Bats and pieces

Yikes, no sooner do i mention that I'm related to shamed brit TV star Michael Barrymore (see post below) than Jacques Peretti does a reveal-all documentary about him on Channel 4. I'm watching it as I peep over my laptop screen right now. It looks a bit sordid, lots of tragic slurring English voices and talk about cocaine and swimming pools. At this point I'd like to clarify that Michael Barrymore is my deceased grandmother's cousin. And I've never met him. Ahem.



Anyway, music. I went to see Sebadoh in Whelans last week. They were class, four acoustic guitar strings, 34 songs and the truth. However, there was something funny about the whole gig though. Everytime they finished a song and briefly tuned up or whatever, a strange awkward silence descended on the Whelans crowd. They were cowed. Early in the gig Lou Barlow wondered about the re-occurring bubble of silence himself, telling us we were terribly well-behaved and that he was expecting a mad response. At gigs, I hate awkwardness and silence. So I started filling the sound vacuum with beery woop woops. I deplore a vacuum. If you are at an awkward gig in Dublin and some weird bastard shatters the silence with an ill-timed "wooop wooop!!!" its likely to be me.

Sebadoh were supported by Dublin band Bats. I landed in late enough and missed a few of their tunes. But as I eked my way through the strange crowd who were present, I couldn't tear my eyes from the noisy excitement on stage. It was filled by a bunch of young dudes in varying degrees of anonymous clothing and unassuming stances who created an absolute perfect storm of unconventional stop-start metal noise in their short allotted time. The lead guitarist's splayed fingers crawled mesmerizingly up and down his fret-board like a tarantula while the others managed to both look completely modest and rock out with ferocious abandon. They sounded a bit like Slint, Napalm Death and Steve Reich met up on a college piss-up in Fibbers. Great stuff altogether, and the best Irish crew I've heard live in a while.

MP3: Bats-Atom & Eve

Wots a meme when its at home?

In the comments section on a previous post Aoife Indie Hour 'meme'd me. Now I'm torn between looking like an egotistical bebo kid or a curmudgeonly online grinch. I'll go with bebo kid.

According to Sinead Gleeson who tagged Aoife here’s how it works:

Link to the person that tagged you.
Post the rules on your blog.
Write six random things about you in a blog post.
Tag six people in your post.
Let each person know they are tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.
Let the taggee know your entry is up.

Six random things about me. None are made up.

1: I find tea (the drink) very aversive. In fact I don't even know what it tastes like. Its milky, creepy, reminds me of toothless old people and teabags stain things.

2: I am related to shamed British TV comedian Michael Barrymore.

3: At the age of 3 my twin brother and I sat on eggs from the fridge in an attempt to hatch them and cried when they broke all over our dungarees.

4: The first time I kissed a girl at a junior disco I had to run and puke from a combination of anxiety and the fact that her breath smelled really bad.

5: As a child, I once climbed a tree with Podge from Ham Sandwich. He was at the top and I was following from behind when he decided to have a pee from his perch.

6: The song at the end of bear in the big blue house when he sings to the moon makes me feel profoundly melancholy

I'm tagging
Ian
Lolo
Karl
Adam
Nialler9
Mp3Hugger


Self referencing bloggers dance the smug conga ;)

Sorry if any of you dudes are annoyed by this.

Saturdays=The Pub

I'm bowled over by the new M83 album. I really am. I want to write about it here in more detail once I have a bit more time on me hands. There's something glorious about it. Its an entirely irony-free homage to elements of 1980's American popular culture (the highschool misfit in John Hughes movies) written by a Frenchman with a penchant for the overblown. Listening to it is an innocent and heady experience, like stepping into a hot shower where all the cynicism is gently rinsed off you. I'm excited about seeing them in Andrew's Lane Theatre tonight and will report back here later in the weekend. I also want to write about Sebadoh in Whelans t'other night, and the excellent Irish support that came from Bats.

Right I'm off to eat something rancid from Spar for my lunch. This is what will be on my headphones, Graveyard Girl. Gasp at the audaciously cheesy teenage lyric "I'm 15 years old and I feel its already too late to live. Don't you?" then feel the bumps stand up on the back of your neck when the majestic synth break-down kicks in.


MP3: M83-Graveyard Girl

GLOOM-GAZE

Flitting between blogs to seek out new tunes can be equal parts reward and head-banging frustration. The best blogs have such a fierce musical identity that you soon feel like you 'know' the blogger and his or her idiosyncratic tastes in tunage. However, it appears the sole function of many blogs is to poop out redundant copies of the same 'leaked' flavour of the month promo MP3 in the hope that it will generate hits for the site. When I look at how crushingly predictable the top blogged bands sidebar is on the hype machine website, I get a sense that the more clever indie labels now have a controlling touch on the "buzz." This is not a bad thing. It just indicates that many blogs are tired, clichéd, similar and don't really express an individual or critical taste in music; just a knack at being spoonfed by those sacred tastemakers over in pitchforkmedia. So its a treat to be able to knock into somewhere like mp3hugger and consistently find outstanding new tracks by bands I've never heard of, but generally end up liking a lot. Recently, the 'Hugger posted a track 'sleds' by a band called Pyramids, which I am going to post up here 'cos it properly grabbed my brain-goolies and gave them a pleasant squeeze.


MP3: Pyramids-sleds

This spiderweb of free-floating voices and soft dissonant drifts of glide-guitar leaves its trace long after you've finished listening to it. A bit like the spectral glow left on a turned off TV screen in a dark room. I looked into some more of this band's music expecting more of the same spaced out drones and was surprised to find a thrilling mixed bag containing much heavier and doomier sounding music than the present evidence might indicate. Pyramids are not quite shoegaze and they are not quite metal either. They inhabit fraught psychic wastelands somewhere between My Bloody Valentine and Sun O))). They'd fit nicely on an ATP Nightmare Before Christmas bill, sandwiched between Pelican and Throbbing gristle. The rest of their music is cathartic stuff, attacking hard with crescendos of industrial drumming and distorted moans before releasing into the ambient celestial stuff. Brilliant altogether.

As part of my continuing realization that I actually know fuck all about music, I discovered today that there are a whole bunch of great metal(ish) bands that utilize the gliding dynamics of shoe gaze and ambient music to add a psychedelic depth to their sepulcheral rawk. Pyramids are but an interesting brick in a dark wall that contains Pelican, Isis, and Jesu. I'm not even going to dare pronounce on this genre 'cos I know nowt about it, not even what its called. Gloom-Gaze? Doom-Prog? Post-Sludgecore? I have mates who would laugh off fuck buttons for being too commercial and who have been listening to this stuff for years. I'll consult them and get a primer CD made. In the meantime, here's another MP3. This time from Jesu. Its called Farewell.


MP3: Jesu-Farewell

Freaked out spaghetti

According to a sign outside my local pub, live music last night was going to be provided by "Tommy Lee Jones." I didn't go in to check if the gruff talking Texan himself turned up. This is because the last (and only) time I went into the pub I was politely asked to leave by a man with a battery operated voicebox. It was half twelve at night and I needed a few bottles of 7up to use as mixers in a house party 'round ours. Voicebox man and two others were playing darts on a board that kept electronic scores, and when I asked for the 7up to take out, he robo-told me "Bzzt don't be boddering the bar man coming in at dis hour for something silly like that. Bzzt."

I always liked the artist David Shrigley and his cartoons in the Saturday Guardian regularly make me laugh out loud. Admittedly, every now and again they are unfunny and inscrutable. Anyway, I often wonder is he actually insane, or is it possible to see life through such a neurotic, skewed lens and be well in the noggin?



I was excited last year when I heard that he was involved in a project where he collaborated with a bunch of left-field indie musicians. It was called 'worried noodles' and the bands recorded songs around lyrics and sketches drawn by Shrigley. In retrospect I should have been wise enough not to think this would amount to much. Like many projects where random collaborators are lumped together around a concept it didn't really work. It was a something of a musical whose line is it anyway. Lots of chaff, not much wheat. This one was nice though. Grizzly bear not sounding like themselves at all, at all, and singing about Shrigley's favourite type of Jam.

MP3:Grizzly Bear-Blackcurrant Jam

Necessity-the mother of egg fried couscous

In one of the more deluded episodes of my young life, I once convinced myself I invented the coke float. I was about senior infants age, and tucking into an ice-cream after the usual glorious feed of shite our parents let us eat after the Friday visit to Navan shopping centre. Giddy and high as a kite on nutrition free junk, I went mad and tipped a load of Cadet cola into my ice cream. The rest was fizzy, creamy history, until Monday morning anyway. My teacher burst my balloon in humiliating fashion by telling me to shut my excited trap and informing the whole class that the super new dessert I wouldn't shut up about had already been invented. Tough news. At that stage, I was seriously planning to market the stuff in containers with a photo of my grinning face on the front. I coulda been someone, I coulda been a contender.


Miss look what I invented!! I'll never need to sit a shitty spelling test again.

Tonight, I'm going to cagily put it out there that I've invented something new and food related. I was starving and there was fuck all food in the house. This was because two weeks ago I impulse bought a pair of expensive headphones. I knew that before payday I'd be a famished skeletal wreck, but on the plus side I'd tripping out on hunger hallucinations for free and listening to Brian Eno MP3s in crystal clarity. So here it is, ahem, drumroll please... egg-fried couscous. Lighter than egg-fried rice, more exotic than an omelette and easier to make than a poop after a night in Whelans. Now it wasn't just couscous and egg. I also found a shallot, some chilli and a clove of garlic, and piles of salt and pepper. Like the ice-cream float, the rest was history. I'm dead proud of myself. Please don't tell me its already invented. 'Cos to do that would be to punch my inner 7 year old in the head. So yeah, if you're gonna tell me egg-fried couscous has already been invented, congrats, you just punched a kid in the face.

Since getting the new headphones I've been listening to really expansive noisy stuff. Its amazing how new it all sounds, and hermetically sealed too; none of the nasty outside world leaking in. The downside is that I've been bumping into things and walking out in front of buses. Here's something insanely expansive and noisy from a band that once drove a JCB through a stage.

MP3: Boredoms-Star

In praise of Donal Dineen.

Donal Dineen was knocking around Whelans last night because of the Milosh gig. I never met him in person, and years ago I figured that if I did, there were a million bum-licky things I would like to say to him. As things turned out I didn't get the chance to unleash one of my vintage beery monologues on him. Lucky for him I suppose. When he landed in, he came across like a friendly Kerry fisherman, weighed down with audiovisual equipment instead of mackerel. All I managed was a quick handshake, and a thick tongued "well Donal, how's it going?" What I would have liked to tell him was that for me, he was the Irish equal of John Peel. That a crackly clock radio on my bedroom floor lulled me to sleep in a hammock woven from exotic ambient indie music for most of the leaving cert years 1997 and 1998.



I remember being at a family funeral in Falcarragh, Donegal for the first ever broadcast of here comes the night, his original show on Radio Ireland, later to become Today FM. All the beds in the house were full, so my twin bro and I fell asleep on matresses in the sitting room near the dying glow of a turf fire that filled the room with its scent because the chimney was blocked. We had a clock radio near us and had tuned into Dineen's debut excitedly, because we liked no disco. I first thought 'shit, he has a bad radio presence, too many stops, dead air, nervousness'. But then Autumn sweater by Yo La Tengo came on. That spare drumbeat, followed by that plaintive, lovelorn synth; it was really something new to me, and it stuck. From that point on, Dineen's show became the most integral part of my bedtime routine. What i loved about it most was the gently insistent way he trained his listeners' ears to new music. Obscure sounds drip fed to an audience by stealth. He would slyly drop a little-known song into the mix every night, and repeat it over the coming nights until four or five days in listeners would be manically texting for the new Casino versus Japan cut. It was light years from Dave Fanning. Dineen I salute you.


Sadly, I rarely manage to listen to the radio this weather, bar the odd BBC podcast of movie reviews and shit. So I hardly hear what gets played on Donal Dineen or anywhere else. However, my mate Dessie, who drives late at night a lot (he's a late night kinda dude) recently assured me its as good as ever. I'm gonna be presumptuous and reckon Dineen would play the sort of tune I'm putting up here. Its in the spirit of his show I hope. Its a remix of Spacemen 3's Big City that Erol Alkan did a while back. I heard it a few weeks ago in Loreana's gaf. It drifted down the stairs as I watched Sky News on the couch. It sort of hung in mid air near her banisters like a wavering mirage. I ran straight upstairs to find out what it was. I've listened to it a few times since, and it has that immersing warmth shared by so many of my old favourite tunes on here comes the night. Oh, and please, could someone please either provide me with a link or the name of the song that Donal Dineen used to play about the Arctic explorers and penguins???? I recorded it into a tape once. I fuckin loved it.

MP3: Spacemen 3: Big City (Remixed by Erol Alkan)

A cool gig in June!!

Evangelicals really caught my attention this year. Their music is a skewed, modern take on Psychedelia, with troubling lyrics that seem to sometimes deal with mental illness. Speaking of mental illness, that album cover is no fuckin' joke. They're the sort of spooked eyes you'd see rolling in the head of a Cork person after three days in a Dance tent at Oxegen.



Anyhoos, they are playing that upstairs place in Whelans on the 8th of June. Watch as June slowly morphs into May's big brother.

MP3: Evangelicals-Skeleton Man

I was dressed for success...

Sometimes without realizing it, you end up taking a holiday from your favourite bands. This happened to me with Pavement. They are a band that nestle somewhere between Guided by Voices and Built to Spill in a fuzzy corner of my affections, but who haven't been on my mind for months. Not since I started this blog anyway. Weird. I've managed to write reams of rambling shite about music for 6 months, yet have drawn a big Pavement shaped blank. Its time to set the world to right. My holiday from Pavement is over, and its fuckin good to be reunited with them. I took a lot of buses today, so I had a chance to binge on Pavement. Swords-Belfield-Chapelizod, a commuting nightmare ameliorated by the big three albums, Slanted, Crooked Rain and Wowee. Holy fuck, when you listen to that stuff back to back its nigh on overwhelming. Pavement were magnificent. They turned so many conventions of alternative music inside out. Their music was a bookish, obtuse, insanely melodic and a less likely to induce suicide yet still sometimes a-bit-sad alternative to the clichéd grunge gruel of their yank contemporaries. And they made it sound so natural. Malkmus literally breathed some sort of inhuman genius for a while. They also had a profound influence on alternative music on both sides of the Atlantic. In fact about half of what makes one of the most English-sounding albums of all time so great is the fact that a certain guitarist was skateboard flipping past a Californian sunset in his head when he was in the recording studio. Blur would not have been Blur without the influence of Pavement. They would have been a contrived pastoral 60s tribute band with nice songs. People say that 'Blur' is Coxon's album because its the one that holds the brightest candle to his idols Pavement. I say hold up a minute folks, listen to much of what makes 'Parklife' interesting. Its invariably the dichotomy between Albarn's polished melodies and some thrillingly idiosyncratic guitar squiggles that really shouldn't work with that sort of material.



Anyway, enough of that, Pavement crashed back into my life in a big way last night when an old clip for "father to a sister of thought" turned up on the '120 minutes' slot on MTV2. Two bands had the misfortune to be shown either side of it, Okkervil River and Foals. I think both of these bands are decent, but either side of Pavement? The poor fuckers wilted against the blinding brilliance. I'm glad in a way that it was that song that turned me back on. Because there is a certain type of Pavement song that is my favourite type of Pavement song. Its the one that's so pregnant with melancholy I'm almost too frightened to listen to it. Many of Pavement's best tracks are shot through the tummy with a sad bullet of some sort, but some are so raggedly heatbroken the very opening note makes you gasp. Here, in no particular order, are my favourite three downbeat Pavement tunes. Maybe you have never heard Pavement before? If you haven't, I'm jealous.

Actually, wait, I said the MP3s were in no particular order. I lie. "Here" is one of the most beautiful songs ever written. Ever.

MP3: Pavement-Here
MP3: Pavement-Father to a sister of thought
MP3: Pavement-Major Leagues

To end, there is a persistently growing rumour that pavement might reform. WHY? WHY would this be a good idea? Pavement exist, hair-raising songs intact, suspended untouched in mid-90s amber. Perfect. You can't fuck around with that. Don't reform lads. Please. Don't. Reform.

Oopstairs

Next Wednesday (the 9th), the Dublin live scene sees the grand return of Storkboy Choons and Colours Move. Once again its a Foggy Notions affair. They'll be playing the upstairs room in Whelans in support of that sophisticated Canadian bleep-merchant Milosh and Mr Donal Dineen. This time around the boys intend to supplement their laptops with a bag of new tricks, including visuals by their mates and an actual musical instrument. Fancy that. I attempted some visuals for the colours move track 'winters' and ya can see the choppy results below. At times its quite out of sync, but I think I succeeded in giving it some of the qualities of the track. Before anyone pulls me up over this, yes it does contain super 8 footage, and yes I did say something about "the usual super 8 bollocks" in my comment box a few weeks ago. I made the video out of imovie and an affecting old clip I found. I had a holy fuck moment yesterday when I found out that such a powerful piece of time-wastingly (nay life-drainingly) addictive software as imovie had slumbered unused in my laptop for the past three years. I thought my life was fucked from blogging. Its really fucked now. I'm gonna spend the next 4 months pretending to be Michel Gondry and lamely faffing around with this shit.

Video: Colours Move-Winters


Winters really crawled under my skin when I was making that clip. It has a genuine emotional tug.

Update!! Not to do with this but analogue magazine is up for a student media award. If you are a student you can vote here.