New release Monday
Monday, January 22nd 2007
Headed to FOPP this evening to buy a couple of the new releases mentioned in the last post, The Good, The Bad and The Queen and Field Music. It proved to me that, for me at least, physical product is still the thing. There's a thrill to heading to a record shop to buy a new release that you're excited about that you just don't get from downloading files onto your computer. It's not the same.
The anticipation was the best bit though as the actual purchasing was a bit disappointing. FOPP has always had a new release section at the front of the store and always had a healthy selection of that weeks new albums, I certainly don't recall not being able to find whatever new CD I was looking for. Walking in the store this evening, prominence was given to a whole bunch of records that they were knocking out for £1 and £3, which is okay, new year stock clear out etc. Beside that were the new releases which consisted of a display of about 4 columns across and 6 rows down all stocked with the debut album from The View. Beneath that were 3 rows of The Good, The Bad and The Queen and at the bottom 2 rows containing 2 or 3 other records. No Field Music to be found. Firstly am I to understand that there were only 4 or 5 releases today? Are the record company that desperate to sell albums by The View, do FOPP expect to sell that many? Why was the Field Music album not out with the new releases, a record that has been given strong reviews all over the place. I had to go and look for it on the shelves and the guy behind the counter said they only got 5 copies of it in.
It seems disappointing if FOPP are going to neglect new music like this and concentrate on knocking out cheap back catalogue and DVD's. The cheap back catalogue has obviously always been a strong attraction but as a shop on the route to the train station you would have thought they would do well from people popping in to pick up the new albums on the way to the train. I know January is a slow month normally and maybe that would justify one album dominating the space but not when you are not even putting out copies of all the new releases in the new releases section.
This is not the first time I've been annoyed at FOPP, I should have been offered a Candylion when buying the Gruff Rhys album last week. By the time I realised this on Wednesday they had none left. I demand my cardboard lion!
Should have gone to Avalanche next door. A feeling strengthend by my noticing they were selling Good, Bad and the Queen for £8.99. Bah!
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Marit Larsen - Don't Save Me
Friday, March 17th 2006
These days, as I keep track of my listening preferences as never before, via iTunes playcounts and submissions to last.fm (formerly Audioscrobbler), it's become apparent that out of all the possible genres of music, pop is the one I love most of all. Oh sure, I've dallied with jazz, swayed to soul and chilled out to reggae but it's always the poppier side of those genres that has tickled me most.
In the past admitting to liking pop music was a rocky road, sneered at by the so-called hip and difficult to defend in the era of production line SAW records. It should be pointed out that I never liked those records then and they don't sound any better now even in the rosy glow of nostalgia (well some do, Mel & Kim's singles still sound quite fine for example). I'm not sure what 'the kids' buy these days but it doesn't seem to be the pop music you'd think they'd like, Rachel Stevens, Annie and Girls Aloud for example, makers of some of the finest pop music over the last few years perform pretty dismally in chart terms. Are the kids buying records at all?
These records almost have built in nostalgia attached mind you - Dee C Lee covers, Adam And The Ants references and misty eyed rememberances of clubbing days past are all reflections of the age of the producers of these records and therefore are likley to appeal to your average over 25 year old rather than your under 10 and your average 25/30 year old probably isn't out buying singles. They may however be the main age group of your music blogger, hence the love for these records in that domain.
Still we're veering off the point of this post, all this preamble is to introduce a new song which is resolutely POP! and which is currently rocking my world. It seems to fit the criteria of several singles that I've loved over the last year (Mark Owen's 'Blame It On The Boogie' and Junior Seniors 'Take My Time' (still not released in the UK!) for example) - I found out about it online but no one in the real world seems to have noticed it. To be fair it's premature to say this about this record, it has after all just been released in Norway and it has yet to be released anywhere else. In addition Stylus reviewers also gave it the highest praise I've seen for any single reviewed there (9.0) and the album just got an A- review too.
As you'll have seen from the post title I'm talking about Marit Larsen's 'Don't Save Me' (follow the link for video and streaming audio). It's upbeat, doesn't outstay it's welcome, features lots of strummed acoustic guitars, a killer chorus, those big piano chords so beloved of ABBA and Steve Nieve on Olivers Army, a proper middle 8 rather than a lazy key change. Handclaps! Hell it's even got a harmonica solo. There's also something about the Scandinavian accent when singing (cf The Cardigans, Annie etc).
I would suggest you check it out at the above link and let me know what you think.
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Muffin
Tuesday, February 7th 2006
Of all the things I expect to be wiping from the toilet seat before sitting down chocolate muffin crumbs is not one of them.
What possesses someone to buy a chocolate muffin and then to decide to sit in a public toilet with the lid up and eat it leaving crumbs on the seat and the empty paper case floating in the toilet water?
I mean were they sitting with their trousers round their ankles while doing this or would that have been to unhygienic and disgusting?
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Sitcom
Friday, February 3rd 2006
Golden age of sitcom, my arse.
First Hyperdrive fouls up our screen and bleeds away some of the good will that Nick Frost had built up from previous projects and now after Nathan Barley Chris Morris loses some of his cred with his appearance in the painfully bad The IT Crowd. It took all my good natured tolerance to watch past the first 10 minutes just so I could say I gave it a fair chance.
I know what you're going to say, it's the first episode give it another chance. Well sorry but I gave it one full episode and a quick glance at episode two and I just can't takes no more.
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Switch
Friday, February 3rd 2006
Finally I got around to cancelling my Amazon DVD rental account. Like many who sign up for similar deals and start with good intentions of watching lots of films I had stopped watching any at all. I find it hard to find at least 2 hours regularly in an evening where I have the time and energy to watch a full film. So off it went and instead I have diverted the monthly fee to Emusic where I might actually get my money's worth.
I've been thinking about it for quite a while and the joining offer of 100 free songs was just too good to pass up. I've been hunting through their catalogue and I think there's plenty there to keep me interested for quite a while. It's roughly £8 for 65 songs a month and there is no DRM on the files so that's pretty good. There's no major label stuff on there it's all indie but when that includes Sufjan Stevens, Cat Power, Devendra Banhart, The Decemberists Teenage Fanclub, Posies, Belle and Sebastian, Pixies, Go-Betweens, Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti, Sloan, Spoon, lots of 4AD and Cherry Red artists etc etc etc then the lack of major label input is no loss.
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The Life Pursuit
Tuesday, January 31st 2006
"If you happen to be going to one of our UK shows AND you happen to stumble over our LP somewhere on the net, you MAY have a listen...we wouldn't want you to arrive COMPLETELY underprepared! You'll want to own it when it comes out anyway. Won't you?"
So says the Belle and Sebastian website. Well I did happen to stumble across it and I have listened to it a lot and you know they're right I do want to own a copy of it because it's bloody great. In all good record shops(and probably some bad ones too) next Monday (Feb 6th).
Didn't think they could top Dear Catastrophe Waitress but by jove I think they've done it.
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Distractions
Tuesday, December 20th 2005
Well, as usual this has been neglected for so long it's unbelievable. I pop in here occasionally to see if some posts have miraculously appeared but they never have. You'd think I'd have a million things to write about given the amount of new music I've been listening to over the last 2 months (lots!). In due course I may just do that, new years resolutions and all that. I should also do a post about my end of year compilation which is not that far off being completed.
The fact I'm posting this now should be taken only as an indication that work is really stressful and I'm so desperate for something else to occupy me that I've resorted to posting here. Things must be bad!
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Drawing
Friday, October 14th 2005
A while ago I decided to start drawing again. It's something I had done as a child as I'm sure we all did but probably like most people I had left it to lie dormant since my teens (if not before). My thought was that I probably had reasonable drawing skills hidden away if I only could put the time aside to work at it. Partially this had been awoken by drawing with my son, just silly animals and things but it was fun and I was quite pleased with some of them given how little effort had been put into producing them. Nothing that I'd want to keep mind you but pleasing all the same. I had also been inspired by a number of blogs that I had discovered where people had been posting sketches and drawings alongside their words. There are a lot of very talented people out there - professional and amateur. On the one hand I think 'there's no way I could do anything that good' and on the other there's the voice that's saying 'it would be fun to give it a go though'.
The blog that kicked this off was really Everyday Matters. Danny Gregory is a writer and illustrator and as well as posting lots of great drawings, also from time to time is kind enough to post drawing tips or posts that are just damn inspirational. Really it was his work, his drawings of the every day things that he came across in his daily life that pointed out to me that anything can be the subject of an interesting drawing. In some respects it's almost as though the quality of the lines, the compostition or the use of colour can be just as interesting to the eye as the subject matter. That's my experience anyway and an important lesson to learn if most of the week is spent at work, at home or moving between the two and not necesarily anywhere more interesing than that.
It was also Danny's blog that made me aware of the book by Betty Edwards
Drawing On The Right Side Of The Brain. This has been useful in getting me to actually sit down and draw a bit and helping me to think differently about how I percieve objects and the space they occupy. I've been leaving it to sit for a while because I need to pick up a non-permanent marker and make a couple of cardboard frames for some of the exercises but for a week or two it kept me occupied and away from watching pointless rubbish on TV. It's certainly true, as she points out, that the time just disappears when you are concentrating on the details of a drawing but it's fine to look up and 1.5 hours have gone when you hopefully have something good to show at the end of it. I would suggest picking up a copy, you might surprise yourself at what you can achieve by merely changing the way your brain looks at objects.
It would seem that just recently a section of the animation community have stumbled upon blogs and realised they could be a good motivator for them to keep sketching and also a good way to share some of their work in progress. There are a whole bunch of these that are worth keeping an eye on and it's worth diving back into the archives as there really is some lovely work to see related to both commercial projects and just random drawings. On the whole they all seem to link to one other but I'll list in the sidebar some of the blogs that I've been checking out. I suggest you do the same.
Finally for an example of someone who has a traditional blog (in the sense that they write about their life and experiences) but who uses drawings to illustrate it I would visit vitrolica webb's ite.
Again I find it inspiring, more so than if it was just a text based site. To me it personalises a website having drawings on display that have actually been created by the human hand, be they done on paper and scanned or drawn on the computer. Websites with their standard fonts and layouts can be impersonal and almost dehumanised regardless of the words that are being written. Including such creativity alongside the written word humanises it, makes it a warmer place to visit and gives more insight into the person you are reading about than mere words ever could. I love it and more people should be doing it.
Of course, usually I have a quick look at these at work, get all inspired to do something but by the time I get home at night I'm tired and no drawing gets done *sigh*. Maybe I need to buy a sketch pad and carry it with me. Hope these sites inspire you too.
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Catching Up
Friday, August 5th 2005
Yes, yes I know, no updates. But it's Summer and I've been away sauntering round Denmark.
Two weeks without internet access and no withdrawal symptoms. It's great if it's there but if it's not then it turns out I'm not that bothered. Who would have thought.
Also, two weeks without any decent TV. I don't expect to turn on the television in another country and have the choice of programs be Heartbeat or Keeping Up Appearances (though the latter isn't really unexpected, it's hugely popular there). Apart from that it was endless news programmes with long reports on the Tour de France and awful American and Australian mini series which you can't help watching over the top of your book when no one's looking. Of course there may have been other fantastic Danish made programmes but I certainly didn't notice any, not when I was watching.
Lack of other media stimulation meant I was able to plough through Simon Reynolds book 'Rip It Up And Start Again:Post Punk 1978-1984'. An interesting read, more of a straight history than perhaps I expected but interesting all the same. It was pleasing that so called 'New Pop' was covered as there was lots of good music to come out of that and it was interesting to see how the bands from that time grew out of the post punk bands but I did sort of feel that certain parts of this section of the book didn't need to be there with bands covered in one paragraph and then discarded. It would have been better to tighten this section up and not try to cover all bases. It was certainly a fertile time for bands coming up with new ways of doing things, a manifesto being almost more important than what you committed to tape (which in many ways is, of course, bollocks). I had a brief period after reading the book when I was eager to hear certain of the bands mentioned that I had never heard before but that quickly passed. I just get the feeling a lot of the music was of the type it would be good to hear once for curiosities sake but after that I would never need to hear again.
I acquired a lot of films whilst over there to add to my pile of unwatched stuff, The Big Lebowski, Good Bye Lenin, The Ninth Gate and a whole bunch of films that were acquired by 'other' means - War Of The Worlds, Mr and Mrs Smith, Revenge of The Sith, Layer Cake, Sahara. Most impressively most of these have got Danish subtitles.
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Star Wars and the stars
Monday, July 11th 2005
It was at a late afternoon showing that I saw Star Wars. The film was due to kick off at 16:15 and I was there about 16:00 sitting on my own watching the silent adverts and wondering if any one else would turn up when I heard the door open and walking up the isle were Fran and Dougie from Travis! Words were briefly exchanged:
"Ooh, this is like a private cinema, sorry to disturb"
Somewhat off putting when you're trying to concentrate on a film especially when they're chatting about phoning their guitarist to make sure he was ok in London (this was the day of the bombing). I didn't bother them - what would you say - though I had my camera with me so there could have been a photo opportunity. Decided i wasn't really that bothered and that they would appreciate being left alone. About eight others came in to watch the film when the lights had gone down so not sure anyone else noticed them. Just surprised for guys who presumably have a certain amount of free time and spend a lot of time on airplanes that they had never seen it before. Maybe they liked it so much they needed to see it again rather than sitting bored in a hotel room.
Also they're obviously selling some records - I had balked at £5.75 (£5.75!)for a regular coke and a popcorn but they came in laden down with drinks, popcorn and hotdogs. Oh these rich rock stars and their decadent lifestyles.
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Gigs
Thursday, June 16th 2005
Reading Graham's post over here, it's prompted me to start posting about some of the live gigs I've seen as I've been thinking about it for a while. I'm glad that he's got his thoughts on his first gig down in writing whilst it's still reasonably fresh in the mind. Most of my live gig experiences that I think back on, I end up wishing that I could go back and relive those special moments so that they were clearer in the mind than they are at the moment. There are flashes of rememberance of every gig I've been to but no solid technicolour memories. That might be much to do with my poor recall of things past but it's also just the nature of live music. It's a passing thing, it's purely of the moment and it can't be recaptured once it's gone. Even if you turn up a recording of the gig it's never going to be the same as it was when you were standing there listening to it. In fact live recordings can suddenly just expose all those defects that you hadn't noticed or hadn't cared about when you were there in the moment. Brian Wilson is a case in point. There's a lot you'll forgive the man when he's sat up there on stage given what he's been through to get there but you're a lot more unforgiving when those vocal performances are exposed to the cold light of a digital recording playing in your living room.
So I guess I'm going to randomly pick some gigs that I've been to and try and recapture what I can remember about them Some of them might be short, it might be really uninteresting things I can remember but lets see where it goes.
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Oasis
Friday, June 10th 2005
Reading some of the interviews that the Gallagher brothers have given in support of their new record and having heard some of the tracks from it the thought strikes that maybe every three or four years they should just come out and do a whole bunch of interviews without any record actually being released.
God knows their interviews are way more entertaining than any music they are producing at this stage.
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