and the stagehands had been in to tether and drag away his inflated sense of self-worth, there was a perplexing wait of almost an hour before the main act finally appeared. During this time it was as though all the energy were sapping out of the crowd, meaning that by the time Ladyhawke took to the stage, she would have to work hard to get the place jumping.<br /><br />In the flesh, Pip Brown (why use a pseudonym if you have such a cool name?) doesn’t really come across as a pop phenomenon. Dressed down in a denim waistcoat, her blonde fringe obscuring her eyes, her interaction with the crowd was anything but T4 Beach Party. But there was something endearing in her nervous asides that captured a personality refreshingly opposed to her support act’s cruise ship histrionics and forced jollity. Opening the set with a trio of album tracks before dropping her first hit of the night (‘From Dusk Till Dawn’), she encountered a problem all too common amongst debut album success stories – a lack of material for her audience to sing along to. Until she has another album’s worth of songs and a few more hit singles under her belt, it’s going to be nigh on impossible for Ladyhawke to provide the kind of sustained energy needed for big, headline gigs.<br /><br />It was not until the last four or five songs of her set that she began to roll out the big guns with ‘Paris Is Burning’, and the room really started moving. Finally the pop hooks began to come thick and fast, and by the time the band bounced off the stage, a palpable sense of goodwill left the audience on tenterhooks for the inevitable encore.<br /><br />Inevitable, of course, because she had not yet played her biggest hit to date, the big, dumb, glorious romp of ‘My Delirium’. Whilst there could be hardly anyone in the room who didn’t know what was coming, Ladyhawke had one more trick up her sleeve, returning to the stage to belt out an impassioned Patti Smith number. For the few minutes of ‘Free Money’ she let go of her inhibitions just as much as her crowd had been willing to the whole evening, and her obvious enjoyment stirred those last reserves of energy among us for the big finish. And yet, when it came, this three-minute slice of indie disco perfection was curiously underwhelming. Brown seems to be tiring of ‘My Delirium’s status as the ‘big hit’ among her repertoire, and it was not infused with the same sense of glee with which she had owned someone else’s song minutes before. Whilst her enthusiasm may have been waning, however, the audience’s excitement still reached its crescendo, and it was impossible not to be swept along by the sugar rush grooves. If anything, by playing down her most famous song in favour of an obscure yet charming cover, Ladyhawke made herself a much more interesting proposition, for this reviewer at least. It is clear that she possesses a way with a grunge-pop melody, and her lack of interest in being seen as a ‘one-hit wonder’ hinted at further promise just waiting to be realised.Sephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01223134482207910582noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1048588910107290769.post-69660160280590123622009-04-28T07:36:00.000-07:002009-04-28T07:52:57.059-07:00In Good HEALTH<strong>13th April 2009<br />The Albert<br />HEALTH</strong><br /><br />If you can’t stand unbelievably abstract similes, look away now, because this review is going to contain a lot of them. Apologies, but that’s just the way it’s going to have to be. There’s a great difficulty in describing what HEALTH (all caps, don’t ask me why) actually sound like, chiefly because they sound like precisely <em>nothing</em> else. Looking at the four men standing on stage as the gig starts, you might be forgiven for thinking that the sound they’re about to produce can’t be <em>that</em> radical. I see a drummer, a bassist, and two guitarists, one with a microphone, one with a synthesiser. Sure, there are a lot of wires and pedals going on, but they can’t sound that dissimilar to a traditional rock band, right?<br /><br />Wrong. Because after about five minutes of unadulterated mayhem, band members clambering over each other, beating drums, screaming, hammering god-knows-what buttons to produce full-throated blasts of multi-layered noise, you come to realise that you have never seen a gig like this before, and will probably never be lucky enough to see again.<br /><br />HEALTH are only doing five dates on this UK tour, and Brighton’s The Albert is the first venue to play host. They’re famous enough (Their collaboration with Crystal Castles on ‘Crimewave’ charted in the UK top ten) that they don’t need to play gigs this small, but on tonight’s evidence alone, booking HEALTH into a succession of sweatbox rooms above pubs might just prove to be an artistic masterstroke. The sell-out crowd are packed in tight to the low stage, and the energy and enthusiasm is palpable, only increasing in fervour with the painstaking sound-check, each individual drum tested and retested a hundred times until the desired ‘robots fighting in a lift shaft’ tone is achieved.<br /><br />Then suddenly, without warning, the show begins with new single <a href='http://healthgetcolor.com/'>‘Die Slow’</a>, hinting at a move into more dance-oriented territory, perhaps buoyed by the success of remix album ‘HEALTH//DISCO’, certainly the point in the band’s career at which they began to garner more attention in the music press. The band have remarked in interviews how often people come to their shows and shout for a song that has already been played, not recognising it from the remix, and it seems that their response has been to hone their chaotic noise palate into rhythms and grooves.<br /><br />That’s not to say there isn’t plenty of chaos going on, but it steps up a notch when the band plunge into early single ‘Triceratops’, showcasing what made their noise-rock debut so suitable for remixing in the first place; that whilst the bizarre, roaring sounds HEALTH make may sound unhinged, as a unit they are incredibly tight, handling labyrinthine, polyrhythmic beats and guitars that sound like a jet engine playing a harmonica, at breakneck pace, without ever slipping out of time. Loops upon loops of feedback and zoothorned vocals pile on top of each other and coalesce into a dense, pulsing throb.<br /><br />The crowd are certainly in a mood to move their feet. Heads and arms flail everywhere as the front five rows bounce and writhe with the noise. Up on stage, this unleashed energy is reflected by the band, who tear into each song, giving every last ounce of themselves to the performance. They speak only once in the whole hour they are on stage – “Hi, we’re HEALTH, we’re from Los Angeles. Thanks for coming out tonight. This is our last song.” – before exiting on the frenzied, minute-long ‘Courtship’. A drumbeat, a scream, some mutilated vocals and the spectacle is finished, and all that is left are the hundred or so reeling audience members, trying (and failing) to put into words what they have just witnessed.Sephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01223134482207910582noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1048588910107290769.post-26519267413347209322009-04-23T06:02:00.000-07:002009-04-23T06:07:27.139-07:00Orchestral Manouvres in the Cowley Club<em>A version of this review appears at www.brightonmusicscene.com</em><br /><br /><strong>April 10th 2009<br />Cowley Club<br />Lamp/Cove/The Pirate Ship Quintet</strong><br /><br />Let’s get this straight right from the off. I love post rock. LOVE it. It’s an alien thought to me that someone could fail to be sonically aroused by that simple yet brilliant concept of combining roaring wall-of-sound guitar with propulsive strings and brass, then proceeding to do the quiet-loud-quiet-LOUDER dynamic until the cows come home. It’s a genre that, provided everyone concerned knows what they’re doing, cannot fail to impress.<br /> <br />So objectivity be damned, then. It was never really in doubt that Friday evening’s entertainment at the Cowley Club would be an experience of total immersion in sound, and that I was always going to leave sated, and, more likely than not, grinning from ear to ear.<br /> <br />It helps no end that Brighton’s favourite anarchist bookshop-cum-bar is the perfect setting for such cacophony. Some might feel that orchestral rock is best suited to that more grandiose, ‘cathedral of sound’ kind of venue, but something about this cosy, collective atmosphere channels the intensity of the music into an altogether more absorbing beast. It’s as if the university string quartet and their noisemaking guitarist friends decided to crash their college lecturer’s front room during a drinks party. Books line the walls. There is an excited murmur of discussion about the use of time signatures. The real ale is thick, and the beards are thicker.<br /> <br />Some of the finest facial hair on display belonged to the unenviably named Lamp, who were first to take to the stage. A tight unit consisting of two guitars and a frenetically pounding drummer, their set demonstrated an almost telepathic level of awareness between the trio that was a sight to behold. Facing inward toward each other (as if the audience were simply privy to an intimate scene of three friends creating music for their own enjoyment), their individual, rhythmic phrases wound together to create a constantly shifting, off kilter aesthetic to their lyricless songs.<br /> <br />In fact, vocals were almost entirely absent from proceedings for the whole night. The closest we came was during second act, Brighton’s own Cove (what’s with all the monosyllabic band names, guys?), when the occasional verse of spiky, gain-distorted guitar thrash would be leant some added adrenaline (if it were needed) by garbled, spoken word interludes, as well as short bursts of the more traditional guttural yelps, reminiscent of Fugazi or At The Drive-In. Whilst the audience seemed less drawn in by Cove’s head-throwing antics than the more measured approach of the other two bands, they brought a louder, more visceral sound to the party that achieved a pleasing balance for the spectacle as a whole.<br /> <br />It was this noisy aperitif that brought us round, at last, to that long-awaited post rock main course. From the off, the Bristol-based Pirate Ship Quintet (who, confusingly, appeared to have six members) wore their influences on their sleeve. It is obvious that their cello and trumpet driven sound owes a huge debt to Godspeed You Black Emperor, but really, who’s complaining? If you’re going to emulate, you may as well try and emulate the best, and the Quintet proved themselves more than adept at handling the languid build-up, the swell and release of epic proportions, and of course the imposing ten minute track lengths that were required of them. <br />Whilst perhaps the group failed to demonstrate as great a range of subtle intricacies of tension and atmosphere that separate a band like Godspeed or Mogwai from the crowd, it would be churlish to complain about the Pirate Ship Quintet’s sound against such illustrious company. They do what they set out to do very well indeed, which is to make music that over-indulges the senses, absorbs you into it, and makes your heart beat just that little bit faster.<br /> <br />Any post rock outfit lives or dies by the standard of its orchestral element, and the strains of the cello, foregrounded by the squall of guitars that surrounded it, did not disappoint. Fingers danced over the instrument’s neck at often dazzling speeds, covering the whole range from delicate melodies (over a backdrop of subdued, chiming guitars) to frantically bowed bass lines (the same guitars now galloping like thunder). These cinematic soundscapes were furthered by the occasional, constantly ascending note on the trumpet, or screamed vocal, the human voice treated as an instrument for atmospheric effect, rather than leading the action. The rush of all these elements combined, allied to a constant, gradual push on the volume pedal, is impossible to describe, but when it hits the sweet spot, it hits hard, and the only sane reaction is one of breathless satisfaction.Sephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01223134482207910582noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1048588910107290769.post-24273413654118275222009-01-16T09:40:00.000-08:002009-01-16T09:57:50.938-08:00LinkageSo I wrote some stuff over on <a href="http://wiredforstyle.co.uk/index.php?page=fantastic-5">Wired For Style</a> which is up now. For some reason my name's not been attached to it, which is a bit of an irritation, but trust me, them words up there, they're all mine. So anyway, if you want to know how to be cool like me, there's some things to start you off. I particularly want one of those <a href="http://www.houseofbendie.com">House of Bendie</a> hoodies. They look just the thing for job interviews in trendy 'experimental' London media offices. Enjoy.Sephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01223134482207910582noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1048588910107290769.post-32418319530468576662008-12-29T06:38:00.000-08:002008-12-29T11:24:11.655-08:00Strengthening ResolveAs the new year is almost upon us, I thought I'd join the countless swathes of writers contributing their own unoriginal twopenceworth to the already bulging sack of articles about the yearly irritant of new year's resolutions. God, but I'm so fucking <em>original</em>.<br /><br />The main problem with doing these things on New Year's is that it's the worst possible timeframe to attempt it in. You've just had your post-christmas break from alcoholism and gluttony, and are just gagging to start the cycle again. Then you go out and it's advisable, if not compulsory, to drink your own weight in booze (especially as you've built up such a tolerance during the winter months, when there's nothing else to do). For the next week, you're experiencing the hangover and can hardly motivate yourself to stand up, let alone go jogging, and even if you could get out of the door, it's just too cold. This is why people always look healthier during the summer months. Aside from ceasing to look pasty and malnourished, and being able to leave the house without being dressed up to resemble a sock stuffed with fabric, it's the only time of year when it's logistically possible to actually <em>do</em> anything healthy. Going to the park to kick a ball around becomes a pleasure rather than insanity. You start happily eating salads instead of condensed chunks of fat. And you do all this without the pressure of some ill-conceived yearly self-betterment programme.<br /><br />My own resolutions are far from high definition (YES! A technology pun!). I'm constantly resolving to do things, not just at those moments when, due to some arbitrary fluke of calendar making in the distant past, we all get to watch the numbers click round to zero again and go "aaah". I've already resolved about four times on this very blog to post more, only to be scuppered by my own absentmindedness, lack of organisation and <a href="http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=1YssKR6LOEQ">short attention span</a> (<em>DAMN</em> you, facebook tetris! Why can I not just let anyone else have a higher score than me?)<br /><br />My other regular resolution is to exercise more, not in the gym, which as a proud and self confessed skinny <a href="http://www.demonbaby.com/blog/2004/04/first-annual-myspace-stupid-haircut.html">emo</a> streak of piss I hold a moral objection to, but just by jogging or swimming enough that I don't have a near heart attack every time that I need to run for the bus. Trouble is, there just aren't enough hours in the day for something that I so loathe doing. How do these people who work out regularly <em>manage</em> it? Unless they actually enjoy the gym experience, which I can't even begin to believe. Even when you remove the factor of trying to exercise in skinny jeans and eyeliner without everyone around you laughing themselves into an epileptic fit, you're still left with the sheer humiliating drudgery of it all. It somehow manages to combine mind-numbing boredom with intense physical discomfort, all the while asking you to pay for the experience, rather like purchasing a membership to the museum of R&B, knitwear and vegan cooking, where for a nominal fee the staff will hold your arms apart and take turns beating you around the torso with wet sacks of cement, but you can't shut your eyes because they're stapled open like that scene in <em>A Clockwork Orange</em>, forced to watch an endless parade of chunky sweaters and deep-fried haloumi, the warblings of R. Kelly only drowned out by the screeching of the curators as they laugh themselves silly at your discomfort, crying with laughter, for two hours, laughing, laughing, laughing.<br /><br />Gosh, that was a long sentence. Excuse me while I lie down and catch my breath.<br /><br />Anyway, that's why this year I'm resolving not to make any resolutions (and <a href="http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=EkMit4sFX2M">paradoxes</a> be damned). You see, I'm much more content to be a disorganised whirlwind of poor decision making and occasional laughable attempts to better myself than some sanitised, asinine model of the perfect human being. Flaws and failures are a good thing, they make it all the better when you somehow manage to do things right for a change. So join me, ye huddled masses yearning to break free from the tyranny of health club membership. Drink, smoke and abuse your body to your heart's content (no overeating, though, if there's one thing I can't stand it's fat people). I think I'll start right now. There's a bottle of rum left over from christmas downstairs, it should do the trick.Sephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01223134482207910582noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1048588910107290769.post-1166243006461421252008-12-09T13:35:00.000-08:002008-12-09T13:52:21.126-08:00Albums of the Year 2008It is December, and in December it is traditional to do lists. I like this because I am male and slightly OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Obsessive about Compact Discs). Here is mine, for my 10 favourite albums of the last year. Any one of these thoroughly deserves a more detailed album review, and will probably get one sooner or later (probably later) in my ongoing ‘great albums’ feature. They were chosen because I believe they are truly great works of music that stand on their own as one self-contained entity, and are as such deserving of a place on anyone’s CD rack. I know this because I am a blogger, and am therefore infinitely more qualified to write about music than some 'music journalist' with their 'journalism degree' and 'grade 9 music theory'. Oh yeah. My opinions count for a <em>lot</em>. There were some albums this year that contained some great music, but I can’t justify to myself putting on the list, mainly because they are let down by a few clunky tracks. Still definitely worth checking out though, are the efforts from Conor Oberst, Does It Offend You, Yeah?, Hot Chip, and MGMT. All contain musical genius and musical mundanity in equal measure. Then there were the ones that don’t make the cut solely because I don’t own them yet (and therefore can’t judge them as a whole body of work), but from the songs that I’ve heard, Foals, Santogold, Kanye West, Sigur Ros and Mogwai may deserve just as much praise, so go and buy them with my blessing. Anything else though, and I will judge you harshly, because that is just the kind of music snob that I am. Yes, I’m right and you’re wrong. And yes, there will be a test at the end. Thank you.<br /><br /><strong>10. Pink Floyd – <em>Oh, By The Way</em></strong><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_gyvUNyLx4BZJ8y9jNdGytT8gIYZ6KXOS1_mKHgO2GMz5FbprdT-djpYt3xt0FaaNH4jjuXtV-cBi-gqDcLI4wvwYEZMS-LHwtBM2ci2WLVPvIs0Vt4sJh4uWOTYUUZSVyvskN_t7H6A/s1600-h/floyd.JPG"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277908080685534322" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 200px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 193px" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_gyvUNyLx4BZJ8y9jNdGytT8gIYZ6KXOS1_mKHgO2GMz5FbprdT-djpYt3xt0FaaNH4jjuXtV-cBi-gqDcLI4wvwYEZMS-LHwtBM2ci2WLVPvIs0Vt4sJh4uWOTYUUZSVyvskN_t7H6A/s200/floyd.JPG" border="0" /></a>Yes, yes, I know. I’m cheating. It’s a boxset, it came out at the end of last year, and I don’t even own it, despite what I just said. You name me 10 albums from the last 12 months that you thought were genuinely brilliant, then. Anyway, that’s why it’s at number 10 on the list, despite containing not just some of the best music you’ll hear this year, but very probably the best music you’ll hear, like, <em>ever</em>. In your lifetime. Even if they invent mp3s in the future that orally pleasure you while you listen. Let’s just accept that I’m putting this in the list as a tribute to synth pioneer and genius Rick Wright, who passed away earlier this year. If there was any justice in the world, it should have been a national day of mourning. However, it does feel a bit cheap for me to put this ridiculously extensive collection in at number one, despite <em>Dark Side Of The Moon</em> and <em>Wish You Were Here</em> knocking every other album on this list clear out of the water. And anyway, “ridiculously extensive” means that for every <em>Dark Side</em> eargasm, you have to sit through a <em>Division Bell</em>, the auditory equivalent of finally getting that girl you’ve pined for for ten years, only to find out that she’s now into coprophilia and trainspotting. So number 10 it is. Sorry, David. Sorry, Roger.<br /><br /><strong>9. Death Cab For Cutie – <em>Narrow Stairs</em></strong><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEip6vvfJ7leCX32YSHv33SRhTNEbwQp0RfUIFIHXS4kO20L2UKdLDzGZH68vYeYlnFUeB30smRjb692s4TlA_K9do1ZI3UvhoL-JTuiqjx4H7hJJ2ucIyWMOLXW2lhd7oLQ5waUWGYElVg/s1600-h/deathcab.JPG"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277908321447432642" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 200px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 200px" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEip6vvfJ7leCX32YSHv33SRhTNEbwQp0RfUIFIHXS4kO20L2UKdLDzGZH68vYeYlnFUeB30smRjb692s4TlA_K9do1ZI3UvhoL-JTuiqjx4H7hJJ2ucIyWMOLXW2lhd7oLQ5waUWGYElVg/s200/deathcab.JPG" border="0" /></a>This one gave me a bit of a headache in its selection, because I only got round to buying it last week. Is a week really long enough to make a value judgement on whether an album is a work of art or not? Well, in the short time that I have had to listen to it, <em>Narrow Stairs</em> has won me over with its tried and tested deathcab formula of ever-so-fragile guitar, textured brass and string arrangements, and guess-how-emo-it’s-going-to-go lyrics. On this latest album, the vocals run the whole gamut from heartfelt to tortured, by way of pleading, introspective and melancholy. But for all the shortcomings of their admittedly narrow lyrical palette, deathcab really know how to push the sonic envelope. If David Byrne had been an emo in 1978, this would have been the sort of stuff he’d have been up to; subtly polyrhythmic, shifting, fragmented, but with a keen underlying sense of groove. Perhaps the oblique cover art is even a deliberate nod to the seminal <em>Fear of Music</em>. It still remains to be seen if they’re capable of making their own take on that kind album, or even their <em>Remain in Light</em>, but in 2008, deathcab took a couple of steps in the right direction.<br /><br /><strong>8. British Sea Power – <em>Do You Like Rock Music? </em></strong><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-m6XsGLJ4_BE8I466TlyS4oKqf534NANFVZwmR8_JtSXq8wy6zo5IvUEgGkEkFuCyf3HHysTYQxZub4AqKHj-19zvs_s48Ab5Wpn8vSu52ikV9FMtSdaY45waKhErwhrrhkijy75XUTQ/s1600-h/bsp.JPG"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277908559125367890" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 200px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 200px" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-m6XsGLJ4_BE8I466TlyS4oKqf534NANFVZwmR8_JtSXq8wy6zo5IvUEgGkEkFuCyf3HHysTYQxZub4AqKHj-19zvs_s48Ab5Wpn8vSu52ikV9FMtSdaY45waKhErwhrrhkijy75XUTQ/s200/bsp.JPG" border="0" /></a>I’ve always been a massive fan of BSP; their so-uncool-it’s-cool image (Bird watching! Hiking! Real ale!), their kaleidoscopic lyrics about anything and everything (Dostoevsky! Canvey Island! The Larsen B ice shelf!), and of course their insane live shows, which usually draw to a close with equal parts piggybacks and feedback breaking out all over the stage in a sheer orgy of noise and spectacle. But I’ve always felt that they were yet to pull out their big statement, the album that defined them as a band. Not so anymore – 2008 saw BSP mature into a swirling, orchestral monster of an outfit, complete with horns, air raid sirens, and blissfully swollen production from the minds behind Arcade Fire and Godspeed You Black Emperor!. ‘Do you like rock music?’, the title asks, either inquisitive or reproachful, ambiguously daring. It’s certainly a call to arms both for rock music that rocks, and against the banality that in recent years has tried to pass itself off as ‘rock’. Do I like rock music? If this is what the term represents, then unequivocally yes.<br /><br /><strong>7. Bloc Party – <em>Intimacy</em></strong><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0w99ZBjJ_j8HL_0M4MDncGjuQv9Kr731AIoqAW6PshKE6MhQQFSyxIOdjRVSFD2pbP8zEk7DI3DXiwgRYC9VZQp-dBCuN-WTcGsfCoQJWzK7L_3yTaRxXW6tIFwA42w-ot99CoLy2ISE/s1600-h/bloc.JPG"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277908733844208290" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 199px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 200px" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0w99ZBjJ_j8HL_0M4MDncGjuQv9Kr731AIoqAW6PshKE6MhQQFSyxIOdjRVSFD2pbP8zEk7DI3DXiwgRYC9VZQp-dBCuN-WTcGsfCoQJWzK7L_3yTaRxXW6tIFwA42w-ot99CoLy2ISE/s200/bloc.JPG" border="0" /></a>There was very little fanfare when the third Bloc Party album was quietly stuck up on the band’s website for download a few months ago, perhaps unfairly considering the fact that for all the commercial success of its predecessors, this incarnation is a far more satisfying whole than the band’s earlier, more patchy efforts. Bloc Party have honed their sound into a smart, charged whirlwind of sirens, beats and cut up vocals, sacrificing neither the pop hooks of <em>Silent Alarm</em> or the experimentation of <em>A Weekend In The City</em>’s more exciting tracks. And when it’s not a fluorescent explosion happening <em>right now</em>, the intimacy of the title comes to the fore with fragile flourishes, all the while building in tension until the next eruption of tangled and chaotic noise. It’s a giddy headrush of an album that constantly throws you off balance and cements Bloc Party’s credentials as by far the most intriguing by-product of this decade’s indie explosion.<br /><br /><strong>6. HEALTH – <em>Health//Disco</em></strong><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3L4yk2gXomQoGMpJKXOMIcDtS2mvwHJfG3bVXxgNVkfdlwKJKh2ldjtQgLG-f86QPxm6YmIWYiqUokMaIhJeJzOaCtflz-t4yY7D0s8fI44GUTMX2qB5elx51DzBzbGBysrf62zBYUHA/s1600-h/health.JPG"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277909316310406322" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 200px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 198px" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3L4yk2gXomQoGMpJKXOMIcDtS2mvwHJfG3bVXxgNVkfdlwKJKh2ldjtQgLG-f86QPxm6YmIWYiqUokMaIhJeJzOaCtflz-t4yY7D0s8fI44GUTMX2qB5elx51DzBzbGBysrf62zBYUHA/s200/health.JPG" border="0" /></a>It should be fairly obvious from a casual glance through my favourite albums that there are two things that really get my blood pumping when it comes to music. With this compilation of remixes, HEALTH combine the squall of furiously huge noise rock guitar textures with furiously distorted squelches of towering synth, leaving you with little option but to give in completely to total immersion in the sound, flailing your arms and thrashing your head. Furiously. It’s rare for a remix album to be this painstakingly put together. The disparate sounds of different outfits providing their own take can often sound clumsy, interrupting the flow. But here the dark disco efforts of Acid Girls, Crystal Castles, Thrust Lab et al are united by the torrent of pure brooding noise into a pulsating cascade of amphetamine charged dance rock. There is no album quite like it for sheer adrenaline inducing, propulsive, driving energy, and for that it deserves to be played in full at every nightclub from now until the end of time.<br /><br /><strong>5. Crystal Castles – <em>Crystal Castles</em></strong><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFgrf_G6eQ9iFXGZfZ7dydzk_Se2sTa_e8nyjaSi6wXVdlvQ_A_DgW0T434RriuckQ4a0ly2zMp0XxIRyi-Pv9jirXQmXyjln4RMPcImn5WRHjJa0QHMLN4OBj-690pgzUNi9Cp5oI88o/s1600-h/castles.JPG"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277908926403170450" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 194px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 178px" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFgrf_G6eQ9iFXGZfZ7dydzk_Se2sTa_e8nyjaSi6wXVdlvQ_A_DgW0T434RriuckQ4a0ly2zMp0XxIRyi-Pv9jirXQmXyjln4RMPcImn5WRHjJa0QHMLN4OBj-690pgzUNi9Cp5oI88o/s200/castles.JPG" border="0" /></a>In my ideal, fantasy life, I’d live in a basement studio with Crystal Castles’ frontwoman Alice Glass. We’d spend all day playing with vintage synthesiser effects and gameboy noises, both wearing too much eyeliner and adopting a superior attitude to the world in general. We would only come out by night to feed, screaming random strings of unintelligible gibberish at passers-by. But, being that she’s a successful French-Canadian goth-pop star and I’m a skint, unemployed blogger, my fantasy life will probably have to take a back seat for a while. Instead, I’ll have to make do with Crystal Castles debut album, a sleek, shadowy beast comprised of, you guessed it, vintage synthesiser effects, gameboy noises and screams of unintelligible gibberish. The treated vocals coat interwoven lines of gothic techno beats and eightbit keyboard in a glitter bomb of mystique as they intersect and collide like a fight between two giant robots in a disused Atari factory. It’s not quite a long-term relationship with your very own fantasy swaggering electro mistress, but it’s a good second best.<br /><br /><strong>4. Fuck Buttons – <em>Street Horrrsing</em></strong><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxcUMRyd34wURe5-RbSvLbqmLViwsY0FigV5dkXyr5hKGwIekB5aN_KUs7GXjmKnMI3Lgjtlan00zEFQ41b541JXzsNQ_Iv_vx1nDmmswgj2ad1qT86-sKsLKjxkfMkqIXRLV_s9qLd6M/s1600-h/buttons.JPG"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277909507166732738" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 200px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 179px" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxcUMRyd34wURe5-RbSvLbqmLViwsY0FigV5dkXyr5hKGwIekB5aN_KUs7GXjmKnMI3Lgjtlan00zEFQ41b541JXzsNQ_Iv_vx1nDmmswgj2ad1qT86-sKsLKjxkfMkqIXRLV_s9qLd6M/s200/buttons.JPG" border="0" /></a>Let’s start with my mother’s capsule review: “That’s just noise. I know that’s what parents always say, but it’s literally just noise.” Which it is, inarguably. Noise is good. You’re going to have to accept it if you’re going to get anything out of listening to this audacious scream-of-consciousness, which veers from blistering feedback to tribal drumming to delicate windchimes to sub-bass hiccups and back to blistering feedback without missing a beat. It’s never going to make any best seller lists, that’s for sure. But this six-track, hour-long exploration of drones and tones pounds away at the senses, creeping into your consciousness until you start to wonder why all music doesn’t sound like this. <em>Sex on Fire</em>? It’s all very well and good, but couldn’t they have shrouded it in humming pulses of distortion-addled bass, added a faux-trance hook and delivered the vocals through a child’s toy microphone and an overdrive pedal? Noise. It’s the future. Deal with it.<br /><br /><strong>3. TV On The Radio – <em>Dear Science</em></strong><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhyphenhyphencwSEB1Ef6tg7bBweURcJ1PbTS2tu7bVT4CFNOIXZX2Q_WjdSLlpFl5paWy3nKeUAGux8Hm99Y8VH_zo0rK2V1LZefdcnytiMUVmkN3iWFsKk0lrNer8AMb_bjuhN8DnZ6QsPyIO4Vk/s1600-h/TV.JPG"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277909701237128658" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 200px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 198px" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhyphenhyphencwSEB1Ef6tg7bBweURcJ1PbTS2tu7bVT4CFNOIXZX2Q_WjdSLlpFl5paWy3nKeUAGux8Hm99Y8VH_zo0rK2V1LZefdcnytiMUVmkN3iWFsKk0lrNer8AMb_bjuhN8DnZ6QsPyIO4Vk/s200/TV.JPG" border="0" /></a>Rock music isn’t supposed to have this much <em>soul</em>. It seems unfair that in the twin vocals of Kyp Malone and Tunde Adebimpe, TV On The Radio possess two of the greatest vocal talents in contemporary alternative music. Each breathless word is infused with the kind of wrenching emotion that your average anodyne indie vocalist just can’t muster. It helps that the music matches that intensity at every step, from the richly produced handclap beats to the warm tone of the full throated guitars. Add to that the glorious brass, courtesy of the Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra, and the whole thing becomes a thick stew of swirling cacophony, constantly driving forward with the claustrophobic fury of a thunderstorm. Then everything drops back to reveal the vocals alone once more, still just as intense with nothing to support them but their own barely controlled emotion. And that’s the core to the greatness of this album; even as the music treads through a kaleidoscope of funk, electronica, rock, pop and jazz, TV On The Radio never veer far from the soul.<br /><br /><strong>2. Radiohead – <em>In Rainbows</em></strong><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNXICRbxsqRffalcdh5XzO1akVfSqZ8xZo3mZ8MtYCZiyn6X-LplmU0pJ8b2f2Uhfnur8SdvyNHFbNf8_CwOM1FPV18OiOl4s-mTqs6uqxtleKIeYDo_EXsGIJ9tQzB4swthNEI25wve8/s1600-h/head.JPG"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277909923969901362" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 200px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 198px" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNXICRbxsqRffalcdh5XzO1akVfSqZ8xZo3mZ8MtYCZiyn6X-LplmU0pJ8b2f2Uhfnur8SdvyNHFbNf8_CwOM1FPV18OiOl4s-mTqs6uqxtleKIeYDo_EXsGIJ9tQzB4swthNEI25wve8/s200/head.JPG" border="0" /></a>It may have been available on the internet for the last few months of 2007, but it was kind of a sign that 2008 would be a great year for music when <em>In Rainbows</em> got its physical release on New Year’s Day. ‘Top this’, it seemed to be saying, and given that I consider any new album from the ‘head to be marginally more important than say, the ordaining of a new pope, the idea didn’t even seem conceivable. At least it would be fun to watch the other bands try. Alright, it’s not <em>Kid A</em> or <em>OK Computer</em>. But it’s a close bronze medal in the back catalogue of a band so consistent in their brilliance that it’s not an overstatement in my mind to say that they must possess some sort of God-like powers. Radiohead have returned from the left-field armed with the knowledge of how to make pop songs so perfect and detailed that you can listen to them a hundred times and still hear something new and glorious every time. 2008, hold your hands up; the messiahs have returned.<br /><br /><strong>1. Portishead – <em>Third</em></strong><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhevpUTc-q39Z5XXSgY8pAjdIrmf19DlnMvGPb3EmB5JCHRozSkOiqqXU3NcMxpSZCmqJshtrDsBUgpaUokjOJTD3bn06ijcVSC0xOuY3XuTBbYLJI4qvzPiVXBocLH9MIV4TwueGmgDIo/s1600-h/portishead.JPG"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5277910103894410946" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 200px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 200px" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhevpUTc-q39Z5XXSgY8pAjdIrmf19DlnMvGPb3EmB5JCHRozSkOiqqXU3NcMxpSZCmqJshtrDsBUgpaUokjOJTD3bn06ijcVSC0xOuY3XuTBbYLJI4qvzPiVXBocLH9MIV4TwueGmgDIo/s200/portishead.JPG" border="0" /></a>Anyone who knows me will know that it takes something special for any given album to get the nod over Radiohead, but boy, is this album something special. Within five minutes of starting to listen to it for the first time, I’d already broken into spontaneous applause and by the time it had drawn to a stately close an hour later I was completely overwhelmed and ready to crown them the best ‘head of 2008. Axl Rose, take note; this album took eleven years to make, and it <em>shows</em>. Every single track is a polished nugget of solid gold, traversing post rock, trip-hop, kraut-rock, electronica, jazz with aplomb, each song delivered with a nonchalant ease, yet in every case written and rewritten to perfection. Beth Gibbons’ haunting, fragile voice, easily one of the vocal performances of the year, soaring over a jigsaw puzzle of sounds ranging from lo-fi, scratchy acoustic guitar to ten megaton machinegun drums, never once sounding out of place. Without a single misstep the music constantly shifts gears from brain-throbbing intensity to ambient perfection, from intimate and swaying to warlike bombast. Eleven tracks, eleven years. And every one a masterpiece.Sephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01223134482207910582noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1048588910107290769.post-811186122788362252008-12-01T01:57:00.000-08:002008-12-01T02:57:03.748-08:00All Apologies, All EulogiesSo I haven't posted in what, forever. November was not my month. Internet went down. Too cynical and writers' block. Life got in the way. I apologise unreservedly. It shall not happen again this crisp December. Think of it as an early resolution.<br /><br />Richey Edwards was declared legally dead <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/nov/26/richey-edwards-manic-street-preachers">last week</a>. From a concerned poster on my social networking wall: "I heard about the ruling on Richie, but do try not to act morose and distant. Don't let grief get in the way of being your normal cheerful self." (I believe the word is irony). I'd like to satisfy all wellwishers as to my mental state. I am not down (any more than usual). Life goes on. Although perhaps with more abstract and terse prose.<br /><br />Okay, that's enough of that. I can't keep writing a post in this style, it's driving me insane. I read a lot of Don DeLillo this week, and it's hit my clauses hardest. Microsoft Word would have a field day - "Fragment- consider revising". That's irony too, isn't it? Is Bill Gates laughably hypocritical when it comes to sentence structure or what? Fragment. Consider. Revising. Where's the grammar in that? Practice what you preach, you unapologetic Creosote cretin. And make your operating system less infuriating while you're at it. And kill that <em>fucking</em> <a href="http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=yX8yrOAjfKM">paperclip</a>.<br /><br />Anyway, Richey. Yes, this news is sad to me, as it will be to all true followers of the <em>Bible</em> (not that papery, leatherbound thing, the <em>real <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holy_Bible_(album)">Bible</a></em>). That the obituary I linked to above was the most read article on the Guardian website for the day it was published indicates some of the level of devotion the man inspired. The thing is, this news doesn't really change anything for me or the legions of acolytes like me. We know Richey is gone, we've had 14 years to accept the fact. But he still lives. No, not on some Goan beach or secluded monastery, but in his words. I know this is corny (how else can one write a eulogy?), but his fierce genius still breathes through those machinegun bursts of lyrical insight that litter the Manics' early songs. I wish you peace, Richey, wherever you may be. A morality obedient only to the cleansed repented. You were stronger than Mensa, Miller and Mailer. You spat out Plath and Pinter. And you did not burn out, you will never fade away.Sephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01223134482207910582noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1048588910107290769.post-41623570267241765132008-10-27T07:28:00.000-07:002008-10-27T08:46:20.677-07:00Oh oh oh, Sweet Love und RomanceApologies to anyone who was waiting with bated breath for my musings on XTRMNTR yesterday, it's been a bit of a rollercoaster week and I haven't had time to write it. But I promise it will be coming along shortly, in fact I hereby pledge to post at least a couple more times before this weekend, when halloween commitments mean that I shall be otherwise engaged (If anyone's wondering, I'm going as <a href="http://sephfromabove.blogspot.com/2008/10/album-review-holy-bible.html">Richey</a>, of course).<br /><br />Anyway, to keep your <a href="http://www.wambie.com/foto_br-272.html">appetite</a> sated in the meantime, here's something I wrote quite a few months ago. I dug it out of my files today, having been reminded of it this weekend at the Brighton festival, where ten-foot chalkboard letters spelled ELL-OH-VEE-EE across the library forecourt. They were daubed in day-glo lines with the loves of the people who, throughout the day, had been invited to grab a paintbrush and colour in their passions. In the dark, crisp night, hundreds of people were standing and looking at the sculpture. Some were holding hands, taking photographs. Everybody was smiling, and I felt a simple warmth inside, that reflected their contented expressions.<br /><br />So. Romance, then. It seems to me that those everyday faults in logic that make up our existence – our reliance on language, our trust in linear narrative and misplaced sense of finality – are supremely reflected in the fumblings of romance. Love makes bad poets of us all. That’s precisely the reason why it is so captivating.<br /> <br />Sweet nothings, now there’s an interesting concept. Why does romance reduce a statement to the status of a nothing? Maybe in the twenty-first century, we’ll learn to replace nothings with somethings, the performative utterances of love.<br /><br />I read about some scientific research a long time ago that suggests that the part of our brain concerned with making rational decisions doesn’t come into play until after we act; we act spontaneously, then justify our decisions with logic afterwards. This doesn’t just go for instinct – and just because you give something a name doesn’t mean it has any explanation – but for other, much more critical decisions like speaking, walking, standing up, sitting down, things that directly affect the course of our lives. Ever been on your way somewhere, lost in your own little world, and suddenly realised that your feet have carried you somewhere familiar, of their own accord, without any apparent intervention from your head? That’s what I’m talking about.<br /> <br />If we aren’t even in control of our own actions, what kind of grip do we have on the future, however we may trivialise it with plans and timetables and alarm clocks and shopping lists? The future, even the close future, from one second to the next, from one <em>instant</em> to the next, as universe shifts into universe, forming and collapsing like surf on the shore, is completely out of our control. Accept it. Go outside right now and kiss a complete stranger. It’s the best you can hope for.<br /> <br />That’s as if to say that hope is something that concerns the future. It isn’t. Hope is something that manifests itself only in memory and past. We live, we hope, we hope that it will or will not happen to us again. Hope is important, certainly, but it is important in that it tells us who we are, not where we are going.<br /><br />Creation is in itself an act of destruction. When you create something, you make a conscious decision to eradicate all the potential forms and guises that idea may have taken. For every act of creation, a million acts of destruction. God is the destroyer of worlds, because in creating existence, he destroyed the infinite potential for existence to exist as something else. To truly create, you must accept that which you destroy. The history of art is filled with drink and drugs and depression because to be a creator is to celebrate destructiveness. This is why people like the idea of a soul. It’s something tangible and permanent. With everything around it decaying, it is indelible. Its half-life is infinite. It cannot be destroyed or tarnished except by an act of will. Which is where fate comes in. <br /><br />Fate allows us to accept the possibility that inevitable destruction is not complete and perfect. Fate is a tautology. Things happen because they happen, like the needle scratching endlessly through the groove in the record. But what if the self is not inward, but a manifestation of fate? Maybe fate is an outward representation of self, soul, psyche, id, being? That part that says ‘this is me’ isn’t part of our being in a physical sense. You can’t hold it or taste it or see it. It doesn’t have mass, or colour or texture. Why do we have this impression that it exists behind the eyes? Maybe we’re all fooling ourselves, and fate and free will are the same, and we just don’t realise it. Maybe creation and destruction are both just our own affirmation.Sephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01223134482207910582noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1048588910107290769.post-21321546038207910922008-10-20T07:51:00.000-07:002008-10-20T08:17:35.983-07:00Album Review: 'Loveless'I do seem to have set myself a bit of a challenge with my album review this week – how to get across in words the ethereal listening experience that is My Bloody Valentine’s <em>Loveless</em>? The only way I can think to do so would involve some sort of cack-handed <a href="http://web.mit.edu/synesthesia/www/">synesthesia</a> – ‘like the sight of eddies of dust caught in the beams of white light shining through a narrow window’, perhaps, or ‘the auditory equivalent of being gently massaged by thousands of hands at once’?<br /><br />Alright, that’s enough of that. I’m aware of how difficult it is to interpret writing about music anyway, without it getting all <em>meta</em>. I promise from here on in not to overcomplicate what it is that makes this album great; the texture, the depth, the tone, the <em>sound</em>.<br /><br />What must it have been like to hear new music in the sixties and seventies? Constant innovation, new sounds and recording techniques being developed all the time, record upon record, all of it sounding nothing like anything before, all of it <em>new</em>. But after this wave of innovation came, to some extent, a plateau. The growth of this palette of sound slowed, steadied. There could be fewer great leaps into the unknown. Come 1991, there was a sense that we'd heard it all before. There's a limit to what you can do to an electromagnetic signal.<br /><br />But then along comes something like <em>this</em>. Kevin Shields’ guitar doesn’t sound like <em>anything</em> else, <em>ever</em>, over-italicised or not, it’s as simple as that. It has become something of a cliché to say that a guitarist ‘makes his guitar speak’, but with Shields it is more than that. He makes it sigh, breathe, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DEnwUAzPG4">cry</a>. The range of resonance he coaxes from that battered Fender Jaguar is astonishing. It can sound huge and at the same time distant, as in ‘Touched’, where it somehow contrives to replicate the sound of dinosaurs mating. It can sound like diving jets and whirligig fairground sounds all at the same time, as in ‘To Here Knows When’. Most of the time, though, it sounds like a gale, a whirling maelstrom of pure white noise, but all the while concealing at its core a melody heartbreakingly fragile and beautiful. It is a music of contradiction.<br /><br />You know those days where, despite yourself, you manage to fall into one of those half asleep, half awake states? The ones where you’re not sure when you were awake and when you were dreaming? Next time that happens, take my advice; seize the opportunity. Stick <em>Loveless</em> on the stereo, lie down and roll with it. There is no music more perfectly fitting for the liminal state between reality and dream. As you drift in and out of consciousness that rolling, chiming roar sweeps over you in tangled waves of feedback and scattered fragments of thoughts and memories. At points you surface and everything is clear, at other times there is nothing but the sound. Like <em>The Holy Bible</em> last week, the conflict at the heart of this album is between ugliness and beauty, yet here that tension is played out not in the lyrics, swamped and concealed by as they are by the voice of the guitar, but in that delicate balance of blissful noise, as if the listener had returned to the womb.<br /><br /><em>Loveless</em> was a famously torturous album to produce, nearly bankrupting Creation, the label that funded it. But that effort is ingrained in every note and every glistening, distorted chime. It is a masterwork, the kind of record that defines an artist’s career. But Kevin Shields clearly wasn’t content with just the one, as we’ll see next week, when I’ll be talking about his work with Primal Scream (or <a href="http://www.culdesaconline.com/index.php/2008/08/05/primal-scream-beautiful-future-b-unique.html">prmlscrm</a>) on <em>XTRMNTR</em>.Sephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01223134482207910582noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1048588910107290769.post-63016076854752581432008-10-16T04:22:00.001-07:002008-10-16T04:29:08.157-07:00Heaven (or Hell) #3<strong>Joyce meets Dickens</strong><br /><br />Remember the drill, click the picture to make size your friend.<br /><br /><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSGo2Gc_QQfCDGbbFzrXV1qRKCGWjxPPz639cyug7nkD7Xvpzdn0g2L9smMg0BCC7QUOXqwNuAt8Vhib72JikhYm1k3CYPQrV-V2rb35VJ9Y3t6jZIsrICZSetaHfasHivXcwjny9ewUg/s1600-h/Joyce+vs.+Dickens.bmp"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5257711521707989746" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSGo2Gc_QQfCDGbbFzrXV1qRKCGWjxPPz639cyug7nkD7Xvpzdn0g2L9smMg0BCC7QUOXqwNuAt8Vhib72JikhYm1k3CYPQrV-V2rb35VJ9Y3t6jZIsrICZSetaHfasHivXcwjny9ewUg/s400/Joyce+vs.+Dickens.bmp" border="0" /></a>Sephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01223134482207910582noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1048588910107290769.post-32594967834498380502008-10-13T06:45:00.000-07:002008-10-13T09:13:54.734-07:00Album Review: 'The Holy Bible'<a href="http://sephfromabove.blogspot.com/2008/10/you-got-money-i-got-soul.html">Last week</a>, I posted my introduction to this new album review section. I waxed lyrical (a rather neat choice of cliche there, as you'll soon see) about how, for me, great music is more than just nice words and pretty tunes. It's atmospherics and intricacies, the ultimate dedication to all-consuming mood. I'm now going to be rather irritating, and plunge straight into a review of an album that is truly <em>great</em>, for precisely <em>none</em> of those reasons.<br /><br />Hey, wait. Come back. Let me explain. Manic Street Preachers' <em>The Holy Bible</em> is my favourite album. It's been my favourite album pretty much since I first discovered it, three or four years ago, and immersed myself in its lyric booklet. Here was the spirit of Ginsberg, Camus and Plath, distilled into a near perfect hour-long outpouring of intelligent, literate rage. It's the voice of my hero, Richey Edwards.<br /><br />Richey couldn't play his guitar. He didn't sing. He was an alcoholic, self-harming anorexic. But there was a fiery, poetic intelligence that burned within him, and lyrically, there is no other rockstar that even comes close to the attention to detail, the wealth of information in his songs. Nowhere was that talent so totally addressed as this, his legacy, his statement of intent. It's almost ludicrous, the quality and consistency of the words that make up this dark, intense beast. Songs about the extremes of human existence, about anorexia, prostitution, <em>genocide</em>, delivered with such a perverse, searing beauty that it's impossible to tear yourself away.<br /><br />Take the couplet from 'Yes' that I quoted back in my very first entry on this blog, a paean to the prostitution of the self in one's art; "In these plagued streets of pity you can buy anything/for $200, anyone can conceive a god on video". Or the devastating introspection audible on the autographical 'Faster'; "I am idiot drug hive/The virgin tattered and the torn/Life is for the cold made warm and they are just lizards/Self disgust is self obsession honey and I do as I please/A morality obedient only to the cleansed repented". These aren't just words to mouth along to, they're complete works of art.<br /><br />I'm not being completely facetious here, building up some manifesto one week only to tear it down the next. I <em>do </em>reserve the right to contradict myself (as Nicky Wire once said of his occasionally hypocritical <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEdxEiUjhwk">TV interview rants</a>), but there is musical genius at work here, too. At every turn, the ugly beauty of Edwards' vision is mirrored by some terrific (in <a href="http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/terrific">both senses</a> of the word) production. Take the doom-laden bass that crawls under your skin at the start of 'Archives of Pain', for instance, brooding and growling, gradually joined by keening feedback, before unwrapping itself into a scratched, battered and bruised guitar riff. You wouldn't think it possible for a guitar to sound like revenge, bloodlust and capital punishment, but somehow the way it writhes, contorts, it captures the fury of those lyrics.<br /><br />Samples are scattered throughout these thirteen tracks, disembodied, disenfranchised voices, pulled from myriad sources, yet somehow bound to each other. A salespitching pimp. The anguished mother of a murder victim. A weary, ageing actor. At the midpoint, a snippet of taped interview with the author J.G. Ballard surfaces through the claustrophobic din, Richey's mantra. "I wanted to rub the human face in its own vomit, and then force it to look in the mirror." Ballard was talking about his novel, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crash_(1973_novel)"><em>Crash</em></a>, but he cuts to the core of what <em>The Holy Bible</em> is about.<br /><br />The monolithic, six-minute penultimate song 'The Intense Humming of Evil', hyperbolic though it may sound, condenses all of these elements in a burst of controlled post-punk atmosphere that really does justify that title. Opening with a bed of industrial white noise, the sounds of a death-machinery, it builds unbearable suspense with a minute-long sample of a reporter at the Nuremberg trials; "From the ditch at Kerch, the dead will rise, bringing with them the acrid smoke and the deathly odour of scorched and martyred Europe. And the children, they too will come, stern and merciless. The butchers had no pity on them." Just as the crescendo becomes almost unbearable, it is interrupted by the snap and echo of reverberating snare, the beat itself becoming malevolent and machine-like. The guitars somehow manage the trick of seeming to constantly ascend, up and up, cranking the pressure further and further as Richey's words document with dignified respect the horror of the holocaust; "In block 5 we worship malaria/Lagerstrasse, poplar trees/Beauty lost, dignity gone/Rascher surveys us butcher bacteria". And the dread bass returns once more, still climbing further and further up, slowing and slowing, until finally it echoes quiet and all that remains is the shrill howl of the wind through Birkenau, where the birds no longer sing.<br /><br /><em>The Holy Bible</em> proved to be Richey's epitaph. Just a few months after its release he vanished, never to be seen again. It is not known whether he is alive or dead, if he committed suicide or went into hiding, but this record remains, a document of his brilliance. It's an unflinching, confrontational, disturbing experience, and it's everything that great art should be. No compromises.<br /><br />Next week, I'm going to the opposite end of the spectrum, to an album that delivers just as much intensity, almost without the use of any words at all. It's going to be the epitome of shoegaze, My Bloody Valentine's <em>Loveless</em>. See you there.Sephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01223134482207910582noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1048588910107290769.post-70805591443042251922008-10-10T18:14:00.000-07:002008-10-10T18:57:47.969-07:00Why Perfume Adverts StinkYou know what I find weird? Television adverts for perfume. Has it never occurred to anyone that there is no way to illustrate a scent through the medium of TV? Has anyone ever watched a thirty second short for Chanel or Calvin Klein and thought “I’ll have me some of that”? If you’re buying aftershave for someone, you go into the shop and ask the assistant, maybe test a few different alternatives, and buy the product based on its one saleable attribute; smell. What you don’t do is make your decision off the back of some George Clooney lookalike arsing about making coffee in the buff.<br /><br />I am of course, talking about the immortal promo for Davidoff Cool Water (an inspired name, that – I’ve always wanted to associate my musk with the neutral smell of H2O). When this advert comes on (I know, I know, they've changed it for the one with the handsome bit of rough out of <em>Lost</em> now, but he's not so funny to write about), I always think: someone <em>wrote</em> this? Probably not just one person, probably a team of highly paid marketing staff. Imagine the pitch – “So, black and white, it’s got to be black and white to show it’s a classy advert, and there’s a man, right, because we’re aiming this product at men. It’s implied that he’s wearing our scent, although as this is purely a visual medium, he could smell of stale rat’s piss for all we know. Anyway, he’s naked, that’s a nice angle, it’ll keep the female viewers’ attention. What’s he doing? I don’t know…what do normal people do at home? I don’t know because I’m in advertising, and therefore have sawdust where my brain should be. Err…making coffee? Boy, this is hard when you’ve done as much coke as I have this morning. I know, maybe he kicks a cushion around a bit, just so we know he likes football, ergo, isn’t some sort of weird pervert. And then of course, we can have a girl come in at the end, and run the age-old message: buy our product, and attractive women will want to have sex with you.”<br /><br />Of course, I shouldn’t just single out Davidoff for its bizarreness. In fact, by perfume ad standards it’s fairly tame. Take the homoerotic masturbatory insanity of those <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFkR3Q3zMLk&feature=related">Gaultier shorts</a> – ‘Sailors! Ballet! Nipples! Tattoos! Perfume!’ My personal all time favourite was the one for Chance by Chanel, which began “I see…I see a city”, immediately drawing the casual viewer in with its mysterious hints at prophecies and soothsayers. It goes on to reveal that in this city are people, one of whom is a man (what are the odds?), before shrieking, “it’s your chance! Take it! Take it! TAKE IT!” with increasing volume and desperation, at which point the photogenic young couple suddenly find themselves in a gondola adrift in the middle of the ocean, all sense of plausibility and narrative logic seemingly abandoned. I like to add a footnote at this point, “and buy our cologne”, as I feel the advert as it stands really doesn’t do enough to get this across. I feel let down by this abrupt ending. How do the couple get back to land? Do they starve to death or drown? It doesn’t tie up the loose ends. It is unsatisfying. And, perhaps most importantly, WHAT THE HELL DOES IT HAVE TO DO WITH PERFUME?<br /><br />It’s not like feminine unguents are not the only culprits. Bad advertising is one of my pet peeves, so I’m sure I’ll return to the topic in later weeks, to talk about some of the horrors that the world of commercials holds in store for its most lucrative contracts; namely, cars and alcohol. Liquor is, it seems, as baffling a prospect for marketing people as scent – what is one selling exactly? Can you illustrate the experience through pictures and sounds? It sort of puts me in mind of that David Chappelle sketch about Samuel L. Jackson Beer (“IT’LL GET YOU DRUNK!!!”). Car manufacturers have no excuse, however, for abandoning the saleable merits of their products in favour of the more abstract ‘giant dancing robot’ approach that they all seem to have taken of late. But <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyb4Wq8UYyA">Adam Buxton</a> has already skewered that satire kebab much more brilliantly than I am capable of, so I won’t devote any more time to it here.<br /><br />There is one other trend in perfume marketing at the moment, which is celebrity endorsement. However I can’t really see how this is any different. Maybe you want to smell like P Diddy or Paris Hilton (and how sad/weird is that?), but how do you know that by buying their perfume you do? There’s no way to empirically verify this (short of busting through a ring of beefy security guards to get a sniff of Beyonce’s neck – volunteers, anyone?), but I’m willing to bet that they don’t splash on the stuff every morning, and I’m even more certain that the secret of their success is not their odour (although if I was going to be catty I might say that in Miss Hilton’s case I suppose it must be <em>something</em>).<br /><br />All this is why I’ve grown to love the simplicity of Lynx adverts. Okay, it may smell of stale soap, but at least it doesn’t pull any punches, commercial-wise. SPRAY ON, GET MORE, it booms, as thousands of scantily-clad women charge towards a cheerfully spraying male. Okay, so it’s probably sexist, and it’s not exactly awash with delicate visual metaphor, but it boils down the message of the Davidoff advert much more succinctly, and it’s much more enjoyable for your average deodorant customer to watch.<br /><br />There are two very good reasons why these terrible adverts are here to stay. The first, and most obvious, is that most advert directors want to be doing something bigger than pretentious TV spots. They want pretentious TV <em>shows</em>, pretentious movies. They want to make another fucking <em>Lost In Translation</em>. And they're not going to be given the chance to do that until they get themselves a big ol' showreel of adverts that really <em>pop</em>. But the second reason may be less obvious to you: These guys <em>want</em> their adverts to be bad. They want you pissed off and scratching your head, asking your TV set "What the hell was that you just showed me?" Bad or good, in advertising it don't matter unless it's <em>memorable</em>.<br /><br />Name a car insurance company. Five seconds. Got one? Is it <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ru1VmKE3nEA">esure</a>? Is Michael Winner's smug, leering face making your blood boil so you can hardly read this? Those ads were so bad they made you angry, right? Esure doesn't care. You remembered who they were. And all because they made the Most Annoying Advert Ever<size=8><span style="font-size:78%;">TM</size></span>. That's the big, dirty secret. These guys want you mad. They want you mad so you act irrational, they want you irrational so you'll buy their stuff. Doesn't the whole thing just make you <em>furious</em>? Good. Now buy my book.Sephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01223134482207910582noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1048588910107290769.post-83819791897016104582008-10-08T15:38:00.000-07:002008-10-08T15:45:00.272-07:00Absence400 metres up the side of the monolithic tower the two men went about their business, welding, welding, welding. Like houseflies in gas masks they clung to the riveted steel frame, siphoning showers of sparks that died to dust long before falling to meet the heads of the commuters below.<br /> <br />Maintenance was an anonymous occupation. Jody often speculated upon the people and the stories being told far below him, people going about their business, completely unaware of his presence. If you forced a pushpin into a map, he always thought, it would pierce both himself and some complete stranger, someone who would never have cause to acknowledge his existence. Under the mask, his brow would prickle at such thoughts.<br /><br />When he had first started working on the towers, everyone he met had shown such interest. ‘How exciting’ they had cried as he told them of his life in the clouds. He had been a hit with women, a fearless modern-day hunter-gatherer, scaling cliffs to bring home bison. It had been fun.<br /><br />Of course, since that morning, times had changed. Now no-one talked anymore, and everyone still stared up into the air whenever a jet went overhead. Suddenly, overnight, the questions had changed from incredulous intrigue to incredulous concern. <br /><br />“Aren’t you worried?”<br /><br />“Do you have life insurance?”<br /><br />“What if it happens again?”<br /><br />He always explained that nothing had changed, you were just as safe on the outside of a building as you were on the inside, but no-one seemed to be listening. As soon as people heard <em>towers</em> they saw <em>planes</em>. Times had changed.<br /><br />He thought back to that day, the rolling news and the low roars that had torn through the crisp air. The gaping, smouldering wounds of blackened concrete had reminded him of a time from his childhood, back home in that whitewashed two up, two down in Oklahoma.<br /><br />He had gone to the cinema that day, with his mother and elder brother, a weekly tradition. They would catch the matinee, and then later, drink sodas and discuss the movie in the polished haven of Huey’s, the best (the only) soda bar in town.<br /><br />In the early evening they had returned, greeted by a terrible sight. Something, some monster, had punched a hole clean through the thin wooden walls of the lounge, then breathed fire on their home within. The three-piece was a soot-blackened mess, dripping still with water from the fireman’s hose.<br /><br />His immediate fear was for his father, who spent his Sundays watching the game, beer in hand, from that very couch. Panic gripped him and queasily he ran inside the shell of the front room, his feet treading white steps in the charred ground.<br />Later they would be told that Herb Ackerman, a farmer from nearby Redbird, drunk on a cocktail of gin and his wife’s presumed infidelity, had sped off the dirt road, through the wall, the couch and the liquor cabinet, a shower of coruscating sparks and then a terrific explosion as it tore apart the kitchen drywall, severing the gas main. Herb had felt nothing, in his last seconds, except perhaps for a desperate loneliness. Jody’s father was unharmed in the back bathroom, feeling only the heat of the devastation upon his bare knees.<br /><br />The relief at seeing his father again had been all consuming. Although the following months had been difficult, Jody had never forgotten that initial churning in his gut, and was always glad that, for him at least, the worst had not happened.<br />High above, a plane was coming in to land at Kennedy. Jody, as always, leant out and over, and saw the haunted faces peering up and past him. For a moment all was still. Then the heads went down and he was invisible again.Sephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01223134482207910582noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1048588910107290769.post-48256700302807812142008-10-06T13:44:00.000-07:002008-10-06T13:49:57.799-07:00Heaven (or Hell) #2<strong>Beethoven meets Nietzsche</strong><br /><br />Now with 100% more swearing! (remember to click for more biggerer)<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7jWHaZXXquZRIl1eDZzAU0klOgDHsW_PUMn6Qr-Zxgo6T5NU3GSil3CNbKZRh8rG30gHaemgvzT6TcvT47KTiGgYvo9VeF5lSlY-dWWNjh-rE5MX97Lv4CLpetM89DZ3x12XEHspuP1M/s1600-h/Beethoven+vs.+Nietszche.bmp"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7jWHaZXXquZRIl1eDZzAU0klOgDHsW_PUMn6Qr-Zxgo6T5NU3GSil3CNbKZRh8rG30gHaemgvzT6TcvT47KTiGgYvo9VeF5lSlY-dWWNjh-rE5MX97Lv4CLpetM89DZ3x12XEHspuP1M/s400/Beethoven+vs.+Nietszche.bmp" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5254145566032206978" /></a>Sephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01223134482207910582noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1048588910107290769.post-44668491864214990552008-10-05T13:11:00.000-07:002008-10-05T16:39:12.570-07:00You got the money, I got the soulWhen I set up this blog, I had a series of sort of vague ideas of what I was going to do with it. One of those sort of vague ideas was that I might occasionally turn my hand to music criticism, mainly just because it's a field of writing that's always interested me. Like just about every other music geek, I delude myself that my taste in music is better than everybody else's, act like a terrible snob when I find out that someone enjoys something that I consider unworthy, and more or less live in a perpetual state of fury that the whole world does not understand the music that I love. When I first read <em>High Fidelity</em> by Nick Hornby, I got tremendously excited, because I recognised so much of myself in those characters, who lived and breathed music with an all-consuming passion that far outstripped their ability to sustain functional relationships, even interractions, with other human beings. "That's me," I thought to myself,"I mean, with a much inferior taste in music though, obviously."<br /><br />I have a tremendously unhealthy relationship with music. One of the first questions I have to get out of the way, before I can objectively judge whether I'm attracted to a woman or not, is "what do you think of Radiohead?". A negative response to that question is a bigger turn-off than syphillis, in my eyes. Start talking about the programming on Kid A, though, and I'll be making wedding plans within the hour. I swoon at <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delia_Derbyshire">girls</a> who know their way around a microkorg or a protools unit. I know that this is disturbing. I can't help it. It's the way my mind is wired. I struggle to even have a proper conversation with someone until I've established that we at least like a couple of the same albums.<br /><br />I don't really know where this obsession comes from. Both my parents have a fairly uninspiring attitude to music; they like some of it, they don't like most of it. My Dad will often say things like "you can't have a good song unless it's got a catchy tune", and other like statements which make me cringe with despair.<br /><br />I first picked up the guitar when I was about thirteen. Now I play whenever I have a spare moment. Sometimes I write songs. Sometimes I play in a band. But I've always thought of myself first and foremost as a music fan above a musician. It's a troubling dialectic between words and music that goes on in my head. No matter how much of a feel I have for good writing, I can't shake the voice that says: <em>Music is real. Rhythm and melody, they exist only as themselves. Art and literature are only refractions, shadows cast by music on the cave wall of reflection.</em><br /><br />I've had an idea for a book that I've been toying with for a while, in which the lead characters' development is charted by a series of pieces of music criticism, the subject of each one hinting at the path his narrative will take. Some of the music writing that appears in this blog may be used for that project eventually, but for the time being it's just to satisfy that primal need, to share that music which stirs so much in me with others, to force them to understand.<br /><br />Maybe it would help if I tried to explain what it is that makes 'great' music for me. Not just 'good' music, there's altogether too much of that for me even to think of writing about. Most of the music I hear I can find something 'good' in, but that's beside the point. If music is just 'good' I don't really want to hear it. That's like saying food is 'edible' rather than 'delicious'. I know lots of 'good' albums which I can listen to every so often. Everyone just wants a <a href="http://bestwellnessconsultant.com/2008/09/23/1996-mcdonalds-hamburger-karen-hanrahan-best-of-mother-earth.aspx">Big Mac</a> from time to time. But you couldn't really call it the <em>point</em> of eating.<br /><br />Great music illicits a gut response. It is hardwired directly to your involuntary muscles, provocative and tantalising. What I said earlier, about being a music fan rather than a musician? I guess that's because any time I hear a piece of music that really grabs me by the throat and moves me, it's because I'm thinking <em>wow, I could never have made that</em>. I need music to do things that I don't expect. I hate that old phrase "a tune that feels like you've heard it a million times before". What does that prove? Why would I want to listen to that, if I know where it's going? I'm not saying songs like this aren't good. I'm saying that they aren't great.<br /><br />Intrinsically connected to this need is the need for detail, craft, layer upon layer of painstaking production. If I'm listening to an album for the hundredth time, I still want to hear something new, every time. I can't stand bands that try to record their albums 'as live'. Of course there's an energy and a joy to live performance, of course I love to watch music being played skilfully right in front of me, surrounded by like-minded fans, but you're not playing live. You're recording an <em>album</em> for fuck's sake. A piece of art, a legacy. If you don't make every conceivable effort to make each individual note or beat a vital and valuable part of the enterprise as a whole, contributing to this vast mosaic of an experience, well then, you don't deserve to be making music.<br /><br />So to my mind, those are the two most important principles of great music. There are plenty of other principles which are vastly important, if not essential, of course. Valuable, intelligent lyrics that contribute to the piece, rather than vapid, shallow words. There is obviously something to be said for musicianship, the ability to do with an instrument what others can't. But above and beyond all other considerations, it is the adherence to and the pursuit of the mood, the atmosphere, the form. And the form of great music must only be the album, a complete and self-sustaining body of work.<br /><br />So, starting next week, I'm going to aim to do a weekly critique of each of my favourite albums, trying to explain just why I love them so damn much. This is going to be one of the few regular bits of writing you're going to get from me that will be entirely positive; in fact it will all but shimmer with love and passion and good vibes. That said, I must warn you now, I'm going to lead off with one of the darkest, most confrontational and abrasive albums of all time (but also, in my opinion, one of the greatest ever to be recorded), the most indelible lyrical masterpiece to spill from the pen of the beautiful yet tortured soul of Richard James Edwards, Manic Street Preachers' <em>The Holy Bible</em>. See you next week.Sephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01223134482207910582noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1048588910107290769.post-28054298820880077932008-10-02T15:21:00.000-07:002008-10-02T15:44:00.710-07:00The Philosophy of Kids TVThe trouble with life as a student is that, after a while, you get into the habit of over-analysis. All the hours spent discussing the minutiae of novels, ideologies, philosophies, surrounded night and day by people who are too clever by half, you get into a state of mental delirium, where you can see Jungian commentary in the Marks and Spencer adverts, Nietszche in <em>Neighbours</em>, kabuki in <em>Coronation Street</em>. Or, as I found, the complex ethical and sociological structures at play in the world of children’s television.<br /><br />It all started, as these things invariably do, with a very late night. I’d been at a seminar earlier in the day, discussing the theatrical work of Samuel Beckett. If you’ve ever studied Beckett you’ll know that this pretty much means a discussion of every essay, philosophical, political or literary, that has ever been written. That night, or more accurately the following morning, during one of those meandering conversations which suddenly turns out to have been going on for several hours, I started to tell the others about <em>Act Without Words II</em>, a short mime composed by Beckett, thought of by some critics as a retelling of the Sisyphian myth.<br /><br />Sisyphus was a king of ancient Greece, ordered by the gods, for who knows what transgression (probably incest, this being ancient Greece), to roll a boulder uphill for all eternity. This concept of constant work without reward, nor accomplishment, excited Beckett’s famously cruel sense of humour. I opted to dumb down Sisyphian literature for my friends by describing it as “meaningless and repetitive tasks with no success. A bit like the<em> </em><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TFMAhzPyKU"><em>Chuckle Brothers</em></a>”. I probably shouldn’t have said that, for it opened up a whole grade-A can of worms.<br /><br />The endless trials of the unfortunately named Barry and Paul Chuckle (“Let’s not over-hype ourselves, Barry. We’re expecting chuckles, not guffaws”) have always fascinated me. The joyful abandon with which they laid into the week’s task, regardless of aptitude or training, should, I feel, be a lesson for us all. Paul would be occasionally cynical, but never world weary, whilst Barry was the happy go lucky dreamer of the pair. Bricklaying, window washing, plumbing, whatever - they would set about it with the minimum degree of fuss and the optimum of bad luck. And ‘no slacking’. The idea that there was more to the duo’s adventures than mislaid pots of paint and quaintly unintimidating brushes with the law delighted us. And so we decided to delve deeper, and discover more of what lay below the surface of the 3-5pm slot of the British weekday.<br /><br />Of course the programme that immediately leapt to mind like a well-oiled cougar was that stalwart of mid-90s CITV, <em>Funhouse</em>. Armed with a combined twenty-plus years of higher education, we now saw it for what it obviously was; an indictment of organised religion. It all made sense. The arbitrary tasks assigned by a beatific figurehead (<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Cd2TLIbhMg">Pat Sharp</a>, the latter day Jesus Christ, complete with flowing locks and disciples in the form of the ever-present twins). And the reward at the end, eternal peace achieved only through following the strict dogmatic doctrine of the church of funhouse. Sharp saw what he was doing; illustrating the horror of the unruly scramble, the holy war, to finish atop the hierarchy of mayhem.<br /><br />Moving on, we decoded another of ITV’s trademark chaotic gameshows – <em>Finders Keepers</em>, surely emblematic of the search for meaning in everyday life. For whilst we are searching we do not know what it is that we search for, we can only rationalise our discoveries with the benefit of hindsight. We envisaged a bleak bonus round; guest presenter Albert Camus laughing laconically whilst offering a playstation two to the frantically searching sprogs if they could but find their soul within the house. They always fail.<br /><br />And who could forget <em>The Queen’s Nose</em>, a paean to the wish fulfilment culture of commodity fetishism, the fifty pence piece representing the false consciousness created by global capitalism, our heroine subservient, a tool of the economy. Let us not forget that it was only through the selfless invocation of (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Mabbutt">Gary Mabbutt</a> (the working class man; the proletariat) that she could free herself of the oppression of the 50p and all that it symbolised.<br /><br />Now we were on a roll. <em>Bernard’s Watch</em> - a Derridean meditation on the inherent subjectivity of time - came next, followed swiftly by <em>Blue Peter</em>, which obviously taught us the lesson of import substitution. Why buy a Tracy Island, when it is within one’s capabilities, with a little sticky back plastic and some egg cartons, to manufacture one’s own, with its own individual flaws and idiosyncrasies? In these financially insecure times, such a message can only be a boon to the sound development of young minds.<br /><br />But it was getting late, and we were getting tired, our ideas more fractured and disjointed. It was when we reached the conclusion that <em>Get Your Own Back</em> was “an attempt to reconcile the tyranny of ontology through the medium of Dave Benson Phillips and his redemptive gunge” that it was deemed to be best for all concerned if we got some sleep. It was a fractured repast that night, my dreams haunted by visions of Neil Buchanan teaching <a href="http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/markrothko/default.shtm">Rothko</a> the art of papier mache. Three parts water, one part PVA. So it is, was, and ever shall be.Sephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01223134482207910582noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1048588910107290769.post-35255475554833549652008-10-01T10:56:00.000-07:002008-10-01T11:09:28.594-07:00TattooThe first letter appeared as a shadow brought to life by the steam from my apparatus, jolting me from my solitary reveries. It hung, spectral, somehow inside the wall. At first I did not see it for what it was; it was not until I stood back to admire my first endeavours that I saw it, perhaps half a foot across, an ‘o’ hanging behind the delicate surface of my bedroom wall. I paused, stood back and stared at it for some time, the ‘o’, just waiting there, and staring back at me.<br /><br />At this point I did not know that it was an ‘o’, of course. It may have been an eye, a centre, the bullseye of a target, perhaps, but it was inevitable that now I had begun to uncover it I must continue. What was I to do, ignore it? That ‘o’ would henceforth always be there, even if were to paint over it, cover it with some handy bookshelf or my grandfather clock, the knowledge of its presence would haunt me. No, the task was begun; it must be finished.<br /><br />The patch that I had steamed around the ‘o’ was perspiring now, beads of sweat draining through the pores in that delicate pattern. I applied the scraper forensically, searching for a rift into which it might burrow. The top layer came away easily, strips coiling down to the floorboard to form narrow seashells there. Already I could see the shapes of more letters pushing through, where the surrounding, dry paper had come away. But there were further layers beneath, for under the delicate surface of my wallpaper lay another surface, the handiwork of a previous occupant. As it emerged I began to see that it was made up of a pigment of yellow, the yellow of canaries and corn, delicate to the touch. This layer was so thin that I might have scratched through it with a fingernail.<br /><br />I stood back again. The letters that queued up, either side of the ‘o’ (whose vague form was hardly any clearer to the eye now than it had been minutes earlier) were an ‘n’ and a ‘t’.<br /><br />‘not’.<br /><br />Not what?<br /><br />Not an invitation to continue my investigation, certainly, but the same problem as before; only worse now, much worse. I struggled to imagine what ‘not’ might mean, and no permutation readily sprang to mind that eased my troubled thoughts. But I could not stop here, the legend only half-read, for I would forever wonder what else lay beneath that surface. Moving closer I set the scraper to work once more.<br /><br />It made short work of the mysterious pigment, which crumbled away in seconds. The next layer was much darker, and momentarily I thought I had found the resting place of my hidden message, but on further inspection it turned out merely to be yet another layer of paper, this time a drab grey pattern of interlocking forms. The words (and there were now more than one, sliding into view above and below the ‘not’) still continued to tease me from behind this new frontier. The letters were a little brighter now than they had been when I had first approached the wall, and yet somehow no clearer.<br /><br />I must confess that by this point I was becoming somewhat irritated. Digging the scraper into the wall, scalpel-like, I resolved to test how deep the layers of paper ran. To my surprise, it sank in to a depth of almost an inch. There must have been well over fifty layers there. To think, with every generation that has lived under this roof, my little room has shrunk smaller and smaller, millimetre by millimetre, one paper’s thickness at a time.<br /><br />I considered, for a brief moment, the possibility of tearing down the whole lot at once, cutting deep grooves inward and sliding my scalpel underneath, but the idea was obviously a poor one. Who knew what two layers my message lay between? I could not risk tearing the walls down too hastily, what if the message was lost before I could read it? I readied the scraper, and started on the interlocking patterns of the third layer.<br /><br />This fell away in individual pieces, singular atoms, but the uncovering was hard graft. Time and again I worked the knife in, releasing the cells so gradually and painstakingly that I thought my task would never cease. There was yet another tissue beneath, fracturing and splitting as rapidly as I could look at it, but it was necessary first to remove all of that third layer, piece by piece, atom by atom.<br /><br />As I worked away it came to my attention that the mysterious yellow pigment that I had thought to be a layer of paper, was in fact oozing through the gaps in the interlocking pattern behind. It seemed to be emanating from layer four, but I could not understand how, or why. Perhaps it was the heat of the steam, bringing the walls to life. They seemed to breathe, sweating yellow droplets onto the surface where they formed unpleasant stains that I wiped with the back of my hand…<br /><br />…As I collapsed to the floor, exhausted, as much of the fourth wall uncovered as I could possibly hope to uncover, I realised that almost two hours had passed. Two hours, and the shaking of my muscles, worn pale from lack of blood, was the only testament to my efforts. Still the words remained virtually the same as they had been, and worse, the corners of the uncovered patch seemed to be coming down to fill the space that I had already cleared. I needed to rest, and yet I could not, for fear that if I slowed I should have to tackle more of that tough third layer than I already had suffered through. The next surface seemed as though it would be less difficult. It splintered and fractured, dividing again and again into smaller iterations. I felt that, much like the mysterious pigment, a quick attack would make short work of it.<br /><br />I braced myself, steadied my shaking limbs, and went at it again with the scraper. As I had suspected (and hoped), this new topsoil flew off the wall in an instant, surrounding me with clouds of yellow-hued dust. Was I inside the wall? It covered me, choking me, coating my skin and clinging to my hair. There seemed to me more than could possibly have come down off the wall. It was multiplying, filling every available pore. And as it began to settle, more appeared to spring up before me. I made another frenzied assault, this time swinging my arms to better clear the air as I worked. My arms burned with electricity from within, and my fingers began to feel numb. I kept the pace up as long as I could, until my head swam and the room span before me, choking down yet more dust, striving to breathe. I am spent; I fall heavily to the ground and crawl myself away.<br /><br />The subject of my autopsy stands proudly before me, the letters (still!) indistinct, and yet blazing so brightly that I imagine I could not even make them vanish by shutting my eyes. Of course, there is no question of doing such a thing. What would be the point? The words would continue to exist, for I have read them now. I read them once again, as if I don’t already know what they say.<br /><br />‘Tomorrow will not happen’.<br /><br />The words burrow through me to my core, stripping away layers of skin and muscle. They haunt me, are ingrained in me, etched upon my consciousness as deeply as they are engraved in the mortar opposite. I do not know where they came from, cannot know who made them, and yet I know them unmistakeably to be true. Tomorrow will not happen. When it is said that ‘it is written’, it is written here.<br /><br />Already it seems to me that the incision I have made into the various tissues of paper is closing up, covering the words once more. Somehow I know that, try as I might to destroy more of the facade, there will always be this inexorable march of the layers across the wall, covering my efforts once again, hiding the words from view. That is no matter now; they are there, they will always be there, today will not.Sephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01223134482207910582noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1048588910107290769.post-68054078811724601292008-09-30T11:30:00.000-07:002008-10-01T11:10:33.522-07:00In Heaven (or Hell): An Occasional Cartoon SeriesI'm going to try and post one of these every week. I always wonder what it might be like in the afterlife, with all those dead celebrities hobnobbing. <strong>"Dead Celebrities: Now Up To 90% More Interesting Than Live Ones!"</strong> I didn't want to make any character judgements though, so I'm never going to say whether I think they're in heaven or hell. If you want, you can say purgatory. That might require slightly more knowledge of Catholic dogma than I have time for, though.* I think people get too hung up on trying to guess what the afterlife is like. As far as I'm concerned, Heaven is a nightclub, and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell,_Norway">Hell</a> is a place in Norway.<br /><br /><strong>#1: Freud meets Oedipus</strong><br /><br />(click for bigness and legibility)<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWF-nJS0I-WAqrF-CadiZaX9916AjSaM0HjV7a2n1oKiYxqEHYxfNfNraSuNbZJjIPtlJQUZ64sZqBYy7l8sXt8dRN4VcsdXoH-D3tWkpf7rr2GljwsM47cMpg_SEhJwWSVVvKu7irh84/s1600-h/Freud+vs.+Oedipus.bmp"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWF-nJS0I-WAqrF-CadiZaX9916AjSaM0HjV7a2n1oKiYxqEHYxfNfNraSuNbZJjIPtlJQUZ64sZqBYy7l8sXt8dRN4VcsdXoH-D3tWkpf7rr2GljwsM47cMpg_SEhJwWSVVvKu7irh84/s400/Freud+vs.+Oedipus.bmp" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5251886460782624162" /></a><br /><br />*Not really true, I actually find Catholic dogma pretty interesting, even if <strong>my</strong> karma does run over <strong>your</strong> dogma.Sephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01223134482207910582noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1048588910107290769.post-36832961846706096832008-09-29T14:12:00.000-07:002008-10-01T11:11:04.173-07:00Welcome SpeechSo it has come to this. A blog. Everywhere I look, blogs. Want a job? A <em>creative </em>job? Got a blog? No? Well, get one, dumbass. I was in the pub the other night with an old school friend. She had a blog. See? Everywhere, from all sides, blogs, blogs, blogs. You must get one, she said. You want to be a writer. How on earth are you going to be a writer without a blog? She makes a good point. Everybloodybody has got one. You might just as well try and be a writer without feelings of existential angst and espresso. You might manage it, but you wouldn't be a real <em>artiste</em>. (You can go and read <a href="http://www.babygotbrit.blogspot.com">her blog</a> as well, if you like. She's religious and stuff, but don't hold that against her).<br /><br />I realise that with this opening post I'm breaking the cardinal rule of good writing, and blogging about blogging itself. If this irritates you, heed my warning now: this trend may continue. I'm a tremendously self-indulgent writer, after all. But self-indulgence is what you need to blog, surely, isn't it? It's just a big narcissistic <em>look-at-me</em>, after all, right? I'm comfortable with that. Besides, that's what all writing is. Your main character is always you, the author, or a refraction of you, anyhow. Let's just step through that barrier while we're here. This is about me. My blog, my rules. It's my blog and I'll cry if I want to. And other assorted hackneyed phrases with the pivotal noun replaced by 'blog'.<br /><br />My main motivation in doing this, aside from my desperate craving for attention, is the sudden realisation that, unless you get web-savvy, no-one's gonna see your stuff. I hate whoring myself out as much as the next man, but prostitution of your art is the only way to get by nowadays, what with all the web two-point-ohs and twitterings, facespacing mybooks and user generated content, consumer-customising, fanfic blogspotting blueberry mobile-marketing, <em>Wired </em>magazine reading wannabe Douglas Coupland technophilia going on. For in these plagued streets of pity, you can buy anything, and for $200, anyone can conceive a God on video.<br /><br />A second warning: when I write, I tend to adopt a pissed-off tone most of the time. I can't help this, it's because I'm usually pissed off most of the time. Please accept my apologies in advance. "I don't mean to sound uncaring, but I am, so that's just how it comes out." But I'll try not to make it all that this blog is about in future. Aside from journal articles and general 'stuff-and-things' pieces like this one, I'll try to do the odd bit of music and film criticism, just generally about things that interest me. So, uh, that'll be articles about 'difficult' music that I'll look down on you for not appreciating, then. I'll stick up some short stories and chunks of creative writing. I might post the odd wry cartoon or suchlike. A link to <a href="http://www.thechap.net/">something that amuses me</a>, here or there. Mainly though, it'll be about the philosophising and ranting. Lots of ranting. Boy, can I rant. Like that bit earlier. I've got a facebook. I think <em>Wired</em> is an excellent publication. I actually really like Douglas Coupland. See? I'm so damn gen-x that I even pick holes in the things I enjoy. God, I hate me.<br /><br />Ooh, this is going to be <em>fun</em>.Sephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01223134482207910582noreply@blogger.com1