A combined gig and album review, this, after a trip to the Old Blue Last, Shoreditch, for the launch of Teeth Of The Sea 's debut, Orphaned By The Ocean . Since this was a free performance with two great supports, Big Naturals and Alexander Tucker , the upstairs room was absolutely packed out. Big Naturals - just a drummer and a bassist - lurched from post-rock to more obviously hardcore, metal and avant-garde sounds and are highly recommended. As is Alexander Tucker, doing deceptively complicated things with loops of acoustic sounds [...]
I haven't consulted my partner-in-music-crime about this but after our triumphant round-up of 2008 we should probably do one of those posts where we say that x will be big this year. The only problem is that I seem resistant to various buzzes. The White Lies, for example... Jude Rogers' review in the Grauniad today has confirmed my reaction to single 'To Lose My Life' (we agree on the 'Girls on Film' thing, though where she hears Joy Division I hear Dead Or Alive; so gloomy it's camp). Or Florence and the Machine, briefly reviewed in [...]
I listened to a lot of music last year. Every slight recommendation (personal, electronically generated) was dutifully followed up and mostly, it has to be said, dismissed. I trawled blogs, read with total incredulity glowing eulogies of utter shite and downloaded and subsequently deleted a plethora of tracks. Yet, it was bound to happen: something really great slipped through the net. I've seen Parts & Labor described as the 'best band you've never heard of'. Yep, that'll be me then. Receivers is their fourth album and it seems that a lot of their hardcore fans aren't [...]
Not trying to have the last word, mind, but I had a few more favourite Christmas songs to post. Sorry if you've heard them before, but they cover all aspects of the festival, as far as I'm concerned. The Now-Traditional Annual New Eddie Argos Christmas Song - ' Countdown To Christmas ' - Glam Chops The 'Ghost of Christmas Past' Decent-If-Pretty-Faithful Christmas Cover - ' Stay Another Day ' - Maps The Christmas-Referencing Song That's My Year-Round Ringtone - ' Crystal Castles Save Christmas ' - Crystal Castles What [...]
I like Christmas. I especially like it for the excuse to booze. Then again I like to booze most of the year, so I don't really need an excuse. Remember kids, booze is for life not just for Christmas. So here's two tracks that I like to listen to with booze. They go well with brown, yellow or clear booze. Happy christmas to all. The Divine Comedy - 'The Drinking Song (Live)' The Wonder Stuff - 'A Great Drinker' angrybonbon
I've stated my love of Loop before here , but with the re-mastering of two of their albums - Heaven's End and Fade Out - I've got another excuse. For the most part Loop are criminally forgotten and under-rated in most histories of the Alternative/Indie spheres. I was hoping these re-masters would propel them back into the kid's consciousness, but I've yet to find much evidence for this. Collecting together various different and unreleased versions, rarities and Peel sessions (plus a stack of curiously abstract guitar loops from Fade Out ) these [...]
The Hold Steady were meant to play London in October but Tad Kubler's pancreatitis put paid to that; so here they are in December, making up for the cancellations. This time we were there early enough to squeeze up to the edge of the moshpit. We were close enough to see it almost kick off at one point, and to see Gig Justice meted out to one git who barrelled through to the front only to return crestfallen minutes later, wearing at least one pint of beer. Whoops! The HS seemed glad, rather than just contractually obliged, to [...]
I'm trying to review this as a soundtrack album so I haven't yet watched the DVD of the Lips' film Christmas On Mars - you get the two together in a CD pack. Just in case you haven't heard about the film, it's been seven years in the making, stars the Lips and friends, and was directed by Wayne Coyne, the Lips' friend Bradley Beesley and George Salisbury. Beesley made the superb The Fearless Freaks: The Wondrously Improbable Story of The Flaming Lips , one of the best music documentaries I have ever seen, as well [...]
[Email subject line] Best of year post JKneale: Ere, shall we do this? Angrybonbon [follow up phone call]: Go on then. And so it came to pass that BBO had what amounted to an AGM to finalise their top ten albums of 2008. And as the top five pretty much picked themselves it was straightforward affair with only a minor amount of trading of horses at the tail end. So in order of merit/scrobbling/lounge, tram and washing up listening, here they are: 1. British Sea Power - [...]
Something's happened to I Like Trains....Did you spot it? No? Look again. It's all in the writing. A move from iLiKETRAiNS to the former, for reasons unbeknownst to me. There's another potentially more worrying development on The Christmas Tree Ship EP - it's missing David Martin's deep baritone and affecting storytelling. I do hope this is a temporary hiatus. Perhaps I'm just being lazy in having to imagine the historical subject matter - the loss of a ship in 1912 that carried Christmas trees across Lake Michigan to the residents of Chicago - rather than having the events [...]
Well, it didn't get to be Christmas Number One last Christmas, but it should have done. Members of Black Box Recorder and Art Brut (hence the name) offer an irony-free take on the Christmas hit, bells and all, with this tale. An xmas song, cynically written in August, takes over the airwaves and turns into a monster, insisting it is Father Christmas "with a filthy stick-on beard". It only sods off after xmas is over... until next year, obviously. So you get a Proper Christmas Song about "the season of Nod and Roy" as well as a Proper Kicking of [...]
Another late review: London's Silvery's first album, out last summer, is a rum 'un. It's brimming with charm. Lots of organ (probably steam-driven), perky knees-up rhythms, catchy catchy pop in the tradition of all those English eccentrics, performing bears and village greens. Uniforms are worn and a reading list is provided (Fort, the Angel of Mons, London's lost rivers and tube stations). The last song ends with a story about the wreck of a tiny battleship crewed by mice, found dead in their sailor's uniforms, and a great punchline. It's like iLiKETRAiNS at half-term. However... I'm all [...]
Just a quick write-up here, as Nick's 'tache seems to be glaring at me. Off on a freezing cold London evening to the fabulous Art Deco Troxy on Commercial Road, a former cinema restored to general duties (cage fighting, beauty pageants, gigs). It looked pretty good and the sound was great for such a big and lumpy venue. There's a carpet, and yes of course the superannuated goths in the crowd were sitting down on it. I swear one had even brought their own war memorial. Anyway Nick and the Seeds were on fine form. We got quite [...]
Named after Stockhausen's experimental work, Kontakte have begun to put my faith back in the post-rock genre just as it started to wane. They make songs and sounds with sweet melodies that swirl around your brain without becoming annoying. They know when to pick it up and change it so that the formulas make you want to tune in without turning off. Admittedly, some of Soundtracks to Lost Road Movies is a bit familiar, but it's recognisable in a comforting and reassuring rather than mundane or predictable way. Plus they're a brave lot as the second [...]
100 posts since March 2007! Not exactly grafting, clearly, but in between the other stuff we have to do BothBarsOn has brought you a roguish mix of new music and some old rubbish you'd either never heard of or wished you hadn't. We've had a ball and are proud of our nearly 22000 hits - hello Hawaii! - and would like to pass on our secret to anyone who thinks this is tricky: 1, Here's WordPress . Get yourself a blog. 2. Here are the HypeMachine and Elbows . Publicise it to [...]
Another late review, of Mercury Rev's Snowflake Midnight and its free-download companion Strange Attractor . I've been a fan since 1998's Deserter's Songs , which I know makes me a bit of a johnny-come-lately, but I was a little underwhelmed by the last album ( The Secret Migration ), which seemed a little patchy. The new material represents something of a departure in that it's much more reliant on electronic textures and programmed rhythms. It still sounds like the Rev - Jonathan Donohue's voice is still instantly recognisable, for a start, and the general feel of [...]
I was thinking of not reviewing this gig as I'm not sure there is much I can say about MGMT that hasn't been said before both here and elsewhere. Yet, because I spent last night bewildered and, at times, in fits of giggles, I can't resist. The reason for the mirth came from watching the crowd. Miss S. aptly remarked that it was a gig where she (and I) felt both too old and too young at the same time. The kids were out in force with their impossibly swept hair, head wrapped bandanas and odd [...]
As the lights go down and a radio is tuned through a series of '88 hits (including 'Can I Play With Madness' - which I always hear as 'my vest' - 'Sweet Child O' Mine' and something called 'Never Gonna Give You Up', by an unknown artist), I knew my excitement was well founded. When my favourite pop stars appeared and the first three notes of 'Red Berry Joy Town' surged through me, I went nothing short of delirious. I really can't sum up how good these two gigs were. Birmingham was a blur of meeting [...]
I'm all blogged up, so in an effort to relieve myself I begin with the Archdrude's visit to Manchester as part of his Joe Strummer Memorial Busking Tour which took in a whole series of historical sites of civil protest and direct action across the UK. In Manchester he played at the site of the Peterloo Massacre - something that doesn't need much introduction (see here if you're not up-to-speed), but requires a lot of remembering. Amounting to an un-sanitised memorialising, replete with ranting and ritual, [...]
Well it struck me that the last post was basically a cover of a boyband love song that added guitars and a bit of oomph, without destroying the soppy poppiness of it all... which sounds a bit like this, the Wedding Present's cover of Take That's 'Back For Good'. I had to do this for karaoke recently - the Take That version, unfortunately - and if it hadn't been for this cover I would have been lost. I was always more of an East 17 fan really, though I have no idea if there is an Electro Hippies cover of [...]
Both bars on
Bison - Quill
Neutral Milk Hotel- Aeroplane Over the Sea
Shinichi Osawa – Big Beach Mix 2012
