BLOG MORE WRITE LESS

I need to post more. I always write these massive essays, then I go ages without posting anything, because it's too much effort to write. so anyway, here are some tracks that have been getting a lot of play in the old windows media player, and they're offered with no explanation. AT ALL.

But first, picture made me incredibly happy:


All these are on zShare

DOWNLOAD: HEALTH // DISCO - Triceratops (Acid Girls Before Dancefloorasauruses Ruled the Earth Remix)

DOWNLOAD: HEALTH // DISCO - Zoothorns (Nastique's Thornzoo Remix)

DOWNLOAD: Björk - Wanderlust (Ratatat Remix)

DOWNLOAD: Channels 3x4 - Meeting

DOWNLOAD: Sébastien Tellier - Sexual Sportswear (SebastiAn remix)

DOWNLOAD: Crystal Fighters - I Love London (Vocal) (zShare)

Crystal Castles - 'Through the Hosiery' Lyrics

Once again I have been trying to decipher the words of a Crystal Castles song, because is there really a better way to waste a sunday evening?
The track 'Through the Hosiery' appears on Crystal Castles self released album, which is out march 18. The thought of uploading one of the previously unseen unseen album tracks (unseen on the blogosphere anyway) is very tempting, but realistically I'd rather not live in fear of being emailed with copyright notices. Crystal Castles love leaking their content all over the internet and have been doing so for the last 2 or 3 years, so it's not like you can't wait another 3 weeks to hear the 5 or 6 songs you don't already have. If you are going to buy one album this year, make it Crystal Castles. You owe it to them.

Anyway, here's my attempt at guessing the words to one of the tracks on the new album. I'm guessing these are about 50% right, so if anyone's thinks they have a better idea of what the actual words are, I'd be delighted to hear. Leave a comment or something. I'm not hosting the mp3 but you can probably find it on the Hype Machine.

**Altered a bit on 26/03


You want it all but don’t care what you want
Feel complete, uh it’s good
You sleep by my side, it’s understood
It’s not too late you wanted it good

Through the hosiery
To the ovary
To the nothing
How do you feel when you can’t feel nothing?

Feel so good, You said it before
To your feet, you fall to the floor
Deep inside you still want more
Deal or not, you look to the door

Through the hosiery
To the ovary
To the nothing
How do you feel when you can’t feel nothing?

You can’t get, you’re waiting for me
You put it in, You need discipline
Cover my head, but you can’t beat nothing
Blood on my hands, you can wait on something

Through the hosiery
To the ovary
To the nothing
How do you feel when you can’t feel nothing?

Drink some more, feeling opened up
We’re holding it in, now look what you’ve done
One more go, you can’t hold it back
Drink some more, get it off your back

You can’t get, you’re waiting for me
You put it in, You need discipline
Cover my head, but you can’t beat nothing
Blood on my hands, you can wait...

I originally thought it was armoury, but that didn't really sound right or make any sense. Ovary it is.

I really do like this song a lot, my only critique is that it's a bit annoying at the end where the last verse just fades out halfway through the line. And the vocals seem a bit quiet. But it might be to do with the mp3 I have of it being a leak and it's not the real thing. Who knows? And here are some lovely Crystal Castles and rap mash-ups, made by the wonderful ABX at thehoodinternet.com. Enjoy!

DOWNLOAD: Crystal Castles vs Nice & Smooth - I Rhymed Slow in 1991 (ABX Mix) (zShare)
DOWNLOAD: Crystal Castles vs The Pack - I'm Shining Like A Crystal (ABX Mix) (zShare)

OH ITS THE BASS: Crystal Castles Album!

I AM IN LOVE. I AM NOT GOING TO REVIEW IT PROPERLY IT LEAKED ON THE INTERNET A FEW DAYS AGO IT IS SO COMPLETELY NOT WHAT YOU WOULD EXPECT - THE LAST TRACK HAS AN ACOUSTIC GUITAR IN IT - I CANNOT WAIT FOR THE NEXT ALBUM AND IT BETTER HAVE THIS TRACK IN IT OR I WILL BE MOST UPSET.
And looking at that picture there, doesn't Alice actually look a little bit like everybody's least favourite pop granny?

OH EM GEE: Crystal Castles // These New Puritans // The Horrors // Ulterior, @ The Astoria, 16/02/08

All my evil evil plans to go to many many many gigs this half term went along the way of track 4 of Lightspeed champion's debut album (look it up), but at least on the final saturday I got to go do some crazy dancing. The first band, Ulterior, seemed to be genuinely horrible people. Their sets started and ended with them positioning an electric guitar directly in front of an amp and leaving it there for a few minutes. Their myspace biography drones on about how they will preserve originality and ‘destroy the cult of the past’, which in theory is a good thing, but in real life they sound like an almost-as-good version of The Presets - whose debut album ‘Beams’ is soooo good, I can’t believe I missed it until a few weeks ago! (Oh, and they also have a new one out in April – more on that later.) Long story short, Ulterior have a few decent songs, but they could possibly work on their crowd-pleasing skills, instead of being tortured artists and 'invalidating all kinds of imitation'.

These New Puritans set started out slowly, but the crowd was full of goth teenagers with backcombed hair and too much eyeshadow who made themselves busy trying to look moody and unimpressed - it's hardly fair to blame the band for the complete lack of dancing. These New Puritans make leftfield indie music - their album is really good, with the exception of a few absolute rubbish ones. 'Numbers (aka Numerology)' is one of them. It is horrendous. It really does amaze me that a band good enough to produce some truly killer tracks ('En Papier', 'Colours', 'Infinity Ytinifni' for example) can make such an error of judgement that they think a 'Numbers' is worthy of playing. After being subjected to the worst song that band has ever made, things finally got moving when they played lead single 'Elvis'. I'm not going to run through everything they played as I have already forgotten them all, but the set was really very fun.

The venue was nearly overflowing with excitement when Crystal Castles took the stage, even some of the eyeliner and straighteners brigade got their backs off the walls. It was surreal, Ethan (is it Ethan or Ethin? or some people say it's actually Claudio) kind of sneaked on stage and made a few scary electronic gurgling noises before Alice ran on and the amazing 'Atlantis to Interzone' started. While it's technically a remix, in a live setting it can technically be regarded as a whole new song. It's amazing. One of the main complaints people generally have about Crystal Castles live sets is that they never play long enough, but this time the set went on for about an hour. 'Alice Practice', 'Air War', 'Mother Knows Best' and 'Crimewave' were all present - there were a few omissions (Where was 'Love and Caring'?!) but realistically when you're a band with about 30 different songs you're not going to be able to play them all. Due to my overestimating the robustness of my digital camera at some previous concerts I was megapixel-less for the show, but I bought a nice disposable camera for £2.50 and I'm currently waiting to see how the pictures came out. Probably crap. Oh, and it turns out my phone's video functions cannot cope with loud noise AT ALL, which means all the effort I put into trying to video one of the songs was wasted, because the backing track is solid white noise.

The Horrors played a set that was a complete anticlimax. All of their songs merged into one blurry graveyard screaming session. Knowing that I was not a massive Horrors fan I decided not to devote my efforts to being as close as possible to the stage and the band, but instead on voluntarily getting as hurt as possible in the moshpit (which I regretted a bit the next morning).

A quick note: If you are a person with massive white rasta dreadlocks, please do not combine this with being a person who jumps around at gigs. Everyone within a metre radius of you got whipped in the face with your massive disgusting hair and it actually really hurts a surprising amount and it's horrible and they smelt and there was a bit when part of one got caught in my teeth and a bit ripped off and got caught and I was nearly sick and of all the things that happened that night, the dreadlock in teeth moment was the one that came closest to ruining my weekend. Please consider others, and either stop going to gigs or get a haircut.

IT MAKES ME SICK

They are currently holding all of the following places on the Hype Machine top 50:
1
2
4
5
9
12
13
31
32
39
oh, and 45.

Why I don't Like Vampire Weekend

If you were to take the value of how much I know about African music, multiply it by a million, square it, divide it by the cube root of pi and raise it to a power of ten; it would still be zero. Vampire Weekend definitely have a vast amount more knowledge and enthusiasm for Afropop than myself, but is it really necessary for them to put on African accents in their songs?

Evidence: listen to 'Blake's Got a New Face'. It is straight out of Ladysmith Black Mambazo.

Lightspeed Champion @ Bedford Esquires, 02/02/08

It was really fun. The first band was a kooks-wannabe local indie band and weren't really all that interesting, but I will forgive them because I'm sure they'll get better. Next up was Semifinalists, a band made up of a small japanese man wearing even smaller jeans, a drummer in massive headphones, a lead guitarist with the worst haircut seen this side of 1996 and, somewhat inexplicably, Dev Hynes on bass. They were really weird and nobody seemed that impressed. But, their one redeeming feature as a band was their very cool band t-shirts (I can't find a picture of them anywhere on the net, you're going to have to trust me on this) which were, unfortunately, on sale for about £13.50 more than the shrapnel in my pocket.

Anyway, enough bashing the support bands, Lightspeed Champion put on a genuinely entertaining and lovely set. The first few tracks were performed 'acoustic' - meaning just Dev on guitar and another guy on violin (note to self: find out who) and even the occasional bit of harmonica thrown in. A few tracks in, it finally went 'full band' - half of 'Semifinalists' joined in, contributed some backing vocals, and a drummer girl appeared out of nowhere. Things started to get a little bit crazy during 'Galaxy Of The Lost', when roughly three quarters of the people in the venue all decided to try to get as close as possible to the front of the stage at exactly the same time. It didn't exactly become a mosh-pit, but things got pretty sweaty. In between songs was filled with cheery banter, such as before 'Everyone I Know is Listening to Crunk', which was introduced as 'a reasonably stereotypical song about, um, breakups and stuff. Oh, and it's also about hip-hop.'

All of the songs performed were from the recently released ‘Falling Off The Lavender Bridge’ album, with the exception of the encore track that we were specifically asked not to write about on the internet and one other. Written on the tracklist as ‘Prostitute Song’, Dev had to explain to us that the song as of yet doesn’t actually have a title, but it was about a Brazilian prostitute and that was there to remind him. It was really good and even though nobody had heard it before, by the end of the track everyone was singing along to the chorus. We were told it will be on the next album, but until then there’s ‘Falling Off The Lavender Bridge’- definitely a must-have for this spring!

Buy the album from Rough Trade

DOWNLOAD: Lightspeed Champion - Everyone I Know is Listening To Crunk (zShare)

And just for the LOLZ, here is some actual crunk.

DOWNLOAD: Missy Elliot ft Fatman Scoop & Ciara - Lose Control (zShare)