So where were we on Sunday, as previously apologised for in advance? At Indietracks, the small but perfectly formed coming together of the glockenspiel/hairslide kids at the Midland Railway Centre in Derbyshire. We've written up a review of the day on our Myspace blog, then changed all the 'we's to 'I's and reposted it on The Art Of Noise. Then we transferred over a few photos*, took out the arty Tramshed At Dusk shots and some of the blurred ones and uploaded them to our Flickr account.
(* If you're in A Smile And A Ribbon, Friends Of The Bride, The Indelicates, The Chiara L's, The School, The Victorian English Gentlemens Club, Stephenhero, The Parallelograms, Pocketbooks, Das Wanderlust, MJ Hibbett & The Validators, The Electric Pop Group, Wake The President or Darren Hayman & the Secondary Modern, congratulations, you can successfully Google your own band's name. Oh, and we've taken photos of you.)
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
Monday, July 30, 2007
Weekender : not afraid of bronze
FREE MUSIC: Seems it's still not going to happen for Spoon in Britain, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga top ten in the Billboard 200 but getting next to no attention whatsoever even in a music press climate that throws its arms out to welcome the likes of the Hold Steady. A shame, as it easily matches up with most things anyone's produced this year for intelligent groove-laden thrills. The single The Underdog may change matters, and luckily that's the track they're giving away.
HEY YOU GET OFFA MYSPACE: School Of Language, rather than our usual stock in trade of some eager nineteen year olds, is a slightly cynical and around about half the block singular older gentleman, David Brewis, now formerly of Field Music but still within the Field Music organisation, or something. It's similar in a way to the band being cut and pasted in whatever your favourite sound manipulation software is, resultantly a little more outside the retro-modern pop box Tones Of Town worked within. An album is apparently on the way soonish, and if you're in London tonight and see this in time they're/he's playing with the Mules and Jonquil at the the Big Chill House in Kings Cross.
VISUAL REPRESENTATION: In Britain, when we look for clips of the stars before they were famous we generally have to settle for early videos before properly paid stylists got to them. In America stars are bred virtually from the womb, which means while there's precious little evidence of their days as scruffy urchins the amount of material available for cherrypicking is near enough endless. Even so, there's something almost creepy about this clip of fifteen year old Jenny Lewis from Teen Set video magazine, the concept of a video magazine already ageing it to 1991. Even if you're aware of Lewis' teen queen acting background it's weird to see the these days rarely noticeably cockahoop Lewis playing the smiley, Meg Ryan-admiring, question point-missing, trampoline-using all-American fifteen year old sweetheart. Wonder if she still has all those hats.
VIRAL MARKETING: The only real disappointment we have with the forthcoming Go! Team single Doing It Right is that since we saw them perform it live early last year they've dropped the "G! O! Exclamation mark!" bit from the start. Their 2006 Coachella performance retains it for posterity, however, as it does The Wrath Of Marcie (changed over time from Mikey) from Proof Of Youth, released September 10th. Even earlier last year they were playing Titanic Vandalism apparently at a record store designed to look like a Texan's idea of a London Underground station.
FALLING OFF A BLOG: Dusty Sevens fulfils two puposes - digitalising old vinyl and digging out all sorts of loving nonsense. You can't not love a site that's just finished a Siddeleys-related competition.
IN OTHER NEWS: At last someone brings an emergency stop just in time to music video's longest running joke. The Hello Experiment blindfolds a group of clay sculptors and challenges them to make a replica of Lionel Richie's head.
HEY YOU GET OFFA MYSPACE: School Of Language, rather than our usual stock in trade of some eager nineteen year olds, is a slightly cynical and around about half the block singular older gentleman, David Brewis, now formerly of Field Music but still within the Field Music organisation, or something. It's similar in a way to the band being cut and pasted in whatever your favourite sound manipulation software is, resultantly a little more outside the retro-modern pop box Tones Of Town worked within. An album is apparently on the way soonish, and if you're in London tonight and see this in time they're/he's playing with the Mules and Jonquil at the the Big Chill House in Kings Cross.
VISUAL REPRESENTATION: In Britain, when we look for clips of the stars before they were famous we generally have to settle for early videos before properly paid stylists got to them. In America stars are bred virtually from the womb, which means while there's precious little evidence of their days as scruffy urchins the amount of material available for cherrypicking is near enough endless. Even so, there's something almost creepy about this clip of fifteen year old Jenny Lewis from Teen Set video magazine, the concept of a video magazine already ageing it to 1991. Even if you're aware of Lewis' teen queen acting background it's weird to see the these days rarely noticeably cockahoop Lewis playing the smiley, Meg Ryan-admiring, question point-missing, trampoline-using all-American fifteen year old sweetheart. Wonder if she still has all those hats.
VIRAL MARKETING: The only real disappointment we have with the forthcoming Go! Team single Doing It Right is that since we saw them perform it live early last year they've dropped the "G! O! Exclamation mark!" bit from the start. Their 2006 Coachella performance retains it for posterity, however, as it does The Wrath Of Marcie (changed over time from Mikey) from Proof Of Youth, released September 10th. Even earlier last year they were playing Titanic Vandalism apparently at a record store designed to look like a Texan's idea of a London Underground station.
FALLING OFF A BLOG: Dusty Sevens fulfils two puposes - digitalising old vinyl and digging out all sorts of loving nonsense. You can't not love a site that's just finished a Siddeleys-related competition.
IN OTHER NEWS: At last someone brings an emergency stop just in time to music video's longest running joke. The Hello Experiment blindfolds a group of clay sculptors and challenges them to make a replica of Lionel Richie's head.
Sunday, July 29, 2007
In shops tomorrow: 30/7
Singles
A lot of arse is talked about musical reinvention, specifically by tabloid people who apparently genuinely think Madonna hopping between changing dancefloor trends or Robbie Williams going from balladeering boy band member to balladeering solo singer is genuine risk taking. Try, then, dark countrified emotionally charged Saddle Creek-approved anti-folk from one of Test Icicles. Devonte Hynes, the one with the pink guitar who seems to know everybody in the London indie scene, does very well for it too with debut 7" Galaxy Of The Lost, produced by Mike Mogis and featuring Emmy The Great on backing vocals. (Incidentally, well done to nme.com for their recent headline about Lightspeed Champion's debut proper London show, "Jack Penate and The Strokes come together". Penate came on to add guitar to one song, and the set finished independently of him with a cover of New York City Cops. They were about as "together" as Pakistan's Islamic factions.) Not a lot about this week - if A Silent Film have been taking lessons from Oxford bretheren Radiohead they certainly wouldn't be the first, or worst, as demonstrated on cinematic EP The Projectionist. Hands up who thought The Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster had bitten the dust? One of the first to emerge from the Brighton scene, in the nearly three years since their last album they've lost a guitarist, been dropped by Island, become labelmates of Luke Haines and who knows what other dark arts. EP In The Garden is their first release in all that time.
Albums
GoodBooks occupy a mildly odd position in the realms of young British guitar bands - never ascended to Next Big Thing status but nonetheless described as a hype band in some quarters, often passed off as something that's already been done even though they were considered original standouts when the bands who were doing it back then were in the process of doing it. In a word of Pigeon Detectives and Good Shoes why it's them who suffer the slings and arrows of misfortune is another issue, but as it is it seems not a lot of people have decided not to like them. Their loss - Control shows a band some steps ahead of much of the pack, a band who value ideas just as much as three chord thrills and far more than aiming for the Jo Whiley constituency, much as they value pop specifics such as, y'know, hooks and choruses. Like the oft compared to Bloc Party, they know their effects pedals and influences outside the post-punk hegemony, in their case the much namedropped by Max Cooke Hot Chip and other alt-dancefloor targets. This isn't New Rave, though, the synths adding to the guitar-fronted rhythms rather than being the be-all and end-all. If nothing else, at least this late in the game it's great to have a first album that isn't a complete waste or letdown. The Wedding Present's mark on John Peel session legend is well-established and was celebrated with a six disc box set in April. What's less well remembered is Cinerama, the band David Gedge formed as a side project to reflect his love of John Barry and his desire to move away from Weddoes guitar squall, did ten of their own between 1998 and 2003, collect on The Peel Sessions' three discs, all of which are also out seperately. Just as many gems, on a comparative count-up, lurk here, as well as covers of Yesterday Once More, All The Things She Said and Groovejet and on the latter sessions Wedding Present songs old (Spangle) and new (I'm From Further North Than You). The eccentric scratchy indie-funk of Cud has worn surprisingly well in parts, and with a one-off date at Summer Sundae festival on the way (inspired by Guy Garvey's pronouncement last year that there are "bad things going on in the world, and I don't mean Cud reforming"?) the big hit album Asquarius and concept debut When In Rome, Kill Me are summarily extended and reissued. A similar treatment awaits The Young Knives Are Dead, despite the band's disapproval of Shifty Disco's re-release of their raw 2002 mini-album debut. We never quite knew where we stood with the Lo-Fidelity Allstars - like Bis, their influence today may be far greater than anyone would have suspected at the time, but for most their best moment was their reworking of Pigeonhed's Battleflag. Best of Warming Up The Brain Farm attempts to act as judge and jury. And whose idea was a Platinum Collection of Suggs' solo material?
A lot of arse is talked about musical reinvention, specifically by tabloid people who apparently genuinely think Madonna hopping between changing dancefloor trends or Robbie Williams going from balladeering boy band member to balladeering solo singer is genuine risk taking. Try, then, dark countrified emotionally charged Saddle Creek-approved anti-folk from one of Test Icicles. Devonte Hynes, the one with the pink guitar who seems to know everybody in the London indie scene, does very well for it too with debut 7" Galaxy Of The Lost, produced by Mike Mogis and featuring Emmy The Great on backing vocals. (Incidentally, well done to nme.com for their recent headline about Lightspeed Champion's debut proper London show, "Jack Penate and The Strokes come together". Penate came on to add guitar to one song, and the set finished independently of him with a cover of New York City Cops. They were about as "together" as Pakistan's Islamic factions.) Not a lot about this week - if A Silent Film have been taking lessons from Oxford bretheren Radiohead they certainly wouldn't be the first, or worst, as demonstrated on cinematic EP The Projectionist. Hands up who thought The Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster had bitten the dust? One of the first to emerge from the Brighton scene, in the nearly three years since their last album they've lost a guitarist, been dropped by Island, become labelmates of Luke Haines and who knows what other dark arts. EP In The Garden is their first release in all that time.
Albums
GoodBooks occupy a mildly odd position in the realms of young British guitar bands - never ascended to Next Big Thing status but nonetheless described as a hype band in some quarters, often passed off as something that's already been done even though they were considered original standouts when the bands who were doing it back then were in the process of doing it. In a word of Pigeon Detectives and Good Shoes why it's them who suffer the slings and arrows of misfortune is another issue, but as it is it seems not a lot of people have decided not to like them. Their loss - Control shows a band some steps ahead of much of the pack, a band who value ideas just as much as three chord thrills and far more than aiming for the Jo Whiley constituency, much as they value pop specifics such as, y'know, hooks and choruses. Like the oft compared to Bloc Party, they know their effects pedals and influences outside the post-punk hegemony, in their case the much namedropped by Max Cooke Hot Chip and other alt-dancefloor targets. This isn't New Rave, though, the synths adding to the guitar-fronted rhythms rather than being the be-all and end-all. If nothing else, at least this late in the game it's great to have a first album that isn't a complete waste or letdown. The Wedding Present's mark on John Peel session legend is well-established and was celebrated with a six disc box set in April. What's less well remembered is Cinerama, the band David Gedge formed as a side project to reflect his love of John Barry and his desire to move away from Weddoes guitar squall, did ten of their own between 1998 and 2003, collect on The Peel Sessions' three discs, all of which are also out seperately. Just as many gems, on a comparative count-up, lurk here, as well as covers of Yesterday Once More, All The Things She Said and Groovejet and on the latter sessions Wedding Present songs old (Spangle) and new (I'm From Further North Than You). The eccentric scratchy indie-funk of Cud has worn surprisingly well in parts, and with a one-off date at Summer Sundae festival on the way (inspired by Guy Garvey's pronouncement last year that there are "bad things going on in the world, and I don't mean Cud reforming"?) the big hit album Asquarius and concept debut When In Rome, Kill Me are summarily extended and reissued. A similar treatment awaits The Young Knives Are Dead, despite the band's disapproval of Shifty Disco's re-release of their raw 2002 mini-album debut. We never quite knew where we stood with the Lo-Fidelity Allstars - like Bis, their influence today may be far greater than anyone would have suspected at the time, but for most their best moment was their reworking of Pigeonhed's Battleflag. Best of Warming Up The Brain Farm attempts to act as judge and jury. And whose idea was a Platinum Collection of Suggs' solo material?
Saturday, July 28, 2007
The Weekly Sweep
Early, we know, but we're out all tomorrow.
Animal Collective - Peacebone [mp3 from Obscure Sound]
Arcade Fire - No Cars Go [mp3 from Indietastic]
Burningpilot - Case History [Myspace]
Cajun Dance Party - Amylase [Myspace]
The Concretes - Oh Boy [Myspace]
Effi Briest - Mirror Rim [Myspace]
Emmy The Great - Easter Parade [mp3 from The Daily Growl]
Eugene McGuinness - High Score [mp3 from Eardrums Music]
Foals - Mathletics [Myspace]
The Go! Team - Doing It Right
GoodBooks - Alice
The High Fidelity - Luv Dup
Jens Lekman - Friday Night at the Drive In Bingo [mp3 from The Glorious Hum]
Late Of The Pier - Bathroom Gurgle [Myspace]
Les Savy Fav - Meet Me In The Dollar Bin
Lightspeed Champion - Galaxy Of The Lost [YouTube]
The Rentals - Last Romantic Day [Myspace]
The Rumble Strips - Girls And Boys In Love [Myspace]
Super Furry Animals - Suckers [Myspace]
Whipping Boy - Twinkle [Myspace]
Thursday, July 26, 2007
Who does Jack Penate look like?
Not on the current NME cover, where he looks like a young George Michael, but in proper photos. This has been annoying us ever since we saw the Second Minute Or Hour video, and we'd welcome your suggestions.
Also, does anyone who hasn't already had a go want to do August's Songs To Learn And Sing? We think we've got someone, but best to have a backup. Don't worry, we'll be more organised about that from now on.
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
One day
we will compile a Nuggets of Britpop era lost greats, and these will be on it:
If there's any Tiger on there can you let us know? We're not wading through all 230 hits for 'Tiger Race'.
If there's any Tiger on there can you let us know? We're not wading through all 230 hits for 'Tiger Race'.
Friday, July 20, 2007
Thursday, July 19, 2007
Sweeping The Nation Covermount 8: '07 In The Shade
Before we do go Steventonwards, it's been a little while since we did one of these, and to be honest it wasn't meant to be this one at all - we've been working on a themed Covermount, which will now probably turn up in the middle of August. In the meantime, have this one on us. Again it's held on Sendspace, although let us know whether you're happy with it and its tendency to delete files without warning or whether you think you can cope with Rapidshare now or something similar.
So this is our selection of 21 summer anthems taken from releases so far this year. Be aware, though, that this is not a straight Best Of The Year So Far - these tracks most seem tailor made for your mp3 player lounging at the local park. There are many great albums and singles not featured here because, when it comes down to it, you don't really need your back yard barbeque soundtracked by the Twilight Sad or Battles. (Although, if you're reading this and have or know someone that owns one of those speaker-filled bass boosted high performance cars, throw out that second hand mixtape and play Mirrored in it. Pedestrians will shit themselves.) Have we had The Great 2007 Indie World Mini-Crossover Summer Anthem yet? In 2006 we were spoiled for choice - by this time last year we'd had Lloyd I'm Ready To Be Heartbroken and Pull Shapes, with Young Folks and Let's Make Love And Listen To Death From Above starting to attract radio attention and We're From Barcelona ominously on the horizon. This year? We're not so sure Foundations counts due to how that whole lemon business is splitting the nation, so we're stuffed. Or are we? Stick these on a CDR, go for a drive in a convertible (when it gets drier, and apparently we're coming towards the end of the really rainy season after seven or so weeks) and, well, enjoy yourself, it's hotter than you think.
'07 In The Shade
Panda Bear - Comfy In Nautica [Person Pitch]
Softlightes - Heart Made Of Sound [Say No To Being Cool Say Yes To Being Happy]
Au Revoir Simone - Stars [The Bird Of Music]
LCD Soundsystem - Someone Great [Sound Of Silver]
Of Montreal - Suffer For Fashion [Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?]
Strange Idols - She's Going To Let You Down Again (The C86 revival gets into full swing)
Those Dancing Days - Hitten (Stockholm teen girl fivesome with an organ)
Bonde do Rolê - Solta o Frango [With Lasers]
Lucky Soul - Get Outta Town! [The Great Unwanted]
The Rumble Strips - Girls And Boys In Love (From forthcoming album Girls And Weather)
Feist - I Feel It All [The Reminder]
Billie The Vision and the Dancers - There's Hope For Anyone (Eccentric Swedes, from the as yet unreleased in the UK When The Ocean Meets My Hand)
The Young Playthings - So Good, So Bad... So Good! [Who Invented Love?]
Land Of Talk - Sea Foam [Applause Cheer Boo Hiss EP]
Modest Mouse - We've Got Everything [We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank]
Field Music - Working To Work [Tones Of Town]
Loney, Dear - I Am John [Loney, Noir]
The Hussy's - Tiger (Sly earworm pop from Glaswegians featuring former Supernaturals leader James McColl)
Sondre Lerche - Airport Taxi Reception [Phantom Punch]
Friends Of The Bride - Buckle Up, Sunshine! (Suave retro/not-retro from Raynes Park Young & Lost favourites)
Ola Podrida - Photo Booth [Ola Podrida]
So this is our selection of 21 summer anthems taken from releases so far this year. Be aware, though, that this is not a straight Best Of The Year So Far - these tracks most seem tailor made for your mp3 player lounging at the local park. There are many great albums and singles not featured here because, when it comes down to it, you don't really need your back yard barbeque soundtracked by the Twilight Sad or Battles. (Although, if you're reading this and have or know someone that owns one of those speaker-filled bass boosted high performance cars, throw out that second hand mixtape and play Mirrored in it. Pedestrians will shit themselves.) Have we had The Great 2007 Indie World Mini-Crossover Summer Anthem yet? In 2006 we were spoiled for choice - by this time last year we'd had Lloyd I'm Ready To Be Heartbroken and Pull Shapes, with Young Folks and Let's Make Love And Listen To Death From Above starting to attract radio attention and We're From Barcelona ominously on the horizon. This year? We're not so sure Foundations counts due to how that whole lemon business is splitting the nation, so we're stuffed. Or are we? Stick these on a CDR, go for a drive in a convertible (when it gets drier, and apparently we're coming towards the end of the really rainy season after seven or so weeks) and, well, enjoy yourself, it's hotter than you think.
'07 In The Shade
Panda Bear - Comfy In Nautica [Person Pitch]
Softlightes - Heart Made Of Sound [Say No To Being Cool Say Yes To Being Happy]
Au Revoir Simone - Stars [The Bird Of Music]
LCD Soundsystem - Someone Great [Sound Of Silver]
Of Montreal - Suffer For Fashion [Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?]
Strange Idols - She's Going To Let You Down Again (The C86 revival gets into full swing)
Those Dancing Days - Hitten (Stockholm teen girl fivesome with an organ)
Bonde do Rolê - Solta o Frango [With Lasers]
Lucky Soul - Get Outta Town! [The Great Unwanted]
The Rumble Strips - Girls And Boys In Love (From forthcoming album Girls And Weather)
Feist - I Feel It All [The Reminder]
Billie The Vision and the Dancers - There's Hope For Anyone (Eccentric Swedes, from the as yet unreleased in the UK When The Ocean Meets My Hand)
The Young Playthings - So Good, So Bad... So Good! [Who Invented Love?]
Land Of Talk - Sea Foam [Applause Cheer Boo Hiss EP]
Modest Mouse - We've Got Everything [We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank]
Field Music - Working To Work [Tones Of Town]
Loney, Dear - I Am John [Loney, Noir]
The Hussy's - Tiger (Sly earworm pop from Glaswegians featuring former Supernaturals leader James McColl)
Sondre Lerche - Airport Taxi Reception [Phantom Punch]
Friends Of The Bride - Buckle Up, Sunshine! (Suave retro/not-retro from Raynes Park Young & Lost favourites)
Ola Podrida - Photo Booth [Ola Podrida]
In shops in four days' time
As we're away turning our clothes brown in a field for the next few days, we need to drop off ideas today for what you should be buying next week. And like last week, decent new stuff is very thin on the ground - great singles band Garbage have a best of out under the inevitable title Absolute Garbage, our fifteenth favourite album of 2006, Joan As Police Woman's Real Life, gains a seven track extra CD, and a band forever on the edge of something big in an American post-Belle & Sebastian cult sense, Bishop Allen, bring out The Broken String. Roots reggae figureheads Culture's seminal Two Sevens Clash gets a thirtieth anniversary buff up, the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band re-release program (with a swathe of hitherto unreleased tracks, we forgot to mention last time) is completed with the posthumous Let's Make Up And Be Friendly, and Matador give their now ex-cash cow Interpol's udders one last tweak with radio session and demo six tracker The Black EP. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Is Is EP is one track fewer and older, all the songs predating their first proper release. Finally, who could resist The Goons' Unchained Melodies - the Complete Decca Recordings?
As for singles, Arcade Fire lead the way with a third 7" culled from Neon Bible, the monumental reworking of No Cars Go. Feist goes with the fairly obvious 1234, The Silent League leader Justin Russo's ex-employees Mercury Rev could do with songs like Aeroplanes these days, The Heavy find another untapped retro seam with the mighty glam-funk of debut That Kind Of Man and the Electric Soft Parade's Misunderstanding is more woozy anthemry.
As for singles, Arcade Fire lead the way with a third 7" culled from Neon Bible, the monumental reworking of No Cars Go. Feist goes with the fairly obvious 1234, The Silent League leader Justin Russo's ex-employees Mercury Rev could do with songs like Aeroplanes these days, The Heavy find another untapped retro seam with the mighty glam-funk of debut That Kind Of Man and the Electric Soft Parade's Misunderstanding is more woozy anthemry.
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
Five out of twelve ain't bad
Funny how every year sees the worst ever Mercury list, isn't it?
Although, parts of this year's is a real headscratcher, and we don't just mean The View and New Young Pony Club. We didn't put Favourite Worst Nightmare on our predicted list because, well, what message does it send the band if it doesn't win, and what message does it send the whole of the rest of British music if it does? Their mate Dizzee Rascal is in a similar position, although at least he has the cold comfort of being able to weigh his work well against that of three years ago. And is Seb Rochford, who guests with Basquiat Strings, never going to get nominated for primary concern Acoustic Ladyland?
It's not as safe a list as many have said - six we'd say are currently well known to the bits of the public with a passing musical interest, one more than last year but well down on 2004's nine. What it does betray is the Mercury's gradual evening out of its scope - in 1997 Roni Size won from a shortlist that found room for John Tavener, Beth Orton, Mark-Anthony Turnage, Primal Scream and, famously, the Spice Girls; a year later Pulp beat off challenges from Peter Maxwell Davies with the BBC Philharmonic, Mark Morrison, Courtney Pine, Underworld, Norma Waterson, Black Grape and the War Child Help album. Maybe, of course, this is merely reflective of the necessarily contracting scope of what music magazines cover, although Fionn Regan has hardly made acres of newsprint. And hands up who was alert enough to spot the Young Knives, whose Voices Of Animals And Men was released four weeks into the qualification period?
No, our main criticism is... well... it's a bit meh, isn't it?
In unrelated news, it's not on Radio 4's Listen Again A-Z but RealAudio fanciers can until Saturday morning still listen back to Shots From The Hip, Andrew Collins' enquiry into whether the music journalist still has a role in this new world of blogging, featuring input from Charles Shaar Murray, Caroline Coon, David Hepworth and, yes, Conor McNicholas, pretty much confirming most of what you suspected about the aim of your all-new, all-Smash Hits After It Was Good-tastic NME.
Although, parts of this year's is a real headscratcher, and we don't just mean The View and New Young Pony Club. We didn't put Favourite Worst Nightmare on our predicted list because, well, what message does it send the band if it doesn't win, and what message does it send the whole of the rest of British music if it does? Their mate Dizzee Rascal is in a similar position, although at least he has the cold comfort of being able to weigh his work well against that of three years ago. And is Seb Rochford, who guests with Basquiat Strings, never going to get nominated for primary concern Acoustic Ladyland?
It's not as safe a list as many have said - six we'd say are currently well known to the bits of the public with a passing musical interest, one more than last year but well down on 2004's nine. What it does betray is the Mercury's gradual evening out of its scope - in 1997 Roni Size won from a shortlist that found room for John Tavener, Beth Orton, Mark-Anthony Turnage, Primal Scream and, famously, the Spice Girls; a year later Pulp beat off challenges from Peter Maxwell Davies with the BBC Philharmonic, Mark Morrison, Courtney Pine, Underworld, Norma Waterson, Black Grape and the War Child Help album. Maybe, of course, this is merely reflective of the necessarily contracting scope of what music magazines cover, although Fionn Regan has hardly made acres of newsprint. And hands up who was alert enough to spot the Young Knives, whose Voices Of Animals And Men was released four weeks into the qualification period?
No, our main criticism is... well... it's a bit meh, isn't it?
In unrelated news, it's not on Radio 4's Listen Again A-Z but RealAudio fanciers can until Saturday morning still listen back to Shots From The Hip, Andrew Collins' enquiry into whether the music journalist still has a role in this new world of blogging, featuring input from Charles Shaar Murray, Caroline Coon, David Hepworth and, yes, Conor McNicholas, pretty much confirming most of what you suspected about the aim of your all-new, all-Smash Hits After It Was Good-tastic NME.
Monday, July 16, 2007
Weekender : one of the most influential blogs on the independent UK music scene, a real alternative to the mainstream
FREE MUSIC: Is it too early for an American Early Years? That band's use of swirling Spiritualized drone in rock structures is echoed in People Noise, a Louisville duo comprising the guitarist from post-punk revival also-rans VHS Or Beta and Boom Bip's drummer. The Killing Fields also suggests a lot of post-grunge and The Bends going on.
HEY YOU GET OFFA MYSPACE: Oxford sextet Witches claim to "write songs for people who need warming up on a cold night". Presumably a mid-American shack without central heating, as this smart, intricate songwriting crying out for top class recording - not that these are substandardly produced, it just needs to be great sounding on surround sound systems - contains not so much what the band call "a cross between Radiohead, The Flaming Lips and Love" but definite reflections of Sparklehorse, Yo La Tengo, Belle & Sebastian's tender moments and Wilco when they weren't MOR. They're playing the local hootenanny Truck, which we'll get back to in a moment, at 10am on Sunday morning. What sort of slot is that? Have they done something very criminal?
VISUAL REPRESENTATION: "English football club A.F.C. Bournemouth has been known to play various Pavement songs during pre-match warm-ups. In 2005, following the release of Stephen Malkmus' Face the Truth, an A.F.C. Bournemouth supporter, outraged by the album's alleged lack of artistic integrity, burned Stephen Malkmus in effigy at the gates to Fitness First Stadium." That, we promise you, is on Pavement's Wikipedia entry, with a link to the club's website front page attached so nobody, perhaps rightly, queries what, how or why. For no real reason whatsoever let us show you live versions of Summer Babe and Here, the appearance on Space Ghost Coast To Coast and the unforgettable video to Malkmus' Jo Jo's Jacket plus Shynola making the thing, a process which seems to include precious little Malkmus.
VIRAL MARKETING: So this weekend we return to a point somewhere in a field in Oxfordshire - Steventon, to be precise, for Truck Ten. Much ballyhoo is expected, as much as we enjoyed last year with any luck, albeit somewhat wetter if the ten day forecasts are any judge. Corporate Anthems will be previewing the best of the bill from tomorrow, but before then from Truck Nine Jetplane Landing have uploaded to their Myspace a very unstably shot clip of Effect A Change (from Once Like A Spark) from last year coloured by a crowdsurfing Sam Duckworth, while digging around also finds the end of set closer Acrimony, a professionally shot half of the Mystery Jets' Half In Love With Elizabeth, the festival's own compilation of events and Keyboard Choir and their DIY robots.
FALLING OFF A BLOG: Hip Young Gunslinger, one of the post-Popjustice types but none the worse off for that (apart from how they all like Hadouken!), says it's "about anything, everything and (frequently) nothing from the world of pop". Sounds like our kind of blog!
EVERYBODY GET RANDOM: The best interview structures are the easiest, they say. The Line Of Best Fit's 20 Questions puts that to the test, with a brantub of semi-random questioning for Grizzly Bear, Jeremy Warmsley, Lucky Soul, iLiKETRAiNS, The Thermals, the Mystery Jets, Mark Ronson, Loney Dear, The Kissaway Trail, Fields, The Hussy's, The Hold Steady, The Album Leaf, Tracy Thorn, Giant Drag and, blimey, Siobhan Donaghy.
IN OTHER NEWS: The 2007 Mercury Music Prize nominations are announced on Monday, and after our 7/12 and 6/12 efforts of the last two years we feel duty bound to have another go at what the judging panel will select as the year's twelve best British albums. So, advance congratulations to: Acoustic Ladyland, Amy Winehouse, Bat For Lashes, Beverley Knight, the Cribs, Jamie T, Jarvis, Klaxons, Kris Drever, Maps, Scott Matthews and The Good The Bad And The Queen. Award night is 4th September, and we're confident in stating that this list will be more accurate than Scotland On Sunday's confident prediction of nominations for Arcade Fire and Rufus Wainwright.
HEY YOU GET OFFA MYSPACE: Oxford sextet Witches claim to "write songs for people who need warming up on a cold night". Presumably a mid-American shack without central heating, as this smart, intricate songwriting crying out for top class recording - not that these are substandardly produced, it just needs to be great sounding on surround sound systems - contains not so much what the band call "a cross between Radiohead, The Flaming Lips and Love" but definite reflections of Sparklehorse, Yo La Tengo, Belle & Sebastian's tender moments and Wilco when they weren't MOR. They're playing the local hootenanny Truck, which we'll get back to in a moment, at 10am on Sunday morning. What sort of slot is that? Have they done something very criminal?
VISUAL REPRESENTATION: "English football club A.F.C. Bournemouth has been known to play various Pavement songs during pre-match warm-ups. In 2005, following the release of Stephen Malkmus' Face the Truth, an A.F.C. Bournemouth supporter, outraged by the album's alleged lack of artistic integrity, burned Stephen Malkmus in effigy at the gates to Fitness First Stadium." That, we promise you, is on Pavement's Wikipedia entry, with a link to the club's website front page attached so nobody, perhaps rightly, queries what, how or why. For no real reason whatsoever let us show you live versions of Summer Babe and Here, the appearance on Space Ghost Coast To Coast and the unforgettable video to Malkmus' Jo Jo's Jacket plus Shynola making the thing, a process which seems to include precious little Malkmus.
VIRAL MARKETING: So this weekend we return to a point somewhere in a field in Oxfordshire - Steventon, to be precise, for Truck Ten. Much ballyhoo is expected, as much as we enjoyed last year with any luck, albeit somewhat wetter if the ten day forecasts are any judge. Corporate Anthems will be previewing the best of the bill from tomorrow, but before then from Truck Nine Jetplane Landing have uploaded to their Myspace a very unstably shot clip of Effect A Change (from Once Like A Spark) from last year coloured by a crowdsurfing Sam Duckworth, while digging around also finds the end of set closer Acrimony, a professionally shot half of the Mystery Jets' Half In Love With Elizabeth, the festival's own compilation of events and Keyboard Choir and their DIY robots.
FALLING OFF A BLOG: Hip Young Gunslinger, one of the post-Popjustice types but none the worse off for that (apart from how they all like Hadouken!), says it's "about anything, everything and (frequently) nothing from the world of pop". Sounds like our kind of blog!
EVERYBODY GET RANDOM: The best interview structures are the easiest, they say. The Line Of Best Fit's 20 Questions puts that to the test, with a brantub of semi-random questioning for Grizzly Bear, Jeremy Warmsley, Lucky Soul, iLiKETRAiNS, The Thermals, the Mystery Jets, Mark Ronson, Loney Dear, The Kissaway Trail, Fields, The Hussy's, The Hold Steady, The Album Leaf, Tracy Thorn, Giant Drag and, blimey, Siobhan Donaghy.
IN OTHER NEWS: The 2007 Mercury Music Prize nominations are announced on Monday, and after our 7/12 and 6/12 efforts of the last two years we feel duty bound to have another go at what the judging panel will select as the year's twelve best British albums. So, advance congratulations to: Acoustic Ladyland, Amy Winehouse, Bat For Lashes, Beverley Knight, the Cribs, Jamie T, Jarvis, Klaxons, Kris Drever, Maps, Scott Matthews and The Good The Bad And The Queen. Award night is 4th September, and we're confident in stating that this list will be more accurate than Scotland On Sunday's confident prediction of nominations for Arcade Fire and Rufus Wainwright.
Sunday, July 15, 2007
In shops tomorrow: 16/7
Singles
Inevitably, then, it's beginning to look like, having signed to a major label, GoodBooks then get trampled underfoot in Columbia's attempt to take, well, other acts towards the big time instead. In this case, the current priority promotion of chancer du jour (jour being some time last summer for a couple of hours) Ali Love. A shame, of course, especially as they've now got up to the big one, Passchendaele, released two weeks before the ninetieth anniversary of the titular battle and the first/best evocation of their combination of the smart end of 2005's International Year Of Jerky Post-Punk with something 'other', more electronic and somehow romantic. Radio's loss. On the other hand, you can see why daytime radio would want nothing to do with The Victorian English Gentlemens Club, abrasive cross-purpose artrock in a blender whose debut album came from nearly nowhere to blow us away nearly a year ago. Apparently they're getting set for album two before the end of the year, preceded by a limited edition double A-sided 7" of La Mer, which we haven't heard, and Stupid As Wood, which we have as it was the one of the eponymous debut's Santiago-and-Deal-breed-Colin Newman highlights. Still no online sign of Bang The Tin, the Pancake Mountain acoustic revision of Ban The Gin. And if they're never going to become Edith Bowman's Top Rated choice, then we have about as much of a chance of Virgin playlisting as XX Teens, whose Darlin' has earned them Fall comparisons that seem barely warranted until you hear how the usual jumble of Norman Collier effect guitars and slurred shouting has been augmented by steel drums, synth-brass and little regard for a mix that seperates any of it out. And to think they just stand there. BC Camplight made a cognescenti splash early last year with his Brian Wilson/Todd Rundgren debut album, and the first sight of his second collection of experimental chamber-pop is Lord I’ve Been On Fire; Loney, Dear backs up his own rising standing on Saturday Waits; well after the album event Jarvis sneaks Fat Children out on both sizes of vinyl; and the Rakes, currently to be found in the folder marked 'Big First Album, All But Forgotten By Second', release what should have been the hit had they not first given it to a Hedi Slimane compilation, The World Was A Mess But His Hair Was Perfect.
Albums
Blimey, really not a lot about this week. It's so quiet out there, especially for new releases, that we're shoehorning in an import-only album released in North America on Tuesday. It is, however, Sticking Fingers Into Sockets, Arts & Crafts' six song entry into the glorious world of Los Campesinos! Completists note, it's both sides of the two British 7"s, a cover of Pavement's Frontwards (it's on the Watery, Domestic EP, which now forms part of Slanted and Enchanted: Luxe & Reduxe, which you have in your collection because you're good people) and Clunk-Rewind-Clunk-Play-Clunk, a new song that, while boasting a great title, doesn't have quite as great a title as some of the unreleased songs down the bottom of the charts on their last.fm page. There have been moments in the couple of months since we've made this discovery when we've considered not sleeping until we've heard Snap! Crackle! They Put Me In A Foster Home! As for records you can buy over the counter in Great Britain and Northern Ireland, while we wait for a new dEUS album - being recorded in their own studio for release early next year, apparently - Pawlowski Trouve And Ward is a three way split album of solo material by Mauro, Rudy and Craig, the three lead guitarists in the band's history, all unsurprisingly but no less welcomingly leaning towards the sphere of avantgarde indiepop the Belgian outfit have long made their own. The Tindersticks were believed to have stopped being a glamorous glum-chamber rock concern when Stuart Staples took his Vic Reeves club singer basso profundo on a solo sojourn, but word is that he merely split the band around him and is planning to put out a record under the band name with his current touring compatriots. Worked for Status Quo. The Complete BBC Sessions happily includes the sessions they did for Mark Radcliffe's first and last Graveyard Shifts and reminds us that we once saw Melanie Sykes introducing their video on MTV. Even a cult concern can have a Return To Form Album, and Robyn Hitchcock's was 1999's Jewels For Sophia, back out in its full Cheese Alarm glorious oddness pomp. Having left Peter Buck and the other Venusian 3 to REM duties he's currently touring with backup from John Paul Jones. You know that the sportswear/rap crossover has hit a pretty pass when MF Doom gets to personalise some Nikes, so reserve your DOOM Dunks and kick back with the CD and DVD reissue of Mm.. Food, his food-as-metaphor concept breakthrough of 2004.
DVDs
What differentiates Inside The Smiths from the rest of the low budget, low copyright-adhering unofficial DVD biography brigade - Johnny Cash: Music In Review, for instance - is that Andy Rourke and Mike Joyce are the centrepiece of it. So no, no music, but plenty of unheard stories, the odd local luminary (Hook, Shelley, E Smith, erm, Ricky Wilson) backing up the claims to greatness and no sense whatsoever that, whatever small talk Morrissey and Marr retain, this is paving the way for a reunion.
Books
A good ska group needs a good bassman, and fulfilling the danciest of bottom ends in the Specials dance party was Sir Horace Gentleman, also known as Horace Panter (which isn't his real name either, but no time for that now). Apparently he was one of the stumbling blocks behind the planned 2004 reformation, which seems odd as he was in the late 90s version of the band, but anything that pisses Simon Jordan off is fine by us. He's got an autobiography out, Ska'd for Life the uninventive title, telling the story from Coventry Automatics to post-Dammers collapse. Perverted By Language: Fiction Inspired By The Fall has been out for a couple of weeks but we didn't get round to mentioning it before - 22 short stories inspired by Fall song titles, penned by Stewart Lee, Kevin 'Local Man Ruins Everything' MacNeil and some people we've never heard of.
Inevitably, then, it's beginning to look like, having signed to a major label, GoodBooks then get trampled underfoot in Columbia's attempt to take, well, other acts towards the big time instead. In this case, the current priority promotion of chancer du jour (jour being some time last summer for a couple of hours) Ali Love. A shame, of course, especially as they've now got up to the big one, Passchendaele, released two weeks before the ninetieth anniversary of the titular battle and the first/best evocation of their combination of the smart end of 2005's International Year Of Jerky Post-Punk with something 'other', more electronic and somehow romantic. Radio's loss. On the other hand, you can see why daytime radio would want nothing to do with The Victorian English Gentlemens Club, abrasive cross-purpose artrock in a blender whose debut album came from nearly nowhere to blow us away nearly a year ago. Apparently they're getting set for album two before the end of the year, preceded by a limited edition double A-sided 7" of La Mer, which we haven't heard, and Stupid As Wood, which we have as it was the one of the eponymous debut's Santiago-and-Deal-breed-Colin Newman highlights. Still no online sign of Bang The Tin, the Pancake Mountain acoustic revision of Ban The Gin. And if they're never going to become Edith Bowman's Top Rated choice, then we have about as much of a chance of Virgin playlisting as XX Teens, whose Darlin' has earned them Fall comparisons that seem barely warranted until you hear how the usual jumble of Norman Collier effect guitars and slurred shouting has been augmented by steel drums, synth-brass and little regard for a mix that seperates any of it out. And to think they just stand there. BC Camplight made a cognescenti splash early last year with his Brian Wilson/Todd Rundgren debut album, and the first sight of his second collection of experimental chamber-pop is Lord I’ve Been On Fire; Loney, Dear backs up his own rising standing on Saturday Waits; well after the album event Jarvis sneaks Fat Children out on both sizes of vinyl; and the Rakes, currently to be found in the folder marked 'Big First Album, All But Forgotten By Second', release what should have been the hit had they not first given it to a Hedi Slimane compilation, The World Was A Mess But His Hair Was Perfect.
Albums
Blimey, really not a lot about this week. It's so quiet out there, especially for new releases, that we're shoehorning in an import-only album released in North America on Tuesday. It is, however, Sticking Fingers Into Sockets, Arts & Crafts' six song entry into the glorious world of Los Campesinos! Completists note, it's both sides of the two British 7"s, a cover of Pavement's Frontwards (it's on the Watery, Domestic EP, which now forms part of Slanted and Enchanted: Luxe & Reduxe, which you have in your collection because you're good people) and Clunk-Rewind-Clunk-Play-Clunk, a new song that, while boasting a great title, doesn't have quite as great a title as some of the unreleased songs down the bottom of the charts on their last.fm page. There have been moments in the couple of months since we've made this discovery when we've considered not sleeping until we've heard Snap! Crackle! They Put Me In A Foster Home! As for records you can buy over the counter in Great Britain and Northern Ireland, while we wait for a new dEUS album - being recorded in their own studio for release early next year, apparently - Pawlowski Trouve And Ward is a three way split album of solo material by Mauro, Rudy and Craig, the three lead guitarists in the band's history, all unsurprisingly but no less welcomingly leaning towards the sphere of avantgarde indiepop the Belgian outfit have long made their own. The Tindersticks were believed to have stopped being a glamorous glum-chamber rock concern when Stuart Staples took his Vic Reeves club singer basso profundo on a solo sojourn, but word is that he merely split the band around him and is planning to put out a record under the band name with his current touring compatriots. Worked for Status Quo. The Complete BBC Sessions happily includes the sessions they did for Mark Radcliffe's first and last Graveyard Shifts and reminds us that we once saw Melanie Sykes introducing their video on MTV. Even a cult concern can have a Return To Form Album, and Robyn Hitchcock's was 1999's Jewels For Sophia, back out in its full Cheese Alarm glorious oddness pomp. Having left Peter Buck and the other Venusian 3 to REM duties he's currently touring with backup from John Paul Jones. You know that the sportswear/rap crossover has hit a pretty pass when MF Doom gets to personalise some Nikes, so reserve your DOOM Dunks and kick back with the CD and DVD reissue of Mm.. Food, his food-as-metaphor concept breakthrough of 2004.
DVDs
What differentiates Inside The Smiths from the rest of the low budget, low copyright-adhering unofficial DVD biography brigade - Johnny Cash: Music In Review, for instance - is that Andy Rourke and Mike Joyce are the centrepiece of it. So no, no music, but plenty of unheard stories, the odd local luminary (Hook, Shelley, E Smith, erm, Ricky Wilson) backing up the claims to greatness and no sense whatsoever that, whatever small talk Morrissey and Marr retain, this is paving the way for a reunion.
Books
A good ska group needs a good bassman, and fulfilling the danciest of bottom ends in the Specials dance party was Sir Horace Gentleman, also known as Horace Panter (which isn't his real name either, but no time for that now). Apparently he was one of the stumbling blocks behind the planned 2004 reformation, which seems odd as he was in the late 90s version of the band, but anything that pisses Simon Jordan off is fine by us. He's got an autobiography out, Ska'd for Life the uninventive title, telling the story from Coventry Automatics to post-Dammers collapse. Perverted By Language: Fiction Inspired By The Fall has been out for a couple of weeks but we didn't get round to mentioning it before - 22 short stories inspired by Fall song titles, penned by Stewart Lee, Kevin 'Local Man Ruins Everything' MacNeil and some people we've never heard of.
The Weekly Sweep
Friday, July 13, 2007
Stand-in in the way of the remote control
Tonight's Friday Night Project on Channel 4 is being presented by a radical feminist associate of Calvin Johnson whose band's current album was produced by one of Fugazi and came out on Kill Rock Stars.
Does this compute for anyone else?
Does this compute for anyone else?
Thursday, July 12, 2007
Too much perspective
One of the little joys we have in life is reading Brian Reade's weekly column in the Mirror, because he is, frankly, the worst columnist in Britain. Not in the Richard Littlejohn/Garry Bushell sense, but in the "and you did full journalistic training, did you?" sense. Today, however, in his oh so sarcastically hilarious critique of Live Earth, he manages a new personal best:
SO MANY old pop groups are reforming it seems like a long round of the game in Never Mind The Buzzcocks where we're shown five pensioners and guess which one used to sing.
Still, there's no disputing that Genesis, The Police and Spinal Tap contributed something that none of the kids could bring to the Live Earth concert. Carbon footprints with walking sticks next to them.
Do you think someone should tell him?
SO MANY old pop groups are reforming it seems like a long round of the game in Never Mind The Buzzcocks where we're shown five pensioners and guess which one used to sing.
Still, there's no disputing that Genesis, The Police and Spinal Tap contributed something that none of the kids could bring to the Live Earth concert. Carbon footprints with walking sticks next to them.
Do you think someone should tell him?
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
This was going to be a long and involved post about the Spice Girls reunion, but frankly we're feeling a bit too lethargic for all that
Only to say: you don't hear Spice Girls songs on the radio too often, do you? Far from the growing middle-aged surprisingly gracefully air of the Take That reunion - which, as we know, sold to James Blunt mums rather than McFly kids, so presumably this is targeted at the Abba far-too-old-to-be-partying single 34 year olds - this whole thing is surely going to be nothing more than five mid-30s women going "god! Do you remember those stack-heeled wedges?" for an hour and far too much money of your time. And obviously the girls will have been so surprised at the level of goodwill throughout their tour that they'll just happen to find a whole album ready and waiting for them the moment it finishes.
And Paddy Power are offering speciality bets on the whole thing, the last refuge of the overconfidently salaried. Interesting to see that joint favourites to be their UK support are two acts from The X Factor, the show Simon Fuller has recently taken Simon Cowell to court over its intellectual property rights.
And Paddy Power are offering speciality bets on the whole thing, the last refuge of the overconfidently salaried. Interesting to see that joint favourites to be their UK support are two acts from The X Factor, the show Simon Fuller has recently taken Simon Cowell to court over its intellectual property rights.
Monday, July 09, 2007
Weekender : saving souls one step at a time
FREE MUSIC: In the week when the Mooney Suzuki release a new album to no attention whatsoever, some up to date psychedelically flavoured rock'n'roll comes from New Jersey's The Special Pillow. Your Dead City revisits those halcyon days of The Hiss meaning something to someone but remembers to bring the pre-reformation late Dinosaur Jr buzzpop edge.
HEY YOU GET OFFA MYSPACE: There's a bit of hype building around Eugene McGuinness at the moment, largely due to having a YouTube viral hit with current single Monsters Under The Bed. It's in this month's top 40 most viewed in the UK, whatever that actually means. Besides such Flash Video notions, the Liverpool-based 21 year old has plenty going on in a starter pack Jeremy Warmsley style, sounding a touch at times like a Jamie T who's not finding the world falling apart round his Cockney ears, plus a sure hand with monstrous cabaret-esque laptop effects and a Shins-esque quirky pop disposition (is that a Dennis Wilson influence on Vela?) With Domino releasing a mini-album in August, put a reasonable amount of pretend money on him producing something extraordinary given time.
VISUAL REPRESENTATION: Continuing on the television performance theme, there are many and varied ways in which a band can royally mess up their big telly moment. You'll have seen one with Win Butler's narkiness on Friday Night With Jonathan Ross last week, the latest in a long tradition starting in 1969, Bob Harris here introducing the famous A Happening For Lulu performance, firstly a properly constructed Voodoo Chile, then the famous segue from Hey Joe to Sunshine Of Your Love. Similarly a band may decide to trash their equipment, like the Posies on The Word, or let 'em all on, as with Symposium on Top Of The Pops. Eamon Hamilton, back when he was British Sea Power's Official Fleet Reserve, went for a wander around Jools' studio - actually, whatever did become of the Patrick Mooreheads, here seen clearest at about 1:25 engrossed in a card game of their own? Do let us know if you do. The big opportunity, though, comes when a band have to mime and get to show displeasure or decide they can really do something here. The role reversal Roll With It and All About Eve's monitor-muted Martha's Harbour are virtually part of the national heritage now, but a couple of personal favourites are Fish out of Marillion enlisting audience help on Lavender - a bad throat, he later said - and Muse's not strictly accurate New Born, with Dom and Chris transposed, on late period Live & Kicking. See the way the magic Bellamy fingers glide across the keys at the start.
VIRAL MARKETING: REM have been doing these 'Working Rehearsals' in Dublin this week, bringing out some old material and trying out some new songs they're in the process of recording. First hand accounts are good, reminding some of the Fables Of The Reconstruction/Life's Rich Pageant era, but see what you make of in progress versions of Until The Day Is Done, Living Well's The Best Revenge and Horse To Water.
FALLING OFF A BLOG: In the email making us aware of The Pop Register its maintaner prosthyletizes that "I want music enthusiasts to forget the stigmas - pop isn't always about dumbing down and hitting the masses - its about a fun way of producing genuinely appealing and exciting music." Which basically means it's a knowledgeable and fairly eclectic new music blog, and you can't have too many of those.
EVERYBODY GET RANDOM: From the desk of now former XFM DJ and definitely former Jesus Jones keyboard player Iain Baker comes Shadow Globe Radio. Currently in its beta version, it's dedicated to finding and playlisting the best new music and getting its users to vote for their favourites, the not particularly great but we're aware we're in an online minority on that front Silversun Pickups currently leading the race for the first proper playlist from, essentially, every band you've heard a whisper about in the last couple of months.
IN OTHER NEWS: The other festival we bang on about is Summer Sundae, five weeks away from the weekend just gone and, we hear, selling nicely. That we know about: what is also happening this year is a week-long Fringe Festival around Leicester up to the day before the shebang begins. Highlights include The First International Kinky Judge Fair alldayer starring Thomas Trux, Misterlee and the Hellset Orchestra, a Drowned In Sound night headlined by Public Relations Exercise, Foals supported by Tired Irie and the Official Fringe Festival Warm-Up, spanning four venues on the Thursday night. For a mere one of your English pounds (and most of the tickets are being reserved for outsiders) there's a bill featuring assorted local favourites (the Dirty Backbeats, Redcarsgofaster, The Displacements), the long lost My Drug Hell, Scott Capurro headlining a comedy stage, surprises, fun, hoopla and compere duties from Dave Bartram of Showaddywaddy, which should be worth the admission itself.
HEY YOU GET OFFA MYSPACE: There's a bit of hype building around Eugene McGuinness at the moment, largely due to having a YouTube viral hit with current single Monsters Under The Bed. It's in this month's top 40 most viewed in the UK, whatever that actually means. Besides such Flash Video notions, the Liverpool-based 21 year old has plenty going on in a starter pack Jeremy Warmsley style, sounding a touch at times like a Jamie T who's not finding the world falling apart round his Cockney ears, plus a sure hand with monstrous cabaret-esque laptop effects and a Shins-esque quirky pop disposition (is that a Dennis Wilson influence on Vela?) With Domino releasing a mini-album in August, put a reasonable amount of pretend money on him producing something extraordinary given time.
VISUAL REPRESENTATION: Continuing on the television performance theme, there are many and varied ways in which a band can royally mess up their big telly moment. You'll have seen one with Win Butler's narkiness on Friday Night With Jonathan Ross last week, the latest in a long tradition starting in 1969, Bob Harris here introducing the famous A Happening For Lulu performance, firstly a properly constructed Voodoo Chile, then the famous segue from Hey Joe to Sunshine Of Your Love. Similarly a band may decide to trash their equipment, like the Posies on The Word, or let 'em all on, as with Symposium on Top Of The Pops. Eamon Hamilton, back when he was British Sea Power's Official Fleet Reserve, went for a wander around Jools' studio - actually, whatever did become of the Patrick Mooreheads, here seen clearest at about 1:25 engrossed in a card game of their own? Do let us know if you do. The big opportunity, though, comes when a band have to mime and get to show displeasure or decide they can really do something here. The role reversal Roll With It and All About Eve's monitor-muted Martha's Harbour are virtually part of the national heritage now, but a couple of personal favourites are Fish out of Marillion enlisting audience help on Lavender - a bad throat, he later said - and Muse's not strictly accurate New Born, with Dom and Chris transposed, on late period Live & Kicking. See the way the magic Bellamy fingers glide across the keys at the start.
VIRAL MARKETING: REM have been doing these 'Working Rehearsals' in Dublin this week, bringing out some old material and trying out some new songs they're in the process of recording. First hand accounts are good, reminding some of the Fables Of The Reconstruction/Life's Rich Pageant era, but see what you make of in progress versions of Until The Day Is Done, Living Well's The Best Revenge and Horse To Water.
FALLING OFF A BLOG: In the email making us aware of The Pop Register its maintaner prosthyletizes that "I want music enthusiasts to forget the stigmas - pop isn't always about dumbing down and hitting the masses - its about a fun way of producing genuinely appealing and exciting music." Which basically means it's a knowledgeable and fairly eclectic new music blog, and you can't have too many of those.
EVERYBODY GET RANDOM: From the desk of now former XFM DJ and definitely former Jesus Jones keyboard player Iain Baker comes Shadow Globe Radio. Currently in its beta version, it's dedicated to finding and playlisting the best new music and getting its users to vote for their favourites, the not particularly great but we're aware we're in an online minority on that front Silversun Pickups currently leading the race for the first proper playlist from, essentially, every band you've heard a whisper about in the last couple of months.
IN OTHER NEWS: The other festival we bang on about is Summer Sundae, five weeks away from the weekend just gone and, we hear, selling nicely. That we know about: what is also happening this year is a week-long Fringe Festival around Leicester up to the day before the shebang begins. Highlights include The First International Kinky Judge Fair alldayer starring Thomas Trux, Misterlee and the Hellset Orchestra, a Drowned In Sound night headlined by Public Relations Exercise, Foals supported by Tired Irie and the Official Fringe Festival Warm-Up, spanning four venues on the Thursday night. For a mere one of your English pounds (and most of the tickets are being reserved for outsiders) there's a bill featuring assorted local favourites (the Dirty Backbeats, Redcarsgofaster, The Displacements), the long lost My Drug Hell, Scott Capurro headlining a comedy stage, surprises, fun, hoopla and compere duties from Dave Bartram of Showaddywaddy, which should be worth the admission itself.
Sunday, July 08, 2007
In shops tomorrow: 9/7
Singles
It's a funny thing, seeing Bat For Lashes live. You hear about Natasha Khan's predilection for headdresses, spooky symbolism and pagan nods and expect something Bjorkian and mystical, and then it turns out she's wearing a normal top and jeans and is hugely self-effacing onstage, apart from when she's getting the audience to howl like wolves. It's almost disappointing. It's not actually, of course, because she's something really quite special live. What's A Girl To Do? is special as well, a ethereally demonic 60s girl group svengali'd by Chan Marshall, Sarah Nixey and Trish Keenan from Broadcast. Nixey has her own single out this week too, back to the classy electro-futurist grindstone on a cover of the Human League's The Black Hit Of Space. That she now looks like Ray Of Light era Madonna is less easy to contemplate. Bloc Party coming on after the Chili Peppers at Live Earth was almost as odd a piece of scheduling as how late the Pussycat Dolls were on, although in the latter case they wouldn't have had to come down from Kinross. Hunting For Witches reminds all that they can still be angular when they want. No more of this sort of thing, obviously, but at least the Pilooski Re-Edit of Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons' Beggin’, as well as having no point whatsoever, doesn't have some anonymous dancefloor diva wailing over it. Everyone who picks up a guitar has something at least halfway listenable in them, apart from Dogs, and in The Hours' case it's the tremendous not-stadium-actually-let's-say-800-capacity-venue piano pop of reissued Ali In The Jungle. Like them, but better, Tokyo Police Club may never match the vitality of their debut single, but 7" Your English Is Good suggests next year's album may yet prove us wrong.
Albums
There's some odd things going on in this week's new release piles, and we don't just mean that Smashing Pumpkins album that's essentially Billy Corgan's second solo album renamed under the band so that people will notice this time (we know Siamese Dream was virtually recorded solo, but that was different). Victoria Hart, for instance. She was the singing waitress "plucked from obscurity" to sing at a massive Cannes party, and less than two months later she has a full album ready for release on a major label. As does Paul Potts, who was the underdog winner of Britain's Got Talent from a pool of performers in all areas of showbiz, so it wasn't like a singer had to win, the final being held four weeks ago. How curious. Anyway. Our Love To Admire sounds on the face of it not unlike the previous two Interpol albums: dankness, echoey guitars, Joy Division bits, ominous portents, poor lyrics. It sounds like it's had a little more spent on creating a bigger atmosphere, aided by the move to a major label and Rich Costey at the controls, and it's not as immediately arresting as Turn On The Bright Lights or Antics, but there's patches which suggest more light and shade has been welcomed into their world. It could well be a grower. Spoon have been around for twice as long with an eighth of the widespread critical impact, last album Gimme Fiction nearly putting them in the Shins bracket of odd but accessible wonky indiepop before the Shins ruined it as they went and started selling records. Sixth album Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga attempts to follow the same crossover course but gets bound up in its own sense of the smartly quasi-experimental. It unfortunately won't take them out of the cult collegiate bracket, but it grooves, it swings in an alt-Motown sense and in America at least a lot of people will find a new favourite album the majority haven't heard. The Strange Death Of Liberal England readily admit they take their cues from the Canadian choral post-rock modern tradition, Constellation Records in particular, and Forward March! is liberally doused in choral chanting, part-orchestral mighty arrangements, FX pedal attacks and titanic building, yet there's still something very lo-fi and British about it which marks them out as a hugely exciting prospect. No Motor In The Sky Oil On The City, though? Glaswegian ska collective The Amphetameanies seem to have been going forever and have had so many names pass through their ranks that Now That's What I Call... The Amphetameanies, given a full release after sneaking out in December, includes This Boy, written for them by Alex Kapranos before he left and recorded it for Franz Ferdinand. The current line-up still includes Bis' John Disco and Belle & Sebastian brass man Mick Cooke. Into the reissues, starting with a band who are members of that select group that have had a far greater influence than they ever sold records but because of their modus operandi and lack of eyecatching tragedy will never be as commercially feted as your Drakes or Buckleys. Young Marble Giants made an album, played a couple of years' worth of gigs, quietly drifted apart, play one-off gigs on special occasions and are still in contact with each other, and there it is. Except, that album was 1980's Colossal Youth, a spooked, minimally pastoral introverted lo-fi masterpiece released well before Victoria Coren and her word hunters could put a date of coinage to that last term. Alison Statton sings offhandedly like imminent disaster hasn't quite been noticed yet, main writer Stuart Moxham (who conceived the band as a reaction against punk and didn't want Alison in the band) plays circular muted rhythm guitar, Phil Moxham's elastic bass drives the operation almost straightforward, a drum machine programmed by the Moxhams' cousin beats away forlornly in the background and a seaside organ and ring modulator makes an occasional cameo. Kurt loved them, Courtney's Hole covered them, Peter Buck has namedropped them. Allegedly there are new songs in the pipeline but in the meantime Domino are putting it out with the instrumental Testcard EP, B-sides and demos on a seperate disc, so as not to spoil the mood. The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band did not go in for minimalism much, not when there were music hall traditions to warp, trad jazz to bend into peculiar squares, exploding robots, costumes to adopt, trouser presses, theremin legs and recordings on four track tape recorders to work to their extremes. The four albums they recorded in the prime of their lifetime are back out at mid-price, and every home should have at least one of Gorilla (The Intro And The Outro, songs as performed on Do Not Adjust Your Set, giving Ben Gibbard's band a name); The Doughnut In Granny's Greenhouse (psychedelia, My Pink Half Of The Drainpipe, titular reference to passing solids); Tadpoles (Urban Spaceman, Canyons Of Your Mind) and Keynsham (title inspired by a radio advert for a pools results prediction service). Enjoy the Foo Fighters last night? Then you may be interested in the tenth anniversary reappearance of The Colour And The Shape (actually released in May, but who's counting), produced by rock production's foremost Ray Stubbs soundalike Gil Norton and the first recorded as a band after Grohl had done everything on their eponymous debut himself. The expanded version means a disc containing six B-sides, including their cover of Baker Street. And who knew we'd live so long as to be able to buy Sleeper's Greatest Hits? Honestly, they're not as bad as post-Britpop culture would have you believe.
It's a funny thing, seeing Bat For Lashes live. You hear about Natasha Khan's predilection for headdresses, spooky symbolism and pagan nods and expect something Bjorkian and mystical, and then it turns out she's wearing a normal top and jeans and is hugely self-effacing onstage, apart from when she's getting the audience to howl like wolves. It's almost disappointing. It's not actually, of course, because she's something really quite special live. What's A Girl To Do? is special as well, a ethereally demonic 60s girl group svengali'd by Chan Marshall, Sarah Nixey and Trish Keenan from Broadcast. Nixey has her own single out this week too, back to the classy electro-futurist grindstone on a cover of the Human League's The Black Hit Of Space. That she now looks like Ray Of Light era Madonna is less easy to contemplate. Bloc Party coming on after the Chili Peppers at Live Earth was almost as odd a piece of scheduling as how late the Pussycat Dolls were on, although in the latter case they wouldn't have had to come down from Kinross. Hunting For Witches reminds all that they can still be angular when they want. No more of this sort of thing, obviously, but at least the Pilooski Re-Edit of Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons' Beggin’, as well as having no point whatsoever, doesn't have some anonymous dancefloor diva wailing over it. Everyone who picks up a guitar has something at least halfway listenable in them, apart from Dogs, and in The Hours' case it's the tremendous not-stadium-actually-let's-say-800-capacity-venue piano pop of reissued Ali In The Jungle. Like them, but better, Tokyo Police Club may never match the vitality of their debut single, but 7" Your English Is Good suggests next year's album may yet prove us wrong.
Albums
There's some odd things going on in this week's new release piles, and we don't just mean that Smashing Pumpkins album that's essentially Billy Corgan's second solo album renamed under the band so that people will notice this time (we know Siamese Dream was virtually recorded solo, but that was different). Victoria Hart, for instance. She was the singing waitress "plucked from obscurity" to sing at a massive Cannes party, and less than two months later she has a full album ready for release on a major label. As does Paul Potts, who was the underdog winner of Britain's Got Talent from a pool of performers in all areas of showbiz, so it wasn't like a singer had to win, the final being held four weeks ago. How curious. Anyway. Our Love To Admire sounds on the face of it not unlike the previous two Interpol albums: dankness, echoey guitars, Joy Division bits, ominous portents, poor lyrics. It sounds like it's had a little more spent on creating a bigger atmosphere, aided by the move to a major label and Rich Costey at the controls, and it's not as immediately arresting as Turn On The Bright Lights or Antics, but there's patches which suggest more light and shade has been welcomed into their world. It could well be a grower. Spoon have been around for twice as long with an eighth of the widespread critical impact, last album Gimme Fiction nearly putting them in the Shins bracket of odd but accessible wonky indiepop before the Shins ruined it as they went and started selling records. Sixth album Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga attempts to follow the same crossover course but gets bound up in its own sense of the smartly quasi-experimental. It unfortunately won't take them out of the cult collegiate bracket, but it grooves, it swings in an alt-Motown sense and in America at least a lot of people will find a new favourite album the majority haven't heard. The Strange Death Of Liberal England readily admit they take their cues from the Canadian choral post-rock modern tradition, Constellation Records in particular, and Forward March! is liberally doused in choral chanting, part-orchestral mighty arrangements, FX pedal attacks and titanic building, yet there's still something very lo-fi and British about it which marks them out as a hugely exciting prospect. No Motor In The Sky Oil On The City, though? Glaswegian ska collective The Amphetameanies seem to have been going forever and have had so many names pass through their ranks that Now That's What I Call... The Amphetameanies, given a full release after sneaking out in December, includes This Boy, written for them by Alex Kapranos before he left and recorded it for Franz Ferdinand. The current line-up still includes Bis' John Disco and Belle & Sebastian brass man Mick Cooke. Into the reissues, starting with a band who are members of that select group that have had a far greater influence than they ever sold records but because of their modus operandi and lack of eyecatching tragedy will never be as commercially feted as your Drakes or Buckleys. Young Marble Giants made an album, played a couple of years' worth of gigs, quietly drifted apart, play one-off gigs on special occasions and are still in contact with each other, and there it is. Except, that album was 1980's Colossal Youth, a spooked, minimally pastoral introverted lo-fi masterpiece released well before Victoria Coren and her word hunters could put a date of coinage to that last term. Alison Statton sings offhandedly like imminent disaster hasn't quite been noticed yet, main writer Stuart Moxham (who conceived the band as a reaction against punk and didn't want Alison in the band) plays circular muted rhythm guitar, Phil Moxham's elastic bass drives the operation almost straightforward, a drum machine programmed by the Moxhams' cousin beats away forlornly in the background and a seaside organ and ring modulator makes an occasional cameo. Kurt loved them, Courtney's Hole covered them, Peter Buck has namedropped them. Allegedly there are new songs in the pipeline but in the meantime Domino are putting it out with the instrumental Testcard EP, B-sides and demos on a seperate disc, so as not to spoil the mood. The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band did not go in for minimalism much, not when there were music hall traditions to warp, trad jazz to bend into peculiar squares, exploding robots, costumes to adopt, trouser presses, theremin legs and recordings on four track tape recorders to work to their extremes. The four albums they recorded in the prime of their lifetime are back out at mid-price, and every home should have at least one of Gorilla (The Intro And The Outro, songs as performed on Do Not Adjust Your Set, giving Ben Gibbard's band a name); The Doughnut In Granny's Greenhouse (psychedelia, My Pink Half Of The Drainpipe, titular reference to passing solids); Tadpoles (Urban Spaceman, Canyons Of Your Mind) and Keynsham (title inspired by a radio advert for a pools results prediction service). Enjoy the Foo Fighters last night? Then you may be interested in the tenth anniversary reappearance of The Colour And The Shape (actually released in May, but who's counting), produced by rock production's foremost Ray Stubbs soundalike Gil Norton and the first recorded as a band after Grohl had done everything on their eponymous debut himself. The expanded version means a disc containing six B-sides, including their cover of Baker Street. And who knew we'd live so long as to be able to buy Sleeper's Greatest Hits? Honestly, they're not as bad as post-Britpop culture would have you believe.
The Weekly Sweep
Saturday, July 07, 2007
We had some stuff to write as well. Ah well. In the meantime, you'll see why we're posting this, apart from it being ace, tomorrow:
Tuesday, July 03, 2007
Songs To Learn And Sing: July 2007
See, this is going to be far better for us all than big month-long splurges. After the success of the original Songs To Learn And Sing last November and the failure of the More Songs... follow-up last month to make it to the end of the period allotted to it, what's now going to happen is a new volunteer/victim will be putting the song they think everyone should hear forward on the first day of each month, or if that day falls on a Sunday or Monday the first day after our weekend business has been concluded. Sound reasonable? Good. Here's everything that has been submitted so far in the name of Songs To Learn And Sing, and here's the choice - a free choice, remember - for this month, from comedian James Kettle:
Toto - Africa
If you’re a sentient being, the likelihood is that you’ve been exposed to this song before. If you’ve ever idled away the day staring at VH1 Classic or been shopping in a supermarket on the continent, the odds only go up.
Now, you might not think much of this song. You might think that the lyrics are trite and silly, and laugh at couplets like "I know that I must do what’s right/Sure as Kilimanjaro rising like an empress above the Serengeti". You might cringe at the efforts of a bunch of be-mulleted LA session musicians to rustle up a funky African groove. You might note the unfortunate irony that Toto’s statement that they "bless the rains down in Africa" coincided with the onset of the Ethiopian famine (which doesn’t so much prove the non-existence of God so much as suggest that if he is up there, he doesn’t have much time for the hubris of be-mulleted LA session musicians).
But I love Africa. It’s utterly ridiculous, and wonderfully bereft of irony. There’s nothing apologetic about the song - every note, every bizarre line ("He looked at me as if to say/Hurry boy, she’s waiting there for you" - what kind of facial expression is that?) is performed with utterly bombastic sincerity. And yet it’s a wonderfully listenable record, with a dementedly soaring chorus that only seems to reinforce the inherent ridiculousness of the whole performance.
I was once a guest on a late-night show on Resonance FM (the niche-within-a-niche London arts station dedicated to broadcasting experimental noise, some of it verbal) and the DJ asked me to bring in some records to play. I brought in Africa. To be strictly accurate, I brought in my £1.50 vinyl copy of its parent album Toto IV. He looked at it, put it to one side, and stuck on some experimental noise. Here’s what you would have heard.
The complete collection
Toto - Africa
If you’re a sentient being, the likelihood is that you’ve been exposed to this song before. If you’ve ever idled away the day staring at VH1 Classic or been shopping in a supermarket on the continent, the odds only go up.
Now, you might not think much of this song. You might think that the lyrics are trite and silly, and laugh at couplets like "I know that I must do what’s right/Sure as Kilimanjaro rising like an empress above the Serengeti". You might cringe at the efforts of a bunch of be-mulleted LA session musicians to rustle up a funky African groove. You might note the unfortunate irony that Toto’s statement that they "bless the rains down in Africa" coincided with the onset of the Ethiopian famine (which doesn’t so much prove the non-existence of God so much as suggest that if he is up there, he doesn’t have much time for the hubris of be-mulleted LA session musicians).
But I love Africa. It’s utterly ridiculous, and wonderfully bereft of irony. There’s nothing apologetic about the song - every note, every bizarre line ("He looked at me as if to say/Hurry boy, she’s waiting there for you" - what kind of facial expression is that?) is performed with utterly bombastic sincerity. And yet it’s a wonderfully listenable record, with a dementedly soaring chorus that only seems to reinforce the inherent ridiculousness of the whole performance.
I was once a guest on a late-night show on Resonance FM (the niche-within-a-niche London arts station dedicated to broadcasting experimental noise, some of it verbal) and the DJ asked me to bring in some records to play. I brought in Africa. To be strictly accurate, I brought in my £1.50 vinyl copy of its parent album Toto IV. He looked at it, put it to one side, and stuck on some experimental noise. Here’s what you would have heard.
The complete collection
Monday, July 02, 2007
Weekender : today our heart swings
FREE MUSIC: The seven member Vancouver outfit They Shoot Horses, Don't They? don't sound too far removed from Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, right down to the drone organ and David Byrne underwater vocal stylings. It certainly strains at the edges of structural post-punk revival at times with horns and Pere Ubu/Pavement/Xiu Xiu stylings. A Place Called LA goes to the doomy carnival.
HEY YOU GET OFFA MYSPACE: Chopper Harris is the band name beneath which lies Ed Treacy, a man who appears to have more ideas then he really knows what to do with. Recently signed to Parlophone, here lies one of the myriad singer-songwriter chartbound visionaries from the mid-80s (Treacy namechecks Prefab Sprout among his influences, which does our work for us) dragged through a laptop. Expect Radcliffe and Maconie to express an interest within months.
VISUAL REPRESENTATION: A random selection of unlikely and unusual TV appearances this time around. To wit: a pipe-toting country boy philosopher introduces Bob Dylan's TV debut on the excellently titled Folk Songs And More Folk Songs; a not entirely together Pop Will Eat Itself on RTE's Late Late Show (note an unremarked upon Lily Savage as a guest, and if anyone can make sense of the Hitler joke at the start of this clip, do let us know); Suggs covers Suedehead on Danny Baker After All in 1993 with Mark 'compared to Tatu's How Soon Is Now it's Citizen Kane' Kermode on double bass (and presumably that's the same Jacques Peretti who now writes for the Guardian in the credits as researcher); Husker Du perform for and banter with Joan Rivers in 1987; a not entirely shevelled Thom Yorke beats the recycling drum for Friends Of The Earth on BBC Breakfast; Stevie Wonder performs Superstition on Sesame Street; and to prove that we do kids' TV slightly differently, Sooty drum batlles against Nicko McBrain of Iron Maiden.
VIRAL MARKETING: We've had a lot of emails this week, mostly about assorted generic pills and that strange one about online greetings cards from suspiciouslly unnamed 'relatives'. But one we did receive gratefully was from our old professional friends The Victorian English Gentlemens Club alerting us to All The Sevens, their launch for the La Mer/Stupid As Wood double A side (released 16th July - we'll remind you) at Clwb Ifor Bach in Cardiff on 7th July. Support comes from the fantastic Gindrinker and Threatmantics, who we don't really know but are assured "specialise in a purely visceral in-your-face gypsy punk". £3.99 entrance plus "a free Russian pin badge".
FALLING OFF A BLOG: We're sure we'd mentioned Black Country Grammar before now. Well, clearly we hadn't, as it was still in our list of blogs to namecheck. Even if he hasn't updated since the end of April there's still plenty going on in terms of wide-ranging mp3s.
EVERYBODY GET RANDOM: The key question arising from the Truck Festival line-up, not counting "so where's (X), then?": Eamonn Dunphy on the Market (acoustic) stage on the Saturday? The U2 and Roy Keane biographer and wantonly controversial Irish football pundit has always had a folky element?
IN OTHER NEWS: We can't emphasise enough how great a work the comic series Phonogram, released last week in trade edition, is, and as a round-up to this first series Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie have told all to Comic Book Resources (warning: spoilers). It's about music journalism as much as music, see.
HEY YOU GET OFFA MYSPACE: Chopper Harris is the band name beneath which lies Ed Treacy, a man who appears to have more ideas then he really knows what to do with. Recently signed to Parlophone, here lies one of the myriad singer-songwriter chartbound visionaries from the mid-80s (Treacy namechecks Prefab Sprout among his influences, which does our work for us) dragged through a laptop. Expect Radcliffe and Maconie to express an interest within months.
VISUAL REPRESENTATION: A random selection of unlikely and unusual TV appearances this time around. To wit: a pipe-toting country boy philosopher introduces Bob Dylan's TV debut on the excellently titled Folk Songs And More Folk Songs; a not entirely together Pop Will Eat Itself on RTE's Late Late Show (note an unremarked upon Lily Savage as a guest, and if anyone can make sense of the Hitler joke at the start of this clip, do let us know); Suggs covers Suedehead on Danny Baker After All in 1993 with Mark 'compared to Tatu's How Soon Is Now it's Citizen Kane' Kermode on double bass (and presumably that's the same Jacques Peretti who now writes for the Guardian in the credits as researcher); Husker Du perform for and banter with Joan Rivers in 1987; a not entirely shevelled Thom Yorke beats the recycling drum for Friends Of The Earth on BBC Breakfast; Stevie Wonder performs Superstition on Sesame Street; and to prove that we do kids' TV slightly differently, Sooty drum batlles against Nicko McBrain of Iron Maiden.
VIRAL MARKETING: We've had a lot of emails this week, mostly about assorted generic pills and that strange one about online greetings cards from suspiciouslly unnamed 'relatives'. But one we did receive gratefully was from our old professional friends The Victorian English Gentlemens Club alerting us to All The Sevens, their launch for the La Mer/Stupid As Wood double A side (released 16th July - we'll remind you) at Clwb Ifor Bach in Cardiff on 7th July. Support comes from the fantastic Gindrinker and Threatmantics, who we don't really know but are assured "specialise in a purely visceral in-your-face gypsy punk". £3.99 entrance plus "a free Russian pin badge".
FALLING OFF A BLOG: We're sure we'd mentioned Black Country Grammar before now. Well, clearly we hadn't, as it was still in our list of blogs to namecheck. Even if he hasn't updated since the end of April there's still plenty going on in terms of wide-ranging mp3s.
EVERYBODY GET RANDOM: The key question arising from the Truck Festival line-up, not counting "so where's (X), then?": Eamonn Dunphy on the Market (acoustic) stage on the Saturday? The U2 and Roy Keane biographer and wantonly controversial Irish football pundit has always had a folky element?
IN OTHER NEWS: We can't emphasise enough how great a work the comic series Phonogram, released last week in trade edition, is, and as a round-up to this first series Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie have told all to Comic Book Resources (warning: spoilers). It's about music journalism as much as music, see.
Sunday, July 01, 2007
In shops tomorrow: 2/7
Singles
There doesn't appear to be a reason why 4AD are putting out another single from TV On The Radio's Return To Cookie Mountain, especially as few of the tracks from it really work on their own. It was our album of 2006, though, so the post-apocalyptic shoegazing gospel with Bowie on backing vocals of Province on 7" is very much worthy of your attention. It's funny to think that Interpol have become a bona fide influence given how before Turn On The Bright Lights landed in the UK they were best known as being 'a bit like Joy Division'. Much as everyone now seems down on them, The Heinrich Maneuver is a classically Interpol PDA/Slow Hands-style statement of much the same intent as before but a reminder nonetheless of what they do. You pretty much know what the Go! Team do too, but it's a lot more difficult to copy or categorise. Just another too cool for school B-girl blaxploitation horn-driven soundtrack, that's Grip Like A Vice. It's interesting that, assuming their current O2 supports for Snow Patrol don't amount to much, the Twilight Sad have taken off in America more readily than they have in Britain, the Scottish-accented Arab Strap gone shoegaze near-stadium size sound not being the first thing you'd think of as Triple A Alternative material. And She Would Darken The Memory Of Youth comes on 7" from the grower that is Fourteen Autumns And Fifteen Winters. The Indelicates label themselves "despicable folk-rock cabaret with a mission to end all music", which makes their friendship with Art Brut (Eddie's in the video to this and we're not sure they're not in the new Direct Hit clip) and namedropping of Luke Haines make perfect sense. Inevitably opinion splitting to the last, Simon Indelicate, Julia Indelicate and three people not surnamed Indelicate - we see - take another scabrous sideswipe at modern pop culture and those who follow it on second proper single Julia, We Dont Live In The 60s. We'd mention the band Julia used to be in with a raised eyebrow at this point, but that's exactly what they'd expect us to do. The Hold Steady give Chips Ahoy! another go on 7", the Concretes do fairly well without Victoria on Oh Boy and The New Hot Chip, as nobody calls them yet, Fujiya & Miyagi, make a break for the summer dance music took its revenge with Uh.
Albums
There's a certain unevenness with Chemical Brothers albums nowadays, Push The Button containing anthems that were harder edged than the party starting of yore and, well, not much else to write home about. We Are The Night seems to have taken the psychedelic route of much of their best material, with Klaxons, Midlake's Tim Smith and Willy Mason helping out and Ali Love hindering out. Forever doomed to be subject to sniggers about religious sects, the Polyphonic Spree soft launch The Fragile Army in black smocks and Sections now running up to 32. There are hints of darkness, but it's mostly the usual joy to the world, something rarely apparent, at least at face value, in Steven Adams' darkly sardonic songs for The Broken Family Band. Hello Love puts a rocket up their alt-country mores. Candidate have long been indie-folk's best kept secret, largely because Joel and Alex Morris have been busier with their Framley Examiner and Bollocks To Alton Towers/Far From The Sodding Crowd projects. Oxengate still sounds like lo-fi Americana's take on Fairport Convention. The once hotly tipped The Crimea famously made their second album Secrets Of The Witching Hour available for free, but presumably the accountants' predictions came back to them so their decidedly opportunity-missing collection is now out in shops. There may be American underground-influenced bands formed in the last ninety years who don't owe a debt of gratitude to Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation, but they must be very dull people. Every home that takes in this welding of the famously dissonant, oddly tuned Youth sound to tighter song structures is a good home - it's good Teen Age bloody Riot on it! - and now you get a single stripped down demo of Eric's Trip and an album of contemporary live tracks, one unreleased, and covers of the Beatles, Captain Beefheart, Neil Young and Mudhoney. Blondie's third album Eat To The Beat was issued in 1979 along with, for the first time ever, a VHS featuring a video for every track on the album, which EMI have only just thought to transfer to DVD and attach to a remastered album, the stars of which are Atomic, Union City Blue and Dreaming. At much the same time Howard Devoto was making a very different sort of art-pop in Magazine, and when they split he followed the path of their funkiest, least commercial sound in 1983 solo debut (and indeed swansong) Jerky Versions Of The Dream. Really funky, in a hard edged way, we find the Stax archive rarity crate-digging project up to its fifth volume, in other words 5000 Volts Of Stax.
DVDs
Given the budget and the enormous hall venue, the Dresden Dolls were never going to do things by halves, and as such The Dresden Dolls: Live At The Roundhouse features Amanda, Brian and troupes of avant-garde dancers, vaudevillians, circus performers and so forth.
There doesn't appear to be a reason why 4AD are putting out another single from TV On The Radio's Return To Cookie Mountain, especially as few of the tracks from it really work on their own. It was our album of 2006, though, so the post-apocalyptic shoegazing gospel with Bowie on backing vocals of Province on 7" is very much worthy of your attention. It's funny to think that Interpol have become a bona fide influence given how before Turn On The Bright Lights landed in the UK they were best known as being 'a bit like Joy Division'. Much as everyone now seems down on them, The Heinrich Maneuver is a classically Interpol PDA/Slow Hands-style statement of much the same intent as before but a reminder nonetheless of what they do. You pretty much know what the Go! Team do too, but it's a lot more difficult to copy or categorise. Just another too cool for school B-girl blaxploitation horn-driven soundtrack, that's Grip Like A Vice. It's interesting that, assuming their current O2 supports for Snow Patrol don't amount to much, the Twilight Sad have taken off in America more readily than they have in Britain, the Scottish-accented Arab Strap gone shoegaze near-stadium size sound not being the first thing you'd think of as Triple A Alternative material. And She Would Darken The Memory Of Youth comes on 7" from the grower that is Fourteen Autumns And Fifteen Winters. The Indelicates label themselves "despicable folk-rock cabaret with a mission to end all music", which makes their friendship with Art Brut (Eddie's in the video to this and we're not sure they're not in the new Direct Hit clip) and namedropping of Luke Haines make perfect sense. Inevitably opinion splitting to the last, Simon Indelicate, Julia Indelicate and three people not surnamed Indelicate - we see - take another scabrous sideswipe at modern pop culture and those who follow it on second proper single Julia, We Dont Live In The 60s. We'd mention the band Julia used to be in with a raised eyebrow at this point, but that's exactly what they'd expect us to do. The Hold Steady give Chips Ahoy! another go on 7", the Concretes do fairly well without Victoria on Oh Boy and The New Hot Chip, as nobody calls them yet, Fujiya & Miyagi, make a break for the summer dance music took its revenge with Uh.
Albums
There's a certain unevenness with Chemical Brothers albums nowadays, Push The Button containing anthems that were harder edged than the party starting of yore and, well, not much else to write home about. We Are The Night seems to have taken the psychedelic route of much of their best material, with Klaxons, Midlake's Tim Smith and Willy Mason helping out and Ali Love hindering out. Forever doomed to be subject to sniggers about religious sects, the Polyphonic Spree soft launch The Fragile Army in black smocks and Sections now running up to 32. There are hints of darkness, but it's mostly the usual joy to the world, something rarely apparent, at least at face value, in Steven Adams' darkly sardonic songs for The Broken Family Band. Hello Love puts a rocket up their alt-country mores. Candidate have long been indie-folk's best kept secret, largely because Joel and Alex Morris have been busier with their Framley Examiner and Bollocks To Alton Towers/Far From The Sodding Crowd projects. Oxengate still sounds like lo-fi Americana's take on Fairport Convention. The once hotly tipped The Crimea famously made their second album Secrets Of The Witching Hour available for free, but presumably the accountants' predictions came back to them so their decidedly opportunity-missing collection is now out in shops. There may be American underground-influenced bands formed in the last ninety years who don't owe a debt of gratitude to Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation, but they must be very dull people. Every home that takes in this welding of the famously dissonant, oddly tuned Youth sound to tighter song structures is a good home - it's good Teen Age bloody Riot on it! - and now you get a single stripped down demo of Eric's Trip and an album of contemporary live tracks, one unreleased, and covers of the Beatles, Captain Beefheart, Neil Young and Mudhoney. Blondie's third album Eat To The Beat was issued in 1979 along with, for the first time ever, a VHS featuring a video for every track on the album, which EMI have only just thought to transfer to DVD and attach to a remastered album, the stars of which are Atomic, Union City Blue and Dreaming. At much the same time Howard Devoto was making a very different sort of art-pop in Magazine, and when they split he followed the path of their funkiest, least commercial sound in 1983 solo debut (and indeed swansong) Jerky Versions Of The Dream. Really funky, in a hard edged way, we find the Stax archive rarity crate-digging project up to its fifth volume, in other words 5000 Volts Of Stax.
DVDs
Given the budget and the enormous hall venue, the Dresden Dolls were never going to do things by halves, and as such The Dresden Dolls: Live At The Roundhouse features Amanda, Brian and troupes of avant-garde dancers, vaudevillians, circus performers and so forth.
The Weekly Sweep
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