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July 16th, 2008
02:55 pm - Vic Thrill + The Saturn Missile - Circus of Enlightenment
Last year's Circus of Enlightenment from Vic Thrill (also known as former frontman of The Bogmen, Bill Campion) and The Saturn Missile (also known as former guitarist of Garden Variety, Anthony Rizzo) is described on CD Baby as "a mash of punked-up drum 'n bass rhythms, guitars, and electronica combined with elements of backwoods Americana and reggae-dub. Imagine Guided By Voices getting together with Basement Jaxx and Brian Eno!"
 I've liked the Bogmen for quite a while... At least, their first album Life Begins at 40 Million - their second album, Closed Caption Radio wasn't so great (and got them dropped by Arista, so it marks a rare time where I agree with the mainstream music industry). But I loved the former, and so I really wanted to like this.
From the CD Baby description (which is actually somewhat accurate, but not particularly representative) I wasn't expecting anything like Life Begins... and certainly such an expectation would have been confounded. Campion's voice is still identifiable, but no longer the powerful, soaring, melodic blast with a tendency to Jerry Lee Lewis over-the-top-ness. The record sounds more like a celebration of fractious, out-of-control noise than anything else: it wears its eclecticism and complicatedness on its sleeve, to the point where actually integrating all these disparate elements seems like an afterthought if it was even a thought at all. That sounds like more of a criticism than it deserves: that aspect of it is actually wonderful. But by track 9, Church of Kong, I found myself longing for something relatively straightforward. The following track, Nothing Left to Defend delivers on that, and yet feels like something of a let-down. Finishing track They Want You To Be Just Like Them is the most coherent thing on the album, sounding something like Super Furry Animals at their Beach-Boysiest.
As with so much in the paradigm of eclectic experimentalism (and, indeed, with so much out of New York) the line between self-indulgent wank and (flawed) masterpiece is very thin, and it's still too early for me to tell on which side Vic Thrill falls, but, either way, this is definitely an album I'll listen to more than once.
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February 17th, 2008
05:43 pm - New albums for this week
As always, these are all first-listen impressions, subject to change.
Wolfsheim - Spectators
I loved It's Hurting for the First Time, the video for which ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) palmer posted the other day. That was really the reason I bought it. Unfortunately, after that first track, I found the album a little boring. There was nothing that made me sit up and take notice. I suspect it might grow on me if I give it a chance, but I'd need to find time to give it a chance, which I don't expect to happen soon.
Icon of Coil - I
I decided it was time to finally get some Icon of Coil when amarok listed it as being similar to Funker Vogt. I suspect what I really wanted was more Funker Vogt, actually, but that's not to say this is a bad album. Again, I'll probably have to listen to it more than once to really decide, though.
Symphonika - Gothic Angel Warriors
The CD case describes it better than I could:-
Already featured on international movie and game trailers including the 'Final Fantasy XII' worldwide TV ad (under Patrick Stewart's voiceover), 'Gothic Angel Warriors' juxtaposes live orchestra and choir from the Slovak Radio Orchestra and Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra with extreme percussion and choral metal. In a word: awesome.
Hatsune Miku - Hatsune Miku 1st Song Album
Assuming something wasn't lost in translation, that is the least imaginative album title ever. But given that it is essentially sung by a robot, I suppose that's to be expected. It's actually pretty passable J-Pop. Maybe the words are slightly mispronounced by the software, but since I don't speak Japanese anyway, that hardly matters. It also features, as I mentioned in my previous post, a version of Ievan Polkka, as well as a version of Melodies of Life from Final Fantasy IX. It could probably do without the latter, actually. I really don't know whether to describe this from the point of view of a normal album, or from the point of view of a showcase of a singing robot! I have said many times that I'm disappointed by the 21st century so far, but this delivers.
Hatsune Miku - Miku x Miku
This does seem like less of an album and more of a showcase of what Miku can do as a piece of software. I probably like the 7 songs on here even better than the other album, though. The fourth track, Guru ~Bu Obu So~ Do sounds really dark and aggressive. It's great.
Top Artists for the week ending Sunday 17 February 2008
1 Hatsune Miku 49
2 Funker Vogt 22 (probably more due to iPod not being synced and even then iPod syncing not working properly)
3 Icon of Coil 14
4 Wolfsheim 11
5 ‰‰¹ƒ~ƒN 7 (Windows' gibberish way of displaying the Japanese characters for Hatsune Miku. Fuck you Windows.)
6 坂本龍一 6 (Ryuichi Sakamoto)
7 Combichrist 3
8 Radiohead 2 ('Palo Alto' twice after noticing a lyrical similarity between that and Infected Mushroom's 'Cities of the Future'.)
9 John Benjamin Band 1
9 Gazel 1
9 Puressence 1
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January 7th, 2008
08:36 am - Ahead of its time
 You owe it to yourself to buy, borrow or steal Ryuichi Sakamoto's B-2 Unit.
Sakamoto is perhaps best known for his work on the scores of The Last Emperor and Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence as well as other soundtrack work. More recently, he was hired by Nokia to compose ringtones for the 8800. This album, however, is from 1980, contemporary to his work with Yellow Magic Orchestra, who have been described -- not unfairly -- as "the Japanese Kraftwerk" for their pioneering in electronic and synthesised music.
This Kraftwerkian experimentation is very much present on this album, to the extent that it can only be described as "ahead of its time". However, unlike Kraftwerk's synonymy with austere seriousness, Sakamoto's work is infused with a more enlightened playfulness. The album opens with percussion-heavy Differencia, the driving rhythm, busy ambience and sparse melody setting the stage for what is to follow. But not for what is to immediately follow, that being the beautiful Thatness and Thereness, where the percussion is stripped away and classic songwriting is backed by charmingly awkward synthesisers. This song was my first introduction to Sakamoto, following imomus' recent cover:-
 This is followed by Participation Mystique, heavy-handed (the album has been criticised for this, and while it's true, I'm not sure it's valid as a criticism) percussion taking centre-stage again, synthesisers trying in vain (and I mean that in the best possible way) to bring a melody into the proceedings and ending up with a sort of eerie, ghostly presence. Imagine a run-down crowded area from some dystopic cyberpunk nightmare, and then subtract the crowd: That's what this track sounds like. This gives way to something with a little more life in the form of E-3A which fuses the at-the-time still infant (hell, infant? It was newborn!) genre of electrofunk with Japanese traditionalism.
The synthesisers finally win their battle to get some melody involved with the bold sci-fi-horror-movie creep of Inconic Storage. It's easy to forget that the subsequent track, Riot in Lagos, is a couple of years older than me: It sounds remarkably contemporary, like something Röyksopp or Mylo might have come up with were they not so TV-ad-friendly. Anyone averse to experimental music should stay away from Not the 6 O'Clock News. Anyone who is not shit, however, will be treated to five minutes of the best possible noise. There are again shades of traditionalism here, but they're being beaten back by the noise. It's hard to tell without context whether this is a statement of sorrow for the loss of traditionalism, or a statement of enthusiasm for the new and exciting (or neither of these) but as someone who cheerfully embraces contradiction, I can identify with both sentiments. The sci-fi-horror then returns for album closer The End of Europe (Sakamoto had ended his first album, 'Thousand Knives', with a track called The End of Asia). It's not impossible to believe that this track could have influenced Vangelis' score for Blade Runner -- a film which Sakamoto would liberally sample in a later work.
Ultimately, if I was expecting more in the way of the melodious quality of Thatness and Thereness, those expectations were frustrated -- in fact Thatness and Thereness is the only actual song on the album. But frustrated expectations do not always lead to disappointment, and in this case this album is something I'm glad I found.
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November 18th, 2007
07:11 pm - New albums of this week.
 Some compilation of Jacques Brel
I've always really loved Jacques Brel's songs, whether it was Nina Simone singing Ne Me Quitte Pas, or Scott Walker singing Amsterdam, or Momus singing a repurposed version of La Chanson de Jacky as Nicky, but I never really listened to the man himself. I thought listening might be of some historical interest, but I wasn't prepared for his performances to be every bit the match of his songwriting. I was, therefore, quite pleasantly surprised. Along with Audrey Hepburn, Brel is one of the most commonly touted answers to the idea that there are no famous Belgians. Well, Audrey Hepburn doesn't really count - she may have been born in Belgium, but that's as Belgian as she gets, being of Anglo-Dutch descent. Brel has more of a genuine claim to Belgianness, but one gets the impression that what he's famous for is more almost pretending to be French than for his music having any uniquely Belgian quality.
 Nightwish - Dark Passion Play
I've never been as big a fan of Nightwish as I would secretly like to be. They're my dirty little secret. Or were, until I came out just now. Damn my policy of never filtering posts. In my mind, Nightwish instantly equates with guilty pleasure. That may explain why I didn't even know about this album until two months after its release. I'm glad I eventually did, though. It's not my favourite album ever - there's a bit too much depressingly generic filler for that - but it certainly makes my life that little bit better. I had heard that it wasn't for those Nightwish fans who don't like other metal, but I think that reviewer must have been listening to a different album since I hate metal, HATE IT TO HELL and have no trouble getting into this. I think not being a 'proper' fan might actually have helped in that, since to be honest I couldn't care less about the politics surrounding Tarja's departure from the band, nor do I really miss her input. Obviously it changes the sound, but coming at it from an unprejudiced viewpoint, it's just different: not necessarily better nor worse. That may create a contextual gap in the way I see the album, of course, and I don't know how 'proper' fans feel about this - I try not to associate with 'proper' fans of anyone if I can help it - and in fact I don't care. I like it.
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August 17th, 2007
11:30 pm - I lied.
I know I said there would be no new album this week. In that post, I also posited the possibility of a not-shit-making machine. I can only assume that such a machine exists in some far future, where archaeomusicologists have (will?) unearthed - with great dismay - the works of a whole crop of mid-noughties neoglam poseurs. They fed this source material into The Machine, and sent the result back in time, giving us:-
Luxxury - Rock and Roll (Is Evil)
The formula is, by 2007, fairly familiar: dark, almost goth verses give way to epic glam disco choruses. But the differences are huge - it's done well, for a start. Where the formula calls for a glam-stomp on a sticky unwashed floor, Luxxury places that stomp on a bed of shiny, futuristic synthpop, sticky not with vomit and beer, but with sex.
As with almost anything, it's not unflawed. 'Eine Kleine Indie Rock Gesamtkunstwerk' is a thirty-second parody of Baron von Luxxury's peers, showing that he knows how much better he is than them. Fair enough, but he could have chosen some track for it to follow other than '(A Tragic Waste of) Perfectly Good Love', which tries and tries to shine like the other songs on the album, but one of its neon bulbs somewhere is broken, its mirrorball is tarnished, the most fun person there has left for another party, a man who nobody else seems to know is being sick in the corner. The lyrics are a little wanting in places, too, unexpected Jean-Paul Sartre references wedged awkwardly between couplets that are so banal you can imagine the (awesome) music pleading with the party's host for up to a couple of hours to let this boring mate come along, too.
On balance, this is a fine album, though. Its flaws are insignificant compared to my main regret, which is that it is physically impossible for me to give those future archaeomusicologists maximum cuddles for sending this stuff back to us.
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August 10th, 2007
06:26 am - В Советскый Россия, Гуси щипает ТЕБЯ!
I think I might try learning Russian again. I don't know why... just for something to do I guess. Sudden impulses like that are cool, according to a friend. I think I'm getting it a bit more, now. I still can't decline nouns into nominative and accusative forms, but at least now I can remember which is which (of course, English and French only have such declension for pronouns, so it's not something I've really had to worry too hard about before).
In other news, albums of the week. Only one new album this week, plus various individual tracks (money's getting tight, you know).
Infected Mushroom - Vicious Delicious
It's only in the past few months that I've even known about IM, but even so, I'm surprised it's taken even that long before getting some of that stuff. Unlike last week, when I was pretty much on a nostalgia thing, I think this is the kind of thing I would have completely hated on principle five years ago. I was stupid five years ago.
Other random tracks
Continuing with Infected Mushroom, I felt like I couldn't really afford another album, but I at least had to get Cities of the Future. It's my new favourite track ever. And continuing with a kind of psychedelic trance thing, I got a few Juno Reactor tracks: Navras, Masters of the Universe, Pistolero, Mona Lisa Overdrive... Again, I never would have touched Juno Reactor five years ago, but it was about a year ago that I heard about them (I have a degree in not paying attention to Matrix soundtracks) and it's taken this long for me to even get hold of a little bit. The other track I got was Gimme Gimme Gimme by Beseech. I would say goth covers of ABBA songs are always fun, but I don't even know if there are any others. Do you know?
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August 1st, 2007
08:41 pm - Three new albums
My three new albums this week aren't new at all.
The Velvet Underground & Nico
Need I say anything but 'finally'?
Barenaked Ladies - Born on a Pirate Ship
I listened to this a lot when I was 14-15. Ten years on, it's a totally different experience. In some ways it's better - layers of nuance my pubescent mind couldn't comprehend - but in many ways it's not as good. As you'd expect from an album which attracted a 14-year-old boy, I guess, much of it seems a bit puerile, now.
The Bogmen - Closed Captioned Radio
It was six and a half years ago that Jesse sent me their 1995 Life Begins at 40 Million, which I thought was okay at first, then left it alone for a year or so. Then I listened to it again and was blown away by how great it was. So it's a surprise that it's taken me so long to clock onto this, their 1998 offering. But I can't say I'm terribly disappointed that I didn't find it sooner. The textural experimentalism (while not on the level of the post-rock crowd, certainly quite unique for a pop-rock band) is there, as are the eastern-influenced vocals and rhythms, but it lacks the something that carried Life Begins... to glory. Maybe it was the humour of the earlier album which was missing on this one. Or maybe, like Life Begins..., it's fantastic, but it'll take me a while to realise that.
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