Suburban Ghetto Musick

DEATH

2008-11-07T16:20:00.002Z

I have decided to officially say this blog is pretty much over, because basically I do not want to keep feeling guilty about not writing enough on here but I also really can't be bothered to write on here anymore. My life has literally got so hectic since starting A-levels and sharing my opinion on bands I like or might not like has slipped off the radar a bit. And the amount of time I waste on statcounter looking at what google search terms people have used to stumble on here ("Alice Practise did a party poo", anyone?) is time that really could be spent on other things.

i'm not going to delete this, on the offchance that I decide to start agin vaguley in the future, but this is probably the end. It was fun while it lasted.

Enter Shikari @ The Alban Arena, 08/10/08

2008-10-11T16:11:00.007+01:00

(Photo from a totally different concert, but included here for aesthetic and 'show you what the band look like' reasons)

Enter Shikari are a band I have never been wildly enthusiastic about, but half of them went to the same school as me, and this show was about a mile and a half from my house and I've heard they are quite good live. The rumours were true. Never in my life have I got so battered at a gig, nor have I ever been that violent in a moshpit. I usually just dance in the middle until someone runs over and floors me, but this time I was going for it, flying into people and punching and kicking and screaming. School on thursday was not a very fun experience, but it was definitely worth it. Support from one local band who I didn't think were very good, and a drum and bass called DJ Pdex who was probably not all that brilliant but at the time was very fun to jump around to.

Musically, Enter Shikari are only slightly different to pretty much every other ridiculous emo band, despite the fact that they like to make a big fuss about the fact that they use a bit of synth every now and then. The singing, when it goes into a full 'screamo' mode is, a bit horrible, but they aren't badly-written songs and if you pretend Enter Shikari's fans don't all have myspace names such as "<3 GEORGIA♥[ravetingz]FTW <3" it's possible to almost enjoy some of their songs, but only in a really S-Club 7 guilty pleasure kind of way.

Enter Shikari - Kicking Back On the Surface Of Your Cheek
zShare | YouSendIt

///Update: If you've found me through a search engine looking for photos, as far as I know there was no official photographer but a girl called Lorien took a few decent shots and you can see them on her Flickr

Underage Festival 2008

2008-09-05T16:59:00.011+01:00

(All photos by me, please don't use without permission!)

The one-day extravaganza for all of London's annoyingly fashionable topshop-lovers returned for its second year. It was bigger, louder and more chaotic but I'm going to be honest: it wasn't as good as last year. This is mainly due to the fact that the line-up did not include as many bands I loved, but also there were way too many stages, and it didn't seem to be as organised as before. I managed to score myself a photopass which was a very interesting and fun experience, but from it I have also learned that the actual fun in gigs is definitely from jumping round and getting horribly sweaty. So, no more photopassing for me I reckon. Unless someone wants to pay me, but this is quite unlucky to happen.

First act I managed to catch was Kid Harpoon, but he was pretty boring so I headed off to see a bit of Nick Harrison, and to be honest I cannot actually remember for the life of me what I thought of this band, but they were probably OK. After this I saw Polly Scattergood playing in a shed for about 2 songs, and she was really good. I hadn't heard of her before but she is honestly really good.

From there it was Ox.Eagle.Lion.Man. This is a group I have been casually aware of for a while, but hadn't actually got round to listening to, and upon seeing them live I have no idea why anybody would want to listen to them ever. The singer, who runs around calling himself Frederick Blood-Royale, puts on this ridiculous moaning posh voice, like Antony Hegarty but about 10 times worse. The songs themselves seemed reasonably well-written but the rest of the band need to find a new vocalist.

From here I saw Pull in Emergency who I didn't really have an opinion about and still don't, White Williams who I thought were really intresting and inventive, and if we are going to go along the Santogold/MIA method of describing bands then they are a bit like a cooler New York version of Metronomy. I didn't stay for the whole set because I wanted to check out a bit of Poppy & The Jezebels who I though were OK and then I saw Cheeky Cheeky and the Nosebleeds in the Topman tent and they were absolutely fantastic. Really good slightly shouty indie dance-punk. After this one of my friends persuaded me top see a bit of Count and Sinden, who were good in terms of the actual music but they had a really annoying rapper person just sort of repeating 'yeah, yeah Count and Sinden' on top and this totally ruined it.

Care Bears on fire were crap. They were yet another band of american 10 year olds. There was one of these last year and they were crap also. Nobody had heard of them or liked them or decided they were good after watching them. Sorry, I am being horribly mean and nasty to these spoiled american tweenagers or whatever the disney channel is calling them at the moment but whoever decided to fly out this rubbish band and put them on the main stage is a fool.

I decided to go see FrYars, and have now made up my mind that I do not like his music, because it is annoying. Team Waterpolo I thought were reasonably listenable but slightly too middle of the road to appeal to me, Those Dancing Days were awful and then I saw some very small new unsigned band called A Girl Called Kate which is a rubbish name for a band but they were really good. Then for about 5 minutes I saw SCUM and they were the most amazing noise terroroists and it was fantastic, but based on the music on their profile, the recordings bear no resemblance to the live show. Then I spent a short while being slightly more impressed than I thought I was going to be with ridiculous emo outfit My Passion before i headed off to take about a million photos of Florence and The Machine, who was amazing in just about every way every way possible. That's all there is to say really.

After that I saw a bit of Sons & Daughters. i was quite impressed, but not so much that since then I've actually bothered to listen to any of their stuff. XX Teens are crap. In every way. Goldilocks was quite good, but rap when it's not knowingly taking the piss out of itself I never find that exciting. After that it was back to the red bull bandstand to see a scary girl metal band called Kasms. I think my obsession to weird scary electro bands is translating into also having the ability to appreciate non-electro scary hardcore music, which I find slightly worrying. Next time you see me I will look like this probably. Then it was off to see Ipso Facto, who aren't that good, but for some reason in my head I think of them as nice people even though they wear strange black and white outfits. From here it was Dizzee Rascal, who in terms of musical skill is not a great live performer but everyone was dancing and having fun so we will forgive him for that.

I left Dizzee early to check out the amazing Bonde do Role, who were incredibly fun to watch and came across as really genuinely hilarious people. From here I saw Foals, which was absolutely insane. The tent was so packed that the crowd barriers were actually bending, and some safety-conscious stage manager decided to temporarily stop the set and get all the photographers OUT RIGHT NOW, ALL OF YOU, IT'S FOR YOUR OWN SAFETY YEAH ETC ETC. Which was quite annoying. After this was headliners Gallows, who were not exactly something to listen to whilst doing your homework but the insane onstage (and eventually offstage) antics were a sight to behold.

SO THERE YOU HAVE IT. More than a month late, and badly written as well, and no mp3s either. I am spoiling you people I really am.

MORE PHOTOS:

summer's over

2008-08-30T16:42:00.003+01:00

since i've last been on here i've managed to fail to go to the partyshank gig I was advertising, had a wicked time photographing loads of bands at the underage festival, spent a week sheltering from welsh rain in a welsh caravan, saw loads of brilliant comedy acts in edinburgh, got my results (they were good), rocked out at the reading festival then cheated at a ridiculous number of card games with my brother in southwold. I've also given up using capital letters because THERES NO TIME, DAMMIT.

this summer has been amazing, and i am planning on gradually writing about all the musick-related stuff eventually - even if that means you'll have to wait til october.

A Severe lack Of Blogging

2008-07-16T21:27:00.005+01:00

I am back from 3 weeks of having amazingly good fun sailing the seven seas from Liverpool to Norway (OK - there aren't actually seven seas there but you get the idea), then running round the tiny fishing town of Maloy and generally spreading mischief and mayhem - well, as much as you can when bars are charging £6.50 for a pint of beer.

Anyway, this summer I am going to be away from the computer quite a bit - hopefully not as long as my nearly-two-month absense that has just happened, but SGM is not dead. Things here are due to be a bit slow for a while, but I have a couple of gigs lined up for this week: Partyshank and Glamour for Better in Bedford, and the amazing Underage Festival in Victoria Park where I will be taking millions of photos with the photopass I have managed to acquire using underhand and corrupt methods - lying, stealing, bribing, murdering etc. Catcutter Records have sent me a compilation CD which i'm going to listen to at some point, and it's pretty much all bands i haven't heard before but having been out the 'sphere for about a month I am ready to listen to some new exciting bands.

Also, on a bit of a side note, the Forestry Commission is building a massive forest in the fields across my road. Which means I will have to have a big party there at some point.

HEALTH live at Pure Groove, 10/06/08

2008-06-12T16:41:00.003+01:00

Readers, it's been a while, but now my GCSEs are finally over. Summer's here!

Seriously, Health are amazing. On tuesday I decided to skip revising and go see them play a free instore at the new Pure Groove store that's just opened up this month. I was not disappointed. The shop is literally tiny, and the band took up basically the whole of the stage with their piles and piles of crazy equipment. And as they launched into their first track 'Girl Attorney', John Famiglietti the guitarist immediately started jumping and spinning round through the crowd, and nearly whacking us in the face with his guitar. It was a half hour set of what could be described as solid noise, but as performers they are incredibly interesting to watch just to marvel at their equipment and techniques. The lead singer Jake Duzsik had two microphones, one making normal sound and the other making a shrill, high pitched scream. And despite their eagerness to do a bit of 'crazy dancing', and the slightly chaotic nature of their songs, you can see they are amazingly well-rehearsed and slick.

Usually at concerts I consider about 90% of the fun to be based on jumping around, getting very sweaty and slightly injured; but this was a lunchtime concert full of 30-somethings and vinyl. The strange thing (for me at least) was that the lack of dancing was a good thing. Most of their songs are completely chaotic and strange anyway, and with the band getting so into what they were doing it was nice to be able to just observe, if that makes sense. The volume was incredibly loud, and the songs really took on a new dimension in a live setting. They played pretty much all their album, sadly omitting 'Lost Time' and possibly a few others, but there were definitely a few new tracks I'd never heard before.

The band's UK tour finished last night, so UK readers will have to wait until august to see them again, whereas any Americans I urge you to see them on their US tour which is starting next week!

Tellier Was Robbed

2008-05-25T11:30:00.003+01:00

This is the best video I could find, recorded from french TV. it's worth watching for the spectacle of Sébastien Tellier's five female backing singers each with matching beards and sunglasses, a golf cart and the slightly counterproductive decision to inhale a load of helium.

Eurovision 2008 - Sébastien Tellier
by Woodythefrench

The UK managed to come joint last, and the top spot was run by Russia, seemingly because every former Soviet Union state awarded a maximum douze points for them.

Lillica Libertine remixes Does it Offend You, Yeah?

2008-05-24T18:03:00.008+01:00

I think now would be a good time to say that, in all honesty, I didn't really like 'Epic Last Song' on Does It Offend You, Yeah?'s debut album. It's not an awful song, it's not a crying on the floor with fingers in your ears song, it just didn't really do anything for me. And the Lifelike remix might be a slight improvement, but it's still not really anything to get that excited about.

Anyway, clearly the band disagrees with me about 'Epic Last Song' and they're releasing it as their next single, out on the 2nd of June. You can watch the video below.

They've also comissioned a remix by Lillica Libertine, which pushes the epicness (is epicness a word?) of the song all the way up to 11. It slows everything down, throws away all the vocals apart from the central chorus line, adds in some strange vocal effects and turns it into a grinding acid house track from the future. It's pretty 'out there' but at the moment I wholeheartedly approve.

Does it Offend You, Yeah? - Epic Last Song (Lillica Libertine Remix)
-link removed by request.

The single is available in loads of different formats, including CD, download or two 7" singles each with a different remix; which I quite like the idea of but there hasn't been a working record player in my house since 2002 so I might have to pass on those - alternatively you can order all 3 for just £4, and get a free japanese logo poster that I desperately want. Available to buy from here.

Please don't let my lack of enthusiasm about Epic Last Song deter you from the rest of the album, which has some really brilliant songs. Buy it from Rough Trade.

And finally - they've also launched a forum where you can make internet friends and compare which one in the band is your favourite. YOUNG OFFENDERS. it has a good name, methinks.

GCSE Music - What Idiots.

2008-05-23T10:43:00.005+01:00

(Photo by Jack Hynes)

Year 11 pupils sitting music GCSE have been given exam papers with the answers written on the back. The OCR exam board (Oxford, Cambridge and RSA Examinations) paper involved pupils listening to pieces of music and then identifying composers and styles of music, and at the end of the paper was a copyright acknowledgement for each piece of music. Twelve thousand people took this exam. Hahaha.

Listen to my friend Wil being interviewed about it yesterday by BBC Radio (Mp3)

or read more on this BBC news article

BRONZE BY GOLD HEARD THE HOOFIRONS

2008-05-17T15:51:00.008+01:00

Well, recently I have been getting really into listening to a lot of HEALTH. And I'm not even talking HEALTH/DISCO remixes, I mean the full-on noise rock experience. Yeah, I am that hardcore.

Usually when there's really short tracks on an album they are really crap and pointless, for example 'Number One' on Lightspeed Champion's debut or 'Silver Thoughts' From Cut Copy's latest offering. If it's a little bit of fluid sound that does not stand up on its own as a song, it shouldn't be a seperate album track. HEALTH's shorter tracks however, might just be their best ones. Highly compressed thrash-noise compositions that properly get you awake and ready for anything. Like this one:

HEALTH - Girl Attorney zShare | YouSendIt

Another one of my favourite tracks from their self titled album is 'Courtship', and anyway I just want to show off to the world how clever I am when it comes to recognising a bit of sampling. Listen to this song, and at the 0.17 mark it launches into this cool scream/shout thing, and Crystal Castles fans will definitely recognise this from the backing to Crystal Castles' latest single 'Courtship Dating'. And this isn't just something i've thought up, on a bit of paper that comes with the album it says 'background screaming courtesy of Health'. There's clearly some kind of conspiracy going on here with them both using the word 'courtship', but i don't know what it is yet.

Crystal Castles - Courtship Dating zShare | YouSendIt
HEALTH - Courtship zShare | YouSendIt

And anyway as I was having a read round the rest of the album literature I was intrigued to see that the track 'Air War' does not credit the vocals to Alice, but in fact they are sampled from 'Thema (Omaggio a Joyce)' by someone called Berio. I wasn't all that surprised the vocal wasn't Alice - and I don't think anyone would be, seeing as to be honest it sounds absolutely nothing like her - but without another option most people had assumed they were by her. And so in the name of investigative blogging, I decided to have a look around. After a bit of googling I found out the song is on a few different CDs, all of which are out of print. I then stumbled upon this blog. It didn't have an mp3 of Thema, but it made a bit of a reference to it, along with a lot of interesting stuff about postmodern composing that I didn't understand at all, but was still quite interesting to stumble through. So I decided that at the end of the day it wouldn't hurt to email the blog author, a Mr Jacob Sudol, and ask ever so nicely if he'd send me an mp3. It turns out he'd actually already posted it on his blog last June, and I've posted it here it is for you to enjoy as well.

To introduce it a bit, it's a reading of the opening to the Sirens chapter of James Joyce's Ullyses, which I haven't read but I think I will one day. It's not read the composer Luciano Berio himself, but his wife Cathy Berberian. Herself a soprano singer, she definitely deserves a lot of the credit for it due to her crazy vocal acrobatics, but then gradually her voice is subjected to all kind of crazy effects: distortions, echoes, stutterings; the tape speeds up, and then it slows down. Eventually it becomes an unrecognisable mess of sound. It's pretty weird, and although it's obviously a bit dated sounding - it was made in the 1950s - it's quite amazing to think people were messing around with sound like this before either of my parents were born. If you like it, I might suggest you also have a listen to 'Visage', which, although unlikely to get into your last.fm most played, is quite a terrifying experience and worth hearing at least once.

In the CC track 'Air War' the vocals are a bit more high pitched and of course, made even less recognisable to the point that a lot of people thing the words are in a completely different language. I've just found an old Pitchfork article that is quite funny to read now, because it describes "Alice's vocals" as "reminiscent of Luciano Berio's Thema (Omaggio a Joyce)". Haha, silly pitchfork.

Luciano Berio - Thema (Omaggio a Joyce)zShare | YouSendIt
Luciano Berio - Visage zShare | YouSendIt
Crystal Castles - Air War zShare | YouSendIt

Buy Crystal Castles' Album
Buy HEALTH's album
Buy HEALTH's remix album

Oh yeah, and because this blog is now a year old, as of a few days ago, I am posting the lyrics as well, to celebrate.

Bronze by gold heard the hoofirons, steelyrining imperthnthn thnthnthn.
Chips, picking chips off rocky thumbnail, chips. Horrid! And gold flushed more.
A husky fifenote blew.
Blew. Blue bloom is on the
Gold pinnacled hair.
A jumping rose on satiny breasts of satin, rose of Castille.
Trilling, trilling: I dolores.
Peep! Who's in the... peepofgold?
Tink cried to bronze in pity.
And a call, pure, long and throbbing. Longindying call.
Decoy. Soft word. But look! The bright stars fade. O rose! Notes chirruping answer.
Castille. The morn is breaking.
Jingle jingle jaunted jingling.
Coin rang. Clock clacked.
Avowal. Sonnez. I could. Rebound of garter. Not leave thee. Smack. La cloche! Thigh smack. Avowal. Warm. Sweetheart, goodbye!
Jingle. Bloo.
Boomed crashing chords. When love absorbs. War! War! The tympanum.
A sail! A veil awave upon the waves.
Lost. Throstle fluted. All is lost now.
Horn. Hawhorn.
When first he saw. Alas!
Full tup. Full throb.
Warbling. Ah, lure! Alluring.
Martha! Come!
Clapclop. Clipclap. Clappyclap.
Goodgod henev erheard inall.
Deaf bald Pat brought pad knife took up.
A moonlight nightcall: far: far.
I feel so sad. P. S. So lonely blooming.
Listen!
The spiked and winding cold seahorn. Have you the?
Each and for other plash and silent roar.
Pearls: when she.
Liszt's rhapsodies.
Hissss.

3 Songs That Are Somewhat Vaguely Relevant To A Recent News Item

2008-05-05T15:18:00.004+01:00

Shock! Horror! Incest! Rape! Here are some vaguely disturbing-ish songs that could be seen as some form of commentary.

Death From Above 1979 - Little Girl zShare | YouSendIt
(from the album 'You're a Woman, I'm a Machine'. Buy)

Interpol - Evil zShare | YouSendIt
(from the album 'Antics'. Buy)

Patrick Wolf - The Childcatcher zShare | YouSendIt
(from the album 'Lycanthropy'. Buy)

************

1. Of the following options, is this idea of using mp3s to belatedly bring you the news
A. Too pretentious?
B. Not pretentious enough?
C. Just right with regards to levels of pretentiousness?

2. Of the following options, how obvious is it that I have stolen the idea of having loads of questions from Hipster Runoff?
A. Too obvious?
B. Not obvious enough?
C. Just right with regards to levels of obviousness?

Love Music Hate Racism Carnival @ Victoria Park, 27/04/08

2008-04-29T20:06:00.008+01:00

(Truly awe-inspiring cameraphone photography by me)

Mmmkay. Sunday was fun but overall the day was quite badly organised, and whoever thought it would be a good idea to encourage every act to badmouth the BNP at every possible oppurtunity was foolish. Obviously the BNP are stupid evil racist nazis, but I didn't need to be told that by twelve different people at 20 minute intervals. Some of the politics were also a bit wonky too, such as the festival's organiser saying the BNP should be banned as a party, which is obviously wrong. If the government just goes around banning political groups on the basis that their political beliefs are wrong, then how can this country be any better than Nazi Germany, Apartheid era South Africa or McCarthyist America? Anyway - rant over - I spent most of the day jamming out in the dance tent to a load of trance/grime/dubstep/bassline/garage and old nineties house music, breaking all the rules of 'Thou Shalt Always Kill' and dancing like an easily amaused moron but it was very fun. There were a lot of 'Gyals wiv Attitood' who I can only assume hadn't been to the kind of musical event that might be described as a 'gig' before, and some of them got very annoyed at people like me who wanted to jump around. There were more than a few times when it looked like someone who'd accidentally stepped on someone's toe was 'gonn get slapped' for 'disrespecting ma family' or something. But it was alright on the whole.

After a bit I made the mistake of thinking it might be a good idea to check out Hard-fi, seeing as I figured the people dancing there might be a bit tolerant of getting brushed against by accident, but after spending about 5 minutes saying 'excuse me' I was at the front and I realised nobody was dancing or was going to. There were several thousand people crammed in like sardines with their eyes on the stage and no intention of moving. Ever. Which, all in all is not their fault because Hard-fi really are the worst band in the world. Ever.

With reference to me saying it was badly organised, I asked a million stewards when Patrick Wolf was playing, and it turned out they hadn't even decided which stage he was playing on until about an hour before he took the stage. It took a lot of asking to find out when he was actually on, but when he finally took the stage he was really good. We arrived a bit early and saw the last ten minutes of Akala, and heard a few tracks from his new(ish) album, and one bit where he managed to rap a whole song a capella at a rate of about ten syllables per second. Which I thought was quite impressive. Back to Mr Wolf - it was quite a short set, starting with 'Accident & Emergency' and closing with the brilliant 'Magic Position'.

The show started off with Patrick wearing a black shirt and trousers combo but in the middle of one song he threw them off revealing some rather brilliant Union Jack pyjamas. It was quite an upbeat poppy set, with a full backing band and Mr Wolf dancing round the stage armed with a microphone only. Last time I saw Patrick Wolf, at the Underage Festival (also in Victoria Park), it was a more piano-based ballady show that eventually I left to go rock out to Boy Kill Boy instead, because I couldn't see anything or hear it that well. As Patrick introduced the track 'Vultures', a massive pit opened up behind me and the rest of the set became a big euphoric crowdsurfing pile-up, as opposed to a million teenage girls trying to get as close to Mr Wolf as possible. It ended with Patrick Wolf climbing all over the crowd barriers and flailing around Alice Glass-style, and it was really fun.

Patrick Wolf - The Magic Position
ZShare | YouSendIt

And the fact that I heard this song about 20 times means I am actually starting to like it. Please don't hate me, I am already full of enough self-loathing as it is.

T2 Ft Jodie - Heartbroken
zShare | YouSendIt

HYPED

2008-04-22T16:19:00.005+01:00

When i started this blog I was under the impression it was going to be a matter of minutes until the Hype Machine lovingly welcomed me. 11 months later, I Am In. The shameless whiney email paid off, and Zoya told me she'd added my blog (Thanks Zoya!). At least i think so, because at the moment i can't find it anywhere. But I think this might be because as of yet I haven't posted any mp3 links that aren't via zShare. Anyway to celebrate here is a really nice track by Late of the Pier. It's one of those songs that make you feel really alive. Not saccharine-sweet happy-clappy sugar-pop, not crying-in-the-corner emo-pop, it's just a really nice song. I'm not 100% sure what the significance of 'Fairy Lights' is, if it's been remixed by Fairy Lights or that's just the name of the mix by LOTP, but it's really wicked anyway.

Late of the Pier - Broken (Fairy Lights Mix)
zShare | YouSendit

And the latest offering by Lillica Libertine is similarly brilliant. This is what I imagine the papparazzi were listening to when Diana's face got sprayed across the tunnel.

Lillica Libertine - Britney Spears
zShare | YouSendit

Oh and don't be tempted to try to put these two wicked acts together. No offence to Lillica libertine, but his remix of Bathroom Gurgle is waaaay below the standard he's usually at.

Eurovision.

2008-04-20T17:31:00.008+01:00

Tomorrow night. It feels very strange to actually care about who wins. Tellier all the way.

Sébastien Tellier - Divine (Danger Remix) (zShare | YouSendIt)

From what I read in Kruger magazine, Sébastien Tellier's next album may or may not be about mental illness. Buy 'Sexuality'.

Danger for French Eurovision '09?

Scenesters, Sneakers, Hipsters, Blogs

2008-04-15T18:14:00.010+01:00

(image credit: karina shah)

Blood Red Shoes released their debut album on monday. I'm about ten blog years behind with this, but it's well good. I was reading in the enemy and the reviewer was saying how the guitars were full of 'raw sexual energy' or something - I'm not too sure if the guitars are all that 'sexual', but there's some really good tracks and what I really like about it is the way it's got a whole range of emotions, including all the more negative ones, they are properly shouting and it's got loud aggressive guitars - but it's still about a thousand miles from the border to emo territory. Playing the whole album, some of the songs are a little bit same-y but I think you can forgive that when the songs are as good as they are, and on their own each track can stand up as a decent bit of rock and roll. There aren't any cringingly awful tracks, unlike say 'Good Time' or 'Numbers', on Crystal Castles and These New Puritans' debut albums.

And now onto SebastiAn, king of whoosh noises and glitchy violin masterpieces. Four new tracks have surfaced all at roughly the same time, on the Motor EP are Motor, Momy and Army; all quite nice and relatively standard Ed Banger industro-techno that we've come to expect from SebastiAn. And soon to be released on Ed Banger Records 3 is Dog, the most insane change in direction since Marilyn Manson recorded that folk-pop album in 2004. It's got unintelligible Metallica-style vocals and heavy metal guitars. It probably was put together electronically, and still sort of fits the style of a HGHLY BLGGBL BNGR, but if you close your eyes you can almost see Jimi Hendrix's corpse jamming it out. Judging by the 'minimix medley' put out by Feadz, Ed Rec 3 is gonna be pretty amazing. Some of the stuff on Ed Rec 2 got boring very quickly, such as Limousine by Vicarious Bliss (which, if I ever hear again, will probably lead me to kill someone). And 'Robot Oeuf' by Uffie may be the best thing she has ever done.

Oh and be jealous - look who rolled up to Rough Trade and bought the t-shirt. Oh yes, I did. The fact I am semi-terrified of wearing it out for fear of ruining it I am counting as irrelevant. Seriously though, So-Me is possibly the best graphic artist of the 21st century. I'm not saying he has superhuman photo-realistic drawing skills, and I'm sure most of his work is photo-traced, but he has brilliant taste. And he's better than Kate Moross anyway.

This year's Underage Festival: The line-up is not that impressive if I'm honest. It will still be fun but I'm not buying the souvenir t-shirt this year. zShare time!

Blood Red Shoes - This Is Not For You zShare
SebastiAn - Dog zShare

Love Music Hate Racism Carnival

2008-04-04T16:42:00.005+01:00

On Sunday 27th April the 30th anniversary of the 1978 'Carnival Against the Nazis' is being celebrated by another open-air concert in Victoria Park, organised by the everyone's favourite music-related anti-racist charity, Love Music Hate Racism. It's going to be fun. The full line-up can be viewed here, but rather than bore you with a massive list of acts you and I have neither heard of nor would particularly like, I will tell you now that Patrick Wolf, Babyshambles, Bishi and the Roll Deep Crew are all performing live, and as well as that there's going to be loads of speakers including Tony Benn. Try to ignore the fact that Hard-fi are playing, I think the best option would be to just pretend you haven't noticed.

Also, I think I may have forgotten to mention entry is entirely free!

Patrick Wolf's set is going to be particularly interesting, seeing as he'll hopefully be playing some entirely new and unreleased tracks from his upcoming fourth album. A new demo surfaced on his myspace a while ago (it's now been removed) but luckily the ever-brilliant Saam at Keep Hope Inside managed to speedily rip it and put it up for download. Read the full post for some in-depth discussion.

DOWNLOAD: Patrick Wolf - Wargames (Demo) (Yourfilehost)

So, unless you've got something better to do in three sundays' time, or maybe you're a racist, why not roll up to Victoria Park?

NEWS NEWS NEWS

2008-03-30T13:06:00.009+01:00

BOLT ACTION FIVE IS DEAD.

I am sure in a few years one of them will be an folk-pop singer songwriter, and the twelve-year-olds of now will be the sooooo up-to-date Bolt Action Five fans of tomorrow.

LYKKE LI'S ALBUM IS REALLY GOOD.

I like it a lot more than I thought I would. i think the steel pans or whatever they are in 'Little Bit' put me off a bit but there's some real gems on it. My favourite has to be 'Complaint Department' which is all sort of moody minimalist techno and sounds like it was produced by Kraftwerk of something.

CUT COPY'S ALBUM IS REALLY GOOD.

Apart from the weird noises in between songs - literally the last 35 seconds of 'Out There on the Ice' and the first 14 seconds of 'Lights and Music' should just be cut. They are horrid.

CRYSTAL CASTLES' ALBUM ISN'T OUT.

Which is weird, because usually all their stuff is released in the UK first. On the other hand they are now on a canadian label, and it's not like it matters, seeing as I have all the mp3s anyway, which will do me fine for now. 28th of April is, I think, the UK release date.

TREVORBROWNCRYSTALCASTLESMADONNABLACKEYEGATE.

OK, they completely ripped him off and he now hates them, which is fair enough from his point of view. But I am not capable of feeling any sympathy for a man who earns a living making this sort of stuff. Seriously, do not click that link. I think I am actually glad they were such utter bastards to work with (Trevor Brown has now given up trying to get payment from them) because I am really not sure how I would feel wearing my CC/TB shirt if i knew that my money was going into that man's pocket. To label him as a paedophile would be unfair, but he clearly has a lot of unresolved mental health issues, as do his fans. I can't remember where I saw this or who wrote it, but to quote/paraphrase an unnamed blogger/internet lurker, "Madonna is going to owe Trevor Brown a lot of money if she ever gets a black eye".

THE PRESETS' ALBUM IS PROBABLY GOOD BUT I HAVEN'T HEARD IT

Apart from 'My People', which is a bit like having your head stamped on but definitely in the good sense.

I'M GOING BANKRUPT

My recently discovered sense of not wanting to illegally download everything I listen to is not sustainable, I am going to have to either
a.) rob a bank
or
b.) make a cool band and sell loads of t-shirts with a stolen Trevor Brown design.

You Have No Idea What You Are Getting Yourself Into

2008-03-24T14:00:00.005Z

(artwork by me)

Does It Offend You, Yeah?'s debut album dropped today. Buy it. It's a horrible mish-mash of of rock, electro and, surprisingly, pop. The first three tracks are all pretty heavy stuff, but at number four, 'Dawn of the Dead', it goes all indie-pop and conventional. Although not necessarily the best track on the album, probably the most inventive would have to be number six, the brilliantly-titled Attack Of The 60 Ft Lesbian Octopus. It's a two minute instrumental that is just begging to be the theme to a low-budget eighties sci-fi film of the same name.

Important People in The Film Industry: if you managed to make $2.7 billion from a film based on a theme-park ride (according to wikipedia anyway) then just think how successful this film could be. And, er... give me some of the money, thanks.

DOWNLOAD: Does It Offend You, Yeah? - Attack Of The 60 Ft Lesbian Octopus (zShare)

I quite like comix too, actually

2008-03-21T10:59:00.008Z

Time to pretend I'm part of an American superblog! Franki Chan, Superstar DJ/President of Blog/Record Label IHEARTCOMIX has been very busy making a mixtape. I know I only just posted about one mixtape, but this one is seriously too good to wait. It's one second short of an hour and includes 19 tracks, 10 of which are completely brand new IHEARTCOMIX tracks, 8 of which are exclusive remixes made just for the mixtape by RADIOCLIT, FLOSSTRADAMUS, DESIGNER DRUGS, MIAMI HORROR, MANO feat HOLLYWOOD HOLT, TOM NEVILLE, LIES IN DISGUISE and LA RIOTS and 2 other originals just for the mixtape by ACID GIRLS and HEARTSREVOLUTION. Here's the tracklisting:

1. ACID GIRLS – Intro Track
2. THE GLAMOUR – Respect The Party
3. THE TOXIC AVENGER – Pokerface (Lies In Disguise Remix)
4. HEARTSREVOLUTION – Switchblade (LA Riots Remix)
5. OCELOT – Lo Sforzo (St. Andrew Remix)
6. MATT & KIM – No More Long Years (Radioclit Remix)
7. HEARTSREVOLUTION – C.Y.O.A. (Flosstradamus Remix)
8. HAIL SOCIAL – Heaven (Designer Drugs Remix)
9. GAMEBOY/GAMEGIRL – Fruit Salad
10. MATT & KIM – It’s A Fact (Printed Stained) (Mano Remix feat. Hollywood Holt)
11. PROTOKOLL – Moving Forward (Designer Drugs Remix)
12. THE DEATH SET – Negative Thinking
13. TOTALLY MICHAEL – Winona (Miami Horror Remix)
14. HEARTSREVOLUTION – Dance Till Dawn
15. ACID GIRLS – Matter Made
16. SURKIN – White Knight Two
17. THE TOXIC AVENGER – Stage Divin’
18. OCELOT – Our Time (Tom Neville Remix)
19. FUTURECOP! – Starworshipper

DOWNLOAD: IHEARTCOMIX RECORDS REMIXED - FRANKI CHAN MIXTAPE (zShare)

The 8 new remixes are going to be surfacing as separate mp3s soon enough, one that I personally cannot wait to get my hands on is the the LA Riots Remix of HEARTSREVOLUTION's 'Switchblade'. I think it's an undeniable fact that it's very special. And here's something not on the mixtape they also sent me:

DOWNLOAD: Toxic Avenger - Escape (LA Riots Remix)

And everyone's Myspace:
myspace.com/lariotsofficial
myspace.com/dreamburger
myspace.com/heartsrevolution
myspace.com/officialjuiceboxxx
myspace.com/mattandkim
myspace.com/ocelotmthrfckrs
myspace.com/protokoll
myspace.com/oxycottontail
myspace.com/toxavanger
myspace.com/thisblush
myspace.com/totallymichael
myspace.com/thefuturecop
myspace.com/surkin
myspace.com/gameboygamegirl
myspace.com/thedeathset
http://www.myspace.com/mattandkim

Oh and seeing as I've mentioned HEARTSREVOLUTION a few times in this post, does anybody know where this came from? It's some kind of remix/mash-up that's about 90% CYOA and 10% Love Will Tear Us Apart. Who made it? Where can I get a lovely 320kbps mix of it? I NEED ANSWERS!

Un mixtape pour vous et aussi un chanson avec un piano

2008-03-20T15:51:00.008Z

32 double DJs are three 16 year-olds and they want to spin some vinyl at as many gigs as possible. If you're a venue/promoter/dictator of a small foreign country, email them now. They're very nice people too. Probably.
They've got a fair few mixtapes on their myspace available to download, but everybody hates the nasty 96kbps myspace compression, so here's a lovely zShare link to their 'Electro House' mixtape. It's short and sweet, here's the tracklist:

New Jack (Steve Angello Mix) by MBG and SDS
We Run This (Duke Dumont Remix) by Missy Elliott
Enur Ft Natasha - "Calabria 2007 (Hatchmatik Clubabria Remix)"
Stuck on Repeat By Little Boots
Like This Like That (Count of Monte Cristal Remix) by SE:SA
Put Your Hands Up For Detroit - Fredde Le Grand
Perfect Exceeder by Princess Superstar
Out At The Pictures by Hot Chip
Polkomatic by Vitalic

DOWNLOAD: 32 Double DJs Electro House Mix (zShare)

oh and seeing as it's on there and everybody loves it at the moment:

DOWNLOAD: Little Boots - Stuck on Repeat (zShare)

***BONUS: Little Boots - Stuck on Repeat (Acoustic) (YSI)

I won't post the Hot chip dub version because I don't like it. But if you think you might - knock yourself out.

(For more about Little Boots, check her Myspace or read this interview at ohhcrapp.net)

Album Review: Crystal Castles

2008-03-18T11:36:00.007Z

Today the Crystal Castles album dropped. I am currently wrapped up in a duvet on the sofa on the laptop, having spent most of last night vomiting into the bath. My original plan of preordering it off Rough Trade sort of slid off the to-do list at around the same time I found an entire leaked copy of the album as a zip file, after searching google for 'Crystal Castles album' to find the release date. At some point I will probably roll up to HMV and buy it anyway.

The album is 16 tracks long and includes a massive range of different styles. Because daytime TV is not what it used to be, here's a track by track review of the album.

01 Untrust Us
This song could be described as beautiful. It's strange and ethereal, like some kind of alien opera.
02 Crimewave (Crystal Castles vs. HEALTH)
An old favourite. It's a bit contraversial I'd say to put a remix on an album, but with HEALTH basically saying how completely in love they are with Crystal Castles at just about every oppurtunity they can get, it's not as if they are likely to object.
03 Alice Practice
Listen to this on headphones as you walk down a busy street and try to not imagine you are Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator. YOU CAN'T.
04 Magic Spells
The thing with these subdued sounding tracks is that they can sound almost more scary than the more 'thrash' songs. and the video makes it even worse.
05 Xxzxczx Me
AIDS ROBOTS
06 Air War
This song is incredible fun.
07 Courtship Dating
How Timbaland can claim to not have stolen the backing music from this is a miracle.
08 Vanished
A remix of Van She's 'Sex City', I am told. I have to say I prefer this to the original.
09 1991
I'm sure this used to be called 1983
10 Good Time
the only track that does nothing for me. A poor bit of album filler if you ask me.
11 Love And Caring
Step into the shower. Turn the shower on. ARGH that's not water that's tiny shards of broken glass pouring out the shower ARGH I'm bleeding everywhere.
12 Knights
My five year-old brother said this song makes him think of monsters and the monsters are scary.
13 Through The Hosiery
This is basically a pop song that Girls Aloud or something could have done. And that's a good thing. I might be wrong and it might all be sorted on the actual album, but the vocals in this song seem to be a bit too quiet. And the last verse just fades out which is annoying. Otherwise, good.
14 Reckless
BEST INSTRUMENTAL CC SONG EVER
15 Black Panther
The tune is brilliant, but the vocal effects are a bit distracting. It was quite charming on the old tracks where the awful sound quality was due to the band using old broken microphones, but these effects here are just sort of distracting from the actual content opf the song.
16 Tell Me What To Swallow
What the hell? It's a bit of a cliche to have an acoustic track at the end of an album, butI think the idea of Crystal Castles conforming to a cliche is probably more surprising than them not. This really is not a brilliant song, but the bizzare soundscape just adds to the dizzying effect.

OK that was rubbish but I'm ill so you'll have to forgive me. Most of the new tracks are better recorded in the vocals, but also stylistically different in that none of them are really shouty thrash-rock. Which is OK for on the one album, but let's just hope it's not a decided change in direction for the band. More scariness please.

A Thought

2008-03-07T22:11:00.006Z

Why is it that I still feel disappointed that I'm not going to SXSW, when it is blatantly obvious that there was never any chance of me going? I feel genuine upset that I will not be attending. What is wrong with me?

BLOG MORE WRITE LESS

2008-02-27T18:13:00.009Z

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

2008-02-24T21:53:00.011Z

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!

2008-02-21T20:29:00.004Z

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

2008-02-17T19:06:00.014Z

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

2008-02-09T22:24:00.000Z

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

2008-02-09T20:53:00.000Z

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

2008-02-04T22:11:00.001Z

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)

Metronomy release Radio Ladio video, tour dates, album 'Night's Out' released soon

2008-01-31T17:37:00.000Z

The video for Metronomy's new single was unveiled today and, to quote the band, 'some people fucking hate it....go to youtube.com and have a look'. On it's own the video is really not that great - yes they are painted crazy colours, but it's nothing truly groundbreaking - but combined with the song it's a pleasant enough viewing experience.
I would have to argue that the best bit of the video are the angry comments from people who want their three minutes back, some of them really are hilarious. Example:

im real sorry but that was the worst thing ive ever heard and what the hell is a radio ladio i cant belive it that song made me want to abuse my self

But the real entertainment can be obtained from people who passionately wish to defend the honour of their favourite synthpop band. Example:

it cracks me up the dark hole that some of these children come from who have such a shitty misdirected conciousness that they have to tear down some one or something that they could not say to annother face to face but hide behind a keyboard typing hatefull comments they are getting their reward in full by closing the third eye and assuring desturcion will met you half way!!!! look up because below is the nashing of teeth by defeated loosers!!!

Which just about proves that you can't argue with multiple exclamation marks!!!!!

The second album has been delivered to the label and there's no release date yet, but it's said to be planned for march/april this year. They're also starting a massive UK tour with support from Primary 1, and there's dates and details on their Myspace.

WATCH THE VIDEO.

New justice track: FAKE.

2008-01-28T21:22:00.000Z

OK I feel like a bit of an idiot now.

DOWNLOAD: ~~Justice - Hope~~ (zShare)

Buy the Justice album.

WILD SPECULATION: My Top Albums of 2008

2008-01-13T14:22:00.000Z

Happy 2008! Here I'm going to write about bands I'm excited about for this year, focussing on bands who either already are / maybe will / if i had my way would be releasing an album this year. So, for example, despite my unrequited love of Kate Nash she is not on this list because I am pretty sure she has no intention of releasing another LP this side of December the 31st.

I made this! It's really creepy, yes?

Regina Spektor - Any rumours that Regina Spektor is releasing an album in 2008 exist only in my imagination. Begin To Hope was a great album, and seeing as it came out mid-2006, it's about time there was another full-length Regina CD out soon. PLEASE REGINA.

Noah & The Whale - One of those bands that even though you've never met or read an interview about, you can just tell they are all really nioce people. I have a thing where I sort of imagine certain famous people are, in fact, my friends (eg. Johnathon Ross, the scottish woman in extras, Kate Nash) and Noah and the Whale, while not quite as famous, are up there with them.

Lillica Libertine - A Lillica Libertine album would put many DJs out of work. Clubs would just hit play on the CD player and the whole night is sorted.

Frankmusik - Seeing as Frankmusik is busy producing tracks for Bolt Action Five, BBO$$ & The Zombies, and probably loads of other bands, it's unclear when he'll get round to releasing anything full-length. But I look forward to the day.

Lightspeed Champion - about two years ago I read the name 'Test Icicles' in a magazine article that was mainly about the Arctic Monkeys and how some bands are using this thing called the 'internet' to get noticed. But I only really listened to them about two months ago and WOW they were good. And Dev's new sound isn't too bad either.

The Teenagers - Now streaming on their myspace, even at a rubbish 96kbps this is good!

Blood Red Shoes - Noisiest band ever. Like the White Stripes, except from England and also good. I want their album.

The Klaxons - bring on the sequel!

SebastiAn - Justice released an album, Digitalism released an album ... it is your turn, SebastiAn. I really have no idea if he's planning to release an album, but if he isn't, then hereby i am startin the official online campaign that SebasiAn should release an album because it would be realluy good.

Foals - Foals have decided that they are going to take the two songs that garnered the most attention in 2007, 'Mathletics' and 'Hummer', and leave them off their debut album. This band are either very, very clever or very, very stupid.

Late Of The Pier - This band are incredibly good fun and need to release more material.

Cajun Dance Party - I am such a celebrity, recently I discovered my step-cousin goes to school with these kids. Isn't that just amazing? Seriously though, what I like about this band is that they are just completely refusing to really be part of any annoying fashion style or genre-specific music scene. They are just amking good old-fashioned indie pop that could have come about at any point in the last 20 or 30 years. And they are doing it well. What i really like about this band is lead singer Danny Blumberg's voice, because he's one of those people who can sing in tune nicely, and doesn't have the most amazing vocal range b ut still attempts to reach for those high notes. And although he's no Charlotte Church, there's something very human about the sound of his voice straining to reach those high notes.

Los Campesinos! - I am such a celebrity, recently I discovered my friend's french teacher is the mum of one of the Campesinos. Isn't that just amazing? Once again very seriously, this band are quite similar to Cajun dance party, but up the ante somewhat by managaing to also cram in xylophones, female vocals, and spoken word internal monologues.

Emmy The Great - Emmy seems to be the bitch of the current 'London New-Folk Scene'. Every time I read a review of any of the indie Folksters, it always seems to describe Emmy The Great as somebody's backing singer. NME recently got very confused about what she meant by calling herself 'The Great'. The review seemed to say that Emmy had just decided she was 'great', and spent most of the article saying how bad the band name was, and questioning whether Emmy really is 'great', and forgetting the whole historical context of Alexander The Great, and the witticism of calling herself 'The Great' and that it has a certain ring to it, possibly because as far as i know there have never been any ruthless military leaders called Emmy. What idiots. Emmy The Great has a phenomenal lyrical talent, and combined with her voice and musical ability, makes amazing songs. Emmy's songs are the kind of song you can play on a loop for about three hours and think about the lyrics, full of emotion, self-doubt and clever little cultural references about everything from Woody Allen films to S Club 7. Possibly my favourite Emmy track is 'MIA', which describes (in gruesome detail) being the passenger in a fatal car crash. The song is filled with such powerful imagery - the bit that always makes me wince is at the end when the sky is described as "as blue as i've ever seen it but yet still tinted with red" - meaning there's blood and bits of mangled corpse sprayed on the windscreen. The brutally simple depiction of death is heartbreaking.

Hadouken! - This band killed new rave. But we'll cope, because the whole joke was getting boring, and neon highlighter colours so don't suit me. 'That Boy That Girl' was the first Hadouken song I heard, but since then the band haven't really managed to produce anything that rivals it. Realistically, there's only going to be 2 or 3 songs on this album I haven't heard, but just maybe one of them will have something that can top the snarling success that was 'That Boy That Girl'.

Does It Offend You Yeah? - This band went from Hadouken's support act to LA Night Club Favourites and magazine champions. They recently finished recording their album and it is going to be amazing. So many of this band's tracks are absolute killers, and unlike many recent 'MySpace Generation' bands of late, they've been pretty conservative about releasing material. Which might realistically work to their advantage because loads of people are going to want to hear more. Whereas

Partyshank - I first heard about Partyshank when I was on the train to see Cajun Dance Party. My friend Emil's description of them, that 'they somehow wire a pile of toys together and make crazy pulsing dance music', intrigued me and I investigated further. Partyshank are possibly the most energetic live performers and are really awesome and you should go see them. As far as i know, they don't currently have any plans to make an album, but they seriously should.

Crystal Castles - You love them. I love them. They are going to destroy music. The end of music is nigh. Do not fight them. Embrace the micro-korg. Embrace the lyrics about incest. Punch madonna in the face. Seriously though, how can words describe this? The Crystal Castles Album is THE album i am most excited about for 2008, partly because i had this weird dream in which I quit school and was asked to join the band and go on a massive world tour with them. Seeing as i am currently the proud owner of zero musical talent or skill, if this were to really happen my role in the band would be somewhat dubious. But it was a cool dream. I am sooo in love this band, and they are actually releasing an ALBUM. it's out at some point in march, and at 16 tracks long, it's going to kill. And i am going to love it.

ALBUMS I'M NOT THAT EXCITED ABOUT IN 2008:

Lily Allen - i am so bored of you by now.

And here are some lovely zShare download links!

DOWNLOAD: Regina Spektor - Your Honor
DOWNLOAD: Emmy The Great - MIA (Live on Xfm Xposure)
DOWNLOAD: Crystal Castles vs Health - Crimewave
DOWNLOAD: Lightspeed Champion - No Surprise (Live on BBC 6Music)

***//// ARGH ITS THE CC ALBUM TRACKLISTING!
I have decided it is a good idea to put a load of exclamation marks next to the tracks i'm really excited about hearing.

01 Untrust Us
02 Crimewave (Crystal Castles vs. HEALTH)
03 Alice Practice
04 Magic Spells
05 Xxzxczx Me
06 Air War
07 Courtship Dating !!!!!!!
08 Vanished !!!!!!!
09 1991 !!!!!!!
10 Good Time !!!!!!!
11 Love and Caring
12 Knights
13 Through the Hosiery !!!!!!!
14 Reckless !!!!!!!
15 Black Panther !!!!!!!
16 Tell Me What to Swallow !!!!!!!

Can I also mention that, because I was born that year, track number nine is blatantly about me.

Tom's Top Albums of 2007

2007-12-23T20:22:00.001Z

JPEG OVERLOAD!

Everyone's making lists, but music is so subjective and I'm so indecisive that putting albums in order is just too annoying to cope with.
But i like passing judgement on things, so I'm going to give them marks out of ten for their album covers. I'm interpreting 'year' very loosely, because a year ago this blog didn't exist, and a few albums from the last year and a half I just need to get out my system. Please don't comment me to point out that one of the albums here came out at the end of last year, because that would be very dull.

Battles - Mirrored

I have a confession to make. For some reason I decided I didn't like Battles early on this year, and whenever there was any conflicting evidence that might make me arrive at the conclusion that, in fact, Battles are good, I put my fingers in my ears and shouted 'NA NA NA I CAN'T HEAR YOU' and span round the room in circles. But then about a week ago it was quite late, and I was being driven home in the car, when Battles' seven-minute epic 'Atlas' came on the stereo and I was hooked. Due to the joys of being expected to provide every member of your family with some sort of 'gift', I still haven't got round to buying the album, but I have £10 of the money I am assuming I will recieve from some nice relatives for just that. And the cover's pretty nice too. 8/10
Buy

To My Boy - Messages

I think this is quite a nice cover overall, the way it's very clearly had very little alteration with computers, and the colours are nice. 7/10
Buy

CSS - Cansei De Ser Sexy

I HATE THIS COVER. It's very boring and the colours are horrible and it doesn't really reflect the message of CSS's music. The typography is kind cool, but this whole cover really should have been a lot brighter. 2/10
Buy

The Wombats - A Guide To Love, Loss And Desperation

This isn't really anything at all interesting or grounbreaking, but neither is the Wombats' music, so this kind of fits. The music and the cover are both nice. The cover is nice but boring, and the music is nice and fun. 5/10
Buy

Cold War Kids - Robbers And Cowards

This one is reaaaaally good. The peeling posters and monochromatic colours give it that sense of Americana and small-town decay. The album itself doesn't really do a lot to back this up - reallistically there are only four good songs on it, but the cover is great. 8/10
Buy

The Knife - Silent Shout

They really could have done something a lot more interesting. I hate these minimal covers, I really do. 3/10
Buy

The Thermals - The Body, The Blood, The Machine

Blah Blah Blah politics blah blah blah religion blah Jesus blah blah blah America. There are some killer tunes though. 5/10
Buy

Les Savy Fav - Let's Stay Friends

I know Les Savy Fav are a rather monumental rock band, but this cover really does nothing for me. And it seems to be coloured in using felt tip pens. 2/10
Buy

Bloc Party - A Weekend In The City

I suppose I kinda like this, the whole 'modern life is depressing, look at how boring your life is' message, but could they not just have shoved a studio photo of the band on the cover? 6/10
Buy

LCD Soundsystem - Sound Of Silver

What was this supposed to be? It's some kind of giant hairdryer wrapped in foil, and the text seems to be trying to say the band's called LCDSoundsy Stem. I really like creative line run-off in the middle of words, like this for example, but in order for it to look good the letters need to be in places where they would actually have to run onto the next line, (like for example the edge of the record sleeve, not just random taps of the enter key halfway through words!) 1/10
Buy

Simian Mobile Disco - Attack Decay Sustain Release

Simple and cool. I love it. (My decision is not based on the fact that it might be possible for me to argue that they must have 'copied' having a load of grass from this blog.) 8/10
Buy

Patrick Wolf - The Magic Position

You have to admire this man for just doing exactly what comes into his head and rolling with it. I managed to see about three songs of a Patrick Wolf live show this summer, and he was great. The lighting and the colours in this photograph are perfect, and the weird 'circus' theme is really creative. 8/10
Buy

Amy Winehouse - Back To Black

This is a cover that's roughly what everyone wanted and expected. The lettering's very old-school 'jazz club' and suits the music. However, this crazy crazy heartbroken addict CANCELLED HER TOUR AND RUINED MY LIFE so she is not going to get any points at all. 0/10
Buy - except don't, you'll only be funding her life of excess!

Gossip - Standing In The Way Of Control

OK, I kind of almost get the logic behing Beth Ditto not wanting to shave her armpits, so fair play to her. But did they have to put them on the front of the album where everyone would see them? 6/10
Buy

Bjork - Volta

The bold colour, the subtle diagonal lines in the background, the strange monster suit.... this woman is mentally ill but we love her. 9/10
Buy

Kate Nash - Made Of Bricks

VERY DISAPPOINTING. I spent most of april/may/june listening to Kate Nash's music and getting all excited about how cool she was, but this cover is sooo boring. She's a singer, not a builder. 4/10
Buy

Justice - †

It's very minimal but you can see they were trying to make one bold statement with just having the one massive crucifix. If they're going to just call the album '†', then it kind of makes sense to have such a minimal cover - at least it's consistent. 7/10
Buy

Klaxons - Myths Of The Near Future

This is great because there's so much to see. Like I only just noticed that the strange fan shape in the bottom right is a photo of leaded church windows. The whole cut-and paste ethic here is really cool - does anybody know if I'm completely wrong in having this faint idea that the band made this themselves? 8/10
Buy

M.I.A. - Kala

Best album cover of the year. (This is taken from my list of good albums, not just any old rubbish album with a good cover.) The huge brightly coloured pixels make it look like a test card, then in the middle there's MIA in that big crazy hat looking like some kind of military leader. The 'Fight On!' typography references the bollywood influences and the sepia tones on the central photo makes the cover look really low-tech and third world-ey. 10/10
Buy

Not on this list:

Burial. I didn't get it. It was really boring. You may as well just listen to the noise of a busy street.

Panda Bear. I didn't get it. I'm not going to re-download the three tracks I downloaded off other blogs and subsequently deleted so that I can explain in depth why I didn't get it, but it just seemed really really boring.

Jack Penate. Sooooo bored of it like four songs in.

***/// UPDATE:
I cannot believe how bad I am at writing lists - I completely forgot to mention Digitalism, Bat For Lashes, Dizzee Rascal, Arctic Monkeys, Enter Shikari. Ah well, I can't be bothered.

***/// UPDATE:
I also forgot to mention how much I hate Scouting For Girls, The Hoosiers, The Pigeon Detectives and of course The View.

To My Boy let you download their album for Free!

2007-12-19T16:48:00.000Z

Well... not exactly. But they've recorded eight of their album tracks with acoustic guitars and slightly off-perfect production and you can download it for free from HERE. I'm not sure how stupid I am for doing this, but I made the mistake of thinking you had to sign up for their newsletter before they'd let you download it. On closer inspection, the link is in very big letters at the top of the page.

Anyway, To My Boy make very nice synthy electropop. To be honest, Messages (which was released in June) is a nice album and I did play it a bit, but it hasn't really lasted in my playlists all that much. There's a few tracks that are favourites (I am xRay and Eureka are both amazing) but overall it's not the most killer album there ever was. However, it's nice to see an electro band that quite clearly are very capable musicians, thus rendering the 'electro music is just programming a computer to make rubbish beeping noises because these people couldn't make real music if they tried' argument (that some of my friends have been pushing) completely wrong.

The acoustic tracks have clearly not had any 'pop dust' sprinkled on them, but there's a nice quality of the guitar and piano interspersed with drums that seem to be comprised entirely of hands drumming on a table, where before there was the heavy synth backing track. Just generallly nice music.

You can buy Messages HERE or from your favourite independent record shop. Or HMV but you will experience eternal damnation in hell if you do.

Look What I Made

2007-12-18T16:21:00.000Z

Also available in huge size.

I'm A Sucker For Concepts.

2007-12-08T19:53:00.000Z

This is a good'un. The Billion Dollar DJs sent me a very nice email and told me about their new creation, The MySpace Mix. The rules are, they make a big old mixtape exclusively from tracks they've downloaded low-quality off MySpace, with the artists' permission of course. The idea of it is enough for me, as far as I am concerned it could be so bad as to render it completely unlistenable and I'd probably still post it, but it's actually quite good as well.

DOWNLOAD:Billion Dollar Djs - The Myspace Mix (zShare)

And here's the tracklisting with links to all the featured artists' myspaces: (no individual mp3s, get them yourself!)

Frikstailers - Foonkie Boogie
Blackpool - Two Kids
Niyi - 808 Clap
MK303 - Floos (Remix B)
Blamma! Blamma! - Carry Me Home
Catherine Ferroyer-Blanchard - Tu Fais Le Malin
The Faint - iDisappear (Matthew Savant Mix)
Arrow!!! - D.O.E.S (Demo)
Pimp The System - PTS Anthem
Lismore - All That You Are
Snowden - Black Eyes (Le Castle Vania Remix)
The Twelves - I Feel Fine
Trippple Nippples - RIP Meat
Bitchee Bitchee Ya Ya Ya - Fuck Friend
Flamingo Crash - Yes? Yes? Yes?
Shoot Charlie - Boaster
The Genevan Heathen - Swagger (feat Omnikrom)
You Say Party! We Say Die! - The Gap (Between The Rich And The Poor)
SIBOT - 12345
Glass Candy - Digital Versicolor

ENJOY!

I have discovered a great new band, and because you are reading this, so have you. At my most recent Live Review I said I wasn't sure who the first band were, but I described their finale track as 'extremely danceable'. I wasn't joking. I first got hold of a Damn Shames mp3 from Good Weather For Airstrikes M3 Volume 16, and I have been hooked ever since. With a playful guitar riff and just a very generally upbeat tune, this is a song that is just about perfect.

DOWNLOAD: Damn Shames - Dancing In The Aisles (zShare)

Bah Humbug.

2007-12-07T21:35:00.000Z

Photo Credit: TIO.

The time has come to celebrate Rome's replacement of the original Christian faith with a hybrid of Mithraism and sun-worship as a state-sanctioned alternative to the orgies of the Winter Solstice.

For, without millions of Christians celebrating the birth of Mithra on roughly the same day as the death of an obscure heretical bishop, 'Santa Claus' could never have been invented by 19th century Americans, and subsequently trademarked by the Coca-Cola Corporation.

As you are bombarded by the offspring of successful memes cobbled together from religious sources as disparate as Druidic rites, Dutch regional festivals and even the birth of 'Jesus Christ', give thanks to your true saviour; Santa Claus™ and his numerous corporate sponsors.

For the profitably of the entire retail sector - and therefore your nation's whole economy - now depends upon your excessive spending over these next few weeks, and the full weight of millenia worth of ritual has been appropriated to ensure that you will not only spend guilt-free, but feel guilty if you do not.

Thanks to the Santa™ brand, the corporations that own your world can ensure that you and your family will continue to enjoy a greater level of material comfort than 90% of the world's population for the rest of your lifes, or until industrialised civilisation collapses due to total resource depletion and the effects of climate change, whichever comes first.

All you need to do is continue consuming more than you can afford, and you will be rewarded with more products and services than you could ever possibly want or need.

And that is the true spirit of Christmas.

DOWNLOAD: Vandals - I Don't Believe In Santa Claus (zShare)

Recently I wrote about Niyi and Namalee, and somebody asked me if I'd copied it from a magazine. I hadn't. The above, however, I did. Not from a magazine, from a humour website. I read it on something like December the 27th, thought it perfectly summed up our horrible consumerist culture, and saved it for this year. However, I have no idea who wrote it, so if it was you and you're reading this now, thankyou for writing it and sorry for stealing! Message me and I'll credit you.

Film Review: Reservoir Dogs

2007-12-04T16:21:00.000Z

This blog has mainly been where I write about music, probably because if I wrote about everything else I would never end up doing anything, and so eventually this would end up being a blog about writing a blog. Which would probably not be all that interesting.
Anyway, I felt motivated to just quickly notify the world of my opinion on Quentin Tarantino's 'masterpiece', Reservoir Dogs.
It is an old classic, very popular very critically acclaimed. I have already given Harry back his DVD and I can't be bothered to Wikipedia up a load of quotes, but a lot of people think it's good. One of the main reasons people liked it was the way the film was told 'non-linear', meaning chopped up, shuffled around then played backwards and sideways. It's interesting because you don't have the traditional experience of events being revealed to you chronologically, and despite some slightly confusing jumps, it works. And THANK GOD they chose to keep it slightly confusing, instead of adding loads of '3 Months Later'-type subheadings. It's a snapshop into a highly stylised way of life completely different to the majority of the audience, and probably not incredibly realistic, but it's not pretentious. Everyone likes it.

But it's really boring. The actual plot is dull. If the film was played chronologically, it would bore audiences to death. The plot is so basic and undeveloped it's like a twelve year old wrote it. This is a twelve year old who got a good mark, a gold sticker and an A plus, but not a genius of storytelling. (For the twelve year old analogy to work, let's just temporarily ignore the violence/morals of the story.)

If Tarantino wanted to make a really good film, why didn't he write a good story, and then chop it up and play it sideways?

Anyway, here's an oldie that you really must be mad not to like. And I realise for most of you 1995 isn't exactly an 'oldie', but it is and you will just have to cope with that.

DOWNLOAD: Fun Lovin' Crimals - Scooby Snacks (zShare)

Some Shameless Advertising

2007-12-04T15:56:00.000Z

Gigs in Bedford next year!

Ideally I'd like to go to all of these, as Bedford events are actually rather incredibly fun, despite the occasional overzealous policing by that bouncer. I have no idea as to which of these are weeknights, how many weeknight gigs I can persuade my dear parents to let me go to (alas, not Crystal Castles last Thursday) and whether I can decide if Joe Lean and the Jing Jang Jong are good enough to make them still worth seeing, even though they have the worst band name there ever was in the history of time.

MAJOR love to the Hungry Bears for organizing all of these, 2008 is going to be fun. Especially Late Of The Pier, because they are actually mad.
///Update: Hungry Bears have a new official website: www.hungrybears.co.uk

Foals + Bombay Bicycle Club + Matthew !WOWOW! @ 229 The Venue, 24/11/07

2007-11-25T17:31:00.001Z

(I forgot my camera, so all of these are by photographer extraordinaire Riaz Philips. Those are my legs. See more photos here)

Having literally not been to a gig for aaaaages, it was nice to finally go and shove some indie kids around in the spirit of fun. If you're under 18, living in/near London and go to a gig every now and then, you'll probably have heard of All Age Concerts. Theyre one of the main champions of gigs specifically for under 18s (not forgetting Underage Club) and they are pretty well respected for consistently puttting on a helluva good show, and last night was no exception.

Due to various train/ticket/massive queue problems we missed most of the first band's set. The ticket said Tinseltown were playing, but apparently they had to pull out due to some kind of illness. i don't know what the replacement band were called, but their last song was extremely danceable. After this there were some DJs who did a pretty nice job, putting down some club classics such as 'Licky' by Larry T and Princess Superstar. After that was Bombay Bicycle Club, who put on a more than adequate performance. BBC, like so many others, is one of those bands who I knew about for ages, and I knew are probably quite good, but just could not be arsed to actually listen to their tracks. However, I am now aware of how truly great they are. Currently I don't own any mp3s of theirs, but go stream some off their myspace now!

After that we had the pleasure of a truly monumental DJ set by a man who was calling himself 'Matthew !WOWOW!'. Despite the fact he was wearing gold sequined leggings (no, he really was) he was able to drive the crowd into an all-out frenzy. The highlight had to be Justice's 'Phantom I and II' as remixed by Troublemaker, which he managed to keep spinning for something like 10 or 12 minutes, with some rather wonderful glitchy rewinds and reverses thrown in.

Foals took ages to actually come on stage, and I spent most of the time rambling to one of the musicians in The More Assured (who had decided to turn up for some reason) about how much of a shame it was that I won't be able to attend their gig next Saturday (also at 229), because I'm going on a fun fun fun weekend in Dorset with my family. When they finally took the stage even the boring people who'd been posing at the sides and back joined the crowd and everyone got really horribly crushed to death, myself included. Rattling off recent singles 'Mathletics' and 'Balloons', the band were clearly enjoying themselves, climbing onto stacks of speakers and jumping high in the air. The crowd were also going mental, and crowdsurfing was increasingly common towards the end. The set closed with killer (and i mean killer) track 'Hummer' bringing the venue to a complete standstill. I actually cannot wait for the Foals album, rumoured to be released sometime in early 2008.

DOWNLOAD: Justice - Phantom + Phantom Pt. II (Troublemaker Edit) (zShare)
DOWNLOAD: Foals - Hummer (zShare)

Oh, and this kid's shirt is too cool not to put here:

Alice Practice Lyrics? My Obsession Is Becoming Worrying.

2007-11-21T21:16:00.000Z

I have been playing every Crystal Castles mp3 i own on a loop for about 2 hours.
I spent about 10 minutes working out the words to 'Alice Practice'. I don't care if it's just a soundcheck Ethan decided to shove on myspace, I now know the words. And don't tell me there aren't any. I, like many, thought Crystal Castles was just random screaming, then I realised if you listen to 'Mother Knows Best', there is a bit where Alice spells out 'H-E-R-P-E-S'. Which is quite gross really, but just the tip of the iceberg if you read the full lyrics. 'Insecticon' is profoundly less disgusting, although I'm sure it's a metaphor for some kind of obsessive/abusive relationship; or there's 'XXZXCZX ME', which is about 'Aids Robots', apparently. Just a thought: what do their parents actually think about the weird music they make?

HEEEY.

Scars, in you, son.
You shrug it off,
Except for you don't.

Better, it surely
It don't fall out.
Said I live low,
I lisp, I die.
But you've been shooting
Bled with deadbeats,
Only crawl so your sad eyes.
Quite christian,
Blood...

Drop it: it's dead.
We dropped it
And took the body home.
Sad eyes...

Scars; I'm chopping dagger
See you'll never walk, only stagger.
Sad eyes,
Quite christian,
Blood.

These are obviously not definitive, but I think it's a reasonably good guess. God knows what it means or even if it's meant to mean anything. If you think you can do better, post your alternate lyrics!

***///UPDATE, January 2008. I've changed my mind, now I reckons the first line is 'scars will heal, soon'.

Love Your Enemies, Kill Your Friends Vol. 1

2007-11-11T12:16:00.000Z

Sorry about posting being very infrequent as of late, I have just managed to finish a pile of history essays that are going to get rubbish marks anyway.Recently I've been listening to a lot of scary sounding sinister stuff, (probably as a way of coping with SO MUCH WORK) and here's the first official Suburban Ghetto Musick mix. You've probably heard a lot of the stuff on here, most of it's pretty new but there's a few tracks that go back a few years. Because I'm rubbish and useless I forgot to do that really cool thing where you shove some kind of blog logo onto all the tracks, but I honestly cannot be bothered to spend another half hour waiting for Megaupload.
It's all here as a zip file, if it doesn't work then comment and I'll put them all up here as separate mp3s.
Hypocrite time: Support the artists! Buy buy buy all these if you like them, I am too lazy to find buy links to all of these.

DOWNLOAD:Kill Your Friends Compilation

P.S. - Do not actually kill your friends, this blog is here to promote music not murder. Except maybe Peaches Geldof, feel free to kill her.

****/// Update: For general whoring and self promotion purposes, here's the tracklist in a more search-engine friendly way (text). Regular Posting will resume eventually.

Rage Against The Machine vs SebastiAn – Killing In The Name Of SebastiAn
Fake Shark Real Zombie – Wolf Is The New The
Sohodolls – Trash The Rental
Mindless Self Indulgence – Shut Me Up
Trash Fashion – Mom & Daddy
Crystal Castles – Alice Practice
Enter Shikari – Labyrinth
Lillica Libertine – Ultra 10
Blood Red Shoes – Stitch Me Back
Queen Adreena – Pretty Like Drugs
SebastiAn – Ross Ross Ross
Party Sausage – Terradactyl Egg Protector
Pre – Know Yr Teachers
Klaxons vs So-Me – Golden Skans To Interzone
Bark Bark Bark – One Thing Stands
Test Icicles - Sharks

DO YOU WANT A FREE TICKET FOR AN AMAZING GIG ON SATURDAY?

2007-11-07T18:54:00.000Z

i am incredibly annoyed. My ticket to go see Crystal Castles, The Teenagers and These New Puritans is only valid for over 18s, despite the fact that it is not mentioned ANYWHERE ON ANY OF THE WEBSITES. I really should have known that seeing two of my favourite bands (and another one I don't hate) was too good to be true, but it's just annoying that I only actually find out when my ticket arrives in the post.
Usually, the oppurtunist in me would be trying to sell my ticket but the logistics of me actually making any money seem pretty much impossible. Me and my friends have four tickets; if you would like them, email me & I will post them to you, and you can repay me by pretending to be very interested in this blog for all eternity. Although, thinking about it the chances of anyone who can go reaing this in about 12 hours seems unlikely.

Fireworks!

2007-11-04T14:21:00.000Z

Last night I had lots of fun at the St Albans fireworks, despite the local radio's attempt to ruin the display by playing the same Robbie Williams song three times over the course of the evening. Seriously. Anyway here's some music:

If you like disco, witty lyrics and unrepentantly middle-class accents, you will love the Cleft Palletes. They describe themselves as "Like Crystal Castles but not cool, or good." Which is highly innacurate but gives you a sense of their band ethos. They also wear sunglasses on the tube because they're big deals. As well as some genuinely fun original material they also have a range of remixes which you can stream from their remix page.
The band have made three of their songs available to download from here.
I highly reccomend them all - there's 'Emo Blates' which seems to be an attempt at a spoof death metal record with lyrics as ridiculous as "I hope that you have an umbrella cos it's gonna be raining fire"; 'Party Wall' which has synths that sound like they're ripped out the music to a 90s computer game; or there's 'Seasnake', which is completely psychadelic.

I am home

2007-10-29T08:00:00.000Z

No posts last week - I was busy in Cornwall trying to learn to surf. No posts at the weekend - I am quite a lazy person. Saturday was my birthday and I am very happy to say I am going to see Amy Winehouse in december. YAY. To celebrate, here is a very rushed illustration done with my amazing wacom pad.

I'm feeling rather pleased

2007-10-17T21:39:00.000+01:00

Yay, Lillica Libertine has a new mixtape and it's awesome. Titled 'Oh My Gosh 4', it's 53 minutes of sick electro banger. He's also releasing his EP in november on Meal Deal records.

In other news,

Yeah, that's right, my mum's old wacom tablet does in fact work on my computer so now I can spend my whole time failing my GCSE's through the method of iSketch.

Because I am cool I am also allowing you to download Mr Libertine's amazing remix of Papa Vito's 'Drill It'. I'm not tooo excited about the original, but the remix is phenomenal. Also, When I said "I am cool", I actually mean Lillica Libertine is cool, seeing as he posted the link to this in a bulletin about a week ago. Have a listen.
DOWNLOAD: Lillica Libertine - Oh My Gosh 444 Mix (50.4 MB)
DOWNLOAD: Papa Vito - Drill It (Lillica Libertine Remix)
*Update: Drill it link now fixed!

Partyshank @ Boston Dome, London

2007-10-14T21:54:00.001+01:00

Partyshank @ Boston Dome, London, originally uploaded by OMG TOM.

After the incredible disappointment of not seeing Hadouken! and Late of the Pier" in Bedford on Tuesday, I had an awesome night seeing Partyshank at the Boston Arms Dome on Friday. I'd never been ther before, and the venue's website made it sound like the tiny back room of a pub. But it was HUGE inside. The lineup was a ska band followed by rap outfit Sabotage Party who were actually really good, preaching about not being a twat in the moshpit and always using a condom. (Sample Lyric: "We don't want no STD and we don't want no pregnancy!" - note the double negative, what is grammar coming to these days?)
After that there was another ska band, whose music was infuriatingly rubbish to dance to. However, they entertained in other ways, such as when the lead singer attempted a stage dive and the crowd completely failed to catch him.
What was good was that in between the sets the music was actually really good, supplied courtesy of the ADHDJ's, two kids my age who know how to put on a good tune, and remix it and stuff like that which will forever remain a mystery to me. At about half ten Partyshank finally took the stage, and put on an exhilirating set, starting with 'Untilted'. I am 99% sure this song is actually called 'Untitled', and they happened to spell the name wrong when they uploaded it to their Myspace, but for now I will have to assume it is referring to something that is not tilted. The venue was almost completely empty at this point, either because Partyshank were completely not anyone's cup of tea, or maybe people needed to catch a certain train. The last few tracks introduced a new aspect of Partysdhank performance I'd never seen before: screamo. In general I would say I am against screamo because it generally represents the more depressing emotions and generally leads to people dying their hair black and snarling at cameras for their Myspace pages, but by then I was too immersed in adrenaline to care. I managed to video pretty much the whole of 'Penis vs Vagina', lead track to the latest Partyshank EP, available off their Myspace. I got a bit 'funky' with the camera angles at times, but I'd hate for people to think I was the sort of person who could stand still with Partyshank playing a few metres away.

Niyi & Namalee: Super?

2007-10-08T21:09:00.000+01:00

Niyi and Namalee are all about bright colours, optimism and not being afraid to make a fool of yourself. Namalee's top fashion tip for this season is "saucepans on heads". Making regular appearances in London's no.1 cut-and-paste style magazine Super Super¹, Niyi and Namalee are turning heads. Here's what Niyi has to say for himself on his myspace:

"I'm a really nice guy who who is trying to do this music thing after dropping out of uni. my mum got all african and threw her splipper at me. so i need to prove her wrong... i had to get her to pay my rent the other month, so im not doing so well so far........ and now jus tryna finish an album of some sort, with a broken laptop....and of course prevent further slipper throwing and mum rent paying."

To be clear: Niyi is a solo artist, and so is Namalee (sort of). Namalee's band, Namalee N The Namazons, consists of the frontwoman herself and whoever she happens to be collaborating with. However, Namalee & Niyi are routinely appearing on each other's songs and myspace pages - take 'Niyi's Supershiny Nanamix' by Namalee for example.

Niyi's music is what could only be described as Geek Rap: songs about his love of poached eggs, or having a crush on your friend's mum. Namalee has the ability to effortlessly swap genre about three times a song. From my point of view, it's really refreshing to see a whole scene based on happiness, individualism, looking like a twat and loving it. For too long has the world been full of floppy-fringed, pierced-lip poseurs who want to be taken seriously.

DOWNLOAD: Namalee - Namazonia
DOWNLOAD: Niyi - Ur Mummy
DOWNLOAD: Niyi - Poached Eggs

¹ Surprise surprise, Namalee is creative editor at Super Super. Oh and Creative Review magazine have an interesting article about Super Super that you can read online

THE TEENAGERS + CRYSTAL CASTLES TOURING THE UK FOR FREE!

2007-10-04T16:46:00.000+01:00

Incredible excitement pours forth - Crystal Castles are coming back to London, and so are The Teenagers and These New Puritans. Did I mention it's free? Supposing you haven't already, I implore you to go www.unitaur.com and register for the chance of winning tickets. Starting late october, the Vice Tour is going to loads of student unions, it's gonna be noisy. If you haven't seen Crystal Castles you haven't lived, click here to read my ridiculously overhyped review of them at this summer's awesome Underage Festival.

DOWNLOAD: Crystal Castles - Seed
DOWNLOAD: The Teenagers - Tiger

In other news, if you're free next friday, I would suggest you hop on a train to Kentish Town to see toystep duo Partyshank at the Boston Arms. If you feel so inclined, I might suggest you have a little read of my ridiculously overhyped review of them at the New Cross Inn.

DOWNLOAD: Partyshank - Penis vs Vagina
DOWNLOAD: Partyshank - Untilted
By the way, both of these songs are low bitrate and are repeatedly interrupted by a computer generated voice reading out their myspace address.

Pleased To Meet You

2007-10-02T18:03:00.000+01:00

(This picture has no relevance to anything, but it looks rather cool.)
I cannot allow myself to think that there are some people who have not heard the amazing cover/remix of Blur's excellent Song 2 as put forward by elctro-rockers !Trash Yourself. I'm not going to write a full review as I will just end up repeating what has already been said, so I suggest you hyperlink yourself to This review from Missingtoof.com!
All I can say is that combining a britpop classic with dirty pounding synths is a guaranteed party starter. Enjoy!

Jack Penate @ The Astoria, 26/09/07

2007-09-27T19:30:00.000+01:00

Jack Penate put on a more than adequate set at the London's Astoria, but approximately half the crowd seemed to think they were at some kind of death-metal-football-hooligan-mud-wrestling fight extravaganza. It was the first time my parents had let me go to a gig on a schoolnight, and there weren't a lot of people my age there - for once me & my friends were actually the youngest people in the venue. There were about 3 seperate moshpit incidents that turned into fights, one leading Jack Penate to stop playing and lecture the crowd about how there was no need and it's not what his music is about.
The songs were really good, but there is something about Jack Penate that I find inherently annoying. It might be his Tony Blair-esque voice, or his slightly too rounded face, but that man incites levels of annoyance in me that I usually would reserve for people who are actually annoying. During slow number My Yvonne a female vocalist appeared onstage to do some additional vocals - at first I thought it looked like Adele, but my mate Harry swears she was wearing one of those gold name necklaces that said Julia. The main set ended with Torn On The Platform, but the encore included Learning Lines, a cover of one of those songs you sort of know of but can't remember the name of, and the excellent Second, Minute Or Hour.

DOWNLOAD: Jack Penate - Made Of Codes

There were two support bands, first folk-rockers Johnny Flynn who played a set that was reasonably pleasant to listen to, but not exactly danceable. The lead singer swapped guitars 3 times, and every time there was a smaller guitar. For the last song he got a banjo out, which almost ruined my whole evening. Please do not question my hatred of banjos - I will not go into details, but I do not like banjos. At all.
The second band were terrible. When I saw the poster, I thought 'Yay, Wild Beasts are playing.' Then I remembered that I had never heard of Wild Beasts, and that the band I was thinking of was in fact Foals, and Wild Beasts I had never heard of. The bass and lead guitarists both came on wearing turtleneck jumpers, and the singer did this cringe-enducing dancing that seemed to be based on copying the style of an angry pigeon.
The opening songs skirted the boundaries of good taste, but a few tracks in the whining falsettos became too much to take and several empty beercans started flying, along with a few ones that seemed to be mostly full. I didn't throw anything, but this was for the simple reason that I have the most inadequate throw of anyone I know, with about the same throwing skills as a newborn baby; I didn't want to embarass myself. It is a pity the band didn't feel the same way. Dressed up like a fourpiece Simon & Garfunkel both having bad hair days, I am considering starting a petition to make Wild Beasts illegal.

In other news, WOO YAY St Albans won the online monopoly board vote by a ridiculous margin. Getting more than twice the number of votes than the second place Exeter, locals voted a total of 104,107 times. Arguably St Albans only won because we are the most internet and Myspace obsessed town in the UK, but it does also show that people in St Albans love it so much that to us it's worth staying at home, making up addresses such as *keyboard smash* @ *keyboard smash* .com a million times a day for 3 weeks. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a certain boardgame to beat my brother at.

The MOBO Awards and an extra-special Amy Winehouse mini-essay

2007-09-22T23:52:00.001+01:00

It has become a tradition that every year me and my mum stay in and watch the MOBO awards. To be honest a lot of the music really is incredibly low-quality rubbish - in fact that is not true, all of the music by Ne-Yo is incredibly low-quality rubbish. But what makes the MOBOs great is the awfully rehearsed banter between the co-hosts and seeing Sunita wearing the same dress she wore performing 'He's Gotta Be So Macho' on Top Of The Pops.
Here's a full list of the award winners:

Best UK Female - Amy Winehouse
Best UK Male - Dizzee Rascal
Best International Act - Rihanna
Best Song - Ne-Yo 'Because Of You'
Best UK Newcomer - N Dubz
Best Video - Kanye West 'Stronger'
Best Hip Hop - Kanye West
Best R&B - Ne-Yo
Best Reggae - Sean Kingston
Best Gospel - G-Force
Best DJ - Tim Westwood
Best Jazz - Soweto Kinch
Best African Act - 2face Idibia

Last night on national television Tim Westwood surpassed himself in being a complete moronic fool. He won the MOBO award for Best DJ, as voted for by users of irritating socila network Bebo. The average age of Bebo users must be about 13, and considering that the other nominees (George Kay, Jigs, Rampage, Ras Kwame, Ronnie Herel, Semtex, Shortee Blitz, Steve Sutherland and Trevor Nelson) nobody had heard of, the award should have been called DJ Most 13-Year-Olds Have Heard Of. As Westwood is announced winner, the whole O2 Arena is booing, and his acceptance speech consists of "Yeah innit this is my third MOBO I'm still the best fuckin DJ in the UK and if you don't like that you can fuck off!". I am not going to bother with some kind of witty retort about this.

And despite the fact that Amy Winehouse was nominated for just about every award she was elegible for, she only got one - Best UK Female. Her acceptance speech consisted of "Fankyou. Err... 'Ello, fankyou. Fankyouuu!" and then some wild gesturing. Her live set was coherent, the tune was adhered to but she seemed to be struggling to remember the words. It just seems sad watching the best singer of this millenium drink her way to oblivion. Thing of any of the 'greats' in soul music, and not one of them wrote songs as good as her, if they wrote at all. Amy is unique, the flaky alcoholic with the broken heart, combined with the 'live fast die young' attitude of a punk - and the sad thing is that like so many before her, she probably will die young. Which is just horrible really, if you think how much potential there is for an old lady Amy Winehouse.

Oh and Heat Magazine, LEAVE AMY ALONE SHE'S A HUMAN BEING. Seriously though, the constant barrage of 'Amy Winehouse is dying of not having enough body fat' is becoming annoying. She used to be more curvy but has lost some weight. It's because apparently she used to get through about forty quid of weed every week, and since quitting she no longer has constant munchies and now goes to the gym about four times a week. Which means she is now a bit on the skinny side. The end.

Here's some tracks from her first album, Frank. Way back when she wasn't what could be described as a 'strangely sexy transexual pirate hooker'.

DOWNLOAD: Amy Winehouse - Fuck Me pumps
DOWNLOAD: Amy Winehouse - Take The Box
DOWNLOAD: Amy Winehouse - Help Yourself

NEW HADOUKEN!

2007-09-21T20:47:00.000+01:00

OMG YAY Hadouken have a new track - It's called Love Sweat and Tears. They've lso announced a second mixtape to be released on the 12th of November. From what I've heard, this is going to be released in the format of a USB memory stick, which to be honest seems like the most ridiculous musical format ever thought up. It's NOT their album, apparently, titled 'Not Here To Please You' it's got a load of material already doing the rounds as well as some new stuff. Tracklisting as follows:

Leap Of Faith
Bounce
Girls
Love, Sweat & Beer
Dance Lesson
You Can't Be That
Liquid Lives (Noisia Remix)
Tuning In (H! Rerub)
Bloc Party Vs Hadouken! Remix
Plan B Vs Hadouken! Remix
Bolt Action 5 Vs Hadouken! Remix

The as-of-yet untitled album won't be out til early next year. I'll eat my glowsticks if isn't a mercury nominee. The UK tour starts next friday with support alternating between Shut Your Eyes and The Ghost Frequency, and Late Of The Pier and The Whip.

DOWNLOAD: Hadouken! - Love, Sweat And Beer

Does It Offend You, Yeah? w/ We Smoke Fags + AutoKratz @ Bedford Esquires, 15/09/07

2007-09-15T16:46:00.000+01:00

I saw Does It Offend You, Yeah? supporting Hadouken in June, and they were awesome to the point of almost upstaging the headline act. Now on their own UK Headline tour, I saw them in Bedford on Saturday and they did not disappoint. With their own brand of electro-punk they totally rocked the tiny venue that is the Esquires, they actually brought the roof down.
Unfortunately, the bouncers were clearly not in a good mood for some reason, and I was thrown out of the venue twice. Somebody had thought it might be nice to hang a million glowsticks from the ceiling, and understandably perhaps, everyone was trying to reach up and grab them. So when some of the more enterprising people decided to jump on each others shoulders to pull a few glowsticks down, an evil evil bouncer decided to send us out. The scum. It was OK in the end, because after taking off my glasses and hat, and changing shirts with a friend, I managed to sneak back in.
As well as this, there were two "dancing-related injuries" over the course of the evening. One of them was my mate Kalyan, who (the poor, poor bastard) managed to dislocate his shoulder someway through the first song of the first act, and was ambulanced off to hospital.

But anyway, onto the music. The first act was 'electro skunk rock' three-piece, We Smoke Fags. Quite what their name can mean in a literal sense since the smoking ban is dubious - I, for one, did not see them smoking any fags. Despite the injuries sustained by the crowd, they put on a solid set, kicking things off with the excellent 'Eastenders', and finishing off with their amazing, singalong-even-though-you-don't-know-the-words stomper, Lust Puppet.

DOWNLOAD: We Smoke Fags - Eastenders
DOWNLOAD: We Smoke Fags - Lust Puppet

After an interval during which they turned all the lights on and I spent most of hiding from the security in a corner, wonky electro outfit autoKratz stepped in. All their songs were reeallly long, and a bit repetitive, but they were kinda fun. To be honest, the music sounded more like it was more suited to some kind of drug-fuelled illegal rave in the centre of Berlin, and the crowd weren't all that keen, but they kept the momentum going for a half-hour set.

DOWNLOAD: autoKratz - ReaKtor

At about 9.45, Does It offend You, Yeah? took the stage. They were completely wicked-awesome. Even the song that I thought was boring in mp3 format (Doomed Now) was good. I saw all the songs, except the final reprise of 'We Are Rockstars', because the prick recognised me from earlier and decided to chuck me out again.

DOWNLOAD: Does It Offend You, Yeah? - We Are Rockstars (Kissy Sell Out Remix)
DOWNLOAD: Does It offend You, Yeah? - Battle Royale

Partyshank & Frankmusik @ New Cross Inn

2007-09-09T22:02:00.000+01:00

Partyshank make crazy 'toystep' music by somehow wiring together hundreds of brightly-coloured childrens' toy instruments to create something that sounds like it was made by Crystal Castles, if Crystal Castles were cartoon characters from Japan.
Frankmusik makes emotive powerpop layered over neon synths and 808 drumbeats. As well as having a voice more haunting than ex-Simian and now Black Ghosts vocalist James Ford, he also has the most amazing haircut ever to be banned from most schools. Frankmusik is the male Robyn, if Robyn was a man wearing huge white glasses.
Saturday saw an all ages all-dayer with both performing awesome live sets in the tiny venue that is the New Cross Inn, with support from insane shout-rap outfit Puppy Bucket & Donny Choonara, and a fourpiece of 15 year olds who seem to have a lot of potential and were really nice.

I'm not going to post any mp3s of Puppy Bucket & Donny Choonara, because I have heard them and they are really badly recorded, lacklustre and sound rubbish. To the contrary, their live set was actually really fun and full of raw energy. Me & my small group of friends were the only ones dancing, but it was still pretty amusante.

Next up were Lethal Concept, the aforementioned teenagers who've only got round to writing three songs, so spent most of their set covering other people's song, but made up for it with this infectious enthusiasm for performance. I think they'd payed all their friends to come to the show, or maybe they are just REALLY FAMOUS without me knowing, but the tiny dancehall erupted from the very first track. A young Enter Shikari in the making, perhaps. (Me saying that is nothing to do with the fact they played two Enter Shikari songs.)

Next up was Frankmusik, whose set we nearly missed all of, but from what I saw looked pretty awesome. For some reason everyone got the urge to stand on things at somepoint during the show, and I was no exception. Until the barmaid very kindly asked me to stop dancing all over the bar. Which was fair enough really.

Partyshank finally took the stage, one of them dressed in the obligatory hotdog costume, and the crowd was mental. I managed to lose both my shoes but made the decision to keep dancing and ignore the increasing pain in my feet and focus on the 'music'. The absolute highlight was when FrankMusik took the stage and there was some kind of crazy collaboration which should be a band in its own right, and they should call it PartyFrank. There was murder going on in the moshpit, and to be honest I was amazed that such a violent atmosphere could accumulate in such a tiny venue. Peace and Love clearly has no place in New Cross.

DOWNLOAD: Partyshank - Gary
DOWNLOAD: Frankmusik - Made Her Smile
LISTEN: Frankmusik - 3 Little Words (Partyshank Remix)@ The Partyshank Remixes Page
www.myspace.com/frankmusik
www.myspace.com/partyshank
www.myspace.com/lethalconceptband
www.myspace.com/puppybucketanddonnychoonara

Regina Spektor @ Royal Festival Hall, 07/09/07

2007-09-08T08:11:00.000+01:00

Friday night was without doubt the most moving live performance I have ever seen. Despite the fact we were in a row so far back in a venue so huge that I for one could barely even see Regina, it was an awesome evening. Right from the second track of the show, I went into a sort of trance or something; and was nearly in tears for the whole night. Switching between piano, guitar and simply tapping the microphone in time to the beat, Ms Spektor's performance was electric.
Regina is amazingly talented, and seems to never stop writing new songs - she has literally got hundreds of them. The Regina Spektor discography is like a huge iceberg: I've got 30 of her songs in my mp3 library, (all of which I know pretty well) and this is loads more than any other band - yet I still only recognised about half of the tracks she had to offer. Personally, the highlight of the set was the unreleased 'Baby Jesus', a song that showcases Regina's amazing vocal range, as well as her superhuman piano skills.
All I need now is another Spektor album!
DOWNLOAD: Regina Spektor - Musicbox

TRACKS: Now vs One Year Ago

2007-09-06T19:29:00.000+01:00

Ok, this is probably a bit of a silly idea, but I've set my music library to organise by Date Created and I'm having a look at a few songs that I was ... like actually well into one year ago. Back then I had a bit of a Lily Allen obsession - I am sorry, please forgive me. Since then I have matured somewhat, and realised that 'lyrics by Lily Allen, music by Lily Allen and "insert name of songwriter/producer/person with a hint of musical skill here" ' means that all Lily had to was write some kind of stilted poetry and then be in the same room as someone who worked out a half-decent tune to go with it. Which doesn't mean you can't listen to her songs, and that they are therefore 'bad music', it just feels like a slight betrayal after she started her MySpace career by marketing herself as some kind of music-literate indie songwriter who is from the ghetto or something, when in fact she is nothing more than Britney Spears with a C in GCSE English.
Despite the fact Lily is a bitchy self-obsessed fool, you gotta love her, and some of her tunes really are more than listenable, and often quite danceable. There's been loads of remixes, but this one, renamed 'Crack Whore', by the South Rakkas Crew (I have never heard of them before or since either) is my favourite.
DOWNLOAD: Lily Allen: Crack Whore (South Rakkas Crack Whore Riddim Remix)
Whereas now, it's all about the Britney Spears, who, as far as I know, has no GCSEs to speak of - possibly because the American system of education hands out no such qualification. (Their loss). A few years ago, I was shocked when I saw someone who I had previously thought of as an intelligent, well-rounded individual, liked Toxic. I was thinking something along the lines of 'OMG YOU CAN'T LIKE THAT SHE DINNT EVEN WRITE THAT AND SHE'S LIKE A POP STAR NOT EVEN A REAL MUSIC PERSON BUT A 'POP' STAR OMG RAARGH'. How wrong I was. As far as I can see, it is perfectly acceptable to like crap music if it is listenable and good - I don't have to credit Britney with any real talent. Actually, that's not fair - she is a good singer, but only a small tiny amount of the finished product is down to her input. Nobody will remember this song in ten years, but for now I am quite happy to play this at full volume and try to gargle the word 'more' at the lowest possible pitch imaginable, until my voice does that weird popping noise like I'm that woman from The Grudge.
DOWNLOAD: Britney Spears - Gimme More
And here's a few tracks I am well into at the moment.
DOWNLOAD: Bedtime For Toys - White Fur Coat
DOWNLOAD: Ghost Frequency - Money On The Fire
DOWNLOAD: Afrikan Boy - Lidl

CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE

2007-09-03T18:04:00.000+01:00

Hearts Revolution, the New York Electrothrash duo have a wonderful video for their new song CYOA (short for Choose Your Own Adventure). I am a sucker for freeze-frame animation - for further viewing see the intro to my short-lived summer band of last year Mystery Meat - but freeze-frame animation in some darkened cityspape with floating neon signs thrown in is something else. This band are awesome - they sell records in a pimped-out ice cream truck!

Download: Hearts Revolution - CYOA
www.myspace.com/heartsrevolution
BUY RECORDS AND MERCH @ THE HEARTS REVOLUTION STORE: www.heartschallenger.com

The Riverclub Demos 1 and 2

2007-09-02T12:49:00.000+01:00

The Riverclub are a five-piece unsigned band from hastings. They combine powerful guitar riffing with gently layered synths to create pure guitar pop perfection, with a hint of electronica thrown in. The songs are fast-paced and fun, particularly if you're sitting on the back of a bus, sharing headphones with a friend and miming the lyrics with 'emotional' faces and a few 'meaningful' hand gestures thrown in for good measure. The Riverclub are touring with Tonight Is Goodbye later this month, and released a (now sold-out) EP earlier this year.
www.myspace.com/theriverclub
DOWNLOAD: Riverclub - Demo 1
DOWNLOAD: Riverclub - Demo 2

FIREFOX HATES ME AND I DON'T KNOW WHY

2007-09-01T17:43:00.000+01:00

I cannot download anything, I cannot save anything, I cannot even access email attachments. I got firefox about three months ago, but unless this sorts itself out soon then the love affair is officially over. Why is it so evil?

Late Nights And Marlboro Lights

2007-08-29T10:02:00.000+01:00

Lillica Libertine is amazing. End discussion. Think very scary hardcore electro, then raise this to the power 10. To quote the Californian Electro Superblog that is known only as MISSINGTOOF, "If music were hard drugs this would be government engineered black tar heroin." I could not agree more.
DOWNLOAD: Lillica Libertine - Loose Lips Sink Ships
DOWNLOAD: Lillica Libertine - NewYorkCityViceSquad
www.myspace.com/ilovelillicalibertine

New Look for SGM

2007-08-28T14:23:00.000+01:00

OK, I've messed round with the look.
The text was too small.
It all looked too dark.
Too much pink gives me a headache.
What does everyone think of the new design?

Wombats @ The Green Room

2007-08-25T19:41:00.000+01:00

On my first assignment for UK Undercurrent, I got free entry to the rescheduled Wombats gig in Welwyn Garden City. Myself and my friend Kalyan were collecting emails for the Wombats Mailing List and handing out badges. There were two support acts, the first of which I wasn't really paying any attention to, and which I remember as loud more than anything else, and the second, 'The Mourning After', despite having a really really horrendously awful name, sounded like they have potential to become good. A lot of the past gigs I've been to I have been around the average of everyone at the venue, and it was strange to be at a gig where almost everyone was about ten years older than me. It figures really, seeing as The Green Room is the upstairs to a pub.

Anyway, the band were on at ten and started out with what seemed an impromptu (yet clearly well-rehearsed) A capella rendition of 'Girls, Boys and Marsupials', to a rapture of applause. The crowd were relatively calm at the beginning, and understandably: the stage is about four inches of the ground, the ceiling is low, there's no crowd barrier - it didn't look like it was gonna be a night of wild dancing. However, a few songs in a moshpit erupted, and for some reason I thought it might be a good idea to jump into the swaying mass of twenty-something rugby types. Never Again.
They went through the majority of their songs in a set that lasted nearly an hour, and in between there was a lot of ruminating about the meaning of their songs, and general anecdotes. A memorable one was lead singer Matt Murphy telling us about how, on a train in Germany, they had seen some rabbits 'frolicking' in the distance, and a friendly bit of banter had started about whether or not rabbits are nocturnal. Several hours of internet searching later, they discovered rabbits are in fact most active in twilight hours, or to use the proper term, crepuscular.
There were lots of songs I hadn't heard before, including upcoming single 'Let's Dance To Joy Division', released in October. The finale track, 'Kill The Director', saw the crowd going so crazy the front row were falling over themselves and the second row putting a foot on the stage in order to avoid a massive pile-up, and the security acting as a human barrier. However, this was nothing compared to encore track 'Backfire At The Disco' that saw an all-out stage invasion. I must admit that I was one of the naughty few who spilled onto the stage (in my defence, it was mainly to avoid one of the rugby-types who'd had a few) but the band played on regardless. Absolute mayhem.
The Mourning After: www.myspace.com/tmaband
The Wombats: www.myspace.com/thewombatsuk
DOWNLOAD: Wombats - Derail And Crash

Blood Red Shoes @ Underage

2007-08-22T11:33:00.000+01:00

OK, so the story goes that Ginger Rogers, 30s tap-dance icon, had to re-do a scene so many times that the camera man asked why she'd changed out of her white shoes into some red ones. She hadn't, it turned out she'd danced so hard they were covered in blood.
Ironic, it seems, that during the set of Blood Red Shoes, who got their name from the above anecdote, somebody TROD ON MY TOE and IT REALLY HURT, and then later on i took my shoes off and there was A LITTLE BIT OF BLOOD!

Photo Credit: hoombo choomba

Blood Red Shoes are a two-piece post-punk disco rock band from Brighton. The set-up is unlike anything I've seen before, like a double-backwards White Stripes in reverse. It consists of Laura-Mary Carter on guitar and Steven Ansell on drums, with both contributing to vocals. Their songs combine noisy, aggressive guitar, almost superhuman drumming and subtle, gently layered vocals that still sound good when the crowd are spitting them back.
The best track had to be the finale 'It's Getting Boring By The Sea', which I promise is an absolute killer I defy anyone not to love. The tune is immensely catchy, yet surprisingly tricky to remember; for me this is a song to play again and again.

DOWNLOAD: Blood Red Shoes - It's Getting Boring By The Sea (Via The Blue Walrus)
ALSO: Buy a wicked cool Blood Red Shoes shirt or one their records @ www.bloodredshoes.co.uk/
AND: Download the Blue Walrus Coming Back Mix, it's my official soundtrack to what remains of the summer.

A Punch In The Face

2007-08-21T16:12:00.001+01:00

Photo Credit: jez cave
After Lethal Bizzle, we headed to the Myspace stage to see Crystal Castles at the Myspace Stage. It was really annoying, because they had scheduled Crystal Castles at the same time as cooler-than-thou Parisian sex pests The Teenagers. Crystal Castles and The Teenagers are both blogosphere and personal favourites, and I was torn as which to go to. In the end we decided to go for Crystal Castles, because they were
a. WAYYY more energetic, and we were feeling pretty pumped after our half hour of shouty hip-hop.
b. From Canada, so therefore more likely to be elusive for future live performances.
c. Not performing in a circus tent, and we'd heard the Converse/Artrocker tent where the teenagers were in had a rubbish atmosphere.
Before CC came on, the crowd were rapidly filling with anticipation for their arrival. A screaming chant of 'CRYSTAL CASTLES! CRYSTAL CASTLES!' started out, and it quickly slumped into an all-out wail of joy as Alice and Ethan appeared onstage, sipping from cans of Stella Artois (Shock! Horror!) and eating from a pack of marshmallows.
I will now refer you to a review that appeared on blog bible Drowned In Sound:

"To really be effective, Crystal Castles’ malevolent, malfunctioning eight-bit terrorism needs to be loud enough to envelope the audience in its pulsing dark heart, to wash over you in ferocious, asphyxiating sheets of warped two-dimensional Gameboy glitches and bruising drum bombast that pierces your skull with their sheer shrill force, burrowing deep into the brain like a fever. As it is, owing to those considerate chaps at the Tower Hamlets council and the stifling acoustics of the inflatable stage on which they play, the would-be caustic choir of end-is-nigh sirens that layer the huge ‘Atlantis to Interzone’ remix with which their set begins sound more like a police car siren drowned at the bottom of a canal, Crystal Castles a shadow of themselves."
- Jack Shankly.

I Completely Disagree With This. The crowd were in a frenzy, the sound was almost deafening, and although I am no sound engineering expert, I am almost certain that Jack Shankly isn't either, so neither of us should comment on the abilities of an inflatable stage to project sound. I was more than enveloped in the music's pulsing dark heart, and the adrenaline rush was insane. Serious crowd surfing started, and the security were giving all crowd-surfers a decent telling off, (is it for insurance purposes or something?) whilst also finding the perseverence of some peoples' repeated attempts to surf to the front hilarious. The pit was open and as the ferocious, asphyxiating sheets of warped two-dimensional Gameboy glitches washed over me I was inspired to run in, fists waving, until I was pushed out by three different people roughly twice my size. Usually I am one to shy away from the actual 'moshing' but repeatedly I was going for it, especially when killer track 'Alice Practice' came on. This is one of those songs that is repeatedly referred to as having completely indistinguishable lyrics and for some reason I feel really proud of myself when I manage to work out what some of the satanic-sounding lines are, such as 'Drop it: it's dead' at the 1.57 mark. Despite the fact nobody could understand any of the words that vocalist Alice was throwing at us, a huge amount of the crowd were still shouting something along to the tune.

The set was perhaps the most surreal half-hour of my life: everything about Crystal Castles spells out something that shouldn't work as music. Incomprehensible screaming in place of singing, minimalist 8-bit instead of backing music - everything is wrong, wrong, wrong - yet somehow manages to be right. Looking at their t-shirt design, Madonna with a bleeding black eye, it's like they have taken everything about conventional music, boring popular music in particular, and punched it in the face. It's unlikely Crystal Castles are going to take over the world, and if they ever get a number one I will eat my own wardrobe. Thinking about it, it's a miracle that a band so truly innovative, unorthodox and downright weird have enjoyed the mainstream appraisal that they have. I love Crystal Castles!
DOWNLOAD: Klaxons - Atlantis To Interzone (Crystal Castles Remix)

Underage Festival

2007-08-20T21:39:00.000+01:00

Two Fridays ago I went to the first ever Underage Festival in London's Victoria Park. To be honest, it was possibly the best day of my life. This is probably down to any number of the following reasons:
a. It was actually a really good event.
b. My tastes in live music are still a bit unrefined.
c. I am a very enthusiastic person about anything.
d. Maybe I just thought it was really cool and like being cool.
Anyway, I really should have written this ages ago but I went away for a week the day after and it is quite hard to blog from a depressingly windswept French campsite. The queue to get in was really long, and despite the fact it opened at 12 and we were queueing since 11.15 it was past one O'clock when we got in. This meant we missed the Errorplains at 12.20, but it's okay because the Errorplains really aren't that great. The security were thorough in checking everyone for contraband, including evil items such as chocolate bars, water and the public enemy that is hairgel. (Yes; a boy in front of us in the queue, who for some reason felt he might need to re-style his elaborate fringe, had his hairgel confiscated.)

Photo Credit: Photographer_Rz

We arrived in time to see Lethal Bizzle, a rapper who has recently re-styled himself as some kind of indie pantomine sideshow. He was wearing huge black sunglasses, a chunky chain made of wood, and a black t-shirt with 'LETHAL BIZZLE' emblazoned on it in bold white lettering. Lethal B is not my cup of tea musically, and I feel in no way compelled to buy his album, Back To Bizznizz, released earlier this year. However, he is pretty fun to go see live. The track that everyone remembers him for is 'Pow', which was released in 2004 and despite being banned by most radio stations because of gun references, reached number 11 in the UK singles chart.
The show was full of audience participation: as well as Pow, he performed new track 'Bizzle Bizzle' and MC Hammer's 'Can't Touch This'. With every track, the crowd were screaming the chorus lines and waving our arms like we were at a rap battle somewhere in the middle of 8 Mile.
I would be surprised if a single person there was taking Lethal Bizzle, aka Maxwell Ansah, seriously. His lyrics could have been written by a 12-year-old, and he was wearing a shirt with his own name on it. But it seems Lethal has found himself a niche in the market, as the grime sideshow at rock shows. This Autumn, he's touring with Gallows and then The Enemy on the NME Riots Tour. No mp3 links, because I do not reccomend listening to any of them, but check out his live show - I will be surprised if you don't enjoy it.
www.myspace.com/lethalbizzlemusic
VIDEO: Here is Lethal Bizzle performing Pow.

A quick rave, then a quick rant.

2007-08-02T14:28:00.000+01:00

I just received confirmation I will be teaming for Hadouken! at their appearance at Bedford Esquires in October. I am extremely excited. Seeing Hadouken! at the ULU was amazing, and when I saw Cajun Dance Party at the Esquires I fell in love with was the venue more than the band. Hadouken! put on an amazing live show, and seeing them in such an intimate venue is going to great. I am going for free with street team organisation UK Undercurrent. The deal is, I will hand out flyers etc and collect email addresses before the gig. In return, I will recieve free entry for me and one other, and if I send them a large enough list of email adresses, maybe some extra Hadouken! merchandise. UKU is a great idea.
All Ages Gigs are scum. On tuesday night I was supposed to be seeing Does It Offend You, Yeah? and Lethal Bizzle, but they canceled my show. RARGH.

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

2007-07-09T22:20:00.000+01:00

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

DECLARE INDEPENDENCE!

2007-06-24T19:14:00.000+01:00

Wow. I just saw Björk's live set from this year's Glastonbury Festival. I think the festival itself is something that would definitely be worth clamouring to go to once, and if I ever go I hope to god Miss Guðmundsdóttir is playing. Dressed as some sort of leafy druid creature, she along with about a hundred or so backing singers/dancers/musicians (who all had their foreheads painted eerie shapes that glowed in the dark) raced through pretty much all the tracks off new album Volta, and some old favourites. The set opened with Björk in a huge hat that looked a bit like a tea cosy, and Volta's flagship single Earth Intruders, before moving onto Venus As A Boy, from Björk 's Debut album. I think Björk is perhaps the most under-rated musician of our time. The woman is literally amazing at what she does, and has the most versatile, beautiful voice. I'm not even saying she's unsuccessful, but if you compare how good she is to people who've experienced similar mainstream success, she'll kill them. The highlight of the show had to be the stomper Declare Independence, in which audience and performers gave up any pretense of sanity and the screeching, distorted guitars were pierced only by acid green Björk's awe-inspiring voice. Wow.
DOWNLOAD: Björk - Declare Independence
Watch The Live Set

Bolt The Dizzee Hadouken Fox Party

2007-06-24T13:30:00.000+01:00

OK I'm sorry this is turning into a blog that seems entirely dedicated to Hadouken, but I just had to do a write-up of their excellent (and I mean excellent) mixtape. Sampling all of early 2007's best banger's, this is really one for the scene kids. It's got Caroline's a Victim, Ready To Uff, TWO Klaxons rework's (major kudos on the Golden Skans snippet) and they're even remixing their own tracks. IT IS AMAZING. The available artwork only gives the sampled artist's names and not the songs, and some of the tracks I honestly cannot be bothered to research but it tracklisting is roughly as follows:

Bloc Party vs Hadouken! - The Prayer Remix
Like Woah! - (DON'T KNOW)
David E Sugar Feat Ears - (DON'T KNOW)
Wiley - (DON'T KNOW)
Plan B vs Hadouken! - No More Eating Remix
Virus Syndicate
TNT - (DON'T KNOW)
Skepta Feat Wiley, JME, Creed - (DON'T KNOW)
Klaxons vs Hadouken! - Atlantis To Interzone Remix
Bolt Action Five - Tree Friend Tree Foe
Hadouken! - Tuning In
Uffie - Ready To Uff
Kate Nash - Caroline's A Victim
Mr Oizo - (DON'T KNOW - I REALLY SHOULD KNOW)
Klaxons - Golden Skans
Justice - Phantom
Fox N Wolf - Youth Alcoholic
Radioclit - (DON'T KNOW)
Gossip - Standing In The Way Of Control
Test Icicles - (DON'T KNOW)
Jixilix - (DON'T KNOW)

Get the whole mixtape @ http://www.myfreedownload.co.uk/hadoukenmixtape

Overall the mixtape is really really good. Personally I reckon some of the rap/grimey bits at the beginning go on a bit too long + Maybe they coulda done something a bit more interesting with Caroline's A Victim. I particularly like the way they've really subtly messed with the bassline from Standing In The Way Of Control, although it actually makes me wince so much when i hear people refer to Beth Ditto & Co's three and a half minute frenzied protest track as 'The Skins Song'. Eurghhhhh.

My favourite bit of the track has to be Bolt Action Five's Tree Friend Tree Foe. I hadn't heard of this band before but I am officially in love with them. I have no idea what they are talking about with friends and foes and trees but it makes an excellent track. The Cleft Pallettes have an amazing remix of it, all glitchy synths and super mario drumbeats.
DOWNLOAD: Bolt Action Five - Tree Friend Tree Foe (Cleft Palettes Remix)

In fact, the Cleft Pallettes have some really awesome remixes, especially their edit of the Teenager's Homecoming, in which they manage to laugh at just about everything to do with the Myspace generation of 2007. Get them off their Myspace. I'm also grateful for the screechy Youth Alcoholic bit. It's like the horrible third verse of the Timewarp, except really really good. I do have first-hand anecdotal evidence it will make your pets go temporarily insane. There's a wicked "hungover booty crunk" remix of it available HERE from Discobelle.net

In other news, Cajun Dance Party have just started their UK tour. I'm hoping to catch them at the Bedford Esquires in a few Saturdays' time, and they've just made their 2006 demo EP available free from their website. If you haven't heard Cajun Dance Party yet I seriously suggest you check them out. CAJUN FREE DEMOS
&&amp;amp;&& I have FINALLY managed to get my hands on the Dizzee Rascal album. I'd be lying if I said it's all good - track number 1 is especially crap, the hightlight is where Dizzee coughs at around the 2 minute 40 mark - but there are some awesome tunes. Sirens, his ode to 'goin out n robbin stuff', if you ignore the fact it includes actual sirens, is a wicked banger. Listen to the heavy guitar riffs that sound like they're stolen out an old White Stripes album, and the catchy-as-anything chorus: it's impossible not to be hooked.
DOWNLOAD: Dizzee Rascal - Sirens

Hadouken! Live At The ULU

2007-06-11T22:25:00.000+01:00

After the short train journey from St Albans to Kings Cross and the 20 minute walk to the ULU, we arrived to see a crowd of new-rave teenagers, and what struck me was how young the crowd were. Me and my friends (aged 15) had expected to be among the youngest people there, especially considering it was at a student union. We were literally amazed by what everyone was wearing. Skinny jeans in colours usually reserved for highlighter pens, girls with blue knee-length hair extensions, boys with flat top caps balanced on hair so backcombed they looked like bird’s nests – it was insane. Just about every girl in a skirt was also wearing leggings – we thought one girl was wearing silver (silver?) leggings, but she explained to us she’d actually just spray-painted her legs silver. Everyone had their glowsticks and plastic sunglasses – which loads of people insisted on wearing the WHOLE NIGHT – and we were just about the only people without H! scrawled all over our clothes. It was mad. We arrived at seven O’clock and the queue already had about a hundred people in it and the time was about ten to eight when we finally entered the venue.

The stage was empty and there was a huge banner with the distinctive Hadouken! logo scrawled across it. There was some generic bassy rap music playing and the crowd was gradually amassing at the front. A few bald blokes with moustaches were adjusting the equipment and there were about 5 bouncers in orange polo shirts looking less than amused at the restless crowd. The guns, bitches and bling faded out; the soundcheck men cleared off, and after about 30 seconds of nothing but noisy chatter we were greeted with the slightly out-of-place ‘Close To You’, as sung by The Carpenters, blaring out the speakers. Running onto the stage was Example, a “white rapper from Fulham” possibly best known for his bootleg answerback track to Lily Allen's 'Smile' – called ‘Vile’. He urged the crowd to ‘get their glowsticks in the air’ and most of the first verse was just one huge swaying singalong, but eventually it evolved into a foot-stamping rap anthem. Somehow. I was really thrilled Example was playing; I knew he’d done some support on Hadouken!’s tour, but he wasn’t billed for the ULU gig so I thought it would just be his night off or something. I had no idea how good a live performer Example was. Heavy on sampling and audience participation, for example one song had a chorus that was made up getting the crowd to shout, “BOUNCE! BOUNCE! BOUNCE!” over the bridge to The Rolling Stones’ ‘Paint it Black’, or Britney Spears’ ‘Toxic’ used to describe his smoker girlfriend’s breath. We heard an exclusive preview of new single ‘I Don’t Want To’, which (if I’m honest) I can’t actually remember all that well but it was really good. He finished with a rendition of ‘You Can’t Rap’, a song which, I believe, is worthy of the title of Best Rap Song Ever To Feature An Opera Singer. Ever.

After a much-needed water-break, Does This Offend You, Yeah? Took the stage. Having heard mp3s off their MySpace, where they only have a load of cartoon pictures, I was expecting two blokes on decks or something and maybe a drummer. But what we got was a four-piece complete with guitarist and a bassist/keyboardist. And a guy on decks thrown in for good measure. After making a hugely painful horrible guitar screaming noise, the lead singer grabbed the mic and said, in the epitome of cool, “Does This O-Fuckin-Fend You, Yeah?” and they launched into their first song. I have no idea what it was, but GOD, it was crap. After that tirade was over, they were on form with the excellent Battle Royale. It was here that the sweaty pogo-ing rave saw it’s first bit of aggressive ‘mosh’ action. Mainly due to my mate Alex trying to get in front of some hench teenager who was about a foot taller than him, the crowd started literally falling over itself and pushing and swaying and suchlike. And the girls in the crowd were LOVING it. Literally. Not wanting to appear as some sort of chauvinist/sexist stereotypist, but the girls around the bit of stage I was at were violent. I was punched, scratched and squashed and the particularly sadistic ones were the girls. The weird thing was, I honestly did not feel an ounce of pain. I’m usually one of the kids with a low(er than most) pain threshold, but even when a girl in six-inch stilettos managed to scratch a deep (OK, not that deep) gash in my shin, the adrenaline rush was such that I felt literally NO PAIN. At all. Everything went crazy with their final track ‘We Are Rockstars’ which they dedicated to Headliners Hadouken!, despite one audience member’s shout that it should be dedicated to Jesus, and another one saying it should be dedicated to Joan Of Ark. People were crowdsurfing and punching and kicking and at one point this whole line of people at the front all pushed back at the same time, causing about 30 people a few rows back to land in one huge pileup. As a metaphor to help you understand sort of what it was like, here is a video for the song made by a fan for a video & media course she was doing.

Hadouken! finally came on, I was getting really overheated so I made the decision to pour a cup of water all over me. BAD IDEA. I was bloody freezing on the way home. Anyways, they opened with Bounce, which, judging by their YouTube channel, is pretty standard. The crowd were going mental & it was nice to see them also playing some new material I hadn’t heard, such as ‘Blood, Sweat and Beers’ and ‘Declaration Of War’ which was a personal favourite, as it was much more of a sing song, as opposed to a shout song. The show ended with That Boy That Girl, which neither the crowd nor the band really wanted to stop. James rapped the main verse from their rather fabulous Bloc Party Remix and the end chorus got repeated at least 3 times. It was actually a brilliant gig – go see Hadouken! now, while they’re still small. The Album drops in September, and is a must-buy. I can’t wait.

The Wombats

2007-06-01T15:06:00.000+01:00

I'm a wee bit annoyed. I've signed up on the UK Undercurrent website to spend by saturday night collecting email adresses and handing out flyers and badges in return for 2 free tickets to see the Wombats at the Green Room in Welwyn Garden city. Unfortunately, Wombats lead singer Matthew Murphy has tonsilitis. The scumbag. Anyway, my gig is cancelled and so my dreams of sending off a huge list of email addresses and myspace addies in return for a nice Wombats CD or t-shirt will have to wait.

If you don't know The Wombats, they're a three-piece from Liverpool who recently signed with 14th floor recordings, thus relenquishing the title of the UK's 'best unsigned band' that many had dubbed them as. Their major-label debut single 'Kill The Director' is out on June 25th, available on on CD, vinyl or as a download. The unused stack of 200 or so flyers in my room is telling me to write that you can pre-order now from www.hmv.co.uk
Buy it. It's great. The lyrics are smart and funny, the bass riff foot-stompingly catchy, and the three-part harmonies are heavenly.
I think Matt Murphy's voice is amazing, and is perfectly offset by drummer Dan Haggis and norwegian bassist Tord Overland-Knudsen's falsetto 'woo-hoo's, 'dooby-doo's and 'da-da-da's. The wombats are great.

DOWNLOAD: The Wombats - Little Miss Pipe Dream
www.thewombats.co.uk
www.myspace.com/thewombatsuk

:(

2007-05-24T20:26:00.000+01:00

My photography (for once) here.

COLON OPEN BRACKET. Stupid name really. They make 8-bit electronic music with sort of almost screamo music on top. Sort of like Crystal Castles, only not. A friend of mine described them as 'emotronic', which I think is a nice way to sum it up. They're a four piece from Aberdeen in Scotland (two boys, two girls) and at some point in their formation had the rather wonderful idea of adapting old computer keyboards to use live on stage. Leona and Claire hold these inmuch the same way as a guitar, with a guitar strap and standard jumping around - there's typing but no strumming. Anyway, they played the Camden Underworld just over a month ago, and I was there to see it. The show was a matinees performance starting at 3.30 with loads of other bands playing before. :( finally took the stage at about seven O'clock. Lead singer Mart put on an enigmatic performance; we managed to grab a place right at the front, the girls I was with spent the whole performance stroking his yellow converses; and drummer Adam wowed the crowd with his superhuman drumming skillzzzzzzzzzzz.
The show ended with the strap breaking off Claire's keyboard and her making the abrupt decision to destroy it. Pretty rock & roll if you ask me, and I still have one of the arrow keys and the q. Yep that's me in the flashing green circle. I was really amazed to see myself on the :( Myspace, surely my fame knows no bounds. (Not my photogaphy. Obviously.)

DOWNLOADS: I couldn't see the point in posting any here, but they are available off the :( myspace:
www.myspace.com/colonopenbracket
:( have an EP, First Blood, on release and it's on sale from the Myspace.

KC

2007-05-17T21:59:00.000+01:00

KC is a very strange lady. She dresses like the scenest of scene kids, but sounds like Lady Sovereign. Hmm. Seemingly ALL of KC's song reference her range of t-shirts, which to be brutally honest, aren't all that special. On a line between very cool and very annoying, KC is not for everyone. But, I saw KC supporting Colon Open Bracket at the Camden Underworld a few weeks and she can work a crowd. Nice tunes, nice beats, she just needs to work on the actual lyrics she's writing - which are really crap.

Download: KC - The Best Things Come To Those Who Wait
Download: KC - Geek Chic
Download: KC - Rare Threads

Hadouken!

2007-05-17T17:15:00.000+01:00

Although the Klaxons get credit for 'inventing' the 'new rave' scene, pioneers of the genre (which may or may not exist, depending on who you ask) are Hadouken. Mixing grimey ravey indie electro rock, their new single is here at last. In the making-of video for their new (as of yet unreleased) video for latest single Liquid Lives, the guitarist explains the song is
"based on the whole allegory of emotions based around the drug that is alcohol."
Someone off camera adds, (I have no idea who, sorry)
"It's not a drug ... it's a drink."
A friend of mine ripped this off their Myspace, but as far as I know it's the final mix that will be available for download soon. If you've heard the old demo from Keep Hope Inside in January and liked it, have a listen to this; everything slightly crap about the old one has been resolved. I'm seeing Hadouken! at the ULU in june with Does This Offend You, Yeah? supporting. It's going to be fun. Have a look at their Myspace, there's usually at least one mp3 available for download. Coming soon will be the long-awaited Hadouken! remix of something by Forward Russia, and there has been rumours of an Enter Shikari remix. Now that would be interesting.

Download: Hadouken! - Liquid Lives

www.myspace.com/hadoukenuk -The Hadouken! Myspace
www.myspace.com/hadoukenremixes -The Hadouken! Remix Myspace
www.myspace.com/doesitoffendyou -Does It Offend You, Yeah? Myspace

Vatican DC

2007-05-12T20:33:00.000+01:00

I first heard Vatican DC a year ago, and today on the radio I heard their debut album, 'Make It Ride' is out on May 14. Vatican DC are a London-based post-punk four-piece (Yes, I'm a big fan of hyphens) and they're fast, aggressive and as raw as sushi. Or so I thought. Today I heard 'Don't Pull Your Gun On Me', which is a much slower, more friendly affair. For me the real gem of the album is 'Wow'. The song starts with a few seconds of electronic beeps which quickly merge into a killer bass riff. For me, this is a song that needs to be played over and over. Endlessly. Also worth a mention is their new single, 'Fountainhead' which I don't as of yet have an mp3 of but it's available off iTunes now.

Download: Vatican DC - Don't Pull Your Gun On Me
Download: Vatican DC - Wow
Also Worth A Look:
http://www.myspace.com/vaticandc -The Vatican DC Myspace
http://www.vaticandc.com -A triumph in Flash 8

Hello There

2007-05-10T16:44:00.000+01:00

I've been a fan of a few music blogs for a while now, and I'm a regular user of the The Hype Machine, and for some complex psychological reasons due to the fact I genuinely do think my music taste is IMPECCABLE, and should be shared with the world, I have decided to start this blog. I'm 15 years old, studying for my GCSEs and have no musical skill whatsoever. This is probably because I'm incredibly impatient and expect immediate results. And that piano teacher just smelt a little bit strange.

Anyway, onto the music. First up is Kate Nash. Say what you will about her, but she is an extremely able musician and knows how to write a good tune. I think she suffered a bit at the hands of LDN is a Victim , but to be fair pretty much everything they said is true and, let's face it, Harrow isn't exactly a ghetto - what's so wrong with being oh so slightly well-spoken. And her song 'Caroline's a Victim', everyone seems to think is rubbish. Which it is really. But it's still very fun. It's like that Russian painter who reduced his paintings to white squares on a white background then declared painting was dead. With this song, everything from it has been taken away apart from that sharp drumbeat and the synth bassline - and it still works! Also, she has a new song 'Foundations' due to be released later in the summer. I've got it here in demo form off her MySpace, it cuts out after two minutes but it will have to do for now.

Download: Kate Nash - Foundations
Download: Kate Nash - Caroline's A Victim
BUY KATE NASH MUSIC AND STUFF - www.katenash.co.uk