CHART OF DARKNESS: Gnarls Barkley makes it eight out of eight, and with not much of note coming out in the forthcoming weeks and Smiley Faces down for a July release we're beginning to forsee a Bryan Adams situation where Can't Stop This Thing We Started had its entire top 40 run while Everything I Do was still number one. Infernal somehow still continue a steady climb as they take second place, perhaps more on overall low sales this week than any growing interest - see also the number of download entries, spearheaded by the, shall we say, opinion dividing Sandi Thom at 15. Who's playing this record? It's not on Radio 1's playlist, Radio 2 have it only C-listed, and frankly we're suspecting a Look At Our New Star From The Internet Like The Arctic Monkeys And That scam of sorts. Don't sue us, it's just amusing comment. An odd selection of download entries all in all, actually, as Primal Scream, the Feeling, Nerina Pallot and the Ordinary Boys make early breaks. Certainly a lot more possessing than the actual top ten entries for Christina Milian, Busta Rhymes and Sunblock, Orson bringing down adult pop at 11 and the hopelessly unmemorable Blink 182 diaspora Angels & Airwaves at 20. Towers Of London are at 32, but nobody said the nation ever had taste. Did you know Morning Runner had a new single out, much less one that charts on downloads at 56?
Slightly more stability albums wise, as the Chili Peppers hold off the Raconteurs and Feeder's singles collection. The Beautiful South find their audience again at 6, Neil Young's anti-war diatribe pitches in at 14 and ironically right next to Bruce Springsteen's similarly quickly turned around Pete Seeger album, Grandaddy bow out as underwhelmingly sales-wise as ever at 50 and ¡Forward, Russia! surprisingly only manage 53 - two ahead of Shack - as the rock kids fail to catch on. The songs won't have numbers for titles after this album, apparently. Shame, we'd like to have seen how far they could stretch it. We'd have stuck some in right out of order by now.
FREE MUSIC: Looks like this one's picking up speed at the moment, not least because it's Phill Jupitus' record of the week on 6 Music this week - we noted it down before he played it, honest. Austin, Texas sextet Sound Team deal in that kind of alt-psych stew that stirred the likes of the Walkmen and ...Trail Of Dead. The Fastest Man Alive goes up ahead of the June album release and there's a video too.
HEY YOU GET OFFA MYSPACE: Further to last weekend's ruminations on the Summer Of Spector, a band we've known about for a while but kept forgetting to plug. Lucky Soul are from Deptford Fun City, have had a couple of small scale 7"s out and are blessed with a frontwoman in Ali Howard who sounds like Stina Nordenstam in the Supremes. We can't help thinking Bob Stanley is in hog heaven with all these bands emerging.
VISUAL REPRESENTATION: Right, that's enough subtlety for the week. Here's Sonic Youth and Iggy Pop laying waste to I Wanna Be Your Dog at London's Town & Country Club in 1987.
FALLING OFF A BLOG: We have a favourites folder here just for mp3 blogs, and it occasionally occurs to us that some of our favourites are taken for granted so much that we never get round to highlighting them properly. For example Moistworks, guaranteed to produce between two and ten often extraordinary mp3s from across pop, rock, R&B and so on history a day.
EVERYBODY GET RANDOM: Finally, a way for those band cheerleaders you get on general music forums to be really irritating! Band Madness is an enormous popularity playoff between 512 bands where all you have to do is nominate your favourite from two often quite distinct acts. Jay-Z v Brian Eno seems to have been a close one.
IN OTHER NEWS: A couple of new editions of label podcasts have come to our attention - Transgressive have Ladyfuzz talking us through their album as well as live Young Knives and Rumble Strips from SXSW, plenty of new and recent goodness and the revelation that the Young Knives' album credits call Tim and Toby "the Ant & Dec of the indie world". The Bella Union podcast from earlier in the year is similarly well worth the effort, Gill Mills and Simon Raymonde introducing the Dears, Mazarin, Howling Bells, My Latest Novel, Midlake, the Dirty Three and so forth.
4 comments:
The Morning Runner entry isn't just on downloads...
Isn't it? Amazon showed both this and last week as release dates so we assumed it was the former.
Well, er, haha their mailing list from last Wednesday tells me:
'Don't forget 'The Great Escape' single is out this week on EXTREMELY LIMITED 7" square picture disc and enhanced CD. Due to a distribution problem on Monday the stock was a little more limited than we'd have liked but the problem has been rectified now.'
So that chart position is totally due to a 'distribution problem', then.
On a similar note I couldn't find a single copy of the Hot Chip album in HMV today but it does appear to have been released, bizarre
I'm working on the "everyone's completely forgotten that Morning Runner exist" theory myself. My local had quite a few copies of the Hot Chip album and indeed were even playing it over the speakers (somebody even went up to the manager and asked him).
By the way, I've seen the figures and Infernal did indeed lose about 10% sales, but obviously everyone noticed how bad the LL Cool J record was. Daz really did make some gains though.
Meanwhile, Johnnie Walker was playing the Sandi Thom record last year, and logic would suggest that several million more people heard it there than noticed it on that there Internet; but lo, there's a big sticker on the front saying "THE GIRL WITH THE WEBCAM". I suppose we should count ourselves lucky that Craig Logan didn't sign Leslie Grantham instead.
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