Big hunk o' chunk.

Loads of recent reviews:


New Hot Club EP

Born Ruffians- Pile o' shit.


Crystal Castles- Good Stuff


David Byrne- Work of Crystalline pop genius

Roll Deep- Jus' Deppressin'


The Fall- O FFS.

Serena Maneesh- Mucky puppies.
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Rufus Wainwright review for Gaudie:

Rufus Wainwright
All Days are Nights: Songs for Lulu

This review will avoid the two standard journalistic clichés you find nailed to Rufus Wainwright all the time: (1) that he’s a hedonistic ex-drug addict Wildean gone wild, and (2) that he makes ‘orchestral pop’. These are neither important nor particularly true; Rufus, like Joanna Newsom, uses inventive methods to create wide-ranging, idiosyncratic pop music, which doesn’t mean it’s ‘chamber pop’ or anything else. Anyway, on All Days are Nights, all this is gone and it’s Wainwright alone with piano, so close and so simple that you can hear him draw breath.
He has always been an extroverted, anti-private artist, but it’s more the case than ever on this album. It sounds like the songs are constructed as they go along. This is best expressed on ‘The Dream’, at the heart of the album, which is a five-minute drift around Rufus’ confused consciousness, like in the few moments after you awake from a dream and rapidly, second by second, it slips away from you, remembering less and less with each passing moment. As it is in life, so it is in art.
Three Shakespearean sonnets are translated into songs-sonnets 43, 20, and 10 (we’re mercifully saved from 18 ever becoming a pop song), to be exact. These are the choice cuts from a project Rufus did just before the premiere of his first opera last year (incidentally ‘Les Feux d’artifice t’appellent’ on this album is a stripped down version of the final aria from that opera), involving a wider selection of the sonnets. The sonnets he chose are about Shakespeare’s elusive ‘dark lady’, and Rufus claims that Lulu is the dark lady within us all. And the album does brood, somewhat sultry and detached, complex, perhaps even inhospitable at points. But, just like Shakespeare, we don’t find this sultriness repellent, but enticing, and so you are drawn in.
The piano is complex, soft, trailing and trawling underneath Rufus’s drawling, the songs sprawling out across his well tempered clavier. Rufus, lacking his usual constellation of instruments, uses the piano’s huge range of sounds and techniques to full effect, from swells of arpeggios to bashy chords, to plucking the strings and hitting the soundboard. Rufus sings in a low register, sometimes coming close to mumbling, for much of the time, only to break up into smooth, serene highs at the apexes of the songs.
People have said, and will say, that the album is burdensomely miserable and melancholic, yet misery is not what the album is about. The truth is that Rufus Wainwright has a slightly sad, hangdog voice, in all of his songs on all of his albums. He is always yearning for something more, it is the voice of a self-centred man, and to be self-centred is to be melancholy. But on previous albums this has been hidden underneath swathes of Ravel, or huge, bold brass. But on this album, there is nowhere to hide. It reveals what Rufus has been trying to express for a long time; the inherent sadness in wholeheartedly throwing yourself at the world. This is just a standard Rufus Wainwright album with the more fantastic parts and exotic arrangements removed, and we’re left with nothing but him. It’s not a ‘sad’ album as such, it’s just a thoughtful album, and thoughtfulness is so often confused with being miserable, or boring. But it’s neither of these things, and nor is this album.




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I also reviewed this Alicia Keys single not realising it wasn't gonna be released in britain and so obviously didn't get published.


Alicia Keys ft, Beyoncé
Put It In a Love Song

Let it ring out across the hills. Luscious, opulent R&B is back. Everyone’s talking about Gaga’s Telephone right now, but this is the Beyoncé cameo that deserves true attention. Beyoncé is unquestionably at the top, or approaching the top, of her game right now but whereas in Telephone she was supporting an essentially weak song, here she’s just part of what is an already beautiful song. Alicia Keys is a sporadic producer of moments of pop genius, every few years she comes along with a song that is universally adored; think of Fallin’, No One, and recently Empire State of Mind part II.
This is the next part of this series. At first it sounds simply, perhaps merely, beautiful but eventually you realise that there’s nothing conventional about it. The chorus is a series of descending pleas asking for universalised affection; if you love me, do everything that anyone has ever done when they love someone. The verse starts, and it’s insanely hyperactive-“ifyoureallyneedmelikeyousayyouneedme”- and continues the onslaught of demands and affirmations.
Beyoncé comes in, as she does in Telephone, as the robust, bolshy shadow of the song. Her range has always been small but more than enough, and her cameo is a brief stripe of aggression before the blissy, quivering chorus comes and washes everything else away. Then they sing in tandem for a burst of anger in the middle eight, before, once again, more chorus loveliness.
The song is surprisingly minimalist, musically speaking. The verses consist of just a rattling drumbeat, over which is put a trail of three or four notes on guitar or piano at occasional points throughout the song. The song is whiney but beautiful, commanding but fragile, threatening but a request for commitment.
I don’t know what pop music should sound like if not like this.

i'm not really a great note-taker and so when revision comes i always find obscure, odd little island phrases.

"all the world needs is consistency."

-metaphysics notes.

good youtube comment:

"who cares about money and emo and shit."

also lyric from that dizzee song below:

"there's no politician to tell me the solution,
what's the answer?
what's the conclusion?"

I love stuff like that. Trapped by convention.

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Big up

They were just much too good:

Dizzee does the establishment.

Let us discuss this



Recent dizzee interview:

Interviewer: What kind of music do you like?

Dizzee (quick as a flash): I like songs about sex and violence.

Brother silverdollar long ago mentioned dizzee's talent for beautiful quips such as this, in a post also mentioning his predictions that he'll rise to be 'a pop star who knows EXACTLY what his point is'. This is what I wanna talk about with the above video.

I think that, really, Dizzee has done exactly what we wanted him to, but we're still disappointed like pricks. What else did we imagine would happen? Dizzee rapping (well) in a tuxedo to harps with the latest indie star feels intuitively wrong (and part of his ongoing attempt to emulate jay-z), but what else could he do?

Roll Deep were on top of the pops once, in the dying days of both institutions. They did a little dance routine (wiley's alarmingly fond of dance routines it'd seem). It were reet 'orrible. I saw Wiley live after wearing my rolex had just properly landed and he did the 'authentic' grime thing; 25 second songs before a rewind. And he was getting bottled.

Do we really want dizzee to be a pop star (which we do) and just continue to do stuff like this at the NME awards? Bloggers complaining about him going commercial are properly bullshit, let them eat vinyl. I think why we wanted dizzee to get massive is cos he was obviously a subversive genius with such a universally applicable way of looking at things that he just HAD to be massive. But he was good cos he was shocking. And this is shocking.

To do it the Wiley way, which is the idea that what's shocking and new in 2003 will just be amplified if you do it in front of a crowd of indie kids, raises less eyebrows than what dizzee's done in his dinner jacket.

Rappers need to appeal to middle class white kids to get properly massive. The NME probably matters more to dizzee than any grime publication or blog, and has done for a long time. I'm not saying this is a good thing. But I am saying that he's gone down the only path possible for him to become massive. And this performance is actually good, as well. Let's not forget that.

There's a shop in the town next to mine called 'Home & Beauty'

'Home & Beauty' is a brilliant name for anything.

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Here lies love.

Gavin writes on the struggle to understand love, and I respond with a history of attitudes to love, and types of love, in pop.

LOVE PART I: LOVE AS A SURVIVAL TACTIC.

Sammi Smith expresses this best. Soft, desperate, failing, falling. "Just, please...please."



LOVE PART II: LOVE AS A MERGENCE OF MINDS.

Late night silence and knowing glances. Heaven is a place where nothing, nothing, nothing ever gets said.

Hot Chip do this well on 'in the privacy of our love', which they used to segue into after a cover of nothing compares 2 u, so I'll put that version on here

'there is nothing outside our love'



and 'nothing compares 2 u' takes us nicely into...

LOVE PART III: LOVE AS ALL-ENCOMPASSING OBSESSION.

Easily the best motown song.

'My love reaches so high I can't get over it,
So wide, I can't get around it.'



LOVE PART IV: LOVE AS SELF-DELLUSION/SELF-AGGRANDISEMENT.


Chiffons express this masterfully. 'The narrative voice is unreliable' is a sentence I read about literature on a weekly basis and this, this, this, this is pop's most supremely brilliant use of a clearly delluded narrative voice on a record.

'Though I know you're the kind of boy who only wants to run around,
I'll keep waiting and,
someday, darling...'



LOVE PART V: LOVE AS AN ENHANCEMENT OF THE PHYISCAL WORLD

Ah, this classic. The only good thing to ever come out of Dundee.



LOVE PART VI: LOVE AS A SERVICE.




LOVE PART VII: LOVE AS COMING HOME TO SOMEWHERE YOU'VE NEVER BEEN.

The resumption of normality. Everything you've ever wanted and everything that actually is, combining for the first time.

'I like to write songs about small things. Paper, animals, a house. Love is kinda big. I did once write a love song, though. In this film I sing it to a lamp'



LOVE PART VIII: LOVE AS SHAKY, CONSTANTLY CHANGING, CONSTANTLY REVISIONIST, INSECURE BLISS.


Properly perfect song, this.




LOVE PART IX: LOVE AS A BATTLEGROUND



LOVE PART X: LOVE AS A SLATE-WIPING COMPROMISE.



LOVE PART XI: LOVE AS A QUEST FOR HARD-OBTAINED GOODS.

I originally thought this lyric was 'we're one collective item', taking us nicely back to Love part II.



LOVE PART XII: LOVE AS AN UNSTOPPABLE FORCE.

i cant explain this feeling,
can't you see that salvation is freedom?



LOVE PART XIII: LOVE AS A UTILITARIAN CALCULATION.

'i'm checking it out, i'm checking it, there's
good points, bad points, but it all works out,
you know i'm a little freak out.'

-talking heads, cities.



LOVE PART XIV: LOVE AS THE ACQUISITION OF AESTHETIC PERFECTION.



LOVE PART XV: LOVE AS A FAST-DISAPPEARING SPARK, HELD BACK BY CIRCUMSTANCE AND YOU BEING A SHY TIT.



LOVE PART XVI: LOVE AS A BOSSY, UNWELCOME, PRECIOUS-TIME-CONSUMING MESS INFRINGING ON AN OTHERWISE FINE LIFE.

one of the last lyrics is 'i have to catch a cab and my bags are at the carousel'. that's key.

'There is only lawlessness'

'give love a little shove and it becomes terror'



LOVE PART XVII: LOVE AS FIZZY BLISS.

This is wonderful. Just a few thoughts, repeated over and over.