Feature - Conversations About Music With Strangers AKA Hell

There are three main types of people this will happen with - The Elitist, The Ignorant Muso and The Affable Music Chameleon.

Scenario # 1 : The Elitist
Meeting occurs in queue for small-ish gig.

Abby: Hi, are you wearing a 'Insert Reputable Indie Band That Tries Really Hard To Remain Indie' shirt? Wicked! I love the stuff I've heard from them!
Elitist: Oh, you like them too? Do you have the debut?
A: I've heard a few songs from it, it sounds really good.
E: Like, I have it in three different formats- CD, obviously, limited edition, bought at their homecoming gig. Tape, because it's so grainy and raw, yeah? And on vinyl - it sounds so, so rich on my record player, you know? I was thinking of throwing away my iPod the day I got it.
A: Right, I should get that album.
E: Definitely, it's their best. After that they started getting kinda, you know, big. Like promotion and stuff, top 40 singles and shit like that. Just loses sincerity, right? No longer underground, what's the point. I only have the other albums on mp3, seriously, even then, the lyrics just seem like lies, right? The band's just a joke, like a pop crossover. Wait, where are you going? I have a witty anecdote about my shirt and the lead singer of the band spilling beer on it when he was telling me how unique my music taste is! I need your last.fm, I can recommend you some obscure sub-sub-sub-drone metal! Come back!

Scenario #2 : The Ignorant Muso
Meeting occurs in Topshop/public school-heavy town

Ignorant Muso : Rave, rave, raaaave! Lefal B, killa!
Abby: Lethal Bizzle, nice!
IM: Pigeon Detectives!!! Love it!!!!!
Abby: Hm?
IM: TING TINGS! LOVE THEM, MY GOD, POP'S SAVIOURS, THE ONLY POP BAND I'LL EVER LISTEN TO, THE LEAD SINGER IS WELL FIT.
Abby: Goodbye.

to be continued...
ps I have come to the conclusion that to elitists I must seem like an Ignorant Muso, and to the Ignorant Muso, I must seem like a snobby elitist.

Forrest Gump Chaos Theory

Cool List Draft (#62)

MIA
Namalee (of Namazonia)
Erykah Badu (hey wouldn't it be cool if it ended up being all women?)
Marnie Stern
This is boring I ate like six mini Dime bar things except they're called Daim, I think they were the things they used to put in 'Lunchables' or whatever the kids whose parents were FULL TIME PROFESSIONALS ate
Ken Livingstone
Sian Berry
Wait I can see a man / boy / girl / transgender person
Thom Yorke / the guitarist (they are rilly good at marketing)
Needs to be more revolutionary / less mainstream
Gruff Rhys
Is this an annual thing?
Is it just AS OF NOW here are THE COOL? That's cool.
Kicking_k
Avey Tare
Jamie Stewart
A Genuine Countercultural Movie Star
Jeffrey Lewis (anti-cool)
Kimya Dawson
Amy Winehouse
MIA
Rhys / Joel from Good Shoes
The woman in Taggart
David-Ivar and/or Neman Herman Dune (I am not the editor of accented letters this falls under DESIGN and thus beings my tyrannical reign of EVERYTHING. I delegate WORK to you)
Sebastian Tellier
The winner of Britain's Got Talent
Sir Ian Blair Head of The Metropolitan Police
Gordon Brown (bun da haterz. BUN DEM)
Chris Corsano (well good at drumming)
Anyone who was in Electrelane
Everett True
Jambo234 (or 'Jim Jams' as his mum calls him - she HOT)
Sorry Jim Jams
I mean James
Jamie, even
Benga Burial Scream (hol tyte DUBSTEP you know)
Bumbaclart
Peng
Similar words
Tinchy Stryder and/or Jammer
Kylie Minoise (in a condescending, 'caring' manner do not listen unless you don't value yr ears)
Flavor Flav anyone who says he lost it DUN KNOW JACK
Here's to you, Mrs Robinson
Heaven holds a place for those who pray
Hey, hey, hey
Hey, hey, hey
We'd like to know about you for our files
We'd like to help you learn to help yrself
^^ lol Frank Sinatra used to sing in CRASS
All the GCSE examiners DUN GET VEX'D
My mum when she isn't asking me to do things
HOMEWORK SUCKS
Tiny Masters of Today LOOK THEY ARE HOLDING GUITARS AW WELL CUTE <3
Tom or Neil or Mike or w/e from Editors because he sleeps with Edith Wiley from Radio One (BIG MAN)
Varg Vikernes (joke)
Euronymous (RIP)
Frances Bean Cobain (seriously, she needs to be allowed to be her own person)
Skepta, JME, Eskiboy
Kk I referenced like EVERYONE I can't go wrong
I Am Spy
Prancehall / James Knight / Blaise B / James Jam / Conor Mc
Rajnath Singh (not really)
The opposition leaders in Zimbabwe and Burma. NOT CYNICAL
Amerie
Kanye East (NO only joking he's a dick)
Kk I am done check the 'labels for this post'. Bye. xx

Review - Some stuff I saw on the Internet today

As of today, or quite a few months ago, or whatever, Rupert Murdoch officially owns all the 'intelligent' music sites in the world. Ever. All the forums and all the blogs and all the nice 'alternative' sites with an 'opinion'. www.quietusgroup.com, check it out. I don't know why this upsets me, maybe it's just because I don't like, or don't get, the tone of TheQuietus.com, or maybe because I'm not the target demographic of their site, or that of The Lipster. I'm, like, the target audience of DiS. Drowned in Sound may have nice mods and, um, the odd lively debate about Liars, but seriously - I don't get this supposed coalition of the 'definitive' independent sites involved, it's as if they want to take the outer limits of those websites and make them all conform to a set scene ideology, or something. Not that DiS is anything anymore. The Quietus is currently just a list of names. Really, it is, check out the Steven Wells vs. Dom Passantino (of DiS and ILX fame, ahem) thread. Thread? I mean, um, article. The Lipster's Bjork-with-an-umlaut interview is probably the most readable thing around - and I'd wager that may be because of her personality rather than anything, although granted I haven't checked out the site too much - unless you want to see DiS talk to Razorlight's drummer about NOTHING before they decide, eh, he sounds boring but is kinda nice. Wicked. 7.2, right? It's like Pitchfork, but diluted, really, except it's got forums and is smaller, which is nice because then the Chinchilla gang or Team Brick or whoever get a look-in occasionally.

23500 / 20000

And seeing as that's the Internet broken, then, I'm off to download some mp3s from Pitchfork's Forkcast. Or, maybe, I'm off to do something worthwhile. Such as take the other writer of this blog by her hand, kick a photocopier into gear, and write, like, this totally awesome 'zine I've always wanted to do. About music, and stuff. It'll kick ass. Thanks, Abby!

Feature - Music I Listen To During Exam Season (May-June)

Grizzly Bear! Air! Akron/Family! Elliott Smith! Beethoven!

It's a skull-shatteringly predictable serving of calming melodies, maybe a few songs that remind me of loud, fuck you! music that frequented my ears before those dreaded letters - G C S E - entered my mind and refused to budge, but mostly what most would tag 'boring' or 'zzzzzzzzzzz' or 'this makes me sleep, pass the duvet'. Its the sort of music that lulls you into feigned concentration and makes you feel all productive and clever and prepared, when really you're not doing the 4500 page chemistry past paper that sits before you at all, you're just reviewing the latest Grizzly Bear song, 'While You Wait For The Others,' in your head (It's quite good by the way, though the fact that it has a structure and proper lyrics that aren't disjointed words and phrases tacked together makes me uncomfortable, highlights of my life include sitting in various trains listening to "Colorado" off Yellow House as the sun melts away into the horizon and I fear words and logic would taint the experience and make me think about the meaning and not the beautiful, beautiful music. And the beautiful sunset. I like trains.)

Constant replays of Air's discography mean that instead of humming the riff to INSERT AVANT-GARDE DANCE PUNK BAND's underrated art punk classic 'INSERT OBSCURE ALBUM SONG, PREFERABLY NOT THE OPENER AS IT IS TOO OBVIOUS', I am singing along to Sexy Boy quite loudly and replaying the piano intro to Once Upon A Time until it is embedding in my brain like a ringtone. And all this time, I still haven't actually learnt anything about dynamic equilibrium or the extraction of iron.

Maybe if music contained topic-specific hidden messages, which would combine education and music in one foolproof sweep - Cajun Dance Party tried it with 'Amylase' but it is far less helpful in reality - amylase will not dry up the plaster, it will aid the digestion of glucose to maltose. Sorry purveyors of the slightly stagnant London indie scene, you aren't of any use to my brain.

Expect last.FM. stats to be horribly skewed in the next few weeks, with Mozart and Bach topping the 'most-played' lists, for this is How I Do when exam are nearing - only time will tell if the inoffensive palette of harmonies that is my exam-time music did any real good for my brain. In 3 months and 6 days, we shall all know.

Review: All The Music On My Computer (1)

Okay. No pressure. Game starts in 42 minutes, gotta be across town before then. No time to explain. Don't need to explain, I'm just going through every single mp3 / wma etc. on my personal computer. Which, by the way, is a piece of crap. Precisely 39.97 GB of crap.

That's 7698 'media items'.

9 of these have no "artist", as such. 7 of these come with the prefix acid mothers temple - good-bye john peel.




I probably would've bought more Acid Mothers Temple stuff if it wasn't so smeared with breast. Woo, I managed to say 'smear' and 'breast' in the same sentence whilst talking about psychedelic music. Scary stuff.

Anyway, it's a live recording. So, yeah, whacked-out psolos from Kawabata or whoever, y'know. But the sound is pretty... out there. Bit of an artefact. Good example of what AMT do... oh no, wait, this is Pink Lady Lemonade. Did I just call it an artefact? Well... yeah, it's out there. Not in the mood, though. Delete, move on.

Track 1 (now) is an audio recording of a weird lecture on expressing yr sexuality. 50 minutes and 33 seconds... maybe later. This is going fast, needs to get quicker.

Track 2, "rajasthan anonymous singer", may have been some weird throat-singing thing. But it doesn't work.

Track 3 is a piano based religious ballad I converted from iTunes format. It really is quite bland. I'm deleting that and that. I now have 1 unnamed track in my library. Are you still here?

Next time: !!!, ?????????, ¡Forward, Russia!, ‚µ‚á‚Ô‚µ‚á‚Ô and the 29th Chapter.

Review - A Dream I Had ft. Scouting For Girls

Oh, the horror! All three members of "Scouting For Girls, Totally Convincing And Credible Indie Band" confronted me in my blissfully unaware sleep. There I was, strolling along a Dali-esque landscape, phallic object in hand, dripping in metaphorical detail (Crutch? Check. Soft watches? Check.), quite content in a daze of subconscious thought. The scene was shockingly dark, as per usual in my slightly lucid dreaming - it had all the characteristics of one of Salvador's surrealist vistas, all disjointed forms and free-floating heads of various members of Girls Aloud. Then, like a knife ripping through the canvas, the doughy face of the lead singer of Scouting For Girls looms into my line of vision. Oh No, I cry! This cannot be! My mind must have clearly been very preoccupied with something disastrous of great proportions to hurl this demon at me in my peaceful rest. So there I am, desperately trying to escape the lecherous grasp of the talentless members. "Come with us! ", they say, "we're writing an album and you can be on it, all you have to do is listen to the first one all the way through without attempting homicide.." No! I cried, elbowing the one who looks a bit like an Orc, you will never turn me into one of you! And in that moment, everything went black, eternity fell away before me and I stared into the abyss. Music was playing - at first I thought the booming noise was the drums of the four horsemen in preparation for the apocalypse, yet as the hook began, I realised it was something far more toxic. It was only when the burning image of the Beginner's Guide To Making Money : Indie Pop Edition appeared, scarring my thoughts, that I knew what this sickening death-march was. It was the opening track to the eponymous debut, "Keep On Walking," a song so painfully horrific it is famously known to be played at funeral services in the Indian subcontinent, to ward away evil spirits. It was only the loud beeps of my alarm clock that offered some comfort - I was alive, I was alive, I was alive. And, moreover, I hadn't met Scouting For Girls. What joy there is in the world! Even the incessant chirping of overly-caffeinated breakfast telly presenters couldn't taint my unbridled happiness.
Scouting For Girls should be reserved for drive-time radio when one can turn the volume down and have a chat, not seeping into your subconscious when you least expect it. I can only hope that tonight my dreams are safe - until the next SFG album drops, that is. Oh, God.

The Final Say #1 - MUSE - H.E.R.P.E.S.

5 years ago, something struck the music industry across the face like Chuck Norris backhanding a dog that had ducked to avoid being the one to save a dolphin that had been shot out of a cannon at a high velocity towards a wall and would surely die unless the dog stood in the way and it didn't and and thus the dog had displayed a sign of cowardice and, as you may know, Chuck Norris is against cowardice.

5 years ago, Muse released their second album. Here, MFD brings you the ultimate analysis of an album that shaped the way rock music fans worldwide view global politics.

In 1995, inspired by the death of Kurt Cobain, Craig Bellamy, his sister Chrissie and Dom 'Leather' Howard played their first show at a pub in Swansea. The resulting recordings, "Showbiz", were released on four cassette tapes between 1997 and 2000.

When asked why, drummer Dom claims "It was Craig's idea."

Craig himself has very little to say about the band's early years. "What with the new Blu-Ray recording device just being released onto the market by the wonderful IBM corporation, we felt we had to market our brand as a niche. Our avowed target audience was that of pretentious twats; mainly within the socio-economic groups D-A. Chrissie herself felt that our first product was not iconic enough, and so we met in The Swansea Arms with the marketing objective of producing something with a USP that stood out. It was around that time that I first met David Icke. I was pissed, and Ickey (*colloquialism - Ed) was spouting some retro lizard king thing which I really could identify with - Kasabian's "Empire" had just come out, and it was such an empire record that I wanted to produce a live sound that emulated kosmiche sounds without the kitsch, that could emit the brown note and that could macro-ionise sub-alpha waves within the thorax of at least one mating slug. That, for us, was the aim of this session. What Ickey said just clicked. After that, we got offered $3.4bn to do Glasto but yeah, turned it down. We're noones bitch. Everyone is Muse's bitch. Instead, we played the Kerrang! awards - or rather, we did this live broadcast simulcasted from Sandi Thom's basement in Zurich. That was awesome. I think we toasted some vampire bats that carried neo-scatological rabies that night, just from the trombone section in "Absolution". This was around the time the third tape came out, on a limited edition of 666, 666, 666 copies across the world," he told GQ in April.

You might be forgiven, then, for thinking that a second live album, released in 2 different formats, is a bit pretentious on Muse's part. Not so. Imagine SOMA of sunn o))), Khanate and Mayhem on ketamine wearing day-glo Casette Playa ear rings, humping Euronymous' corpse dressed up as a pantomime horse, and you get Xasthur. Bitch, this ain't Xasthur. This is MUSE. This is conceptual art, rather than 'just music'. And this is the future.

6667/20000

Review - A Live Review Of Tenacious D

Remember the first time you read a book, and you stared at the letters so fucking hard you thought your eyes would pop out and your brain's trying to make sense of it all and you see a familiar word like 'and' or 'um' and you think, ah, joy of joys, I can make sense of this, and then some huge word like COMPLETELY hits your cerebellum and you think - right, that's it, i want a Froob, and you run away like the child you are. This is what happened on my first reading of Phil's review (fictitious? real? the line is so thin it's close to dissolution, H from steps could VERY WELL be moonlighting as the lead singer of The Darkness) Forget the barely-legible handwriting, that's How We Do on this cah-razy blog, if you can't handle it you might as well be wearing flared jeans and listening to Razorlight, you Daily Telegraph reader!

On one hand, the review is revealing - the shock of learning Frank Black's outright denial of the creation of the song, 'Atheist Incarnate' enough enough to make the most stoic men gasp in disbelief. On the other hand, it is cloaked in mystery - the side note proclaims that emos were sponsored by Judas Iscariot. What could this mean? Is Phil getting all biblical on us, or worse still, is he disrespecting the Pillars Of Our Society, the talented and affluent Emos we hear of in movies and television programs (see Hollyoaks).

The review is, at times, cutting - the new rave reference near its end could be seen to be a damning of all zeitgeisty trends, everything that people like us cling on to daily to ensure we aren't the ones at the Hadouken! gig wearing baggy jeans, without a flashy hat or corrosive glowstick in sight.

I shall end with a quote from a book I've just chosen randomly from my shelf - it's the classic, 'Men Without Women' by Ernest Hemingway, and I will try my level best to make a randomly-chosen sentence from one of its brilliantly-written pages apply to the words of this review.

"You'll sleep alright, I said," states the book, and isn't that really what the experience of reading Phil's review means to all of us? I, for one, concur that it does.

18356/20000

Review of the layout of this blog

The fact that this blog is the only one hosted by free Google pussy sell out service Blogger to use the font Courier for the title field marks it out as something a little bit special. Something especially awful.

From the dark grey background and the various shades of light grey used throughout the text fields to the mixture of standard Windows fonts, the odd light baby blue Last.fm album quilt to the purple post titles, it's clear that someone has made a special effort to bore the internet back into the pre-Minivegas days.

One of the places you might look to for a new shade of grey to match yr taskbar with is the little block of "About Me" text on the right hand side. It's not about anything. IT'S AWFUL. Don't even look at it. It serves no purpose, other than being another opportunity to display a love of avant-garde greyism.

Seriously. Take some BASIC COLOUR FORMATTING lessons. Yes, those strings of numbers after the double-f MEAN SOMETHING. Go on www.youtube.com and

(Character length reached... now.)

2445 / 20000

Tenacious D Live Review

An Introduction Of Sorts

Welcome, weary travellers of the internet. Sit down, have a drink and turn the telly on - you're home. Expect hilarious, Nay! , stomach-achingly brilliant irreverence from some of the funniest, wisest, most prolific and talented writers alive in the world, ever. We're so damn anarchic that you'll shudder in disbelief at our antics, cry with horror at our controvertial opinions and wet your pants with fear at our downright destruction of all mediocrity. Half the posts will be slightly funnier than the other half, as one of our writers has a particularly comedic way with words, you should only read those posts (which posts would they be, you ask? as the vapid characters in Nathan Barley would say, read them both, and then just read the good one. Couldn't Be Easier.)
Also, we are better than Music Fan's Mic, but only in an ironic way (luv u jme milton xx)

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