@uspic¡ous Fish¿!
Delirious With Weird

 
Friday, May 30, 2003  
Top Ten Books I Have Started But Never Finished


The Satanic Versus
The Islamic world took offence to this because Salman had the temerity to appear within his own novel as God, for like one scene. Literary theory (author as God of own creation) versus radical religion (Allah as God and anyone claiming otherwise, even in their own made-up book, can fuck right off). Who would win? Why, the publishers, of course. Truth be told Salman’s a great writer; his prose if poetic and colourful and rich with imagery, but The Satanic Versus is such a prosaic and meandering work that I had difficulty paying attention. Normally I love things that wander off down odd little allies and get caught up in tangential eddies of chance and diversion, but I couldn’t quite manage it with this. One day I’ll finish it.

The Society Of The Spectacle
Guy Debord’s riot-inciting masterpiece of 60s social philosophy, this is deeply obtuse and intelligent stuff; take any one line from it, ruminate it till you get it, quote it in your thesis as if you understand the whole thing that way and everyone will think you’re a genius. But try and read a whole page straight off and be left a gibbering, mind-fucked fool. I’ve read many passages, several of them numerous times, I’ve got a half-decent brain on me, and still I get knotted confusingly. One day I’ll finish it.

Robinson Crusoe
Was meant to read this for a module of English at university. Managed about 20 pages. Man gets stranded; man finds ‘ethnic’ companion. Man has very little to do. Man does very little in very boring way. No wonder I gave up. One day I’ll- nah, I wont.

45
Bill Drummond is a complete hero of mine and every few weeks I’ll pick this fantastic autobiographical book up and race through 20 pages, proclaim it the greatest thing ever, and then put it down somewhere and forget I’ve yet to finish it. I’ve been doing this for well over a year now and I’m only 2/3s in. Emma read it in a week. Fantastic anecdotes, insights and storytelling and a pleasingly odd shape to boot. One day I’ll finish it.

Escape From Freedom
Eric Fromm is some old German chap and this is a weighty tome from about the 30s (or maybe the 60s) about how we as a species crave security and so on and so on and I got his point within the introduction; Argh! We reckon we wanna be free but really we’re pussies and are shit scared of ‘true’ freedom so we run away from it and posit ourselves in nice little pigeonholes where other people can tell us what to do and isn’t capitalism bad cos it encourages this by enslaving us to money-as-freedom-giver when really it’s just another enslavement machine only more insidious because it makes us think we’re not its slave blah blah blah and so now I don’t feel like I need to finish it because the rest of the book appears to be just him repeating the same chapter about different types of society and how they each run away from freedom, starting with feudal and moving onwards through history. One day I’ll finish it.

Chaos
I occasionally buy popular science books because it makes me feel cleverer than what I really amn’t. This is particularly cool because it’s about chaos theory which is my favourite because whenever someone talks some shit at you and asks you to explain you can just go “aha! chaos theory I am right butterfly in Istanbul I’m winning the lottery without a ticket now dummy” and they’re minds get melted and they go “what?” and you say back “the infinite regression of causality and minute chance, buddy” and that means you are cleverer and they havest to given you £5. One day I’ll finish it.

Ways Of Hearing
Amazon recommended it to me, and the blurb made it sound dead interesting, like it was a popular musical equivalent of that dead famous art book called ‘Ways Of Seeing’ only really it’s just a load of old interviews the author did when he was a music journalist stitched together with a bit of guff which might actually be very interesting only I got so disillusioned with the fact that the bulk of it is interviews with Wilco and The Pet Shop Boys and whoever that I couldn’t be bothered to give it any more time. One day I’ll finish it.

Psychotic Reactions & Carburettor Dung
Well you Yanks are always gibbering about him so I thought I outta see what the fuss is about and I bought this on sale in Waterstones and read a bit and it’s all about old records, man, who the fuck cares, why isn’t he talking about Tricky and Orbital and S Express and stuff, eh? Plus Hunter S Thompson does that whole gonzo-fuck-head-paranoid-profound thing much better, and with stories too. I’m better than this Bangs guy anyway; he never talks about angels. One day I’ll finish it.

No Logo
I’m really sorry you’re middle-class and the McDonalds logo isn’t carved from wood. One day I’ll… Oh, fuck off already.

Mille Plateaux
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guittari single-handedly (or double-handedly, I guess, as there’s two of ‘em) recalibrate 20th century philosophy by writing impenetrable hokum about ‘wolf-man’ and Freud and schizophrenia and metastratum and fibulas and common quantitative hyperion and axiomatic transcendent paradigms and ambulant smiths and telling us that “God is a lobster, or double-pincer, a double bind”. The back cover sez it’s “the single most brilliant work of philosophy of the last 30 years” and it’s now about 20 years old and, let’s face it, no one else is ever gonna come close so it might as well be the last book ever. Equal parts genius, madness, and ludicrous waffle-istic bullshit. One day I’ll finish it.

5/30/2003 02:01:00 pm 0 comments

 
I know the ‘strike-out’ tags for html; it cannot be much longer before I stumble across the flashing text and scrolling text cues and then world domination baby.

I’ve been on holiday since Wednesday and thus I’ve been pissing around on the internet and fiddling with my blogger template and so on. Hopefully it’s a wee bit better and more interesting as a result.

Plus this holiday lark means I’ve had plenty of time to listen to new music, hooray! And also think about reading books and pick up some DVDs intending to watch them and so on… Even though I never get round to any of it.

Stuff that’s rocking Nick’s world this week includes…

*Amazing Grace, Spiritualized’s forthcoming secretly-recorded ‘garage’ album (which I shall be writing more about later today).
*Mouse On Mars (why have I not heard this band before?).
*Gillian Welch
*Donnie Darko with director’s commentary.
*Black Books (first series on DVD).
*Tits & Ass; The Great Canadian Weekend by Manitoba (this rocks my world just about every week).
*Drinking; copious Newcastle Brown on Friday, copious bottles of Becks and half a bottle of red wine on Saturday, a bottle of rioja on Sunday night, half a dozen bottles of Bud on Tuesday night after football, half a bottle of red on Wednesday night whilst at Bridget’s for dinner. My most indulgent week for months.
*Jelly. Mainly strawberry but also orange. Don’t make it with too much water; it goes all sloppy and shit.
*Ordering stuff off Amazon. Comics, CDs, books. I can’t stop. Good job it’s payday.
*Taking photographs.
*Mille Plateaux – God is a lobster.

It’s all good. I hate people who say that. Later this afternoon I shall be posting a proper review of Amazing Grace.


How bad a person am I? My heart leapt when I found out you were unhappy.

5/30/2003 01:25:00 pm 0 comments

Wednesday, May 28, 2003  
The extended piece for Stylus...

Birds Of Prey
Live
Radioactive
2003


"I'm pursuing life. That's enough for me. If I had to point to one song that shows the future of Live, it would be 'The Sanctity Of Dreams'. It's what I call an evolutionary song. You can tell it's Live, but it breaks new ground. It's an assertion of self; it's taking control, or taking the search from the outside in. This is me, this is where I'm going, it's my dream and my vision that I'm following. I'm not looking to be a spokesperson for some ideal or guru. We have a complete album that demands my heart and my attention, and that is incredibly important to me."
Ed Kowalcyk

Six albums and this is where you are? You can’t possibly be proud can you? Of this shit? The worst thing is that you’re so obviously convinced that this is both personal and universal in it’s profundity; it’s not. It’s meaninglessly encompassing, striving so hard for truth for everyone that it has no affect for anyone, at least not anyone worth affecting. Say something personal, for heaven’s sake man. Stop simpering about your fucking baby daughter. Do you have any idea how dull it is listening to someone being calm and content? In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man as modest stillness and humility, but when the blast of rock n roll blows in your ears then imitate the actions of a tiger! Jam your eyes open, man, jam them open till they bleed, see that this is America and this is God and both of them are dead. Walk past that line which says 1995. 8 years ago, man, 8 years. Who are you? Matchbox 20? Is that enough? This is not my beautiful house! This is not my beautiful wife!

“Paint a moustache on the Mona Lisa / ride a Harley through the heart of danger / pick up a pen and fight a war for the right to dream / I was seventeen… / … I believe in the sanctity of dreams / no more runnin’ from these masqueraders / I believe that society will never dream like me / I dream of love and of the empty graveyard / I dream of Vegas and the transcendental wildcard…”

No one ever really dies. Except they do, chuck. And in the time between its your job to make it interesting to be not dead. Religion is opium for the masses. Marx never saw TV. Marx never heard you. You are the dreariest of dreary mortgage-rock that I can imagine. If this is a career you could at least attempt to make it something to be proud of. Good enough is never enough. This is not good enough. You’re in your 30s and one of you is sporting a tasteful mohican and a goatee for heaven’s sake, with his sheepskin coat and double chin.

“I was lost / I am found / all the buildings burnt to the ground / I can’t stay, I can’t leave… / … do you see your son down on the street? / Is that a gun or the just the father that he needs?”

Your half-spun poetics of the dullard clam will never mean a thing beyond the average man, the mediocre bloke, the nothingness. Financial management accountancy. You could have had a good career as a plumber. What are you fighting for? You don’t even know, do you? You sense it’s there but your flatted brain cannot comprehend its details. And you don’t realise! A bit sharper and you’d be embarrassed. With your guitars and your drums and your ‘soaring’ choruses, ‘rousing’ sentiments. Rousing like the daily grind. I’m having to listen to the Trojan 12” box set, Autechre and Gillian Welch as antidote for your foul mediocrity and joylessness. What’s soul? You think you’ve got it. Substance. Spirit. The emptiest cans make the loudest noises; the emptiest heads have the loudest voices. Maybe, maybe. Chuck Berry is the greatest man to have walked this earth. Take of your shoes and show some respect. Baby. You ain’t nothing.

5/28/2003 01:03:00 pm 0 comments

 
I'll be writing a much more in-depth (if it's possible to get anymore in-depth) piece about this turgid piece of shit for Stylus later today. In the meantime this is the piece for the uni rag.


Birds Of Prey
Live
Radioactive
2003

Live’s sixth album has about it the whiff of desperate men. They may claim that it is an evolution, a spiritual turning point, but the truth is more down to earth than that. Birds Of Prey is the sound of old rockers working in fear of mortgage payments, happily married men with children and sensible coats. In an age of hyped-up teenage definite-article bands (The Thrills, The Libertines) and acclaimed, sonically fresh and open electronic music (Four Tet, Manitoba) Live are a complete anachronism. Four-square rock abounds as if Pearl Jam never got past Ten, while Ed Kowalcyk spouts directionless spiritual platitudes and cheesy ham about his baby daughter left, right and centre (“I don't need no one to tell me about heaven/I look at my daughter and I believe”). With a track listing conceived as a structured ‘life- journey’, Birds Of Prey is embarrassing for so many reasons, and forgettable for so many more.

5/28/2003 09:20:00 am 0 comments

Tuesday, May 27, 2003  
How was Spain baby?

5/27/2003 12:35:00 pm 0 comments

 
God is a lobster.

5/27/2003 11:35:00 am 0 comments

 
"I'm pursuing life. That's enough for me. If I had to point to one song that shows the future of Live, it would be 'The Sanctity Of Dreams'. It's what I call an evolutionary song. You can tell it's Live, but it breaks new ground. It's an assertion of self; it's taking control, or taking the search from the outside in. This is me, this is where I'm going, it's my dream and my vision that I'm following. I'm not looking to be a spokesperson for some ideal or guru. We have a complete album that demands my heart and my attention, and that is incredibly important to me."

Wanker.

5/27/2003 07:16:00 am 0 comments

 
And I'm walking down the steps that are made of slate, and they're wet (they don't even exist, nor does this park, I know that and still I wanna believe it's real); down the steps to the river, across the iron bridge, back down the road that doesn't exist but is where you live, and you're there as is your sister and namesake...

"I wanna hold your haaaaaaaaaaaaand, I wanna hold your haaaand..." and I did, once. What are you doing now, baby? Are you eating, baby? Are you drinking Asti? Are you fucking two in one day baby and getting a thrill from that? Are you the ass in the glass? Is Ray dead yet baby? His heart can't hold out much longer; all that weight to carry.

Listen to me! Marx! Listen listen listen it's this and this and this and I don't know who I am anymore; Marx, and everyone else ran away scared. I stuck it baby. I came back here and The Beatles baby.

Back up the hill, I've gotta keep walking waking walking, back down the steps and across the bridge and did you put your heads together baby, heads together in the park baby? It's 4.10am, it's 5am, it's 6am, it's 7am, it's wake up with money. It's five years next November baby. It's a shit Christmas baby, a shit Christmas with Miles and a bottle of claret sitting alone at 6pm and are you with them now baby? With your acting buddies? Good for you. Saskia's dead. Did you know her? Arranged her memorial on the day America died. I drank a lot that night baby; I drank a lot with you and with your friend.

The doors of perception are wide open; I could never open my doors enough baby; never enough for you. Open up the doors and let Robert Zimmerman in. Sorry baby, I can't. You know why? I ain't got no doors baby. I ain't got no doors. I know you too well; there's no mystery. It can't work. I can eat ice cream with.

"Money can't buy me love..." Money can't buy me money. The internet knows I'm guilty, for fuck's sake; it's trying to fuck me up.

I'd put my records down if it landed on my doorstep. I'd pick up my torch again.

Geldoff's going back. Bono's banging his fist on a table. Are you awake baby? London calling. It's four and a half years ago, 7 years ago, 19 years ago. November 1998. A firework in my neck and I died. Was I not mysterious enough baby? The only mystery is that anyone ever thought I had any content. Who do you see if you... in your dreams.

Pachelbel and theft. I jumped a wall and it fell out of my pocket; did you not see me running? Did you not think... no. Why would you baby? You want spirits. I ain't got no soul. I ain't got no nothing.

there is no sunken treasure
rumoured to be
wrapped inside my ribs
in a sea
black with ink

I ain't got no doors, baby. Are you watching Star Wars baby? Are you smoking a pipe baby? Are you looking for doors? Ways out? No ways out, no ways in. Nothing to be in. Listen to me baby. Stage and screen.

5/27/2003 07:14:00 am 0 comments

 
Average Man
Turin Brakes
Source
2003


Third single, second album and even Turin Brakes themselves recognise their inherent mediocrity. It’s a brave step, and an endearing one. Five listens in and I can’t remember how it goes though, so it can’t be as good as Painkiller, memorable if only for it’s inspired usage of the word ‘bicycle’ in the chorus. This is similar fare I guess; lead guitars slide after a country fashion, rhythm guitars strum after an acoustic one, vocals are high and quavering and the drums have never seen a dancefloor. It’s very nice, just as Olly and Gale appear to be very nice, but oh! What’s the fucking point, eh?

5/27/2003 06:56:00 am 0 comments

Monday, May 26, 2003  
Grockels. They step aimlessly and mindlessly into the middle of the road like fattened pheasants, kill me, kill me, I'm trying love, I really am! What are you doing here with your fat, repellant children, eating cake and swearing at their own mothers in Somerfield? I'm buying some Toulouse sausages; I'm driving to work; I'm having a beer, and what are you doing? You're masticating housebricks, you're downing WKD, you're in your dress shirt, you're making an effort to relax, you're clogging our roads, you're ignoring traffic, you're ten yards away from a Pelican and still you step, old woman, you step in front of my car and then you snarl at me! How do you have the temerity?!

5/26/2003 02:58:00 pm 0 comments

Sunday, May 25, 2003  
Back later.

5/25/2003 11:54:00 pm 0 comments

Thursday, May 22, 2003  
Live

I picked up a copy of Live's new album, Birds Of Prey, yesterday from the guy who edits the music pages of Exeter University's student paper. I've never consciously heard their music but I'm more than aware of their reputation (big in America, small over here, post-grunge sincerity-rock, earnest and workmanlike) and that their reputation thusly marks them out as the kind of band I don't really like. Why did I choose Birds Of Prey over something else? Because I thought it'd be good for a laugh.

Oh how fucking wrong I was.

The press release is full of quotes from Live's singer/songwriter dude (who's name I'm supposed to remember gathering by the tone of it's usage in said press release - I think he's called Ed) about how he's just become a father and how this has "ended [his] ten year spiritual quest". Wankbag. I gave the first three tracks a cursory listen last night and I was appalled. Firstly, I'm just tired of, as whatsisface, Meltzer? (I just took out the book yesterday after spotting it in the corner of my department) would say "the aesthetics of rock", and all Birds Of Prey consists of is "the aesthetics of rock". Guitars are strummed, drums are struck, a bass is woefully undervalued. There's some shit in the press release about how they'd had time to let the record 'breathe' while they'd been off having kids as they had time to do nothing except write songs, but how this did not mean the record was 'over-produced'; no shit, Sherlock! Some production would have been nice! Some sense that you've at some stage listened to some music that contained instruments other than guitar, bass, drums. Some semblance of horizons that maybe included, you know, some reverb or a keyboard, even if a sampler or an FX unit is too much to hope for; something, anything to suggest that maybe you've got just a teeny weeny cursory interest in making the music you're creating, you know, interesting to listen to. But no. Oh no. It's just songs.

And shitty, crappy, self-involved, faux-profound songs at that. Songs I can deal with; you can almost ignore the above outburst as the ramblings of a man given too much to listen to Radiohead this week. I like the Richard Hawley album. That's just songs. But oh, what songs. And with arrangements too. Birds Of Prey's opener, Heaven, chugs in on some half-assed riff that Bush rejected because it was too dull, and the plodding, predictable melody is constructed like a brick wall, all cement and witless logic. The sentiment, jesus... I can't rememebr the precise lyrics, thank fuck, but the sentiment is something along the lines of "when I look at my baby [baby in the midwife sense, not the Chuck Berry sense] I can believe in heaven", or possibly, and this is even worse, he might even be meaning to convey "when I look at my baby I no longer need to believe in heaven because it's right here on earth in the presence of my daughter". Yowsa. And indeed, yum yum. Is that cheese or is that the liposuctioned fatbag of a middle-aged weekendwife left at home during the week by her workaway businessman husband? MMMMMMMmmmmmmmmmmm... Is this profundity? Did Jesus get nailed for this? This is sloppy crap. No one should be allowed to make records when they've recently become a father except for Stevie Wonder. Stevie Wonder vs. Live; who wins in a fight? Stevie's BLIND and he's knocking you out, ma' man!

The second track is called She, and thankfully I can't remeber anything about it at all. The third track is called The Sanctity Of Dreams. More witless fuckerisms. (How witless? - a guy called Hank Roberts released an album also called Birds Of Prey on May 6th, a mere 20 days before Live unleash their album of the same name; a; it's witless to release an album with a previously used title, and b; it's double witless to do so with an album released in the same month. The most vague glance at Amazon would have told them they were unoriginal.)

What is it with these bands? Do they think they're good? Do they honestly think this is good music, that these are good songs they're writing? I cannot understand how Live can perform these songs, live or in a studio, and not be crippled with embarassment at their own ineptitude and crapulence.

Amazon tells me that "Customers who bought music by Live also bought music by these artists: Pearl Jam Lifehouse Counting Crows Matchbox Twenty Bush". Figures.

5/22/2003 01:36:00 pm 1 comments

Tuesday, May 20, 2003  
Hail To The Thief Pt. 2.

So where are Radiohead now? No-man’s land. Is Hail To The Thief a return to form? Yes, if only because Amnesiac was a poor refraction of Kid A. Is it more like OK Computer? It is more like OK Computer than Kid A is; but it still has more in common with Kid A than with The Bends. What did you expect? Garage rock? The shameless platitudes and U2isms of Coldplay? How foolish you have been. No need to be scared now.

Techno-fetishisation still abounds. ‘2+2=5’ is the most direct thing they’ve done in years; ‘The Gloaming’ the most abstract. There is a sense of purpose here that had been left outside the rehearsal room of the last two albums. They are better for it. Putting ghosts inside machines and making the repressive beautiful. Kid A now appears inspired. There are still no singles. ‘Where I End And You Begin’ replenishes itself organically while ‘Backdrifts’ eats itself and ‘Stand Up. Sit Down’ propels itself into the future-noir. This is no-man’s land because nobody else can. Magnificent.

5/20/2003 10:45:00 pm 0 comments

 
Oh, and, of course, the burning question;

Why is even Sting so embarassed to be seen working with Craig David that even though we all know exactly who the fuck he is he still insisted on using a stupid fucking pseudonym???!!

We know it's you, Gordon Sumner, and we're going to tell Trudi.

5/20/2003 04:10:00 pm 0 comments

 
And now I get told that James Oldham has direct financial interests in the success of both Coldplay and The Vines because he's involved in their management; if that's not a hammer to the dignity of NME I don't know what the fuck is. No wonder Hail To The Thief scared him so much. The Vines as the greatest debut album EVAH last year in NME? I don't think so somehow. And when one considers that NME early this year voted The Stone Roses' debut album the best album EVAH, period, debut or not, wouldn't that then make The Vines' debut the best album EVAH? Or is my logic flawed? Or is NME just a piece of shit? Poseurs, all fucking poseurs. Coldplay as best album of last year? Is this Rumsfeld saying "no, really, we're invading Iraq for their own good, not our good, not at all" with his fingers crossed, his fat little bejewelled fingers? Not about commercial interests at all? "Oh no" says Mr Oldham or whoeverthefuck, "we voted Coldplay the best album of last year because we love it." Why do you love it? Roof over your head? 30p a word not enough? Do you actually love the music? Does it make your heart soar? Does it make you desperately want to believe in a benevolent God? Does it reduce you to nothingness? Does it evaporate your self? Does it transcend your mere mortal boundaries? You fucking plug. You siphon. When you stick your hosepipe in someone else's tank and take that dangerous little first suck to get the petrol flowing I hope your lips get stuck and the vaporous liquid you so heartily crave chokes your little blackened lungs out. Once. Twice. Three times. A hundred times. But one day you'll get distracted and choke on unleaded, boyo.

Simon Williams used to run Fierce Panda out of his kitchen while writing for NME. How many debut 7" singles of NME bands did they pump out? How much hype did NME cloy those bands with? Single Of The Week for All You Good Good People? Brothers & Sisters? Oh you little weasels, controlling the means of production, clutching at base and superstructure together, eating and keeping the cake.



On a lighter note, I picked up Summer Sun by Yo La Tengo after putting it off for a couple of months. Yo La Tengo have been on my 'investigate' list for some time now but their back cat. is never available in Exeter shops and I keep forgetting to order anything by them from Amazon. I'll get some soon though, because Summer Sun has impressed me quite a lot; there's a lightness and sincerity about it, an unpretentiousness that belies the complexity of the music. In many ways it reminded me of The Delgados' last two albums, but less direct and more creative. Beach Party Tonight, Little Eyes and Don't Have To Be So Sad all stood out as great moments, the latter being incredibly touching and honest, and the penultimate track, Let's Be Still, is just staggering; a ten-minute jazz-fusion attempt that functions perfectly and finds a groove like sanguine molasses. Some have said that it's too smooth and sophisticated especially in light of their previous work, but I wouldn't know. Certainly it dips in the middle as a handful of tracks run into one another in a haze of MOR postrock, but the level of craft invested in it's creation is obvious. Like the Blur album it's the work of a group who've been together for a long long time and who aren't overtly concerned with statements or garnering attention anymore; and also like the Blur album it's got some truly wonderful moments within it's folds.

5/20/2003 04:07:00 pm 0 comments

Monday, May 19, 2003  
Hail To The Thief

Hail to the NM-fucking-E.

Do you see that? Do you see the fear in James Oldham's eyes?

I don't understand; I'm thirty-five years old, I shouldn't have to deal with this anymore, I want a column in The Independant...

"The electronic pieces, ultimately diluted takes on the superior work of artists like Autechre and Aphex Twin, served simply as distractions."

See the fear? The incomprehension? James Oldham glances skywards and sees a cloud and lightening and not understanding he claims it is the wrath of God, dissolves himself in mythology; he can't engage, he can't deal with this. He's a conservative (small 'c') old goth, a sensitive indieboy, convinced he's a humanist and a liberal and open-minded and into 'art' and 'expression' but only if it fits parameters. What the fuck are NME doing giving him the Radiohead album to review? Because he's been there longest after Swells? Because he loved The Bends? See how he trots out the meme "superior artists like Autechre and Aphew Twin" and see the fear in his shaking hands as he types that?

I don't understand them, I don't know who they are or what they do or what it means, but everybody else talks about them in hushed whispers so they must be special, they must be beyond reproach, they must be magical; how can Radiohead appropriate magic? How can I understand this? I can't I can't I can't must submit.

What did you expect? Garage rock? More of the fucking White Stripes? Yeah Yeah Yeahs? Strokes? OK Computer was conceived to sound like "DJ Shadow producing The Beatles"; even NME themselves managed to notice that bass was the key instrument on that album, from Airbag and Exit Music's ominous rumble to Karma Police's melodic undulations, and now they're expecting Radiohead to follow somehow in the wake of these hicksville Americans who don't even have a bassist? Who are scared to utilise any technology made after 1963 in the production of their music? Did you really fucking think that? You idiots. Fools.

They've gone electronic. They're making weird art. I don't like it. I don't understand it.

Why must the 'rock songs' on Radiohead's last two albums necessarily be more effective than the 'electronic' or 'experimental' ones? Because James Oldham is a rock critic, firmly embedded in his canon and afraid to step outside; afraid to see anyone else who should be within his canon step outside either, in case it forces him to open up his mind. Because he thinks he already is open-minded; jimmying that crowbar in slightly and levering his cranial plates apart just a tiny amount is going to let the light in and as soon as that happens James Oldham will be made to realise that actually his open mind is clamped tightly shut. Wisest is he who knows that he does not know. Everything In It's Right Place is as good as anything on Drukqs; better, even. You can say that. There is no objective truth to the matter, it can't be proven, but equally there is no objective fact which states "Aphex Twin is by definition superior to Radiohead". Stick your neck out, James Oldham! Say "fuck it; Idioteque is better than Windowlicker!" Go on; be brave. Running scared of the nasty electronica isn't doing you any favours.

What if it is good? What if it's amazing and I just don't realise? What if I can't understand?

And so NME give Hail To The Thief a 7, a cop-out on both sides, neither damning it nor praising it but rather saying "look, we don't fucking know, we're not qualified to say anymore." NME voted Coldplay as album of the year six months ago and now Radiohead return and make Coldplay look decidedly lightweight and vapid (as if we didn't know already!), and they're more concerned with covering backs attempting to second-guess the public and other critics/journalists. HTTT will, of course, sell shitloads of copies, simply because Radiohead have built up such an enormous fanbase over the years, and it will, of course, be compared unfavourably with that albatross of a third album that to this day people can't quite get over. And still people will bitch about Kid A and Amnesiac, because you are not allowed to step outside your box, and because most people still cannot listen and think for themselves. Hell, that's why music journalism exists. Wrap me in plastic and stick an 'r' underneath my fingernails and sell me right on back to the kids. I am 24 and I am dying. I was 18 when OK Computer came out and I didn't give a fuck about it. I was 21 when Kid A came out and I was nonplussed. I was 16 when In Sides by Orbital came out and it BLEW MY MIND. I was very nearly 18 when Ladies & Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space came out and THAT BLEW MY MIND TOO. Then I went to university and went mad and sought solace in familiar and comfortable things, largely, and only now am I breaking shit open and finding cool new things underneath and to the left of again. I do not want Travis. I do not want Muse. I do not want Coldplay. I care not for Radiohead but even I can see that HTTT is a fucking brilliant album; it's thrown Kid A into relief for me, shown me that it is a masterwork, reaffirmed by belief that Amnesiac has some great moments but is a pale weak sibling of Kid A (should they have been a double? Yes; Sandinista! wouldn't have worked as two singles, or even one single, ditto The White Album; in each case we need the chaff to throw the wheat into splendid relief; and Kid A and Amnesiac are so obviously of the same cloth, the same sessions, that we need to see the whole scope to find out what they were doing, where they were leading towards). You simpering wimp, James Oldham. Vote for Coldplay. Pine for The White Stripes. Be scared of Aphex Twin! Be in awe of Autechre. Be confused by Radiohead. Do you really, really want more crunchy garage rock stodge? More winsome acoustic indieboy stodge? Or do you want progress, bravery, ideas? Because that's what I always thought NME was about; and now you're running scared.

5/19/2003 01:55:00 pm 0 comments

Tuesday, May 13, 2003  
Back in the days when I was a teenager, before I had status and before I had a pager, I used to find the abstract listening to hip hop, my pops used to say it reminded him of bebop. I said "well daddy don't you know that things go in cycles, way that Bobby Brown is just ampin' like Michael..."

Simon Reynolds think's Prefuse 73 is crap. Simon Reynolds says that Ludacris "creams [Prefuse 73] on just about every front, including riddimological invention." Simon Reynolds may be right; Simon Reynolds may be wrong. I don't care. As respected as Mr Reynolds is I think he needs to clamber off his high-horse from time to time and worry less about what's 'real' and 'vital' and 'relevent' and 'street', and just concentrate on what's good. MVC Exeter has, like many record shops these days, an 'Urban' section. What the fuck is that? That's the section to catch-all anything that isn't obviously Rock & Pop. Which is, of course, stupid in the extreme, because the resultant 'Urban' section ends up composed of hip hop, r'n'b, drum n bass, house, electronica, nu-soul and anything else that people can't be bothered to categorise properly and that isn't 'rock'. MVC's 'Urban' section is subdivided into two further categories, but these are un-named, and you have to figure out for yourself precisely what governs the placement of one thing in one section and another in the other. Broadly speaking, the two sections appear to be divided into 'black urban' music and 'white urban' music: ie; Chemical Brothers and Paul Van Dyck on one side, NWA and The Fugees on the other. Strangely enough, Tricky finds himself on the Chemical Bothers side of the divide. I'm not sure how that works. I also found Fridge in with the Chemical Brothers (is postrock 'urban'?), even though the new Four Tet album was positioned firmly and squarely in Rock & Pop. Solo Music in Exeter has an 'Alternative' section (where you will find NOFX and Kids Near water), a wonderful classical section, but not even a cursory, tokenistic nod towards a dance section (I know the manager, I must have words with her about this).

But what about Simon Reynolds? Like Freud, Reynolds seems to dogmatically fit things into an arbitrary grid according to a pre-defined system; with Freud it resulted in any variation of response to a specific question being slotted into one possible conclusion ("Sucked your thumb as a child? Fancy your mother! Didn't suck your thumb as a child? Fancy your mother!"); less analysis than narrow pigeon-holing. Reynolds' is obviously different; his analysis, we know, is generally very good; it's not that we're questioning. What we're questioning is value judgements; is it dishonest of SR to dismiss Prefuse 73 in favour of Ludacris? No it isn't; but it is dishonest to dismiss Prefuse 73 in favour of Ludacris on a sociological basis rather than on the basis of whether you like it or not. Reynolds' recent assertions on his blog that dancehall and UK garage are where it's at at the moment are fine; for loads of people that's true. For loads more it isn't. Music as force for sociological and cultural revolution and documentation? Fair enough; but can't music be just as valid without having to force upon it sociological resonance? ie; can't we just happily appreciate and enjoy it and be enriched by it on an almost solipsistic, aesthetic level? Reynolds' didactic approach then comes across as slightly patronising ("hope lies with the proles") and posits everything inside a dualistic, inverse-rockist system - "Is it street? I like it! Is it relevent? I like it! Is it not relevent? I don't like it! Is it rockist? I don't like it!" Thus The Streets get the thumbs-up, Ludacris gets the thumbs-up, UK garage gets the thumbs-up, but The Roots don't, Prefuse 73 don't, Flaming Lips don't, and the reason why these things either find favour or don't doesn't seem to be because Reynolds likes or dislikes them or whether they are any good or not so much as because they do or don't fit his schematic, like Geir Hongro in negative ("No melody? No worth! Even if it is relevent!"). Hence even if Prefuse 73's new album was the most God-kissed, sky-fucked moment of creation, SR would still not like it because it's a white guy doing 'arty' electronic hip hop (even though it's not particularly hip hop or arty; it's just electronica with hip hop beats and odd noises). It's almost as if SR is positing 'black' music (yes, I know it's a tenuous and dangerous term and I hate to use it) as beyond tampering with by those from priviliged backgrounds; but it's more than that, it's not just 'black' music, it's all 'working class' music, which is an even more dangerous and tennuous term to use. Socio-economic cultural bias? Yes, there may be one; but no, it doesn't make a record bad.

I'm talking myself in circles.

As for Prefuse 73; it's wicked. I'll tell you why soon.

5/13/2003 05:25:00 pm 0 comments

Sunday, May 11, 2003  
The Things / Turned Away
Audio Bullys
Source/Virgin
2003

Audio Bullys (never ones to let grammar get in the way of a good typeface) step up with possibly the year’s best single thus far. Like The Specials’ Ghost Town, The Things ties disenfranchised disillusion to a magnificent dark party tune, a solution of reggae brass, house pianos and enormous beats. Turned Away is almost as good; a slice of two-step metropolitan rap not unlike Mike Skinner’s bedroom observations of UK dance culture. People thought The Streets were a novelty act too until they heard Original Pirate Material in full; Audio Bullys are standing on the verge of getting it on.

5/11/2003 11:43:00 am 0 comments

 
Subject
Dwele
Virgin
2003


Virgin Records America are currently pinning their nu-soul hopes on Detroit’s Dwele (his full name, Andwele, means ‘God has brought me’ in Swahili, so says the press release, as if that had any significance at all). Unsurprisingly multi-instrumentalist, MC, singer, and “smoky café soul” poet Dwele is claiming to be part of “the new Motown”, which is complete crap. And even if it wasn’t, who’d want to be “the new” anything when they could be the first something? Subject, Dwele’s debut album, is sickly smooth and Tomahawk-Cruise-Missile-accurate; theoretically all the markers are in place, the jazzy tones, the hip hop beats, the r’n’b sweetness and the whiff of fusion, but the end result is limp and characterless. Tracks like Possible veer much closer to Craig David’s flaccid garage-swing than the magnificent hyper-urban bouillabaisse of D’Angelo’s Voodoo, and even if Sho Ya Right gets close to luring you in, Dwele’s anonymously indistinguishable voice fails to take you that extra yard. Hip hop and its close relatives are burning right now, but Dwele, like Common, is a damp matchbook, hung-up on authenticity and missing the point.

5/11/2003 11:43:00 am 0 comments

Saturday, May 10, 2003  
Point
Cornelius
Matador
2002


When I was 8 or 9 years old our school had a guest speaker come and talk to us about the years he had spent living in China. I can recall only two things from this distant lesson; firstly, that Chinese people apparently loved The Moody Blues, and secondly, that Chinese culture innovates and creates, whilst Japanese culture merely replicates and revises ideas drawn from elsewhere. How much truth there was in this I didn’t know and still don’t; in all probability it was just the unformed musing of a strange old man. I certainly don’t give it any credence as anthropologically observed cultural fact. Yet it almost made a kind of odd sense to my formative self, and the notion has remained at the back of my mind through the years.

Cornelius filters fifty years of Western pop music through a lens which distorts cultural topography, delineating space, time and genre; the result is surf pop harmonies directly juxtaposed with electronic glitch, underground guitar abuse, hip hop beats and the woozy ambience of psychedelia, to create something approaching avant garde futurist pop. A few years ago we’d have called him postmodern, but these days we’re over the shock of the sampler and the intertextual referent, and such pigeon-holing is no longer necessary. The question is not whether what Cornelius does is postmodern, or even whether it is any good (it is very good); the question is whether he is an innovator or merely a confused replicator.

Like The Vines looking at Britpop and grunge from an antipodean remove and getting the cultural references all wrong, Cornelius hears Western music from a perspective shorn of cultural context, digests the signified without ever being aware of the signifier or even the sign, and takes what he likes almost arbitrarily with no sense of guilt or etiquette, un-hamstrung by the US/UK alt.pop hierarchy’s need to pay dues and stay within the strictly lineated confines of orthodoxy. The difference between The Vines and Cornelius is that his end product is so much more colourful, eclectic, and unpredictable. Why is this? Perhaps Japan is at that one further cultural remove on from Australia; and hence Craig Nichols becomes caught up in the romantic myth of the rock n roll ‘star’ in a band because that’s what he reads alongside the music, while Cornelius finds himself caught up in pure sound and imagery shorn of mythology. The back cover of his first album to reach a western audience, 1998’s Fantasma, is adorned with a photograph composed of multiple exposures of Cornelius in a room, playing a different instrument in each 500th of a second; Cornelius the culture junkie, the music addict, hungry to stretch his ears. It’s tempting to label him a dilettante, but in truth I believe he’s more of a naïf, albeit a very intuitive and effective one.

Fantasma ended by spinning its radio dial back through itself in a self-referential montage, the record’s own life flashing before its ears at the moment prior to expiration. Point begins similarly but in an even more abstract way; Bug (Electric Last Minute) is a short blast of disparate noise sources cut together; as the album progresses each of the sounds presented in the opening minute will be recontextualised and developed in full songs, from snatches of guitar, bass and glitch to fragmented vocals and musique concrete found sounds. Cornelius mashes sounds together like a child shaking a kaleidoscope mashes colours, but with a deliberation and precision that refute chaos. From a distance it is a confusion, a jumble, but up close it is sharp and perfectionist. Another View Point wallops driving bass and bicycle horn guitars, splatters pointillist electronics over the top and lets the handbrake off; midway through a refined American gentlemen announces “this is called a déjà vu experience” and a nick of acoustic twang sends us back to the beginning in earnest. Drop utilises an aqueous sample for rhythmic effect in much the same way as Orbital’s I Wish I Had Duck Feet, the sound of water not just present to add ambience but purpose. Tone Twilight Zone meanders through an early-evening forest inhabited by crickets and drowsy birds, gentle electronic rhythms and clicks guided by acoustic guitar, the context and content of equal importance.

Cornelius is obsessed with hidden detail; listening on headphones reveals dizzying usage of stereo-imaging, up-and-down strokes on guitar separated across the sound-stage. Pop the white CD tray out and find yourself affronted by an impossibly lurid street-scene hidden inside the back cover, as if an unruly colour-blind child had painted downtown Osaka with a rainbow. Even the clattering, guitar-abusing I Hate Hate’s drill’n’bass percussion and aggressive metal chords are decorated with beautiful hiss and blip. Still we’re nowhere nearer to knowing if Cornelius is an inventor or a serendipitous copyist; all of the sounds, textures and ideas used here have been heard before, just not all together and not in this order. Is he a popster creating art by accident; or is he making art out of pop by design? Does his intention even matter? The birth of the reader supposedly creates the death of the author and all that, after all.

Album closer Nowhere soundtracks a sultry, lapping tide with woozy lounge strings and trumpet, before closing with a piercing high frequency which gives way to a second of noise and voice before a huge piano chord which takes an aeon to fade-out, just like A Day In The Life. And then it becomes clear what Cornelius has been up to all along; taking all the things he loves and sticking them together as best he can. Which is what pop music has always been about. More rounded and less determinedly schizo than Fantasma, Point is a great album of delicious odd-pop made by a whimsically modest genius. From Nakameguro to Everywhere.

5/10/2003 11:19:00 pm 0 comments

 
Come Here When You Sleepwalk
Clue To Kalo
Leaf
2003


Is the legacy of punk all those perky Californian skaters proffering spiky three-minute teen-baiting paeans to onanism and bad hair? Or is it something entirely different; the vicarious wherewithal for anybody to pick up an instrument and play? Punk itself didn’t really break any rules; it just played to the rules louder and snottier than they’d been played to before; the systems it was smashing were more social and cultural than musical. Post-punk, on the other hand, really did offer expanded sonic horizons; PiL, Sandinista!, Wire, Talking Heads, Durutti Column, Joy Division; little or nothing in common sonically with New Rose, God Save The Queen or Teenage Kicks, but facilitated by the call to arms that the racket of 76-78 heralded. Because after that, anyone really could try anything.

10 years ago Adelaide’s Mark Mitchell would have been recording his sad songs of heartbreak alone in his bedroom with a 4-track and an acoustic guitar; these days, of course, a laptop and some ideas are all you need to open up whole new worlds that stretch far beyond those offered by an old drum machine and a battered six-string. Narrative in the traditional bedroom singer-songwriter sense is gone, subsumed within the texture, the beats and blips and filtersweeps. Anything is possible and everything is allowed, not just in terms of potential sonics, but in structure and feel and non-adherence to what’s gone before. Bedroom electronica is the new punk. Maybe.

Come Here When You Sleepwalk is a soporific reverie that wafts gently and beguilingly but ultimately insubstantially. The First Song Of The Rest Of Your Life is not what it claims to be, but rather is an incidental passageway into the album via track two, Empty Save The Oxygen, wherein a hesitant guitar figure and Mitchell’s broken melody (“I’d like to love you / but I’d like a lot of things”) give way after 3 minutes to a plethora of electronics that you can easily become lost in but which are difficult to commit to memory. We’ll Live Free (In NYC) could be where Spiritualized would have ended up if Jason Pierce had continued his fascination with drones and shimmers rather than becoming infatuated with orchestras and songs, while Within Reach Of My Own Arms fucks your head around with an omni-directional resonant hum, like a strange dream of tinnitus informed by a hypnotic and lurid aqueous recital.

The album centrepiece and undisputed highpoint is the 11-minute Still We Felt Bulletproof, which gets closest to achieving synthesis between experimental electronics, confessional acoustic songwriting and emotional resonance. It’s the kind of territory Radiohead have been so keen to explore over their last two albums, and in this context it’s clear that it works most effectively as a lone venture rather than group pursuit. This Dies Over Distance is less effective though, and shows up the weaknesses inherent both in Mitchell’s tentative Stuart Murdoch-esque voice and his less than inspired lyricism. It reads like a solipsistic love-letter pleading for a lover’s return, as if Mitchell is saying ‘see how beautiful and delicate my music is; I must be this beautiful too, how can you not love me?’, trying to earn love through what he does rather than who he is. The constant displays of emotion throughout the record, song titles such as Your Heart Is Your Compass and Do You Know That Love Can End?, posit Mitchell as a sentimental indieboy, and suggest that he has ambitions to be perceived as something more demanding of attention than the deliberate ambience of Eno; yet his soundscapes are so dreamlike and detached that he can never quite achieve the impact he yearns for. This is bedroom music with a direct lineage in The Smiths and Belle & Sebastian, perfect for those who loved The Notwist’s last album and fancy branching out into marginally more experimental and less song-based territories. Leaf labelmates Susumu Yokota and Manitoba may be working with delineated house and garage respectively, keeping an eye on the dancefloor even if their feet sometimes stray away, but Clue To Kalo’s IDM is resolutely ‘dance’ free. Come Here When You Sleepwalk is a very pretty album but ultimately insubstantial and unexciting.

5/10/2003 11:17:00 pm 0 comments

Thursday, May 08, 2003  
Enough of all the self-obsessed proselytising and analysis; here's a new record review!

Rounds
Four Tet
Domino
2003


It seems unfair to refer to Four Tet as a side-project now the moniker has seemingly overtaken Fridge as Kieran Hebdon’s primary musical venture, certainly in the minds of the general music-consuming public and mainstream music press. Perhaps the spirit of collaboration inherent in Fridge impels the group to lean towards more difficult sonic experimentation, the three members pushing each other wilfully into directions each individual may not have pursued alone, and which certainly aren’t geared towards mass consumption. The results can be fascinating, boundary-less works such as 1998’s sprawling Semaphore, or they can be inconsistent and trying like 2001’s occasionally beautiful but more often dull Happiness, less a coherent album than a series of semi-successful musical explorations disguised as a record.

Hebdon’s solo work continues to garner praise and forge ahead even as his day-job stutters down dead-ends and unappealing cul-de-sacs. Four Tet is less about work and more about play, and as such allows his personality to emerge much more effectively than the overt intellectualisations of Fridge. 99’s impossible to find Dialogue played with laptop jazz, somehow successfully combining the mechanised, artificial rigidity of computer technology with the spontaneity of our most freely expressionist and human musical form. In 2001 Hebdon perfected what neologists might term ‘folktronica’ on Pause, a late summer’s melange of delicate found-sound sonics and charmingly recontextualised acoustic melodies and beats. Hebdon’s third album as Four Tet, Rounds, neither breaks with form nor retreads ground which should be left fallow; it is more of the same, but ‘the same’ for Four Tet is perpetual evolution and motion. We know from the off that this is Hebdon’s work because he moves within the same landscape, the same musical topography; it’s his precise location and activity which alter. Hands starts the album with a baffled heartbeat and is familiarly formless; distant chimes join a confluence of independent sounds held together by peals of bass which form a steady foundation. Any sound repeated to a rhythm becomes music; melodies emerge from scraps of noise which become recognizable, melodies formed without the constraints of discernable instrumentation or codified rules governing context and destination.

There is the temptation with electronica, as with jazz and dub, to become immersed within it’s folds and endless permutations, to become so familiar and comfortable with it’s sonic landscape and how different artists traverse that landscape that it becomes difficult to form value judgements and qualitative assessments of the music’s worth on any objective level. Four Tet, like Susumu Yokota or Manitoba, has nothing to say; the point is that this nothingness is expressed beautifully in ways that reveal further nuances of nothingness the more familiar they become. She Moves She has no point as such, no climax or manifesto other than to explore itself. It does a cool jerk, skittish but precise energy and a satisfying kick drum slam redolent of The Neptunes of all people, while head-shaking snatches of interference juxtapose minimally decorative and delicate plucked guitar strings. Is this symbiosis of the human and the mechanical? My Angel Rocks Back And Forth uses buzz-thump-clicks and autoharps to place angels deep within machines, opening up the potential of cybernetic systems by taking the key concepts and using them as a basis for the creation of art and culture. Laptronica is the art of the perfectionist, but like Manitoba, Four Tet is an imperfectionist, a manipulator of precision chaos and chance; the sense of unpredictability that this creates gives the music it’s humanity, quality and emotional resonance. Hebdon is a steersman, not a dictator, even though it’s his hand that places and defines every aspect of this music.

Rounds’ centrepiece is the nine-minute Unspoken, and sees Hebdon tying up folk, jazz and hip hop in his laptop’s net. Eno-esque treatments weave through the background as a simple and touching piano motif leads the track through three minutes of building, all unified by a proper boom-bip beat. Guitars, scree, backwards phrasing and freeform brass slowly layer over one another as the summit is approached, never hurried but still powerful, momentum over velocity; like Up In Flames this is proof that electronica doesn’t have to be cold or passionless, that it’s freedom from the constraints of trad song structure and rock history doesn’t necessitate a lack of involvement from the listener. You may not get to sing along, but this is not ambient music; it is immersive and involving. A land without codified rules but with individual responsibility; this is simply a great record of beautiful music and it doesn’t need constraints from verses and choruses and the urge to be a ‘song’. The nearest we get to rock here is the riff that runs through As Serious As Your Life, and even that is quickly subverted with beats, textures and jolting repositioning forcing you to recontextualise the purpose of the sound as well as the sound itself.

Where I work people come to listen to jazz on headphones in little brown booths and I always say that it’s an artificial listening experience, but one needs to ask what is a natural listening experience? When and how does this music get consumed and what is its purpose? What is art and who is a genius? Where is the line drawn between circus games and lasting quality, if it is a line that can be drawn at all? So far I’ve listened to this album on headphones at night and whilst watching Italian football, in the office background, and intently, cross-legged on the floor in my music room, making notes and slowly increasing the volume until I can no longer hear the phone ring or the doorbell chime; is that the natural way to listen to a record, hermetically sealed from the outside? This is how beautiful the world is and we didn’t even notice, because we were so busy looking for the purpose and the presence that we failed to notice how great the indifference and the absence are. I always found myself in those in-between moments, the bits nobody else noticed, the incidentals and the segues, and that’s what this is about. Slow Jam is five minutes of in-between moments, a muffle and a woman’s voice speaking without words, and then this meandering guitar line leading you forwards and upwards at a slight incline towards somewhere you’ve never been before. It never reaches the destination; but that’s not the important thing, the reason for travelling is the journey. A dog’s toy squeaks, the familiar is made wonderful and the everyday sublime. What more is there to say? Not much; Rounds is great.

5/08/2003 02:59:00 pm 0 comments

Tuesday, May 06, 2003  
So what else made it's way onto that minidisc that was designed to soundtrack my closure with Northampton?

Something Like You by Michael Head & The Strands and Cornish Town by Shack. Weekends were dead in Northampton for students. Most students hadn't travelled far to be there (who would?) and it was such an anti-student den of violence and thuggery at weekends that the wise ones left for the parental bosom if they could. Being 250 miles and five hours by rail away from South Devon, this was not an option. I would go home once a term on average, always a spur of the moment. Thursday night into Friday morning the panic would reach an unbearable climax and I wouldn't sleep. Come the morning my bag would be packed and I'd make my way to the railway station where I'd pay £60 or so to get out of the place for two and a half days. Yes, it did get that desperate sometimes. But on the weekends when I didn't seek to escape I would stay in; the town heaved with local people on Saturday daytimes and the pubs were all spoiling to be the host of violence in the evenings. Weekdays were safe and comfortable; weekends were resolutely not. And so, on more than a few Saturday evenings, I would buy a bottle of red wine and spend the night alone in my room with only Mick Head and his companions. HMS Fable didn't touch me much, apart from John Heads' two tunes, Beautiful and Cornish Town, the latter with it's euphoric kiss-off line "you're trailing colours through the air / I know you're some fine baby..." not sure of thre explicit meaning of those words but more than aware of their effect. It was The Strands album that really got me though, and Something Like You was the finest tune, folky and delirious but so gentle. Some songs from those three years in Northampton I can't listen to now, but others have transcended association because they're simply wonderful. HMS Fable as a whole has been dumped in my brain's mental bad bin; The Strands haven't.

Olly once professed that his favourite album ever was Let's Get Killed by David Holmes; because of this My Mate Paul squeezed on. We did, after all, had some good times there... Many nights of drunken or stoned idiocy soundtracked by varied and cool stuff, funky and designed to soundtrack those precise moments. Track two from T Power's extraordinary Self-Evident Truth Of An Intuitive Mind LP also found it's way onto the MD; shorn of the preceeding track's deliberate psychedelic build up the shock of those deep bass pulses was lessened, the lull of synaesthesia not set in place to be smashed apart, but the track itself (Amber? Red? Magenta? Turquoise?) still brought back memories.

I saw At The Drive-In's last ever UK gig (their last ever gig fullstop? I can't recall) at Camden Electric Ballroom in late 2000 (if memory serves). The legend is true; they were awesome, Cedric a ball of mutant energy, hurling himself from speaker stacks and spitting incomprehensible bile, chastising the audience for moshing and cajoling them for not dancing, while the rest of the band sent huge, discordant and sharp waves of noise rebounding off the underground walls of the sweatpit that is the Electric Ballroom. NME pissed their pants over this furious, angulur Texan five-piece, spunking beads of hyperbolic praise over their every move for a period of about nine months before the band split, presumably due to having been toiling and sweating for six years to achieve something only to find that the something they'd been afetr was a crock of shit. The big-haired two would go on to form Mars Volta. The other three wouldn't. Whatever; Relationship Of Command and Vaya were fine, nay, stonking records, and Enfilade from the former found a place on the Northants MD. It opens with an ansafone message of a Hyena threatening a leopard's cub ("10,000 kola nuts wrapped in brown paper, midnight, behind the box..."), climaxed with a strafingchorus about cartoon villians tying innocents to traintracks (presumably an important socio-political allegory about something), and even threw in a middle-8 replete with dubby bass and Augustas Pablo-style melodica lines drifting hasily in the background. You don't expect that from an NME-sponsored post-hardcore dissident politik Next Big Thing.

Enfilde was in a one-two sucker punch alongside Asian Dub Foundation's awesome and celebratory New Way New Life, another slice of post-punk, post-dub, politik partying from an NME-hyped source. Elsewhere I placed the first six-minutes of Godspeed's Dead Flag Blues, ROYGBIV by BoC, the opening track from Witness' crushed and tender 1999 debut, and Such A Rush, Coldplay's anti-materialistic early-peak from The Blue Room EP (Martin actually spitting and passionate for once; "look at all the people / going after money / why can't you be happy?"). I even, yes, found room for an Embrace song. They did, after all, feature very heavily during my three years in the wilderness. One day I might even find the time to document that stream of experiences and oddities in full; for now I'll just say that I found the only Embrace song that really fitted the situation and mood; the 1 minute 43 second, wordless paranoid blaxploitation work-out, Bunker Song. It seemed to fit. On the first day I ever heard it I had to kick down my hosuemate's door because he'd done a runner and left us with debts to pay.

The full tracklisting;

The Rock by Delakota
Come To Daddy by Aphex Twin
Something Like You by Michael Head & The Strands
Such A Rush by Coldplay
Track 2 from The Self-Evident Truth Of An Intuitive Mind by T-Power
Dead Flag Blues by Godspeed You Black Emperor
2nd Life by Witness
You Just Have To Be Who You Are by Idlewild
Break Me Gently (Incidental) by Doves
Bunker Song by Embrace
ROYGBIV by BoC
New Way New Life by ADF
Enfilade by ATDI
Eurostar by The Boo Radleys
Cornish Town by Shack
Flim by Aphex Twin
My Mate Paul by David Holmes
Once In A Lifetime by Talking Heads
The Teacher by SFA
Horses In My Dreams by PJ Harvey

5/06/2003 10:58:00 am 0 comments

Monday, May 05, 2003  
Northampton...

I'm never going back again. This is a good thing

James and I had wondered if maybe we'd over-hyped the shiteness of the place to ourselves, if memory had painted it worse than it had really been, if our unwillingness to be there, if the total wrongness of our presence there had tainted our experience of it. No no no no no! 22 hours back there was long enough to realise that the extreme crapulence of the place was not imagined. And it's actually got worse. Spinadisc has no records left! The vinyl section upstairs has shrunk by 50% at least and the CD sections downstairs were apallingly stocked and arranged. HMV and Virgin less than worthless. How did I ever buy music in tha place? Any one shop in Berwick Street yesterday afternoon had infinitely more worth than Northampton's collected record outlets. Jesus... And the pubs... Even The Hogshead is too classy for Northampton now; it's been replaced by some luminescent green/yellow/pink/orange shitbag named "me; bar". Christ.

We toured the old haunts, walked around the campus, even had a drink in the Pavillion bar. Five years... At a later point I will give more information and though to the minidisc I made. It was gloriously sunny when the train departed Milton Keynes (I had to bus it to there) on Sunday morning, and I listened to Manitoba and felt profound elation to be leaving.

As soon as I got off the train in Northampton my feet fell into the old step, leading me to HMV, then to Virgin, then to Spinadisc, then to The Charles Bradlaugh, as if I'd never left, let alone as if it had been two years since I left. But I nailed it. I nailed the feeling, the dread that comes over me when faced with that town, not God forsaken because God disliked it so much that he refused to exist... Everywhere I stand in Northampton I feel as if I am on top of a hill (literally; this may be something to do with the actual topography of the place) and I get the sensation that the rest of the world is rushing away below me, falling into nothingness, and leaving me stranded. I feel the same standing on the beach at Blackpool, facing away from the promenade, faced with nothing but endless, unfriendly, northern sea. It's the feeling that you can never leave, that the world is gone and the piece remaining on which you stand has no worth. No worth at all. No wonder I was so angry and felt so cheated for six months after I'd left.

But I'm glad I went back. I ran away after exams; results were a fleeting visit, no closure, and I avoided graduation for fear of... Now I've properly said goodbye to the place. I never need go back again. I've reaffirmed the feelings I had that it was, actually, yes, truly, really, a shithole. I was a different, often worse person for three years there.

"It's not you / it's this place / and not knowing where to turn..." The Boo Radleys, Wilder.

I'm not going back. Yay!

5/05/2003 12:00:00 pm 0 comments

 
Here are some singles reviews destined for publication in Exeter University's student newspaper...

Singles reviews 5.5.03

Daniel Bedingfield
I Can’t Read You
Polydor


Everyone’s favourite over-weight genre-hopping date-rapist returns (shagging a reality TV girl group near you soon!) with a track off his debut album that’s been re-recorded with guitars to make it more ‘rock’. Oh yes. That’s ‘rock’ as in Coldplay or Travis, you understand. Bedingfield heaves and ho’s and even has a quiet bit in the middle where he tries to hit notes half an octave too high for his voice just to prove how sensitive he is. There’s a Todd Edwards remix of James Dean (I Wanna Know) on the b-side; why? Todd Edwards is a genius, what’s he doing associating with this shag-bag?

Staind
Price To Pay
Elektra


Grungetastic! It’s nearly 10 years since Kurt Cobain used a shotgun and his own brain to stencil his garage wall a la Lawrence Llewelyn-Bowen, and we’re STILL being sold this miserable, self-obsessed, relentless Nazi-sludge rock by hoary sand-throated wankers with ‘issues’. At least it’s not a sensitive acoustic ballad like that one that went massive. Oh no. It’s noisier. “We fail to see how destructive we can be” sings the, ahem, singer. By ‘destructive’ he means ‘shite’. Damn you! Damn you all to heck!

Cave In
Anchor
RCA


Currently being touted as being both ‘innovative’ and ‘challenging’ by the world’s desperate heavy rock media, the only thing challenging about this record is whether you can listen to the comedy rhyming dictionary lyrics without laughing. Witness ‘air’ being rhymed with ‘electric chair’; ‘behind’ with ‘mind’; and ‘crawling on all fours’ with ‘falling through trapdoors’. At least, unlike half the album this is taken from, it doesn’t attempt to be a ‘soundscape’, so we’re saved the four-minutes of flatulent train noises they normally tack on after the last chorus to show how ‘visionary’ they are.

The Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster
Chicken
No Death


Brighton’s finest Psychosexual Narcotic Garage Rock Freak Show™ continue their relentless assault on, well, everything, with yet another sub-3-minute slice of screaming, clattering, Oedipal lunacy. The singer looks like Richard Ashcroft when he was mad (as opposed to just a wanker) and the band make a racket something akin to The Nation Of Ulysses if they’d grown up in Britain’s Gayest Town™. One of the b-sides features the lyric “I want to fuck / and fuck / and fuck you in the face.” Dylan is shamed!

5/05/2003 11:30:00 am 0 comments

 



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Nick Southall is Contributing Editor at Stylus Magazine and occasionally writes for various other places on and offline. You can contact him by emailing auspiciousfishNO@SPAMgmail.com


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