Actual music reviews

 

The Wave Pictures - Sweetheart EP (Moshi Moshi)

I'm scared the Wave Pictures will give up writing songs soon. David Tattersall's voice isn't, and probably won't, get any less whiny than it is on 'Cinnamon Baby'. His crowdpleasing lengthy guitar solos are being featured prominently on record. The title track of this six-song EP and the closer, the Springsteen-influenced (they recorded a covers album, given away as a free CD-R, last year) 'American Boom', are balladic, the latter acoustic- and bass-led.

But this record is so much more immediately likeable than 'If You Leave it Alone', perhaps because it comes about as 'polished' or defined as the Wave Pictures are ever going to sound on record. 'American Boom' might be about the life of Howard Hughes, although it sounds a million times more personal, but it still manages to combine beautiful, no-longer-completely-abrasive indie pop with excellent wordplay, about being on "the cricket pitch, with cracked lips, in the middle of winter". It's got the fast-paced 'Kittens', a recording of old track 'I Shall Be A Ditchdigger' that could have found its home on any Wave Pictures release - and another ever-Wave-Pictures gem, 'Sweetheart': about the sweetest thing you'll hear this year.

I know the Wave Pictures will not give up writing songs, at least, not soon. XFM DJ John Kennedy once remarked to me that it seems the Wave Pictures are set against their own success. You could aptly describe the lyrics and the prolific small or non-label releases that seem not to care about 'major press attention' or 'Radio One plays', like, playing unreleased songs on radio sessions when they've just put out their most widely available and acclaimed album (2008's 'Instant Coffee Baby'), as idiosyncratic. It's also uncompromising, like the Fall, except non-Mancunian, for the way lyrics such as 'I Shall Be A Ditchdigger''s "Leroy I'll, Room 302, I'll be there and I'll be waiting for you" will be sung, easily, by fans unaware of their indecipherable meaning, who will decipher it themselves, or not, or embrace it, laugh, love the story.

They're also very British - Pitchfork's review of their first two full-lengths on Moshi Moshi seemed to pick up this as a flaw, an obstruction to achieving US-wide commercial acclaim. But it's David Tattersall's distinctive, Wymeswold-bred voice, their very guitar-led brand of indie pop, their English charm and their ballads and riddles, that have gained them a steadily growing UK audience. I asked bassist Franic Rozycki, and he didn't know who Good Shoes were. They're magnificent, sweet, intelligent and hilarious. And one of the very best things Britain has to offer right now.


Shonen Knife - Supergroup

Kurt Cobain's beloved Shonen Knife sound like a Japanese, female Ramons, in bright colours. Their latest - they've been around, obviously, for a while - bears a title, and a refrain ending "everybody's feeling satisfaction now", marking them up immediately as more a pop-punk band that is comfortable with their own image, than kindred spirits with the Nirvana frontman who struggled against the fact that his anti-consumerist, anti-establishment protest was naturally packaged and sold at great profit by the very capitalist system that was pissing him off so badly. The lack of such internal warfare here makes for a band that, without wanting to be overtly reductive, are more similar to Deerhoof than a Western post-Ramones pop-punk band. No authenticity squabbles. No bemoaning capitalist realism. Satomi-a-like joy is best captured on a track that reminds me of the first time I saw Mudhoney, a track called 'Muddy Bubbles Hell', with gleeful and childish pronunciation of those very words interspersed with brooding Japanese alt-rock heavy riffers. Seconds of this conjured another ludicrous comparison: Boris. And it is all a bit like that: rock music that achieves simplicity, does it well, and is fun. 'Deer Biscuits', about feeding biscuits to deers at the deer park and making them "very happy", is this epitomised: a more formulaic Deerhoof; an actually fun band that sounds like the Ramones. It is a simple, yet strange record, and it is very well produced. Songs about animals... that animals would actually listen to.

WARNING: LANGHORNE SLIM

Langhorne Slim - Be Set Free

WARNING: This man sounds like Ryan Adams.

FUCK

i'll always want to stay

Oh, hello.

THINGS ;

1. Return of the Ankh is a brilliant album. Totally perfect, intense, hilarious, shimmering, absurd, innovative, more immediate but less urgent than New Amerykah, so incredibly worth the wait.
2. 'Roman Candle' reissue; is a thing which is good, considering that album is probably one of the best albums OF ALL TIME, or at least ONE OF THE MOST BEAUTIFUL THINGS EVER RECORDED. Or something. I love Elliott Smith.
3. A Year To Kill; I will do more musically reviewing next year.

space odyssey

2AM, English coursework bibliography looking distinctly sparse ;

"Bibliography
· Lolita, Much Ado, Venus in Furs, etc
· Hilgards or whatever that thing is
· The talking cure: Literary representations of psychoanalysis : Jeffrey Berman New York & London: New York University Press, 1985
(?????????????????????????????????)
· Larry Wolff “Introduction” Venus in Furs
· Harold Bloom “The Invention of the Human” (read? Don’t read? Just reference in passing?) "

In other news, M.I.A.'s new material is looking ridiculously promising, as in, kind of spacey (worst review of a song called 'Space Odyssey' ever) and reverb and good, working with Rusko is cool although, hey, where is Blaqstarr, how is he even doing. Vivian Girls' new thing, 'Everything Goes Wrong' AKA 61ST BEST ALBUM OF 2009 ACCORDING TO SOME LAME INDIE PUBLICATION (how is some Black Lips offshoot which looks like a potential gang rape 'scenario' better than this???) is really really super good.

And finally, for things that are really really irrelevant, things on the BBC Sound of 2010 that suck - Marina 'I Genuinely Don't Get It' and the Diamonds, Ellie 'Why?' Goulding, Owl 'Seriously, though, why?' City, Hurts 'Are Probably The Death Of Avant-Pop Crossover, If Not Music As A Whole, At Least Until Daisy Dares You Takes Fun Electro Rock And Twists It Into Something That Can Illicit THIS.' I understand that I mentioned 'Lolita' earlier in this post so I can't make a joke relating to the fact that 55% of ReadPlatform's readership are right now beating off to a picture of a 16 year old girl with her tits out, but it still stands : that is potentially the worst thing on the internet right now.

Q : who owned the first decade of the new millenium?

A ;

You can disagree, but you would be wrong. Unless you said 'Diplo', in which case, 'okay, yeah, maybe, I guess'.

I’m always telling whoever will listen that for all its ‘Karley Sciortinos’ and ‘funny pictures’, Platform is essentially the death of ‘youth culture’, staged over ‘the internet’. What a vast and embarrassing backdrop that is, and how blindly Platform follows in the footsteps of V*CE. Don’t worry if you’re beginning to think that I might be making a point, this post says something odd about being allergic to semen at the end. And there are pictures, and a video. And some fashion stuff that we think is pretty cool, which we are going to point out online and then, like, yeah, whatever, wear it to a party.

Platform recently posted an article, as it is nearly the end of 2009 and the beginning of 2010, to point out, in true V*CE imitation fashion, the ’10 worst things about the noughties’. Whoever wrote it at times actually attempts to ‘make a point’ in his one or more of his rants that ‘isn’t totally ironic’. Like, irony is rubbish, and overused. Really? And apparently, also, blogs are bad, because they are saying nothing ‘new’ most of the time, or something. Thanks to the third person in the comments section for pointing out ‘hypocrisy’ in this idle and totally worthless criticism. Other things that apparently suck particularly badly include, um, Doctor Who, Piers Morgan, and (the bastardisation of) ‘indie’.

Do you know one rubbish thing from ‘the noughties’ that springs to mind reading that post?

OVER-INFORMED AND LAZY ‘CRITICS’

I think somewhere in the ‘blogosphere’ that is so maligned on Platform they are likened to the undead and called something like

ZOMBIES

but I might be missing the point.

One of the things that particularly sucks about the internet’s growth and the cult of the internet amongst young people, in particular, is exemplified pretty much anywhere you will find a comment box.

Wherever someone is given a chance to be a ‘critic’ about something, regarding which, because there is usually no qualification or validation pre-requisite to making a response on the BBC’s website, on YouTube, or on a blogpost, they will normally have no real or relevant awareness, you will get dumb responses.

So in the ‘blogosphere’ and, particularly, on websites like the BBC’s Have Your Say and YouTube, you will get an awful lot of comments that rage from simple flaming to total idiocy, via a lot of ill-advised attempts at irony. There are websites, like ‘speak you’re branes’, which thrive off this.

When the notion of unnecessary, brainless feedback becomes so overridingly popular – as in, when most of the nation is approaching ‘web-consciousness’ – people, i.e. the guys who took V*CE online, and the founders of similar websites elsewhere, including the British copycat Platform, will exploit this, to create a website based on ironic half-assed humourous observational criticism, e.g. ‘Well, that’s shit’.

Platform is an example of a website whose readers and journalists have been convinced that it needs to exist. Platform doesn’t need to exist. If it didn’t, its writers would go elsewhere, perhaps, or simply spend less time trying to be funny and trawling the internet for wacky things to write about. Its readers would spend more time on V*CE, or on their own blogs / flickrs / youtube accounts / whatever. It is an example of a website whereby the writers – as ever in hipster culture, the writers are merely the representatives of the ‘bloggers’ that they criticise – have a post writing for some ‘youth culture’ website, which they think means they are ‘informed’ and that their opinions are ‘relevant’, when, actually, neither of those things are true.

Platform’s writers, however funny the pictures might be, are zombies, and this article basically proves its own point, without being aware of doing so.

If you are going to be ironically self-deprecating, whilst attempting to actually criticise bloggers who have nothing to say, and to point out the flaw in the irony of the ‘noughties’ – in that it is a generation with ‘no punchline’ to its endless irony – then you are probably failing, if you don’t recognise that your own website is the exact epitomy of a void in youth culture, and of pointless regurgitation of uninformation.

Thanks for a rubbish article.