the way ozzy goes, "i love you!", in sweet leaf must be the best recorded version of that phrase ever. better than any other time anyone's said it in any film, music, television, anything. its just so panicked, a desperate but fully assured and confident yelp. john darnielle said about black sabbath in his excellent book about them, 'they sound like the guys who stand at the back of the party and never dance'. that is EXACTLY what black sabbath sound like.

i love a lot of the production on master of reality, it was when sabbath became incredibly negative and awful, and the riffs got really slow and doomsome (doomsome almost certainly isnt a word but it sums it up well). its like that middle section of sweet leaf, about 1:20 in where the mid-range single note riff is layered over the crunchy chords, and it sounds like the most dismal, dream-crushing thing ever. in a good way, not in a snow patrol way.

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while i'm on sabbath might as well also say that 'supernaut' is one of the best uses of the guitar ever. that call and response bass-to-guitar riff, beautiful.

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someone asked me what music i liked the other day and i said 'well when i was a teenager i was really into early punk music' and she laughed and said 'when you were a teenager?' and i realised that i'd talked about it like it was years ago, and felt a little disturbed.

recently ive been getting back into punk though. it began when i was sent a fanzine in the post that i subscribed to all those years ago when i was a teenager, and it came in the post and took me totally by subscribed. i was charmed by its beautiful, diy simplicity and thought 'this makes sense all over again'. so ive been getting back into it all. bought an album by nation of ulysses which i'm slowly getting into, but the main area of interest right now for me is, once again, cap'n jazz.

i remember the first time i heard cap'n jazz's cover of 'take on me', and i immediately just wanted to do something. it felt inappropriate to sit around after hearing it. tim kinsellas voice is just so beautiful in such a brozen way.

i'm also massively into 'snake rap' by a band called 'snakes' too, who seem to scarcely exist at all.

also the frumpies

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heard the BEST BUSKER EVER the other day. most buskers assume that what people want to hear is oasis songs and 'imagine', but it really isn't true. then i saw someone on saturday that changed all this.

i was out walking the streets of the silver city and i heard this crunchy, arrhythmic guitar solo coming from around the corner. i went to check it out and saw this guy in a trench coat and baseball cap with a stratocaster sat on a practice amp, slumped over his guitar, playing the main riff to 'sweet home alabama' and 'sweet child of mine' over and over and over again, in a tense, squeaky, scratchy way, all totally solo and unaccompanied-no loop pedal or drumtrack-occasionally pausing to play a trail of horrible bends which constituted a solo. in other words he played guitar EXACTLY like i used to play at gigs. the reason i got into the whole bend-heavy style from johnny thunders is cos it sounds so sarcastic and is so easy to turn into a mess, but this guy had mastered it.

i'm not being ironic or facetious at all, i genuinely loved this guy and wanted to tell him. i gave him £2.

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the jonas brother can fuck off