Soho on a Saturday morning is usually a quietly hungover place. Not on the 20th of April. Continue reading Thoughts On Record Store Day 2013
Tag: music
Soundtrack: Satan’s Schoolgirls
Satan’s Schoolgirls has a soundtrack, and I think you’ll like it! Continue reading Soundtrack: Satan’s Schoolgirls
Learn To Love Again: The Foo Fighters and The Reading Festival 2012
It’s the end of the 2012 Reading Festival. Past midnight, after an epic 2-and-a-half hour show by the Foo Fighters that was one of the finest gigs I had ever seen. We (for the purposes of clarity, we are TLC, DocoDom, new chum Groovy Geoff and yr. humble author) are backstage, sipping cocktails and hanging with the band.
An old Talking Heads song passes unbidden through my head as Geoff jumps up to get a picture with Dave Grohl and Ricky from the Kaiser Chiefs. I ask myself; well, how did I get here?
Continue reading Learn To Love Again: The Foo Fighters and The Reading Festival 2012
Reading The Signs At The Reading Festival
The August Bank Holiday weekend offers up an almost unrivalled set of distractions and attractions for the discerning punter, and always presents yr. humble writer with something of a dilemma. London offers both the UK’s biggest free festival, the Notting Hill Carnival, and the country’s largest gathering of horror fans, Frightfest (more on this from our embedded correspondents on the ground, fear fans).
And then there’s the Reading and Leeds Festival, the climax of the music, mud and over-priced lager season. For the first time in three years, X&HT will be on site.
Tuesday Tunes: The True And Complete History Of Cerise Sauvage
I like my playlists to tell a story. It’s important for them to have an ebb and flow, almost a three act structure.
Today’s playlist is the soundtrack to a short story I wrote a couple of years back. It was an attempt to write about a nemesis, a totally over-the-top, unapologetic female villain. If you haven’t read it, give it a go while listening to the playlist, which features tracks from St. Vincent, Rilo Kiley, PJ Harvey and Fever Ray.
I present the True And Complete History Of The Harlot, Seditionary and Murderess Cerise Sauvage.
(The pic is Cherry Bomb by DeviantArt user LekiLuv. Check out the fullsize pic here.)
Best of 2011: Rob’s Twopennuth
After sterling work from my guests, it’s my turn to talk up the work that floated my boat over the last twelve months. This is by no means a complete list, but we’d both be here all day if I went down that route. In no particular order, then, but sorted in terms of delivery vector, here we go. Titles are clickable and lead to further reading, viewing or listening.
Probably, if I was to be brutally honest with myself, my film of the year. The triumphant return of Lynne Ramsay to the director’s chair, a career-best performance from Tilda Swinton and a new rising star in Ezra Miller made this brutal examination of a woman’s relationship with her bad seed son a must see.
Best soundtrack of the year, for sure. Nicholas Winding Refn’s homage to the driver movie gave Ryan Gosling the breakout role of the year, and provided some of the most powerful visuals of 2011. A touching love story and a chilly, unflinching crime film all at once. If nothing else, everyone has an opinion of the lift sequence.
Best horror film of the year, hands down. Pollyanna Mackintosh astonished in the title role, never vulnerable, always in control, even when chained to a garage wall. The Lucky McKee and Jack Ketchum script explored issues of power, gender and the myth of normality in a world of Lynchian suburbia. Funny, thought-provoking and bloody scary.
David A. Russell’s The Fighter was a remarkable and Oscar-worthy piece, but for me the fight film of the year was Warrior. Gavin O’Connor’s film gave the much-maligned field of mixed martial arts a sense of gravity and worth. Nick Nolte as an ex alcoholic boxer and Joel Edgerton and Tom Hardy as his two sons who are pitted against each other in a winner-tale all tourney give riveting and utterly believable performances. A Rocky for 2011.
Animation of the year, in a tough field that included Miyazaki’s beautiful Arrietty. But Gore Verbinski’s loving and lunatic acid western was genuinely like nothing else on screen this year. Full of mind-boggling moments and set-pieces, screamingly funny and life-affirming, this was Pixar by way of Jodorowsky.
If there was one must-see film for all the wrong reasons this year, it was Charles Ferguson’s documentary on the collapse of the global financial markets. Flint-eyed with a righteous fury, Inside Job skewered the greed, venality and hubris of the men who believed they were too big to fail. Show this to anyone that thinks our financial woes are down to public sector pay or pensions.
My foreign language film of the year. Shocking, brave and sumptuous, Takashi Miike brought us a work of astonishing grace and authority. Like Inside Job, this tells the story of powerful men who believe they are untouchable. Unlike Inside Job, those men face a town full of traps and the sharp end of a sword. There’s no justice anymore.
Tender as a first kiss, heady as your first pint, Elbow’s 2011 album made friends with everyone and cemented their reputations as the country’s finest boozy balladeers. A big fat woozy hug of an album, that sticks to your ribs and will definitely keep you warm this winter.
Tom Waits: Bad As Me
Any year with a Tom Waits album in it is a year to celebrate, and 2011 saw the arrival of his best work in years. Perhaps not his most experimental work, but one where he hammered new fences in and prowled his property with a snarl and a shotgun. No-one else does it like Tom, and Bad As Me was the moment where he proved it. You will be satisfied.
This is an album that goes from minimal bleeps and drones to lovely, weary pop stylings to hammering motorik–on the first track. Wilco have never been more ambitious, more experimental, more widescreen than on The Whole Love. But they’re still accessible and effortlessly rewarding. There’s no art of almost here; this is the real deal.
The Decemberists: The King Is Dead
It’s been a grand year for folk-rock, and although a lot of people have been raving about Fleet Foxes and Bon Iver’s sophomore efforts, the more satisfying album for me was The King Is Dead. Filled with lovely ballads and proper stompers, this was a rich and enduring treat. A simpler album than their epic The Hazards Of Love, but that’s no bad thing when the end product is so uplifting and heartfelt.
Laura Marling: A Creature I Don’t Know
Miss Marling had always been an almost girl for me; great songs, but I was never quite drawn in. But A Creature I Don’t Know grabbed me by the lapels and yanked me in for a big sloppy snog. I finally figured it out: she’s embraced her inner Joni Mitchell, and grown up into a smart urban troubadour in one graceful move. There’s still mud on her strides, but she wears really nice boots now.
Hip-hop doesn’t get any more high concept than this. Geek MC and one-man music empire Akira The Don puts together a mixtape based around the soundtracks of all his favourite old-school anime, invites a ton of lairy rappers over to freestyle over the top, and comes up with an absolute gem. Why watch the throne when you can watch Fist Of The Northstar?
Lazily praised as The Sopranos with swordplay when it first came out, the HBO version of the GRR Martin fantasy series is richly textured, strange and beautiful. The shocking plot twists and brutal deaths of central characters made the show one of my few TV musts of the year. Immersive and utterly addictive. And unlike The Sopranos, this has dragons.
I’m late to the party, but a USB stick with the first two seasons has changed my mind. The most geek-friendly comedy on the box (those of you screaming for the I.T. Crowd or The Big Bang Theory need to watch this) is an extraordinary feat of sustained metatextuality and full of characters that change and grow and don’t again. Remarkable stuff that frequently has me snorting my morning coffee through my nose on the train into work.
The surprise of the year. An unpromising pilot through the Channel 4 Comedy Lab last year and a late night Thursday slot rang warning bells, and I missed the first season. My mistake. This ensemble show on the life of the staff at a suburban mobile phone franchise has cracking performances and a part-improvised script that shows off a cast on top form. It’s consistently hilarious and deeply twisted.
Also back for a second season, this sweet-natured show featuring Tom Hollander as a put-upon priest in the worst diocese in London avoids all the cliches and comes up with a programme that works on all sorts of levels. Like all the best sitcoms, it’s part social commentary, part character study–and all funny.
More in the nature of an intriguing experiment than a success, Warren Ellis and Matt “Disraili” Brooker’s SVK is a book that quite literally works on two levels. The detective story, which Ellis described as “Franz Kafka’s Bourne Identity”, ships with a UV torch that you can shine onto the page to reveal hidden dialogue and thoughts–a neat way of showing the lead character’s telepathic ability. A slim volume, but packed with ideas.
Speaking of books packed with ideas. Matt Fraction and Los Bros Ba return with a second run at the exploits of reality-shafting, universe-killing superspy Casanova Quinn and give the whole shebang a decidedly metaphysical spin. Darker and tougher than Volume One, there’s still room for Matt, Gabriel and Fabio to crank up the gleeful strangeness. Any riff on Kung Fu Panda is always welcome.
I’ve been a fan of Kate Beaton since she had a madeonamac blog, so I’m enormously smug to see everyone else catch up this year. Her history-obsessed strips are effortlessly hilarious, and her comic timing is impeccable. She makes it look easy, damn her. Probably the purest and most talented cartoonist working today, and you need the collection of her strips on your shelves. She’s made Napoleon COOL again, dammit!
This. Blew. Me. Away. Best graphic novel of the year by a light year, Craig Thompson’s massive tome takes ideas of love and loyalty, the language we use to express them and the way it both unites and divides us to create a story nested within a tale folded into a romance in every sense of the work. One to come back to and cherish again and again.
rediscovery: A Princess Of Mars
The upcoming live-action movie of the Edgar Rice Burroughs classic led me to reread the original, which I remember loving as a kid. Yeah, sure, it’s rough round the edges, and a bit old-fashioned in attitude and language. But it’s also a proper no-holds-barred pageturner, stuffed full of imagination, action and adventure that starts on the run and just speeds up. It’s a fast read, and available for free on Project Gutenberg. Proper storytelling from a master of the pulp form.
Goddamn, I love John Lee. Curmudgeonly, contrary, innovative. He shook off easy rhyme patterns in favour something twitchy, febrile and earthy (“I see my baby walking down the STREET/She looking good from her head down to her TOES”). Spotify are pushing John Lee a lot recently, and it’s given me the chance to reacquaint myself with an old friend.
in 2012 I’m looking forward to: Prophet/King City
Comics discovery of the year for me, shamefully, putting me back behind the curve, is the astonishing Brandon Graham. His loose yet detailed, cartoony yet precise art does my head in. A more relaxed Geof Darrow, his books are filled with asides, footnotes and rambling offramps. He has two big releases out for 2012. A writing gig with Simon Roy on a reboot of a cheesy Rob Liefeld Image book, Prophet, reads like the most excitingly French SF-style book of the new year. A survivalist-punk story of a supersoldier revived far too late for a mission that no longer exists, in a world that has evolved without him. A far-future Conan. Has a preview.
The BIG news is a proper release for his magnum opus, King City. A slacker Transmetropolitan. Frank Miller’s Hard Boiled without the bombast. It’s got all the side shenanigans, puzzles and games that were in the original flimsies. This will be one to stow alongside Habibi on your shelves and cherish, true believers.
also: GBV
I mean, we’re all excited about this, right? The return of the most clangularly tuneful hookladed beer-fuelled band on the planet! We’re all practising our Salty Salutes, yeah? To the band whose out-takes and bootlegs outnumber the official releases by a factor of fifteen and are frequently better than the real records? The glorious reunion of Pollard and Tobin Sprout? Anyone?
Fine. Be like that. But 2012 is all about Guided By Voices to me.
and: The Muppets
because The Muppets. Because. The Muppets.
We’ll be back after Conspicuous Consumption Day for the X&HT Review Of The Year. If you thought this post went on a bit, you’re in for a shock. Whoooole lotta stuff happened in 2011.
Happy Saturnalia, Readership.
Best of 2011: Clive’s Picks
Stepping up to the challenge next is Leading Man Clive, who’s dropped a decent size list of goodness. Some of his music tips are amongst my best of 2011, and I’m gratified to note one of my favourite albums of all time as his rediscovery of the year.
Freedom To Listen, or why ST Was Wrong To Leave Spotify
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A lot of hablab in the press over the past couple of weeks about artists leaving Spotify. Coldplay (no tears shed there) and Tom Waits (wail of dispair) both denied the service new albums, citing the old saw of wanting people to listen to the works as a whole. We’ve seen through that one for a while. Both records are available on iTunes for you to buy as little or as much as you want.
Continue reading Freedom To Listen, or why ST Was Wrong To Leave Spotify
The Minor Fall, The Major Lift: 5 Soundtracks That Transcend Their Movies
These are good times for film soundtracks. Reputable dance acts are now willing to work with a director and come up with music that complements and adds to the visuals, rather than simply licensing a couple of songs to play over the end credits. Instead of a duff compilation or an orchestral suite, soundtrack albums are becoming sharp experimental works with a proper narrative flow.
The big beat boys of the nineties make music that has always had a cinematic edge, and the addition of an orchestral edge to the bounce really opens out the sound. Basement Jaxx’s work on Attack The Block adds theremin to the mix, accentuating the sci-fi. The Chemical Brothers created a jagged, jittery soundscape for Hanna that seems to have influenced Joe Wright’s cutting style.
Then of course, there’s the epic score to Tron: Legacy, which has frankly raised the bar for electronic soundtrack work. The scale and sweep of Daft Punk’s work made the album one of my favourites of last year.
A decent soundtrack album can be a sheer joy, mixing great songs with massive instrumentals and moments of mood and drama. Some don’t work at album length. I’m thinking specifically of John Carpenter’s Assault On Precinct 13, which is simply the same cues played over and over again at different track lengths. Or, sadly, Clint Mansell’s music to Moon, which I love to bits, but is stretched uncomfortably thinly over 75 minutes. The final ten-minute piece Welcome To Lunar Industries (Three Years) gives you everything you need. Tellingly, it’s the one track not available on Spotify.
There are certain soundtrack albums that have managed to find an identity above and beyond their origins, becoming works of art in their own right. Here are my top five. I’m sure there are more. I’m sure you’ll let me know.
Continue reading The Minor Fall, The Major Lift: 5 Soundtracks That Transcend Their Movies
Lyrics That Make You Want To Listen To Instrumentals
I’ve been listening to The Icicle Works again lately – Ian McNab’s epic bombast suits my mood, especially here under the grey dome of a typical late spring bank holiday.
Their breakout single “Love Is A Wonderful Colour” is wonderful, widescreen bellow-along stuff, but the opening line almost knocks you out of the spell the band are trying to create.
“My friend and I were talking one evening, beside some burning wood…”
That, I guess, would be a bonfire. I’d listened to the song for years, but only recently glommed on to how clumsy that opening line is. Now, of course, it’s all I can hear. Great.
This fumbled attempt at mystery and atmosphere, while at the same time trying to keep the metre and rhyme of the song in check can lead to some unexpectedly hilarious or outright bizarre lyrical choices. Take, for example, one of my favourites, Thin Lizzy’s “Jailbreak”. Phil Lynott asserts:
“Tonight there’s going to be a jailbreak, somewhere in this town…”
I’d start with the jail.
Comedian Russell Howard pointed this one out, and I have to hold back from yelling “try the jail!” whenever I hear the song. The song also contains a prime example of Lynott’s way with the ladies:
“Searchlight on my trail
Tonight’s the night all systems fail
Hey you, good lookin’ female
Come here!”
You can’t resist, can you? This is the man who allegedly coined the come-on line “Got any Irish in you? Would you like some?” You have to at least admire the swagger and testosterone in the couplet above, and the wink in it is almost visible.
Sometimes, all you need is one syllable to make a line scan, and the temptation is to jam one in and damn the consequences. That’s all that I can think was going through Paul McCartney’s mind when he wrote the opening verse of “Live And Let Die”. It starts off with a philosophical flourish:
“When you were young, and your heart was an open book, you used to say live and let live…”
All good so far. But then we get a sentence that doesn’t seem to know when to finish.
“But in this everchanging world in which we live in…”
CLANG. Brakes on. A binful of prepositions, and all of a sudden Sir Paul is tripping over his own feet. Makes me give in and cry.
Readership, you all know of my love and admiration for R.E.M. but even the saintly Michael Stipe gets it wrong every so often. Famously, the band’s first album Murmur was titled after Michael’s less than clear vocal delivery. Sometimes, it might be better if he mumbled a bit more. The lovely Leaving New York contains the line
“…leaving was never my proud…”
which I would dearly love someone to explain to me. It doesn’t even rhyme properly with the next line of the chorus. In a song that has a strong personal meaning for TLC and I, that line sticks out like a gangrenous thumb.
Of course, the king of rotten lyrics is Simon Le Bon of Duran Duran. He seems to be quite happy to sling together any old word salad as long as it matches the tune. My personal favourite is from “Wild Boys”, where our Simon loses the plot and the ability to string a sentence together all at once:
“You got sirens for a welcome
There’s bloodstain for your pain
And your telephone been ringing while
You’re dancing in the rain
Wild boys wonder where is glory
Where is all you angels
Now the figureheads have fell
And lovers war with arrows over secrets they could tell…”
There’s plenty more where that came from. Although I’d disagree with the school of thought that claims the line “You’re about as easy as a nuclear war” is one of the worst ever. It has the right level of over-the-top silliness that suits the Dran in their heyday.
We could go on and on, but I don’t want to turn this into a simple “crap lyrics” post. It’s the lines that almost work that are the most fun. Besides which quoting out of context does every songwriter here a disservice. There is one that always makes me smile, though, and I want to conclude with Sade. I am happy to say she taught me something about American geography when she sang:
“Coast to coast, LA to Chicago…”
The Windy City is, as any fule with access to Google Maps no, 800 miles inland. I guess “LA to New Jersey” didn’t have the glamourous cosmopolitan ring Sade was after.
EXCUSES AND HALF TRUTHS 