Ticketmaster Reveals its Inner Goth

"This is What Liam's Kid Should Be Like"

Listen to "Cigarettes and Alcohol" by Oasis:

[Download the MP3 Here]
(Thanks Phil)

No Music Day?

Creative wise guy Bill Drummond has declared today "No Music Day". Taking a quick glance at the Hype Machine popular list, he just might be on to something. Would you rather hear the new Bloc Party single, or nothing at all? Discuss it in comments.

I feel shit. It has just gone 6.30am and this is when I usually feel my best, when my mind is at its sharpest, when the ideas start tumbling into place and I am eager for the day ahead. But this morning I feel shit.

I've no right to claim this state; I mean I'm not living in cyclone-hit Bangladesh or stuck down a mine in the Ukraine or wherever it is.

Now that I have got that out the way I'm feeling better already. First thing to be done is this 600-word blog for the Guardian, then get emails sent before the others get to their Macs and PCs.

The reason that I got invited to do this blog is because Wednesday November 21 is No Music Day. Now in its third year, No Music Day was something I made up. I didn't go to any authority to have it sanctioned. I do not know if there is anywhere one is supposed to go to anyway. I made it up just for me, a way of addressing my jaded relationship with music amongst other things, but it seems to have been catching on. Last year the London-based cult radio station Resonance FM decided to embrace it. This year BBC Radio Scotland, a national radio station with several million regular listeners, has elected to observe it. This I feel good about and to this end I will be catching the sleeper up from Euston tonight, arriving in Glasgow bright and early on Wednesday morning. The day will be spent at the radio station being a guest on a number of the shows, fielding calls, making my case and placating doubters. Of course I will have to defend myself against those that think it all some sort of publicity stunt, prank or even worse - a cynical scam.

[Read the whole post]

***Update***: [Read Salon's piece on "No Music Day"]

Listen to nothing:

[Download no MP3 Here]
[Bill Drummond Wiki]

And This Little Piggy Went...

Oink has gotten the treatment that Dead Flowers will probably get someday. You have to love the record industry--can't have people enjoying music, can we?

This from The Guardian:

British police have closed down what they claim is one of the world's largest music piracy websites after a two-year pan-European operation. A series of raids in Middlesbrough and Amsterdam resulted in the arrest of a 24-year-old man and the closure of Oink, a private website that allowed users to locate and download music, movies and other files.

The closure has been welcomed by the music industry, which said that leaked copies of pre-release records meant that Oink users were able to access hundreds of albums before they reached the shops.

The invitation-only website, which had an estimated 180,000 users, was well known among internet filesharers as one of the most popular and exclusive sources of free downloads.

[Read the Whole Article]

Listen to "Cocksucker Blues" by The Stones:

[Download the MP3 Here]

Visa Woes

This from The Guardian:

As reported yesterday a new threat to hinder the current British music invasion are the ever-tightening US immigration and work visa laws. Lily Allen this week had her visa revoked and missed a potentially career-making MTV Awards appearance, while 12 months ago Klaxons cancelled their crucial CMJ performances because the press clippings they submitted suggested they hadn't been going very long. Which, of course, they hadn't. But then this is pop music - no one goes for very long. And if longevity is the criteria by which incoming touring artists are judged, then the US can have nothing but the boring white rock of Elton John and The Police tours to look forward to for the next - ooh - decade, when they could have the pan-international flavours of MIA. It's not just the hip young guns suffering either - Holly Golightly, New Model Army and Mystery Jets are some of the artists whose tours have been nixed by the authorities.

It's a Catch-22 situation. To guarantee an easy passage stateside artists have to fill a P-1 visa, requiring acts to prove that they have been "internationally recognized" for a "sustained and substantial" amount of time. But can someone really be internationally recognized if they have never performed in the US?

Such red tape is standard practice for a country run by lawyers, but it will surely have a detrimental effect. America will be deprived of new foreign culture from abroad, an existing suspicion that the US government are not very nice will fester even further and everyone from venues to concert promoters to merchandise vendors - people who thrive on live shows rather than record sales - will lose out if tours are cancelled at the last minute.

It's no conspiracy to say that this is all a by-product of the paranoia, fear of outsiders and strict border control that has been present since the white man first took over the country, and which has permeated deeper since September 2001. Any non-famous person who has attempted to enter the US either for a short stay or under the guise of work will likely have similar stories.

As it stands, anglophile US music fans are facing government-endorsed rock 'n' roll.

On the upside, though, they may be spared Razorlight.

[Read the whole article]

Hey, that sounds like Muse!The Darkness: Street Spirit (Radiohead Cover)

Listen:

[Download the MP3 Here]
[Band Website]

Notes from the Underground

LA native Jake Drake, a friend of and early contributor to Dead Flowers, has finally struck out on his own with The American Underground. Although it's still in the embryonic stage, the site is a great survey of American indie music, especially alt-country. Recent posts include Jake's thoughts on Ryan Adams, Devendra Banhart, and Paul Chesne. This is definitely a site to keep your eyes on.

[The American Underground]
[Jake Drake on Myspace]

Here's a Brian Jonestown Massacre song in tribute:

Listen to "When Jokers Attack":

[Download the MP3 Here]

Did She Ever Have a Soul to Lose, Man?

Fergie is to start hocking shoes in her songs. The Guardian is disappointed. Obviously, the writer has never heard of Wild Orchid:

I have a lot of time for Fergie. She gives the Black Eyed Peas sass, she hasn't been media-trained into idiocy and her solo album, The Dutchess, is as winning a slice of urban-influenced pop as Gwen Stefani's Love Angel Music Baby (and should have been just as successful). But she's just done something that will sorely test my love. Apparently, she's signed a deal with the American shoe brand Candie's that's being talked up as a groundbreaking example of "product placement". She gets £2million, and in return, Candie's gets her soul. Sorry - in return, she has to mention the brand in her songs...

But why would Fergie Ferg do something so tacky and soulless? She's not some pop tart who exists to lend her name to anything for a million bucks - and this songwriting business goes beyond plain old endorsement. She's not simply agreeing to be photographed wearing a pair of Candie's - she's got to come up with a song(s) about the brand, which will then turn up on an album or single. This, I suppose, is adjudged more subtle than plugging the shoes in an ad (or inventing a band for the express purpose of "covertly marketing" a brand.

But why would she forsake her credibility for a paycheck that's not even especially huge in the great pop scheme of things? (Some will claim that, after singing My Humps, there's no credibility at stake, but I maintain that the song was delivered tongue in cheek by a woman adept at playing male expectations to her advantage.)

Fergie, what in the name of Britney has got into you?

[Read the original post]

Muse-ical Masturbation

The rock world's princes of pretension, Muse, played Wembley this weekend. Dead Flowers yawned. The NME fawned:

During the show, which again saw spectacular pyrotechnics, fire, smoke and gymnasts suspended from giant balloons, the band blasted through a bombastic performance with hits and classics from their backcatalogue, including 'Super Massive Blackhole', which saw giant marching robots projected onto the stage's giant video screen, 'Starlight', 'Time Is Running Out', 'Hysteria', 'Stockholm Syndrome' and 'Plug In Baby'.

Midway through the set, Bellamy played three tracks on his glass top piano including 'Apocalypse Please', their Nina Simone cover 'Feeling Good' and debut album opener 'Sunburn' .

Towards the end of the show the singer changed into a black jacket and white jeans as he strapped on an acoustic guitar for 'Soldier's Poem' before he introduced 'Unintended' by telling the audience: "This is an old song and we are playing it in a new stadium".

The band rounded off their historic two day extravaganza once again with 'Take A Bow' before leaving the stage to huge applause. Drummer Dominic Howard added: "You guys fucking rule. You are unbelievable. We'll see you again soon."

This One Goes Up to 11

The Times (UK) reports on music so loud it's sickening:

Dad was right all along – rock music really is getting louder and now recording experts have warned that the sound of chart-topping albums is making listeners feel sick.

That distortion effect running through your Oasis album is not entirely the Gallagher brothers’ invention. Record companies are using digital technology to turn the volume on CDs up to “11”.

Artists and record bosses believe that the best album is the loudest one. Sound levels are being artificially enhanced so that the music punches through when it competes against background noise in pubs or cars.

Britain’s leading studio engineers are starting a campaign against a widespread technique that removes the dynamic range of a recording, making everything sound “loud”.

“Peak limiting” squeezes the sound range to one level, removing the peaks and troughs that would normally separate a quieter verse from a pumping chorus.

The process takes place at mastering, the final stage before a track is prepared for release. In the days of vinyl, the needle would jump out of the groove if a track was too loud.

But today musical details, including vocals and snare drums, are lost in the blare and many CD players respond to the frequency challenge by adding a buzzing, distorted sound to tracks.

Oasis started the loudness war and recent albums by Arctic Monkeys and Lily Allen have pushed the loudness needle further into the red.

The Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Californication, branded “unlistenable” by studio experts, is the subject of an online petition calling for it to be “remastered” without its harsh, compressed sound.

Peter Mew, senior mastering engineer at Abbey Road studios, said: “Record companies are competing in an arms race to make their album sound the ‘loudest’. The quieter parts are becoming louder and the loudest parts are just becoming a buzz.”

Mr Mew, who joined Abbey Road in 1965 and mastered David Bowie’s classic 1970s albums, warned that modern albums now induced nausea.

(Link from SCYHO)

A "Slow Music" Movement?

Here's an interesting piece on classical music from The Guardian:

Mark Ravenhill was spot on in his remarks about "fun". "More than ever before, the word 'fun' has slipped into our everyday vocabulary", he wrote. "We are all learning to impersonate the Californian teenager who is the contemporary role model for the western world. 'How was your weekend?' 'Oh, yeah - fun.' 'How was the opera?' 'Fun.' After all, if you're not having 'fun', what kind of sad loser are you?"

As fun has climbed to the top of qualities desirable in a night out, we classical musicians have become rather sensitive about our perceived funlessness. Some years ago, I and my colleagues in the chamber music group Domus had an interesting skirmish with fun. At the time we were playing concerts in a geodesic dome, a white tent that we put up and took down ourselves. It could seat 200 people sitting on the grass inside. Our idea was to go to unusual places, present the music we loved and gain new listeners for it. Part of our approach was to talk about the music before we played it.

Thinking that fun would have to be of the essence, we began by saying what fun the music was, and what fun our audiences would have listening to it. We spoke about what fun it had been to rehearse. Then we played masterpieces such as the Schubert String Quintet, Beethoven's Archduke Piano Trio, the Brahms Piano Quartets, Ravel's Piano Trio, Fauré's Piano Quintet. As we played, the audience fell silent. Often they were gripped by the music, and sometimes they were moved.

It didn't take long before listeners started telling us there was a disjunction between the "fun" they had been promised and the actual experience they had had. They suggested that it wasn't helpful to describe such music as "fun" when it was actually moving, complex, absorbing, challenging and satisfying. We were well aware of those qualities, but we'd consciously decided it might be off-putting to flag them up at the start.

Reminds me of a Morrissey quote:

"I would never, ever, do anything as vulgar as having fun."

Sympathy for the Christians

Although I'm no fan, The Guardian has an interesting article on The Cold War Kids losing fans because of their faith:

Did you see Later With Jools Holland last week? Did you see Cold War Kids howl thrillingly through Hang Me Up to Dry, with a power their album never got anywhere near achieving? And if you did, were you left thinking it was magnificent, or did you dismiss them with a shrug: nah, don't go for Christian rock?

Cold War Kids had more buzz than a hive of honeybees a few months back. Then it emerged that three of the band's four members had attended the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, and plenty of erstwhile supporters jumped away in horror, like vampires splashed with holy water. The band's songs were scoured and deemed to be full of propaganda with which to brainwash Our Pop Kids. Because you can't have rock bands singing about God, can you?

There are, naturally, some problems with that argument. First, Cold War Kids' songs are not obvious hymns. Second, rock fans have traditionally venerated musicians singing about God or using religious imagery. They just demand they fit into one of three stereotypical roles. They can plainly not really be terribly Christian (the White Stripes, Nick Cave and Bobby Gillespie, for example), in which case their singing "I was blind, now I can see/ You made a believer out of me" is not halfwitted tosh, but a clever and knowing appropriation of musical forms, making a spiritual connection with the gospel roots of rock'n'roll. Or you can be an elderly cove who's seen enough of the dark side that Christianity is your shot at redemption after the drugs and the drinks and the demons. We're all thinking Johnny Cash here, aren't we? Or, of course, you can be black, because no one bats an eyelid at rappers and R&B stars dropping mention of 'Im Upstairs at every available juncture. But to be a white musician making "alternative rock", and to have faith? How dare you!

Mortgage Rock

Alexis Petridis writes in the Guardian:

What has been the predominant musical sound during Tony Blair's premiership? You might disagree, but I'd plump for what one critic recently dubbed mortgage rock: the portentous, wistful, stadium-filling, ballad-heavy, post-Britpop genre that gets played in the background when an English team gets knocked out of an international sporting tournament, or an unsuccessful X-Factor hopeful collapses weeping into the arms of Kate Thornton. In fairness, it wasn't really around when Blair took office, although the records that influenced it were: Wonderwall, OK Computer, The Drugs Don't Work. For the entirety of this decade it's been, for better or worse, the sine qua non of British rock: you would think the record-buying public would be sick of it by now, seven years after Coldplay's debut, but no. They keep buying it: it was Snow Patrol, not the Arctic Monkeys, who made the best-selling album of last year.

What does its predominance tell you about the Blair years? You could argue that it's rock music as light entertainment, with all the edges sanded off: it's not furiously angry or inconsolably upset or wildly nihilistic in its pursuit of fun. It's the sound of economic prosperity. There's something about it that suggests a vague sense of melancholy, or dissatisfaction, as if things haven't turned out quite the way people expected...

How Do You Afford Your Rock n' Roll Lifestyle?

Next Stop, Rocket Science!

Not to toot my own horn, but I was fortunate enough to be chosen as a finalist in Grambo's Classic Characters of Twin Peaks contest. I chose Jerry Horne. How can you not?

There are, of course, many “classic” Twin Peaks characters. How does one go about picking just one? Should it be an obvious choice, like Coop or Audrey? Or a more marginal character, like Albert or Major Briggs? Ultimately, I made my choice because this characters’ antics still make me chuckle.

It’s Jerry Horne, the obnoxious brother of Ben Horne. While he was only in nine episodes, he did basically all he would have to do in Episode 2, Season 1, where he makes one of the most memorable entrances in the series. The Hornes are having a quiet dinner. Jerry enters, berating the bellhops who are helping him with his luggage. Sylvia Horne, exasperated, cries out “Benjamin!” But Jerry can’t wait to get sandwiches out of his bags. He’s just back from Paris, you see, and he has to share with ‘brother Ben’ the greatest thing he’s ever eaten: butter and brie on a baguette. He ate four of the damn things every day he was there.

To this day, that is still my favorite sandwich.

Later in the episode, when he and Ben make an excursion to the brothel One Eyed Jack’s, Jerry is wisecracking at the bar. When a girl takes his order, he tells her, “Next stop, rocket science!” You’d be surprised how often that line comes in handy.

Classic Entrance + Classic Line = Classic Character.

The actor who played Jerry Horne, David Patrick Kelley, in an earlier role:

This is Blogcore

Some of my fellow bloggers are doing some very good work over in their corners of the web, so I thought I'd point you in their direction:

Whatevs.org: Ol' Uncle Grambo is a blogging legend. In fact, it was Whatevs.org that led me to create my first site, "Glamorama". While Grambo and I might differ on pop culture (I once claimed that he had taken "time off from sipping lattes and bopping along to Kelly Clarkson on his iPod to stab me in the back" in the midst of a Stellastarr* debate), Grambo has always run his site for the right reasons. Plus, with the exception of Amanda Bynes, he has pretty good taste in women.

Recordreviews.org: Run by The Gorilla, who has such a storied past on the web that it's hard to recount everything here, this is a site that pretty much does what it says on the can: records are reviewed the week they come out. Yes, they make hilarious use of Google Image Search, but otherwise they play it straight. Gorilla has even got the legendary Peabs to review albums. Check out his "Neon Bible" review: it's a fine counterpoint to my take on the record.

Information Leaf Blower: The Leaf and I got in touch because we've always had similar interests. Whereas I've always written about Britrock and books, for the Leaf it's Britrock and sports. He also deserves points for consistency. There's not one week that's gone by where he hasn't posted a youtube video of The Jam, a wrap-up of a Celtics game, or a picture of his cat. Check it out.

My Blog is Hipper than Your Blog, Sing It

Idolator vs. Stereogum:

"Oh, Stereogum. How much fun it must be to live your lives as if you were still riding in the middle-section of the eighth-grade school-bus, talking down to the other kids because they're still digging Green Jellö while you've moved on to Superchunk. You're right: It is kind of interesting that the vaunted 33 1/3 series is doing a book on Celine Dion! And it's even more interesting that you guys aren't the slightest bit open-minded toward an opinion that strays from your hard-line "cool vs. uncool" canonical beliefs. Whatever the case, we await the inevitable "It's Okay To Like...Celine Dion" feature in a year, right after you guys make the ever-timely discovery that Hall & Oates weren't that bad."

Normally, I stay out of this sort of blogging tit-for-tat. But I think there's actually an interesting theme here. While dedicating a 33 1/3 book to Celine Dion seems like an unlikely choice, it all gets to one of the little-mentioned maxims of rock: The Stones and The Beatles did it all, man, so you might as well have a laugh.

That's why U2 in the 80s were so boring and that's why the Arcade Fire get more ridiculous with each passing day: this music just wasn't made to be taken that seriously.

The Winner: Idolator

TGTBATQ: Opposing Viewpoints

I said:

"It's an understated collection of well-crafted songs that deserves to be listened to in its entirety, both for its compelling musical and lyrical themes."

Phil (aka Big Boots) said:

"I like tracks 2, and 6.. not really looking for social commentary from that twat in the 'Live Forever' documentary."

In other news, the band was featured recently on BBC 6 Music. They sat down for interviews, played some records, and recorded an acoustic set. More info is [here]. Listen to interview highlights [here].

The acoustic set went like this:
1. History Song
2. Kingdom of Doom
3. Bunting Song
4. Nature Springs
[Download the BBC 6 Acoustic Session in MP3 Format]
(Link from thegoodthebadandthequeen.net)