BLEEDING EARS

So, I’ve left it a week so as to avoid being one of those knee-jerk bloggers. You might say that’s the point of blogging but, well, I disagree.

Michael Jackson is dead.

There are a few facts I associate with this comment:

1) It is a shame when people die
2) His family must be very upset
3) It’s a shame that his kids won’t grow up with their dad
4) He was fairly young

Here are a few other facts I associate with this comment:

a) People die every day
b) I’m not his family
c) He was mentally ill, so probably shouldn’t have been solely in charge of his children’s well-being anyway
d) This idea that the younger you are, the more tragic death is, is kind of strange

Everyone seems to have gone bat shit crazy over this whole revelation, either taking it to the funny extreme-bad-taste joke side (which I must admit I’m thoroughly enjoying) or going down the faux-empathy route, which I absolutely hate.

I got home from work and logged on to the eternal temptation of Facebook, and literally every status update was about this; from “OMG MJ’s dead I’m devasted RIP xxxx” (why the fuck do people put kisses on their status?!) to “reports of Michael Jackson having a heart attack are incorrent – he was found in the children’s ward having a stroke”, no one seemed to escape the media wave of the Jackson demise.

Is he really that important?

One of my favourite dan le sac vs Scroobius Pip songs states; “thou shalt not put recording artists on ridiculous pedestals, no matter how great they are, or were.”

I felt the same way about UK media monkey Jade Goody’s death. People die every day, and it’s sad, but it doesn’t make it sadder because they’re famous and you’re not any more involved with their lives because you saw them on TV a lot.

So I guess I want to leave it like this; Thriller was good, Billie Jean was great, all of the Jackson 5’s output was phenomenal, but a man is just a man, and sad though it is, let’s not let go of reality.

Even the Beatles were just a band.*

Haddock

*Another DLSvsSP gem – seriously, get that album.

Farrah Fawcett also died last week, and she had better hair

Regardless of what the politics of music bans us from saying, bass players usually suck, and don’t get the same fame or opportunity as guitarists for that very reason.

It’s a testament to the talent of this Quebec native, then, that she has played in several top-notch bands (namely Hole and the Smashing Pumpkins) and made it as a solo artist despite being a) female and b) a bass player, all the time without dressing like a prostitute or switching to guitar.

Tonight, in front of a small but intimate crowd who’ve been praying for her arrival through the painful act of the least funny comedian in the known universe, Melissa auf der Maur is exactly how I remember her – pale, interesting and wrapped around the huge bass to the extent that you don’t know whether she’s playing it, or it’s playing her.

A symbol of fragile but dominant femininity, the woman with the impossibly brilliant initials ‘MadM’ surrounds herself with an all-male band and makes them wear uniforms adorned with her name. In fact, the more I think about it the more she seems a bit like a dominatrix – unsmiling, intense and definitely in charge. She’s got a penchant for leather and lace, and remains white-faced and wild-haired at all times. I’d probably do whatever she told me to, whether I was paying for it or not.

She throws herself around the small stage as the low frequencies of her four-string are cranked up to the max, taking over from the top-end sounds that normally take centre stage. I’m worried for her, being such a tiny little thing, but she’s proven that she can handle herself, and squeezes every drop of potential out of the tracks of her debut album.

She tends to drop off the face of the planet for months at a time, so if you didn’t catch her tonight….well, sucks to be you.

Haddizle

Doin' it for the gingers

Hello there, and welcome to my half-arsed attempt at music journalism.

I will be attempting to supply you with sporadic updates about what’s rocking my boat in the world of music. There will probably be an electronic feel to most posts but I’m fairly open minded so you never know what you’ll find. This first post will be a conglomeration of different morsels as it’s my first one.

First up on ‘Yaffle Recommends…’ would have to be the (fairly) recent Essential Mix (see Haddock’s Noisettes review below for a more biased explanation) from the UK-based Sub Focus; there’s some cracking drum n’ bass and dubstep to be found here. It’s a waste of space putting up a tracklist unless there is call for it, so let me know if you have a hankering and I’ll post one up. The same goes for all the mixes - ask and you shall receive.

Sander van Doorn* does a monthly (now bi-monthly I think) mix for internet radio Identity. It’s gone under a lot of changes in the last few months, switching from a music-only hour-long mix to an assortment of introduced songs and snippets from other DJ’s and listeners lasting 90 minutes. I’m still undecided on whether I like the new format; however, I highly recommend the mix that piqued my interest in Mr van Doorn from July 2008, which can be found here. His latest Identity mix can be found here.

The tinnitus-plagued Jody Wisternoff has been producing quality tunes for well over a decade now; fairly slow (130bpm) progressive, melodic and catchy jaunts are his specialty. As well as producing solo efforts, he is a part of the legendary Way Out West with Nick Warren (check out the sublime Mindcircus if you’re not familiar). He releases a monthly mix known as Way Out There. Guaranteed to put a smile on the face and elicit a summery feeling, the latest offering can be found here.

I do have a load of others to mention but maybe they will have to wait until next time when I’ll try to be a bit more organized and a bit less full of cider and cake. Actually, you could do worse than to grab Wisternoff’s Frisky Radio mix here. Tom Middleton’s remix of Orbital’s Halcyon 28 minutes in reminds me why I love music so fucking much. Awesome.

Professor Yaffle

*not his real surname

It’s not often that I’m properly astounded by music, so when it happens, it’s definitely worth talking about.

Arsing around on YouTube, trying to distract myself from the mounting pile of reviews to my right, I came across some Noisettes videos. These guys are a London indie band who brought out a brilliant album, What’s the Time Mr Wolf? two years ago, and though it went largely unnoticed I interviewed one of the boys and fell in love with the band. Seeing them at a festival later that year only cemented my adoration, as they were awesome.

BBC Radio 1 in the UK has a regular feature called Live Lounge, in which they invite a popular / up and coming band into the studio to perform a few songs live.* A tradition has built up where the band do a cover version of a song that’s very different to their own, but they do it in their own style, or change it massively; Biffy Clyro covering Rihanna’s Umbrella and Dizzee Rascal vastly improving the Ting Ting’s abomination of sound That’s Not My Name are particular highlights from the past.

Seeing that the Noisettes had covered a Killers song, then, had me quite excited.

It was even better than I could have imagined.

Everyone pretty much agrees that the Killers are shit now, and in fact were always pretty shit, barring the first five songs (and Glamorous Indie Rock and Roll) from Hot Fuss. Amazingly, Noisettes have managed to take one of their dire tunes and make it spectacular.

I can’t even begin to describe this. It’s a good job, then, that description is unnecessary thanks to the wonders of modern technology:

Noisettes covering the Killers' When You Were Young

Jaw-droppingly beautiful. It makes me want to cry like an acutely whiny child, and not just because I’ve fallen in instant, all-consuming and forever unreciprocated love with singer Shingai again.

Damn talented people.

*This is one of only two things associated with Radio 1 that aren’t fucking awful, the other being their weekly Essential Mix – a 2 hr long mix done by a guest DJ in the early hours of Saturday morning, ostensibly for the comedown crowd. High Contrast, Sub Focus, Andy C and all the other top names in dance have partaken, and it tends to be wicked. Apart from this, though, Radio 1 is gash, and practically all their presenters are talentless suckers of celebrity cock with annoying voices. Jo Wiley is a prime example.

Haddock

Hockey and drum n’ bass don’t normally go together, so heading straight from Southside Louie’s to Circa, having watched Sidney Crosby whine his way to another win, felt a little strange, especially as we were dropping on the way.

I leave all thoughts of ice and pucks behind me though, as I step forward for the routine friskage at the club door. I wasn’t particularly manhandled the last time I came in here, so I’ve left the drugs in my tiny drug pocket rather than going to all the fuss of hiding it in my underwear. The security people seem to be being somewhat more thorough than normal though….and there go the fingers of my female frisker into my drug pocket (which is, unfortunately, not a euphemism). My heart chokes for a second; she feels my keys; thank fuck I thought to put them on top of the tiny packet. She looks at my face. “Hehe, house keys” I smile. She waves me though.

I love you, incompetent security woman.

I’ve missed the guestlist. Oh joy. I have to pull the secret contact out of the bag and again, we’re waved through. The come up coupled with and the exhilaration of being so close to being caught have me bounding through the main room doors and straight into the full-on head fuck of Chase & Status, who’re in their zone and commanding the movements of the squirming noodles in front of them. I squeeze into the middle of the crowd, and join the rest of them in writhing and jerking and letting the bass kick me into motion. As usual, everyone’s facing the DJs, but I can’t really see them – I’m lost in the lights and sounds, as you should be at a real show. The music is almost painfully good – the vocal of Take Me Away flies out above everyone’s heads and they throw their faces back to sing at it.

Then, catastrophically, everything dies. The music is absent, the dancing stops. The MC tries to keep spirits up (“When I say Chase, you say Status: CHASE!…”)but we begin joking and jibing amongst ourselves while the sound engineer plugs something back in. It’s quiet for just that bit too long, like the awkward morning silence after a one-night stand, and then the bass thuds back into the room with even more aplomb than before.

The brief lull in the evening’s events has served to bring the inevitable end of the set to the forefront of everyone’s minds, and as a result those around me start dancing and singing with even more intensity, as if to squeeze the last drops of pleasure from this all-too-short show from our favourite London DJs. I join them in acting with literally no restraint, which would probably be really annoying if I wasn’t me, and by the time Mr Oizo’s brilliant remix of Rage Against The Machine’s Killing in the Name Of comes in to signal the beginning of the end, I have no idea what I’m doing. The fuzzy griminess of the guitar part pushes pure joy into my ear canals, and I don’t want it to ever end.

It does though, as these shows always do, and though the dirty drum and bass of Marcus Visionary tempts me to stay all night long, the climax is passed, and I make my way begrudgingly back to the real world of hockey, work and overpriced groceries, which, in comparison to nights like this, kind of sucks.

Haddock

Chase & Status...or is it Status & Chase?

Bearing in mind that most things involved with Andy Warhol were massively overrated (or at least seem over-referenced to the eyes and ears of a 1980’s baby), the only album spawned from the union of Lou Reed’s Velvet Underground and German vocalist Nico is a pretty delicious affair, even though they didn’t realise it at the time.

The tracklisting, as my room mate pointed out, is a bit “all over the place”, but thena gain arranging such a sporadic mix of tunes into one fluid playlist was never going to be easy. Not would it have been typical of Lou Reed, a man who went on to release both the painfully difficult Metal Machine Music and the innocently sedative Perfect Day.

By those later points in his career he was no stranger to faux-naïveté, having spread a shitload of it over otherwise disgusting songs like Venus In Furs. That the band manage to make a blunt description of a BDSM novel sound like a nursery rhyme is a testament to how brilliant and how fucked up they really were.

For an album that is ostensibly about drugs and sex, most of it is charmingly light and somehow life-affirming. I always get a bit of a sway in my head to the sound of Sunday Morning, and throughout my university years Heroin was the only song guaranteed to have me asleep by the end of it.

Regularly suffering from concentration insomnia – the kind where you can’t sleep because you’re thinking too much, and then you can’t sleep because you’re concentration too much on trying not to think – made me stressed out when my heartbeat became too calm, as I’d then become obsessed with slowing it down to a proper sleep rate. The rushes and crashes of the heroin rollercoaster that the band so spectacularly create, however, not only soothed my need to get sleep, but cradled me in curiosity and fucked with my head until I didn’t realise I was out cold.

I’m sure the same wouldn’t apply to someone who is au fait with the whole smack experience, but to a heroin virgin like myself it’s probably the most intriguing song to have ever been written. From the crazy pace changes to the bland awareness of lyrics such as “when I put a spike into my vein” that are tinged with masochism and self-loathing but then followed by proclamations of love and devotion, Heroin is the closest thing we have to a true drug simulation technique. It’s impulsive, confused, passionate, and it’s fantastic.

I’m Waiting For The Man is another highlight, admittedly within an album full of highlights. It may have been the David Bowie live version from the Almost Famous soundtrack that first for me hooked on this song, but hearing it in it’s own environment is something different altogether. Part of the fascination is the feeling that song is constantly stumbling, perpetually getting ahead of itself and walking just slightly outside of its own beat. It’s hardly relaxing, for that very reason, but grips you despite being one of the more bland songs on the album.

Run Run Run, I’ll Be Your Mirror, The Black Angel’s Death Song…every track on the ‘banana album’ could be classed as a classic, no matter how trite that statement seems. This might be the only thing ever associated with Andy Warhol that could legitimately be called a work of genius, rather than an exercise in public manipulation or relentless self-promotion. Don’t let yourself forget that.

Haddock

The Velvet Underground and Nico

I am currently sans iPod, having lost the lovely little bugger to Apple Heaven (where everthing is white but becomes outdated in three months) after it was submerged in lake water. This is not a nice situation.

It’s not just the lack of choice I miss; I find that I actually can’t do anything as easily as normal.

Running, for example.

I run, but I’m naturally a run-hater. I’ve grown to love it, but only with the sounds of 2 Many DJs or some Chase & Status caressing my eardrums and making me forget the pulsing pain in my abdomen and arches.

Without headphones stuffed in my ears I can do nothing but concentrate on the trial ahead, and how bored I am with the whole idea of going for a run, so by the time I reach the end of the street I’ve already headed back to the house.

Even walks seem to take forever, and the sound of life going on around me gets to be exhausting.

It’s not just physical exertion that needs a beat, either. I sit down to read, an activity I usually enjoy while the Beta Band or David Bowie tell their conflicting stories to my already-immersed brain, and yet with no background noise I skim-read and wonder anxiously when the end of the chapter will present itself.

All this makes me think that, for me at least, music staves off impatience. You get lost in what’s pumping into your head, and get on with life without really thinking about it. There’s music in restaurants, music at work, music in shops, music between hockey periods….take it all away and you’d be desperate to rush through everything, if only to get away from the crushing silence of calm or the blistering noise of a hectic world.

Life without music would be one long slog with nothing to do but wonder when the end will finally appear.

Haddock

When I picked up Maximo Park’s new album Quicken the Heart I had to ask myself this: do I like this band?

It’s a tough question.

That seemingly unnecessary punctuation over the ‘I’ annoys me. I saw them at a festival and was under-whelmed. I never would have paid for this album.

Yet I always feel like Paul Smith’s voice is giving my head a hug. I guess it’s the whole north-east England accent, but I think the lack of USA-centricity helps too; he isn’t faking anything to break America, or pretending he’s the best singer in the world. He just comes as he is.

Having said that, there is always a lot of UK-style pretentiousness going on in their music – the kind of pretentiousness I exude accidentally.

That love of wordplay and over the top verbosity results in the line “it’s just the wraithlike things that quicken the heart” within about a minute of the album starting, which makes me sit up and listen to them more than I ever have before.

One striking thing about this, the band’s third full-length, is how calm it is compared to their previous albums. 2007’s Our Earthly Pleasures kicked right in with the hectic Girls Who Play Guitars and Our Velocity, and while this album’s opener Wraithlike Things isn’t exactly a ballad, I don’t feel that Smith is having a vocal seizure in quite the same way. He normally sings like he dances – jumpy and all over the place – but I feel that he might have actually stood still to record these songs.

As such, the band has lost a little of the youthful exuberance of the past, but have replaced it with something edging towards maturity. They aren’t turning into Coldplay yet, thankfully, but they’re definitely getting older.

The lyrics of The Kids Are Sick Again and Clouds of Mystery epitomise the mindset we all get on those odd days in our twenties when everything seems tiring and a bit shit, whereas Let’s Get Clinical showcases the musical post-adolescence of a band who’re looking to move on. Darker, quieter a more intense than you might expect, it’s step towards Interpolism for the indie Geordies.

Quicken the Heart would have been one of those albums that completely passed me by, had it not been handed to me directly, so you might have to seek it out. Ultimately, though it’s worth it, if only to heard a band getting older before your very ears.

Haddock

Maximo Park - Quicken the Heart

So I was meant to go see the Crystal Method on Friday, at the Koolhaus in TO.

I checked the Guvernment’s website and saw the doors opened at 7…on a Friday night…for a dance act. Odd, I thought.

I rolled up to the doors at 9.15, having assumed they wouldn’t play til 8.30 at the earliest, and having relied on the TTC too much to be on time. I was about to hand over the $35 cover when a strangely helpful security guard informed me that they’d already been on 15 minutes, and would be ending their set at 10.

10pm, on a Friday fucking night.

My money crept back into my pocket, and I slunk away to Circa instead.

Now, I know that the music business has had to shift itself in the last few years, putting more focus on live performances to make money rather than relying on CD sales in the wake of the download revolution, but charging ludicrous amounts for painfully short DJ set is not the way to go; anyone who’s been in the dance scene for over 15 years should know that an E trip doesn’t end before dawn.

It also doesn’t help to lie to broke teenagers that downloading their favourite band’s album is bankrupting the bands themselves. Bands make minimal amounts of money from album sales – the bulk of their income is from gigs and merchandise.

Every band I’ve ever interviewed tells me that playing live is the reason they’re in the music biz, so surely this shift in priorities can only be good for the actual musicians. Exhausting, maybe, but ultimately fulfilling and financially more viable.

Yet here we are, paying (or rather, not paying) $35 to watch 60 minutes of the Crystal Method at a show that ends before most headliners even hit the stage. Are the people at Live Nation that retarded, or are the owners of Guvernment really that bothered about their club night?

Are both so unaware of their immediate competition, or are they disregarding the fact that for only $25 (or a mere $15 with advance purchasing), Crystal Method’s audience might sneak off to Circa instead, where they not only manage to run a show and a club night at the same time but put their headliners on at the sensible time of midnight and let them pay until the come up starts to wane?

A few weeks ago, I paid (or would have paid) $40 for an hour and a half of the Prodigy, a band I’ve been near-obsessed with since before puberty, and still I felt marginally short-changed.

Few bands can get away with that, and the big suits at Live Nation, record companies and lacklustre clubs need to realise this before music fans start to abandon gigs like they’ve abandoned legal album purchasing, and fuck up the whole business entirely.

Haddock

Circa has a side door. I didn’t even know this.

It’s a special place where they usher in all the ‘VIPs’ and the people who’re going to gigs rather than the standard club night. Everyone is mega polite, and you come out of the stairwell behind the DJ booth on the third floor. It wrecks my head.

I feel like maybe life itself has a side door, and it’s open to the people that dare to go looking for it. Perhaps if we all looked a little sideways and refused to join the line, we’d find ourselves on the top floor all the time, a little bit closer to the sky surrounded by people being overtly nice to us.

Hopefully it would be a little more crowded than Smirnoff Ballroom is tonight; when we emerge from the secret staircase wide-eyed, the room has the ambience of a birthday party thrown by a bit of a loser before everyone turns up pissed to abuse the free bar and make crude jokes about the birthday boy’s mum.

We go for a wander and watch Randomland going on below us while we’re hidden from their view, a strange situation that makes me feel a bit like God would if he wasn’t just a figment of society’s imagination.

DJ Lush is doing his best to make people get away from the edges of the room and dance a bit, but two things are working against him: his own annoying and clichéd habit of launching into a wicked tune then doing that pointless ‘rewind’ thing, and the MC’s overuse of the tired phrase “Oh shit!” Alcohol and drugs are doing their bit though, and the anticipation of seeing the main event is making everyone antsy enough to move a little.

At around midnight Ed Rush pops up behind the decks and starts killing like there’s no tomorrow. With the help of a black MC and a white MC he creates some sort of musical vortex that finally drags everyone to the centre of the room and makes them go all ‘legs’. If this was a race war the whites would be fucked; the black guy kicks the white boy’s ass, and after a ‘switch’ runs into the crowd to get down and dirty. He turns up next to me and I yell “you’re awesome!” He looks into my saucer eyes, winks “thanks” and carries on doing his thing. What a guy.

The drugs I’ve taken aren’t really letting me do my usual strut, so instead I’m dancing like Herman Munster and my legs feel like they’re struggling through molasses. Matt Quinn, better known as Optical, soon appears next to his partner in crime and they proceed to take turns in a manner that’s way more cordial than you might expect of people in the ego-driven music business. One of them mixes that insane bass from Noisia’s remix of Painkiller by Freestylers into something else, and it sounds unbelievable to my hyped-up ears. Unfortunately I can’t really express this through the medium of dance, so I just have to grin a lot and lift my arms as much as I can.

Halfway through the set they flick a magical switch and the bass jumps from my knees to my stomach. From time to time I escape the vodka-sponsored space to sit on the smoking rabbits by the bar, and every time I go back notice that no matter how good the music is, something’s missing.

I think the problem is that the room is a little too small to be hosting this type of event. Andy C in the main room was much more affecting; small places might work best for bands, but a dance crowd needs the collective euphoria of many individuals all emanating happiness to really work.

I eventually leave by the front door, no longer feeling special but happy enough to have rolled along with the duo’s cranked tunes and excited by the flyers around the club announcing the upcoming Chase & Status gig….it’s going to be sweet.

Haddock