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Best albums of 2010

2011-02-11T21:18:00.008Z

These guitars sound like I have metal things rolling around my brain. The songs lurch like you’re being dragged across the floor. The songs don’t so much end as stagger away.

Listen to: 'The Virgin'

39) Dirty Projectors & Björk - Mount Wittenberg Orca - (buy here)

This year, DIRTY PROJECTORS and BJÖRK released an EP together and it was about a FAMILY OF WHALES. How awesome is that?? You should download it, it’s for charity yo.

Listen to: 'Beautiful Mother'

38) Caribou – Swim

Gorgeously-crafted electronic pop that’s more like a track-based IDM record than electro-pop... this has been so universally hyped, and it’s well-deserved.

Listen to: 'Odessa'

37) Teebs – Ardour

The Brainfeeder set have had a great year, even if perhaps it was just Flying Lotus who received all the accolades. Lorn, The Gaslamp Killer, and Daedelus also made some great music, but I found that Teebs was FlyLo’s most exciting apprentice. Ardour is an album that almost feels like a collection of rough sketches, formed of a broad sonic palette, a ton of ideas that only need to last a couple of minutes.

Listen to: 'Humming Birds'

36) The Books - The Way Out

All you really need to know is, there was a new Books record out this year. If you’ve never heard them before, they’re heavily focused on spoken-word samples but also have some lovely cello & guitar noodlings, with some fantastic production techniques. This is their 4th in a series of consistently great albums.

Listen to: 'I Didn't Know That'

35) Mount Kimbie - Crooks & Lovers

Whatever post-dubstep is, I don’t think Mount Kimbie are really it – in fact I think that cover art is purposefully mocking that monicker, because Mount Kimbie eschew bass-heavy soulless dubstep, but make shuffling beats in the vein of Burial, with a lot of cleverly-used organic samples. It’s chill, but also sort of disconcerting – check out ‘Before I Move Off’ for never a complete syllable of chopped-up R&B samples.

34) Zs - New Slaves

Noise music is usually characterised as serious, psychologically intense music designed to shift your soul. But Zs do to the genre what Battles did to post-rock – New Slaves is cartoonish, incorporating free jazz instrumentation in a way that can be abrasive (as in the title track), but also, almost lighthearted (‘Don’t Touch Me’).

No proper tracks on Youtube but check them out!

33) Philip Jeck - An Ark for the Listener

Philip Jeck regularly releases very similar, but very consistent ambient records, and there’s something about his aesthetic that really stands out to me personally. It engulfs me more than Fennesz, it feels more soulful than Tim Hecker, and I can feel the essence of his decaying analogue equipment, but in a way that isn’t as exhaustive as The Disintegration Loops (whereas William Basinski used disintegrating tape loops, Jeck mostly uses warped and worn-down vinyl). An Ark for the Listener is perhaps Jeck’s droniest, most towering record to date.

Listen to: 'The All of Water'

[I sort of find it hard to evaluate ambient/drone/noise music... there are a lot of critically-acclaimed, consistent artists who I namechecked here, who make music which I know I’ll dig if I’m in the mood for ambience. This year, I also really enjoyed Knoxville by the Fennesz Daniell Buck collaboration (if you want something more melodious), Going Places by Yellow Swans (if you want something more noisy), Holkham Drones by Luke Abbott (just, awesome studying music), and Landings by Richard Skelton (mostly experimental acoustic).]

32) Tanlines – Settings (EP)

Well this is my favourite cover art of 2010. I can’t explain it. Chillwave kind of died this year but Tanlines might yet prove to be one of the most exciting bands of the movement, fusing their sound with strong Afro-pop elements (and by that I mean hella kettle drums).

‘Real Life’ is the JAM.

31) Sufjan Stevens - The Age of Adz

I feel like maybe I’ll be raving about this record in a few listens time. It doesn’t really make sense to put it so far down the list, I know, but at the moment it feels like Sufjan’s genius (‘Too Much’, ‘I Want to be Well’) is wavering (‘Impossible Soul’, which is still an unbelievable achievement).

Listen to: 'I Want to be Well'

30) Matthew Dear - Black City

Dark, unpolished electro-pop grotesquery.

Listen to: 'Slowdance'

29) Abe Vigoda – Crush

This is where I talk about how Abe Vigoda made a startling transition from tropical punk to synth-pop or whatever – but this is the first AV record I heard, and they’re just as adept at fusing synth with post-punk... this record is a real grower, at first I found it almost generic-indie-rock, but I’ve come to realise how wrong I was: it’s full of rewarding, unique songs.

Listen to: 'Throwing Shade'

28) Dessa - A Badly Broken Code

Dessa sometimes raps and sometimes sings her markedly serious & gritty lyrics, across a really varied record: the album is as effective at being forceful (‘Alibi’) as when the only instrumentation is Dessa’s looped vocals (‘Poor Atlas’) or restrained woodwind (‘Memento Mori’). It’s a very clever album in spite of its directness, (and you can sort of tell Dessa knows it), but nonetheless, remarkably honest.

27) Janelle Monae - The ArchAndroid

Even my sister listens to ‘Tightrope’ over and over again, because it’s awesome, but of course the album is much more than that. Monáe has tons of ambition, as she uses suite forms (complete with overtures) without it sounding forced; it makes it sound like people should’ve been making albums like this for years (like, ones that aren’t prog...) I have to admit, it completely overshadows of Montreal’s recent attempts to make soul music (Barnes’ cameo, ‘Make the Bus’ just sounds like recent of Montreal...)

Listen to: 'Cold War'

26) Darren Hayman & the Secondary Modern - Essex Arms

The frontman of an influential, cult indie pop band (Hefner), still making albums solo after having split up the band nearly ten years ago despite slipping into relative obscurity, should NOT have made an album this good. I expected this to be really middle-of-the-road, but Hayman’s songs are as insightful and singalongable as ever, this is probably his most consistent release (Hefner included!). After only the second time I listened to this record, several songs were stuck in my head all day.

Listen to: 'Nothing You Can Do About It'

25) Anaïs Mitchell – Hadestown

It’s a concept record retelling the Orpheus myth featuring a plethora of indie-folk stars. Each unique voice is assigned a character (including Bon Iver as Orpheus), and YES it’s as awesome as it sounds. I can’t physically understand how this slipped under Pitchfork’s radar, as it had universally glowing reviews everywhere else. Seriously, it’s the best reviewed record in over two years, according to Any Decent Music [as of Feb 2011], although the same site shows it was neglected from end-of-year lists. I honestly believe that this goes to show the influence of Pitchfork; had they reviewed this album, it wouldn’t have been forgotten.)

Listen to: 'Way Down Hadestown'

24) Girl Talk - All Day - (download here)

Girl Talk released a new album this year (he mashes up chart-rap with critically-acclaimed classics. And it’s still free!)

Listen to: 'Get It Get It'

23) Everything Everything - Man Alive

I’m really surprised about the success of this album – the band seem to have gained a lot of fans amongst NME kids, despite sounding like a British Dismemberment Plan. I can imagine all the songs started out pretty basic, then the band threw in idea after idea in an attempt to make themselves sound as quirky as possible. Yet it still sounds like singles from start to finish, mathy and unpredictable but with triumphant, radio-friendly choruses.

Listen to: 'Suffragette Suffragette'

22) Sleigh Bells – Treats

It’s getting more and more popular for bands to be lo-fi for the sake of lo-fi, but it’s clear from the opening salvo of ‘Tell Em’ that noise is Sleigh Bells’ THING. Standout ‘Crown on the Ground’ is a pop song that sounds powerful because of its overwhelming noisiness, and here’s the thing, it couldn’t exist without that noise. It turns out crazed-cheerleader-core is incredibly entertaining.

21) Emeralds - Does It Look Like I'm Here?

Dark Terry Riley synth spirals, gorgeous electro squelches and soaring guitar lines. Like Fuck Buttons were being sci-fi rather than noisy.

Listen to: 'Candy Shoppe'

20) Big Boi - Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty

I listened to Andre 3000’s half of the “split” OutKast album, The Love Below, way more than Big Boi’s half Speakerboxxx, which I didn’t get into aside from the singles... I wouldn’t have thought Big Boi had an album like this in him, until the release of awesome summer anthem ‘Shine Blockas’, followed by more shifts in style with the excellent ‘General Patton’ and ‘Shutterbugg’. He’s still as sharp a rapper as he was in OutKast, and this album just proves that the group’s experimental tendencies weren’t just Andre’s doing.

Listen to: 'Shine Blockas'

19) Castevet - The Echo & The Light

This year I discovered that you can rarely go wrong with a band that is emo + noisy + maths (Cap’n Jazz being my best discovery!) Castevet take cues from that tradition here, but interestingly, they incorporate post-rock/shoegazey textures, managing to infuse the genres while avoiding the tendency of post-rock to be exhaustive, and the tendency of emo to be overly spontaneous. I’ve listened to this record a crazy amount of times, and it has a song called ‘Cities & Memory’, my two favourite subjects for a song!

Listen to: 'Model Trains'

18) Laura Veirs - July Flame

Maybe this record got overlooked back in the winter when it was released, because it’s perfect summer music, from joyfully simple folk songs like ‘Life is Good Blues’, to breezy choruses ‘Summer is the Champion’, and gorgeous string arrangements ‘July Flame’. This is the last of a series of albums on the four elements, ending on fire – but rather than depart from her reserved tendencies, Veirs writes songs about warmth, completing a quadrilogy of records which perfectly encapsulate their themes. She’s one of my very favourite songwriters.

Listen to: 'July Flame'

17) The Body - All The Waters of the Earth Turn to Blood

Trying to assign this a genre at the CD library, I ended up with “experimental choral metal???” It’s a fairly appropriate description to be honest. The album opens with about 8 minutes of beautifully-harmonised female choral parts, until the sludge metal hits like a sledgehammer (‘A Body’). Elsewhere they chop up tribal chants like a skipping CD on ‘Empty Hearth’ and subvert standard stoner rock with those frantic vocals sliding way back in the mix beneath sheets of noise (‘Song of Sarin, the Brave’). I like my metal really leftfield, and although this is one of few metal records of 2010 I properly listened to, it’s super awesome.

Listen to: 'A Curse'

[Other metal records I really liked: Rose Kemp’s Golden Shroud is really genius prog-metal but I only just listened to it now!, Alcest’s Écailles de Lune is some pretty cool shoegaze/metal.]

16) Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti - Before Today

I’m still a bit confused by the success of this record. It puts a skew on everything from hair metal (‘Butt House Blondies’) to lounge jazz (‘Hot Body Rub’), but the production always makes it sound spontaneous and uncommercial – see ‘Fright Night’, a song that really only SUGGESTS cohesivity, all lost because under weird noises and Pink’s mumbled delivery. Whereas sometimes it almost sounds too cheesy-pop (‘Can’t Hear My Eyes’) to really appeal to trendy alt/experimental types (hardcore fans prefer his old stuff). It feels like listening to one of your parents old cassette tapes, but with much weirder sounds than you were expecting.

Listen to: 'Round and Round'

15) The Wave Pictures - Susan Rode the Cyclone

As with any Wave Pictures record, I had to listen to this at least 5 times before it sunk in... it’s mostly darker than their previous work, and less twee (‘I Just Want to Be Your Friend’ is the exception), but I love this band so much and they can do no wrong. Stunning songwriting.

Listen to: 'American Boom'

14) Joanna Newsom - Have One On Me

I realise that this is a work of genius, but it went straight over my head. I wasn’t really sure where to place it on here because I feel like the songs are still clicking, one by one. I’m beginning to see it as a unified work – sparser than predecessor Ys (one of my favourite records of all time) but no less lyrically rewarding.

Listen to: 'In California'

13) Das Racist - Sit Down, Man - (download) /Shut Up, Dude - (download)

Referencing everything from Google (in several tracks) to Arundhati Roy (‘Ek Shaneesh’) to Captain Beefheart and Grouper (‘Amazing’), Das Racist are zeitgeisty, quirky, and yes, obsessed with race – but they’re primarily hilariously witty. It’s the nature of mixtapes to sound a bit unrefined, and while the hits are awesome - ‘Chicken & Meat’, ‘Rainbow in the Dark’, ‘hahahaha jk?’, and ‘rapping 2 u’ - there’s weaker points too, like the end-ish of Shut Up, Dude and tracks 5-8 of Sit Down Man, but it’s well worth sticking with it for the good stuff. Especially cause these are free too!

Listen to: 'Rainbow in the Dark'

12) Owen Pallett – Heartland

“The songs on Heartland form a narrative concerning a ‘young, ultra-violent farmer’ named Lewis, commanded by an all-powerful narrator—named Owen.” Despite being probably the worst concept album ever, Heartland is up here purely because of the gorgeous arrangements... Pallett has a wonderful ear for harmony, and here he perfectly synthesises electronic and orchestral textures.

Listen to: 'Lewis Takes Off His Shirt'

11) Little Women – Throat

I don’t know whether this is free jazz, punk, noise, sax-metal, or what... At first I thought Little Women were skronking skilfully, with astonishing command of the mind-boggling mathematical structures of their music, but where were they going with it? The left turn comes at ‘Throat IV’ (which I don’t want to spoil for you, but it’s incredible). They do so much with two saxophones, drums, and a guitar (and then rip it all away again for the scary finale ‘Throat VII’). An album so powerful and terrifying that you’ll have difficulty taking it in.

Listen to: 'Throat I' (and then the whole thing, in order!)

10) Deerhunter - Halcyon Digest

For some reason I had Deerhunter down as indie-rock auteurs, doing weird guitar shit while still being cool as fuck (kind of Sonic Youthy). It’s actually a lot simpler than that, but the album’s a grower so it took a while to hit me. While they’re fond of the odd mathy, layered breakdown, the songs are actually deceptively simple, fragile but warm, with reverb you can bask in.

Listen to: 'Desire Lines'

9) Girls - Broken Dreams Club (EP)

The bare bones of the new Girls songs are underwhelming (when I saw Girls live over a year ago, they played a couple of these tracks and they pretty much sounded like the weaker tracks on their debut, Album). What elevates this EP is the arrangements; the production. I can’t really say it better than the Pitchfork review, but this is possibly the most effective use of a studio I’ve ever heard. Christopher Owens’ lyrics are, on paper, trite and unoriginal (although I’m lead to believe he’s at least being sincere). But on the record, augmented with lush arrangements and insane production embellishments at every step, Owens might as well be a lyrical genius.

Listen to: 'Thee Oh So Protective One'

8) Thee Silver Mount Zion Memorial Orchestra - Kollaps Tradixionales

People don’t treat SMZ with the reverence reserved for parent band Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Yet the group have retained their emotional force. It’s not as raw, or as revolutionary as Godspeed were back in the day, but it still hits those cathartic heights: ‘There is a Light’ and ‘’Piphany Rambler’ demonstrate that SMZ have perfected the art of the long-form song.

7) These New Puritans – Hidden

I first heard this in the car on the way to band practice; it was just swords and terrifying chanted vocals, soon I just burst out with “THIS IS AWESOME”. I thought it was something from Anticon; it has this subverted hip-hop swagger and meaty, bassy beats, but also a bunch of bassoon and foley techniques (those awesome swords – see ‘Attack Music’). Turns out These New Puritans were actually just Brit rockers who tired of conventional songwriting, choosing to enlist a woodwind section and focus on mantras and tribal drumming. The result is a violent, brooding record; every experimental element proves successful.

Listen to: 'Attack Music'

6) The Tallest Man on Earth - The Wild Hunt

Try as I might to get this record past the CD library purchase list vote, it’s always dismissed as “another guy with a guitar”. But, (although there’s only so far I can go without mentioning Bob Dylan), Tallest Man is idiosyncratic not just in his astonishing voice (I can’t even describe it), but he also hones out his aesthetic in his use of open tunings. Having learned a few of the songs on guitar, they all fit similar patterns (and they’re all so much fun to play), but all have different tunings. Every time he strums it sounds like a thing beyond something any open-mic night Oasis-covering acoustic guitar hack could muster – the effect is aided by earthy production. And the songs work on lyrical references I still can’t get my head around; each is an elaborate puzzle, and I enjoyed the album for its pure tone before I listened to the lyrics, (which is unusual for me, as his textures are so bare). He puts down the guitar for gorgeous closer ‘Kids on the Run’, proving himself just as adept at piano – far from just “another guy with a guitar”, then.

Listen to: 'The Wild Hunt'

5) Perfume Genius – Learning

Everyone seems to think the Perfume Genius performs this album solo on piano. It’s because it’s intimate, but that’s not because it’s just him – every detail of the production makes a huge difference. It’s lo-fi, but very methodical. The first thing that will strike you about it is his evocative voice, and those lyrics: ‘Mr Peterson’ is especially arresting, but you’ll start to notice that droney, vibrato organ, the tapped feet, and that even the tape hiss sounds like it’s been processed so it’s like a wavery veil over the whole thing. Turn it right up at the end and there’s another song being played in the background. The record’s songs which are practically built out of these techniques (the gorgeous ‘No Problem’ for one) are kind of overlooked, but as important to Perfume Genius’ cathartic songwriting process as more obviously emotional songs like ‘Learning’. It’s actually not so much of a personal record as you might have heard. It’s based on feelings rather than his experiences, and it should resonate with anyone who’s, just, ever felt sad.

Listen to: 'Mr Peterson'

4) Flying Lotus – Cosmogramma

Perhaps the most ambitious record of the year (Kanye I’mma let you finish...), Flying Lotus wanted to create the best trippy music ever. His sonic palette is colossal, drawing on the influences of his aunt –jazz harpist Alice Coltrane, and J. Dilla-esque quirky instrumental hip-hop, but introducing more orchestral, experimental elements; the record transcends, even invents, genre.

Listen to: 'Do the Astral Plane'

3) Titus Andronicus - The Monitor

Titus Andronicus make cathartic post-punk, with lyrics that are remorseful and caustic, but at the same time it feels triumphant. They’re as adept at riff-based punk rock (‘A More Perfect Union’) as when they add in piano (‘A Pot in which to Piss’) or even bagpipes! (epic closer ‘The Battle of Hampton Roads’). It’s also an expansive loose concept record (based on the US Civil War), and the song lengths add to its truly epic nature; it’s one of the best-crafted albums (as a whole) I’ve ever heard.

Listen to: 'A More Perfect Union'

2) Los Campesinos! - Romance is Boring

It’s really awesome when I meet other people who love LC! as much as me – it actually happens quite a lot; the nature of their music will immediately turn some people off, but those who like them REALLY like them. And their brilliance is marred by so many flaws that their music is almost built around them. First of all Gareth’s awful singing voice is something that I find absolutely brilliant, and his lyrics are so TMI it can make you cringe (‘Straight in at 101’ offers the couplet “I think we need more post-coital, and less post-rock/Feels like the build-up takes forever, but you never touch my cock”). ‘In Medias Res’ never really establishes any sort of structure, more sways around song fragments. ‘Plan A’ is a complete anomaly, an uncharacteristic dance-punk song about Gareth’s dream of blagging himself into the Maltese national football team. The two highlights are spazzy math-pop single ‘There are Listed Buildings’ and sombre, string-laden ballad ‘The Sea is a Good Place to Think of the Future’. But all these things are what endear them to me so much – the lyrics are awkward, but therein lies their insight (and that’s why I relate so much), and its musical incoherence only highlights a multitude of flavours of awesome.

Listen to: 'The Sea Is a Good Place to Think of the Future'

1) Baths - Cerulean

I don’t even know where to begin with this. It surprises me to not put an indie-rock record up here, to be honest. It might be that you skimmed over this record, if you’ve heard of it at all. It’s often lumped in with chillwave (frequently compared to Toro Y Moi), but Baths transcends that genre – while the percussion and synths are woozy, that usually just serves as a bed for something far more powerful. It’s so subtle that it takes a while to sink in (all the best records are growers). But you can see it in the haunting lyrical mantras (‘Rain Smell’, ‘Departure’), in the gorgeous melodies (‘Indoorsy’, ‘Lovely Bloodflow’), and dense but uncomplicated production (‘Maximalist’, ‘Hall’). It’s flippant (‘Aminals’ is a lovely Bibio-esque glissandoed melody with lots of samples of cute kids “We’re elephants, we love giraffes!!”), but there’s something honest, intensely emotional behind these songs. The lyrics on Cerulean are minimal but complex, more subversive than you realise at first – for instance, ‘You’re My Excuse to Travel’ seems to be a love song about travelling rather than the 2nd-person addressee. All this belted out in Will Wiesenfeld’s gleeful falsetto, which is often in the mix even when there are no lyrics (‘Apologetic Shoulder Blades’ being the best example).

I was utterly bewildered when I discovered that the copy I’d initially been listening to was actually the unmastered demo version. It packs three extra tracks, removed in the version I bought: the most typically Baths-y Baths song ‘Mecha Joy’ pitches his voice against light piano over earthy beats; ‘Seaside Town’ uses hazy panpipe/flutes and samples Kirsten Dunst in Kiki’s Delivery Service to create something at once slightly cheesy and heartbreakingly beautiful; ‘Palatial Disappointment’ is just a staggeringly emotional song, packing more lyrics than any other Baths song, proving Wiesenfeld as brilliant a poet as producer. Why these three tracks were dropped escapes me, however, the mastered record redeems itself with the addition of the wonderful ‘Plea’, and when I heard the extra flourishes on ‘Hall’ and ‘Apologetic Shoulder Blades’ I fell in love with the album all over again. It is music that fits all moods.

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And a couple shout-outs to two amazing visual albums released in 2010 – Animal Collective’s ODDSAC and Dustin Wong’s Infinite Love. Listening to/watching these releases is much more special than listening to any of the albums and I’ve actually only watched them once each, but found both very rewarding - however, ODDSAC is probably the best example of this form. Most people think of Wong’s release as an album with accompanying visuals, but I found that both were intertwined, and found that the visuals made the music sound way more awesome. I’d like to see more artists create things like this in the future!

PS: I've started up a new music blog - haven't yet posted on it so watch this space, I'll edit in a link soon. I realised that music journalism is something I'd absolutely love to do as a career, and as of yet I don't have anything structured to show for it. Also, I want this to mark a refinement of my style of music journalism so it's probably going to be a bit less daft than this post. I actually intend to update pretty regularly, with a fairly broad range of material that will focus on the experience of music as much as the music itself.

Best bands I saw in 2010

2011-01-03T18:59:00.002Z

16) Rolo Tomassi

playing a tiny, sold-out gig in The Chameleon (basically a loft). I didn't realise who the vocalist was till they started. I also saw them play in a polar opposite venue - outside the city hall on a Sunday afternoon in Sheffield, without compromising the insanity of their music

15) A Hawk & A Hacksaw

really impressive musicians playing weird instruments in crazy time signatures is my thing

14) Ariel Pink

power cut at the original venue meant we relocated to The Chameleon (where Rolo played). The band smoked a joint in there before they played & Ariel said it was the best crowd they'd seen in years, the gig finished at about 2am

13) Nedry

dubstep/post rock band I saw supporting other bands, twice. When I met Ayu, it was the only time I've met a musician I'm into where it didn't feel super weird! She's really cool

12) Mount Eerie

and that's the "black metal" Mt Eerie. 2 drummers, bass + synth bass, Elvereum + his guitar; awesome walls of sound

11) of Montreal

the theatrics made this, making up for the fact that I've kinda gone off their last couple of records. They covered Thriller!

10) Broken Social Scene

they were just having a great time

9) Darren Hayman

at The Chameleon again - Hayman was on his own, and didn't really bother with his microphone, but played the most engaging songs & he has the best sense of humour!

8) Autechre

sounded nothing like anything they've put on record, I thought I was going to die of bass

7) WHY?

Yoni Wolf is the coolest. This was on a boat!!

6) The Wave Pictures

my band supported them! Would surely have made the list anyway

5) Melt-Banana

for their encore, Yasuko announced that they'd play "10 more songs"... which they completed in under 3 minutes

4) Fucked Up

Pink Eyes spent the first song on stage, the rest of the night rampaging through the crowd, who were divided into people going mental at the front, and the super boring people stood way far back. At one point, Pink Eyes climbed onto the bar & motioned that he was about to stage dive into the standing-still half, did a countdown, lunged... then waved his arm like "I'm just fucking with you"

3) Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra

I missed out on the Godspeed reunion but this was still great...

2) Los Campesinos!

saw them twice, but only at festivals, both times involved me meeting strangers & us screaming lyrics at each other

1) Titus Andronicus

at the front of a tiny venue - amazing atmosphere. Then they stayed at my girlfriend's house. Best day ever??

Best songs of 2010

2011-01-03T01:59:00.006Z

Here are my favourite songs of 2010!

30) Das Racist - Hahahaha jk?

“I'm all up in the freezer at your crib like ‘Where yo gin be at?!’” (http://rapgenius.com/lyrics/Das-racist-ft-boi-1da/Hahahaha-jk oh wow)

29) Allo Darlin' - Kiss Your Lips

“Underneath the stars on the ferris wheel, you swung your feet and sang my favourite Weezer song, so I sang along... ‘I’M A LOT LIKE YOU, SO PLEASE, HELLO, I’M HERE, I’M WAITING, I THINK I’D BE GOOD FOR YOU, AND YOU COULD BE GOOD FOR ME!’”

And it’s definitely up there with MY favourite Weezer songs and it sounds just as awesome in this song, if not more so cause I’ve heard the original so many times but never on a ferris wheel but how cool would that be... and also this song sounds like it could last forever, maybe it’s just the chord structure, but it’s a twee song that actually sounds like a JAM, which is pretty great.

28) Wavves - Post Acid

I wanted to dislike you, Wavves, after you put on one of the worst live shows I’ve ever seen, but I can’t deny how much fun this song is...

27) Ted Leo and the Pharmacists - The Mighty Sparrow

Couldn’t stop listening to this song... great pop-punk

26) The Tallest Man on Earth - Kids on the Run

“And no we will never be a part of the pictures once taken, when we’re feeding fire with the flames till no memories gone”

25) Vampire Weekend - Cousins

I think Vampire Weekend should APOLOGISE for releasing a song as awesome as this as their lead single even though they KNOW FULL WELL that the rest of the album was boring and shitty.

24) Deerhunter - He Would Have Laughed

I think I’ve seen love for every single track on the Deerhunter record but I think this is a perfect, haunting closer, I love songs that have two distinct halves. Poor Jay :(

23) Tennis – Marathon

This is a song about sailing into a cove and it is lovely and it will be stuck in your head for days

22) Girls - The Oh So Protective One

“He'll never know about the times that you cried in the movies, never know about the times that you cried to the music, about your mother or your father or the way you got your broken heart”

This took some getting adjusted to but man I never thought a Girls song could be so densely-instrumented; it’s still the same band singing about the same stuff but with a BRASS section, with a goddamn trumpet solo! Lyrically, Owens has a knack for phrasing gorgeous, complex emotions in a really simple style. I’d never think to try & write so directly but I wish I’d written this song, it says so much.

21) Sleigh Bells - Infinity Guitars

The demo version of this song came out last year and you know, it was ok, but the mastered version adds a level of awesome which MAKES the song, suddenly blasting it to the upper limits of volume. I imagine that Derek E. Miller hit a wall of frustration when he realised that the song couldn’t physically go any louder at the end.

20) Titus Andronicus - The Battle of Hampton Roads

“Prepare to be told ‘That shit’s gay, dude’”

19) Baths - Hall

This song works perfectly as an album closer so I dunno why Baths shifted it to the middle of his finalised album. The opening cacophony of (still pretty awesome) random samples quickly arranges itself into a driving beat, which runs until it’s just about to lose steam... then gets EVEN MORE AWESOME when Baths’ vocals come in. What a glorious ENDING.

18) Yeasayer - Ambling Alp

The final 15 seconds of this song are the most joyful thing ever!

17) Los Campesinos! - Straight in at 101

“I've been playing straight chicken with gay girls - IT'S NEVER ENOUGH!”

16) Sufjan Stevens - All Delighted People

Sufjan has so much ambition it’s not always fully realised, but when he pulls it off, I’m in awe.

15) Owen Pallett - Lewis Takes Off His Shirt

“I’M NEVER GONNA GIVE IT TO YOU!”

(the live version I've linked to is the best live video I've seen this year)

14) Flying Lotus - Do The Astral Plane

Awesome electronic future jazz!!

13) Baths - Seaside Town

I must really love Baths because this song has so many things I should be cynical about but it’s still 13th on this list and oh god I love it so much

12) Happy Birthday - Subliminal Message

“You say you don’t wanna be my girl, but will you just be anyway?”

11) The Tallest Man on Earth - Burden of Tomorrow

“But rumour has it that I wasn’t born, I just walked in one frosty morn, into the vision of some vacant mind”

10) The Knife, Mt. Sims, Planningtorock - Colouring of Pigeons

I was a bit underwhelmed by that Knife opera, in part because this track really heightened my expectations – there are so many bits of gorgeous instrumentation going on yet it doesn’t sound overstuffed. The rest of the opera was mostly electronic squelches and aimless dicking about, but this piece was utter genius.

9) Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti - Round and Round

This is just such a great tune. I don't know whether it's pop or anti-pop.

8) The Wave Pictures - American Boom

“Like all the first things, you so comically inaccessible, waiting to meet your husband from the train”

7) Titus Andronicus - A More Perfect Union

“Cuz tramps like us, baby we were born to die”

6) Perfume Genius - Mr Peterson

“He made me a tape of Joy Division, he told me there was part of him missing, when I was 16, he jumped off a building”

5) Loscil – The Making of Grief Point

“...I have lost interest in music... it is horrible...”

Endless Falls, the relatively unremarkable ambient record Loscil released this year, ends on this collaboration with Dan Bejar (Destroyer). Bejar takes Loscil’s disconcerting (but otherwise forgettable) atmospherics as a bed for this impenetrable monologue, never quite giving you a complete frame of reference for what he is talking about but it’s something about the creation of music itself. It reminds me of a captain’s log, like it has been recovered, displaying his final stages of madness. Bejar distorts personal pronouns and shifts in tone from phrase to phrase, sometimes stammering over incorrect grammar but sometimes sounding commanding and terrifying. While usually Loscil’s music doesn’t move me, his subtly changing layers and piano patterns here augment Bejar’s monologue – they work beautifully as a team. I listen to this while I’m wandering round a city and the feeling it gives me is unique.

4) Baths - Palatial Disappointment (aka Iniuria Palace, which is an even more genius title)

“All the classical music in the world cannot ~~read~~ weep as deeply as a broken hearted teenager”

3) Cee-Lo - Fuck You!

I don’t think it’s too presumptuous to say that you’ve DEFINITELY heard this song and you DEFINITELY loved it

2) Fang Island – Daisy

Sometimes I’ll think a song is cool but has one REALLY AWESOME BIT that’s like, a bridge, or the end of a guitar solo or something, and it just doesn’t go on long enough. This song sounds like a bunch of those awesome bits have been stuck together and they last the WHOLE SONG.

1) Japandroids - Younger Us

“Gimme that night you were already in bed, said ‘fuck it’, got up to drink with me instead”

Shout outs to a few songs which were up online in 2009 that were technically released this year – Los Campesinos! ‘The Sea is a Good Place to Think of the Future’ & 'There Are Listed Buildings', Big Boi ‘Shine Blockas’, Sleigh Bells ‘Crown on the Ground’, y’all woulda been in my top 10 had I written a list last year.

EDIT: Also gotta give a shout out to Nicki Minaj's verse on 'Monster' by Kanye West for being by far the best bit of an album that's either WAY overhyped, or of which I've completely missed the point

Why my favourite song ever is my favourite song ever (and an extended footnote)

2010-09-15T18:49:00.004+01:00

I think a couple years ago just after Neon Bible came out I made a list and named "No Cars Go" my favourite song of all time (Hey here's a link)* (and it's still one of the most goosebumpy songs ever; when I saw Terry Gilliam's webcast of their NYC set that was the song that moved me to tears), but it's sort of lost some of its power and is perhaps too straightforward to be a "favourite song ever", or maybe I only form "favourite songs" for a short period of time. Anyway this one has been my very favourite for a long while now and while I'm sure I'll have overplayed it soon I realised the other day that I can write enough about this song to convince anyone (including myself) that I find it the most enduringly brilliant song I've ever heard, so I'm going to explore it a bit and hopefully it will explain a lot about me right now & why this song resonates so particularly at this time in my life (& of course is going to continue doing so for ever now). Don't worry, "Get Me Away From Here I'm Dying" by Belle & Sebastian and "Gold Soundz" by Pavement (you were the best song of the 90s, I was totally stoked when you got the Pitchfork approval because this is a song that you can easily love personally - B.O.B. was a good democratic choice for the 00s but it's hard to really LOVE that song whereas Gold Soundz sounds more like the "favourite" song of a generation of indie kids), y'all still mean a lot to me & always will but I've come to the conclusion that "Now You Are Pregnant" by The Wave Pictures is my favourite song ever.

And I suppose that's helped by the circumstances in which I heard that song; the first time it really struck me was the first time I saw the Wave Pictures live, in Nottingham about a year ago. I realised I'd heard it before on Spotify just because of the line about Johnny Cash and the punchline really made me smile because I hadn't even paid attention to the song the first time I heard it. (Songs that sound awesome the first time I hear them never hold up & become my favourite ever or anything). When they do it live, Jonny "Huddersfield" Helm, the drummer, takes lead vocals and Franic Rozycki (bass) and David Tattersall (guitar and the guy who wrote this song and sings on the record) back him up with some gentle fingerpicking. It's almost an ambient effect and really makes you pay attention to the lyrics but it loses some of the catharsis of the chorus. And this was the first Wave Pictures song I listened to when I got home after their brilliant performance - they're the most charming band I've ever seen; David's stage banter is hilarious and you can really tell he loves his job. It just sort of left a warm glow within me & back then I felt like I should have known all the lyrics like a lot of the cute hipster girls there seemed to. At one point Franic was trying to find a bottle opener so I held out my keyring and David's dad shouted to him that I was offering one but then he'd managed to open it on the edge of a guitar tuner. Me and Alex left slightly disappointed that they hadn't played "Strange Fruit For David" (which is their most instantly lovable song but after having listened to all their songs dozens of times it's just a sort of mid-level brilliant Wave Pictures song) but we both got really into the band afterwards.

Anyway I listened to Now You Are Pregnant a lot, on repeat, for the next couple of months, after having perhaps avoided it before because of that daft fucking title. When I was on Alex' radio show Christmas Special the tunes I picked out were "Which Song" by Max Tundra, "Gyroscope" by The Dismemberment Plan, and of course "Now You Are Pregnant". That was when I realised I actually knew all the words (and Alex knew most of them) and we sang pretty much the whole thing along with it, mics were off but we subjected a few of our bemused friends to my not-always-hitting-the-high-notes tenor (this song could've done with being a semitone or two deeper). Beautiful moment. There's something we both really dug about the most obviously appealing aspects of the song, like the punchline and the whole 'or I could rush into the shop and tell you that I adore you' turning point but there's a whole lot about it I suppose I haven't really asked Alex about even though we spent a bunch of hour-long car journeys to band practice just singing along to Wave Pictures songs on the stereo and saying how much we loved the lyrics - I think once I was like '...who's your favourite Wave Picture??'; our fanboyism is a bit ridiculous really. And I'm pretty sure "Now You Are Pregnant" is also his favourite song ever and we have now sung it all the way through in public many times, both drunk and sober, mostly the former, but I've never really gone into WHY it's my favourite song ever and I expect if I did that we'd have pretty different but equally valid reasons.

The song had its only real proper release as the B-side to "We Dress Up Like Snowmen". This is why people haven't heard of it. And well, The Wave Pictures are really low-key, so whereas Moshi Moshi alumini like Bloc Party and Florence & The Machine are massive now, The Wave Pictures have stayed harcore lo-fi and write songs that it takes ages to get into. They're sort of a cult band; I mean I know a lot of people who love them to bits just because I'm in that sort of social sphere. I've even sort of bonded with people because of mutual Wave Pics love.

So the song itself.

I can play it fairly easily on guitar (although barre chords hurt my left hand lots by the end); It's mostly A Bm C#m Bm D D C#m Bm repeat, all in the same barre shape starting on 5th fret. Then E (barred on 7th fret), A5 (which I think is just played open if you have a capo on 5), D (barred on 5 and with a little of the sus2) for the other bits. Which is really not a brilliant chord progression and if I showed it to my pedantic music A-level friends they'd scoff at such an unsavoury structure (I ii iii ii IV iii ii), none of it should work, but that just makes the V I IV bit sound better, cause it's always been building up to the dominant but never makes it until that moment, and I suppose the simplicity it sort of puts the focus on the lyrics. The melody is endlessly intriguing because it is unrepetetive but at the same time flows perfectly and has got stuck in my head a lot of times. But trying to find patterns in the structures proved very difficult - it is as if David improvised melodies over the top of it & shuffled them to best fit the words, so it forms peaks & you get repeated sections in it when you get repetitions in the lyrics; so whereas the melody at first seems improvised which fits the stream-of-consciousness style, the more you listen to it the more structured & methodical you realise it is.

And it's very important to me that it's stream-of-consciousness; it's one of the best examples of literature that mirrors the patterns of consciousness. It's a device familiar to devotees of Modernist poetry & prose, a famous example being Molly Bloom's soliloquy in Ulysses - there's actually quite a lot of literature that is misattributed as stream-of-consciousness, for instance my favourite novel, Mrs Dalloway, is frequently described as such, and I'm actually all right with that because it shares so many features with the style and the point is that Woolf is focusing on consciousness. If I were to mull over the pronouns & tenses David uses in "Now You Are Pregnant" I'd conclude that it isn't really stream-of-consciousness (David eschews the technique to produce the wonderful couplet 'But I don't need therapy because I have cigarettes / And I don't have any bad memories only bitter regrets', two of the most immediately accessible and standout lines), and perhaps I'm only inclined to refer to it as such because it's in 1st-person, however the devices of repetition and non-sequitirs and exaggeration make this sound more like an interior monologue than a poem, but of course it rhymes, because it's a song, and it works even better as a song because there's no need to quibble over punctuation, it's more direct vocally and mirrors actual thought processes better than it does on the page. The fact that David doesn't pin it down to any specific style & breaks lots of rules only makes it more endearing & unique.

When you were satisfying your thirst for success
And you looked older than I did,
I didn't think that that was you at your best.
We were only lonely little kids
Amidst stacks and stacks of slacks and black platform shoes,
We were little kids.
And you could say sorry ten billion times,
But sorry didn't do what you did.
I threw myself at you and I threw myself away
Amidst stacks and stacks of slacks and black platform shoes.
Johnny Cash died today, and you say, you say things,
Lovely things, to lovely other people,
And I'm not invited.

But I love the back garden at my parents' place,
And I love the view out of my Glasgow window,
And I love waking up on the floor of a flat in New York,
And you don't know any of these things.

And I've seen you selling shoes but you've never heard me sing,
And I used to hate your boyfriend and the things you did.
Somehow I found out and I was disappointed,
But I don't need therapy because I have cigarettes,
And I don't have any bad memories only bitter regrets.
Johnny Cash died today, and I could take a train
And take an hour to think on the way of what I would say when I saw you.
And I could walk into the shop and buy myself some black platform shoes,
Talk to the other girls, and just ignore you.
Or I could rush into the shop and tell you that I adore you,
Because I adore you.

Johnny Cash died today and you'd say, you'd say
"It's not like Elvis though is it?"
And you would be right.

So we get the line which is repeated purely for the sound of the words, and I dunno if many people actually do this in their heads but I can totally imagine David Tattersall's internal monologue being really musical (when I met David, he spoke in a vulnerable tenor that made him sound as if he were singing every word he said. I found it quite fascinating, I could listen to him talk all day), so it's quite believable that he could be thinking the phrase 'stacks and stacks of slacks and black platform shoes' just because it sounds so good, rhymed trochees lapsing into the spondaic catharsis of the phrase 'black platform shoes', a phrase which really doesn't mean anything in the context of the song but is repeated three times and certainly makes the text more authentic as something that could be an interior monologue. It's like a memory of something and it's never quite clear where from, because it reappears when they were 'only lonely little kids' (incidentally I somehow doubt they ever met as kids but I think this just adds to the sense of David's childlike attraction to this woman and her immaturity), I believe it's just resonances of the memory of him seeing her at the shoe shop that recur throughout the song, seeing as that's where he appears to be headed during the song.

I should zoom out a bit. I've decided that the song is a snapshot of David's thought process while he is already on the train, even though he's saying he 'could take a train'. Because within this thought process he is thinking about thinking: 'and take an hour to think on the way of what I would say when I saw you', I find this so funny because he's thinking over and over about this woman and then kidding himself that he'll take a train on a whim and only while he's on his way will he start thinking about what will happen when he gets there. He's planning to have a structured think while thinking about things with a boundless creativity and, if we are to suspend disbelief, no apparent structure. But from this structurelessness we reach an answer by the end (not that I can picture the song's protagonist marching into the shop with such conviction), which kind of makes me think that this is as focused as an internal monologue can get (I know for sure when I tell myself I'll plan something like this I always mentally lose track while I'm thinking about it), so he may as well be already on the train. But of course he might not have even had the nerve to buy a train ticket; the main reason I picture this song on a train is because this is the exact setting where these thought processes work so beautifully. The gentle 3/4 rhythm propels along like the train in the background and the thoughts just fall into place around it. I think like this best when I'm on a train, it's where my brain feels most creative for some reason. If I ever write a book of poetry I'll include instructions to read the poems on a train or a bus.

The only guiding aspect that the narrator has over his thought process is his desire to prove to himself that he is not in love with this girl. This is ultimately a song about pretending to yourself that you are not in love with someone and I think that this is something that nearly everyone MUST have experienced and I think most people are probably continually experiencing most of the time no matter how much we try and deny it. And he sort of does a good job because I have no idea what he sees in this girl. She looks old yet is still childish, she is selfish, she hangs out with the wrong crowd and has some idiot boyfriend with whom she's done something unspecified and horrible, and she doesn't even appreciate Johnny motherfucking Cash.

And it's amazing because he keeps DISTRACTING himself from her whenever he thinks something nice about her; there's no concrete nice thing she's done but the odd unjustified positive adjective about her - 'and you say things, lovely things to lovely, other people and I'm not invited' is actually a quite absurd assumption for the narrator to make since he wasn't there but this is exactly the sort of thing I assume about people, all of the time. All this before he spends 3 lines, just as the violin comes in, detailing complete non-sequitirs just to take his mind off the pain of not being invited to whatever it is she gets up to. Or maybe the train just passed by something that reminds him of 'the back garden at [his] parents' place'. For a while my favourite line in the song was the one that follows the 3 non-sequitirs: 'And you don't know any of these things'. He cares much more for her, and knows more about her than she knows about him, and it's unclear whether he's treasuring all these aspects that have nothing to do with her & finding beauty & happiness elsewhere, or, and I really like this, if he thinks that all these experiences, if she knew of them, would make her attracted to him & she doesn't realise what she's missing. All of this of course is irrelevant because Johnny motherfucking Cash died today, who are we to sit around thinking about some stupid girl when one of the biggest musical legends in the entire world, died today?

You're supposed to laugh when David sings 'And you'd say, you'd say "It's not like Elvis!"'. It's a brilliant punchline and a surprising way to end such a wistful song, because of course it is funny the first few times but if you look deeper there's something disarming about how this is actually speculative. It's not something that happened but something he can totally see her saying if he were to seek consolation about Johnny Cash's death. Which just makes it more tragic; he adores her in spite of how embarrassing her mannerisms are, how ignorant she is of what is important to him. And by the 4th repetition of the punchline David has come to agree with her; not even her but this imaginary, exaggerated version of her: 'And you would be right'. And I suppose it's not really like Elvis but that's not the point any more, it's about the feeling of forgiving someone's flaws for a reason it's impossible to articulate.

And I shouldn't need to tell you how much I love the violin coda, or what it should make you feel because augh it's beautiful. And when it doubles up it creates possibly the densest musical texture the Wave Pictures have committed to tape! Which isn't very many layers of instrumentation but I mean there are more layers to this song than any other I can think of.

Here is a video of the Wave Pictures singing the best song ever a capella; Jonny forgets the words halfway through and David's harmonies are a bit shaky but still brilliant, then Jonny and David sing the alternate ending version which isn't as good because it loses the strength of the rhyme 'ignore you/adore you' but for some reason they tend to favour this version live now, and Franic just looks at them and I'm wondering if this is because he's listened to the superior studio version (I say studio but the Wave Pictures just record things live to 4-track then overdub a bit afterwards) as many times as I have, not because he feels he needs to know it inside out for the band but because it's so goddamn amazing.

I think David has written a lot of songs that are similar in structure to this, but they're largely hidden away and never really recorded (a few have been played live and on numerous Blogoteque-esque web-shows, and actually when I saw them live the first time, about half of their set was new, unreleased songs), and I really just want them to make music upon music upon music but Moshi Moshi, a label for whom I otherwise have a lot of respect, seem to be stifling their output (which probably would be multiple albums per year if they were given the opportunity to produce that many). It's baffling that their most recent album, Susan Rode The Cyclone, was only released in Europe and limited to the Sweetheart EP in the UK - which is a real shame because this is just 6 songs off the album, leaving off 4 great tracks, apparently because it was easier for the label to promote this? It's a really good record but I feel that it doesn't go into any of the meandering songwriting that "Now You Are Pregnant" does so well; nonetheless a lot of the lyrics are about overthinking things and god I can't think of anything better to write songs about. It's also their most cohesive album, and I feel like I'm still exploring it because it took a long time for me to "get" any of the songs apart from classic-Wave-Pics-style "I Just Want to Be Your Friend", sadly omitted from the Sweetheart EP. So when so much of their material is tucked away it frustrates me that their best song is so concealed and indeed that David has written songs even more obscure than this that are probably still absolutely brilliant.

After I decided that "Now You Are Pregnant" was my favourite song, I played it to a few people and they seemed a bit bemused by my choice especially given my experimental tendencies, but I guess I'd have been bemused by it had it been presented to me in that context; it took a heck of a long time to truly appreciate. I finally met the Wave Pictures in June. My band supported them for the first gig of their tour of Britain this June, in Nottingham. As I'm sure you've gathered I have this reverential appreciation of the band and when I met them I didn't really speak to them enough to have a proper conversation. I asked Jonny about the rider and some of my friends kind of put me off while I was talking to David about the setup so he probably thought I was dead weird and I don't think I even said much to Franic. Which is disappointing but typical of me, honestly; I still don't know what I would have said really. I think I'd clued them in that I was a fan seeing as I was wearing a Hefner t-shirt and they've collaborated with Hefner's Darren Hayman a bit, and I was pretty eager to meet them, but I imagine they were still surprised to see me at the front singing every word. They didn't see our set and we sound nothing like them so maybe that's cool. They did play "Now You Are Pregnant", upon Alex' request, and there was a row of us (including members of the lovely Of Mice And Mental Arithmetic) with arms around each other's shoulders, gently swaying. There were more people singing along, during the whole set, than I've ever seen at a gig. Later I'd planned to have a chat with them if I saw them after their Summer Sundae set but in the end they cancelled on the day, due to illness, which is perhaps the most a day has been ruined for me, ever.

I dunno if I'm trying to persuade YOU that this is the best song ever but I hope that you can attach yourself to a piece of art like this. I find the song's effects on me like a beautiful memory but because it's somebody else's (and I have no idea whether or not it is fictitious) it comes free of the baggage that such a memory would entail and I can wallow in every detail and it really does make me feel better, and whereas I think music should be about escapism (which is why I love "No Cars Go" so much: it's a song ABOUT escapism), this is escapism that never lets me forget myself as well and I don't really know why but I was in tears while I was trying to type this bit.

* A few points on why reading old stuff I've written embarrasses me, I'm sure this will too in a few years. Welcome to whyitisdifficulttowriteaboutmusic.blogspot.com.

- 4 is still my favourite instrumental song ever but that's because it does this uniquely Aphexy thing of being at once laid back and frenetic. I can chill to this even though there's that crazy fucking snare that goes all over the place and never gets old. And this might be Aphex's most perfect use of harmony ever, and it has strings! And every time you get the 'Richard? Yeah?' sample it's like you've just hit repeat, and it's this great goddamn song again. Brilliant. I shouldn't need to use the sentence 'It works well for this piece' because it's CLEAR I think it's great, I've just told you it's one of my favourite songs ever.

- I still don't know how I'd describe No Cars Go but please kill me if I use that many abstract nouns again

- I didn't know shit about paranoia but Climbing Up The Walls is still great

- But don't let me use clauses like 'and it's amazing' or whatever if you already know that I think it's amazing. If I'm saying "This sounds like my eardrums are being scraped out" then I might have to qualify that with "in a good way!" or something but if it's obvious then there's no point in me using these superlatives.

- 'Weezer must be treated with great respect'? Maybe if we'd treated them with MORE respect they'd never have made Make Believe/the green album/anything after Pinkerton. I'm kind of surprised I was so snooty about these kinds of bands when my music taste back then left so much to be desired. I'm trying to be less music snobby - I bought a Foo Fighters record the other day and everything. Think I chose Buddy Holly cause it's the first one I heard and it got me into them but come on it's all about The Sweater Song. EDIT: Hurley is absolutely AWESOME. The 3rd best Weezer record.

- Hopefully I've justified my liking 'beautiful phrases that stick out' while I was talking about Now You Are Pregnant; I love songs like A Song To Pass The Time where the lyricist has laboured over each phrase making it sound as unique & memorable as possible & I think this validates the song form over poetry: phrases in the lyrics of this song dug into my head as effectively as catchy melodies & while I think this song meant more to me back then, I reckon everyone who lives in suburbia can appreciate how beautifully Conor Oberst portrays it.

- I think I just wanted to include any track from Sufjan Stevens' Illinois & my description of it is fucking terrible. But this sort of explains what I mean about favourite songs being independent of artist & album, I shouldn't try & be inclusive.

- So er, what is Justice's signature sound? How do I describe this so someone who's never even heard We Are Your Friends will know what to expect? - Well it's definitely electronica. But like, distorted electronica. - Yeah but there's something else... I mean that sounds a bit vague... - Well their rhythms are really, you know - Er, dancey? - Yeah you know, upbeat and that. - Upbeat rhythms, we'll go with that.

Sexism in Music Journalism

2010-08-09T22:48:00.008+01:00

I've been meaning to rant about this for ages, and now we're halfway through summer I feel like I should get something posted up here. (And I can only apologise for the clusterfuck of brackets and italics). Way back in January I was really pissed off when I read Pitchfork's review of Laura Veirs' July Flame, which lead to me becoming very wary of the way gender is addressed in music criticism.

In fact, my attention was drawn to the issue when M.I.A. (Maya Arulpragasam) criticised Pitchfork (and other journalists) for assuming that Diplo was the brains behind her music. Diplo was cited by multiple media outlets as the producer of Arulpragasm's album Arular, despite the fact that she met Diplo after completing the record. The incident arose when Arulpragasam surprised her interviewer with the accusation, steering the interview to make her statement rather than answer their questions, catching Pitchfork off-guard. Of course, Pitchfork bury her argument beneath a misleading headline, and then the bemused interviewer completely misses the point, saying 'at the end of the day, no matter who produced the tracks, it still says M.I.A. on the spine of the record packaging'. But the mis-crediting wasn't just pissing off Arulpragasam on a personal level. As she invokes the broader issue of sexist attitudes in the music industry, the interviewer attempts to dissociate Pitchfork from these allegations: '[I]t seems strange that people would portray you as being a puppet. Still, I've definitely read things about you that suggest a lot of the work was done by someone else.' I kind of wish Arulpragasam had been a bit more subtle for once - she was never portrayed as having zero creative input into this, and the interviewer makes her argument seem overblown. It's exaggerated, sure, but there is certainly truth in her complaint that journalists emphasise masculine intervention in any woman's recording process. As this Idolator article points out, had M.I.A. collaborated with a female producer, there would not have been as much of a debate over production credit.

The same thing happened to Björk, who posted a statement on her website highlighting the common error of journalists crediting the arrangements of her album Vespertine to Valgeir Sigurðsson. (Björk wrote and produced the majority of the album, collaborating with a multitude of other musicians on different tracks - but infrequently with Sigurðsson). Björk suggests that the problem is exclusive to electronic music and technological processes, but I would argue that there is evidence that these sexist attitudes are more widespread. Björk points out that Pitchfork 'credited nico muhly for the choir arrangement of “hidden place” from vespertine . also that he has done string arrangements for me . this is not true .' Pitchfork appear to have deleted their response (the news feed is periodically cleaned up); try as I might to find a cached version I've had no luck. I remember them dismissing the argument and attempting to make Björk seem hasty and misinformed, while agreeing that the issue at hand was problematic. Although they said they had already reprimanded those responsible for the mis-crediting, again, Pitchfork attempted to distance themselves from the blame even though the error had been made because of the reasons Björk describes, and even though the problem manifests itself in different ways.

But why does this happen? Recently Stereogum posted a piece on Cocorosie in which Antony Hegarty suggests that the lukewarm critical response to Cocorosie's music is rooted in their physical unconventionality: '[A]s women Cocorosie are dismissed because their visual presentation frustrates many male writers’ abilities to sexualize them'. There is an unspoken prerequisite in criticism of female artists to assess them physically and judge their creativity separately, which simply does not exist in criticism of male artists. Journalists seem to believe that by highlighting a man's presence on a record, their praise and criticisms have more credibility. Cocorosie's moustaches are ironic in the suggestion that they should be judged on masculine terms, which leads to a confusion on the part of those who will inevitably judge their femininity before their creativity. The version of The Adventures of Ghosthorse and Stillborn I downloaded lists 'Devendra Bamhart [sic]' as "composer" in its ID3 tags. Cocorosie covered one unreleased Banhart song, "Houses", on the album. Go figure.

By attributing production and implying the attribution of creative input to Arulpragasam's peers, reviewers are freer to judge M.I.A.'s music on its own merits, and indeed this facilitated the universal acclaim that her first two albums received. In some reviews it is as if the referencing of masculine input validates the strength of an album. And I'm really not striving to find examples to make my point here. After I made this conclusion, my search for evidence quickly confirmed my hypothesis. I wish I had time to find data on this - but search for reviews of your favourite solo artists, count how many references to contributors there are. I've found that it's so much more common in reviews of female artists. Reviewers of Laura Veirs' work ensure that her boyfriend and producer, Tucker Martine's presence on her records is felt. Reviewers appear much more likely to mention the influence of the producer (who is, let's face it, usually male) if the artist is female, and while I feel that Martine's influence is a very compelling aspect of Veirs' recorded music, the Pitchfork review which elevates Martine's importance as tantamount to Veirs', ridiculous. The portrayal of the female as the 'angel-sweet' voice with the producer doing all of the work is not uncommon. And if I were Laura Veirs, I'd take the reviewer's assertion that '[Martine's] bare and simplistic arrangements still bear enough edge and interest so as not to dull the listener into passivity' as a personal insult. Not only is Martine not credited as arranger, (in the liner notes it is stated that he '[r]ecorded and mixed' the album, also performing 'drums, percussion, treatments'), but I mean the songs are really great! Martine isn't performing the difficult task of making Veirs' lacklustre frameworks vaguely listenable - he's complementing her gorgeous arrangements with a subtly introspective production style. Yet it is only when such mis-credits fall upon the likes of audacious performers like Björk and M.I.A. that we hear about such injustices.

The Pitchfork review of Veirs' most recent album, July Flame, is what really set me off on this. It made me so angry to read the phrase: 'The summer feel is probably not accidental'. Probably not accidental?? Is Veirs as a songwriter so inoffensive that this reviewer (Joe Tangari, senior contributing writer at Pitchfork) feels the need to remind the reader that her songwriting talents are potentially only achieved by accident? And it's not just a small aspect of her songwriting. The title gives you a bit of a clue as to what her stimulus is; the album completes a tetralogy of albums exploring the elements, ending on fire. Tangari says that he thinks Veirs' ability to give music a summery feel is a conscious decision, but what's wrong with just saying that Veirs' music impressively evokes a summery mood, in contrast to the perfectly wintry Carbon Glacier? Veirs has surely proved her worth as a master of focused, evocative songwriting, and instead of applauding this, Tangari just seems surprised that Veirs stands on her own two feet. I just cannot imagine an article stating that it is 'probably not accidental' that, say, Sufjan Stevens' "Casimir Pulaski Day" is a bit of a tear-jerker. Male musicians are not subject to this scepticism.

Tangari closes his positive review by namechecking every man who appears on the album (see the album's credits), already having emphasised Stephen Barber's string arrangements (which only appear on two tracks), Tucker Martine's production, and Eyvind Kang's viola-playing; while I can't deny that he's right in saying that Veirs is modest, again the review is attributing the album's excellence to the contributors, when Veirs arranged the whole thing except for Barber's string parts. Similarly, the BBC review of the album namechecks Martine, Barber, and Jim James (erroneously stating that he duets with Veirs on "Make Something Good"; in fact James is not present on this song, and I rather think it elevates Karl Blau's role on backing vocals to imply that the song is a duet). The review (by David Sheppard) also offends by describing Veirs as 'chanteuse' - 'Noun: A female singer of popular songs, esp. in a nightclub', according to dictionary.com. Even if I find the phrase "singer-songwriter" really annoying, I'd rather Sheppard had used this phrase which at least acknowledges that Veirs controls the songwriting process, rather than making her seem like she's just singing. As such, when he mentions Martine and Barber, it gives the impression that they're more in control of what the record sounds like.

Then I found Dan Weiss' laughable review of July Flame's title track, and really I just want to pick this apart to prove how bad music journalism can be. Weiss begins by suggesting that Veirs adopt a stage name in order to stand out a bit, lazily dismissing her work as part of an 'unchallenging medium', confusingly equating her lack of an intriguing stage name with lack of intrigue. 'All she can continue to do is write better and better songs and hope for the best.' Exactly what is Weiss reviewing here? Once he's accepted that the songwriter is writing songs which are good, he gets down to what's going on in the song, summarising his fairly indifferent attitude as he describes Veirs' voice as a 'vaguely sexy purr'. Weiss is not reviewing Veirs' song so much as her voice and persona, and here it's like Weiss' interest in the song is only held by this 'vague' sexiness, the only element he can detect in Veirs' voice. Weiss adds, 'the violin-and-choir-assisted coda won't be for everyone I know', just to remind you that enjoyment of music is in fact subjective. Weiss' amateurishness is that he fails to pin down what is good or bad about it - he aims to make it sound indistinct, but achieves this by lack of effort rather than by reasoning. (But let me take a moment to point out how difficult music journalism is. Merely pointing out these sorts of flaws doesn't mean I can write fluently about music, but if writing like this can be published in arguably the most influential music journalism source of the century, I might have a decent chance of making it.)

Other reviewing traits include only comparing an artist to another artist of the same gender, and comparing a male artist to a female is a rare thing indeed. So upon Googling male "indie-folk" protégés such as Johnny Flynn, Damien Rice, Fionn Regan, et al, it's nearly impossible to avoid the names Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, and Nick Drake (which are repeated to the point of interchangeability, for Christ's sake) - but I'm harder pressed to find these names in a Laura Marling review (Joni Mitchell crops up a lot instead). This not only lends weight to my argument that music journalism is inherently sexist, but shows up the ineptitude of the reviewers, who base their token comparisons upon gender rather than songwriting. The NME managed to print the paragraph 'Regina Spektor, though, has been an unacknowledged big sis influence on the sound of many young female artists. You can hear her early work in Florence’s jazzy bellow, in Peggy Sue’s raw-hearted confessions and in Kate Nash’s vocal quirks and proud femininity.' It's as if they deny Spektor's ability to influence male artists, and pigeonhole her music into some sort of gender-defined rut, conveying whatever it is in Kate Nash's music that constitutes 'proud femininity' only to confirm the restrictive gender binary.

In conclusion, while M.I.A. and Björk's responses to the sexism they faced are an important step forward to exposing the problem, I believe that there are injustices manifested in the rhetoric of music journalism which causes female artists to be judged on different terms to males.

Top 25 albums of 2009

2010-01-22T17:07:00.002Z

See last.fm. I've done fairly extensive (too long) reviews of my top 25(!!!!) and still didn't feel satisfied that I'd been representational enough...

PS I have a Twitter now because apparently I don't have the patience to write more than 140 characters about anything apart from music. Voilá!

Writing Journal, Day seven

2008-11-10T20:04:00.004Z

Final entry then, and I've just made the late deadline. This time it actually involves some creative writing! Apologies to Beverley, I know my blog's been quite patchy...

I wrote some haikus on the bus, and while I like the idea of minimalism, it felt too claustrophobic. I can't flow with my writing like the way it used to happen. While one of my favourite poems is Ezra Pound's ultra-short "In a Station of the Metro", I think it requires a hell of a lot of skill to actually pull this kind of thing off. So 17 awkward syllables, with phrases crowbarred into tight spots, provides the basis of my Haikus. Having said that, I liked the fact that it's impossible to ramble, and I could just sum up one thought. So I came up with three that I liked; here's my favourite:

Haiku for a Bus Driver
Pavements scroll. I pose,
Aloft. Each streetlight is fixed.
Brakes bring new faces.

I'm trying to figure out how to go about editing this. It's far too short to start finding synonyms or to try and flip the syntax around. In fact, I'd quite like people to be more harsh when criticising me, telling me which bits need editing, and how they'd edit it. Which I absolutely hate doing myself, but still, it's important to have honest feedback. I handed in my Personal Statement for UCAS to some teachers today, and painfully realised how horrible some of the bits sounded. The Personal Statement is a new form of self-portrait, written exclusively by 17-year olds, in under 4000 characters. Every Personal Statement is an absolute work of art, but at times it sounds like I've not taken it at all seriously, and at times it sounds so overwrought. Maybe I can channel that kind of feedback into editing my poetry.

With longer poems, sometimes I just write a page full of nonsense, then attack it with crossings-out, then completely rewrite it, and this is the editing process. It made me wonder what would happen if I tried to write the same poem on three different days, forgetting the results each time. I've tried that before, but never really had my heart in writing what is ostensibly the same thing over again. Especially what with my current block of flow.

Also, I was supposed to be having a poem published in my school 'zine today, but due to lack of material, publication seems to be being postponed indefinitely. So I'm going to dump it here!

I wrote it about my Duke of Edinburgh gold expedition, which was basically four days of hiking and wild-camping in the highlands of Scotland. It grossly over-exaggerates the relatively bearable weather conditions, and you should bear in mind that I had a heck of a lot of fun on this expedition! I wanted to write something really grandiose, as we've been studying Paradise Lost in English. I've also been messing round with rhyme and sonnet structure, which is fun. But Katie seemed a bit scared by it. I think it's pretty epic!

Aloft atop titanic Scottish peaks
that plunged us into unforgiving mist,
Dwarfing our humble, heaving bodies blist-
ering with throbbing footsteps sunken deep
between the mossy giant's shoulder blades,
his stagnant marsh ubiquitous. He sweeps
his snow-capped clansmen 'cross the weathered trails,
Beside the tranquil streams and hazy glades.
Even nature's formidable displays
of ceaseless rainstorms, cliffs, and stony gales
deterred us not from this ambitious feat,
For through such gripping cold and smothering heat
we fought, with proud and aching footsteps strugg-
ling onwards till our journey was complete.

I just realised that I accidentally wrote a haiku without realising it. I didn't even edit this.

Haiku for Haikus
Seventeen awkward
syllables, with phrases crow-
barred into tight spots.

Maybe my flow is coming back! Or maybe I just pushed the limits of meta-humour. I wouldn't blame you if you groaned at that effort.

How do you make a living from writing?

I'm still quite naive when it comes to money. I have a lot to learn, as I have no idea what kind of money is involved in writing, and I scarcely have a concept of the costs of living... I'd love to have writing on the side, alongside a more feasible job. Like a column. How cool would that be? It would be like this blog, except I'd get paid, and I'd have to be coherent and concise. This is where problems arise. I really have no idea how people get involved in writing.

I think my dream writing position would be a Pitchfork Media reviewer. Unfortunately, many people agree with me, and so their reviewers don't actually get paid. It's enough of a reward to get the free music, I suppose. By this rationale, it seems far easier to get a writing career with something that does feel like work. Unless you're very lucky. But as I've said before, I'm more than happy to shelve my writings, and share things with friends.

Thanks for reading my journal! Perhaps this will lead to a new dawn of Message Sent activity...

Writing Journal, Day six

2008-11-09T15:46:00.002Z

I finally have time to write some stuff! It's been a bit hectic.

How do you find out about what's happening in the writing world and what do you think we can do to improve information for young people?

SYW is quite informative of spoken word stuff in Sheffield, and we have Off The Shelf too which is a great thing for writers to have. Other than that kind of thing, I'm not entirely sure what "the writing world" constitutes. I heard about SYW from Olivia and Priscilla, at the beginning of my time at King Ted's, and I thought Off The Shelf was pretty well-publicised around Sheffield. Everything else came through SYW.

Words Aloud has been fantastic, although it's the last one on November 25th! I've got to find something memorable to read out to mark the last evening. It will be quite sentimental actually.

I really hope I can find similar stuff when I head off to uni soon... It hangs on what kind of circle of friends I fall into... It's probably going to be fine, but it's still a bit scary. It is really hard to find out about new stuff like this, so I need other people with the same interests. But we're living in the information age... Facebook is the really the only real-life networking I need; I get invited to gigs, parties and performances through my friends and groups quite frequently, which is brilliant. I'd say it's the best way to involve young writers, as the internet is becoming increasingly ubiquitous, and things will still be spread by word of mouth.

Writing Journal, Day five

2008-11-07T07:53:00.001Z

So I'm a bit behind, inevitably, since I have had practically no time to write anything today (and probably won't tomorrow either), so I'm now hurriedly finishing off yesterday's (now the day after yesterday's) journal. I knew this would happen. It's annoying now though, because I already know what my follow-up is going to involve... sigh.

So today, Wednesday November 5 (shush), I did something I've not done in a long time. It sounds immature for me to talk about this, but hopefully you'll see where I'm going at the end. I thought I'd got over episodes off sudden insecurity, but today I reminded myself of what I used to be like by making a completely incomprehensible noise at a girl in the queue for the bus. Well, not just out of nowhere. Literally nonsense, though. She'd asked me something I didn't hear because I had the Mars Volta blasting in one ear, but it was obvious she was asking me if I wanted to go before her. So my reply should not, of all things, have been "Shurenumbfm". And yes, I remember the sound. Ugh.

I like the fact that I can be more expressive through text. I once went to the Botanical Gardens with Olivia to be interviewed about poetry in Sheffield, with Seb, who's a really nice guy, who's now in a relationship with Olivia. So I was obviously a real third wheel back then, and I got in front of the camera and completely lost it. I could barely string a sentence together, for some reason. We found it funny afterwards, but it just shows how bad I am at spontaneity, and I just don't understand people who can just talk for hours! I like being able to go back and cross things out and delete them all the time. Self-correction is quite satisfying, but you can't really do it in real life.

And I like that while you only really have one way of talking conversationally, writing can be prose, poetry, journalism, etc. At SYW we've done postcards, scenes from plays, and I still have a page full of an onomatopoeic transcription of the noise of a time machine. Today, we began a project on just expanding a character, and having a realistic, complex character who you know inside-out. Allan is based on myself, or kind of a midway between myself and a close friend. As well as a character I dreamt up for what may have turned into a novel at one point, but who was a lot different because he was going to have lived in a world like a constant lucid dream. I love having new ways of thinking about the world, and through a new character, one who I would hold a lot of respect for, I think I'm going to have fun developing Allan. =)

The novel idea never really got off the ground, though. I'm rooted in poetry; I just enjoy it more, and feel satisfied when I stop myself from rambling. It can be somewhat daring, presenting imagery that may be misleading or suggestive, and hoping the reader doesn't just hear all the negative parts of the poem. Obviously I'm the person who has most insight into the poem, and sometimes I feel like my stuff doesn't have the right impact, but I also like the idea of constructing poetry to result in multiple interpretations.

The creation of beauty is less exact in prose, but sometimes I favour it, for instance, recently I've just been jotting down stuff that's happened to me, that felt like it was laden with imagery. I feel like Erasherhead sometimes, walking round town with weird stuff going on in the background which sometimes doesn't seem to make a lot of sense, but at the same time must be symbolic... So I've tried to write down these symbols and derive some sort of meaning out of them by the time I've finished writing. I probably won't show these to anyone because a lot of them bring out a side of me I'm reluctant to display. I do the same in poetry, but I don't know if people pick up on it, and if they do, they're not as inclined to accept that it's true. I shroud my poetry in ambiguity, and I hope that different people see the sides of my writing that are relevant to them. It's harder to be ambiguous with prose, which I suppose is why novels are more popular than poems.

I'm getting quite annoyed at myself over being conversationally ineloquent, though. I think partly because Bethan's voice is so beautiful. I stumble over words so much, and slur my speech like I'm drunk. (Apparently it's terrible when I actually am drunk.) I think it's because I prefer writing, so I always want to go back and rephrase things, and start over, while I'm supposed to be having a conversation with someone. Okay, I'm barely a stuttering wreck, but I feel that it's something which has impeded me socially. Sometimes my friends phone for advice, and I find myself apologising for my lack of support. Yesterday, Michael was giving me meta-commentary about the way I was comforting him, which was actually quite funny.

And quite often conversation is quite banal... I love the stuff I talk about with my friends, though. Quite often, the most uninteresting conversation turns into a semi-philosophical discussion, which is really rad. It sounds quite pretentious of me, really. But I think that that's something I have to forget about when writing about this stuff in poetry.

And yet, when I'm trying to sum up thoughts as big as skies, I'm always going back to something I wouldn't admit to thinking twice about... Like earlier... I mean, it would have to be a girl, wouldn't it? This was actually exactly what I picked out about Allan, when I named one of his most confusing contradictions, in his continuous obsession over other human beings, and things that he would say hardly matter. I described it as an artistic pretense. I think both me and Allan would admit to overthinking trivialities. Allan's obsession over another human is not an emotion he would say made sense. And today's incident was something I should have forgotten about by now. I know you've guessed that I thought she was incredibly pretty. On the bus, she was reading a book for a social psychology course, and I realised that I must have freaked her out a bit, and wondered if she was analysing it and working out what was up with me. Not that it would have been wise to apologise for my incoherence. And of course it doesn't matter, because I'm never going to see her again.

Writing Journal, Day four

2008-11-05T23:30:00.002Z

I'm a bit caught up in the US election tonight... Radio 4 is on, and I'm clicking obsessively around the Guardian website, and yelling about every flicker of activity amongst a load of Americans over IRC. Not exactly something I'd ever feel poetic about, but I like the way everything's kind of fallen around it. School is cancelled tomorrow, as the heating has broken, and I'm seriously considering pulling an all-nighter for this - I know it's a cliché, but it's history...

Anyway, I'm really enjoying blogging this journal. I used to hate the idea of getting into a rhythm of things, and I don't think I've ever managed to compel myself to writing in a diary past February, but I've actually written four sizeable days' worth of writing.

Still, I don't think I'd ever be able to seriously do writing professionally. I'm terrible with deadlines, absolutely dreadful. My writers' block would make me an impoverished wreck. It would be fun, I suppose, but I'd definitely never go in for creative writing, and probably not journalism. Although I was seriously considering a degree in it at one point. With 3 years of English on the cards, I'm not exactly set on any career paths.

I probably shouldn't feel so weird about the idea of doing work that I would actually enjoy, but there is something inherently unnatural about that. I guess I decided to work on something more realistic, and thereby postponed all ideas for job opportunities. Which is what most people do! I'm really looking forward to doing English, though. I want university to be the best 3 years of my life, and I'm sure it will be. I think writing will definitely be part of that, and yes, I can enjoy it. I'm sure work just detracts from anything you enjoy, so I can only come to the conclusion that it's all good. :)

Writing Journal, Day three

2008-11-04T07:58:00.000Z

(Late again...)

Have teachers helped or hindered you as a writer?

I always enjoyed doing those creative writing bits in the SATs. Before school got all serious. I think that was an excuse to just get creative for once without getting derided. I once was asked to write about the view from my window, but decided that that was boring, and instead wrote about the view from some crazy alien's spaceship at the edge of the universe. I must have just read the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy series, and I loved that kind of hyperimaginative writing. Adams' ability to just think up crazy alien cultures and inventions is the kind of thing I think the SATs were all about. He clearly loved his writing to bits, had a lot of fun with it, and I think for a while I wanted to be a writer - without actually writing very much. I was about 12 at the time, I suppose. I still have a ~30 page word document entitled "WAR OF THE PI", which was about an incredible fat alien (called P%rk) eating a pie that perpetuates youth, and the adventures of the bizarre aliens trying to rescue the magical custard from P%rk's stomach before it was digested.

I've only shown WAR OF THE PI to one other person, and while he seemed quite enthusiastic, I don't think he actually got past the first page. My hyperactive ramblings which I handed in for the creative description tasks were never particularly well-received, as I always tended to break the boundaries I'd been set, and add some sort of action to the scene. This was my way of telling everyone that there is nothing more boring in literature than a description of something stationary. Yet that seems to have been the only creative writing we were asked to do at school...

I can't remember if I was any good with imagery back then. It's become the focus of my writing these days. Beverly's post today mentioned Sylvia Plath, who is probably my favourite writer ever, just because she uses imagery in a way that could kind of be described as hyperimaginative. Plath's poetry is never straightforward. It requires a lot of imagination to get to grips with: every similie is a long shot, and there's so many connotations carried by every word. Her writing is so dense, and very rewarding. I'm flipping through Ariel right now, and just flicking straight through poems like Lesbos, you can just tell that it somehow sounds so depraved, without necessarily taking everything in. I prefer her earlier poems in terms of meaning, simply because I understand them (mostly), and the Bell Jar is terribly beautiful; but in terms of language, Ariel is her masterpiece.

I guess some of my poems (Major, for instance, which I posted to Message Sent a month or two ago), are directly influenced by Plath. In retrospect I think the poem I did for Olivia (which I finished today) sort of uses that style, too. Free verse, at least. Thanks to my teachers, I never thought poems had to rhyme. I found out enough about literature I guess, but I still felt more inclined towards journalism rather than poetry or prose. I never actually felt compelled to read poetry until I was 16, which isn't that long ago!

You can blame my friends for this exposure to art. At my old school, nobody would have dared to express themselves artfully, (apart from the odd rock band, I suppose). When I moved to my 6th form, I met my friends, and I now feel like I'm part of some bohemian subculture of Sheffield, which is pretty rad! And I love literature so much now that I'm dead set on studying it at university.

Friends are always going to have far much more influence on people than teachers, of course. I think my current teachers are pretty awesome, actually, but of course it's my friends who join in and support my writing. And I have far more freedom than ever before, because I'm friends with the most open-minded people I've ever met. Open-mindedness is, in my opinion, the strongest virtue, and while I previously wanted to be a journalist, people assumed I'd be telling lies about celebrities in the Daily Mail, now I'm a writer, and that can mean whatever the hell I want it to mean.

Writing Journal, Day two

2008-11-03T18:42:00.003Z

Today's (well, yesterday's) journal is late because my internet died.

I managed to write the poem for Olivia today, I can never decide if my poems are any good till a couple of days after I've written them, but hopefully she will appreciate the gesture. :)

My creativity was somewhat hampered by the culmination of a half-term full of procrastination, so I spent a long time doing, (or trying to do), english and maths homework, and I even shunned that in favour of violin for most of the day. It's been one of those days where I can barely tell where all my time went. All I know is I feel tired now, and it's become dark outside. Not exactly a creative environment.

I wish I lived closer to town, or just next to Broomhill like most of my friends do, so I could just wander off into town for a few hours and sit in Remo's with a notepad and a fountain pen. Possibly a beret, Lennon-esque shades, and a stripy jumper. And I could grow a Dali moustache.....

What time do you like to write at? Do you write every day or once in a blue moon?

I usually write on the bus, at the end of my day, but rarely in the evening. Or wandering round the Winter Gardens, or a park, waiting in between school and orchestra, or something. I can hardly ever write about something that isn't connected to my day. It's not something I force myself to do... I easily wrote every day at one point, but somehow I don't think simply sitting and looking poetic actually generates creativity. I still try to make myself write, and I guess it gives me a good sense of well-being if I do write anything I like, but to stare at a blank page is one of the most frustrating activities in the world. It's happened a lot recently.

I just need new types of inspiration. I want to start writing one day, and wonder how my style has so suddenly changed. I've been listening to the new Los Campesinos! album a lot today, (it's amazing by the way), and the songwriting on it is just crazy. Written down in the lyrics zine, it's the kind of thing you could never imagine being set to music, because it's so dense, it's practically prose. I wish I could write poetry in this kind of conversational tone. It's that style of writing that doesn't seem hyperemotional, but it's so emotionally charged. In "It's Never That Easy Though, Is It?", they basically describe the most horrible thing that could happen to anyone ever:

"As if I walked into the room to see my ex-girlfriend
(who by the way I'm still in love with)
sucking the face of some pretty boy, with my favourite band's
most popular song
in the background."

But nothing I write ever goes anything like this. Nothing creative, at any rate, because I don't really see blogs as creative writing. Not that I don't make an effort, I do, but this actually is a conversational tone: when I've tried to blog about my insecurities or whatever, it's just been the sort of thing I'd say to someone over the phone if I had half an hour to plan everything I wanted to say. In poetry, though, I'm way too obsessed with finding imagery for things, so it barely even sounds real any more. I think one of the things I said that I wanted to get out of SYW was to just nail a writing style, and know what the hell I sound like when I write. I'd love it if someone read something of mine, anonymously, and think "Oh yeah, that's Stephen." But I also want to break out of whatever it is that is my writing style. Just making the same thing over and over again is boring.

Hmm... I contradict myself too much, but at the same time, I don't really, because it all makes sense to me.

Writing Journal, Day one

2008-11-01T22:16:00.003Z

Hello, for the next seven days I am (fingers crossed) going to be keeping a journal of what I've written, and stuff related to writing, to help out the Yorkshire Young Writers' team. :) Here is a description of my task... http://yorkshireyoungwriters.blogspot.com/2008/10/journalling-week.html

Recently I've been suffering from a bit of writers' block. I did intend to write today, as I thought I'd have an hour or so in between hanging around with a friend and meeting my girlfriend. But practically as soon as I sat down, Bethan turned up...

It's not that I've not had the ideas to write about... just transferring that artful picture, an idea I want to capture in a poem, into actual words, has proved hard recently. I always used to get ideas in the form of words, I used to hang over a phrase I wanted to use, and just go from there. It's not happened like that for a long time. I can write when I force myself to, but I've barely written anything I feel like expanding upon in months.

I wanted to write something for Olivia's birthday, because she's probably the only reason I carried on with writing in the first place. And I need something to write for my school newspaper which is due to print on Wednesday, I think? It's really not coming, though.

But I figured, today, that maybe that creative conduit between the mind and art is beginning to rebuild. I had a really surreal day today, so much so that this day in itself could even be something I'd want to write about. I was getting flickers of phrases instead of just vague feelings. I'm sure true poets live their lives afloat a stream of gushing stanzas, but at least I'm trying.

Do you find writing in a group setting inspiring or do you prefer to write alone?

Or maybe it's because I've not been to Sheffield Young Writers properly, in a while. I've not read my friends' writing in ages; it's definitely good to share ideas... and while I always find my SYW work more restrained, I can almost always write at least something...

I should really get into the habit of writing things down as soon as I think them. I'm sure I forget so much stuff, because I don't do this. ST Coleridge began Kubla Khan after a psychedelic dream, waking and writing down all that he could of this bizarre vision, until he was interrupted by a knock at his door, and the dream's details floated away. I briefly wondered if I'd write brilliantly if I wrote everything down as soon as it popped into my head, and decided that it would probably be better writing if I did, but perhaps I shouldn't quite compare myself with Coleridge just yet...

I really hope other people do this

2008-08-24T23:05:00.002+01:00

I replaced the downstairs mirror in the hall above the shoe rack with one-way glass, and placed a spycam in a scraped-out hollow in the plaster. I'd been making faces at myself in the mirror again and was wondering whether or not it was just me. I hoovered up the plaster-dust that had fallen into my dad's walking boots and spent a few moments nudging the mirror, squinting, and wondering if it was straight, then began the recording, carefully lowering the mirror. I smoothed the hair out of my face, then I repeated the squinting at myself, looking slightly downwards at a patch in the middle-bottom of the mirror, tensing jaw muscles and wondering whether or not it would look different when I replayed it on the spycam. I squinted like I do on a sunny day and I've forgotten sunglasses, frowning more and more as I looked increasingly unapproachable. I widened my eyes dramatically, opened my mouth, inspected my tongue for that gunk you get if there's no mouthwash in (there's never any mouthwash in), then tried to maintain a neutral, walking-down-the-street expression. I smiled the smile that marks my favourite song shuffling onto my earphones and wondered what that pretty stranger thinks as he or she sees me glance at his or her face in some creepy, subconscious attempt at eye contact, that I guess I always stifle. I tried to look at myself sideways. Eventually I stepped away, the mirror cut me off as I climbed the first step - then I leaned back, ducking my face under the mirror, and checked that the spycam was still there.

Exactly one week later, the house was empty again, and the external hard-drive to which the spycam was transmitting had run out of memory about two and a half days ago. I pulled back the mirror, briefly brushing a thin lock of over-curled hair from my left - right - eye, and took the black box from out of the wall. It took over an hour for the .avi file to sort itself out, so I guess the computer can do things a hundred times as fast as I can. But I can fast-forward.

And it went a bit loopy, and froze up, when I tried to play the huge file. I impatiently dragged and clicked the hell out of everything on the screen, watching the windows go all white and fill with imprints of the stuff I dragged over them. But eventually the first pictures jerked into the frame, the vandalised interfaces springing awake angry and confused like they were sleeping drunks, and I'd drawn cocks and swearwords all over them. I saw the back of the one-way glass at forty-five degrees, shifting about until I'd got the camera in place. Soon the glass merged down into the clarity of my hallway, and my unbrushed hair popped up into the frame. I instinctively pawed my forehead, and watched my week-younger self follow suit, brushing dopey strands from between his eyes. He was looking slightly above the lens at first, but it kept shifting, as he mostly looked himself in the eye, then looked back down to the reflection of some indistinct point on his blank grey T-shirt. I watched him scare me with his ugly leering faces, pausing the video periodically and trying to remember what had gone through my head. The most striking bit was the image of me squinting. I looked almost thuggish. I leaned back and my thoughts twisted round, picturing myself smiling and squinting, cross-legged on a rug on the grass, wearing a jumper in the sun, and spouting that one awkward phrase to her again and again...

So after about half an hour, I made a final couple of clicks, then heaved myself out of the swivel chair, and sprawled myself out on my bed, staring at my ceiling, my tiny, smudged hand-mirror reflecting every spot of my face, and I was reliving that conversation I should never have spoken in. The computer was struggling to delete the hundred hours of the mirror's viewpoint, of which I'd only viewed the first five minutes.

Major

2008-07-30T23:30:00.002+01:00

Major is, in my opinion, the best poem I've ever written. It's the only thing I've written where I feel I've created some form of empathic depiction of what I was feeling. In this case it was when I was walking through the crematorium gardens shortly before my close friend's mother's funeral. I performed it live on the radio in June this year.

Willows stroll thoughtfully over

Ash-leaved fluffed island grasses

Placid wanderways roll

Nameplated edges through

Nameplated dust.

I sigh, and wonder what to think.

Plastic flowers drape protectively over dead names

So the names can kneel

And smell plastic memories

The thud as they landed by the names

Was an ash kiss.

From obligingly stolen neighbour’s garden flowers…

To gaudy, heartshaped melodrama flowers!

Telling, and insufficient.

I sigh, and wonder what to think.

How many of these names could I love?

I loved none but those who step

Without gushing tears

But with brewing pensive sighs

That they leave uncast and dry.

“I think…”

And breathe a wave of air with them –

And –

I treasure silence.

I sigh, and think these helpless thoughts –

Each time each name was read

How far it is around each path

Each body or fragment of ash.

And when my thoughts are in cinders

Their twisted poetry

Will crush my name to powder.

“We’re all dying”.

“We’re dying in the major key”.

Writing and me

2008-07-30T22:02:00.002+01:00

As blogs go, Message Sent is probably the most inconsistent one in the world, and as such I'm probably going to disappoint you all by not updating for months after this post. It's not that I don't feel like writing, it's that the stuff I do write ends up elsewhere.

Message Sent has always been an outlet for my writing of any form, but since I started King Edwards, my writing, (bar those two rabbit-in-the-headlights posts from the beginning of my school year), hasn't been written with my blog in mind at all. I got really into poetry last summer, so I guess I've been writing poems for near enough one year. I turned to poetry to vent emotion, while my other journalistic work ended up in my school magazine, the ingeniously-titled "KeVIIn" (King Edward VII newspaper). I've written quite a few record reviews in there, got a few poems published, as well as a couple of articles on my general interests- lucid dreaming and webcomics. Writing with my friends reading it is a bit intimidating, though, so hopefully these articles were less niche-y than the stuff that ended up on Message Sent. I have no idea why there is a Soldat review here. It seems like ages ago that that stuff was part of my life.

I never really thought of Message Sent as any kind of reassurance, but my blog definitely functioned as somewhere to open up. I didn't expect anyone to read this, but thanks to everyone who did. I guess I'd have liked to think people did, people who I'd never met. Now, I have people who I'd never met back then, who feel like people I've known all my life. This school year has been completely refreshing. I've opened up to real people, and while there's still stuff even now that I've kept to myself, it's through writing that I've told people everything I've wanted to tell people. Maybe slightly obliquely, which is perhaps even better.

So I've joined Sheffield Young Writers, and attend Words Aloud, an open-mic poetry night, where I occasionally perform; as well as the newspaper stuff I'm involved with. There are other things too. At the moment it's the summer holidays and I want to write and read everything I've ever meant to, all in this summer. I've got to set targets somewhere, even if they're completely ridiculous. And the only reason I'm writing here again is because I'm getting back into writing articles. I've turned full circle. I've moved away from writing for an audience whom I don't know, met people and generally got a life, and now I'm back to writing for an audience whom I don't know. Of course I know that anyone can just Google my name or click the links on my Facebook, (and of course it's happened), and find me writing this, but I don't expect people to care. I've realised the potential of the blog as an art form, and while I don't expect to gather any dedicated readers whatsoever, I've realised I just want to write in article form with an audience of faceless internet-dwellers. I'm writing because I love words.

Later, I might post some more of my favourite things I've written this year.

Arts Award article - Arts Event

2008-07-25T22:29:00.007+01:00

City of Sheffield Youth Orchestra summer concert

On July 19^th, CSYO performed the results of a week of intensive rehearsal, two days before jetting off to Barcelona for their traditional European tour! With friends in the orchestra and an exciting repertoire of Romantic-era pieces, I knew I was going to love the concert.

The concert was held in the relatively small location of All Saints’ (Ecclesall) church, which definitely gave a more intimate feel to their music. The acoustics were amazing, and I was near the front, in the midst of the captivating performance.

Before the performance began, the conductor, Christopher Gayford, made a short speech explaining his selection of the pieces. The concert was centred around Hector Berlioz’ seminal ‘Symphonie Fantastique’, one of my favourite symphonic compositions ever. He explained how this work was perhaps the first piece to incorporate words as part of the presentation – Berlioz wrote descriptions of what was happening in the story in the symphony, which were printed in the program. It is an emotive tale of unrequited love, which escalates into the protagonist’s attempted suicide and drug-induced dreams. This approach to music became very popular in the Romantic era, inspiring several composers to write tone poems, which were pieces of music based on works of poetry. The first composer to develop this form was Franz Liszt, and the orchestra selected his 6^th tone poem ‘Mazeppa’, to perform. ‘Mazeppa’ is a poem by Victor Hugo involving an exiled hero who becomes the leader of a group of Cossacks. The final choice was Carl Maria von Weber’s ‘Overture to Der Freischutz’, a work full of emotional contrast, which I studied for A-Level music! The piece was one of the first that is now described as ‘Romantic’, and it greatly influenced Berlioz’ work.

We began with ‘Der Freischutz’, and it was immediately clear that the orchestra had practised the piece meticulously. It began with the ambient woodland scene, and then the orchestra slowly erupted into the dramatic character themes. They performed this piece very accurately indeed - although I spoke to some of the performers afterwards, and they thought that this was the only piece that didn’t go badly!

Not that the other pieces sounded at all unprofessional to the audience, as was proven as they launched into ‘Mazeppa’. Once again they showed great skill, with precision and captivating dynamic contrast. The highlight was the thrilling ‘wild ride’ section, which reflects Mazeppa’s journey tied to a frantic horse.

After the interval, the orchestra began ‘Symphonie Fantastique’. The orchestra admitted that they hadn’t quite got the first movement right, but it still sounded impressive, and the first three, passionate movements were captivating. The symphony becomes more interesting in the 4^th and 5^th, after the protagonist attempts to overdose on opium. He witnesses his chaotic funeral, complete with a knelling bell. I was wondering how they would approach the inconvenient bell part, until I saw the percussionists run outside the church, and heard the clang of huge tubular bells. They were noticeably out of tune, but I thought the dissonance sounded quite appropriate with the movement’s crazed mood!

Overall, I thought that the choice of music was superb, and the performance was fantastic, although I am admittedly biased. However, I genuinely couldn’t have hoped for a better choice of material performed. If you ever get a chance to see Symphony Fantastique performed, I definitely recommend it. The emotive tone poems of the Romantic era provide a very enjoyable concert!

Thankyou for your attention! This article appears instead of the Björk concert I had originally planned to review. Unfortunately, this concert has been cancelled twice. Grr. This review is a somewhat last-minute replacement. Once again, it would be really awesome if you were to comment on this. Tell me what you think of my writing style, the best bits, and what I left out, or just overall comments.

Arts Award article - My Arts Hero

2008-07-25T13:50:00.009+01:00

Jeff Mangum

Jeff Nigh Mangum is the musician best known for his band Neutral Milk Hotel. Jeff and his High School friends were the founding members of a group of musicians known as the ‘Elephant 6’ collective, who were obsessed with melodic pop songs, strongly influenced by The Beach Boys and The Beatles.

Jeff was born in 1970 and grew up in Ruston, Louisiana, along with other future members of Elephant 6. The collective gained momentum as the friends recorded and circulated tapes recorded on four-track recorders, the early forms of their records. Some of Jeff’s have been circulated on the internet, and they sound weirder and weirder the older they are. The other three members were Robert Schneider, who produced and performed on Mangum’s records, who is best known as the frontman of The Apples In Stereo; and Will Cullen Hart and Bill Doss, of The Olivia Tremor Control. The Elephant 6 members relocated to Athens, Georgia, in the mid-90s, and they have mostly stayed there ever since. The collective’s music was popular in American indie circles, particularly during the 1990s, making amazing indie-rock albums such as The Olivia Tremor Control’s ‘Dusk at Cubist Castle’, the ‘Major Organ and the Adding Machine’ project, and most famously, Neutral Milk Hotel’s ‘In The Aeroplane Over The Sea’ (‘Aeroplane’). The collective continues to produce music, though I tend to feel it’s reached a point where the experimentation that made them famous really makes their music more and more unlistenable. Other bands that had some relation to Athens or the collective have also represented Elephant 6, most successfully my favourite band, of Montreal, as well as Beirut, Elf Power, and A Hawk and A Hacksaw – all of whom are still enjoying success, particularly in North America.

Mangum’s music fits into the collective’s style, as his songs are essentially simple pop songs using straightforward chord structures, but he incorporates psychedelic elements such as noise, and at times near-incomprehensible lyrics. The most interesting thing about Mangum’s lyrics is trying to figure out what on earth he actually means when he sings his songs, for instance the song ‘Oh Sister’, the video for which is below.

Oh sister, don’t be afraid of me

I won’t be nailing you down in the nursery

Just like the rest of them did with those watery

Wandering fingers that slipped that were supposed to be

Glorious and fine

Oh sister, won’t you believe in me

I only wanted to be hard on your family

Here with you now in the zillionth infirmary

Your mother makes frantic and drunk calls from Germany

All of the time

Oh sister, sweet brown and beulahery

Milk from your blisters on your grandmother's jewellery

There in the parlour all naked in front of me

Watching the light from the cracks making archery

Animal designs

The verses have a remarkable recurring rhyme scheme that really sticks in your head. Jeff combines made up words, (‘Beulah’ was another Elephant 6 band), striking descriptions of the members of the family, and distorted sexual imagery; these themes are common in his lyrics. There is contrast between sensitivity and pain, and each verse sounds like a fragment of a dream – dreams being a huge part of his lyrics. Jeff states that,

“I have this song called ‘Ferris Wheel on Fire’, and in the dreams a lot of times I'll be walking around and there is this Ferris wheel in flames, and I'm on the ground walking through the crowd – a lot of the songs are influenced by my dreams.”

His lyrics tend to confuse people. You have to be really in tune with his style in order to understand what is going on and why he is singing these things. One of the things people tend to find quite repelling about ‘Aeroplane’ is ‘King of Carrot Flowers Part 2’. This is the bit where he yells “I love you Jesus Christ”… it’s often cited as the main thing you have to get past with the album, and it’s also been interpreted so many ways. Mangum isn’t religious, that’s for sure. Whether he just thought Jesus was a great role model, or whether he was using a different voice, or anything, it’s never really been explained. The liner notes state that

“Since this seems to confuse people I’d like to simply say that I mean what I sing although the theme of endless endless on this album is not based on any religion but more in the belief that all things seem to contain a white within them that I see as eternal”.

Admittedly, Jeff’s lyrics are enough to turn anyone pretentious. Still, this sort of sprawling prose is just what the album’s lyrics are about, jagged chunks of poignant emotion.

As for the music itself, Neutral Milk Hotel were always fond of horns, played by Scott Spillane, as well as using many instruments I’ve never heard of, (the lines notes of ‘Aeroplane’ list instruments including “wandering genie”, “zanzithophone”, and “one-note piano”). An example of this is the title song from ‘In The Aeroplane Over The Sea’.

There are lights in the clouds

Anna's ghost all around

Hear her voice as it's rolling and ringing through me

Soft and sweet

How the notes all bend and reach above the trees

The song is to some extent a testimony to the emotional power of music, a power that Mangum has mastered. He refers to “Anna’s ghost”, referencing Anne Frank, who appears in most of the songs on the album, and is described in the song ‘Holland 1945’ as “The only girl I’ve ever loved”. Mangum speculates visions of her resurrection; in ‘Oh Comely’ he laments “I wished I could save her in some sort of time machine”. His lyrics are written with the most blank honesty I’ve ever heard… the word ‘quixotic’ describes these feelings quite well. I had to look it up during my research, but it means he’s using all this romantic imagery to make up for the fact that he can’t really achieve any of his dreams. And that is the most striking thing about the album: beneath horns and Mangum’s warped, yelping voice, his bare emotion is transmitted through him and an acoustic guitar.

In fact, ‘Oh Comely’ was recorded in one single 8-minute take, with horns added afterwards. ‘Aeroplane’ is probably the most consistently brilliant album I’ve ever heard. The themes and stories in the songs fit perfectly – even with the instrumentals, and the song ‘King of Carrot Flowers Pt. 3’, which Mangum wrote about a decade earlier – the thing as a whole locks into one finished work of art, seeming to stem directly from one moment in this man’s life, every thought flowing around his head. This approach to the themes on the album has greatly influenced my own creative writing.

‘Aeroplane’ is universally regarded as Mangum’s magnum opus, and so his earlier album ‘On Avery Island’ is often overlooked. This album is mostly Jeff’s work, with Robert Schneider acting as a technical helper and producer. While the record isn’t as cohesive as ‘Aeroplane’, certain songs possess inarguably moving lyrics and similarly psychedelic, yet honest, lyrics. It’s more accessible in places, for instance the song ‘Gardenhead’ features a tune that could almost be described as catchy.

There are beads that wrap around your knees that crackle into the dark

Like a walk in the park like a hole in your head

Like the feeling you get when you realise you’re dead

This time

We ride rollercoasters into the ocean

We feel no emotion as we spiral down

To the world and I guess it’s worth your time

Cause some lives you live and some you leave behind

It gets hard to explain

The Gardenhead knows my name

Of course, it’s barely pop music, and some of Jeff’s lyrics are downright disturbing. For instance, there’s the snippet entitled ‘Goldaline’. This fragment works in so many musical contexts, one chopped-up verse that is recycled in several of Neutral Milk Hotel’s early works. It is most effective in its last incarnation, in ‘Oh Comely’, as the song effectively modulates into A minor, and Mangum shifts to the verse’s surreal vision of Siamese twins in a forest.

Goldaline my dear

We will fold and freeze together

Far away from here

There is sun and spring and green forever

But now we move to feel

For ourselves inside some stranger’s stomach

Place your body here

Let your skin begin to blend itself with mine…

It’s the monolithic verse of the album, the most striking and possibly most important. Although the Siamese twins are a new character, it harkens back to the imagery from another song, ‘Two-Headed Boy’, and in 8 lines it reflects the album’s many themes. Sexuality is represented in the gruesome line “Let your skin begin to blend itself with mine” – yet it also mirrors the possibly incestuous lyrics of ‘King of Carrot Flowers’. The twins huddle together awaiting the jaws of some terrible beast, if only to escape the coldness of life. Mangum’s spiritual views of death are also discussed in ‘Holland 1945’, describing a beautiful resurrection, and the twins, are freezing in this life, far from the “sun and spring and green” that other people feel. They yearn for the fulfilling warmth of death.

But it’s not all that grotesque. Despite all the death and decay, Mangum’s bare emotion is presented in a thoroughly beautiful way. The lyrics are inarguably repulsive, yet ‘Aeroplane’ is an album which has topped a ‘Best albums of the 90s’ by Magnet, and lingers in the top 10 of several others, including a 4^th place with Pitchfork Media, who described it as, “an impossibly rich text that begs to be deciphered, yet continually evades any singular interpretation”, comparing the album to TS Eliot’s ‘The Wasteland’. It’s quite understandable if you’re feeling completely confused and repelled by the music you’ve heard in the YouTube videos. I was confused at first too. It latches onto you with threads and steadily begins to make sense. For me, it became the most incredible work of art I’ve ever witnessed, and I know that many people agree.

So why do I regard Mangum as a hero? He’s not changed the world at large. At the height of his career he had a nervous breakdown, (although he says “It was a very wonderful thing to have happen to me”), and retreated to obscurity, leaving many people to speculate about his whereabouts and personal health. The last Neutral Milk Hotel-related appearance was in 2000, under a pseudonym – ‘World of Wild Beards’ – in a pub in New Zealand, where he explained his absence, and how his presence at the show was because “We just wanted to get away from our new president”. Since then, he’s been dipping in and out of Elephant 6 projects, his contributions rarely going beyond ‘guest instrumentalist’, or ‘backing vocals’. In late 2007, he married Astra Taylor, a film-maker, and he still lives in Athens.

So, Mangum’s impact is not on a global scale. Those who heard his record generally adored it, and a significant, perhaps somewhat scary number of people are as obsessed with it as I am. His work has been a huge influence on the music of Bright Eyes, the Arcade Fire, and Cursive. He’s been described as a bit of a weirdo magnet. As Mike McGonigal wrote:

“I can recall one show, watching afterward as Neutral Milk Hotel's Jeff Mangum dealt with some guy who'd made, like, a magical sculpture depicting how great the band was, using his own chewed-up gum or something. Another cross-eyed girl with long hair held onto Jeff's forearms for 20 minutes, as she told him exactly how important his message was to the planet…”

While this might be a little excessive, I too must confessed unrestrained adoration for this man’s lyrics, to the point of idolisation. Mangum has expressed confusion and discomfort regarding all this attention, and the prospect of him recording more music for Neutral Milk Hotel is looking increasingly unlikely. But most fans are satisfied in his offering of the most hideous and beautiful music they’ve ever heard.

Thanks for reading! If you have feedback, please comment below. You could comment on my writing style, the best parts, if there's anything you feel I left out, or should have left out, or just give me general comments. If it inspired you to listen to more Neutral Milk Hotel, that would be awesome. Speaking of which, there's an excellent EP-length live show (Jeff Mangum solo, Live in San Francisco @ Aquarius Records) available on the Elephant 6 website, here.

Revelations; contradictions

2007-09-26T20:31:00.000+01:00

I remember long ago, when I was very small, when I realised what it meant to die.

I must have been about nine years old at the time, and it was one of those long nights where I had nothing to think about, because I stayed awake, thinking about stuff. I ended up thinking about my pet fish, and how they'd all died, and been unceremoniously dumped in the bin. When they had died, they had stopped working, although sometimes we knew that it was going to happen soon. And all of the fish had died a long time ago, but all these things disjointedly floated into my consciousness as I lay in bed - and suddenly I realised that this was going to happen to me too. I was going to stop working like those helpless little fish. Everyone I knew, everyone who was going to be, everyone was going to come to a halt, and nobody had any way of stopping it. I cried all night. And as I cried I thought of how nothing could come after death, and made myself think that there must be something afterwards, because a life was too special to end.

I think I was less practical back then, because I have since determined that it's all predetermined by the way particles blast around the universe - all particles, even ones that seem controlled by organisms - those organisms themselves are controlled by the particles that they are composed of. Which is of course a much less-romanticised viewpoint. It bores me. And it seems fanciful when written down, contrasting to how much sense it ought to make. But it's mind-boggling. Do people refuse to believe that they are all just insignificant parts of this planet? - a planet that doesn't mean anything, it's all just matter. All the matter in the universe is all that matters in the universe. As I write this, I feel foolish, and make myself believe I'm wrong. I always seem to be wrong these days. Maybe nobody has the answer. I don't have mine. Maybe I'll be laying in bed one day, and it can strike me then, too.

I feel so depressed at the moment. I still feel like a nobody amongst somebodies. My personality is beige, and the polka dots are the parts I have to keep to myself. I don't really take myself seriously any more, and sometimes I think that I never will... I'm loveless. I always think I'm better alone, as I'm far less nervous, but at the same time I'm getting agitated about how I'm alone. Humans are drawn to each other, even if it's nothing to do with sex, and I know many more people now. But all I can think of is how they dislike me. (I know that this is exactly what I said in my last post, but it's even worse now.)

And another thing that is gradually getting worse... I am realising how I won't really be able to cope with my A-Levels. I can't concentrate, even when my head is clear. Sometimes that comes as a feeling too - a realisation that I really must do something and work. It's not happened yet, and I'm wasting my time here rather than finishing my music homework.

Or maybe one huge thing will hit me, like a steamroller. I will suddenly realise where I'm going wrong, and realise why I don't feel confident about myself. I will suddenly realise that anything is possible, that physics is all an illusion, and I will soar into the skies, forget about everything, never ever have to work, and I will wake from a dream within a dream. This makes so much sense to me, it's unbelievable.

I don't belong in this horse race

2007-09-19T17:26:00.000+01:00

While my head is full of things that are going to stay inside, I also have a lot of stuff I need to say...

I've started a new school, and it's a fantastic place. Everyone I've spoken to has been really friendly, and my subjects are mostly going to be alright, as long as I put in the extra work that truly is needed at this level of education. And I'm already beginning to feel at home there, so why do I still have an empty feeling in my gut during every bus journey over there?

The problem is my self-conciousness. I'm becoming increasingly aware of, and dismayed about, my own image, the way I appear to people. I wish I was charismatic, polite, and confident, but I really don't have anything to be confident about. Sure, I've made friends at this school, but that's because everybody is so damn nice to each other. I genuinely like all the people I've spoken to, I like them a lot. But what I really hate is me. I hate my nervous laugh. I hate the way I have to make boring small talk to fill in the gaps in conversations. I hate the way I simplistically start sentences the same way to illustrate a point. And I hate my stupid face.

But the thing is that I really have done well in my first week-and-a-bit at this school. I've not messed up majorly, and done something really idiotic, and this surprises me because I thoroughly expected to mess up. I guess I still think that I am about to really offend someone, probably through a total accident. It's inevitable with me. But as I said, I'm more concerned that I'm so awkward. I feel like a fifth wheel - I don't really contribute anything to any conversation. If I don't have an interest in the subject, I don't say anything. I don't even know if I should any more. And I still never expect people to take a liking to me in any way. So I'm very quiet, especially today, although this really depends on my mood. My thoughts have been self-depreciative to the point where I was close to tears a few times.

I'm still not fully sorted out. I wish I knew everyone here. I wish I was taller. I wish I had a sense of fashion. I wish I had confidence, and a quick mind that would enable me to be more witty. I wish I had a perfect speaking voice. I wish I had clear skin, and great hair, and bigger eyes... I don't know. Basically, I don't like who I am.

The ironic thing about this post is that I would never talk about this sort of thing in person. In reality, I come across really boring, but the thing is that I'm really shy. I like shy people. I like confident people as well, if their personality justifies their confidence. What I really like is when I get the opportunity to break away from the small talk and actually discuss stuff like this. And so far, I've not really. Or maybe I have, and I'm just too shy... Either way, this is why this post has ended up here, wallowing in its own helplessness. I've not gone emo, honest.

The Universe Works on a Math Equation that Never Even Ever Really Even Ends in the End

2007-04-30T20:57:00.000+01:00

EDIT: Seriously, my existential crisis was a big thing to have happen to me, and I just wanted to write about it. If you think it's stupid, I don't care. If you don't care, that's fine. Don't look in to it too much. I mean, I doubt you will, but don't re-evaluate your own existence because of this. Argh, I'm being pretentious again. ;_;

I really wanted a post to show my thoughts about why I'm here. It's been an issue that has troubled me for a few months. We've all given it some consideration, but recently it seemed that all of my subconscious thought was dominated by these questions. Now I have a theory, and decent enough reason to believe it. I'd like to think that some observant people knew that this was troubling me... fortunately, it's not any more. I respect existentialism a lot more now as a result of it. And all this sounds really pretentious, but this is the last time I'll ever bring it up! I swear!

So, let me start by saying that all these beliefs are fully agnostic. Arguably, they don't really make sense. And this is most people's arguments against other beliefs. The creationists argue that matter couldn't spontaneously create life; the atheists argue that nothing could have the power to create such a universe, and question how a creator itself came to be. So I simply came to my theory that made most sense.

I've gone through many beliefs and evaluated them, and the most likely one I've thought of is that our universe created itself. After trillions of years of existence, the universe, specifically minds made up of the matter in the universe, create another universe. A race of superintelligent beings, of indeterminate origin, (although, I don't believe in aliens, so I'd imagine humans), will find a way to create a universe. I heard speculation of the possibility of this, and I guess I like this theory. Because the amount of energy and matter in that universe at the beginning of its creation, (before the Big Bang, the pinprick of stuff that existed), was exactly the same, the stuff that happened in this universe was exactly the same as the universe that created it. This universe would exist in equal but separate dimensions, (including time, of course), and thus, is in fact the same thing as the one that created it. You can either look at this as infinity, or one. Infinity, as in each universe creates the next, and nobody can discern which the original was. One, as in the same thing therefore the same events, as I explained. The latter is how I view our universe, although there is arguably no difference. It's a comfortable compromise between creationism and "Stuff just happened, what the hell". Most atheists really believe this, that everything just happened, with no explicable reason.

And yet, most atheists wouldn't admit to being nihilists. I myself am a nihilist, but a reluctant one. I don't believe that any supreme being wills us to exist, and that we exist simply because that is all we know how to do. I am fully aware that the instinct of organisms is to reproduce and stay alive, but this doesn't answer why. Many people seem to think that this is the meaning of our existence, but it's not. It's like a good beginning to a theory. A D-Grade in nullifying nihilism. Outwardly, I do care what my actions are, and their effects, because I enjoy life. I'm still agnostic about stuff, for one thing, and also, I figured that since life is the only thing everyone knows how to do, I should live it like my instinct wants me to. Inwardly, I know that none of it matters.

One other thing is that I don't believe in free will. I do believe in a great impression of it, and this is all that matters to a human. Really, everything you do is defined by the structure of your brain. And there is no other way it could happen. Take flipping a coin. The probability of the outcome being heads is either 0 or 1, and since humans can't actually work out which it will be, we think it is 0.5. The flip of the coin is all decided by pressure applied by the flipper, the behaviour of the air, gravity, the coin's mass... Nothing on earth can figure out the outcome. And really, this is all your brain is. Dependent on the structure of your brain, the positions of the neurons in it, you will either think that this article is just pretentious drivel, or, (hopefully), something more thought-provoking. Overall, everything is defined by causality, and the universe can only take one path of events.

Please remember that I'm not certain of any of this. And I don't denounce new theories straight away. I'd enjoy talking to you about this, whoever you are. Just because I've given up thinking about it all for a while doesn't mean it doesn't interest me, nor am I committed to that in any way. And if not... well, thanks for reading.

Top 10 Freeware games according to RincewindSW

2007-01-21T12:03:00.000Z

As part of the Metanet community, I am, as I've said before, a die-hard freeware gamer. The great community there frequently recommend freeware games to play, made easier by the IRC channel crawling with 20+ N fanatics. Currently, a huge number of us are playing Gunbound, and 4v4 games are not uncommon. And because of the vast number of freeware games I've played, I thought I should list the best. There are one or two dubious choices, but I have deliberated the list, and I'm sticking to it. Kingdom of Loathing almost made the list, but I decided that its text-basedness disqualified it. All the others can be downloaded.

10: Space Cowboy
For a freeware game, Space Cowboy is graphically stunning. It follows the typical 'Runescape' MMORPG gameplay of getting upgrades and completing simple quests, but with a difference: You're a 3D spaceship. And away you fly, to shoot at hundreds of laggy, generically-named (Ubermoth is the best) beasts. It's bug-ridden, too. But this didn't deter me at first. I think the novelty of the amusing gameplay and 3D spaceship flying simply wore off.

9: Within a Deep Forest
Atmospherically perfect, WaDF makes for a lovely platform game to play and relax. Explore several intricate and amusing little 2D worlds in your bouncing ball of awesomeness - which is changeable as you complete more of the game. That's really all there is to it. Once you've explored everywhere, tried the challenges and remained fruitless, you either have to quit or seek cheats, unless you're a real fanatic. Still, this is a beautiful audiovisual game. Not very lastable, but for what it is, WADF is exquisite.

8: Runescape
Runescape was always the most controversial one on the list. People are polarised by this, I think I'm the only person who has ended up in between. While I love how the game has so much stuff to do, even in the free section has about 20 skills and hundreds of items, I dislike the simple, click-limited gameplay. This is the main argument against. But these people fail to realise that the game's fun comes in the realisticness of the problems faced. It's simple stuff for simple minds - hit rock, get coal. Kill monster, get loot. Put ore in furnace, get steel. And of course this is boring. But for a while, Runescape's world enthralled me and drew me in to its challenges and its economy (which incidentally has become quite a talking point amongst the few educated members of the community). I don't play any more, because I'd done all I could in the free game. At the end, I was simply levelling up, calculating how much work I'd need to do to get into the mining guild, or save 100K to buy 1K Chaos runes. But the work involved became too tedious, lengthy and repetitive, and so I stopped. But until level 50 odd, I had lots of fun.

7: War Rock
The main thing that is great about War Rock is its freeware status. No way would I pay for this game! It has, however, established itself as the dominant freeware First Person Shooter. It quite obviously rips of CounterStrike, particularly on the close quarters game. But vehicles and flag bases are added in the bigger map games, adding playability, but despite the flags the objective is still body count. I suck at this game, but I still admire it's thoughtless fun.

6: Return to Blockland
Blockland was a very lazy attempt to recreate Lego Creator as freeware, with many awesome bonuses, and a multiplayer twist. I see the irony in how I go back to the Blockland website and find a release date for it as shareware, with some awesome-looking screenshots. But that's shareware. Return to Blockland is a fan's mod of Blockland, but what a mod it is. Tricky to set up right, but well worth the technical fiddling. It renders the original Blockland, which it is based on, useless. RtB has a wide selection of blocks, and hundreds of hidden features - passworded doors, vehicles, weapons... I feel I have only tapped the surface. I can barely use any of them. Moving bricks is indeed very cool, and it opens a wide range of possibilities. My excitement builds as I reminisce about the projects I did create, and even the projects I could have created, but each building takes so long. And sadly, the game is absolutely hopping with bugs. This is one of the most ambitious games I've ever seen. Once a group of Metanetters created our own island, with property for us all. It was amazing while it lasted, but it grew laggy, and we eventually moved on to pastures new - new maps, and increasingly obscure projects. And in this fashion, the craze died.

5: GunBound Classic
Gunbound is the best example of how freeware and commercialism don't mix. GB Revolutions is a bad game - a shame, because it's essentially the same as all versions. A MMOG that focuses, thankfully, on the cleverly-crafted gameplay rather than upgrades. You control a small vehicle, with its own exclusive shots, which you fire at the opposing team. It's turn-based, like Worms, and has that slight tactical edge that recently endeared Classic to dozens of Metanetters.

4: Trackmania Nations
VROOM! A simply amazing freeware racing game. Both single and multiplayer modes are very playable, and there's a map and car editor too. The cars handle superbly, as you'd expect them to in any modern racing game, and the tracks are F1 on drugs. Loop-the-loops and colossal jumps are two-a-penny, making this surely the most thrilling pure racing game ever created. The only problem is that the novelty of the amazing tracks you can tackle does begin to wear off, if you're impatient like me.

3: Continuum
Trench Wars, the game's primary server, is like and IRC server full of different games, and really, that is why I love it. The first piece of freeware that got me hooked, there really is no end to the possibilities that its simplicity presents. The premise is simple: You're a 2D spaceship. Continuum grabs this idea by the throat and creates Capture the Flag, Dodgeball, Base Wars, Hockey, Zombies, and multitudes more - all found in Trench Wars, at certain times. This would be perfect, but of course you can't just walk into any channel and start a game. Moderators host the obscure ones, and they can activate the game, attracting dozens of people. Definitely worth a look.

2: Soldat
You can see my previous entry for a full review, but to sum up, Soldat is an immensely fun multiplayer shooter, with lots of gameplay options.

1: N
N looks like a fairly decent flash game, but plays like... well, like you're a ninja. The creators have said that the game is based on how fun the character is to control, and it succeeds like no other game I've played. The physics are perfect too, and the only bugs are ones which can be easily avoided by changing the level, and the others don't detract from the gameplay. Not only is this my favourite freeware game, but it's my favourite game ever. There are 500 levels in columns to start you off, but the lastability in this game tends to come from NUMA and the community's frequent map packs. The level creator too is fun, but I myself am not an avid mapmaker. This game is definitely worth the small download, and should keep you busy for weeks, if not months!
Truly amazing stuff.

Soldat

2006-12-04T22:22:00.000Z

Sometimes shooting games are much more fun in a simple 2D format, and don’t need to look realistic to be good. Soldat fulfils my expectations for an excellent shooter that gives each round capabilities for tactics, skill, or just brainless murdering sprees. With equally enthralling single player and multiplayer games, both of which contain several styles of gameplay, Soldat should occupy the even the gamers with the shortest of attention spans.

Select your weapon, soldier.

In any game, you must pick a gun, and a secondary weapon (you have grenades as well). Then you set off and try to achieve your objective, which involves killing as many enemies as possible, or running around chasing flags. When you die, you respawn again and repeat, until the end of the round, just like any decent shooter game. It’s very simple stuff. But here’s where the fun begins. There are 7 different styles of game, each of which can be tweaked for maximum fun, with different maps, modes, bots, and even the delightfully fun Weapons Mod.

The flamethrower is one of the powerups available in the boxes that get scattered about the map.

The game comes with 51 maps, designed for the different Game Styles, and 3 modes. Personally, I don’t use any of them unless I’m in multiplayer, but many people prefer Soldat with Realistic mode. There’s also Survival mode, where everybody respawns at once, and Advance mode, where you start with secondary weapons and fight for random primary guns. The bots, which are only really used in single player, all have their own favourite weapons, for example Boogie Man is a chainsaw-wielding maniac who fares surprisingly well for somebody who doesn’t use missiles. For advanced users, there is Weapons Mod, a text file that can be edited to create crazy and powerful weapons, that are there to mess about with – unless you turn into a real Soldat nut! I’ve personally only used them to create ridiculously destructive miniguns…

Weapons mod is a hoot!

The only way to go about describing the gameplay is to describe each Game Style in turn – each is a new type of tactics, but the same manipulation.

Deathmatch is the standard brainless killing spree. Kill anything that moves. Some will find this the most fun, a simple distraction, but I prefer tactics, and a proper goal.
Capture the Flag, the most popular style, is a variation on the classic tag game – with guns. Steal the enemy flag and return it to your own.
Hold the Flag is rarely used; your goal is to keep the flag with your team.
Pointmatch is also rare, and uses the flag again, it’s like Deathmatch but with a point system for different types of kill.
Teammatch is Deathmatch with teams.
Rambomatch is again similar to Deathmatch, but players seek a magic bow, and only when using this can they score points.
Infiltration is the most tactical, Alpha Team must captue Bravo Team’s flag, but Bravo’s only goal is to defend it for as long as possible.

Customise your character, and watch his head get chainsawed off.

Your soldier moves like a dream. The mouse and keyboard-based combat works really well, if after a bit of practice. You’re treated to a jetpack, which makes moving around that much more fun. And maybe the best part of all: all guns are equal. This ensures true variety in weapons, I’ve never been in a server where everyone is using the same gun. They help more in different situations, which is why I treasure my Barret, Desert Eagles, and AK47 for their differences.

The graphics aren’t a masterpiece, but why should they be? In 2D, the blood and guts aren’t thrilling, but they do the job. Everything is small but compact, to maximise gameplay. And they have the sound effects roundabout spot on!

Soldat can automatically take end-of-game screenshots, making bragging on your blog much easier.

Multiplayer is the reason I have been playing Soldat so much recently. There are some servers that take gameplay to whole new levels. There is one called dodgeball, in which teams throw knives across the arena at each other, separated by a wall. Last team standing wins. Or decaying zombie, in which legions of zombies with bad AI swarm around their flag – your mission is to clear them and take it. Or how about Snipe & Slice, a server where the only weapons available are the Barret, chainsaw, and knife. Multiplayer for me is the reason Soldat is lastable, the AI gets old and predictable (after a long while), but multiplayer lives on!

Why not try sticking 20 bots in a tiny arena to see what happens?

Overall Soldat is amazingly compact, with so much different gameplay it’s unbelievable. Considering the fact that it’s freeware (technically shareware, but the shareware doesn’t really add a lot to the game), the game is definitely worth checking out. And give it a chance, check out all the stuff I’ve mentioned if it takes your fancy. I’m sure there are a heck of a lot of details that I’ve not even looked into. Get some headshots for me, young soldier.

Björk - Post & Debut

2006-11-27T21:42:00.000Z

To pause from the recent articles of indie sensations and what could be interpreted as "trying to be cool" (indeed, I do my best), I'm going to take a pause and write about a shameless pop artist. Björk really does have an amazing voice, and in her first two albums she used it in fairly formulatic dancey pop numbers, that were all over MTV 10 years ago.
Firstly, after an interesting background of weird Icelandic punk bands that several biographers describe in great legnth, Björk settled down into solo work and released Debut - a pop album. It's like modern electronic disco pop. There's nothing quite like it, but I know from the thumping rhythmic timpani of the opening, and standout, track, Human Behaviour, that it seriously makes me wanna dance! Sitting here in my computer chair it's all I can do to stop myself nodding my head and tapping my feet. This dancey feel is built up in the next track, Crying, which features a catchy bassline, and layers of unindentifiable sound - is the bass played on a piano? Is that pan-pipes? Could this be vibraphone? The singles stick to the classic pop structures. Such is Venus as a Boy, which features dense strings, but none of the dance rhythm. Then comes one of the most noteworthy tracks, "There's More to Life than This". Recorded live, Björk apparently runs off, with the microphone, into a toilet halfway through the song, emerging back out as the band 'crescendo' again. But of course the album shows its flaws. Like Someone in Love is simply boring. It's a cover of some ballad, set to a harp, which could have worked, but it's just slow and repetetive. It doesn't work with the upbeat mood of the album at all. Even Violently Happy, a single, shouldn't really last 5 minutes, again it gets rather tedious. Although she insists: "I'm driving my car too fast with ecstatic music on", you wouldn't really guess it from the poor tune. The repetition is my main problem, which recurs a bit in all the tracks, really, which I guess is to be expected in pop music. The 2nd half of the album is a little disappointing - until, that is, you hear the fantastic Play Dead. It almost didn't make the album, almost didn't boost its popularity, and almost left it completely obscure. Björk recorded it for a soundtrack a few months after Debut's release, and due to its astounding popularity, she re-released the album with Play Dead on the end. And, with a link to the other single (Big Time Sensuality), I leave Debut to discuss the similarly different Post.

Post is, unfortunately, remembered for It's Oh So Quiet, a fact which most Björk fans (including me, and Björk herself), resent. It's an unoriginal cover of a broadway song that really grabs attention with the tumultuous brass, and wide dynamic contrast from "sshhh", to "You fall in love - ZING BOOM! The sky up above - ZING BOOM! Is caving in - [B]WOW! BAM![/B]", literally screamed. Anybody who listened to the album, however, remembers the wide range of songs, from Enjoy, a dark trip-hop beat, to Isobel, a cryptic song about a very mysterious woman. I can't fathom it at all. It just goes to show: the lyrics are much deeper. Hyper-Ballad (live version is fantastic) in particular is thought-provoking, the story of a woman who throws trinkets off a cliff is one day overcome by the thought "What if that was me?" The songs are frequently darker, and more grungy-sounding. First single Army of Me
shows this perfectly, it pounds through your head and is infectious as hell! Another one of my favourites is I Miss You, which slowly adds instruments, eventually creating a percussive, animated work of genius. The songs can be more subdued, for instance Possibly Maybe, but I much prefer the lively or moody songs. The final track, Headphones, is a quiet but penetrating vocal tapestry that achieves perfection yet again. It's very hard to pick a favourite track. Overall, it's clear that Post is a much more varied album, one that I much prefer to Debut. The problem of repetition is fixed, and Björk explores new territory, most notably trip-hop, which shapes much of her later career.

If you've read all this, given Björk a chance, and not found Debut and Post to be your cup of tea, I fully understand. So can Dawn French. Even if you're with me, this parody is hilarious!

Wikipedia articles: [1] [2], Amazon Pages: [1][2], professional reviews: [1] [2].

Pavement - Wowee Zowee

2006-09-20T21:14:00.000+01:00

Wowee Zowee musically defines the term "grower". At first the eclectic scrapbook of 18 inconsistent songs is interesting but not really musically pleasant, just a swirl of strange, angry little songs merged with slow, melancholy ballads. But as soon as you realise that each is, in its own right, a work of genius, Wowee Zowee as a whole sort of gels.
The way we are greeted with a slow guitar chord and piano note repeated unevenly doesn't exactly set the tone. Most people will have worked this out by the first line "There is no castration fear!". So that's alright then. After this oddity, we reach the classic Pavement single Rattled by the Rush, a near-perfect indie song, as well as the only one I could find on YouTube. Rattled by the Rush is the only song that really could make a decent single, but I'm sure I watched Father to the Sister of a Thought - a more folksy indie song - on YouTube a month or two ago. TO add to the already inconsistent tracklist we then hear Black Out and Brinx Job, completing the slow lapse into a weird vocal track and general Pavementish insanity and noise. After this there are no patterns. Grounded's peaceful lull is somewhat interrupted by Spiral Stairs' addition to the album, Serpentine Pad - basically a punk song, which ends, to a Pink Floyd-like (sort of) intro to Motion Suggests. From then on the songs don't flow in any way, but fit together in an antiflow... it just works.
But of course in an album as weird as this there are flaws. Western Homes is a terrible song to bow out on, but does keep the experimental feel with the interesting vocals, which waver like a hot atmosphere. If only they could be paired with a better song. Best Friend's Arm, while being a funny little addition, is really just Pavement trying to play another Slanted and Enchanted song, and failing. Otherwise, it's hard to pick out other failings, but the collection still seems to have an unfinished air about it.
Of course, the best thing about this album is the experimentality. It built on the strange noises that Pavement had already started using previously, but using them much more effectively. Bob Nastanovich's keyboards, sound effects, and percussion are all used to maximum effect here, unlike the other albums, and of course this is a good thing. It still doesn't stray far from the guitars, drums, bass setup, but there's enough variety of techniques to make it sound original.
If you do wish to invest in this album, I recommend the remastered edition that is due in November. If it's anything like the other two remastereds it'll be well worth the money. I am buying it again, as well as the upcoming (if not confirmed) rereleases of Brighten the Corners and Terror Twilight, which will effectively complete a collection of all Pavement songs. Fantastic news.

Wikipedia article, Amazon page, a professional review.

EDIT: I've changed my mind, Best Friend's Arm is an awesome song.

PS: Sorry this couldn't've come at the regular time of Sunday night (a time I wish to stick to in future). Also sorry it's more Pavement. Still to come I have Björk, Bright Eyes, Beck, and Massive Attack; possibly more. Then it'll be back to standard goings-on.
Other stuff going on: Links bar to your left. Much cool stuff. If you do play N, join the forums. Most of what I do on the internet these days can be traced back to there. And I'm on the IRC channel (as linked to in the forum) pretty much all the time I'm online.
Also a hit counter. I needed one, badly.

Pavement - Slanted & Enchanted: Luxe and Reduxe

2006-09-10T22:16:00.000+01:00

Before Slanted & Enchanted, Pavement were a small band who really weren't recognsised further than a few friends and audiophiles who were lucky enough to have attended a gig, where they may have been presented with a cabbage by former drummer Gary Young. Young, Stephen Malkmus and Spiral Stairs were not the 5-piece band that split up in 1999, but just 3 guys who were practically jamming in their garage, recording the results onto cassette. The 50-page booklet that comes with this reissue explains the process in more detail. "We'd set up a few small amps, no bass, with just the guitar played through a bass amp". Crude as the setup is, it actually works. Young had to run around the house starting and stopping the tape machine. Luckily they got the album together. It's maybe the most lo-fi thing I've ever heard, but the songs are fantastic enough to make up for it.
This album is often cited as one of the best and most important of the 90s. Spiral Stairs modestly comments that it "launched a thousand Weezers (in addition to Weezer)". If that's true, I appreciate this album just for that. The original 14 album tracks are, for me, the bulk of this album. Of course. There's not a weak song. Even the punk-ish shouting of 'Two States' and 'Conduit For Sale!' (in which Malkmus scream "I'M TRYING!" 16 times in a row for each chorus) are fantastic, even for me, an often electronically oriented music lover. Over half of these songs are real standouts, there's no point in listing them. It's not all angry screaming either, we get the thoughtful 'Here' and Zurich is Stained, adding an extra dimension to the album. The songs all flow, particularly 'Trigger Cut/Wounded-Kite at :17', which has has a near-perfect chorus melody, as well as Perfume-V. But they also contrast to singalong "ooo"s, in In the Mouth a Desert.
I haven't even got to the bonus tracks yet - a whopping 34 of them! After a second reissue (Crooked Rain Crooked Rain) Pavement look to be releasing pretty much every song they've ever made - fantastic news for people like me. There are some songs here that didn't make the album, thankfully they didn't fade away, or we would have missed some great material. We get 2 sessions with the late John Peel, with 7 surprisingly good songs and a version of 'Here'. The 'Watery, Domestic' EP and its outtakes aren't really anything extremely special for me, but you can't help but like Shoot the Singer and Greenlander, even if you won't be humming them on your way to school/work like Slanted & Enchanted's original works. To finish the 2nd disc there is an awesome concert of 13 songs, which includes a couple of new tracks.
I truly think that this is an essential album. Pavement haven't been noticed by today's youths, who think that Nirvana were the band of the 90s. If some of them heard Pavement, they'd be blown away. This is a good place to start.

Wikipedia articles: [1] [2], Amazon Page, a professional review.

Guillemots - Through the Windowpane

2006-09-03T22:53:00.000+01:00

With Arctic Monkeys and Thom Yorke favourites for this year's Mercury, I've decided to review new artists Guillemots's debut album, one that for me is better than either of them. (Yes, even The Eraser.) After a few EPs and singles earned the Guillemots a few fans in late 2005, but now have widespread respect after some video and radio airplay, and of course the priveliged Mercury nomination.
The main problem here is inconsistency, it's just so hit-and-miss, for me. There are precisely three fantastic songs on this album: Made Up Lovesong #43, Trains to Brazil, and Sao Paolo. I love all three. The happy little Made Up Lovesong #43 got the publicity, complete with joyous lyrics and lead singer Fyfe Dangerfield's trademark wailing at the climax; and Trains to Brazil's similarly jubilant instrumentality would provoke me to make the comparison "A Happy Arcade Fire." For me, the true musical genius shines through in the epic Sao Paolo, a huge song with a full orchestra, climaxing in the middle with the sort of music that deserves to be screamed from the top of a mountain.
Meanwhile, we get one or two incredibly drab songs. Blue Would Still be Blue may have a nice vocal track... but that's all it is. And a few broken chords played in a staccatoed sound effect. Later, the almost silent And If All thankfully lasts under 80 seconds.
The Björkesque Annie Let's Not Wait is a small joy on this album, as is Through The Windowpane. We do get quite a bit of synth-ey pop backing to Dangerfield's dynamic vocals, creating some catchy little pop songs, but they can so easily bring in a whole orchestra wherever they like. This is the sound of a group commanding the studio and creating their record exactly how they wanted it.
I don't totally love this record, as I've explained. But it has its moments, and certainly shows more brilliance than the generic indie bands of this day and age.

Wikipedia article, Amazon page, a professional review.

Stephen Malkmus: Stephen Malkmus

2006-08-30T22:42:00.000+01:00

When Pavement broke up, every member went in completely different directions. Bob Nastanovich owns horses, Steve West is a stonemason, and Stephen Malkmus, Pavement's driving force, is doing what he was born to do: make music.
The stereotypes for solo albums like this are inevitable - it's only for fans of their band, it won't be as good as the band... and although it's definitely not in Pavement's league, Malkmus has turned in a new direction with new band the Jicks, with a new take on songwriting. He seems to want to write songs properly for a change. No nonsense, like on 'Type Slowly' (Brighten the Corners) "One of us is a cigar stand and one of us is a lovely blue incandescent guillotine". Another example is Stereo. Contrarily, in the singalong 'Jenny and the Ess-Dog', Malkmus narrates a simple love story of a couple who can't make up the distance between their years, as he poetically puts it, showing perfectly understandable songwriting. In a couple of other tracks, such as the insane 'Jojo's Jacket', we get a taste of Malkmus simply going wild, focusing of the catchiness of the tune more than anything else. Malkmus uses things like percussion, effects pedals, and vocals more creatively in this album, but it just doesn't quite hit you in the same way as Pavement. Of course, it works... in 'The Hook', we have cowbell, shakers, and a drumkit; when you're singing about pirates anything goes. Later, in the slower 'Vague Space', probably the album's highlight, we get wah-effects, steel drums, and keys.
The album does have its letdowns, the boring 'Trojan Curfew', and album opener 'Black Book' fails to excite in any way.
I'm glad I decided to show interest in Malkmus' work, after he abandoned Pavement to basically do it all himself. Some songs just wouldn't've worked with Pavement, fans will know what I mean. (An example of something that really belongs on a Pavement record is 'Discretion Grove'). And is it just for these fans? I think not. Many people will prefer this coherence to Pavement, but personally I'm not one of them. This is the sound of an artist trying to do something new, but struggling in these new surroundings. Only slightly, I hasten to add.

PS: Handy linkage. Wikipedia article, Amazon profile, and a professional review.

The Duke of Ediburgh Award

2006-08-12T20:28:00.000+01:00

First off, here is a link to an interview I conducted for Cube Magazine, about the Duke of Edinburgh award. (You may have already heard this.) This will tell you all you need to know about the award. Incidentally, I hate the sound of my voice as well... (and the picture). I know that this is rather long. 17 minutes long. If that's too much, you could also look at the Duke of Edinburgh Award website.

However the point of this entry is really to document my experience in the Silver award. I've finished 3 of the sections: expedition, skill and service. I have to do physical for a year. For my skill I played violin (nothing new there), and neither did I have to change my lifestyle to do Badminton for my physical, so I really had it easy in the award. For my service I did Environmental work, which was actully rather fun. All my friends in the award did this with me as well. And then we get to the fun bit: expedition.

Expedition is where you get shoved out in the wild somewhere. We visited the Dark Peak, then White Peak, then the Yorkshire Dales. All 3 are of course obnoxiously hilly areas, usually painted with heaps of bracken and heather and stuff. The odd small town (except in the Dark Peak, our first practice, as we started off fairly near our home town. Whilst you're out in the wilderness you can't use other people to help you to reach your goal. Simply put, you can't use shops. (This did in fact go out of the window on our 2nd practice, but we got away with it.) But it also means you have to sleep in a cold tent, cook your food, and not get lost or tired. And we had to walk 16 kilometres each day, for three days.

1st practice:
This was very easy. I was nervous of screwing up somehow but since we camped in our Group Leader's back garden, things went fine. We were allowed a huge camp-fire - slightly more pyromanical than ones boy scouts make - and we messed about with that until midnight, for some even later. We all regretted it the following morning of course. Walking got much harder, my muscles ached. At that point I was thankful that this was only a two-day practice as opposed to the three-day 'real thing'. We did have it easy. Despite this we got lost and ended up walking a couple of K further than our route, but more unfortunately we detoured through a cow field. I reckon our pre-expedition training was to blame for the irrational behaviour of two of our campers. Cows are not, contrary to their reactions, scary. And there were legions of them on the walk. In this particular field the cows seemed especially interested in our troupe. There's one of us who you'd expect to do something stupid in this situation, and he didn't let us down. He started running, startled the cows, and caused someone else to panic and attempt to jump over a barbed wire fence. He tried to clear it. Needless to say it left his legs worse for wear, especially since it took us a couple of minutes to get him down from there.

2nd practice:
Think of the most horrible weather conditions you could have to do the expedition in. You immediately think blizzards, thunderstorms, horizontal hail... but it was the sun was never going to submit on this practice. It was boiling. It made us way slower. We had enough water and such but walking in that heat was draining. At least it was only 2 and a bit days... Our route wasn't great; lots of uphill struggles. But we still managed to beat the other 2 groups to the campsites each time. Not a lot happened on the walks, to be honest. We ended up going to several shop we saw, and stopping in a children's park at one point (great fun), but otherwise it was all about making it to the next checkpoint. The most inspired thing that happened was when we took a shortcut (which we had been allowed, actually) and ended up at a tranquil green at the edge of a little village. We were there for over an hour, playing cards and... talking about the ducks. (That was actually pretty funny.) At the campsites we were pretty damn bored. It was during the World Cup, and we missed England getting knocked out. However there were people in caravans who watched it and told us the score. It's unavoidable, even in the middle of nowhere.

The main expedition:
This turned out to be trickier. I had definitely got myself dressed for the occasion though. The weather was supposed to be even worse than #2. It wasn't, but it was still rather hot, and we had the full 3 days to cope with. In fact, we set off a day before we set off walking. We slept in a youth hostel that night, the advantage being something along the lines of 'not having to get up early to catch public transport into Skipton at 4AM, not as if it'd set off at that time, because we can't get a damn lift'. Yep, we caught a bus, 2 trains, and theoretically another bus - but half of us (me included) were stuck at the bus stop waiting for a lift from our group leader when it turned out that the bus only accomodated about a dozen people, most of whom were citizens. So maybe we were annoyed by then, but for me the youth hostel was alright. The food was pretty good and we got a good night's sleep, I reckon. Also we'd gone on a walk up to a cave, which was awesome. There were some great plunge pools and perfect climbing rocks. It wasn't such a bad idea in terms of wearing us out, even if the cave was a couple of kilometres away. Well worth it. The next day we proved our awesomeness. We had to get ourselves on top of Malham Cove. There are 2 ways, shown in this diagram. Guess which we took... The first day did indeed go well. So did the second. We were used to this now; the practices were well spent. And actually, the next campsite was where we had most fun. It was quite hot, but we coped fine walking this time. However it gave us a fantastic excuse to go and throw ourselves from a fantastic rope-swing we found into the river. Good times. In the third day we rushed to the end, taking a few shortcuts that we were apparently encouraged, by the group leader, to take. This was because we'd done 2K extra on the first day. There was fun to be had yet, however. Even after we'd found another set of ducks (these were after bread), even after we'd walked, we visited the train station. In Leeds train station, we had... problems. My friend had the ticket, and 4 of us (out of 16) went into the ticket-only conveniences bit. 20 minutes later, we realise that the others are stuck outside. Ah well, it was altogether an amazing experience, I definitely recommend the award to anybody with an award group in their area.

Thanks for reading. Feel free to share your camping, or D of E, experiences.

Q: What is for dinner? A: A yam.

2006-05-30T19:52:00.000+01:00

Thankyou to http://www.marriedtothesea.com/

Thanks to http://www.toothpastefordinner.com/
Thanks to http://www.nataliedee.com/

Explanation. So it is all because a yam is for dinner.

Also I am working on a blog about work experience, I can't avoid that one. It's a biggie. But that was seriously great, at Cube magazine, and incidentally my voice is on the internets now! Seriously, check it out. (Make sure you're using Internet Explorer unfortunately.) My main one is here, and I lent my voice to discussions here, here and here. And all other Cube interviews etc. are here. Enlarge some of the pictures because they have the people who I was with at the Cube, some great guys, hopefully we will all meet up again soon.

One final thing is another member page. Sorry about all these. If you are interested in music and want to broaden your horizons check out http://www.last.fm/. I have a member page here, it has all my favourite music and it should keep expanding. Anyway here is my picture with all my top bands by amount of plays. As I said, it will change, currently I've been listening to a lot of Pavement, but that was just before I got the plugin thingy. I trawled through 4 whole pages of styles for this box, but these are cool.

Those are recent songs of course. Here are my top all time bands... so far.

Check it out, comment if you get a station and stuff and I'll take a look at your music.

Another website, sort of

2006-05-21T18:34:00.000+01:00

I have another website. It is all about my favourite pages on the internet. It's really more of a members' page but you can view it on Internet Explorer and Netscape even if it is really part of a Firefox plugin. I should mention this first really. explains it. Download it (and Firefox if you don't already have it) and start clicking Stumble. Over half the time I get something boring/stupid, but sometimes I get a real gem. Recent favourites include this strange piece of art?? or something, this fantastic game, these spaced out backgrounds, and a half-decent blog for a change. On my page, you can go on the drop-down list for more pages I like, by category, or something.

Some more organised linkage:
My StumbleUpon page. The StumbleUpon homepage.

What I did on my holidays

2006-05-10T19:37:00.000+01:00

OK I finally got round to this. School just takes my writing ability out of me (ironic, I know).
We set off to East Midlands airport at about 4am. 4AM! That meant we had to get up at 3am. It was quite bad. And then I didn't manage to go to sleep during the 2 hour car ride to the airport. At this point I would have expected the airport to be courteous towards me for having to get up at 3am. But no it was the most boring airport ever. We hung about watching BBC news 24 on big screens until they called us to the plane. However I did have a new mp3 player (and a book), so I wasn't bored, but ordinarily I would have wandered about the airport, but I lacked a motive, and also I had next to no energy for obvious reasons. The flight too went without andthing interesting occuring. I mean, we could have, like, nearly died or something. I was stuck in a dirty seat looking at the safety instructions that had been smeared with jam. Well, that's what you get for flights that cost about £4. Well, something like that. But when we finished the flight it was quite funny. There wasn't an arrivals building. There was an arrivals tent. We were in Bergerac and were greeted by 4 painted steel walls topped by a tent roof. And a set of rollers which our baggage hurtled down and landed with a crash at the bottom. Or sometimes they just got stuck at the top. But at least it didn't take long, we hit the road in 20 minutes. In this car.
The gite we got to was quite cool. It was BIG. I mean bigger than our house, even if it was only one floor. It took 17 seconds to walk from one side of the house to the other... so yeah. There you have it. The latter is where I slept; I made short work of it. There were 2 dogs there, one turned out a bit camera shy… but the other was a big poodle. It tried to bite me once because it had proved quite bad at catching Frisbees, instead it was startled and ran off. I went round the corner, and it tried to bite me! It wasn’t very good at that, either.
So then we set off on the typical (at least in my holidays…) car drive about the village. On the way back it was around dinnertime, and it was Sunday. Apparently, absolutely nobody in France is alive on a Sunday. Until we went to this one place. It was a cafeteria. It was a strange little place. Reminded me of the cafes in Ikea – the service was the same. However the food wasn’t Swedish meatballs… it was even more obscure. It was kind of played up like a fast-food place. Except with different-ish food. There were chips… but no conventional meat to go with them. I thought they had chicken, but alas, it was not a chicken that wielded this meat, it was a duck. They also had veal, and something I was unable to identify either from the blackboard with the names or by the look of it. So I ended up with just chips. It wasn’t the greatest meal ever. But then, as I was eating, my eyes wandered to the huge TV at one side (kind of flanked by aquariums and games consoles for some reason). Chuck Norris was on TV! This was the first time I’d seen Chuck Norris outside the internet. It was quite awesome. The first thing I saw him do was strangle a rattlesnake in front of some scouts. Later in the programme I even was lucky enough to see him roundhouse-kick some punk, and leap from a helicopter onto a plane about to take off. Good old Chuck. We all came back tired. I was the only one awake, reading Sourcery and listening to my mp3 player. Then when my sister got up I so totally pwned her at Monopoly. It was cool because the last blow was when she landed on the Hotel de Mayfair. My picture of the moment was deleted… but it was like this. I was pretty good at Monopoly during that holiday. To finish the day, I went to bed trying to ignore/kill the bugs all over the place… LOOK AT IT IT CAN’T EVEN SPELL OMG! And there were lizards, but as far as I know none of them got in the house.
Next morning, I wasn’t too surprised when I was woken up at about 10am. I should have slept on the plane or something, but what are you gonna do. Not a lot happened really, we drove to some towns. Interesting thing is the trees and crops in this region. I’ll start with the trees I guess.
They were big and stumpy. By stumpy… I mean… imagine an oak tree with no branches.or twigs or leaves. It had boughs, but there are only about a dozen boughs on each tree, and they look like the trunk but a bit thinner. Now imagine that the trees are painted white. Did it look like this?
And the crops. France is a wine-growing land, everyone knows that. You probably have mental images of great rows of lush green vines, with little purple gems nested among them. Well… actually they don’t quite look like that during April. Maybe around June to early July they will look like that. However on holiday there were entire armies of little stumps about a foot high in immaculate rows, like “special” soldiers. It looked really stupid. You wouldn’t believe how much land had been devoted to these plants; neither of my pictures manage to convey this. They have tried.
Tuesday, and we decided to visit a big dune. It was the biggest dune in Europe, and it was quite amazing. How the sand had all managed to get up there was a bit clever. It was very windy and the sand began to attempt to bite into your skin. On the other side it wasn’t too bad. Just a hell of a lot of sand still! There were some mental people there. Foreigners! There were some French boys who were chucking themselves down it. I would have done that if the sand hadn’t already gone in my eyes, clothes, and really anywhere else you could think of…
Anyway, that night there was a pretty awesome storm. It’s quite lucky that I got this picture because lightning is, you know, fast, so this picture was dictated by luck more than anything else. Also the exposure was longer in the dark. Anyway, this raged on somewhat. It wasn’t raining too hard but the lightning seemed to be coming from all different directions. During the time we spent in the car coming back from a restaurant, I took these three pictures. Arty! Now where can I use them? Anyway, it lead to a powercut in the end, which happened while I was administering some more Monopolownage. So we had had enough by then, and went to bed (shortly after the several minutes I spent emptying sand out of my shoes into the vague direction of the bin).
The next day was a day in which the pictures seem to do the talking. We went here where we were greeted by someone who didn’t really look like a troglodyte, but he was barbaric enough to balance horizontally on his index finger. I have no clue why we went to this place. It was just a bit of a carving out of a cliff, really. Apparently these ‘troglodytes’ lived here and… fought battles, I guess. They probably wouldn’t have allowed this rickety staircase in England. I didn’t give a damn. When we got up there were lots of rocks all over the place. It just made me laugh. It was like “and here is a cave! There are rocks in here. Here is our prize artefact, a HOLLOW ROCK! Do not touch” And here you can see the warriors’ footsteps. Educational! And that night we didn’t have a proper tea because my sister is vegetarian, and French people wonder what a vegetarian is. We went, and asked if anything was meat-free. After explaining that fish, chicken, beef, and pork (in that order) did in fact constitute meat, we went home, since that place was the only one open in miles. But we did have stuff in the fridge.
On the last proper day we went to a market. This isn’t Barnsley market, it’s a French market. Although it did have a Paella stall, and an English book stall. It was a good stall! I got my Discworld Companion, so I was happy. Most of it was weird plant stalls, African traders’ stalls (Get your elephants here! A choice of straw or some igneous rock type!), fresh food stalls, and a clothes shop in the square which had dragged half of its stock outside. When we had done, we wandered around the place, and I met some geese. Sideways! Later we visited a chateau, and went around there. I wasn’t interested since it was all about wine, but the pictures are nice. And we saw a rabbit!
I had time for one last camera spree while I was supposed to be packing. Here you go!
And some stuff I left off:
And voila! I hope you enjoyed that, thanks for reading it all and having a look at my very amateurish work with a camera.

Rincewind SW??, Radiohead, Stuff.

2006-04-15T10:14:00.000+01:00

Rincewind SW --

[noun]:

A master blogger

'How will you be defined in the dictionary?' at QuizGalaxy.com

Or as I am known in places where spaces are banned:

RincewindSW --

[noun]:

A real life muppet

'How will you be defined in the dictionary?' at QuizGalaxy.com

By the way I'll be blogging the events of my trip to France... soon... I promise...

And another thing, I just posted this in the Metanet forum. Thought it was blog-worthy!

I simply must do my top 10 Radiohead songs now.

10: Myxomatosis: Whuu whuu whuu whuu whuu wom whuu whuu whuu wuuu wuu! whuu whuu whuu whuu whuu wu whu whuu whuu whuu wu - etc. That is my interpretation of the fantastic fuzzy bass.
9: Kid A: This is the RH song I dance to most. At first I thought it was too weird but now I appreciate why the vocoder was used, it really works. Makes it soung vague and dreamy, like the keyboards.
8: Karma Police: A great melody and lots of excellent polyphony going on behind it.
7: Pyramid Song: Yes, it is beautiful.
6: Just: An awesome solo. Probably Radiohead's best song without any keyboards in it.
5: There There: The percussion is well used and the vocals at the finale are sufficiently scary. Great, simple arpeggio solo at the end too.
4: Talk Show Host: Best B-Side I've ever heard. A really simple riff and more spooky vocals.
3: 2+2=5: More rocking guitars. The second part always blows me away. It has a subtle keyboard right at the end... which is why Just won that title!
2: Paranoid Android: Just kickass. The movements are all different but the 2nd is just amazing. Jonny's 2 solos are perfection.
1: Idioteque: The Laptop-produced percussion rolls around your head as you listen to Thom Yorke's driving vocals "Ice Age coming Ice Age coming", "This is really happening", Global Warming is on its way. It's an excellent song, even better live.

Doing that list was so hard! How do you compare Just and the Pyramid Song??
Finally: What almost made the list - Morning Bell, Morning Bell/Amnesiac, You And Whose Army?, Life in a Glasshouse, A Wolf at the Door, A Punchup at a Wedding, Climbing Up the Walls, No Surprises, Kinetic, The Amazing Sounds of Orgy, Everything in its Right Place, The National Anthem... I'll stop now.

ANOTHER EDIT??!!

Yes they have some more cool stuff there. Including Daily Cyanide and Happiness! Also maybe the funniest Toothpaste for Dinner happened today.

And no more edits. I will probably blog up my holiday at the weekend. Fingers crossed.

My Desktop

2006-04-13T22:04:00.000+01:00

And around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around

Yes, that's my desktop. Surprisingly it doesn't lag my computer too badly... the Screen Capture is misleading, without that on it runs smoothly.

(Blogger uploaded it as a .jpg, thanks to Putfile for hosting this. Upload Video and Images - Putfile My page on it)

Bangin' Choonz

2006-03-28T22:18:00.000+01:00

Worst. PE lesson. Ever.

We started off filling in merits which was OK because it requires only a few cells of brain activity. When we finished doing the task, which was explained by PE teacher as if to a toddler, or maybe even a chimp, and who expected us all to make about 3 mistakes each: "count up the merits and write how many there are in your planner, and pick out your best results and put them in your planner", and were expecting a free lesson of talking* for the remaining 30 minutes. (*not really) But then he paired us all up and expected us to go round the sports hall doing degrading activities such as pull ups, a new type of press-ups (that looked like they had been devised in under 30 seconds, closer to 30 minutes to PE teacherus non-sapiens. I think every person (complete with brain) was paired with the person that they would least like to be with. Actually I think mine was the second least. But still, it was the sort of thing where as long as I didn't breathe in I'd be fine. Anyway the worst part of it was that Non-Sapiens decided that we'd find the process more enjoyable with music, because young people love music. OK I've changed my mind, I hate music. I'm sitting in silence now, but that's mainly because I closed Winamp; Test Icicles weren't really matching my mood, but then again I don't know what was. Because at school PE music is MINISTRY OF SOUND. If he'd had rap I would have coped, but this was simply depressing. Rant over.

Also Questionswap is amazing. I love it. Register and post on the Question of the Day and shiz, at the moment it's a reasonably small community, but growing by the hour. I've been quite hooked to it recently. Here is my profile. While you're at it here's Mark's profile. (Look and laugh). Also go to question of the day archives for yet more frivolity, it's where the best stuff is. I have mentioned QS in Filler, but only briefly, which was unjust, I now see.

Anyway, it's Easter soon and I'm going to France on Sunday through Friday, so watch out for that in my next blog. Holidays and April probably won't mix, but we'll see.

Guns for sale.

2006-03-11T12:07:00.000Z

It's true :(

Please click the link and watch the video before reading on.

Whilst laughing at this video, I felt quite guilty. It's pretty damn scary. AK47s for all. A loophole in the law. In America people have these for self-defence, but after watching this I don't know what the hell they're advertising it as. "Look at the holes in the head, heart, ribs..." after a kid who looks about 12 blasts the dummy to pieces. And how much is "A year's worth of ammunition"? What are you going to use an AK47 for, legally? This loophole in the law sound scary. I don't want to think about it... it's awful...
Anyway, someone in my class reckon's he's "hard" or whatever, because he goes shooting with his dad all the time. I'm pretty sure it's illegal to shoot rabbits. Anyway, whatever the effect is, it's lost on me. It honestly makes me despise him. Guns are things to kill people with. Nobody realises this. So that's my rant for today, I'm shocked at it.
Oh, and the best line is where the woman says "I think I might have to treat myself to one of those..."

EDIT

Armed violence wrecks lives by fuelling conflict, poverty,
and human rights abuses. The campaign is calling for an
international Arms Trade Treaty which will make it harder
for arms to get into the wrong hands.

Your support will help us to show that people - like you -
around the world are outraged by arms trade abuses, and
demand tougher arms controls. Act now at:
http://www.controlarms.org/million_faces/en/index.php/register?s=1563294

Filler

2006-03-05T20:11:00.000Z

Sorry. I haven't added much this week, it's been very busy, because I have had to sort out my work experience interview, and at any time when I feel my brain can cooperate with me, instead of doing a blog, I've forced myself to revise. Unitl now! But to be honest I don't have a great deal to write about, so I'll tell you about some stuff in random orders.

Firstly, I guess I'd better do a more positive blog. If you have CGP revision books at your school, don't take them for granted; they're great. 20 years ago (is that it??) you would have had to revise out of something like this! I can't find a better picture, but you can imagine the contents of this book, can you not? And now we have these big colourful/shiny/lively books which are readable. They really make sense. This is a good example. They make science revision worthwhile. Everyone will say how they hate them but come on, they are great.

Another thing... you're missing out on all my favourite websites of the minute. I will have to create this list. I'm not going to bother organising them, because they are all great for different people. Yes, most of them are games, but keep looking, there are some for non-internet geeks.
N is a fantastic game where you take control of a ninja who can jump up walls. It's simple (collect gold, open doors, dodge enemies) but REALLY effective. I'm addicted, and that's an understatement.
SKRPG is a text-based RPG, which is for those internet geeks, sort of. However, I'm compelled due to the ingenious clan rankings, and the fact that my clan is awesome!
NotPr0n - Still here, at -15... I'm so slow! But the positives were sheer brilliance.
Cyanide and Happiness is a rather demonic webcomic. The server for the pictures is down at the moment, but it should be back in the next few days. Love it.
Pandora is a music website that helps you find new bands to listen to. It does actually work, sometimes. It helped me discover Portishead, Nerf Herder, and Pavement, and probably others.
Livejournal random picture thingy by Drew of Toothpaste for Dinner is all, like, WHOOSH!! It really is that good. Don't get too addicted...
Rex the Runt is hilarious. Please comment if you remember this. Watch episodes here.
Jayisgames is great for any free (mainly browser-based) web games, it has all my favourites, even the downloaded N.
Gamesforthebrain is an example of something I found, with loads of challenging and interesting think-ey games.
Soldat is a game I only properly started today, and was immediately addicted. It's the perfect shoot-em-up, in 2D.
Question swap is something I actually found while writing this, yet I still want to share it! It's amazing! I won't say any more, just go to the website.

And I'm quite into Kontraband, but I won't link, since some of it is racist/nsfw. I hate getting racist stuff on the internet.

And I think I'll leave it there, I'm developing a headache.

An interview with blogger.com

2006-02-22T18:02:00.000Z

On my Blogger profile you can put a random question on, and your answer. I asked for 15 questions and have answered them all here.

1) What would you wear for camouflage if you were hiding in a gingerbread house?

I would wear brown paint with lumpy bits in it. All the brown paint would be on tablecloths.

2) What reason do you have to believe the earth is flat?

Well, all the evidence I do have has not quite been proven to me as I haven't seen it. (Damn, this answer lacked humour...)

3) Your bow is not broken but you've run out of arrows. How can you fake being a bard?

Well assuming a bard is a ranger or something, I would simply tell everyone that I'd lost my arrows, cause I'm awesome like that.

4) Your pajamas have duckies on them. Why did you switch from choo-choos?

Duckies <3>.< 5) You've got to make contact with the alien leader. How will you tell when the conversation is finished?

When he has shot the dove that the hippies released, then impaled me on a laser partway, then shot the laser, then led his other aliens on a killing spree, then taken some artifacts back to the flying saucers.

6) The squish of mud between your toes; how would you live your life as a frog?

What?
Um... no really I don't understand.

7) If you were a pirate, how would you avoid laughing when saying "poop deck"?
I would rename the Poop Deck as the Fart Deck.

8) Why does the taste of pennies remind you of losing a tooth?

Because every time I lost my teeth it was because a masked demon pinned my head against the tarmac and smashed pennies into my gums.

9) You're trapped in a well with a goat and a slinky. Describe how you will escape.

Using magic...
Failing that, shove the slinky down the goat's throat and make it run up the wallfacing back down to the well. I would grab the slinky and yank. The goat would fall back down as I would spring up and out of the well. Then I would say "Thankyou Jesus!"

10) You can punch a hole in an apple using a straw. How do you think that makes your milkshake feel?

I would think it would be reassured that it hasn't got a freaking straw in it.

11) You're going to the moon! What did you forget to pack?

Air.

12) Your pajamas have duckies on them. Why did you switch from choo-choos?

We have a limited amount of questions don't we Google...

13) You're going to the moon! What did you forget to pack?

Google is screwing this all up now :<

14) This is a colon : and this is a semi-colon ; - what's a semi-truck?

Who writes these? Hmm... I'd say it is the front part of the truck that moves it as normal, but the back flicks up like a big... um... comma.

15) If you were a wrestler, what would be your finishing move?

Gtg, bye

Swapits...

2006-02-20T22:02:00.000Z

Well... I have been meaning to publish this onto the internet for ages. Well, at least a month.

Our school has introduced a new, unfair award scheme. It is appalling. How it goes is: Instead of buying the regular mix of vinegar-soaked chips, dry, plastic-y pizza, and cold beans for dinner, we are encouraged to indulge in something that is not composed of the 3 elements of school dinners: salt, fat and sugar. Which is alright to be honest. This sort of thing is pretty much inevitable. However they have taken it too far. They have resorted to bribery. So now, instead of buying a cheese sandwich, pay 20p extra for a cheese and SALAD sandwich, pick out the dry bits of cucumber and the dregs of slimy, butter-soaked lettuce, and you have got yourself 10 whole swapits. Or so. In any case, that should be enough to get you started. So in our assembly informing us of this great oppurtunity, we hear the clichéd phrase, "Log on to dubbleyudubbleyudotswapitsdotcom!!", actually an erroneous URL, however the millions of fliers drifting over the floors at school confirmed the correct site. And now it seems that the craze is up. A month later we hear that "The snackbar was almost sold out of healthy food". I could argue that this wouldn't take very long, and I may be right, but of course I haven't succumbed to partaking in the scam. The food may be good but it is tainted, TAINTED I SAY! Either way, I wouldn't have a clue.

Anyway, how I see it, it is a giant scam. Suspicious thing is that the healthy food costs more. It's a fact that chips are cheaper to produce but they are still quite probably overpriced too. And healthy food costs about twice as much than to make dinner in the morning. So you don't have to bother packing a lunch, granted, but instead have the joy of sitting amongst the idiots at our school rather than in a corner in your form room! And guess what, you get Swapits! I can't believe people are stupid enough to fall for it. But hey maybe I can. Knowing the average mindspan of the apes at our school, they'll have the simple notion of "Free Stuff", and they're off. So there we go. I bet most of them get the swapits and realise that the site is about as accessible as a wheelchair shop situated atop a clock tower.

Another thing... the website really is laughable. Or cryable, as the saying goes, I can't decide which. As soon as the page loads you are bombarded with 12 disgusting .gifs, 1 or 2 of which are adverts for things like Lego and "Are you being bullied? The fact that you are buying things off here suggests that you are." Then whisked off to one of the categories; ripping off eBay was unavoidable, and I hate eBay as well. Just take a look round. Again, you don't know whether to laugh or cry.

For example here is an offering for some headings typed out on a Piczo website.
"with this you will get a website with music videos games picz n everything you want for you to custimise ,choose the name ,and style buy this swap and i will send you a password and username for it and also the instructions and site name email me @ bongo-da-bad@hotmail.co.uk or go on my website at www.happy-valentine.piczo.com" (It might be a better layout than the Swapits homepage.)
Really. It is scary. The other day I found a pair of tweezers. You can get lyrics to songs, printed out on A4. It is AWFUL. Here is another typical advert. Most of the CDs are much worse but I was checking if there were any good ones. Turns out there are, if you would trust this advert, and if you love mainstream indie (Yes, like me, but not that much. 2 bands maybe. There's no Pavement on Swapits.) "THIS IS A GREAT NEVER USED BEFORE FRANZ FERDINAND ALBUM INCLUDING SONGS LIKE .....TAKE ME OUT!!!AND THIS FIRE!!!!!!!!!!! SEARCH JJ55 AND SEE MY GREAT DEAL FOR VANS SWEATBANDS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

So I have to resist my urge to rip the print screens of the homepage off the wall as I walk past the canteens. They honestly just go onto the website and Click File -> print. Then stick the chopped-off pages around school. It encourages gambling, and personally I don't care about that but if you told our headteacher that the school encouraged gambling you can imagine the results. I honestly can't think of a reason why it wouldn't count as a form of gambling.

And there are more reasons. Since this is my second blog I might have to urge you to click comment now. Please? OK. Tell me if you have any more reasons why swapits should be condemned to hell. Oh, and thanks for reading all of that, it took me a good hour to write, and I appreciate it.

EDIT...

And yes, another reason I'm annoyed is because of course, I bring half-decent food every day. Where is my reward? But no I don't give the school money, so no I am living with no pleasure in my life. It is not complete without 50 Cent lyrics printed in Times New Roman size 12 onto A4. Had to add that, sorry. ;)

Hello Google Blogger.

2006-02-19T17:52:00.000Z

Hallo!

Welcome to my Blog. I hope that it gets lots of hits and people can see what I have to say. You'll find out about me as I write more.

I aim to update this twice weekly. Maybe it will only be a funny picture or something. Or an outburst of joy. But that's good enough damnit!

Have fun. Add this to your bookmarks, I expect you to return.