Some singles this week

Yeah, so the quality slides yet further. I thought that seeing as I am actually quite charty sometimes it might be nice to talk a little about some singles that I have either been feeling or not feeling in the last week. It might even become a regular thing. To be fair, I don’t think anyone reads this anyway, so who’s going to complain? Besides, it can’t be any worse than the one in The Guardian’s Guide. And here’s a revised (as of 25th April) version, to make it less dodgy.


This week I have probably been most impressed with Rihanna’s latest. Her debut single, ‘Pon De Replay’ was one I have a fondness for, due to the cool rhythm and tight, blatantly studio-created, harmonies. I was disappointed with her followup, which I remember little about, other than the video was on a beach. There was no attitude to it.

It was with much relief that I heard ‘S.O.S. (Rescue Me)’, then. In terms of modern updates of the ‘Tainted Love’ cover, it destroys the Marilyn Manson version as the mix is far more hectic and has this ‘Sad But True’* kind of rolling incessance to it. I think what I like most about it is the fact that until the very end there is no pause in the vocal. Verse-pre chorus-chorus, with no purely instrumental sections to detract from the addictive volition of the piece. The best bit is the non-segue of ‘You got me tossing and turning, I can’t sleep at night / This time please someone come and rescue me’. The ‘bwoy’ segment about halfway through is really saucy, too.

The mix really makes the most of the ‘Tainted Love’ ‘BOOP BOOP’, as well as the multi-tracked vocals, and just rolls on like a locomotive. It’s briliant, and thankfully there is no guest rapper (a la ‘Check On It’, ) to break the flow of the song and muck things up with stilted rhyming. Granted, there have been some great guest spots like Redman on Xtina’s ‘Dirrty’ and Ludacris on Ciara’s sexy-as-hell ‘Oh’, but in general the guest rappers pollute female-led pop songs far too often.


That is a fate which sadly befalls this next female-led pop song. I say ‘sadly’, on account of this being an otherwise prime slab of pop brilliance. I was very pleasantly surprised with ‘Say I’, by Christina Milian (featuring Young Jeezy, who is now presumably now able to ‘take it easy’). I’ve never been a particular fan of hers, though a couple of her singles were innoffensive enough. So I didn’t think this would be much of a song when it started, but it has a very smart choice of main sample (I forget where from) and a killer hook. Who could have known one letter could be so thrilling?

Rather than the smooth and sultry confidence of recent high-points of neo-R&B ‘Oh’ and ‘SOS’, this is instead an emotionally charged call-to-arms which actually recalls prime Aaliyah at times. And from me, that is about as high praise as this genre can receive. While this is not quite an ‘Are You That Somebody’ or ‘Try Again’ in terms of genre classics, there are moments like the second verse that really set the ol’ juices flowing. I dare you to really listen to the passion in the otherwise formulaic ‘You wanna dance then get down / You wanna chill then sit down’ line and not be feeling it.

Then we get to the guest spot, and it drops off. I’m sure his own material is fine enough (I have never heard it), but slo-mo lines like ‘The media talk so bad about me / But the streets they do so bad without me’ are so awkwardly-rapped (even with ‘clever’ splicing) as to make the mediocore stylings of 50 Cent come off like Ghostface covering Rakim lines. Poor is most definitely the word.

Thankfully, The Other Xtina brings the quality back with some Aaliyah-sounding ‘oh’s, ‘we can make it if we try’s and that briliant, minimalist chorus, and this is undoubtedly her best single yet. She looks like Toyah Wilcox at points in the video; not sure whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but it’s a thing nonetheless. And not even the mumbling of Jeezy can bring it down.


And Infernal’s ‘From Paris To Berlin’ has really been growing on me. It’s like a Scissor Sisters song, but without the overt coolness, and is much catchier. I think someone high up must have been unimpressed with Chris Moyles hating on it the other week (he said it was rubbish. Which it really is, but then he went on to champion those Brighouse bores, Embrace), as it’s got a massive push this week from Colin & Edith. You’ll hate yourself for liking it, but you’ll like it anyway.


Obviously, none of these singles are anywhere near as good as ‘Crazy’ by Gnarls Barkley, but that goes without saying. Can’t write it up here, though, as I got it in December. Still, it’s received deserved success, and is the best ‘hit’ single in years. And I heard the album on my semi-pimpin’ hi-fi (fully pimpin’ when I get that Cyrus CD player to match my amp) yesterday and it is grand.

There seem to be a couple of issues with it in terms of some songs ending prematurely, and the quality dipping a tad in the middle, but as a whole it is an album that is great. And at 37 minutes it is of a refreshing and perfect length for a poppy album. If only Outkast might learn from their Dungeon Fam brother…


And I have no idea how recent it is, but new to me is a song by the beautifully-voiced Feist, by the name of ‘Mushaboom’. I actually haven’t heard the original tune, but a Postal Service remix. Now, I like Postal Service (especially their ‘Such Great Heights’ single), and this remix is good, but I dunno. There is something very twee about the whole thing and it repels me ever so slightly.

I should hear the original (and the album, for that matter), as I really liked her cover of ‘Inside And Out’ from last year. And fool that I am, I only realised it was a Bee Gees cover recently. Erk. And in searching for a pic for this blog, I have discovered that she is not only talented but also pretty.

And deserving at least a slight mention is ‘Bjorkbeat’ by The Calico Sequence. It is, as the moniker implies, a slightly more dancey take on the lovely Ms. Guðmundsdóttir, mixing the excellent ‘Joga’ with the equally excellent ‘Pagan Poetry’. It’s short and somewhat throwaway, but is definitely worth a listen. Google their name, as they’ve stuck the song on their website for free.

* That’s a Metallica single (1992, off the top of my head), for those who do not know things they should know. Listen to it, and the self-titled album from whence it was pulled.

Live review: Boris, 13 April 2006


Sheffield Corporation.

Support: Grails

So this was a last minute deal for me. Thought I was going to be out of the country for this one, but an important job interview forced me to delay the holiday, meaning I was free this evening. Luckily, one of my allies in good music was up for the trip to Sheffield, tickets were still available, and the trip was planned!

Finding the venue wasn’t too bad; after some bizarrely convoluted directions, we found the venue was actually pretty much a straight line from the train station. So easy was it, combined with the lateness of doors opening (not the advertised 7pm), that we decided to get a drink at a nearby bar. A bar, it must be noted, that seemed far more posh (and therefore desirable, natch) from the outside than it proved to be. Still, they had Britvic.

Anyway, I was paranoid that the much-desired Boris merchandise would sell out, as it is wont to do (and in fact that’s what it did the first time I saw them. Fortunately I was second in the queue so I was unaffected). We went to the venue, which was now reasonably full.

Didn’t seem to miss out on much, as I got the CDs I wanted (exquisitely packaged Boris: At Last – Feedbacker – (Conspiracy Records, 2005) and the Mabuta No Ura soundtrack (Essence, 2005)), and a couple of t-shirts. Oh yeah, there was a particular shirt that had sold out in Medium Blue, so I got Medium Green instead. Big loss, I know.

First up was a local opening band, with all the derivative sound and awkward appearance that nomenclature suggests. It was OK, but nothing any fan of Dillinger Escape Plan or even Poison The Well has not already heard. Who cares, they quickly finished and I sought out a cloakroom.

Unfortunately there wasn’t one, so I was stuck having to hold my (now packed) rucksack for the whole show. (I refuse to put it on my back – not on the dance floor; I refuse to be one of those annoying people.) That would limit my mobility, but the main thing was seeing Boris and buying cool Boris stuff, so I could handle that.


Grails came on and they impressed me massively. For some reason I had always imagined them to be Japanese, but they looked and sounded very American.

This was instrumental music, with a really cool sound. Instinctually, my brain drew comparisons with No-Neck Blues Band and the brilliant last Earth album. So yeah, this was all about the long songs featuring drones and country-ish guitar sounds. I especially loved the acoustic guitarist going nuts for the noisier passages.

What seemed to be the main man (he was centre-stage) was quite the dapper fellow. Indie hair, coupled with a suit and very Krautrock bass playing. That, and he occasionally sat to dabble on his Moog. And on top of that, there were periods when he played his bass one-handed while handling effects with the other. One of those bands.

Like I say, the songs were long and, as a result few, in this support slot. Watching them, I wished I had picked up their CD instead of that second Boris t-shirt, but the CD will still be there in the future. They were informed late into the set that they had five minutes left, so they engaged in what seemed like a jam, and was a delightful slab of textural density and feeling. Good band indeed.

The weird thing is that, as much as I was enjoying the set, near the end my attention was drawn to Boris, and how much I was going to love their set. And after hella delay, during which the band was hiding behind a slight wall, they finally came on. Still hard to think they released Absolutego in 1996; they look like a set of teenagers!


When they started, the sound was absolutely massive (especially once attractive guitarist Wata was upped in the volume stakes). My friend had asked earlier if the band was slow or fast. I said they were pretty slow for the most part, but they brought the energy for this tour.

No performance of even a segment of the eerie, epic Flood (Inoxia, 2000), the band was definitely in the mood for 2002’s excellent Clutch-beating Heavy Rocks (also Inoxia). Don’t think they played my favourite, ‘Dyna-Soar’, but what they played definitely sufficed.

The set rattled through some really intense rock songs, and at point I was feeling quite sick. Ah, it had been a while; that used to be my benchmark for judging whether a gig was truly great (Neurosis and Iron Monkey definitely passed this test). The penultimate track was a long and beautiful noise-drenched affair that reminded me of Xinlisupreme’s classic ‘All You Need Is Love Was Not True’.

With the curfew beckoning, and our train in the none-too-distant future (we missed it), they finished with probably their finest moment, the glorious opener to Pink (DIWphalanx, 2005), ‘決別’. Or ‘Farewell’, as I think the forthcoming western Southern Lord release would have it. This tune is one of those exquisite blasts that, when you first play them, you just think ‘this is the best song ever’. You know deep down that won’t really be the case, but for that period, it really is.

The band did justice to its take on the My Bloody Valentine/Jesus & Mary Chain uber-noisy indie drone song, and I was lost in enjoyment of the moment, once more. I thought closing with this was a wise move, as it’s one of those songs you just can’t follow.

All in all, it was a great gig, save for a couple of (peripheral) qualms. Firstly was the lack of a cloackroom, the presence of which would have saved a lot of hassle. My main issue, though, was with the audience.

From the cretin who declared Metal ‘dead, innit’ while Grails were playing, through the 99% of the audience who didn’t move at all during Boris, save for chatting to their friends; to the moron I had to restrain myself from hitting (something I haven’t done in anger in about a decade) for his repeated anti-dancing sentiments.

Anyway, stupid, passionless crowd aside it was great. My friend spent the gig dancing in rather a camp manner, and came away from it loving Boris and wanting Pink. I came away from it having seen one of my current favourite bands in the whole world.

Just a shame the journey back to the station wasn’t as straightforward as the one to the Corporation had been. C’est la vie…

5 albums

…that changed my life. Yeah, I was asked to write a little something something at another board and I figured that seeing as it was quite (but not very) meaty that I might as well Blog it~! So here we are.

Poison – Flesh & Blood (1990)

This started it all for me. Ten years old, staying in a hostel. Some teenagers put headphones over my ears and I was blasted with the sound of rock. Found out who it was, got it bought. Didn’t belong to parents or a sibling – this was my own album and my first rock album ever. It is also the first album I have ever loved, and one of the two that really changed things for me.

Everywhere I went, for a good year or two, I took my cassette of this and my massive black Aiwa Walkman. That thing was indestructible. Anyway, I can go for months or years without listening to this, but whenever I return to it, I love it as much as I ever did and will always know all the words.

Kerrang! – The Album (1994)

I think it was between this and Megadeth’s Youthanasia in HMV that time. I picked this because it was two discs and featured loads of bands I had only read about. Plus Megadeth were on it anyway. This was very definitely an eye-opener in terms of Metal.

I spent ages not liking most of it. The set was divided thematically between the two discs: Kontemporary Kaos was the modern stuff, which included the likes of Pantera, Sepultura, Biohazard et al. it was too heavy for me, but I liked the Alice In Chains, Wildhearts and Duff McKagan tracks.

The Kerrang! Klassix disc was more what I was into. In fact, what changed my life about this was more the poll Radio 1 and Kerrang! ran in about 1992. that featured some classic rock songs that really educated me. ‘Stargazer’, ‘Stairway To Heaven’, ‘One’, ‘Youth Gone Wild’… and a lot of these found their way to this disc, so it was all good.

Eventually, though, there was a change. Slayer’s ‘Angel Of Death’ was on this disc. Too heavy for me. However, it was so heavy that my friends and I used to play it just as a ‘wow, this is heavy!’ freak show. Eventually it started to grow on me. Then I got into the heaviness on the more modern disc, and I was transformed into a proper extreme Metal fan…

Neurosis – Through Silver In Blood (1996)
…Which resulted in this. Long story short, I read a 1996 end of year poll. This album was nowhere near the writers’ lists, but was either top or near top of the lists of musicians I loved then (Burton C Bell, Patrick Wiren, Phil Anselmo). Still, I figured it was just a Black Metal album or something, so didn’t bother.

Flash forward to Las Vegas, August 1997. I’m in Tower Records and have bought the Limp Bizkit debut, Pantera live album, Spawn soundtrack and Fear Factory remix album. I have ten bux left and figure I might as well spend it. So I look around for something, and happen upon this album. I remember the recommendations and, thinking the artwork looked interesting, bought it.

Didn’t like it. It was too weird. The first track took too long to kick in. Man, it’s 12 minutes.

*Skip*

Track 2. This is just noises.

*Skip*

What the fuck?

*Skip*

This is taking ages to kick in as well, and made me jump when it did. This is 12 minutes too.

*Eject*

Anyway, we went on a road trip to a log cabin in Utah. Looking down at the eerie front room with its rocking chair from my sleeping position on a ledge over the door, the intro to ‘Aeon’ made sense. It was like the start of a horror film. On the way back, the starkness of ‘Eye’ really resonated when driving past the equally monumental mountains. Dusk drew in and I could see the Vegas cityscape on the horizon. Suddenly the apocalyptic darkness of ‘Aeon’ sounded like the most powerful soundtrack to my life.

Got back and they were bizarrely featured (for the first time ever) in the current issue of Metal Hammer. They were touring, and releasing back catalogue albums I had no idea existed. Saw them on 2 October that year and realised they were my favourite band in the world.

What’s weird is that, unlike pretty much everything else in my collection, this improves with age. The more music I hear, the more amazing I realise this album is. Equally, the more underground and experimental music I hear, rather than diluting the effect of this album, makes me appreciate it all the more.

Radiohead – Kid A (2000)

Metal as a whole was kind of turning me off by this stage. The genre had been reduced to some cartoon parody of its former self, thanks to bands like Coal Chamber, Limp Bizkit (half a good album does not a career make) and Static-X. I needed something new to save me.

I had got into OK Computer in 1999, after a couple of years of resisting. Reading an article in Q magazine in September 2000 got me really excited about an experimental dance album from Radiohead.

Around this time I was starting university and as a result was encountering changes on personal, social and aesthetic levels. The album came out at precisely the right time. I bought it on the morning of release (eschewing a lecture for it, which would become a recurring theme in my time in Manchester) and its greatness hit me from the start.

It didn’t sound overly experimental to me; in fact, opener ‘Everything In Its Right Place’ sounded quite 80s. But it was all good, and opened my eyes to the fact that what I had dismissed previously as ‘just dance music’ could be intellectually and emotionally engaging. Cue months of just buying electronic music and HipHop, as it kicked off a phase in my life of checking out any type of music possible, as long as I thought it might be good.

I now have varied taste in music, which covers many genres and decades. While I’m sure that would have happened at some point anyway, this album and the context in which I experienced it facilitated this as a massive and immediate shift in my life.

Probot – Probot (2004) This is not a classic album. It’s not even an especially great album. However, it most definitely affected my listening tastes – and therefore my life – in rather a big way. Years of dismissing most Metal had gone by, and I’d rather listen to Autechre than any Thrash band.

Anyway, I had been reading for years about Dave Grohl’s Metal project. Was kind of interested but not that bothered. Anyway, I had been reading interviews with the man, and his enthusiasm was infectious. I loved the idea of a young Grohl listening to his hardcore and Metal vinyl at home in Virginia, while rocking the Trouble and Corrosion Of Conformity in his beat-up truck.

So I got the album and it just… connected. It rocked, and it was almost as much of a return to the roots (Cavalera, Dorrian, Wino and the boys) for me as it was for him. I loved it. More importantly it kicked off a new appreciation within me for the heavy music.

I changed tack and went totally underground, into the world of Doom and hardcore that Probot reminded me of. My love for Electric Wizard, Khanate, Corrupted, Boris, sunnO)))… even Converge to an extent, can all be traced back to the Probot album getting me back into things.

Megadeth – ‘Holy Wars / The Punishment Due’ (1990)

So in this post I’m really just going to gush about a song that I’ve been into for [thinks] most of my life, now. However, it’s only recently that I have been hit by quite how masterful a song it is. Anyway, before I go any further it’s probably best for those ignorant of the greatness to take a listen to it for themselves, and for those in the know to revisit it:

Megadeth – ‘Holy Wars… The Punishment Due’

Right, we’re back. Yeah, I’ve always liked this song a lot, but for some reason viewed Rust In Peace as some kind of no-man’s land between the classic ‘In My Darkest Hour’ era and the streamlined pop-metal brilliance of (the first half of) Countdown To Extinction. However, this song is an absolute classic. The kind of genre-transcending thing that Metallica used to do so well.

The first thing that hits is the mania of the piece. Guitar notes descending like someone who’s running so fast down stairs that they’ve lost control of their legs and are now just falling. And on top of that we get the bizarro lead melody which sounds like someone learned to play it backwards before they learned it forwards. And it’s all more punk rock/hardcore than metal in its delivery, especially for 1990. There’s an immense aggression to it that even goes beyond what Slayer were doing at the time with their excellent Seasons In The Abyss.

What will undoubtedly be a sticking point for many is Dave Mustaine’s voice. It’s very high-pitched and weird. However, I reckon that works really well on the best Megadeth music. The very fact that he is not some gruff, masculine Hetfield/Anselmo/Thomas lends an emotional fragility to the bluster – the listener really gets the sense that this talk of holy war and general mayhem is not just something to get righteous about, but is actually very real. And scary.

Then we get that Spanish guitar breakdown (which I guess is supposed to sound Middle-Eastern), which leads directly into the more traditional realms of macho staccato metal. It’s a really rhythmic segment, with strangely phrased lines about ‘know-it-all scholars’. And it goes crazy, because that doesn’t last either. Classic riff kicks in (‘wage the war on organised crime’), and the emotional poignance is there once again. No idea what he’s singing about this time – Mustaine seems to have turned himself into a super-soldier, and there is a sadness in his voice when he sings ‘either way, they die’.

The song seems to have settled in now, as Dave tells us about ‘their’ mistakes – killing his wife and baby for a start. He prefaces the first solo with the warning of ‘no more mistakes’. And then it all breaks down again, into a thrash-fest that is punctuated by some ejaculation-delaying palm-muting. Then the proper nutty solo that Thrash of the time was so happily full of. And it’s a really good solo, too. Marty Friedman goes all-out in showing why he’s comfortably a peer of the likes of Kerry King and Kirk Hammett.


Oh, it turns out that the lyrical content of the second half of the song was inspired by the Punisher comics – explaining the ‘Punishment Due’ part of the title, natch. That lends more sense to the superhero lyrical content of this portion, as I thought it had just gone completely off-kilter. What was it with Mustaine in this era, and his dual songs? We have this one, as well as ‘Rust In Peace / Polaris’ and ‘Good Mourning / Black Friday‘… it’s actually a good idea, lending a sense of dynamic and variety to a type of Metal that can get samey in the wrong hands. Either that, or he had some kind of alcohol-fuelled ADHD.

Anyway, by the end of that it’s really roaring along. We get a really energising and heavy conclusion to a song that is a really fucking great six and a half minutes. So yeah, vague lyrical content aside this is a top notch song from the turn of a decade, and Megadeth really do deserve more props than they get. While I am generally very modernist in my listening to heavy music, I do wish more of the big modern metal bands had songs like this – most of them have nothing to compare. I suppose the closest would be System Of A Down with their excellent ‘Chop Suey!’ (though that doensn’t really get great until the second half). Worryingly, a very real modern equivalent would be ‘We’re All To Blame’ by Sum 41. I always hated them, but I’ll be damned if that’s not a great song.

It’s a shame Mustaine was so deranged due to drug intake during this time. He once said about the song: ‘It’s revolving around the way that war is imminent and it doesn’t really matter what country it’s in… Khadafi [Libya]… Khomeini [Iran]… It’s funky (sic) how these guys have weird names, these idiots that lead different countries. But it shows you… war’s war, no matter where you’re at.’

A bit bigoted there, but anyway, it’s sad that sixteen years later, Jihad is still as real a threat as it ever was, whether the ‘idiots’ in power are in Iran/Iraq/Afghanistan or England/America/Italy. I didn’t mean for this to turn into a political blog post (and it won’t), but it’s sad that people in power within each major religion never seem to learn from past mistakes.

‘Next thing you know, they’ll take my thoughts away’, indeed.