Monday, October 09, 2006

Weekender : you know when you grope for luna

Before we start, we still want you to put your name forward for our latest big idea. While you're doing that...

CHART OF DARKNESS: The singles chart is far too depressing to comment on this week. If we murdered Scott Mills, could we now claim legal justification? To be honest the albums aren't a great deal more cheering, with the Killers and Evanescence at 1 and 2, Jet, Daniel O'Donnell and Lionel Richie inside the top 20 and the sort of sale promoted re-entries that give us a headache. So, that's that done much quicker than usual.

FREE MUSIC: Thank goodness, then, for Seafood, whose new album appears to have been released so far under the radar that it's set to turn up on the shipping forecast. Their exciting melodic scree largely remains, and they're giving away five tracks from previous albums. Western Battle from the still fearsome When Do We Start Fighting?, the album which should have made them huge four years back, is particularly recommended.

HEY YOU GET OFFA MYSPACE: Multinational foursome Sunny Day Sets Fire cite The Wizard Of Oz and 'fireworks' as influences. You can see what they're getting at, as they're a good example of that type of band that feels perfectly at home mixing a dark core into ultraviolet music. Last single Wilderness sounded like Know Your Enemy Manics channelling the Arcade Fire, debut Brainless like The Polyphonic Spree with three quarters of the desk tracks turned off, while elsewhere we hear traces of Grandaddy, Architecture In Helsinki, the Magic Numbers and general Boy Least Likely To-adjunct summer fun twee-pop. At least on the surface, anyway.

VISUAL REPRESENTATION: There's a slew of Pixies DVDs out now or soon, which proves that whether full club gigs, acoustic or just a document of the reformation you can never really get enough of them these days. More evidence: River Euphrates from a Brixton Academy gig the full length version of which was apparently circulated at the time in the industry and we're desperate to see, Monkey Gone To Heaven and Tame on NBC's Night Music, Dead and I Bleed plus a chat on Snub TV, Cecilia Ann and Allison on The Word (it's a cliche, but really do check that dancing), an interview for Rapido with Tracey MacLeod alongside the Throwing Muses (De Caunes is overplaying that accent, isn't he?), Letterman performances from 1992 (Trompe Le Monde with Paul Schaffer and the house band and 2004 (Monkey Gone To Heaven)...oh yeah, and that divine Velouria video.

FALLING OFF A BLOG: You know, you wasted that £1.99 (we mean, bloody hell) on the NME just for the Simian Mobile Disco mix covermount CD last week. The Ill-ec-tro-nic beat the rush to get it ZIPped and online, although why they feel the need in the intro to apologise for browbeating the paper is beyond us.

EVERYBODY GET RANDOM: Clever in an admittedly sub-Hype Machine way, the most blogged about albums in a weekly updated chart format.

IN OTHER NEWS: Oh, alright, have your comedy Stooges rider link. Here's the Stooges' (actually very good value, if completely pointless to its sole target audience and you suspect set up to get The Smoking Gun's attention) rider. The bassist, by the way, is the great ex-Minutemen econo-jammer Mike Watt.

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