If anyone can tell me what I thought of the Broken Social Scene track I'd be very pleased to know.
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Sunday, 28 February 2010
So anyway here's that Hot Club review I mentioned a while ago which after sending it to 3 publications was eventually accepted by FACT, but I can't find a link to it there, perhaps it's in the paper edition.
With Days Like This as Cheap as Chewing Gum, Why Would Anyone Want to Work?
“They shoot horses, don’t they?” So Horace McCoy asked us during the depression, and so Hot Club de Paris ask us in the present, on the fourth song from their new EP. And it’s a good reference point for Hot Club; the lyrics feel like they’ve been lifted from mid-20th Century American literature, with talk of dance marathons, cops looking for guns long since thrown into the river, and a car sinking in a lake with its inhabitants tapping out a (no doubt atypical) rhythm on the window pane. ‘Dog Tired..’ and ‘Extra Time Then Sudden Death’ are the best tracks here, both fizz with images and doodling guitar lines, working in harmony to produce the most bizarrely anthemic songs you’ll hear this year. It’s exactly what you’d want from a Hot Club EP (though it’s almost as long as their albums, with fewer tracks); unusual and lyrical music about the small things in life and how, when laid out one after the other in a song, they amount to something quite extraordinary. It’s quite like Joanna Newsom in that sense, and also in the sense that both are very good. Hot Club always feel like old friends and this EP fits like a glove from the first listen.
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Also Gavin, anti-Kantian that he (sometimes) is, used me as a means to an end, and without my consent sent my Hot Chip review to a site he writes for after it was rejected by my student paper in favour of a negative review, which felt like a girl you give a lovingly crafted valentines card to ripping it up and getting off with a guy who punched her in the face instead. I imagine. Anyway, thanks to Gavin, as it turned up on google news (which I think means it was widely read?)
The reason I link to it is cos they highlight the Amy Winehouse/Duffy diss. Cos this is a good comparison. Hot Chip are primarily a soul band as far as I'm concerned, and it's always been obvious to me that this is the best tag to give them. You could really hear the Destiny's Child influence in their early singles (take B-side 'The Girl in Me' as undeniable evidence for this). Crap journalists call them electro pop cos they have synths, which is like saying Black Sabbath are the same genre as Django Reinhardt as they both use guitars (there's also another link between the two which music nerds will see stand out like a sore thumb). Shit like this is what I hear in my head when I hear the term 'electro-pop', music that comes on in Topman and makes me feel alone. Hot Chip are a soul band. 'One Life Stand' is the 21st century version of Take Me to the River.
Lazy Hot Chip journalism was also responsible for a lot of papers saying that 'every song on the record feels like a single', which they're only saying cos Joe said he wanted to write such an album, and simply ISN'T true, given that 3 tracks are very long and without choruses (Alley Cats, Brothers, Slush) and Thieves in the Night could never be a single, for anybody. That's half the album gone, cockles.
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Very good b-side. Remember 'let's build a home' by the white stripes? And put my best friends in whhhhhhhhhOOOOOOOOPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP
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still on a hunt for one life stand remixes...
and despite appearances this blog is NOT becoming a Hot Chip fan site, if you're worrying.
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(Black Sabbath's Tony Iommi and Django Reinhardt both have disfigured fretting hands. Sore thumb, geddit?)
Boys kissing boys, It's about time for me to take what's mine, Virginia.
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There's a very nice bit in the Alan Bennett diaries where he's sitting in the park and a man comes up to him and asks if he has the time. Alan says that he does not, the man stands about for a moment with a pitying smile, and then eventually moves away. Alan sits, the realisations dawns, and calls after him "but thank you very much for asking."
I've always found this sweet and very touching, but especially today as basically the exact same thing happened to me just now.
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And today was a truly lovely day to be in the park. First properly sunny day for ages, and I pretended it was summer. Sky blue canvas shoes et al, swish ting y'know. What am I gonna do with this weather, I thought. I'll make an effort with the new Vampire Weekend album, I decided.
I wasn't that keen on Contra and didn't put much of an effort into it ever since I heard the first track 'Horchata' which just isn't a very good song. It's quite smug, too preppy, like Cliff Richard. I think Vampire Weekend are everything that I love and hate at once. I think the hipster thing is unfair and due their fans rather than the band themselves, which is a shame. But they do seem to base their image around Bennetton a bit too much. On the other hand I like that pop music has gotten back to focusing on the small details, and they remind me of the sea. If I had to choose one word to sum Vampire Weekend up it would be 'Pastel'; everything soft, delicate and beautiful.
Vampire Weekend are only really great when listened to on the beach. They sound like that classic ideal of the seaside: blocks of colour and brightness. I can only listen to Vampire Weekend when my surroundings are equally beautiful; the sea, the park, the botanical gardens, Old Aberdeen. If you listen to it in an industrial part of town or a train station its beauty seems both amplified and diminished; crushed by the ugliness but also mocking it with its own beauty.
As for the album itself, it's hard, I have no concrete feelings about it. I think that perhaps all that can be said about the album is that it's beautiful; and you don't really need anything more. Like Brideshead Revisited, perhaps it's merely ridiculous, preppy fantasy. Waugh himself hated Brideshead for its insane, frankly unbelievable beauty-as do I, in a way-he wrote it when incapacitated during the war and longing for the past and all its flavours, memory distorting reality. Actually I suppose that's another example of beauty (in this case of the past) mocking the ugliness of the present.
Sorry, that wasn't very good was it. -----
I also listened to 'Kind of Blue' whilst I did the crossword and, with a juggler practising on the lawn on a dog walker on a bench throwing a ball, felt like I was in Seurat's world.
"Rammstein are starting to resemble that scene near the end of event horizon where you see brief flashes of 'hell'."
-James Lightfoot
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Where is the best place to listen to Burial? The supermarket is the best place to listen to Burial. It is, of course, made for the post-rave walk home and the comedown, and that it does indeed do incredibly well. But a supermarket is just a little bit more great. I think it's cos I often begin to drift in supermarkets, unsure what to do, constantly distracted. And Burial is the music for this emotion-bewilderment, but serene and content bewilderment, stimuli all around you but none of them particularly concrete or persuasive. Limbo.
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For similar but slightly different reasons talking heads are good in shopping centres (particularly 'dream operator').
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And Blondie are good for walking down busy high streets. Sassy.
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I only came across the phrase 'Save it for a rainy day' used with regard to books just the other day, and what a beautiful turn of phrase (literally): banal cliché made withering put-down just by shifting reference.
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I've recently been getting back into my old habit of flicking radio 1 on when I'm changing CDs or in my room for just a few seconds, putting shoes on or whatsoever. And it seems that even from these mercifully brief encounters, they're playing two songs very much at the moment at all times of the day. One is 'Let's dance to Joy Division' by the wombats, and the other is 'Brianstorm' by Arctic Monkeys.
What the fuck? Has literally nothing happened in indie music since 2007? It's bad enough to have Zane Shitcum Lowe playing it, but the daytime ones (I know none of their names) should at least stick to their duty and just play new music (in which they apparently trust).
Though to be fair, they still quite often play 'Cry for you' by September, which I absolutely adore, and is about as old and unimportant as the fucking wombats.
Also, remember this? I remember it was a big deal in sixth form, singing it with friends, almost a joke, but also deadly serious. Which is the attitude people should have to all music.
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Also from around the same time and equally great (apologies for the video, which is horrible)
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I realise I haven't discussed any new music in this post whatsoever (which is not unusual). I have a review of the new hot club EP sitting next to me which I've sent to loads of people with no reply. If I don't get it put anywhere in the next few days I'll dump it here.
I also hoped to write about any good One Life Stand remixes I've found but I haven't found ANY that are above 'alright'. ------------------
I'm making mixtapes again (Asda the only place that still sell cassettes). If you want one please let me know and I will very happily post you one.
Apologies for the huge amount of spelling mistakes in my last post. I actually know how to spell all the words which I didn't spell correctly.
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The desert is an ocean.
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Wittgenstein in pop culture no.3:
"Facts all come with points of view"
-Crosseyed and Painless
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Always and forever.
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I went to see Mary Beard lecture recently and have subsequently become obsessed with her blog. Here's a just lovely article from it. The argument structure is quite beautiful.
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RIP Howard Zinn.
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Ahh Lady Sovereign, what a fall from grace.
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Here's my review of the new Hot Chip album for my student newspaper. I'm a bit brokenhearted at the moment so towards the end I go a bit crazy about what a beautiful experience it is to listen to this music when I feel like this, which is perhaps irresponsible as she'll almost certainly read it. Nevertheless:
One Life Stand is an album made to be listened to in Aberdeen. It is icy yet warm and familiar, with a sense of being frozen and timeless, as if it could belong anywhere. It’s also comfortingly monochrome; the songs all form a sort of melancholic soup onto which you project your own thoughts and feelings, much like the Aberdonian landscape. Which is not to say the songs aren’t individually brilliant. The title track caves in from robust, falsely uncaring interrogation into a weeping request for monogamy. Or listen to the way Alexis sings “You are my loveline” on Hand Me Down Your Love and try to imagine ever turning him away. God, it makes you shake. It’s a truly unique voice, quivering and feeble in the corner but much too beautiful to ignore, like a kitten. Alexis Taylor so immensely surpasses Amy Winehouse, Duffy etc etc as the greatest soul singer of our age. He is David Byrne crossed with Fontella Bass, in that he has total confidence only in his own insecurities and failings. Like all the best music (or art, or friends, or anything), it makes the deficiencies we’re all burdened with feel like blessings. Loneliness, confusion and an ever-shifting sense of identity, in the world of Hot Chip, seem like the things everyone should choose to feel. With a voice this beautiful, anything can be sold. The nerdy and the lonesome made epic heroes through sheer beauty of expression alone; tears are mightier than the pen. Voices dominate this record. The synths on previous Hot Chip records have been what made them hits, think of Boy from School or Over and Over, and then the midpoint, Ready for the Floor, where vocals and synths hit parity in the most beautiful way possible. But on this album the voices have taken over. The synths only exist to bubble and hiss in dutiful appreciation underneath the pure, virginal serenity of the vocals. Like Ibsen’s Peer Gynt is, as all Educating Rita fans know, a play for voices, so this is an album for voices. Voices to nestle in your ears on another walk home, voices to buttress you at your weakest moments, voices to settle chest pains. Voices, such voices.
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Sunday, 31 January 2010
He's back.
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Decade DONE. A good one, a top one. Song of the decade was needless to say 'I Luv U'. Top musical memory of the decade was probably dancing it to it a rubber circus tent, with the hot, slippery bass bouncing off the brightly covered walls around us, falling over, losing it, getting it back. Just heaven.
(Also: such a cool video. and really i think 'cool' is the only word i can use to describe it. just, so cool)
Other great times I've had dancing this decade:
-'I feel love' in the duracell tent. This is a massive cliché that has been hooking misty-eyed people for decades now but god it was so perfect. -Doing the Stop Making Sense dance routines to Talking Heads in a club in Warrington when I was 17. -And, weirdly, at my 'straight edge' Leeds, dancing to Klaxons (by no means a favourite) with my best friend in total darkness with burst glow-sticks putting little dots of light on people so they looked like frameworks for computer-generated folk. -Also jumping arm-in-arm with Joe at the White Stripes when I was 15. -A Wiley gig in Manchester where there were about 16 people in Sankeys so we all had loads of space and freedom. Not what I, he, or anyone was expecting.
'Something Good 08' obviously needs a mention as it means more to me than words can say, but it's much less seminal, life/genre/culture-altering and just brazenly outstanding as Dizzee.
Album of the decade is a split between White Blood Cells and Silent Shout. White Blood Cells was about equal to Panic on Sunset Strip by Johnny Thunders and Stop Making Sense in reining and certifying my personality when it was in the flux of my teenage years. So it means a lot. But Silent Shout was more slow-burning and I only really got into it after I came to Scotland; standing on a frozen street with cold, hard-faced granite all around and hearing the harsh, unforgiving voices was about as intense as music can get.
Other unfathomably wonderful albums that must be recognised are Look into the eyeball, The Blueprint (not even pretending to have been into it at time of release, obv), Trompettes de la Mort, Voices of Animals and Men, and Untrue.
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Coming soon: the return of good pop/bad pop.
(Let's just pretend it was a big thing in the first place)
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New TNJX tune.
TNJX was always so blatantly better than Wax Stag. I mean, it's the same basic idea. Joyous, MDMA-on-yr-cornflakes pop music with no room for melancholy or violence at all. But TNJX is a million times better. It's so wilfully inane and formulaic yet with such a sense of profundity and novelty. Every TNJX song ever has, for example, included that drum surge after a breakdown where it goes DUM DUM DUM DUM DUM DUM DUM DUM DUM DUMDUMDUMDUMDUMDUDUMAHHHhhhhh, and then the melodies come back in perfect synchrony (at 40 seconds and 1:55 in this particular song). But it's all we ever want and all we'd ever ask for. It's like early Beatles or the Ramones, we know what's coming and that's fine because we love it so much when it gets here. Or a soap opera plotline might be a better comparison. TNJX songs are magical cauldrons bubbling with little melodies that enchant and bewitch every single time. Long live the king!
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Wittgenstein in pop culture no.1:
"There are holes in what we do."
-Alexis Taylor on 'Bendable Poseable'.
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Meades is back! Another chance to see a documentary about Aberdeen which I've mentioned before:
I can't express enough how good an idea it would be for you to watch this. You can see my bedroom window several times, and this is the LEAST good thing about.
It's also on youtube if you don't get to it before it's iplayer best-before date.
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Squeeeeee!aky yet hard as fuck:
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Wittgenstein in pop culture no.2
"Seems, madam? Nay 'tis madam, I know not seems."
"The rest is silence..."
-Both from Hamlet.
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One of the many failing in indie rock recently has been its inability to deal with texting.
Some of the best music throughout history has been an attempt to deal with the technology of the time. Old blues lyrics about trains, all those motown songs which talk about telephones. I don't see why texting can't be a new force in pop songs. I mean texting is SO important to nearly everyone these days. I guess bands shy away from it cos it's a bit sad to write a song about texting. But texting is really profound. It's the modern equivalent of note-passing in class but it's better than note-passing because it holds with it a greater sense of risk. Text-flirting is completely detached from the corporeal world, all it is is words hanging in the air.
Grime managed to deal with it well, though. We've already heard I Luv U which mentions mobiles, but also this:
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It's a shame that the mountain goats cover of One Fine Day by the Chiffons is not very good, because it could be AMAZING. I mean, what a song. Like 'I'll Get You' by the Beatles, you can just hear the willful self-delusion (think positive!) in every single syllable.
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Will put up a hot chip review in the next few days.
x
Tuesday, 19 January 2010
Here's a review I wrote about a Stewart Lee gig for my student newspaper which was rejected, presumably because of the title (it's a heckle he got on the street in Aberdeen).
“Satirical C*nt.”
Stewart Lee “If You Prefer a Milder Comedian,Please Ask for One” at The Music Hall, 10th November 2009.
We live in facile times. We live in times when Michael McIntyre is considered something other than merely Michael McIntyre. Top Gear presenters scurry about our landscape in unattainable aluminium crushing saplings. Our age is crying out for someone to give it to us straight, like a pear cider that’s made from 100% pears. Stewart Lee may or may not be this man. He has certainly shed the universal misanthropic anger at the world around him of his youth and replaced it with a misanthropic anger about the world around him which has been forced on him against his will, by the continuing failings of popular culture as he sees it. The set’s general theme is the inescapability of pop culture; how hard it is to avoid Clive Anderson in the modern world, basically. The influence of stand-up newcomer and all-round zealot Josie Long is clear on Lee, who himself helped her break into the circuit. He has a newfound Longesque earnestness, inspired by his new status as a parent and by his disgust at the angry-about-nothing humour of the Frankie Boyles. Throughout the set there is a sense of a desperate will to be happy and content despite the frustrating world around him, even when he stands on a table in the middle of the audience and screams unamplified improvisation about the Mark Watson pear cider adverts for fifteen minutes, climaxing in his aggressively accosting someone getting up to use the loo with, “If you’ve EVER seen ANYTHING, you’ll KNOW that this must be pretty near the end.” The whole gig has the atmosphere not of a man struggling to be heard (he’s always been popular amongst those in the know, and always will be) but to find his voice. In the parenting world he has little to complain about, and wants it to stay that way, but this just means the minor disappointments push him over the edge even more. He finishes the set by singing a straight-up, unfunny rendition of Steve Earle’s ‘Galway Girl’, his favourite song, remarking to the audience, who tense up when they see him get a guitar, that the last taboo in stand-up isn’t rape, incest or the holocaust; it is a man trying to do something sincerely and well. Too true.
