burial

james recommended 'untrue' by burial a while ago and, cuz i respect the bruv, i gave it a listen and 'liked it'. today its genius, which everyone has tried to get across to me, hit me and, as talking heads put it, nothing is better than that.

its place is clearly in the early morning-sun rising, post-club, glasses of water, tired eyes, ears ringing, broken memories of the night you've had. everything is muffled, the music a darkness from which ghostly faces lurch out then fade back into. everything is fractured and distant here, you're alone on a flat, minimal plain. fragments of rave music wheeze out from its remains, beats skitter across the landscape, clouds of bass swarm overhead, vocals try to talk to you but they're unclear, uncertain and hard to decipher.

its brilliant and i need to hear it after a night out, lying in bed in total darkness as it rocks me to sleep.



also, new template for this blog. i like it a lot more than my old one that had that pointless random number in the top left corner. i really like the whole minimalist, simple circle thing you see these days on everything from album covers to cook books to wallpaper. the backround on my phone is one of circles shifting from purple to white and back again and it, rather pathetically, genuinely makes me happy.

and if anyone's interested the subtitle-'every day i wake up'-is a jay-z lyric. i'm very fond of double meanings in books and music, and that's one of my favourites.

also watched stephen hawking master of the universe today. my reaction to astrophysics is always one initially of awe but then, as the scale of what they are talking about becomes clear, sadness. what gets me is the university folk they have on there, all so clever, so brilliant. it dawns on me that i will soon be at university, in the english and history departments, reading books on trivialities whilst they across the corridor concern themselves with questions that all religion, art and science has tried to answer for thousands of years. the statistics given are just so incredible that in the face of them nothing else seems to matter. when they explain how small our planet is relative to the universe, all i can think about is how little a ramones album is relative to the universe, and how it would never have affected it if it didnt exist. what i initially found inspiring i soon find depressingly belittling.

it makes me feel all the more inadequate because the art i love the most is art concerned with trivial things: alan bennett plays where biscuits are symbolic, the fall writing about trucks, talking heads songs about paper. if i listened to the epic pomp of iron maiden perhaps i wouldnt feel so bad.

i think everyone in this increasingly secular world, where there are products to save you the bother of cooking rice, is constantly worried about the risk of wasting their life. and stuff like this always makes me feel that i am wasting my life, that anything i ever do will not be as important or significant as the ultimate findings of these experiments into the start of the universe. i find it difficult to believe that a book on the literary traditions of paradise lost (and there are so many) counts for anything next to this. but then as the dazzle of the figures fades, or rather i once again forget just what exactly they mean, i am back in the real world, and in need of the art i cling to in order to understand it. and it occurs to me how much more real this is to me than anything i saw on the program. the professors on the program by comparison seem lofty and even pretentious. my thoughts reverse and its their lives that seem to be a waste of time in the face of such greatness of expression. and thus, music and writing once again restore me to balanced levels. my amazement at the physicists never truly goes away but it is now equalled by my amazement at the music i have and the people i know and the the things i read. music is nothing, but theres something consoling about that. it's carefree and it doesnt matter and thats a beautiful thing. the physics is amazing and important but no one will ever properly understand it-its not stuff our minds can ever truly visualise. our bodies and minds have evolved for simpler things-community, speech, relationships-and those are the things i find myself most comfortable learning about. i disagree with oscar wilde; we shouldnt be looking at the stars, we should be looking in the gutter. innit.

new raconteurs album described as 'dylan-meets-stones' and i couldn't be less interested.

i dont like it when people scream 'marry me!' when someone does something quite well.

ok i've calmed down now and i admit i was probably too passionate in my hatred of the last post. i'm ill and fragile and it was just such a bad song that it got me really annoyed. also i'd just gone totally crazy on pop/r&b cds and so was probably a little biased against the indie scene, which to my discredit i am in general. i do of course love some indie-hot club, the young knives, arcade fire etc, but its the marc bolan/gang of four-esque stuff that really gets on my nerves.

also one thing i was worried about immediately after i published was that i seemed like i was raging against indie fans, which i totally wasnt. its the musicians i despise, not the fans. i'm really against this view that people who listen to shit music are shit people and so i just wanna make it clear that thats not what i meant.

but still, clocks are awful and i stand by my comment that music like that is some of the worst made yet.

anyway, i got a REALLY good 'house megamix' from that shit book shop, the works, yesterday for 20p!!!!!!!! it features one song in particular that i love, which i'll talk about later when i've found it on the internet so you too can witness it.

on the subject of dance-dance music, loving this song a lot at the moment. its hectic and crazy, yet with a really uplifting sound to it, and a pulse that you want to go on forever-everything that makes a club song great. i have yet to hear it in a club or at a party, but i bet it'd be great, one of those songs that gets strangers nearby to put their arms around you, and they're the best. its just that kate bush sample, so messed up, it sounds like shes gasping out her last words, in a good way.

incidentally 'wuthering heights' by kate bush is getting a lot of plays from me lately. no honestly.

also getting a lot of attention recently:

'after laughter comes tears' by wendy rene
'speakerphone' by kylie
'slow' by kylie
'i see a darkness' (will oldham cover) by johnny cash and indeed most of the album that songs from
'SOS' by abba
'beware of the birds' by justin martin
'the beach party' by hot chip
'detroit' and 'let me think about it' by fedde (taking it back, kids, alllll the way back to 2006)
'destination unknown' by alex gaudino (as above, revisiting these house tracks after james played them at a party and i just thought 'yes, this was good, this makes sense all over again')



did you see those photos of prince charles visiting bob marleys house in jamaica and playing the bongos? why does he do these things? who is he trying to impress?

"the conventional is now the experimental"

thinking about pop music today, i realised something. theres been a shift, somewhere in the last ten years, where pop music is now a more genuine form of human expression than rock music is. rock bands are all so obviously designed and fake nowadays (kooks, muse, fratellis etc), all singing about what they hope the kids will like, whilst a lot of the pop groups of the moment, like girls aloud or you could even say britney, are talking about their own lives ('piece of me' by britney is amazing by the way, i stand by a lot of the things shes done recently-i thought the head shaving incident was an amazing statement-and i love that track a lot). and girls aloud singing about getting your frock on and getting pissed with the girls on a weekend. pop music's so direct, so melodic and accessible in contrast to the directionless, boring and oh-so-often patronising rock music that slathers around at the moment.

i was just thinking about this when, bang, as if from nowhere, this came on the telly:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQViQPs-Np4

it sums up everything i want to say about how shit rock bands are at the moment. this music does literally nothing for me. there is music that i dont particularly like but i can still go 'yeah, i get it, just not my thing right now, still good though' eg drum n bass, david bowie, justin timberlake, amongst others. but this music i see nothing in. it goes straight through me and yet it drives me crazy. this track manages to contain all the things that i hate about it: the dull, uninspired guitar work treading the tired old rock band format; the completely meaningless, unimportant lyrics; that fucking top hat being the one gimmick that is needed so they are vaguely identifiable from the fratellis (but doesnt the fratellis guy also wear a top hat); the mild, shallow interest in 'vintage' things that goes no further than saying "i'm into vintage"; the same old boring 'man on the street' style of singing; the chorus about some girl who was a bit upsetting at one point in his life, the generally cynical lack of effort and they confuse punkish honesty and free-spiritedness with casual laziness and a lack of interest.

i hate it, i hate it so much. i dont like to get angry about things but this honestly is, in my opinion, some of the worst art that has ever been made and it upsets me that people are saying 'yes, this is enough for me to be happy with'

and when these fucks talk about music, they always say stuff like "well we've always loved the kinks" in the same joyless, uninspired way. god i really hate these idiots...sorry for going on.

it's amusing and great that we've got to a stage where commercial, processed-beats ridden pop music now has considerably more soul and pulse-raising melodies than music made by a garage rock band.

when did music lose its meaning? there is nothing inspiring about this shit. even the video is completely awful, a mish-mash of senseless sketches that mean nothing, to no one. i know that everyone my age hates nirvana and thats fine but i still reckon kurt was the last person who knew what the fuck to do with a guitar. no one since kurt cobain has had any real idea of their own about how to approach the tired old horse of rock. in a way this was because nirvana were all about how old and constricting rock music had become. when kurt would give up on songs live and just take the piss, they were my favourite bits, cos he was breaking out of the mould and leaving it all behind. incidentally nirvana are the only grunge band i've ever really liked, the rest of it is all either pretentious noise (mudhoney) or scuzzy misery-rawk (pearl jam), so i'm just talking about nirvana, not grunge, which was on the whole pretty negative miserable music.

when did musicians stop caring about the constant pressure to keep the quality up?
when did people start ripping off post-punk and why?
when did the smiles and laughs on musicians faces turn into smirks?
when did irony become acceptable in not only fashion but also music?
when did 'trash fashion' become acceptable?

music is so beautiful. more than any other form of art, it is a way of directly connecting two souls, instantaneously. when someone sings to you right, you understand everything about them, you're best friends for a minute. it makes you realise the inherent beauty in the world around you. people put music and their favourite songs in the most important parts of their lives-their weddings, funerals, sexual intercourse, even suicides are all done to music. it matters to people more than anything else. it's played in lifts and shopping centres because it makes the people there feel better. it is a current that runs under society. doesnt it say something about humans that 99% of our songs are about love (or lack thereof)? it's the only thing in the world other than a person that can wrap itself around you. Music's amazing, it's my favourite thing. i have 'wasted' my life and failed many exams that i shouldn't have failed because of my listening to music constantly and i just get honestly upset by mediocrity like this. it just pisses on everything that i love and hold dear and i want it to die.

today i overheard someone say,

"i only read mills & boon. if its not mills & boon i'm not interested."

can you imagine actually living such a life?

every foals song, the same.