Monday 9 July 2007

I could never be a drummer; I'd throw up.





Saw Cajun Dance Party on Saturday. I will not lie, it was very very amazingly good fun. I squeezed right to the front, close enough for, if I'd wanted, I could have ripped all the cords out of the keyboard CDP's resident pianist Vicky was playing.Towards the end of the night the singer was stage-diving, the guitars had about 2 strings still working and the crowd had managed to somehow crowd-surf the singer Danny's microphone stand all the way back to the auditorium.
It was the first night of Cajun Dance Party's UK tour. It was a pretty good start. The support acts were an icelandic band called Jakobinarina (pronounced "yack-oh-been-a-reen-a"), and a guy singing ballads on a piano. The poster said it was Jakobinarina and Tinseltown supporting, but after checking out tinseltown on MySpace, it turns out it wasn't. Whoever he was, he was good; and he handed out FREE shirts after his set. They were these off-white fairtrade organic cotton shirts (WHY ARE THE ECO FRIENDLY T-SHIRTS NEVER WHITE? MY HADOUKEN SHIRT IS ALSO ALL YELLOWY!) with "NICE GUYS DON'T PLAY GOOD MUSIC" hand-sprayed onto them. I managed to get a girls extra small size, and i am pretty sure it is roughly the same size as any t-shirt that my four-year-old brother might wear. Ah well, I can just tell everyone that it is the style to wear childrens' clothes. Or girls' clothes.

I can't remember tracklisting perfectly, but the finale was The Next Untouchable, soon to be Cajun's new single. It was an awesome gig, buy their single off iTunes, it's amazing.

DOWNLOAD: Cajun Dance Party - The Next Untouchable



I have a recurring dream in which I manage to single-handedly start some kind of illegal underground warehouse rave club scene in my middle-class suburban town just outside the M25. It's not going to happen, but every time I put on Pirate Soundsystem's Headspin Remix of Hadouken!'s 'Liquid Lives', there it appears. One word for this track: WAREHOUSE.
It's not music in the music sense of the word - I will actually eat my own hat if this EVER (even in like a hundred years) comes up on Desert Island Discs - but it's one hell of a dancehall-oriented track, and the bassline SCREAMS neon.

DOWNLOAD: Hadouken! - Liquid Lives (Pirate Soundsystem Headspin Remix)


And now, Regina Spektor. She's finally coming to London, so me, Wil and Jane are going down to see her at the Royal Festival Hall. Except, annoyingly, Kate Nash has decided to schedule the ONLY London date of her UK tour that very day, and somebody's offered me a free ticket. RARGH. The scheduled time of both shows are EXACTLY the same, and I've already paid for Regina Spektor. The decision was tough, but I'm going to Regina, seeing as this is her World Tour and she probably won't be in London again for at least a year. But argh, it's still really irritating.
Although, on the upside, as remarked by my sister after she heard Habanera, the B-side to Kate's Number 2 smash Foundations, Kate Nash is starting to sound more and more like Regina.
Habanera is a masterpiece. It's a little bit too arthouse to ever get the mainstream recognition of Foundations, but it's a solid tune. It builds up from Kate just singing some high-pitched dadadadaaas over a deep piano riff, in comes some drums and some lyrics. The real artistic bit is in the random noises that build up over the course of the song. There's a match being lit, coins being dropped and glasses being tapped. Or something like that.

DOWNLOAD:Regina Spektor - Wasteside

DOWNLOAD: Kate Nash - Habanera