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.