Plug it in...

Tweet I'm getting left behind by internet lingo, or maybe I just don't care. Zombies? FAIL? Zombie-FAIL? Am I the only person who finds internet humour is increasingly becoming weirdly clandestine and unfunny? Or are you all laughing at the sad grouch from your big fuck-off roflcopters..? ZOMG zombie kitteh? Laugh? I nearly fell out of the fuckin' roflcopter mate. Whatcha mean you don't get it? Haha zeitgeist FAIL! STUFF After Alphastates, Villagers and So I Watch you from Afar successfully mated with each other last week, there will be another cross border initiative in the Purty Loft this Friday at 8pm. This week it costs €5 and will feature The Rags, Escape Act and John Shelly & The Creatures. Former Analogue and current Hummingbird Mentality blogger, Gareth, could be insane. Why? Because he has recorded the most mental series of humour podcasts I ever heard. If you put them into your brain via your ears you will hear a batshit, possibly sexually deviant old professor called Frump guide you around various famous Dublin locations. It's called the Invisible Tour Guide and you should check it out here. Jason Lytle, the man behind Grandaddy, will soon return to the fray with his new solo-album 'Yours Truly, The Commuter'. Remember how mopey and destroyed Grandaddy sounded on their last two albums? I do. That shitty, grey day of the soul I bought Sumday. Listening to it was an exercise in spiritual drainage. Here was a document of a band who all hated each other and were chugging along on autopilot. It wasn't terrible, just average, but it was so bereft of life and energy that it upset me. After a few weeks I threw it in a bin. It remains to this day the only album I ever threw in a bin. Well, Jason has come on a good bit, but not fully, since then. He's still bawling into his beer, 'drinking wine in the morning', sometimes maudlin, othertimes sentimentally optimistic, and always obsessed with prettiness. All of Grandaddy's musical stylings are present and correct on this record. The borderline cheesey melodies, the bashed up acoustics, wavering vocals and cheap synths - all there. In fact, this is a Grandaddy album in all but name. After one or two listens I have to say I like it but it makes me feel sad, even when it is trying to be happy. A lot of the lyrics are terribly raw and beat up. No alcoholic robot allegories here. Just an open look into the eyes of the hurting man behind them. MP3: Jason Lytle-Yours Truly, The Commuter The album boasts the best song title I've heard so far this year: Birds encouraged him.

From here we go....sublime again?

Tweet Swedish uber-aesthete The Field is returning to the dance fray in a few weeks with his second full length album, Yesterday and Today. Lead single 'The More that I Do' is knocking around right now. I've had a few listens and am including it below so you can too. Dude looks like he could do with a Lemsip or something. MP3: The Field-The more that I Do So what's it like? Well, errr, more of the same really. The utterly distinctive sonic template from Sublime remains intact on every level. Perhaps this isn't a surprise from an artist whose work derives so much of its power from a hypnotic feeling of stasis (most of his tracks involve lush layers of tiny melodic variations interlocked around an oscillating central sample). I couldn't help but feel a little selfishly let down on first hearing this. I think I was expecting him to reinvent the wheel or something. After a few spins, though, it has absorbed me and made me excited for the album. The piece uses a vocal sample from an old Cocteau Twins track as the metronomic base for a typically dizzying staircase of pretty stuff (including calypso drums) going forwards, backwards and inside out all at once. Cosmic.

Perpetual Motion Machine

Tweet Nearly every Sunday, through one circumstance or another, and despite not buying it, I end up exposed to the Sunday Independent or something in its pages. It lies waiting around the house for me like a coiled foe in a dungeons and dragons computer game. I hate it, but always end up reading it; normally while on the bog after a hard day's roast beef. To assuage the self-hating fits the paper induces in me as a reader, I've determinedly decided to write a pointy blog having a go at it tonight. And what do you know, such is the embarrassment of plain wrongness contained within its disingenuous broadsheet format, that I've found it hard to specifically take a pop. I mean where do you begin with such a grotesque, knowingly evil, ruptured haemorrhoid on the arse-starfish of Irish journalism? Ignoring Barry Egan for sanity's sake I'll have to randomly cast my die and start at Niamh Horan, who is behind a troubling story about thin women buying diet pills in spite of regulations saying said drugs should only be sold to obese people. This should be a well-meaning piece of investigative science writing, shouldn't it? Oh Nelly, let me count the ways in which it is not. Apparently, according to the Sunday Independent, "Irish chemists are selling a new 'over the counter' diet pill to healthy thin young girls -- despite reassurance by the drug's manufacturers that staff will only sell the drug to people who suffer from obesity". So far, so hmm. But how do we know this? Well, the roving Sindo doorstepper decided to find out for herself. Her sensationalist non-story proudly asserts that she is "just" eight and a half stone. Below, is the picture that accompanies her courageous piece. Now imagine, for one minute, the Guardian's (handsome) Ben Goldacre thrusting his sexy bod out at you on a weekend morning to illustrate a serious story about HIV retrovirals. Does that image work? No? Well, that could be because he has honourable reasons to modestly substitute an image of himself with a picture of Frankenstein's monster when he is writing objective science journalism. If this woman, or whoever asked her to write the story, really gave a hoot about eating disorders, why in the name of God is she posed, hand smugly attached to hip, like she is a glamourous celebrity advertising this fuckin' stuff? Why are we given her exact weight? Surely, if you write a piece about eating disorders, and have properly researched said piece, you might conclude that this level of unnecessary detail might be questionable when addressing such a media-sensitive psychological disorder? You might consider that vulnerable people could possibly ignore the story and see the glamorous, successful journo's body-weight as not only the real hook but a target to hit and go beyond? This sort of transparently insensitive, self-serving shit does not just sicken me but makes me die a little on the inside every Sunday. I know Sindo journalism is a self-fellating spectacle at the best of times, but this pushes their writer-as-story shtick to a new, distasteful level. Also, because it really does matter, it would be more interesting to see the nuts and bolts of what peer-reviewed studies make of the specific claims surrounding the so-called "wonder drug" (claims so unquestionably reproduced in this cynical piece that it reads like a subversive advertisement for the ropey product it ostensibly attacks)? Maybe the real story is right there. And don't even get me started on the fucking Herald.

Plug it in...

Tweet Pluggy things worth plugging before bed. The Secret of Monkey island 2, now there's a game. I used to enviously read reviews of it in computer games magazines when I got my first PC and wonder what it would be like to play. Now, thanks to an MS DOS emulator I am happily clicking away at it before bed every night and it is every bit as good as I imagined it would be as a teenage sadcase. You can get all sorts of old PC computer games (known as abandonware) here. In addition to Monkey Island 2, Ultima VII, Betrayal at Krondor and Tie Fighter are swarming around the bloated spectacle of my work like flesh-eating insects. I discovered abandonware at an unfortunate point in my write up. Speaking of computer games, Vinny, the bespectacled uber-gamer of Adebisi Shank and Vinny Club fame, writes an excellent blog about them here. Vinny will also be DJing at Soundcheck in Spy on Thursday night along with part-time compost-heap monkey Lolo. She promises to play Japanese Pop, and I'll make an educated guess that Vinny will be playing snippets of Hulk Hogan's Hulkamania album through a rewired Atari 7800. If you like Irish music and are looking for an excuse to get out of the shitty city centre this weekend I'd advise heading out to the Purty Loft in Dun Laoghaire this Friday night (24th). There will be a sort of cross border music magazine night organised by AU and State. This will be the first of a series of nights cross-pollinating music north and south through the medium of inter-band group sex (I jest). The next will be in Laverty's Attic, Belfast on May 1st. It kicks off at 8pm and features Alphastates, Villagers, So I Watch You From Afar, State and AU magazine DJs. All for ten euro and all until 2.30am. Class, no?

Do do do do this is Insania

Tweet Warp Records, the label beloved of greasy computer science postgrads with thousand yard stares and serious men with record bags biologically attached to their hoodies, is twenty years old this month. For a long moment, in the early to mid nineties, Warp was at the vanguard of the type of headphones electronica that is sometimes called intelligent dance music (IDM) by cretins - 'cos all other dance music is by that definition not intelligent, right? I know it feels alienating to these sorts when more rhythmically inclined people enjoy it in social contexts...but unintelligent? In its heyday the label spewed out classic drum n'bass, tech house, dub and ambient releases by the likes of Aphex Twin, LFO, Boards of Canada, Sabres of Paradise and Black Dog. As the headphones electronica scene is now as quaintly mid-nineties as an episode of Home and Away with Donald Fisher in it, the Warp roll call has recently expanded to move with the times. They've signed bands who play instruments such as Maximo Park, Battles and Broadcast. Also, after hiccups with bigger distributors, Shane Meadows now releases his films on Warp and Chris Morris will be putting out a project rejected by channel 4 on the label, a film satirising that hot halal spud, Islamic fundamentalism. All good stuff I'm sure you agree. And though the label doesn't set the electronic agenda in the way it once did, it still spits out the odd brilliant artist from the wotthefuckhappendtomyearsjustthere?? school of music. Musicians like Tim Exile and Hudson Mohawke. Exile's recent album Listening Tree is so staggeringly new-sounding I suspect those Warp wiseguys might have signed him in the future and sent him back for the craic to mark their 20th birthday. MP3: Tim Exile-Family Galaxy

Little shiny things

Tweet While squinting at one of those tiny rectangles of text excreted between pictures of the Horrors' haircuts in this week's NME, I noticed a band called the Leisure Society's new album get a bit of a monstering. The only bit of useful information I could gleam from the typically phoned-in review was that the band formed from a group who used to count Shane Meadows and Paddy Considine among their members. Yeah, before making some of the best British kitchen-sink cinema of the last decade, they were in a psych-folk group together. How my love for those two grows and grows. Unsurprisingly, it turns out Mr NME was a bit of a reactionary clam-nut in his review and The Leisure Society's album is all sorts of terrific. It will sound familiar to fans of Dead Mans Shoes and A Room for Romeo Brass 'cos lead songwriter Nick Hemming not only composed the tingly instrumental interludes heard in those films but also helped cherry pick their awesome soundtracks. Dead Man's Shoes OST, on Warp, is a classic.

The album, called Sleeper, is sterling Brit folk in the tradition of Adem Ilhan or Badly Drawn Boy before his Bruce Springsteen obsession damaged his understated talent. You'll hear hints of Paul McCartney, Fairport Convention and even The Incredible String Band in these songs too. With so much acclaimed contemporary folk coming from American artists such as Bon Iver and Fleet Foxes it is refreshing to hear a sound so resolutely English. The NME journo seemed to dole out his 3/10 review on the grounds that the album contains banjo, glockenspiel and ukulele. I mean how could they? How could they touch those Satanic instruments? Those instruments Ian Curtis raged so ferociously against to make way for the incandescent supernova of originality that is White Lies to stick it to the man and bravely blow the MTV2 playlist apart. 

Out of an album of gems it is hard to cherry pick. But this song is great.

 MP3: The Leisure Society-A matter of time

Rattle bag

Tweet "I rhyme to see myself/ to set the darkness echoing" Tupac couldn't have put it better himself. MP3: Seamus Heaney-Personal Helicon Reading poetry can be a proper sweaty struggle. Especially when you are a young reader. Many of the poems I tackled as a youth left me feeling alienated and a bit dim. When your pre-frontal cortex is still forming away, a poem like T.S. Eliot's 'The Wasteland' is nothing short of an impenetrable castle made of solid ice encasing the murky forms of people who will always be 'smarter than you' moving around inside. It still mostly is, actually. Thank God then for Heaney. Not just for his poems, but for his truthful prose that guides you into the daunting world of poetry, shining a light onto some of its more elusive creations. Here he is, writing about his own youthful struggles with Eliot's poems... "later, during my first year at Queen's University, when I read in E.M Forster's 'Howard's End' an account of the character called Leonard Bast as somebody doomed forever to be familiar with the outsides of books, my identification was not with the privileged narrative voice but with Bast himself, pathetic scrambler on the edge of literacy." It's comforting to read the likes of that from a Nobel Laureate. His prose collection 'Finders Keepers' makes brilliant and essential reading for anyone interested in a series of crystalline texts on the art of poetry. Like John Updike, another favourite writer of mine, Seamus Heaney is a wizard at making that which is initially obscure ring clear. His clarity of thought is a gift to readers. And his poems, of course, are wonderful. Happy 70th Birthday.

LoLo Recommends: Sin Fang Bous

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Good evening! LoLo here, usurping Gardenhead's blog to bring you some recommendations from my recent record purchases. I realize it's been a while since the last LoLomix installment, but I assure you one will be arriving soon. In the meantime I would like to recommend an artist I have recently fallen in love with called Sin Fang Bous.

'Clangour' is the charming solo effort from Sindri of Icelandic band Seabear. It's a beautiful twinkling album with a frost-like sound and breathy icicle vocals. It's not too dissimilar from his former band's work, but definitely more upbeat with hints of folk and electronica. To listen to this record in its entirety feels like being put through a cold cycle in a washing machine. It slows, speeds up and twists around with a tinkling that sounds like pennies falling out of pockets rattling in the drum. At the end you are left feeling completely rinsed with melody. He has a lovely jumper and large eyes and he explains his own music to you below: Mp3: Sin Fang Bous- Advent in Ives Garden Buy the album here

Something old, something new

Tweet Country rock, now there's a genre of music I know fuck all about. I wouldn't know a Crosby from a Stills, never mind a Nash, if they all jumped up and bit me on the bum. I really like this album though, which I recently discovered while trawling through blog aggregators. It's a 1968 collaboration between The Byrds' Gene Clark and the famous banjo player Doug Dillard and it's called 'The fantastic expedition of Dillard and Clark'. That's the pair of them indulging in a bit of homoerotic goofiness on the front cover. This is a gleefully loose, rangy and relaxed set of songs, more country than rock, thanks to Dillard's bluegrass banjo riffs. However, Clark's rock heritage shows through too. There is a sparkling, blissed-out clip to songs like 'Lain' down the middle' that could only come from a Byrd. So pop open a cold beer (not one of those minus five Budweisers though - they're just weird) and sling this one on, err, the MP3 docking station for some good ol' times. MP3: Dillard and Clark-Out on the Side

Into the mystic

Tweet It's received wisdom that talking about your dreams is boring. Doug Martsch puts it well when he sings 'no one wants to hear what you dreamt about unless you dreamt about them'. I dream a lot and I used to tell people about my dreams a lot. But now I've come to recognise that dull mist that descends over people's faces when conversation switches to 'lads I dreamt I rode a unicorn wearing a Meath jersey into Tesco last night. Except get this, it wasn't really Tesco, it was my granny's house when I was young......' 'Really? That's eh, interesting. Wow, never knew it was that time already. See ye tomorrow.' That's the self-conscious caveats out of the way. I'm going to post about a dream I had today. Except it wasn't really a dream. It was sort of a vision, in that I knew I was dreaming, and it was as tangible as something that happened ten minutes ago; if not more so, because of the heightened sense of it all. It whacked me out and I still feel affected by it. I dreamt that I was climbing barefoot up the side of a sand dune for some time. There was a strong sea-borne wind coming up over its ridge. After a while, I found myself on top of the dune, looking over a small bay. A good friend of mine was sitting at the water's edge, gazing out to sea. I was delighted to see him and ran toward him. As I ran, the quality of everything around me changed, the air, the sky, the sea itself. The breeze dropped. The sun dropped too. But it didn't get dark. The air was perfectly still and infused with light; it illuminated itself. I could see this. Tiny motes of light in the still air. Soon I was sitting beside my friend and looking out to sea too. The sea was vast now. An ocean that stretched out to points beyond my understanding. I felt how I felt grappling with the notion of forever as a child. How can something go on for ever? What is beyond it? The ocean flashed gently and repetitively in coruscating golds, silvers and blacks. We sat in silence and after a fashion my friend said to me "you know we can always go here. It's always here. People can just go here on holiday." I asked him if he was dreaming too and he told me he was. We looked out to the ocean again and he said "everyone is in that sea you know. Everyone ever is under the water. Out there swimming away." At this point I was overwhelmed with the awareness of it all. Everyone was indeed out there. People born and people unborn, swimming at all depths beneath the lapping endlessness. I was shaking and laughing. Properly cracking up, like. I woke up exhausted, wonky and unreal, like Terence McKenna at the end of some sort of grade 5 DMT journey. I think I'm going to feel this way all day. MP3: Pan American-there can be no thought of finish Normal service resumes tomorrow.

Getting Down with da Kidz

Tweet Here I sit in bed, well into the wrong end of my twenties, with a tubby stomach swaddled in a grizzly bear t-shirt bulging sadly over my laptop keys. I could easily write something complacent and derisory about upcoming artist Micachu to hide my nagging awareness of the void widening between my tastes and youth culture. But I won't. Even though she does sing like a cockney chimney sweep and look like a missing Mystery Jet. And yeah, a dead-eyed boy in a backwards baseball cap will probably take ketamine and fuck a pair of kooky twin sisters as one of her songs plays out in the next series of Skins. Children today eh? Adorable little tykes. Her album, Jewellery, is very good you see. On it, a magpie's nest of influences coalesce into a dirty pop racket that reminds me a bit of Blur when they drifted furthest from the Britpop template (see 'music is my radar'). Deep within jewellery's barrage of rattling, honking, dub-stepping, all round musical waywardness, is a masterful little pop album that should prove sturdy enough to weather the hype 'em then smite 'em bonkersness of the English music scene today. Of course, in my day....durr...what was I saying? oh yes, Pavement, now there was a smashing band. Come here and sit over beside Grandad, Effie from Skins. Would you like a werther's original? MP3: Micachu and the Shapes-Curly Teeth Edit: Link now works

Children's Classics: My Neighbour Totoro

Tweet The recent compost mix is giving me a clusterfuck migraine to put together, so I'm temporarily shelving it to write a few posts about something close to my heart, classic children's films. Apart from the odd winning effort from Pixar (although a lot of their stuff is overrated in my book and lacking the glow of genuine wonder that infuses Toy Story), most children's films these days are soul-shrivelling affairs. Trite, cookie-cutter storylines, agonizingly wise-ass characters, jive-talking barely concealed racial stereotypes, endless banal references to adult pop culture and off colour humour are the order of the day in today's mid-term break cinema. It would appear that few directors - for whatever reason - are able to release a children's movie that doesn't have one wily eye on the adults in the audience.

I blame Shrek. The rot that set in after this self-satisfied, undeservedly praised celebration of pop cultural flotsam is phenomenal. Since Shrek, we've been treated to all sorts of two-tiered muck, of which the accolade of most unholy example would be a close fought match between the green cretin's third offering and the truly rancid Shark's Tale. Surely, a basic rule of thumb to observe when creating a successful kids movie might be to not include smutty material that is clearly intended to fly over kids heads? Why taint innocence? Anyway, if the film is truly good, it should, and will, appeal to adults. Who doesn't like ET or Toy Story? I'm going to start off my short bundle of posts with 'My Neighbour Totoro', a beautiful animated film which unfolds like a lucid visual poem. This film, directed by the Japanese auteur Hiyao Miyazaki is bewitching to the point of being mystical.

 
The plot of My Neighbour Totoro is strikingly simple. This is a film that has no bad guys, no romantic subplot, and no climactic finale. Indeed, such is the deliberate, gentle development of its storyline that I could well imagine it being laughed out of the studio of Pixar, where even the introspective Wall-E had to succumb to pressure to tack on a whizz bang ending. The movie tells the story of two young sisters, Satsuki and Mei Kusakabe. They move with their father into a new house near a large forest at a time when their mother is ill in hospital. Full of curiosity, the girls soon find out that the world around their house has magical secrets. They see tiny furry black creatures that live in the shadows of the house and tell their father. He calmly tells them that these are just dust bunnies, a type of sprite. Now, at this early point, Totoro has completely diverged from the cliched plotting of most kids films. The dust bunnies aren't the kids little secret. The Dad doesn't express disbelief, he just calmly accepts what they tell him. Things just happen to be.

 

Later, the girls meet Totoro, a giant furry forest sprite with a mouth like a sperm whale who lives with two smaller Totoros in a dreamily pastoral corner of the woods. It is the sort of mossy place of refuge from a hot summer's day that will be familiar to anyone who spent afternoons playing in the woods as children. He is a playful creature and loving, letting them sleep on his fuzzy stomach, and even flying through the sky with them at one point. Later still, they wait for a bus with him, and in a visually remarkable scene, they are all taken for a spin on a bus that is half cat. At another point, a giant tree grows overnight from a seed planted by the girls. Little else happens. The children's mother remains in hospital. Despite a few clues that she will get better, we never know for sure, or even what her illness is exactly. We see a young boy get embarrassed around Satsuki earlier, as if he fancies her, but this too is never developed. Again, things just happen to be.

The magic of Totoro is in the details, and in the matter of fact way the benign magical creatures are presented. In its close up and often comic observances of the two girls playing together and noticing little things in the world around them, it communicates pure truths about what it is to be a child. It is lit through with a soft nostalgia. Yet, it doesn't hide from the bigger, sadder theme of the mother's illness. The animation is gorgeous. The bucolic surroundings are rendered in watercolour and the Totoro creature is so expressively drawn that it has since become an icon in Japanese cartoon history. Miyazaki went on to direct piles of other ambitious films such as Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke which deal with grander themes such as the environment and Japan's links with its past mythology. Great as these films are, I think that for its gentle handling of a serious issue and the raw enchantment that glows from every single frame, he will never top Totoro. A masterpiece.

 MP3: Joe Hisaishi-The path of the wind (music from the film)