You Have No Idea What You Are Getting Yourself Into

(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)

Album Review: Crystal Castles

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.

Tom's Top Albums of 2007

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!

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.