Those Geese Were Stupefied

Redirect yourselves

2009-03-30T23:07:00.003+01:00

Trying out Wordpress for a while. Stall it over and see how you like it. If I feel out of my depth, I'll bail back to the shambly safety of Blogspot.

Update your links and your bookmarks and your subscriptions!

Those Geese Were Stupefied

What Road Records should do:

2009-03-15T18:06:00.003Z

1. Get the stock right - I understand that it's a problem for a small shop to have a large amount of new stock, but to maintain regular interest in a shop that small, it needs to happen. I buy most of my CDs in Tower, not because of price or any other reason, but because they have more CDs I want. No amount of goodwill can get around that. The standard here is Rough Trade. That shop in Portobello in London is smallish, but their stock is unreal. I wouldn't trust myself to go in there and come out without something, ever.

2. Ditch the dusty stuff - Secondhand vinyl takes up quite a lot of space in the shop and - desperate as I was to find SOMETHING worth hearing - I couldn't find one record I wanted when I was in right at the start of the closing-down period. From my experience as in the bookshop near my house, I have some idea of what you buy in and what you sell in terms of secondhand stuff, and the stuff there has been stripped out already to the point where most of it will be there in twenty years.

3. Use the space for something else - like... more new vinyl? I don't know. Tower has got a new vinyl section that is very much the standard to aim at, and I'm not sure how Road will compete with this.

4. Ditch the dusty Irish stuff - I have nothing but praise for the fact that Road will stock almost anything independent and Irish, but there comes a time when a CD-R in a clear plastic sleeve that hasn't sold in five years has to be binned to stop it cramping the style of the Jape album or even the Ambience Affair EP. It brings the tone down.

5. Brighter lights - Is this reasonable? Dark and dusty shops are uninviting.

6. Let more people know it's there - One of Road's main complaints was that their old customers weren't being replaced by new, young customers. While point 1 (the stock thing) impacts on this, the fact that people don't know it exists has got to impact on it. I knew it was around somewhere, but it took going out of my way to find a Mumblin' Deaf Ro instore, I think, to actually figure out where it was. People have got to know. At LEAST put the logo on the bag. Even if people don't know where to find it, let people know that it's there to be found.

7. More reasons to go - Instores, compilations, something. To get people to make the leap between knowing it exists and actually finding it. To get people to go more often, once they do know it's there. Tower is in the kind of place where I can barely avoid going in once a day to at least browse. Road is not. So get me there somehow.

8. Modernise - That isn't a great title for this one, but what I mean is that Road is associated with a generation of Irish musicians that isn't exactly on the cutting edge. The benefit was played by Jape, The Jimmy Cake, Si Schroeder, Adrian Crowley and some members of the Dudley Corporation and Large Mound. Not that a lot of those bands aren't great. But that line-up could have been Jape, Fight Like Apes, Grand Pocket Orchestra, Katie Kim and Children Under Hoof. No need to cut associations with older musicians, but forge associations with younger musicians too.

9. Redesign the website - Just make it look a bit nicer. Surely in the current atmosphere of goodwill, someone will do this for free or at least cheap.

10. Have gigs - why not? Everybody seemed to have fun at the One For The Road thing, from reports. This is another way of keeping Road in people's consciousness after they're satisfied that they've done their civic duty and saved it.

I write this as somebody who shopped in Road reasonably often - say, second most of any record store in Dublin. I don't have any of the sentimental connections that a lot of people seem to have of halcyon days past or of a first break by stocking a homemade record. I'm just a consumer. Your average 20 year old who for one reason or another likes to buy a CD or a 7" every now and then. I'm just thinking out loud here, so don't wade in and tell me to shut up. I fail to see how any of the suggestions could hurt, anyway, and if Road is planning on continuing, it's clear that it's going to have to do SOMETHING, because it can't rely on the goodwill boom continuing indefinitely.

Photo by Naomi McArdle, sorry if it's not cool to nick it.

Keep it real keep it real shout out

2009-03-15T03:54:00.002Z

This is a review that was meant for the ill-fated February issue of Analogue Magazine, which fell prey to tightening advertising budgets. It came straight out when I sat down to write it, and I'm quite proud of it in a round-about, I-realise-it's-gush sort of way. I gave it 1000% if you didn't guess.

Chemical or natural? There is a single moment on Merriweather Post Pavillion, after a few lush, watery minutes of introduction, where the music reaches out of the speakers and cracks open reality so that you can see inside, in a way that only Tibetan boddhisativas and LSD-devoted professors usually experience. That moment, called forth with an invocational ‘if I could just leave my body for a night…’ is a genuine landmark in the winding path of music’s history. There is a level of transcendence, of originality, of genius present in that moment on In The Flowers, and on Merriweather in general, that elevates it instantly to the realm of hushed tones. So, is it chemical or natural?

It doesn’t matter. It’s easier for once to talk about this album in terms of what’s it not, rather than what it is. It’s not a retread of anything that has come before. It’s not difficult to engage with, but it’s also not populist in the least. It’s never dull. In fact, over eleven tracks, it comes off as almost too short and leaves a small but inescapable feeling of disappointment that it’s over, in the way that all great albums should. But that’s not to say that it’s unfinished, or imperfect. It’s not. This is Keats’ well-wrought urn manifest, an album genuinely without low points or flaws.

But even out of this consistent brilliance, there come peaks. Besides the aforementioned In The Flowers, My Girls is stunningly beautiful and layered in Panda Bear’s signatory reverb-drenched harmonies, erroneously attributed to the Beach Boys. Lyrically, it’s an affectingly earnest account of the responsibility of providing for family. The evident singalong qualities of the refrain create a strange feeling of intrusion into Panda’s ‘four walls and abode slats’, but the ability to get such basic, instinctive emotions into a song this catchy without coming off as cheesy must be marvelled at.

Summertime Clothes recalls the lyrically-evocative Animal Collective of the days before Panda Bear was a significant songwriting influence, painting a picture of happy and naïve summer days over a seriously danceable pulse. But the next track proves exactly why it was a good idea to give Panda equal air-time. Daily Routine grows out of individual organ squeaks into an arpeggiator-based piece of everyday escapism that dissolves eventually into a slow repetition that’s almost shamanic in texture. Which then gives way to the golden melodies of Bluish. Which then give way to… you get the picture.

It doesn’t let up. The album closes with Brother Sport, tropical and trance-inducing in a way El Guincho could only dream of. After a mid-section of ever-building rhythms and a screaming Avey Tare, the tumult reaches saturation point. The clouds part and a new day dawns. With one of the most smile-inducing melodies you will ever hear, Animal Collective give you two minutes to dance and forget your troubles before the album finally ends. Merriweather Post Pavillion is an album that effects emotions in a very real way, pulling you headlong through nostalgia, hope and the forty shades of joy. I can’t think of another album that is as perfectly executed, as plain perfect as Merriweather Post Pavillion. I would be extremely surprised if this didn’t turn out to be the best album of the year. Or the decade. I’ll stop at that before I say something I might regret later.

Aye from every angle he was the very image of England's greatest playwright...

2009-03-09T04:03:00.002Z

Last week this blog got the most traffic since I started it. This was, ostensibly, because I posted more often than I normally do. Maybe it also has something to do with the fact that the posts were short, had something of a point, and weren't about events that nobody had been to.

Don't get used to it.

Anyway, to celebrate, here is a YouTube video of my favourite comedy sketch of all time. When I saw this first, it hurt my stomach. I don't know why, it just did. It's from Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews' surrealist sketch show Big Train, and it's about Portaccio, the greatest ever Shakespeare impersonator.

America of the South

2009-03-05T14:29:00.003Z

I don't normally do this sort of post, but then I don't normally do the sort of post I did the last three times I've posted, and I'm in the wilds of exam stress at the moment so I'm going to DO IT ANYWAY

Because this band is incredible.

America del Sur formed somewhere in America some time in the last few years. Then they broke up. When they did exist, they made an album on tape and for free download on the internet.

It's a synthesis of Grizzly Bear-esque unusual chordliness, Of Montreal-sque many-chordfulness, Tapes 'n' Tapes-ish energy, Pavement-oid guitar meandering and...

It's just fantastic, put it that way. It's the great lost American record, better than everything but maybe five albums I've heard in the past year. And it's legitimately free. You need to hear this.

America del Sur - America Del Sur (Rack and Ruin Records, 2008)

Robbert Bobbert and the Bubble Machine

2009-03-02T15:17:00.003Z

So you're an original founder of Elephant Six. You've got production credits on both Neutral Milk Hotel records as well as work with Olivia Tremor Control and Beulah. You've made enough great albums with The Apples In Stereo to have a good shot at the Indie Rock Hall Of Fame, and on top of that, your solo projects Marbles and ulysses weren't too bad either.

What do you do next?

Write music for children educating them about science, maths and ethics! Make it into a cartoon!

That's the career path for Robert Schneider, aka Robbert Bobbert from Robbert Bobbert and the Bubble Machine. It's unclear who the Bubble Machine is as yet, but the bookies have thrown up the names of the bubble machine from the Flaming Lips at 3/1 and the bubble machine who formerly worked with Dublin Duck Dispensary at 10/1.

It makes a lot of sense when you think about it. Apples In Stereo + a straight admission that you're writing for children = Robbert Bobbert and the Bubble Machine.

But then, when you hear some of the songs about science, like 'Gravity', you'll realise that certain AIS songs, like for example 'Energy'... are exactly the same.

Check this one out:

Or if you want sound quality, try MySpace.

So Cow In A Shed

2009-03-02T00:00:00.005Z

Television Personalities - This Angry Silence (And Don't The Kids Just Love It, Rough Trade, 1981)
Kim Jung Mi - I Wanna Enjoy The Warm Spring Breeze (Now, World Psychedelia [Korea], 1973)
The Who - Boris The Spider (A Quick One, Reaction, 1966)
Fiddle Bambi - Banana Uyu (Bambi Rocks, Beatball [Korea], 2005)
Annie Philippe - On M'a Toujours Dit (Ticket de Quai EP, Riviera [France], 1966)
Big Monster Love - Little Bear's Song (Perils of Internet Dating EP, Abomination, 2006)
Tracey Ullman - They Don't Know (You Broke My Heart In 17 Places, Motown, 1983)

I think they call that crate-digging. Except internet age crate digging.

That's right.

IT'S A FREE COVERS EP FROM SO COW

It's great, too.

Download it here

Fighting in the Apes

2009-02-28T16:52:00.001Z

<a href="http://www.fabchannel.com/fight_like_apes_concert/2009-01-14">Live Concert Video - Fight Like Apes</a>

What, you mean you've never seen a full Fight Like Apes gig?!

Well here's one in Holland to a crowd who clearly have no idea what the hell is going on.

Nothing provokes the nationalist feeling like a nice Lilywhite accent billowing off a stage towards Dutch people.

Filling in the Blanks

2009-02-28T15:40:00.002Z

So, I don't know that much 80s music. But I'm trying. You can too.

Here's a library.

Television Personalities/Replacements/Talking Heads/Minutemen/The Fall/Husker Du/This Heat/REM/Missions of Burma/etc, etc. Fifty albums, fifty download links. Dig in.

Dulce et decorum est pro pornographia mori

2009-02-18T00:25:00.004Z

A return to the no-fi phone photography method of documentation for a no-fi gig at the Joinery on Arbour Hill in Stoneybatter on Sunday night.

What's that, you say. a gig in Stoneybatter?! Yes. In a large room in what seemed to be a stripped-out former shop. What you might call a "space", I think. Bring your own drink. I didn't bring any, but some did and I'm sure they were delighted. It seemed to be some sort of Deserted Village buzz, and I have only nice things to say about that label, even though I've only got Thinguma*jigsaw's (awakeinwhitechapel) by them.

Their logo was a fetching road sign on that CD and they included the translation: Sráidbhaile Iargúlta. In one swoop, Deserted Village instantly rooted themselves in Irishness - for who else has such bilingual signs? - and that somehow made them seem all the more cool to me, because they were putting out a mortality-obsessed Norwegian duo and not trying to be too detached and hipstery. I don't know why that seemed important to me, it just did. It also might not have been anything to do with them, but there was a merch desk with non-performing bands' stuff, so I surmised.

So I missed Cian Nugent, and Laura Sheeran was essentially just thirty minutes of equipment failure, one stunning song, one alright song and a semi-sean nós a capella song about love.

Next on, Peter Delaney. Peter Delaney's Duck Egg Blue EP from a couple of years ago helped open up my conception of what music produced in Ireland could sound like at a point when I was still pretty fuzzy about the fact that it didn't have to be gig-focused and Dublin-centred. He's from Limerick and he plays the ukelele. Not in a jaunty sort of way, but in a deeply sad way which can only be created by an instrument with no natural sustain. Two ukeleles he had with him in fact. He played only three songs, concluding with an unpolished, melancholy epic called 'The Guest' which is, at some point, going to be spoken of with reverence. Probably.

After Peter came LITTLE MYTH EPIPHANYMPH, icily scouring the room with her silent death-stare and THE SEVERED HEADMASTER, presenting the merry morbid show to the gathered patrons. So comfortable did he feel in fact that he later introduced himself and his companion by their real names: MARTHA REDIVIVUS and SETH HORATIO BUNCOMBE.

Banjo in hand, Seth sang sanguinary songs about death, mortality, fatality and downfall with the peace-disturbing bowed-saw playing of Martha creating a bizarre, unsettling atmosphere in the background.

But here's a secret.

YOU HAVE TO BUY THE MYTH

SUSPEND DISBELIEF! JESUS!

When the singer of Thinguma*jigsaw tells you that he is about to sing a song about a mortuary, you don't give off a relaxed chuckle.

When the singer of Thinguma*jigsaw tells you that he is about to sing a song called "Sweet and laudable it is to die for pornography or, in Latin, Dulce et decorum est pro pornographia mori"... that's not funny either! Internalise it.

Some woman hummed her way through 'Dulce et decorum est...' and in return had the last several lines of the song (which is about the production of snuff films) sung directly at her. She soon exited her front row seat, possibly to meet with early demise.

Highlights? All the new songs sound just as atmospheric and eerie as the first albums, and the show was mostly new songs. The Daniel Johnston cover 'Walking the Cow' and the (awakeinwhitechapel) opener 'Serpent's Apple', opening and closing the show respectively, were the equivalent of hits.

But in the end, the crowd in this bouncer-free, bar chat-free, cheap, communal space tainted the experience themselves. This is why we can't have nice things.

+

Catch-up: Cato mess with my concepts, my inner vision.

2009-02-16T02:03:00.004Z

That's an insane picture. I got it from Of Montreal's MySpace, from an album called 'Of Montreal as mythology'. There were no other pictures in the album. I thought that it would be a reasonably good way to preface a review of a band I've talked about a million times before on this blog. Just click the 'Of Montreal' tag at the side to check them out...

Oh wait, I tag things in a completely senseless way, by venue and nationality. As if anyone ever wanted to check which Danish bands I'd seen or how many gigs I've been to in Crawdaddy since September 2007.

A better way to preface this review would be to go look at these incredible pictures at State and this interview at Aoife B's gaff.

Okay.

I turned up at the Button Factory alone and stood around, trying not to look awkward while people arrived. Nobody I recognised. A weird sort of in-betweener crowd: half were comfortable, beer in hand, waiting around the back to step up when a band appeared. The other half were excited, on edge, 80% female and at the front. I belonged at the back. But I went to the front. Sorry if you were a short girl and I was standing in front of you. I've put in the same fawning hours you have, get off my back.

Casio Kids played first and I was initially thinking, "wow, Unicorns!". Then it all got a bit smoothed out in a sort of a Hot Chip vibe. But then, gradually, it became clear that Casio Kids are Scandanavian. A quick Google shows that they're Norwegian, but I could not stop hearing Swedish bands once I realised they weren't Anglo-American. The Shout Out Louds. Jens Lekman. Even fucking Dungen. It's something about the inflection when they sing.

They passed the time, and I like that they sing in Norsk, but nothing to write home about.

If you were about to write home, however, and you needed something other than "things good here, hope all is well at home" to tell the people in the old country, you wouldn't have had long to wait.

Enter Of Montreal. BP Helium in Eno-mode as in 2007 (rather than Low-era Bowie mode, as 2008, if I remember correctly). A tiger, a pig, a smattering of shadows, a diplodocus-headed gentlemen of some description, and a respectable family. And Kevin Barnes, character in his own postmodern fantasy. Much of the excitement of this show is in the insane, postmodern theatrics that go on, both behind Kevin and involving Kevin. An anthropomorphic tiger hunting to tense music is exactly that in this context - it's not a song with a theatrical accompaniment.

But I suppose I should mention music. Minuses first:

- He's not feeling the lyrics. But hey, who says every singer of their darker hours has to crucify themself on stage to satisfy me.

- As with every Of Montreal live show, the sheen is dulled a little in performance, and the backing tracks are always a touch busy... as if everything's not in its right place. Although maybe that helps.

+s?

Well, as Damien Hirst knows well, if you're just arranging diamonds, you're going to end up with something pretty valuable no matter what you do. Of new material, 'Triphallus to Punctuate' was my favourite, as it is on record, because of its bizarrely disco-fried "ah yeah" part as much as anything else. Of old material, 'Sink The Seine-Cato As A Pun' was pretty stellar, as was Gronlandic Edit, and though there was nothing further back than Sunlandic Twins, 'Wraith Pinned To The Mist' waved that flag fairly well.

Just a good show then, right? Just an American band, bigger than small clubs but smaller than big theatres. Same setlist all tour, even if it synchs with performance art. Worth the entrance fee, definitely.

Kevin smears himself head to toe in shaving foam and leaps into the crowd. You see a hand flailing so you grab it to right him onto his feet and feel you've done your part. Go home happy.

"Do you think they will do an encore?" I heard an obviously largely housebound fellow attendee ask.

'Suffer For Fashion', immediately weighing in on a level above the entire regular set. 'I Was Never Young', holding the fort. Then (you know this already if you ever wanted to know, so there's no point in suspense, especially in a textual medium where there is no temporal block on you) Smells Like Teen Spirit.

Which they apparently no longer issue the lyrics to at birth. But I bellowed them nonetheless. Leapt around and knocked the guy-protecting-girlfriend and the I-need-to-get-this-on-camera-phone and the lets-do-live-song-by-song-analysis people out of their comfort zones a little I hope.

Haha

It was great. Insane, but great. Five members and four actors on stage, blasting it out. Crowd giving it straight back. If you don't have 'em, steal 'em. The encore, as usual with OM gigs, lifts the show and makes the whole thing seem that much more epic.

So fuck you, the everyone I know who went to the last one but didn't go this time. This was great, even if I think I nearly killed myself sprinting up Dame Street for the last bus because of it.

Old OM posts:
Fawning about Fauna
And about Skeletal Lamping
December 2007 in the Button Factory
The early 2007 show was before the blog, I forgot this

++

Catch-up: And you'd smile and say, "I like this song"

2009-02-09T00:23:00.006Z

Went to London and spent a weekend in a penthouse apartment in Kensington with seven friends listening to Merriweather Post Pavillion. It's not like we didn't try to go out. We did. It just never worked. We nearly made it to a salsoul club, whatever that means. We did make it to an insane club that wasn't sure whether we were 'indie rock' enough to get in, despite the fact that the closest they came to indie rock all night inside was 'I Wanna Be Your Dog' by the Stooges, a drop in the gushing river of indifferentiable electro.

I bought records on Portobello Road and in Rough Trade. I bought clothes in (predictably) American Apparel. Took black cabs, saw Westminster, went the wrong way around the Circle line to get to where I was going. But the weekend was about Animal Collective. Every gap, while we were cooking or waking up or just hanging out, was filled with Merriweather Post Pavillion.

And then the weekend passed, and it was Monday the nineteenth of January and we went to the Koko in Camden to see Animal Collective.

This guy stood in our way for a while, singing Orwellian songs in a John Lydon-on-I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of here persona. Few support acts have been worse.

Then came Avey, Panda and Geologist. The set-list was as follows:

In The Flowers
Daily Routine
Also Frightened
New Song
Slippi
Weird unrecognisable version of Winter's Love
Guys Eyes
Summertime Clothes
Lion In A Coma
Brothersport
Banshee Beat
Chores
My Girls

The rainbow strip lights were going and it was the first Animal Collective gig I've ever been to that hasn't had majority new stuff being passed down from the improvisational gods on high. It was mostly pretty cathartic.

Things that were off:

Winter's Love's only recognisable bit was ONE BAR of the drum loop from it, during a 5 minute long improvisation that was apparently supposed to BE Winter's Love

I think the bass was missing from My Girls, which robbed it of some of its finality at the end

I have a feeling they missed synching the beat in Banshee Beat, ironically, but it was still great as just an Avey strumathon.

Things that were on:

Everything. The guts of Merriweather Post Pavillion, which is probably the most perfect album I can think of, and I've been thinking for about two months.

Slippi, being off the cuff as it is, freewheeling along. Chores, starting in ultra-slowed down, lamenty Panda Bear mode, but eventually kicking in to its full-on frenetic brilliance.

Songs like Also Frightened and Lion In A Coma leaping off the page and being counted even more than they are on the album.

Brothersport, being an incomparable live experience.

Side notes:

met a man who was talking about government laws and saying "that's right yeah" every four mumbles on the tube, who seemed to know what he was talking about.

Read in 'The London Paper' (a free Tube-rag) that 'Josh Dibb and co.' were playing the Koko, Josh Dibb being Deakin who has been on hiatus since just before the release of Strawberry Jam.

It was a great gig. I'm sorry this review has no logic or structure, but it was quite a long time ago.

+++

And in conclusion...

2009-02-05T02:31:00.003Z

So there you have it. That list was, to recap:

1. Vampire Weekend - Vampire Weekend
2. Why? - Alopecia
3. Of Montreal - Skeletal Lamping
4. Beach House - Devotion
5. Times New Viking - Rip It Off
6. Deerhoof - Offend Maggie
7. So Cow - I'm Siding With My Captors
8. Jeremy Jay - A Place Where We Could Go
9. El Guincho - Alegranza
10. Xiu Xiu - Women As Lovers
11. No Age - Nouns
12. Wolf Parade At Mount Zoomer
13. Stephen Malkmus - Real Emotional Trash
14. Roots Manuva - Slime and Reason
15. Fight Like Apes and the Mystery of the Golden Medallion
16. Department of Eagles - In Ear Park
17. The Mae Shi - Hlllyh
18. Santogold - Santogold
19. Parenthetical Girls - Entanglements
20. Port O'Brien - All We Could Do Was Sing
21. Marnie Stern - This Is It And I Am It And You Are It And So Is That And He Is It And She Is It And It Is It And That Is That
22. Ponytail - Ice Cream Spiritual
23. The Dodos - Visiter
24. Correcto - Correcto
25. This Is The Album of a Band Called Adebisi Shank

The figures:
Irish: 12%
By bands I was already into before 2008: 40%
Saw live: 48%
Reviewed for print: 32%
Interviewed for print: 12%
Owned on CD or vinyl: 40%

Might briefly review the Animal Collective gig I was at in the Koko in London in January, and the Of Montreal gig I was at in the Button Factory last week, for the sake of being complete. My main efforts, however, will primarily be going towards the study of dusty old books in the Ussher and Berkeley libraries of Trinity College Dublin for the next several weeks.

Like I said last year and probably this year before I embarked on that ridiculously overwrought top 25, I do it more for myself to look back on than for others to read. Let that explain the bits that got too obtuse, or the bits that weren't really developed enough to make sense.

It also gives me an opportunity to go back and re-engage with albums that might have fallen by the wayside, which happens all too often when a set of mp3s falls out of my 'recently added' and off the 2GB mp3 player I carry around. I wouldn't have thought nearly so hard about those albums if I hadn't committed myself to actually reviewing them, rather than listing them. So I'm glad I did.

No album was as good as Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer? No album was as good as Merriweather Post Pavillion. But it was about par for the course as a year. I'm looking forward to burying myself in comfortable, mostly older music for a while. At some stage I might take Merriweather out of my CD player (it's been a month), or Wire off my turntable... but not till I'm ready.

Phew.

See you round.

Oh, thanks to Darragh and Dan for writing those interim posts, and to Bobby Duck Dispensary and Brian So Cow who so foolishly fell into the trap I laid for them to review each other's albums. Wouldn't have worked if I'd explained!

The Year. 1. Occident, out on the weekend.

2009-02-03T00:44:00.005Z

1. Vampire Weekend - Vampire Weekend
XLTake a simple, relatively formulaic guitar, bass and drums construction. Adds subtle keys and collegiate vocals. Tacks on an occasional baroque string flourish. And end up with what? Well, with the keys transformational steps in the process mired in the cloudy confusion that obscures the reasons for all great pop music, you end up with the best album of 2008. Nothing to it.

It couldn't have been any other way. No other album dominated my headphones like this one did, or wrapped up my consciousness in its deceptively simple folds. I first encountered Vampire Weekend late by blogger standards (having missed out on the blue CD-R and attendant hype), but early enough by normal person standards. Some time after Christmas last year, I saw the video for A-Punk and thought it was by-numbers NME bollocks. Then, after returning to college, I was handed a promo copy of the album, a white disc in a clear plastic sleeve. Thanks XL for splashing out there.

I was expecting it to be bad, to be honest. I convinced myself it was for a little while. But it's impossible to resist it. It's insidious. Once I'd heard it twice it would not leave the jukebox in my head. Waking up in the morning I would hear the harpsichords of 'M79', disembodied, and be unable to remember where I knew them from. Walking down the street, I'd tap the syncopations of the drum pattern in 'Mansard Roof' once it kicks in, subconsciously.

But the key song was one that doesn't sound a whole lot like the quintessence of the album - it doesn't have African rhythms, fruit-flavoured keys or particularly referential lyrics. Walcott. Sounds like the Walkmen if they'd had a wash. Perfect pop song, perfect length, perfect builds and breakdowns.

Then I saw it. It's like that all over. I listened again and again, so that it was whole verses, with the lyrics lodged in my memory, that would appear when I was reading newspapers or playing games or walking through college corridors. It became a daily thing for me, one of the few bandnames that survived the initial wearing-off of novelty on my mp3 players.

If they were slipping out of my consciousness towards the end of the year, the gig brought them right back again, and the fact of interviewing them forced me to look at them in different ways, to question different angles, to probe and see what happens. Doing a degree in English literature at the same time as writing for an indie music magazine probably leads to unnecessarily prosaic and theoretical approaches to things. But whatever.

I asked them about it, they told me what they thought, and I really enjoyed hearing it. It changed what I heard again. It became more African just because people elsewhere were talking about it being African. But the interview challenged that too:

"I think the idea that you can only appreciate African music by associating it somehow with poverty is just as ridiculous as saying you can only listen to African music if you’re some rich safari hunter. It really is nothing to do with it. I hope that people who listen to African music, just because they like the sound of it, would also take it upon themselves to be a moral, ethical person. But, you know, those are two separate things. I find that the people who get angry about an American band being interested in African music aren’t offering any alternative. They tend to be the people who exoticise African music, and ghettoise it, as something that can only be appreciated in this particular way."

And as if to pull things back out of the theory and back to the real world, they play a new song that sounds like Strawberry Jam and a cover of a Fleetwood Mac song at the gig. As if to say "we are a pop band, stop over-thinking it".

As I listen to it tonight, it's no less exciting than it has been in the year I've heard it. It might be, yet again, an overly subjective choice for best album, but I know other people think it too. And there's no reason to deny that I've listened to it most and enjoyed it more than anything else, more cerebral or more wrought, put out in 2008. I had it clamped to my ears for 12 months. When it wasn't, it was bouncing around my head. It even made me go to see a band from the Congo with my afro-enthusiast friend. That's something.

The Year. 2. In Berlin I saw two men fuck in a dark corner of a basketball court.

2009-01-30T02:31:00.004Z

2. Why? - Alopecia
Anticon
What is this album about? That's the question that has kept me coming back to this album, something that I never thought I would like so much even when I heard it first in the shadow of a newly-wrought appreciation for oaklandazulasylum and Elephant Eyelash. On every listen, a new line stands out and seems to colour the whole differently, but then on closer inspection it all disappears, like some imagined structure in the clouds of the cover.

It's impossible to pin down, or I find it impossible anyway. There's so much to it. For one thing, death is unavoidable on Alopecia, no matter where you look. The first line: "I'm not a ladies man, I'm a landmine, filming my own fake death". On 'Fatalist Palmistry', he sleeps on his back "because it's good for the spine (and coffin rehearsal)". On 'The Song of the Sad Assassin', Yoni and the perpetual female "you" find a dead body floating in water, and wrap its wound anyway.

So that's the first step. It's about death. But that's just a black background to paint on. All human existence is about death. There are layers still to unwrap. The other universal which is omnipresent on Alopecia is sex, as seen inside the head of Yoni Wolf. Everyone's normal is someone else's perverted, but some of the lyrics challenge by most standards. "I'll suck the marrow out and rape your hollow bones, Yoni". "I never said I didn't have syphilis, Miss Listless". "Stalker's my whole style, and if I get caught, I'll deny."

Now sex and death are universal, and obviously they've been done to death [ugh] but when they're unearthed in such a bizarre and obsessive manner, it's hard not to see things differently. Need more ingredients? Try Christian imagery. Son of a rabbi, talking about a past or future girlfriend as the "female young messiah", "what the church-folk mean by the good news" on 'Simeon's Dilemma'. It gets thicker than that, though. Perhaps aware of the trade-off sometimes known as 'selling out', or perhaps for some other unknowable reason, the martyr references are nothing short of messianic. "If I get lost, or die on a cross, at least I wasn't born in a manger." "Does the cock crow thrice until someone is denied?"

I'm not going to get any further with that sort of approach, I doubt. New parts will reveal themselves, but there'll never be a whole. That's the thing about lyrics like this. To twist the meaning of what one of the ghostly fathers said about language, it has both a social and an individual aspect. Social is what we can get.

It's the sex, the death, the weirdly incongruous religious imagery. But individual is what we miss, and what we can never know. When you write a diary, you write, first and last, to yourself. And that's what Why? is. That's why it'll never be see-through. It might not even be see-through to Yoni. It really is something literary though, and it makes me a little sad to think back to those fist-pumping fans singing back to him about raping his hollow bones at Andrew's Lane. If you say it yourself, maybe it's a personal sort poetry. If someone else says it to you... isn't it a threat?

The Year. 3. The kind of guy who would leave you in a K-hole to go play Halo in the other room.

2009-01-23T15:54:00.003Z

3. Of Montreal - Skeletal Lamping
Polyvinyl
Word on the street has it that the album format is dead, and that pick ‘n’ mix downloading from mp3 megastores like iTunes and eMusic is the way of the future. Well, even if you’re naïve enough to believe that money will continue to change hands as the generations who have never had to pay for music march resolutely on, you’d have to be pretty deluded or incredibly narcissistic to believe that you’d be able to play God with an album and come out the better for it, telling from 30 second previews which songs are worth having and which are likely to be skipped over anyway. Like, on your iPod.

If you do believe that, though, I doubt you’d have much fun with Skeletal Lamping. Following up what seemed to be a perfect synthesis of the Pop Song and incredibly complex, cerebral structures and lyrics on ‘Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?’ (my erstwhile favourite album, though a late challenger may have emerged), Skeletal Lamping eschews the ultimately superficial shell that is the 2-6 minute song. If you were trying to figure out which songs you’d like from 30 second samples on Skeletal Lamping, you’d literally only be hearing about a quarter of the songs, or ‘sketches’ as they might more properly be called.

The concept, as I grasp it, is as follows: Kevin Barnes comes up with what is known in the trade (maybe) as a “bit”. Normally, this would be hewn through hard labour into something approaching a four-minute song. But on Skeletal Lamping, the bit exists in its own right. It segues into another bit, which could be completely different. This process repeats, and occasionally bits might reappear, or an extended sketch which goes verse-chorus-verse-chorus might show up, but the net result is, at the end of an hour or so, a fairly volatile mass of styles.

Could be terrible. Probably sounds terrible. Some people did think it was terrible, perhaps misguidedly expecting that most sacred of taboos, a repeat of the last record. It’s not terrible though. It is, very basically, a mind map. 50%, say, of Kevin Barnes’ mind is reasonably funky. 20-30% is concentrated in doe-eyed pop, some of which crosses over into the 50% funk. Sometimes he turns into Aladdin Sane for about a minute and a half. Sometimes he’s normal and he sings nostalgic love songs. Sometimes he is fucked up and sings from the perspective of a middle-aged pre-op transvestite named Georgie Fruit, who you may have met in the latter stages of Hissing Fauna.

The pieces of the jigsaw often don’t make sense in isolation. But of course they don’t. Who has ever looked at a single jigsaw piece and exclaimed in recognition of genius? That doesn’t happen. It’s a mind-map. It doesn’t make sense by itself. It makes sense as a whole, though, and probably gives a clearer picture of a particularly interesting person/character/person than any of Of Montreal’s previous efforts did, even though they weren’t half as veiled. At moments there is unbearable tension, such as a pitch-black invocation of the ubiquitous “ladies of the spread” who overlook Georgie’s existence. At other moments, there is reckless, screwy disco abandon that would seem like kids’ TV if you hadn’t heard the half-hour of music that came before.

Cokemachineglow said there weren’t moments of transcendence. I got into an argument about this, and shorn of the weapons of sobriety and reasoned detachment, I did what I always do. I got vaguely hysterical and threw my hands to heaven. There are moments of transcendence. So many. First track, Nonpareil of Favor. Its title is a fucking moment of transcendence in itself. Anyone who uses words that are almost exclusive to Macbeth in the title of a song is permanently invited to my house (familiarity with my sometimes musical project is not expected – but about 75% of the songs have Shakespeare references, mostly to Macbeth). The measuredness of the build-up is transcendent. Kevin/Georgie celebrating a love realised in the first (and only) verse is transcendent. Turning the first corner of the album is transcendent in itself, and the sleaze of the second sketch is, through contrast with the first one, transcendent too.

But let anyone stand in front of me and tell me that the three minute wig-out that follows is not transcendent. It struck me (on a bus, as these things are wont to do) that the wig-out at the end of Nonpareil of Favor is both a representation of chaos in the perceptible universe in general and inside the head of Kevin/Georgie. That somebody can make noise sound like something that specific and that complex is surely a sign of genius?

I realise that this review moreso than probably any of the other album reviews I’ve done here is based totally on a subjective view of the album. But in the end, every review is subjective. This CD, complete with David Barnes’ insanely detailed, analogous-to-the-music fold-out cover art, took over my life for a while. So it commands this place. The only question I have: how do you follow this?

The Year. 4. Humming tomorrow's nursery rhyme.

2009-01-16T18:44:00.005Z

4. Beach House - Devotion
Bella Union

How important is style to music? I don't mean style in the sense of the 'skinny jeans and tight t-shirts' that the bouncers of certain London "indie-rock" club nights require. I mean the layers, the arrangements, the how of the music. Its realisation. The fact that there is a piano playing that melody instead of a flute. The fact that that word is slurred, rather than sounded properly.

It's probably a society-wide assumption that style is something that goes on top of music, especially in the essentially post-punk landscape of indie music. I first came across that idea reading about poetry and the debates various crusty Oxbridge types had about the concrete universals and intrinsic beauty or values, below rhyme and rhythm, below the mere words.

I thought it was missing the point then, and I think it's missing the point now, in the context of music. There's no such thing as style in that sense. It's not a paint that you put over some song that you've plucked from the ether, or your arse, depending on how flighty your aspirations. The song is its style, nothing more.

And it's from this theoretical standpoint (very sorry about all that, casual observer) that I oppose the criticism that Beach House's songs are boring, samey plods with an interminably sickly layer of style-paint coating them. These songs are made up of their lush organ sounds, reverb-soaked guitar lines and misted spider-web shakers. In the very same way that Times New Viking aren't a noise band with pop songs underneath, but a band with great noisy pop songs, Beach House aren't playing regular songs and then making them pristine and pretty with layers. It's a house, if you'll excuse the pun, built from the ground up. An impressionist faces a blank canvas and ends up with a masterpiece. He doesn't just colour in between the lines.

It's another world. There's a truth somewhere in those low organ chords that seem like they came from nowhere and have nowhere to go. Victoria Legrand's voice, reminiscent of Nico, gives her romantic evocations a sense of nobility that few peers manage. The album feels like a dream, a Xanadu trip, even though it's largely about domestic love. There's also something to be said for its timelessness. It could pass as a 60s album if it tried, but it doesn't sound derivative or retro. That's a surefire sign, I think, that it will last.

Final Interlude: Because 2008 was not born in isolation

2009-01-14T16:38:00.002Z

((Okay, last interlude, sorry this is taking so long. In this episode, Daniel Gray of Underground Wires, Analogue, Totally Dublin and Lorem Ipsum talks about the album that defined his 2008. If I had to pick one of these, it would be... well it would be the top album on the list, but you'll have to wait for that, or guess it (it's not that hard). But of the past music that dominated my stereo and headphones in 2008, I would say Blood Visions by Jay Reatard, Kala by M.I.A. and perhaps Slanted + Enchanted fill that gap. Feel free to leave yours, if you're still paying attention.))

Being but a young hopper still in the trial and error stages of his trade on the tough street corners of alternative and indie music 2008 taught me one particularly harsh lesson: As soon as you strongly define your music taste it changes instanteneously. I could rightly be accused of dilletantism given the amount of genre-hopping my pallete did this year- From Julian Cope-recommended Krautrock for breakfast to a Lydia Lunch of no-wave noise rock, a three-course dinner of funk, soul and hip-hop, before ending the day with a nightcap of DC hardcore punk.

Perusing most end of year lists leaves me feeling awfully inobservant. I can't see the charms in Fleet Foxes, the brilliance of Bon Iver, consistency enough in TV on the Radio to warrant a lofty position in the top of most charts. Am I missing something? When I went to form my own list I could find very few releases from 2008 that actually left me feeling the gurgling of excitement deep down in my ribcage sparked off by contact with pure brilliance (though Hair Police, Marnie Stern, Mahjongg, and Indian Jewelry all made my ears perk up). The album that truly left an indelible imprint on my musical consciousness, that made me want to delve into back catalogues, order in special editions to Road Records, hunt out every iota of biographical information, and explore every incendiary note of every explosive song was a less recent release.

23 Skidoo- Seven Songs (Reissue)

If I had the privelege of writing this particular entry this time last year !!! progenitors Outhud and their spontaneous and combustible album 'S.T.R.E.E.T.D.A.D.' would be tip top of my 2007 (But Not 2007) list. To my less educated earbuds the NYC outfit were the first of their kind- alchemists of punk, funk, ambient, industrial noise rock, and ethnic polyrhythm, and hypnotists extraordinaire. It was akin to a soap plotline then when I discovered Outhud were not the fathers of the recent NYC punk-funk movement they'd been telling me they were- A revelation from Uncle Simon Reynolds and a subsequent DNA test revealed that the babydaddy was, in fact, British post-punk band 23 Skidoo. Sounding something like Cabaret Voltaire beating the shit out of Fela Kuti down a Sheffield backstreet with a gamelan, Skidoo will sound instantly recognizable to anybody who's heard !!!'s “Must Be The Moon” dropped in an indie disco- It's the same template minus the twerpy vocals and trippy lyrics. In fact, if those protruding lumps at the side of your head are functioning correctly you'll have directly heard 23 Skidoo: The Chemical Brothers cloned their song “Coup” to create ubiquitous big beat gangbang “Block-Rocking Beats”. More relevantly to the music released this year I found cropping up on my 'to find on Rapidshare' list their far-reaching influence radiates through bands like Mahjongg, Yeasayer, Gang Gang Dance, Not Squares; any band of white boys incorporating “black” music into their patchwork.

However, while there's a readily-available list of bands that sound like Skidoo today, those bands bravely staking out new territory and chalking up new chemical equations on the blackboard of the musical landscape while still creating something distinctly pop-orientated are as rare as kedang drums. In this aspect they share most in common with the toast of 2007: Battles. Experimental in the least alienating and masturbatory sense, populist, mindful of craft, and blending together a full platter of familiar ingredients to create an entirely new dish. No band, for me, cooked up such a storm in 2008.

The Year. 5. Your face is on fire, your hair is a mess.

2009-01-09T03:39:00.005Z

5. Times New Viking - Rip It Off
MatadorI just watched a documentary made by a very embittered middle-aged man about the obsession of record-collecting, the individuals who indulge in it, and what they sacrifice to do so. When offered "warmth" as an explanation as to why one would accumulate 20,000 LPs, one collector retold something that Geddy Lee (of the prog band Rush, who you never have to listen to) explained to him: vinyl isn't really warmer. The light distortion is just creating that impression, and he only prefers it to CD because it is recreating a recording embedded in his mind.Those sound waves that Neil Young claims are missing - they're just being filled up with the crackle of static and pick-up buzz. It's a self-created myth of nostalgia for a youth on the bedroom floor, a fondness for the ritual maybe, but nothing more.

It's an interesting thought. "Warm". What does that even mean, in a musical context? How do you describe it? Is cold something like Merriweather Post Pavilion, where every note occupies its own space and the entire song is preserved in crystal? Is warm... Times New Viking?

It certainly fits with Geddy Lee's theory. Live, Times New Viking are a reasonably polite, guitar-led indie pop band. It has elements of Flying Nun kiwi lo-fi, elements of surf rock, elements of 60s beat bands. Obvious elements of Yo La Tengo's moments of smaller scope. But on record, it becomes something transcendent. Because Times New Viking create noise. They create those in-between waves, the static. They do it on purpose, too. This isn't like the Royal Trux or something like that, people kicking their guitars and groaning. These are good, catchy songs. Recorded clean. And then forced, like the weight of the world turning coal into diamonds, into this muddle of colliding music, this mess.

When you can barely hear lyrics, the phrases you think you hear become so much more important. It's the same thing that made Murmur by REM so great, and that gets people through the sonar-bleep Sigur Rós songs while they wait for the drama to build again. Drop Out equates getting up late and being a wreck so perfectly, even if it doesn't mean to, that I can't wake up at 5 ever again without hearing it. And My Head? I'm not sure what's wrong with my head, but I know there's something, and it was probably caused by the noise.

Songs like The End Of All Things are made into something unreal by the gain-knob abuse. It sounds like the song that plays out over the credits after the actual, factual apocalypse... "that's all for everyone, that's all for you". And when the noise cuts out, the smoke clears and you can survey what is left of your house and your possessions (and your hearing, after half an hour of this on headphones)... there are about five seconds when you can see into the heart of all of this, and you know that it makes sense. I don't know why. I can't tell you why, just like I got the why of it wrong when I did my initial review for Analogue. It just makes sense.

The Year. 6. Do re mi fa so's star will scream.

2009-01-06T01:25:00.004Z

6. Deerhoof - Offend Maggie

Kill Rock Stars

It's hard to say anything about Deerhoof that hasn't been said before. These guys are hardened vets of the highest rank. Satomi Matsuzaki and Greg Saunier plus others have been making genuinely fantastic albums with a barely plausible regularity, given their complexity, for a decade and change. Their music is a dichotomy. It's pop in its purest, most child-like sense, the sort of thing you could put on at 10 o'clock in the morning over Play-Do figures dancing in a meadow and have some sort of success with those aged 2-5. But it's also experimental, almost avant garde. And these two senses don't trade places. They exist simultaneously, in a captivating sort of musical messianic duality.

To be honest, I'm not really qualified to talk about Deerhoof on their own terms. Most people aren't, I would think. To talk about Offend Maggie in purely indie rock terms is probably as off-base as that Beatles review where he talks about their augmented shifts. But I don't know anything about Ornette Coleman. So I have to say that, when you jam an absolutely manic musical genius drummer/songwriter into a band with a Japanese woman who was essentially hired because she was quiet but who turned out pretty well, you get weird things. Like the Large Hadron Collider. And about as inexplicable to the man on the street.

So, some specifics about Offend Maggie then. It's probably the most focused album they've ever made. The guitars sound more in charge than ever, and the rhythm makes a serious point of upsetting that authority. Many of the songs are perfect. Offend Maggie the song is fussy but articulated, folky but assured. Basket Ball Get Your Groove Back is the best knowingly insane song Deerhoof have ever knowingly included. Snoopy Waves skips around with some fantastic riffs that I can only describe as groovy. On This Is God Speaking, God has nothing interesting to say, or if he does, it pales in comparison to the instrumental genius on every song surrounding it. Man has come too far.

The Year. 10-7.

2009-01-05T01:09:00.003Z

10. Xiu Xiu - Women As Lovers
Kill Rock StarsWhen Women As Lovers was released, it was billed as the most accessible Xiu Xiu album yet. There are several reasons to support this assertion: one might be that every song is melodically-based, a departure from the frictive noise pieces that have appeared and sometimes defined the band's albums to date. You could also point to overtly accessible songs: the cover of Under Pressure, with vocal duties split between the worldly Michael Gira, the enchantingly innocent-sounding Caralee McElroy and the manic homosexual street preacher style of Jamie Stewart himself. No Friend Oh! with its pop chorus and non-difficult melodies is another example. However. However, however, however.

Who could be taken in by this idle talk? Women As Lovers might seem consumable, but it's not, and it's probably not meant to be. It is, as with everything from Jamie Stewart, concerned with the unbearable heaviness of existence. Torture in Guantanamo. His dead father's sex life. Intolerance. Percoset. Self-consciousness. Loneliness. In a voice that could be used to terrorise children into bed for fear of being cut into pieces and taken away in a black bag. This is heavily depressing stuff to listen to, and no doubt it's heavily depressing stuff to make.

But that's why Xiu Xiu exist. Seekers of happiness stroll no further. Women As Lovers is everything bad, set in high contrast on a stage with nightmarish gargoyles carved where the gold leaf and pegasi should bed. When it leaves itself room to seethe, like on Master Of The Bump (Kurt Stambaugh I Can Feel The Soil Falling Over My Head), it evokes empathy. When it builds itself up in balls of tension, it calls forth a more inexplicable sense of sadness. But the emotion never ceases, like a bumpy rollercoaster that only goes down. Music as nightmare.

9. El Guincho - Alegranza
Young TurksIt's a rare treat to be able to use words like "spectacular" or "extravaganza" about an album that is even remotely listenable. Imagine the joy, then, of finding Barcelona resident El Guincho's Alegranza. Straddling the hitherto underrated no-man's-land between latter-day Animal Collective and tropicalia compilations, Alegranza is essentially a beach party in a can, the soundtrack to an imaginary ur-summer. The result of applying lo-fi looping techniques to the cheesiest of musical sources is an unrelenting, swirling, euphoric experience. It is not mere reckelss abandon, however, with the same notes of childish wonder (and a couple of melodies) from Panda Bear's Person Pitch making appearances. The highlight, Kalise, is repetitive almost to the point of infuriation for three and a half minutes, until it recedes without warning into a chorus that approaches anaesthesis in its fulfilled joyousness. Just like the inevitable but slightly embarrassing situation of involuntarily singing random words that sound vaguely like the original Spanish, any words I use to try to explain how much fun El Guincho is on a sunny day are meaningless. Alegranza means joy. In translation I mean. But you get what I'm saying.

((This is from Analogue. Last one from there, I promise.))

8. Jeremy Jay - A Place Where We Could Go
KTake the Everly Brothers. Strain off their smile for the benefit of Good Christian Television Viewers, and remove the harmonies. Put more reverb on everything. Then imagine what would happen if a very strange, soft-spoken Patrick Wolf-esque Californian in a v-neck and tie took the first verse of any classic song and just repeated the lines with more and more emphasis every time. There's something very ordinary about Jeremy Jay's music, referential as it is to 50s teen drama ballads, David Bowie, Buddy Holly, Jonathan Richman and French chanteuses. But there's also something spectacularly surreal about it. Maybe that's what an absence of audible influences from after 1972 will do.

Jeremy Jay is as tall and thin as a Topman model, and to be honest, he looks exactly like one. Jeremy Jay grew up in California but for some reason his family was Francophone within the household. Jeremy Jay is on K Records. Jeremy Jay seems like a cookie-cutter hyper-literate bohemian type, but a brief MySpace exchange revealed that he's not much of a speller. There's a lot that doesn't make sense about Jeremy Jay, and that's what makes him so impossibly intriguing. I mean, what is this guy picturing when he closes his eyes and listens to his own music? Much more pertinently, what should the listener be picturing?

The mystery of Jeremy Jay is a part of what endeared him to me. But he definitely doesn't lack the songs to back it up. Beautiful Rebel and Heavenly Creatures as a tandem would blow the shit out of most of the crackly remasters they sell in infomercials late at night on the lesser channels. Escape To Aspen, just like everything on the album, seems barely held together with thread, but it is still toe-tappingly catchy and strangely beautiful. But the title track is the highlight. "We'll meet super late. And we'll go for a walk. Dream kisses. Danger. Romance. No-one knows." Not sung, but spoken urgently. Is he poking fun at himself or is he serious? Does it matter?

7. So Cow - I'm Siding With My Captors
Covert BearIf success in music came proportional to merit instead of by fickle democratic means, So Cow would be sitting on a multi-platinum catalogue, appearing on "OMG! The 90s!" specials on Channel 4 and marrying Zooey Deschanel. Alas.

What are the best Irish albums ever? Loveless? U2? Something by that glut of late 80s bands that are held in such high esteem? I've got a suggestion. Nobody would ever print this in a broadsheet, but I'm Siding With My Captors is genuinely up there. It's short, seamless and literally spotless in terms of the absence of chaff. There is no such thing as a highlight, because there aren't any low points. Only the style of delivery changes.

Greetings is a plaintive, self-doubting, heartrending love song, perfectly measured over two minutes, and it would be perfect for radio in a parallel universe. On the more unwieldy end of the guitar pop is the 52 second One Hundred Helens, a semi-surreal and deceptively unhurried piece enumerating the Helens on So Cow's street.

Shackleton is another in the line of Brian Kelly songs about inadequacy and love, led by a wavering synth-organ sound over what sounds like a Casio preset drum track. "One day I'll write the song you deserve babe, I'll give it all I have/One day I'll write the song you require, until then, la-la-la".

Lines like that are the overt signs, but throughout the all-too-brief 29 minutes of the album, there is an all-pervasive sadness that sets it apart from These Truly Are End Times. These aren't character songs, and they're not all that cased in metaphor either. It documents a life, not just lyrically, but in the reverb-soaked chords, the impossibly knotted riffs over weird bar lengths, the progressions that feel just slightly wrong. I probably say this online at the same rate that poverty claims victims in the developing world, but So Cow is the real thing . Though I am confident that ongoing lack of recognition will thankfully still provide no obstacle to his making albums as good as this.

The Year. Interlude 3: Free Download

2008-12-31T01:38:00.005Z

((To take you through this, Brian Kelly a.k.a. So Cow. The man needs no introduction, but if you need one, try here. See what I did there?))

Dublin Duck Dispensary - Luanqibazao

Rack and Ruin

Luanqibazao was the best Irish album released this year. I think. Not many will agree. But then they will have had both the advantage of actually listening to a lot of Irish music (I don't really bother keeping up anymore, save GPO and Adebisi) and they will most likely have had the disadvantage of not even knowing this collection exists.

It's been tagged as no-fi. Incorrect. This is fi. It's pop-fi and it's smile-fi. It's gallop-fi and it's fist-fi. It's a selection of timeless pop moments run through a single adventurous, curious mind, that of Bobby Aherne. This isn't about your Times New Vikings and your Lovvers', this is about your Abbas (Mamma Mia!, not Mahmoud) and your early Beatles singles. Peg it with Slanted and Enchanted if you must indie-schmindie it up, but it's far lovelier.

I can't claim to have any idea what Aherne is singing about. I'm content not knowing either. It's his world, after all. The arrangements on these songs are ridiculously more interesting than most others I've heard this year. There's thought going into this, people. Original thought in that most played out of musical arenas.

There are standouts. Happy Holidays fizzes and spazzes. Break A Leg falls over itself in restrained giddiness before becoming something really quite beautiful. Roald Dahl is perfectly-judged childish pop dramatics. Brain Damage shames and embarrasses most contemporary bands in its 25 seconds.

Then again, I think Deerhunter and Beach House suck shit, so what do I know.

((I play in Bobby's live band, so I felt awkward posting about the album, but I couldn't let a list of 25 go without mentioning it, purely for the way it got into my head and fucked shit around this year. You can still get it for free on Rack and Ruin, along with acupofteaandasliceofcake and They Do The Police In Different Voices))

The Year. 15-11.

2008-12-29T04:07:00.009Z

15. Fight Like Apes and the Mystery of the Golden Medallion
Model Citizen
A disclaimer: I know the production is dodgy. I know Something Global sounds bizarrely like Avril Lavigne. I know all that. It took me a month to get over minor differences in inflection on the songs that were on the EP. But I got there in the end. And as a collection of songs, it'd be remiss of me to leave this out just because it wasn't the album to put Dublin on the world indie map. So many of these songs are undeniable. Lend Me Your Face, Jake Summers and Do You Karate are all the pulse-raising clumps of alternapop they were last year. But it's heartening to note that the rookie Digifucker is, in all its abstraction, dejection and aggression, probably the album highlight. And Tie Me Up With Jackets, the lyrical high point of the Apes so far, wraps up a Side A that could fight almost anything and win. The second half is patchier, but that's forgivable. Hot Press insanely said that it was the best thing in the world in 2008. It's not, but it's a remarkable display of off-kilter songwriting ability, and I have a feeling it will still stand on its feet in ten or twenty years because of it. Now, who has Steve Albini's phone number?
MySpace, or if you're interested, this is a blog named after a line from Jake Summers.

14. Roots Manuva - Slime and Reason
Big DadaHaving watched Dizzee Rascal and Estelle zoom past him to worldwide audiences and financial reward with half the lyrical talent,‭ ‬it would be easy to forgive Rodney Smith some bitterness.‭ ‬However,‭ ‬Slime and Reason's opening line,‭ "‬A lot of people don't know about Smith‭"‬,‭ ‬seems more like a simple statement of fact than a complaint.‭ ‬This album doesn't acknowledge anything in its surroundings.‭ ‬Rather,‭ ‬it is the newest chapter in an isolated musical portrait of the artist.The music channels the place-in-time feeling of Jamaica's Studio One recordings from the‭ ‬1960s and‭ ‬1970s.‭ ‬However,‭ ‬the dancehall carnival feeling is skin deep only.‭ ‬Smith is one of the difficult school of rappers that fight with their demons on acetate for the world to hear.‭ ‬Consistently throughout,‭ ‬but especially on closer‭ The Struggle‭‬,‭ ‬we find him enumerating the difficulties of balancing artistic advancement and the need to provide for others.There are few rappers in the world who can deal with real internal turmoil and lyrical skill in a successful way.‭ ‬Nas is one.‭ ‬Roots Manuva is another.‭ ‬There is enough universal wisdom in Slime and Reason to make it one of the most vital hip hop albums I've ever heard.
This review originally from Analogue. The video to Again and Again is pretty excellent, and you should check this uninformed review against that of the experts.

13. Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks - Real Emotional Trash
Domino"Of all my stoned digressions, some have mutated into the truth". That's the first line of Real Emotional Trash, and that's the premise. Follow the music where it wants to go. Wait for the beauty to reveal itself. In a world of indie rock that Malkmus perceives to be divided between the Gang of Four devotees and those who love Pavement, an album in the milieu of long-deleted 60s bands in the psychedelic slipstream of the more cocksure likes of Hendrix and The Doors is likely to be a curveball. Many felt it didn't work, but my gut feeling is that comparative listening is hurting Malkmus. You can only judge an album on its own isolate merits. And Real Emotional Trash is not devoid of those, even if they are longer and a little more esoteric than those that preceded it. Simply following the music where it wants to go paints pictures with subtle and novel shades. But it is the clearings in the dense forest of fretplay that provide the true transcendence. When Out of Reaches or Gardenia pop out of the furore, context makes them something strangely, and differently, beautiful.
SM is at least my second favourite interview I've ever done. This video might be better though.

12. Wolf Parade At Mount Zoomer
Sub PopSpencer Krug is a font of genius. This is a truth self-evident. Picture his input to anything as a white light. The question is not whether or not the germ of inspiration is going to be there, the question is how it's going to translate to music. In front of the white light, you could put any number of things. You could have slides of colour, or you could cast shadows, or block it off, or whatever. That all comes from the context. How do you listen to a new Wolf Parade album when the guy who wrote almost all of the truly great songs on the last one has spent the last three years taking his music into new, complex and much more developed regions with a different band? You just have to go with it. It works, too. It's not quite the opus that the unjustly underrated Random Spirit Lover unfolded into, but the spidery, proggy character of Mount Zoomer stakes its own claim. It's surprisingly unified for what is now essentially a side project for both primary songwriters. Songs such as Boeckner's bare, aching Fine Young Cannibals and Krug's more knotted but equally aching Call It A Ritual sit well together and create a slightly gothic feeling that evokes the wildness that the title describes.
Dan Gray did an interview which was pretty good, and Pitchfork did several.

11. No Age - Nouns
Sub PopI read a lot of magazines and blogs, and a lot of my friends do too, so I've slowly developed quite a stockpile of indie rock anecdotes. With some of them, I can remember the page and issue of the magazine it came from. With others, it's just a vague recollection, or something I was told in passing. My favourite No Age anecdote is one of the latter. I was once told that Nouns was recorded and mixed in full, then played through a guitar amp and recorded again with a single microphone. This recording is the one that ended up being released. I'm not sure if this is actually true, but it sounds a lot like it and it's a good story. It's loud and it's muddy. Everything is distorted. But it has more going for it than the half-attentive stoner shoegaze it might be, just on production values. Eraser bristles with static electricity before releasing it and heading into a hooky chorus. And Teen Creeps, as I have noted here before, is one of the tracks of the year. It's not often that music perceptibly explodes on your speakers, but this does.
Metacritic is an interesting one here for such a divisive record, but bring the band and you have two friends for life.

The Year. Interlude 2: Homemade, stapled-together super-limited EP

2008-12-19T02:42:00.008Z

((So Cow will feature on this list more conventionally, don't worry, but as well as the excellent I'm Siding With My Captors, his output this year featured another work worthy of note. Destined to be apocryphal, this CD-R in a hand-daubed canvas sleeve did not fit the mandate of the list. But, being Ireland's best ever musical product, it would be criminally remiss to leave anything he made out the yearly reckoning. So I asked the infinitely more qualified Bobby Aherne of HiFi Popcorn, State and Dublin Duck Dispensary to do it.))

So Cow - Wackity Schmackity Doo
Unreleased
Like Mr. McCausland before me, I shall begin this intermissionary kudos by speculating as to why our Stupefied host has neglected from including my assigned album on his rundown. Perhaps it's because the status of Wackity Schmackity Doo as an actual album is ambiguous; despite its 13 tracks, its creator instead prefers to refer to it as an EP. Or perhaps it's because it remains sinfully unreleased; its existence confined to 25 CD-Rs sold in Galway's Roisin Dubh on a night in early September. Another likely reason is that it would be slightly unorthodox and overly-enviable for one young man to hog two spaces on a 'Top 25' list for a year in which hundreds of very worthwhile albums reared their heads; a fact testament to Brian Kelly's high status as ~~Ireland's~~ Europe's very own Jay Lindsey.

Wackity Schmackity Doo (taking its title from a Patton Oswalt gag) was conceived and birthed in a single weekend in So Cow's garden shed. This might explain Kelly's less-wrought-than-normal lyrics, as well as some of the more off-kilter bits, but it does little to explain the colourful splashes of snotty yet adorable punk rock (like the any-other-band-would-kill-for 'Outskirts' or 'The 'You're Nice' Mysteries') or the band-jamming cohesion of this curt solo experiment as a whole. It may not be a concept album, but it does have a conceptual timeline: So Cow welcomes you to his radio station (102.4FM), So Cow wants to be your boyfriend, So Cow thinks he was a bad (shitty, even) boyfriend, So Cow gets bored singing about relationships and instead composes some R.P.G. video game soundtracks and strums a mandolin for a few minutes before returning with an earnest reimagining of the 'Only Fools and Horses' theme tune. The Wall it ain't, but these impromptu eccentricities are what make it - only twelve weeks after its creation - a lost classic.

So actually, in summation, the most likely reason that Those Geese Were Stupefied is omitting this strange and sparkling gemstone from his 'Best of 2008' list is so that he can feature its inevitably celebrated reissue on his 'Best of 2028' list. For those who wait, good things can't fail to come.

((Bobby is the default James Boswell to So Cow's Dr. Johnson, as proven by this interview. If you need this CD-R, your best bet is some sustained pestering.))

The Year. 20-16.

2008-12-18T00:30:00.006Z

20. Port O'Brien - All We Could Do Was Sing
City Slang
You know how your English teacher in school told you not to start your story with waking up? Well, Port O'Brien don't care what your English teacher says. All We Could Do Was Sing opens with a fantastic, cathartic track called "I Woke Up Today", sung (or shouted) by everyone in the band in unison. It's one of those songs that turns into the only thing you can think about for a couple of weeks. Communal and celebratory. Other than this, Port O'Brien do a good line in nautically-themed folky indie. From 'Moby Dick' to 'The Old Man and the Sea', the ocean has always been an excellent paradigm for the more solitary emotions in the spectrum. Port O'Brien sell the sea myth pretty hard, but the fact that main songwriter Van Pierszalowski genuinely does commercially fish for salmon makes for heightened fascination with his lyrics. 'Fisherman's Son' is a particularly salient example of this, expressing the conflict that arises from having to drop real life and go to sea for several months. The closer, 'Valdez', is a short, sleepy ditty that begins with the line "Exxon, Exxon, clean it up" and sounds like it was recorded on a dictaphone buried under a large pile of laundry. The album is varied enough to be continuously interesting, and if ever you wanted a break from the stresses of real life, there are worse places to look for it than Port O'Brien.
This review differs to the others, and is kind of spazzy, because I did it for Analogue right after I got the CD. The original print review, a live review and a full length interview all archived on the Analogue site.

19. Parenthetical Girls - Entanglements
Slender Means Society
A sprawling orchestral pop album conceived and realised over the course of four years by a man who claims not to "know a G from an A". Worried? Don't be. The defining moment of this album comes at its very beginning, as if to rebut scepticism and speak for itself before anyone has a chance to second guess it. A piano key is tentatively struck. A few chords are sounded, as if to test not only the instrument, but also the ear of the listener. Then, a flourish of violins and Zac Pennington appears to take it the rest of the way. 'Four Words' is very much emblematic of the album as a whole - a vocal narrative of literate lust, familiar from previous releases, but carefully supported by an impossibly complex artifice of hundreds of individual instrumental tracks from bumbling brass to Andrew Bird-esque pizzicatos. One possible criticism is that the arrangements, while all orchestral or at least "big" in some way, don't necessarily follow any central theme, and the mood can swing between the baroque and the Disney soundtrack from song to song. But that is a small price to pay for a record of such sustained poise and elegance. And the pop tunes are here too, by the way.
Here's a music video, and here's a good interview from The Torture Garden blog.

18. Santogold - Santogold
Atlantic
So what is Santi White, if not a high-end cash-in on Maya Arulpragasam's adoption as culturally "important" in the UK, and as hot shit in the USA? What is this, if not M.I.A.-lite? Let's investigate - similar vocal style, similar sense of style writ large, but without the pervasive politics and fear underwriting the pulp tendencies. 'Creator' is the first single off the album, produced by Switch, the man responsible for much of Kala, and it very much recalls M.I.A.'s atonal sung-rap and dirty beats. But the true standout is the second single and opening track of the album, and it blocks that line of thought completely. 'L.E.S. Artistes' is three and a half minutes of perfectly juxtaposed artiness and emotion rolled into a pop song, and it casts its positive shadow on the rest of the album. It's not Maya A, it's... Karen O? 'Shove It' sees White ride a dub bassline into the future, and 'I'm A Lady' comes across like a new 'Gigantic' by the Pixies with Kim Deal's puerile lyrics subbed out for considered maturity and an updated genius pop chorus. The mish-mash of styles that makes up the album could make it awkwardly disjointed, but instead it creates what comes across as a fantastic extended demo-tape to spite the world. What Santi White is essentially saying is that she can do anything, and she can do it well. Compelling listening.
The magnificent L.E.S. Artistes from Pitchfork.tv, and the nuclear weirdness of an unrelated Santo Gold at his site.

17. The Mae Shi - Hllyh
Moshi Moshi
I'm sure there's a perfectly reasonable explanation for all of this. I just don't know what it is. You see, I literally walked in on the Mae Shi by accident, having been guestlisted for another band. I missed the write-ups, the historification by blog and trial-by-comments-section that usually characterise my introduction to an American band. So I'm not completely sure what I'm supposed to think of Hlllyh. All I know about their context is that one of them was wearing a No Age bandana, which he gave to Coady, possibly assuming it would be returned. This lack of grounding makes it very hard to know what to make of spazzy, synthy, poppy hardcore with very overt Old Testament rapture influences in the lyrics. It's more than influence, really. It's at the point of being a concept album. When the singer says, speaking as God, "they lost the scent, and I don't even care why they didn't repent/We need a new creation" on 'Pwnd', it's so left-field compared to anything else I've ever heard that I really don't know what to think. Maybe I'm supposed to be perplexed. I could do the research, but I'm not sure I want to, like the apocalyptic evangelists the Mae Shi reference/are. If missionaries put this kind of perverse pop punk energy into proselytising, I'm sure millions more would be saved.
Only a link to a previous post here because, like I said, I'm not doing the legwork here.

16. Department of Eagles - In Ear Park
4AD
You know what? Grizzly Bear have taken way too long following up Yellow House. That album was, and still stands as, a work of singular originality and genius. But what do Rossen, Droste and company spend their time doing nowadays? Well, Ed Droste leaks Animal Collective songs. And Daniel Rossen? Well, he makes interesting albums with pre-Grizzly Bear bandmates. Much of Rossen's trademarks from the fatherband are still present: the guitars are split between folky fingerpicking and 50s palm-mute plucking, and the arrangements are largely no different. However, the influence of Fred Nicolaus adds a certain spice, and his Destroyer-esque voice is a welcome change of pace to Rossen's effortless drawl. In fact, Nicolaus' 'Teenagers' is a definite highlight. There is also, I fancy, a vaguely perceptible hint of GB touring partners Radiohead slipping into some of the lush arrangements. On the whole, though, the mood is the same as that of Yellow House - play this alone, late at night, and let it work its magic.
Plenty (including a rooftop P4K session and a Takeaway Show) to be had on the DoE site and then also a great Daytrotter to enjoy.

The Year. Interlude 1: Compilation

2008-12-14T16:31:00.005Z

((Some things didn't fit into my conception of this list. Compilations, EPs, other... surprises. So I'm bringing in the big-hitters to help me out. First in a series of linking guest-posts is Darragh McCausland, of Analogue, State, Asleep On The Compost Heap and his kitchen.))

Jay Reatard - Matador Singles '08
MatadorSo Karl is delegating out the artists who he doesn’t think fit the criteria for his albums of the year list. I don’t know whether to admire or worry about such fastidiousness. Any frozen heads in your fridge Karl? We shouldn’t give a fuck that Jay Reatard’s singles collection is not technically an album because

A: it sounds like one (a brilliantly coherent one too)

B: Jay certainly wouldn’t give a fuck either

For what it’s worth, the music on this collection of singles isn’t futuristic, world-changing or anything like that. It’s just a bunch of reatardedly awesome pop/punk tunes, which doesn’t for one second dip in quality, tempo or attitude. Jay is a rare creature in the current rock landscape, an old school songsmith who just gets on with the business of churning out these thrilling songs, hopefully oblivious to the hurricane of hype building around him.

((Watch this snivelling interview with Nitsuh Abebe and then watch the blistering live set, all on Pitchfork.tv.))

The Year. 25-21

2008-12-13T19:01:00.013Z

25. This Is The Album Of A Band Called Adebisi Shank
Richter Collective

Adebisi Shank emanate from one of the most productive scenes in Irish music, that of bands who seem to have spent adolescence listening to metal but have now discovered their inner maths geek. What sets Adebisi Shank apart from other purveyors of spastic, geometric rock is the direct connection between feeling and music. It's like a print-screen of a hyperactive, manic depressive mind. They are not simply showing off rhythmic ability, rehearsing the different ways in which you can play fast in an unusual time signature. It's much more measured than that. While at points, songs can seem like the individual band members are battling each other with their instruments, the whole is as tempered in its way as a piece of classical music. Nothing happens for longer than it has to, and the result is something intensely expressive and almost incandescent. I also saw, while sharemining for new music, a post on an American forum saying that this album was fantastic, and I felt a little happier in the knowledge that a song called 'Mini Rockers' is getting onto Floridian iPods. Fitting ambassadors.
This picture pretty much says it all, and then this collective commits it to wax.

24. Correcto - Correcto
Domino

Indie rock from the island of Britain is in ebb at the moment, and the cartoonised post-punk sound that launched a number of bands to the mainstream in the first half of the decade has tainted everything with its own descent into pastiche. That's a pity, because Correcto, from Glasgow, make the kind of catchy but clever music that is almost ingrained enough in British music since 1976 as to be the new traditional at this point. On the upbeat songs, Danny Saunders' flawed voice rides large Buzzcocks-esque guitars to places at least as interesting as the Postcard Records offspring of Glasgow circa 1980, and on the quieter arrangements he channels the pint-and-a-bag-of-crisps-at-the-battle-of-the-bands style of Half Man Half Biscuit. Self-awareness is the order of the day, with the self-portrait 'Walking To Town' carrying the refreshing admission "I look like a fucking goon". Another perceptive observation on the next track: "No-one over thirty can do the Watusi". And 'Joni' is one of the most criminally-overlooked pieces of pop genius in the last decade. A self-deprecating running commentary on popular culture is a welcome respite in a world where much of the good music is coming from the no-child-left-behind sincerity of North America.
Check out Joni if you haven't heard its infectious strains, and then head to MySpace to commiserate with the band over the fact that no-one actually seems to care about them at all.

23. The Dodos - Visiter
FrenchkissI have never had much of a tolerance for Americana. Those straightforward, folky albums that tumble down through the filter of the make-or-break American indie axis have always been unavoidably naff to me, no matter how hard I tried to see what so many people were seeing. Years of this mean that I'm no longer excited by acoustic music. It needs to have a really big twist to win me over. The Dodos have. With an acoustic guitar and a drum kit, they paint layers and more layers, and then go digging in them for the elusive melody that no-one has found yet. The magically liberating tool that is the loop-pedal has been around for a while now, but few have avoided the potential for excessive meddling like Meric Long. His rapid strums, along with the outdoorsy drums of Logan Kroeber, provide a bustling backing for the introverted-extrovert songs he sings. The freak wins the battle with the folk, and the likes of 'Red and Purple' or 'Fools' are some of the most memorable songs of the year.
Ball it over to Pitchfork.tv for the fairly stunning video for Fools, and then stall the ball to Daytrotter for the old songs/new songs/demos/unreleased songs/explanations you've come to expect and love from them.

22. Ponytail - Ice Cream Spiritual
We Are Free
Ponytail are a band who have a lot of fun. This becomes immediately apparent at the 15 second mark, as Molly Spiegel releases forth a piercing, feral peal to conjure up the full glory of her Baltimore bandmates' instrumental assault. Ponytail channel Cool bands like Sonic Youth and their lesser-known (or simply lesser) comrades at times, but they bring an enthusiasm to the table, often in the form of simply playing fast, that makes this effectively instrumental 8-song effort excitingly original. There is also a definite Japanophile tendency that goes a ways to explaining the unselfconscious mentalness of tracks like 'Late For School'. It's also fun to see that, just like post-Strokes bands began to show up in the aftermath of Is This It?, there is such a thing as post-Deerhoof in the world today.The cover art, trippy and hand-daubed, is a pretty good indication of how this sounds. But the real tell is the exclamation mark snuck in at the end of the title. ! pretty much sums it up.
Check Ponytail out on, looking exactly like they sound, on MySpace, and then check out the perpetually useful about.com for advice on how to sport your own.

21. Marnie Stern - This Is It And I Am It And You Are It And So Is That And He Is It And She Is It And It Is It And That Is That
Kill Rock Stars

More notes required. Exponentially more drums hit per bar required. More words per title required. Marnie Stern's second album is an explosion of unrelenting excess from the first avalanche of music halfway through the opener 'Prime' to the last tapped arpeggios of closer 'The Devil Is In The Details'. On first glance, Marnie's music seems to reside in a bizarre psychedelic-perceptive cave within the milieu of Van Halen-esque classic rock, but better touchstones would be the life-affirming likes of The Mae Shi, the hemidemisemiquaver hi-hat proggishness of Battles, or the positive apocalypticism of Lightning Bolt. It's rather refreshing to see guitar virtuosity of this magnitude attached to someone with their head in the real world. And though she has a tendency to declaim the poetry of whatever comes into her head, her stream of consciousness aphorisms make it all the more urgent.
Read Matthew 'Fluxblog' Perpetua's interview with Marnie Stern at Pitchfork, then regret missing her kissing booth.

Housekeeping

2008-12-08T19:55:00.004Z

Some odds, some ends:

Found this out while standing in Tower Records (if you're an employee of Tower Records reading this, I'm sorry I stand around in your shop whenever I'm waiting to do anything for any amount of time up to an hour) - for some reason I assume to be related to the release of The Sound of The Smiths, a shitload of Smiths 7" singles have been re-released. I'm going to buy as many as I can find next time I'm in town.
Kevin Barnes interview hangs in the ether - last Thursday, went to ghostly answering machine. Tonight, he answered, but very nicely asked to reschedule due to soundcheck. As the old saying goes: don't try to do a phone interview with your heroes.
Don't go to the Analogue site, it's afflicted with some sort of virus at the moment.
The programme on TG4 with the Kerryman who talks to his paintings while he teaches you to paint is my favourite programme.

Smash or Trash

2008-12-06T18:47:00.004Z

I'm finished with college for Christmas, having accelerated through about 10,000 accumulated words of essays and assigments at an alarming rate, and have got down to the real work coming up to Christmas. Those of you who've been following this blog for a while know that I spent about a month and a half last December and January writing progressively longer, more complicated and more emotive reviews of the 25 best albums of 2007. Traffic actually spiked on the blog, and I had fun doing it even if it took over my life for a while.

Well, I'm doing it again. I have my albums, and it's just a matter of ordering them, and then writing about them. I've been listening back to the year, and what I originally thought was a weak year for music is opening up its folds to me. Vampire Weekend, Why?, Of Montreal, Times New Viking, El Guincho and Deerhoof all put out genuinely brilliant albums in 2008, and many lesser gods put in a good showing too.

But listening through this afternoon with my 15 year old brother in the room, I thought I'd take the opportunity to get his opinion on some of the tracks that make up what I consider to be 2008's best albums. I played a game. Called Smash or Trash. Conor likes Kanye West, reggae and ska and chart indie. He surprised me a little. But not much. Here's the data I collected:

Trash...
Adebisi Shank - Colin Skehan (comment: not that bad, but still trash)
Beach House - Gila
Correcto - Joni
Deerhoof - Snoopy Waves
Department of Eagles - Teenagers
The Dodos - Red and Purple
Dublin Duck Dispensary - The Last Bottle In The World (comment: Is this the song from the morning? Like, the alarm clock? Trash. Definitely trash)
Fight Like Apes - Lend Me Your Face
Fleet Foxes - White Winter Hymnal (comment: are you serious? What do you think?)
Jay Reatard - Always Wanting More
Jeremy - Beautiful Creatures (comment: is this Smokey Robinson?!)
Lovvers - No Romantic
No Age - Teen Creeps
Parenthetical Girls - Four Words (comment: likes arrangement, annoyed at voice)
TNV - Drop-Out (trashed immediately)
Wolf Parade - Call It A Ritual

SMASH!
CSS - Jager Yoga (comment: Sounds like Bloc Party. Did not recognise it as CSS, or who they were.)
El Guincho - Kalise (comment: thought it was hilarious, said "is he Mexican?")
Man Man - Hurly Burly
Of Montreal - Triphallus To Punctuate (said smash early, and began to regret it when the "I supporrrrted your kid" disco bit happened.)
Ponytail - Beg Waves
Santogold - Shove It (comment: sounds like The Specials at the start)
Vampire Weekend - Oxford Comma
Why? - The Vowels Pt. 2 (smash, thinks Joni's voice is hilariously weedy)

The picture is the submission of some O'Neill to some Lord Deputy and I have no excuse for its use other than it was on my desktop.

Pretend it's whales keeping their voices down.

2008-12-01T03:01:00.005Z

Best album of the decade so far is... what? Hissing Fauna? Kid A? Feels? Don't hold me to this in the future, but I'm going to throw out Apologies to the Queen Mary as a candidate. For an album that the band immediately regretted releasing, it's pretty near flawless. From the anthem of Krug-ist ambiguity that is You Are A Runner And I Am My Father's Son to the Americana sincerity of Boeckner's This Heart's On Fire, the album does not drop the ball once.

"You're being ridiculous", I hear you legitimately say. Okay, hold on. Musical awakening was a slow process for me. No-one is born at 13 listening to Eno. It took me until the middle of my teenage years to accept REM, and they were the first band I ever got into that used clean guitars as anything other than a build-up to distorted guitars. And even with that "revelation", it took me a long time to get beyond the Q Magazine canon.

The internet started making noise about Wolf Parade around 2004. An older friend included the six-song EP from that year on a data-DVD of music he thought I might not hate. While the likes of Clouddead or Tilly and the Wall took a few years to make an impact, Dear Sons and Daughters of Hungry Ghosts arrested me immediately. That song specifically. I listened to it over and over on the way to school. It became my most played song on the fledgling Audioscrobbler site. This feral man, speaking poetry over a darkened, muddy, organ-heavy backing. It all seemed to make sense.

When the album came out a few months later, I e-mailed their Yahoo address to gush. Arlen, the drummer, replied with a short note punctuated at the end with a smiley of some sort. "We are coming to play Dublin". The fact that this man, from the far side of Canada, and seeming so shrouded in mystery and genius to me at that time, could reply - it knocked me over. I ordered a fake ID. Two, actually, in case one wasn't enough (it wasn't). And I got into Whelans, first time ever in a club at the age of 17, to see the drunken gods of Wolf Parade perform. It was phenomenal.

Things are different now. I don't get as blindly impressed by music as I used to, which is a universal symptom of voracious consumption. I go to enough gigs that I have developed a dislike for large-venue shows because of the disconnect, but also because of the type of people who attend. I am, in short, a curmudgeonly and cantankerous grump. But Wolf Parade are back. And they're Vicar Street sized now, apparently. So I get myself to a Ticketmaster.

Giveamanakick support. They are not acoustic metal, they tell us. Right. Let's call them... stripped-down hardcore. They acquit themselves well, but it's just a distraction. People are talking, or shouting conversation more accurately, and much as I try to pay attention, it's tough.

Then Wolf Parade appear. Not like the men-apart that I saw in Whelans in 2005, but the Spencer Krug I saw stage-frighted and desperate for alcohol with Sunset Rubdown in Crawdaddy during exams, and the Dan Boeckner I saw, cocksure with sneaky-naggin vodka and orange in hand with Handsome Furs at Whelans. Sure, Arlen and Dante don't have any new associations for me, but the absence of Hadji Bakara, Wolf Parade's hyperliterate version of Bez, definitely helped make the experience seem slightly alien.

Until they started.

You Are A Runner. I don't want to lapse into just recapping the set-list here, even though if you're still reading you're probably not a neutral. Spencer put one knee on his stool and adjusted his mic stand (he did this every time he began to sing for the entire gig, Asperger's-style), and got to it. Maybe four songs in, he did the same again, but with the one-handed organ intro to Dear Sons And Daughters Of Hungry Ghosts.

Spencer looked like he was about to get sick the whole time. Dan looked like he was about to fall over and have a fit. But they both look like that all the time, so it's okay.

Songs off the new album came to life. It seemed to be especially Dan's songs that got a lift from the live environment. Soldier's Grin, the opener from At Mount Zoomer, was infused with energy. Language City was forgiven its awful lyrics ("Language city is a bad ol' place.../Eyeballs float in space") and made up for them with live brio.

The band seemed delighted with the size of the room and the traditionally over-enthusiastic Irish crowd. Dan in particular grinned at the end of every song, and even the fearful and moody Spencer managed a few "you guys are sweethearts". But of course the true critic does not factor that sort of thing into the equation, especially the critic who sees Bruce Springsteen for the dull dad-rock man he is (me).

What made this gig the best since Animal Collective in secret at Whelans came after the epic set-closer Kissing The Beehive. If the longer songs off At Mount Zoomer began to lag a little, the encore was the perfect riposte. The Grey Estates was The Grey Estates, quintessentially Boeckner. But it was the final pair that blew the thing up.

Spencer Krug, whom I later drunkenly declared to be "my second favourite man" to whoever would listen, put his shoulder to the yoke. He put a knee on the stool. He adjusted the mic stand. He held down a C chord for a few seconds. I didn't recognise it. Nobody did. It didn't seem like the band recognised it either until Arlen began the individual snare hits that mark the beginning of I'll Believe In Anything. Whether on Apologies To The Queen Mary or the first Sunset Rubdown album, it's one of my favourite songs, and it took me into the moment like nothing in at least the past year. It was cathartic, ecstatic, chaotic and all other Greek words that describe unbridled brilliance.

This was followed, with what seemed like Sisyphean effort on the part of Spencer, by Fancy Claps. Guess what it was like. Okay, I'll tell you. It was cathartic, ecstatic, chaotic and brilliant. "When I die, I'm leaving you my feet/When you die, you can stand up for me." Sung, or yodelled or bellowed or howled or whatever Spencer does, with the conflicted conviction of one of the indie world's few true geniuses.

It's gigs like this that make me regret how positively I review other things, because it was on another level. It's gigs like this that remind me what it was like when I heard things for the first time, or when I would commit myself blindly to bands. When they were mine, and I didn't just listen to them but I owned them as well. I don't know why I'm reminded of this, but I am:

Feed the gaping need of my sense, give me ad lib
To pray unselfconsciously with overflowing speech
For this soul needs to be honored with a new dress woven
From green and blue things and arguments that cannot be proven

+++

In keeping with the teetering tight-rope of legitimacy that this blog tip-toes constantly, I have taken this picture from the Flickr of HouseParade without asking. I hope the fact that we seem to have been near each other at the gig, and that it was a fantastic and communal experience, will stop him/her from pressing charges. Excellent picture, HouseParade!

Wellllllllllll I got friends in low places.

2008-11-25T23:33:00.003Z

High Places.

What they do is not so much performance as a sort of twisted midwifery to a very obscured and confused baby. Man playing very low-volume drum pads and a woodblock. Woman talking (not even backwards), or singing without enthusiasm. A table covered in wires acting as a barrier between uninterested band and uninterested crowd. There is no aspect of this that comes across better live than on record. In fact, the most impressive member of High Places, Sampler, would probably prefer not to tour at all.

The best thing High Places have ever done was appear on Bradford Cox's video guide to the Pitchfork festival. And I don't even like Bradford Cox. May this band go away soon, and may their mp3s languish unheard in the mysterious ether of a thousand hard drives till the Great Computer Virus of the Future removes them from recorded history.

No catchy bits. Even their "one good song" was drowned in its own self-conscious muck. This is a totem pole made of its own hype, and it should never be given the twelve euro tribute I foolishly gave it.

-

A delicate mix of sweat and menstrual blood.

2008-11-22T19:23:00.002Z

I've been listening to Parenthetical Girls since their first album (((GRRRLS))) came out in 2004, or pretty soon after. Jamie Stewart produced half of it (Side A and Side B are the same songs with different producers), so I decided to download it and see what it was like, if only because I was in the first throes of Xiu Xiu excitement and I was riled up to hear anything that had their name associated with it.

It was camper than anything I was used to. There was something about the sincerity in the stripped pop layers that took me by surprise. It was too keyboard-heavy and close-focused to fit in with vaguely baroque pop bands I was into at the time (Arcade Fire, Sufjan Stevens), and not nearly life-affirming enough to line up alongside the sunny indie (Architecture in Helsinki, Polyphonic Spree). Songs like Love Connection (which ended up covered on Etiquette by CFTPA) seemed to have a sort of body poetry that was different to anything I'd heard before. I'll block-quote some, seeing as I set the precedent with the Why? post:

Chapped lips, tongue kiss, insert expletive
Fluids of a summer night
With slight duress, forced imperative
Find me quoting Donovan
The delicate mix of sweat and menstrual blood
Seeping into trampled grass

Zac Pennington is the kind of self-obsessed, sex-obsessed, hyper-camp pop experimentalist I can get on board with. Strangely enough though, four years and two more albums after I first heard (((GRRRLS))), I had never actually seen what he looked like. So when he appeared, thin as a rake and bejumpered in threadbare blue, I was... no, I wasn't taken aback at all. He looked exactly like I expected. First time that's ever happened.

The set the ( ) girls played was short, with no encore, but it was heavy on old material and there wasn't a lowlight in the bunch. The revolving cast of Guy In Tight T-Shirt, Red Jumper Man and Kind Of Cute Girl took up duties on various synths, glockenspiel, drums, gamelan singing bowls, autoharp or whatever else, while Zac sojourned into the crowd, illustrating his every perfectly-enuniciated word with a graceful extension of his thin arm.

Among the finer expressions of love and lust was his index finger to index finger measurement of you- can-guess-what during the line "I felt his size, close to a dozen times" from Unmentionables off this year's Entanglements.

The undoubted highlight, however, was the medley of Love Connection Pt. 1 and Love Connection Pt. 2*. This was called in by Guy In Tight T-Shirt and met with an "are you sure?" from Zac, but they carried through with it and it made my night. Further sweetness was added by the fact that they apparently rarely play either of the songs, nevermind back-to-back with no gap.

The homely, fire-placed atmosphere of the upstairs venue in Whelans added a lot to the experience, as did the impressive Former Soviet Republic in support, and all in all, the gig was as good as I could have hoped.

I've been incredibly lucky with gigs lately, but before you say "But Karl, EVERYTHING gets a positive review", whet yisser appetites for the next post. Where did I go to escape the weekend Whelans crowd? Stay tuned to find out.

++

*Love Connection Pt. 1 and 2 are on different albums, so it's not just like playing King of Carrot Flowers Pts. 1, 2 and 3 together. I hadn't even considered how they'd fit together until last night. Perfectly, as it turned out.

Lethal poison for the system

2008-11-17T01:19:00.003Z

Full disclosure: before seeing Built To Spill perform it in its sprawling, magnificent entirety, I'd never head Perfect From Now On. I don't mean that I wasn't familiar enough with it, I mean I literally had never heard a note of the album, physical, digital or otherwise. How I could be so lax as to fail to prepare myself for the PFNO tour, I have no idea. But it happened.

Last time I saw Built To Spill was in McCarren Pool in Brooklyn, supported by Cat Power and Bob Mould from Hüsker Dü. The place, located in "romantic downtown Brooklyn" according to its website (it was a bit grimy), was roughly the equivalent of Marlay Park as a venue. And it was full, full of the kind of fist-pumping, soul-pouring fans that you get at Radiohead or Coldplay gigs there. The band played exactly that kind of set too, with such vastness and profundity that it seemed impossible that they'd ever have to play any lesser stage.

Two years later, Doug Martsch is literally within groping distance if I leaned, on the stage of Whelans. Whelans, the safety net for Saturday nights, the gig venue, the post-gig venue... It was almost like a culture shock, because of the magnitude of the associations I'd made for BtS in my head. Sort of profane.

Until the floating strains of Randy Described Eternity. The defiant resolution of I Would Hurt A Fly. It just snowballed, too. The band fed off the crowd, which led to the crowd feeding off the band, and the whole thing spiralled into one very loud, guitar-driven catharsis.

I suppose it might have been better if I'd been anticipating the next song like other people had, but for me it just seemed like a perfectly-measured set. I had some fun imagining that I was seeing this band for the first time, as a support act or at a festival or something. This "middle-aged farmer from Idaho" (thx Darragh, constant poet of the everyday), his middle-aged cronies playing essentially wanky guitar, with a cello in the background. The most unlikely thing ever, but it was great. Awe-inspiring at times.

Then the "encore", straight from the end of Perfect From Now On into Goin' Against Your Mind. That song is a gutfuck monster epic, and it had to be. Curfew at Whelans bumbling in to wreck things once more. It ended, and people shouted. "Carry The Zero", "Center of the Universe", "Big Dipper", etc. Not to be. Time's up, one more song.

Paper Planes.

Trippy.

+++

Video taken by Loreana Rushe about two places behind where I was standing at this, one of the best gigs of the year.

And your eyes are piss-holes in the snow.

2008-11-14T01:26:00.004Z

"I'm just not used to being out and about this early on a Sunday. My body doesn't know what to do." - heard in conversation outside Twisted Pepper on Abbey Street whilst waiting for the fantastically devised stripped-down Why? matinee set, not so long after noon.

Thanks to the manoeuvres of LitSoc (who like Joni for his poetic lyrics), DURNS (whose RN stands for Rock Nostalgia, leading me to believe that they were drawn in by the MOR rock of Gemini Song), Analogue (because Bren was in a position to make the calls, and because Why? are our official collective ninth favourite band*) and Bodytonic (who I assume opened their new venue at a strange hour so that people would know it was there), this genuinely exciting prospect came to pass. There were probably somewhere a little above fifty people there, all seated, and they saw something pretty unique.

Are lyrics poetry? That can't be answered with a yes or a no because the definition of poetry isn't static, and the nature of lyrics is also pretty varying. If I was to be anal about the whole thing, I could mention that almost everything that pop-culture considers poetry is actually lyric poetry, from Shakespeare to Ginsberg. But I won't. I'll do it by experiment.

Here's
To inhaling crushed bones
through a dried up
white out pen
and riding the backwards racer
in hot June rain
in a matching blue and gold
plastic bag / poncho / raincoat.

It's a wooden coaster
with a medium hill height mean,
high hill to flat ground ratio
you know I'd sell my shingles
for a thimble dip of snow.
Back then I'd've sold my single
for a fingertip of glow.

That's the form of the first verse of Crushed Bones from the liner lyrics to Elephant Eyelash, by the way, I didn't just space it out so it'd look like that.

I personally think what Joni Wolf does is more lyrics-set-to-music than a contiguous rock and roll song type of thing. All of the lyrics (excepting maybe the few songs that are actually sung straight through) heave with internal rhyme, with perfect measurement and judgement so that there can always be a lot of syllables if there needs to be, without there ever being too many. These songs (they are definitely songs, even if you concede that they could constitute poetry) would stand alone. Take away the careful guitar and keyboards of Alopecia and Elephant Eyelash, or the bedroom fuzziness of Oaklandazulasylum and you would still have the skeleton of something genuinely excellent.

It might even be better.

Some of the time it was. The Fall of Mr. Fifths (off Alopecia) in particular came off amazingly, stripped of its organ and the cushion of reverb. The sight of Joni, microphone left on its stand, rhyming to the backing a single drum, conjures images of San Francisco beat gatherings to me. It's almost mesmeric.

I asked him awkwardly about this while I tried to jam the synth that I had to inexplicably provide back into its case after the gig had finished. He must do it often, I said. In exotic places like Oakland, coffee shop Anticon gigs must be the order of the day. He looked vaguely pitying and explained that he wasn't part of "that scene".

Another convenient imagined reality smashed. But really, that just made the Twisted Pepper set even more unique.

Some day, Those Geese, I will write an unreadable, 5,000 word post on Why? as poetry using academic standards. There's so much. The recurring obsession (or identification?) with Christ and Christianity in general. Bones, whether raped, snorted or inhabited. The bizarre images in general. It will be done. No it won't. Oh well.

++

*This statement is not true.
**This picture was nicked off the Analogue blog, and was taken, as far as I can tell from the Properties, by the magnificent ivebeentired, whoever that is. Nice picture, yo.

And your eyes are slits in bags of fat

2008-11-14T00:44:00.004Z

Disclaimer/Acknowledgement: This gig was ages ago. I have the same excuses every blogger has, so I won't bore you with them.

Why? at Andrew's Lane Theatre. Where have I heard that one before? Oh yeah, here. But lack of imagination notwithstanding, it was great to get a second visit off Joni and crew on what is essentially the same tour. Bands (Of Montreal, Deerhoof, Animal Collective) seem to have started skipping us over again this winter. Even if we've started to bleep on the radar of bands like this, the second sweep through Europe generally heads straight to the UK without so much as a cursory glance at "the best crowd in the world".

On the evidence of this redux, however, it appears that good behaviour (i.e. loud cheering) has indeed yielded us the proverbial "nice things". Hurray.

The set was essentially the same as last time, possibly in a different order. It's amazing how good it was, given that fact. These songs in their live format don't seem like they could ever be old. The arrangements are tense, much closer than the occasionally too-clean productions on the album, and needle-point tight. The clacking snare-rim beat of Crushed Bones (opening track on Elephant Eyelash), strewn with daydreamy arpeggios, provides the perfect tensile canvas for Joni to sing over. Or rap over? Speak over? Sing-rap-recite.

It's hard to tell exactly what Joni is. There is definitely a literary character to what he does, almost like a novel full of fictionalised diary entries but with no clear conclusion. Musically, indie rock cannot fully claim him, because of the clear hip-hop influences, for example on the drums. But hip-hop doesn't want him, as I found out on a rap forum I was lurking on while trying to find Pharaohe Monch's album*. "Pussy-ass Jew boy bullshit", or something to that effect.

It obviously doesn't matter where he's categorised. That's a job for people like me on the midnight oil, and has no actual importance. The gig was (almost) as packed as last time, and the people there were (almost) as zealous as last time. And what was last time? I believe I concluded by literarily calling it "deadly" at the time. This was deadly too. Real atmosphere, real chemistry. But above all, great songs.

I'll be right back with more Why?

++

*the secondhand CD rack at ground level right in front of the counter in the new Freebird facing onto the Central Bank is THE source for every decent rap album since 1980.

**the picture is of Josiah Wolf, whose skill at playing glockenspiel and drums at the same time is beyond impressive***

***those two asterisks don't refer back to anything specific in the text.

Pussy and paper is poetry, power and pistols.

2008-11-06T17:30:00.002Z

Last year, a nebulous personality in a waistcoat approached various youthful musical enthusiasts with promises of a land of milk and honey. He wanted to create the New Jerusalem. Where? 1995. The youngsters fell, one by one, for his charms. But now, as the stigma of talking about it reduces with every brave soul who comes out and tells the truth, it is time to give up hope. Following the lead of Ailbhe and Bobby, here's my not-actually-a-piss-take (though it was ripe for one) review of Me Against The World. It's shit, but everyone's doing it.

Tupac Shakur understands how to use a gun. He earns quite a lot of money. He also enjoys women, but only on a casual basis. He is at pains to stress to us that his flow in particular is somehow better than everyone else's. Especially his enemies. If it seems logical to you that the listener would be able to pick that out without help, then it's also logical to assume that you probably don't listen to a lot of gangster rap.

Me Against The World is guaranteed to sell millions. It would sell millions even if it was terrible. This is in part because it's probably the most archetypal record of its type so far created. But it's mostly down to the 2Pac myth. Like the gangster version of a bullfighter, 2Pac has become a legend in his own time for living in constant danger, but always coming out on top. If the album proves anything, it's his ability to create in the face of difficulty. Because if prison and a failed assassination attempt isn't difficult, it's hard to know what is.

When other rappers come in with guest verses, the difference between 2Pac and other gangstas becomes a little clearer. Even if he rapped about those things that would annoy anyone who doesn't make their living "hustling", his actual flow is eminently better than most. There are two variables in the term gangster rapper. 2Pac is a rapper who raps about his world. He's not a gangster who advertises that fact through rap. That's key.

So many of the songs are full of regrets, like “Dear Mama” about his mother, or “Me Against The World” which is basically the antithesis of ”It Was A Good Day” by Ice Cube. The production isn’t exactly groundbreaking. Soul keyboard loops and quasi-G funk beats, as standard. It’s a mood thing though. Easily forgivable.

"Young Niggaz" is a highlight, dealing with kids "murdered for hanging at the wrong place at the wrong time". It's strange to hear a man so far down the road into "Thug Life" to be telling the next generation "you could be an accountant, not a drug dealer". It's not affected though. It's part of the whole tapestry of the LP, 2Pac's battle between celebrating being where he wanted to be, and finding out that it's not the way it should be.

Song titles like "If I Die Tonight" and "Me Against The World" reveal a tattooed man with a gun down his trousers, but one who is acutely aware of how transient the world he has created is. As this CD reaches shops, Tupac Shakur is in Clinton Correctional Facility for sexual abuse. He's not a savoury character. As the Intro reminds us, he was shot five times last November. That's something it's impossible not to think of as the disc spins. There are people who are directly harmed by his actions, and there are people who would like to directly harm him too. Tupac lives in a sort of limbo, and he raps from there. This means that there is something very open-ended about Me Against The World. This is not the end of the Tupac Shakur story.

Catch up

2008-11-04T02:18:00.005Z

Port O'Brien were a tentative plus. More, in a slightly less familiar tone than is usually taken here, posted at Analogue. They seemed tired, and they didn't play Pigeonhold, but it was still pretty good. I went to Whelans with a guy I know but hadn't seen in ages, his Nordy girlfriend, Zebedee and Joshua. They plied me with free rider wine and we discussed how Thin Lizzy definitely aren't the best Irish band ever, despite what (assumably) Mighty Stef fans shouted during the set. Zeb thought Van Morrison was the best if he counts, and he didn't hate U2. I withheld my opinion so as not to be rude. They were mad for the Guinness.

The USB cable for my phone doesn't seem to be doing anything, so the era of the no-fi snap is dead and I'm back to stealing Flickr pictures from anyone whose Flickr I can find and Google Image searching "salmon of knowledge". Alas.

Why? was excellent if exactly the same as last time in Crawdaddy, and very much different but very interesting in the stripped down gig at Twisted Pepper. A review of both will be forthcoming.

It's that time of year to start thinking about a top 25. If anyone has any recommendations of things that they think are better than Vampire Weekend, Deerhoof, Of Montreal or Why?, tell me now while there's still breathing room.

New Analogue goes to print tomorrow with a 2,500 word Vampire Weekend interview (uaimse) and a similarly-sized Built To Spill piece from Darragh leading the troops to battle. This one appears to have been copy-edited hard, too, so prepare for new levels of free, mistake-free indie music journalism.

+

I see a salty message written in the eaves

2008-10-28T18:54:00.005Z

Most of the time, I'm the kid. It's been like that for a long time, I don't know why. I was one of the oldest in my class all the way through school, but I ended up being the kid anyway. On my road, I made friends with people a year older than me, and I was always the kid. At school, when I was in Transition Year, I made friends with a couple of people in Sixth year and I was the kid in those relationships too. With Analogue and the people surrounding Analogue, I am a couple of years behind, so I can seem like the kid sometimes too, especially when I show up to interviews. The other night when I was playing a gig in Anseo, a woman was heard to say "he can't be older than fifteen" as I got behind the microphone. I'm the kid. It just ends up that way, I don't know why it is.

But last week, probably for the first time of my life, I felt old at a gig. At the age of twenty, I was suddenly the old curmudgeon, stuck in his ways with his headbanging and attempts at normal dancing. Around me were heaving swarms of underage girls being giddy about the band, and analogous swarms of underage boys trying to look cool in front of them. They pogoed. I tried to pogo too, but somehow, I was weighed down. I tried not to make a snide smile at their chants of "Ezra, Ezra" before the band started, but I couldn't help it. I tried to zone out everyone else, but extended arms with phones and cameras surrounded me and dragged me back to a world where fame is the thing and the fact of Vampire Weekend being on stage in the first place is two-thirds of the battle for enjoying your night.

Bah, humbug.

The band were a lot of fun though, I have to admit. They were feeding off the unselfconscious singing along (of the type I talked about before, with fists raised during lines about Peter Gabriel as if they were singing about world hunger), and putting the energy back into the show. The slightly more skeletal live approach worked really well, and songs that were skeletal to begin with, like Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa, probably came off the best.

I can't pick out any weak moments in the set. They played everything off the album and one new song that sounded like Animal Collective ("I can see that, yeah" - bassist Chris Baio, upon being quizzed on this matter), and even included an ill-thought-out but nevertheless not-terrible Fleetwood Mac cover as an encore. They don't simply replicate the sound of one of the year's best albums, but they don't try to mess with the formula either, and anyone with half a funnybone couldn't have failed to enjoy this.

Oh, and a postscript to the bottle-blonde gentleman who felt it necessary to make a low-res digital video of most of the set over my head while simultaneously dancing... I can think of a website you might like.

+

Trick or treat serial killer

2008-10-24T20:17:00.004+01:00

In one of my multiple incarnations (hint: it's not history nerd, or narcoleptic) I've done a Halloween single. Listen to it here if you like. Then buy a ticket to the gig with the exciting How Will They Cope, the dynamic A Series of Dark Caves and the avian Dublin Duck Dispensary on Halloween night.

I'm only joking, you can't buy tickets. But this is my end of the promotional machine upheld.

Also:
I interviewed Vampire Weekend last night for Analogue. We talked about the validity or otherwise of rich-boy criticism, about ghetto-ising African music, about new songs that sound like Animal Collective and about Tina Fey backlash. Gig review will be done soon.

Wash away what we create

2008-10-19T02:03:00.006+01:00

So I also went to that Drowned In Sound show at Whelans too, thanks to the beneficence of my lovely girlfriend, who pitched exactly right on what I would want for a birthday present. I won't bore you with the details of my Odyssean trek to the venue, because I probably already did between bands, but just remember never to get a 38 bus anywhere ever if you still have the use of your extremities and your critical faculty.

The mess that is post-rich Ireland's transport infrastructure meant that I missed all but the last couple of songs by Times New Viking. Close watchers will know that I also missed Times New Viking last time they played because I was at The Mae Shi and they went on early. Guess why I missed them this time? They went on early.

What sort of promoter puts on "motherfuckin' Times New Viking" (Dean Allen Spunt, No Age) at 8 o'clock? I mean I made it to the venue at about twenty minutes past eight and I only saw the last two songs. The ticket said doors at 8. I have never been to a gig where the band starts at the time the doors were supposed to open, because logically, there would be no-one there at that time. This is apparently what happened last night. I wouldn't know, because I wasn't there. Fuck everything.

Anyway, next tack.

No Age were incredible, thankfully. It was my second time seeing them, but my first time indoors, and my first time with a respectful amount of album-listening done. Last time was more fun in the sense that the Dutch punks at Lowlands were moshing enough to make my wobbly headbanging seem okay. Last night my wobbly headbanging seemed to be shared by only two or three acquaintances and the members of Los Campesinos! who were in the crowd.

The show, though. Very, very loud. Intense. No Age have some really great songs. Teen Creeps, for example, has got to be one of the songs of the year.

Strum, strum, strum. Dididi-deh-do-do - NOISE. Washes and washes of noise. Two guys just being honest about it, playing a great song at a volume that cannot be ignored. There aren't many better moments in modern life than the heavy bit kicking in. And that's what No Age are all about.

They had some new stuff (I think) which was more directly rocking and less obfuscated. I enjoyed this. I would like to see No Age at a house-party (maybe the Hideaway House as Adam said in a comment below) or somewhere less self-conscious and less full of LC! fans. Because they've got energy in spades and it's a pity not many were sharing in the loud, loud glory of it.

As for Los Campesinos, I didn't like them. I've never liked them anyway, but they were never going to beat No Age. It's their own fault for picking such good support acts. Their lyrics are so blatantly poserish that I'm surprised anyone except teenage girls can stomach it. "I was listening to music and reading fiction at the same time" or whatever. I mean, what the fuck is that? They play like a major label band on Letterman or something. There's no heart to it. They're just trying to be clever, and their songs aren't particularly good. They're the opposite of No Age's honesty, in my eyes. If they didn't have vaguely different instrumentation I don't think anyone would ever have thought of them as separate from the NME continuum in the first place. Because they're not. Death to Los Campesinos.

Long live No Age.

Times New Viking I am sorry please don't split up before I see you.

+

Gealt-teach iargúlta lastiar den ré

2008-10-16T18:42:00.004+01:00

Hideaway House. What a good idea. Take a place that is available, whether by chance, circumstance or charity, and put on gigs there. But don't make it into a "venue". No bar. No need. No anything. Just a room in a house with a PA. Get bands you think are good rather than bands you think will draw, because you don't have to cover any particular monetary figure, and the room is tiny anyway. Charge five euro. If you charge less, you won't be able to get those touring bands, or pay expenses for bands from elsewhere in the country. If you charge more, Ian MacKaye will murder a yuppie.

The Hideaway House is art in itself, in a way. It's just a guy's house. But open it up as a place to have gigs and the posters on the walls from festivals in Europe or movies in French, the cracks in the ceiling, the receding branchy darkness of the garden and the huge banner saying "This Area Is A Social Space" all seem to take on some kind of... significance?

It's a cool place. Better acoustics than a church hall. Better entertainment (and definitely better manners) than a house party. Better couches than... Whelans...

The gig itself wasn't actually that impressive. The Creeping Nobodies ( from Canada) are essentially avatars of form over content. They aren't quite as no-wave blanked-out as Cap Pas Cap while playing, and they did attempt to crack a couple of poor jokes to a cold-ish room, but their music is repetitive and amelodic. It's not that they come off like they write bad melodies. It just seems like melody doesn't figure in their songwriting process at all. They make a kind of arty murk, with enough danciness for the indie-rock shuffle, but not enough that anyone would have to challenge their own self-consciousness.

Music For Dead Birds (Galway), who were before the CNs, were a little better. They had some good anti-folk moments, and the guy's voice is interesting, but they veered back too often towards that regular sincere acousticism that I have a very low tolerance for (cf Heathers mini-review).

Cap Pas Cap were probably my favourites of the evening, and the first band that I saw. Last time I saw them was about a year ago and I was on the verge of falling for their shtick. This time, it was a little hard not to find the dead expressions and quarantined sound kind of affected, but they still played a good set. They didn't even play the hits (off the 12" that I bought when they supported Crystal Castles in Kennedys - the night I realised that even serious people can fall for bad music if it's energetic and it looks cool. Fuck anyone who hated on Nialler9 that time). But some of their newer stuff, particularly the last song they played (which featured a tom-heavy drum beat - a mini-departure for CPC) was interesting.

I was late for Ran, consensus was that they were deadly though. So well done Ran.

I'm going to leave this gig without the customary plus or a minus, because I didn't think that much of the headliners but I liked the whole idea. Check it out if you haven't been.

No encroaching

2008-10-10T00:33:00.002+01:00

Went to see Ireland B play Nottingham Forest in Dalymount tonight. A couple of key points:

It was probably the worst football match I've ever paid to see.
The only notable player from either team was Caleb Folan who scored before being taken off at half time. He's actually good, and made an effort.
Nottingham Forest feature a geriatric but still plugging away Andy Cole. Compare his trajectory with his strike partner Dwight Yorke's... one is playing friendlies on a Wednesday night for a team of dossers against a team of kids. The other is an anchoring midfielder in a decent enough Premiership team.
The queue for chips was at least 8 long the whole way through the second half.

Trap was there though. Nice to see he really exists. Also (you can look away here anyone who knows me in reality):

Anthony Stokes of Sunderland and Ireland (Bs but also senior squad) once played for Shelbourne, before he moved over to Arsenal's youth academy. When I was in second year, the team I played sluggish but sly right back for lost 15-0 to his Shelbourne team in the cup, and he scored 8 goals. In my memory he was about 6'3". In reality he seems about 5'9". But that's my claim to fame. I hope he becomes a future legend.

In a side note, I went to Soundcheck afterwards with two accomplices. We walked in, walked upstairs, came back downstairs, stood awkwardly for three minutes and then left. Note to self: you are too young for Soundcheck.

Art-core, you know the score

2008-10-05T17:46:00.004+01:00

I'm not all that sold on Lovvers as a band. Being knowingly obscurantist always irks me a bit. I gave out to anyone who would listen for about three weeks about how Times New Viking were just pretentiously messing with perfectly good Yo La Tengo-esque songs for the sake of being arty. I'm not that into Husker Du, not enough to Google their name to copy and paste it with umlauts into this article anyway. My pop-sense tingles when bands don't let you hear as much of their song as they hear in their head.

But after the gig, I can see why their album (or EP, if you don't consider seven songs in less than fifteen minutes to qualify for album status) sounds like it does. They're trying to reflect an attitude and an energy from the live show.

And the live show is good. It takes all the cues from the hardcore end of things. The guitarist, bassist and drummer play as loud and as hard as they can for the entire set. Everyone sweats. And the singer sings from the crowd. Hardcore singers, as much as anyone into hardcore that I know would probably punch me for saying this, are as much cheerleaders as they are musicians. Their job is to break down the arms-folded barrier between the crowd and the band. They go, they bump into people, if anyone knows the words they get equal access to the microphone.

Lovvers did it to a tee. Their arty, garage rock buzz is what saves them from being a crappy hardcore band, but their hardcore buzz is what makes them fun. The guy flopped into people. I pushed him a few times, he pulled up my t-shirt and put his sweaty face on my shoulder. It was horrible. They played a load of songs in a short space of time. 'No Romantics' and 'No Fun' were their best songs.

But they weren't really playing songs, the way I see it. They were just transferring energy. That's their milieu, I think. It definitely comes across better with a sweaty man in your face than it does with just an album the length of an Our Brother The Native song at your disposal. It was fun, and I think the crowd felt a little more involved than they normally would. All the hallmarks of a good hardcore show were present, and it was all the better for it.

+

Swoop swoop (rock rock)

2008-10-05T17:38:00.003+01:00

(This is what I wrote on my phone as a review of BATS, one of the best live bands to be seen in Dublin, after their support of Lovvers in the Boom Boom Room):

Science is the doctrine
Music is the medium
AND BATS WILL DESTROY YOU

The no-fi photograph from the same phone/mindset.

++

Who needs an eye?

2008-10-05T17:14:00.004+01:00

Two open proposals to Grand Pocket Orchestra:

1. Make a limited run of GPO action figures. Of all bands that have ever lived in Ireland, none would make a better set than you. And it's not even like people would just want the singer or anything. Everyone in Grand Pocket Orchestra has a distinct, fruit-flavoured air. There could even be two Paddys, one with a guitar and one with a mic lead wrapped around himself, eyes bulging, face looking blue from lack of oxygen, doing the Wii skiing action that he does. I would buy them. If Of Montreal can sell their album as a paper lantern, GPO's album could easily be action figures with secret USB ports where you can get 1/4 of the album.

2. How deadly would a Monkees-style mini-series about life in a fictionalised Grand Pocket Orchestra house be? They could all get into half an hour of mischief, before introducing guest stars or something, and they could open and close with a song. There could be puppets in the kitchen who only talk to Bronwyn or something. Imagine it though... *ding dong* "I wonder who's there?" (Noel Edmonds style), then the door opens to canned applause and Fight Like Apes appear. The fun is doubled.

So the in-store itself in Tower was fun. Grand Pocket Orchestra are getting better and better as time goes by and any initial reservations I had about a second guitarist drowning the tweeness are completely gone by now. The balance that seemed like it was slightly tipped when Flesh first joined is restored, and the songs are getting complex and nearly chin-strokingly thought-worthy while staying in the same Kinder Egg world. It was disappointing that there weren't more people there to get a copy of Make Happy War, which is the older, better brother to the young, fun first EP.

+

New Blogroll

2008-09-23T22:34:00.003+01:00

How fancy is the new blogroll thing? Does it in order of the most recently updated. That's going to make things so handy for me. I can finally delete half of the myriad live and dead bookmarks on my Firefox. Bit of spring cleaning.

I will start going to gigs again soon, I promise. Maybe starting with Our Brother The Native on Sunday.

Then I can hopefully knock the video for The Rat down to a place where it doesn't wreck the Blogger theme, and get back into the right way of doing things around here.

The Rat.

2008-09-22T00:07:00.003+01:00

Tried to post this on the Analogue blog a while ago but I don't think it worked.

No words can express how deadly I think this song and this performance is. If words could express it, the words I would choose would be: violent, frenetic, energetic, frantic, fast.

I wonder if the Walkmen ever resent Vampire Weekend for leapfrogging them.

Statement of intent

2008-09-21T00:02:00.002+01:00

Here's some gigs I want to go to.

Our Brother The Native
Holy Fuck
Times New Viking/No Age
Port O'Brien
Vampire Weekend
Story of Hair/So Cow
Roots Manuva
The Walkmen
TV On The Radio
Jay Reatard
Built To Spill
Wolf Parade
Beach House

Never going to get to all of those.

Special Bulletin

2008-09-19T01:15:00.004+01:00

Started listening to Fight Like Apes' album as soon as it went up to stream.

One-listen verdict:

guarded expression...

cautious smile

wide grin!

Gareth wanted me to link to his exclusive review of it, for some reason possibly relating to a belief that Fight Like Apes fans read this blog because it's named after them. So go there, read it, then go to entertainment.ie and compare notes with newly ebonics-employing Analogue web supremo Gareth Stack.

music scene is crazy, bands start up each and every day

2008-09-18T17:44:00.006+01:00

A summary is a shortened version of the original. The main purpose of such a simplification is to highlight the major points from the genuine (much longer) subject, e.g. a text, a film or an event. The aim is to help the audience get the gist in a short period of time.

Groom - Not impressed. A little bit OK Computer-y at times, but way less cool. And the song of theirs that kept coming on between bands is something I cannot imagine anyone who doesn't watch rom-coms without irony ever liking.

The Hot Sprockets - I was expecting "folky" and "a whole different buzz altogether", because the girl from Muzu said they'd be like that. But they weren't.

Holy Roman Army - This band needs to get some visuals going, and figure out a more exciting way of playing live. Granted, they were on way too early for the kind of music they play, but being soporific is never a good trait in a live band.

The Vinny Club - Man pressed play on iTunes, then arses around.

Foxface - Their blurb was about ten times as exciting as they were.

Noise Control - 90s rap rock? Seriously?

Heathers - Can't see why everyone is so impressed by these. They have a couple of lyrical turns that make you go "hmm", but if you do everything using terms of reference derived from female American singer-songwriters from the 1990s you're never going to be able to be new or impressive. I also couldn't stomach the fact that they literally did not stop harmonising once in the first four songs.

Carly Sings - Too quiet, venue too loud. Couldn't hear, had to leave.

So there you have it. Hard Working Class Heroes 2008.

One Big Stormcloud In A Duffelcoat

2008-09-18T17:21:00.004+01:00

Apologies to MC Aoife Mc for shamelessly pilfering this image, but it's the best one on the first page of Google Image search and my camera was stolen in Munich so that's where I have to go for pictures.

It came from the West, with a "strange American accent that I really didn't see coming". So Cow has been to Dublin before, at Dame Lane for Loreana, in Anseo for Hefty Horse and at somewhere else for some Korean thing during Electric Picnic. But So Cow has never been this deadly, at least while I was there.

Seriously, when did this happen? So Cow has made two excellent albums in These Truly Are End Times and I'm Siding With My Captors, and played fairly good live shows. But the live shows have always been approximations of the recorded material to some extent, because they've been to backing tracks or with under-rehearsed bands. This time, with a drummer capable of bombing a Middle-Eastern city with only his sticks and two tins of biscuits, and a bassist with a beard, So Cow turned into some kind of breakneck proto-punk garage trio. It doesn't sound like an effort to be like what's in Brian's head or on his CDs any more. It sounds outside that, better.

It was breakneck. It was slightly out of tune at points. Songs like Moon Geun Young and Casablanca from the first album got garaged up and spat out so they'd sit with the stuff from the second album. And the second album stuff, like Greetings and Normalcy, got a serious shot in the arm, infused with all kinds of aggression and energy. Most solos were substituted with simple rocking out. Some chunks were added, like the metal intro, or various outro messes. The whole thing, being "SO COW 2008! PLAYING THE HITS!" went by way too quickly and left me feeling like I'd been hit by a fish or something equally unexpected.

The best part for me, though, was To Do List. Like an oasis in a storm of ultra-tight garage mess, original So Cow and new So Cow drummer harmonised over a strummed ditty for a minute of so. Until... breaking into full band awesomeness and carrying the thing to a complete new level. One of those "Woah!" moments. Gig of the weekend this time, without a doubt.

+++

Programmed To Destroy Us

2008-09-18T16:10:00.008+01:00

So on to Sunday. The Judaeo-Christian God, who'd been letting the cistern fill up since mid-August, eventually opened the flood-gates and flushed his toilet once more onto the hapless Dublin. This had a fairly negative effect on Hard Working Class Heroes. Example 1: I got wet. Example 2: I had to wear an unfashionable anorak over my already unfashionable attire. Example 3: Fewer people showed up.

Robotnik though, was unmissable. If you were at Meeting House Square or Andrew's Lane at all during the festival, you've seen the video for Puddlestarter he did for Muzu, featuring an anthropomorphic horse with a rainbow umbrella getting super-soaked and making some of the greatest expressions ever recorded while battling Chris Morrin on the floor for supremacy during the instrumental section.

The horse was there again in the Academy 2. Robotnik is someone who does enough to be on the radar for a lot of people, but who doesn't necessarily fill them with childish joy and enthusiasm for his music. More than 50% of his appeal is in the drama and the visuals, in my opinion. Without the costumes, the supersoaker, the horse, he's just a guy. I'm sure people would still listen to a degree, but he wouldn't have the medium-sized status he has right now.

His set was good enough, for what it was. People Walk Away was a highlight. He has a tendency to sound a bit too influenced by the music of the 90s, and at other times he forgets melody. But with Robotnik, image is core. He sang a song about rain dressed in a raincoat. He did some other okay stuff. Then he played Puddlestarter and had an elaborate and slightly too violent fake fight with a horse, who tackled him after the fight was over and forced him to sing the last chorus from the floor. It was fun, not enough fun to make me want to run out and buy the album, but fun.

+

This banana could be you! Or me!

2008-09-18T16:10:00.005+01:00

Nowwwwwwwwwwww...

As Crawdaddy filled up for Fight Like Apes, there was a definite sense of anticipation. It felt weird, like on of the landmark shows people talk about - The Smiths in the Hacienda or Radiohead at Glastonbury 97 or whatever. The room was heaving. They played at the same time as the Concretes, but I can't imagine even having given half a thought to seeing that. It was like a big fight or something. Like when Bernard Dunne fought Kiko. It wasn't the title fight, but if he fucked it up (which he did) it was back to square one. Luckily, Fight Like Apes were not knocked out by a Spaniard in the first round. The opposite, really. Gig of the weekend.

That was this time last year. "Elephant 6 on punk rock tablets" I said. "Like a wall" I said. Various other universally positive things I said. It was definitely gig of the weekend. It was probably gig of the year, being honest. But obviously things have changed between my ears and Fight Like Apes in the interim. I'm one year less wide-eyed about the fact that an Irish band can actually be GOOD. And they put out a single I really didn't like.

So how were they in Meeting House Square, the damp towel of venues?

Great, actually. Unlike SEBP and Bats, they were sufficiently loud to connect (possibly to do with the pseudo-scientific "synths=full wave walls of sound" theory I invented out of my arse last year) even though they kept giving out to the soundman, who was probably on a drawbridge over a pit of Dublin City Council alligators.

The high points were manifold. Either I'm starting to appreciate the lesser spotted (non-first EP or Do You Karate?) Fight Like Apes songs more, or I'm just listening harder because I don't know them as well, but some of them really shined. Knucklehead is an amazing song, and must be feeling very unfulfilled that it wasn't the A-side to its Photoshopped cousin Something Global. Accidental Wrong Hole is still one of the best premises for a song in existence. The new one that's a letter to a roadie called Samuel, dispensing with his services with a double-suplex followed by a backbreaker, is power pop in a good way.

The new one with the words "lovely noise" prominent was alright... suffered from a bit of lyrical Something Global-ism in that it was very "you do this, we hate you for it". But y'know... who am I to judge, that's pretty much what I do on this blog (except it's usually love). And I hope they weren't trying to imply that Yo La Tengo aren't deadly.

I need to stop rambling on so much in this blog, I used to have a kind of concise style and I avoided the word "I".

The middle-aged man who, last year, stood beside me and Bobby and laughed completely out of proportion to his increasingly piss-taking tennis jokes (they were wearing sweatbands) turned up again. Like, it started with "They must play tennis" "Ahahahaha!" but by the end it was just like "Racket!" "Ahahahahaha!"... "Andre Agassi!" "Ahahahaha!" He must be related to someone in the band, or work for HWCH. I hope he enjoyed it as much this year.

Did I? I suppose, in a different way. Some people I talked to didn't, but I thought it was really good. The way they play and act seems naturally more geared towards bigger stage and a bigger crowd now, and that helps in somewhere like Meeting House Square. They fought on the ground and threw a bass at each other. They played great noisy pop songs with intensity. Their album is streaming on entertainment.ie from tomorrow, and fickle as I am, I can't wait.

++

Dance of the Sugar Rush Fairy

2008-09-17T17:38:00.011+01:00

Okay, back to do this after an absence due to dog ear haematoma removal. Let's do this shit.

Grand Pocket Orchestra are back (i.e. I haven't seen them in a while), and they've evolved (like a Pokémon) into something essentially the same but intangibly better. Boat loads of songs I hadn't heard before were spilled out into Andrew's Lane Theatre on Saturday with maximum aplomb. It wasn't just that I hadn't seen them performed before... they were songs I hadn't heard before, a style that was new and different. Less finger-paint, more Jackson Pollock.

New single Ballet Shoes is an example of it, to an extent. Hearing that song makes me do the band-comparison stream in my head. Vampire Weekend? Clap Your Hands Say Yeah!? Built To Spill? Am I just going mad? Possible. But other songs, only experienced for their sub-two minute durations and then part-forgotten after they zoomed by, had even more of an impression. One of the songs, with no guitar in the intro, reminded me of something Sunset Rubdown might do. Another one didn't remind me of anyone from America, and I can't remember any details apart from thinking it was DEADLY.

In my last Fight Like Apes post, I finished saying something silly like "Grand Pocket Orchestra, step it up" or whatever. But I have to admit, as stupid a remark as that was, I was not fully expecting them to make a leap. I liked them, and I expected them to be as good as they were for a while yet. The kind of band I'd go to see at a festival, or at Whelans maybe if I had the money to spare. I'd buy what they put out, and use it in my CD alarm clock. But, to borrow Ian's expression... shit just got real, yo. Excitement is kicking in. Genuinely anticipating their next EP. Waiting on an album. Wanting to see the songs that they played so briefly again, and get to know them. I can't wait to watch this unfold.

Apart from intelligent and engaging new songs, Grand Pocket Orchestra still have: an ADD-esque mentaller for a singer, a lady with an octopus-like capacity for playing multiple instruments simultaneously, a vaguely unsettling guitarist and an excellent drummer with a mohawk. The live show has never been less than excellent with this combination. But imagine: GPO action figures... how is that not a good idea?

++

Winged/Wicked Things

2008-09-17T17:38:00.010+01:00

Science in the lyrics, in the music and in the spare time. Dublin's most precise prog-hardcore band were unfortunately set-up in Meeting House Square on Saturday, thus negating one of their most prominent traits (the loudness) and leaving them a little disconnected. Bats are a band who generally successfully peddle a bag of metal, hardcore and prog tricks in a conscientious manner to people who would never dream of listening to some of the bands the members probably listen to at home. Not being loud enough makes this a little impotent.

Still good though. These Ones Lay Eggs (from 2007's Cruel Sea Scientist) is a bit of a magnum opus, flicking between rhythms and tempos like my mother with a remote control. You just get enough of each part to be interested, then it moves on. It's like this with most Bats songs, These Ones Lay Eggs is just particularly excellent.

Apart from that one, my highlight of the set was the singer (who is always recognisable in public because of the Anticon t-shirt that appears to have fused to his torso) dedicating a song to "the people at CERN who are doing an amazing job". To break the universal silence, I may have shouted "yeah!". And then looked up what it actually did when I woke up the next morning.

So there you have it. Bats. Pedagogical progcore.

+

The Last Of The Famous International Playboys

2008-09-15T20:24:00.003+01:00

David Turpin splits the ranks, I think. You either like it or you don't. I had no idea which camp I was in until I actually showed up at 4 Dame Lane on Friday. Some were convinced I wouldn't like it at all. Others were simply convinced that THEY didn't like it. Still others gave his music the fantastic description of being "suggestively electronic". And the resident Analogue pop-savant (who I still haven't met, though Indie Bar tells me he's AMAZING) wrung a great interview out of him. All of this made me more and more curious.

I admit I only saw the second half of the set because I was picking up gear, but I walked straight to the 'yea' side of the house. Being whispery and suggestive is not something that would ever put me off music after four years of Xiu Xiu, so I have to say I was enthralled. My head started to fill with names of other bands, which tends to happen when I get excited about something: Patrick Wolf, Jim O'Rourke, Antony & The Johnsons... but most of all...

I was that stereotypical teenage Morrissey obsessive, if you didn't already know. Turpin drips Morrisseyism. Not in his style of singing or his music, particularly. But just his manner. Complete self-assurance, and an eyebrow raised at all times, whether in reality or just in his head. So long live David Turpin.

+

Duck Duck Goose

2008-09-15T20:14:00.002+01:00

This was a lot of messy, messy fun.

AND WHEN IT'S TIME TO PARTY WE WILL ALWAYS PARTY HARD

2008-09-15T19:37:00.004+01:00

I spent the winter (not on the verge of a total breakdown or in Norway) on the floor of my bedroom playing a second-hand copy of Madden 03 for PS2 to the strains of Mcluskyism, (awakeinwhitechapel) and a copy of the Super Extra Bonus Party LP I adopted from the Analogue post-bag.

Of the three, it was SEBP that I least expected to get into. But lo! through the magic of the extra effort an actual physical copy of an album elicits in me, I found myself throwing it on every other night. I jerked my head to Mushie Shake, imagined I knew the words to Spanik Sabotage and appreciated the excellent foray into traditionalism that was Everything Flows.

Friday in Meeting House Square was my first time seeing them live, apart from a few flashing lights behind a few hundred sweaty backs at the very end of their set last year. It was good, but I can't help but think that it could've been better in a few ways. Not that any of those ways are in any way Super Extra Bonus Party's fault.

First off - low volume? Come on sound man! Jesus! If they want the drums turned way up, turn them way up. If music is supposed to grab you and make you dance or jump or nod your head, play it at a volume that allows that to happen. Fuck city bye-laws.

Then, from second- and third-hand accounts, the lights and visuals are one of the best parts of the set. Outdoors, lights are ineffective unless you're putting Radiohead or Flaming Lips money into it. And the screen for the visuals required a full 90 degree turn to see. So it was a choice between the band or the visuals. Not a choice that should have to be made, especially for integrated visuals (as opposed to simply playing the Robotnik video in the background).

Still, they made the best of it. It was a party. Feet were tapped, heads nodded. The band jumped, I wished the music was loud enough and I was drunk enough to jump as well. It's actually ridiculous that I haven't seen them, now that I come to think of it. I was at Club NME when they played, but I was playing elsewhere and only made it there in time for Cadence Weapon. Friends have gone while I was saving money or going to something else. I even won a free guestlist off Nialler9 once, but I was either at another gig or I didn't check it in time.

I will see them again though. Indoors, preferably

+

You! You work all night!

2008-09-15T19:12:00.003+01:00

Over the weekend, I attended my second Hard Working Class Heroes festival. This time last year I was mulling over the experiences of the twenty or so bands I saw/noticed, and considering whether to start a blog to collect my thoughts. I decided to do it, and God help me, I live with that narcissistic watershed to this day. That was in the Pod complex, and it was great. This year it was in various venues scattered from Abbey Street to Andrew's Lane.

Obvious advantages of having it in Pod:

So, so quick to get from venue to venue because a) everything is obviously connected, b) you don't have to get through the hen-stag traffic that clogs the arteries Temple Bar on the weekend and c) I only got asked for ID once over the whole weekend last year(as opposed to somewhere between ten and twenty this weekend - DO I REALLY LOOK THAT YOUNG?)
You don't get the same bleed to surroundings. How many people missed (at least the start of) bands because they were getting food, or got delayed in a shop buying cigarettes, or something like that? In Tripod, it's a five minute walk to anywhere remotely worth being, so people tend to just stick around.
It doesn't rain indoors.

Anyway, here's how I'm going to format this year's reviews. I didn't see as much as last year, and half of what I did see, I only saw some of, so I'm only going to do full reviews for a couple of bands per night, and then do a wrap-up. Sásta go leor?

Right. Better get to it then.

Lowlands Notebooks - Sunday etc

2008-08-24T17:06:00.002+01:00

Lykke Li:

magnetic personality - eclectic music - tendency towards hit or miss -banging single

+

MGMT:

songs all either "bleeeeep or faaar away" (thank you Katie) - limp - bad

-

Sigur Rós:

quiet loud fairytale thing - not half as bowled over as my friends - most of the set ordinary - regular gig, not theatre set-up as Oxegen 2006 - highlights did hit the nordic sublime

+

The Roots:

sore neck from jerking it and trying to dance to rap - unused to this - virtuouso instrumentalists - guitar/bass solos for twelve hours - rap as part of the music, not over the music - ultimate fun - genius festival closer

++

Lowlands Notebooks - Saturday etc

2008-08-24T16:55:00.003+01:00

50 Jaar Nederpop (Dutch pop retrospective, see here):

bim bam bom, House For Saaaaaaaaaaaale, Heideroosjes singer, fullest main stage ever, loads of fun

Los Campesinos:

Pete Dohertwee - nothing there - no gap between fun and good music

-

British Sea Power:

dull, soft focus, 4/4 rubbish

-

Breeders:

halfway between sloppy Sleater-Kinney and less self-absorbed Cat Power, even if they were there first. not very good.

-

Iron and Wine:

Vote For Pedro t-shirt brigade vs. my Dublin jersey - unfolding and uncertain - jam sensibilities - virtuoso drummer - Woman King opener - a little too spacey

+

No Age:

bedroom noise - attack! - youth abandon punk

+

Diplo:

mix mix mix - combining rhythms - Soulja Boy and Lil Wayne and Paper planes - Baltimore to bhangra

+

Modeselektor:

boring

-

Lowlands Notebooks - Friday etc

2008-08-23T01:15:00.002+01:00

Holy Fuck:

sweaty, communal, committed, Lovely Allen, Super Inuit. ultra buzzing vibrant violent headnod energy.

++

Hot Chip:

ragged, loud, second record, Nothing Compares 2 U, bit classic rock, bit festival set

+

Lowlands Notebooks - Sex Pistols

2008-08-23T01:14:00.001+01:00

senile grand aunt being bitten by vipers into singing the hits

but perversely ENJOYING it.

clap along everything

anarchy breakdown singalong

absolute travesty

-

Lowlands Notebooks - Flaming Lips

2008-08-23T01:11:00.002+01:00

pixellated, made of space

panda head

streamer rafter disaster

alien rainbow mess

future laser, retro box of light

squid gong

SHEETS OF LIQUID SKY

last party in the world

++

Get Low

2008-08-14T12:24:00.002+01:00

In Amsterdam now, about to get the train out to the world's largest artificial island for Lowlands. Last year's line-up (LCD Soundsystem, Arcade Fire, Battles, Sonic Youth, Interpol at marquee level alone) was exceptional, and there aren't really any bands I'm truly pranging to see, but I'm sure I'll find some way to keep busy. For example:

Flaming Lips - widely acknowledged as an incredibly awesome mad freakout live experience. I haven't seen them before, so that's one thing I will definitely not miss due to being drunk, stoned or lost.
Heima/Sigur Ros - They're showing Heima on the huge screen, which is a perfect opportunity to flake. Or, if I'm arsed, I might actually go to see them. Quiet -> LOUD. A simple formula, but it's worked for them so far.
Hot Chip - There are all kinds of dance acts playing, but I'm not heavily into that kind of thing. I prefer the soft, knowing electronics of the Chip.
Holy Fuck - I also like the hard, grating electronics of the Fuck.
Iron & Wine - I had Woman King years ago. I still do, actually. Maybe this will be good.
Lykke Li - The hype choice.
Modeselektor - Have to dance sometime.
The Roots - Self-proclaimed greatest ever live hip hop band. Didn't know they were playing until just there.
There Will Be Blood - One of the best films ever made. Clashes with something good, but we'll see.

Things I Will Not Be Going To See:

The National - Not an old man, don't like dad rock.

Snack Point Charlie

2008-08-09T22:10:00.003+01:00

I'm in Berlin at the moment. I have to be up early in the morning, so I can't go to the apparent best club ever which Junior Boys led my friends to last week, prefacing a 48 hour odyssey that ended without shoes in Kreuzburg for one of them. I only have one pair of shoes with me anyway, and I probably don't have that kind of stamina in me, so I'm going to be dull and blog some bits and pieces.

I got my mp3 player, along with a camera, stolen in the "Party-Room" of a hostel in Munich of all places. This has led to a quite surprising result. When you don't have the option to listen to Times New Viking at full volume whenever you want, you end up much more aware of the music being played on the PA in receptions, restaurants and shops. The song in your head isn't of your choosing any more. This is especially important when you're spending a month staring out of train windows for between four and nine hours at a time. The soundtrack of your life is out of your control.

Mine, so far (because every journey further than a walk to the shops has its built-in soundtrack) has been as follows: Bad Boys For Life by Puff Daddy, Without Me by Eminem, the zither theme from The Third Man (since Vienna), Nantes by Beirut, everything by the Pet Shop Boys (thank you German radio), Mercy by Duffy, that song by the Rasmus, Nessun Dorma by Paul Potts.

I miss Times New Viking.

A few observations from Berlin: at some sort of ersatz Nazi museum on boards near the last stretch of the Wall, I noticed the phrase "Unsichtbar gemachte Geschichte" - history made invisible. It was about the rebuilding of Germany after the war, and having been here for nearly a week, I thought that described the way things are here really well.

It's not that they're allergic to history in general - they're proud people, and there are the same monuments and symbolic statues and museums and things here that there are in Vienna and elsewhere. It's just that they skip straight from Bismarck to JFK. For something so unavoidable anywhere in Europe, it's kind of remarkable they manage not to Mention The War. Obviously it's for the best, and I'm sure it's just one of those things known and not spoken. But that's just my one-visit, one-week observation.

I'm going to go do something else now, maybe eat Vietnamese food. Bruce Springsteen just came on the radio where I am. I am not happy at the prospect of having it in my head for the day tomorrow, no matter what Dan, Rory or my parents say.

In other news, Dublin Duck Dispensary are playing Hard Working Class Heroes, on the Friday at 7.30 in Andrew's Lane. "Unmissable". Check out the Hot Press review.

Tschuss, Blogosphere.

Polskaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

2008-07-28T16:20:00.004+01:00

I'm in Krakow at the moment, about a week into a month-long wander through Europe ending at Lowlands in Holland. I've been to Vienna, Bratislava and Auschwitz so far and I'll be in Warsaw by tomorrow night, but in keeping with my diligent efforts to conscientiously document my entire experience of live music, I am going to blog for a minute between checking e-mails and train timetables in a net cafe.

I saw Gipsy Kings accidently in a square in the middle of the Old City in Krakow last night. They were pretty funny. Latin rhythm, tourists shaking their bum-bags, gypsy dancers gypsy dancing. My girlfriend loved it. She was brought up on the Gipsy Kings. I, on the other hand, was discovering them for the first time apart from that Bombolayo song that I didn't know was by them.

It was funny. I laughed. The singer kept saying "Polskaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" even though everyone in the square at 10 on a Sunday was an American tourist or a stag night. An experience.

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About as much use as a cuntless whore

2008-07-19T20:18:00.003+01:00

Okay, the title is a little strong. Fight Like Apes releasing Something Global in Tower Records. It's pretty much a consensus opinion from people I've talked to that the single is bad and sounds like sickly polished pop-punk. It sounds like that live too. Even their good songs (including the one that contains the line this blog is named after) are losing edge and gaining polish. I really, really, really did not want to be sitting here saying "I liked their early stuff" before the album even came out. But it's hard not to.

Their best songs have been the same ones since way back when. Jake Summers and Lend Me Your Face. They're still good, but the bite's not there any more. It used to seem like May Kay was going to climb off the stage, grab your skull, put a foot on the wall for leverage and rip your face off whether or not you wanted her to. It's not like that any more.

Without the roughshod, grinning lunatic side, they're just another band. Just another Hooray For Humans. That minute change in mood makes the kitschness and the pop culture pillaging seem more contrived than inspired.

I assume the album's going to sound like Something Global, production-wise, and have the boring songs (i.e. anything not on the first EP or some of the second EP) on it. There's still a chance they could write 10 great songs in the next year or so and come out with a good second album, because all the things that made them so good are still hanging around somewhere underneath the Mr. Muscle approach. But as it stands, I don't know. I'm really sad about making this post. But whatever.

Grand Pocket Orchestra, you're up.

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Oxegen Preview

2008-07-11T22:27:00.002+01:00

Friday:

Mud

Saturday:

Tent-slashing

Sunday:

Despair

Dot's Ugly Cadence

2008-07-11T12:40:00.004+01:00

So last night's gig then, put on by new Analogue Magazine Promotions/etc guy Daniel Gray in conjunction with Hefty Horse. I resigned my part in the casual comedy at about nine o'clock (it went well I thought) and then went for a short walk to buy a quarter of fizzy cola bottles before returning for Disconnect The Dots.

Their deal is mostly instrumental, with effects on the vocals so that they sort of become part of the music rather than on top of it. There is a core of really intelligent songwriting in what they do, and at various points they sounded to me like Sunny Day Real Estate, certain of the louder Smiths songs and High Places, but always with the sampler beeping time in the background. Between the mix, the guitar sound and certain moments of uncertainty, they may not have acquitted themselves quite perfectly, but I, knowing the pair of them but not knowing what their music would sound like, was quite impressed by some of their songs, particularly the Dan-on-guitar, Cáit-singing, no sampler one (which was the Sunny Day one) and the last one.

Ugly Megan headlined, and I'm still a big fan. They had toys and thumped acoustic guitar beats, and twee melodies to the hilt. I described all that stuff in the last entry I did about them so I won't do it again. What came across to me the most this time was how much they're into rap and rap culture. I don't know how I missed it before, I thought the Snoop cover was just one of those twee jokes. But no.

They did a cover of American Boy which was in fact better than the Snoop one by a fair bit, and one of the highlights of their set was a song that goes "I'd give you all the love that a pimp can give a ho, because you're my favourite ho, my favourite ho, fo sho". Over the twee-est Moldy Peaches strummy backing ever. Their "encore" was probably my favourite though. Intricate guitar-thumping beat that reminded me of The Caterpillar by the Cure.

After dumping my stuff in the apartment of someone I don't know (sorry!) I ended up at Cadence Weapon in Club NME, which was surprisingly empty. I hadn't heard much Cadence Weapon, but I was disappointed. The dancey beats and "jump!" parts do nothing for me. I was expecting a sort of MF Doom type thing for some reason (because people were calling him the saviour of rap occasionally + he's a nerd) but his actual lyrical skills are nowhere near as good. Nowhere near. I was also disappointed that he played mostly dancehall in his DJ set. So down with Cadence Weapon

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Part Time Job

2008-07-09T00:13:00.002+01:00

Something I do occasionally is make music on my four track. It is usually layered up with fake versions of things like French horns and Moog sounds. It's about things varying from date rape in the Abbasid empire to Macbeth, taking in city-tiredness and feelings of resignation on the way. I call it/myself Treehouses.

On Thursday I'll be supporting Ugly Megan and Disconnect The Dots in Anseo on Camden St. I won't have the layers of French horns, but I will have electric piano, drum machine and Fender Stratocaster with which to back myself up. I'll be playing for about 25 minutes, some time not long after 8 o'clock.

The €6.50 door price goes on financing a 'zine that the Indie Bar Kid is trying to print, which contains such interesting things as this interview with So Cow, a rambly piece on Nitelink music by me, and a Reviews section set in 1995 (again including reviews of Tupac and Green Day by me, as well as Pavement, Pulp and much more).

Come down and watch. I'm not promising anything, but come anyway.

Songs All Sizes

2008-06-20T18:36:00.004+01:00

This post is not related to reviewing a gig (that's the stated purpose of this blog by the way, if you're a newcomer), but is a reply to Adam's "meme". The accompanying picture is my girlfriend's dog, sitting in a flower pot. She was not prompted. Trixie is her own woman, and is always herself with no regard to what people expect of her. As evidenced by the fact that she sits in flower pots, for reasons known only to herself. Now, the meme.

"List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre,whether they have words, or even if they're not any good, but they must be songs you're really enjoying now, shaping your spring. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they're listening to." (I'm not tagging the other people, because everyone I know has already been hit, pretty much)

There is no theme to this. They're seven songs that are current in my head. The music I hum when I'm sitting around doing nothing.

The Fiery Furnaces - Straight Street
I came really late to the Fiery Furnaces. I am hypnotised by how many words they use. I am going to be honest and say I have no idea what this song is actually about, which is a problem with the Friedbergers' use of 10,000 syllables a sentence in their songs. It's still excellent though.

Kila - Tine Lasta
Everyone switches off when Kila are mentioned. This is a misstep. Ronán Ó Snodaigh sings like a pig on fire over his own drumming in this. Could be bodhrán, could be djembe, I dunno. It's as intense as you're going to find, though. I don't understand half of what he's saying, because my Irish isn't that good... but I don't understand the Fiery Furnaces either. It's the energy that matters.

M.I.A. - Paper Planes
I don't know what it is about this song. It's catchy as shit, obviously, but am I the only person who hears centuries of colonial oppression in every good M.I.A. song? I'm pretty convinced it's just because I'm a sap. But seriously. There are tonnes of bricks weighing on this track.

Mumblin' Deaf Ro - The Drowning Man
I love Mumblin' Deaf Ro. He writes genuinely interesting songs that read (listen?) like short stories set to music. I only have his albums on CD, because I got to like the idea of keeping anything I have in a physical format off my computer. So he's one of a few things I've bought in the past year that I actually sit down to listen to, with no MSN or blog-browsing or whatever in the background. "Float, float, float, float, sink, sink, drown". That's poetry if ever I heard it.

Grizzly Bear - Little Brother (Friend EP version)
This version of this song is one of my favourites ever. In my head, it soundtracks the winter from starting in Trinity in October to when it started to get brighter around April. Rain, dark, wet, gloomy. Early or late. Walking places alone. Also, that moment when everyone has left the party and you're one of a few left, just staring. Also, medication.

Jay-Z - December 4th
The song that gets one of the best albums of all time into gear. It's the Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man, the ultimate rap bildungsroman. I feel really uncomfortable trying to talk about rap because I've got minimal reference points, but this could be a capella and still be just as good. Proper oral poetry. The man is a genius. If you can't respect that, your whole perspective is wack.

Dublin Duck Dispensary - Electric Picnic
As friendly, as happy, as contented as meeting a warm towel after getting out of the sea. So lo-fi you might have found yourself checking to see if your speakers are blown if you weren't forewarned. Jars of colour. And exactly one tiny bit too short, the perfect way to be.

So there you go. I briefly considered trying to pick cooler stuff, but it's better this way. This is the stuff I walk around to. If your interest is piqued in any of them, go to my Muxtape and see what you can see see see.

High White Deer

2008-06-18T02:12:00.002+01:00

The ground's been covered by others already, and I've fallen into the bad habit of writing way too much about everything, so I'm going to do one sentence reviews of all the bands from the Future Days festival, which was a good night in general.

High Places - Their one good song was good, if just as muddy as everything else.
White Williams - Shite Williams
Deerhunter - I wanted to like them, but they did not grab me.
Dan Deacon - The best holiday entertainer ever, and my vote for world-wide funmaker.
Jape - Tried bit hard at the start, before busting out the perennially great Floating and sliding easily and brilliantly to the finishing line.

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I was a Flower of the mountain yes

2008-06-16T01:49:00.003+01:00

I don't often leave the D2 comfort zone to go to gigs (and when I do I generally make a big deal of it), but Thinguma*jigsaw are special. I've never seen them before, and as their album is probably the best thing to come out of Ireland since... James Joyce? I was excited.

James Joyce, then. My understanding was that the event was in celebration of Bloomsday, and that this was why Thinguma*jigsaw were playing (they love him). Thinguma*jigsaw are an insane, hyper-literate, necro-obsessed Norwegian couple whose arrangements consist of banjo-and-musical saw, banjo-and-flute or banjo-and-melodica pretty much exclusively, if you didn't know.

It was a walk around Howth Head, followed by a repair to the Bailly for further music and merriment. James Joyce and Thinguma*jigsaw (with the potential for added Mumblin' Deaf Ro) in Howth is basically the ideal Saturday afternoon to me. There was something weird though. Aoife Mc flagged it, but I missed it. Psycho Kate Bush fan event. Not that there's anything wrong with being a Kate Bush psycho, but I'm not one, and I've only heard two Kate Bush songs ever. So that was a bit of a shock. Also, we couldn't find the actual walk so we just went to the pier until the pub bit started anyway.

I think the Severed Headmaster and Little Myth Epiphanymph, a.k.a. Seth and Martha (Seth may be a second level of fake name - possible real name Stein) were probably there for the Joyce rather than the Bush too though. They started with a reading of the climax to Ulysses that captured a lot of its fluidity and energy, and also showcased Severed-Seth-Stein's hybrid Norwego-Hiberno-Americo-Mockney accent.

They commanded silence for their music. The Headmaster landed somewhere between an author reading his work and a circus ringmaster introducing acts when explaining songs. Martha did not talk, but her death-stare said enough. They sang a lot of songs about death, including a cover of I Love The Dead by Alice Cooper which has the implied Joyce association attached (cheat sheet: last book of Dubliners is called The Dead). His voice is a frail falsetto, over a musical backing which has to be skeletal by definition.

Skeletal is Thinguma*jigsaw all over. They trade in silence, gaunt banjo picking under genuinely shiver-inducing bowed-saw parts. They are kind of scary, especially at such close proximity. If you can't picture the music still, go to the Muxtape and listen to Serpent's Apple. I have no idea how a duo would develop into what Thinguma*jigsaw are. No microphones, no nothing. Just words, bones and shivers.

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I'd rather date Rwanda

2008-06-11T16:40:00.005+01:00

According to some review I found while researching (putting "Stephen Malkmus" into Google and clicking everything for five pages) for the Analogue interview I did with him before his gig on Monday, Malkmus fans are divided into two camps. Those who like Face The Truth, and those who like Pig Lib. I want to preface this post by saying that I like both. I love Pavement, I like focused Malkmus a healthy amount, but I also genuinely enjoy the jam bits. So, unlike a lot of people I talked to after the gig, I wasn't disappointed or surprised that he went mostly with the strung out guitar jams. I was actually pretty happy.

Thing is, to my ears, Malkmus guitar-waffle never descends into pointlessness. He has said in interviews that you're not supposed to listen that closely to the instrumental breaks on Real Emotional Trash. But I think you can. Through all the solos in the live set (and there were solos in pretty much everything), my attention never wandered. It's not just fucking around! Seriously! It's what blues would be if shit, Record Collector magazine-reading, high school English teachers weren't choking it to death through reverence and simultaneous enjoyment of 70s classic rock. The Jicks sound fresh to me, and distinctive. The really great instrumental parts were the best part of the show.

Thing is, by playing a lot of really long songs, there's less time left to play some of the million excellent songs of average length in his catalogue. Pencil Rot? Jenny and the Ess-Dog? Also, by definition, Stephen Malkmus solo is hampered by the fact that half his audience at least is hoping every time he finishes a song that the next one is going to be Cut Your Hair. He even said "I need a hair cut" before one of his encore tunes (possibly Baby C'mon). Probably intentional, probably habitual.

He's not hung up on being a solo artist. He had no complaints about talking about Pavement as if it was still a real entity in the interview. He's just doing the jam-out thing right now, and it's probably just as fun to pretend he's going to play Cut Your Hair to him as it is to actually play Cut Your Hair. Still, he's a fucker for teasing. Really enjoyable show, nonetheless. I put one of my favourites off Real Emotional Trash, Gardenia, up in the muxtape you can find in the sidebar, if you're curious.

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Put the shadows in their boxes

2008-06-08T02:11:00.002+01:00

01 15 Step
02 Bodysnatchers
03 Airbag
04 Bangers & Mash
05 Nude
06 Pyramid Song
07 Arpeggi
08 The Gloaming
09 The National Anthem
10 Faust Arp
11 Videotape
12 Optimistic
13 Where I End And You Begin
14 Reckoner
15 Everything In Its Right Place
16 All I Need
17 There There

Encore 1:
18 Exit Music
19 Jigsaw Falling Into Place
20 Climbing Up The Walls
21 Planet Telex
22 How To Disappear Completely

Encore 2:
23 Super Collider
24 You And Whose Army?
25 Idioteque

+++

In Rainbows

2008-06-07T12:01:00.003+01:00

Radiohead Day 1. It rains on the queue, like it always does. Bat For Lashes plays. Her band have a lot of interesting instruments, including a horn played with a bow, but she doesn't really capture my imagination. It rains some more when she finishes. Then, ten minutes before Radiohead are due on: rainbow. Two rainbows. The significance is not lost on anyone.

Started with All I Need, which pretty much set the tone for the day. The gig in Marley Park in 2006 was basically a festival set, all the songs one could pogo to. But this is the In Rainbows tour. The regular set was full of stuff off In Rainbows, and stuff that followed that general vibe. Lucky, for example, came out early, and a couple from (my favourite Radiohead album) Amnesiac appeared. Guitar rock in general was limited. A good thing.

Thom is a weird guy. He's like an avatar of all this horrible stuff he sings, complains and makes artwork about for a living. Fake fits for dances. Gurning. Staring down Scotch_Mist style webcams which operated as cameras for the big screens. His straight-to-camera, eyebrow-raised, way-too-close rendition of You and Whose Army? straight down the lens raised laughs. But it was pretty frightening too.

I was happy to see Myxomatosis, complete with body-twisting, Boney King of Nowhere dance. Everything In Its Right Place was not the set closer, Videotape was. Better yet, How To Disappear Completely ended the first encore. Just the type of weird but representative, slight sick-feeling set I was hoping for.

Second encore brought Supercollider, a new song, which I'm assuming is about this fucker. Then Just, and Paranoid Android. It is impossible to not fill with joy hearing Paranoid Android. It is a work of utter genius, and very possibly the best song ever written. I know I love superlatives on this blog, but I've devoted a solid five or six years to Radiohead and have consistently listened to and loved them more than any other band. I will never get sick of spending €70 to see them (or getting tickets as presents, as the case is with tonight).

Heading out again after dinner. See you there.

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In The Morning All I Could Do Was Sing

2008-06-02T01:39:00.006+01:00

Duty called me to Tripod on Tuesday. Tapes 'n' Tapes, Sons and Daughters and Port O'Brien.

There was a time when I would have paid to see Tapes 'n' Tapes, but that time is not now. And I have no love for Sons and Daughters. So the only band I was interested in seeing was Port O'Brien. Which was convenient, because they were the ones I was interviewing.

It was only a short, first-of-three opening set in a Tripod that went from empty to half-full as it progressed. Not really the kind of thing that can give a true impression of a band, especially one like Port O'Brien who are quiet twice as often as they're loud and play a lot of soul-searching songs about the sea. It was good to see though.

The difference between Port O'Brien and every band that sails the ocean deep in their imagination is this: salmon fishing. Van Pierszalowski, who is the main singer and songwriter, is the son of a commercial salmon fisherman, and Van spends summers in Alaska with him. Being a skiff-man, whatever that is. Cambria Goodwin, who plays banjo (inaudible at Tripod but essential to the sound on record) and also sings, is a baker at a salmon cannery. When Port O'Brien write songs with nautical metaphors... they're not metaphors. Well, they are. But it's a level closer. It's like the difference between a Hollywood actor doing an Irish accent, and an actual Irish accent, sort of.

Relating to the gig specifically, I'll just say that even though the other three people in the band (Josh, Zebedee and Caleb) were straight out of Vetiver/a Californian medicinal marijuana supplier's in appearance (flares and beards, basically), there is a distinctive Arcade Fire vibe about their live show. Part of it's the chemistry between Van and Cambria. Part of it's the energy of certain songs of theirs, not as developed as Arcade Fire's by a long shot, but showing signs. I don't know what the rest of it is, it's just an instinctive thing on my part.

The gig didn't do them justice, because they were cut short and the circumstances weren't right. But if you follow up on one thing I say on this blog, make it this: click the Muxtape link on the sidebar, and listen to I Woke Up Today.

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Got up late, no room to breathe (Monday, pt. 2)

2008-05-31T16:39:00.005+01:00

So The Mae Shi at Crawdaddy on Monday was really good. But the real reason I left the house on Monday was to go to Times New Viking. Whose new album I really like.

Long story short, there was a mix-up with times. We assumed the Mae Shi would be done early because they were a support act in a Pod venue where curfew is king.

And we assumed Times New Viking would start late. Because it was in Andrew's Lane, which has a theatre licence. And because of an anonymous tip-off (probably not anonymous, I just don't know who it was).

We left the Mae Shi at about 10.20, before they were finished. Thinking Times New Viking couldn't have started earlier than 10, and more than likely would be a little late.

Plus, promoters were pretty accommodating about Sunset Rubdown/No Age and Liars/Thurston Moore. And The Mae Shi and Times New Viking seem like they would have a fairly big crossover. So it would be okay.

Not so.

It was raining. We ran all the way down Harcourt St.

We got there.

"SHIT! Is it over?!"

"Yeah dude, you guys missed it", quoth the drummer from Times New Viking, smoking outside.

Fuck.

God gave me very specific instructions. (Monday pt. 1)

2008-05-31T16:08:00.006+01:00

The Mae Shi are a band I hadn't heard before last Monday. For most of the gigs I review on this blog, I have about six months of fanboy excitement brewing up inside me hyping it up. Not this time.

Technically I was there courtesy of Crayonsmith via their manager Dave via Bobby. But I don't think much of Crayonsmith. I might have mentioned that before, because they do support 70% of all bands. If not though, I'm putting it out there now, I don't like their music. Most of it is begging for melody, and the ones that have decent tunes at the core are generally pushing a bit towards 2005 NME territory. I wouldn't have bothered mentioning that I don't like them, except that they're physically impossible to avoid, either live or in Irish music writing. Even us Analogue boys having been covering them. But it's not for me.

Mae Shi were on second, behind Noah and the Whale, who I have no interest in whatsoever. I was asking stupid questions ("Are they post-rock or what?") and making stupid claims ("They look like I won't like them.") for the whole of their lengthy set-up. They opened with I Get Almost Everything, from the crowd. They spent lots and lots of their time in the crowd.

Most of their stuff was really good. "Twee hardcore" was the label State luminary and aforementioned guestlist fixer Bobby gave them. Not too far wrong. It was as if that sort of ultra-serious flavourless US punk-hardcore had been squirted with gunge or something. Run To Your Grave is one I remember as standing out, even though I didn't get the album until after (maybe "get" in inverted commas would be more appropriate).

For a record that seems to be some sort of concept album about biblical judgment, executed over glitchy keyboards, incredibly catchy singalong choruses and bursts of hardcore, it's surprisingly cohesive and excellent. HLLLYH, it's called. It's infused with a punk-like communalist vibe, except with all the accessibility of someone like Danielson.

They engulfed the whole crowd in a sheet at one point. Everyone was pushing it up, singing along even if they didn't know the words. The energy was thick enough to bottle and sell. And they were (technically) a support band. Basically, as their press stuff says, The Mae Shi want you to love life as much as they do. A nice thing to experience.

Photo from Fuchsia's Flickr, more there.

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Within the fruit there are worms.

2008-05-29T17:26:00.004+01:00

In my life, I've e-mailed Jamie Stewart a total of maybe four or five times, trying to impress on him how incredibly important it is that he come to Ireland to play. He's e-mailed back a few times too, but it was all polite, meaningless words mostly. Or at least no commitments. Not that I expected him to just jump into a helicopter because I e-mailed him or anything.

The point is that I was happy when Xiu Xiu announced. After three days of an exam-study-gig-(or Champion's League final)-sleep schedule, I was getting tired, but it was Xiu Xiu. Come on, like. I noted to my friend Goo that when we were at Why? in Andrew's Lane, which is a shed, it was packed out with enthusiastic people with angular haircuts, but that Whelans was only half full for Xiu Xiu? First time they've been here ever, and no-one turns up? For shame Dublin.

It was way louder than I was expected. Certain quarters have complained about Xiu Xiu being sort of self-aware drama, or "music as nightmare" - it's not something I necessarily agree with, in terms of their recorded output, but the gig was definitely down that aisle.

Most of the time they weren't playing melody, Jamie and Caralee were hitting something very hard, whether cymbal, bell or snare. Ches Smith was hitting things hards all the time he wasn't being silent. Devin Hoff's electric double-bass made everything that much more ominous in person than it comes across on record.

There were whispers and there were screams. There was no banter whatsoever, except for a couple of muted thank yous and a "this is our first time in Dublin" at the end. There was no encore. It was just an hour and a bit of blasting through Women As Lovers and choice cuts from earlier albums. Even poor Clowne Towne was at the receiving end of a no-nonsense belting, in the absence of Caralee's arpeggiating Mini-Moog thing on this tour.

It's hard to pick highlights, because it was more like a rehearsed art show than a rock gig. Everything is integral, and it works as a whole set, not as a list of songs. It's stupid to pick stuff out. BUT. I'm going to anyway. Clover off La Foret, with gamelan bells and pin-drop silences was really mesmeric. No Friend Oh! is just a good song. Master Of The Bump had a bizarre boudoir vibe. There weren't bad songs.

The complaint I could make is this: I know they were at the end of a tour, and they're not the most populist band in the world anyway, but a little personality could have gone a long way. I know Dublin orgasms any time someone pretends to like it more than elsewhere, and I'm not saying that, but some sort of acknowledgment that they were playing a real-life place and not just a date on a tour might have been nice.

Also, in case they ever come back:

Do not sing along to the hurried, whispered lines about rape and self-loathing.

Just a tip, take it or leave it.

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The child in a grown man's beard

2008-05-27T00:33:00.003+01:00

Sunset Rubdown for me is a freezing winter's morning, walking from Docklands to Trinity. It's about 8.40, I've missed the train I should've been on, and taken a gamble on going to Docklands. By the time I get to college I'm late for my class, I can't find it anyway, and I have nothing else until 3 or 4. I walk up Grafton St. and have a muffin in Stephen's Green near the James Joyce statue. The soundtrack to the whole thing is Random Spirit Lover.

It's hard for gigs to compete with that sort of subjective, impressionistic association. Random Spirit Lover will always remind me of that day, even though it's not particularly notable. Any live show is going to have to work really hard to replace it.

Spencer is a big ball of some weird energy in person. He sweats ridiculously. Sometimes, when the music is getting to a climax, he stands up with one leg on the stool behind him while he bangs out the keyboard line and yelps. He's not the best communicator between songs, but there's no point in real-life talk when you can say what you need to say through animal metaphors and overwhelming wordy brilliance in-song.

I was surprised that some people weren't crazily impressed by this gig. To me, every song was like a set-closer. The Shut Up I Am Dreaming Stadiums and Shrines was the second song they played. It could've been an encore. The Taming Of The Hands That Came Back To Life was a good example of a song that is great on the album, but really, fully comes alive when that weird Spencer Krug energy is imbued live.

The rest of the band are on the same frequency too. Camilla Wynn Ingr's keyboards and vocals are about 5% of what makes Sunset Rubdown 400 times better than Wolf Parade.

...

OH SHIT!

Fuck, I said it. Fuck my 2005/6 self. Sunset Rubdown is a completely different level of band. They not only do what they do better, they just work on a different level altogether. The Mending Of The Gown is the best song of 2007 and possibly of the decade so far, despite what I said (or neglected to say) in December, and they ended the set with it. Then, solemn-faced, The Angry Threats Of Little Lord came out for the encore.

Why it wasn't the perfect gig
One or two songs were not very good.
Support band Speck Mountain said Dublin was in the UK.
Drunken Lout, shut up.

Apart from that, I can't fault it.

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A genie made me out of the earth's skin

2008-05-25T23:03:00.003+01:00

Gig's off. Sitting underground in the library in college on a beautiful summer's day because there were no free seats anywhere else, I got four texts to tell me. Something to do with a missed ferry. Disaster.

Eight hours later, I'm standing outside Whelans in a queue that goes around the corner, eating free chips (thank you Foggy Notions) and getting jittery for a gig that seemed semi-destined to go down in the great tradition of Dublin gig folklore. It couldn't be anything but brilliant. That was just the energy around the place.

Seeing Animal Collective in Whelans is the kind of thing that can only happen by chance. They're way too big under normal circumstances. Oxegen 2006 was good, but it was Oxegen. Tripod was only alright, the sound was dodgy and the singer couldn't sing.

This time, Avey could sing. It absolutely made all the difference. It unlocks the (in my opinion) best of their back catalogue, though new stuff is Panda-heavy. But it also means that the two-vocal attack kicks in, like it should. And that's central. It happens in new stuff like Walking Around With You and in old stuff everywhere. Avey sings, and Panda chimes in, or Panda sings and Avey murmurs under it. The layering is a big part of the charm.

Adrenaline had me trying to jump around a bit like a spa at the start, but when I stopped fucking around, it really did start being profound. It's not a rock show, and it's taking me a while to beat that mindset, but I'm getting there. Peacebone appeared, and it was good, but the extended Fireworks-Essplode-Fireworks-Essplode-Slowed Down Fireworks spree was one of the greatest things I have seen, full stop.

Being close enough to actually pull out plugs if you wanted to makes the experience so much more personal. You feel in the mix. It swirls around, you can see where each sound is coming from and feel the chemistry of the whole experience. No-one else could've almost completely ignored their two best albums and still played the best gig New Whelans has seen. The new stuff, particularly Song For Ariel and the new new one, is up there with the best stuff they've got.

So at 1.45, I ran for the last Nitelink to get home in time to get up for an exam. But as my friend Coady kept reminding me when I moaned to everyone I saw about it, I would have regretted it more than anything in my life if I hadn't gone.

Picture stolen from Bobby, who also gets credit for sending the text that has already been subsumed into Temple-Bar-to-South-Circular lore: EVERYBODY TO WHELANS, I'M NOT BULLSHITTING.

+++

Death-Week Review Preview

2008-05-21T00:51:00.002+01:00

Here are my two schedules for this week:

Gigs:

Monday, Animal Collective
Tuesday, Sunset Rubdown
Wednesday, Champion's League Final
Thursday, Xiu Xiu

Exams:

Monday 9.30am, History
Tuesday 9.30am, English (in the fucking RDS! [I live in Blanchardstown] What the fuck!)
Wednesday 2.00pm, English (same)
Thursday, no exam
Friday 9.30am, English
Saturday 9.30am, History

It is a week of little free time, where the men are the separated from the boys. The men are the ones who suck it up and sell their tickets on so they do well in their exams. The boys (i.e. me) are the ones who have to run for the 2 o'clock Nitelink to be in bed for 3am to get up at 7.30am to do a exam in leafy Ballsbridge.

Animal Collective and Sunset Rubdown were great. Manchester United and Xiu Xiu have a lot to live up to. Proper walkthroughs when I don't have A MILLION FUCKING EXAMS! See you then.

No More Pocket Combs

2008-04-27T14:28:00.006+01:00

Singing along to Why? is like reading along to a short story. Nobody told that to pockets of devout fans in Andrew's Lane last night though. While it's a little awkward to see people pumping fists and shouting "I'LL SUCK THE MARROW OUT AND RAPE YOUR HOLLOW BONES YONI!" in any situation, never mind at a gig, the rock show contingent made things a little exciting if nothign else. It took Yoni about six songs to break out of his ultra-serious face, but once he acknowledged the several hundred people working themselves into a frenzy in front of him, the whole thing took on a sort of a personal colour.

Apart from the energy of the room, the gig itself was surprisingly excellent. I was expecting something much more lo-fi and... white-boy hip hop. It wasn't like that at all, for better or for worse. They stuck mostly to Alopecia and played all the prominent songs from it. A Sky For Shoeing Horses Under was particularly impressive for Josiah's ability to play breakneck vibraphone and drums at the same time. The Vowels allowed a bit of bobbing and was probably a highlight, though I have to say that they're such a tight live band that the best songs on the night were just the best songs from the albums.

Which would mean Gemini obviously, being the aural proof that MOR can be good if it has great lyrics. Catching unconnected sentences of those great lyrics was the best part about seeing Why?. Even though the hair-cutted masses did their best to half-rap along, Why? is in essence the stream of consciousness of one guy from Cincinnati. It's immune to outside circumstances, because it's so self-absorbed. It's like a diary. That's why he's so good.

They promised to come back soon, like everyone does. I'll practice my words and my fist-pumping in the interim. I'll definitely be there though, because this was deadly.

++

Lights Are Blinding My Eyes

2008-04-13T23:14:00.005+01:00

Last night I saw someone I've been listening to since the year I did my Junior Cert for the first time. The Streets blew up too early for me I think. There was never a chance of me shelling out for tickets to a big outdoor gig, really, so I was so resigned to never seeing Mike Skinner in the flesh that it just never really entered my mind.

Then Budweiser stepped in. Say what you will about corporate sponsorships, any nice-ish beer that's willing to subsidise a gig in a tent on a fake island in a dock in April is well worthy of my thanks. I also enjoyed the six tubes of orange jelly beans Nokia gave me, so help me God.

I was surprised by how much fun it was, actually. Mike Skinner, complete with diamond-encrusted in-ear monitor, was exactly as charming as he seems, even when he was calling the crowd a pack of wankers. I pogoed at a gig for the first time since Radiohead in Marlay Park, and I wasn't madly put off by having two or three strangers on my lap at various points when Mike decided everyone had to hunker down.

Like LCD Soundsystem, The Streets manage to transpose non-rock music to a rock-show environment pretty well. The set was weighted towards older songs, from Original Pirate Material or A Grand Don't Come For Free. The opener, Turn The Page, as well as Let's Push Things Forward and Could Well Be In got me on a nostalgic Junior Cert-studying kick, and obviously Fit But You Know It was deadly. Everything was good actually, even Let It Be-sampling Never Went To Church which is a terrible song under normal circumstances. I had a lot of fun, fuck credibility.

Credit to my lovely girlfriend Katharine for the photograph.

++

Jiminy Jillikers!

2008-04-13T00:32:00.006+01:00

On Thursday, I went to see Holy Fuck in Whelans. I've been an unlikely fan of theirs ever since Analogue dropped their LP into my bag for review purposes in October some time. Thing is, I'm a little non-plussed with the current trend for beeps, bleeps and beats. So I reckon if I wasn't made to listen to it, I never would have. It was lucky I did. It landed in the top 20 of my overblown three-month attempt at an end of year list for 2007, and I reckon in retrospect it could have been higher. There's something really frantic and tense about them that I really like. So I went along, as I said.

I don't know whether it was the impending economic recession weighing on people's minds, or the fact that forty-year-olds somehow infiltrated the front row, but the buzz was not as great as could have been hoped. Nonetheless, they came out with two wooden boards decked with toy keyboards, effects pedals, melodicas, mini-microphones, curious red buttons which may have been kill switches and an even more curious device along the lines of an enigma-machine which seemed to be a tape loop instrument of some description. They ran through most if not all of their LP, and some interesting new songs too.

Lovely Allen was the best song on the night, probably because it is their best song full stop. Everything else was good enough too. There was something a touch lacking though. If you go to see Holy Fuck, you want it loud and dirty. Not Holy F*ck, as the posters compromisingly rendered it, but the full-blown, psychotic, scuzzy, thumpy, breakneck, dirt-encrusted semi-electronica band. There was a sense that some of their noise-play was just washing over the audience rather than properly getting in under their nails. I can't think of a good metaphor, but there was something they forgot to bring.

No complaints here, for €13.50, but the energy their music carries never quite transferred to the room, to the chagrin of myself, my friend Kearnsey, Nialler9 and Aoife Mc and Ian. Could have been worse, but also could have been better.

Credit to Cáit for the photo, she has more too.

+

Du Ug Meg

2008-03-11T00:47:00.006Z

Last night, as a result of Sunday lethargy and a vague inclination, I rolled up to Whelans for Casiotone For The Painfully Alone. It's only the third gig I've been to in 2007, and the first that I'm blogging about (So Cow in Galway went on the Analogue blog, and I just wasn't arsed doing Grand Pocket Orchestra). Are you as excited as I am?

Storkboy Choons - Do The Octopus

The first support was Storkboy Choons, a Kells man with the uncanny ability to look exactly like Asleep On The Compost Heap. It's fairly ambient stuff, and a weird thing to have on early in the night at an indie gig, but it makes sense that Storkboy would be pitching to that crowd rather than the clubbing crowd. It was actually really enjoyable, sort of cathartic. Things went in unusual directions and then sort of reeled in. The volume also seemed to increase steadily for the whole set. The general buzz was probably assisted by the fact that every Kells citizen of child-bearing age seemed to be there to support.

There are negative sides to playing such ambient stuff live obviously - not having any gaps in the whole set meant that concentration tended to wander, even though it totally made sense from a musical point of view. Also, a seated audience from the broad rock tradition (as opposed to the dance tradition) is going to be staring at the two guys sitting at their laptops tweaking Ableton, and it's not the most visually stimulating experience. But it was the first Storkboy Choons gig. Between the fact that the music was actually quite decent, and the way that the dynamics of the set worked with tunes working into each other in ebbs and swells, there were the guts of a really good act. Definitely interesting enough to keep watching in the future.

Ugly Megan - Bobby Orlandisco (live, but not from last night and without the sampled loops and things)

Second on was Ugly Megan. I actually (cryptically) named this entry after Ugly Megan and used a picture of them instead of Owen Ashworth because of how much I liked them. They are from Waterford. And they are the lo-est of fi. The mouldiest of peaches, if you will. The Moldy Peaches is the best gateway into describing them, I'd say. It's a boy and a girl, and they fluctuate from hyper-twee music with intentionally naive lyrics to hyper-twee music with knowingly referential lyrics. Their voices even sound a little bit like Kimya and Adam's. But it's not a wholesale thing.

The mechanics of how they make music are pretty interesting. More than one song started with the gentleman (Orlando, according to the title of one of their songs) pounding his fist off the soundboard of his acoustic guitar for a bass-drum and clacking muted strings for a snare. And then looping it. A salutably lo-fi way of laying down a sick beat, if you ask me. The lady (Kathi according to the title of the above song) loops on what could have either been a xylophone or a keyboard on xylophone setting or maybe both. They both sing, in a really unpretentious and effortless way. They have quite catchy songs. Orlando is also so awkward on-stage that he seems to find it incredibly difficult to do anything. But that actually comes off as endearing in context. They exchange looks and nods when they change bits. They just generally defrost my frosty blogger cynicism. I liked them a lot.

Casiotone For The Painfully Alone - Bobby Malone Moves Home (a home video by someone about their small town hometown)

Casiotone For The Painfully Alone came on at about 9.50. I have listened to Etiquette quite a lot since it came out, on last-bus trips home alone and in my room depressedly studying. But I think that's probably the optimum place to listen to Casiotone For The Painfully Alone, unfortunately. Owen Ashworth is a bearish man, and if I were to summarise his live show in one sentence it would be thus: "A man played tracks and mumbled his songs into a microphone, then got his friend to sing for a while, then mumbled Paul Simon, Bruce Springsteen and Parenthetical Girls into a microphone".

That seems a little unfair, because it is. He's good enough to listen to. But I think if I didn't already know the songs I would've had trouble following what he was saying, and the whole point of Casiotone is (ironically not the Casiotone backing but) the short-storyesque lyrics. He played all the hits, and for me the cover of Love Connection was probably the highlight. New Year's Kiss and Bobby Malone Moves Home were both also quite good. Holly Hobby was sung as Bobby Hobby, weirdly. Overall, something was just lacking for me though. Unfortunately.

I'd probably plus the gig on CFTPA's merits anyway, but Ugly Megan and Storkboy secure it. Sorry for the incoherence. I have no excuse, really.

+

A Mixtape

2008-03-06T23:24:00.005Z

I bought some tapes last week because my girlfriend asked me to make her a mixtape for her car. It got me to thinking: my brother is 14. He has never experienced making a tape. When he got interested enough in music to want to collect tracks together, he had Limewire and iTunes sitting in front of him. He just types "marijuana reggae" into the search engine, picks the first twelve things that come up, and eventually burns them to a CD.

Thing is, he doesn't even listen to the CD. Because that's not a part of his musical existence. He listens to music on the computer and on his mp3 player. And that's it. I think that's a pity, personally. He doesn't though. He never developed a sentimental attachment to circular pieces of plastic, and he definitely never bothered involving himself with cassettes.

I know the cassette is a format destined never to have a retro revival, unless it's an ironic one. But I still fondly remember the hours I would spend with my entire CD collection (of about 10 CDs and a few free magazine compilations), plus things I had taped off my friends and off the radio. Pressing record and stop, record and stop.

Trying to figure out whether Nirvana into Moby or Nirvana into Pennywise was a better idea. Record and stop. Trying to ensure I got enough tracks per side so I didn't have to fast-forward at the end, but also trying to ensure that I didn't end up cutting off the arse of a good song. The sound of a tape rewinding in the Walkman I got for my communion is as much a part of my memories as kicking a ball against a wall or my friend putting on a jumper with a wasp in it.

So I made you a mixtape. Well, I made it for myself, and for my girlfriend. On tape. But here it is on mp3 anyway. There'll be another one in a while. There isn't really a theme, but I did try to make stuff go together, and every song comes with full love and backstory from your Selector here.

Talking Heads - Thank You For Sending Me An Angel
Vampire Weekend - Walcott
El Guincho - Kalise
The Cure - The Caterpillar
Xiu Xiu - Under Pressure
REM - These Days
Bülent Ortaçgil - Suna Abla
Gruff Rhys - Gyrru Gyrru Gyrru
The Kinks - Do You Remember Walter?
Peter Delaney - Pariah Chimes

Click here to download.

Tight Ends

2008-03-03T01:09:00.002Z

A couple of weeks off and I'm feeling refreshed.

Reasons I'm back on the blog:

After this week, I have minimal college work to do for a while, so I will have time to post shite.
There are great turbulent swathes of brilliant gigs just over the horizon. I've got tickets for Xiu Xiu, Animal Collective and Radiohead only, but I would be surprised at myself if I didn't end up at least at Casiotone For The Painfully Alone, Holy Fuck, El Guincho, Why?, Sunset Rubdown and Stephen Malkmus between now and traipsing through Europe in July and August. Probably more too, depending on how quickly I get a job.
The whole righteous blogging thing seeped through to me from the Irish Blog Awards, which were admirably non-drawn out but could have done with Ham Sandwich and Dickie Rock doing a half-time show or something.
Darragh, who thinks the word cunt is too heavy to throw around, seems to actually like the blog, which makes about six people - the official point where I can claim to have an audience.
It's mostly just boredom though, the same reason I do anything.

Fun things you can hope to see:

Maybe a mix-tape. It will be a physical tape, but obviously I will put it up in mp3 format, maybe with a picture of the tape.
Tá sé ar intinn agam beagáinín blagadóireacht a dhéanamh trí Ghaeilge. Cén dochar a dheanfadh sé?
An ongoing lack of anything substantial other than me talking about gigs I was at.

As an aside, I think I accidentally told Aoife McIndie Hour that my blog was HiFi Popcorn last night, because I am an idiot. Aoife Mc, and Bobby, if you read this, I'm sorry and I have no explanation. It didn't even strike me until about twelve hours later that I'd done it. It's possibly the weirdest thing I've ever done. Tourettesy, even.

If I imagined saying that, then I'm even more weird. It's getting hard to separate dreams and reality.

Loose Ends

2008-02-11T19:08:00.000Z

It took me a lot longer than I'd expected to do that list, but I'm glad I did it. I know some people followed it, and some people skimmed, and that's cool, but mainly it's a photograph of 2007 musically, taken from inside my head. So when I'm gnarled and old and rediscovering Web 2.0 from the world of Web 11.5, I think it'll remind me pretty much of how I was thinking.

It also gave me a reason to properly listen to the 25 best albums of the year. Some of them I hadn't listened to since the first few months of 2007, some I only started listening to a few days before I made the first list. The order is as I thought it up at the start of December. If I was to do it again, Sunset Rubdown would be a lot, lot higher, and a couple of other things would move around.

A few links for your perusal:

A post I did about So Cow in Galway for the Analogue blog.

A very impressive technological advancement allowing you to read the third issue of Analogue online with flippable pages and stuff.

Quotes were taken from the Radiohead interview I did for that magazine and put in stories for Pitchfork and NME.com. NME didn't even link to the website, fuckers.

I can't think of other things to link to.

If I don't post again for a while, forgive me. Between the magazine agus an diabhal liosta sin, my mind is empty of muso sentence constructions. Then again, I'll have nothing to do in a while and I'll end up writing half a novel about something shit. We'll see.

The Year. 1. Always Touching By Underground Wires.

2008-02-11T00:53:00.000Z

1. Of Montreal - Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?
Polyvinyl

The first time I heard Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer? I thought it sounded like a cross between very cheesy 80s pop-metal and The Beatles. I don’t know why that first impression stuck with me, but it did. I didn’t stop listening to the album almost daily until December. I’ve seen Of Montreal live twice since. I bought it on CD in Cambridge, Massachusetts along with Icons Abstract Thee and woke up to both of them for several months. On my way to Hard Working Class Heroes in Tripod one night, I decided they were my favourite band. On several occasions I decided that The Past Is A Grotesque Animal was my favourite song. I talked to Kevin Barnes once about his uncle. I got everyone in the band to sign my copy of the album. I know about 90% of the words - which admittedly is not super impressive, but words don’t memorise so well when they don’t rhyme and they’re all multi-syllabic. Hissing Fauna has been a stupidly large part of my life since I first unzipped the downloaded RAR. In that teenage way, the same way The Smiths or Radiohead or REM were for me at various stages of my development. So it’s at number one in my incredibly belated list of 2007’s best albums.

Musically, it lands between purple funk and something approaching twee. It is incredibly constructed. Only headphones properly reveal how much layering and building up went into it. There are songs where what seems like a single bass part is in fact two, bouncing between speakers for no real reason. It happens with the guitars everywhere too. And the non-lead vocals. There are three man, one second “oohs” at varying points. So it’s very impressive as a studio project, even apart from the fact that there are about five separate melodies per song implanting themselves in the mind of every listener. It’s manically catchy. From dance floor-ready disco stuff like She’s A Rejector to grooving, loping seriousness like Cato As A Pun, there are undeniable melodies in every possible shape.

It’s the lyrics that make Hissing Fauna so good though. A baby (you’d have to assume his daughter) gurgles carefree as an invocation right at the start, and there’s something about the freedom and honesty of that that seems to be relevant to the rest of the album. ‘No holds barred’ is the best cliché for it. Quoting is very unlikely to do any justice to how well-measured, lyrical, insightful, beautiful, hateful, funny and shocking Hissing Fauna is at varying intervals, but I’ll try.

“What has happened to you and I/And don’t say that I have changed/Cause man, of course I have”. His girlfriend gone back to Norway with his daughter in Cato As A Pun. “I spent the winter on the verge of a total breakdown while living in Norway/I felt the darkness of a black metal band/But being such a faun of a man, I didn’t burn down any old churches/Just slept way too much” as the first line of a joyous, lysergic Sentence of Sorts in Kongsvinger. “Somehow you’ve red-rovered the Gestapo encircling my heart” or any other line in the ten minutes of The Past Is A Grotesque Animal, one of the most accurate love songs ever written, in my humble opinion anyway. Everywhere. The whole album is full of lines that make you stand back and smile, or frown, or laugh, or have some other emotional response. And they keep appearing, for the first hundred listens.

I would consider this one of the best albums ever made. I’m not just a sappy blogger saying that. Actually, I am just a sappy blogger, but I don’t come to these sweeping statements lightly. I genuinely do think it is one of the best albums ever. I will vote for it on every Channel 4 poll ever conducted until technology outruns my ageing intellect and I have to get my grandchildren to do it for me. Unrestrained magnificence.

The Year. 2. The most perfect day I've ever seen.

2008-02-06T02:21:00.000Z

2. Radiohead - In Rainbows
It's up to you.

So we move to within inches of finishing the list that I expected to be done with by Christmas. There are hurricanes of bullshit blowing around this album from every corner (including that which I contributed to Analogue), and that’s difficult to ignore. Everyone span it differently. From the extreme right, people like Forbes fucking magazine and Paul McGuinness denounced for killing the business. From the far left, impoverished musicians denounced it because it was letting people think that music doesn’t have an intrinsic value. From the middle, people scowled and looked for ulterior motives. Fuck all those people. Including me. This is a great album.

In Rainbows is the sound of Radiohead emerging from the end of a dark tunnel. Kid A, Amnesiac and Hail To Thief was a trilogy of particularly fearful albums, mired in negative vibes. Trace a line from The Bends to Hail To The Thief. Gloom goes up. So does the feeling that Thom Yorke is an unsalvageable lunatic. The line stops at In Rainbows. The Eraser seems to be the end of entire albums of intense paranoia. While In Rainbows isn’t exactly what you’d describe as “happy”, there’s a definite hope involved that doesn’t come into the gloomy trilogy. The claustrophobia is gone, replaced by sparse instrumentation and heaps of reverb. Renowned composer Jonny Greenwood lends strings. Some of the least loaded and best, most simple Radiohead songs ever appear. We are reminded (for the thousandth time) of exactly how great a singer Thom Yorke is.

It starts urgently. A fairly old-sounding drum machine squelching out bumps and claps in a difficult time signature. Thom comes in first, singing urgently too. It’s not till the guitar comes in that the tone is properly set. Anodyne and measured. Anything but boring, however. The beat jerks around beneath the song and provides the best 5/4 groove since Take Five. Bodysnatchers is half and half fuzz rock and Burkean sublime, but it’s the oldest song on the album, Nude, that provides the first moment of that sort of pure musical joy that make Radiohead the Best Band In The World. It sounds almost like devotional music, and if any other song in existence (bar maybe Pyramid Song) can provoke emotion like Nude, I have yet to hear it. The strings come it, and it is otherworldly. The first perfect song on In Rainbows.

Weird Fishes/Arpeggi is probably my least favourite song on the album, but even it has a saving grace, a breakdown and recommencement straight off Kid A. All I Need gets back to making attempts at the sky. The bassline grooves throughout, and Thom sings a love song of sorts. It might be the best indicator that In Rainbows is not in the Kid Amnesiac lineage. Eight years ago, this would have been How To Disappear Completely. Now it’s not. It’s melancholy as all fuck, but there is hope there. Faust Arp sounds exactly like The Beatles. McCartney finger picking, George Martin strings, an insane man talking about plastic bags and other generally cloudy modern things.

Then Reckoner. I hate these bits where I have to sound like a sap to explain what I’m thinking, and I usually try to avoid them, but it’s hard, seeing as I’ve gone the track-by-track route here. I think if I was drowning, Reckoner would be playing over the slideshow of my life. Definitely actually. Nothing could make slow, panicked death seem more like the right thing to happen than Reckoner. And when the first section stops - the “ripples on a blank shore” part, and the strings with the “In Raaaaaaaaainbooooows” in the background… Does not get better. The second perfect song.

House of Cards and Jigsaw Falling Into Place, I wouldn’t go to war for, so I’ll skip them to speed this up. Videotape though is the third and final perfect song. Just a piano, Thom Yorke’s life on video and eventually an obtrusive drumbeat. The kind of thing you listen to while lying on the floor in the dark. Not that I do that. If it wasn’t for two or three slightly disappointing songs, and the exclusion of Last Flowers To The Hospital, this would be the best album of the year, and maybe the best album of all time. But they’re there, it disrupts it a little and drags it to places it would be better avoiding. It’s still absolute genius, and every other superlative I can conquer.
This is Radiohead, it doesn’t need links.

The Year. 3. Woman Vocalising, Man Speaking Backwards.

2008-02-02T17:15:00.000Z

3. Animal Collective - Strawberry Jam
Paw Tracks

Sitting in a car on the way to somewhere yesterday, the radio was turned to Raidio na Life. In Irish, some young man was talking along the following lines: “…agus tháinig an EP seo amach ag an t-am céanna le Feels, ar Fat Cat. An t-ainm atá ar an ceirnín ná People - seo hí!”. And with that, he span a six-minute, non-album Animal Collective track with almost no words. Given that the Irish language and six-minute non-album Animal Collective tracks are possibly my two favourite things, I now have undying respect for that man, whoever he was. There aren’t many days when I don’t listen to something by Animal Collective. Could be People on Raidio na Life at 10.30pm. Could be Spirit They’ve Gone, Spirit They’ve Vanished at 4am. Could be waking up to Did You See The Words? in my CD alarm clock at whatever time I have to wake up. But most of the time, it’s my Strawberry Jam double vinyl, in the kitchen at any time of day.
Peacebone opens the album with melting pulses and proceeds to jaunt and bounce around madly. As much as it is the poppiest and arguably catchiest thing Animal Collective have ever recorded, it is the lyrics that get me. I don’t know if quoting them will do them any justice, but nobody can talk about every day things and make them seem like the most unusual events and places like Avey Tare can. It’s definitely a lysergic jam, and if it was not for secondary reading in interviews and Take Pills by Panda Bear, I’d be assuming there were drugs going on. There aren’t apparently.

Everything is immediate, straightforward and direct. It’s not like an Animal Collective album at all really. It’s like 10 Grasses. But that doesn’t mean that the subtlety isn’t here. It’s just higher up in the mix, if that makes any sense. Like the breakdown of Chores, “when there’s no-one watching” - that’s a vibe that they’ve been tapping for a decade, but it’s never been so unashamed until now.

For Reverend Green into Fireworks is unparalleled in brilliance by anyone, ever. That seems like a pointless and lazy statement, but upon mature reflection I actually do think I can validly make that broad, sweeping statement and stand by it. Like I said before, it’s hard for me to find decent adjectives to describe these songs that are at surrogate God levels for me. So, to avoid declining into utter fawning fanboydom, I won’t. I’ll just say they’re great. Unsolved Mysteries is too, and the idea of finding the sensuous, alluring woman you lean in to kiss is actually Jack the Ripper makes me laugh occasionally still. Derek is a Panda Bear track that sounds like a really good Panda Bear track. Winter Wonder Land possibly beats even Alan Parsons In A Winter Wonderland by Grandaddy as the greatest Christmas song ever written.

It’s a beautiful album about ordinary things, imbued with a very keen sense of fun and games, but also washed in occasional sublime sadness. It’s not particularly short, but it feels like it could handle about four extra tracks. Maybe that’s a good thing. “It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied”, as Lord Henry would have it. And the best thing about it? It actually does sound like Strawberry Jam.
Collected Animals is where the Ultras hang out, but really you should try to make your own.

The Year. 4. Singing hallelujah with the fear in your heart.

2008-01-31T01:13:00.000Z

4. Arcade Fire - Neon Bible
Merge

There is a certain religiosity about listening to Neon Bible. It could just be the word “bible” in the title making me think that, but I’m not so sure. It could also be something that only develops after seeing The Best Live Band in the world play. It could be the organs, it could be the lyrical references. It could be just the general mood. No matter what it is, it’s there. This is not background music. Every rumble, every sweep demands complete attention, complete devotion to the communal cause. At some point (possibly between the click of the light and the start of the dream? No?) there was a broad realisation that we were no longer dealing with an ordinary band. It’s the kind of thing that fills Mojo or Uncut. Talking about albums from thirty years ago with borrowed nostalgia, projected reverence. But it’s now. Neon Bible will be on a pedestal in fifty years, like no other album released this year (even In Rainbows) ever could be.

It’s a set-piece really. Ominous horns and a skeleton key piano part open Black Mirror, letting you know that Neon Bible is not going to be like Funeral. It’s going to out-morose an album named because of family deaths. That sort of vein continues with varying levels of obviousness throughout the album - vaguely gothic in a Helena Bonham Carter sort of way. More apocalyptic though. It’s sort of exhilarating to listen to. There are ghosts everywhere, in Regine’s vocals, and the organs, strings and rumbles. Before seeing the songs live, darkness was what I picked up from Neon Bible. A sort of black and white, Dickensian London meets Bush’s America trip through the downside of being human, and doing it in the world right now.

If you were ever going to write a “things to do before I die” list, and you haven’t seen Arcade Fire, you need to see to that. Without seeing them, the songs are dark, they’re negative through the neo-baroque arrangements. Live, they’re life-affirming. Like the Evangelist preachers (with whose imagery Win likes to play) ushering on the end of the world with joy every Sunday, coming together with a few thousand to see Neon Bible live is like being lifted up out of reality through music, and community. I’m not really able to express this without sounding like an absolute spanner. But it’s not gloomy music, I suppose, was the point. It’s an escape. Take My Body Is A Cage. Possibly the most depressing lyrics Win has ever written. And set to plodding, funereal music. But I defy you to listen to that song through and try to deny that it scratches heaven. That is what this album does consistently throughout. Out of darkness comes light.
Arcade Fire’s website and them with Bowie at the Grammy’s. Not on the album, but as the description says: If you don´t cry watching this, you are dead inside.

The Year. 5. If I were man, and you a dog.

2008-01-30T23:52:00.000Z

5. Deerhoof - Friend Opportunity
Kill Rock Stars

The closer to the end of this list I get, the harder I find it to find good adjectives to use, and also to express how fucking excellent the music in question is. Coincidentally, the closer to the end of this list I get, the more I also regret writing giant tracts about twenty-five albums instead of studying or writing music or something more productive. But that’s not Deerhoof’s fault. Friend Opportunity came out at the start of the year, so, in the worst crime against art since Elgin prised the friezes off the Parthenon, nobody put it on their lists. These lists are of course about two months old by now. But fuck it.

There are two sides to this album. On the one hand is the usual Deerhoof. Riffs that sound like those pictures where flights of stairs run into each other and defy perspective. Incredible infectiousness. Quirky, perceptive and confusing lyrics that sound like either a child or a woman with less English than Satomi Matsuzaki (or Greg Saunier) wrote them. Everything you loved about The Runners Four, Apple O’ or Milk Man is distilled here, perfected. The Perfect Me and +81 are two songs that I would have in an all-time indie pop single compilation, and the spiritual successor of Dog On The Sidewalk, Kidz Are So Small makes little or no sense, in the best way possible.

But then there’s also some sort of nameless melancholy that creeps in. Maybe it’s Greg’s voice. Maybe it’s the gaps between wall-shaking riffage. I don’t know what it is, but it's there on Cast Off Crown, and even, despite the apparent nominal evidence to the contrary, on Choco Fight. Ignorance of Friend Opportunity should be punishable by death. A venerable band to be cherished and held aloft, with psycho-sugar meat-riff cutesie songs. Testing the boundaries of fun for the good of all mankind.
Their KRS page has a very good Things section with interviews and videos, and Bren has Greg in the first issue of Analogue, which pretty much inspired me to try to get involved in the first place.