Hands up who wants to win a double pass to see Future Islands (brilliant electro-rock group from Baltimore) play in the Workman's Club on October 20th? All of ye, right? If you want a chance to win, send an email titled Future Islands to asleepontheheap@gmail.com and include the name under which you want the tickets to be held. I'll pop all the names into a random number generator site and announce a winner this coming Sunday, during the Antiques Roadshow (ish).
Future Islands are going to be supported by Patrick Kelleher and his full band; and if you don't win the competition but have a few bob burning a hole in your American Apparel jeans, I say go anyway. Both bands are ace, and for €15 you're getting some quality live music. Future Islands' most recent album is a stunner, all mournful and strung-out even as it parties hard (like New Order used ta be). Check 'em out below.
PS. The Workman's Club is a new live venue on Dublin's quays.
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Junior infants 1986. I can smell it in my memory better than I can see it. Try as much as I might, all I can coax out of my mind's eye is a coat rack laden with snorkle jackets, a couple of dead wasps on a windowsill and a breezeblock wall painted yellow. I must have stared at that breezeblock wall for a long time in junior infants, because I remember details of it; flattened bits of blue tack, the channel between the bricks, a dribble of paint frozen hard. But the smell of junior infants, on the other hand, that's a vast continent. There's one big smell, the junior infants smell - a smell that I will take to the grave. This smell is so clear in my mind, I can still break it down into constituent parts, crayola wax, bleach, shitty little jam sandwiches, a cloth that mopped up gone off milk, new shoes, dead leaves traipsed in from the yard, chalk powder, and, the most heart-tugging smell of all, marla. Whenever I smell marla, I go weak. It's my madeleine.
wheel da fuckin' biccie!
I'm thinking of junior infants because I was out with Tripping Along the Ledge blogger Eoin recently and we were talking about embarrassing stuff remembered from primary school. Specifically, how grown adults bring up things that happened way back in the day as if they only happened last week. For example, you could be socialising in a pub in your home town when some character you barely recognise will approach you out of the blue, clatter you chummily over the shoulder, introduce you to his wife, and then say "remember that time in Mrs Mangan's class when you followed through on a fart."
Eoin's story was about some young fella zipping his mickey into his trousers. Sadly, my story doesn't enjoy the luxury of having somebody else as its central star, yet it's weirdly similar to Eoin's in that involves junior infants, nudity, and a toilet.
The year's 1986. The class is Kells junior infants. After getting permission to take a number two toilet break in class, I do my business without checking to see if there is enough loo roll for wiping (being five, my brain is not developed enough to form such contingency plans). Only a few sheets remain - definitely not enough. I figure I'd better ask the teacher for more rather than go around with an itchy bum all day, which, you must admit, is hygienic thinking. I pull up my trousers, exit the toilet and raise my hand to ask the teacher for an extra roll. Thirty heads swivel round. Laughter. Confused, I look at the teacher. She's laughing too. I look to my twin. He's not laughing, he's curling into a hopeless cringy shape. "Look at the twin's willy" cries a girl's voice. I feel the air around my legs, look down, and experience immediate, excruciating, shame. I turn on my heels and scurry. More laughter. Compounded misery. There's a pathetic little tail of bog roll flapping from my skinny hole, and it follows me as I disappear back into the shameful sanctity of the toilet cubicle.
Twenty-two years later, I'm standing at the bar of Whelans when a woman approaches me. "Well, you're one of the twins from Kells aren't you?" she says. I can vaguely remember her and try to exchange small talk. I introduce her to a couple of friends from Trinity. "In fairness, we hardly remember each other", she tells them, "but wait until I tell yis about this time in junior infants..."
(Embrace are britpop also-rans who, in spite of mostly being shite, squirreled this impossibly lovely song away on their second EP*. You can download it by clicking on the small arrow)
*according to a commenter it is also on their debut album, which I have on cassette somewhere. Going to blow the dust off it later. I might have been a bit quick to rubbish them.
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I can't fib at this stage, my rate of posting speaks for itself. I've got blogger's block. Something, somewhere, is clogging up the system and stinking. Loathe as I am to admit it, I think it's the list. Ack. Three albums to go and I would rather lick a poo than write about them. Last night I opened three 'posting' windows simultaneously, dosed myself in Aldi's version of diet Red Bull (red thunder!) and settled down to slay the beast for once and for all. By 3am I had written two sentences. One of which was "fuck this shit". I am also trying to write a research paper, and that is choking to death on a clot of clustered brain shit too. What to do, what to do.
keep on walking, buddy, or I'll have your eyes out.
Life, hah; *slips into cliché* one minute it's a thrill-a-minute, full of work, gigs, parties and holidays. The next, you're facing another endless Autumn of grim slopey walks around a decaying Meath town at twilight. Double ack. To make matters worse, they've stopped stocking the guardian in the shops in Kells. Oh malign universe, why play with my life like this? What will appease you? A sacrifice? I'll do it. Next week I'm going to climb up the side of the hill of Lloyd with a pocket full of black cat bangers and my pet magpie Bathory (he lives in a cage). We're going to sacrifice a puppy in one of those wooden teepees which were originally built as children's playhouses before the Craig's list adults took over and riddled them with used Durex. A puppy, or an eight-year-old child - if I can catch one of the shits who keep tipping over our recycle bin on weekends. The soundtrack? Probably this.
P.S. I might be getting a job in Dublin soon.
P.P.S. The universe is still malign
P.P.P.S. Any advice on defeating writer's block that doesn't involve plagiarism/ taking drugs/ flotation tanks/ is welcome below.
I think it must be nearly a year since this list began. Hardcore. Shit's percolated and settled since then, like sedimentary rock yo. Worthy albums which were not included in the prototype list have since popped into my head. I think I mentioned this problem in an earlier post and said I would retroactively insert them into the list in the spirit of no brother gets left behind. So here goes, I will write a little bit about each album and suggest a suitable position for it on the list.
By the way, I've surprised myself with this entire exercise. When I started out I thought the list was going to be less an accurate reflection of my favourite albums of the decade and more a snapshot of my state of mind on a single night last Autumn. Yet, looking back over the order of it all, I have to admit it still makes sense. It's not as arbitrary as I thought it would be, indicating that I'm I'm not as flighty in my tastes as I thought I was. Wow, a journey of self-discovery through lists. My life emulates the hackneyed plot of a Nick Hornby novel.
Retroactive insertion is about to commence, but, before it does, "one last thing" (via Columbo (via 'via device' via Hipsterrunoff)); there are at least five albums from the nineties which I think are better than my top three from the last decade. Is this because I am getting older? I think it is. When I start faffing on about Pavement and Blur's superiority over Arcade Fire, a small part of me secretly suspects I'm that ageing sad-case (or legion of sadcases) who wrote letters into the NME about the brilliance of The Smiths the entire way through Britpop. I'm going to start 'getting' Bob Dylan soon. I just know it.
Radar Bros - And The Surrounding Mountains (2002)
This is slowcore baby. The Radar Brothers are part of a loosely associated bunch of bands who are characterised by their ability to slow jangling indie-pop melodies right down to gradual, dilated, chime-a-thons. If you're not familiar with the 'Brothers, think of the likes of Bedhead, Galaxie 500 or Low. I saw the Radar Brothers at ATP a few years ago in a weird final day haze, with the stage-light glinting off the pickup bits of their guitars, and notes hanging thickly over the heads of a crowd milling about in a sort of half-involved, druggy, ATP way. I felt like I was watching a band perform through treacle. They broke the slowcore barrier, and moved beyond it into the realms of treaclecore.
Radar Brothers have lots of albums which are all excellent but, which, like those of the aforementioned Low, sound very similar. They demand patience. My favourite album of theirs is called 'And the surrounding Mountains', and it's a miniature masterpiece, deceptively uniform in its sound yet ultimately brilliant in its generosity to the patient ear. The melodic intelligence the band employ on this peak work is as sophisticated as, say, Teenage Fanclub, and the lyrical content of the album is tied together by an astonishingly strange conceptual thread alluding to familial ties. Mothers, uncles, fathers, and sons are joined in surreal vignettes about mountains, lakes, and campfires. All shot through by Jim Putnam and company's psychedelia on xanax approach to music. How xanaxy? Allow one of my typically nostalgic little anecdotes from compost heap year zero to explain...(ah how young we were... and, um, how shockingly arrested our development still is. Man children. Fucking man children. I'm surrounded by them; and I am one, Goddammit). You'll likely deduce from the piece of writing below, that a cake was not the only thing that got baked in the preceding birthday celebration. Ahem.
Frank's 22nd birthday, crashing on the floor of his Granny's holiday home in a fishing village in Waterford. Wrapped against the cold floor in duvets and sleeping bags; we are thinking about music that shares that fuzzy duvet quality. Warm and enveloping music that lets us fall luxuriantly into its cozy embrace. Womb tunes. We decide there and then, that, if we form a band, we will call it 'audio-duvet' and all the music we make would share this toasty glow. Excited, I find a song that would embody the 'audio-duvet' aesthetic. It's on a mix-tape I made for Podge. It's by a band called Radar Brothers and it's called 'On the Line'. I put it on and we collectively clamber back up umbilical cords and into our respective wombs as the weird soft chords fill the cottage shadows.
I hereby retrospectively place Radar Brothers between positions 13 and 14 on this list - bear with my ridiculousness here - making 'And the Surrounding Mountains' my 13.5th favourite album of the decade.
