Joys – Page 28 – syntaxfree

2004 List: Six Songs

A long time ago in a galaxy far far away, I decided to write about some of the music I’d really enjoyed in 2004. I do realize it is now May 2005, which means that as far as a lot of the indie music press is concerned, The New “The” Band are now where it’s at, and The Old “The” Band are, like, so five minutes ago, and my shitty writing about 2004 music is totally off the radar.

But I care not! Behold as I fly in the face of convention – not, mind you, out of feisty sticking-it-to-The-Man rebellion, but sheer inability to follow it. My various song and album lists have been staring me in the face for months, but I’ve been continually prevented from actually writing about them by serious duties such as smacking the Pingu and other similarly weighty online tasks.

So here it is, my Six Songs I Really Liked In 2004 But Which Weren’t On Albums In My Albums List (Forthcoming, Seriously!) For Said Year And Which I Haven’t Already¹ Written About list!

Me Plus One (Annie):
Everyone keeps going on and on about Chewing Gum, Heartbeat and The Greatest Hit, which are all wonderful, but I seem to be the only one who’s craziest over this one. This is the best song S Club 7 never made, slinky bass, spunky beats, Annie sing/speaking her way through verses like “Mrs D, Mrs I, Mrs F F I, Mrs C, Mrs U L T. If ever there’s a girl who could rock your world, then that girl sure is me! (Right!)” and then we’re into the chorus, O joyous chorus, “feeling good, I’m top of the pops”, and for the video in my head we’re all tiny bubble-shaped dancers in a glass of Lucozade.
Get On Dis Motorcycle (Petey Pablo feat. Bubba Sparxxx):
If you still say you’re jaded of Timbaland productions after listening to this one, I will kill you until you are dead. Never on God’s sweet earth has there been a more glorious union of manipulated kiddie-singing samples, frenetic bhangra pluckings, and classic crunk growl.
Greetings In Braille (The Elected):
This song is a perfect little slice of alt-country lo-fi electronica with wistful nostalgic lyrics that sound great in the context of the song but look bad when quoted as email signatures. In other words, this song is emo as fuck, but don’t let that discourage you. It’s real purty.
Paint The Moon (The Czars):
For the first two minutes or so this sounds like standard-issue Czars material – very pretty, but in a way that blends into the larger prettiness of the album rather than standing out as a song in its own right. Then we hit the bridge, the bass and guitars suddenly assert themselves, the harmonies get really lovely with “Let it go, let it go, let it fall down from the sky and leave this world behind”, and after this you don’t resent the subsequent return to verse-chorus-verse because when a song’s taken you that high you have to come down some time.
Parliament Square (Stina Nordenstam):
I love midnight walks in parts of London that are crowded during the day, but deserted at night. This is a song for those walks, where less is not just more but everything, where even the silences contain multitudes and the timelessness of the great city envelops you. Against wintry piano, restrained guitars, and a saxophone like a lonely busker hoping against hope that his day isn’t over, Stina sings a photograph: “It may be silent, but I hear bombs fall. I hear sirens down in Whitehall. I see fires around you, Paul, but you stand so still and you look so small.”
Atmosphere (Technova):
I don’t know when this was made, but I only heard it for the first time when Andrew Weatherall put it at the end of his Fabric mix, thereby making it the only dance mix that has ever made me want to cry. The beautiful synths in the Joy Division classic become the heart and soul of this remix, which I now wish I could have had as the secret soundtrack for the end of all my great clubbing nights in London. For me, it perfectly captures it all, the lights coming on in the club as you realize you finally have to leave, the tiredness beginning to set in as you wind down from your sensory overload, but also the quiet joy that keeps you walking to the tube station – and if it’s winter, and still dark after 6 a.m., those synths light your way like sparklers in slow-motion.

¹ Stuff I’ve mentioned before: Galang (MIA), Evil (Interpol), You Make Me Like Charity (The Knife), Baby Boom (The Crimea), and These Are Your Friends (Adem).

Skycatcher

One more photo from the weekend. This was taken at Gilman Village, but the building itself is on Alexandra Road. I was just experimenting with some tips Russ gave me last weekend on using the spot meter, and am quite happy with the results here.

Labrador Park

Some photos from the weekend. These were taken at Labrador Park.

Barnacles and colours

Lichen life in the ruined fort

Makciks and tankers

(makcik: Malay lady, usually middle-aged or older.)

ARSE!!!

I’ve been waiting for weeks for the Somerset House summer series of gigs to be announced, hoping to plan my trip to England around attending one of them. Watching Orbital, Yo La Tengo and Calexico in that beautiful courtyard made for some of the most memorable gigs of my time in London, and that’s saying a lot.

So they’ve finally been announced, and here they are:

5 July: Beth Orton
6 July: Doves
7 July: Queens Of The Stone Age
8 July: Super Furry Animals
9 July: The Mars Volta
10 July: Sigur Ros
11 July: Bright Eyes
12 July: Bloc Party + The Kills + The Cribs
13 July: Los Lobos & Orishas

Problem 1: The last time most of these acts interested me was when I still read the NME, and I gave that bad habit up long ago after realizing that more cutting-edge commentary could be found in The Sun. Bloc Party aren’t bad but they don’t blow me away either. The Mars Volta, if Deloused In The Crematorium is anything to go by, would be fun for half an hour, then repetitive and tedious. I can tolerate what I used to hear of the Super Furries, but don’t know how good their recent work is. The one act there I do really like is Sigur Ros, but I’ve seen them already and would rather see a band I haven’t seen yet. But all is moot – seeing any of the bands I’ve just mentioned isn’t even an option, because of Problem 2.

Problem 2: I’m spending 8-10 July boogie-ing in the rainforests of Borneo, and I get called to the Bar on 13 July, which basically means that my only realistic option, considering travel times etc., is Beth Orton, who is deathly boring.

Hence: ARSE!!!

Waning Lyrical

I haven’t found time to write about my fantastic weekend yet, but gracet helpfully gave me a meme to fill the silence with:

“Find a song that everybody knows and put the lyrics into the Babelfish (http://babelfish.altavista.com/). Translate them from English to German, then German to French, and then French to English. Then post here with 3 clues. See who gets the song right first.”

I deliberately chose a song which had incoherent lyrics to begin with, but I still think this is pretty easy.

Translated lyrics:

Freight on rifles
to take in top your friends,
him it recreation is to lose
and it is a panel itself to pretend
more ensured me
white which I know
has word salts

Hallo (X 16)

the lights him we are here are maintained
maintaining to us less dangerously than I believe
than stupidly and contagious
here we are now maintained has us
Mulatto
Moskito of the Albino
has my Yea
libido

me are more badly above than I make well
and for this gift
that I believe our small whom group
is always been and always the will at the end blessed

Hallo (X 16)

with the lights of him we are here maintained
it believes that stupidly and contagious
here we are now maintained has us
Mulatto
Moskito of the Albino
has my Yea
libido

and that I precisely forget
what that it takes to us,
and but I estimate that it forms me smile
that I find to be hard hard for him, good OH-
found that also always, nevermind

Hallo (X 16)

the lights him we are here are maintained
now less dangerously than I believe
than stupidly and contagious
here we are now maintained has us
Mulatto
Moskito of the Albino
has my Yea
libido

Clues:

A close friend of Neil Gaiman has regularly covered this song in her gigs.
A parody of the album cover featured a donut in place of the greenback used in the original.
The lead singer’s child is apparently middle-named after a legume.

PC Gaming

While Alec was cooking up a scarily elaborate Chinese feast for my family on Sunday, I decided not to get in his sweating, cursing way, and started cleaning up the guest room for Russ. Since my sister and I used to share the room, a fair amount of our stuff is still in the cupboards so I was going through them to clear space for Russ to hang his clothes.

The thing about cleaning my old flat is that no matter how much I remember about my childhood, there’s always something I’ve completely forgotten, until it resurfaces, that brings me some delight amidst the dust. Sunday’s treasure trove was a box of old card games, some well-known like Old Maid and Go Fish, and others I couldn’t remember for the life of me.

I have no idea what card game these were from, but they’re amusing throwbacks to a time when Mind Your Language was my favourite comedy and I’d never heard of the word “stereotype”.

Two little Injuns

Man, even then people were mean to the Welsh

People are always surprised I don’t keep my boyfriend’s photo in my wallet. Think I’ll start showing them this instead.

After my family had left and we’d finished cleaning up, we sat out on the balcony for a well-deserved rest. I drank my coffee, and Alec smoked his pipe. We were the very picture of yuppie sophistication – apart from the Top Trumps. My sailing ships totally kicked his sailing ships’ asses. Next time we’re playing combat aircraft, and after that, racing bikes.

Dude, where’s my lower half?

Each pack came with some teaser cards for other Exciting! packs you could own in the Top Trumps series. This is where I realized that my childhood, and indeed my life so far, has been woefully incomplete.

Fabulous Buggies Top Trump pack cover card

Coolest. Top Trump pack. Ever. I want this so bad.

Dorksylvania

An update on the Sonic Youth/Cat Power saga at U Penn I ranted about previously – the gig went ahead, apparently with an audience of about 300-400 people in a venue which could have housed 2000.

What a bunch of dorks. And by that, I mean the other 1700 who could have been there but were probably too busy RAWKING OUT to the Dave Matthews Band cuz they, like, RULE. Of course I hate the people who were there too, but that’s just envy.

Now I’ve vented some spleen, I hasten to add that I’m not entirely humourless about this whole thing. This column in the college newspaper was actually pretty funny: RIAA sues 4 students for bad taste in music.

“The Recording Industry Association of America filed lawsuits yesterday against four Penn students who were found to have downloaded Sonic Youth songs onto their computers.

Citing “bad taste,” officials said the individuals will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. If convicted, the students face a minimum sentence of 10 months in an alternative music rehabilitation center.

Treatment could also include intensive listening sessions featuring musicians of the 21st century, or trips to spring concerts at other universities that plan to feature contemporary artists.”

Later in the column:

“Lawsuits such as the ones aimed at the four students are part of the RIAA’s strategy of suing individual users for their personal music preferences. The trend began in September 2003, when the group sued two Princeton students for downloading entire Ace of Base albums.

“I just liked ‘I Saw the Sign’ and it got out of control,” recovering bad-music addict Bridget Takacs said. Though her police record will forever be branded “stuck in the 1990s,” Takacs was grateful for the intervention.”

Words About Noise

I liked the introduction to Bryan Berge’s review of Tom Smith/Sightings’ Gardens Of War:

“Noise defies language. In the everyday sense, noise is the category of sound that cannot be explained (“what is that noise?”) or doesn’t merit explanation (background noise). Thus noise is marked primarily in its relation to language, or more precisely in that lack of relation. In a technical sense, noise lacks the typical harmonic patterns that mark most resonant sounds produced by this wide world o’ vibrating objects. This too is a refusal of language, that most important of organized sounds in our acoustic lives. And finally, noise music attempts to obliterate our critical faculties, to send reason scurrying to a tranquil wrinkle deep in the brain stem while caustic sound ravages the ears. At its best, noise overwhelms, leaving the listener a battered, quivering mass of flesh who gulps for air and squeaks like an animal but who certainly does not smugly put down the headphones and deliver a discourse on the effectiveness of the brutal crunching sound in the fourth minute of the third track.

But here I go anyway.”

Also:

“Whenever I was tempted to form a thought during Gardens of War – “this song sounds like a particularly frightening Sunburned Hand of Man session overrun by homicidal robots” or “is that fuzz guitar playing some sort of insect melodyï¿½” – a grating din arrived to punish me. We’re talking some serious negative reinforcement here. So I never strived for language and conscious analysis again – all that you see here was written after the album had seeped into my skin after so many listens that I could relive it without the threat of another storm cloud breaking in my ears.

Only guttural grunts and surreal words-in-isolation issued from my brain and mouth while the record played.

As such, I did a spot-on impersonation of Tom Smith’s vocals.”

There’s also a bit about being forced into a corner by a big angry man with a genre fetish, but it doesn’t work well when excerpted.

Used To Be A Raver

At Jacob’s place on Saturday, we had to pick bits of paper out of a box, and then play a song which matched the theme written on the paper. Not having expected this little twist on his instructions to “bring obscure music”, I’d just brought a few CDs and some mp3s in a thumbdrive, but was happy enough with what I managed.

For the theme “Fat Bottomed Girls”, I played Vybz Kartel’s Picture You And Me (“in a tree, F-U-C-K-I-N-G”), feeling that this contained similar key elements of juvenile misogyny.

Alec then drew “Start The Panic”, and astutely observed that such a theme could pretty much apply to anything in his musical collection. However, we decided to spare everyone else the undeniable fight-or-flight impulse that a choice selection from The Chieftains In China would have provoked, so I played Knifehandchop’s Used To Be A Raver instead.

Other than that we drank, and ate Twisties, and played mahjong on the floor, and Jacob ate his cat.

Jacob gettin’ Ozzy wit’ it.

Mahjong tiles and alcohol.

I was joking about the cat. Witness intact Schopie with loving owner.

In Memoriam, Pope John Paul II

I took this photograph in Krakow, nearly a year ago.

Today it makes me think of the man who gave much to their nation, and the world.

In my prayers

Goodbye, Holy Father. Please pray for all of us.