tell me why I don't like cats?

Tweet There is a heartbreaking poster of a stray dog stapled all over the telephone poles in Chapelizod. I only wish I had photographic evidence of it to demonstrate the emotionally devastating effect of which it is capable. The poster contains a digital photo of the dog and a written description of its condition. It is a small, filthy, excruciatingly pathetic, white West Highland terrier. It stares pleadingly out at you as if it knows you personally and hopes in its little doggie heart that you are the blessed human who will finally rescue it from a life of being booted around the place by some drink-addled nutter who thinks it's okay to whup seven bells out of his mutt every time Leeds FC lose a match. It looks, in all honesty, like a one-eyed teddy bear salvaged from the charred ruins of a burnt out orphanage in the former Yugoslavia. Maybe these fame-hungry canine monsters ejected one of their group and left him roaming pathetically around Chapelizod while they water skied to dizzy celebrity heights with their trainers Calum Best and Bianca Gascoine? To make matters worse the poster in Chapelizod came with a disturbingly detailed description of the dog's condition. It was as if the dog was discovered by Ireland's leading scientific expert on the condition of busted up terriers. The mutt in question was ten years old according to the poster (how the fuck did they know that? Did they amputate its tail and count the rings?). It was deaf. Not neutered. Very unsteady on its back legs. Trouble breathing. I swear, all this information was covered on the poster. I now want to send the poor creature off to a clinic in Switzerland where it can die in dignity after reading all that shit. Anyway, the creepily knowledgeable person who found this poor banjaxed animal wants to return it to its owner... I'm sorry, but c'mawwwwwwnnnn man! Have you never read Dickens? If you find a pathetic, smashed-to-pieces creature quivering on your doorstep surely the last thing you would want to do is return it to its heartless master? If I had a garden in Chapelizod, I'd call the number and adopt the dog myself. Poor creature. MP3 time. First, I'm utterly rubbish at predicting musical trends or, indeed, at listening to lots of new stuff. So there is no point in me recommending anything hot for 2009. However, if you want to come back in two year's time, I could make some good recommendations for 2009 then. For what it's worth, I'm looking forward to new music by Patrick Kelleher, Grand Pocket Orchestra, Bats, The Ambiance Affair and Tenaka on the Irish front. Nialler, who listens to a lot more music than me, and, who admirably looks beyond the sly bullshit that press releases feed to lazy reviewers, has an excellent list of artists you can look forward and who won't remind you of the same yawnsome bundle of acts you might have read about everywhere else. Check it out here. MP3: Passion Pit-Sleepyhead Passion Pit are a band who are being hoisted on us from every direction right now. I'm putting up the MP3 so people can make up their own minds. Passion Pit look like a bunch of quintuplets genetically engineered out of pieces of Weezer's Rivers Cuomo, and they sound like a cross between The Postal Service, The Avalanches, Graham Norton's wrist and felt (the fabric not the band, hence the small f). MP3Hugger highlighted an interesting fact about this song. The sample is actually taken from an old yank-friendly Irish song by Sligo harpist Mary O'Hara, but pitchshifted in that Kanye West/Tiesto trance ditty about heartbreak (broadcast from a twelve-year-old's mobile phone on the back of the 27A bus) kinda way. I don't get this band. I can't understand how they will amount to anything more than the sort of sickly sweet residue that is left on your tongue after you snaffle candyfloss. They cross the most simplistic approximations of dance music with an idea of what psychedelic music might sound like to a musically competent American teenager whose parents took drugs in the sixties so he wouldn't have to. If they are a big tip for 2009 then the year is truly fucked. Seriously, this band makes MGMT look like some sort of hardcore psychedelic visionaries from another dimension. They are that feeble. To say they leave me cold would be an understatement. They leave me buried under layer upon layer of ice in some frozen, hyperborean wasteland on the dark side of Pluto. Maybe you like the song? I dunno. If you don't, here is one I hope you do like. I missed out completely on David Byrne and Brian Eno in my favourite songs of 2008 because, true to form, I only got round to listening to 'Everything That Happens Will Happen Today' recently. My brother laid it on me and started brimming about how he and his mate decided (in a shared late night reverie) that 'strange overtones' could be their favourite song of 2008. I see where they are coming from. It is a wonderful song, bleedingly aware of the artists' ages, "this groove is out of fashion/ these beats are 20 years old", and marinated in a bubbling melancholy that comes to a heartbreaking boil on Eno's beautiful pop chorus. It reminds me a lot of LCD Soundsystem's 'all my friends' in its sentiment. Is getting old the new getting young? Or do young people have fuck all to say these days? Or am I just getting old? So many questions. If I had to choose between this and Passion Pit, I'd know what I'd go for. MP3: David Byrne and Brian Eno-Strange Overtones