enormous yes

What I listened to in 2010

2011-01-18T08:28:00.000-08:00

This is what Last FM says I listened to most last year, and I'm not about to argue.

1. Laura Viers — July Flame.

All this endless beauty:

2. Arcade Fire — The Suburbs

My second favourite album of 2010? OK, I take it back, I will argue with LastFM: the album had at least four great songs, but the number of times I fell asleep on the train only to find it still playing when I woke up suggests it was on bloated side.

Anyway, here's one the great songs:

3. John Grant — Queen of Denmark

Very obviously the best music that Midlake made in 2010.

4. Sun Kil Moon — April

Screw you, Last FM: this was my album of the year. Favourite non-Chester memory of 2010: walking across my local golf course at night, accompanied only by April, falling snow and foxes appearing like ghosts in the distance.

5. Sun Kil Moon — Admiral Fell Promises

More of the same, which obviously made it one of the albums of the year.

6. The xx

Very much the year before last. Which didn't stop me listening to it practically incessantly.

7. Bonobo — Black Sands

On our first day in Spain, this album played on a non-stop loop as we decanted our minds by the pool.

8. Biosphere — Wireless

You know how music's often too musical? This works as a refreshing ear-sorbet:

9. Tame Impala — Innerspeaker

Because it was delicious to imagine an alternative history of the Beatles where George went all West Coast.

10 Laura Marling — I Speak Because I Can

It grew on me.

The Decade in Music #13: The Ting Tings, "That's Not My Name"

2009-12-21T04:17:00.001-08:00

Sometimes when you're cooking, whether it's crushing the cashews, slicing the garlic or just chopping the chicken, one simply has to funk it out; otherwise, what would be the point? Mere sustenance can achieved by the inhalation of Pringles. I make it my life's mission to introduce dance-cooking to the masses.

Happily, our current kitchen in Hanwell is large enough to permit a certain amount of righteous shaking of the tail-feathers.

The song that got our kitchen rocking most in 2009 had to be the Ting Tings' "That's Not My Name". Now, I'm not a girl and no-one ever calls me darling, much to my chagrin. So you might say there's something faintly ridiculous about me shaking my rump and singing along to an anthem of female empowerment.

Yeah, you might say it, and with good cause. But I would say TUSH! and FIE! I ignore you and say, get outta my kitchen, dude's gotta strut. This is a classic:

[Lee was not harmed in the making of this post.]

The Decade in Music #12: Kylie Minogue, "Slow (Chemical Brothers remix)

2009-12-20T14:41:00.001-08:00

While it's true that I was dying with excitement to get to Australia, one thing that I could really do without, in fact, the one thing that gave me significant pause if not the outright heebie-jeebies, was Australia's reputation as the Mecca for all the world's most brutish and downright evil arachnids. If you're a young and up-and-coming spider who wants to make it as a really first-class terrorist, you know you have to go to Australia and earn your stripes. The stories are legion: the redbacks that apparently like nothing more than hiding in toilets to get first dibs on a tourist's arse; the huntsman, a spider the size of a small but malevolent dog, that likes to hide in a car's sun visor so that it can fall into laps, the better to cause maximal cardiac arrest; the white-tail, a spider with a bite that, according to popular lore, causes one's skin to go black and die; Atrax robustus, the Sydney funnel-web, infamous for falling into swimming pools and not dying or climbing into babies' cribs and into urban myth.

But my years in Oz were notable for a complete lack of encounters with our eight-legged f(r)iends. This I achieved by the simple expedient of living half way up a tower block. Job done. The only spiders I saw were the stupendously large and comically evil golden orb weavers, slinging giant webs across the cliff tops of Clovelly. If you're so inclined, you can see a picture of such a spider — eating a bird. Yes: a bird.

But my first encounter with a live huntsman is fixed in my memory. I was staying in a friend of a friend's flat, moving between Clovelly and Balmain by way of Newtown. Unlike the bracing airs of the Clovelly and Balmain, Newtown has the air of a reclaimed swamp: there's something oppressive and more than a little fetid about it. Anyway, I would use their office to listen to music on their giant PC while they were at work. One day, I was strewn across their giant leather seat, I came face to face with a huntsman on the wall. How it stayed attached to the wall was a feat of natural engineering that baffles me still; surely it weighed as much as a small grapefruit. I sat riveted for 20 minutes, willing the spider to move and break my trance. It did not move. I managed to back out of the room in a cold sweat, then ran round the house trying in vain to get my sang-froid back. When, in order that I might get a better look at my adversary, I willed myself to poke my head round the corner, it had completely vanished. I wonder if you've ever read Julio Cortazar's wonderful short story, "House Taken Over"? It's about a couple who gradually are confined to one half of their house, then a single room, by undescribed assailants or invaders. Eventually they are forced to leave:

Before we left, I felt terrible; I locked the front door up tight and tossed the key down the sewer. It wouldn't do to have some poor devil decide to go in and rob the house, at that hour and with the house taken over.

That was pretty much how I felt about that room, and then that house. In practically no time, I was safely installed in a Potts Point antiseptic tower block with nothing more horrifying to worry about than the odd roach and the unceasing and implacable mosquito.

What's this got to do with Kylie Minogue? Honestly, not a great deal. But the track I was listening to, and greatly enjoying, at the moment of this momentous encounter with a mobile nightmare unit, was the fantastic Chemical Brothers remix of Kylie Minogue's "Slow". And that's enough to get it into my list. Enjoy (but don't think of a giant huntsman while so doing):

The Decade in Music #11: Elbow "Grounds For Divorce"

2009-12-16T11:48:00.000-08:00

My band of the decade has to be Elbow. I’m a hopeless fanboy when it comes to Radiohead but, like any obsession that sometimes translates into a state of anxiety ("but why don’t you like them? What do you mean "Pyramid Song isn't the greatest single recording of the last ten years?" etc), I'm often driving to exasperation. But Bury's finest and loveliest have been nothing but an amber-scented bath of delight.

I was there when they held the Camden Falcon hypnotised in 2000. I chatted to Guy when they came in to be interviewed for MP3tv.com. I was there, obsessively checking and rechecking the Sydney branch of HMV for a copy of Cast of Thousands, many months after its UK release. I've recounted here my bizarre dream of meeting Guy at a garden party (I know, I know: tell a dream, lose a reader). I've regularly eased into the soothing bath of Garvey's Finest Hour. But now, when I think of the Elbow, the following story immediately comes to mind.

It’s 2006, and a boutique music festival called the Playground Weekender has just been launched in the splendid surroundings of the Hawkesbury River, an hour or so outside of Sydney. Splendid? Ridiculously lush would be more accurate. Siuated on a sheltered bend in the river and overhung on one side by mossy cliffs that afforded the site's only shade, it was a long way from the concrete nightmare that’s The Big Day Out, not least because of the gigantic kangaroos that would nose around the tents.

The festival had been set up by a couple of English chancers, and they in turn promoted it mostly around the hostels of Kings Cross. The upshot of this unintentionally niche marketing campaign was two-fold. Firstly, backpackers, largely British, were over-represented. (Ivan Millat would have had a field day). And since the good burghers of Sydney had failed to show any enthusiasm for this upstart affair, the festival was nowhere near its capacity. Which was perfect: you could set out your picnic blanket in the sun, get a cheap jug of mojitos and listen to Tom Middleton play a totally zonked set of mid-afternoon psychedelic classics.

So we had this spectacular site and its bands more or less to ourselves. It was a great line-up too. Laurent Garnier, Tom Middleton, The Avalanches on DJing duties. The White Lies, The Presets, !!! playing live. The incongruous highlight, since they barely fit the electro-rock template, was Elbow. Now, I’m not saying Guy seemed chemically altered. He was just looking very very happy. So happy, in fact, that during some blissed-out mid-section, he wandered down to the front row and kissed a bunch of girls. Including Shana. On the lips, mind. The full works, if you please. Whenever she now recounts this story, Shana gets a kind of misty, faraway look, like she’s auditioning for Cate Blanchett's role in Lord of the Rings.

Elbow played one new song that night, and I didn’t think a great deal of it. Lots of clanging, Guy enthusiastically hitting things, and then some big dumb blues riff. Boring. The song later turned out to be "Grounds for Divorce", and I could barely have been more wrong if I'd tried.

Here’s a quite wonderful version of "Grounds for Divorce" recorded with the BBC Orchestra.

Here’s our Flickrset from the Playground Weekender. Interesting note: seems I once had a tan.

The Music of The Decade #10: Portal's GLaDOS

2009-12-16T06:37:00.000-08:00

Warning: this song is from a computer game. Don't say you weren't told....

This exceptionally lovely song came from the very end of Portal, one of the games of the decade. Throughout the game, GLaDOS has revealed herself to be one neurotic, untrustworthy, cynical and deeply psychopathic computer. It was a shame that you had to be concentrating elsewhere during the final confrontation, because more than anything you just want to listen to her wheedle, rant and fulminate. “Well you found me. Congratulations. Was it worth it? Because the only thing you’ve managed to break so far is my heart”:

Come the game’s ending, we got two things. A: the cake. Rumours of its nonexistence were circulating but there it was, with a little candle and everything; B: this rather beautiful song, the melody to which was subtly prefigured in a tinny bossanova style on the little transistor found in the fugitive’s cell. Some game endings are so crappy–that means you Bioshock—that you feel hollowed out by the wasted hours. But this was unexpectedly touching, a sweet touch in a game full of them. I mean, just listen to this compilation of the gun turret’s voices:

The Music of the Decade #9: LCD Soundsystem, "Someone Great"

2009-12-15T01:57:00.000-08:00

Well yeah, of course, everyone loved "Losing My Edge" It's still ludicrously fresh and hilarious and just a bit painful. While I would like to be able say that this ode to hipsterism and its discontents was awfully close to home, that would be an almighty fib: when this song came out the last thing I was doing was hanging out with the Sydney-side cool kids. In fact, mostly I was just hanging out with Cordy, one of my very favourite girls in the world, taking in the sun and harbour air.

When the fuss had died down, we were left with "Someone Great". How to write a wrenching but glowing song about grief without so much as a minor chord? Like this.

The lyrics are wrenchingly uneuphemistic and desperately moving. The only hint of self-pity allowed is when the singer bitterly notes that the weather hasn't had the good grace to be sympathetically gloomy:

The worst is all the lovely weather,
I'm sad, it's not raining.
The coffee isn't even bitter,
Because, what's the difference?

Buy LCD Soundsytem's Sound of Silver [UK/US]

"Someone Great":

The Decade in Music #8: Beth Gibbons & Rustin' Man, Out of Season

2009-12-14T06:27:00.000-08:00

The second half of 2002 was spent in the unexpectedly not-at-all unpleasant surroundings of Walthamstow Village. In one memorable day in August, I had moved all my worldly possessions from N16 to a new place in E17 and then, after nothing more stimulating than a brew with new flatchap Will, I went back into town for B's memorable stagdo in Shoreditch. It was a busy day.

When I think of this time, the music I hear, rather incongrously, is the supremely melancholic Out Of Season by Beth Gibbons and Rustin' Man.

It just so happened that Will, who's now head of press at EMI, was friends with Mr Paul Webb (aka Rustin' Man), a member of the cherished Talk Talk, and he (Will) would come home from what sounded like jolly hunting trips in the country, excitedly chattering about a new record which he claimed was going to be "the greatest record ever made". Should it need saying that that's exactly the sort of hype to put me off for life? So when I finally heard the record, I naturally loved "Mysteries" and "Tom the Model" but I largely ignored the rest of the album, thinking it was barely-there and wintry, too sketched, too skeletal.

But Lee! Don't you love music with those qualities? Yes, and that sound you here is me slapping my forehead repeatedly. Out of Season uncannily effectively splits the difference between late Talk Talk, Nick Drake and Portishead. It frontloads the aforementioned songs and keeps its real secrets for those who can get past the big numbers. Hunker down the record and you're rewarded with little gems that make "Tom the Model" seem like a gauche barn-burner: mournful torch songs ("Romance"); the sort of fire-lit folk that Goldfrapp hinted at on their last album ("Drake").

Buy Out of Season [UK/US]

"Drake"

The Decade in Music #7: Ryan Adams - Heartbreaker

2009-12-07T11:19:00.000-08:00

Here's Clive James on Sydney Harbour:

"Sydney Harbour remains one of the Earth's truly beautiful places. Apart from the startling Manhattanisation of its business district, the city was more or less as I remembered it, except that for the twenty-one years I lived there I never really appreciated it — one of the big things that can be said in favour of going back, partly offsetting the even bigger things that can be said for remaining an expatriate once you have become one.

The late Kenneth Slessor, in his prose as much as in his poetry, probably came nearest to evoking the sheer pulchritude of Sydney harbour. But finally the place is too multifarious to be captured by the pen. Sydney is like Venice without the architecture, but with more of the sea: the merchant ships sail right into town. In Venice you never see big ships — they are all over at Mestre, the industrial sector. In Sydney big ships loom at the ends of city streets. They are parked all over the place, tied up to the countless wharves in the scores of inlets (‘You could hide a thousand ships of the line in here,' a British admiral observed long ago) or just moored to a buoy in mid-harbour, riding high. At the International Terminal at Circular Quay, the liners in which my generation of the self-exiled left for Europe still tie up: from the Harbour Bridge you can look down at the farewell parties raging on their decks. Most important, the ferries are still on the harbour. Nothing like as frequent as they once were, but still there — the perfect way of getting to and from work." Clive James, Postcard from Sydney

For the first few month of my life in Australia, I worked in North Sydney, which meant catching the ferry to and from Balmain. The job, though I was grateful for it, was awful beyond words; but the daily journey! The details of it are etched in my memory: the waters of the harbour, glittering in the morning light, criss-crossed by boats of all sizes and speeds; that moment when the immensity of the Harbour Bridge came into view and you had to suck in your breath.

This was also the time that I finally heard Ryan Adam's Heartbreaker and fell for it completely. I would sit on the wooden platform at the North Shore ferry point, listening to "Oh My Sweet Carolina" and try to guess which of the distant twinkling lights were going to turn into my ride home.

"Oh My Sweet Carolina"

Buy Heartbreaker [UK/US]

The Decade in Music #6: Royksopp, "What Else Is There? (Trentemøller remix)

2009-12-03T03:24:00.000-08:00

Well of course there are too many contenders for dance remix of the decade. That’s just ridiculous right? I suppose the decent thing here would be to attempt a scholarly post on how MP3 blogs made the discovery of new remixes a thing of almost indecent ease.

I could talk about The Knife’s superb Heartbeats, which is unendingly fantastic for so many reasons: that crypto-atheistic chorus: “To call for hands of above to lean on/Wouldn’t be good enough for me, no”; the enigmatic lyrics of the middle-eight: “And you, you knew the hands of the devil/and you kept us awake with wolves’ teeth”. While the original sounds like something from A-Ha’s junkie brethren and José González’s finger-picked guitar version is silkily beautiful. But no rational argument can be made that Rex the Dog’s remix is not king. Here it is:

Remix of the year though? Not quite. What about something from Stuart Price in his Thin White Duke guise? I lost count of the number of superb makeovers he delivered over the last few years. Unfeasibly massive reworkings of Madonna, Gwen Stefani, Missy Elliott; and this, my personal favourite, Fischerspooner’s “Just Let Go”. Playing that on headphones transformed my otherwise bucolic walk to work across the calm green expanse of the Domain into a harrowing flashback of some deeply wrong night in a Taylor Square club.

Points must also be awarded here for that ticking clock which also made an appearance in his production of Madonna’s “Hung Up” and his remix of Gwen Stefani’s “What You Waiting For?”

But the following remix is the only one that made Marshall H hijack my stereo at one in the morning and crank it to maximum volume for the duration. That I didn't get ejected the next morning still seems a minor miracle. Maybe they were grooving too. The track was also played at carnage volume on car journeys across desolate parts of NSW.

It’s the Trentemøller remix of Royksopp’s "What Else Is There?" There's so much going on here. Karin's skipping voice as the breakdown comes; those New Order guitars; that ugly five-note riff that anchors the song. Listen:

The Decade in Music #5: Dominik Eulberg, Kreucht and Fleucht

2009-12-02T03:20:00.000-08:00

"[…]I found that getting high often left me feeling apprehensive, hypercritical of myself, and prone to an unwelcome awareness of my life as nothing but a pile of botched and unfinished tasks. Over the course of these pot years I graduated from college, got a master’s degree, wrote a number of novels, paid my bills and my taxes, etc. I was never arrested, never got into any kind of trouble, never broke anything that could not be repaired. Mostly it had been fun, sometimes hugely; sometimes not at all. Marijuana could intensify the sunshine of a perfect summer day, but it could also deepen the gloom of a wintry afternoon; it had bred false camaraderies and drawn my attention to deep flaws and fault lines when what mattered—what matters so often in the course of everyday human life—were the surfaces and the joins." Michael Chabon, Manhood for Amateurs, 2009, p. 34-35

For much the same reasons as Chabon's, I gave up the smoke completely one day in 2006. We’d just returned to Sydney from a trip to California. It was a glorious sunny day and, although I felt some depression about the end of a fabulous holiday exploring Yosemite and Big Sur, everything was more or less just swell. What followed, from a cursory toke, was two or three hours of the most debilitating mental agitation; what I suppose we must call paranoia, even though the word does faint justice– it's more like being forced to look at yourself and everyone you know through a microscope fitted with distorting horror lenses. Enough was enough.

The album we were listening to that day was Dominik Eulberg’s Kreucht and Fleucht, which means, according to this Pitchfork review, something like “creeping and flying”. Before the agitation took hold, I can remember being awed by the glistening polar textures of disc one. It was a fresh reminder of just how miraculous music could strike you in, let's say, the right mood: the apparent perception of new dimensions and details, how freshly scrubbed the sound could seem; the sheer awesomeness of it all. I can dimly remember how the strange chants and mechanical clanking of tracks like “Leuchtturm (Wighnomy's Polarzipper Remix)” took on an oppressive air of creeping Lovecraftian dread: like witnessing some ancient tribe in the dead of the jungle night, in the midst of some unspeakable ritual. Yeah, it was that good.

The Flying disc, which I listened to quite a bit later, is the more trancey, with fantastic tracks like Holden & Thompson "Come To Me (Last Version)" and Chaten and Hopen's "An Area (Hrdvision remix)" building a crescendo of deeply fucked-up techno with vocal samples morphing from the sensual to the incoherent precisely evoking a night out, the streaks and smears of club lights behind the eyelids. But it’s still just possible for me to glimpse, between the seamlessly dovetailed beats and the architectural detailing, something vertiginous and cold and dark.

Buy Kreucht and Fleucht [UK]

Here are a couple of beauties from Disc Two:

The Decade in Music #4: The Divine Comedy, Absent Friends

2009-11-30T10:45:00.000-08:00

So we've had one break-up record. Apologies: here's another one. But the gap between Elliott Smith's Figure 8 and the Divine Comedy's Absent Friends can be measured in light years. If the first is a black mirror, the second weighs far less heavy on the heart.

Before we get to Absent Friends, let's look at Regeneration, the album that finally convinced this Divine sceptic.

In my imagination, I’m swimming against the tide; taking a stand, if I can mix the metaphor, against received opinion. Of course, this is largely fatuous bollocks. Mostly I'm just behind the times. Regeneration is a case in point.

Just about everyone I knew who'd had a good word for Neil Hannon's archrock project now seemed suddenly united in their disapprobation of Regeneration; shocked , hating the way it too eagerly threw off the fine smoking jacket of the preceding records and took up the Hoary Plaid of Rock. The wit and suavity had been ditched, or so they said, in favour of clod-hopping guitars and hairdos that could be politely called umkempt. Worse, they could only hear, in Nigel Godrich’s portentously atmospheric production, a cut-price Radiohead. And what were the songs even about? Previously, Neil Hannon would have sung about, I don't know, the National Express or hay fever or somesuch. Now he seemed to be singing about his feelings. This would never do—oh dear me no. So, Regeneration = Bad.

Which is where I shuffle in. Where long-time fans were choking on the stifling atmospheres, I was breathing in something delicious and quickly realising this was an album to which I could give a piece of my heart. I ended up listening to this album more in 2001 than I did any record except Elbow's Asleep in the Back.

Fast forward to late Australian summer of 2004. The end of a thing: I've just moved out of our water-side flat in Balmain to an apartment overlooking Sydney harbour (plus) that also houses an accountant (negative). A traumatic move by any measure: I'd moved to Australia for love, but that was over, and hear I was moving from west to east with just clothes, some books, and a few CDs for company. Including Absent Friends.

Absent Friends is Neil Hannon's masterpiece. It's a spring of melancholic positivity. Even when it flirts with outright sentimentality, I forgive it completely. If I recall, none of the songs address heartbreak per se. But the songs have a new directness and romantic sweep. "Come Home Billy Bird" brings back the wit, being a comic travelogue closing with a triumphant final line.

Listen to the best song, "Our Mutual Friend”. The music yearns and swells like a particularly swooning Hovis ad, even while the lyrical details stay touchingly ordinary:

On our friend’s settee
She told me that she really liked me
And I said, “Cool. The feeling’s mutual”.
We played old 45s
I said, “It’s like the soundtrack to our lives”
She said, “True, it’s not unusual”

This record was my constant companion during these hesitant weeks. Because what I remember most of this time alone in Potts Point is the feeling of possibility. Listening to this record and gazing out across a strange and beautiful city in late summer light, I was sure of only thing: it would all come good in time.

Buy Regeneration [UK/US]
Buy Absent Friends [UK/US]

The Decade in Music #3: Electroclash

2009-11-20T03:45:00.000-08:00

It's 2002, and I find myself entirely seduced by the genre they're calling Electroclash — a genre that's going to vanish quicker than you can say "I too would like wear my sunglasses at night."

Now, I suppose it’s just about conceivable that we’ll be having a nu-electro movement in a year or so. But the accelerating atomisation of dance music suggests otherwise. And who'd want it back?

But back then, I fell hard. I mean, what wasn’t wasn't to like? Frosty mittel-European vocals from bored models? Check. Spangly covers of obscure 80s classics. Definitely. Super-trebly synths? Par for the course.

First came the love: That'd be Kittenz & Thee Glitz from Felix Da Housecat. The genre's great albums can be enumerated on the fingers of one silvery mitten and, in truth, I’m not sure that even Kittenz counts as great. But the first five or six songs are a blueprint that not even Felix could improve upon. “Harlot”, “Walk With Me” and “Silver Screen Shower Scene” are among the scene’s ur-songs, dirty synthy poseurs all of them, strutting and pouting and full of gakky disdain like a singing Helmut Newton photo.

The affair levels out: we go to a house-party, science postgraduate students, somewhere out East. I see fit to commandeer the stereo and replace whatever anaemic nonsense they’re playing with a hardcore electro-clash compilation, featuring the wondrous “Sunglasses at Night” from Tiga and Zyntherius, the disturbing “Rippin’ Kittin” (Jude Rogers has more here) from Miss Kitten and the Golden Boy and, um... not a great deal else that's worth remembering. Oddly, the popularity and good vibes I had thought to generate were not forthcoming. People can be so fickle right?

It’s all over: Fischerspooner, handed somewhere in the precinct of a million quid by Ministry of Sound, did two great things early on before buggering off into an amyl-scented fug. One was "Emerge", a bona-fide classic. The second was their where-you-there? gig at the Arches in London. Six songs, all mimed to a backing track. Costume changes for each song. Fake blood. Wind machines. Strobes. The sort of ambition that seemed to vanish in the middle years of the British musical decade.

Electroclash as a genre was eagerly retired, even as its DNA metastasised into the chart mainstream. They'd be better and harder dance music later in the decade. But for the time there, these songs were my irresitably sexy shiny baubles of fun.

Here's "Emerge":

Here's "Rippin Kittin":

And "Sunglasses at Night":

The Decade in Music #2: Samuel Barber and John Adams

2009-11-19T01:58:00.000-08:00

2001. I'm the editor at the ill-fated Network Of The World in lovely Chiswick. It's basically a TV station producing daily music packages. Being a TV station, our open-plan office has massive plasma screen everywhere. Normally they're showing our own output: sports shows, tech, games, something called life which consisted of, um, whales. It's all a bit blurry.

So I'm working at our ridiculously high-powered PCs, fighting the temptation to get back on Napster, when I become aware that the office has emptied. Then I see that’s not quite right: everyone's gathered around the chief designer's dual monitors. Not being one of nature’s joiners and sort of just assuming they're all watching some viral video or other, I ignore the commotion.

My interest is only piqued when some sort of collective laugh or gasp issues from the group. OK, you've got me, I think. I get up and go take a look. I’m confused: I don’t immediately see what’s so interesting about a plume of smoke billowing from the World Trade Center.

And so it was that the afternoon unfolded, surreally, nightmarishly, numbly. Back at my desk, IMing friends and paranoically imagining highjacked planes crossing the Atlantic, we watch the iconic collapse on the huge plasma screens. That night, on the way to something or other, conversation is stilted: we’re numb. Only the debut of Blue Planet on the BBC is some kind of respite. The permanence of nature is a comforting message. But beyond horror, emotion was hard to come by.

It was, of all things, the Last Night of the Proms that helped unfreeze me and bought some measure of cathartic sadness. It so happened that Proms that year had been especially dedicated to American music. Leonard Slatkin, an American citizen himself, was conducting a hastily revised programme, dropping the jingoism for something more reflective. In tribute to the victims, there was a minute’s silence. Then played Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings. Slatkin’s face says it all.

Some years later in Sydney, I went to the Opera House to hear a performance of John Adams' On The Transmigration of Souls. Especially composed to commemorate the attacks, the piece featured speakers set around the auditorium playing verbal fragments from letters found in the wreckage. The effect was to give a human face to those otherwise incomprehensible weeks.

So, not pop music. Nevertheless, two of the most intense musical experiences of my decade.

Buy On The Transmigration of Souls
.
An interview with John Adams on the composition of the piece.

The Decade in Music #1: Elliott Smith, Figure 8

2009-11-16T08:55:00.000-08:00

Release date (UK): April 18th, 2000

Ah 2000, I hardly remember you. And for that, I’m mostly grateful.

Where 1999 had been a fabulous year of adventures and hi-jinks — London! — the first year of the new century, the early part at least, was mostly a bust.

At the tailend of 1999, I embroiled myself in what was in hindsight an disastrous relationship with someone who, as I later discovered, was rather more attracted to hard drugs than she was to me. Whoops! She left for Barcelona on May Day 2000: the day we voted in Ken Livingstone as the Mayor of London: naturally I was distraught.

Which is were Figure 8 came in. I’d first heard the lo-fi version of Elliott Smith in 1997, on a cassette from a friend over from Portland. As 2000 came around, I would have said my favourite album was XO, a masterpiece of guitar playing, waltz-time balladry and almost baroque pop harmonising. (I’m still no nearer to replicating the amazing beauty of “Independence Day” or “Tomorrow Tomorrow” on guitar today. Slow down!).

But Figure 8 seemed from the first to be over-stuffed, too rich, lacking the killer songs, too long. But, post-heartbreak, the album stood revealed as somehow written about, and sung to, me. How was such a thing possible? Listen: “Everything Reminds Me of Her”. Already the title. And then: “I never really had a problem because of leaving: But everything reminds me of her, this evening”.

Listening again today, all that emotional turmoil long since forgotten, it seems a trick of the light, or, at any rate, of the heart. It's not a depressing album by any measure. And knowing what we know about Elliott and his own misery, the record is ultimately hopeful. The middle eight of “In The Lost Of Found” has, to a great swell of strings: “day breaks every morning when he wakes and thinks of you”. And, right at the end, the direct devastation of “I Better Be Quiet Now”.

While the decade would never be so raw again, I can listen to this album, a record which made a profound connection at a dark time, and just about detect the aftershocks of those narcissistic pre 9/11 days.

Buy Figure 8 from Amazon

Sweet Adeline, the best Elliott Smith site.

My Decade in Music: The Best Songs and Albums of the 2000s

2009-11-16T02:42:00.001-08:00

Well that's ten years done almost done with. Ten years of happy and heartbreak, of England and Australia, of dancing and chilling and hands-in-the-airing. Of listening to music on CD then MP3 player, then iPod. Of listening to albums entire to shuffling between playlists. From buying the odd record to obsessively scouring the MP3 blogs. From Napster to iTunes to Spotify. Can I shape the last ten years, after all only my third full decade of listening to music, into something with even the faintest accordance with my slippery memory. Let's give it a go.

Now, it’s so easy, isn’t it, it’s just so easy to scoff at those websites and magazines that have decided to publish their lists of the top albums of our splintering age, only to then have the likes of you and me point and laugh and tweet our outraged hilarity at the notion of, say, a Bob Dylan album anywhere near the top 50.

But what would make my list? Freed from having to meet demographic expectations and unrequired to satisfy a massive or medium or even discernable readership, I’ve compiled a list of the albums and tracks that have meant the most to me over the last ten years of my life, that have soundtracked my stately passage from an immature 25 to a marginally more rounded 35.

Some of the following selections may not even have been released during the decade but hey: I'm in charge, right? One thing that’ll be immediately obvious: despite my fond opinion of myself as a listener with an ear-thumb in every flavour of sonic pie (wait: is that disgusting? Or delicious?), the blunt fact is that my tastes aren’t particularly catholic. Hip hop, jazz, metal, you name it, they're all conspicuously under-represented. I can only plead honesty: if the selection strikes you as revealing a shockingly prejudiced quasi-bigotted, Phil Collinsy collection of records, well... you've got me.

One other thing: this list is more or less in chronological order. If life is just long enough to write this in the first place, it’s not quite long enough to put these records into order of preference. And anyway, would it really be fair to compare a record I've loved for almost ten years with something released only in 2009? Course not.

OK. Let’s get on with it. I'll try to publish a new piece every day. Let's start as the new century gets under way....

1: Elliott Smith, Figure 8
2: Samuel Barber and John Adams
3: Electroclash: Felix da Housecat, Miss Kitten and Fischerspooner
4: The Divine Comedy, Absent Friends
5: Dominik Eulberg, Kreucht and Fleucht
6: Royksopp, "What Else Is There? (Trentemøller remix)
7: Ryan Adams - Heartbreaker
8: Beth Gibbons & Rustin Man - Out Of Season
9: LCD Soundsystem, "Someone Great"
10: Portal's GLaDOS song
11: Elbow, "Grounds for Divorce"

Mistaken For Strangers

2009-10-01T01:01:00.000-07:00

I've always loved this song. The lyrics just keep getting better:

You get mistaken for strangers by your own friends
When you pass them at night under the silvery, silvery Citibank lights
Arm in arm in arm and eyes and eyes glazing under.
Oh you wouldn't want an angel watching over -
Surprise, surprise! They wouldn't wannna watch
Another uninnocent, elegant fall into the unmagnificent lives of adults.

God in the Quad

2009-08-28T02:17:00.000-07:00

James Wood in the New Yorker writes about the new academic defense of religion, principally Terry Eagleton's largely incoherent attack on Dawkins et al. Annoyingly the piece is behind a subscription wall, so I can't link to it, but it's well worth a read.

This quote struck me:

"When the pianist Andras Schiff says, as he did recently, that , while Beethoven is human, "Mozart was sent from Heaven, he's not one of us," is he merely making use of a post-religious language, or is an actually religious language using him? ABolishing the category of the religious robs non-believers of some surplus of the inexpressible; it forbids the contrails of uncertainty to pass over our lives. What is most repellent about the new atheism is its intolerant certainty; it is always noon in Dawkin's world, and the sun of science an liberal positivism is shining brassily, casting no shadows."

Why Evolution is True has no truck with such fine shading.

One Night To Speed Up Truth

2009-08-27T11:20:00.000-07:00

Lord knows how I missed this.

Mew - No More Stories

2009-08-27T11:04:00.000-07:00

Discovering an undiscovered hankering for Danish proglite, I've been feeling Mew's No More Stories.

Here comes music journalism: there's a song called "Silas the Magic Car". With a children's choir. Mmm.

Yeah, exactly.

Here's the video for the first single, "Introducing Palace Players", a song angular in much the same manner as the Giant's Causeway, but with a brilliant little video:

Leviathan, or The Whale

2009-08-18T06:03:00.000-07:00

High on the list of books I must read this decade, certainly much higher than any number of gloomy Russians or periphrastic Frenchmen, is Melville's Moby Dick. It was James Wood's essay, unpromisingly titled "The All and the If: God and Metaphor in Melville" that got me hooked on this shaggy mammal story. The way Woods tell it, Melville is second only to Shakespeare in his awesome attempt to encircle a world with a mad effusion of words. I've tried before, only to be done in by the awesome tedium of that chapter-long sermon which, I'm ashamed to say, occurs before our heroes have even left the land.

Clearly I'm just going to have to skip the damn thing, having just read Philip Hoare' quite wonderful Leviathan, or the Whale. The book, an intoxicating hybrid, mixes W.G. Sebald's gloomy peregrinations and gnomic musings with a bloody history of whaling. Hoare, depressed by the murk of London and the death of his mother, travels to New England and meditates upon the obscure biology of the sperm whale, describing how a great American industry was founded upon the wholesale slaughter of this fabulous beast. We see just how uniquely dangerous the life of a whaling Nantucketer really was, as they rowed in their tiny boats to the Whale's blind side, hoping to harpoon it before it panicked and stove in their puny vessel. We also follow the feckless Herman Melville, the new enfant terrible of American letters who's hoping to write a great adventure novel but who instead meets Nathaniel Hawthorne and is gripped by the transcendental fever that would elevate Moby Dick from the merely picturesque into a new American mythic.

We've killed hundreds of thousands of sperm whales in the last three centuries. Whale oil has been used in surprising ways, even lubricating the moving parts of the Voyager satellite. Here's a video where the balance is, however fleetingly, redressed:

Sperm whale attack
by dmars72

Carol Brown

2009-08-14T05:13:00.000-07:00

They said it wasn't as good as the first season. Pfft. 'They". They know nothing.

Arcadia

2009-08-13T06:39:00.001-07:00

We saw Tom Stoppard's Arcadia last night. I don't need to tell you that it's a wonderfully mind-bending couple of hour that touches on literary authenticity, 18th trends in gardening, the second law of thermodynamics, Lord Byron and his devilish ways, the heat death of the universe, iterated equations and much else besides.

Iterated equations? Yes. Feed X into equation, get Y. Let Y be the next X and repeat. From such humble beginnings can come all the patterns of nature. For instance, take a look at these truly extraordinary computer generated flowers:

This dance is like a weapon

2009-08-13T01:06:00.000-07:00

A new song played at Latitude:

múm "11 songs to drown in a lake to"

2009-08-12T09:49:00.000-07:00

"11 songs to drown to" - a múm mixtape by seaninsound

2009-08-11T07:52:00.000-07:00

From Normblog:

The claim made by Richard Dawkins, and mentioned by Martin in passing here, 'that imposing parental beliefs on children is a form of child abuse' surely merits some clarifying explanation before we assent to it. It is, of course, easy as well as necessary to draw a distinction between putting a belief to children in a way that makes it plain to them that there are alternatives to, questions about, disagreements over it, and insisting on the belief as the sole unchallengeable truth. There's a difference between trying to educate children in a spirit that encourages interest in the world and finding out about it, on the one hand, and indoctrination, on the other. However, teaching people anything at all must involve putting across some points, beliefs, theses, in a more favourable light than others. If nothing else, education in a non-doctrinaire spirit means explaining the different modes of holding a belief and why leaving them open to falsification in the light of counter-evidence or the demonstration of internal inconsistency is an intellectual virtue. Again, must we not discriminate better from worse as between maintaining some standards of personal cleanliness and not doing so, or between behaving with consideration and kindness and being rude and dishonest? More generally, educating children involves, willy-nilly, the imparting of moral beliefs. This cannot be done without the presentation of some things as good and others as less good or downright bad. Even done in a non-doctrinaire way, it must involve a degree of active direction. It's misleading, therefore, to pretend that only dogmatists and fanatics narrow the minds of their children to the available sum of human beliefs. Everybody does it to some extent. Socialization of any kind would be impossible without it. It begins with the teaching of language.

The Abstinence Teacher

2009-07-30T03:53:00.000-07:00

My better- or rather, my vastly superior - half recently bought a copy of Tom Perotta's The Abstinence Teacher from Shakespeare and co in Paris. Since I had only brought How to Lose Friends and Alienate People along as holiday matter, I needed a new book, and stat (not because Toby Young's memoir is awful - it's not. It's just that it's one of those little pamphlets you can hoover up in more or less a single sitting: cf. those of Marcus Trescothick and Michael Atherton; I scanned the salient chapters--the crack-up, the Ashes--in various Borders around town). Anyway, I wheedled and pouted like a sad champion until I was allowed to read.

It's actually brilliant. I sort of knew it must be at least a bit good, since it had been hugely well reviewed just about everywhere. It's a nice question, therefore, why the book I never trained my voracious I MUST BUY THIS kleig lights upon the book for even a fleeting moment. Anyway. The book is about a sex education teacher in a small American town, whose turf gets encroached upon by an incongruously gamine Christian pushing her abstinence-only program into the school, and who also has to deal with her daughter's soccer coach who, after much drinking and drugging, is now born-again.

Apart from the brilliant interior voices of the assembled pastors, sad-sack teachers, ex-wives and husbands, defiant teens and jarringly perky Christians, what stands out is Perotta's compelling facility with dialogue and plot. Fantastic set pieces, such as the recalcitrant teachers having to relate a "sexual experience I regret" or the born-again convention, are powered forward by the smooth engine of the plot, all its part moving in lovely harmony as the book's smooth groove's crescendo hits a surprising note at the climax.

Fantastic.

Antichrist

2009-07-29T02:22:00.001-07:00

Some thoughts about the movie Antichrist, about which I hardly know what to think, which seems to me puts it three quarters of the way to greatness.

Now, heaven knows, it seems a lifetime since we had a honest-to-goodness movie scandal, an attempt by the redtops, in the name of all that is decent and holy, to foment outrage over what they would have you believe is some squalid awful little movie fit only for immediate banning, then the burning of all involved. Not so very long ago, when we were still being treated as innocent lickle bunnykins by the State, you only had to say "Cronenberg!" and the offending piece of celluloid would be removed from our sight, never to be seen again.

I remember in the early days of VHS coming into possession of strange almost samizdat catalogues that listed thousands of titles that I could never hope to see, with strange and impossibly exotic titles: Clockwork Orange; Straw Dogs; I Spit On Your Grave; Driller Killer; Last Half on the Left; Texas Chainsaw Massacre. What on earth did these titles portend? And when the original video nasty scandal got them all banned (I seem to remember Videodrome being held up as a paragon of all that was evil. Why?), naturally I became all the more curious. These movies all but promised to freeze my young blood, harrow up my very soul, make my two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres and, since we're on the subject, cause each particular hair to stand on end like quills upon the fretful porcupine. Fantastically scary shit, in other words.

Now, with every two bit video nasty finally released and detoxified and with even Cannibal Holocaust watchable over the webular intertubes, we've all got a bit blase. Who's gonna shake us from our slumber?

If the papers are to be believed, and there's a statement that needs strong shoulders, then Lars Von Trier's latest noisome concoction is just the thing to reawaken outrage muscles not flexed this millennium. The way the critics are telling it, Antichrist is little more than horror porn, Hostel or Saw taken to a shocking new extreme. Real penetration? Genital mutilation? This is one sick snuff movie that must be banned forthwith.

Actually, it's nothing of the sort. Rather, it's a beautiful and bleak film with a talking fox.

Yes, Antichrist is surpassingly strange and disturbing, a fever dream of a film. It reminded me of a more elliptic Whicker Man, with its obsession with rituals and symbols and the pagan heart of nature beating beneath a veer of Christian respectability; although it should be said that Antichrist made that film look like Carry On Pagan - there are no songs, or Christopher Lees or prancing virgins in this.

Rather we have a movie that spends its first hour in a sickly trance of anxiety, less film than a high gloss version of the DSM V. It's a case study of pathological and profound depression, as Charlotte Gainsbourg's unnamed character tries to get through the anxiety attacks that plague her since the death of her and Willem Dafoe's child. He's a therapist; he treats her; tries to get her off the drugs; has a therapeutic nostrum for all her symptoms. Gainsbourg is all too believable as she struggles with tremors and paralysis and numbness and his impotent rationalism. Von Trier says that he identifies with her character; the film was born from a period of profound depression he suffered. It's all up their on the screen.

At this point, Defoe wants the couple to go to the woods where Gainsbourg had previously attempted to finish her PhD concerning the torture of women (by women?) throughout the centuries, a thick tract entitled Gynocide, replete with photocopies of medieval woodcuttings and modern outrages. He wants her to confront her fears. It's fair to say that things don't go quite according to plan. From here on in, there's a great deal that's symbolic, referencing (I assume) animistic traditions, folklore and paganism, even shamanism. A constellation called the Three Beggars becomes important (even though, as the man points out at one point, "there's no such constellation"). Foxes, crows, deers. Ants and acorns. Nature as Satan? Sure. It's all in there.

I'm not at all sure what it all means. That's part of why I thought it was fantastic. Any film that features, in no particular order, beautiful ultra-slow motion black and white scenes of snow and sex soundtracked by Handel, a hand covered in ticks, a miscarrying deer, a hatchling bird being devoured by ants, an oddly unkillable crow, weird lensing effects, such that the forest seems to be a living and devouring thing, a most terrifying dead tree, the aforementioned fox with its terrible message, childishly scrawled titles, a classic "book that explains the madness" scene, and an epilogue that is both very moving and not entirely comprehensible, is worth the experience.

The genital mutilation? I closed my eyes.

Michael Jackson R.I.P.

2009-06-25T16:27:00.000-07:00

Michael Jackson died just over an hour ago.

Thriller was the first album I ever remember listening to on headphones, just a little kid in the darkness watching the twinkly green lights on our NASA-era stereo. I'd always fall asleep before I got to the end. I was mesmerised by 'Human Nature'.

And then, the Bad tour came to Wembley Stadium. It was the first stadium show I ever saw. I'm not sure any subsequent gig has come close to the electrifying thrill of seeing Jackson, in his prime, no need to call himself the King of Pop, everyone knew he just was, dancing and singing like no-one before or since.

And then, later, when you started to learn a bit about music, came an appreciation of the sheer fucking irresistible groove of those best songs. That bassline. That guitar solo. The ecstatic yelps and sighs, the chirruping vocal tics beyond language.

In the days and weeks and years to come we're gonna hear plenty of lurid stories about his last years. I'd be lying if I said I won't be reading them with as much prurient interest as the next guy.

But for now - here's to Michael for all those tunes, and the memories they'll always trigger.

Cheers.

Declare Independence

2009-06-18T11:01:00.000-07:00

I've identified a plausible candidate for that gnawing empty feeling. It's that I haven't seen Björk play live in years. What a terrible oversight. I'm blaming the fact that I didn't listen to Volta a great deal, which says more about my lazy listening than it does about the record's intrinsic quality. Oh wait, it also says that any album that prominently features the vocals of Anthony sends me running in the opposite direction lest I be flattened by the schools of amourous sirenians sure to be attracted by his penetrative mating call. I digress. I've seen Björk play three times, and each time she was increasingly and absurdly brilliant. The first time at the Opera House in Covent Garden was absolutely magical, nape-prickling stuff. This video, of a song that struck me as kinda meh in its recorded form, is a reminder that we really ought to, to paraphrase Auden, see Björk immediately or die.

Sorry but this is funny

2009-06-03T07:24:00.000-07:00

I have no words, so I'll let Sasha explain:

Sometimes consensus is better than a hot tip. Even if we can’t agree on the big things—like whether or not free-market capitalism itself is the condition that produced the current economic malaise—we can all send each other the same funny video at the same time. (When our own Ben Greenman and Dita Von Teese agree on something, I think we are close to consensus.) The video for “Total Eclispe Of The Heart,” below, makes good on an Internet challenge meme: narrate the images in a video, literally, by creating a new version of the song that inspired the video.

I'm still frankly staggered at the suggestion that this is based on the real video. Even with the literal lyrics, why didn't a nation throw up its own pelvis laughing?

Mayflies

2009-05-19T03:12:00.001-07:00

Mayflies

In somber forest, when the sun was low,
I saw from unseen pools a mist of flies,
In their quadrillions rise,
And animate a ragged patch of glow,
With sudden glittering – as when a crowd,
Of stars appear.
Through a brief gap in black and driven could,
One arc of their great round-dance showing clear.

It was no muddled swarm I witnessed, for
In entrechats each fluttering insect there
Rose two steep yards in air,
Then slowly floated down to climb once more,
So that they all composed a manifold
And figured scene,
And the seemed the weavers of some cloth of gold,
Or the fine pistons of some bright machine.

Watching those lifelong dancers of a day
As night closed in, I felt myself alone
In a life too much my own,
More mortal in my separateness than they –
Unless, I thought, I had been called to be
Not fly or star
But one whose task is joyfully to see
How fair the fiats of the caller are.

— Richard Wilbur

Collected Poems 1943-2004 (Waywiser, 2005), copyright © Richard Wilbur 2005

Sherlock Holmes

2009-05-19T02:37:00.000-07:00

Along with every other right-thinking Englishman of good breeding and temperament, I loathe, dispise and generally disdain that infamous vulgarian Mr Guy Richie, on the unimpeachable grounds that he is a debaser, a corrupter and bespoiler of all that is good and right in our culture.

But on the other hand, my admiration and joy when surveying the works of noted theatrical gent, Mr Robert Downey Jnr. Esq. are without parallel this side of the capital's most delectable fleshpots.

So I don't know how I feel about this:

One espies the presence of Jude Law. As long as Moriarty isn't played by Shia Leboeuf, I'm reasonably interested.

The Road

2009-05-18T09:40:00.000-07:00

"Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery." - Last lines of The Road.

Synecdoche, New York

2009-05-18T02:31:00.000-07:00

Neither the sun nor death can be looked at with a steady eye, said a clever man, and films about death are as rare as hen’s teeth. Real death, that is, not Hollywood death in a hail of bullets or from some fatal but apparently mostly painless disease, contracted perhaps as the result of questionable moral choices in the Sixties. Synecdoche, New York is about the shape of life and then “the only end of life”. It’s perhaps the strangest and most involuted film I can recall. It’s also intensely sad, although rarely in a heart-tuggingly manipulative way. It's more about the steady accumulation of defeats, that slow motion pitiable crash of most people’s lives. Synecdoche is a figure of speech where the part stands for the whole; keeping track of the levels of correspondence, from character to character, from director to character, from Kaufman to Caden Cotard, is all but impossible; you keep getting floored by sudden connections long after the film has finished. There's none of the comedy of Kaufman's previous screen-plays, though there is much narrative and visual wit. Mostly there are melancholic echoes and disturbing revelations and jolting narrative jumps and morose proclamations; all the epiphanies turn out to be fleeting, provisional. Like life.

Whither posting?

2009-05-12T03:10:00.000-07:00

You're always on soggy ground when you have to apologise for the lack of posting. But that's what I'm reduced to: begging your patience and asking for an extension. Let's just agree that the dog ate my homework and also my keyboard and motivation. Posts to follow, on a range of ostensibly exciting topics

Confessions of an English Mystic, being a review of the latest album by Bat for Lashes - Two Suns

2009-04-22T04:55:00.000-07:00

Just a couple of Monday's ago, as I lay adrift in the adoring sunshine, I found myself falling and rushing, as if sucked through a tunnel, into a laudanum-induced dream, a delightful fugue state whereby a horde of homunculi danced jazzily across my mind's eye before dissolving and abstracting into a most pleasant delirium of fluttering geometries, bejeweled ziggurats and byzantine topographies. Then, sailing through this most queer inner cosmos, I saw great planets on fire, plunging and shattering against a crystalline sun. I saw dark hearts blazing while they beat and an orchard strewn with vastly swollen fruit. All these sightes were set in a rippling landscape, as if the very Earth herself desired transfiguration and deliquescence.

And there, in a lush valley threaded with streams and brooks and gurgling oases of honey and ambrosia and possibly the juice of cranberries, I saw a majestical iridescent fortress, fretted with golden fire, from which emerged the most fantastical chimera, a creature of such impossible provenance I am loath to describe it lest I be removed to Bedlam. It was as if the Lord had taken the body, legs and tail of the proud unicorn but then combined it, somehow, with the head of a horse... this was, as you imagine a sight most fearful and awesome to behold. Indeed, it was deeply mental.

More than this I cannot remember, for I was rudely plucked from my delerium by an insistent knocking on my door. It was a fellow trying to sell me his wares. He claimed to be from Porlock. I told him that I had no use of wares, thanks, this being the 21^st century, and just where the Tooting Bec is Porlock anyway? Making the tenacious limpet seem positively irresolute by comparison, our man continued his pitch, convinced that his wares were of the highest quality. I eventually got him to leave whereupon I retired to my bed, eager to reawaken my visionary state. Alas! Ecstatical slumber proved elusive: each time I tried to relax and coax back the lost world, my mind became bepopulate with the mere fancies and flimflam of this drear world. All that remained were fragments; shards of the dream now lay shattered about.

Happily, Natasha Khan of Bat for Lashes seems to have visited this same undiscovered country and brought back not glimpes and shards but whole songs; a rich and vivid tapestry full of the fevered denizens and mind-wrong architecture of that other place. Two Suns, on the surface simply an album, and a second album at that, is in fact, a travelogue from this undiscovered country, a glimpse of a better place from an artist who’s peeked behind the curtain to reveal an unsuspected truth: that there are worlds and wonders unseen by you and I and also Lady GaGa.

Speaking in Code

2009-04-16T06:51:00.000-07:00

Can I see this now please?

More info about Philip Sherburne.

Review: DM Stith - Heavy Ghost (Asthmatic Kitty)

2009-03-29T11:11:00.000-07:00

THE DM STITH GUIDE TO BECOMING A WITCH

Forget tincture of henbane or other such homeopathic nonsenses. As far as I know, there is but one universally agreed and empirically proven method of inducing witch-hood: you must first fetch yourself to a local churchyard, preferably on All Hallows night, then you walk widdershins thrice round the church. You should find, crouched athwart a tombstone, the Devil, most likely in his cankerous black frog form (try again if he’s not there. Any multiple of three ought to work). Close your eyes and kiss those puckered amphibian lips, and Bob’s your... well, in fact he’s no longer your uncle but a happy reminder of the mortal world you’ve just left behind. Old Nic has transformed you into a weird sister, no strings attached. For the rest of your natural life, you'll enjoy trouble-free naked cavorting with the Great Goat himself, drinking the blood of virgins whenever you’re in the mood and generally having amazing witchy larks. One word of advice: steer clear of any local folk who invite you to their barbecue.

The real centrepiece of a witch’s life, leaving to one side for the moment the business with the broomsticks, is the coven, which is really just a chance for you to let your copious and surely jet-black hair down. As with weddings or Bar Mitzvahs, the difference between a desultory gathering and a hot diabolical shindig often comes down to the tunes. Many's the virgin about to be rent by the Knife of Kris who's suddenly had to halt proceedings to get Girls Aloud off the stereo. Avoiding such faux pas is all important to a well-done blood rite. And that’s where Heavy Ghost comes in.

Perfect for any self-respecting middle-class sacrificial rite or suburban satanic mass, Heavy Ghost is a lurid and sulphurous album brew, rich with the tang of forgotten magiks. You can practically taste the eye of newt.

Twitching the strings at the centre of this antic puppet-show is DM Stith, an acolyte of Sufjan Stevens. Stith has clearly learnt at the feet of his master. But Stith takes Steven’s sacred patterns and inverts them. He’s more the mysterious gardener coaxing and training the tendrils of his organic sound until you’re listening to a wall of hawthorn festooned with poison berries, the nests of strange birds with human voices and impossibly thorny branches. Seriously.

DM Stith's sweet voice hangs entranced at the centre of these songs and keeps them from flying off into chaos. "Heavy Ghost", for instance, is a messy bricolage of voices that knit together creating drifting clouds of harmony and sunshine, flying free in the way only messy bricolages can. "Braid of Voices" shows the trick, or the art, to best effect: minimal song structure, numinous chords, reverent chanting, building up wizard-you-will-not-PASS-style, before winding away into a scary nowhereness. It's The Drift reimagined by Jeff Buckley. (The resurrected corpse thereof).

If you like Radiohead's “We Suck Young Blood”, you'll like this. It has all that song's claustrophobia and stem-wound complexity. Also the airlessness and lack of obvious feeling. What's powerful here comes mainly from the sense of a spell cast; once it's all over and you're back blinking in the daylight, you can’t quite remember the structure of the experience. Then you notice you've been expertly eviscerated.

If this doesn’t go down a treat at your next vampires and vicars party, you’re probably just a human.

More information on Heavy Ghost here.

Video: Fever Ray - If I Had A Heart (2009)

2009-03-27T10:40:00.000-07:00

Fever Ray - If I Had a Heart
by MuteRecords

It someone seems wrong to describe oneself as a "fan" of The Knife. God knows, we absolutely caned their last two albums of bone-chilling hardcore horror techno pop (that's right), with Silent Shout being my album of 2006 (at the gym, it was a headphone tonic to all that aspirational house they pump in to really make you "go for it!"). It struck me as formally perfect and terrifying with it, much like the electronic wails which play over the opening credits to The Shining: somehow and at the same hugely addictive and massively bowel-loosening. I'm fairly sure this some our their pitch-shifting effects are outlawed by the Geneva Convention. But a fan? Seems like the wrong word. Maybe acolyte?

Anyway, singer Karin has a new project called Fever Ray. An album review will follow if I can get hold of a copy; in the meantime, here's the video for the single. That still is so Knife perfect it's almost a cliche. Still, I'm keeping the lights on tonight.

Ever Since Darwin

2009-03-27T06:37:00.000-07:00

Here's my latest article for Orange Travel. The brief was to survey some of the stranger species discovered since Darwin's day. I had a slightly more esoteric list, which included the rather marvelous megamouth shark, but unfortunately we were limited to photos we could source from AP.

How many different species of animal and plant are there?

Astonishingly, we’re no nearer an answer today than we were when Charles Darwin attempted to explain the amazing diversity of life 150 years ago.

It’s estimated that there are an amazing 5-8 million species of beetle alone, with new species discovered every day. And it’s not just beetles. Scores of new birds, reptile and even mammals have been discovered in just the last decade. Darwin would have been awestruck...

To celebrate the great scientist’s bicentennial year, we take a tour of the planet and meet just a handful of the weird and wonderful new species discovered and named in the last 100 years.

From a hauntingly beautiful wild cat and a shrew with an odd nose to a dragon with gruesome feeding habits, find out what amazing species live where - and how to see them in the wild.

1. Komodo dragon

What is it? The largest living species of lizard, the Komodo dragon (Varanus komodensis) is a huge monitor first discovered by western science in 1910. It grows up to three metres long can weigh as much as 70kg.

Where does it live? These almost prehistoric creatures live on the island of Komodo and some neighbouring islands in Indonesia where they are the largest predator.

Evolutionary Selling Point (ESP): In 2005, a team of researchers discovered that the dragon’s bite was poisonous. As if that wasn’t enough, the dragon’s saliva also contains a bacterium which causes septicaemia; if the prey should survive the initial ambush, the dragon will simply wait for it to die of the resulting infection.

2. Grey-faced sengi

What is it? Discovered by motion-detecting cameras in 2005, the grey-faced sengi (Rhynchocyon udzungwensis) is a previously unknown – and unexpectedly large – species of elephant shrew and one of the handful of new mammals that get discovered every year.

Where does it live? This odd-looking creature (its Latin name means “snouted dog”) was found living in a small village community by scientists in the high-altitude Ndundulu forest in Tanzania’s Udzungaw Mountains.

Evolutionary Selling Point (ESP): Elephant shrews are very hard to see, being both incredibly wary and highly camouflaged. They build special pathways through the forest which they patrol looking for insects, using that long snout as a sense organ, and down which they dash if threatened.

3. Yeti crab

What is it? The oceans, which cover over seven-tenths of the earth’s surface, continue to reveal bizarre new species. This shaggy crab was discovered by a Californian team diving in the South Pacific Ocean and was quickly dubbed the yeti crab (Kiwi hirsuta) due to its covering of blonde hairs or cetae.

Where does it live? The yeti crab was discovered by submariners some 900 miles south of Easter Island at a depth of more than 7,000 feet.

Evolutionary Selling Point (ESP): The crab, which looks more like a lobster, lives on hydrothermal vents near to the mid-ocean ridge. It is thought that the crab, which feeds on green algae and shrimp, uses its extraordinary covering of hairs to filter out the poisonous minerals being continually belched out of the vents.

4. Golden-mantled tree kangaroo

What is it? First described by scientist Pavel German in 1990, the golden-mantled tree kangaroo (Dendrolagus pulcherrimus) is named for the colouration on its shoulders. This adorable creature leaves in the mountain forests of Papua New Guinea - a habitat thatʼs shrinking every year.

Where does it live? In the Torricelli Mountains of Papua New Guinea and the nearby Foja Mountains in Indonesia.

Evolutionary Selling Point (ESP): Newly discovered animals are often at risk of becoming extinct before they can be fully described by science. This highly specialised animal lives in the trees in high mountain regions and was previously much more widespread. Itʼs now conﬁned to two small regions, making this perhaps the most endangered of all marsupials.

5. Bornean clouded leopard

What is it? “Scientists Discover New Beetle” is not exactly headline news. But the discovery of a new species of big cat? That’s a big deal. Although long known to local tribes, western science first heard of this cat’s existence from a tantalising description by a French naturalist in the 19th century. But it wasn’t until 2007 that existence of the Bornean clouded leopard (Neofelis diardi) was finally confirmed.

Where does it live? It keeps itself to itself in the deep tropical forests in Borneo and Sumatra.

Evolutionary Selling Point (ESP): The Bornean clouded leopard has a local name which means “tree branch tiger”, suggesting that this immensely secretive feline is a skilled climber. It’s also effectively camouflaged in the dark undergrowth of the forest.

6. Nectophrynoides sp.

What is it? This fantastically-coloured toad is the most recently-discovered animal on our list - so new that it hasn’t yet been given a scientific name yet. It belongs to a genus of toads that are found only in Tanzania. It has a distinctive “plink” call that can be heard echoing throughout the valley it calls home.

Where does it live? This particular genus of toad all live in the jungles of the South Nguru region of Tanzania, with this species being further restricted to a single valley.

Evolutionary Selling Point (ESP): All the toads of this genus have one characteristic that distinguishes them from other toads. The females are viviparous, which means they give birth to live young, making them the only toads in the world not to lay eggs – an advantage when there are plenty of egg-eating predators around. This particular species is covered in glands, bumps and assorted protuberances. Why? To date, no-one knows.

7. Swimming batfish

What is it? Discovered in 1958, the swimming batfish (Ogcocephalus darwini) is a kind of angler fish that makes its living on the ocean floor, feeding on fish, crustaceans and polychaete worms.

Where does it live? Darwin would have kicked himself – the swimming batfish was discovered in the waters around the Galapagos Islands in the Pacific ocean.

Evolutionary Selling Point (ESP): Despite its name, the swimming batfish is not a good swimmer. Instead, it uses its spiny pectoral fins to walk on the ocean floor. Like other angler fish, the batfish dangles a lure to catch its prey. But, instead of using bioluminescence like its cousins, the batfish secretes chemicals into the water which many smaller fish find irresistible.

8. Samkos bush frog

What is it? First described by a team of scientists in 2007, the Samkos bush frog (Chiromantis samkosensis) is a new species of moss frog known from only a single specimen. The frog’s appearance is down to its translucent skin, through which it’s possible to see its green blood and turquoise-coloured bones.

Where does it live? In the remote Cardamom Mountains of Cambodia.

Evolutionary Selling Point (ESP): Very little is known about this frog. It’s quite possible that it’s already extinct because its habitat is under threat from local road building. Frogs like this one are able to breathe through their skin, which must be kept moist at all times, else they will suffocate.

9. Lepilemur seali

What is it? Even though primates are our closest cousins, new species are still being discovered. Lepilemur seali is a brand new species of lemur, first described in 2005 by veterinarian David Louis and yet to be given a common name.

Where does it live? All lemurs live on the island of Madagascar off the eastern coast of Africa.

Evolutionary Selling Point (ESP): Lemurs belong to an ancient family of primates called the prosimians. They arrived in Madagascar while it was still attached to the African mainland. When the island split around 160 million years ago, the lemurs were left in isolation to develop into hundreds of separate species. It’s thought their name derives from a Latin word meaning “spirits of the night”; if you look into their huge and haunting eyes, it’s easy to see why.

10. Smoky honeyeater

What is it? Proving that new species of bird are being discovered every year, the spectacular wattled smoky honeyeater (Melipotes carolae) was among a number of new species unearthed in 2005 by a team of researchers trekking in Western New Guinea (the Indonesian territory of Irian Jaya).

Where does it live? In the remote forests of the Foja mountain range in Western New Guinea, at altitudes of above 1,000ft.

Evolutionary Selling Point (ESP): Honeyeaters are a large family of birds similar to hummingbirds. Both families feed on the nectar of plants, though the honeyeaters are yet to master the art of hovering. Males of this are able to flush its distinctive wattle as a way of attracting the opposite sex.

Dark Night of the Soul

2009-03-19T05:50:00.000-07:00

The Grey Album was a riot, no, but I can hardly say I loved it all that much. I'd rather not listen to that much concentrated Jay-Z, thanks, even when he is backed by the Fabs.

But the sheer transgressive thrill of it! I'm game for anything that samples The Beatles creatively. And then, of course, there was the record's sheer unobtainability, back in those far-off days of 2004 when downloading a samizdat album was still something of a thrill, like being part of a select club, rather than these days when you can get any album you choose over the interwebs. A mash-up of a record that could never get released featuring a band whose governing interests are still highly suspicious of anything digital. Delicious!

And now, oh Goddess of Irony: Danger Mouse, the creative brains behind The Grey Album, seems to fallen foul of EMI and those 19th century copyright laws again, for who knows what reason. I don't propose discussing the byzantine byways, cul-de-sacs and dead-ends of licensing and copyright and clearance law (for that, HearCanal drops regular and well-formed thought packages). But the new record currently languishing in limbo, Dark Night of the Soul, sounds, to these irretrievably rockist ears, like a far richer listening experience than The Grey Album ever was. And it's looking like it might never be released! W00t! Go EMI! Etc.

Dark Night of the Soul seems to be the work of Danger Mouse, Sparklehouse (whose name I can never hear without hearing the japanese music journalist in Meeting People is Easy misnaming them Sparklyhorse. An improvement...) and, of all people, David Lynch, plus a host of collaborators, including Iggy Pop, Frank Black, Flaming Lips, The Shins and more. Sparkelhorse and Dangermouse look after all the music, Lynch after the photography that accompanies the project. At this point, some unspecified dispute led to the album being mothballed. That hasn't stopped the team behind Dark Night releasing the album; except that now it comes with a blank CDR scrawled with the legend: "For Legal Reasons, enclosed CD-R contains no music. Use it as you will."

At which point, eyes roll heavenward, fists bunch and a small amount of blood leaks from the mouth as the thwarted listener contemplates the far-sightedness of EMI, a company finding ever more dispiriting ways of trashing its brand. OK, in the spirit of fairness: the artists might be spitting the dummy over some trifle that's currently opaque, though one suspects not. Whatever. The album sounds fantastic.

I know this because the whole thing is available for your listening pleasure at NPR's Dark Night of the Soul listening pages, though who knows for how much longer. There are some dustily beautiful songs here, woozily padded with that gauzy starlight that illuminates Dangermouse's best productions, with thick black forest harmonies and sepia-coloured songs from The Shins and Jason Lyttle and The Flaming Lips.

Enough yakking from me. Go listen.

Review: Gui Boratto - Take My Breath Away

2009-03-17T03:40:00.000-07:00

First things first: what a terrible cover. I really ought to apologise: there should have been some kind of warming before I foisted it so carelessly upon your undeserving eyes. Is that really the image I want curious visitors to see when they first alight here, blinking in the strange new light? I'm sorry.

Secondly: yes, yes, you've got me; I’m quite aware that I’m stalling, thank you, that this dust cloud of verbiage is the equivalent of endlessly rearranging the stationery so that I might avoid describing an album that achieves most of its effects by the exciting way it makes nothing happen. But what words would adequately describe the sensory pleasure that comes from following a melodic line meandering microtonally across an unwavering harmonic bass? Certainly not those words: ‘pleasure’, ‘melodic’, and ‘harmonic’ would all require extensive annotation, footnoting and hedging if they weren't to be flat-out misleading.

Let’s agree that the project of trying to describe Gui Boratta, a Brazillian DJ who specialises in a kind of rusted hi-gloss pop tech (cf. an airbrushed Japanese painting of a crying cyborg; The Tragical History of R2D2, perhaps, the Loneliness of the Long Distance Galactic Satellite, WALL-E’s difficult teenage years) is misconceived from the get-go, especially when you could just download the album from your download store of choice and decide for yourself. Wait, that was defeatist.

It was easier to describe Boratta’s debut album, Chromophobia, since it had something close to songs and, as any fule no, songs can be captured and pinned (have you ever tried making an insect collection? The saddest part is that the magnificent irridescence of the butterfly or the beetle fades when you kill it. There's a moral in there somewhere). It was lovely. So it didn’t have the unbelievable, frictionless surfaces of The Field’s From Here We Go Sublime or the fantastical ormolu of Booka Shade’s Movement. It did have “Beautiful Life”, what Dave Pearce would call a dance anthem but what I would call a deliriant, the feeling of too much champagne, the lusty fizz of anticipation made into music:

Take My Breath Away doesn’t really scale those heights, but "No Turning Back" kinda roars. Much of the album reminds me more of Efdemin than it does the previous album, which is a very good thing. Thrill! As a shower of synth lines fall like rain. Wow! As your ears are buffeted by a pressure wave of overwhelming bass. Swoon! as the microchopped vocals say something incomprehensible and sad. Sway! As the tension builds and is released by the asymptotic convergence of melodic lines in headphone space.

No it won’t do. The nonsense is creeping is creeping back in. This is a techno album, not the solution to a quadratic equation. It’s as good as the first album, possibly better. But, all in all, it’s quite different. Ultimately, it’s pretty good. Will that do?

[Editor's note: that was a guest post by Arela Dew. She won’t be coming back]

Some short notes on the cover of Swan's White Light from the Mouth of Infinity

2009-03-13T03:15:00.000-07:00

A little rabbit-boy stands looking lost in his sunday-school finery, wielding a carrot and all alone in a queer landscape. He appears to be standing in a bloody heart. What on earth is going on here? And more importantly, what does the music sound like?

This beautifully mysterious cover for Swan's awesome (in every sense) White Light from the Mouth of Infinity may not be a design classic. But it has that strange property of getting odder the longer you look it. Is that carrot food? Or a weapon? What's with the heart? Why is he dressed like page-boy? It’s a wonderful—and unsettling—example of a band using a painting by a contemporary artist to disorientate their audience and confound expectations.

Swans first took flight in the no wave movement that slithered out of New York in the late seventies. They were uncompromising brutalists: their music was punishingly loud to the point of unlistenability. Legend has it that people would throw up at the sheer sonic bombardment. Swans did it before My Bloody Valentine and they did it louder.

Swans was Michael Gira, now the head of Young God Records. He was the entranced shaman at the heart of their sound, flinging nihilist chants on tracks with one-syllable titles like “Cop”, “Thug” and “Fifth” and (later) more family-friendly titles like “Raping a Slave” and (my personal favourite) “Public Castration (is a Good Thing)”.

If Swans had continued occupying this fetid niche, they would have gone down as a footnote, an extreme but ultimately unpleasant milestone in the history of the American underground. But Gira had realised that extreme volume and battering music was dead-end. He had an artistic ambition that couldn’t be contained by one-dimensional sturm und drang of his band and so he began to take steps toward a new dimension.

So, with a new partner and amanuensis in the shape of the mysterious Jarboe in the band, he began stretching and tearing at the template, mutating Swans into something deeper, allowing ancient folk and cracked blues to seep into the songs. Gira’s, meanwhile, voice was evolving into something compelling, stentorian and mile-deep, with Jarboe’s witchy ululations interleaving with and leavening his baritone.

So successful was this evolution that they signed with a major label, releasing just the one record. Unsurprisingly it was not a success. Gira learnt that lesson that Swans’ evolution shouldn’t be about grasping for some kind of popular acknowledgment. Freed from this anxiety, the two best records of Swans’ career swiftly followed.

So that’s the potted history. What about the cover? The history tells us that Swans were at a crossroads — their previous songs had been about death and paranoia and self-loathing and doom and despair and all things gothically awful. Not a million miles away from Nine Inch Nails or Tool today. But this cover says something has changed.

Compare to their previous covers. Filth gives me nightmares, Cop is striking and spare, while Children of God hints at the pagan or animistic influence that was seeping into their sound.

But it’s the White Light cover that really shows that Swans had arrived at a new and coherent vision. The songs had slowed. Some were even ballad-pace, even if they were filled with Gira's unremittingly bleak poetry. But something mythic or archetypal had crept into their songs. Some wit appeared. And this cover perfectly sums up the ambiguity. It’s sort of sweet and scary, like a myth or a fairy-tale too horrible, or at least too odd, to tell to children, some image dredged up from a dyspetic's insomnia.

The painting is by Deryk Thomas, a Scottish-based painter whose website features some more straight-forward fairytale paintings such as “No Use Crying”.

Here’s what he says about his work for Swans:

I still get letters from Swans fans wanting to know if I'm a real person or just someone made up… 'Deryk Thomas of Edinburgh' is a real person and yes surprisingly I'm still alive and working

I produced the Swans album art in the early 90s. Swans were a colossally great group and I was a real fan of their music… I recall sending a drawing of a little rabbit to Jarboe sometime in the late eighties… It was a small sketch for something I was formulating, provisionally called “Ups and Downs in Toy Town”… I got a call from Michael Gira saying that he liked the image and wanted to use it for their next album cover… He then wanted to expand on the original piece… Thus bunny becomes bunnies and then bunnies become fireballs … I did a lot of artwork for Swans… and I know that many of the unused images ended up on sundry rogue websites and the like… That is very annoying, as many of those drawings I really dislike… and that's been the only stuff on the web, I believe,

I still enjoy looking at this image, because it was so completely simple. The original sketch was just that: a motionless bunny in a big green field and a big blue sky… the viewer has little to look at and so hopefully begins to consider the rabbit and move into some inner place… There's a lot of feeling there in the blankness for some reason… And I like the title Michael gave it… He's a very humorous man… curiously at one with his excessively astute ontological exactness… In Edinburgh, Swans nearly killed their audience with the extremity of their volume… that's an honest fact…it's no joke.

Although the very mysteriousness of this cover is what makes it so compelling, there's a clue to where the story goes next on the cover of Swan's follow-up album, Love of Life, where our rabbit friend has been joined by an identical companion. Their carrots now droop sadly and their heads blaze as if dipped in oil. No, I've no idea what it means either. But it's an arresting indeed beautiful image.

(Full disclosure: I may find this sleeve personally unsettling because of an early encounter with the B&W comedy Harvey, about the man who’s accompanied everywhere by a six-foot invisible rabbit. As a child I found this idea intolerable. It still gives me the willies.)

Being Human: A ghost, a werewolf and a vampire walk into a bar. No, really.

2009-03-12T08:27:00.000-07:00

Something wicked comes to the Yes household. Normally of relaxed disposition, we've taken of late to sleeping with the light on, keeping up a constant stream of nervous chatter. Anything that'll keep at bay the silence, into which can creep the awful question: oh god what's that in the loft?

Once, in more innocent times than these, I would have ventured into our loft’s depths without a second thought. But those times are passed. Now, shadows scuttle from the corners of our dark-adapted eyes. Surely that was too large to be a rodent? It's possible that our new tenant is some foul Summerian spirit, biding its time in our roof before it seeks out some poor prepubescent for a spot of head-turning. I could live with that. But I suspect I know exactly what's causing the Fear. Behind that wardrobe with the fur coats and surrounded by the corpses of fatally curious pigeons, lies a glowering and maleficent set of DVD box-sets, nine complete seasons, each in bulky old-school packaging. This is Shana's collection of the complete Buffy the Vampire Slayer; and it scares the living crap out of me.

All of which is a belabouring of the point that I never really watched Buffy; my loss, I fully appreciate. With more arcs than Gaudi’s balconies, the show was a super-stylish example of just what TV can do when given the better part of a lifetime in which to unfold. But it always struck me, from the handful of episodes I did manage to catch — and here I run the very real risk of excommunication from my own home — that the tone of the show was less Shining, more Dawson’s Creek with more fangs. In other words, for all of Buffy's vaunted charms, on the whole, it was content to leave bowels unloosened.

Ultraviolet, on the other hand, knew a thing or two about sphinctural declenchment, and when a show can scare, or even just deliver chills, you’re more likely to cut it some slack; necessary when your lead actor is Jack Davenport. The show followed a secret branch of the security services dedicated to hunting ‘Code Five’ (vampires to you and me, although the word is never used). Shows like this have to earn their believability by playing or tweaking with the rules of the vampire game, dismissing all those other vampire books, films and shows as just entertainments, as fabrications or distortions, whereas this, this is the truth. Ultraviolent pulled off this trick brilliantly, so that instead of stakes to kill vamps, we had guns that fired carbon-tipped bullets and were fitted with special cameras to distinguish between humans and ‘the leech’; their gas grenades contained Allicin, the active ingredient of garlic; local paedophiles would be revealed as vampires; and so on.

All of which brings us neatly to BBC3’s Being Human, a show that seeks to split the difference between the rites of passage drama of Buffy and the spooky procedural of Ultraviolet, between being frightening and being interested in characters; Henry James meets Rentaghost. It’s unashamedly high concept: a werewolf, a vampire and a ghost share a flat in Bristol: Fiends, if you will. It's brilliantly written by Toby Wodehouse: funny, touching and shocking.

Our protagonists aren't merely monsters. They’re people too, trying to come to terms with what they see in the mirror (or what they don’t see, in Mitchell’s case). They are:

George, a geekily bespectacled hospital porter and all-round nice chap, moonlighting, as it were, as a werewolf. Played to neurotic perfection by Russell Tovey, George is always trembling on the edge of a mild hysteria after being an attack in Scotland left him with the alarming habit of turning into a ravening wolf every month. He tries to keep this under wraps by keeping away from friends and family.

Mitchell was recruited to the parasitical ranks during the Great War and is evidently a superstar vampire whose exploits are still talked about among undead communities (Deadbook?). But now he’s desperately trying to go straight. Guilty secret: he had an affair with George’s old sweetheart; a forgivable act if not for the fact that he killed her and turned her into a vampire: the treachery trifecta. Mitchell is drawn irresistibly to flesh and blood, and flesh and blood reciprocates: he’s played by a delectable Aidan Turner.

Annie. A bit of a bubblehead, Annie is neurotic, scatty, lovable and deeply dead. She’s still very much in love with her fiancé Owen, which is problematic because A) he happens to the landlord of the house into which George and Mitchell move and B) he’s a really a villain who’s found a new woman with indecent haste and C) because she’s dead.

Within this ménage mort a trois, the show can wittily explore a whole range of themes: George’s unwillingness to let anyone get close to him in case he hurts someone during a change, or what it means to struggle with addiction (Mitchell), or what it is to be alone. It's often more like Alan Bennett than George A Romero. There are so many great scenes: George’s experimental transformation in his house to “Smack my Bitch Up”, Anna practicing her ghost lines in a mirror, the scene’s with the avuncular head of the vampires, Herrick, who seems to be plotting some awful final solution, Mitchell’s tussles with George’s ex, Lauren, who’s now a fledgling Vampire unaccustomed to the rhythms and requirements of blood-sucking. Props also for Herrick’s creepy number two Seth, a manc vampire with maturity issues, and Nina, the ward sister who starts to fall for George, much to his consternation.

It’s often genuinely scary. The moments where the lead’s true natures irrupt into their daily lives are always shocking: George's meeting with the creature that turned him or his first encounter with Mitchell; Nina’s sanguinary revenge on Mitchell at the end of episode one; how Anna really died.

This first season built to a spectacular ending with shades of The Road and Happiness and 24 Hour Party People (oh yes), even if the coda wasn’t quite the surprise the editing evidently thought it was. Anyway, a second season has been commissioned, which means there is a reason to watch BBC3 again in the near future. (Eight episodes too!)

In the meantime, does anyone know a good exorcist?

Random walk

2009-03-12T04:05:00.000-07:00

I don't know about you, but I find it nigh on impossible to resist the temptation to skip tracks on the iPod until something I know and like comes on. Which means I keep failing to pay attention to new tracks, and thus the pool of songs I do like gets no wider.

So, in an effort to rectify, here's a random walk through my iPod where I've actually, like, paid attention to the songs. Only the first 20, mind — I’ve got work to do...

1. 2000000 – Modeselektor, Happy Birthday

“Deux zéro zéro zéro zéro zéro sept”, raps the French fellow, in French (quelle naturellement). But Modeselektor are very much German, beloved of Thom Yorke and mentastic gurners everywhere, and quite possibly the most exciting electronic band in the world. The duo have an incredible knack for supercrazy, superstupid beats, flipping manically from spastik break-beat to grinding techno in the space of a few lunatic bars. So, despite the fact that I haven't the faintest idea what the fellow’s rapping about with such frenetic abandon, this is a thrilling start. Can we keep it up?

2. Sea of Sand – Guy Gerber & Shlomi Aber

A bog-standard beat — not the most promising of beginnings; but then, this being a minimal tech classic, what else would you expect? Gradually, though, little whirlpools of sound start interrupting and smearing across the beat, and little riffs and gaseous loops waft across your cranium. Once the whole contraption's in motion, it’s a joy to behold. You know how William Poundstone once pointed out that to run a self-assembling universal Turing machine using Conway’s cellular automata, you’d need a grid as big as a galaxy? Well, this song is that grid.

3. Meadow –Thomas Brinkman

Yeah, OK, so we start with a morass of little clicks and crickles, standard laptronica and... HOLD THE PHONE… who’s this stentorian dude? “Up north there is a meadow”, he intones with more reverence than a meadow typically warrants, while the music drones menacingly over the gurgling sound of a waterfall. At 1.45 something new threatens to happen but decides against it. Most of the drama here comes from the wide dynamic range, as startling synthetic gurgles, whooshes and other unexpected sonic events keep breaking the clicky reverie. And then, at the three minute mark, comes a Depeche-y beat, and the whole thing goes downhill gently, although odd little guitar riff-clanks remind me of Young Gods. Nice cloud-break at the end.

4. Broken Promises – Quiet Village, Silent Movie

Taken from the wonderful Silent Movie, this could almost be the queasily lush start to some lost Isaac Hayes masterpiece. The album doesn't seem to getting as much suction as it might out there in the real world. Too exotic? Not beige enough? Whatever: superfantastic.

5. Heart of Heats - !!!

This takes me straight back to the Playground Weekender in NSW, at which !!! were the undisputed highlight. They were an unbelievably funky giant octopus except with as many heads as arms. Or half as many arms? The overdriven or overcompressed bass really makes the song.

6. I’m in love with the Night – Dawn Landes

I largely defer to this man. Love the “Falling” tremelo'ed guitar. She’s got a lovely lilt to her voice too – reminds me of Laura Cantrell’s, always a good thing.

7. Young Bride (Cassettes Won’t Listen remix) – Midlake

Compared to Erol Alkan’s magisterial rework of Roscoe, this, to my untutored ears, is bland in the extreme, if you'll pardon the oxymoron. Reader, I skipped it.

8. What’s the Excuse this time? McAlmont & Butler

The partnership of Bernard Butler and David McAlmont was big news in the early Britpop years, before deadening dadrock ruled the roost and a pop savant with unabashedly orchestral pop leanings and a heroically flamboyant Prince-channelling androgyne suddenly couldn’t get arrested. But, by and large, these are still fabulous songs, songs I'd love to hear get covered, resurrected. How about Amy Winehouse doing a version of “Yes” as a comeback single?

9. 2 Nocturnes, Op. 37//ii G – Frederic Chopin

Supremely lovely piano song, with a central descending phrase that reminds of something I can't put a name too.

10. So Haunted – Cut Copy, In Ghost Colours

Love the transition from skinny-trousered rock band verse to neon ultra-chorus. Glorious.

11. Ecstasies in the Open Air - Sir Richard Bishop

A blissful instrumental mostly played on acoustic and electric guitars with some lovely synths burbling away happily. Vaguely Beatles-y – you could imagine this being composed halfway up a mountain in Rishikesh.

12. The Wrong Coat for you, Mt. Heart Attack – The Liars – Drum’s Not Dead

I can barely get my head round the bonkers concept the liars employed on Drum’s Not Dead. Or, I should say, I can scarcely credit the chutzpah. Two characters, Mt Heart Attack and Drum, er, battle it out and have adventures across the album. This is one of the lovelier cuts; submerged and faintly disconcerting, illuminated by the deep ocean flare of that subaqueous, ever-descending riff.

13. Boutique – Andy Stott – Merciless

Again with the dull techno! Enlivened a little with some classical piano flourishes, but still. Would sound better in a club, for sure, but I'm not in a club innit.

14. After the Flood –Talk Talk – Laughing Stock

This is how it should be done. Brushed drums; spectral organ chords; the patter of rain; the quivering, Reich-like harmonica; the distant squeal of guitar; Mark Hollis at his most ecstatic. Ten-ish minutes of pure bliss. Whenever I get tempted to write about one of the very greatest albums ever made, I remember that Nick Southall has already said everything that needs to be said.

15. Where We At – Henrik Schwarz/Ame/Dixon

This track has been lionised elsewhere: three scene superstars, a brilliant monologue cum rant over a stately glide through its many movements, and therefore it reminds me a bit of Underworld.

16. Hafssol – Sigur Ros – Hvarf/Heim

The DVD is an overwhelming experience, like pretty much everything else about Sigur Ros. They exist to be oceanic; and this song obliges with its vasty deeps and joyous expansions.

17. Supernatural Superserious – REM – Accelerate

A return to the charts for REM — but a return to form? A return of the block chords of Monster. Is that what anyone really wanted? Overmastered too – it really was much the loudest track in the list, along with Cut Copy; but that’s hardly a surprise – you never really got the sense that REM were all that wedded to sonic superbity, or that they wouldn't bow to the current trend for mixing hot just to get the damned thing on the radio. That said, a pretty good tune. Goes a bit cack at the two and a half minute mark.

18. Sleeping Beauty – Patrick Watson

Sounds like the start of Radiohead’s Nude, all gorgeous sonic foam and bubble, before an arpeggiated pattern cranks up and Patrick’s vocals float over a hothouse of strings, strange whale feedback.

19. Past the Long Black Land – Colleen - Les Ondes Silencieuses

Using ancient and half-forgotten instruments, Colleen creates a very spare sound-world with just some wheezing strings and the plucked harpsichord alike she’s playing. It’s haunting, exceptionally sparse and finally moving. Just don’t put it on at a party.

20. Necessary Evil – Edgar ‘Jones’ Jones

A fitting note on which to end, a tight little soul shake-down with Jones battling a whole battalion of backing singers and a strutting sax ripping up the place. Police siren too! Always good.

Review: Peter Broderick - Home

2009-03-12T01:39:00.000-07:00

A sonic cathedral of sound? Please: Listening to Peter Broderick's latest album Home is like watching Alan Ball's totemic plastic bag fluttering around Chartes.

In other more straightforward words, it's really a quite captivating experience where songs are often built on precisely stacked harmonies, guitars describe stately arpeggios, Broderick sings of the sky and stats and snow and nature, and washes of subtle instrumentation sketch a twilit mood, expansive but still.

It's a serence experience. The only downside? I can't remember a thing about it when it's finished. Two possibilities: A) it's a serene experience, immersive and narcotic, where the way songs shift and blur track by track is half the point.

Or B) the songs are a bit dull.

I'm feeling generous, so let's go with A.

Update: He doesn't sing of stats. He sings of stars. No-one in their right mind sings of stats. "Your beauty is an outlier on a standard distribution curve" has none of the makings of a classic lyric.

Review: John Surman - Coruscating

2009-03-10T09:45:00.000-07:00

John Surman is a new name to me for the very simple reason that he's an improvisational saxophonist and, being a busy man about town, I perhaps haven't devoted as much time as I might to improvisational saxophony. If I'm honest, I suffer, or at least suffered, a terrible prejudice that free jazz = tuneless skronk, or at least ≠ a good time, especially if the instrument thusly abused is a saxophone.

That's my loss, since Coruscating is a quite amazing record, more composed than freewheeling, a union of rich chamber music and Surman's ethereal reed playing.

"For The Moment" is typical of the quite ravishing trick Surman's mastered here. He starts with a formal structure, a classical scaffolding upon which his phrasing can get asymptotically closer to free jazz before suddenly veering away to illuminate a new facet of the structure. That's right: aymptotically.

It's sensational stuff, which is not something I'd be saying about free jazz. Here's another sentence that strikes my protesting fingers as highly unlikely but that they're compelled to type: even the fretless bass solos on the album are captivating.

The Other Hand by Chris Cleave

2009-03-10T04:33:00.000-07:00

As you can see from the picture on the left, the major impediment to buying, let alone being seen to read, The Other Hand by Chris Cleave is that cover: it's fantastically awful, resembling a self-actualisation manual or a lachrymose memoir about how the author was kept in a cupboard as a baby, boo hoo. What's worse, I seem to have bought a special Waterstone's-only cover. The paperback in Amazon has much the better cover; and don’t let’s even mention the American version. But with that spleen-venting out of the way, what's it actually about?

I'm not allowed to say. The blurb goes to some length to convince the potential reader that we're talking about a once-in-generation story about which nothing can be revealed. Sceptre, the publishers, have tried to insist that reviewers refrain from giving the game away. On the inside cover, we have a personal letter from Cleave's editor, saying that this is a truly superb and original novel, comparable to Cloud Atlas, Schindler's List and Life of Pi. That trifecta had me snagged.

The novel is narrated in alternate chapters by Little Bee, a Nigerian refugee who's spent the first two years of her English life in a refugee centre. She's fled the obscene event that's killed her family. Finding out the true name of this horror gives the book it's narrative drive. Coming from the opposite end is Sarah, a magazine editor married to Andrew, an op-ed writer suffering depression. Somehow they're connected to Little Bee:

"It started on the day we first met Little Bee, on a lonely beach in Nigeria. The only souvenir I have of that first meeting is an absence where the middle finger of my left hand used to be. The amputation is quite clean. In place of my finger is a stump, a phantom digit that used to be responsible for the E, D and C keys on my laptop."

That paragraph gives some indication of the mastery with which Cleave set the story in motion. He voices Little Bee beautifully and uncondescendingly and threads her story with Sarah's beautifully. There are some amazingly powerful scenes. Andrew's funeral at the beginning of the book is unbearable, the unendurable tension of the original beach scene (not dissimilar in effect to Ian McEwan's Enduring Love and that bravura bit of business with the balloon), the pivotal Batman disappearance scene in Richmond Park; the final reckoning on another African beach: all these are written with a flinty prose that stays out of the way of the story's lurching momentum.

I'm not at all sure that the hype does this novel any great favours. It's not remotely like the books it's been so compared to. But it is a very tense book, intensely cinematic. Clearly I’m going to have to read Incendiary now (in which the old Arsenal stadium is blown up by terrorists. Bloody Al Quaeda: can’t they do their research?)

Principium Amicitias

2009-03-10T00:38:00.000-07:00

Bernard Shaw said he'd swap all the existing paintings of Jesus for a single photograph. The next best thing would would be an authenticated portrait of William Shakespeare, painted from life. Lo and behold, a new portrait that seems to have been hanging on an Irish family wall for the last four hundred years has just come to light.

This golden-skinned chap sure makes a change from the somewhat misshapen fellow we'd got used to from the cover of the first folio. And it makes an Englishman's heart swell with misplaced pride to know that the world's greatest playwright was clearly a bit of serious ruff.

I apologise.

UPDATE: Charlotte Higgins isn't convinced.

Midlake - The Trials Of Van Occupanther

2009-03-09T19:17:00.000-07:00

I've been listening to Midlake's second album The Trials Of Van Occupanther for months now, to the exclusion of just about anything else (other albums, food, basic hygiene). Let me say right away that the album is jaw-droppingly brilliant, like a smooth hit of a new drug. So notice is duly given that this post is less a considered appreciation full of learned comparison and cool analysis, and more a dribbling fan letter. Apologies are offered.

Trials is the Texan band's second album after the less-than-overwhelming Bamnan and Slivercock. That album’s name alone had suggested an overweening commitment to the whimsical, an impression the music confirms, its studied psychedelia getting pretty tired over the course of an album. Lazy comparisons to The Flaming Lips were thrown around by critics; but lazy Flaming Lips is closer to the mark: Bamnan is free from the emotional punch of peak Lips. But there are some faint presentiments of the story-telling ability that lifts Trials free of the pack.

It's clear from the first track that the band have undergone a collective Great Leap Forward. The music has moved into a kind of turbo-charged combination of AM rock and recondite folk, the vocals now stacked and smeared like classic folk rock. From their studied rustic image (few moderns bands can pull off being so comprehensively bearded) to the fact that all of Midlake sing, their voices interweaving around serpentine melodies and thrilling harmonies. Listen to the track Branches and the LA version of Radiohead's I Will; each song stacks it harmonies like a madrigal.

But it's the lyrics that set the album apart. Something is not quite right in the rural idyll of the titular Van Occupanther. His ruritanian community seems to be facing an impending, possibly ecological, catastrophe. In fact, this disaster may have already occurred, leaving Van Occupanther the only survivor – a fact that he is either unaware or in denial of (see also the Martin Amis story “The Immortals” from Einstein’s Monsters.)

While the sound may be a souped-up folk-rock, ringing many familiar bells, the lyrics touch on none of the American mythos of, say, Dylan or The Band. Trials is connected to the Americana tradition only in the most oblique or occluded sense.

Check out the central lyrics to the slashing, urgent Roscoe (which also happens to be the best song I’ve heard this year):

The village used to be all one really needs
That's filled with hundreds and hundreds of
Chemicals that mostly surround you
You wish to flee but it's not like you
So listen to me, listen to me

Oh, oh, oh and when the morning comes,
We will step outside
We will not find another man inside
We like the newness, the newness of all
That has grown in our garden soaking for so long

Whenever I was a child I wondered what if my name had changed into something more productive like Roscoe
Been born in 1891
Waiting with my Aunt Rosaline

These lyrics have a sinuous and insinuating melody, and the chorus is defined more by its sudden vandal slashes of guitar than by its structural position. There are plenty of other equally good songs. 'Young Bride' is a ruritanian stomp - the wonderful video shows the protagonist escaping from her stifling family life to a snowy fantasia of 'frozen lakes, snowshoes and hunters'. The title track is a hopeful mantra, only varying at the very end. The final track is 'Head Home', where the sense that they've channelled the spirits of Fleetwood Mac is strongest. The harmonies glisten and the guitar solos are fuzzily wonky. And check out the lyrics:

Bring me a day full of honest work and a roof that never leaks
I'll be satisfied
Bring me the news all about the town
How it struggles to help all the farmers out during harvest time

But there's someone I'd like to see
She never mentions a word to me
She reads Leviathan

The music and massed swell of voices drops out on that final line - what it means is beyond me: is the reference to Hobbe's manifesto about the need for a strong man to lead significant? Search me. The line is immediately followed by the key line: "Think I'll head home".

Album of the year so far…

Justin Timberlake - "My Love"

2009-03-06T11:05:00.000-08:00

Why? Do I need a reason?

OK, fine: because it's Friday, and because I need a break from the logorrhea that's afflicted me lately, I thought I'd post my one of my favourite videos of the last few years. This is the full version of Justin Timberlake's "My Love" complete with jammed-sounding intro with Timbaland doing his thing (rather more successfully than T.I. later in the song, which is saying something given their respective reputations as rappers).

Anyway, it's still a great song, even if one or two of the lyrics veer a tad close to the wince-making. Mainly it's all about the dancing, which looks supercool (at least to this rhythmically-challenged soul), especially as the vid starts strobing between the black and the white backgrounds. At the end, the camera does almost a vertical 360 around Justin, which makes the intricate moves he's making in the air look mental (Sorry, I'm just not tooled up with the latest critico-theoretical language used to describe dance). Ahh thank goodness: the weekend just arrived...

Kanye Baby!

2009-03-03T16:52:00.000-08:00

Everyone's favourite rapper Mr Kanye West was at the Opera House on Sunday night; or, to put it more accurately, Mr Utzon's vast but vanilla interiors were transformed by a glittering riot of fedoras, sharp white suits, feathered hats, shades; the whole place was like a demented Hype Williams video. (And to think I'd chosen the Mahler and Mozart double-header to get loaded. What was I thinking?)

So anyway, I went down thanks to a handy invite from the lovely people at Universal records, and took my seat among the seats reserved for the industry. I know this, because we were just about the only people who don't shake our collective tail-feathers the moment the beats begin. Too cool for school, I suppose, which is a shame because I wanted to GET UP ON IT.

After a small eternity, things started to happen. A dozen elegant string players from the Sydney Symphony took their seats in the bleachers, led by woman in white who was later introduced as Kanye's musical director. She played like a demon and, when not fiddling up a storm, spent the rest of her time exhorting the crowd to lose it. With a line-up rounded off by turntablist extraordinaire DJ A-Track, and two superb backing singers who provide all the vocal samples, the sounds was as rich and deep as any hip hop show could be.

After a tantalising overture of Diamonds Are Forever, Kanye himself appeared in white-rimmed shades, black gloves, and a neckerchief mask, looking like a Hamas Michael Jackson. The sound started out muddy, the strings and rhymes submerged beneath the awesome bottom end. But after that, everything was frikkin' amazing...

Some highlights: Gold Digger. The DJ begun this with the barrel house blues of the original Ray Charles track - but no-one was fooled; and no-one remained seated, especially after those heavyweight quarter beats at the start were teasingly elongated over four machine gun bars before the rasping clavichord melody kicked in. (At least I think it's a clavichord... Similar to Superstition...Answers on a postcard)

The string medley of Bittersweet Symphony and Eleanor Rigby. Delicious...

Jesus Walks. This song is already tre intense, but this time the string section ratcheted up the tension, providing the staccato stabs of the original.

Roses. I swear to God: EVERYONE knew every single word. There's something surreal about being in the Opera House and hearing thousands of people chanting "Bitch, are you smoking reefer?" Something very cool about it too. See also: the bit when everyone growled along with "My grandfather trying to pull it together. He's strong".

Kanye's between-track chatter is both jaw-droppingly boastful and winningly cheeky. He plays a few verses from a bunch of his own productions - Jay-Z, Ludacris, etc - and then says "I did these. You thought I was just about the tunes? These are MY beats!" And how's this for ego: "I don't really know how to say this.... but I'm a big deal". Cue deafening applause.

Gone. Another chance for the string section to show their chops.

And not forgetting the section in the middle where he played along with some classic tunes. First up was Al Green's Let's Stay Together, followed by Rock With You by Michael Jackson. The third track...? In fact, it was Take On Me by A-Ha, complete with Kanye dancing about like a happy tool, and the DJ dropping out the beats for the ecstatic crowd to provide the chorus.

"They said I couldn't bring hip hop to the Opera House".

Boy, were they wrong.

Finally, here's me and the peeps from Universal and iTunes:

Susan Greenfield's House of Epical Nonsense

2009-03-03T06:30:00.000-08:00

Professor Baroness Susan Greenfield is the Director of the Royal Institution and is well known for her books and TV series about neuroscience. And yet, despite such impeccable bona fides, she's all too willing to talk a rare species of balls.

Greenfield’s area of expertise is synaptic pharmacology, and on that subject at least, she knows whereof she speaks. You can be sure that it's a field advanced by carefully controlled and refereed studies. Yet from time to time, she abandons the scientific method, with its near-pathological tendency to hedge, and wades into the latest tabloid panic, telling editors everything they want to hear: "Top Scientist Says Stroking Puppies Causes Autism".

The Spectre of Social Networking, Yesterday
She first came to my attention when she embarked upon a crazed Jeremiad against the legalisation of cannabis. At this point, I should say I’m making no claim one way or another about legalisation. I think her Guardian essay would have been just as damaging if it had been in favour, since it is comprehensively riddled with non-sequiters and tortuous semi-logic. Her thesis consists largely in trying to convince us that alcohol is not all bad, certainly not when compared to the evils of cannabis. What, for instance, are we to make of the following blithe assertion:

"Alcohol has a range of non-specific actions that affect the tiny electrical signals between one brain cell and another; cannabis has its own specialised chemical targets, so far less has a more potent effect."

That’s not science or argument as I know it, that's an all-but-meaningless assertion. But Greenfield has barely begun. Watch as a veritable county fair of aunt sallies are set up only to be expertly — if not stylishly — demolished:

"If cannabis were 'just the same' as alcohol and cigarettes, why are people not taking those already legal drugs for the much-lauded pain-relief effects?"

Who's saying they were 'just the same'? Isn’t part of the point that cannabis is thought to be less harmful than alcohol and cigarettes? And hold the phone: people don’t drink for alcohol’s pain-killing effects? The best that can be said about that is that the burden of proof rests squarely with Greenfield. Then there’s this syntactical train-wreck:

"Even the most loony of liberals has not suggested tolerance for morphine or heroin abuse, because they are prescribed clinically as potent painkillers. And think about it: if cannabis brings effective relief from pain, then how does it do so? Clearly by a large-scale action on the central nervous system."

That sentence has to be read twice to be understand, even though reading it once was painful enough. Greenfield clumsily tries to close off the argument’s closed off by using the word ‘abuse’, since plenty of people, and not just the ‘most loony of liberals’, would tolerate regulated morphine or heroin ‘use’ if it meant that crime fell. That second clause is also ambiguous. I assume she’s saying that no-one’s making the analgesic argument. But she could just as well be saying that no-one’s suggesting tolerance precisely because those drugs are prescribed clinically. And then her second argument is far from the clincher she thinks it is, unless she believes that the threat of any ‘large-scale action on the nervous system’ is enough to terrify us into abstinence; and if that’s the case, then she ought to be arguing for the banning of horror films or roller-coasters, since adrenalin also causes a “large-scale action on the central nervous system”.

But those two sentences were models of limpid prose compared to this monstrosity:

"Further wishful thinking is that, because cannabis doesn't actually kill you, it is OK to send out less negative legal signals, even though the Home Secretary admits that the drug is dangerous. Leaving aside the issue that cannabis could indeed be lethal, in that the impaired driving it can trigger could well kill, there is more to life than death."

The retinal discomfort caused by those opening four words is only somewhat relieved by the comedy of the closing seven. But, to give the Baroness her due: there is, indeed, more to life than death.

Remember, this is the Director of the Royal Institution we’re talking about. She has no business sounding like a second-rate Littlejohn, throwing factoids at the well and hoping they cohere. Mud-flinging can, of course, be effective. But tyou should at least check for signs of internal contradiction. Despite her repeated insistence that the effects of cannabis are massive and powerful and long-lasting, she also finds herself saying:

"The effects on the brain in real life are most probably subtle and therefore hard to monitor."

Now she tells us. Now for all I know, any one of her arguments, such as they are, might be true. Perhaps all of them are. As I say, I’m not arguing the toss one way or the other. The problem here is simply being able to discern an argument. When the prose is this bad, you keep having to peer through the fug, hoping a train of thought might emerge. A style of writing this clunky and scattershot can't help but suggest a style of thinking in similar disarray.

Now, this first-class mind and science explicator non pareil (not to mention unelected legislator) has now turned the logical engine of her mind toward a new and more existential threat that’s reared its incorporeal head. Fortunately, the good professor is ready to smite this beast. Have at thee, Social Networking:

"[Experiences of social networking] are devoid of cohesive narrative and long-term significance. As a consequence, the mid-21st century mind might almost be infantilised, characterised by short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathise and a shaky sense of identity."

Well, in my most Pooterish moments, I could entirely agree with her. But I recognise I'm ignoring the evidence of controlled studies or the anecdotal evidence of those entirely well-adjusted minds of those friends who regularly blog, twitter, facebook (hey it’s verb) and the like, without seeming to lose their identity.

If Baroness Greenfield wants to make pronouncements outside her field, that’s up to her. But as director of one of the world’s greatest scientific institutions, she should, at the very least, be making it her mission to defend and explain the scientific method. And that means citing refereed evidence. And, in this case, the evidence seems somewhat more sceptical than her about the dangers of social networking. If the worst that can be said about a technology is that it might make you a bit more like Stephen Fry, I think we can relax. And let's not get our science from self-appointed panjandrums with axes to grind.

Ben Goldacre on Greenfield

Review: School of Seven Bells - Alpinism

2009-03-03T03:36:00.001-08:00

March is here! I love this time of year, when you can just sense Thomas’ “force that through the green fuse drives the flower” starting to build.

We visited the Victorian dinosaurs at Crystal Palace the other day. The park had been overseen by Richard Owen, arch anti-Darwinist and the man who first described the reptilian fossils that were pouring out the new world as “terrible lizards”, or dinosaurs.

But in the middle years of the 19th century (the park was designed as a companion to the Great Exhibition), not a great deal was known about how to reconstruct from the fossils how the living creatures may have appeared. The solutions were creative. Only have the head of a great sea reptile? Then hide the body by having its head poke terrifyingly from the water. Don’t know what the head of the dinosaur looked like? Face the model away from the audience. Most notoriously, they placed iguanodon’s thumb spike on its snout. Also apparent is the common presumption that the dinosaurs were akin to slow-moving and cold-blooded reptiles like the crocodiles, dragging their bellies and tails on the floors, rather than the highly active, often bipedal, poikilotherms they were, typically holding their tales aloft for balance. It’s not just dinosaurs. There’s a marvellous giant sloth (Megatherium), some colossal Irish Elk and some very odd-looking pterodactyls.

I’m rambling. What I wanted to say was this: it was a beautiful cold blue day. Exactly like a day in Autumn in fact. But instead of the melancholy of encroaching winter, there’s the excitement of approaching Spring, when the trees will “begin afresh, afresh, afresh”.

Goodness, I'm still rambling. What I really wanted to talk about was School of Seven Bells’ Alpinism. Here’s another band doing exciting research with drone dynamics, rather than just slavishly shoe-gazing. What does Alpinism sound like? Like the better bits of Golden Palominos’ album Pure. Like My Bloody Valentine with, like, audible lyrics and fantastic singers and harmonies. Like Imogen Heap, if her attempts to rock out weren’t somewhat embarrassing.

First song “Iamundernodisguise” sounds precisely as I always wish Ladytron would but never do. “Face to Face on High Places” has a chorus riding upon a truly swooshsome wave of noise, as does “Half Asleep”, even if the latter's chord sequence is hardly original. “Wired for Light” judders forth on a squealing middle-eastern figure (a la “Galvanize”), mixing winsome melodies with wide galactic spaces before ending in a blissful vocal round. It's delectably dreamy.

After that, the album loses some spark, and starts trading noise for nice, rarely a smart move: they start sounding like a second-rate Garbage. But, even if only for the first handful of songs, they make a joyful noise unto to the creater.

Happy March!

Playlouder

2009-03-02T10:13:00.000-08:00

... seems to have turned into some kind of music networking site has archived some pieces I wrote for them back in mists of time. Since you've expressed an interest (though I may just have been confused by an echo), I will republish them here in all their questionable glory:

My Vitriol - Finelines

Black sheets of rain, jagged beds of metal, stormy seas of noise, the perfect synthesis of Nirvana's raging punk psychosis and the amorphous body-throb of My Bloody Valentine. This is the sound of Finelines, at least in My Vitriol's finely-cheekboned head. They're not far off. But making that elusive beast the rock classic is easier said then done. Chuck in a few fillers toward the end and no matter how many operatic planet-straddling monsters you started off with, chances are you've fucked it.

One argument against My Vitriol says that Muse have cornered the market in theatrical spleen-venting, leaving the thrilling but retrograde guitars of opener "Alpha Waves" looking well eighties. Possibly, but with Som Wardner's unerring ear for a melody and the burning metal guitars giving it perpetual crank and bend, it's the Devonish geezers that end up looking redundant and silly.

Check "The Gentle Art Of Choking" for an intro that could almost be Ash were it not so adrenalised, for stunt guitars that wheel and stall then before spinning to high-altitude safety. The same goes for 'Cemented Shoes', only with more of above. A useful point of reference is Sugar's hi-trauma mini-album Beaster: pain alchemised to pop gold, claustrophobic, unstinting, brutal, beautiful.

It may well be too long and it might stick to its blueprint a little too faithfully, but singularity of vision can hardly be criticised on a debut record. Finelines is a black-hearted but coruscating journey at speed.

Funny thing is, I can't remember a single thing about this record. Also, I suspect I may not have known what "coruscating" meant.

Live Review: Ane Brun at the Union Chapel

2009-02-27T02:21:00.000-08:00

To the Union Chapel in Highbury, and what must surely be the finest venue in London if you like your music semi-sacred. Candles, pews, high windows, stained glass: most bands or singers would seem embarrassingly racous and ramshackle in such a perfect place. Not so Ane Brun. Over the course of an enthralling evening, she and her amazing singers fill the air with songs of powerful beauty every bit as marvellous as the architecture.

After the Fleet Foxes snooze fest, one tiny part of my brain had heretically wondered just how entralling an experience a girl with a guitar could possibly be. That part of my brain has been placed in stocks for a week of ritual humiliation: this was perhaps the most bewitching gig I've been to since the first time I saw Jeff Buckley. The acoustics in this wonderful space are so good, Brun singing solo would have been joy enough. But she was in fact joined by a girl's best friends, her "Diamonds", three sirens that provided the spell-binding harmonies that elevated this experience into the realm of the magical. So well did Ane and the singers from Wales, Norway and Sweden combine, that Ane would regularly stop playing for whole sections of songs so that we might experience the nape-prickling joy of four interweaving a cappella voices, swelling and swooping across the pews. Each singer got a rapturous reception: at one point, Ane mentioned that she's tempted to just shut up and listen to them sing. Happily for us, she joins in.

What an exquisite instrument her voice is! It's a head voice, capable of almost operatic highs (the chorus of "Armour" has the prettiness of chamber music), of suddenly swelling emphases from the chest and of long sinuous melodies on a single breath ("Baby we were made of gold", that last word hovering over four bars, and the ornamented melody of "Ten Seconds" over the lines "You're just hanging around with yourself" are examples).

Brun's songs hew to the chillier minor keys, but they nearly always admit sudden shafts of radiance. The framework is provided by her guitar playing. Her technique seems tantalising simple at first: basic finger-picking over open-tunings (she only started to play guitar at 21, using tab books). And yet, from such an unadorned style, she constructs beguiling grids of sound that flicker with unexpected blues and ghostly grace notes; peculiar chords keep falling towards the tonic like a series of endlessly opening trapdoors. It's not dissimilar to José González' finger-style. But where he has the more rigid classical technique, Brun has that crucial sigh in her playing, a willingness to use the dissonant chord where needed.

She doesn't always play the guitar. The aforementioned "Armour" has Ane at the piano, banging out that song's wittily simple rhythm. One of the Diamonds takes the keys for "Don't Leave", which frees Ane to concentrate on singing this marvelous song, dropping almost to a whisper for the verses before letting rip with the "It won't do us no good" chorus (I absolutely love this verse: "I have no plan to be/anywhere else but here/or to become someone that leaves/I didn’t even know there was an exit here/darling, don’t you try/to capture me", followed by "I am here now/I’m right here by your side/I’ll lay my hand on the couch next to you/you can hold it if you would like to/it will do you good".

Brun says at one point "here's another song about heartbreak": that's her best songs in a nutshell. It's not that they're confessional songs in the mode of, say, Joni Mitchell's Blue. The identity of the Other is rarely sketched; all the songs are about an 'I' or a 'you' and employ sometimes elaborate metaphors, as well as a good measure of wit, to approach the subject of pain. "The Puzzle" is a good example. Comparing the attempt to put yourself together again to solving a jigsaw puzzle is maybe not the most dazzling metaphor ever conceived. But it's how the metaphor plays out that's so fresh: "Clearly the corners were an easy start/ that was when everyone was still helping me out/ when it was time to fill in the frames/ they left – they thought I ought/ to have gotten over you by then". That's pretty desolate in anyone's book*. Here's a more wistful version of the same emotion: "I was gonna love you till the end of all daytime/ and I was gonna keep all our secret signs and our lullabies/I was made to believe that our love would grow old/we were gonna live in a tree house and make babies/ and we were gonna bury our ex-lovers and their ghosts/baby we were made of gold" ("The Tree House Song"). It's not all Red House Painters-style wrist-slashing: "What am I going to do?/ I will drink a bottle of wine over you" is followed by the sly "for me/it is red or nothing". And how's this for meta: "My friend/ You left me in the end/ I can't believe I'm writing a song/ Where friend rhymes with end".

There are so many self-lacerating lyrics, it's enough to make you wish you were heartbroken, just so you could grap these songs to your heart like a salve. But all Northern Europeans can appreciate the yearning for yearly change in "Changing of the Seasons" (which I happen to think is her best song). An unnamed man wakes after the "the best sleep he'd ever met" with his lover. But he can't help but to wonder whether he's satisfied, whether someone else should "meet his hazy anticipating eyes". The chorus is his: "Restlessness is me/you see/it´s hard to be safe/it´s difficult to be happy". He muses that his disenchantment is linked to the seasons, "the relief of spring/intoxication of summer rain/the clearness of fall /how winter makes me reconsider it all". So far, so faintly self-pitying. What elevates the song is the final verse, where his dreams melt away: "then she awakes/reaches for the embrace/he decides not to worry about seasons again". By this point, I'm normally a warm puddle.

Although I first heard Ane's music in 2006, I've resisted writing about her before (and not just out of sheer laziness). I've never been quite sure I could describe music this intimate, this powerful without descending into purple prose of the worst kind— more love-letter than review. Also I was superstitious about letting too much light in. How idiotic. Anyway, that can't be helped now since, if the universe is a fair and just place, many more people will soon get to hear this beguiling singer, who then fall head over heels in their turn.

Come the end, after a duet with support act Teitur on "Rubber & Soul" (home to the startling lyric "In my dreams I'm on your floor/vomiting and defeated"), a brilliant new song written in America ("This is a tour song. Don't worry, there isn't a tour album next") that features the f-bomb (only sung by the Welsh singer; the rest are too nervous to sing it in a church), and a breathtaking version of "True Colours", Ane and her singers get a standing ovation; they look genuinely delighted. It won't be their last.

*With a suitably windswept video too:

All pictures courtesy of Anika in London. Thanks!

Fleet Foxes @ Roundhouse, 24/2/2009

2009-02-24T00:42:00.000-08:00

Off to the Roundhouse for the Fleet Foxes, with support from The Acorn.

Dear reader, I confess we were more than a bit bored: The Acorn's album Glory Hope Mountain, which is very much cut from the same cloth as Fleet Foxes and which seemed so rich and strange just a month or two ago, sounded... kinda dull, even though they played it pretty much note for note. The vocal melodies all seem to twist in the same melodic directions and, while they have wistful shapes, they fail to snag on the heart or mind. Not being able to hear the lyrics doesn't help. Meanwhile, tempos don't vary, choruses don't happen, and dozing keeps seeming the most productive option.

As for the Fleet Foxes, I couldn't help but thinking that this was just about the whitest gig I've ever been too, with the whitest music. You can get off, if that's your thing, on their richly stacked harmonies. But there's no propulsion or funk. No-one moves so much as a muscle. It's utterly sexless music. Now, only a lunatic goes to see Fleet Foxes expecting to get down. But it sure seemed a bit strange that the crowd were most animated during the between-song banter. The preserved-in-aspic aspect of the music is only emphasised with acoustic covers of folk 'classics' from 1972. Get thee away from me, Mr Sandman, I don't want to sleep this early.

The music they play comes way too easily to these musicians, and that ultimately has a lulling affect, one reason why I find the album difficult to listen to in one go. You yearn for something to cut to the quick, to stop your heart. The only song we could remember immediately upon leaving was "Mykonos". Compare and contrast Bon Iver at the Empire some months back. Ostensibly similar (they all sit down to play their instruments, for heaven's sake), their songs sounded handed down from heaven, and at a price.

Still, chief Fox Robin Pecknold is only, like, 22, and this is only their first album, so I expect we'll get something amazing in due course. Hey, here's a suggestion: if Bon Iver can be influenced by D'Angelo, maybe FF can get themselves some soul of their own. Jamiroquai maybe?

Review: U2 - No Line On The Horizon (2009)

2009-02-22T08:37:00.000-08:00

An orthodoxy of sorts seems to have hardened among decent right-thinking folk about U2: let's call it the Pop paradigm (wait! Come back!) According to this view, 1997's Pop was a grotesque overreaching attempt to stay relevant, overblown in some places, half-finished in others. Was that an attempt at a techno song? "Discoteque": huh? This isn't the U2 we know and love. Pop has gone down in U2's history as the Tap--like turd full stopping the ironic carnival that started with Achtung Baby! and which gifted us such steadily diminishing returns as Zooropa and, heaven help us, Passengers. Too many giant lemons, not enough joshua trees. That this critical trashing was merrily aided and abetted by the band themselves, eager to tell anyone who'd listen how the album had to be rushed to market so that they could get on the road for the Popmart Tour and how everything in future would be Back to Basics, yes indeed. The job of best rock band in the world is vacant, said a penitent Bono, and we're reapplying. Their reputation was only fully rehabilitated with the triumphant All That You Can't Leave Behind and confirmed with How To Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. So goes the orthodoxy.

Of course, the trouble with orthodoxies is that they're too often balls. Pop is perhaps my favourite U2 album, the subsequent two albums being, to these ears, all but unlistenable (not least because the very best songs have been played to death on TV and adverts)*. Pop came out the same year as albums like OK Computer, Ladies and Gentleman We Are Floating In Space and, um, sundry other great records (OK, alright: I was referring to Attack of the Grey Lantern). I was working in a Virgin Megastore at the time, and would often play them over the PA (somehow, all that great music is inextricably linked in my memory with the comet that was visible throughout that summer.) Pop has some of their best songs: "Please", "Gone" (which comes with a very atypical Bono chorus: "Goodbye/You can keep your suit of lights/I'll be up with the sun/I'm not coming down": Bobbie Gillepsie would have been proud), "Wake Up Dead Man", "Discoteque", "Mofo". That some of the songs on Pop are somewhat sparse works in the record's favour: where the band's subsequent output tends towards bloated maximalism, all the joy and spontaneity crushed ruthlessly from the songs by an obsessive working and reworking, Pop's best songs sound conjured from thin air, alchemised by four guys who go way back just playing in a room.

The last two records... actually I can't remember a great deal about the last two records, since I listened to them all the way through only a handful of times. They certainly seemed horrible: not an ounce of wit or playfulness, too many chants written explicitly for the stadium (don't U2 at their best sound like they're playing just for you, not a stadium; even if that is, in fact, what they're doing?) But precisely because I owe this damn band an enormous (yes) debt of gratitude, I imagine I'll always have to listen to whatever they put out between here and the day they stop. And so here's No Line On The Horizon. Are they redeemed?

Yes. More or less. This album has the band's best songs since Pop, even if there are a couple of now-obligatory mid-tempo clunkers. The lyrics stay mostly on the right side of embarrassing, Bono's still in fine voice, the songs about Africa are happily absent, the production from Lanois and Eno (listed as band members in the sleeve notes) is frequently amazing. The title track is a mysterious swamp of guitars and bass, Kings of Leon by way of the Glistening Chimes of Eno.** "Magnificent", despite its hostage-to-fortune title, is a triumph, actually, with a piping little keyboard hook in the chorus that's just swell; "Moment of Surrender" has some lovely unexpected chords; "Stand-up Comedy" is blithely self-referential and "Unknown Caller"'s chorus is nicely odd.

The best songs come last. "Fez" swirls coquettishly before deploying the big Edge chords, the single let's just say it at least makes sense on the album, and "Cedars of Lebanon" is another downbeat album closer much in the mold of "Love Is Blindness". So. If U2 are never quite going to get back to the restless spirit that created "Hold Me Thrill Me Kiss Me Kill Me" or "Lemon" or "Numb" or Zooropa's title track, then so be it. But this'll do.

*Though it's worth noting here that the band's tendency, since at least All That You Can't Leave Behind and the Best Ofs, for offensive clipping and too much loudness. I suspect that this album is no different: there are a number of songs where what should be the thrilling in-rush of Edge's guitar sounds no louder than what went before. You know you're in trouble when a supposedly quiet verse with no guitar is no quieter than the subsequent verse with guitar. Try "Until The End of the World" for an example of sane mastering: when Edge's guitar solo comes in, it sounds like the song suddenly enters a fourth dimension.

** Can someone call a band that please?

"Roger's Version" - John Updike

2009-02-20T01:30:00.000-08:00

Roger's Version had been sitting unloved on our shelves for the better part of a year before it finally got read. I think I saw an extract in Hitchen's Portable Atheist and was immediately moved to buy the book. But it took Updike to die before I finally picked up the book. What a heartless bastard I am. Anyway, Roger's Version concerns a theology professor (and we get to hear a lot about theology) and his tussles with a student of computer animation (and we get to hear a lot about computer animation) concerning the younger man's belief that God is on the verge of being revealed by advances in astrophysics (and we get to hear a lot about etc). Less cerebrally, the student is sleeping with Roger's wife (although 'sleeping with' is precisely the kind of periphrasis Updike avoids: their couplings are described in unflinching detail).

While this is going on, Roger has made contact with his niece, some white trash living in the projects of this (as far as I can tell) unnamed city. And, while he tries and fails to persuade her to get schooling, he is also seduced by her to the extant he feels that he must protect her when she hits her child, risking his good name and that of the school of divinity to which he belongs in the process.

So, not a great deal of all that much happens. But there are some fabulous set pieces. Roger's inventorising the city in which he lives and the way it changes as he moves downtown; his first theological tête-à-tête with Dale (the conceit being that Roger has all but given up believing in God: "there are so few things which, contemplated, do not like flimsy trapdoors open under the weight of our attention into the bottomless pit below"); Dale's breakdown in front his computer's infinite fractals; and a marvelous scene at dinner-party where Roger's colleague casually dismantles Dale's argument from design.

There are brilliances on every page: Updike really does, in his phrase, "get it all in". I had earlier abandoned In The Beauty of the Lillies halfway through. That's going to have to go back on my to-read list; and then, it's time for Rabbit.

Let’s see the 'criticism' of Israel for what it really is

2009-02-18T09:27:00.000-08:00

The new anti-semitism: essential reading from Howard Jacobson in The Indie.

A discriminatory, over-and-above hatred, inexplicable in its hysteria and virulence whatever justification is adduced for it; an unreasoning, deranged and as far as I can see irreversible revulsion that is poisoning everything we are supposed to believe in here – the free exchange of opinions, the clear-headedness of thinkers and teachers, the fine tracery of social interdependence we call community relations, modernity of outlook, tolerance, truth. You can taste the toxins on your tongue.

Zeitgeist Corner: Frank O'Hara

2009-02-15T05:26:00.001-08:00

Dear reader, since you are an educated person of quite outstanding taste and learning, no doubt you are familiar with the poetical works of Frank O'Hara. I salute you and your greater commitment to self-improvement. Despite being a big fish in the poetry pond, O'Hara is news to me.

Oddly, this didn't stop O'Hara's writings being at the heart of two quite distinct creative works in this last week. The first of these was Zadie Smith's Speaking in Tongues, a spellbinding lecture she gave for the New York Review of Books (an audio version is available here). Her theme was voice and register, of the perils of moving from on to the other, and of authenticity. She described her own loss of a 'real' London voice as she tried on the voice of the academy, to Eliza Doolittle, a heroine who really suffered for her loss of voice, all the way up to Barack Obama. It's a bloody marvelous piece which should be read immediately. Here's a bit that chimes:

Voice adaptation is still the original British sin. Monitoring and exposing such citizens is a national pastime, as popular as sex scandals and libel cases. If you lean toward the Atlantic with your high-rising terminals you're a sell-out; if you pronounce borrowed European words in their original style—even if you try something as innocent as parmigiano for "parmesan"—you're a fraud. If you go (metaphorically speaking) down the British class scale, you've gone from Cockney to "mockney," and can expect a public tar and feathering; to go the other way is to perform an unforgivable act of class betrayal. Voices are meant to be unchanging and singular. There's no quicker way to insult an ex-pat Scotsman in London than to tell him he's lost his accent. We feel that our voices are who we are, and that to have more than one, or to use different versions of a voice for different occasions, represents, at best, a Janus-faced duplicity, and at worst, the loss of our very souls.

Whoever changes their voice takes on, in Britain, a queerly tragic dimension. They have betrayed that puzzling dictum "To thine own self be true," so often quoted approvingly as if it represented the wisdom of Shakespeare rather than the hot air of Polonius. " What's to become of me? What's to become of me?" wails Eliza Doolittle, realizing her middling dilemma. With a voice too posh for the flower girls and yet too redolent of the gutter for the ladies in Mrs. Higgins's drawing room.

The lecture's second half is about what Keats called (rather clunkily?) negative capability, the skill of being able to fully inhabit other voices as if they were your own, of "being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason", a talent we venerate in writers but abhor in politicians. Smith reaches the tentative hope that Obama's obvious gifts as a writer won't inhibit him a man of action. And then we get this:

Being many-voiced may be a complicated gift for a president, but in poets it is a pure delight in need of neither defense nor explanation. Plato banished them from his uptight and annoying republic so long ago that they have lost all their anxiety. They are fancy-free.

"I am a Hittite in love with a horse," writes Frank O'Hara.

I don't know what blood's
in me I feel like an African prince I am a girl walking downstairs
in a red pleated dress with heels I am a champion taking a fall
I am a jockey with a sprained ass-hole I am the light mist
in which a face appears
and it is another face of blonde I am a baboon eating a banana
I am a dictator looking at his wife I am a doctor eating a child
and the child's mother smiling I am a Chinaman climbing a mountain
I am a child smelling his father's underwear I am an Indian
sleeping on a scalp
and my pony is stamping in
the birches,
and I've just caught sight of the
Niña, the Pinta and the Santa
Maria.
What land is this, so free?

Frank O'Hara's republic is of the imagination, of course. It is the only land of perfect freedom. Presidents, as a breed, tend to dismiss this land, thinking it has nothing to teach them. If this new president turns out to be different, then writers will count their blessings, but with or without a president on board, writers should always count their blessings. A line of O'Hara's reminds us of this. It's carved on his gravestone. It reads: "Grace to be born and live as variously as possible."

Well, at this point, I was as bowled over as you can be in the lifts at Convent Garden station. This sounds like a poet I want to read more of, even if he's light-years from the tight little metrical constructions of a Larkin or an Auden or whoever: I do like a good poetical list, scansion be damned*.

And then, the first episode of Season Two of Mad Men (the absence of which I think explains our winter melancholy better than any putative lack of daylight). It was a sheer delight. I'm especially addicted to those moments when Don Draper looks into the middle distance and enunciates to his less-gifted flock some hitherto-unguessed-at principle of advertising. This week: "Why do men fly?" Do tell, Don! "They fly because they want to escape the city. They fly because they want to see a skirt that is one inch too high." *applause* (Next week: "What do men want? They don't to eat eggs. They want to go to work on them. Work something out won't you."

Anyway, the episode culminated in a Don voice-over, a reading from— yes, you're way ahead of me— Frank O'Hara's Meditations in an Emergency: "Now I am quietly waiting for/ the catastrophe of my personality/ to seem beautiful again/ and interesting, and modern".

Wow. Of course, since these things come in threes, my radar is now fully extended. I won't be at all surprised if today's winner of the 3:30 from Chepstow is called 'O'Hara's Paradox'

*Like Borge's certain Chinese encyclopaedia that divides animals into those: (a) belonging to the emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camel-hair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies.

That's a list.

Darwin and Lincoln and Hornets and Bees

2009-02-11T12:36:00.000-08:00

Couldn't get through the day without a tip of the hat to those two great emancipators, Charly Darwin and Abe Lincoln, who were both born on this day in 1809. Two connected items for your edification and delight.

Item 1: Orgel's second law: evolution is cleverer than you are. The European honeybee was introduced into Japan because of its high honey yield. But there is a local predator for whom honeybee grubs make a delicious snack for their voracious young. Scouting for bees, Vespa mandarinia or the Asian giant hornet, will leave a chemical mark on a ripe hive and then return with a raiding party of 30 or so individuals. When the raiders arrived, the bees are doomed: the hornet, five times bigger than a bee, rapidly makes bee-meat out the hapless invaders, scything through the nest at speed: one hornet can sever 40 bee heads a minute. So a small scouting party can annihilate a nest within a couple of hours: that's 30 hornets killing 30,000 bees.

Of course, this being natural selection, the story doesn't end there. When a hornet scout discovers a local hive, the Japanese honey bee is ready:

Secondly, general rejoicing chez my house at the news that gentleman essayist Adam Gopnik has published a new book. Entitled Angels and Ages, the book looks at Lincoln and Darwin's careers as writers and how their unique mastery of language meant their impact was that much richer and deeper than if they had simply been great men content to leave the speechifying or explicating to others. Read the first chapter; if the book's as good as Paris to the Moon or Through The Children's Gate, it should be a treat. How much of a treat? Well, Gopnik's quite marvelous essay on CS Lewis, with its ringing peroration in defence of the fantastic, is still the only piece of literary criticism that can moisten my eyes):

Poetry and fantasy aren’t stimulants to a deeper spiritual appetite; they are what we have to fill the appetite. The experience of magic conveyed by poetry, landscape, light, and ritual, is . . . an experience of magic conveyed by poetry, landscape, light, and ritual. To hope that the conveyance will turn out to bring another message, beyond itself, is the futile hope of the mystic. Fairy stories are not rich because they are true, and they lose none of their light because someone lit the candle. It is here that the atheist and the believer meet, exactly in the realm of made-up magic. Atheists need ghosts and kings and magical uncles and strange coincidences, living fairies and thriving Lilliputians, just as much as the believers do, to register their understanding that a narrow material world, unlit by imagination, is inadequate to our experience, much less to our hopes.

The religious believer finds consolation, and relief, too, in the world of magic exactly because it is at odds with the necessarily straitened and punitive morality of organized worship, even if the believer is, like Lewis, reluctant to admit it. The irrational images—the street lamp in the snow and the silver chair and the speaking horse—are as much an escape for the Christian imagination as for the rationalist, and we sense a deeper joy in Lewis’s prose as it escapes from the demands of Christian belief into the darker realm of magic. As for faith, well, a handful of images is as good as an armful of arguments, as the old apostles always knew.

If there's writing half as good in this new book, I'll be one delighted bunny.

Saul Bass head-shrink

2009-02-11T11:38:00.000-08:00

Saul Bass, he of the awesome credit sequences for Hitchcock, Preminger et al, also designed book covers. Check out this psychology textbook. Could just have easily been a Kafka cover.

[More on the credit sequences here.]

Elbow redux

2009-02-04T00:06:00.000-08:00

More evidence that the licence fee would be a snip at half the price, Elbow performed all of the Seldom Seen Kid with the BBC Concert Orchestra. Listen to "Grounds for Divorce":

Check out the choir giving the terrace chanting some real welly. And how the guitar irruptions are thrillingly augmented by the string section. Oof...

The whole thing is available in the UK until Saturday.

Christian Bale: are we human?

2009-02-03T06:05:00.001-08:00

Actually no (or should that be not? The Killers have permanently messed with my mind). Here's an audio of Christian Bale throwing a colossal wobbler.

Attenborough on Darwin

2009-02-02T03:30:00.000-08:00

I'd been dreaming of a programme like Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life (BBC) for much of my life: something to tie together all those magisterial series, from Life on Earth to Planet Earth. But, for a prime-time BBC1 show, this was better than I could have hoped for. It was stunning, moving stuff, Attenborough at his twinkly authoritative best (and ably abetted by Steve Jones as the show's science consultant).

The programme sketched Darwin's journey from tyro naturalist stupified by the endless forms most beautiful he encountered on his voyages (his journal's thumbnail sketch of the tree of life appended with a tentative "I think") all the way to his statue's recent usurpation of great rival Richard Owen in the Natural History Museum. There were some terrific closely argued sequences (yes, but what about the eye? What about the gaps? What about the distribution of species? Let me explain, said David, filling in those gaps that baffled even Darwin) and, finally, a wonderful animated sequence limning the milestones on the journey of life, from the pre-Cambrian explosion to the evolution of man, refuting the biblical notion of our dominion over the earth and triumphantly putting us in our rightful place, as close to to great apes as lions are to tigers (cue slo-mo footage of the big cats and the humble house cat).

There was one but one way this show could have been improved, and that would have been a discussion of parasites (I know, I know: always with the parasites). Attenborough himself has talked about how he can't believe that a benevolent God would ever have decided that creating Loa Loa, a parasitic worm that lives in the Human Eyeball causing river blindness, was a good idea. It would, perhaps, have been slightly icky viewing for a Sunday evening; but there have been some awesome sequences in previous series: the fluke pulsing psychedelically in the eye of a snail from Trials of Life lives with me still (the image, not the fluke). Sadly I can't find the clip: why no-one would upload a 20 year-old clip of a humble snail suffering a nightmarish parasitical infestation is quite beyond me.

What January blues?

2009-01-14T08:31:00.000-08:00

Best. Video. Ever.

Bubblicious from Rex The Dog on Vimeo.

Hamlet at the Novello Theatre

2009-01-08T00:30:00.000-08:00

My first post of 2009 was going to be something more substantial than the below, and is still forthcoming. But, striking while the iron is hot and all that...

To Hamlet at the Novello Theatre in London, in which noted popular actor David Tennant miraculously recovers from back surgery and makes a triumphant reappearance as the tortured prince of Denmark. Now, I don't claim a great knowledge of the theatre. I've seen comfortably under 50 plays in my lifetime. But this was the second Hamlet after seeing Kenneth "Ken" Brannagh play the Dane in about 1990, and Tennant's was much the superior effort. Of course, I should qualify that by saying I'm vastly less stupid and oiksome than I was almost 20 years ago (!) and, for all I know, I may have been witness to what it generally considered to be the finest Hamlet of modern times. Oh well (I have to physically restrain myself from typing 'no matter'). This Hamlet, with Patrick Stewart as Claudius (and a particularly Stentorian Ghost), was thrilling, with Tennant prowling and sporting the stage like a thing demented (whither his slipped disc?). Never mind that Ophelia was somewhat duff. Polonius was pomposity personified, the scenes with Rosencrantz, Guildenstern and the gravedigger were hilarious and the whole thing was finally very moving, despite Gertrude dying to laughter as she went from full health to stillness in a beat.

Review: School of Seven Bells - Alpinism

2009-01-03T04:59:00.000-08:00

Commissioned pieces for Orange

2008-12-02T01:28:00.000-08:00

Below is a selection of the travel features I've written for Orange Travel.

• Strange buildings around the world

• Shark attack hotspots

• Eastern bloc special

• World's most enchanting railway journeys

• Eccentric Britain: Quirky Days Out
[This piece will be featured in the future GCSE textbook, “How To Get An A”.]

• The World’s Deadliest Locations

• A Decade since the fall of the Berlin Wall: An Eastern Bloc Special

• The World’s Best Bars

• The Earth From Above

• Crazy Buildings Around the World

• The World’s Weirdest Creatures 1

• Weird and Wonderful new species

• The Beasts of Britain

• The World’s 20 Best Buildings

• Extreme Cuisine – how adventurous are you?

• The World’s Best Zoos

• Terminal 5 Chaos Blights Heathrow

• Britain’s Favourite Landmarks

The things that matter

2008-11-24T10:17:00.000-08:00

Earlier this month, there was an election that mattered quite a bit to quite a few people. A lot of people sort of thought it was really important. But some things really matter. This video puts the whole thing into some much-needed perspective:

Binary marble adding machine

2008-11-18T02:39:00.000-08:00

Wow. Lots more here.

Election nuggets

2008-11-06T10:32:00.000-08:00

Now is not the time for sarcasm, right? So let's pass gracefully over the revelations that Sarah Palin thought Africa was a country and get to this. Colin Powell was swept up in the maelstrom of Cheney/Bush bollix, giving a presentation of WMD evidence that turned out to be, how shall we say, creative. But personal redemption was at hand. His beautiful and moving endorsement of Barack Obama on Meet The Press was something to behold:

I’m also troubled by, not what Senator McCain says, but what members of the party say. And it is permitted to be said such things as, “Well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim.” Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim, he’s a Christian. He’s always been a Christian. But the really right answer is, what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer’s no, that’s not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president? Yet, I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion, “He’s a Muslim and he might be associated terrorists.” This is not the way we should be doing it in America.

I feel strongly about this particular point because of a picture I saw in a magazine. It was a photo essay about troops who are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. And one picture at the tail end of this photo essay was of a mother in Arlington Cemetery, and she had her head on the headstone of her son’s grave. And as the picture focused in, you could see the writing on the headstone. And it gave his awards–Purple Heart, Bronze Star–showed that he died in Iraq, gave his date of birth, date of death. He was 20 years old. And then, at the very top of the headstone, it didn’t have a Christian cross, it didn’t have the Star of David, it had crescent and a star of the Islamic faith. And his name was Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, and he was an American. He was born in New Jersey. He was 14 years old at the time of 9/11, and he waited until he can go serve his country, and he gave his life. Now, we have got to stop polarizing ourself in this way.

Fine words indeed. And how's this for closure for one of the most visible faces of the first Bush term:

The terrible aftermath of Barack Obama's victory

2008-11-06T00:22:00.000-08:00

Look, I want to promise this will be the last US election video I post before returning to the fascinating world of, uh, parasites, but this is too good not to post. In the words of the The Wire, I feel ya.

Obama Win Causes Obsessive Supporters To Realize How Empty Their Lives Are

ELECTION DAY, NOVEMBER, 1884

2008-11-05T02:58:00.000-08:00

If I should need to name, O Western World, your powerfulest scene and show,

'Twould not be you, Niagara - nor you, ye limitless prairies - nor your huge rifts of canyons, Colorado,

Nor you, Yosemite - nor Yellowstone, with all its spasmic geyserloops ascending to the skies, appearing and disappearing,

Nor Oregon's white cones - nor Huron's belt of mighty lakes - nor Mississippi's stream:

This seething hemisphere's humanity, as now, I'd name - the still small voice vibrating -America's choosing day,

(The heart of it not in the chosen - the act itself the main, the quadrennial choosing,)

The stretch of North and South arous'd - sea-board and inland - Texas to Maine - the Prairie States - Vermont, Virginia, California,

The final ballot-shower from East to West - the paradox and conflict,

The countless snow-flakes falling - (a swordless conflict,

Yet more than all Rome's wars of old, or modern Napoleon's): the peaceful choice of all,

Or good or ill humanity - welcoming the darker odds, the dross:

- Foams and ferments the wine? it serves to purify - while the heart pants, life glows:

These stormy gusts and winds waft precious ships,

Swell'd Washington's, Jefferson's, Lincoln's sails.

- Walt Whitman

It just goes to show, a black man in America still can't catch a break

2008-11-05T02:50:00.000-08:00

WASHINGTON—African-American man Barack Obama, 47, was given the least-desirable job in the entire country Tuesday when he was elected president of the United States of America. In his new high-stress, low-reward position, Obama will be charged with such tasks as completely overhauling the nation's broken-down economy, repairing the crumbling infrastructure, and generally having to please more than 300 million Americans and cater to their every whim on a daily basis. As part of his duties, the black man will have to spend four to eight years cleaning up the messes other people left behind. The job comes with such intense scrutiny and so certain a guarantee of failure that only one other person even bothered applying for it. Said scholar and activist Mark L. Denton, "It just goes to show you that, in this country, a black man still can't catch a break."

From the Onion

2008-11-05T00:07:00.000-08:00

Proof that John McCain has reached the "acceptance" stage

2008-11-03T07:09:00.000-08:00

(Headline appropriated from James Fallows)

Brooker on choke 'Brandgate'

2008-11-03T03:03:00.000-08:00

Charlie Brooker gives the Mail both barrels:

Friday's paper included a rundown of other "obscenities" broadcast by the Beeb, which the paper fearlessly "uncovered" by recording some TV shows and writing down some of the jokes. To protect readers' sensibilities, all the rude words were sprinkled with asterisks, although since the Mail's definition of "rude" extends to biological terms such as "penis", it was a bit like gazing at an ASCII representation of a snowstorm on a ZX Spectrum circa 1983. Perhaps next week it will produce a free sheet of asterisk stickers for readers to plaster over their own genitals, lest they catch sight of them in a mirror and indignantly vomit themselves into a coma.

Wait: Marlo's voting to have his wealth redistributed?

2008-10-31T01:47:00.000-07:00

The BBC. It's not all bad.

2008-10-31T01:22:00.000-07:00

As Brand/Ross rumbles into another day (good job it's a quiet month for news otherwise this would be nowhere), let's check in with another reason our licence fee is money well spent: Paxman. Here he is, interrogating the head of an Islamic school in Acton that teaching antisemitic garbage to its pupils. Never mind the false search for balance; in this clip, he sniffs blood and doesn't let go.

In other news, there's an election on! Don't forget to vote now:

Silhouette Masterpiece Theatre

2008-10-30T01:35:00.000-07:00

Introducing Silhouette Masterpiece Theatre

So, why did you leave Australia again?

2008-10-27T02:44:00.001-07:00

Hmmm, let me see.

Oh yes, I've remembered:

More here if you're that way inclined.

Fixed

2008-10-24T00:33:00.000-07:00

Artist Lisa Black tinkers with animals.

Introducing Epidexipteryx hui

2008-10-23T01:40:00.000-07:00

More information at Discover.

Show me how you do that trick

2008-10-23T00:33:00.000-07:00

Lovely encomium to the once-mighty Cure over at Hear Canal. Question: did the Cure go bland, or did my ears just grow up? Could I ever fall for something as darkly florid as Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me or as divinely overwrought as Disintegration again, or would I simply cringe? There's been nothing remotely in the vicinity of the Cure the last decade that's been anything other than awful. No goth, no emo. Nothing. Right?

One of the things I liked about the Cure back in the day was that, for all the laborious back-combing and shakily-applied slap, their spectrum was massively broader than that of your Missions and Fields of the Neff (then), and the hordes of the Emotic (now). No moody blacks or crushed velvet reds. No leather dusted with flour to make them look like desert warriors (I'm looking at you, Neff). The Cure's colours spanned the whole rainbow, even if they were often the garish colours of a bruise. So, if the Cure weren't goth, what were they about? They were about love. Oh sure, they were were also about dogs and cats and piggies and cockatoos and caterpillars and snake-pits and spiders, a conjured menagerie populating Smith's songs from the very beginning, a very English strain of dark imaginings that goes back to Dadd, Tenniel and Lear. But underneath it all, Robert Smith was singing, mostly, about love: fervid and self-obsessed or sickly and hungry or desperate and lost or just sweetly romantic, songs like "Show Me Heaven", "Lovesong" and "Pictures of You" put a whole generation of stunted adolescents on the road to something like real emotion. That's got to be worth something.

McCain fires back. Oh wait

2008-10-22T01:13:00.000-07:00

So John Murtha (D) has been going round calling the inhabitants of West PA 'red-necks' and 'racists'. When 'mad dog' McCain got hold of that, he shook it till it bled.

Oh no he di'nt.

Camille @ The Roundhouse

2008-10-21T09:48:00.000-07:00

Sunday, and to Camille in North London. Her backing, uh, 'band' was extraordinary, what with the beat boxing, chest slapping, floor stomping, slinky dancing (mostly from the beat-boxing fellow, it should be said. Camille did a great deal of thrashing about of a decidedly unslinksome nature) and general air of Gallic cool. Camille herself sung herself into the ground, but you sensed there wasn't a great spark between the audience and her. Maybe it's just a London crowd waiting to be impressed, who can say?

We left midway through the first encore, which meant we missed a very special guest who was dragged from the audience. To think: we went all the way to London, and missed Mr Jamie Cullum. Tragic.

You can see the Russian Tea Rooms from here...

2008-10-17T03:16:00.000-07:00

The campaign's getting a little strained, to say the least, what with all the terrorists and abortions and angry plumbers. So it's good to see the protagonists have not had a complete sense of humour malfunction:

Funny. But even better:

Dude, he's got game!

This is more mean-spirited. Which doesn't stop it being funny as hell: Palin as President.

Choose Life

2008-10-06T03:08:00.000-07:00

Following a recent pub discussion about parasite populations (I don't get out much), I thought I'd post this thoughtful article on parasites.

Was especially taken with this:

[...]a healthy ecosystem is usually rife with parasites, and when the parasites begin to disappear, this may foreshadow serious problems. For example, Lafferty has found that the fish in pristine Pacific coral atolls carry many more kinds of parasites than fish living in nearby overharvested atolls. Marcogliese has found that when acid rain damages Canadian rivers, the parasites fall out of the river food webs even while their fish hosts seem in good shape. Pollution can kill delicate parasites outright, while overfishing may wipe out parasites by removing some of their hosts.

No more on parasites, I promise. Unless I find some seriously cool new vids.

VP Debate Flow-chart

2008-10-03T07:45:00.001-07:00

36 Hours

2008-10-02T04:34:00.000-07:00

You know those scenes in films like Wall Street, where the big investor or piratical banker gets him come-uppance in a tumultuous final reel, where we see blinking boards and frantic traders indicating tanking stocks, where, even though the film-makers rarely deign to explain what's happening, we get a frisson as the barely-comprehensible but nevertheless exciting disaster unfolds?

Well, this is like that.

Pulling Pulling

2008-10-02T04:08:00.000-07:00

In a world where My Family and Two Pints of Lager continue to be made, Pulling, the fantastically dark show about three women and their adventures in men and booze, has been yanked from the schedules.

Rising food costs, ongoing slo-mo credit catastrophe, and now this? Maybe Kenneth Williams was onto something.

Deeply, deeply hilarious. Right?

2008-09-25T11:48:00.001-07:00

There's funny, there's funny, and then there's this:

Watch CBS Videos Online

... once I've picked myself up off the floor, I'm off to build a bunker and stock up on food and water.

Dedicated to all human beings

2008-09-24T02:54:00.000-07:00

Because the Nude remix competition was so much fun, those clever boys at Camp Radiohead are doing the same with Reckoner, a song that at least has the virtue of being in 4/4.

They've posted versions with James Holden and Diplo; both are merely OK — a sure spur to someone out there to do better.

Obama & the Conquest of Denver

2008-09-16T08:50:00.001-07:00

Michael Chabon on the Democratic Convention:

When Obama concluded his speech, we looked at each other, and then at him, and all stood up, wild with applause. (God knows what kind of madness was going on down there among the California delegation.) We had come to the end of volume two of the great adventure. Now it was time to go save the world. Game on.

David Foster Wallace

2008-09-16T03:10:00.000-07:00

David Foster Wallace is dead. I can’t say I ever read any of his fiction, which is certainly my loss; I’ve been conditioned against it by, one, a highly critical essay on Wallace’s mimetic style by, I think, James Woods (Wallace being the ne plus ultra of writers you’d expect Woods to hate: hyper-modern, super-dense, with no feeling for beautiful prose for its own sake) and, two, the sheer door-stopping weight of the things: Infinite Jest looks like it would do serious damage to one’s phalanges should it ever be dropped on them.

But the non-fiction, the reportage and literary critiques, are spell-binding; hyper acute and super-smart, Wallace’s (supposed) weaknesses become his strengths: giving each idea as long as it needs, and exploring all its branches; the dazzling research; the illumination of the metaphors; the obscure terminology (which all turn out, on interrogation of the dictionary, to be precisely the right words); and, of course, the subject matter: the wonder of Roger Federer; the plight of the lobster; John McCain; David Lynch; and so on.

But I wanted to quote from his essay on Borges. It’s from a review of Edwin Williamson’s Borges: A Life. It’s a small masterpiece of concision:

The truth, briefly stated, is that Borges is arguably the great bridge between modernism and post-modernism in world literature. He is modernist in that his fiction shows a first-rate human mind stripped of all foundations in religious or ideological certainty -- a mind turned thus wholly in on itself. His stories are inbent and hermetic, with the oblique terror of a game whose rules are unknown and its stakes everything.

And the mind of those stories is nearly always a mind that lives in and through books. This is because Borges the writer is, fundamentally, a reader. The dense, obscure allusiveness of his fiction is not a tic, or even really a style; and it is no accident that his best stories are often fake essays, or reviews of fictitious books, or have texts at their plots' centers, or have as protagonists Homer or Dante or Averroes. Whether for seminal artistic reasons or neurotic personal ones or both, Borges collapses reader and writer into a new kind of aesthetic agent, one who makes stories out of stories, one for whom reading is essentially -- consciously -- a creative act. This is not, however, because Borges is a metafictionist or a cleverly disguised critic. It is because he knows that there's finally no difference -- that murderer and victim, detective and fugitive, performer and audience are the same. Obviously, this has postmodern implications (hence the pontine claim above), but Borges's is really a mystical insight, and a profound one. It's also frightening, since the line between monism and solipsism is thin and porous, more to do with spirit than with mind per se. And, as an artistic program, this kind of collapse/transcendence of individual identity is also paradoxical, requiring a grotesque self-obsession combined with an almost total effacement of self and personality. Tics and obsessions aside, what makes a Borges story Borgesian is the odd, ineluctable sense you get that no one and everyone did it.

A brilliant summation of Borges' appeal; and a passing definition of modernism that's as good as anything I've ever read. I've included some further online examples:

"Host" The Atlantic Monthly, April, 2005
"Consider The Lobster" Gourmet, August, 2004
"The Weasel, Twelve Monkeys, And The Shrub: Seven Days In The Life Of The Late, Great John McCain" Rolling Stone, April 13, 2000*
"David Lynch Keeps His Head" Premiere, September, 1996

Essays:
"Laughing With Kafka" Harper's, July, 1998
"Tense Present: Democracy, Usage And The War Over Usage" Harper's, April, 2001
"John Updike, Champion Literary Phallocrat, Drops One; Is This Finally The End For Magnificent Narcissists?" New York Observer, October 13, 1997
"Tennis, Trigonometry, Tornadoes: A Midwestern Boyhood" Harper's, December, 1991

Creamy not foamy

2008-09-10T09:27:00.000-07:00

How to make the perfect flat white:

Conjoined, talons engaged

2008-09-10T07:38:00.000-07:00

In our mounting excitement for the new TV on the Radio album, thrillingly titled Dear Science, we thought now might be an opportune moment to post the video to what we think is their best song to date, "Province", which of course features the inestimable Sir David Bowie on trademark warbly backing vox:

I'll write more on the album when I finally get a copy...

The dream again nobody understands

2008-09-10T03:10:00.000-07:00

It’s a blue day in the country, the birds are singing in the dreams; it’s thunderously good to be alive. It helps that I’m sipping a Pimms at the B-man’s country house. It's a lovely pad, airy and bright, a perfect venue for the summer barbecue that’s in full swing. Much wine does flow. B flits from guest to guest, the proverbial life and soul. I retire to the other end of the immaculate lawn, exhausted as always by the prospect of socialising. Someone’s had the same idea: standing at the back of the garden is a tall melancholy fellow. He’s holding a glass of white wine and looking out at the countryside beyond with an expression of dreamy lugubriousness. He's wearing an insouciantly rumpled suit and a check shirt. I know this man: it’s Elbow’s lead singer Guy Garvey, a lovely man by any measure, indeed one of the Greatest Living Englishmen. My next sentence leaps from my mouth unbidden.

"Hey Guy. Love the new album!"

He looks at me. His eyes narrow. I’ve said the wrong thing.

"How have you heard it?"

Oh dear: It's not out yet. In fact, it’s not out for some time. So, the way I have heard it is this: I have downloaded it. Illegally. He knows this. I die inside, quite exploded by my own petard. This garden party has turned awfully chilly.

*******

Ok, so I should confess immediately that the above was a dream I had a few years back. Vivid as you like, but happily a dream nonetheless. Talk about the anxiety of the long-distance downloader.

One of the best songs from Elbow’s second album A Cast of Thousands is “Not A Job”, the chorus of which turns on a dream that remains, in this case tantalizingly unexplained:

The dream again nobody understands
Walking through the long grass on your hands
It's not a job to do today
Sleep it off

enormous yes

What I listened to in 2010

The Decade in Music #13: The Ting Tings, "That's Not My Name"

The Decade in Music #12: Kylie Minogue, "Slow (Chemical Brothers remix)

The Decade in Music #11: Elbow "Grounds For Divorce"

The Music of The Decade #10: Portal's GLaDOS

The Music of the Decade #9: LCD Soundsystem, "Someone Great"

The Decade in Music #8: Beth Gibbons & Rustin' Man, Out of Season

The Decade in Music #7: Ryan Adams - Heartbreaker

The Decade in Music #6: Royksopp, "What Else Is There? (Trentemøller remix)

The Decade in Music #5: Dominik Eulberg, Kreucht and Fleucht

The Decade in Music #4: The Divine Comedy, Absent Friends

The Decade in Music #3: Electroclash

The Decade in Music #2: Samuel Barber and John Adams

The Decade in Music #1: Elliott Smith, Figure 8

My Decade in Music: The Best Songs and Albums of the 2000s

Mistaken For Strangers

God in the Quad

One Night To Speed Up Truth

Mew - No More Stories

Leviathan, or The Whale

Carol Brown

Arcadia

This dance is like a weapon

múm "11 songs to drown in a lake to"

The Abstinence Teacher

Antichrist

Michael Jackson R.I.P.

Declare Independence

Sorry but this is funny

Mayflies

Sherlock Holmes

The Road

Synecdoche, New York

Whither posting?

Confessions of an English Mystic, being a review of the latest album by Bat for Lashes - Two Suns

Speaking in Code

Review: DM Stith - Heavy Ghost (Asthmatic Kitty)

Video: Fever Ray - If I Had A Heart (2009)

Ever Since Darwin

Dark Night of the Soul

Review: Gui Boratto - Take My Breath Away

Some short notes on the cover of Swan's White Light from the Mouth of Infinity

Being Human: A ghost, a werewolf and a vampire walk into a bar. No, really.

Random walk

Review: Peter Broderick - Home

Review: John Surman - Coruscating

The Other Hand by Chris Cleave

Principium Amicitias

Midlake - The Trials Of Van Occupanther

Justin Timberlake - "My Love"

Kanye Baby!

Susan Greenfield's House of Epical Nonsense

Review: School of Seven Bells - Alpinism

Playlouder

Live Review: Ane Brun at the Union Chapel

Fleet Foxes @ Roundhouse, 24/2/2009

Review: U2 - No Line On The Horizon (2009)

"Roger's Version" - John Updike

Let’s see the 'criticism' of Israel for what it really is

Zeitgeist Corner: Frank O'Hara

Darwin and Lincoln and Hornets and Bees

Saul Bass head-shrink

Elbow redux

Christian Bale: are we human?

Attenborough on Darwin

What January blues?

Hamlet at the Novello Theatre

Review: School of Seven Bells - Alpinism

Commissioned pieces for Orange

The things that matter

Binary marble adding machine

Election nuggets

The terrible aftermath of Barack Obama's victory

ELECTION DAY, NOVEMBER, 1884

It just goes to show, a black man in America still can't catch a break

Proof that John McCain has reached the "acceptance" stage

Brooker on *choke* 'Brandgate'

Wait: Marlo's voting to have his wealth redistributed?

The BBC. It's not all bad.

Brooker on choke 'Brandgate'