Short draughts—long swallows, men; 'tis hot as Satan's hoof

I'd advise all casual perusers of blogs who might have happened upon this page to click over to Karl before sinisterly melting back into the pervy Internet fug you may have appeared from. 2009, like 2008, sees Karl bravely struggle with the Herculean task of reviewing his top albums of the previous year without falling prey to a fickle electronic calendar which, as we all know, gives more of a shite about fads than genuine criticism. One of my favourite Internet pastimes is to keep abreast of Karl as he staunchly types page after carefully considered page of well-thought criticism. And who gives a shit if it comes a month or two after the herd? It's brilliant you see. I also have reason to believe that he is fuelled by a diet of horrendously sugary drinks, so read him while he actually has teeth to sink into the albums he reviews.

Of Montreal played the Button factory tonight. I'll wager that I, and others, will get at least two phone calls or texts later. One might read "That was the greatest heap of self-indulgent bum-juice to which I ever bore witness". The other might state something along the lines of...
"Ohmyfuckinggodofmontrealhowcomeineversawthemlivebefore
...howcometheyarenotthebiggestbandintheworld?"


I look at Kevin Barnes and I really do not know him. I can't establish if I even understand the cut of his jib, never mind if I like it. Like, what makes him tick, and should we really care for a man of his age acting so wilfully, indulgently, odd? Yet, from time to time an odd lyric and melody of his combine and manage a successful sideways stab at a sublime, slippery thought or feeling I've harboured. Sometimes, Of Montreal knock the wind out of me. I'm sure that if I get married, divorced and subsequently become bisexual I'll probably start to understand the rest of their canon.

If you were at this gig, please report below.

MP3: Of Montreal-A sentence of sorts in Kongsvinger
MP3: Of Montreal-Wraith pinned to the mast and other games

Sandra's raspberry parfait was a disaster

I'm surrounded by cats today. Feral ones. There are so many of them that they are falling out of the bins. I went over to the bin hut earlier with a bag of rotten onions I found in my cupboard (don't ask) and bore witness to a cat-ocalyptic vision of what earth will be like when we all die of cat AIDS and the moggies take over. One of them already knows me. I gave him milk on one or two occasions. I now regret this, because he comes to the patio door every single night, stands on his hind legs like a human and just stares me out of it. He was perched on a bin today and as the rest of the cats stalked around oblivious to me, he stared, and stared, and stared. And then lightly trailed me back to the flat. I closed the curtains to hide from him. But guess what? He's paddling at the glass. Not scratching. Just paddling softly and knowingly. Brrr, that will probably be the eternal sound I hear when I wake up alive inside my coffin, just like my childhood nightmares predicted.


PSSST...Hey kid. Wanna play with my poop? It's both safe and fun.

Fun feline fact. There are two links between cats and schizophrenia. One is that there is a vicious virus in their shit called T.gondii that causes a psychotic deterioration in the brain similar to schizophrenia. The other link is that a famed painter of cats was a schizophrenic called Louis Wain who was popular at the start of the 20th century. His artwork is interesting because it documents the progress of his illness and is often used to illustrate this in abnormal psychology textbooks. His early paintings, while admittedly not exactly normal, are relatively naive depictions of anthropomorphic cats engaging in random human activities. Sorta the lolcats of their day.

However, as Wain's mind began to splinter and leak all over the shop, the cats did too. They first morphed into electrified kitties with waves of energy emanating from their fur. Soon their eyes and faces lost definition and dissolved into swirling wallpapers of repeating, paisley fronds. Finally, all that remained were shattered abstractions that bore little or no resemblance to the cats at all, blazing psychedelic overloads of fractals and colours that normally only occur when you lick the bark of special trees in the amazonian rain forest.

Look and see!

fig (i) Cute Cat


fig (ii) Did someone spike the kit-e-kat?


fig (iii) Ecto-cat


fig (iv) Hindu God cat


fig (v) 'your brain is an ego-devoid mess of fractal uncertainty' cat


And now an MP3. 'Emma Blowgun's last stand' is taken from the album when your heartstrings break, the fuzzy indie-pop highpoint of Beulah's catalogue. I adored this song when I was 19 and played it to death. I believe Beulah were the only band ever signed on the Elephant 6 Collective's label. Yup, contrary to what some might think about the Elephant 6 Collective, the bands didn't all share a label. And Beulah, their one signing, were more a band that they thought had potential than a proper member of the collective. Now, go pack that fact away and take it to the next nerdy table quiz in the Bernard Shaw.

MP3: Beulah-Emma Blowgun's last stand

AerObama

Daft Punk ride the Obama zeitgeist with this superfun video. It's a reworking of Aerodynamic with lots of funky plastic toys, an Obama doll and retro star wars style effects.


Daft Punk vs. Adam Freeland - "Aer OBAMA" from Gold Greendot on Vimeo.

I'll be posting again later.

Trancentral lost in my mind

Over the coming months, most of my time will be spent in college. Although I rarely allude to it here, the biggest thing in my working life, and something that is now in it's final stretch (I hope), is a research PhD. Over the past three years I've intermittently worked on it full-time, between taking breaks from it, doing music-related stuff and doing part-time work. I remember, when I started out, a friendly lecturer who supervised my undergraduate thesis told me that a PhD is like a combine harvester. It is huge and frightening, but it moves very slowly. So all you have to do is walk slowly and steadily in front of it and you'll be fine. Wise words.

I aim to finish the research and hand in something resembling a doctorate before September this year. I dunno will that result in less blogs (as research gobbles up my spare time) or more (because I am out less and in front of the laptop more)? It certainly will lead to fuck all live reviews on The Compost Heap. That's for sure. Anyway, I can, and will, shake that PhD shaped monkey/friend/many-tentacled-thing off my back and put it out of it's misery. I will also, of course, let you know how I get on.


Boo!

The title of this post refers to the KLF's chill-out album which came out in 1990. I could write endless blogs about the magnificent and krazy kapers the KLF eked out of their khaotic kareer. However, it is their quietest moment that stands out most for me. Their chill-out album is their masterpiece and it stands tall in dance music's history. There is little else like it. The album unfolds around the concept of a late night journey along the Mexican border. I think they made it with cassette recorders and tape-loops and legend has it that the whole thing was done in one majestic take. On the initial European release the entire album plays out as a single track. The American release, though, was divided into lots of smaller tracks for royalties and copyright reasons. But to all intents and purposes the album should be taken in over a single listen.

The album is hard to describe verbally without making it sound naff. There are a lot of found sounds like brooks bubbling and trains rattling on distant tracks. Maybe this already makes it sound too grounded in reality for fans of such abstract ambiance as Stars of the Lid? Or cheesy, like a relaxation tape? Yet, it is not like that at all. It casts its own spell, transporting you into a limbo, a zonked half-state of being caught somewhere between a dream of rural America during the small hours and the receding ecstasies of a night spent raving. Old steel guitar melodies, shreds of music, voices and even Elvis singing 'In the Ghetto' are among the detritus that crackles forth from radio speakers. Snippets of KLF's own house tracks bleed into the approaching dawn like the meltwater of memory and mingle weirdly with the more concrete elements of the sonic environment before decaying. Ultimately, dawn arrives, and you are left shivering in the dew with the last traces of the night's weirdness evaporating before your very eyes.

Here are two snippets BUT you really have to listen to this thing in it's entirety.

MP3: The KLF-Elvis on the Radio Steel Guitar in my Soul
MP3: The KLF-Justified and Ancient Seems a Long Time Ago

tell me why I don't like cats?

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

The austere sun descends above the fen

What a classic Winter's day it was in Kells today; vintage, picture postcard stuff. Salmon sunset, furry frost, static plumes of smoke frozen hallucination-pink above chimneys and the rhythmic clink of my frigid testicles knocking together as I walked across the town. When Jack Frost is working overtime, even the shittiest things are blessed with a touch of beauty. Only on a day like today could a discarded Club Orange can look like a mysterious ice age artefact half-buried in the permafrost.


Kells is built on a hill. My housing estate is at the bottom and the Super Valu complex (our feeble attempt at a shopping centre which is doomed to languish eternally in the mighty shadow of Navan) is at the top. When I get my evening Diet Coke withdrawal jitters I normally go as far as the local garage but this evening I decided to walk to Super Valu to enjoy the winter sunset. It was worth it. I sat on a bench at the top of the town and watched the sky go nuclear as the sun set behind the Spire of Lloyd (Ireland's only inland lighthouse and modern day dogging hotspot). It was a lovely moment which was quickly punctuated by the fact that my bench was in a kiddie's playground and two five-year-olds were playing right in my line of sight. Realising how this wintry idyll might be misconstrued by those of a more cynical persuasion than you or me, I hastily removed my hands from my jacket pockets and left the playground to march home in the quickening gloaming.

Clinkety clink! Look! Jack frost just dropped two gleaming winter MP3s onto the compost heap. See if you can pick them up with yer mittens on.

MP3: The Fun Years-My Lowville

I discovered The Fun Years during an afternoon playing linky-link through hype machine and music blogs that like similar music to me. There are two dudes in The Fun Years. One plays real instruments and the other fiddles magic out of his laptop. They create weather-beaten electronica that unfurls in all sorts of endless, langourous ways. At times their music recalls Godspeed You! Black Emperor in the way it builds towards rumbling climaxes. Yet, it doesn't possess that group's love of bombast. Rather than resolving itself in an obvious way, the music sort of decays back into deep, soupy banks of primordial fog. The album this track is taken from is called 'baby, it's cold inside' and it's my most listened to discovery in a while. The whole record is worn out, smudged, faded and bleached in such a way that the songs play like half remembered fragments. Definitely one for fans of knackered old polaroids.

MP3: Friendly Fires-Paris (Justus Köhncke remix)

This is my first fave remix of the new year. It's an expansive reworking of Friendly Fire's 'Paris' by Justus Köhncke. Robbing a trick from his label mate Axel Willner, Köhncke stretches and slices a vocal sample into a airy ice-rink of sound (okay for the first few minutes it is SERIOUSLY like The Field). Although the track skates across this surface for most of its duration, the main vocal melody is melded to a vibrant disco pulse and a staccatto, Blue Monday-esque drum riff. What a gorgeous marriage of pop, disco and blissed out techno.

Wot the knife did next

The Knife are definitely one of the more important and interesting bands of this decade. I reckon that people have an idea of this rather than knowing it outright. I read a review of Silent Shout in some paper/magazine of importance (please let me know in comments if you remember where) that gave that album a score of one out of ten, before saying it was probably the most pretentious and offensive shit the reviewer had ever heard. I think I remember an album or single by that collective excretion of Scot-flavoured Libertines effluent known as the Fratellis scoring quite high on the same page. Naturally, I checked the Knife's album out and sure enough it was fantastic. This led me to the perverse yet demonstratable conclusion that bonkers one star reviews are far more indicative of an album's qualities (or at least existence) than an entire army of seven or eight out of tens. With a one star, you can be sure that an album has ruffled some fucker's feathers and it almost definitely has more to do with the reviewer's personal taste than it's musical merit.



As far as I know there is no new material due from The Knife any time soon. But fear not, because their glacially voiced Bjork-alike Karin Dreijer is releasing a full album under the moniker 'Fever Ray'. The first MP3 from her forthcoming record is a curious and tasty nibble (particularly to people with really snazzy headphones-it is deeply rich at the low end). She sings a vocal melody over the unnerving thrum of a demonic piece of machinery doomed to be forever starting up like a supernatural lawnmower from hell and about to run out of Castrol GTX. The track is imbued with an unapologetic minimalism and a vibe of being beamed out of a club full of decaying, emotionless aesthetes more interested in their own flaking beauty than emotions or the world around them. Sound familiar? Yup. it's the Velvet Underground and Nico version 2.0. Need any more convincing? The song is called 'if I had a heart'. Well, it sure doesn't sound like it Karin.

MP3:Fever Ray-If I had a heart

Lots of people copy the Velvet Underground's sound. At least here we have an artist identifying with the band's spirit rather than their sound which dates back to the sixties. I hope Fever Ray's album lives up to the promise of this track. Because it is a bit mysterious and a bit thrilling, and quite unlike recent efforts by Primal Scream, The Verve, Spiritualized or any other past-it, ageing panto group who have deludedly attempted to take up the Velvet Underground's considerable mantel.

A few albums I liked in 2008 (and a box-set)

Did you ever pull a Christmas cracker against yourself? I did earlier to celebrate New Year's Eve. Because I was alone engaging in an activity meant to be shared by two, I guess you could call it a cracker-wank. It wasn't very climactic, but I suppose a plastic football on a key-chain is a better end product than "la petit mort" and a soggy andrex.


Alf Sez: Happy new year from Melmac kids! Hah! You know, on Melmac we go round our sun so often that it's new year's celebration time every two days. Oy-yoy! At least we don't have Ryan Tubridy there. Once a year is too much for this alien. Hah!

This is my first ever New Year's Eve alone. My girlfriend is DJing and everyone else I know is either down the country, abroad or lurching queasily into 2009 at some half-filled music event in Dublin. I like it. It's a bit Macauley Culkin in Home Alone. Everything I do has a perverse novelty factor because some part of me thinks I really should be holding onto the wall of the jacks in Whelans for dear life by now. Or standing frigid on Camden street while a nameless vortex thunders through the streets of Dublin, robbing shreds off people's souls and leaving little lumps of dread in their tummies.


Corey and Tegan are ringing in the new year on glockenspiels during a High Places aftershow party in a loft. You're not invited.

Just in case you think I'm an ultra sadcase instead of the more common garden variety, I didn't just pull crackers y'know. I also hob-nobbed with some post-apocalyptic cannibal scum during a game of Fallout 3 (more fun than it sounds), opened my window to smell the frostiness outside, ate a Chinese and am only now (due to major Fallout 3 related delays) starting my list of fave albums of 2008. Like many of tonight's sexual encounters it's going to be short and sloppy, but I have to get it done tonight 'cos in spite of whether anyone reading this could give a shit, it's turning into a pesky itch that needs to be scratched. Bring on the sloppiness.

7: Fuck Buttons: Street Horrrsing

The Fuck Buttons formula is really simple. Big, bright, satisfying crunchy sounds, lots of music box prettiness and a smattering of distorted screams that could either be a dude invoking a deathly curse on all our heads or reading a Chinese take-away menu. When I think of Fuck Buttons I think they are made out lego blocks or even better, duplo. They aren't fiddly shit like lego technics or mecanno (which I strongly suspect Battles played with as kids). Does that make sense? It's the best I can manage right about now.

MP3: Fuck Buttons-Bright Tomorrow

Joint 4: Vivian Girls: Vivian Girls/Jay Reatard: Matador Singles/Times New Viking: Rip it Off

All of these bands in some way appealed to my Achilles heel (The Guided By Voices tendon) by recording sturdy pop on shitty equipment. In the case of Times New Viking's equipment, the Bristol Stool Chart was obviously being applied fastidiously. Sadly, they applied it to a small few songs too. If there is one thing worse thing than polishing a turd, I suppose it's turding up a turd. There's nothing worse than scraping all that turd off a turd if you're looking for a diamond. However, the album remains on the list on account of it's many moments of brilliant, awesome, mega-classness. Though, next time 'round, hide more diamonds in your turds guys. At least they are doing better than Robert Pollard, whose recent albums have left us brave remaining devotees (all six of us) feeling like we are hunting for diamonds in veritable turd-stacks.

MP3: Vivian Girls-Going Insane
MP3: Times New Viking-Another Day

3: Lindstom: Where you go I go too

Lots of people hate this. "Self-serving, noodly, prog-inflected cosmic disco trash which takes you on a scenic journey not into space but rather into Lindtrom's backside" they moan with thin, smug smiles on their grey Arcade Fire munching faces. "Fuck them" I say every night as I reverse peel myself into my silver all over body suit, don my power rangers helmet and climb into the huge pretend space-ship I made out of a cardboard fridge box. My ipod sits on the mission control panel. I drink two bottles of cough syrup, turn Lindstrom up really loud and whhhoooooosssh! I fly off on an important space mission to bring disco music to a dangerous planet in the gamma milky-way quadrant. A place where guitar-wielding apes sit around a huge black obelisk under its seven moons.

2: Vampire Weekend: Vampire Weekend

There's not much I can add to groaning skip of collective opinions on this piece of work. I heard it. I thought wow, that is a smart, fun pop album with nary the tiniest bit of polyfila present. I then played it all summer. It made people dance. It still sounded great. I played it again tonight. Guess what? It's still as fresh and shiny as a new shoe. Believe me, it shall be banging out of the jukeboxes of the year 2020, albeit in some sort of freaky R2D2 holographic format.

1: Fennesz: Black Sea



Black Sea is astonishing. Like Stars of the Lid's effort last year, it has invaded my brain like a virus that makes you well instead of sick. All Fennesz's usual tricks are present and correct. Glitch, acoustic guitar, a hint of orchestra, the odd found sound, and wave after wave of drones that sometimes fall light as cushions, other times swarm like winged mechanical insects. Everything sounds a bit wider in scope than on his previous work, though. Tweaked into panorama format. Water abounds. So does industry. Grey skies and maritime fogs rolling over the rusty hulls of capsized oil tankers. A choppy sea swollen purple, green, and black. The tiny rainbow whorls made by spilled oil on the surface of water. It's less meandering than Venice and not as spooky in that dead water lapping at the slimy steps of sinking palaces way. It's less melodic than Endless Summer, yet the melodies are there, unfurling subtly and prettily when the tide-like din recedes. But my gosh is it powerful and, for want of a better word, 'big' when compared to those two albums. It is, like I fancy with all of his work, wholly located somewhere quite specific in both physical and mental geography (emotional too). He knows where it is, but he leaves plenty of gaps for us to fill out our own mental journeys.

This lengthy dark swoon is the centerpiece of the album and it's as good as anything he's done.

MP3: Fennesz-Glide

So they are my picks for the year. The box set is Nah und Fern by Gas (his four seminal records on the Kompakt label). More stately ambience. I'd say I'm getting as predictable as an episode of Murder She Wrote at this stage. I'll try to broaden my tastes next year before I end up listening to so much stuff on Touch and Kranky that I evaporate into a cloud of barely audible musical vapour. Actually if I do, and someone is around to record it, please do, and send it to Stars of the Lid c/o Kranky records.