Day 7: A Song that Reminds you of a Certain Event

Tweet Band: Ash.
Venue: The Point Theatre. Year: 1996/7?
Gardenhead's state of being: Very teenage and delerious.



I can still taste and smell the thrilling mixture of Lynx, shitmix (a bottle of whatever foul shite from your drinking cabinet you could transfer into a plastic receptacle), and 'the horn' that permeated that gig. I also distinctly remember lunging into a girl in the middle of 'Oh Yeah' and reaching, feral and claw-like, towards a breast. I had deliberately worn a pair of converse that had lost half a sole that night, in order to look as 'scruffy' and indie as possible. The breast lunge failed in spectacular fashion, and I sliced my heel on something due to my rubbish choice of footwear. Regardless; when Tim Wheeler and co. lashed into this utter stonker, my mates and I were borne aloft on that most transient wave of pure abandonment...you know, wot Fergal Sharkey was talkin' about when he made John Peel cry time and time again.

Day 6: A song that reminds you of somewhere

Tweet My good mate lives in a house fondly known to all of us as 'the pit', on account of it being, well, in need of some new wallpaper let's say. This song reminds me of a couple of truly magical mornings I had there way back when. One of the most beautiful cover versions I know.

Day 5: A song that reminds you of someone

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This person has been there with me through thick and thin. Ah the times we had, hah? Like that time we got caught scribbling veiny appendages all over the edges of binomial expansion equations in Pat Duffy's maths class. And the time he decided to take a surprise piss from the top of a tree I was climbing up behind him, that was a good 'un, I fondly remember that. As I do that other time, when I had to kindly ease him from the traffic on George's Street which he was trying to direct, stinking of buckfast and dressed from head to toe in a man-sized Barney the dinosaur costume.

Hoo boy, they're coming thick and fast now, these associations. That last one reminds of another fond memory I have from the costume period, of the day his mother found him at the front door in a man-sized baby grow - soiled, nay fucking destroyed and germ-riddled - from three days of solid buckfast abuse at various house parties. It looked like it had poo and blood on it. His mother cried, as I remember. Oh such special memories.

Then there was the time we listened to this -

MP3: My Morning Jacket-Golden

Glowing as softly as it moved, the net curtain carried a barely there breeze into the front bedroom of our rented estate house in Drimnagh - the condensed magic of a perfect August evening etched into our brains' permanent records via the power of a piece of old net from Guineys. We lay on our backs silently - us bearded chums who looked comically teenagerish in our childish single beds - and we let Jim James's ethereal voice send us into the kind of shared dreamy fug that only best friends know.

Brideshead revisted

Drimnagh Revisted

PLUGGEDDY PLUGGEDDY PLUGzz for people I know and things I like.

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Days 5, 6 and 7 of thirty days coming soon. But first a word about a marketing agency my good friend has started for musicians. It's called Amp. I'm no marketing expert, but I know she's more than pretty good at that sorta shit. Here is her blurb:

"Amp are a new online music marketing agency based in Dublin. While the traditional music industry has changed, Amp believe that artists can still earn a good living and continue to create music by taking advantage of the power of internet to connect with fans and sell their music. We help them do the business and marketing side of things so that they can concentrate on the music.Our website is a place where musicians can learn the basics for themselves, or we can work with them directly."

While I'm at it, here is another deadly thing a mate of mine is involved with, and which I've mentioned here before...



And now that I've completely whored myself, I'm going for broke and mentioning this...which is brilliant.

IMRO

Tweet Update: after meeting with people in imro today, I would like readers to refer to blog post here after reading the below.

"I gotta letter from da government/ da other day"
More like an email from IMRO actually. They want me to pay 'em a license for this blog because it appears that at some point along the line I linked to music from acts they represent. The license would cost me 150 quid a year or more should I choose to purchase it. What do I get in return for this excellent purchase? Just the 'privilege' of providing free publicity to Irish bands while engaging in my profitless hobby (sorry IMRO I mean my vocation). CLASS.

All the ins and outs of this thing can be found on Niall's blog here and Jim Carrol's blog here. My personal two cents are "hey I'm no Lawyer, but surely Irish music blogs, tending as they do to host single MP3s and promote gigs rather than encouraging the wholesale downloading of albums, should be nurtured, not slapped with some shite about a license fee that is going to cause half of them to quit in confusion and frustration?"

Elmo loves you. His Irish cousin IMRO clearly doesn't, might (with further progress).

Day 4: A song that makes you sad

Tweet This is a tough one because I can cry at the drop of a hat. In fact people who know me well are positively bored of seeing me cry at so many odd moments and at so many unlikely things. I remember breaking into a juddering, sobby shitheap in a chipper a year ago because one of the proprietors' cousins who I never met died. Anyway, I'm emotionally cheap. I cry at discarded tayto bags, evening herald headlines, and what i'm eating for dinnner.

Yet, in light of all this shite, and even though my face resembles funtropica water theme park at the best of times, I think I can fairly say this is a song universally regarded as heart breaking. Wayne Coyne wrote it about his terminally ill dad. It reveals the blazing emotional honesty at the heart of the flaming lips, and it also feels, well, heavy. Ya get me?



MP3: The Flaming Lips-Waitin' for a superman

Day 3: A song that makes you happy

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Look at squirtle's face. He's modelling a what is known in the pokemon industry as a shit eating grin. Why? Because he's just after hearing the bit 57 seconds into Hardcore UFOs where it shifts up into a mega-euphoric fucking racket.

MP3: Guided By Voices-Hardcore UFOs

Day 2: Your least favourite song

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Declan Nerney: Death Eater

Breathe deep and buckle up securely folks, I'm taking you somewhere dark. A place where the joys of life are a dewy memory, a glint of light last seen down the wrong end of a warped and dusty homestead marmalade jar. Walk carefully with me among the ghoulish hordes who haunt the cabaret halls of our hotels, who descend on towns with names like Ballybofey and spend rain-sodden package weekends swaying in seats to maudlin music about the recent Irish past repackaged as American Country. Repackaged by the jug-faced grinning waxworks who stared deathlessly out of every cassette box that lay around my father's car during every extended trip of my childhood, and who, according to youtube, still have the same rictus grins, and pull the same awful Texas-meets-Mullingar shapes on their CD covers. Boys and girls, drink deep from your complementary cups of maudlin juice and hold onto your souls, we're in 'Country and Irish' territory.

While I can flit through favourite songs to beat the band, the grisly, creepily-upbeat, Mariachi suicide note that is 'Stop the World and Let me off' by Declan Nerney is empirically, unequivocally, my least favourite song of all time (a length ahead of the next contender, Metallica's 'Nothing Else Matters').

Why this particular song you might ask? Well the entire Irish and Country scene makes my spinal fluid run backwards and my mouth fill with the taste of flat TK red lemonade and tayto crumbs. It fills my mind with images of grown men sitting in daylit bars at Christmas, crying about how "there's more gone every year" and "none of us have long left now do we" and "it used to be different with the visiting and drop of drink back in the houses". Yet Declan, Longford's finest, has a special place reserved in whatever twitching, maladaptive corner of the brain bundles the worst horrors together, the 'post-traumatic stress disorder' embiggenedy chlammybellum or something.

To further elaborate on the Nerney problem, I must tell you about the while I spent working ten hour shifts in a steel fabrication factory near Navan. My main responsibility in this drafty shed was to use a gigantic machine to punch holes in plates of steel that were up to two and half inches thick. Ten hours of this, a day, with the smell of steel parings hot in my nose and a fug of alcohol typically hanging hotly around my head too - I was a 19-year-old pub fiend at the time. This in itself was a tough station, though I gritted it out for the pay and, more lamely, for the bonus of getting muscly arms before I started college (go on and laugh yeah yeah).

However, on top of all this, one man who worked there had me on the verge of inserting my head into the hole punching machine and experimentally putting the pedal down. A man with a radio, which he hooked up to all the intercoms in the factory and which played his favourite tapes all day. Guess what they were? Ho yeah, countrified, neutered songs with names like 'I wonder if its raining back home in Donegal', 'lets all come in for tae', 'I'll never see my lovely X back home in lovely Y' 'The wonderful X in the county of Y' and lyrics like 'I'd jauntily blow my head off with a shotgun/ and leave a mess for the state pathologist behind the silage bales/ except my lovely shotgun/ its back home in Mayo'. All sang to the same rink-a-dink casio country beat with gruesome keychanges, all disconcertingly draping maudlin sentiment in weirdly upbeat vocal stylings, all as creepy as fuck. And the worst of them? The one that seemed to play every hour? It was Nerney and his mariachi ear worm of despair. The song with the most heinous key change in history, the most traumatising dissonance between its subject matter and its delivery and above all, the song that stank most fearsomely of a world of shit. I will never hate a song as much.

Day 1: your favourite song

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MP3: Glen Campbell-Wichita Lineman

I can't listen to Wichita Lineman and remain unaffected. It resonates with very sad, very deep things inside a person. A lonely man out working in the elements, fixing telephone lines, and listening, heartbroken, for a woman's voice singing through the whines of interference - such existential imagery in Jimmy Webb's lyrics! In fact, the narrative could work as a Kafka short, a thought reinforced by the fact that its short arc has no romantic resolution ("the wichita lineman/ is still on the line"). And the music just destroys me. Glen Campell sings with a reined-in stoicism, holding back the heartache, while all around him Jimmy Webb's orchestration weeps binfuls of the saddest tears ever.

The song is hypnotic too. The instrumental segments are so seductive and mesmerising that if you chopped them from the song and played them to me on repeat like video game music for an entire afternoon, I'd probably beg to hear it one more time. 

30 Days of music...

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Microsoft paint is my hero

So Karl (Those Geese) is doing a thing as he calls it. And he thinks others should do this thing too. I think he's right. It's a neat lil project that appeals to the Brian Eno fan in me; forcing your creativity out by setting boundaries and all that. I would like to say that the forthcoming series of posts has nothing whatsoever to do with the compost heap whirring around in a creative rut at the moment, but that would make me a stinking sac of lying shit.

So this is how it goes -

day 01 – your favorite song
day 02 – your least favorite song
day 03 – a song that makes you happy
day 04 – a song that makes you sad
day 05 – a song that reminds you of someone
day 06 – a song that reminds of you of somewhere
day 07 – a song that reminds you of a certain event
day 08 – a song that you know all the words to
day 09 – a song that you can dance to
day 10 – a song that makes you fall asleep
day 11 – a song from your favorite band
day 12 – a song from a band you hate
day 13 – a song that is a guilty pleasure
day 14 – a song that no one would expect you to love
day 15 – a song that describes you
day 16 – a song that you used to love but now hate
day 17 – a song that you hear often on the radio
day 18 – a song that you wish you heard on the radio
day 19 – a song from your favorite album
day 20 – a song that you listen to when you’re angry
day 21 – a song that you listen to when you’re happy
day 22 – a song that you listen to when you’re sad
day 23 – a song that you want to play at your wedding
day 24 – a song that you want to play at your funeral
day 25 – a song that makes you laugh
day 26 – a song that you can play on an instrument
day 27 – a song that you wish you could play
day 28 – a song that makes you feel guilty
day 29 – a song from your childhood
day 30 – your favorite song at this time last year


P.S. As soon as I manage to turn my gigantic beetle-shaped shell upright and regain the use of the bits of me required to type a long blog like I used to do here, I will.

Vaguely melancholic stopgap...

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As I've posted once or twice here before, there are times when I'm not exactly life's happiest camper and it's not easy to churn the blogs out out. Yet, it's at times such as these, when I'm not in the best form to write at length about it, that music means the most. I think it was Charlie Brown who once said to Linus that Happiness is a Sad Song.

And, just in case the above is too gloomy for your tastes, below are a couple of shots of this year's St Small business's Paddy's Day parade in Kells...

WTF?

No shit to big or too small...

My favourite albums of the decade #8

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Woohoo only eight albums to go right? Not quite. Accumulated notes now tell me that more than eight albums remain to be slotted into this c*nt of a thing, which is turning into the most indeterminable c*nt of a thing since Jarndyce became legally involved with Jarndyce or the Wayans brothers started making films with the word Movie in the title. I've weighed up my options and I've decided to do justice to the overlooked albums by retrospectively jimmying them back into the list at the appropriate points and using decimals to indicate their positions (e.g. number 14.5). What's that sound, you say? Yes. It's my mind unspooling.

#8 The New Pornographers - Twin Cinema (2005)

Kerrrr-unch. Ah, there was no doubt this power-pop masterwork was going to land in my top ten with anything less than a satisfying crunch. Twin Cinema could crunch its way into the hardest heart. I was already in love with the New Pornos when it came out, after falling hopelessly for them thirty seconds into 'The fake headlines' from Mass Romantic. A.C. Newman, that ginger-haired lego man of great songwriting repute, was mainlining an alchemical blend of big-hearted music straight into me and I was sucking it down like a bug eyed fiend (this was a time in my life when sing-a-long hooks formed the base of my musical food pyramid).

Before I heard Twin Cinema my grá for the New Pornos was already something serious; yet after I heard it, I turned into an evangelical lunatic. Like that creep we all know, I brought my own iPod to house parties to stick the album on, only to ruin whatever song off the album I was trying to play because I was droning over it  in my broad Kells monotone through a mouthful of pistachios about how they were the best power-pop since Big Star. Yeah, that creep.

Anyway, while power-pop doesn't hold the same immediate appeal for me as it once did, Twin Cinema's place in my affections is unlikely to ever budge. It's such an airy, generous, shout-out of an album. Everything that makes the band great crystallizes over its course. Rushing builds of momentum, unexpected melodic switch-ups, Neko Case's gorgeous vocals, Bejar's pretentious wine-soaked weirdness, and an overall sense of things bulging and spilling over, all charged up by Newman's potent songwriting gifts.

MP3: The New Pornographers-Sing me Spanish Techno