seagulls and a new album

Tweet Seagull shit is an offensive substance. I'd say it ranks somewhere between bin-juice and the congealed pus in an old man's dentures in terms of its offensiveness. Considering that the aforementioned bin-juice is part of your average seagull's diet, along with fish mulch, it's no wonder their poop is so vile. They also have larger bowels than the more benign birds in the Irish environment. When seagulls decide to loosen their guts people know about it. A typical gull shit is a greenish-white, 11-inch streak of putrefied haddock dropped from a height. Not pleasant.


did you just spill my facking pint mate?

Gulls are bad ass fuckers when compared to other birds. Only recently, I found out that pissed off gulls are liable to use their shit as a weapon. A few weeks ago I spent a sunny afternoon in my mate Frank's top-floor apartment in the city centre. Apparently, gulls like the city because there's lots of shit in bins for them to feed on so they are increasingly nesting inland. Anyway, on this particular day, the sun was belting on the Dublin rooftops as we supped fruit juice and listened to tunes. So we swung the patio doors open to let the weather in around us. Frank was barely out on the patio, when there it was, the screaming gull. It came wheeling in from nowhere, talons out, its beak open at a frenzied angle that made it look like a mad little man with wings. It swooped straight for Frank and with remarkable accuracy dropped a bullet of shit on him. My gast was well and truly flabbered by this. I wanted to know if it was a one off? Like a gull gone postal after getting pissed of by humans one time too many? But apparently not. The fucker attacked Frank many times before this incident, once going for his hair, often sniping him out with streaks of such quantities of offensive shit you could half-fill cups with them. Now I'm worried about gulls. I'm googling them and finding out things I really don't want to know. For example, an old woman in Australia died after a gull went apeshit and left her in a heap on the pavement bleeding to death from "deep beak puncture wounds". Gulls eh? Bad fuckers of the avian world. I'm now interested in training one up, feeding him bin juice for a week and sending him after the fat controller in Bus Aras to avenge what happened there last week.

Music news. MP3Hugger is doing something great. He just released a downloadable album of 10 unsigned acts who caught his eye recently, with all proceeds from the download going to the acts. It's the same price as a daycent bag of Pic'n'Mix and about as varied. There's something there for everyone. Download it Here.

This is the taster MP3 from the album Indiecater Volume 1

MP3: Cymbals eat Guitars-Share

Die Schwarzwald

Tweet If you were a kid who lived near a forest, even a small one, it probably loomed large in your imagination. I lived (and still do) near a pathetically small forest called Headfort forest. Tiny as it was, it didn't stop us from making up all sorts of mad stories about it. Older kids, swept along by the great Kells ouija board craze of 1991 would head out there in the evenings and end up spooked, pale, and blethering about a dead fisherman with hooves who spoke to them, and continued to speak to them until the school called in a priest.

At one point, in the depths of the aforementioned great Kells ouija board craze of 1991, I was afraid even to go to school, because every day played out like an episode of most haunted. Week in and week out, we'd hear about some wacked-out older out kid from over the town doing something nuts, like pulling clumps from their hair out after spending half the night being whispered to by an eyeless nun.

Later on, it dawned on me that the early 90s were Acid-House time. There was a lot of LSD doing the rounds (not to mention those tiny mushrooms on the pitch and putt course), and this might goes go some way towards explaining all those shades going billy-o about the town. You might ask what sort of mental kids mix psychotropic drugs with games for communicating with the dead? But I guess that was Kells at the start of the 90s. Regular children were wearing heat sensitive orange tie-dye and watching the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air; we, on the other hand, were snaffling magic mushrooms in graveyards and getting exorcised by the local priest (true story: a certain priest did one or two things along these lines at the time).

Where was I? Forests, and the grip they exerted over my imagination. That acrid smell of bruised elderflower leaves. The soft leaf mulch under my doc martins. Half-submerged orange frisbees of fungus on tree barks. Rooks picked out against a corroded silver sky. It was one easy skip from this heady mix of sensory stimulants to creepy flights of fancy. Grasping woody hands, witchy cackles, and puppety demons flitting through the gaps ahead. All this, from a tiny forest. Imagine what it would have been like to grow up on the edge of a proper forest? Like the German Black Forest, Die Schwarzwald? It's a great word, Schwarzwald, weighty, ominous and expressive of the how the forest must have seemed in long-gone times. A mossy mystery as big as a small country. An impenetrable place, full of thick shadows as alive as the moss they fall on, toadstools, tangled briars, pagan secrets...



I'm thinking of the Schwarzwald a lot at the moment, because it's a key reference point for a collection of
music I've gotten into recently. It's called 'Nah und Fern' by Gas, a collection of four albums re-released as a box set. Gas was the ambient electronic side project of Wolfgang Voigt who co-founded Cologne's renowned Kompakt label. The minimal aesthetic of many of the acts on that label owe a debt to his production work and his various early releases under different monikers. The Gas records, however, were his collective masterwork, and were, until now, a sort of holy grail for techno lovers prepared to trade silly bucks on Ebay.

The music made by Gas is ridiculously hard to convey in prose, which is why a sample MP3 is provided below. It's techno in the barest sense, in that you will often hear 4/4 beats, sometimes close, but mostly far, far away in the thick mix. They beat dully like faint signals through a soupy fog, either anchoring you or tricking you into following them ever deeper into and over Voigt's horizon-less sonic terrain.


Voigt was inspired both by Germany's forests (the 3rd record Konigsforst translates as King's Forest) and German composers whose music he sampled from old vinyl recordings. He layered, treated, and distended these samples into billowing drones and textures which, on headphones, convey the largest sense of 'space' I've experienced in music. Voigt called the project Gas because he wanted the sounds to be vaporous,airy and everywhere at once, and throughout the records, the timeless life of the forest is tangible; its mulchy darkness, its gnarled depths, and from time to time its clearings full of light and heat. The record works almost as a prayer to the forest, or a communion with its spirit. Nothing less than that level of spiritual depth.

What you are reading here is easily about as excited as I can possibly get about a new musical discovery. I want to share it. Even if you are into music with more conventional structure, give it a go and with a little patience you may find yourself drawn into these albums' great depths. If you live near a forest, why not take them with you on headphones? Just don't stop to talk to the cloven hoofed fisherman. He's bad news.

MP3: Gas-Konigsforst 1

If this blog post seems familiar, it is because most of it is taken from a blog post I wrote a few years ago. 

The seven deadly songs

Tweet I got a meme thing in my comment box from Adam. The rules were to post up seven songs that you are currently listening to and tag other people. I'm going to flout the law of Fleetwood Mac by breaking the chain (because I don't know seven bloggers well enough to tag). However, I'll pull a Karl and post a selection of songs up anyway. I'm listening to music very intensely at the moment, what with being at home and all, so there's a lot to choose from. The amount of MP3s I put up will be determined by how well fileden behaves as I write this post.

1: MP3: Steve Reich-Different Trains (Part 1)

2: MP3: Steve Reich-Different Trains (Part 2)

I'm binging on Steve Reich at the moment. I love repetition. I love repetition. Different trains is a difficult yet compelling piece. In it, Reich uses urgent rhythms, tape loops of voices, and tightly wound micro-melodies based on the rhythm pitch of those voices to evoke the unutterable terror of the Holocaust. The different trains he refers to in the title are the train journeys Reich himself took across America as a youngster, and the trains speeding toward the ruin of the concentration camps during the Holocaust. Part 1 is based mostly on the American Railway experience and there is a sense of thrilling dynamism through most of it. Part 2 is a different beast altogether, the trains whistles are shrill and violent, sirens fill the air and the palpable sense of inevitable, unavoidable, encroaching atrocity makes it a harrowing listening experience.

3: MP3: The Dodos-Red and Purple

Over on Analogue recently someone got their nads in a knot over a review I wrote where I compared High Places to Animal Collective. They felt I was a lazy reviewer and my comparison was ill-founded. Okay, I'm lazy, but it's becoming increasingly difficult to talk about a lot of recent music without drawing a line to it from Animal Collective. I think Pitchfork calls this music new-primitivism on account of the occasionally chanty nature of the vocals and the prominent clattery rhythms shared by these artists. Lots of bands wear the Animal Collective influence heavily and suffer from it; it can be a crushing mantle. Others, like The Dodos, wear it lightly, and let it enhance their own sound; the same way a good stock might add backbone and flavour to a range of delicious and individual soups. Ahem, feel free to whup me in the comment box below for that toe-curling analogy

4: Lil' Wayne: Lollipop

When I temporarily lived in Canada as a teenager I was partial to acting the mentalist from time to time. One night, as you do for the crack, I drank a bottle of prescription cough syrup. Lil' Wayne's drink of choice is some weird ass shit. Every floor in the building was soon tilting at 45 degree angles. I could barely crawl and was hanging on to my bedpost for dear life in case I slid down the floor and out the back window. Sadly, in my codeine addled stupor I didn't pen any woozy, world-beating rap. I did manage to produce some fetching luminous green puke though.

5: The Left Banke: I've got something on my mind

This is the classic 60s baroque pop cut that Jens Lekman sampled for Black Cab. I listen to it a lot. It's a jaunty, ornate little fucker with incongruous lyrics that deal with obsession and sadness.

6: Sun O))): Cursed Realms (of the Winter demons)

Sunn O))) collaborated with Malefic for this (Malefic is a renowned American Black Metal artist who, under the name of Xasthur, creates scrotum-tighteningly bleak music about how much he hates humans). Inspired by Kenny Rogers' collaboration with Dolly Parton 'Islands in the stream', Sunn O))) nailed Malefic into a tiny coffin with a microphone to record an inhuman shriek from the depths of his rotten soul to go with their diabolical detuned drones. All-in-all Cursed Realms (of the Winter demons) is a perfect alternative to Vampire Weekend to get people loosened up at your Summer barbeque. Just make sure to warn guests wearing lightly coloured chinos that Sunn O))) are fond of notes that hit parts of the digestive system other robed doom-metal merchants can't reach.

7: Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band-Dachau Blues


I'm really trying to get a foothold into Trout Mask Replica after reading Lester Bangs' breathless exaltation of the album. I can't decipher it. Those mutilated blues rhythms and cascades of surreal language leave me alienated. They won't let me in. To listen to Trout Mask Replica, for me, is to peer through a tiny window into the interior of an infinitely monstrous rusty factory. It's full of strange mechanical machinery, grinding cogs, whizzing belts, hammers and steaming pistons, all operated by wild beardy pirates on drugs. God knows what these machines are producing. Actually, come to think of it, I don't know if I ever want to be let in. I can admire the complex madness through the window. But at the moment, that's about it. Yikes, I just realised that this song is also about the Holocaust. Err, maybe a change in listening habits is in order.

I'm banned from Bus Aras

Tweet I feel like Dr Richard Kimble. In the space of 5 days I've managed to get caught fare-hopping on the Luas and banned from Bus Áras (at least according to the creepy and inexplicably angry security guard I had an altercation with last Monday). This shocking one-man-crime-wave of mine is rendered all the more frightful by the fact I spent most of the week in Kells, involved in the sedentary pursuits of writing up my research and eating pretend German versions of all my favourite branded food products. (Can Lidl become a hobby? I think my parents' new hobby is Lidl. It's so easy for me to make my Dad's day now. All I need to do is eat a bowl of Froot und Bananenbrickferst, smile, then say "wow, this tastes lovely, just like Kellogs fruit and fibre" and he'll launch into an excited spiel about how it cost 9 cent a box, and not only that, but he got a new magnetic birdfeeder on special offer and next week he's getting a digital photoframe which will display all five photos in our family's digital photo collection scrolling by indefinitely in low grade LCD).

So yeah, Bus Aras. I was cheery, full of pep and vigour after the big Future Days gig in Vicar Street and had just guzzled a Spar breakfast fruit smoothie (frozen raspberries from the experimental Spar greenhouse in the Antarctic whisked into a palatable and energising formula with the energy gift of guarana for the modern Dublin twentysomething: I say this sarcastically because if anyone reading this blog has ever paid an extra euro for a poncey energy drink because it contains "guarana" you've been had. Buy a bag of Siucra and lick it for a few hours. It's cheaper and more effective. Scientifically, it is. I swear). Anyway, I had a spring in my step, and I was ready to hit the hometown for a week of solid academic graft and knock-down German approximations of nutrition. But my bladder was full so I ventured down to the Bus Aras jacks for a wizz.


You're barred son

In Bus Aras the jacks are a disgrace. We're talking 2 inch deep puddles of the rancid collective urine of the previous 20 piddlers, doors falling off hinges, urinals blocked with that unnamed industrial strength substance composed of chewing gum and pubes, and those junkie-detterrant dim lights which look like the glowing tubes which kill blue-bottles in chippers and end up making people piss all over their own jumpers because of their inefficiency. Bus Aras (a public building mind you) charges 20 cent for you to utilise these facilities. I'm not scabby. Far from it. But why would you pay 20 cent to potentially contract chlamydia and inhale the vapours of strange people's urine under a fluorescent light for a few humiliating minutes? To add insult to all this, the 20 cent grants you permission to shuffle through the sort of wonky turnstile last seen on the Cusack stand in 1991. And it's broken. Yup all those 20 cents of the past weren't churned into fixing that shitty cattle farm turnstile. No sir, they probably pay the smug security guard who catches rogue toilet users, like me.

I didn't pay the 20 cent. I did the obvious trick of pulling the turnstile back a few inches. Because it's been broken for 3 years, this is very easy to do and many know how to do it. Then I went in to widdle. Little did I know, however, that a security guard was waiting inside like a garda car on a Cavan by-road the day before they submit their 'figures' for the old pay rise. He was a small Scottish man, and a dopplegager for the fat controller in Thomas the Tank Engine. He pounced me and tried to humiliate me, making me out to be some sort of scabby pompous cheat trying to wee for free. I'm normally uber-placid, but for some reason something got a hold of me. Some sort of Incredible Hulk rage. It started with me politely saying I didn't want to spend 20 cent there because I didn't know how a public building could charge for people to use its toilet facilities while they were such a disgrace. It sadly ended with me saying (actually shouting), "I'd rather piss in an alley. I can do this across the road for free in the Isaac Butt and go home without getting a disease off the seat. In fact I'm going to do that now." (I sadly did say this). It all ended horribly. He stalked me up the stairs in that crappy security guard way.

He then shouted at me in an indignant voice for effect, in front of everyone in Bus Aras, that I had embarrassed him with my mannerisms (so that's why he chose the main thoroughfare to shout at me?). Also, he remarked that I was a snotty posh student who could afford to pay to use the toilet. I'm fucking 27, and while admittedly a student, he had no way of knowing this. I'm guessing he went for broke on my crap haircut. Although, it might make more sense for me to be a dole sponging wannabe trendy than a student at this age. To piss me off further, he had a Scot accent and said "Snoate-ey steewww-dent" and "Poashh" which for some reason riled me (this, I guess because he was probably working on whatever resentful stereotypes he generated from Scottish students during his security guard days in Scotland, and applying them to me). Anyhoops, the bottom line was that I was banned from Bus Aras by that dude. Whatever the fuck that means? The station? Outside it too? For a day? For ever?

Finally, I'm not posh. I'm about as posh as a badly fried frozen chip dunked into a runny fried egg. This only matters because I want to make a point about pathetic inverse snobbery. It's as bad as regular snobbery. Why do some people think that anyone who can speak with an extended vocabulary is posh? Nice easy way out there lads. Well, papers and books only cost what they cost, and believe it or not some of us didn't have to be rich to read them and learn a few words. Anyway, even if I was well-to-do, what would be wrong with that?

Back to the security guard; I worked as a security guard for a year when I was 20. Therefore, I can comment on this from their perspective. I know many of them are good dudes earning a living. However, some of the older ones are in it for some sort of sad power trip where they can offload their dim-witted prejudices on the public in a controlling fashion. And some of the others just like to leer at cleavages through cameras that are conveniently mounted everywhere. Do you know what the greatest use of CCTV in Dublin is? No, not solving crime, you innocent but forgivable, idealistic poppet. Nah, its for security guards to make X-Factor style comparisons on the various cleavages walking into the Jervis Street/Illac/Blanchardstown shopping centre. You know when they are all talking real important-style into their walkie talkies? Its not because there is a crime in progress. Its because "a fucking unbelievable pair of Polish melons is going up the escalator lads, swivel the cameras." I know this. Why? I worked with them for a year. It's true. That's what the ones I worked with did mostly anyway. Therefore, I can say it forthrightly. Anyway, the dude in question told me I'm barred from Bus Aras and he never forgets a face. I suppose because he is the fat controller in Thomas the Tank Engine, faces are easy to remember: Thomas=happy, Gordon=grumpy etc. Autistic children love Thomas the Tank Engine for that reason.

This wasn't my usual blog. It was a rant. But business will resume as normal next time around. In the meantime here is an MP3 from the 13th Floor Elevators. They wrote all their music on LSD, recorded it on LSD, and played it live on LSD. They also played the 'jug'. This was a weird wibbledy-wobbledy-wonder of a one-off instrument that appropriated the sonic mind-meld of an LSD trip. It wibbles away through many of their freaky songs. For them, it was the sound of the human mind turning into a tangle twister. It apparently oscillates the same rapid way the brain does when psychedelic substances are interfering with the synapses. It fascinates me. I'll probably never in my adult life take the requisite amount of LSD to fully 'get' the 13th floor elevators (though I might on my 85th birthday), but you can appreciate them from a sober layman's perspective without going loolah on the old microdots. Big up to the one and only Rocky Erickson too. He was out there. The lyrics he howled (not all written by him) were incandescent poetry from the other side. Rocky is still out there. Mentally mangled I believe, because he was treated poorly in a mental asylum after pleading insanity on a marijuana charge. But although he is near ruined, he is managing to record his own records, with the support from genuine fans and bands who appreciate his influence.

That's poash student music

Rocky Erickson's music will live on in a way that the likes of Jim Morrison's widely regarded yet empty, conceited hippo-shit should not. Yet, for some reason Jimbo's heinous babbling river of self-mythologising crud means something to lots of people. Why guys, why? He was a greedy, dark, narcissistic guy with ruined looks and no imagination who thought genius equals taking too many drugs. He compared himself to a reptile and took his cock out while reciting his own 'poetry' (which will never bother Dylan, never mind Auden) about being the self-styled lizard king of the counter culture. He was flabby, sad and had ruined his body at that stage. Yet he still liked to reveal his cock from under the hanging 5 stone empirical demonstration that he did not possess the physique of a lizard, unless it was a narcissistic alcoholic human-hating overweight lizard from the planet cock. However, Jimbo is still hugely popular with Italian students who visit Ireland and Irish kids who go to the gaeltacht. Why guys, why? If you are that age and reading this, listen up. Young Jim looks admittedly OK on a tshirt. But this summer, try forget whatever it is that appeals about him, and sample the Hold Steady, The Beatles, early Pink Floyd, The Who, or Springsteen. Heck, even the Rolling Stones. Anything except the Doors. Anything except the Doors. Can I say that one last time? Anything except the fucking Doors.

MP3: The 13th Floor Elevators-Roller Coaster

A pretty mess by this one band

Tweet So yeah, perfect songs; glossy, slick, impenetrably perfect things that they are. Like marbles. Or ridiculously ornate yet also impenetrable. Like Faberge eggs. I've been thinking about them too much over the last few days, as I am want to do with something on my mind. So I'm nipping the 'perfectly perfect' song thing in the bud right now (before this blog turns into Mojo). Instead, I'm going to move on to the sort of stuff that really thrills me (although I do love the last few songs posted). Namely, messy music. Music that feels like that double whiskey you down at the exact point when you are out at a wild gig and teetering on the precarious knife-edge between the most rock'n'roll night of your life and a romantic hook-up between the right side of your face and a carton of garlic and cheese chips in Roma 2.

I called this blog 'a pretty mess by this one band'. It's the name of the first EP by Grandaddy. Back in the day, Grandaddy used to be my favourite band on account of their debut album 'Under the Western Freeway' which struck me then (and still does), as a bona fide classic. It was a doomed, melancholy affair. Forests, foliage and dreams of outer-space got romantically entwined with concrete and the city. All the while, melodic genius looked on and wept. Anyway, the EP I mentioned is pre-Freeway, and while it's good, it isn't stunning or anything. However, its title seems to neatly sum up the lo-fi aesthetic. Mess is beautiful. Accidents can be exhilarating. And perhaps most importantly, talent in the raw is immeasurably more beautiful than talent polished to a dull yet pleasant sheen in a recording studio.


Ghirlandaio. What an innovator. He painted an old man with a lumpy nose and made him beautiful while those around him were painting things that looked like Agyness Deyn crossed with Johnny Depp (with wings). He was the Guided By Voices of the Italian Renaissance.

Some songs to exemplify my tongue-tied points above

MP3: The Clean-Tally Ho!

This is the rallying call of a scene in New Zealand that had a fertilizing effect on all the 90s lo-fi American giants from Pavement to Neutral Milk Hotel. The song is all wrong. The organ and guitar aren't really friends. The recording is a shambles. The singing is distorted and out of tune. Yet, listening to it is like having the excitement which all the world's kids feel on Christmas Eve boiled down to a droplet and sprayed up your nose.

MP3: Guided By Voices-Hardcore UFOs

"Sitting out on your house/watching hardcore UFOs" sings Robert Pollard, letting us know he is into wild childlike abstraction. "Are you amplified to rock?" sings Robert Pollard, letting us know that he also loves to guzzle beer and rock out like the most pantomime stadium groups; thereby establishing the dichotomy that runs through his entire subsequent career. This is the opening track off Bee Thousand, an album which pops at the seams with some of the best rock music ever. Bee Thousand stands proudly with the best of the bands Pollard himself worships: Wire, The Who and The Beatles. Now listen to how the sound quality falls out of the mix halfway through this, the first song on the album. It may have happened by accident during recording, but it's no accident that this is the first song on that record. Hardcore UFOs is a manifesto. Guided by Voices put the biggest sonic flaw on Bee Thousand right at the start because they want the listener to think 'okay this is a fucking massive tune, but it's rough as chips'. That drop in sound is two fingers in the air to bands who spend months polishing their turds into soon to be forgotten radio fodder. It says you may be vaguely hummable, popular and super-produced but Guided By Voices are rough, alive and a zillion fucking times more incredible than you will ever be. Remember, in context, this came out around the time of some of the worst over-produced MTV-era jock rock. Uncle Bob, I salute you, and my series of blogs on Guided by Voices will soon hatch.

MP3: Guided By Voices-Echos Myron

Yup, Mr Pollard again. Here, he writes a song permeated with the same pure melodic energy that the Beatles channelled in their heyday, Yet it's handicapped by the tape hiss that makes it so precious to those who exalt it the most. If The Kinks released a full studio version of Echos Myron in 1966, it would probably be a pop standard.

MP3: Times New Viking-Teen Drama

Heirs to Guided By Voices? This is the song that kicks off their new album Rip it Off. It's a beast. What I love about Times New Viking is how they not only distort their every instrument (including the drumkit), but they also distort their singing voices. This technique gives this song a savage drive that quickens the pulse every time it's played. It's a new lo-fi anthem. Times New Viking have a formidable pop sensibility and they could have recorded a pretty slick version of this (or any other song on the record) in a nice studio after they signed to Matador. Why didn't they? Listen to the arousingly filthy guitar noise that announces itself at around 1 minute 21 seconds and then decide for yourself.

I previously threatened to blog about Guided By Voices' entire discography. Shite. This blog feels like my surreptitious start to that (it wasn't planned this way, honest). I'll try to be healthy about it and keep it at a ratio of two normal blogs to one GBV blog. It might take over my life though. Fuck.

More pearly perfection

Tweet I wish the title of this post was about my teeth. Sadly my mouth is a jumble of irregular, translucent shards that have been ravaged by years of diet coke abuse. You know that ad on telly where the dentist shines a torch through teeth and they are all see through? That's what my teeth are like. Except mine look a little more like something you'd find in the jaws of one of those scary fish that have lurked at the bottom of the ocean since prehistoric times. Go handy on the diet coke there kids! In the last post I mentioned that I was going to put up a few songs that I love for their imperfection. I won't do that just yet, because I want to post a few more examples of songs that feel perfect as I rushed up the last two. Since that last post, songs that might be perfect have dropped into my head in dribs and drabs, and I'm sure they will continue to do so over the next few days. I don't know for sure what these songs have in common. Mostly, I suppose I never tire of hearing them. Also, none of them are that long. Finally, I guess when listening to them, it's hard to imagine them being as good if sung by someone else, remixed, or messed around with. MP3: Roy Orbison-Crying Have you ever dropped a nickel into an old jukebox and slow danced with a dwarf through a room draped in velvet red curtains as tears streamed down your cheeks? Neither have I. But if I did, I think I'd put this Roy Orbison song on the jukebox. MP3: The Beatles-We can work it out This is one of the most stunningly beautiful pop songs ever written. John and Paul trade melodies, while a woozy accordion and stoned tamborines make it one of those mercurial songs that bridge the awesome gap between 'pop' Beatles and 'druggy visionary' Beatles. 'Ticket to Ride,' 'Help' and 'Rain' also fall into this category. I prefer this song to 'A day in the life' for some reason. MP3: They Might Be Giants-Birdhouse in your soul I remember hearing this on Atlantic 252 radio as a child. It made me feel dizzy. It's a song that repeatedly climbs and slides back down a mad helter skelter. The trumpets are fucking demented too. Like angry elephants in heat. The lyrics are atrocious bobbins, but that somehow adds to its perfection. MP3: Super Furry Animals-Northern Lites This is a perfect song about the Super Furry Animals' favourite strain of cannabis. It's heavily influence by the Brazilian Tropicalia music movement and, of course, the dope. The coda is beautiful. Another two songs with beautiful codas are 'my uptight life' by Teenage Fanclub and 'the workplace' by Jim O'Rourke. Gotta love the codas. Finally: My review of the Future Days festival gig in Vicar Street last Saturday is here on Analogue.

Perfect from now on??

Tweet So straight after the last blog I packed some nutritious supplies from Lidl (their jaffa cakes are excellent, more compact and richly flavoured than McVities), a sleeping bag, a 160 gigabyte ipod containing every great song since 1950, some LSD, MDMA, and a rock of crack. I ascended the slopes of the highest mountain in the vicinity of Kells, the hill of Lloyd public park. For three days and nights, as the doggers and cottagers came and went around me, I meditated on the slopes of Lloyd, tripping out of my tiny bin on illegal substances and communing with my spirit animal (a lone prarie wolf called Gardenfang) in search of the perfect song. Not until the last speck of crack was hungrily huffed into my makeshift pipe, and the last crumb of jaffa cake digested, did I return down from that hill, as a blinding kaleidoscopic sun rose over Southborough computer parts factory in the distance. I brought with me knowledge from a higher plane. Today I'm going to share it with you. In the strange depths of my cosmic journey, after I flew hand-in-hand over Jupiter with newsreader Anne Doyle, Gardenfang revealed to me that my search for the perfect song was futile and supercilious. "You know absolutely fuck all about musical theory Gardenhead" he growled. "You couldn't even play do-ray-me on the tin whistle in 2nd class." He was right. "Moreover all the songs you think are perfect tend to be somewhat melancholy, which suggests that there is a modicum of subjectivity at work, and that you may have had a traumatic formative experience set to melancholy music as a child." He was right there too. I got lost inside Dunnes Stores in Navan shopping centre once, and "I've gotta get a message to you" by the Bee Gees was playing over the speaker system. Still, I wasn't going to let a hallucinated wolf tell me what I could and couldn't do. So I turned around and said "Gardenfang, I may be a cloth-eared bullshit merchant, but I'm going to have a go at this anyway. Now fuck off back into my subconscious, while I go into Lynch's pharmacy to get me some valium to come down off this crack in time for breakfast." I'm going to divide the songs into songs I think are perfect because they are perfect, and songs that I think are perfect examples of imperfection. I will post just a few off a long list. I'll put up a few more in the next post. Also, if you wish to make suggestions, please do. Perfect because they are perfect MP3: The Mamas and The Papas-Twelve Thirty (young girls are coming to the canyon) A lot of The Mamas and The Papas stuff seems pretty perfect to me. This song is utterly joyous, a sort of innocent early celebration of the summer of love through the eyes of someone who moves from dreary New York to a sun-soaked Californian canyon. The chorus makes the hair stand on the back of my neck; the harmonies make me smile. However, the description of young girls pouring into a canyon makes it seem a bit like a vision of what a suicide bomber sees when he goes to suicide bomber heaven. MP3: Cyndi Lauper-Time after Time Jesus, I love this song. I played it to death on my sony walkman after Jessica Prezbelowski stood me up on prom night. I sat on the high school steps. I sipped a Rolling Rock, letting the melancholy synths wash over me, and wondered about how so many 80s songs are overlooked as cheesy when they are in fact completely heartfelt and majestic. Then I remembered the video where Cyndi Lauper is in bed with a ceramic dog and I smiled through my salty tears. Oh Cyndi. You would have made such a better prom date than Jessica. Tomorrow: songs that are perfect because they are imperfect. Now I'm off to Dublin catch the potential gig of the year in Vicar street. Dan Deacon, Jape, Deerhunter and High Places all under one roof? You fucking betcha!

The perfect song?

Tweet My computer is going through a very traumatic experience at this very moment. It's downloading the entire Guided by voices back catalogue. That would be about 900 songs in all; a 1.9 gigabyte beast of a torrent. Poor little laptop. Its beleaguered hard-drive will need some R & R after being molested for 13 straight hours by one of the largest ever indie-rock canons. It could be worse. I could force-feed it all the solo Robert Pollard stuff too, bringing things close to the 2,000 song mark. But that would turn my laptop into the computerized equivalent of the man in the movie Seven who was force fed spaghetti until his stomach exploded all over the shop. I don't want my computer exploding and shitting Guided by Voices songs everywhere. It would be the end of humanity as we know it if such peculiar things as 'Kicker of Elves', 'Jabberstroker', 'Wrinkled Ghosts' and 'Those Little Bastards that Bite' escaped into the real world. Remember when the ghost containment unit blew a fuse in Ghostbusters? Yeah, worse than that dudes. Worse than that. We heard your laptop has a Guided By Voices containment problem. Anyhoo, I'm doing this so that I have all of the GBV stuff on my hard-drive because my CD drive is broken and I can't upload from CDs. As Karl reminded me recently, I never got round to that epic Guided by Voices post. So this is my first step toward this mountain of a task. I think I'm going to do a potted chronological history of this band who have such great hold on my imagination. Starting from the very first record "forever since breakfast", I will take each release in turn and post an MP3 or two. Sometimes I'll focus on the release, other times on the songs, other times on some random shit that may or may not be related. It will be Asleep on the Compost Heap's own 'revolution in the head'. But without the fine breadth of musical knowledge or sense of history; and instead of using primary sources I shall lazily cull my information from Wikipedia and Pitchfork. Hurrah! Okay back to perfect songs. The Pitchfork feature I mentioned can be found here. The dude who writes it posits that there is such a thing as an objectively perfect song. He firmly believes that some songs in the pop/rock canon are simply unassailable and cannot possibly be improved on, for example 'I want you back' by the Jackson 5. Now, in my book, I can see where he is coming from. 'Cos that's a pretty neat package of a song. He also, interestingly, notes that a perfect song isn't necessarily an exciting song. Perfect songs can be boring. Like the way a model with flawless looks might not arouse your joust the same way someone with an unusual defining feature might. Like Erin O'Connor's nose. I love that nose the way I love the cack-handed transition between two completely different melodies in Guided By Voices' 'Tractor Rape Chain'. I've asked a few heads about this. They mostly disagree. All seem to think that there is no such thing as an objectively perfect song. Music is too subjective and connected to personal experience, they argue. Is this true? What do yis think? In no particular order, I'm going to post a few songs that I think are nigh on perfect over the next few days. For what it's worth I have a number one that was mentioned on the 'Heap a while back. It's Wichita Lineman, written by Jimmy Webb and sung by Glenn Campell. To me, that shit sounds about as perfect as you can get. Before I go into my own choices, we all know that Paul McCartney thinks 'God Only Knows' is the most perfect song written, and that John Peel gave that accolade to 'Teenage Kicks'. Well, here is the song that Pete Townsend described as "the most perfect pop song of all time". MP3: Abba-SOS I'll bet he was ragingly jealous. Add a little more bombast, some windmilling guitars, Roger Daltrey singing, and 'SOS' is the best song the later-period Who never wrote.

I saw a flashlight turn on in the evening

Tweet Evangelicals are playing Wheelie-bins tonight. I'm very curious about these guys and how their haunted-house of an album will make the transition to a live setting. The Evening Descends is a mixed affair, mixing cheesy monster-movie horror with moments of what I fear are genuine madness. It plays a little like a psychedelic concept album. At the end of first track the singer mournfully announces "and the evening descends". This, then, appears to happen. The ghoulies begin to multiply, disembodied voices echo in the dark, and odd sounds manifest from time to time in the thick mix. Creepy. Like the ad for 'Most Haunted' on Living with all those raggedy ghost shapes flicking around a forest. (As an aside, how misleading is that ad? I mean, it promises genuine ectoplasmic entities floating outside ruined castles, and what does it deliver? A luminous Yvette Fielding getting worried in the basement of a Pub in Warrington because she was secretly goosed by a: a demonic 17th century landlord or b: a randy chav camera assistant). Photographed enjoying themselves at the evangelicals gig in Whelans are Parapsychologist Matthew Smith, former Blue Peter presenter Yvette Fielding, scouser psychic Derek Acorah, and Derek's 5,500-year-old spirit guide Sam (not visible but in the front left of the picture). Back to Evangelicals. The album has its mis-steps though. There are moments of theatrical horror shtick that leave them sounding like Muse playing the Rocky Horror Picture Show, or Of Montreal at their most exasperatingly self-indulgent. 'Bellawood', for example, is utterly hokey. It's a breathy exercise in the overblown that falls embarrassingly flat. Better to listen to 'How do you sleep?'. Here the cheesy crust flakes off entirely, and we are left with a frazzled man dreaming of confronting the devil in a doorless room night after night. MP3: Evangelicals-How do you sleep? I think this gig is going to be a right royal mess. Whether thats good mess or a bad mess remains to be seen. But I doubt it will be anything short of interesting.

Ich liebe minimales techno

Tweet Yo, just a quick update. I noticed that yesterday I promised two tasty techno nuggets and only dispensed one. This won't do at all. So today's bonus techno tidbit is another stonker from Paul Kalkbrenner. This one is more recent, from a year or so ago, and is again more demonstrative of his harder dancefloor sound than the more introspective stuff on Self. Its called Keule. Like an Audi, Keule is perfectly constructed yet fiercely functional, and built to perform one simple task, namely to destroy a heaving dance barn at 2am. It is constructed around a steady, basic bass-line, some disturbing rattling sound effects and a fierce beat that descends around the 2 minute 20 sec mark. At that point its easy to imagine him looking down as a thousand hands hit the air and the collective surge of a mass of delirious ravers. MP3: Paul Kalkbrenner-Keule Wie komme ich am besten zum droge-partie bitte? Forthcoming: I read some dude in Pitchfork recently trying to quantify what makes the perfect song. He had an interesting spin on it and the songs he picked were intriguing. Of course, its exceptionally hard to be objective about it but surely some songs are less perfect than others. I'm gonna have a good long think about what, to me, are the most perfect songs ever written and throw a few of them up here. Some will be obvious *ahem* Echos Myron. Others, Less so.

a couple of tasty techno nuggets

Tweet I'm spending most of my time inside the family home in Kells these days. This means eating loads of the odd shit with which my recently Lidl-addicted parents stock the fridge. Such as chocolate wafer treats half-dunked in a funny brown shell that the EU forces the manufacturers to call 'chocolate flavoured coating' but looks and tastes more like dried brown acrylic paint. When my parents return from Lidl grinning like toddlers I know that sub-standard German discount food is not the only thing they purchased. They're suckers for all the other random crap that goes on sale there. Such as...a 6 inch satellite dish that now hangs off our washing line and seems only to pick up German Porn channels and Muslim Clerics hollering in Arabic, a drill, a step-ladder, and a first aid kit. If I were MacGyver I'm sure I could use all of the above to construct some sort of Islamo-germanic porno bomb from outer space. But I'm not, so I just marvel slack-jawed at the growing pile of useless random shit that continues to land in our family home every Friday. Sure you'd only be paying twice as much for your dried Polish meatballs and mystery mollusc sticks in Tesco lads! Speaking of marveling at piles of random useless shit, what about the new Big Brother contestants? Yikes. As ever, its full of depressing, attention seeking amoebas. I guess one or two could well be likable given time, but its such a soiled show. The innocence of the first few seasons is now buried in a fecal pile of media-savvy, self-aware, frond-haired twits who mentally filter every single thing they do through a dozen imagined heat magazine bylines. The calculated cynicism of these creatures is breath-taking; the babbling empty crud they talk, worrying. They are the shit that falls steaming out of of the elephantine arse-ring of our celebrity age. All Big Brother is doing in its current form is reinforcing the idiotic idea held by many British and Irish children that to gain recognition in life you need not develop a real talent or anything like that. God fuckin' forbid. Nowadays why bother? Because you can get famous by being a preening freak who wears their stupidity and narcissism as badges. Big Brother in its current form is vicious excrement altogether. Its never-ending overlapping cacophony of "ME ME ME ME MEEE" is the sound of the encroaching apocalypse. In Kells, the music I can play loud is limited by a lack of CDs. But my brother recently turned me onto a German minimal techno artist called Paul Kalkbrenner, who records on the Berlin BPitch Control label. The album he gave me is called 'Self'. It is wonderful and mixes muscular techno workouts with the odd downbeat accordion interlude. Indeed, the overriding feeling I get from the whole collection (banging tracks included) is one of melancholy. Its possibly the sad bolt of inevitability that hardened clubbers feel as the grey wash of dawn leaks into another pill powered night. I wanted to post a really sad sounding track called 'Since 77' but couldn't get the MP3 onto my laptop. As good, but more banging in the traditional techno sense, is 'Gebrunn Gebrunn' which I'm sure I heard in the depths of Ricardo Villalobos' incendiary set in the Tivoli a while back. TURN THIS ONE UP LOUD. But not too loud. It can remove loosely attached things from walls. MP3: Paul Kalkbrenner-Gebrunn Gebrunn Finally on the Analogue Site you can read my recent reviews of Jens Lekman in the Village and Times New Viking in ALT.