I'm off

First Impressions of Earth - The Strokes
Five Leaves Left - Nick Drake

This is my final post this year as the iPod Challenge is off on holiday for a couple of weeks. I'm taking my iPod with me but I won't be posting and I'll be listening to whatever the hell I goddamn feel like. I've also been given one of the new iPod Shuffles for Christmas (hence the lack of 'challenge' over the last couple of days) and that's going too. I had my doubts about the Shuffle but I've come to realise it's like listening to the best radio station ever - i.e the one where you're the controller, the playlist compiler, the DJ, and the listener. Nary a duff track in sight, which is more than can be said for The Strokes recent outing. There's still flashes of brilliance but the piss-poor Iggy rip-off of Heart In A Cage is certainly not one of them. I still think there's hope for them yet, but they were always going to struggle after the hype that surrounded them at first, and the level they set themselves with Is This It?

Nick Drake is Nick Drake - what else can I say? Actually, I have a theory about Nick Drake but now is not the time to go into it. I have more of his albums on the iPod so I can expound at a later date (that'll bring you back, won't it?).

OK, to paraphrase, I'm tired and I want to go to bed. Happy Christmas your arse, all the best, I'm offski.

Just a quickie

Final Straw - Snow Patrol
Finally Woken - Jem

A quick update. As I mentioned before, Final Straw and I got acquainted at a particularly messy time of my life and it got to me more than I think it would have done at another time. Now when I listen to it I can here that it's a decent enough album but the lyrics are mostly in the vaguely sensitive vein favoured by Chris Martin et al. Will the first track of this album ever be toppled from the number one spot in my Top 25? It'll take some doing as I think the next song is about twenty plays behind. All these statistics, do you think the iPod was perchance designed by a man?

Finally Woken is a girlfriend choice and I think it may have been a drunken one. For a while, the first track of the album, They was played constantly on Mark Radcliffe's Radio 2 show and it didn't sound too bad. However, a whole album of Jem is a too much. The production is superb - each track sounds completely different as the album swings through genres, grabbing bits from everywhere - Tricky, classical music, The Neptunes - but Jem's voice divests the record of any intrigue it may have held. She is lumbered with the same sort of blandness as Dido, making this album sound mostly like an Ikea advert. It's a pity - with a stronger vocal performance this could have been something special.

Effin' Hell

False Flags (single) - Massive Attack
Family is for Sharing - Brothers in Sound
Fashion Nugget (only one track - I Will Survive) - Cake
Feel Good Lost - Broken Social Scene
Fever to Tell - Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Fight Club SE - The Dust Brothers

OK, I promise I will try and stop the horrendously bad puns that have made up the last couple of post titles, but it's Friday, it's been a long week, and 'Effin' Hell' is the best I can come up with. So far, so effin' good (sorry, I have no control over what I write - you may have noticed). False Flags sounded like a decent return to form for Massive Attack. I've got 100th Window but it is the least played Massive Attack album I own. The others are inviolable classics, each of them with the power to take me back to the place I first heard them and recreate an entire period of my life in my head. Sometimes this makes for uneasy listening but it's surely a sign of a great album.

Cake are a band that I always thought I'd hate - one trick pony smart arses who had one decent idea and flogged the fucker to death. My girlfriend lent me some of their albums and I was surprised to hear that they weren't actually that bad. This however, was downloaded when I only wanted to hear this song, hence its solitary nature. I remember reading somewhere that one test of whether a cover version was worthwhile or not was to ask if it added anything new or unique to the original. I think it's fair to say that Cake's reworking of I Will Survive fulfills this criteria as it removes every last ounce of disco glitter and turns the song into a tired but resolute 'fuck you' to the man/woman who's done the dirty on the singer. I like it when bands surprise me - I wonder if there's anything Babyshambles could do to make see a reason for their continued existence?

Two final points - I think Fever to Tell has been the first album that I've listened to in this challenge that has made me wish I hadn't buried it away on my iPod. I borrowed it from a friend because I'd fallen in love with the track Pin the last time I'd been back in the UK. This song made it on to numerous playlists on my iPod but I don't think I gave the album itself much more than a cursory listen. Shows you what I know about music - it's fucking fantastic. It batters along with a verve that most current 'rock' bands can only dream about. Karen O sounds like the re-incarnation of every punky female singer that melted my over-eager teenage heart, and the musicians are tighter than the duck's nether regions. They're definitely not getting punted off the iPod. Not sure I can say the same for the Fight Club soundtrack, though. I loved the film and the novel but certain soundtracks shouldn't be listened to in isolation. In the film it was there in the background, helping create the atmosphere that made the film so successful. On its own it sounds like a lost child clattering noisily around the supermarket trying to find their mother. I'm listening to it as I write this and praying for the moment when Where Is My Mind? kicks in at the end.

Everything Begins With An 'E' (and some with an 'F')

Ege Bam Yasi - Can
Elan Vital - Pretty Girls Make Graves
Elephant - The White Stripes
Ellis 2001 - Ellis
Emotive - A Perfect Circle
Empire - Kasabian
Entertainment! - Gang of Four
Everything All The Time - Band of Horses
Everything Is - Nine Black Alps
Everything Is Wrong - Moby
Excerpts From The Diary of Todd Zilla - Grandaddy
Excuses for Travellers - Mojave 3
Exile In Guyville - Liz Phair
Exit Planet Dust - Chemical Brothers
Eye to the Telescope -KT Tunstall
Eyes Open - Snow Patrol
False Flags (single) - Massive Attack
Family is for Sharing - Brothers in Sound
Fashion Nugget (but only one song - I Will Survive)
Feel Good Lost - Broken Social Scene
Fever to Tell - Yeah Yeah Yeahs

A mixture of work, end of year parties, last minute preparations for Christmas and my winter holiday, and good old-fashioned laziness is behind the recent lack of posting. All the elements have worked in their own different ways to prevent me from writing. Most obviously, if I'm busy working I'm pushed for time. So, even though I'm able to listen to music and scribble down notes on the train as I scoot around Tokyo, I haven't really had the time or the energy to write anything when I get home. This post was actually written in a notebook this afternoon when I found myself with an unexpected break (I bet you're amazed to find out that I actually put any forethought into this blog at all).

End of year parties cause a variety of problems but the two main ones are the following. Firstly, if I'm hungover there are certain types of music I want to listen to and certain types I don't. Brian Eno good, Throbbing Gristle bad. Basically, if I want to listen to music when I'm in this perilous state (and I often don't) I want something relatively gentle - acoustic guitars strumming away over burbling folktronica perhaps. Clanging metallic industrial thrash experimental avant garde death metal noise carnage from hell is not the soundtrack I'm after as I fight my way through the madding crowds of Tokyo's train stations like a horny homesick salmon desperately trying to make its way upstream. This means that I need to choose my music carefully, something the relatively random nature of this challenge precludes. Secondly, if I know I'm going out for three hours of all-you-can-drink carnage, I always think it's a good idea to leave my iPod safe at home, in case I don't manage to do that to myself.

I'm going to Cambodia and Vietnam next week so I've been spending time sorting out hotels and visas. I've also been trying to find presents for my family back home that are a) decent; b) a size that can be sent to the UK without me having to use my thumbs as collateral with a Yakuza loan-shark just so I can pay the postage; and c) a reasonable price here. Chocolate and calendars it is again then, much the same as last year. However, trying to find a calendar that's different to the ones I've sent in previous years is something of a challenge. Either I've been in Japan for too long or it's time I was starting to use my imagination a bit more when it comes to buying Christmas presents.

My final excuse - as I said, I'm a bit of a lazy bastard. Last night I had the choice of writing this and some other stuff that I had to finish, or watching Insomnia - guess what I went for. Anyway, am I actually going to mention music at any point in this post? Well, I can try. Listening to Everything is Wrong made me realise that Moby was actually decent once. This was of course back in the days when, if you wanted to hear his songs you had to buy his album rather than just watch an evening of commercial television. Instead of his current 'Best Of' album he should have just taken Everything is Wrong, tacked on a disc of bonus tracks (of course including Go), and re-released it as a deluxe edition. Whether he would allow the puritan anti-consumerist, anti-capitalist sleevenotes to be included in this re-issue is another question entirely.

Anything else? Exile In Guyville is fantastic but didn't it turn to be something of an albatross for the rest of Liz Phair's career? Exit Planet Dust is still a buzz and it is the ideal soundtrack for walking to the station at shite o' clock in the morning (when you haven't got a hangover). If Coldplay are MacDonalds then Snow Patrol are KFC - they're not quite as bad but they still leave you feeling ultimately unsatisfied. I was given Final Straw just after I'd ended a long-term relationship so my guard was down and I fell for it completely. Even now tracks from it make up the top 3 of the 25 most listened to tracks on my iPod. It's not a bad album but Eyes Open is little more than a rehash of it (apart from the song they did with Martha Wainwright).

All the 'F' albums are getting left for another post as I think this one has gone on for too long.

P.S - I haven't included any links from this post as I have done with the others because my computer is having one of its all too frequent go slow days. Must be casual Friday or something.

This post is brought to you by the letter 'D'

Do You Know Squarepusher? - Squarepusher
Dog On Wheels (EP) - Belle & Sebastian
Doolittle - Pixies
Dragonwyck - Dragonwyck
Dub Housing - Pere Ubu
Duello - Unicode

It's a bit twee, I know, but bear with me - things that make me happy:

• Glayva - it's getting mighty cold round these parts and nothing puts a heat in you quite as pleasantly as Glayva. I'm not getting paid for this, I'm just drinking it as I write this post and it's taking the edge of what is a bitterly cold night.
• Seeing vain people in Tokyo make utter arses of themselves - I was walking through Shinjuku tonight when some posing bint in sunglasses, big boots, a pout, and a strut that would put Liam Gallagher to shame, went arse over tit because she couldn't handle the ten inch spike heels on the boots that she'd chosen to wear. Her boyfriend, some gormless git in a cheap looking expensive suit and more Louis Vuitton than should really be seen on a man, was affronted and proceeded to give her a bollocking on the street. If only my mobile battery hadn't have been dead at the time; I may have had my first posting on YouTube.
• The letter 'D'

I seem to remember reading something, either an interview with or an article written by Brett Anderson in which he claimed that the seventh track on any album is always the best one. I've spent the last ten minutes Googling variations on this theme but with no success. If anyone else knows what I'm talking about please post a comment and a link if possible. In a similar vein, my experience with the letter 'D' (at least as far as my iPod is concerned) has lead me to believe that it's somehow imbued with some kind of mystical significance. Just look at the evidence over the last few posts. Hell, even an album of early Seventies psychedelia that sounds like it was dreamed up solely for the Almost Famous soundtrack can't sully the power of the magical 'D'. I can't remember who pointed me in the direction of Dragonwyck, but it's well worth further investigation.

I've been looking for a link for Unicode, but I haven't been able to find anything (not doing to well on the Google front tonight). They (I think they're a 'they' anyway) are an experimental band from Italy. I saw Mattia Coletti (who may or may not be a member of the band) in Tokyo earlier this year and he was like nothing I've ever seen before. If you're looking for an escape from skinny ties and New Wave wannabes this is a fair distance from all of that.

It's bound to go pear shaped soon

Damage - Blues Explosion
Danny the Dog OST - Massive Attack
Dark Side of the Moon - Pink Floyd
Daydream Nation - Sonic Youth
Dear Catastrophe Waitress - Belle & Sebastian
Death to the Pixies (Double CD) - Pixies
Deftones - Deftones
Demo - Tokyo Sundown
Demo - Raddie and Weourus
Desperate Youth, Bloodthirsty Babes - TV on the Radio
Destroy Rock 'n Roll - Mylo
Different Class - Pulp
Dirty Hits - Primal Scream
Divine Hammer (CDS) - The Breeders
DJ Kicks - Daddy G

'C' was something of a traumatic letter with it's twin salvo of shite, Civilian by Boy Kill Boy and Costello Music by The Fratellis. As long as there was nothing too bad 'D' was always going to be good in comparison, but it's gone way beyond the call of duty to roll out a bunch of storming albums. Granted, the ones by Mylo and the Deftones are a bit flat-footed, but are harmless enough pieces of aural chewing gum. Different Class is an undeniable classic that manages to shoehorn anthropology, vivid prose, razor-sharp wit (of the kind that 'comedians' like Russell Brand can only dream about), scathing social critique, and cracking tunes into an album that's just a little over fifty minutes long. I haven't heard Jarvis Cocker's solo album but I intend to buy it sooner rather than later.

Dark Side of the Moon is another one of those albums that's always there or thereabouts in 'Greatest Ever' polls, but I'm still not convinced. Pink Floyd have always been a mystery to me in the same way that organised religion is. Both have millions of devout followers who don't react too kindly to criticism of any sort, both are huge money-making organisations, and both sets of believers are almost always proselytizers who think your soul/music taste is in mortal danger if you don't see the error of your ways and open your heart and mind to the true path. Dark Side of the Moon is interesting to me in the same way as evangelical TV channels are - it gives me a chance to look into the belly of the beast and see what all the fuss is about without giving myself over to it completely. Maybe I was born too late, or maybe I just didn't take the right drugs at the right time, but I still can't see what all the fuss is about. Maybe it just makes more sense when you're fifty years old and listening to it as you drive your kids to school in the Range Rover.

I'm listening to Dirty Hits as I write this. As I mentioned on Tokyo Music I finally saw Primal Scream live this year, and they were worth the horrendously inflated prices that are inevitable when you go and see foreign artists in Japan. I wasn't too sure about their Greatest Hits album though, not through any doubts about the quality of the music, or whether this was a sign of them selling out, but because it made me feel like I was getting old. Over the last couple of years there have been a spate of 'Best Of's and '10th Anniversary Special Edition's released, and for the first time I can remember buying the records when they originally came out. Is it inevitable that as someone who's never really grown out of the music geek stage, this is how I'm going to measure the progress of my life?