Exactly a year ago today, I made my very first post on here. Writing for a music blog had been a aspiriation of mine, but I never thought I'd have the supply of tracks to work with it. I applied to ilictronix both times positions became available, and in hindsight my first effort was not exactly stellar to say the least. When I saw that positions were open last year, I attempted again, this time with much more effort and a lot more music experience under my belt. for a long time reader of music blogs it was a dream [...]
Like it or not, numbers rule everything around you, everything from temperature to test scores. So I was looking through my record collection today and realised numbers are a large part of my music as well, here are a few choice cuts from my catalogue. Starting with the track that spurred me on to do this post. Three is fittingly the third track on Protection , The song itself has little to do with the number other than the opening verse and the sampled voice in the [...]
Here are a bunch of tunes that we've meant to post about for a while, but wanted to do them a bit more justice too than it turns out we're able. It is the regular refrain of blogs like ours we know, but it doesn't make it feel like any less of a cop out to not find the time to write these up properly. So, with apologies to the artists involved, here is a wonderful and eclectic mix for a wet Wednesday in February. The Seedy Seeds will release new album [...]
As a stark contrast to the week I posted Let's Get Loungy, nowadays at college I have NO work to do. And this has given me a greater appreciation for the more laidback tracks in my collection, here's some of my favourites at the moment. Recently tending to my hippity hop cravings along with good old Nightmares On Wax is Flying Lotus, his Reset EP hits all the right buttons for me, it's pretty much all I want from instrumental Hip Hop. This track Massage Situation [...]
I love winter, and odds are it's snowing where you are. Or at least cold. So I'd like to share with you a portion of my chilled winter playlist, as I do with every other season :P. Planning this post two artists came up a ton in my noted tracks, Let's start with the first: Röyksopp, with one of my favourite songs, Sparks is that special kind of song that hits every right note for me, and it really comes into its own around winter time. [...]
I've said before a few times that I have a weakness for vocoders, and I always have, I don't know why but something about that sound just makes everything AWESOME. (well, except speedbass maybe) and today, I'm going to dig through my collection to find my favourite examples of it in use from the the early stuff to fairly recent tunes. We've come a long way, baby Up first is MSTRKRFT, who used it a whole bunch on their first album, The [...]
As I'm sure you've seen from my other Pick 'N Mix posts, I have a soundtrack for almost everything. And this October is no different, I have an assortment of tunes to make you dance, and some to creep you out. Let's begin :) I'll start with the electro first, Oizo delivers with the original version of pourriture, not necessarily a Halloween song but fits the bill quite well with it's screechy guitars and haunting vocals. I'm also using it for my Zombie movie I'm doing at college, [...]
As we know, every journey needs a soundtrack, and me? After a long day at college I just wanna walk home and get my swagga on along the way, and I'm sure you lot do as well, so today I'm picking my current favourites; the ones that make you feel like an unstoppable king as you saunter down the street :). A bit like this I like the kinda song that has a bit of funk and catchiness to walk to, the kind where [...]
It's my Birthday on the 8th, and it was a tough choice on whether to do another Warp entry or knock up a lil' treat for you, loyal readers, a nice fresh dollop of Pick 'N Mix :). You've probably had enough of my warp posts for a while. Good news, because so have I, and instead have this mixed bag to share with you all, a whole 2 days early, you lucky bunch. This will be you very soon First up is a [...]
The World Cup is one week away. One week! I'm so excited about the World Cup that I'm beyond the joyful constant-vibration stage and well into the much darker, more worrying "buy any associated merchandise within grabbing distance" phase. The best thing about the World Cup - after the football itself - is the crud that surrounds it. Crud like this tie-in dirge-song, which, astonishingly, is Serbia's official World Cup anthem. Or maybe more grouchy, neurotic and home-spun crud like this surprisingly risible effort by Mark E. Smith from [...]
All music recycles the past - it has to in order to generate new ideas, just like any other art form. But it's safe to say that, within the realms of guitar music at least, this retrospective thievery has become the ends and not the means. 'So what?' , you might say. But when bands steal ideas, attitudes or sounds from the past and fail to add their own splash of colour to the mix, then we're all being short-changed, and the bands become, essentially, tribute acts. And if I want tribute act, [...]
Expectations: quashed. Norms: avoided. Head: scratched. Not Squares use cowbells, 'dirty synths', tight double-speed drums and disco basslines, and yet the band is not instantly hateful and their songs are not the kind of generic ADHT nonsense found on mobile phone adverts. So what gives? Call me a naive, old cynic, but what drives me up the wall is when a two-bit band scrabble aboard the most fleeting of bandwagons, whelp out a truly woeful, turgid two-bit song and make a success of themselves, all because they were bright/stupid enough to harmonise with the two-bit musical [...]
Everyone has a song that, when heard, will whip them up and away to a moment in their past. Mine is the title track of Spiritualized 's Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space, and only the opening space-shuttle bleeps are needed for an involuntarily reliving of heady art college days - the tacky plastic smell of cheap acrylic paint, the groping of strange art concepts and stranger art students. Now Ladies And Gentlemen... has just been re-released, with the obligatory extra discs of new material, in an exciting black [...]
When I was in France, while the Tour de France was snaking its sweaty, wild-eyed way through the countryside, my tent was pitched high on a hill, which in turn was overlooked by Mont Ventoux. It's a huge, imposing lump of a mountain, undulating, steep and bereft of trees and other life near the summit. The penultimate stage of the Tour finished on the top of it, where presumably the riders fell straight off their bikes into a huge heap of cramping limbs and destroyed will. In the next tent was a crazy Norwegian. Most Norwegians [...]
I watched 20 minutes of The Da Vinci Code movie . The book was stupefyingly bad and guess what - a clunker of a book became a clunker of a movie, too. It seems commendably perverse when you consider how many good books are butchered into poor movies. Anyway, I watched it all the same, knowing I'd hate it. Experiencing something in the knowledge that it will be unpleasant in order to see just how bad it is must be a trait unique to humans. It would certainly explain [...]
Innovators in pop are very rare. And when there is, a familiar pattern emerges: Proponent of new sound gets minor fame through aforementioned newness of sounds. Others quickly pick up new technique/style, and due to further innovation become even more famous. Then everyone else follows suit, and charts are flooded with dreary watered-down nonsense. Bad times. Such is the self-consuming nature of pop. Like everything in pop music, the laptop 'n' traditional guitar-band combo is nothing new. But it was once. Today's New Band, Apple Eyes, have grasped this idea [...]
Having seen Oliver Stone's JFK for the first time, here are my considered observations: After three hours of a movie, both my buttocks go numb Back and to the left back and to the left back and to the left ZOMG BLACK OPS!!1!!!1!! If any film was destined to be identified as a 'dizzying tour de force' by lazy journalists and film students everywhere, this was it. It's hard not to be entirely in thrall with [...]
Time to catch up on some deserving efforts, on which I've been procrastinating for a couple of weeks now. Here's an assorted bag of musical sweets for your no-so-guilty consumption...... - 'Invaders Must Die' surfaced from The Prodigy a couple of months back and was generally overlooked, presumably as a relic of a forgotten electronic past. Well, bands like Late of the Pier and Hadouken! have been making a decent [...]
Time to catch up on some deserving efforts, on which I've been procrastinating for a couple of weeks now. Here's an assorted bag of musical sweets for your no-so-guilty consumption...... - 'Invaders Must Die' surfaced from The Prodigy a couple of months back and was generally overlooked, presumably as a relic of a forgotten electronic past. Well, bands like Late of the Pier and Hadouken! have been making a decent name for themselves playing sprawling electronica with aggressive beats, so if lead [...]
If you ever want a reminder of the power of pocket money and a taste of its indiscriminate, bewildering influence on all our lives, just take a look at the pop charts. There is always, without exception, a heavily promoted, quasi-'urban' pop band that makes teenage girls weak at the knees, teenage boys boisterous, and the rest of us stunned at the stupidity of humanity. Check out R&B/Hip-Hop/Mentalist act N-Dubz . Once you get past the sheer awfulness of their name, brace yourself for the utter lunacy involved [...]
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