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Why Don't You...?


As much as I love the whole iTunes/iPod way of listening to my music and keeping it stored, looking round the message boards it seems as though listening to your music collection is turning into a statistical and organisational exercise rather than something fun (it's all about the head and not the heart).

For some the focus is changing from actually just listening to and enjoying the music to constantly thinking about how they are listening to it. The number of discussions out there on how to structure your playlists and how to rate your songs and what those ratings mean is a typical example of male geek behaviour. It's boys and their toys and High Fidelity's list making taken to it's logical conclusion where we don't talk about what we are listening to but how we listening to it.

This can be an interesting discussion point I suppose and something I'm thinking about myself given the amount of music I have digitally available to me now and also the higher capacity and less erratic iPod that will soon be in my hands. Some people, however, really need to find something more constructive to do with their time.

12:36 | 1 Comments, | permanent link

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The Go! Team - Thunder, Lightning, Strike


The only thing about discovering a fantastic record long after it's come out is you're disappointed at all the lost time when you could have been listening to it.

In this case we're only talking a few months but for me that's quite a bit to be off the ball on a new record. Usually singles are heard on the radio so far in advance of a record's release or I've read advance reviews or online buzz that's piqued my interest so I pretty much know what I want before it's come out.

The reviews of this passed me by though. Looking back I can find positive reviews in the usual mags and plenty of effusive praise around the net but for some reason I didn't pick up on them. Thankfully that has been rectified now and this is up there with the best records I've heard this year. It's certainly the most fun.

The record takes sampled horns, clattering live drums, guitar, harmonica, recorder, Vince Guaraldi piano, theme music from 1980's American teatime action shows and female MC'ing reminiscent of Betty Boo and Double Dutch and mixes it altogether into a fuzzy whole that not only makes you jump around the room in glee but also makes you nostalgic for being 8 years old and running around in scuffed shoes and a duffle coat drinking from a kwenchy cup. Imagine Belle And Sebastian's "The Boy With The Arab Strap" but recorded in a basement with loud drums behind it and you're part way to describing at least part of this records charms.

Not that this is purely a nostalgic exercise, far from. It doesn't sound like a record from 20 years ago, it just seems to push certain buttons, in me at least.

Pick it up if you can and we can jump around together. You won't get too tired, it's only 35 minutes long.

12:24 | 6 Comments, | permanent link

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Further Ripping Yarns


So, ripping continues apace. At the weekend moved onto box sets and outsized CD's - by which i mean Radiohead's Amnesiac in library book stylee and Divine Comedy Best Of in book fashion also. I've been adding CD's over the last couple of weeks and seemed stuck at around the 1300 album mark. Found this hard to understand and hadn't really fully investigated. Had a look on Sunday though and as it turns out I had the CD Collection playlist limited to 100Gb for some reason. Doh!Took that off and turned out I actually had about 1380 albums in there. That's quite a lot of records. I'm glad I don't have an iTunes play count figure recorded for all those CD's. I could imagine that a lot of them haven't really been listened to as much as I think they have.

It's a great leveller though having all the music this accessable. All those box sets that I never pull from the shelf or the many free magazine CD's I have now have as much chance of featuring in my listening as a normal CD from my racks. This can only be a good thing in discovering wonderful things I didn't know I had or that haven't been given the full beam of my attention. Of course I might also discover that most of the music I own is in fact rubbish and that's why I've barely heard it.

11:22 | 4 Comments, | permanent link

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Updates


There are posts in the pipeline that I've been thinking about. As usual I'm writing posts in my head and thinking of ideas a lot more than actually writing the things. The posts always sound much better and more interesting in my head when I'm coming up with them on the fly than when I write them down here. I'm trying just to splodge stuff down more and post it with minimal thought and editing. I figure that even if the English isn't perfect and the meaning isn't always that well thought out it'll be more interesting to read than some thought out edited piece which I appear to have lost the knack for. I'm sure back in my University days when I was writing frequent essays I would have found it easy to come up with well written and coherent posts but these days I don't really do much actual writing so I've lost the knack.

Anything on this blog should therefore be thought of as a series of notes and thoughts rather than coherent and well argued think pieces (you probably noticed this was the case anyway). In any case I can't imagine having the time and inclination to post something every day. It might be an interesting experiment but I bet I couldn't even keep it up for a week. Maybe come January I'll give it a go. Don't hold your breathe though.

So, maybe coming soon, a rundown of my best songs of the year playlist (usual caveats apply) and maybe an ongoing series of gig memories, just to see what I can remember of the days when I actually went to the occasional live music event.

(Nice moment there - the 'tick tocks' of a Gwen Stefani remix nicely leading into the ticking clock at the start of XTC's The Meeting Place. Sometimes iTunes on random comes up with much better segues than you could ever design yourself.)

11:32 | 0 Comments, | permanent link

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Fillums


Bridget Jones, in addition to not being that great as a film, also has one of the most irritating soundtracks I can remember. They have chosen songs that lyrically tie in with whatever's going on in the scene but they've also chosen the single most obvious set of songs that'll appeal to the Cosmo reading female audience that are watching. It's so unadventurous it's scary and if I were to check I'm sure I would find that these songs were all already used in the first film and indeed every other rom-com from the Working Title stable. The only shock, in fact, was the lack of an M People song.

Spiderman 2 on the other hand had a good use of a popular song, using Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head to score a scene of joy at being free, briging to mind it's original use in 'Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid' in a similar scene of revelling in freedom. It's orchestral score, however, was somewhat disappointing. Normally I've enjoyed the scores of Danny Elfman and they've been well suited to the darkness of Batman and The Nightmare Before Christmas for example. For the most part I didn't really notice his work in Spidey except at those moments when it was crying out for a recognisable theme. Some of the most important moments in the Superman films were made all the more dramatic by the repetition of the John Williams theme. I'm thinking specifically of when, say Superman regains his powers after giving them up for Lois or when he's been beaten into submission only to rise triumphant again. That repeating theme helped make the heart swell at those pivotal moments. Now Spiderman is a very different hero from Superman, much less triumphant and more human but still it would have been good for the Spiderman theme to swell out of the soundtrack as his powers returned and he headed off to face his enemy.

Still, a bloody great film. It's nice when workmates lend you things.

15:13 | 1 Comments, | permanent link

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