DON'T STOP THE DRONIN'

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Having passed my viva, I'm now doctor gardenhead (PhD). The raggle-haired gent in the picture above is a representation of me claiming my PhD from the wraiths and spectres that can claw at a fellow doing academic research. Big up to my friend, the legendary Belgian expressionist (not to mention fellow fan of ghouls), James Ensor for the commission. Anyway, you guys, just call me gardenhead. I'm saving the Dr. for use on my ESB bills, bank statements, and other such strew-casually-around-the-place-able shit. If the title becomes any more use to me, I'll let you know. I'm currently trying out for post docs, but there isn't much work, expert or otherwise, in the field of biodegradable mounds of food-waste these days.

In further self-aggrandising news the 'heap got selected by the Irish Indo as a notable music blog and the only reason nialler9 is not on that list is 'cos he wrote it.

In garden news, I am pleased to report that our unusual winter visitor (in Kells at least), the Black Cap, has found a lil mate and they seem to be nesting. He's a sturdy little guy who hogs the feeder, but 'cos there's only the one of him and he's got such comical attitood, we love him for it. Best of luck to him, his mate, and their prospective hatchlings.

funkiest little garden dood with 'tood of the year award goes to...it's only the fuckin' blackcap! 

New music time. Burnt Sienna, below, is something special from the forthcoming debut album by London duo Walls who recently signed to Kompakt. Their signing continues the label's tradition of maintaining a beady eye on the odd experimental thing that doesn't quite fit with the techno template but which keeps Kompakt, and particularly its pop ambient offshoot, feeling fresh. The full album (self-titled) is a great all-round trip, confidentially running through bases marked kraut, drone, and electro - but as for this track? This is their home-run. It's FUCKING MASSIVE. It's a rolling bank of sea fog that's miles deep and locked down on a magisterial groove; and that's not to mention the hardcore emotional tug, which tangentially evokes all sorts of ruinous heartbreak and shit. Epic. Emo-noise. This year's Mogwai Fear Satan or Sweet Love For Planet Earth.

MP3: Walls-Burnt Sienna

MAJOR BOOBOO and need help

Tweet While fiddling around with my site I lost almost the entire site and links. How do I get EVERYTHING back as normal? using google cache? I don't even know where to begin. Help me please :( If its any help the old site is preserved in the amber of the google cache right here

UPDATE: CRISIS AVERTED!!!!

my favourite albums of the decade #9

Tweet Come with me on a journey through cyber time. And meet a wide-eyed young man - a handsome fella, yet to be physically ravaged by his prodigious diet coke intake. A lad who, in his spare time, engages in the slightly pathetic activity of posting star reviews on Amazon. This young man had the following things to say about Boards of Canada's eerie second album, Geogaddi - an album whose strange density grows stranger still as the years go on.

#9 Boards of Canada - Geogaddi (2002)

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful: This is amazing., February 19, 2002 By Darragh Mc Causland (Ireland) - See all my reviews This review is from: Geogaddi (Audio CD) ...Geogaddi is a multi textured sonic masterpiece. From the opening discordant melody of 'ready lets go,' you know that the band are about to take you on a strange and wonderful journey. All of the elements that made Music has the right to children so special are present on geogaddi, oscillating synths from old documentaries, textures so deep and mysterious you could swim in them, tiny intricate sounds that only reveal themself on the 17th or 32nd listen, all tacked on to hazy, scratchy beats. In a word, magic!!! There are those who will complain that boards of Canada haven't come that far in four years, or that they haven't broken much new ground. To me, this is the unfairest of criticisms. A band which is already as far out there as BOC and which has such a unique vision does not need to please electronic music snobs by doing something entirely new. Anyway, much of todays so called revolutionary electronic music sounds suspiciously like a cold sneering joke played by the artists on their listeners. Geogaddi is unquestionably a different album to Music has the right to children. It is more dense and psychedelic with some tracks feeling like a bottomless pit of texture and reverb, like "dawn chorus". There is a more sinister edge to proceedings too. A lot of the tracks shimmer and shine on one level, but sounds deeper in the mix are frankly really spooky. Boards of Canada were never all sunshine and stars, but now more than ever their music throbs with eerieness. Finally the melody. Geogaddi is drenched in melody. Songs grow on you and completely hook you after a few listens. Every throb, thrum and bleep seems achingly melodic. Some come across like snatches of childhood song and others like musical toys with their batteries running low. This album is nostalgic but not in a corny way.

MP3: Boards of Canada-Dawn Chorus

my favourite albums of the decade #10

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#10 Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavillion (2009)

Abstract

In spite of much 'blog chat' about the potential psychotropic effects of listening to the music of Animal Collective, there is a paucity of scientific evidence in the literature to support these claims. The present study aimed to assess whether there is a link between controlled exposure to Animal Collective's 'Merriweather Post Pavillion' album and subjects' performance on a variety of standardised measures of mind-expansion - which included popular children's toy etch-a-sketch, a soduko puzzle, Sega's super monkey ball, and some independently-assessed likert evaluations of performance on a magnetic fridge poetry task.

The participants were 11,000 Irish indie music fans (mean age = 27.5, SD = 3.45, 59% male). The participants were broken into three matched groups and subjected to three test conditions with differing stimuli. All three groups' performance on the standardised tasks were measured one hour prior to exposure to their assigned stimulus and one hour afterwards. Group one (indie landfill group) listened to The Fratellis for 55 minutes. Group two (control group) listened to Anne Boyle reading soothing news stories about the young scientist exhibition for 55 minutes. Group three (experimental group) listened to Merriweather Post Pavillion (MPP) for 55 minutes.

The findings clearly demonstrate that the MPP group performed significantly better than both the control group and the indie landfill group on all tasks, with the exception of the Sudoku task (which in non-scientific parlance was significantly 'owned' by the Anne Doyle group). Moreover, the etch-a-sketch drawings rendered by participants in the MPP condition were variously described as 'bewildering yet gorgeous', 'class', 'awww yeah' and 'like the BBC test card thing with the girl and the balloon, but in 3D and with a sort of a smell, sorry, no, sorry, I didn't say that, turn the radio off, no i mean me, turn me off...did you hear me say that? where's mammy? don't touch me I'm worried'. Findings unrelated to the hypothesis which might merit further investigation centered around the clinically significant portion of the Fratellis group who were hospitalised after attempting to nasally ingest the sand from their violently dismantled etch-a-sketch toys.

The findings imply that, within the conditions measured, a 55 minute exposure to Merriweather Post Pavillion had a statistically significant and positive psychotropic effect on listeners. However, further research will be required to investigate whether the findings are generalizable beyond an Irish indie audience and, as such, they should be disseminated in Europe and North America with caution. Possible confounding variables include demographic evidence of the population sample's love of the Arcade Fire and The National, and, also, the recent availability of so-called 'legal highs' in Ireland.

MP3: Animal Collective-My Girls

Woody's Round Up

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Woody: Toy Story 3 is coming out, and I'm afraid.
Buzz: Why?
Woody: Toy Story 2 was the Godfather II of animated feature films. It was a sequel that surpassed an already stunning piece of cinema in every conceivable way. It was incredible. I'm worried that Toy Story 3 is going to be the Godfather III of animated feature films. I'm worried it's going to be a big bogus pile of shite.
Buzz: Please Woody. Please don't say any more.
Woody: Why?
Buzz: I secretly think that too.

the tilt of this strange nation

Tweet Joanna Newsom - Have one on me

Gardenhead Sez: Call me Gardenhead. Ladies and gentlemen, we are in Moby Dick territory with this monster. Joanna Newsom's latest album plays out like a determined pole-vault into great American epic territory. I pity that pole; at over two hours and packed with lyrical and musical material of plutonium grade density 'Have one on me' is ridonculously whopping.

Where do you begin with something this vast? Like, what's the jumping in point? Fuck knows. I could mention the fact Newsom continues to address many of her metaphorically stunning lyrics to a mysterious shifting entity called 'darlin'. Or, I could try to make conceptual sense of the album's chronological structure (sorta classic American songwriter pop to start, then kinda free and mazelike harp stuff, then a sortakinda synthesis of what went before, maybe). Or, I could call slimy green bullshit on a smelly dead twig on almost every spouty review I read of 'Have one on me' during the short few days which followed its release (once you consider the fact that Drag City only sent out review copies of this thing the week before it hit iTunes, it's hard to read hacky humdingers like "it's flabby and lacks the conceptual focus of Ys" and consider them written with even a grain of critical honesty). Or, I could waffle about whether or not it's a fine thing that her voice has changed and gone a bit Joni Mitchell now (particularly during some elegant and sunny swandives in the first three or four tracks). Or, I could talk about how that no matter how blindingly brilliant and mature her music has now become, Joanna Newsom remains an objectified squeaky-voiced kleenex receptacle for some; doomed to continually suffer sweaty commentary from insidious sexists who can't get through 300 words about her music without coming out with some choked splurt about her physical appearance. Or, I could note how the album reminds me of Sufjan Stevens' 'Illinoise' or Van Dyke Parkes' 'Song Cycle' in that it appears to consolidate its American heritage by confidently incorporating a range of musical styles that sound to me, as an outsider, as classically American. Or, I could use the hoary adjective 'labyrinthine' as a jumping off point and actually think about it and mean it.

Well, there you go. A lot of potential jumping in points and I'm already pooped. If there is anything to be learned from this aborted review, it's that 'Have one on me' is worth, emm, jumping in to. And while I'm tentative about saying anything grand or sweeping about it, I'll happily give it FIVE GNARLED TREEFINGERS OUTTA FIVE. And I'll blog about some of the individual songs soon. 'Good intentions paving company', 'soft as chalk' and suchlike merit microscopic attention anyway. Astonishing don't even begin to describe those choons.

Corey Sez: I want to bone Joanna Newsom and make her squeak
Tegan Sez: Corey wants me to watch while he bones Joanna Newsom and makes her squeak. Also, it needs more casio

MP3: Joanna Newsom-good intentions paving company

When the wind comes racing off the river There’s a car all black with diplomatic plates

Tweet Remember Corey and Tegan? No? Well, when Asleep on the Compost Heap last heard from them they were attending a High Places after-show in a loft somewhere in Brooklyn. You weren't there? That's okay, you probably live in Ireland, and, anyway, they hate inviting people to shit.


Don't talk to us right now. We are too busy on Twitter, getting meaningfully cut up about mark linklehorse's suicide.


Anyway, Corey and Tegan have kindly agreed to take some time out from their grueling ironic knitting schedule to give their second opinion on some short reviews of new albums over the coming days.

Vampire Weekend - Contra
Gardenhead Sez: I'm glad I didn't pass a rash judgement on Vampire Weekend's second album. You see, I didn't warm to it at first. The arrangements seemed a bit prissy and vacuum-sealed, the lyrics a smidgen too playfully-clever - what with all those weirdly enunciated syllables clinking around like ice-cubes in a glass of hor-chat-a.

And yet the songs have managed to slink into my affections to a point where I am now playing the album on a daily basis. Yah, some of the arrangements may still come over slightly prissy, but they are beautiful confections, kind of like nouvelle cuisine things from 80s cookery like all these tiny colourful cubes of vegetable hanging suspended in a tinted jelly mould. I'd also class it as a reddy brek album, long on slowly released goodness. A new song bobs to the top of my playlist every other day, revealing some novel facet or other. Today my favourite is 'I think UR a contra' which is the fragile torch song that ends the album, repeatedly dissolving into the sort of feathery sweet nearly nothingness last heard on Animal Collective's 'Sung Tongs'.

I'm still parsing the album's lyrics and am now a bit more comfortable with their staginess. They remind me a lot of britpop-era Blur; it's the same sort of throwing a world up on a screen thing. It's not instantly endearing but it's interesting, and regardless, there are more than a few spikes of naked sincerity in there. Final verdict? Four gnarled treefingers out of five!


Corey sez: My post-structuralist take on this album, a lively imaginary dialogue between Derrida and Kitt the talking car from Nightrider, can be read in my friend's 'zine META.
Tegan sez: Corey sometimes teabags me when we are on coke. Also, it needs more casio.

Thanks for the input lads, and we look forward to your views on Joanna Newsom's latest.


MP3: Vampire Weekend-giving up the gun

It's march....the jury's in on Joanna Newsom and others! Johnjoe Mary Gaughan reflects

Tweet How's she cuttin' regular readers and browsers from the world web (the internet)? Like a blade, is she? Now lads I'm aware there's fierce pressure for us to shimmy the show forward and talk about some other music thats not on that fuckin' yoke of a list.

Well, with me top twenty five albums stalling in this mucky arse-end of what yis call the internet (or the web is it now? yis eggbrains), I'll be moving on to new tapes that's been on in the motor since christmas time. Suffice to say I have been listening to the new shtuff day in and day out now - the new-released music your man'd say on top of the charts, the vampire weekend, the gorrilaz, prins thomas (the norwegian fella) and me own Bagatelle tape. Day be day people come here to hear about new songs from the american bands and the rave (intit the rave they call it now? Or is it the dance? It wouldnt be for me, but it does be on in the Tunnel disco adont in the hotel sometimes. The fields of Athenry now that was a good one, they had that one bangin' away 90 with a young wan singing like you'd hear in the young fella's cars and I'd nearly swing to that myself with the few pints, but the rest wouldn't interest me at all). And sure it seems all go, as they would say on the radio, over the luvly harpist wan who looks like a fairy (she spakes fierce sentences too, swallying the thesauruses, int she boys?). They were sayin' below in Munnellys that she has a new song out alright - ah shtop that, she can sing lads.

A complex woman, is what I heard. If only wimmen were simple like us bucks hah? Like that now could be a carslberg ad on telly - 'if Carlsberg did wimmen'. Ah lads, Imagine? It'd be the jockey breakfast every day, the ride and the rasher. Oh they're a bleddy mystery aren't they? Great they are as well, I'll concede. Until ya give them a map! HAA!

  

Did I mention the angelus on the news? It's a good one for thinkin and reflectin about the immigrants and all that. You see them colourin' pictures and makin baskets in the angelus; god love them you'd think. But then they folly you round the post office on a Friday, hand out for the pension. The news is good these days though hah? I have to say, it's the best on the box nowadays. I was only sayin yesterday there's a fierce amount of them domestic murders with the husbands, god have mercy on the'wives. But the husband always does it I do think (like in them Brian Dennehy cop films on the satellite), and that's the real truth. The victim impact statements are not to be missed either, I'll tell yis. They give a fierce personal side to the case. I'll tell yis, I like a good long victim impact statement on the news;  and the pathologist, she's a gas one too. Always has the hair done up goodo and brassy when she's pickin' around the body and all. I prefer something meaty now on the news to the likes of emmerdale to be honest. Something more real to life y'know? The soap murders, they're alright, but you always know they're actin' like. D'yknow?

Fair City, though, they can be good and realistic with the murders.

My favourite albums of the decade #10.5

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Gnnnnggggg.....what's this? This strange whistling...is it my brain or the kitchen appliances? Energy wavering....clocks running backwards...vomitous globes of ectoplasmic energy slowly cannibalising and regurgitating themselves outside my bedroom window...what the fuck? It can't be...can it? It is. Gnwwwiiip...I'm inside a rip in the space time continuum. OK Good. I was hoping for this. Now that the rules of time and space are getting diddled silly, I can fuck a few Animal Collective related albums into one position without explaining myself.

#10.5 Panda Bear - Person Pitch (2007)

No matter where you stand on them, it would take a very contrary personality to argue against Animal Collective being one of the very few influential/unique/distinctive bands to emerge into the collective consciousness over the past few years. A while back, I used to jokingly end pub conversations about music by drawling..."you have to remember though, we ARE living in a post Animal Collective world." It was a goofy bit of shit-talk, typically deployed to puncture a music argument taking itself too seriously (e.g: "No Darragh, what I'm actually saying is that this new Of Montreal song is reconciling Kevin Barnes' inner feminist with the collective dreamwish of racial transmogrification shared by him and his fans in a remarkably tuneful way" "Well Karl, I kind of agree, but you have to remember we ARE living in a post Animal Collective world")*.

*I never had this conversation with a Karl on any level. In fact I may have dreamed it after eating a goodfellas friday fever pizza yesterday.

Yet, this shite is probably only funny because its sorta hard to overestimate their importance these days. Especially within the last decade's emerging critical culture of blogging which adopted them as a mascot band from day one and suckled their reputation on a thick churn of praise ever since. And yah, a lot of Animal Collective directed praise sure leaks out of this here manboob.

At the risk of blathering on before this rip in the space-time continuum shuts ahead of my getting around to 'Person Pitch', let me say one sweeping, secondary schoolish thing about Animal Collective. They are my #1 band of the last decade. Lyk 4 eva doodz. No matter what sort of hideously introverted Austrian techno-concrète stuff outranks their albums on this list, let it be known that my giddy devotion to the idea of Animal Collective 'the band' belongs in a different category altogether. Without wanting to get maudlin or anything, I have to say I'm now convinced that my admiration for these guys tastes of the last sweet swallows of that particular form of music fandom which happens before 'headphones at home man' takes over. (It's already happening. I have nasal hairs now and actually clipped them for the first time last week. I also started buying music from iTunes as a last ditch treatment for a persistent itch in the wrinkly skin on the top of my brain which is continually depressed and bugged by higher reasoning).

Right, Panda Bear. His real name is Noah Lennox and he is a member of Animal Collective during the day. What else do we know about him? Well, on close inspection of the album cover above - where he is cunningly disguised as a panda chilling in a hot-tub with a sexually explosive plethora of zoo animals, bacteria, and under tens - we can infer that, during the night, he is most likely a furrie, a paedophile, or both.

Ah no. Come back Noah, we're kidding. I'm taking the piss about the sexual degeneracy. What's that 'spokesperson for Noah Lennox'? He doesn't read this blog? Ummm, are you sure? Ummm okay, well, hmmm... well, yah.

Anyway, when 'Person Pitch' came out, I wasn't sure about it to be honest. I saw it as a sort of cast-off or stop gap between albums for Animal Collective. I reckoned Noah Lennox was merely flexing his gift for Brian Wilsonian melodic perfection in an environment where the subsequent recorded sketches had no need to worry about Avey Tare-shaped pins popping their pretty yet ultimately floaty shapes. In other words, I figured 'Person Pitch' was a one-sided experimental EP when compared to the rest of the band's oeuvre. In yet other words, I preferred Avey Tare's egdy yelps to Lennox's west-cost harmonics. Worse, I figured the album was weak - a hodgepodge of feeble found sound tacked onto seven pretty songs. For shame.


Now, listening to the enigmatic twelve minute exhalation of rushing emotion that is 'Bros' I realise a few things... (i) it is possibly a song of the decade (ii) it's a nigh-perfect example of the animating, sampled, circular spirit Animal Collective borrow from techno and deploy to mighty effect when they play live (bros is possessed by techno) (iii) the muffled screams packed into the whole endeavour are like flakes of anchovy...a reminder that while Lennox's vocal proclamations may outwardly equate with yum-yum, happy-happy, joy-joy, we can't be sure about what's really going on (iv) 'Bros' is only one slice of a whole slab of this stuff..and did I mention how the song makes whale-like overtures to techno? Yeah, like whale mating noises.

'Ponytail', the track uploaded below is fucking brilliant, but it sadly ain't 'bros'. Seems I can't rip the whole song in ye olde space time continuum. Here's some serious youtube 'bros' action though. Dream-like and true.

MP3: Panda Bear-Ponytail