Friday 30 May 2008

Los Campesinos - Death To Los Campesinos



I love it when you stick in a new album, press play, and the first track is blow-you-away awesome. This is one such track and pretty much all of the album lives up to its promise (with the exception, in my opinion, of the final track). The band is Cardiff based Los Campesinos, the track is "Death to Los Campesinos" and the album is Hold On Now Youngster, released March this year. BUY IT and LOVE IT.

Los Campesinos - Death to Los Campesinos

Thursday 29 May 2008

The Kinks - Come Dancing

Here's a class Kinks track from the early 80s (I know! Who'd have thunk it). It's a reminiscence of watching an elder sister go out to the Palais...

Another saturday, another date.
She would be ready but shes always make them wait.
In the hallway, in anticipation,
He didnt know the night would end up in frustration.
Hed end up blowing all his wages for the week
All for a cuddle and a peck on the cheek.
...and remarks on how things have changed. It's brilliant. When I listen to the Kinks I can hear Morrissey and the Smiths, and even the Arctic Monkeys. This Rolling Stone review sums it up well.

Ray Davies is still writing and touring and released another solo album in 2007.

The Kinks - Come Dancing (1982)
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Now playing: The Kinks - Waterloo Sunset

Wednesday 28 May 2008

The Brothers Butch - Kay Why

Every line in this fantastic obscurity from the late '60s is drenched in innuendo.

The Brothers Butch - Kay Why

(This is taken from the compilation Queer Noises 1961-1978: From The Closet To The Charts.I picked it up in a record store in Toronto, but it is available on amazon.co.uk and probably other places if you look).

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Now playing: The Brothers Butch - Kay Why?

Tuesday 27 May 2008

Ben Folds - Get Your Hands Off My Woman

Ben Folds - Get Your Hands Off My Woman

Ben Folds got married again - and don't they look lovely in the photo? Aww. Good luck to them. But that's wife number four. He's going to be getting a bit of a reputation is he's not careful. It's very noticeable how this marriage wasn't mentioned on Ben's myspace or his website. It may be just because they're trying to keep it private. But I suspect it has more to do with the fact that Frally Hynes, his last wife, was really involved in a lot of his projects. She recorded some of his videos, sang on Root To This on Fear Of Pop Volume 1, took loads of photos which were included in album artwork. I guess the fans kind of felt like they knew her. So in a way Fleur Folds has big shoes to fill. But all I really hope is that they have lasting happiness.

I often wonder what goes on in the minds of people who get married multiple times. Do they just like weddings? Or do they just see weddings as the next step in every relationship that lasts over a certain amount of time? And do they treat each marriage like it is the one? How seriously do they take the vow to grow old together?

I'm not sure that I believe in "the one" and I'm definitely a bit cynical about most marriages (you almost can't help it when you've grown up in a marriage like that of my parents) but I do think that if you make a vow you should take it seriously and do your very best to follow it through. People get divorced too quickly. Scrap that: people get married too quickly and then get divorced too quickly.

Don't get me wrong, I love Ben Folds, I really do. I could very easily write a big long paragraph here about how much but it wouldn't be all that interesting to anyone but me. Suffice to say I treated Ben Folds a bit like a messiah when I first heard Whatever and Ever Amen. But as you get to know music and musicians more and more you realise that they're not perfect in the way you once thought they were, and the more familiar they are to you the less exciting they become. Where songs like Underground literally used to make me laugh out loud, now the joke is too well-known. Where each different version of Rock This Bitch used to amuse me with how creative it seemed, when you've listened to a whole group of them in a row you realise how they aren't as different as you once thought. And where Evaporated's "And I poured my heart out..." line seemed like the most perfectly spine-tingling moment I could ever have, the tingles have become less and less. It's just like a real relationship - you get accustomed to the features you love about your partner until they don't seem so amazing any more. The difference is, I suppose, that you can always take a break from listening to a band until it acquires a new freshness. I'm listening to Rubber Sled off the Fear of Pop Volume 1 album for the first time in absolutely ages and it sounds brilliant. It's a bit more difficult to take that kind of break from a real relationship. (Plus, real people have more faults than the average Ben Folds song). Anyway this has been a long an meandering paragraph and it's about time for the summing up sentence which, as usual, looks just a wee bit egotistical if you take it out of context...

I guess I'm kind of married to Ben Folds!

Here's a bonus for those who read that ramble (or skipped to the end)

Ben Folds - Rubber Sled

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Now playing: Fear Of Pop - Rubber Sled

Sunday 25 May 2008

Alfie - Crying At Teatime

Continuing the trawl through my old CDs, here's the fanfuckingtastic title track of the final album by Alfie, poor sadly demised shuffley Manchester indie-rockers Alfie. I'd never really paid much attention to them until I randomly went to a gig of theirs in Oxford when they were promoting this album and was just a tad swept off my feet.

Alfie - Crying at Teatime

P.S. I'm really rather flattered by how many people listened to yesterday's tracks - thanks to you all! Though I have always been perfectly prepared to talk to myself (and am actually fairly used to it), all the same it's nice to know that I'm not!

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Now playing: Alfie - All Too Heavy Now

Saturday 24 May 2008

I'M BACK BABY

22 days later I have got myself a new external harddrive and am hard at work uploading all my favourite CDs - a process that took about a week last time. What fun!

Here's a bonus bunch of absolute stonkers to welcome y'all back. The first is a track by New York anti-folk singer Dawn Landes. I'm never sure what anti-folk is supposed to me. I mean either it's folk or it's not. "Anti" doesn't really make much sense in this context. Wouldn't "New Folk" or "Different Folk" or "Young Folk" be better? Anyway here it is.

Dawn Landes - Picture Show

Here's a lovely track by one Mr Dave Brubeck that popped up fairly randomly on my chunes player and I will share accordingly.

Dave Brubeck - Trolley Song

Finally, here's what is pretty much my favourite Pulp track of all time, and definitely up there in my list of all time favourite songs. It's Sunrise from their final album and it builds to two of the best climaxes ever in music. Problem with the superlative?? Well, I say to you, "NER".

Pulp - Sunrise

Friday 2 May 2008

disaster

I'm going to have to stop posting for a while as, using my exceptional talent as a human being, I dropped my external harddrive on the floor and it no longer works. I'm going to try to save the data if possible; otherwise I've got to upload all my CDs again. Last time that took about a week to do. I have a LOT of CDs.

I've got a really long post about the Divine Comedy already written and raring to go and am also planning posts with tracks by Los Campesinos, Air (feat. Neil Hannon), David Bowie, Laura Viers, Buffalo Springfield, Catherine Feeny, Be Your Own Pet, Donora, and Them, Roaring Twenties.