TH.G.ULAR

Prisencolinensinainciusol

2009-12-18T12:57:00.005Z

See more funny videos and Music Videos at Today's Big Thing.

Apparently this is a song called Prisencolinensinainciusol, written by Adriano Celentano in 1972. I am not sure about the details, but am very certain it is awesome.

It's meant to be a breakdown of which English syllables and sounds are identified by foreign ears. Probably. So the "words" are all gibberish, but somehow compelling anyway.

Welcome to Big School

2009-11-13T08:40:00.032Z

Maybe it's just Iceland's position on a fault line, but I have dug Björk for occupying a peculiar territory on the brink of the mainstream as much as for her music. Thanks to her my adopted uni-town hero Chris Corsano has been on Letterman, Matmos have met Metallica, Konono No1 have been heard on MTV, and she also gets to open the Olympics and remain popular with RZA and Mr Butler. Creating that territory where refugee elements from disparate sources can make a new life being bawled over has allowed her to make some rare jams indeed.

Treatment of sources is tricky, with social concerns to navigate as well as engaging with the sound. I remember uber critic Scott Seward digging the Konono No1 record's release, but gently pining for the era when ppl like Talking Heads would hear African music and try and rip it off rather than release it. The point wasn't that it was anything less than necessary that credit and money is properly given, but that curating can be dull, and canny rehousing of a sound is a more satisfying method of integration. Through her collaborating, Björk has done a pretty great job of both putting the spotlight on artists and incorporating them, and turning it into an event. Her £s and peculiarly visible position allow her to rotate her collaborators on stage as she chooses; laying into her for trend-hopping plays down what a rare talent she has for it, what a sympathetic and imaginative band leader she makes.

So you can see why I'm pleased to see after their collaboration with that good lady earlier in the year, Dirty Projectors have been imported by Solange Knowles. Dave Longstreth's long made use of RnB moves in his singing, the band cited big sister Beyonce as a favourite. and they pulled off a languid, robed dance routine on top of a mountain for their video for Stillness Is The Move. So it makes a kind of sense for Solange to cover it, but it's still quite a significant step up for the Dirty Projectors. She's somehow got in trouble with Universal Records for this despite the fact it's not being released, and as she's specifically asked for it to be spread around, enjoy with a clean conscience: ["Solange - Stillness Is The Move"].

Thing is, performer's aside, this is less of a synthesis and less novel than the original. It's significant that Solange doesn't really have to stretch to convincingly repatriate Amber Coffman's vocal part as pure RnB. Longstreth's glassy alarm trill is replaced with slowed samples from Erykah Badu's Bag Lady, itself sampled from Dre's XXPlosive, the effect cool enough but kind of unremarkable. Which is, yknow, considering what this is, remarkable. It might be unreleased, but Solange's gesture is promising and will keep me going, but damn I would love to see Solange incorporate Longstreth riffing away on a hillside, silently rotating like a wizard. In fact if you guys could make me an animated gif of that, ideally on a tshirt, that'd be fine.

BLING

2009-11-23T02:40:00.001Z

BLING BLING BLING BLING BLING BLING BLING

Last night

2009-11-23T19:15:00.002Z

I had a dream I had somehow travelled back in time to the Victorian era. I was able to do this more or less at will, but I was definitely not supposed to at all. I was sat down talking to someone, preparing to go home, when I realized they were Girl Talk and they'd travelled back in time and released all their music incredibly early. The public loved it, even though there was no way to produce, or, I suppose, listen to the stuff Girl Talk was making.

Magical Animals&Meaning In Real-Time

2009-05-13T22:10:00.009+01:00

It's painful being clueless&confused. And one thing that can bring on cluelessness is NOISE. Maybe its the sound of confusion. Thinking about it can give you a feeling worse than 36 hrs of ear-ringing, which is exactly what I got from Black Dice (gotta be louder than yr support), especially if you think about its relationship w/ROCK. You might hear a demon tell you all noise has one true face, one meaning, one effect but you don't need to be arguing w/a purist to notice its differing pedigree&lineage. You can make noise yr rotting end or the sound of yr insemination (yum!), its all on YOU, and maybe was all about YOU from the start anyway, which is obv.the most painful of all. You could put it to song as "you look to find direction but all you see is yr reflection"&in fact someone DID,&they provided a good bit of theatre to start the night out. We were in a big old hall w/very sweet bar staff. Lianne had got in on the guestlist and had inspired me to take notes. Our opening act started hid behind the monitors giving nothing away but carefully propping up a faded cream baseball cap emblazoned thus:

EAGLES
WORLD TOUR 1994

As a background accompaniment to this focal point we get some shifty looping clicks which form the basis of a gradual layering up to a thin brassy sheen, a sort of formless anthemic nostalgia, which framed the EAGLES hat pretty well. The nostalgia breaks into a bright&slightly frightening haircut buzz which gets lost in the Bill&Ben/bath-fart gloops that have been bread&butter to a generation of noise bros, and some birdsong trapped in chewing gum.

Wide pan-out and bringing the sunset indoors w/bassy rumbles&cosmic ice cream van tones to invoke the same very excellent Caribbean scene heard at the end of Panda Bear's Carrots. Treating us to the grand finale now, the EAGLES cap surfaces w/battered electric guitar and solos over the waves into eternity, in a gesture of Rock Generosity to the audience, leaving us w/a warm glow of fretwork vapour-trails of the past. This is the end of rock though over-exposure, meaning impossible because all moves have been made so many times, filled up so much space, that they cease to be discernible. This thought cemented w/an epilogue where our lonely hero strums out a washed-out ballad for the end of (rock) time, singing "In a house full of meers/it's not easy to find yr way" and the prev mentioned direction/reflection musing. & the name of this act?: DUCKTAILS

W/no noise but treating rock as a live option, were Experimental Dental School, who were polite enough to thank us after every song&are probably devoid of vices. They are a lean DIY duo -rock sustainable as cottage industry- w/chops and a bit of mentoring from Deerhoof. All small scale enough that me not liking them doesn't seem worthy but of more import: their guitarist Jesse Hall's short trousers&general buffness hint towards possible transformation into Zell from Final Fantasy VIII(&they've just released their album for free).

I decided to spend my t-shirt money on more beer. Now able to pronounce Zywiec, Neil Campbell from Astral Social Club stepped us his game for this kinda immense London audience w/assistance from Tirath Singh Nirmala (whose beard was blamed by some serious guy behind me on the first of three buses home for spoiling his enjoyment of the set - ...) and other hairy British bohos, including a makeshift choir. My feet planted, Campbell does everything possible to assist me in having the best pint of my life, saturating everything with harmony to turn it into one moment of endless immediacy. I'm waiting for the heartbeat bass drum to enter and underpin and sure enough, when it comes in you can feel a wave of people getting on board all at once. A mysterious wave and the choir of cider-drinking longhairs appears to goof and churn out drones. Campbell's wailing, back-arched and completely at home in the world. "It never was nor will be since it is now" they used to say as solace for minds stuck in bodies w/an aptitude for suffering, now Astral Social Club show everyone the same trick.

Lvl 100 Beastmasters Black Dice navigate audience-agony by not-really-giving-a-shit, tonight manifested in turning out the lights and STARTING just like that. It is night time now&I'm light on my feet, the stage filling up w/foliage, flares belched up into the sky, a bandana'd&bikini'd silhouette giving a Queenly salutation, Mizaru w/sideways belly move and powerstaff artfully drummed for emphasis, Kikazaru behind curtain of hair & Iwazaru staring out like a shepherd w/statue's eyes.

For ease of control magical animals are introduced so that our livers and spleens will be overtaken with herd instinct and get to it. But they're easy on us, gently eliciting conversation between creatures and also deploying their recent trick of animal song. Only once do they bring out the cane, w/the bass part from Kokomo, and jesus - 200+ haircuts&pelvises rolling in time! This is ridiculous. I've finished another pint without noticing. I take a cruise to&from the toilet through a menagerie of livers and spleens and toes. Of course that arsehole on the bus home prefers listening to the records. Of course he does.

Here's an interview between Black Dice&Genesis P-Orridge in self-titled magazine w/recording through skulls and some first class anecdotes

x sweet x.

2009-07-12T02:37:00.004+01:00

Reading all my Meltzer over the last couple of months and looking at his formative listening experiences compared to my own, one thing I felt was a real lack of Japan. Now that isn't a cue for dwelling or musing on the relationship between Japan and some X, cos it's always been part of my X and that's my point, it's as unfamiliar and weird as California. But I'm going to share something I'd really like to see about someone I'm way off having my fill of:

And here he is redeeming my weekend with his undefeatable coat move and a champion guitar solo:

Away w/yr other, that's fucking homely.

Highlights from the Comments Appended to a YouTube Video Entitled "Exogenesis Symphony Pt 1: Overture by Muse"

2009-11-12T15:16:00.003Z

this song gives the feeling of a black planet sized ship hovering next to a destroyed planet and on the other side theres a huge sun (GoldenEagle911)

Everytime I hear this song, I want to explode into a happy nothingness. (dewey4evur)

I think this is one of the most emotional, amazing, hard-to-believe-that-a-human-w rote-them songs Matt has written....I thank God for his life.... (Mintbubblegum95)

day-to-day troubles burns away to this song (doopydoop123)

this sounds like a love scene taking place in the sky..or heavens...in the roman era....very sensual (yerm669)

THE BEST (jasmn09)

Dr Ciaran and the Space Sickness

2009-11-12T01:33:00.009Z

I went to see my doctor. Dr Ciaran.

He is a bad doctor. Whatever is wrong with me, even if it's nothing, he prescribes Muse videos.

I hear it's the same for all his patients.

Watching them, I got a weird sense of deja vu. I realised it wasn't that they sounded like Queen or ELP, it was something more profound than just the style; there was some deep spiritual affinity I couldn't place.

Muse were trying to realise a vision, and with every video I watched, I got closer to working out what it was. I felt that I was recognising some common experience or history with Muse, and I wondered if this was what Dr Ciaran had foreseen, if there was some suppressed memory hidden in the music he wanted me to discover.

Then one evening as I watched Muse's symphony, Exogenesis, it clicked:

Well done, Dr Ciaran, well done.

Wilco (the gig)

2009-11-05T01:10:00.003Z

I went to see Wilco in Leeds and they were so good I may never need to see another band again. I’ve been waiting so long for this I’m not even sure I was there.

Three songs in and Jeff Tweedy throws someone out for filming the gig.
This is the wrong foot we have got off on.

“I’m sorry you had to see my scary face,” he tells us later.

Someone shouts, “We love you Jeff!”

“Oh, good!” He replies. “We love you too! We wrote a song about it. We played it already. We played it first.”

They opened with Wilco (the song) as we all knew they would.

I’m very sweaty. We had to run for the train. I’m there with Chris and he spilled coffee down his shirt an hour before our originally intended train. So he went to a dry cleaner then bought a new shirt.

In Leeds we are looking for food. We see a Nando’s.

“We’d have to sit in…but shit, for Nando’s it’s worth it, we have time,” I convince him, or I would have if not for the prices. We settle on Subway.

“What the fuck are you doing?” I ask when he sits down.

“Aren’t we eating in?”

“Are you fucking kidding? You think we have any fucking time at all?”

“But 10 minutes ago,” he begins.

“That. Was. Nando’s!” I tell him.

“So in America, when we play this song, everyone sings along and we all take a break,” Jeff Tweedy is telling us. He's talking about Jesus, etc

“I don’t expect it to happen here, but you want to sing along, feel free. If I think you’re doing a good job I’ll just step away from the mic, like this.”

It’s more a sway.

“This is a soft sell; we’re not a hard sell rock band. You don’t have to sing along!”

Almost immediately he’s stepped away from the mic.

He seems more into the gig now, swinging his mic and throwing it so high it looks un-catch able, yet he does.

The first encore starts with Poor Places, the psychedelic ending building and tearing ahead taking us to some immense and unrecognisable froth of distortion.

When I feel as lost as I ever have, I recognize the simple drum beat from Spiders and Wilco are concentrating so hard on making this music.

Everyone should be able to go and see Wilco whenever they need.

Jeff gets us to clap; he wants our arms as high in the air as possible. But my armpits stink from the sweating.

In the second encore, during Impossible Germany, the band members gravitate towards each other. Jeff and his second guitarist, Pat Sansone, I believe, face each other and John Stirratt drifts over to Glenn Kotche whilst Nels Cline, who never speaks, plays a solo that might have been going on forever. His face is constant motion. Only Mikael Jorgensen doesn’t move, since he’s at the piano.

All gig I’ve been looking over at this one sound guy, who wears the beard of a metal band. I can see him enjoying it, maybe taking some ideas, but he never nods his head along with the rest of us.

“Ok,” says Jeff, “do you want to hear something from A.M or Summerteeth?”

We cheer for Summerteeth.

“Man,” he asks, “why does everyone pick on A.M?”

Soon they’re playing Can’t Stand It, the song I wanted.

Chris and I stay with Eleanor. Inside her house I can see my breath. I watch Beetlejuice and spend time, instead of sleeping, just going in circles of I can’t be a writer, I can’t be an illustrator, I can’t grow old.

Jeff Tweedy screams like no one I’ve ever heard. It is exactly what I needed.

Ted Leo, optimist

2009-10-26T13:56:00.002Z

Ted Leo seems very smart. His music, the actual music, feels very earnest and whilst his lyrics can be self conscious, sometimes angry or bitter, the earnestness remains. Ultimately he seems very knowing, and his songs often feel hugely melancholy but optimistic. This is what I like about him and his songs.

putting the 'it' back in 'shit'

2009-10-21T23:04:00.002+01:00

It feels like all the cold in England is coming from this place, though really it’s just a road with some ferns.

I’m on Snake Pass with Gaz and Dave, driving to Sheffield to see Themselves play.

Gaz sings The Bad Touch by the Bloodhound gang like “making love to one another…like animals…do on TV.”

Dave keeps shouting not to look at the Ipod display while he tries to find some Themselves, so my passengers can hear some before the gig.
He’s already smoked half a spliff and he’s my driving guide for this journey; I haven’t even taken my theory test.

As we reach Snake Pass he tells me he doesn’t have his driving license with him. If we get pulled over I will never drive again. If I don’t make any one of these corners we will never do anything again. I make a joke about having the bends. No one else finds it funny either. The road feels like an animal trying to throw me off its back. I force myself round the bends at 50. I tell the others it’s ok, I checked the road on Google Earth.

Pete calls me before.
“I gather you’re planning to drive to Sheffield tonight?”
I tell him yeah.
“In what world is that a good idea? You’ve got nothing that proves you can drive and Dave last week drove his car home drunk and on loads of pills. And he’s going to be telling you what’s right and wrong.”
Dave can hardly believe this is legal, but it is if we stay off the motorway.

We make Sheffield and actually I hadn’t accounted for this. Snake Pass is a direct connection between Manchester and Sheffield. As soon as we have directional options I’m lost, technically.

The people downtown aren’t real. The black outside the car is replaced with light and hundreds of people. We pass Spartans. We see the venue, Bungalows and Bears. Seconds later we see Anoush for the first time in maybe a year. I shout him. Gaz starts singing all the single ladies! All the single ladies!

Dave joins in and whilst we’re waiting behind someone in a queue to leave a car park Gaz undoes his seatbelt and, a blur, lunges forward to jab the horn, laughing maniacally.

Anoush has a kind of smart innocence which can be too much but is also what I love about him. I’m thinking about the drive home. I might as well be about to slay my first dragon. Anoush is amazed I took snake pass. Tonight feels worthwhile.

At the gig we meet Frankie and her friends. That drive has made me the closest I will get to being a king and I can’t stop staring at Frankie’s friend, a pretty girl with this low cut top whose name I never learn but who has awakened some medieval lust I try to ignore, not certain if she’s staring back at me or my staring.

The support act is The Ruby Kid, a Sheffield rapper. He usually performs with a band but tonight just plays to instrumental mp3s from his laptop. His opening song is vocals only.

He name drops James Joyce and Jean Paul Sartre and I feel like if he was just a writer he wouldn’t be anything new, but since he’s rapping it makes all the difference, though I don’t think it should. But we might get on ok if we were drinking together, and he seems like a drinker.

The phrase each more lovely than the last was invented for girls who go to Themselves gigs.

“Hey shut the fuck up back there,” Doseone tells the people at the back.
“No, no, it’s a bar, dude, it’s a bar,” Jel tells him.
“I don’t care if it’s Mao Tse Tung and his closest advisors birthing communism.”

This was worth the drive. Doseone’s rapping has a force it doesn’t on record. I get the same feeling watching him freestyle as I do watching Bruce Lee fight.

About Jel Dave says, I had an MPC and I was fucking shit; this guy is FUCKING AMAZING. Dave’s hair is wet where he finished the spliff.
“Roland!” he says, “I’m drunk! But I sincerely love you!”
I love you too man, I tell him.

“I’m getting bored,” Gaz tells me. Talking at gigs is like standing in front of paintings.
“I can’t understand what he says and they don’t do anything with the songs.”
Aren’t they doing something now? I ask, but he doesn’t hear.

It feels like sometimes Doseone is trying to create a texture with his voice. Sometimes the pleasure for me is listening, figuring out what he’s saying and what he might mean, as with any lyrics.

Doseone looks like he’s been shot, like he might cry at any second, rapping in the face of and pushing audience members.

“Hey Jel,” he asks, “Would you rather go to Heaven or Hell?”
“I’d like to go to the hot death place. I think it’d be more fun.”

I think Doseone is a kind of persona. He seems very against commercial hip hop, something he’s become a kind of inversion of. Adam Drucker, Doseone, has maintained a lot of control over his creative output – the way he designed the covers for Subtle’s albums and the fact Subtle perform in costume, for example. And he seems so fucking good at what he does.

He asks questions: Are you a good person? Does anyone here have a best friend?
Where else am I more anonymous than a crowd like this? I don’t speak to Doseone all evening because I would be trying to answer these questions. I’d be proving points.

His energy is at odds with the Sheffield crowd. Almost no one is moving. He seems almost ridiculous taunting people on the balcony, asking how much Disney money is in Ice Cube’s bank account.

“When Jel’s mum had to get her dick removed I was the first one at the hospital.”

The last time I saw Dose was the basement club where we put Subtle on, so Jel was there too, the Bierkeller in Manchester. There was a feeling of vague reverence, perhaps imagined, everyone there to see them, see Dose speak. It seems like he played up to that some, undermining it with jokes and observations.

Maybe this time, performing almost as wallpaper with this bubble of people between Themselves and the bar, he’s making fun of all that. It just doesn’t matter if you say yes, I am a good person obviously.

In a song towards the end of the set Jel stutters this drum solo, then just stops.
“Ok,” he says, “That’s that.”
Doseone has been trying so hard not to let this happen to the whole gig, which has had this sense of stopping and starting. This is a bar, first and foremost.

“We’re going to make you a promise,” Dose says.
“Themselves will let you age but we’ll never let you grow old. Seriously. I’ll kick you in your dick if you’re getting old around me.”

It’s raining for the journey home. There’s nothing beyond the windows of the car. My blood feels like lead or something. We’re taking our friend Frankie home with us.

How’s the experience so far, I ask as we reach snake pass.
A bit bumpy, Frankie says.
“Bumpy?” I ask, “BUMPY?” Her words are a challenge. Staying above 50 is not. Staying alive will be if these bends stay as sharp. I tell myself respect the road. Tonight will not be the night I leave a good looking corpse, or rather one hideously charred.

I had a dream the wheel of my car was a croissant, making steering almost impossible. Gaz and I are singing and it is almost too much when the road does the wet dog getting dry thing again.

The final bend reveals a spread of orange lights floating in the black.
That is our home.

We’re on a motorway and everyone is screaming except Navigating Gaz making me think he planned this. Dave is screaming YEEEESSSSS! like it’s the last thing he’ll ever do. We’re very illegal.

There’re no cops and I don’t get flashed when I go past a speed camera ten too fast.

We drop Frankie off and Dave tries to take photos of his dick with her camera after she leaves it in the car.

We drop Gaz off. Dave says,
“Man, I tried so hard to take photos of my penis on Frankie’s camera. I didn’t know what I was doing; then I realized I was filming. So she has three videos of my dick on there now, but it’s too dark to see anything.”

I don’t slow down for any of the junctions on my road.
You fucking dick, Dave says but he’s laughing.

I'm not saying that

2009-10-02T00:28:00.009+01:00

But I might do in future. Maybe I'll say: 'You can only Not-Be the Sort-Of-Band-That-Doesn't-Go-'Doo-Doo-Doo' if there's some contemporary/prior band out there to do all the Be-ing.' I'm pretty sure Derrida spent years making the same point. Which is interesting. But what I was saying was more that I'm pretty sure round Oh Sweet Nothin time Reed knew he wouldn't be able to pull the doo doo stuff off in a detached enough way to still get licensing money from Away We Go, so when Transformer time came round and he was feeling the McCartney lack and he came up with the idea of putting it in someone else's mouth, even better, COLOURED GIRL'S mouths, well, he probably felt so good he got up and did some tai chi celebrations and maybe he was on such a roll he penned a few lines of what would become THE RAVEN.

trumpet saxophone union

2009-02-10T17:43:00.002Z

I was listening to this song, Rock Fort Shock, that Bob sent me a while ago.

Here it is one youtube: (it's really fucking loud btw so watch out)

Anyway. The trumpet line works well with the saxophone in unison. The saxophone is way background on it all but you can hear it when the trumpet gets lower and it's subtle and good!
Also the trumpet that comes in at 1:35 is one of the best things ever.

On ritual and trumpets:

When was the last time you heard trumpets in a Fugazi song, or the Clash or Bob Dylan?
Ok so Bob Dylan has some trumpets and I think the Clash do too. But fucking Fugazi?
My point is those big campy rock fest quick fixes, like Live Aid are never going to work, but they're not unecessary gestures.

With a band like Fugazi, maybe you hear them and like their music and listen to their message and you decide to live your life a different way, to walk off the high street and find something new. I'm oversimplifying, but you get the idea. I know this is going off topic and I've planned it out - it never gets back on topic, but bear with me.
Gigs, in their way, a kind of ritualistic. They're a big public gathering of people who have something in common. You don't go to a Fugazi gig, though, to hear a political message. You go to fucking rock. But the message is there; they're trying to reach out to you on a personal level.
The alternative, I suppose, music with no real meaning, is stuff like dance music or the fucking Killers or Razorlight or some shit, although I haven't listened to those bands. Maybe they're fucking prophets. But I think that kind of music that is more about the gathering than the personal.
People like doing stuff together. Does any of this make any sense? It's just a rant I guess.

so you're saying

2009-09-30T11:55:00.001+01:00

that it's actually the presence of the Beatles that enabled "Oh! Sweet nothin'" to be so good?

ON THE CONTRARY

2009-09-27T15:33:00.002+01:00

The only reason Lou Reed held off on the affirmative jabber was because it was being done so well by the likes of McCartney et al but as soon as he felt the void he was all about doo do-do do-do do-do-do doooooo even if he had to get "the coloured girls" to help out.

Why the Velvet Underground are better than The Beatles

2009-09-23T00:59:00.002+01:00

Because at the end of "Oh! Sweet Nothin'" by the Velvet Underground, Paul McCartney isn't going "doo doo ba doo ba doo doo dooooo" which he definitely would be if it were a Beatles song.

Mother fucker!

2009-09-19T23:06:00.005+01:00

Mother fucker!

The turkey

2009-09-11T00:31:00.002+01:00

J.B, in Kansas, is asking me what Weezer I have which is the Blue album. Oh, and the Green one, but I don’t really like that. It feels like I’m done with that band, I tell him.

“But you don’t have their best album,” which he tells me is Pinkerton.

Across the Sea comes from this album. Melanie, my friend in Kansas, sent me this song, years ago. I think I took the same thing from this song she did.

I’m home, but that doesn’t feel like the right word. I’ve been to all the places I talked about in America. I’ve started a job where I have to sign my name a hundred times every day. You have a weekend and the first time you sign your name when you’re back you forget how long you’ve been away, what day it is, how long you have left on your shift. What doesn’t help is working in a massive sports hall with no windows.

Each day I start my shift with one of J.B’s thousand plus songs he gave me in my head.

Most days it is a song from Pinkerton. This is an album, I think, about a guy, girls and relationships. Rivers Cuomo, obviously, is the heart of the guy but it could be a concept album about a million people that would love this album.

It’s a fucking incredible description of loneliness, shyness, excitement, partying.

Its strength, I think, is that it’s basically a story that works really well as a bunch of songs.

The idea of it as a semi concept album revolving around Pinkerton from Madame Butterfly is sort of weak, but it’s enough of a thread to tie the songs together, to let you know “this is a whole.”

This is an album chasing its own tail – a lot of the lyrics come out of the self conscious over analysis of Rivers Cuomo.

How stupid is it, I can’t talk about it, I have to sing about it.

It has that rational side, also featured in Why Bother? And an idealistic, passionate side, as in Tired of Sex or El Scorcho – a song which ties the two together.

There’s a bitterness contrasted with playfulness, The Good Life a good example.

The confliction in the songs and the record is highlighted by the consistency of the album. If Blue album is a mashup of colour, Pinkerton is all the same hues. All the songs feel part of a tight whole. A couple songs even flow into each other. Compare that to In Dreams and Surf Wax America from Blue.

Partly this may come from the albums initial conception as a space opera where all the songs would flow into one, but whatever.

But that conflict thing is maybe what stands out the most. The wild emotional contrast of the feelings and ideas cover all my responses to relationships and the idea of them. I am in tight with this album.

The songs are incredibly catchy. I’m excited at the start of each. The style, vibe, is incredibly unpretentious, the excitement of the band massively endearing.

The drum fills especially come from, go beyond, those 70s rock bands that Weezer, so Blue album taught me, grew up with. This is the other way Rivers’ personality comes through, it’s how he chose to tell this story.

When Rivers doesn’t quite hit the right notes, it’s a self conscious thing, he could have done another take, but it feels earnest, makes the songs more expressive and approachable. It ends up very bittersweet.

It’s a record to listen to alone, whilst thinking about why you are and why you shouldn’t be. When you’re thinking about how frustrating it is trying to deal with other people, how easy it is not to trust anyone, to end up confused and why human interaction ends up so false, difficult and disgusting.

But it’s also about how easily you can end up falling in love with everything. How you can feel wretched but want to celebrate that in the most heartfelt way, to consolidate, just say fuck it and feel good.

This review has been Hell. In writing it I wanted to reflect the personal nature of the album, which was easy when writing about me, but when trying to apply it to the album and its content in an analytical way was much harder.

It is a deeply personal album, it easily moulds to your shape. Rivers gives the exact right amount of balance between his story and yours, but maybe that’s more to do with the subject matter. In which case I’d say this makes the album even better, as it could represent a sort of unity between people, which is what the album is most basically about.

I have needed this album, I wish I’d had it for years.

Terminator X quit the hip-hop scene in 2003 and has been running an ostrich farm in South Carolina.

2009-09-10T17:51:00.000+01:00

So, about that Tyondai Braxton thing...

2009-08-25T14:58:00.004+01:00

Pitchfork Media previews "Platinum Rows." Check it out.

A lot of the noise surrounding this record is of the "golly, he's made a classical-crossover album! How perfectly novel!" variety. Such terms as "New Music" (in the obnoxiously specific sense used by classical boffins, which implies that all popular music is "historically regressive") and even "nu-classical" (thanks again, Pitchfork!) have reared their heads.

I'm still out on this; if there's one thing to be said for Market Garden, it's that it's pretty much ploughing its own furrow. Bits of it sound like New Music (of the fleet-footed, Jennifer Higdon school), bits of it sound like Warner Brothers' soundtracks, and bits of it sound like GirlTalk sampling John Williams and Van Dyke Parks. So, it's either a visionary mash-up or a quasi-pornographic mess. With kazoos. Or fucking both...what do I know?

Late to the party

2009-08-05T13:58:00.004+01:00

FAO: long-haired headphone-bedecked bus-riding dial-uping uber-bummed sixteen year old Mogwai-adorned Tom: as yr elder and better, let me tell you that right now you are sleeping on a guy and this guy is the future.

Yknow, the guy that wrote that tune you've only heard through Jam's furious air-riffing with his leg up on a bench and his head circling with an intensity normally saved for Enter Sandman, the guy that JAMES STAFFORD has some pretend-hate crush on (his reports after seeing Wilkes-Krier in the flesh a dazed&deeply felt "he's a BEAST..."), this guy,

Well shit you might be missing out now but in 2009 you'll be reading his short-stories, watching news anchors fawn over him as he demolishes their shows, reading his mutant replies to fan letters that blast out epic calls to action and and and AAANNNNDD ! - REALLY fucking anticipating his instrumental new age piano record about his car, as in, once you've heard about, nothing will be as vital for you to hear, as in, there will be no gesture that could possibly compete with this; having enough heart that you can throw things SO wide open even George Winston is allowed in! I mean shit. I'd already heard how well he got on with donk, the man can't stop bringing us into the fold like the good shepherd he is.

I apologise unequivocally to everyone else for not being able to better prepare you for this event. I did not foresee this. On the other hand:

Guitar Solos

2009-07-30T15:19:00.004+01:00

Not a fan of them, in general. But this one ("Say Please") agrees with me.

Thoughts on that whole Tyondai Braxton album listening party

2009-07-04T15:51:00.006+01:00

"Strange, steroidal kitsch" was my suggested hook; my friend Alex responded with "classical Girl Talk."

The last time I heard any TB solo material was 2005--noisy, loopy electronic stuff, with a distinct emphasis on texture. I want to say "industrial," but I'm sure that Industrial afficionados will disagree. Central Market, Braxton's first post-Battles solo release, preserves the loops, and it's hardly quiet, but otherwise evinces a major aesthetic shift. It's more dancy (although not in a strictly danceable way--go on, prove me wrong), and the sound palette has expanded to include all manner of acoustic instruments: pianos, trombones, flutes, clarinets....

Considering that he used to be a one-man (plus copious effect pedals) band, Braxton's desire to exploit the resources available to an established recording artist with a built-in fan base is understandable. However, the results of his explorations are anything but: four-to-the-floor bone-shakers, built on Reichian keyboard loops and symphonic string swells, punctuated by fuzzy synth glissandi and pitch-shifted chipmunk vocals al la Battles' Mirrored; gloopy electro-ambient interludes; brass fanfares and flute solos; militaristic snare drum rolls (on almost every track).

Okay, so maybe that sounds like a blast (how would I know what a blast sounds like?), but the reality is thoroughly perplexing. Central Market is a stomping monolith of random episodes, confusing and (at a "listening party," at least--lights dimmed, voices hushed) kinda arduous. Maybe it'll come together after a few listens; it's certainly colourful, and there's an underlying sense of musical mischief that might just redeem the kitschiness, once properly apprehended. For now, however, I'm totally in the dark. What do Girl Talk sound like, anyway?

yes, I would hang out with Madonna for a day

2009-05-25T15:29:00.002+01:00

Something in the way you love me won’t let me be.

Not my words: the words of Madonna. Or whoever wrote them for her.

I know these words because I’ve been listening to a Flaming Lips’ cover, of the song Borderline, which I quite like.

I don’t want to be a prisoner so, baby, won’t you set me free.

I actually really like the lyrics. I like them more because Madonna did them first.

I get this sense of naivety which I find oddly earnest and which totally doesn’t fit with the rather epic end to the Flaming Lips’ version.

But it makes so much sense for the Flaming Lips to have covered this. The can’t-help-it-playfulness in the lyrics are there in everything Flaming Lips have done that I’ve heard (in fairness I only have Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. I’ve heard bits of other albums, although I can probably rest my case on that title alone).

I don’t know if they covered Borderline with a sense of irony (“Madonna cover” is inherently pretty lols) but I like to think Wayne Coyne has a total childhood sweetheart love affair going on with those 80s songs.

I also really like Material Girl by Madonna and it has that same sense of playful naivety from Borderline. I don’t know how these songs fit into her career in terms of time or style or anything and I feel like it would be wrong of me to be bothered.

I was also thinking about fashion. I think I really like 70s shirts but I can’t wear them because I’m not willing to fully commit to a 70s look. You can pull off a vaguely 70s tinged shirt or something and it can look damn good, but I’m not that high level on the fashion subtlety scale (which doesn’t exist – so I could never get there).

We had 70s shirts and perms and all that. We had 80s mullets and garish t-shirts and socks with tights and etc. Then we had that 90s minimalist thing which I’m not even sure existed. Now we’re back to that 80s stuff. Like an unimaginative mountain or lazy fashion chasm – one side mirrors the other. Are we about to see a resurgence of delicious 70s shirts? Please, God?

And italo disco is resurfacing, another icon of the 80s, blended into dance punk and house: It’s back, but we do it a little differently.

This could be good news for 70s shirts is what I’m saying.

2009-05-13T15:40:00.003+01:00

Free jazz comes from theory? I don't know. Coleman certainly has some theories (he calls his system of organising musical material "harmolodics"; I know nothing about it, but the blending speaks of a desire to arrive at some sort of urmusic--something that deals with all the musical elements in a more cohesive way, dissolving the traditional hierarchies), but a lot of people say they're bullshit.

It came about naturally, I guess: a number of musicians were interested in bypassing the standard set-up to get to the heart of expressivity and interplay...something like that (consider the socio-political factors involved: the civil rights movement, Black Power, the rise of individualism).

I certainly don't see free jazz as a specifically cerebral music, any more than I see abstract expressionism as a cerebral art.