CocoRosie – The Adventures of Ghosthorse and Stillborn
Dan pointed me to CocoRosie and it took me a while to get the hang of their previous album Noah’s Ark which could shine with its odd combination of low-fi singing and strange electronic bits particulaly in K-Hole, Beautiful Boyz and Noah’s Ark. And while I remain a bit sceptic about the whole ‘folk’ and ‘ethnic’ hype that journalists distill from their press kits, their new album doesn’t disappoint.
The sound in The Adventures of Ghosthorse and Stillborn is a bit richer than that of Noah’s Ark (maybe a bit overproduced for my taste) and has a light hip-hop sound to it (or whatever too much bass in the beats and people speaking is called). Luckily that’s not enough to make me feel uncomfortable.
The album’s fourth chapter, Japan (Life is like a rollercoaster / it does flip and roll you over
), is somewhat childlike, despite its lyrics much fun and contains a weirdo opera piece. And my favourite so far is – naturally – chapter 7, Werewolf which is followed by Animals mentioning everthing from a solar eclipse to baby dinosaurs…
A final, positive, note should be made on behalf of their record company, Touch and Go Records who shipped the LP with a code that let me download MP3 versions of the songs for my iPod from their site. Just as things should work…
!!! – Myth Takes
!!!, a band with a name so ungooglable that they have to write chk-chk-chk along with it everywhere to make it more accessible. Their music mixes instruments with a hint of electronics which I started liking a while ago. In a way their current album Myth takes may be the album going where I would have liked The Rapture’s Pieces of the People we Love to go. Enjoy the disco-ish Heart of Hearts and the full eight minutes of Roll over Beethoven.
And if you ever needed an excuse to get a record player, this album may be it. It’s cover and sleeve art is such a finely detailed drawing that I doubt printing it in small CD size does it any justice.
Patrick Wolf – The Magic Position
Patrick Wolf released his third album, The Magic Position. In his case this means a third hair colour: After blond for the fantastic Lycanthropy and dark for his sophomore effort Wind in the Wires
we now arrived at a red that is brought into a somewhat childish context by the album’s cover art. As the image suggests, the album comes along more brightly and with a good helping of pop – in the album’s title track, say. A bit too much pop, people – including myself – might say.
While the album hasn’t lost the charme of Patrick’s style and mixing of electronic weirdness with proper instruments, I found it – particularly the first half – too far on the light and shiny side and thus lacking some of the power the previous albums had in songs like Tristan, Paris or even The Childcatcher. I guess we’ll have to wait a year to see whether this lightness is his new way or was just an escapade. Currently he seems to mix both happily. I’ll take bets for the new hair colour until then.
Kings of Leon – Because of the Times
Kings of Leon released their third album as well. I really liked their first album Youth and Young Manhood and their second album Aha Shake Heartbreak had a few good songs as well, so what about their current album Because of the Times?
I’m not sure to be honest. To begin I thought the album’s name was about the lamest you could have. And, while looking nice, the cover art just didn’t fit in for that kind of album. And the music is partially on the dull side as well. But it still contains a number of songs I enjoyed like McFearless or particularly Fans. A bit overdone perhaps, but good enough.
Arcade Fire – Neon Bible
Arcade Fire’s second full album Neon Bible definitely was one of the most eagerly awaited new albums for me in the past months. Their previous CDs were fantastic, seeing them live was outrageously good, so hopes and fears for the new album were high.
And while Neon Bible may not be as much of a revelation as its predecessor was, it is a solidly good album. The songs are good. But they have become quite boastful and pressing rather than keeping the understatement found on Funeral. My inner conspiracy-theorist is tempted to blame things like mixing and marketing for that, and I am curious to see how those songs work out when played live.
Neon Bible and Intervention are my favourite songs on the album so far and I am rather irritated by them putting No Cars Go from their first EP on the CD as well. Perhaps it’s just because it comes from a different context, but I keep thinking it doesn’t fit in.
When getting the CD, I knocked myself out and spent a few extra Euros on getting the ‘deluxe’ (or whatever they call it) edition. I can now recommend not doing that. The box it comes is too thick for what’s in there, so everthing makes a shaky noise when moving it and the CD uses even more space in the shelf. The extra flipbooks provide amusement for a minute at best and the cheap printing they used has one of the worst printing stinks I have experiecned (and usually I like that smell). In addition I find that the booklet is not printed nicely (a slight off-white shade for text just looks crap when rastered rather than using a special colour and even if that was intended by whoever did it, printing lyrics in justified text can safely be labelled stupid - or smart and reader hostile, which to me as a reader is the same).
The Rollercoaster Project – Drone 1
This is an odd one that nobody expected – least of all myself. Reader Mike of Dreamboat Records sent me Drone 1 by The Rollercoaster Project who makes what I’d label as ‘strange electronic music’.
The CD’s eponymous song is based on the same small rhythmical pattern being repeated over and over again at different pitches. And there’s also a remix version of that song. The third song on there, Algorar, has a touch of Sigur Rós to it but sounds more mechanical than them.
Technically the CD is interesting as well – not only does it come with an all black CD in nice packaging, the electronic bits of the music also prove to be a big challenge for compression algorithms. If you ever needed to convince someone that today’s iTunes quality can definitely case audible losses, this is the CD you want. Which of course means you don’t want to buy the CD at iTMS but rather as a CD or at Bleep. [Update: See below for Mike’s special offer to you.]
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah – Some Loud Thunder
To make the beginning of the year worthwhile my other big obsession, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah released their second album Some Loud Thunder in January. Of course I dug in for the full width of their offerings via Insound – which once again thanks to low American prices and Dollar was reasonably priced despite needing overseas shipping. As a bonus for pre-ordering there was even access to MP3s of the album a week or so before it was released – and thus a fortnight before it made it about the big ocean.
The album is all right. I think they overdid it by making the album’s opening and title track sound poorly recorded. It’s hard to see the point of faking bad recording quality. Of course I’m thrilled that the album contains the wonderful Satan Said Dance and other songs like Mama, Won’t You Keep Those Castles In The Air & Burning? directly follow the spirit of their first album. I’m not a big fan of the circuseque Encountering a Crippled Elephant and I note that in some songs like Yankee go Home there’s actually chance to understand the lyrics by listening to the music.
While I don’t think it’s the next big thing, I’m starting to like the last track ‘Five Easy Pieces’ which just cries to be used in the closing scene of a film.
Peter Bjorn and John – Writer’s Block
Peter Bjorn and John’s (no they don’t write Björn for some reason) Writer’s Block may very well end up being the most agreeable album of the year. I haven’t met anybody who doesn’t like it so far. And it certainly is enjoyable and relaxed. I hope we are not going to to grow sick of it by the time Young Folks has been played in all clubs and dozens of commercials. The wrong way round thing in the cover art keeps amusing me.
Malajube – Trompe L’Oeuil
Malajube are another great Canadian band (just what exactly do they do in Canada to achieve that?) Happy, screamy, jumpy, yet not aggressive and in French (or Québecois, I presume). I have been enjoying this CD a lot and it looks like Malajube are playing at Haldern this year…
Also Ran
And that’s not all. There have been many other albums out which I heard but don’t have the patience to write on or didn’t even bother to buy and just was a collateral listener to. Examples for those would be The View which saw a good deal of hyping but which seemed – to be polite – average to me. I guess it might sell well nonetheless. And just as I could appreciate but didn’t manage to be a big fan of Bloc Party’s first album, their new album A Weekend in the City ‘suffers’ the same fate. It’s all right, but it doesn’t do much for me. But hey, they have a lengthy song called Kreuzberg on there and my flatmate really likes them, so this is not going to pass me completely.
Similarly Maxïmo Park remain in their sphere of lacklustre pretence with Our Earthly Pleasures. I’m also starting to develop more and more of a dislike for their singer’s voice. Bright Eyes’ Cassagada can be listened to without problems – all charming but not that exciting or new. And the Klaxons who seem to be the dernier cri over in the UK are also all right, but not that compelling to me. Just like !!! they might be a good replacement for The Rapture’s album, though (all right, enough bitching about that one I guess).
Lovers of Swedish music may want to pick up the compliation Labrador 100 by the Labrador label – who are publishing The Legends for example. Everbody quite liked the song Fists Up by The Blow which made it onto one of our kitchen samplers, but the CD turned out to be a bit on the dull side. Little Barrie stay right on track by keeping their charming 1960s style and not being overly exciting at it. Jamie T apparently saw some serious hype a while ago, which went right past me and while it’s not exactly my cup of tea, there may be more than just ‘dull Mike Skinner wannabe’ to the music – in particular less hip hop – he seems to be playing at Haldern this year, so I may lend another ear to him. The Fratellis came to people’s attention by making their way into an iPod commercial (and their song Flathead used there is quite similar in style to Jet’s Are You Gonna Be My Girl which shared the same luck) but the music is too upbeat, poppy and dull for me. Not too bad but not as great as their first album, is The Rakes’ Ten New Messages which may just be a bit too clever for its own good and lack the bits that made Capture/Release rock. Finally, the German band Klez.e who sound, well, quite German. Not outrageously good but not too shabby either. Oh my indifference!
Worth recommending to anybody who likes Low or Múm is Explosions in the Sky’s new album All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone. Starting to sound a bit dull to me – Arctic Monkeys with their new album Favourite Worst Nightmare, whose title reminds me of The Hives and the writing on whose cover I loathe. Of Montreal’s new album Hissing Fauna, Are you the Destroyer? is quite interesting as well and Modest Mouse’s We Were Dead Even Before The Ship Even Sank seems promising as well. Those will take a few extra listens, though.
A final shout goes to Rob Hoeke. I really started liking his song Drinking on my Bed and when digging through old files recently I found an ancient MP3 with just that song again in a recording that’s much nicer than the one you can get on iTMS.
]]>- Notre Dame: Sur Ton Repondeur
- The Hit Parade: Autobiography
- Architecture in Helsinki: The Owls Go
- Final Fantasy: That’s When the Audience Died
- CocoRosie: Beautiful Boyz
- Go Home Productions: Essex Doves (David Essex / Doves)
- Pluxus: Igår, idag och from nu
- Stereo Total: Das Erste Mal (Mad Professors Dub Trip 3)
- The Strokes: I’ll Try Anything Once (‘You Only Live Once’ Demo)
- Clap Your Hands Say Yeah: Some Loud Thunder
- Dr. Dog: Easy Beat
- Islands: Rough Gem
- Malajube: Montréal -40°C
- Arcade Fire: Intervention
- Sufjan Stevens: The Henney Buggy Band
- Opal: Empty Box Blues
- St Christopher: All Of A Tremble
- Of Montreal: Wraith Pinned To The Mist And Other Games
- 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.
]]>I still have to make up my mind about the album in total. Some songs like Satan Said Dance which I’ve already heard at their live gigs predictably kick major ass. And others like the album’s title song Some Loud Thunder are great as well (absolutely great if the recording didn’t sound even crappier than usual). On the other hand I might end up with a bit more indifference towards this album as some of the songs towards its end are a bit dull or irritating (Upon Encountering the Crippled Elephant, say). And I’m not sure this ‘irritating’ will work out to be of the exciting kind in the long run.
But it has only been a day there will be many more opportunities to prove me wrong…
- Mogwai’s Mr Beast DVD
- The Flaming Lips’ The Fearless Freaks film
- Walk The Line
- Haldern 2005 recordings
- Clap Your Hands Say Yeah Live
- Panzerkreuzer Potemkin with the new Pet Shop Boys soundtrack
Mogwai
There was a ‘making of’ DVD coming with Mogwai’s Mr Beast album. While considering it to be potentially interesting, I was also sceptical because often bands you like will disappoint you when starting to talk. So did Mogwai. And that wasn’t because of their Scottish accents which made me turn on the subtitles, so I didn’t need to fully concentrate all the time just to understand their gibberish. The whole film was a shaki- and blurrily filmed mess. Post modern, pre modern, whatever. It didn’t show us much, except that Mogwai seem to have their own studio now where most of them hang out most of the time using their Gameboy, iBook, Powerbook – i.e. electro toys you can fold up. In between they mentioned that recording an album is terribly boring and takes ages. Well done, guys.
And while I have the opportunity let me mention once more how crap DVDs and their user interfaces are. The remote control for a DVD player (and similarly of Apple’s software DVD player) has around a million buttons (estimate, actual numbers may vary). Of which about 80% just don’t do anything most of the time because it’s ‘forbidden’ in some way. For example, it remains a mystery how to quickly cue forward 15 minutes, say. The remote of our DVD player has four buttons which look like they could do this. One that’s ‘search forward’, one that’s ‘skip forward’ and the two others are the up and right arrows on a cross of arrows on the remote. The best I could get the damn thing to do is slightly faster playing of the DVD (maxing out at 16 times the actual speed). Just compare this to hitting top and fast forward on a video player. And the bitter irony on this is that it’s entirely a fault of the user interface. DVD should rock in this respect when compared to video. And it can do so. But apparently only when using ‘rogue’ players like VLC which give you the handy scrubbing bar we all know and love and which’ll even let you take screenshots which Apple’s broken DVD player can’t.
So what’s the name of the font they use for the menu items in that screen as well as in the CD booklet?
The Fearless Freaks
The Flaming Lips are a great band and thus – in anticipation of their upcoming/new album perhaps – it seemed a good idea to see their own documentary The Fearless Freaks with footage from many of the countless years of the band’s existence. The documentary starts off slowly and almost disappoints by focusing almost exclusively on Oklahoma City and Wayne Coyne’s many brothers – both topics which may be relevant for the topic but which I could easily care more about…
It’s also educational. We learn about what the band did in their early years when starting off with roughly and having the plan to make up for any lack of talent in sheer noise. They even had video captures of that and, well, it looked a bit rough. But they didn’t give up and eventually started to be more experimental and charming, doing their car park events and the Zaireeka album (of which I bought a copy at some stage but still couldn’t convince enough people to come over and perhaps bring along a stereo to enjoy it – I’ve only done that once so far during a social of the wonderful Offbeat society).
And then, of course, came The Soft Bulletin which is both quite accessible and incredibly cheerfully brilliant. It must be one of the best albums of the recent past. Things moved on on a high but not quite as perfect level to Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots – which is featured in the opening post of this site – and have been looking cheerful since.
An interesting film. And looking around their website because of it I saw that they’re not only having a new album now but also sell surround versions of both The Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi. Which – judging from comments at amazon – are brilliant. Doesn’t help me of course with my proper stereo equipment but it’s about the first time I find myself thinking that the hassle of surround sound may be worth it.
And the Lips are touring. I’d quite fancy seeing them as that’s said to be brilliant. But they’ll only come to Hamburg and Köln at times which will be quite busy anyway. Let’s hope I can work something out for that.
Walk the Line
My parents don’t have many CDs. But one of them is a Johnny Cash CD. Which is probably the only audio CD that made it to my dad’s office and the first CD I ever played on a computer (using Apple’s nice CD player in System 7 and a CD drive with a caddy if you need to know). And that’s about as far back as my history with Johnny Cash goes. I thought it was too country-ish and my dad’s music so it couldn’t be cool anyway.
So I was surprised to find quite a cool cover version of U2’s One on some magazine CD many years later and realise that it has been done by Johnny Cash for his American Recordings III album. The IVth part of that series is even better and got me slightly hooked on the old man’s music without being overly enthusiastic. And thus I had a mild interest to see Walk the Line, particularly as everybody was saying that the film is worth seeing.
Unlike my own Johnny Cash exposure, the film deals with the young Johnny Cash, the beginning of his career and how he met and started fancying June. Thus I saw many things I didn’t know or particularly care about. But that wasn’t bad.
Haldern 2005
When standing in the rain at Haldern last year we got rather while seeing many great gigs. The only thing that was a bit annoying – apart from the weather – were the TV cameras there which meant that you had giant devices moving around at the front of the stage and some more of them further to the back. At the time I thought that this was a bit annoying and that operating such a camera must be incredibly boring. For some reason it appears that people filming music think their job can only be done while moving the camera. At least the cameras there were moving around in endless cycles of left-right-left-right.
But all that wondering and annoyance vanished when I could actually see the recordings (thanks Martin!) which were broadcast in WDR Rockpalast. Not only could I watch them in a dry and warm environment, compared to the crap you get to see on so-called music television these public-broadcaster recordings where nice and civilised. They have band names and info displayed along with the music as well as the song titles inserted as new songs started. And all that at exactly the time when you want to see the information rather than when it makes it more likely for you to stay on for the next ad break.
Great work. Very enjoyable. Not perfect, though, because they skipped the ‘less important’ bands who played early in the afternoon and thus missed Art Brut and The Coral – both of which I would’ve loved to have on that recording.
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
In some downloading frenzy I discovered a Clap Your Hands Say Yeah gig that was taped on video by a fan. To be honest it’s not the greatest recording ever. In fact it has quite a few amusing scenes where the heads of the band are just cut off or you see irrelevant details only. But then again, it’s nice to see a video like that. And this one is going to stay as I used the opportunity to try iDVD for the first time… which was painfully slow and failed to correctly predict how much film I can fit on the DVD but did produce a DVD with a cool menu to play in the DVD player… so whenever TV is bad now I can just watch some CYHSY gig instead.
Panzerkreuzer Potemkim
Броненосец Потёмкин in Russian or Battleship Potemkin or rather The Armored Cruiser Potemkin in English just has a good sounding German name, so I used that for the title. The classic by Russian (Latvian?) director Sergei Eisenstein is a supposedly well-known silent-film classic that I had never seen. So it was great that the Pet Shop Boys had made a new soundtrack for it recently and it thus got some new attention and was actually shown.
I thought the film was quite impressive in many ways. Not only does it look like making films must have been much harder back in the 1920s where cameras just wouldn’t give constant images as they do today, it also made me feel like all the things we see in cinema these days and which seem new and original should really just be déjà-vus. It’s like everything is in there. From the close-ups on people, to the uniformed masses to the pram rolling down stairs. Amazing.
I’m not a big Pet Shop Boys fan. Well, I remember that our music teacher presented us ‘Go West’ which was in the charts at the time as an example for the usual harmonic pattern of pop music from Mozart to today’s charts. That’s probably the closest I ever got to the Pet Shop Boys. While they seemed to be cool in a strange way, their music always seemed to be both too electronic and too poppy for my taste. And their soundtrack for the film was all right. Luckily a bit more on the electronic / techno-y side which went really well with the black and white and the kind of robotic movements you tend to see in such old films.
The only thing which kept irritating me were the subtitled intertitles (correct word?). I also wish those had been slower, quite a few of the Cyrillic letters can be deciphered and some of their words are quite similar to ours, so I often tried to figure out the Russian titles… and of course then failed to completely read the translated version before it was gone. Hmmm.
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As a local radio station had apparently pushed the gig quite a bit, I was a bit scared we wouldn’t get tickets at first but a quick trip to a travel agency in the afternoon sorted that for good – tickets for myself, Jean and Thomas. When we arrived, their support band, Dr. Dog played. And while they looked a bit freaky at first – including all the key elements from freaky beards, to freaky woolen hats to insane sunglasses – they played really well. Good music. I really like support bands being good!
Then Clap Your Hands Say Yeah came on. They looked exactly like they did in December. The singer occasionally having the stare of the guy on Scrubs, the bassist/keyboarder looking quite similar to my friend Nico (haven’t seen him for a while) and being the only bandmember to smile while playing, the other bassist/keyboarder and guitarists looking rather similar (and like one of the cooks in I Kina Spiser de Hunde) and the drummer wore a T-Shirt which was quite cool (but the words on which I forgot).
Oh, and they played their music. They did so much more energetically than the other time and it was fantastic. The fact that we easily ended up enjoying the show in the second row only helped that. And the fact that the crowd was in a good mood to go with the music this time helped even more. And the fact that the crowd absolutely loved my favourite song, Child Stars Upon This Tidal Wave of Young Blood topped things off. They also played a few songs which aren’t on the album, including Satan Said Dance which I already enjoyed in December and some Dylan or very Dylanesque song they played together with Dr. Dog in their final encore. A great way to end a gig.
It seemed that everybody enjoyed the gig very much. Me and my friends did for sure. So off we went to buy some T-Shirts, record for those who hadn’t got it and so on. And then when I picked up my coat, my friends spontaneously decided to get the LP autographed by the band and quite simply walked backstage tracking half of the band down and then finding the rest in other places in the club. They were very relaxed and cool and I still hate my friends for just doing this without me…
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Now that everybody’s here
Could we please have your attention?
There is nothing left to fear
Not now that Bigfoot is captured
But are the children really right alright alright?
But are the children really right alright alright?
But are the children all alright?
There is danger in the night
There are things we can’t control but
Will we give ourselves a fright
When we become less than human?
There are people who say why, oh why, oh why?
Now there are other ways to die, oh why, oh why
Oh why, oh why?
But upon this tidal wave
Oh god oh god
But upon this tidal wave
Oh god oh god, of
Young blood
Young blood
Young blood
Young blood
Young blood
Young blood
Young blood
Young blood
We are men who stay alive
Who send your children away now
We are calling from a tower
Expressing what must be everyone’s opinion
“They are going out to bars
And they are getting into cars
I have seen them with my own eyes.”
“America please help them!”
And they are
Child stars
Child stars
Child stars
Child stars
Child stars
Child stars
Child stars
Child stars
Child stars
Child stars
Child stars
Child stars
Child stars
Child stars
Child stars
Child stars
Child stars
Child stars
Child stars
Child stars
Child stars
Child stars
Child stars
Child stars
Child stars
Child stars
Child stars
Child stars
Child stars
Child stars
With their sex, and their drugs
And their rock and rock and rockandrockandroll
Hey!
And being mildly repetitious as well, you actually have the chance of understanding a word or two of those lyrics, no matter how sloppy they are pronounced. So the expression ‘Child stars’ stuck and I thought I should have a T-Shirt in that spirit. A bit of dabbling later, I came up with this simple handwritten affair:
Note the little tribute detail at the bottom. So, well done Mr. Sven, yet another T-Shirt design that’s most likely obscure enough to not be recognised by anyone… because, well, it refers to the last lines of the last song on a CD with severely hard to understand singing. But I still liked it and wanted that shirt.
After having learned about a local store that does the kind of printing I wanted for this in small numbers, we went there today and walked out with a shirt half an hour later. It was quite interesting to watch the shirt being made: They use a plotter with a knife instead of a pen to precisely cut the shape you want out of a special plastic material that’s then stuck to the shirt with heat and pressure as in the other T-shirt making techniques. Interesting to see that happen. And voilà:
See the shirt on my t-shirt site.
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And somehow they seem to start being successful and more widely known, playing outside the U.S. and even in Berlin, which I only learned about two days ago. With the gig being on a Thursday and me having to be at uni on Fridays for numerous seminars this was a challenge. But luckily I had passed on my Clap Your Hands Say Yeah goodness to Jochen and he was quite keen on going as well. Plus he has a car. Together this gave the borderline insane plan to drive the 350km to Berlin after uni, see the gig and then drive back to be back in time for seminars on Friday morning. The plan was made, tickets were bought, and Away we go…
Just that we didn’t. Jochen couldn’t find his car. And it turned out it had been towed. It hadn’t even been parked illegally to begin with but a construction site was set up where it was parked early this week… and, as has been learned now, you’re supposed to look whether such things happen at least every three days. With Göttingen being a place where you’ll only need a car when leaving town, this didn’t happen. So the car was gone and had to be gotten back, by going somewhere out of town, paying horrendous charges for the towing and even the parking of the car and our clever plan was close to failing. But we left anyway, as we figured that we could still make it if the driving was good.
I think I’ll skip the part of the story where we went the wrong way on the motorway (probably a situation where my strategy of not paying any attention to other people’s driving backfired) for a while before figuring out that we’d rather go the other way and head straight to us having a pretty good ride on the Autobahn, maxing the car out – which in the tiny black French car (identified by me as a blue Polo
) means going just 160 (km/h) and arriving in Berlin on time. The next challenge was to find the club. This looked tricky. An internet route planner had given us a route with around twenty little steps, each detailing where and when to turn in full sentences. Not very handy, particularly when two thirds of them could have been covered by the simple instruction to just stay on the B2 until we reach the Brandenburg gate…
We ended up finding the club at once and arriving on time – five minutes early even. Well done! On our way to the club we met some other people asking for the way – and for sure we could help. The other people were from Berlin. But from another part of town. And in Berlin people like to think that all their parts of town are extremely different and more exciting than the others. In fact they even asked us whether the club’s name, Mudd Club would be pronounced in an English or German way in this part of town. Eeeek!
I thought, I don’t know and you shouldn’t care
. But at least he had made the point of being from another – presumably cooler – part of town. We didn’t go on to elaborate that we’re not from Berlin at all – just didn’t seem worth it.
Anyway, the small club was quite full and we had to push a little to get reasonably good places a few metres from the stage. People were quite stubborn. But eventually things worked out reasonably well. Particularly because all the young kids these days seem to be quite small – making it OK to be standing behind them. After a short while the band came on and played the songs from their album and a few other ones.
While I didn’t expect the band to be the most offensively energetic one in the world – after all their music isn’t of that kind either – I found them a little bit too unenergetic in total. It almost seemed as if they were at bit tired, bored or ill. And only one of the keyboard/guitarists looked like he was having fun more than just occasionally. A bit more enthusiasm would have been nice.
;/a>
But then again, they did play their songs. And I still liked them. Particularly Upon This Tidal Wave of Young Blood is starting to be utterly addictive. Even something as presumably boring as Child Stars
being sung thirty times in a row is brilliant. I don’t know why… but I might have to make a T-shirt with those words. In fact, repetition of lyrics is quite common in their songs, but its never boring. They also played a new (unknown to me, anyway) song revolving around Satan which featured fierce repetitions of the word satan. That was rather cool. Particularly as the song was a bit more rhythmic than many of the others.
As it is with ‘young’ bands – they have less songs than you want them to have. And after having played their album, some extra songs and a Bob Dylan cover they ran out of further material (or just didn’t want to play anymore) and the gig was over. Too soon. I would’ve enjoyed some more songs.
Finally, let me mention that I thought the singer looks like the grown up brother of Zach Braff. Particularly when singing the really incomprehensible bits of lyrics and rolling his eyes when doing so, I was reminded of Scrubs…
After the gig, there was a party with music made by the Karrera Klub people. That was fun as well. Basically they started playing all the popular bands of the year. And some of the favourite bands of the previous years as well. From Arcade Fire to BRMC, from The Libertines to Babyshambles and so on. A little bit too obvious in the choice of songs perhaps, but enjoyable while it lasted and we had to leave.
After a brief walk through fresh and cold air, looking at night-time Berlin, we returned to the car and off we went… After more uneventful hours in the car that raised our awareness of the huge number of trucks driving around in the night we made it home by half past four or so. Astonishingly I managed to be in uni in time for our seminar at nine this morning.
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… and after only having seen yesterday that the wonderful Clap Your Hands Say Yeah will be playing in Berlin this Thursday (i.e. today), I in fact managed to convince a friend who loves their album as well that we have to go there. Which is borderline insane as it’ll mean uni, lots of driving, gig, lots of driving, very little sleep, back to the seminar at nine in the morning. But it should be great!
To make things even more fun, the back tyre of my bike went flat this afternoon and there’s no time to fix it now…
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So now I’ve got the CD and I’ve been listening to it a lot in the past six or seven weeks. Trying to describe it wouldn’t do the music justice as I’d end up describing the singer’s voice as whiny, the music as not being rock music and their song titles as too long. And then I’d have to explain how I don’t consider these descriptions to be negative…
Anyway, with Clap Your Hands! the CD has a wonderful intro, with Is This Love? it has a fantastic climax and around those it has numerous other great songs. Whenever I listen to the album, and particularly to The Skin of my Yellow Country Teeth, I am reminded of Arcade Fire songs. I was even tempted to say that Clap Your Hands Say Yeah could be considered a U.S. American Arcade Fire – but after seeing Arcade Fire live recently I’ve come to think that the comparison is only mildly appropriate.
As with many albums I enjoy I find it really hard to say why this one is great. But it is. And whenever its 38 minutes are over and I hear
They are going out to bars
And they are getting into cars
I have seen them with my own eyes.
America please help them!
And they are
Child stars (30 times)
With their sex, and their drugs
And their rock and rock and rockandrockandroll
Hey!Upon This Tidal Wave of Young Blood
I’ll sigh, reach for the remote and hit the play button again.
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