Rancho Relaxo

I know, I know, the compost heap is starting to live up to its name. Its fast becoming a neglected and dank corner of the 'net where sweet fuck all happens and things putrefy. A badly tended blog. Its not meant to be this way!!! But college and my inability to manage time and anything in my life that isn't an ipod wheel or the ringpull on a can of beer have conspired to make me a strung out and exhausted gardenhead. Truly asleep on the compost heap, snoozing in the thick fug of fruitflies and decomposing banana peels, dreaming of escape to somewhere where crickets whirr as the sun sets deep and red. For the moment, I've made do with a mini break to Kells for a bit of rest and relaxation. Now, its a mark of how viciously I needed to get out of Dublin when 2 days in Kells midweek feels like a 2 month visit to Rancho Relaxo. But it really does.

I'd like to take this opportunity to shamelessly plug the chicken balls available at the rose garden Chinese take away in Kells. They are wonderful things. Hefty, golden and delightfully irregular looking with a light batter that cloaks huge steaming pieces of meat. And thats just the guys that serve them, parp! I eat a disturbing amount of chicken balls and these are the best. Most in Dublin come coated in a sort of worrying lagging jacket of spongey batter thats burnt brown on the outside and a sort of cottage cheesey slime on the inside. For some reason, I never learn and repeatedly put myself through the endurance test of eating them. The Kells chicken ball on the other hand is the Platonic ideal of a chicken ball, the perfect standard by which all others should be measured. I advise all chicken ball fanatics to go on a little gastro-tourism trip to Kells.


Sqwaaawkk!!

Okay MP3 time. I'll endeavour to keep the blog fed with tidbits even if they are sometimes smaller than the usual meandering missives. Today's tidbit is from the Fuck Buttons album Street Horsssing. I find it hard to keep up on all the new music and can normally only properly assimilate about 10 albums or so a year. So I typically play catch up on stuff that was buzzed about months ago. True to form, Fuck Buttons wormed its way into my brain bosca only recently. I really love this record and at the moment its proving a very calming and cathartic listen. Its funny how noise can do that no? I mean, elevator music like Katie Melua would send me screaming through a plate glass window, but this textured exercise in the interplay between raw noise and melody chills me out and soothes me to sleep.

MP3: Fuck Buttons-Sweet love for planet earth

Finally keep an eye on Analogue Magazine for my interview with Deerhunter's Bradford Cox and some of the rest of the gang including their new guitarist Whitney. Bradford talked about shitloads of stuff, the new album, why noisey music is better than sex, getting drunk to interview Stephen Malkmus and much, much more!!!