tweedledum and tweedletwee

I was gonna write about Hercules and Love affair tonight, drop a fresh MP3 from their new album; then glide out my door on the crest of a slick and shiny wave, marveling as I go at how the paving slabs light up at the touch of my jiving feet all the way into town. Instead, I took on extra shifts at work, so I'm staring down the barrel of a 6am start and listening to precious old skool Brit indie in my jocks. Well some of it is decidedly more precious than the rest. Case in point is Tigermilk by Belle and Sebastian. I'm imagining what my Greenday-loving 14-year-old former self would have done if he found out he'd grow up to like acoustic songs about sailors and gay art students delivered by a man who lisps like Daffy Duck reciting sally sells sea shells... They'd have peeled that poor traumatised kid from the front of a passing bus in 1995. Actually, that would make a great lyric from Tigermilk. "A walking clearasil ad/ the spottiest boy alive/ they peeled him from the front of a bus/ in nineteen ninety five". Its some album though, a classic.


Corey and Tegan have special knitted pockets on their cardigans to keep their copies of Tigermilk.

MP3: Belle and Sebastian-The state that I am in

Less precious, yet utterly brilliant are the enigmatic Young Marble Giants who are in that rare club of hugely influential bands with one album to their name. Its called Colossal Youth and it was released in 1980. Its sparse, tense, quite strange and occasionally psychedelic. I'm gonna write about it in more detail when I have my thinky reflective head on, but if you have never heard of them the following MP3 will give you a handle on this classic record. Its probably one of those occurrences when a band have expressed their vision in such a powerfully perfect way that if they were to record again it would be redundant, dilutive rubbish. A bit like wot happened when Second Coming dumped all over the mercurial beauty of The Stone Roses from the coke-addled heights of Led Zeppelin mountain.

MP3: Young Marble Giants-Searching for the Night

Now its off to bed to second guess me alarm clock for a few sleepless hours. Yay.