1. The Electric Soft Parade: If That’s The Case, Then I Don’t Know
2. Stars: The Beginning After the End
3. The Radio Dept.: Why won’t you talk about it
4. The Lovekevins: Tamagotchi Freestyle
5. !!!: Heart Of Hearts
6. Friska Viljor: We Are Happy Now (La La La)
7. Love Is All: Busy Doing Nothing
8. Tokyo Police Club: Cheer it on
9. The Gossip: Standing In The Way Of Control
10. Operator Please: Just A Song About Ping Pong
11. Shout Out Louds: Blue Headlights
12. CocoRosie: Werewolf
13. Múm: Guilty Rocks
14. Spoon: You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb (Garage Reverb)
15. Johnossi: Man Must Dance
16. Rob Hoeke: Drinking On My Bed
17. Kings Of Leon: Fans
18. Feist: One Two Three Four

1. Notre Dame: Sur Ton Repondeur
2. The Hit Parade: Autobiography
3. Architecture in Helsinki: The Owls Go
4. Final Fantasy: That’s When the Audience Died
5. CocoRosie: Beautiful Boyz
6. Go Home Productions: Essex Doves (David Essex / Doves)
7. Pluxus: Igår, idag och from nu
8. Stereo Total: Das Erste Mal (Mad Professors Dub Trip 3)
9. The Strokes: I’ll Try Anything Once (‘You Only Live Once’ Demo)
10. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah: Some Loud Thunder
11. Dr. Dog: Easy Beat
12. Islands: Rough Gem
13. Malajube: Montréal -40°C
14. Arcade Fire: Intervention
15. Sufjan Stevens: The Henney Buggy Band
16. Opal: Empty Box Blues
17. St Christopher: All Of A Tremble
18. Of Montreal: Wraith Pinned To The Mist And Other Games
19. David Vandervelde:Jacket

And there’s cover art as well which can be seen as a spring-time tribute to Zapfino.

Boo for iTunes which seems to cover less than 50% of the songs used when submitting the compilation as an iMix. And Last.fm aren’t much better.

And then the question about ‘Sampler Ⅲ’ started to appear. And here it is:

1. The Strokes feat. Regina Spektor: Modern Girls and Old Fashioned Men
2. The Cloud Room: Hey Now Now (cool video as well)
3. Ben Folds: Such Great Heights
4. Architecture In Helsinki: Wishbone (Rah Teti Remix)
5. Love Is All: Ageing Had Never Been His Friend
6. CSS: Let’s make love and listen death from above
7. Tegan and Sara: Where Does the Good Go
8. Sufjan Stevens: Chicago (Acoustic)
9. Band Of Horses: St. Augustine
10. Mobius Band: A Hint of Blood
11. We Are Scientists: Hoppípolla
12. The Swingle Sisters: Little Organ Fugue (a capella Bach goodness from the Thank You for Smoking soundtrack)
13. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah: Cigarettes (BBC 6 Music Gideon Coe Session)
14. Teddybears : Punkrocker
15. Ghislain Poirier: La Blessure
16. The Thermals: Here’s Your Future
17. Tapes ‘n Tapes: Insistor
18. Snow Patrol: Hands Open
19. The Raconteurs: Crazy (well, everybody’s covering it…)
20. Tiger Tunes: Highly Visible & Out Of Control
21. The Pipettes: Your Kisses Are Wasted On Me
22. Nouvelle Vague: Ever Fallen In Love

Let’s see how well that mix goes down. With it’s odd combinations of unexpected cover versions (We Are Scientists doing Sigur Rós – I am tempted to add a !!!!!LOL after that) and stuff from the internets it may have a slightly harder time finding friends.

Add to those ‘reports’ their record ‘reviews’ which also invariably seem to serve mainly to point out what extensive back catalogue and general music the writer can refer to for coming up with inadequate comparisons to other bands (although in many sad cases that back catalogue doesn’t seem to be all that comprehensive), to point out that the writer actually has read all the PR material and other press reports and jokingly mentions their key points in the first sentence before going for his own two paragraphs of fame and you’ll start thinking Zhil byl korol’ kogda-to, Pri njom blokha zhila (damn have to find out how to write this properly in cyrillic letters…)

That isn’t to say that good articles don’t exist. And it’s great to read them. But the number of people who are able – both from their musical background, their knowledge of the subject at hand and their writing skills – to write good articles seems to be minute. So, invariably you end up getting music magazines ‘for the train journey’ or ‘for the CD’ rather than ‘for the music magazine’ (actually the free German magazine Intro tends to have nice photos as well).

And when I bought the Rolling Stone (Germany) this week, I actually mainly did it to read the report about Haldern for which they bought one of Richard’s photos (I’m afraid he’ll have to suffer from Almost Famous style remarks for this in the forseeable future…). And that article was, err, rather bad, making the weekend sound rather unpleasant, which up to that one rainstorm it wasn’t.

But then I listened to the included CD. It was from their “rare tracks” series – which can be quite annoying. And indeed many of the songs on there are a bit annoying. But somehow it’s one of the weirdest and most fun compilation CDs I got from a magazine in a long time. With a title of Another Time, Another Planet they promise A journey into far-out sound and we get just that. You may want to grab a copy if you can:

1. Joe Meek: I Hear A New World
2. Butthole Surfers: The Hurdy Gurdy Man
3. The Flaming Lips: Take Meta Mars
4. Hawkwind: Silver Machine
5. Shadowy Men On A Shadowy Planet: Shake Some Evil
6. Yma Sumac: Chuncho
7. Tiny Tim: Tiptoe Through The Tulips
8. C.A. Quintet: Underground Music
9. Jad Fair & Daniel Johnston: I Met Rocky Erickson
10. The Residents: This Is A Mans Mans Mans World
11. The Royal Macadamians: Houseboy
12. Joe Meek: Entry Of The Globbots

1. Mogwai: Acid Food
2. Band Of Horses: The Funeral
3. Architecture In Helsinki: It’s 5!
4. The Subways: Oh Yeah
5. The Kooks: Naïve
6. Louis XIV: A Letter To Dominique
7. Cold War Kids: Hospital Beds
8. Micah P. Hinson: The Leading Guy (all those great MP3 downloads come from a post at stereogum)
9. Man In Gray: Sleeping
10. They Shoot Horses Don’t They?: Emptyhead
11. The Flaming Lips: The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song
12. Yeah Yeah Yeahs: Mysteries
13. Dirty Pretty Things: Doctors and Dealers
14. Be Your Own Pet: Fire Department
15. Rogue Wave: 10:1
16. Josh Rouse: Quiet Town
17. Kind of Like Spitting: Share the Road
18. The Beatles: Rock And Roll Music (intended as a tribute to Populärmusik från Vittula)
19. The Undertones: Teenage Kicks
20. Peter Licht: Safarinachmittag … and some German stuff to finish things off
21. Element Of Crime: Im Himmel ist kein Platz mehr für uns zwei
22. Die Sterne: Aber Andererseits

Go and enjoy! In a tongue-in-cheek-way, I keep thinking of the Kind of Like Spitting song as a piss-take on the blogging world. After all it contains (if out of context), the lines I’ve had some really nice people // say some really smart things to me which pretty much seems to be all that the well-known blogging people write about these days.

1. Sigur Rós: Untitled
2. Ghinzu: Sweet Love
3. Bright Eyes: Lua
4. The Postal Service: Against All Odds
5. Adam Green: Kokomo
6. Nouvelle Vague: Teenage Kicks
7. The Clientele: Losing Haringey
8. Kings of Leon: Milk
9. My Morning Jacket: Wordless Chorus
10. The 5.6.7.8’s: Bomb The Twist
11. The Avalanches: Frontier Psychiatrist
12. The Cribs: I’m Alright Me
13. The Killers: Somebody Told Me
14. The Wannadies: Hit
15. Das Pop: Du
16. Stereo Total: In/Out
17. Peter Licht: Sonnendeck (Radio Edit)
18. Hund am Strand: Jungen Mädchen
19. The Bravery: Unconditional
20. The Streets: Fit But You Know It
21. Whyte Seeds: Slow motion

It may earn you some respect in the eyes of some onlookers when you’re handling the pretty red transparent vinyl of The Postal Service’s Give Up or the cute cover of Timid Tiger’s and a Pile of Pipers, but I doubt that it does any good (in fact I still have the impression that the Give Up LP just doesn’t sound as good as its digital cousins). So in a quest for less respect, I decided to bring along some home-made compilation CDs as well. They tend to be perfect for the task – you can simply collect all the songs you might consider playing in a playlist, turn that into CDs and – after a bit of rearranging and fiddling – there you are ready to go with half a night’s music handily on a few CDs.

But of course things aren’t all that simple. At least not for people like myself who tend to make things unnecessarily complicated for themselves. That rearranging and fiddling I mentioned above needed some extra attention. If I’m burning the CD anyway, I should try to make a CD that’s not just there for convenient song storage but that’s good to listen to as well. Thus I may have to fill in some extra tracks to get a reasonably smooth curve from the obscure to the popular back to the obscure, to hide some unknown tracks between related well known ones, to mix the new and the old, the current hype and my favourites without leaving the flow. And like that the simple exercise in playlist building turned into a slightly longer exercise in compilation disc making. Leading to an outcome that I’ve extensively enjoyed in the kitchen for the past week:

Your Final Lullaby

1. Patrick Wolf: Wind in the Wires (clifftop demo)
2. Mew: Am I wry? no
3. Nada Surf: Where is My Mind
4. The Kills: Gypsy Death And You
5. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah: Satan Said Dance
6. Infadels: Can’t Get Enough
7. Arctic Monkeys: A Certain Romance
8. The Bravery: Public Service Announcement
9. Liars: You Know I Hate Stupid Phones
10. ¡Forward, Russia!: Nine
11. Wolf Parade: Dear Sons And Daughters Of Hungry Ghosts
12. Hot Hot Heat: Goodnight Goodnight
13. The Libertines: Don’t Look Back Into the Sun
14. Spoon: Small Stakes
15. Bloc Party: Banquet (Phones disco edit)
16. The White Stripes: Blue Orchid
17. Hard-Fi: Seven Nation Army
18. Shout Out Louds: Please Please Please
19. Mansun: Drastic Sturgeon
20. Fantastic Plastic Machine: L’aventure Fantastique

1. Caribou: Drumheller
2. Arcade Fire: Headlights Look Like Diamonds
3. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah: Is This Love?
4. Razorlight: Golden Touch
5. Shout Out Louds: Please Please Please
6. The Cribs: Direction
7. The Killers: On Top
8. Maxïmo Park: Graffiti
9. Mando Diao: White Wall
10. Bloc Party: Banquet (Phones Disco Edit)
11. Timid Tiger: Combat Songs & Traffic Fights
12. Hard-Fi: Stars Of CCTV
13. Chikinki: Like It Or Leave It
14. Caribou: Pelican Narrows
15. Patrick Wolf: The Libertine
16. Kaizers Orchestra: Maestro
17. The White Stripes: Blue Orchid
18. Little Barrie: Free Salute
19. Kings of Leon: Milk
20. Brian Wilson: Old Master Painter / You Are My Sunshine

Sample most of it at iTMS and give me a nice star rating while you’re there…

1. What a Waster, The Libertines
2. Dreaming of you, The Coral
3. Take It Or Leave It, The Strokes
4. Hotel Yorba, The White Stripes
5. Are You Gonna be My Girl, Jet
6. Joe's Head, Kings of Leon
7. Little Boy Jr, Mando Diao
8. Bandages, Hot Hot Heat
9. Pin, Yeah Yeah Yeahs
10. Beat City, The Raveonettes
11. Sink Venice, Ikara Colt
12. Whatever Happened To My Rock'N'Roll, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club
13. MF From Hell, The Datsuns
14. Brace And Break, The Thermals
15. The Bitter End, Placebo
16. Plug In Baby, Muse
17. Say Hello To Angels, Interpol
18. Fashion, The Robocop Kraus
19. Small Stakes, Spoon
20. Myxomatosis, Radiohead
21. Steak For Chicken, The Moldy Peaches
22. What A Waster (sung by Adam Green), Adam Green/The Libertines

Notice how many songs are available at iTMS. Not bad at all. Does anyone else see the 'need' for iTunes being able to publish your own playlists with references to iTMS inserted wherever appropriate? That could be fun. And if Apple weren't just a slave to the music industry they'd do the decent thing and give you a cut of the money they earn on your playlists – or at least a free song, say.

Mac iTunes users: Fancy a quick and dirty Apple Script to turn your playlists into HTML? Make sure to have double clicked a song in the playlist before running it. Unfortunately that does not include the links to iTMS.

The CD is called It's not saying a doctor that makes me a doctor – it's the white coat that makes me a doctor. That's quite a long name for a CD. It is related to the CD's cover which features a photo of Dan ingeniously dressed up as Dr. Zoidberg, who in turn contributed the CD's name in some Futurama episode or another.

As for the tracks, I couldn't resist putting in the Futurama slant at the beginning. These are followed by a few electronic tracks because Dan likes that sort of thing. Putting in a whopping fourteen minutes of Alec Empire right at the start may be pushing it a bit too far – no risk, no fun. Then come more pop-ish tracks, including the overwhelmingly brilliant In/Out by Stereo Total and a cool semi-German version of Love Me Till Tuesday by Bowie. Then a bit of alternative stuff and some German songs to end with, having in mind that Dan is probably the most open for strange German bands of my friends in England.

Here come the tracks:

1. Futurama Theme
2. New World Order (1 & 2), Alec Empire
3. Paper Tiger, Spoon
4. The Love Program, Das Pop
5. Canabis, Ska P
6. In/Out, Stereo Total
7. Lieb Mich Bis Dienstag, David Bowie
8. Song For Jedi, Dionysos
9. All I Really Want, Barry Bliss
10. You Don't Have To Be A Scientist To Do Experiments With Your Heart, Jeffrey Lewis
11. In Love, The Datsuns
12. Seid Ihr Mit Mir, Surrogat
13. Wahr Ist, Was Wahr Ist, Die Sterne
14. Michael Ende, Du Hast Mein Leben Zerstört, Tocotronic
15. Reiselust, Fehlfarben
16. Ein Jahr (Es Geht voran), Fehlfarben