All of Your Fears Are Well Founded and True

Baroness are from the states, they’re southerners and they make this badass mix of southern rock and bruising volume with a healthy dose of chug-chug-chugging guitars. Apparently this is progressive sludge metal. Ignore the label, it’s really groove laden and if I was to describe it I would call it heavy, heavy (really fucking heavy) rock.

Blue Record has two great claims to fame:

1. It has one of the greatest ever song titles – “A Horse Called Golgotha”

2. It has one of the most high-octane, fist-pummelling, horse-hoof-pounding tracks of the year – “The Gnashing”. Admittedly this is a rubbish title, but I challenge anyone to listen to this and not get some sort of kick out of the way it builds and builds before unleashing two verses of shouted lyrics in a storm of full tilt guitars and crashing drums.

Actually, I’ve decided I really like Baroness. I like their heavy, loud, groove laden onslaught. Plus, the instrumental interludes on Blue Record, where melodic riffs are teased out for a minute or two, give you little breathers between the heavier songs. What can I say, It’s my first taste of metal and I’m surprised that it rocks so hard, that it’s so much fun and that I like it so much.

“All of your fears are well founded and true, all my hands are callous and cruel, all of my arrows that riddle you through are bullets that fire me back into you.” – The Gnashing (Baroness)

Myspace – Official – Last.fm

Into the deep black of the night…

Ages ago, I wrote about Mastodon and their third album, Blood Mountain. I said that I would never like it and that I didn’t think I would ever understand metal’s appeal. Well, it’s time to eat my hat. But only half of it. For although I still have no clue about the sprawling genre that is “metal”, I’ve had a complete volt-face on Mastodon I’m really enjoying their latest album Crack the Skye.

In fact Crack the Skye has acted a bit like a gateway drug. As soon as I devoured it I listened to their watershed album Leviathan, and then I moved onto Blood Mountain. And now I’m looking for more, or maybe something similar…

The problem is that I still have no clue when it comes to listening to metal, but I think the time has finally come to explore the strangest of all musical genres.

Now, I don’t have a plan of any kind, I’m just going off the deep end. But I do want to come out of this knowing my progressive from my power, my black from my death, and my stoner from my sludge.

So, irregular Shoveling Snow service will continue as normal, just expect to be kept abreast of my voyage into the deep black of the night…

Mastodon Album Covers

Paul Romano’s artwork for the past three Mastodon albums has been amazing.

Crack The Skye

Blood Mountain

Leviathan

Ramona Falls’ Set List

I saw this cartoon setlist used by Ramona Falls at their recent gigs and I thought that it was a pretty novel way of remembering which song comes next. It reminds me those reusable sticker books kids play with.

Set goes:

1. Diamond Shovel  2. Russia  3. I Say Fever  4. The Darkest Day  5. Bellyfulla  6. Boy Ant  7. Going Once, Going Twice  8. Salt Sack  9. Always Right  10. Clover  11. Melectric

(image credit)

Collection of Songs: 2006-Present

As Collection of Songs: 2006-Present is the closest that you can come to a Supernova Scotia album at the moment, I thought that I should mention that in his infinite generosity head-nova himself, David Sheenan, has made it available as a free download on Last.fm. Although it only runs to eight tracks, around 25 minutes, it goes beyond merely collecting some tracks from a bedroom electronica act. It provides a snapshot of some of Supernova Scotia’s best songs to date. ‘Capogg’, as featured on the old Analogue mixtape, is here, as is ‘Oxen’ and the wonderful ‘Worrying is Wasteful’. For fans there might not be anything new here, only Cave and Canvassers Pt. 2 were new to me, yet it’s still a great sampler for anyone unfamiliar with the band.

However I do have a bone to pick with this ‘collection’, for I know that Supernova Scotia have a load of other great tracks that they haven’t included here. Songs such as ‘Bad Party’, ‘Tron’, ‘Boredom Abroad’, some of my favourites, obviously didn’t make the cut. Maybe it’s because these tracks have a more prominent vocal element. Maybe these tracks have been trimmed from the discography with a bit of historical revision, weeding out those tracks that don’t fit in with Supernova Scotia’s currently more instrumental sound. Or maybe they’re being saved for something more professional to come… Either way, with promises of new tracks this October, I’m going to be keeping my eye on Supernova Scotia, hoping for a proper release soon.

Myspace – Last.fm

The Very Best

This is a mixtape. Fifteen tracks of collaborations between producers Radioclit and Malawian singer and musician Esau Mwamwaya. It crosses BLK JKS (who have a new album out), Vampire Weekend, M.I.A. and more, with traditional Malawian music. It came out last year, but it still sounds fantastic.

I like it because although I can’t understand any of the lyrics they still sound wonderfully summery and at the same time a bit cheesy in that distinctly happy-go-lucky African way (especially ‘Boyz’).  The best bit is that it’s still available for free download.

DOWNLOAD

Post-Nothing

Japandroids’ debut album, Post-Nothing, came out in April. It even got longlisted for the Polaris Prize – so I kind of missed the boat on this one. Better late than never however. Post-Nothing is catchy, garage, thick-riff rock made by two guys, one guitar and one drum set.

I like it because it’s loud and overdriven, they both tend to sing in this almost-falsetto that’s a little otherwordly, all eight songs are good and have lines like “We run the gauntlet, let’s get to France so we can French kiss some French girls”. Oh, and the guitars sound like what I imagine diamonds might sound like – if you could play them.

Japandroids – Myspace – Last.fm

A Cartoon in a Cartoon Graveyard

A man tries to walk into the room. He gets stuck in the doorway as a much shorter man tries to walk in at the same time. The room is bare apart from two chairs. They sit down, turn to each other and shake hands. Then they turn to the camera and just at the instant when Paul Simon is about to start singing Chevy Chase starts gesticulating and lip-syncing the lyrics…

A man walks down the street. He says “why am I soft in the middle now? Why am I soft in the middle when the rest of my life is so hard? I need a photo opportunity. I want a shot at redemption. Don’t want to end up a cartoon in a cartoon graveyard…

‘You Can Call Me Al’ was released in 1986. Chevy Chase was the perfect man to mime those words.

Simon and Chase made the video for the song with the help of Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels. It turned out to be pretty popular at the time, Simon was having a big comeback on the strength of Graceland and Chase was at the height of his career. The late eighties were a good time for Chase, he stared in two sequels to National Lampoon’s Vacation and he hosted the Oscars in ‘87 and ‘88, greeting the crowd with the infamous opening line “Good evening Hollywood phonies!”

Then in the nineties Chase’s career nosedived. His movies flopped and in ‘93 his short lived chat show on FOX was axed after six weeks. Despite the occasional accolade, such as receiving a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1994, his career as an actor was over.

Paul Simon wrote ‘You Can Call Me Al’ after his trip to South Africa in 1986. One of the interpretations of the song is that it’s a subtle critique of apartheid. That doesn’t hold any water with me, neither do the references to that Depression era tune Brother Can You Spare A Dime. The only way of understanding this song is to treat it as a joke: it’s about Simon suffering an identity crisis, ‘finding himself’ in Africa and at the same time mocking the whole process.

“A man walks down the street…” could be the opening line of any stock groaner. The whole Betty and Al thing is just an inside joke on a bit of identity confusion at a party Simon attended. Hell “ got a short little span of attention” is a penis joke.

With hind-sight when Simon sings these words they’re tongue in cheek. But when Chase lip-syncs them in the video, it’s borderline tragic. We’re presented with the image of the aging comedian prophesising his impending cultural irrelevancy yet making self depreciating jokes about his crisis while still trying to pull off his same old schtik.

I need a photo opportunity. I want a shot at redemption. Don’t want to end up a cartoon in a cartoon graveyard…

In 1998 he turned down the role of Lester Burnham in American Beauty. He feared it would damage his image. Kevin Spacey took the part and subsequently won Best Actor at the Academy Awards.

Was that Chevy Chase’s shot at career redemption?

Jonathan

“I’m sad and relieved that it’s the end.” 

Jonathan Coulton wrote these words on his blog on September 30th 2006. After posting a song a week on his website for a year, his Thing a Week project had finally come to an end. To be honest, after listening to each song, reading every post and interview, searching the JoCopedia for hours on end, and viewing too many machinima music videos on YouTube, I too am relieved that it’s over.

I began this article a few weeks ago with the aim of telling the tale of Thing a Week. With the recent release of Jonathan Coulton’s greatest hits, JoCo Looks Back, I thought it would be a nice, neat little story about an amateur musician who bravely struck out into the world with a novel vision for creating and distributing his songs. In retrospect that seems like blatant naivety on my part, stories just aren’t that simple. This story isn’t that simple. What’s more important though, and what I found more distressing, is that this story isn’t really that interesting.

Now I don’t mean to insult Mr. Coulton. I’m sure his life isn’t boring, at least not to him. It’s just that from my point of view, a writer looking for an enthralling narrative, it’s rather mundane.  There are no moments of revelation, no hidden desires, no sudden transformations. What I’m saying is, there are no stereotypical plot twists. Jonathan Coulton’s life is not a Hollywood movie.

The story I’ve uncovered hasn’t been about rock and roll. In hasn’t even been about Jonathan Coulton. It’s been about an average writer struggling to find the thread of a story in a mess of real life events and eventually realizing that there was little substance to the whole affair in the first place.

The thing is, I could have told Coulton’s story. I was considering starting with a humourous quote that would lead into a revelatory anecdote, then nicely into a general background paragraph. I was going to refer to him not as Mr. Coulton or JoCo, but as Jonathan, which I considered more personal. I hoped this would add a touch of intimacy to the piece. I was then going to construct a simplified narrative out of the materials I had available. I was going to pick out specific songs, specific themes, special moments in the story and wrap it all up nicely at the end with a nice little bit of reflection. Make a point about how Thing a Week taught me something about the wider world. Pretty standard fare.

But that’s where it all started to go wrong. I began to realise that I was starting to impose my own narrative on the story. I was starting to transform an honest report into a plotted narrative. I felt that I was constructing and placing this narrative on the events to try to invigorate a flagging story.

Now please understand that I wasn’t tampering with facts. I wasn’t lying or rearranging the order of events. I was just unconsciously attempting to highlight certain episodes to try to create tension, create anticipation and find moments of dramatic release. Trying to amplify the natural dramatic elements of the story to make it more entertaining. So I paused and tired to address the problem. I started looking for the real story. That was when I started to run into obstacles.

I quickly realised it wasn’t necessary to tell the story of  Thing A Week dramatically. It could be told in simple paragraph. Jonathan Coulton was a music graduate from Yale, who after working for a computer software company for eight years tried to become a professional musician. He wanted to experiment with how he recorded, produced and distributed his music, therefore he started the Thing a Week project. He updated his blog every Friday for a year with a new song composed that week. He was mildly popular to start with, yet after his songs ‘RE: Your Brains’ and ‘Code Monkey’ were turned into machinima music videos he became an Internet phenomenon. He has hence been able to support himself financially as a musician and continues to play his style of geek rock to ever increasing audiences.

See how easy that was? But that simple revelation led to some more serious problems, problems that went beyond the worrying fact I no longer had a story for my article. I realised that while writing about popular culture can seem interesting at first, the hidden seams that it suggests aren’t so rich. Pop culture topics with depth are rare. Jonathan Coulton wrote some catchy pop-rock songs that lyrically flirted with aspects of Internet and geek culture. They were entertainment, they were never meant as anything more than that.

On top of this, and this is probably most contentious problem that came to mind, I realised that narrative reconstruction of real life events is impossibly difficult and essentially flawed. In 1966 Truman Capote wrote In Cold Blood as a reconstruction of the Clutter murders. As masterful a piece of storytelling as it was, it always remained that – a story. As soon as Capote created a narrative around the events, no matter how much research he did, how many interviews, it left the realm of reporting and became something else.

But out of all the things I discovered through my attempts to write about Jonathan Coulton there is one thing that has struck me the most. It’s an integral part of being a reporter, a journalist, a writer. I discovered it on the first day of my explorations into Jonathan’s life, yet it didn’t reveal it’s true form until the end of this saga. It was written on Jonathan’s same last post that had announced “I’m sad and relieved that it’s the end.”

The second last week of the project had seen Jonathan announce that the final song of the series would be a cover. He also revealed that to help him complete this cover version he would need recordings of handclaps. So he asked for submissions from his fans, as he had done a couple of times before. If you recorded a single handclap and emailed it to him, he would use it in the song. You would be part of the last ever Thing a Week, a small part of music history.

As the tension mounted and people sent in their claps, Friday approached. The final song was nearly ready. Jonathan had been tweaking and recording all week, perfecting the last Thing a Week. Then, that Friday, it was revealed that the last song was a double cover of Queen’s ‘We Will Rock You’ and ‘We Are the Champions’. Jonathan used every submitted handclap.

However the final post of Thing a Week began with a hint of nostalgia and thanks. “Unbelievably, we are here. Thanks to all of you who sent in hand claps – every one of them is in there.” Then it moved into humourous commentary “It was very charming how almost all of you apologized for the quality of the recording, and suggested that I just throw it away and forget about it if it was unusable.” But then it finished with a simple message. A tongue-in-cheek, yet still serious, piece of advice. “I have taught you well – always, ALWAYS doubt yourself.”

Jonathan. You got me again.

Maybe my intuition isn’t always right. Maybe sometimes the stories just aren’t there. I guess it’s better to doubt yourself than to plough ahead with try to write a formulaic feature that moulds the story to the writer’s needs. Looking at how things really are is far more important. For maybe there was a real story here after all, just not one I was looking for.

Fiction and Music

 

Henry Holyoak Lightcap plays Mahler’s fifth symphony at maximum volume. As it blasts through his living room and kitchen he starts drinking. He drinks because of his depression and he doesn’t stop until he shoots his fridge and passes out on the kitchen floor. All the while the orchestra plays on.

This is the opening scene of Edward Abbey’s magnum opus, his homecoming story of Odyssian proportions­, The Fool’s Progress.  The solemn trumpet solo that begins Mahler’s fifth is as good an opening to the novel as any words conjured by Abbey himself. The music is majestic and, as the New Yorker music critic Alex Ross puts it, moves through a “heroic struggle, a delirious funeral march, a wild, sprawling Scherzo, and a dreamily lyrical Adagietto to a radiant, chorale-driven finale.” The perfect accompaniment for a scene that is full of indulgence, hubris and hopelessness.

Yet if you’ve never heard Mahler’s fifth symphony this would have been lost on you.  It would have been a passing comment – a scene setting devise that hinders the imagination. Does this then mean that references to music in fiction are bad?

Personally I’ve always liked it when an author mentions music in a novel. A passing remark about what song is playing on the kitchen radio is all it takes for me to start analyzing the whole scene through this musical lens. Yet there are others who see it as nothing more than distracting name-dropping that has no benefit whatsoever.

This little argument therefore boils down to one question: should writers make specific reference to songs or artists in their novels or rather just deal in vague descriptions?

Well as with most things it depends on how it’s done. That means making a distinction between novels about music and novels that use music to some altogether different end. A good example of a novel about music is Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity. It’s a good book, but because its plot revolves so much around music it’s hard to separate the music that’s central to the plot from the music that highlights the novels themes. The music becomes too important. Musical references are much better suited to the background.

As the writer Paul Micou says: “Music in novels – like much of sex in novels – usually repels me, because the author tries graphically to describe something that is debased by technical description, and that in any case everyone has already experienced in their own lives. I feel the same way about long scenes of preparing and eating food. Unless the music, or the sex, or the food are not an insight into the character, then I become detached from the story.” Musical references work best then when a slyly dropped name or half a line of description subtly enhances a mood or a theme.

If there’s one writer who knows how this is done it is Haruki Murakami. His novels are positively littered with references to music. This isn’t really all that unusual since Murakami is a bit of a music nut. In the seventies prior to his writing career he ran a jazz bar in Tokyo called Peter Cat.

He explained how his years behind the bar influenced him in an essay published in the New York Times last year. He said after college “the professional area I settled on was music.” His café “served coffee in the daytime and drinks at night. We also served a few simple dishes. We had records playing constantly, and young musicians performing live jazz on weekends. I kept this up for seven years. Why? For one simple reason: It enabled me to listen to jazz from morning to night.”

He was quite the fan. He still is, and it is evident in his novels that jazz isn’t his sole area of musical interest. Many of his characters, especially the anonymous male narrators found in many of his works, listen to a lot of music. However it’s probably his earlier 1988 novel Dance Dance Dance that holds the title for most musical name drops he’s pumped into a work of fiction.

Dance Dance Dance is about a male journalist who writes culture pieces for women’s magazines and who becomes entangled in a paranormal murder mystery. It’s a typical Murakami novel: an unnamed, thirty-odd, male protagonist, awash in a world that gets stranger and stranger by the day, forges unlikely friendships with a an mix of characters and never fully understands everything that happens to him. Yet at eighty two references to distinct musicians, it’s Murakami’s most blatant use of music in a novel.

But it works, and it works well. Different types of music come to signify different relationships almost like leitmotifs in an orchestral movie soundtrack. Jazz is the narrator’s theme. When he’s alone, artists like Coltrane, Ray Charles and more obscure acts such as Arthur Prysock and the Count Basie Orchestra pepper the scenes. Similarly cosy and safe hotel muzak, of the “Moon River” ilk, comes to represent his romantic relationship with Yumiyoshi, the pretty receptionist in The Dolphin Hotel. In the same vein classic rock, like the Alan Parson’s Project and The Doors, is always on the stereo when he meets up with Gotanda, a former schoolmate of his.

But it’s in the narrator’s relationship with Yuki, the reticent and possibly psychic twelve year old girl he spends half the novel minding, that Murakami uses music to the greatest effect. Yuki spends the majority of her time listening to eighties pop music: Boy George, Talking Heads, David Bowie, Phil Collins. The narrator doesn’t particularly like it, but he puts up with it and finds common ground with her by introducing her to some ‘oldies’ – Sam Cooke, Buddy Holly, Elvis.  The music becomes a symbol of their ability to connect and – almost – understand each other.

This is only highlighted by the contrast of meeting Yuki’s estranged mother, who says, “I can’t listen to that stuff for more than thirty seconds before I get a splintering headache. Being with Yuki is fine but the music is intolerable.” Pop music connects Yuki and the narrator. Just in the same way that it keeps her and her mother apart. In Dance Dance Dance music acts as a symbol, a theme, a motif and is also at a times as a great for springboard for humour. Murakami proves that using musical references in fiction is not merely self-indulgent egoising, but a successful writing technique.

And if you don’t still believe that music in fiction can be good thing. Well just forget Murakami and consider that Edward Abbey got me into Mahler at the age of fifteen. Now that is an astounding feat of writing.

—

Hence the list below.

This article uses a quote from Oxford Forum’s interview with Paul Micou. You can read the original interview here.

Songs of Dance Dance Dance

This is a list of songs and bands mentioned in Murakami’s Dance Dance Dance. Some other people have made similar lists for Kafka on the Shore and South of the Border, West of the Sun. This will explained in a follow up post later. In the meantime check out this page on Murakami and music.

Ray Charles – “Born to Lose”

Genesis

Mozart – “The Marriage of Figaro”/”The Magic Flute”

Jacques Rouchet – “Play Beach”

Gregorian chants

Ryuichi Sakamoto

Gerry Mulligan

Paul Mauriat – “Love is Blue”

Percy Faith – “A Summer Place”

Elvis – “Rock a Hula Baby”

Bathing Beauty (musical)

The King and I (musical)

Richard Clayderman

Los Indios Tabajaras

Jose Feliciano

Julio Iglesias

Sergio Mendes

The Partridge Family

1910 Fruitgum Company

Mitch Miller and chorus

Andy Williams

Al Martino

Michael Jackson – Billie Jean

Miklos Rozsa

Andy Williams – “Moon River”

Talking Heads

Ray Charles – “Hit the Road Jack”

Ricky Nelson – “Travelin Man”

Brenda Lee – “All Alone I Am”

David Bowie

Phil Collins

Jefferson Starship

Thomas Dolby

Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers

Hall & Oates

Thompson Twins

Iggy Pop

Bananarama

The Rolling Stones –  “Going to a Go-Go”

Smokey Robinson and the Miracles – “Going to a Go Go”

Paul McCartney – “Say, Say, Say”

Duran Duran

Sam Cooke – “What a Wonderful World”

Buddy Holly – “Oh Boy”

Bobby Darin – “Beyond the Sea”

Elvis – “Hound Dog”

Chuck Berry – Sweet Little Sixteen”

The Del Vikings’ – “Come Go with Me”

Jimmy Gilmer – “Sugar Shack”

Beach Boys “Surfin U.S.A.”

Solomon Burke

Deep Purple

Bob Cooper

Joe Jackson

Alan Parson’s Project

Bob Dylan – “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall”

Dire Straits

Purcell – “Baroque for You”

Arthur Prysock and the Count Basie Orchestra

David Bowie

Stray Cats

Steely Dan

Culture Club

Styx – “Mister Roboto”

Bob Marley – Exodus

John Coltrane – Ballads

AC/DC

Kiss

Iron Maiden

Motorhead

Prince

Ben E. King – “Spanish Harlem”

Eric Clapton

Roxy Music

“Frenesi”

“Moon Glow”

“Stardust”

”But Not For Me”

“Moonlight in Vermont”

Chopin

Stern-Rose-Istomin Trio – “Shcubert’s Opus 100”

Sly and the Family Stone

The Doors

Pink Floyd

The Loving Spoonful

Three Dog Night

“Tiger Rag”

“Hello Dolly”

Mantovani – “Strangers in the Night”

Restore-Restart: Two

Round two of the new collection has to start with an album I got just the other day called Loose Community. It’s a collaboration between Otomo Yoshihide, Park Je Chun and Mi Yeon. It’s improvised music from Japan (well according to the sub header at least) – electronics, piano and percussion. It’s divide into five tracks – the first shuffles it’s way through rustling electronics, ruminant drums and mid-pitch drone notes. Track two is a little more perky, creating suspense with some plucked strings and stabby disconnected piano notes. Some tom rolls start appearing too. That suspense is carried over into track three as the drums get more confident and other percussive sounds; gongs, cymbals, bells start to appear. By track four the pattern’s been set – the percussion and piano notes stab while the electronics grate and scratch. It’s only on the last track that the suspense seems released and rustling electronics return with some more pensive, less agitated percussion. However this is only a ruse, before long all the sounds crescendo. The piano flies into a frenzy, the drums sound like a hail storm and the electronics a drill. These fits are punctuated with silence that only enhances their assault. It all descends into a free-for-all before trailing off on a hunchbacked drum rhythm.

This whole business may not sound very pleasurable but I enjoyed it a lot. So much so that I went on to listen to I.S.O.’s – I.S.O. (live in a zen garden). Like Loose Community I.S.O. is a collaborative project involving Otomo Yoshihide, Yoshimitsu Ichiraku and Sachiko M. It focuses on electronic improvisation. I found this quote from the label that released this album over here, it’s a pretty tidy description:

“It is said that Sesshu-tei Garden of Joeiji Temple in Yamaquchi city was built by Sesshu, a priest and artist, about five hundred years ago. The garden is positioned on the north of the main temple, and in the center of the inner garden of about 30 acres is a pond, which is shaped in the Chinese character of ‘heart’, surrounded by many vertically-standing stones. The woods on the east, west, and north sides of the garden make up the shape of a horseshoe, which creates a special space for vision and sound. For this live performance, three performers were positioned around the garden apart enough not to see each other to present their music over the garden. Note: this CD was recorded through one-point stereo recording in the center of the main temple. The surrounding sounds such as animals around the garden, wind, and visitors were kept as they were at the mastering, because if they had been mechanically removed, delicate feelings generated by the extremely subtle sounds penetrating the whole garden would have been ruined.”-Sound Tectonics

It’s a lot more meditative than Loose Community. In fact at times it seems like nothing more than pure silence and the ambient sounds of the garden. When the sound does come though, it fits in perfectly with this natural soundscape. Considering these sounds sources and electronic origins I didn’t expect this to happen or really work, yet it does. “Live in a zen garden” – pretty much sums this up, and I like it.

Restore-Restart: One

Well I’ve been a little slow on updates about the new record collection, but it’s all been a bit of a blur really. It started with Thinguma*jigSaw’s (awakeinwhitechapel). They call their sound splatter folk, well I’m not really sure what that is but I like it. It’s all banjos, flutes, bowed saws and falsetto singing. It’s a pretty bare and stripped back mix, with obviously less is more being the idea here. There’s something else going on concept wise though, apparently it’s all about Jack The Ripper. Well if anything it’s a textbook musical definition of “haunting”.

Mastodon’s Blood Mountain and Jurassic 5’s Quality Control followed quickly on (awakeinwhitechapel)’s heals. Mastodon was loud, very loud and well a bit silly to be honest. Sure it’s got great production values and it’s got that whole endurance thematic concept behind it, but it just sounds a bit naff. So I didn’t really enjoy it, maybe my explorations into metal deserve a second chance though despite the fact that this is considered some of the less overblown material around. In contrast to Mastodon’s dramatics Jurassic 5 was cool, funky and all a bit over my head. This is going to be a grower I think, so for now we’ll swiftly move on to…

Wolf Parade and Of Montreal! Two bands I completely missed the first time around and I’m now really enjoying. I picked up Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer? and Apologies To The Queen Mary. Let’s start with Hissing Fauna, it’s the more complex of the two and the harder to get into. Karl made it his album of the year for 2007 and recommended Thinguma*jigSaw to me – doing pretty well! It’s really dense pop-rock and I don’t know how to describe it right now, but like Quality Control it’s got depths that’ll take time to explore. After that Apologies was so easy to get into, I could almost get fanboyish about it if it weren’t terribly uncool to do so three years after everyone else did. It’s so raw, Boeckner and Krug’s voices are fantastic, the drums are all flat and brash, and ‘I’ll Believe In Anything’ has possibly the greatest build and release moment I’ve heard in ages.

So that’s the first roundup. I also got some albums for Analogue but there’ll be no talking about those until next issue. In the meantime, more on the new collection soon, with So Cow and Kyuss coming up next.

Analogue Issue 5

Analogue Issue 5 has been out for about half a week now. I’ve you haven’t read it yet, go pick it up! I wrote a piece with Ciarán from Goldmine Trash about concept albums that you can read in the online pdf of the magazine (page 30).

Restore-Restart

Last week my iPod broke. I’m not entirely sure what actually happened to it, all i know is that I had to restore it to factory settings. Now, anyone who’s ever done this will know that this wipes all your music off said iPod. Considering this was an 80GB one, and that it wasn’t synced with my iTunes, you can imagine how annoying this was. To put all that music back on with artwork etc. would take far too long. Well maybe not that long, but definitely too long for my thin levels of patience to bear.

So while I was considering how to fix this problem with minimum effort, (a natural talent of mine), I realised that in recent months there was very little music, that was on my iPod, that I regularly listened to. This was a breakthrough. I didn’t actually want to fill up my mp3 player with a ton of music I had heard over and over again and was completely bored of. Yet now I had an empty iPod and no music to listen to. It was then that the solution hit me: start a new record collection from scratch and only put these new albums, songs and mixes on the iPod. This was a pretty exciting idea, I could forget my collection of old and begin again, free from my own tastes!

So today I made my first foray into town to start building my new collection. I also made up a few rules to help me:

1. Don’t buy albums of bands I already own albums by.

2. Try to buy music from genres outside my comfort zone.

3. Give everything a chance.

They’re pretty simple rules – yet they also sum up the whole point of starting again and shaking things up a bit. So after my first expedition what treasures did I find?

Mastodon – Blood Mountain

Jurassic 5 – Quality Control

Thinguma*jigSaw – (awakeinwhitechapel)

Some metal, some rap and some Irish experimental-rock(?). Well that’s all I know about these three acts at the moment. I’ve never heard any of them before, but I’ve had them all recommended to me at different times. Also as a bonus, since it’s my first week, I also bought The Wire (magazine) which came with a free CD – The Wire Tapper 20, so that’ll be added too. So right now I’m gonna sit back and enjoy my new collection, in a few days I’ll post my thoughts on them once they’ve been given a good listening. Feel free to help me out and recommend stuff in the comments section too.

Feature of the Month 2

All through this month I was beginning to think that the “Feature of the Month” award might have been a little hastily conceived. There were very few articles that really stuck out and I was starting to think that I would have to settle for something a little under-par. However yesterday I found this month’s winner, just in the nick of time. It’s a piece written by David Ramsey, a teacher and former editorial assistant, entitled ‘I Will Forever Remain Faithful’. It was published in issue 62 of the Oxford American, which is a quarterly literary magazine dedicated to the American south. It may seem like an odd publication to pull an article from, but I actually found it through Sasha Frere-Jones’ blog over at the New Yorker.

Issue 62 took the legacy of Katrina as its theme and attempted to clear up some misconceptions about New Orleans and it’s surrounding area post-hurricane. In particular Ramsey contributed an article on his experiences as a teacher in a New Orleans school. It focuses though on the massive influence that local-boy, now rap superstar, Lil Wayne has on the kids and had on Ramsey himself during his time there. It reads as an personal exploration of Lil Wayne’s music but it also shines a spotlight on everyday life in New Orleans, the lives of the kids in Ramsey’s school and the social conditions of one of America’s most distressed regions.

It’s funny in parts and well balanced, yet also suggests underlying tragedy. It’s interestingly structured and, as Frere-Jones’ noticed, it reads almost like fiction. Altogether a deserving winner, you can read an online version of it on the Oxford American website.

Feature of the Month

The Observer Music Monthly published a brilliant feature this month that led directly to the creation of this little award. Paul Morley interviewed Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett for the cover feature “Artful Monkeys“. It was mainly a discussion of their opera/musical Monkey: Journey to the West, yet it also covered a lot of other ground with topics ranging from China, the Olympics, Blur, Gorillaz, the evolution of Monkey and the forthcoming album. It was also accompanied by some of Hewlett’s artwork and some great photos by Harry Borden.

What really made the article great reading though was that it provided a great insight into the creative life of this pair. Morley managed to convey through quotes, anecdotes and critical reflection a portrait of Hewlett and Albarn as men with seemingly infinite interests and creativity. This was increased by the structure of the feature. It was written as a Buddhist philosophical treatise, with headings such as “On the fact that we do not normally look at things but overlook them” followed by numbered points. It was quirky yet innovative as well, and entirely suited to the content. Altogether to was refreshing to read for its great style and insightful portraits and observations.

More info about the Monkey album and opera here.

8.8.08

88BoaDrum will take place on the 8th of August this year in New York and Los Angeles. In New York Boredoms will take charge of 88 drummers to play a piece 88 minutes long composed by EYE. In L.A. Gang Gang Dance will take charge of a further 88 drummers and interpret the wall of sound as they see fit. A full list of all the drummers involved is available here. Members of Animal Collective, Modest Mouse, Sunburned Hand of the Man, TV on the Radio, Bauhaus, !!!, We Are Scientists and Soft Circle will all take part. To mention only a fraction of them…

I am so jealous that I’m not going.

Nintendo Vs. Sega

I was listening to the RAC’s Nintendo Vs. Sega EP again today and since it’s still available as a free download on their site and over at Last.fm I thought a little linkage should be in order. Fantastic stuff, it’s made from samples of, you guessed it, Nintendo and Sega games. Definitely some Sonic, Mario and Zelda in there, what else do you recognize?

On a similar note I recently wrote a feature for Analogue about 8bit Music and videogame music in general, you can read it in the pdf version here.

Analogue Launch Party