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.

Bumper bonanza roll-over (aka I'm a lazy git)

Albums covered since the last post:

Amateur Night in the Big Top - Shaun William Ryder
American Graffiti O.S.T - V/A
American Roots - The Essential Album - V/A
Amputechture - The Mars Volta
Antics - Interpol
Apologies to the Queen Mary - Wolf Parade
Archival Recordings - Klaus Nomi (though only one track)
Army (single) - Ben Folds
Around the Sun - R.E.M
As Heard on Radio Soulwax Pts. 1 and 4 - 2 Many DJsAu
Ask Me Tomorrow - Mojave 3
At Folsom Prison - Johnny Cash
ATP 2004 - Mogwai (again only one track)
Autobahn - Kraftwerk
Bach: Cello Suites 1-6 - Pablo Casals
Back in Black (Remastered Edition) - AC/DC

Two things. Firstly, if you want real pain and angst in music forget about your skinny, pasty boys with guitars, they're a bunch of lightweights mewling because they think no-one understands them. I'm afraid we do understand you boys, and the game's up - you couldn't get your hole so you wrote a song about it. For every Joy Division or Smiths we're lumbered with a million and one Coldplays, Keanes, Interpols, or Snow Patrols trying to pass off meaningless and vague adolescent poetry as profound songwriting that tackles the big issues. Bollocks. For the real pain and suffering the country music shelves are a good place to start. Not the shite touted by Toby Keith, Garth Brooks et al, but the older stuff by the likes of Johnny Cash or Hank Williams, or some of the lesser known artists. Take the following song from the American Roots album by the late Eva Cassidy:

Bill and I got married following our first born
Daddy left this gas & convenience store just before he died
And I was only nineteen when I had my third baby
And sometimes I think maybe I should've left here long ago

Travellers are stopping by, check their oil and their p.s.i.
Gas up and away to fly, moving down the line
But this beat-up truck & worn out shoes always give me the blues
Billy sucking down the booze nearly every night

Chorus:- I never seen the city lights
How they must shine so bright
Not like this country night
The sky's black as coal
And this gas-station mountain home
Not a thing to call my own
How I wish I was alone
With a penny to my name

Strangers say this mountain here is beautiful beyond compare
But it's just a dumb old mountain; I see it every day
If I could see sunset skies over fields of green or ocean-tides,
City skyline in the night, I'll be dancing till the dawn

Chorus

Bill and I got married following our first born
Daddy left this gas & convenience store just before he died
Maybe Bill & I someday will find a chance to get away
Until then it's here I'll stay wishing on a star

Chorus

Fuck Yellow or Run, this is true misery and pain - a woman stuck in the arsehole of the States, married to an alcoholic with a dead-end job, living a life that's over before it even had a chance to begin. Of course country has it's share of shite songs but I'm sure that overall there are significantly more and truer reflections on the messiness of life in the country section of your local record shop than there are in the indie/rock section. And before anyone asks, yes I do have Snow Patrol and Interpol on my iPod. My defence? Hell, I like to eat MacDonalds from time to time but that doesn't mean I think it's gourmet food.

Secondly, I spent most of my journey home last night, my journey to work this morning, and time spent travelling between offices listening to Bach. I don't mind a bit of Bach on a Sunday afternoon after a Saturday night has slipped off its leash and turned into a Sunday morning. I sometimes listen to it on the way to work if I want to relax on the train and maybe dose off for a while, but this was too much. By lunchtime today I felt like I was living in a world designed by a Marketing/Advertising deity - classical music following me everywhere, soundtracking my every move, trying to make me buy cars. The fact that advertising has created this image in my head is just another sign of how evil it is - Bill Hicks wasn't far off the truth when he told all the marketing people in his audience to go home and kill themselves because there was no justification for what they did. Anyway, this is a rant for another day, so back to my point. Never before have I been so glad to hear the opening peals of Hell's Bells by AC/DC. I was given an insight into how teenagers must have felt back in the grey part of the Fifties when Elvis burst into their lives with a shake of his hips and a shitload of sex appeal. Culture is good but there's always going to be a place for innuendo-laden songs about taking too many pills and being 'shook' all night long.