Rocktimists.

Dirty Black Psummer

2009-06-05T16:46:00.003+01:00

We’ve talked about Chicago’s Cave here before and since they’ve released a heavy new album Psychic Psummer let’s speak of them again.

As befits the title Psychic Psummer is a lighter record than last years Hunt Like Devil, still monomaniacal in chasing a single chord down the rabbit hole but airier and less in thrall to a basement-dwelling caveman ughthetic. If the first albums jams suggested an aircraft in a holding pattern over a decaying industrial city at dusk, this time it’s over green and yellow fields of crops at dawn.

I still bet if you met the band in person they’d smell of sour bongwater and too many roll-up cigarettes though.

Cave – Requiem for John Sex [ysi]

Ugly MySpace Buy

I’m guessing this might be the guy they’re jamming about:

Wires of Our Nerves

2009-06-04T16:30:00.001+01:00

A lot of the new ugh-fi, bathed in reverb ‘shit-gaze’ bands fail for the same reasons that their predecessors did; the murk isn’t that murky and even when it is the hooks aren’t razor-sharp enough to cut through. And I realise that Crystal Stilts, Vivien Girls et al see some sort of correlation between Spector’s Wall of Sound and their own Wall of Shit but really, can we let the Ronettes drum-patterns and girl group sprecht-song drop? Face it: The Jesus and Mary Chain were always weak sauce.

All of which is a really tangential way of saying that I wish “Living Wage” by Richmond, Virginia’s Nerve City was recorded loud because under the boombox aesthetic it’s one of the catchiest, play-ten-times-in-a-row garage rock jams I’ve heard in years. The fact it bears a title that makes it sound like some lost Thatcher-era anarcho-punk track only makes it more endearing.

Nerve City – Living Wage [ysi]

MySpace Buy

Dyed with the Urine of Phil Collins and the Blood of Jerry Garcia

2009-05-28T17:26:00.003+01:00

It always feels like a cheat calling out summer jams before I’ve even had a chance to determine what kind of summer it’s going to be, but since I was sweating like a rapist just walking out to get some onions to use in tonight’s stuffed courgettes I’m gonna plump for one. It’s from DFA, a record label one wouldn’t have tagged as a generator of tracks to listen to in the baking sunshine in their first few years of existence, but it’s from their 12” hook-up series with Rong records and they’re a little more daylight sometimes.

The original of DJ Kaos’s “Love the Night Away” skates by nicely like The Scorpions attempting a vocal cover of Simple Minds “Theme from Great Cities” but it’s the version by Sweden’s Tiedye (who have released a couple of one-sided 12”s on Italians Do It Better) that really hits that sweet spot. The vocal from the slightly stiff, Teutonic original is kept then dropped wetly on top of more Balearic and yacht rock sleight-of-hand than any song this side of Studio’s remix of Kylie. Bongoes, then popping bass, delicious cocktail piano runs, flighty synth arpeggios, echo vox and, best of all, twin lead guitar solos are all present and correct. It’s a track pumped up to the point of bursting, but only to force one to roll down the windows on the Mondeo and let the sound outside to the people where it belongs.

(And how did it take me so long to realise that Tiedye isn’t a Swedish word but something that you probably don’t want to do your t-shirts?)

DJ Kaos - Love the Night Away (Tiedye Mix) [ysi]

DJ Kaos MySpace Tiedye MySpace Buy

The Way You Go Hog Wild

2009-05-28T14:14:00.002+01:00

Mainly because I had a jpeg that said Shanty Tramp but also because I wanted an excuse to listen to this song over and over again.

“Shanty Tramp” is ultra-addictive “TV Eye” mainlining garage-punk from Victoria, Australia and that’s all I need some days. This was released as a single back in 1990 and there was no more after that as a couple of them got killed in a car crash. This seven-inch makes a great tombstone though.

The Dirty Lovers – Shanty Tramp [ysi]

MySpace

Semtext

2009-05-27T22:13:00.002+01:00

Listening to the mix of dubstep low-end and mid-range isolationalist murk of Mount Kimbie’s “Maybes” sent me back to listen to its nearest junglist equivalent, Third Eye Foundation’s “Semtex” for the first time in years.

Matt Elliott’s Third Eye Foundation emerged from a nineties Bristol scene of lo-fi four-track post-shoegaze bands like Movietone, Crescent and most famously Flying Saucer Attack. Think dense clouds of guitar fog covering mumbled vocals. Like the contemporaneous Bristol trip-hop units, these groups made blunted torpor work for them as an aesthetic strategy. The first two albums by Third Eye Foundation were in this vein, if more hostile (sample seventeen-minute track title: “Way Out Like David Bowman”).

Then in 1996 on Domino Records short lived electronica sub-label Series 500 Elliott dropped “Semtex”, a ten minute sprawl of mezzuin calls, and the usual thick smear of noise but this time pierced by breakneck, hyperactive jungle drum clatter. Writing on drum & bass and on noise has often deployed oceanic and back-to-the-womb metaphors, but “Semtex” is like swimming in a dense slime filled with metal shards.

Here’s the shorter (by five minutes) but harder hitting version:

Third Eye Foundation – Semtex (Version) [ysi]

MySpace Buy

Cosmic, like Jack Kirby

2009-05-27T16:41:00.002+01:00

Delia Gonzalez & Gavin Russom’s Days of Mars was an album that either came thirty years too late or a little too early. Not that it didn’t sound fantastic in 2005. It did, but would have found a larger, more attentive audience being released around the same time as Lindstrøm’s Where You Go I Go Too, Alex Moulton’s Exodus or Williams’ faithful cover of Tangerine Dream’s “Love on a Real Train”.

Of course, Delia & Gavin did blow up in 2006 via Carl Craig’s expansive remix of their “Relevee” (a track title that I have always read with a transposed L and V until typing this) and three years later Russom is back under the name Black Meteoric Star with a more abrasive, drum heavy take on their earlier modular analogue sound.

The six tracks that Black Meteoric Star will be releasing on three 12”s (and then a CD) over the course of 2009 take his cosmic music onto the dancefloor. This is overdriven techno with filtered white-noise cymbals and analogue bleep and blat arranged into hypnotically garish patterns like closely viewed benday dots on a 60s comic book page. The title of one track, “World Eater” even references the impossibly powerful Marvel Comics character Galactus. (Or possibly a Warhammer 40,000 game)

The track here, the repetitive and trancelike “Domination” is echoing without being dubby, and bold and distorted without causing the urge to struggle into a gold American Apparel tubetop. OK, let’s face it: “Domination” is the thickest, soupiest kind of acid house. It’s time for Mixmag to run their bi-annual Acid Is! Back! cover again.

Black Meteoric Star - Domination [ysi]

MySpace Buy

A Quote Kinda Dropped In (Like Pitchfork Pad Out Their News With)

2009-05-26T19:18:00.005+01:00

One night Edge also overdubbed a cool guitar part, that was named "spirit of punk rock", which is a reference to "the spirit of jazz", a character in the Mighty Boosh TV show.

U2 producer Declan Gaffney on the genesis of "Get On Your Boots"

Mini-Pops

2009-05-26T17:23:00.001+01:00

We’re late on it, but here’s a perceptive essay for Frieze magazine by DJ /rupture about the uses and meanings of Auto-Tune. The stuff about its uses in North African music is something Brian Eno should maybe think about next time he feels the need to spout his guff about how Africans can’t bear to sit still and work at computers.

Near the end of the article he writes about Champion DJ’s “Baako” which “is built around a baby crying through Auto-Tune. The software bends the baby’s anguish into eerie musicality. The ear likes it. The mind isn’t so sure. “Baako” is disturbing. The aestheticized cry no longer corresponds to any normal emotion.”

“Baako” sounds a bit like the mewling baby from the untouchable “Are You That Somebody” by Aaliyah did a Jordy and went solo. And a bit like the end of end of Donald Cammell’s 1977 computer-horror film Demon Seed when the part-human part-computer offspring of Julie Christie and a computerised house is born. Or maybe like the lil Lil Wayne from the front of “Tha Carter III” calling for a (literal) lollipop. Apparently the baby voice is taken from this.

DJ Champion - Baako [ysi]

People in Flames Don’t Eat Quiche

2009-05-22T11:56:00.003+01:00

That someone would mix the top-end of redux shoegazing murk with dubstep rhythms was a given, what’s surprising is that instead of it being someone like School of Seven Bells stumbling over a new beat to use, it came from within dubstep. (And let’s not call it shoe-step). Released on Scuba’s longstanding Hotflush label, Mount Kimbie’s “Maybes” opens with repeated clangs of foghorn guitar that sound like they are being played from the top of a lighthouse and recorded from a damp beach a couple of miles away. This is the epic mountainside guitar of pomp-rock suddenly sodden and sorry for itself until the pops and sharp jerks of the drums force it into life.

Second side title “Taps” could describe the funeral march pace or the way that the rhythms sound like something constructed from the sound of a dripping tap as a Tomorrows World demonstration of the possibilities of sampling. At times static and sketchlike, Maybes is the perfect title for this EP; ideas in miniature begging for expansion.

Mount Kimbie - Maybes [ysi]

MySpace Buy

External Scaffold of Pox

2009-05-21T20:38:00.005+01:00

Just reissued under the rubric of being “Carl Craig’s favourite album” is Bernard Szajner’s Some Deaths Last Forever from 1980. It’s an album of naïve melodies, raw arpeggiator grot and the sort of clean and snaking guitar noodling that seems to be many post-prog musicians immediate response to the mechanisation of their craft (definitive example: Manuel Göttsching’s E2-E4).

Szajner’s most famous album is Visions of Dune (recorded under the name ZED) which was inspired by the Frank Herbert’s SF book series and recorded with members of Magma. Analogue synthesis as landscape recurs here but interiorised, although the track “Ritual” is also not too far geographically from the urban wasteland of John Carpenter’s Escape from New York, albeit mixed with an Eno-type melody.

Bernard Szajner - Ritual [ysi]

Bernard Szajner - The Memory [ysi]

Homepage Buy

Oh, and even if Szajner had never made any records he’d still go down in history as the inventor of the greatest instrument of the 20th century, the Laser Harp:

Pop-Cap: Sonic Youth - The Eternal

2009-05-13T16:47:00.002+01:00

Truth in advertising: it does seem to last forever, like death.

Pop-Cap: Tortoise – Beacons of Ancestorship

2009-05-12T21:20:00.001+01:00

Sounds like I imagine the one OK track might on all those minor Euro-prog obscurities that I download from sharity blogs and then eventually delete before even unzipping them.

“Insane Beauty”, Like One Says On Our Premises

2009-05-12T13:42:00.003+01:00

Desire - Oxygene [ysi]

A couple of days ago my physical copy of the seven track version of Desire’s self-titled CD arrived. One of the tracks that never made it to the internet was “Oxygene” and I naturally figured that it would be a slowed down but dancefloor ready version of the Jean Michel Jarre track that that originally got me into electronic music in the first place (thanks to its use in a train based C64 computer game).

Instead, Desire singer Megan Louise is keeping it Quebcois; this “Oxygene” is a French language slow ballad with synths wavering like sob-racked lungs which is a cover of a song by Montreal singer Diane Dufresne who has been performing since the late 60s.

I couldn’t track down an MP3 of the Dufresne original, or even that much about her, but check out this amazing live YouTube for:

Dufresne’s nuts Devo-rutting-with-Klaus-Nomi costume

An audience that’s equal parts Last Night at the Proms and Boys from the Blackstuff

And, if you click through, the YouTube commentariat getting heated about whether Daphne or Celine is Canada’s queen bee

Oh, and fuck it, here is a disco version of Jarre’s Oxygene:

Mc Lane Explosion - Oxygene (Special Greg Wilson Re-Edit) [ysi]

Buy Desire

Pop-Cap: Hector & Bryant – Tension 12”

2009-05-11T18:28:00.000+01:00

Unfair record review concepts number one in a series of seventeen:

“Tension” is the first 12” release from the label arm of London dance music store Phonica, a shop I’ve dropped a wad of cash to over the past few years. And often I’ve dropped that cash directly into the paw of Hector. So how does his 12” compare to his counter service?

Well, both take their time to accomplish their tasks, “Tension” brooding on fuzzy middle distance dubbed-out chords and bass clonk for over eight minutes, and Hector leisurely ambling down the counter to fetch whatever I’m after.

Otherwise they couldn’t be further apart; “Tension” is single minded and focussed, never deviating but getting more and more caught up in the web of its own echoes. It certainly doesn’t sound like if it scored a job in a busy record shop it would carry on a conversation with other members of staff despite the fact that someone was standing in front of it with a bunch of records or stop midway through ringing stuff up in order to have a five minute conversation with some other customer it knows.

(The only other ‘celeb’ I’ve bought records from is one of I Monster. He was pretty good so long as you were buying prog).

Buy

Lipo-Disco

2009-05-09T16:17:00.003+01:00

One of the few good things to ever turn up in the Rocktimists inbox is this SirBilly edit of Dead or Alive’s 1982 UK Indie Chart hit “The Stranger”. Although Pete Burns was the singer, Dead or Alive’s main songwriter and guitarist at this point was Wayne Hussey, later of flour-covered goths The Mission, and it really shows in the original versions surfeit of chorused guitar arpeggios. In this edit SirBilly shears the guitar fluff and concentrates on chopping and dubbing the drum machine beat.

I’d never considered it before but Pete Burns pretty good tranny act and Wayne Hussy’s spag-bol gothic get-up do both obviously have their origin in the same Liverpool post-punk look (with Echo and the Bunnymen’s Ian McCulloch being the midway point between them).

Dead Or Alive - The Stranger (SirBilly Liverpool Edit) [ysi]

Pop-Cap: Burial / Four Tet – Moth / Wolf Cub

2009-05-07T17:46:00.001+01:00

Burial. Four Tet. Aside from each attending the same school it seems an odd collaboration. Burial’s aesthetic is pared down to not just sifting through the refuse of a particular seam of UK garage but certain hours of the night, atmospheric conditions and London boroughs. Whereas Four Tet’s Keiren Hebden thrives on stylistic profligacy; taking inspiration from slews of post-rock, cosmic jazz, folk, post-J Dilla beat craft and, yes, garage. One a moth, one a wolf cub.

If the clanks like rusted windchimes under flickering strip lighting that open “Moth” could be either of them, then the swung hi-hats and ebb and flow that, despite the four to the floor four kick, is more lung motion than heartbeat of the rest of the track really does sound like a combination of their strengths—Burial moving from darkly cramped garage to unrenovated house. It’s a doer upper. Only the dislocated female vocals that are more gesture than sense sound imported wholesale from Burial’s usual palette.

Whilst “Moth” synthesises, “Wolf Cub” is scrappier. The never quite reconciling thumb piano loops and deep tubular chords sound like Four Tet, then when the scratchy, itchily swung beat enters two-and-a-half minutes in, well, there’s Burial. The two levels never quite meet, never converse, just warily circle like Japanese fighting fish.

(Track titles may be reversed!)

First Transmission

2009-05-05T16:27:00.006+01:00

Shuffle the papers and stare at the screen. In your office. In his office. At his desk. Shuffle and stare. Again and again. They are outside. The bastards and bullshitters. The bastards and the bullshitters who got you here. Here, here in his fucking office. They loved him. They hate you. Not for what you do. They hate you for what you are. For who you are. For where you come from. They hate you and they want to destroy you. The men who hold the strings. You can’t sweet talk them. You can’t wine them and dine them. Not like he did. Not now. Not anymore. Maybe, you never could. Maybe, they did it for him. Indulged you. Indulged you for his benefit. And those bastards. The bastards and the bullshitters. Whispering in your ear. Telling you to go for it. Telling you he’s weak. With his crusades. His crusades and his lies. No one wants the job. Not now. No one here. Everybody knows it’s over. They can’t even mount a whispering campaign. There’s no one left. There’s no energy left.

Fuck them. Fuck them all. The bastards and the bullshitters. The bastards and the bullshitters, walking you to the chopping the block, walking you to the knackers yard. You’re still in charge though. Still running the ship. Leading the crew. The captain. The captain going down with the ship. So noble. So fucking noble. Captain of the HMS Titanic. Going down with his ship. The ship you built. The ship we built. Not them. Not the bastards and the bullshitters. Not them. Not them with their youtubes and their blogs. Fuck them. Bad advice, bad advice. But you listened. You listened to them. The bastards and the bullshitters. They said smile. Smile. Smile. Smile. And you did. You smiled. You smiled and shook hands. You believed them. Them with their youtubes and their blogs. You smiled. You smiled and the world laughed. Laughed at you. Mocked you. The bastards and the bullshitters. Their smears and their schemes. Their lies. Lies, lies, lies. His lies got you here. You used his lies. Turned them against him. Now what. You never lied. You accepted responsibility. You always did. You always will. Shuffle the papers and stare at the screen. Shuffle the papers and stare at the screen. Fuck them. Fuck them all. The bastards and the bullshitters. Fuck them.

You shuffle the papers for a final time. You stand up. Fuck them. Fuck them all. You will go down with this ship. You will take them with you. You never lied. You accepted responsibility. You. The captain of this ship. You will go down with your ship. You will take the responsibility. You will take his responsibility. You always did. You always will.

Warren Peas has written for magazines you have read. He came up with the name for this blog. It was as a joke so don’t hate him for it.

Italians Do It Cheaper

2009-05-05T15:14:00.002+01:00

Here's two large scoops of Italians Do It Better related goodness:

Contradefacto On Blast have posted the six volumes of Chromatics tour CD-Rs, whilst Pukekos are offering what looks like the entire Glass Candy discography prior to their Italians... releases.

All this music is posted with the permission of the bands too.

Pop-Cap: Jarvis Cocker – Further Complications

2009-05-01T16:59:00.003+01:00

The break-up of a marriage is slow, painful and demoralising but that doesn’t mean that a Jarvis Cocker solo album seemingly about the death of his should be too. Recorded quickly and cheaply with Steve Albini, Further Complications finds Jarvis trying to wear away the eternal good will afforded him by trying out multiple styles, all of which fit him as well as wifebeater and trucker cap would.

There’s asthmatic uhhs and yeahs on “Angela” and near-instrumental “Pilchard” as his band bluster through rocking out (well, it brought Nick Cave back right?). The dourly self-reflexive “I Never Said I Was Deep” rolls seemingly forever on instrumental vamps and weedy crooning that is more Phoenix Nights than Richard Hawley. There’s even a Batman theme knock-off about new super-antihero “Homewrecker” with, er, raunchy sax honks (by ex-Stoooge Steve MacKay) that seems designed to cash in on Jarv seeing a gaggle of women with fifties tattoos on Shoreditch High Street.

In place of wit or insight, weary puns abound (continuing the bad tabloid feel of his previous albums “Fat Children”). The only respite is on nine-minute closer “You’re in my Eyes (Discosong)” where Jarvis wheezes and his band jam over a loop from Glass Candy’s “Rolling Down the Hills” as warm backing coos gradually thaw the frost from his bones.

Fisking Adam Thirlwell

2009-04-30T21:33:00.001+01:00

Where to start? At the beginning. Or not quite: the first sentence just about holds up. 'In 1967, André Labarthe filmed a conversation between Jean-Luc Godard and Fritz Lang.' The second is trickier but passable. 'It was called The Dinosaur and the Baby.' Labarthe's film was called that, not the conversation. 'Godard, along with François Truffaut, was then at the head of the new tendency in French film, the Nouvelle Vague.' No. Eight years before Truffaut and Godard had part of what had been a new tendency. By 1967 it was all over.

This is pendantry, of course, but Thirlwell's style calls for that. His erudition, such as it is in these matters, seems to be lightly worn, and if occasionally he makes weird (kind of Martin Amis-y?) interjections -- 'But youth is elusive. Youth is complicated.' -- we can count them as stylistic flourishes, a form of phatic speech. Everything is transparent, everything clicks together. Except, as above, it doesn't.

The style, which he shows no sign of giving up on, is 'deceptively simple'. The more confidently and simply something is stated, the greater, or at least more annoying, the deception. 'The Nouvelle Vague put cinema into the street'; 'Bazin's two heroes were Robert Bresson and Roberto Rossellini'; the protests around the sacking of Langlois 'culminated in the May évènements' (someone's been watching The Dreamers); 'The essayistic tendency was patented by Godard'.

It's the last quotation that's perhaps most damaging, since the whole essay is based on the misconception that the nouvelle vague comprised only the filmmakers who started out at Cahiers. In that respect and others it's a very old-fashioned piece: in other quarters, 2009 seems to be the year the 'Left Bank Group', which included the real pioneers of the essay-film, finally gets its due. Thirlwell instead tells us the story about Godard not directing Bonnie and Clyde for the umpteenth time.

The simplicity is misleading in other ways too, simply because reality is elusive. Reality is complicated. So when Thirlwell says 'The Nouvelle Vague, so canonical, so assured of its own history, was really the joyful experiment of a few excitable friends,' we have to be prepared to be told later that it 'believed in a utopian politics, constantly trying to invent new means of cinematic production.' Neither assertion is true, though at least the second acknowledges that the nouvelle vague depended on harnessing the 'means of cinematic production' and that this was not always joyful. (I don't know what 'so canonical' is meant to signify here.)

For the Nouvelle Vague was truly young - the directors' experiments remain contemporary. They are still a shock. And their lesson is delight.

How 'young' are Rohmer's films, how 'delightful' Chabrol's? Nonsense. How, after all this memorialization and hero-worship, its mythology accreted over decades, is the nouvelle vague a shock to anyone?

RIP Big Man - Marilyn Chambers (Addendum)

2009-04-24T16:33:00.003+01:00

Marilyn Chambers - Benihana [ysi]

What is it about porn stars and Disco? Most famously there's tracks from Dennis Parker ("Like an Eagle") and Andrea True ("More, More, More") but even Marilyn Chambers had a go with "Benihana" in 1977. It looks like she made a play for the mainstream that year, also appearing in Cronenberg's vampire-armpit flick Rabid.

In truth "Benihana" is nowhere near as good as the aforementioned songs but it has a nice intro, is breezy and plays the post-Donna Summer, post-hardcore moan card to endearingly stupid effect near the end. Unh yeah, unh yeah.

Neutral and Independent

2009-04-23T15:31:00.007+01:00

Sir Richard Bishop - Ka'an Azzaman [ysi]

Omar Khorshid - Ka'an Azzaman [ysi]

Here's a simple compare and contrast between a track from ex-Sun City Girl Sir Richard Bishop's forthcoming album The Freak of Araby and the piece by Egyptian guitarist Omar Khorshid that it covers. Both are sumptious and spacey pieces of guitar and percussion and for once Bishop may have been out-freaked.

Bishop writes:

When I began my recording session back in December the first song I recorded was “Ka’an Azzaman” which is a cover song written by Elias Rahbani, born in 1938 and one of Lebanon’s finest song writers, arrangers and composers (I am half Lebanese just so you know). The version of this song that I was familiar with was an instrumental version by late Egyptian guitarist Omar Khorshid (1945-1981) who is one of my favorite guitar players of all time, and quite unknown to a lot of people.

Sex with the Headless Corpse of the Virgin Astronaut

2009-04-23T15:02:00.004+01:00

Giuliano Sorgini - John Dalton Street [ysi]

“John Dalton Street”, the main theme from The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue (or Non si deve profanare il sonno dei morti in the original Italian) is rather gorgeous considering that it’s taken from a film that was classified a video nasty in the run up to the Video Recordings Act of 1984. But then, of the original list of 74 nasties, only eleven are now banned outright (mainly for showing Nazis molesting women), with Manchester Morgue passing uncut on reclassification in 1992.

In truth it’s not that gory, but it is tense and is one of the few proper zombie films set in Britain prior to 28 Days Later and Sean of the Dead, albeit a Britain shot partly in Italy by a Spanish Director and with an almost entirely Italian cast who seem to have been given only the direction; to look as much as possible like they have never visited the country. Even English sounding star Ray Lovelock was actually born and raised in Italy. More strangely there’s an inexplicably American police inspector played by Arthur Kennedy, an actor who pretty much appears as that-one-American-guy in Italian movies after roles at home dried up. In this film he is, as you’d want an American cop washing up an Anglo backwater to be, a supreme dick: “You’re all the same the lot of you with your long hair and faggot clothes, drugs, sex and every sort of filth. And you hate the police don’t you?” “You make it easy”, Lovelock reasonably replies.

Despite the title, the bulk of the film plays out in the ‘Lake District’ with only the most cinematically exciting part of the film—which is actually the title sequence—taking place in Manchester as Lovelock closes up his antique shop, wraps a scarf around his face then escapes on his motorbike from a Manchester shown to be almost more apocalyptic than the zombie filled countryside. Under acid skies he steers his bike through smoke-belching traffic jams, surgically masked passers-by, dead birds and a flasher, before passing through desolate industrial zones before reaching the calm of the countryside.

Giuliano Sorgini is mainly known as a library composer (though his imdb listing does include tantalising sounding soundtracks for Porno-Erotic Western and Naked Exorcism and the breakbeats, jaunty flute and mile-marker strings of “John Dalton Street” could pass for a library track called “Escape” or suchlike if it wasn’t for the almost subliminal atonal organ and the rattling percussion that stays a few moments too long for comfort.

The title sequence isn’t on YouTube, but here’s a video by the heavy-as-fuck Electric Wizard which incorporates some parts of it:

This Womb on Legs

2009-04-22T17:28:00.008+01:00

The Geraldine Fibbers - Fancy [ysi]

We’ve spoken before of our love for Bobbie Gentry’s 1969 Southern Gothic country hit “Fancy”, a glittering piece of solid-gold, greatest-of-all time gutter-to-penthouse braggadocio that makes everything on similar subject matter by, I dunno, Jay-Z sound like weak sauce. Anyone can make it selling drugs but how many have bragged that they’ve done it selling their arse? And who, after writing a song like that has then still been in the position where they can sing about getting put on the game by their mother on an early evening variety show? (See below for the YouTube clip of that).

“Fancy” is a great song before we even get to the ludicrously overstuffed embarrassment of riches that is the production; Muscle Shoals session whizzes cramming in funky drumming, ominous string swoops, jauntily mocking horn parts, sweetly cooing call and response parts and a breakdown that sounds like a hayseed Timbaland. The delicate overload of the original makes it a hard song to cover if, like the Geraldine Fibbers, you’re operating in the post-grunge-explosion shitstorm when major labels were signing anything that could be prefixed ‘alt-’ in the hope of someone turning a profit. The fake-indie (Virgin subsidiary Hut) self-titled mini-album that “Fancy” comes from has a (hidden) track where The Geraldine Fibbers team up with Beck but whilst he managed to turn his smarmy faux-irony into a lasting career, Geraldine Fibbers records were easier to find as ex-promos in the quid bins of second hand shops than new in the racks of the megastores even as they came out—they were too country for alt-rock kids and too alt- for alt-country bores..

After mystifyingly dropping some of the best lyrics in the song (“now in this world there's a lot of self-righteous hypocrites who call me bad and criticize mama for turning me out no matter how little we had”) the Geraldine Fibbers focus on the snare snaps of the original then swap that versions steely restraint for a constant build into fiddle scree and guitar squall that finally tips into a final section of an imagined reality where the Fibbers are car radio staples, all Rolling Stones ‘woo-woo’s.

There’s some great Youtube comments for this clip too:

wamij2 (1 day ago)
bobbies puss was first .... hot slut knew wen to exit.

kindofobvious (2 days ago)
youtube recommended this to me. This abstract shack. This womb on legs. ...
I like it.

whuju (1 month ago)
holy f&*king S%@t. I've been a hip hop head most of my life and I'm absolutely in love with this song. SO REAL!

RIP Big Man - J G Ballard

2009-04-20T15:41:00.002+01:00

Mix Up

2009-04-17T15:51:00.004+01:00

Now that he's no longer writing songs like "Pissfun", "Rapeday" and "Wriggle like a Fucking Eel" with ludicrous power-electronics group Whitehouse, William Bennet has reinvented himself as the italo-disco playing DJ Benetti. You can download a mix of his in the Bleep43 podcast series. And when I say Whitehouse were ludicrous it's meant in the best way, they were fucking hilarious the one time I saw them live.

Bleep43 also have a Messiaen podcast. Now that's a name that doesn't crop up in mixes too often.

Over at Lower End Spasm there's a recording of Crazy Cousinz playing some UK funky at the Night Slugs first birthday party.

We Once Hunted for Boars, We Now Hunt for Knowledge

2009-04-16T16:32:00.004+01:00

Here's hot new web 2.0 site We Are Hunted schooling us all on what's popular out there. And apparently it's "Whispering Your Name" by Alison Moyet, from her 1994 number 24 album Essex. Remember, you heard it there first because We Are Hunted isn't just any online chart, it's the Online Music Chart. With capitals.

Did I Mention My Woman?

2009-04-16T15:40:00.003+01:00

Chris Hodge – We’re On Our Way [ysi]

Like Bobby Gentry’s “Fancy”, “We’re On Our Way” is a work of compact maximalism that sometimes plays out like a list of how many of my favourite ingredients are crammed into it’s two minutes fifty seconds: choir, bongos, sitar, organ and a guitar figure a bit like the one on The Thirteenth Floor Elevators “Slip Inside This House” for starters. Plus enough oohs and aahs for a seventies German porno, and despite most of the lyrics being a goofy UFO fantasy Hodge still manages to inform the listener that his “woman’s a sexy lady, she makes love like a dream”.

Currently Hodge’s super-minimal homepage (resplendent with non-functioning buttons to buy from i-Tunes) is Google ranked below “Chris Hodge used trucks, commercial vehicles, lorries, vans, trailers and prime movers” but in 1972 Hodge must have thought he had it made after being signed to the Beatles Apple Records label. Instead he went nowhere with this sole release, possibly because his whole shtick seems so much more 60s than 70s, or possibly because he had the wrong backers at Apple—Ringo discovered him and, weirdly, Yoko’s ex-husband produced the track. Still, dope as fuck and there are cheap picture sleeve copies on e-Bay all the time.

Engineers of Desire

2009-04-15T16:33:00.002+01:00

Desire – Under Your Spell [ysi]

Another year, another project from disco king Johnny Jewel who really is taking the Italians Do It Better label name/bumper sticker to heart when it comes to fertility. I suppose that they do say of him that “he has no decision, he’s just trying to sell a vision”. As Desire (and there’s only fifteen other artists called that in Discogs) he has recruited Montreal based singer Megan Louise for more tracks that mine his characteristic pensive synth and echoed-guitar disco sound. Desire are breezier and poppier than the emotionally spaced-out Chromatics and lack the occasional Southern rap keyboards of Glass Candy. As with the Jewel produced Farah 12” the tracks are occasionally dual language but this time it’s the more pop-friendly French rather than Farsi. There is something very teenage about Desire, something gauche and about feelings being felt for the very first time. Synthetics strings keep things buoyant whilst Megan Louise sings with an easy melancholy glide that makes shopworn lyrics about being under a spell and “mirror mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all” slip down easier than they possibly should.

There is another excellent Desire song for download from the Italians Do It Better blog.

Yacht-Step

2009-04-14T22:19:00.002+01:00

When Warren G first jacked Michael McDonald’s sublime “I Keep Forgettin’ (Every Time You’re Near)” for his almost as good “Regulate” it seemed kind of, well, weird as fuck to me. Mainly because I was a pretty deluded punk rock kid who, like a lot of my naïve contemporaries, viewed Public Enemy as the rap norm and anything which deviated from their heavy and righteous political programme as suspect. I certainly didn’t consider, y’know, AOR fluff to be a suitable basis for hip-hop. In retrospect it seems a fit as tight as two pieces of a jigsaw. McDonald’s adopted Los Angeles is twenty miles from G’s native Long Beach, and McDonald’s music—the early solo tracks and those with Steely Dan and The Doobie Brothers—tells part of the tale of California in the mid-70s—early 80s just as much as g-funk tells the part of the tale of the early-to-mid-90s.

I’m less sure what to take from the unexpected appearance of McDonald on a dubstep track by the straight-outta-Leeds Pangaea. His voice is blanched out beyond meaning with extreme reverb Burial-style, possibly due to inner city alienation or because expressing emotion too directly is a bit icky innit or simply as a contrast with the itchy and bone dry layers of percussion. I gotta say though, dubstep crew should start repping for the UK with samples of obscure jams by homegrown talent like Hue and Cry or M People.

And just so no-one can say that at Rocktimists we’re not down with the dubstep sound of six months ago I’ve also been enjoying Skream’s “Galassia”, a twenty-seven minute entry into the Nike+ Original Run series. I’m never going to use this for its intended aerobic purpose but unlike LCD Soundsystem’s patchwork “45.33” it does seem possible. (I did pitch Nike a series of fifteen second run for the bus tracks by grindcore groups but no go). Really though, just as Burial suggests the sound of zone one to three London night buses, the sleek, ever accelerating variations on simple two-note bass swing and kick of “Galassia” suggest late-night driving at speed, like a 21st century response to Giorgio Moroder’s ”The Chase”. Or possibly the spiralling synth-swells and almost disco syn-drum sounds reference the galaxy that 'galassia' translates to from the Italian.

Pangaea - Router (Original Mix) [ysi]

Pangaea records for Hessle Audio and tracks are available from Boomkat.

Skream - Galassia (Radio Edit) [ysi]

RIP Big Man - Marilyn Chambers

2009-04-14T11:24:00.000+01:00

Dress Down Friday

2009-04-10T19:49:00.004+01:00

No work today so here are some re-edits.

David Bowie - Golden Years (Re-Edit) [ysi]

Timmy Thomas - Why Can't We Live Together (Luke Solomon's Re-Edimix) [ysi]

Toto - Georgie Porgy (OOFT Rework) [ysi]

Cosmic Joker

2009-04-09T20:17:00.002+01:00

An entertaining screed against cosmic-disco divs and collector scum.

Thai Funk ZudRangMa

2009-04-08T18:45:00.002+01:00

One thing lost since high-speed internet became common, at least to me, is emerging from a record shop having slapped down cash for something never seen or heard of before entering. The ability to download stuff before it’s released has had an effect (although there’s still plenty that I can’t find that way), as has the related shrinking of shop inventories, but mainly it’s because I get mailouts for most shops I go to that mean I’ve scanned everything new before even leaving the house.

So it was a surprise when I last visited Soho’s excellent Sounds of the Universe and the Thai Funk ZudRangMa compilation CD jumped out at me as a weird unknown. The sleeve is brightly coloured handsewn Thai fabric stapled inside a plastic bag with a card tab giving minimal info. It turns out that it’s a compilation of Thai funk and disco tracks from the late-60s to the early-80s which is surely one of the few under-fished waters left (if Sublime Frequencies or someone have put out ten comps like this, then forgive me).

Even when the packaging is cracked open there’s nothing beyond band names and track titles to provide any orientation; it would be nice to know who these bands were and why this music was produced. Instead there’s some spiel about how “music has no nationality, no discrimination, no boarder” signed off by the ‘Deephouse Brotherhood’, but if it’s anything sophisticated or nuanced you’re after, then don’t listen here; this is raw and stupid music with absurdly hissing hi-hats and rip-offs aplenty. Pretty much all the disco tracks are covers. There are two versions of Boney M’s “Rasputin” with new lyrics which, brilliantly, follow each other on the CD, moving from lo-fi but relatively faithful to a droning one-chord variation. ‘King of the talking music’ Plearn Promdan tells jokes over a sublimely muzzy “Ma Baker”. The Hot Pepper’s beautifully titled “Get on Train, Go with Bus, Elephant Ride, Put Up Tent” incorporates “Baby Elephant Walk” and “Boogie Nights” for two of it’s four sections.

Whilst the Thai bands are able to replicate the four-to-the-floor of the disco tracks, on anything funky they flatten out the swung beats, much as British beat groups did to the blues songs they glommed. A cover of B.T. Express song “Do It (‘Til You’re Satisfied)” emerges fairly faithfully but elsewhere there’s a track that sounds like a pop version of “Orgone Accumulator” by Hawkwind, whilst “Nam Man Pang (Expensive Gasoline)” (Fela Kuti-esque title!) is straight clonking fuzztone psych-rock complete with dunderheadedly monomaniacal guitar solo.

Plearn Promdan - Sam Bai (Jolly) [ysi]

Sroeng Santi - Nam Man Pang (Expensive Gasoline) [ysi]

I bought this CD from Sounds of the Universe though they are currently out of stock. There are still copies available from the label that released it, ZRM Records, whose shop also has a second-hand copy of a Thai single by someone/thing called Man City Lion!

Rocktimix 02 – On Swirl Vertigo

2009-04-07T15:21:00.001+01:00

Yesterday I posted a first attempt at a prog mix, one which was rejected by the friend I made it for on the grounds that it boasted pretty much zero prog content. So here’s the second attempt which really is 100% pure progressive through and through. Except maybe Donovan and Kevin Ayers. And the Castle Rhythmic Electronic Music track which is from a sixties seven-inch of Radiophionic Workshop style jams. Google brings up zero hits for it so it must be pretty obscure.

Despite what the title says, not everything on the mix was released on the Vertigo label. It was called that so I could do really crappy hand drawn version of the Vertigo logo as the cover of the CDr. I think this mix is from March 2004.

Quiet Sun – Sol Caliente
Led Zeppelin – The Wanton Song
May Blitz – In Part
Kevin Ayers – Song For Insane Times
Savoy Brown – Hellbound Train
Babe Ruth – The Mexican
Donovan – Get Thy Bearings
Colosseum – The Kettle
Castle Rhythmic Electronic Music – Automaton
Kraftwerk – Ruck Zuck
Black Sabbath – The Wizard
Zakarrias – The Unknown Years
Os Mutantes – Mao Refrigerador Nao Funciona
This Heat – Repeat
Thin Lizzy – The Rise and Dear Demise of the Funky Nomadic Tribes
Welfare State and White Noise – Silence is Requested in the Ultimate Abyss
Yes – Heart of the Sunrise

Rocktimix 02 – On Swirl Vertigo [ysi]

Rocktimix 01 – Death to the 20th Century

2009-04-06T14:21:00.003+01:00

I’ve just moved house. The number one lesson I learned is that owning over two-and-a-half-thousand vinyl LPs and 12”s is abject idiocy. By the time I’d shifted them out of a basement into a van, then out of a van and upstairs in the new house I hated them more than I obviously must hate myself in order to end up with them in the first place. Possibly I should have learned this the previous three times I moved house.

One thing I did find was a stash of CD-Rs of mixes that I’d made in the past and because the one thing the internet lacks is blogs posting mixes (and because it still sounds good) here’s one of them. In fact it’s the first mix I ever did, on Valentine’s Day 2004. I’d like to brag that there was a hot chick waiting in my bed for me when I was done, but I’m pretty sure I retired to a lumpy futon alone.

The only reason I made it was because a friend of mine made an all-prog mix and after listening I drunkenly claimed I could make a make a mix that could stamp his into the dirt. Which I did. He may have had DJ skills, decks and a mixer but I had the nous not to mix in Hanna-Barbera themes after King Crimson. This first mix was actually rejected by him though, on the grounds that instead of very much recognisably prog it consists of radiophonica, psych-pop, Stereolabia (<-- the punchline to a funny Lætitia Sadier gag) and tracks that sample or are by Grand Funk Railroad. The actual all-prog mix will follow tomorrow.

Oneida – Turn It Up (Loud)
Japanese Noise Band – At Random
Ray Cathode – Time Beat
Guiliano Sorgini – John Dalton Street
Broadcast – Test Area
Bleekmen – Untitled (Side A)
Metabolist – Identify
DJ Shadow – Hardcore (Instrumental) Hip Hop
Goblin – Mad Puppet
Paul Lansky – Mild und Liese
Bob Seger – Dr Fine
Mouth – Catch a Cab
Avalanches – Yamaha Superstar
The Horizontalist – Sudden Death Overdrive
Stereolab – Dear Marge
Mainhorse – More Tea Vicar
Bleekmen – Untitled (Side B)
Clearspot – Moonman Bop
Atomic Rooster – The Rock
Grand Funk Railroad – Nothing is the same
Bob Seger- 2+2=
The Equals – Stand Up and Be Counted

Rocktimix 01 – Death to the 20th Century [ysi]

Capsule Review #7: 'The Damned United'

2009-03-29T20:30:00.002+01:00

I wouldn't say Michael Sheen is the most irritating sub-Bremner impressionist in the business. But he's in the top one.

Prefab Sprout – Bonny (Leo Zero Edit)

2009-03-27T00:06:00.004Z

There’s a lot of past out there now, more than ever, but it still runs out sometimes. A little over a decade ago rap producers found themselves running out of breakbeats and stabs to sample and make tracks with and obsessive psych collectors found themselves having documented every small run freakbeat single and private press prog obscurity. Luckily for both this was the time when radio and TV stations were getting rid of their libraries of vinyl LPs which had been superseded by CD and DAT. This meant that second hand record shops and market stalls—shit, sometimes bins and skips—were suddenly overflowing with library records meant to be used as backing and theme music that were filled with heavy breaks, rough sitar, wah-wah jams and post-Radiophonic Workshop synth-spatter (well sometimes—more often they featured feeble pastoral flute instrumentals and the like). Records that went for pennies when people initially had no clue what these things were (I got a bunch of Jack Arel albums for 50p each) soon escalated in price as collector scum realised that there was a new frontier, more stuff that hadn’t been heard and assimilated.

The disco re-edit scene must be in a mined-out state similar to the psych scene by now. How many disco tracks are there left to fuck with? I’m basing this only on a hunch, but I’m pretty sure that the last three years must have seen more re-edit 12”s released than there had been in all human history up to that point. From the caveman on up. So let’s give props to Leo Zero for looking to one of the least celebrated areas of British music history for one of his recent edits. That is, Mondeo Pop. It might have been the last time white British pop would interact with soul music on its own terms without being retro or ironic, without being embarrassed or losing their nerve but any love for Mondeo Pop has been conspicuously lacking in the recent 80s revival. Lush, glossy arrangements and unashamedly clever lyrics being a little harder to knock out than yet more deadpan vox and cheap keyboard trifle.

Prefab Sprout - Bonny (Leo Zero Edit) [ysi]

The fledgling Facebook Mondeo Pop group is here.

Leo Zero also has a new blog with edits and artwork. The versions of “Moonage Daydream” there are highly recommended. And these are the available Leo Zero records at Phonica.

Here’s a couple of other edits in a similar vein too, although both of these tracks have had some recognition as ‘balearic classics’. I’m a particular fan of the 1981 geezer-ELO of “I’m Not Moving” which is actually even better without the Idjut Boys hawking thick gobs of echo across it. Let's make it a summer anthem '09.

Phil Collins - I'm Not Moving (Idjut Boys Edit) [ysi]

Chris Rea - On the Beach (Tangoterje Edit) [ysi]

Arthur Russell – The Sleeping Bag Sessions

2009-03-26T22:24:00.005Z

Since 2004, when Soul Jazz released the World of Arthur Russell compilation and Audika began reissuing albums including World of Echo and Another Thought and excavating the music that makes up Springfield and last years beautiful Love is Overtaking Me Arthur Russell’s rep has constantly grown. But it has perhaps grown-up lopsided, with Arthur’s incredible dancefloor tracks being overlooked in favour of the music that fits the image of a shy troubadour, bowing his cello and singing softly to the floor in endless recording sessions.

Partially this is because that image is one that sells and is easy to write about, but it’s as much because Arthur’s disco tracks were issued on 12”s spread across a variety of labels, some of which have been notoriously flaky about licensing their music out. Until recently, one of these was Sleeping Bag, a label actually co-started by Arthur. Taken together with the 2007 reissue of Dinosaur L’s 24→24 Music the release of the The Sleeping Bag Sessions means that all Russell’s music for the label is now easily available digitally and on CD. It’s a pity the packaging is so shoddy, with weak artwork (even if it is based on the Arthur Russell mixed 12” by Bonzo Goes To Washington) and, unforgivably, sleevenotes of only a couple of paragraphs chopped out of context from a Faith magazine article which mainly concern 24→24 Music. I don’t really need to say more than point out the font used is a variation on comic sans.

Not that all the tracks are straight fire. The Bonzo Goes To Washington funk-by-the-yard collaboration between George Clinton and Talking Heads Jerry Harrison has aged about as well as any other early eighties track that makes a feature of playing sampled voices up and down a keyboard. Think of those 'singing' dogs. As politically motivated cut-up records go it’s more Paul Hardcastle than Steinski. The vocal chop-ups on the Russell mix of electro-rappers (deep breath) Sounds of JHS 126 Brooklyn are more compelling.

That hardly matters though. Even if you consider all the music that isn’t written by Arthur as bonus tracks, or don’t consider them at all, then this compilation is still crucial for the music he did write. The decentred, lurching funk of the Felix tracks, the up-close and personal mantra of “School Bell/Tree House” and the rhythmic wooze of the Walter Gibbons mix of “Go Bang!” are all as beautiful as any music ever recorded.

Sounds of JHS 126 Brooklyn - Chill Pill (Underwater Mix) [ysi]

Since it probably won’t appear anywhere legit anytime soon, here’s the bewildering 7” mix of Loose Joints “Pop Your Funk” which came out on West End in 1980. It sounds closer to Black Dice or Boredoms than to Lipps Inc.

Loose Joints - Pop Your Funk (7 Inch Instrumental Mix) [ysi]

Buy The Sleeping Bag Sessions.

Mix Up

2009-03-26T21:37:00.003Z

It’s shameful to do two posts like this in a row but there’s a shit-tonne of excellent mixes out there at the minute so here goes:

Italians Do It Better label boss Mike Simonetti kicks it with his African Connection mix of “mostly African disco LPs and 45's mixed with some Caribbean and Jamaican tunes in there for good measure”.

Over at the always reliable FACT ex-Crosstown Rebels label boss Matt Styles jams together a “a kind of a proto-house selection, '83 hottmixx style” of mainly early-80s records.

Beyond the Wizard's Sleeve own a lot of psych records with the word 'mind' (or sometimes 'mynd') in the title and they'd like to play them for you.

Mix Up

2009-03-23T21:07:00.002Z

Sometimes it seems all we do at Rocktimists is rep for the raw and squirming Dissident label and whatever mix they’ve currently got up online, but that’s with good reason. Resident Advisor have got a mix from label boss Andy Blake to go with a pretty interesting label profile.

I quit following dancehall about ten minutes after I started paying attention to it in, I dunno, ’05 or so coz nI just haven't got time to go after everything. Plus it seemed to become really weak about then too. So now once a year or so I download something like this Heat Wave mix of “over an hour of the most rowdy and x-rated Jamaican bashment from last year mixed in quickfire juggling style” and consider myself an instant expert again.

It’s the same with funky-house, follow behind someone else—in this case Grievous Angel’s “compilation of superb UK funky radio rips”—and have them apply the filter for me.

Last but not least, why not celebrate the sun peeping from behind the clouds long enough to make it worth removing a layer of clothing for with a mix of some of the greatest Mannie Fresh produced Southern rap tracks from over at Crossfaded Bacon.

Interview with Animal Collective's Brian Weitz (aka Geologist).

2009-03-20T10:43:00.013Z

An edited version of this interview, which took place on Monday March 16th, originally appeared in the Nottingham Evening Post. This is the extended fanboy-friendly remix.

(Photo by Meg Rorison, reproduced under Creative Commons licensing terms.)

You’re in the middle of quite an extensive European tour. Is travel still broadening the mind, or does it all become a mind-numbing routine?

It’s a mind-numbing routine. We’ve done it more times than I can remember at this point. We settle into it pretty quickly. But there are always nice parts of the tour, for sure. I’d never been to Milan, so it was nice to play a concert and then have a day off there.

Your ninth album [Merriweather Post Pavillion] has just broken through commercially, so you must be riding the crest of a wave at the moment. Was that something you had factored in? Were you expecting it in any way?

We had a sense that people would like it, and we thought we’d made something special – but we certainly didn’t expect it to do as well as it has. I wouldn’t say it’s any more successful artistically than past ones, because all of our records are intentionally different from each other.

We’ve always been inspired by pop music and dance music, which are palatable styles to people. In the past, we’ve obscured those influences, and kind of hidden them – whereas on this one, before we even started writing it, we said it would be fun to try something new, and just to be a bit more direct.

Does this success increase the pressure of expectation upon you, or are you oblivious to that kind of thing?

We’ve been doing it for a while, so we’ve dealt with negative reviews and we’ve played shows to one person. We’ve been playing together since high school, so if any moments that might be considered failure were gonna have a negative impact on us, it would have happened by now.

There’s a certain pressure that you feel from the outside. Our record label [Domino] is in London, so we have this direct line to the pulse of the UK press, like NME and all this stuff. And we did before that, when we were on FatCat – we’ve always had record labels based in the UK. So whenever we show up in London, the phone starts ringing from the label and from our booking agent, and so that place seems to be where we feel the most pressure.

But at same time, it’s really easy to just to take a step back and say: we’ve been doing this for so long, this is just another show. We can just section ourselves off and let the rest of the people worry about how many photo passes need to be given out, and that kind of stuff. I mean, we have a tour manager now, and people that can help us isolate ourselves from those sorts of things.

With a lot of bands that start with an experimental approach, success can lead to a pressure to round off the sharp edges. Could anything threaten your freedom to do whatever you please with the next project?

I think we’re totally free. Domino never asks for anything specific from us. They never ask to come into the studio; they never ask to hear what we’re working on. There certainly wouldn’t be any pressure from anybody else besides ourselves.

Again, I think when you’ve got a group of guys who have been playing together for fifteen years, they generally know. For the majority of that time, we were not releasing records – or we were releasing records to a very small amount of people and not making any money off it – yet we continued to do it, and so I think the foundation is pretty strong for integrity and doing what we want to do. The next project is already pretty far along, and I have to say that the sharp edges are probably even more extreme on it that they have been for a lot of the past records.

Are you sticking to your technique of touring the new material now, and refining it on tour?

No, actually. We’re doing something completely new. The next project is going to be a DVD, or a film. It’s the four of us, and a director that we’re friends with, and we’ve been creating this sort of visual album – which is how we’re thinking of it.

We’ve been trying to create it simultaneously, where we shoot visual things and we compose original music. We’re trying to do it where we pass it back and forth between each other – so that the visuals influence that we write, and then what we end up writing influences how the visuals are edited together, and how they’re cut. We’re pretty far along in the process, and it takes a while.

It’s not gonna be on Domino or a record label like that; we’re working with a small music DVD production company. We had to fund it ourselves, so the process is slowed down a little bit.

But it’s a kind of thing that’s never gonna be performed live, so we really want the visuals and the music to stay locked together. I’m sure that with the technology today, people are gonna extract the audio and it’s gonna be online. It’s gonna be this thing that very few people actually go out to a film festival and see, or purchase the DVD. But I dunno, maybe nowadays DVDs and visual things are passed around freely on the Internet?

There was an extraordinary pre-release hysteria, centred around your fans’ attempts to get leaked copies of your current album. Didn’t somebody actually hack into your own personal e-mail account?

They created a fake e-mail. We looked into it a little bit. We’re not exactly sure what happened, but I guess it’s not that hard to create a fake e-mail address, or something that just happens to look like an original one. It wasn’t actually mine; it was the band’s e-mail account, but the letter was signed as if it was from me.

An extraordinary volume of words have been written about you recently, particularly on the Internet. It feels like you’re the band that launched a thousand blog posts, and it almost makes me feel like I need some sort of post-doctoral qualification in Animal Collective Studies, before I can even start to discuss the work. Do you keep tabs on all of that? Does it mystify you, or does it interest you?

It’s better not to look at it, whether it’s positive or negative. If you open yourself up to reading positive stuff about you on the Internet, and if you place a value on it, then you also have to place a value on the negative stuff – and for all you know, it’s an 11-year old kid sitting at his parents’ computer.

With the Internet, you have to remember that a lot of these people aren’t even really qualified to discuss us, in my opinion. Like when we get on stage and Dave, who’s Avey Tare, is singing 80% of the song – but people still refer to him as Panda Bear, because they think that Panda Bear is the lead singer, because he’s put out a solo record. It just reminds us that there’s so many intricate things about our band that people still don’t understand, because they’ve put together an idea of our band from these little snippets that they’ve read.

On the Internet, there’s never any fact checking. Nobody knows if anything’s correct, even on our Wikipedia page. There was a rumour going around that Noah [aka Panda Bear] had gone to school with Tupac; it was on Wikpedia.

There is a mysterious, open-ended quality to your music, which can lend itself to people looking for stuff that isn’t there. Is there a temptation for people to over-analyse your work, when they should just ride with it and feel it?

It’s up to them, but I think in general we would prefer people just to feel our music. We’ve never been into very cerebral music ourselves. When we got into experimental music, we responded to things that felt like they were made from some kind of visceral inspiration – or where we had more creative reactions, like imagining little films in our heads. Then we were delving more into experimental music, and finding that there was a huge academic, sort of university side to it. It really turned us off, because to us it was not fun to interact with music in a super-cerebral way.

So we definitely don’t intend for our music to be taken that way. And I know it does for some people, and that’s fine – but it’s not what we intend.

Some people like a song to tell a story, or they like to be able to grasp its precise meaning within the first two or three listens. Because that’s not really the way your music works, some people will see it as “difficult” music – which makes them feel they’ve got to put the work in, to get that kind of meaning out.

It is intentionally confusing a little bit, just because we like confusing music. We like listening to music ourselves that can be somewhat disorienting. But it’s not intended to be completely difficult, or completely obscure.

All those things that are in there – like mystery, or some kind of confusing nature – are there more for enjoyment, because we’re hoping that people will relate to music the way that we do. We’re not there to cause over-analysis. But again, it’s not a negative thing.

How much importance should we place on the word “collective” in your band’s name? Does it describe the way you work?

There’s no Communist manifesto. We don’t all live together and take turns cooking breakfast and stuff like that. Some people think that there’s a reference to some sort of hippie commune thing, and that we believe in some idealist form of collective living. It really has nothing to do with it.

We didn’t even really want to use that word, back in the day. We were not going to have a band name. We would just write which of the four of us played on the record, or something like that.

We came up with Animal Collective when it was the four of us, because it was just too many names to write down. Like when we were going on tour: you can’t tell a club to write this on a chalkboard or a poster. So we said, we’ll just call it Animal Collective because the “collective” implies that it’s a rotating line-up of four people.

FatCat asked that we use that on all of our records, so that there could be an umbrella name for people to find us in record stores. And we were like: well, we’ve already used this on once on a tour when it was all four of us, so let’s just take what we did that time. Now we use it as an umbrella name for whatever combination of us play on a record, and I suppose that still means something. With this record there’s only three of us, whereas the past few records have been all four of us – and now the next thing will be all four of us again.

So Josh, the fourth member, is going to come back on board?

Yeah – like I say, we’re already pretty far along into the process of the next thing. The seeds of it started before we even recorded Strawberry Jam.

Does the Animal Collective creative process only start when you are physically in the room together, or do you work separately and pool your ideas?

None of us live together. Noah lives in Lisbon, I live in DC, Dave lives in New York, and Josh lives in Baltimore. So we have to schedule time to get to work on music – and that time is usually limited, because we’ll have some things going on in our personal lives that are equally, if not more, important than the music. So everybody usually has to do a lot of individual work at home. We have to talk a lot over the phone, or e-mail when we’re gonna get together and actually write and work on stuff.

Is that an egalitarian process? Do you have to consciously sublimate your egos, or are you fighting like hell to get your personal ideas accepted?

No, we’re all pretty good at keeping our egos in check. You always have to make more than you think you’ll need, in terms of ideas, because not every single thing you come up with will be in sync with somebody else’s ideas.

We’ve also gotten into the habit of sending little demos; recording stuff at home, and then using the Internet to send it to people. For Merriweather and for this visual project, that’s been a huge part of the creative process. Then if people don’t like it, the idea can die a really quick death – so your ego doesn’t even have time to get attached to it.

Having played together for such a length of time, you must have developed an instinctive, unspoken rapport – so that when you’re going off in a spontaneous direction on stage, you instinctively know where you’re all going.

Yes, we’re pretty good. We work pretty quick and pretty intuitively with each other at this point. Merriweather was kind of the same, when Josh decided he didn’t want to go on tour after we finished Strawberry Jam.

We weren’t even sure we were ready; we wanted to write new material, but we weren’t sure exactly how the process would start. Then Josh said: I don’t want to go on this next tour, and then we only had a month from finishing Strawberry Jam to the tour starting, and Dave and Noah and I were like: we’ve got to get together for a couple of weeks.

So everybody worked really hard at home for a couple of weeks, and then we’d get together for a couple of weeks. Then we wrote something like eight or nine of the songs for the record, just within those two weeks, before going on tour with them live. That was probably the fastest we’ve ever worked, but it just came together really intuitively. A lot of serendipity was involved, in terms of everybody being on the same page without being in the same room.

Are the songs are still evolving and going off in different directions on stage, or are you more scored and scripted these days?

There definitely is a script to the songs, for sure. We’re performing them in the same manner that they are on the records. There are open-ended moments in the set – like how we get into a song can change from night to night.

The middle of Guys Eyes has a pretty open-ended middle passage, where there’s no set length of time, and what people do in there is not really scripted so much. The beginning of Brother Sport is different, and we go in a different direction with it than we do on the record. So things are changing a bit, but we’ve always liked things to be different between the studio and the live show anyway.

I’ve spent a long time staring at the front cover of your album, so can you tell me what’s on that purple image that lies behind the green beans?

I don’t know, actually! Dave [Portner, aka Avey Tare] and our friend Rob who helps us with our graphic design did it, and they showed it to Noah and me. And we said: that looks cool. But I’ve never actually asked what they put behind it.

I heard Noah ask Dave once, and he said: oh, it was just a picture. So you’ll have to ask Dave if you see him, and I don’t know where he is at the moment.

It’s good you retain the sense of mystery, even within the band members…

Dave does a lot of the visual artwork, and we usually never ask him where he found something, or what he did to it to get it to look like that. The same also goes with Noah’s lyrics. We don’t really ask each other what people are singing about.

Mike Atkinson.
I do more of this sort of thing here.

Tommy James and the Shondells – Cellophane Symphony

2009-03-18T23:12:00.003Z

Ah, the internet. There’s always someone marking out every piece of territory before you even set off. How can we big up unmoored one-off “Cellophane Symphony” by Tommy James and the Shondells more incisively than this description:

As a joke, Tommy begins his proto-prog bloater with a few notes of an actual symphony. Har har. For a second, I thought I wasn't listening to shit. The title track is staggeringly bad drone, refusing all resolution and wielding a Moog like its own justification.

That would sell it to me, stat.

I’ve no clue why “Cellophane Symphony” exists. A ten-minute long instrumental opening title-track to an LP is a, uh, lateral move for the bubblegum poppers behind “Hanky Panky”, “I Think We’re Alone Now”, “Mony Mony” and early vocoder jam “Crimson & Clover”. If “Cellophane Symphony” is an attempt at psychedelia it’s remarkably free of histrionics and heavy artillery—there’s none of the bloooze-bore authenticity via guitar jerk that clogged Woodstock here. Instead it’s light and airy, floating on a bass riff that’s like a Black Sabbath that took helium instead of valium and brown ale. The drums are reined in and content to mark time with constant slow-mo fills whilst the organ and guitar circle each other warily. The aforementioned Moog does what it does best, throwing out little galaxies of spacedust across everything else.

Tommy James and the Shondells – Cellophane Symphony [ysi]

The Blue Wang Report

2009-03-18T18:47:00.003Z

When Sick Mouthy wrote a piece on Watchmen that mentioned Billy ‘Big Boy’ Crudup’s digital blue wang I was unprepared for the amount of random Googler action that those simple words would bring. There are a lot of people out there searching for this guy's dick using a word that only a twelve-year-old or cretin would:

blue wang (19 times)
billy crudup blue wang (9 times)
billy crudup's blue wang (4 times)
billy crudup wang (3 times)
giant blue wang (2 times)
"billy crudup" "blue wang"
"watchmen" "blue wang"
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Just imagine the hits Rocktimists might have got if Mouthy hadn’t missed the opportunity to work Billy Crudup’s blue penis, Billy Crudup’s blue dick, Billy Crudup’s blue cock, Billy Crudup’s blue balls or Billy Crudup’s blue pussy in there.

Back Once Again for the Renengade Master

2009-03-16T21:19:00.004Z

The triumphant return of the much missed Stylus Jukebox, now a stand-alone site but still under the iron-fist of King Pop. Which'd be William B. Swygart. (And here's the archives for 2004, 2005 and 2006).

Book Review #1: Luke Haines - Bad Vibes

2009-03-14T16:38:00.006Z

A degree less intelligent and cutting than it thinks it is—the consistency with the rest of Haines oeuvre is a victory for the auteur theory.

Capsule Review #6: 'The Class'

2009-03-11T09:22:00.001Z

This film certainly 'makes the grade'. Coaxing some 'grade-a' performances from his cast, Laurent Cantet confirms that he is in the 'top stream' of filmmakers working today.

Mix Up

2009-03-10T23:34:00.004Z

Currently rocking to:

Rocktimist fave Ali Renault (as part of his Heartbreak duo) has a mix up at Allez-Allez that spans from the League Unlimited Orchestra version of “Things That Dreams Are Made Of” to murdering black metal dimwits Burzum. Burzum have a songtitle that translates as “The Lonesome Mourning of Frigg”. It probably sounds better in the original Norwegian.

Urb have a mix from kosmische-trance dude Alex Moulton whose Exodus was my third fave album of 2008.

Roman “Alter Ego” Flügel has a sorta deep house mix that tries to capture “an entire night in a 50min mix” over at House is a Feeling.

Lastly, the latest mystery mix at the ever reliable DJ History is Afacan Sound System unleashing a load of ultra-obscure Turkish psych and disco tracks. This is the cheeky direct download link.

Billy Crudup's Digital Blue Wang

2009-03-08T19:39:00.003Z

Hello again.

I went to university in Northampton, pretty much by accident. (I think I thought it was near Southampton, and therefore closer to Devon. It’s not.) Alan Moore, legendary beardo comic guru, lives in Northampton. (So does Jo Whiley; I used to see her in a surf shop by friend worked in. A surf shop, in Northampton. The most landlocked town in England pretty much.) I doubt there’s much significance in this.

I didn’t read Watchmen until well after I’d finished university and fled back to Devon in a hurry, though. Which is kind of irritating, because my degree was Popular Culture with Philosophy, and while we did a module on popular erotic literature, which included a guest lecture by a Black Lace writer who lived opposite campus, none of our lecturers had the foresight to say “oh, Alan Moore, the most famous man in comics who isn’t a fascist called Frank; let’s get HIM to give a lecture, or at least use his proximity to inspire an interesting module”.

But I did read Watchmen nevertheless, several years ago. And I enjoyed it. I wasn’t madly blown away by it; I’m no fanboy. I just like comics a bit, and superheroes in particular (especially those of a little more human disposition – where’s the drama in an invulnerable flying alien with super-strength and laser-eyes?), and a little bit more thought and character than outsiders generally reckon the genre to have. As you probably know (well, hopefully know), I quite like that Dark Knight film.

I reread Watchmen recently, in anticipation of Zack Snyder’s film. I didn’t get all the way through, however, because memories of the stupid ending (a device halfway between those used more fruitfully in The Incredibles and Akira) started surfacing. But I did do that thing of skipping backwards through pages, studying past frames, noticing references, picking up clues, reading the news cuttings and other supplementary intertextual MacGuffins that give context to the world and emotional background to the characters. I’d be interested to know how many other people who’ve read Watchmen have read it as closely. I know that my own reading would be seen as remarkably shallow by many, not least Zack Snyder.

Snyder was an interesting choice of director. A self-confessed fanboy of the comic, he’s no Nolan, or Cuaron, or Del Toro, but he’s leagues ahead of, say, Paul W. Anderson, who perhaps could be seen as Snyder’s most analoguous contemporary. Except that where Snyder picks acclaimed comicbooks to bring to the movies, Anderson picks computer games. Clever.

I really liked Snyder’s remake of Dawn of the Dead, which I saw in the cinema. I’ve not seen 300 but I’m not really a Frank Miller fan and haven’t read it either. But there was no way I was going to miss Watchmen. Not after seeing the trailer last summer. (I should note that Moore refuses to have anything to do with film adaptations of his comics, to the extent that he claims he sim[ply shall not see Watchmen the movie.)

So I went on Saturday afternoon with my girlfriend and another friend, who is the closest thing I have to a fellow comicbook geek, except that neither of us is that into comics, and he has a doctorate in the representation of women in Victorian literature rather than in the representation of giant world-ending alien pseudo-squids in DC comics. I saw both The Dark Knight and Batman Begins in his company, too. (And X-Men: The Last Stand, but the less said about that the better.)

And you know what? All three of us walked out of the cinema at ten past four having thoroughly enjoyed ourselves; maybe it was the cheesecake brownie Ben & Jerry’s, or simply the giddy indulgence of seeing a film at a time when you can walk out into daylight.

But I think it was the film.

No, it wasn’t perfect. But the comic isn’t flawless either; the ending, as intimated, is pretty pants. Well, not the ending per se, but the final, explosive, “so this is what it was all for” culmination. The most notable thing about Snyder’s film is that they rewrote that final explosive culmination, and in doing so vastly improved upon the original. (If you didn’t know, the original ends with a giant world-ending alien pseudo-squid uniting the Cold Warring USA and USSR in peace and love. No, really.) I wont say what the new version is. But it works. And makes MUCH more sense, too.

So, a list of quick positives…

1. Dan Dreiberg, aka Niteowl, was played by the creepy paedo guy from Hard Candy, and he was terrific. It really was as if the character had walked off the page and onto the set.
2. The Dr Manhattan effects were great (with the possible exception of the wang), particularly the illuminated dust floating in his aura. (For those who don’t know, Dr Manhattan is an atomised physicist who reunites his molecules at a sub-atomic level and in doing so becomes… well, pretty much omnipotent. And blue. So powerful is he that he parades around naked, like a Greek god made of radioactive sapphire.)
3. All the effects were great, actually, and the set & costume design were faithful enough to the source material to give anyone with a decent familiarity to it several gasp-inducing moments of déjà vu that were really quite enjoyable.
4. The sex scene was the funniest, most awesome sex scene since the one in Team America; Wold Police-

Actually, yes, the sex scene. How you react to that scene says a lot about your understanding of what this film is trying to achieve, I think.

The original Watchmen isn’t just a comic; it’s a commentary upon the comic genre, a satire and a parody of it, and also a love-letter to it. The characters are deliberate archetypes taken to extremes, the universe a fully-defined alternative reality that posits superheroes as “costumed adventurers” out for justice with just masks and martial training rather than laser-eyes and mutant regeneration factors (Dr Manhatten very obviously excepted). I’m assuming you know it’s set in 1985, that Nixon is still in, that a giant radioactive blue god won Vietnam for the USA, that nuclear terror pervades the whole of society, that “costumed adventurers” have been outlawed (hello The Incredibles, again), that someone is plotting to save the world by making everyone think it nearly ended, etc, etc, etc…

But it’s not really about that. It’s about… misanthropy, and violence, and the nature of humanity, and the way we experience time, and sexual deviance, and the justification of bigger-picture politics, and the nature of altruism, and many, many other things, most important of all being comicbooks as a genre, as an artform, in and of themselves.

So Snyder’s film cannot deliver the same experience as reading the book. It cannot have all the appended press cuttings and book extracts and so on. You cannot flick back a few pages and study the graffiti scrawled on a wall in that one panel where the guy with the “end of the world” placard appears. It cannot be a commentary upon and a satire of comicbooks. But it can be a comment upon and a satire of comicbook films. Because, you know, we’ve had a few of those recently, and far more people seem to watch the films than read the comics.

And so Snyder transposes from comicbook to film, and it nearly works; Ozymandias’ suit has nipples, a clear reference to George Clooney’s lampooned Batman costume. Niteowl’s suite even more closely resembles Batman’s than it did before. Both Silk Spectre costumes reveal as much real flesh as Jim Lee’s figure-hugging illustrations ever did, and in doing so become remarkably unsexy; cellulite and camel toes not really doing either incarnation favours.

But it’s not just comicbook films that are referenced and satirised; Lena’s appearance on the soundtrack transforms a cod-romantic dinner scene between Dan and Laurie into a Pretty in Pink moment. Hendrix’s use for the flight from Mars echoes Marwood’s drunken awakening on the motorway in Withnail. And that sex scene… the flamethrower / orgasm synchronicity, the Leonard Cohen hideousness of the soundtrack, the cheesy, sleazy camera angles, the clichéd climax faces; John Connor’s conception in The Terminator has nothing on this for sublime, laugh-out-loud (and completely deliberate, on Snyder’s part) bathos, two uptight ex-heroes who can’t get turned on until they’ve dolled up like latex gimps and pummelled a ne’er-do-well or five.

Critics of the film seem to orbit around the point that Snyder, as fanboy, is too faithful to the source; that you cannot understand the film without attending undergraduate seminars on the comic; that he is so obsessed with recreating the aesthetic that he loses the depth. Some will cite Nixon’s prosthetic nose, but this isn’t a Ron Howard biopic; it’s a comicbook film with a giant blue naked atomic god as one of the main characters, for goodness sake. If you want po-faced realism go and see The Reader. If you want total cartoon hijinks go and see Bolt.

I could go on, but overstaying a welcome is never a good idea.

I’m not saying Watchmen is a terrific film; I’m saying it’s a very solid one, a fantastic addition to the superhero / comicbook oeuvre, far better than most but not quite the Citizen Kane of the genre that people wanted. Is it as good as the book? Is cheesecake brownie ice cream as good as either a cheesecake or a brownie? I can’t wait for the Watchmen DVD. And I never liked Citizen Kane much anyway.

Set Text

2009-03-04T23:45:00.002Z

Except what we have here is not a text, it's what everyone has been waiting for—Aussie rock critics lined up firing-squad style discussing the pop issues of the day. It’s bangers and mash the whole way.

Start Beef IV

2009-03-04T23:43:00.001Z

Fuck these guys.

Clubhouse – Do It Again

2009-03-04T23:07:00.001Z

Unlike most Rocktimists readers (bar that one guy who lives in Iran) I don’t spin out my days in some city centre nu-media pod where MP3s of trend-setting groups like Crystal Antlers, Crystal Castles and Crystal Stilts are playlisted from a central server. Instead I work in a rail depot where the order of the day is Capital Gold in the morning and Planet Rock in the afternoon, with a bit of Smooth if someone really wants to mix things up.

If you drew a Venn diagram of the music those stations play there’d be the slim total of two groups in the centre where the circles crossover—bands played by all three stations—and both of them great; Fleetwood Mac (‘70s US version) and Steely Dan. The other day Planet Rock played Steely Dan’s “Do It Again” and by about the third minute in (when the solos start) everyone in the room had quieted down and was nodding their head. It was one of those small, perfect moments.

So in celebration here’s a version of “Do It Again”. It’s not the original, as there’s surely a very good chance that you’ve all got it (and it’s not hard to find if you haven’t) but a version that Planet Rock would never play that crasses up the songs undercarriage with the beat and bassline from “Billie Jean”. It’s Italian, from ’83 and by a group that had later releases on Pete Waterman’s label PWL and omnivorous Italo-pop kingpins ZYX. One of the members takes responsibility for at least 32 other aliases. This is maxed-out production-line mersh as it should be done.

Clubhouse – Do It Again (Medley with Billie Jean) [ysi]

Capsule Review #5: 'The International'

2009-03-02T23:03:00.001Z

Results 1 - 6 of 6 for "stop getting bourne wrong". (0.07 seconds)

Deck Down, Deck Up, That's The Way We Like Our Bus

2009-02-28T11:16:00.006Z

(Coz I just read it one more time.)

Charles Dexter Ward - Threnody for Ron Asheton

2009-02-25T21:46:00.004Z

Even in the obscured by clods world of ‘noise’ cassette culture Charles Dexter Ward is a tiny figure in an out of the way corner of the landscape; there was one tape of loner-guitar scrapings followed by a couple of beautiful tracks of ahead of/behind the times kraut-synth work (none of which have left a trace anywhere on the internet) followed by some appearances with north-eastern improv crew Truckstop Women, then nothing for almost a decade.

This is his return, a heavy eight-minute howl of lamentation for fallen soldier Ron Asheton; a fire concealed beneath black veils. Not that there’s any too obvious sonic links between Ward’s style here and that of Asheton beyond the long peals of background gtr-wah that cloud the funeral-procession drums. Instead, think the Sun City Girls if they viewed life through the acrid fumes of lousy ex-mining town cannabis resin instead of an opium haze; clangourous arpeggios loosely wrapped in high-end foliage and four-track murk.

So far as I know, Charles isn’t together enough for any web presence but you can contact him here. [Edit: I was wrong, dude does have a MySpace.]

Charles Dexter Ward – Threnody for Ron Asheton [ysi]

Capsule Review #4: 'Hunger'

2009-02-24T23:38:00.002Z

The birds flying out of the trees symbolize his soul passing on.

Strategic cross-pimping: "Which Decade Is Tops For Pops?"

2009-02-24T16:30:00.002Z

Now in its seventh year, my annual collaborative blog-stunt seeks to rank the last five decades in order of chart-pop fabulousness, by comparing the Top Ten UK singles from the week of my birthday and collating reader scores accordingly.

This year, we're examining the charts of 1969, 1979, 1989, 1999 and 2009. On Day One we compare the five songs at Number 10, on Day Two we shift up a place, and so on. There's a brief memory-jogging medley MP3 to accompany each round, as well as YouTube links for each song.

Last year, the 1960s romped home for the second year running. The 1990s and 2000s tend not to do so well - although the 2000s have been staging a marked recovery over the past couple of years, so There Is Still Hope. Meanwhile, the 1980s have been steadily tanking, ever since 1985 won it for them four years ago.

At the time of writing, we're comparing and contrasting singles by Stevie Wonder, Driver 67, Robert Howard/Kym Mazelle, TQ and Shontelle. So do please come and join us, at http://tinyurl.com/wd2009.

In The Psychiatrist’s Bed – Bon Bon Club

2009-02-23T22:50:00.018Z

We’ve talked about the Bon Bon Club before on Rocktimists, so who could be better to open our exciting new ~~way of updating with minimum effort~~ feature ~~that we stole from elsewhere~~.

The new lineup of Sushi Quatro, Chappati Smith and Boozie Sioux took some time out from slathering themselves in pancake makeup and listening to menswe@r to peep at our Rorschach test.

Boozie: House elves from Harry Potter!
Chapatti: Candy 'princess maow maow' the cat

Sushi: This one looks like Chappati
Boozie: 2 garden gnomes playing clapping songs

Boozie: Waiters washing up

Boozie: TROLL
Chapatti: A small toad crawling up a big toad's bum

Sushi: Release the Bats!
Boozie: Cute fruit bat for sure

Sushi: A hungry, devouring twat
Boozie: I'm sorry but definitely vaginal

Sushi: This reminds me of Bon Bon, the delightful bunny on the cover of our debut 7" single
Boozie: double thumbs-up!

Boozie: Pink bears climbing

Chapatti: the Turin shroud
Boozie: Chinese Dragons

Boozie: Tripping at Le Tour Eiffel

The Bon Bon Club – Love is Blind [ysi]

You can buy one of the last few copies of their seven-inch from Thee SPC records here. This is their MySpace in case you’re still into pretending be friends with bands and all that.

On a related tip here’s a Glass Candy version of “Nostalgia” by The Long Blondes, a band which featured the Bon Bon’s Sushi Quatro (under her government name of Reenie Delaney). I believe it was originally commissioned for a proposed remix 12” that would also have included the Pantha Du Prince mix of “Guilt”.

The Long Blondes – Nostalgia (Glass Candy Remix) [ysi]

It's because of Eric Bana

2009-02-22T18:00:00.002Z

More google hits for Robbie Graham and Matthew Alford from fellow New Statesman blackleg John Pilger, another person who probably hasn't actually seen Munich, but is happy to call it a 'a corporate-backed endorsement of Israeli policy,' which it really isn't. Pilger goes on to ask film critics to be, essentially, political journalists like himself, accusing those many film critics who panned Brian De Palma's Redacted of trying 'to taint the film as a kind of heresy and to bury it.' If a film criticizes any aspect of US foreign policy, it is the film critic's duty to support that film.

But back up, go and read the original Village Voice piece, and gosh darn if Pilger isn't talking a complete bunch of bullshit, unless the Voice was trying to bury the film by giving it substantial and not unsympathetic coverage.

Anyway, film critics frequently 'speak out' as Pilger demands; they do it all the time. And they generally do better than this:

These days, there are two types of censorship. The first is censorship by introspective dross. Betraying its long tradition of producing gems, escapist Hollywood is consumed by the corporate formula: just make 'em long and asinine and hope the hype will pay off. Real talent is absorbed. Ricky Gervais is his clever comic self in Ghost Town, while around him stale, formulaic characters sentimentalise the humour to death.

So... Hollywood for long produced gems like Birth of a Nation, The Green Berets, and all the racist westerns and (you’ll have to read this bit for yourself but seriously) proto-neo-con second-world-war movies he refers to earlier in the piece; but now it produces long, asinine, introspective dross, all according to formula – a recent development – and relying on publicity to attract an audience, another completely unprecedented tactic in the annals of entertainment history. Ho-hum. It actually gets worse when he compares Hamas with the French resistance, but some stuff kind of fisks itself.

Your Questions Answered

2009-02-17T23:01:00.003Z

At Rocktimists we pride ourselves on our wide knowledge base, and not just concerning music and film but all aspects of the arts and sciences. Sometimes people find us through googled questions but the answers aren’t on the site. Today we’re making that right and giving you—the public—the answers to the important questions that have been keeping you awake at night.

The bold text is the search term that was caused someone to end up here. Spelling and grammar haven’t been fucked with.

mercury music prize anyone won it twice
No.

"i lust you" chart position
No Neon Neon songs have cracked the hit forty. Plus the song is spelled “I Lust U” coz they’re all retro-moderne and shit.

are felicity kendal and rachael stevens related
No. They're both Jewish though.

"what is the dark knight about?"
The Dark Knight is Batman. In this film he fights the Joker and then Two-Face. There’s no secret, hidden occult meaning to it; it’s a superhero flick.

homoerotic batman art
Have "Batman do handjob and want to suck Superman’s big cock" as a start.

old laide ,s cum
Batman/boy love we’ll help with, but there are limits.

was ist britain pop?
I’m definitely nabbing this for the title of my forthcoming book.

where does ralf little live
Here.

wot does the chaffinch aet
Chaffinches eat a variety of seeds and scraps. They can also eat fruits, berries, insects and spiders.

Finally, there’s this question, or really these questions:

robbie graham matthew alford new statesman (3 times)
hollywood matthew alford graham screen shock (2 times)
"robbie graham" "matthew alford"
"robbie graham" "matthew alford" screen
alford graham hollywood shock
alford graham hollywood statesman new
alford graham hollywood statesman new wiki
alford graham new statesman screen
alford hollywood graham screen money
matthew alford "new statesman"
matthew alford hollywood graham screen shock
matthew alford hollywood screen graham, shock
shock matthew alford
the power behind the screen new statesman matthew alford comments
Hello Robbie. Hello Matthew. Good to see you again. You might want to note that your article is discussed here and it’s staying there as is, so there's no need to check it every couple of days, much as we love your visits. Pro-tip: sign up to Google Alerts and in the time you save vanity-searching you can probably dream up another conspiracy theory.

Mix Up

2009-02-15T23:35:00.005Z

Here's two hot mixes chock full of disco re-edit joy.

Ash and Max at Disco Horror have been doing a primo job of documenting the best of the nu-disco scene and have just upped the Fear the Beard mix. Personally, I'm not fearing any beard not attached to Peter Sutcliffe.

This is a direct link to an expansive, dubby mix by American DJ Andrew Allsgood. The tracklist is in the comments section. The unconscious similarity with "Bongo Jam" in the Tontelas track is pretty loveable.

And as a bonus here's Allsgood's re-edit of "Magic Man" by soft rock sisters Heart, one of my most played jams of last year.

Heart - Magic Man (Allsgood Edit) [ysi]

The Animated .GIF Awards 2009

2009-02-05T23:59:00.011Z

Each day the first thing I do after getting up is head over to the NME Awards so that I can vote for Oasis and/or Noel Gallagher (he’s the rhythm guitarist of the group) in the eight out of twenty-five categories they’re nommed in. Noel’s even up for best blogger, so big up yourself to him for supporting the blogging revolution.

There are other categories too, ones that Oasis aren’t up for and I have to make decisions about those as well, but I usually feel I can throw weight behind something—best website is Bebo, best venue is the O2 and so on. The one category that makes me worry is the one for Best Album cover as they’re all cheap, nasty designs with little obvious care taken. The NME consistently looks awful too though, like a hip Local Authority drugs pamphlet that tries to connect with da kids in trouble on their own level. There may be a connection.

Here are the nominations:

We Are Scientists – Brain Thrust Mastery
Seems like if you were a jokey New York band with an album concept about being self-help gurus you might make the album cover look like a self-help book or CD right? Instead, go for truth in advertising and show yourselves sleeping, like most listeners will be before the end of the last song.

Guillemots – Red
The cover of Red looks kind of thing that Storm Thorgerson would knock off for the second single from a Mars Volta album. But with a logo designed by a year ten student during a boring maths lesson. The hey-look-life-is-a-complex-thing-just-like-our-music-alright ball of twine is a motif reminiscent of the world’s crappest Rubik’s Cube from the front of the last Elbow album or this classic from Biffy Clyro. Still, Red by King Crimson has a shitty cover too and that’s a fantastic record, so maybe not all is lost for the ‘Mots.

The Killers – Day & Age

The NME doesn’t seem to realise that the only designer allowed to get backslaps for lazy Photoshop filter use is Peter Saville.

Muse – HAARP

Has there ever been a live album with a great cover? Off the top of my head I say no. There’s barely ever been a great live album. Wikipedia informs us that “the album is named after the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, of which vocalist Matthew Bellamy (known for his interest in global conspiracies and the New World Order conspiracy which influences the band's music) holds suspicion.” Citation needed. HFAARP, then.

The Cure – 4:13 Dream

The Cure are this years recipients of the Godlike Genius award, so get to have a pity nom in another category too. Since no-one, not even whoever hawked it up, could think that this is a good cover it might look like the NME having a sly dig at the current state of the certified genii. This theory is blown out of the water by the rest of the covers being equally grim however.

RIP Big Man - Lux Interior

2009-02-05T22:19:00.002Z

As a tribute here is the Purple Knif Show, an hour long radio show from 1984 packed with obscure rock & roll hosted by Lux in reverb and mic jabber mode. I stole the link from elsewhere but in the circumstances I don't think anyone will mind.

Mix Up

2009-02-04T00:23:00.002Z

Since Lindstrøm got mentioned in the post below it would be wrong not to mention that his sometime production buddy Prins Thomas provides this months mystery mix at the always on-point DJ History. The naughty direct download link is here.

Boredoms – Ant 10 (DJ Lindstrom Remix)

2009-02-03T23:00:00.003Z

Boredoms are one of those bands that have lasted long enough and burned through enough styles that just about anyone they chose to work with would make sense; from their early hook-up with John Zorn when they were both in their smashtronix phases to various collaborations with the international trip-hop players in the 1990s and the (inevitable) work with Sonic Youth members.

Just out (and sold out already) is a new volume of Super Roots which pits new track “Ant 10” against four remixes. The original “Ant 10” begins in the broiling percussion sea of recent Boredoms before resolving into a kaleidoscopic whirl of circling electric piano and synth lines over four-to the-floor drums, like a super ecstatic jazz-fusion. (The closest I can think of is parts of Alice Coltrane’s astounding Eternity album).

Three of the remixes (including one by the suspiciously named DJ Finger Hat, who returns no Google hits unconnected to Super Roots 10) just splash around in the shallows of the main track; if you want more, they’re more but little else. The other remix, by “DJ Lindstrom” (or, y’know, Lindstrøm) takes us back to the breadth of collaborators that the Boredoms haveworked with as this is an ideal match, Lindstrøm and Boredoms both being experts at the stretched-out cosmic exploration (Lindstrøm and Boredoms’ Eye have both recorded tributes to Manuel Göttsching’s E2-E4, the hour-long 1984 album which marks the point where the autobahn meets the beach).

Lindstrøm thins the drums down to a constant simmer and making space for laserfire syndrums and phased rainbows before uncoiling the seventies squelch and wah, which was buried in the original track, like ribbons behind a gymnast. There's a constant ebb and flow until the final three minutes of loose and squeaky muppet disco-chorus that seems to parody the low vocal calls that begin the original version.

Boredoms – Ant 10 (DJ Lindstrom Remix) [ysi]

To take us out, the stupidest last.fm shoutbox quote for this track, “Goomba4001 wrote ...It still sounds good, but I NEVER THOUGHT THE BOREDOMS WOULD BE MAKING SYNTH POP!!”

Film Industry in 'Capitalist' Shock

2009-01-29T21:00:00.002Z

This week's non-union New Statesman takes us back to the heady days of Louis Althusser and 'base-and-superstructure' Marxism, though without using those terms. Robbie Graham and Matthew Alford's article 'The Power Behind the Screen' belongs to a tradition that dates back at least as far as the 1930s and F. D. Klingender and Stuart Legg’s book Money Behind the Screen.

The story goes that because the Hollywood studios are – this emerges early in the piece – capitalist enterprises, they have an obvious interest in maintaining the status quo. This will come as news to few people, and fewer still New Statesman readers – a magazine whose financial situation has of course no effect whatever on its contents, and which remains defiantly independent of party politics.

Still, it is interesting to note that the troother doc Loose Change, here identified as a product of the ‘counterculture’, had trouble finding a mainstream distributor. More interesting still, we learn that Paul Greengrass, when he made United 93, which did get a distributor, was actually following a sinister Neocon agenda that supported ‘Bush’s official 9/11 story’. The authors report that

just one month prior to the release of United 93, 83 per cent of CNN viewers confirmed their belief "that the US government covered up the real events of the 9/11 attacks". With the official narrative under attack, the US government welcomed the release of United 93 with open arms: the film was a faithful audiovisual translation of the 9/11 Commission Report.

I guess we shouldn’t expect any better from the magazine that gave us the ‘kosher conspiracy’. But what really bites is the chronic cinematic illiteracy involved in this kind of thing – which is only a more detailed and tendentious version of what gets published all the time elsewhere. (I’m sure I’ve seen more than one article claiming that – already – films being released in cinemas now reflect the Obama victory.) In this particular case the problem, apart from the implication that Greengrass’s film is covering up for Mossad or whoever really did 9/11, is that the values represented by United 93 – collective action, competence, love of one’s fellow man and the like – are not values one associates with the last administration at all.

Their precis of Munich, which ends on ‘a lingering shot of the World Trade Center, its twin towers standing as monolithic reminders as to "why we fight",’ ‘a corporate-backed endorsement of Israeli policy,’ is even worse – simply put, they have completely misread the film, as well as giving us an international Jewish conspiracy theory to chew on. If anything, that lingering shot of the WTC on the foggy horizon – they don’t look very monolithic – is meant to at least suggest that 9/11 was in some way a result of the failure to resolve Israel/Palestine. No-one could see the film as cheerleading for Mossad, at any rate, and it certainly drew a lot of criticism from pro-Israeli pressure groups – which only goes to demonstrate the perils of trying to get a political ‘read’ off a film based on who paid for it.

More amusingly, Graham and Alford end by telling us what they do like: 'American Psycho, which criticised corporate capitalism; Hotel Rwanda, which highlighted the failings of US foreign policy, and Lord of War, which focused on the arms trade.’ Now, American Psycho is a lovely bit of work, but critique of corporate capitalism, or any kind of capitalism, it is not; far superior to the book, it is nonetheless still your basic businessman-in-his-suit-and-tie demonology. Nothing wrong with that of course, but there’s no need to front that it’s The Hour of the Furnace; Lord of War meanwhile is just a dull movie picking up points for saying that the arms trade is a bad thing, not good like you thought. (That’s two Lee and Herring articles in one paragraph if you’re counting.)

In the end, this kind of article, which, as I say, is a media staple, and not just on the left, rests on the idea that the most salient thing about any film is its politics – but moreover, its politics as elaborated in the synopsis of the film, rather than its texture, as in United 93, or even just in its detail, as in Munich. In the end, this kind of article is bad criticism.

RIP Big Man - John Martyn

2009-01-29T17:50:00.002Z

Capsule Review #3: 'Valkyrie'

2009-01-29T09:24:00.001Z

Actually kinda dope.

Slow to Speak as Slow to Think

2009-01-29T00:09:00.004Z

Sometimes in a recession it feels good to celebrate a heroic act of spending. Other times the person doing the spending would be a mark whatever the circumstances.

If you’re spending twelve quid on a pirate 12” repressing of three Devo tracks, that won’t sound any better for the extra vinyl spread coz they aren’t from the master tapes, then y’re a mark. And a schmuck. That goes even if they are ‘curated’ by Terre Thaemlitz, who has gone to the extraordinary trouble of picking the two most famous Devo songs from their most famous album and (here’s the genius) one slightly less wll-known one from their second. You could buy nice second hand copies of both albums for less than the cost of this twelve.

They haven’t even bothered to get the track titles correct. It’s “Mongoloid” not “Mongoloids”.

There’s a whole raft of these 12”s too, all with fake record company logos and “for promotional use only” legend, even though there’s nothing to promote.

If anyone out there has bought one of these, get in touch at the Rocktimists email address and include your bank details because we need to verify your PayPal and ebay accounts.

More Pressure than the Bottom of the Mariana Trench

2009-01-28T22:45:00.003Z

This is the back cover of the ‘deluxe’ edition of the new Franz Ferdinand album. It’s not a good idea to try to gauge what someone is experiencing based on their work but I don’t think Franz Ferdinand are having fun right now. And they were never a band who found it easy to look like they were having fun in the first place.

Feel The Pressure

Three Years. Twenty-five dog years. An infinity in group years. And calculating every second.

Feeling Kind of Anxious

Calculate. Put two and two together and get four. Start again. And again. And again.

The Vaguest of Feeling

Run on the spot for mile after mile after mile. Thick breath on the back of the neck. Drenched. So near –

Feel The Envy

Swallow the bile. Look over a shoulder and force a smile. Drenched. So near and yet so far –

Can’t Stop Feeling

Can’t start feeling.

Love is Not a Victory March

2009-01-27T00:41:00.002Z

I went to see The Wrestler recently despite knowing nothing about that noble art, thinking that Mickey Rourke has never been in a good film and that Requiem for a Dream (by the same director, Darren Aronofsky) is one of the top three worst movies ever—the type of shit I would have found profound as a fourteen-year-old and then felt vaguely embarrassed about later. The Wrestler is excellent though; the plot is prefab and may as well be from Karate Kid VII but Rourke and Marisa Tomei are terrific, the wrestling scenes are exciting, punishing and funny, and there’s a surplus of weird, niggling detail.

I’ve fucked up and been totally unable to find what I really wanted to post here tonight though, video footage of something a friend informed me of as we left and which is a perfect confluence of Christmas number one single and Oscar-bait film. I’ll let Wikipedia tell it, with added emphasis by me on the bit that sounds so amazing: “Extreme Championship Wrestling was infamous for regularly holding "Bring Your Own Weapon Nights" at the ECW Arena in the early days of the promotion. Fans were encouraged to bring their own weapons to give to wrestlers, as fighting in the crowd was a staple of ECW matches. A dollar store located next to the ECW Arena often supplied the bulk of the weapons, with fans purchasing them while they waited in line for each show. Memorable weapons included crutches, a large piece of cardboard with the words "Use Me!" handwritten on it but actually concealing a full-sized Stop sign, a two-man kayak, a Leonard Cohen vinyl record, a VCR (with remote), a cactus, a cast iron ladder, and a Nintendo Entertainment System.”

I refuse to believe that I can’t watch a man getting beaten with a Leonard Cohen LP somewhere on the internet coz, really, what the fuck was the internet even developed for if not that?

The Wrestler also marks the flipping point where even in mainstream mags and papers “that pussy Cobain” (as Rourke’s character Randy ‘The Ram’ Robinson dubs him) and grunge are going to start to be called out as whiney and not-fun, and hair metal seen as old-is-new-again party food like the rest of the 80s. Look for articles on the subject in the next six months.

Hair metal still sucks though. Except “Cherry Pie” by Warrant.

Spotify

2009-01-25T21:47:00.006Z

One of the few good things about the ongoing world economic shit-spin is the probability that the endless amount of tiresome “web 2.0 gurus” that fill up the business and tech pages of the broadsheet papers with spiels about how the music biz can save itself will go back to where they belong, talking to the gullible—but mainly themselves—on their blogs. The idea that musicians were gonna support themselves financially by giving their shit away and making the cash back on live shows was always laughable, and now even the dummies that convinced themselves it was workable can surely see it.

That said, one of their touted ideas, the celestial jukebox—all recorded music beamed from the heavens and streaming straight from one's computer—is here. Or at least enough of a working model that it’s possible to get an idea of the possibilities.

It’s called Spotify and sign-up is here, at least if you live in the UK (there’s no US support yet and access varies across Europe). After that you download a widget to your computer which runs an iTunes-like interface for accessing the music. It actually takes up much less system resource than the memory hog of iTunes and sound quality is pretty good considering the music is streaming over the internet. The only times that I’ve had playback problems have been when using up most of my connection with BitTorrents.

After installation the first thing to do seemed to be to try to find what isn’t available, and out of my initial searches Spotify did much better than I expected, although there is no Denim, Half Man Half Biscuit or “Prisencolinensinainciusol”.

As one of Spotify’s best features is that it’s possible to share playlists, I figured that it would be good to try to put one together for the Disastrous Rocktimists UK Pop Critics Poll track results and see what happened. Considering that the results were quite wide ranging there aren’t too many artists that are missing entirely; only volcano!, 88 Keys (bar one song with him guesting), heartsrevolution, Nat Johnson, Pains of Being Pure at Heart and Salem. Surprisingly S.C.U.M. and “Put a Donk on It “ by Blackout Crew are there (“Did you mean Blackest Crow” suggests the search engine helpfully). Some other artists appeared but not the tracks that placed in the poll: the only Radiohead is Kid A and The Best Of, Tricky has his early work available but not “Bacative” even though plenty other Domino Records stuff is there, Black Milk has some tracks up but they’re mixed in undifferentiated with a girl group of the same name, and for Addictive ft. T2 there’s only “Gonna Be Mine (T2 Gyalist Mix)” and not the original.

So here, as near as I can get it and with a few substitutions, is The Rocktimists UK Pop Critics Poll Spotify Playlist. If you have Spotify installed just click to add.

Rocktimist Mike T-Diva has done a couple of similar playlists, one for his top 75 tracks of 2008 (which is mainly missing funky house tracks) and one for the Pazz and Jop top 100 singles (six missing there).

Lastly, a couple of weird things about Spotify. The tagging of remixes is terrible leading to singles being on there with no fucking way of telling what is up with the multiple identically titled versions listed (save heading over to Discogs and comparing track lengths). And, perplexingly, how did RVNG Mix 3 a mail-order only, unauthorised mix CD by Tim Sweeney of the DFA end up being available?

Mix Up

2009-01-25T21:05:00.003Z

I posted a link to a mix at the end of last week, and here already are links to a couple more from two of the best blogs out there. If I was broke, or at least less greedy, I think I could probably live off free internet mixes alone.

Mix blog Allez-Allez has a half-hour set from Animal Collective’s Josh Deacon featuring Arthur Russell, Panda Bear and Greece’s finest, Aphrodite’s Child.

Over at post-post-punk-and-beyond kings 20 Jazz Funk Greats there’s a cheap-disco mix by new (and unheard by me) Italians Do It Better signings Bottin.

Pazz, Jop 2008

2009-01-22T23:40:00.002Z

Pazz & Jop 2008, the latest iteration of the poll that inspired our own Disastrous Critics Poll is now up on the Village Voice website. Unlike (at least) the previous two years I think I might be the only Brit living in Britain who voted (the other Brit being the NY-based Simon Reynolds). For people that voted and super-aspies there’s also Glenn McDonald’s stat-heavy autopsy of P&J2008.

The results are pretty thrill- and surprise-free, with TV on the Radio winning the albums and M.I.A. the singles. This is probably to do with what seems to be the main trend this year; that going by a whole fucking special section in the comments (“How politics changed how we thought about music, if we thought about music at all”) American critics seemed more obsessed with patting themselves on the back about having played a part in Obama’s victory than ranking records. I get it—you cast a vote! Elsewhere people ponder furrowed browed about the declining fortunes of the rock crit without hitting on the idea that they should perhaps be concentrating on their jobs a bit harder.

On the other hand the boring results might be down to a whole load of douches like Michael Ayers who sez, infront of everyone, no shame, “I didn't get the Bon Iver album when I first heard it. I'm not sure I still get it. But I wanted to get it, because everyone else got it, and I hate feeling left out. So now, I think I get it.”

Or Geoffrey Himes who sez “I don't necessarily vote for the candidates I like the most, but for those good enough to admire and mainstream enough to have a legitimate shot at winning. I didn't really think the Hold Steady and Raphael Saadiq albums were among the 10 best of the year—releases by Bill Frisell, the SteelDrivers, Jon Dee Graham, and David Murray were much better—but I really liked the Hold Steady and Saadiq discs, and I thought they might actually place in the printed lists.” That’s right, he voted for records that were much worse than others he could’ve repped. Put it on the line there Geoff, eh.

Mix Up

2009-01-22T23:16:00.002Z

Confession: I don’t usually listen to any of the promo blat that ends up in the Rocktimists inbox as I’m hard pushed to keep up with all the stuff I wanna hear anyway without adding a load of weedy soft-psych bands to the list.

I have been nodding my head to this dubstep mix by Forensics that showed up in the inbox though. It’s recommended and I’ve stuck a tracklisting in the comments section.

And since I was speaking of info overload, this seems the right place to mention Michaelangelo Matos’s new blog, the self-explanatory Slow Listening Movement.

The Red Man Will Get Ahead, Man

2009-01-22T22:44:00.002Z

I successfully avoided every piece of Obama related music leading up to the election, but here’s one that I have checked post-inauguration; the venerable Steinski—the guy who invented Coldcut, DJ Shadow and Girl Talk—has posted up on his blog a quickie track, "None Shall Be Afraid", which mixes up his typically bouncy, tom-heavy drums with snips of the Reverend Lowery’s benediction speech.

As contrast to a Steinski track about optimism and the beginning of a Presidential term here’s one of his about fear and dread and the end of a Presidential career, the sound of Kennedy getting his brains spread across his wife’s dress set to the “Honky Tonk Women” break. It’s goofy and creepy in equal measure, the kind of weird document a conspiracy obsessive could pore repeatedly over, looking for hidden signs. It’s only competition for el supremo Kennedy blam track is surely The Misfits "Bullet" with its incredible lyrics.

Steinski & Mass Media – The Motorcade Sped On [ysi]

“The Motorcade Sped On” is taken from the Steinski retrospective What Does It All Mean which can be bought physical here or digitally here.

Mix Up

2009-01-19T22:52:00.006Z

Here are some mixes worthy of waking you up on the morning commute:

The Revenge, who gained a lot of attention for his *weary sigh* re-edits last year, has a mix of disco into house on his blog.

DFA/Rekids guy Jacques Renault also has a mix doing the disco into house move here.

Finally welcome the New Year with a funky house mix from Roska that, amazingly, doesn't feature "Devil in a Blue Dress", "African Warrior" or "Bongo Jam". Corner, turned.

Start Beef III

2009-01-17T16:58:00.000Z

Fuck this bitch.

Happiest on Horseback

2009-01-13T23:32:00.003Z

Did an article on page 36 of a 1981 issue of the Times lead to 1992s worst run of top ten singles? We'll probably find out with the long overdue return of Robin Carmody to blogging.

Orgies of Inbreeding

2009-01-09T19:47:00.001Z

Whilst I love end-of-year polls—a chance to measure what I like against what other people are repping for—I really don’t like the beginning of the year when the magazines and broadsheets run their Exciting! Prospects! For! The! Coming! Year! pieces. I’d like these lists if they were filled with genuine punts and oddities but instead they're compiled by churnlists acting like they know by picking a bunch of artists who’ve had long-term development deals, big advances, PR spend and radio play already in the bag. The BBC Sound of 2009 is the biggest and this year even comes with a instructional section called “you should love this music because…” just in case one was having any doubts.

So I was getting away from it all and revisiting the past by reading a few blogs from the turn of the last century when I came across a post from Hanns Eisler about 1928’s crop of tips (when Ernst Krenek won) and how the lists “have become downright stock exchanges, where the value of the works is assessed and contracts for the coming season are settled. Yet all this noise is carried out in the vacuum of a bell glass, so to speak, so that not a sound can be heard outside. An empty officiousness celebrates orgies of inbreeding, while there is a complete lack of interest or participation of a public of any kind”.

That said, I’m glad that Little Boots won the BBC poll this year as not only is “Stuck on Repeat” the only song I’ve heard by anyone on the list that doesn’t make me want to harm my ears but it’s one that’s been a fairly constant commute companion for the past few months. Props to her too for linking this el cheapo (and previously unseen by me) vid for Dee D. Jackson’s amazing sputnik-disco track “Automatic Lover”. (She's got no chance of making the O face with that robot much though).

Set Texts

2009-01-08T00:05:00.005Z

Here is your set text reading elsewhere:

How to push the Animal Collective collective to breaking point.

The strange death of the UK charts. Or maybe their rebirth. Features a graph so you know it's good value.

The Disastrous Rocktimists UK Pop Critics Poll 2008 Wrap-Up

2009-01-07T23:18:00.002Z

Because we’ve run this one into the ground. But before we finish, a few more things.

Here, here, here and here (jeez, there’s gotta be a more elegant way of doing that) is a thought provoking set of interlocking posts on the nature of end-of-year lists, and the way that they balance individual taste and consensus, all-encompassing greed and purpose. The DRUKPCP2K8, as no-one is calling it, was meant to be find consensus but in the end what I thought would be the clear winner, Fleet Foxes, was left out of both the albums and tracks lists (which listed everything getting 10 points and above). I’m no fan of the prozac Everley Brothers so this doesn’t bother me aesthetically, only because it shows that there was a vast heartland of critics—yer Q and Mojo and Independent on Sunday dadrockers—that we totally missed out on getting to. That did mean, to my delight, that DJ KHAAAAALEEED ended number four in the tracks poll however. At Rocktimists we’re always grindin’

The ballot email also asked critics to name a worst release of the year, the thinking being that what a lot of people love, a lot of other people loathe, and we wanted to see if what people thought was worst was a mirror image of the others best. Most crits out there mustn’t be filled with the same amount of hatred, bitterness and contempt as I am as a lot bowed out of selecting anything and beyond that the only bands to get more than one vote were Glasvegas (3), Foals (2) and Girl Talk (2), all good choices. Notable beyond that were Freaky Trigger’s Tom Ewing, “the actual most reprehensible thing I heard in 08 was Elephant Man’s version of “No Air” as “No Queer”. I really wish I’d left it as an OMG rumour and not actually decided to hear it” (I’ve heard it too and it’s hard to say what’s worse, the virulent hatred of the sentiment or Elephant Man’s physically painful attempts at matching the original singing); William B Swygart with the Strictly Come Dancing House Band’s murder of “Spice Up Your Life”, “not technically a release but I had to sit through it, so it counts” and Peter Parrish’s inadmissible but undeniably correct pick of xkcd, “not an album or a track, but xkcd is the worst thing in any context”. My worst of the year? These New Puritans’ Beat Pyramid CD, the gauntly unacceptable face of fake experimentation.

And entirely unilaterally, here’s the Rocktimists video of the year, posted so I get an excuse to watch it again. My brother heard this in the only pub open in our small Northern home town on Christmas day and I am so jealous.

Lastly, a big thanks to everyone who voted or showed support.

RIP Big Man - Ron Asheton

2009-01-07T00:11:00.003Z

Ron Asheton RIP.

You can hear a lot of Ron on the stupidest/greatest ever box set of all time—every second of tape recorded for Funhouse (28 fucking takes of "Loose"!)—here.

The Disastrous Rocktimists UK Pop Critics Poll 2008 - The Jagger Opinion

2009-01-06T23:36:00.004Z

Always a man for expanse, Rocktimists prog-rock correspondent Louis Jagger attached comments to his ballot that are so long that they’re getting their own entry. Also postcode.

A year deep in the shadow of 2007, there were nonetheless a few nice surprises. Chief of all was the impromptu discovery of a debut solo record from The Electric Soft Parade’s more talented brother. I found out about its existence when visiting the band’s Myspace, with the express intention of finding Thomas White’s contact details and hectoring him about why he hadn’t taken creative control of the group and followed a star clearly more expansive and musically sublime than shown by last year’s disappointing ESP record. A swift iTunes download later and it became rapidly apparent that he had done just that. Only 37 minutes long, it’s not got a wasted second, trading in pop snap for flow, craft and a handful of mighty, mighty compositions. Considering it was all done in his girlfriend’s basement for close to no expenditure, it’s as technically inspirational as it is stunningly conceived. White himself claims that there are plenty of things he’d have liked to have tweaked given time, but he had to just “get it out there”. Such modesty is disarming, and belies an album with a clear and thoroughly convincing musical arc. Don’t be put off by the rough edges; White is something of a studio master, and after alternating near-acoustic pluckalongs with showstopping psych-rock-outs, he settles into an ambient-pop groove that thrills as much as it soothes, before ending on a note as unexpected as it is brilliantly-realised: think “smoky jazz sci-fi apocalypse”, then sip on a Daquiri as the sun explodes. For many reasons my album of the year. Sadly, I do not expect it to be on anyone else’s list; it seems like the kind of record you had to have found by happy accident.

After this, there was an intriguing battle for 2-5 by four records I’m more than happy to stick a metanarrative on. More appropriately, they represent two pairs of albums looking to forge ahead and make exciting, different music they can call their own. Volcano and Youthmovies, having been around some time, were unleashing long-awaited 2nd major releases, having refined their raw talents, written some stunning songs, and married progressive structure and attitude to a more organised, user-friendly format. As it turned out, Volcano’s record contained the best moments (more on that later), but Youthmovies’, as their first full-length album, seemed to have more at stake, and consequently was from start-to-finish the more engaging, surprising listen. Volcano, having blown minds and won hearts in 2005 with Beautiful Seizure, were faced with the near-impossible task of following up a classic, and did so admirably, with a less shocking but perhaps more assured, controlled bunch of songs. I’d call Good Nature the stone-cold classic, but Paperwork got better every time I listened to it, and is worthy of a place in the top 5.

The other two records in this little metanarrative were less spiky-guitar post-rock, more rollercoaster-pop stuck in 6th gear with no out-shot except to roll on and on. Silvery were a breath of fresh air, their dementedly whirlwind-psychogeography-London-carnival-apocalypse pop mash containing more than a hint of Cardiacs and Blur while dealing with subject-matter Iain Sinclair would doubtless approve of, the overall effect one of joyous revel in London’s luminous historical underbelly. The music itself was fast, furious, and never less than convincing, the album well-paced and the lyrics intelligent. In the other corner, we had Late Of The Pier, and an album that at first (and any subsequent) description sounds like it should be awful, a sort of Nathan Barley wet-dream glam-nu-rave wig-out. Crucially, despite being this, it’s also musically inquisitive, open-minded, assured and in its zaniness utterly compelling. I’ll find it difficult to say how I came to love it, but believe me, it improves with repeat listens. Funny, smart, self-deprecating, huge, beautiful and constantly engaging, it blindsided a lot of people this year, myself one of them, and its placement alongside records incalculably inferior to it (Klaxons anyone?) is slightly insulting.

There weren’t many more records I liked much this year, so the rest of the list pretty much writes itself. HMHB were superb as usual, making it 6 career-best albums since turning 10, a feat I’m certain is completely unique in the music world. No let-up in lyrical bite, and the songs were just as memorably tuneful as anyone could have hoped. The Chap massively improved on “Ham”, turning out an album both fun and interesting, never academic or dull. Hope you catch my drift. Some massive tunes on show, brilliant lyrics. Pretty good. Art-pop at its most deviously catchy, almost reluctantly dancefloor-ready, scornfully ironic best. The rest is stuff I included to make it 10. In 2007 they wouldn’t have made my top 30.

As for songs, Volcano were responsible for the only truly transcendental moment of the year, a 7-minute rock bolero that should have ended their album (and the careers of several bands who purport to make “art-rock”). Building from steady rhythmic ground into a morose meditation on working life, it reaches a central point of reckoning, reorganises itself in 3-time, and slowly transforms into an utterly triumphant, careening victory-march, with crazed electronics, a tune to die for, and a vocal performance by frontman Aaron With that will take some beating. Then, just as everything reaches its apex, it all drops away and the whole thing is chewed up by an electronic processor. Breathtaking, and I can confirm they pull the whole thing off live as well (being by FAR the best act I’ve seen all year). And they’re nice people! Good lord. HMHB’s “National Shite Day”, based on an awesome rocked-out riff, contained some of N. Blackwell’s best lyrics yet, describing in the first (extended) verse a country in disrepair, and in the second, a nevertheless fictitious personal anecdote that nonetheless constituted both the saddest and funniest 90 seconds of the year. And that chorus! So catchy! All after me: “I do believe it’s National Shiiiiiiiite Daaaaaay!”

The others are all best tracks on their album, “Proper Rock” probably the zenith of The Chap’s drive to write a song that is both 100% sarcastic and yet 100% catchy, a brilliantly exuberant dance-rock Cardiacs in melody but lyrically an RP-voiced, irony-dripping treatise on “proper songs for real folk” about “girls and clubbing” that drops out, tunes in, spins about and shows The Chap frankly having their arty cake and eating it. Special mention to Esoteric for writing an album so enormous that I wasn’t remotely able to comprehend it, but putting by far the best track at the start, a 20-minute doom opus that charms, shreds, crushes, lulls, corrodes and destroys. On its own, a brilliant musical manifesto, but followed by about 90 more minutes of similar-ish dark majesty, perhaps best taken in isolation. And special mention to Late Of The Pier for proving that they could dial back on the pyrotechnics and produce a composition deep with texture, subtlety, mood and patience, along with one of the most outrageous titles in recent memory. Torche and Virgin Passages sneak in for providing respectively the finest feelgood moment in 2008 metal and a completely overlooked 7-minute ambient gem, all keyboard swooshes, poised acoustic guitar and pretty vocal harmonies spinning off into the sunset.

The worst release of the year is a political rather than a qualitative decision, handed to a band that seem to be critically at least crushing all opposition but who have (given actual audio appraisal) released not only their most staid, soulless record but a genuine backwards step, a perfunctory MOR funk-rock outing that hides all their experimental urges behind the need to party, something at which they are completely rubbish at. For some unfathomable reason, everyone’s gone gaga over it and they’re all so hideously wrong. An abysmal waste of potential, a boring mess, and proof that people are sheep.

Later, after I’d tabulated the results, he sent these (three) Facebook messages. They were ignored.

hey, Rocktimists bigdogs, could you please remove "Elbow - The Loneliness Of A Tower Crane Driver" from the no. 9 position on my tracks ballot, push Virgin Passages up to no. 9, and place "Shit And Shine - Toilet Door Tits" at no. 10, please? it is a jam.

srsly anyone with a passing interest in a) noise, b) massive grooves and c) terrorising the neighbours needs to stick that song on, loud

it is the sister ray of the 00's

Volcano! - Palimpsests [YSI]

Half Man Half Biscuit - National Shite Day [YSI]

Shit & Shine - Toilet Door Tits [YSI]

Reductionism

2009-01-05T16:25:00.002Z

Muse Bin - reducing music reviews to single lines.

I have actually
been thinking for a while now
of haiku reviews.

The Disastrous Rocktimists UK Pop Critics Poll 2008 Introduction

2009-01-04T22:50:00.007Z

Yes, Rocktimists has organised it's own poll this year. And, like the title sez, it's a fucking disaster, so we’re only gonna spin it out over about a week and not a whole year like we would have done.

The original idea was to put together a poll that would be a UK equivalent to the Village Voice’s 35 year-old, appallingly named Pazz & Jop poll. Maybe you haven't heard of it—I hadn't until I became an internet music aspie—but it was started in the early seventies by America's oldest living music critic Robert “The Dean” Christgau and since then has polled as many music writers as possible on their top ten albums and tracks of the year. There's usually between 500 and 1000 respondents a year, leading to a good view of critical consensus and, more interestingly to me at least, a view of the rising and falling tides on the margins. Plus it's mean fun to look back at what corny bullshit did well in the past—Arrested Development's Three Years, 5 Months & Two Days in the Life of... came first in 1992. which isn't to pick on rap, the list is always clogged with whatever is mystifyingly popular with crits that year, and that's what's good about it.

Which leads to what is disastrous about our poll. As the emails trickled in, I never quite decided what number of replies we needed to get above to make this thing worthwhile. Greater than fifty would mean that we didn't have to be embarrassed, but it still wouldn't be enough to show what UK music writers were thinking in the oh-eight. Anywhere over 100 would be getting there. However, after constantly hustling ballots to every mag I could think of—from Terrorizer to P/i/X to NME to Disappear Here—and every Anglo blogger of note (about eight) we got forty-one replies. Face red etc. That's probably not a great enough number to have made it worthwhile getting a warning from Facebook saying that they were considering deleting my account for being a spammer (which to be fair I was—sending out invites to any writer I could think of with an unusual enough name that there was only one of 'em on Facebook.)

As for the reasons why we couldn't scare up enough voters, I suspect a toxic combo of no-one giving a shit about what a no-name blog is up to, the fact that between them the writers here have pissed off a lot of people (a slight paraphrase from one response in order to conceal identity: “you'll forgive me if I don't participate: the idea of offering any sort of assistance to Rocktimists rather sticks in my craw”), and over-zealous spam filters (a particular fuck you to fRoots mag on that one). There's also the fact that UK pop crits are a cowardly, superstitious breed of loners and proud of it. The guy who started the US version might call himself the “Dean of American Rock Critics”—and get others to do so too!—but not even Simon Frith would call himself “the Headmaster”, and he is one.

Fuck all that though. Here's what we ended up with, and there is some good stuff, especially some of the individual ballots. Next year, maybe someone with some cred can pick up the baton, coz—and I’m really not trying to be a dick here—it'd sure be more interesting than this.

(And I know that ranking using equal places doesn't work how I've done it. I got lazy and it’s late.)

The Disastrous Rocktimists UK Pop Critics Poll 2008 Album Results

2009-01-04T22:49:00.002Z

Here they are, the top 63 albums of the year (that's everything that got ten points or above), as determined by UK pop critics:

Place	Total Points	Artist	Title
1	80	Portishead	Third
2	55	Elbow	Seldom Seen Kid, The
3	42	Hold Steady, The	Stay Positive
4	36	Vampire Weekend	Vampire Weekend
4	36	TV on the Radio	Dear Science
5	35	Late of the Pier	Fantasy Black Channel
5	35	Los Campesinos!	Hold On Now, Youngster…
6	34	Lindstrøm	Where You Go I Go Too
6	34	Erykah Badu	New Amerykah Part One (4th World War)
7	30	Bon Iver	For Emma, Forever Ago
8	28	Bug, The	London Zoo
9	27	Indelicates, The	American Demo
10	26	Hercules & Love Affair	Hercules & Love Affair
10	26	Cut Copy	In Ghost Colours
11	25	Fuck Buttons	Street Horrrsing
12	24	Abe Vigoda	Skeleton
13	22	Crystal Castles	Crystal Castles
13	22	Frightened Rabbit	Midnight Organ Fight, The
14	21	Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds	Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!
14	21	Wave Pictures, The	Instant Coffee Baby
15	19	Shearwater	Rook
16	19	Tricky	Knowle West Boy
16	18	Why?	Alopecia
16	18	Wild Beasts	Limbo, Panto
16	18	Caretaker, The	Persistent Repetition of Phrases
17	17	Koushik	Out My Window
17	17	Stereo Image	S/T
18	16	Los Campesinos!	We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed
18	16	M83	Saturdays=Youth
18	16	Fall, The	Imperial Wax Solvent
18	16	Kanye West	808s & Heartbreak
19	15	Lil Wayne	Tha Carter III
19	15	Be Your Own Pet	Get Awkward
19	15	Benge	Twenty Systems 1968-1988
19	15	Gang Gang Dance	Saint Dymphna
20	14	Half Man Half Biscuit	CSI Ambleside
21	13	Howlin' Rain	Magnificent Fiend
21	13	Polar Bear	Polar Bear
22	12	Arthur Russell	Love Is Overtaking Me
22	12	Elzhi	Preface, The
22	12	Youthmovies	Good Nature
23	11	Roots Manuva	Slime & Reason
23	11	Metronomy	Nights Out
23	11	Okkervil River	Stand Ins, The
24	10	British Sea Power	Do You Like Rock Music?
24	10	Bloc Party	Intimacy
24	10	No Age	Nouns
24	10	Silver Jews	Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea
24	10	Skull Disco	Soundboy's Gravestone Gets Desecrated By Vandals
24	10	volcano!	Paperwork
24	10	Black Dog, The	Radio Scarecrow
24	10	Fat Ray & Black Milk	Set Up, The
24	10	Girl Talk	Feed The Animals
24	10	Gregory and the Hawk	Moenie and Kitchi
24	10	Grouper	Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill
24	10	James Blackshaw	Litany Of Echoes
24	10	Journey To Ixtlan	Journey To Ixtlan
24	10	Kelley Polar	I Need You To Hold On While the Sky is Falling
24	10	Max Tundra	Parallax Error Beheads You
24	10	of Montreal	Skeletal Lamping
24	10	Q-Tip	Renaissance, The
24	10	Thomas White	I Dream Of Black
24	10	Those Dancing Days	In Our Space Hero Suits

The Disastrous Rocktimists UK Pop Critics Poll 2008 Track Results

2009-01-04T22:48:00.014Z

Here they are, the top 54 tracks of the year (that's everything that got ten points or above), as determined by UK pop critics:

Place	Total Points	Artist	Title
1	46	Hercules & Love Affair	Blind
2	33	Wiley	Wearing My Rolex
3	31	Estelle ft Kanye West	American Boy
4	28	DJ Khaled	Out Here Grindin'
5	22	MGMT	Time To Pretend
6	20	Goldfrapp	A&E
6	20	Kanye West	Love Lockdown
6	20	Santogold	L.E.S. Artistes
7	19	Jordin Sparks & Chris Brown	No Air
7	19	Portishead	Machine Gun
8	17	H "Two" O ft Plat'num	What's It Gonna Be?
8	17	Paleface ft Kyla	Do You Mind (Crazy Cousinz House Mix)
9	15	Portishead	Rip, The
10	14	Juan MacLean, The	Happy House
11	13	MGMT	Kids
11	13	volcano!	Africa Just Wants To Have Fun
11	13	Bug, The	Angry
12	12	Crystal Castles	Courtship Dating
12	12	Alexandra Burke	Hallelujah
12	12	Katy Perry	I Kissed a Girl
13	11	Lil Wayne	A Milli
13	11	Vampire Weekend	Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa
14	10	Addictive ft. T2	Gonna Be Mine
14	10	Black Milk ft Royce Da 5'9"	Losing Out
14	10	Deerhunter	Nothing Ever Happened
14	10	Okkervil River	Lost Coastlines
14	10	Wiz Khalifa	Say Yeah
14	10	88 Keys feat. Kid Cudi	Wasting My Minutes
14	10	Atlas Sound	Let The Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel
14	10	Beyonce	If I Were A Boy
14	10	Blackout Crew, The	Put a Donk On It
14	10	Bloc Party	Mercury
14	10	Bon Iver & Bowerbirds	Lovin's For Fools
14	10	British Sea Power	Open The Door
14	10	Courteeners, The	Not Nineteen Forever
14	10	Cut Copy	Feel The Love
14	10	Death Cab for Cutie	I Will Possess Your Heart
14	10	Elbow	Starlings
14	10	Emiliana Torrini	Gun
14	10	Erykah Badu	Telephone
14	10	Heartsrevolution	Digital Suicide
14	10	Hold Steady, The	Constructive Summer
14	10	Kathleen Edwards	I Make The Dough, You Get The Glory
14	10	Nat Johnson	Heart of Clay (Demo)
14	10	Nat Johnson	Dirty Rotten Soul
14	10	Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds	We Call Upon The Author
14	10	Pains Of Being Pure At Heart, The	Everywhere With You
14	10	Radiohead	Reckoner
14	10	S.C.U.M.	Visions Arise
14	10	Salem	Redlights
14	10	The Week That Was	Scratch The Surface
14	10	Tricky	Bacative
14	10	Vampire Weekend	Oxford Comma
14	10	volcano!	Palimpsests