Dear Jesus.  If I’m good, I’d like to reincarnate as a Jimmy Eat World guitar case.  That would be amazing.

The same part of me that digs American alt-rock also digs Anberlin.  Their new album is on the way, and fingers crossed I might be interviewing them in a week or two.  Obviously if that happens, then it’ll be here.  For now, video for their new single Impossible, and thunk-words.

Enthusiastic.  This video’s a little try-hard and unsubtle in it’s aesthetic, enough so that I can’t really watch it more than once.  But ignore that.

Yeah, enthusiastic is the word you hear in accounts of them.  It’s sugar-rush guitar pop.  Not bad break-up song material, in that way that something will be cathartic at the right time.  Although a frequently unsung benefit (you’ll see the pun at the end of this sentence) is that they give rise to hours of hilarity watching overweight teenage shut-ins cover things like ‘Adelaide’ on Youtube.

If you have the vicious streak to let you find that amusing, in any case.

But they do other good songs.

If you like the guys vocals (I’m meh), follow up with his acoustic side project Anchor & Braille.  Who are still on a to-listen list right now, but that’s the joy of a ‘if you like this then you’ll like this’ recommendation – it’s really just more of the same.

(Also, there are terrible YouTube videos made to go with songs.  LOL.)

The times, they are a-changing.  Dylan did a video dressed as Santa.  I can buy a drink in a Greek Orthodox Church.  We can, if you believe the propaganda, ride a magical snake through the sea and get to France.  And now I’ve become probably the only person to actually visit this blog, as somewhere I keep easily accessible YouTube videos of all my favourite singles of the moments.  Well, I’ll go all the way.

Tris10 is someone I know that produces mixes on occasion.  I thoroughly advocate him as someone who knows how to produce an exceptionally listenable hour-long mix.  He’s not untalented at the mixing machines, but more importantly he also knows how to choose decent songs for a playlist in the first place.  It’s Movember again, and so, his Movember mix.  And more here.

Robyn does weirdly sexy videos.  She made me swell for short haircuts long before everyone started regressing to This Is England inspired manly pixie cuts.  Although this isn’t weirdly sexy.  This is kind of bluntly sexy.  Hmmm – objects that are blunt and sexy I could expand the analogy with.  Nevermind.  But even if you’re going to wear boots and ill-fitting trousers and cut your hair like Patrick Bateman, I could still find you pretty if you’re properly-European.

Sexy!

I don’t think I’d be able to stop myself breaking up with Robyn if we ever dated.  I get the feeling she’d write a song about how awesome I am, and everyone would start listening to it, and there’d be a video with an implausibly good-looking couple representing us, and it might feel kind of nice.

Dancing like it’s 2001 and still OK to break the cycle of one-night stands.  There’s nothing not to like!

I mean, I don’t know, she’s like Kylie.  Actually, she sort of fills the Kylie shaped hole in my life that I don’t want to share with my Mum’s record collection.  Which is comprised of Irish folk bands, and Kylie.  So a pop star who we all know is credible, and does songs with phat beats – I’ll take that.  Anyway.

She did a Dancing On My Own live performance on some-american-tonight-show earlier this year.  It was pretty hot.  In that distinctive and weirdly sexy way.

(The DANCING at 1:36!  More people must dance like that!)

Let’s say that you can roughly rank songs with the following formula

((Playcount + (plays in the 1st week you got it)) * how many times louder than normal conversation you sing the lyrics) – whatever percentage of the song you don’t know by heart.

This song gets MILLIONS of MEANINGLESS POINTS.

I could care less that this is the 2nd Crystal Castles song to make it here.  Because fuck you, it’s a Robert Smith song.  That’s Robert Smith, of The Cure.  A band I understand I should be more familiar with.  And after this I will be.

The basic story is Not In Love, from the 2nd CC album, got passed along to Smith, a human analogue of Jack Skellington, for editing and new recordings of vocals.  And much as I hate to say it, it’s a huge improvement.

Crystal Castles soundtracking a guy who has a good voice.  It’s 80’s and vaguely-goth or whatever, but that’s how I like my undead male vocalists.  It’s all oddly compulsively listenable, and still fresh this being the first week of listening.  It’s a cover album I’d buy.

saw your picture hangin’ on the back of my door

won’t give you my heart

no one lives there anymore

and we were lovers

now we can’t be friends

fascination ends

here we go again

cause it’s cold outside, when you coming home

cause it’s hot inside, isn’t that enough

i’m not in love

could it be that time has taken it’s toll

won’t take you so far, i am in control

and we were lovers

now we can’t be friends

fascination ends

here we go again

cause it’s cold outside, when you coming home

cause it’s hot inside, isn’t that enough

i’m not in love

i’m not in love

i’m not in love

we are not in love

we are not in love

we are not in love

we are not in love

I was once told that a good way to test a song, or even just use a song and set yourself to a particular pattern mentally, is to set it to repeat and let it wash right over you and your aural tastes. Whitewashing with the noise, and setting a heartbeat to the strum of percussion or bass or whatever, and then afterwards, only afterwards, letting yourself start the slow process of articulating thoughts on the subject.

Although I used to hate a room-mate-next-door for doing just that with Vampire Weekend. I never claimed it was a social habit.

So anyway. I’m what, 15 listens in to Brooke Fraser’s Something In The Water, and it’s definitely the song that makes me happy right now, so into this increasingly protracted project it goes.

Her name is Brooke Fraser. She is from New Zealand, which is good for her. She’s also quite tall. If you take the word of the few notes creeping up from the free-music-press, then this is pretty much all that will differentiate her from Feist to you. And they’re not wrong.

Simplistic, with drums and whistling and doo-doo-doo’s and handclaps liberally sprinkled throughout. If I were so inclined and wanted to go all musically-literate, I’d grab a female singer from my Folk(tronica) compilation disc, and draw comparisons.

(Take a break from writing to look for images to embed later. God damn, she’s attractive too. Attractive, folk artist, earthy looks, tall, from New Zealand – and pretty! She’s totally perfect. I’m in love.)

I probably like this a little too much. My tastes drag me too much towards indie teenagers with tight cloths singing and sighing about why no one understands them, and how much everyone is missing out on, even if frequently that seems to amount to just the simple pleasures of sitting in a kebab shop around central London at 2 in the morning, wearing cardigans and making ennui-laden confessions of, not love, but maybe a vague affection for a girl who cares just a little for the external world as you do… Well, you get the idea. And a pretty girl singing and clapping about the occasional glass of red wine (just a glass or two), and simple teenage infatuation and getting a little crazy in the head over a special someone – it’s different, and it’s at the heart of the songs that make me smile, through their simple and appreciated, though so infrequent, denial that the world is a place built for the narcissistic, bored, and narcotically motivated.

I mean just look at those eyes?

“This is what I mean about a feeling of guilt if I try to write something negative here. No one likes the kid at the party who doesn’t dance to anything because it’s too poppy. Once upon a time, when I was doing interviews for Etcetera, we’d filled up positions, but someone wrote in asking to do music reviews. I wanted to fuck him around a little, so I asked for 150 words on Lady Gaga’s Just Dance. He sent in something about it being repetitive or bourgeois, or something like that – everyone knows the type. Altronic nutters. So I asked him to write it again, but entirely positive.”

More language games.

I’m not a fan of death-death metal. So I don’t listen to any death-death metal. When it comes to choosing a least favourite song, it’s a problem. I don’t know any of the songs of the genres that I don’t like, so how do I hear them in the first place, in order to later not like them?

Well, exactly.

So I have no choice but to go for something which other people like – it’s not a forceful move in any direction – I aint no musical bitch, I mean to say.

So. A song which seems to have a legitimacy to whatever it does that I don’t get? It was going to be something Vampire Weekend, but a self-described ‘altronic indie Etonian’ I know might murder me in my sleep. And incidentally, altronic doesn’t spell-check – so now I’m pretty sure he made it up completely.

Without further ado…

Animal Collective – My Girls

(Oh, for God’s sake, it’s got more than 4 million views. LIKE BETTER MUSIC WORLD.)

Forget the cover that gives me a headache. Maybe that’s where all of this comes from anyway. I sit here, it on repeat to try and get something out of it. Something to write on. And nothing.

What’s missing here….what’s missing here is for one thing, any sense that these guys are having fun with what they’re doing.  Am I a girl for saying that?  Probably.  This is a wierd mixture of anthemic electronic, shoe-gazing, nods to Arcade Fire who always seem to work in an element of a Village Fair chorus SOMEWHERE on an album, and more and more and more, summing to seemingly naught.

Phew.

I can definitely see why it’s cool.  And I’m really happy for them.  I have no doubt that when Animal Collective chill collectively as animals on Tracy Island or whatever, they are doing so next to a swimming pool full of heroin and powdered ecstacy tablets, and they’ll have all the animals they can have a merry something with.  These things cost money.  And they get money from record sales. And no one would ever admit to not liking this.  It’s got a cool cover!  And synths!  And it’s different!  And it’s not pop music!  And the lyrics.  Etcetera.
Actually, attention is due there.  The lyrics.

Wibbly-wobbly-wibbly-wobbly-wibbly-wobbily for what, 4 minutes? 5! 5 minutes! Seriously? The vocals… the only words that stand out are Little Girls. Transcribed.

There isn’t much that I feel I need A solid soul and the blood I bleed But with a little girl, and by my spouse, I only want a proper house I don’t care for fancy things Or to take part in the freshest wave, But to provide for mine who ask I will, with heart, on my father’s grave On my father’s grave (On your father’s grave) I don’t mean to seem like I Care about material things, Like a social status, I just want Four walls and adobe slats For my girls

I swear I’m hearing something that’s sampled in a Sleigh Bells song. Well, at least that’s something.

This is what I mean about a feeling of guilt if I try to write something negative here. No one likes the kid at the party who doesn’t dance to anything because it’s too poppy. Once upon a time, when I was doing interviews for Etcetera, we’d filled up positions, but someone wrote in asking to do music reviews. I wanted to fuck him around a little, so I asked for 150 words on Lady Gaga’s Just Dance. He sent in something about it being repetitive or bourgeois, or something like that – everyone knows the type. Altronic nutters. So I asked him to write it again, but entirely positive.

He refused on moral grounds. I mean, really? The taking music too seriously…critiquing things…I’m not sure how I feel about all this. Plenty of people like this strange collective. Good for them. I’m not trying to start fights or something. So how the hell do I even talk about a song I don’t like?

Well, for one thing I say I started listening to Kate Nash after 3 replays. And even now, I can’t remember what the damn thing sounded like. Except something about Little Girls. And that’s the most haunting echo a song has ever left on my mind. I don’t like. I should have stuck to Vampire Weekend. I could have talked about that ****ing riff in A-Punk.

Ah well.

Favourite….. Hmmm.

What’s my favourite place to go on holiday is a totally different question from what was my favourite holiday – you see?  Love Paris the city, but spent a month there once in the company of an ex-girlfriend – a totally different experience to any other visit there.  So it’s a favourite city, but nothing like a favourite vacation.  California is sort of the reverse situation there.

So, I’ll take favourite here to be something like ‘a song you like, for just being a song, and nothing else’ – admiration of a song on its own merits, nothing related to how anything except fuck-yes-one-more-time approval – an existentialist favouritism, if you like.  ‘Being and Nothingness and Pounding Pounding Techno Music’

God damn it’s early.

So mein neuter song?

Alice Practice – Crystal Castles

I hope you weren’t listening to that in a library with headphones on full or anything.  Or even worse, no headphones.  Well, now you know.

And yeah, the irony, you’re probably thinking, that the song I like most just for being a song sounds like Optimus Prime victoriously raping Howler Monkeys.  The screeching, I’m pretty sure, isn’t meant to be understood.  Closest transcription I can find is-

“hi scars, will heal, soon, this drug in us, spins the earth, down. said, i live low i lisp, i die sugar shooting bled with deadbeats only crawl so your sad eyes quite christian blood drop it, it’s dead, we dropped down, and took the body home. sad eyes. scars, like chopping daggers see you’ll never walk only stagger. sad eyes, cry crimson, blood”

And you thought your adolescent years were challenging.

The song comes from discovery of blogs back in them sixth form days.  Crystal Castles soundtracked my revision, my mornings of exams (played on repeat, loud enough to be heard two blocks away, at 7am – those were the days), and my summer of nervous anticipation.  And then I saw them live the day I found out I’d missed my grades.  And it made everything better.

I should talk more song stuff.

Well, hear it somewhere loud.  The crunch-crunch-crunch of the start is immune to overplay – you don’t switch over Alice Practice.  The album wears after a while, mores years from release, but this holds strong.

It wasn’t a lead single – although this is a matter of contention.  Early in their career, CC did an interview for the now long defunct Plan B magazine with Kieron Gillen, where they told him that Alice Practice was basically just what the name suggested – a test recording of the lead singer, Alice Glass, practicing with the microphone.  Then it got put up on Myspace and before you know it… It’s appearing on blog posts under the title ‘My Favourite Song’.

Back on topic.

There are memories behind Alice Practice, but this isn’t why its mine.  Its because it’s loud, no matter the volume, and fresh no matter how long you leave it on repeat.  Cathartic in anger and rejuvenating is lethargy.  And all these kinds of things.

Oh,  one more story.  Roger Crisp, Philosophy professor here at Oxford, and ‘The Bollocks’ when it comes to aesthetic theory (I’m told), compared Alice Practice to the chanting of Gregorian Monks.  I went up to him after the lecture and said ‘That was awesome’.  And he gave me a look of such revulsion and pity, that I never spoke to him again.  True story.

Play it!  Play it loud!

I SAID LOUD!

http://www.myspace.com/crystalcastles