The "theory" of
Intelligent Design has been one of the hot-button topics of the year. On one side you have the creationists that want their beliefs represented in
science classes in the US. On the other hand you have those that believe religion should be kept in
religious education classes. It probably won't surprise you to find out that I am on the side of those that believe ID should not be taught in science classes. It's not science, it's faith. Science is the business of attempting to prove positives about the universe around us. Faith is about trusting what you believe in regardless of the absence of any positive proof.
To be honest this isn't a debate I've got much invested in; there is no danger in the UK of ID being taken seriously in science lessons, so all I draw from this whole controversy is some wry amusement at the circle jerk discussions that are flooding the web where people with a deeply held faith in creationism try to talk Darwinists out of their belief in natural selection, and vise-versa. The only reason I am raising the issue here at all is that it presents some kind of legitimacy in me posting videos of people going out of their way to demonstrate why I personally
don't believe in Intelligent Design, and why I
do think that Darwin's principals are broadly sound.
Redneck SurfingBMX failing to reaching roofBMX fails to jump off a cliff and over a truckDrinking Fire
Thursday, December 29, 2005 9:58 PM
I have nothing to say. Fancy that! The holidays are over so I should get back to blogging, but I have nothing I actually want to say. Ordinarily in this situation I'd pick up a half finished blog entry from my notepad and run with that; finish it off, polish it up and post the bugger. The problem is that my mind is still a little fuzzy after drinking lots of alcohol over Christmas so I can't quite find my voice. You are probably thinking
"Shut up then, you fucking chucklehead. If you have nothing worthwhile to say, don't say anything. You are wasting my eyes!". That's a fair point (although I'd rather you hadn't done a swear), but my response is equally fair: if you don't want to read about nothing, then you shouldn't have read this in the first place. Ah-Ha! Who's the fool now? You are, you are the fool. Take that!
Anyway, if I didn't see you over the festive period, I hope you had a good Christmas and best wishes for the new year.
Wednesday, December 28, 2005 12:35 PM
It's not every day that you get handed a copy of
The Times and are confronted with a large photo taken from your school yearbook, but that's exactly what happened today. Not
my photo of course, my own diabolical plans for world domination are yet to muster any interest from the national press. No, this was a photo of one
Christian Jozefowicz (or Christian
Bailey as he is now known). We didn't mix in the same circles. As
The Times puts it...
Mr Bailey’s Royal Grammar School contemporaries recall a business-obsessed, “geeky” individual with few friends. “He was a nerd at school,” one told The Times. Another described him as a “school joke” who told everyone he was going to be a millionaire.If they had asked my opinion, I'd have been less kind. I'd have probably said
"Christian Jozefowicz? Utter twat." The fact that he had few friends probably accounts for why I inexplicably got invited to his birthday party when I was about 13, an event which I had little choice but to attend, and have all but blanked from my memory. At the time, I almost felt a pang of pity for the guy for the fact that the only people at his birthday party were there under duress. But then I remembered that really, he was just an utter twat.
Hopefully the next time I read about him it is because his rotten corpse is being dragged through the streets of Falluja. If you think I am being ironic there, for once I am not. My contempt for him knows no bounds, the war profitering piece of shit scum can rot in hell for I care. It is far more than he deserves.
Thankfully my last post before Christmas will end on a less ugly note. The Telegraph today carried a front page picture of another of my contemporaries,
Roland Buerk who one year after nearly being killed by the Boxing Day Tsunami has married the woman who saved his life. Other than being in the same scout troup at school I had little dealings with the guy, but he struck me as a decent sort of chap and I wish him well.
It is amazing how the same school can churn out men of such differing quality.
Saturday, December 24, 2005 8:31 PM
I've got a few things that I want to get out there that don't deserve posts of their own, so here goes...
75 bands - There are apparently
75 bands in this picture. According to Dawn (who cheated by looking for the list on the internet) there is actually more than 75, but if you can find 75 band names in this picture, you've done well.
Peeling tomatoes - Here's a random culinary tip for you. If you find yourself needing to peel tomatoes (I make a lot of pizza so regularly do) the easiest way is to get a pot of boiling water going, score a small cross in each tomato with a sharp knife, and drop the tomato into the boiling water for 5 seconds, then plunge into some icy water, and the skin will just slide off. Easy.
Evil Record Companies - This probably is actually worth a post by itself, but I'm always whinging about record companies so won't go on. I'd just like to point out that when you buy a track on iTunes - only eight pence goes towards the artist. Nine pence goes to the credit card company and most of the rest goes to the record company. Remember this the next time you hear them saying that their mafia style tactics are in place to protect the artist. That's a lie. It is to protect their own sickening corporate greed.
Sufjan Stevens - Just to append to my recent list of good music I've heard this year - Sufjan Steven's new album - Illinois - is great. Most of the music I've heard this year is really derivative, not necessarily a bad thing, but it's nice to find something a bit more idiosyncratic.
Finally, I hope you are having a very
Happy Festivus. Conrad has challenged me to wrestle him to the ground and "pin" him, but I have politely declined. I'm saving myself for the "airing of grievances".
Friday, December 23, 2005 1:37 PM
I'm sure you'll all be delighted to hear that I've resolved my book storage problems. John Lewis had exactly the kind of bookshelf I was looking for reduced from 100 squid down to 45, because it had a tiny little dent on one side. It's free delivery too. The shelves that fell down can now been transferred to the loft where the brick work is much less crumbly, in fact it's almost like trying to drill through diamonds (something I do on a regular basis so I know what I'm talking about here). I can now stop trawling charity shops for cheap bookshelves to put in the loft, a task that was turning out to be nigh on impossible task due to the fact that charity shops tend to use any bookshelves that come their way to store books on.
All's well that ends well.
Thursday, December 22, 2005 7:05 PM
Time now for another in what will hopefully be a series of posts about bands I used to play in. Here I give you the
Southampton University Jazz Orchestra. This was Soton Uni's big band, and it was for the most part a lot of fun to play in. This recording was made around six months after the group was formed, and in truth it's not nearly as good as it should have been. There were some fabulously talented individuals in the band, and though occasionally we would gel together as a team, this was far from always the case, and to be brutally honest it is almost never the case in this particular recording. It's a bit wet behind the ears, it rarely swings and as I'm sure you know,
it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing.
It is interesting though how through the prism of time my perception of the tracks presented here has in some cases transformed utterly. I used to hate the track
Jazzgarden for no other reason than it was an utter bitch to play; the lead trombone part would stray into registers where the air was thin and the notes would fly past the page in a blur, yet without that seemingly insurmountable hurdle I can just sit back and enjoy Lucy Fillery's mournful Cello in what is actually a rather nice piece of music. On the other end of the spectrum the supposed bravura on tracks such as Wave now just seems, I don't know,
naive almost.
Whatever. Like I say it was fun, and for my participation I will always be able to drop into conversation the fact that I've done a couple of gigs with Dave Brubeck. Actually, in the loft somewhere are cassettes with recordings of the Brubeck concerts that we did, I should dig them out and post them here too. For the time being though, for what it's worth, I give you the
Southampton University Jazz Orchestra...
Jazz GardenWaveSummertimeLime-Green Cadillac BluesFunk in A
Wednesday, December 21, 2005 9:48 PM
A brief discussion at work today arose from the fact that there have been complaints to Ch4 about them showing Gordon Ramsey slaughter his Turkeys ready for Christmas. The news article didn't go into details about the nature of the complaints, but perhaps the complainants prefer not to think about where their food comes from and being confronted with the harsh reality was a bit much for them. Good. It occurred to me that animal welfare and the quality of the meat sold by supermarkets in this country would be greatly increased if by law you had to supply every meat product with three photos of the animal; one of it soon after birth, one of it during its adult life, and another of it being killed.
For the majority of chickens sold in the UK then, they would be supplied with the following...
- A photo of the newly hatched chick passing along a conveyer belt in a factory.
- A photo of the chicken festering in agony on a pile of its own ammonia ridden shit, its atrophied legs too weak to bear its own weight, its "food" being provided by a tiny tube which it can barely reach, surrounded by thousands of other chickens all in the same predicament.
- A photo of the chicken hung up by its legs on a conveyor belt having it's throat slit by rotating knives (or having its throat slit by the human that is employed to finished the job in the case that the killing machine missed, as sometimes happens).
This might make people think "
Hang on, I'm not sure that I want to buy a food item that has literally been stored in faeces. I'm going to buy this chicken instead, the one with a picture of it sitting in a field playing the guitar.".
Food for thought, so to speak.
Monday, December 19, 2005 6:51 PM
Once upon a time, in a place far far away (Guildford), I used to play the trombone in a Dixieland Jazz band called
The Frank Sextet. I have no idea why we were called The Frank Sextet, we didn't know anyone called Frank and there were in fact only really five of us:
Stephen Davis - Trumpet
Chris Hill - Trombone
John Bullock - Saxamophone
Mike Wykes - Clarinet
Tom Lingard - DrumsIf you lived in Guildford around 1994 - 96 you may have seen as busking under the clock in the High Street or at the occasional gig. We even busked once by the beach in the Spanish resort of Tossa Del Mar and made a good few bob before the local policía moved us on. The odd audio cassette or VHS tape of such performances exist, but even better; given that we all went to the same school, when that school decided to record a CD a year or so after we left, they asked us back to play on it (with the addition of a bassest and a pianist). This means that the Frank Sextet are available in glorious hi-fidelity stereo for future generations to enjoy. And now, for the first time on the web, I give you
The Frank Sextet...
Temptation TagLazy RiverKansas City Stomp
Sunday, December 18, 2005 1:24 PM
With regards to the previous post, I realise now that just typing the word fuck doesn't fully explained the course of events that led to the photo below. Sure, an image paints a thousand words (in this case one thousand instances of the word
fuck), but allow me to elucidate. This is the last weekend before Christmas. For the last few weekends I have been away from home or busy with other things, as will be the case for the next few weekends. So I am taking the opportunity to get some jobs done, one of which was to move some books from the book shelf in the lounge to the book shelf in the spare room. There was a single space on the top shelf, so I stepped up onto the futon, plonked the books down and
fuck.
An ominous cracking sound was followed by a book avalanch spilling around me as the contents of the top two shelves rained down. I was left stood on the futon holding what was left in place, numbed with frustration. It was a delecate balancing act, if I were to simply let go and step off the futon, the remaining books would fall, but realistically I couldn't stay in that position for ever. I surveyed the scene trying to determine which were lose books and which had now taken on the role of
load-balancing books, all the while trying to think back to the tactics I would employ when playing KerPlunk as a child. I gingerly removed a single book and dropped it to the floor. Virtually the entire third shelf followed it without my prompting.
fuck.
I wish to add a new item to my Christmas List: A floor standing book shelf.
Saturday, December 17, 2005 3:00 PM
You may find this hard to believe but I heard the new version of the Do They Know It's Christmas song for the
first time this evening when shopping in the local Co-op. I had not intentionally been avoiding it for the past 12 months, it's just that the music gods have looked after me well over the course of the last year. OK, they were caught napping when they failed to protect me from the vomit-inducing aural assault that was Eminem's latest single, but even so, I've managed to avoid most crap music this year, and for that I am grateful.
This started my wondering who the god of music actually is, and whether I should maybe hold a party in their honour. It can't be easy having to keep a watchful eye over the entire world of music, especially in an age of manufactured boy bands and rich talentless rappers who produce songs that literally sound like there written by some spoilt angry teenager living in middle class US suburbia and make people's ears commit suicide.
Turns out it's
Apollo, the son of Zeus and the mortal Leto. Now I would have thought that being the god of music would be a full time job, but no. Apollo's other responsibilities include poetry, prophecy, dance, reason, intellectualism, Shamans, light, plague, healing, colonists, medicine, archery, and he's also the patron defender of herds and flocks. It's probably this heavy work load that caused him to slip up and accidentally let me hear Do They Know It's Christmas single. I don't know whether Apollo reads this blog (although seeing as he has dominion over intellectualism he probably has to as part of his job), but I would none the less like to offer forth some time management tips, or "life hacks" as they are known these days.
Firstly, if the
healing part of the job is getting a bit much, try and cut down on the giving people the
plague bit. Nobody likes to catch plague, it's more than a minor inconvenience, and I would also imagine that it increases the demand for
medicine too. Secondly, how about privatising
archery? It is after all a minority sport and the combined will of the various archery associations around the world could probably muster enough resources between them to carry on without the need for any intervention from an overworked deity. Thirdly, if you
have to give some people the plague, you can probably advance the causes of
reason and
intellectualism at the same time by giving it to people who read The Sun, vote BNP, or people who bought Eminem's latest single.
I think that's probably enough tips for now. As a measure of how successful Apollo has been over the next twelve months, I've just looked up the current number one (it is apparently a song called "Stikwitu" by a girl band called "the pussycat dolls" who all look like the kind of girls you find puking themselves unconscious in a gutter on a Friday night down West Street) and if I go 12 months without hearing this song, I will declare a job well done.
Thursday, December 15, 2005 8:34 PM
Cats in Sinks dot com. That's right, it's a website with lots of pictures of cats in sinks. Now I know a lot about my cat, I know where to poke him to make him stick his ass in the air (but have yet to find out how this knowledge may be of use to me), I know where to poke him to make him lick himself, I know how to get him to swallow a pill, I know how many items of junk I can pile on top of him before he will buck, I even know what his reaction would be if I were to put him in the bath and turn the shower on for a bit of a laugh. But I have no idea what his reaction would be if I were to just put him in the sink. Sure, I could extrapolate from the bath knowledge to determine that if I put him in the sink
and turned the tap on he would go bat shit insane, but what if I just put him in the sink and took a picture of him? I suspect that he will immediately survey his surroundings and determine that there is nothing for him there, and jump out. But will he? How will I know? If only there was some way of finding out what his reaction would be if I were to pick him up and put him in the sink. And take a photo. Quite the quandary. What to do? What to do?
Wednesday, December 14, 2005 9:26 PM
I went to London last night to see Britten's opera Billy Budd at the ENO (it was very good, thanks for asking). Whenever I head south I always try and go by train. I just find it so much more than pleasurable than driving, especially on days like this when the sun hangs low casting a golden hue on the ground beneath the deep blue sky. I love to watch the world outside constantly morph as it bobs and weaves past my window; we are blessed with some great scenery in this country. I love the fact that I am just sitting down on a comfy chair listening to my iPod or reading or writing, yet I am getting somewhere. Multi-tasking, see?
What is the alternative? Over three hours sat on a busy motorway dealing with retarded motorists, having to drive defensively so that they don't crash into me, getting pissed off because they are dawdling along in the middle lane. Man, it makes my blood pressure rise just thinking about it.
There's also no worry about drinking alcohol if you go buy train, you can drink before and during your journey. As if to emphasise this point, the train guard today held an impromptu quiz and gave away a few bottles of wine. When New Labour announced a few weeks back that they were thinking of banning drinking on public transport, the public's response was appropriately scathing.
My only real complaint is the perpetual engineering works near Derby that add an extra hour to the journey on Sundays. The trip down yesterday took just two hours and ten minutes (we took a short cut), so the fact that the return journey is scheduled to take 3 hours and 20 minutes is a bit annoying. Still, a return first class ticket has cost me just £25 so I really shouldn't complain, and the punctuality record is getting really quite good.
The
Holy Shit! part of this post refers to the ominous dark cloud we headed into shortly after London leaving, a cloud that had a kind of biblical look about it. I thought it was a tornado at first and thought about reaching for my camera phone, but then decided it was a really really really big fire somewhere. Which, if you've seen the news today, you'll know is exactly what it was. The BBC have an
amazing photo of it.
UPDATE -
Loads of amazing photos on Flickr. Apparently they closed the M1 so I'm even more glad I went by train.
Sunday, December 11, 2005 5:17 PM
Someone mentioned at work today that Jor El's voice over that accompanies the new Superman trailer makes Superman out to be a kind of second coming, like he's the new Jesus. In response to this I pointed out that Superman is a much better superhero than Jesus. Superman can fly, plus if you tried to nail him to a cross the nails would just snap, and he'd proceed to lay the smack down on you for even trying. Jesus rarely used his super powers and would just turn the other cheek. Imagine if Jesus was around when Lex Luthor tried to blow up the San Andreas fault. At best he would just phone his dad to get him to sort it out, but God would be all like "I'm not getting involved." and Jesus would be all like "Why do you let bad things happen?" and God would be all like "Free will is an essential component of humanity, it is one of my principal doctrines. You fail to understand this because you are anthropomorphising my existence. I am an omniscient and omnipotent being, not a human. That's kind of the whole point of me having a son in the first place. Jesus, didn't you learn anything in Sunday School?" and Jesus would be all like "I must have been off sick that day".
Then Christian pointed out that Jesus could turn water into wine, which is like the Top Trump of all superpowers, thus rendering my conceit redundant.
Thursday, December 08, 2005 12:55 PM
I've started using
Del.icio.us to tag my posts. What's is tagging? Well, for each post I make, I add a list of words that describe the content of the post, thus enabling the end user (that's you) to browse the site by category.
For example, this post has the following tags...
blog - because I discuss changes to this website.
tags - because I discuss tagging.
podcast - because I mention podcasting below.
radio - because later on in this post I will point out that Radio 1 DJ Chris Moyles is a fat talentless hack. Actually, maybe I won't use the word
fat as that will detract from my overall point, which is that he has no talent and if you have the misfortune to listen to his radio show you will say to yourself
"Hang on a minute, he is doing exactly the same material that he was doing when he started on Radio 1 in the Nineties. I am literally astounded that in the intervening 8 years he has not written any new material and that he is actually allowed to get away with this by both his superiors at the BBC and the general public at large. Imagine if I was a software developer that wrote the same line of code over and over again every day for 8 years. At best I would be fired, at worst I would be commited to some kind of institution for the mentally unsound."bbc - see above.
music - because I talk about the band
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah.
Actually, maybe I should also add the tag
rant, as I did go off on one a bit there about Chris Moyles.
These tags are displayed in a weighted list known as a "Tag Cloud". The more a tag is used, the more prominant it is in the list.
Here's my tag cloud. You may well recognise this concept from
Flickr, indeed to the best of my knowledge they were the first website to use tag clouds.
A couple of updates to posts below...
Podcasting -
According to the BBC, the word
podcast has been declared as Word of the Year by the New Oxford American Dictionary. It is a shame that the definition they used is a bit woolly and also that the BBC illustrated the article with a photo of
fat talentless hack Chris Moyles.
Music - I've been listening to a lot of
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah over the last couple of days. They make me want to clap my hands and say
"Yeah", and I would do exactly that were I not worried about getting strange looks from Dawn and Ben.
Wednesday, December 07, 2005 12:04 PM
I bust up my knee playing football last night. Somehow the upper two thirds of my body ended up running faster than the lower third, launching me head first to the ground and landing hard on my knee. After a few minutes, I had grown a new knee just next to where my original one is. I'm not a medical doctor, but I suspect that my leg decided to grow a back-up knee in case the original was permanently damaged. Anyway, there doesn't seem to be any lasting damage, just a bit sore right now that's all.
Everyone else heroically struggled on without me. They probably thought to themselves, "
Is there any point carrying on now that our star player is injured? Probably not, but let's carry on anyway in his honour, and as a tribute, score more goals than we would have done were he still playing", which is exactly what they did. Bless them.
Tuesday, December 06, 2005 12:52 PM
I had an interesting debate about podcasts with Phil at work the other day. Well, it wasn't so much a debate, it was more me pointing out how as usual, he is wrong and I am right and he is a fool for not realising this sooner. Why will he never learn?
The title of the debate: Podcasts. Subtitle: Passing Fad?
For those that don't know, a podcast is simply an audio file (or increasingly an audio/video file) that is distributed via the web using a "Push" mechanism rather than a "Pull" mechanism. What this means is that the publisher of the podcast effecively uploads the file to your music player rather than you having to find the new episode and manually click on a link to download it. Technically what is happening is that your computer is checking on a regular basis to see if there's a new episode to download and if there is automatically downloading it, so really the technique is nothing new and neither are the individiual bits of technology behind it. The point is these bits of technology have been made to work together to provide a new robust and cheap distribution mechanism across the web.
To give a concrete example; I like Mark Kermode's film reviews, but they are broadcast on Radio 5 during Friday afternoons when I'm at work and unable to listen to the radio. However, the BBC now offer his film reviews as a podcast, so I simply subscribe to it in iTunes (or any other Podcast software), and when a new episode is published to the internet, my Mac will download it for me, and then transfer it to my iPod. I am now free to listen to the episode whenever I want.
Podcasting is an example of where technology has come together to benefit both consumer and publisher. The advantages to the consumer I've already talked about, so what's in it for the publisher? Principally, it offers an extremely cheap mechanism for distributing new content to potential customers. A good example of this is the podcast offered by Alpha Pup Records - Alternative Hip Hop Lounge. Every fortnight, they release a free 15/20 minute mix of their artists' new tracks and people like me listen to them and will then occasionally head off to buy some of the music heard.
Take also the example of Ricky Gervais, who from today will be publishing a weekly podcast with Steven Merchant and his former XFM producer Karl Pilkington. To the three involved, if their XFM show is anything to go by, they will be doing it for a laugh as much as anything, but don't forget they also have a new Extras DVD to promote, and there's plenty of Office merchandise on the shelves still, as well as Gervais's own stand up DVDs. The exposure will help the marketing push and it cost virtually nothing.
Beyond even that, the economic cost of entry into the podcast publishing world is so low that you don't even need any commercial intent to have reason to publish a podcast. You may have a political rather than commercial agenda, you may be a poet or a musician that values creativity before profit, you may just want to use the technology to provide an audio blog rather than a traditional text based one.
Of course the twin concepts of free music and a level playing field are anathema to the "traditional" record lables. They take a principalled stand against offereing free music even if doing so would increase their profits, and no coroporate behomoth ever welcomes increased competition. But they are creaking dinosaurs that deserve to rot so who cares what they think? Actually, we probably should care as no doubt they are currently devising ways to cripple the podcast concept through excessive use of
DRM, and given the economic power they currently posses, they are probably capable of doing just this; another reason why for the benefit of both the consumer and the creative community such companies need to be destroyed.
So what podcasts do I currently subscribe to? Here's the full list...
BBC - Mark Kermode's Film Reviews - Taken from Simon Mayo's show on 5 Live.
BBC - Talking 6 Music - Interviews broadcast the previous week on 6 Music.
BBC - From Our Own Correspondent - Reports from the BBC's reporters around the world.
BBC - File on 4 - Weekly investigative journalism
3 minutes in Shanghai - Audio blog about Shanghai life.
43 Folders - Personal productivity and life hacks from the team behind the
43 folders blog.
Alternative Hip Hop Lounge - Underground Hip Hop. Think Clouddead and you're on the right track.
Future Contingency Mix Tapes - Reasonably ecclectic mix.
Lonely Planet Travelcasts - A different location featured each week from the Lonley Planet team.
Percussion Lab Presents - Electronica and beats.
The Official Lost Podcast - Weekly podcast from the producers; interviews, insights and even full length audio commentaries to be played in sync with the show (for those of us watching the US version rather than on Channel 4). Seriously, this is spoiler-tastic if you are on series 1 still.
Ricky Gervais's Podcast - First episode today, but the XFM show was hilarious, so this should be good.
So there you go, a huge amount of media made available to me for free, and free exposure for those providing it. A passing fad? I don't think so, this is just the beginning.
Monday, December 05, 2005 12:47 PM
'tis the season to be jolly. Tra la la la la, la la, la, la. It's also the season where practically every publication in the world provides a look back at the world of music over the previous year. In some cases this is to provide you with a list of recommendations of music that may have passed you by. In the case of publications like NME the purpose of the list is to give increased exposure to artists that pay the most for advertising, and artists that they think are cool regardless of any artistic merit they posses. Allegedly.
Me, I'm going to because I can, and because I'm sat on a train for three hours with little else to do other than sift through my iTunes library and go, oh yeah, that was quite cool.
The GoodArcade Fire - I remember the first time I listened to the album from beginning to end. It was back in March and I stuck it on the iPod to listen to on my short walk to the Co-op in Crookes one Saturday morning. I got to Co-op and was loving what I was hearing so much that I ended up walking all the way to the Sommerfield in Broomhill instead. Great album.
Martha Wainwright - Sister to Rufus, daughter to Loudon. As much as I love Rufus Wainwright's work up until now, I think this album has gotten as much plays from me as all his work put together over the last few years.
The New Pornographers - Up beat rock/pop. Sort of somewhere between Shack and Brendan Benson. What do you mean you've never heard of Shack or Brendan Benson? Well can't help you then.
Bloc Party - I have a habit of downloading loads of artists recommended by me and putting them on my iPod and forgetting about them. This was one such band, but when I finally got round to the listening to the album I was pretty impressed.
Gogol Bordello - I think I've mentioned here before my secret love of eastern European music, so it's good to see a self-styled "Gypsy Punk" band from Ukraine breaking out into the mainstream. The song "Start Wearing Purple" is hard to shift out of the head.
Nellie McKay - I got this for Christmas last year. I had forgotten I'd asked for it, and why, but when I stuck it in the CD player I remembered that I'd seen her perform on Jools Holland and loved it. Witty satirical lyrics, upbeat nicely arranged music.
Magic Numbers - Another from the current glut of upbeat, talented happy bands. These are probably the most likely to succeed though, and follow in the path trod by the likes of the Kaiser Chiefs.
...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead... - Their name makes them sound like some Death Metal band, but they're actually quite up beat, a sort of heavier version of The Decemberists kind of thing.
Dogs Die in Hot Cars - A kind of 80's throw back band. Up beat guitar based pop.
Estelle. Her album
The 18th Day is an extremely mixed bad. Definitely one of those albums where you;d be better off buying a few of the better tracks on iTunes rather than getting the whole CD. When it's good it's great, when it's bad it's bad.
Pappano/Domingo/Covent Garden - Ah ha, you thought this was just pop music didn't you! Well it's not, I'm going to put opera in too just to throw you. I have now turned your world upside down. Well done me. The new Tristan und Isolde conducted by Pappano with Domingo is a wondrous thing. Lush, lyrical, fast paced and occasionally breath taking.
A few other artists with new work of note that I've recently bought and liked but haven't had time to form a considered opinion about...
Skinnyman, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Wolf Parade, Lil Kim, Arctic Monkeys
The BadNow, in addition to listing good music I've heard this year, here's the shite. This is a list of music not that I've bought, but that I've had the misfortune to hear.
Eminem. His new single. Jesus. I always listen to 6 Music on my walk to work in the mornings, and for some reason last week they had Eminem's new single as the Single of the Week. Monday - I listened to it all the way through and found it to be one of the most horrifically embarrassing tracks I've ever heard. Truly appalling. I half thought I was listening to a parody, but no. On Tuesday, they played it again and I switched over to 1Xtra. I can't remember the last time I had to physically stop listening to a radio station because what was being pumped out made my ears want to commit suicide. Wednesday they played it again and I switched over to Radio 4. On Thursday, finally on Thursday, they announced that they had decided the single was shit and wouldn't play it any more. Quite how it had taken them so long to come to this conclusion I don't quite know. When it comes to music Phil Juptitus has as a good a taste that you could hope for from a radio presenter, but this. This. Jesus. No.
What's her face. You know. Stupid insipid bitch that sings about bicycles in Beijing. How she became so famous I just don't know. What is the point of her? She is nothing. I can't even remember her name.
Babyshambles. I'll be honest, I don't keep my finger on the pulse of what the kids are listening to these days or which "celebs" are which. I'm nearly 30, I don't have to. But I am vaguely aware that there's this repugnant talentless prick called Pete Doherty that used to be in some band whose name I've forgotten who got bollocksed up on drugs and then got a bit better and then started a new band called Babyshambles and every is like "Ooh Babyshambles this and Babyshambles that, aren't they great!" No! Seriously I don't know what it is about the band that has caused so many people to abandon all critical faculties. They really have no qualities that set them apart from any other mediocre guitar band. Their songs have a beginning a middle and an end. Nothing more. If Doherty hadn't been addicted to crack or whatever his drug of choice was, and this was some obscure band, they would get nowhere and deservedly so.
Robbie Williams. Good first album. Well done. There's been a few albums since then and with each passing year (by my calculation it is nearly ten years since his debut solo album) he has gotten progressively shitter and shitter. I've only heard bits of his latest efforts but what I have heard has been pathetic. He seriously needs to either get himself some fresh songwriting talent or join the rest of Take That back on tour.
The Mars Volta - Frances the Mute. Their first album was outstanding. Their second: twaddle. What a pity.
Sunday, December 04, 2005 10:35 PM
Here's a tip for you. Never hire a Rock Concert Lighting Specialist to do your Christmas decorations as you may end up with something like
this (audio & video). And don't invite them back next year, because they might do something like
this.
Friday, December 02, 2005 6:17 PM
