Saturday, June 26, 2010

Anthems by gaslight

Music
In recent days' I have become pretty obsessed with 'American slang' by The Gaslight Anthem.  I downloaded their previous album, 'The old '58 sound' ages ago and listened a few times, but not much (note to self: go back and check it out again!).  A positive review in Uncut of their new one, however, send me back to eMusic and a new download, and I bloody love it (second favourite of the year so far, after you know who).  It has such energy and melody and is perfect for the summer, and I really don't get the reviews which go on and on about their debt to Springsteen; obviously there are things in common but their songs are tight and short and modest, not always things to be said about old Bruce, and I feel a strange celtic strand in their too, with regular reminders of the Pogues for some reason.

The first video clip below is an acoustic version of the title track, 'American slang', which shows off their singers great voice (and tattoos) wonderfully:


Next up is a live clip of 'Boxer', which would have to be good for me to get past the sacreligious baggage of the title, and does it brilliantly, with a great intro (not as good live as on album):



'The Queen of lower chelsea' is slower but has a really cool beat and their vocals and harmonies which are excellent all over the record are well to the fore here:



The last clip is perhaps my favourite from the album, 'Bring it on', which goes through several very cool gear shifts and turns in the closest they come to an all-out epic:



The only other musical thing I want to mention is finding Irish band Bell X1 doing a rather nice version of Don Henley's classic 'Boys of summer' here

Books

This week, I have been reading 'Confessions of an alien hunter' by Seth Shostak, which is a really interesting and nicely written account of our search for life beyond earth, from the very casual/loony land of the UFO-hunters to proper scientific considerations and projects such as SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence).  It skips a little over the fascinating story of NASA's claims for ultramicroscopic life in an Antarctic-found asteroid in the late 1990s but covers many other interesting angles very well.  The manner of writing is really good too, with very good use of humour and references to movies, such as obvious reference points like 'Contact', the logical gaps in which are gleefully exposed.   I particularly loved lines such as 'In other words, for two dozen years, UFOs were exposed to more scrutiny than Lindsay Lohan's social calendar.  Not finished yet but finding it a really good read, covering a very fertile field for good stories with a level of science which is not at all intimidating.

I also did some shopping this week, and bought 'The passage' by Justin Cronin in good old-fashioned hard copy (a big paperback, with a worn-looking nicely done cover) after a few e-mail ads from Amazon which were enough to spark my interest.  After loving 'The strain' I am clearly a bit more open to big epic vampire books, so decided to give it a try. Cork's Waterstone's were also pushing it pretty hard, with big display stands and freesheets with the first chapter reprinted to be taken away.

Finally, I went back to the kindle to download the new book by perhaps my favourite practitioner of the English language, by which I mean 'At home' by Bill Bryson; I actually did not hear much about this in advance, so know very little about it, except that I trust the author sufficiently to make this a fairly safe investment.

Movies and TV

Watched some of 'Hamlet 2' and pretty confused about what kind of film it is supposed to be, and unimpressed, so not inclined to watch the rest; I do like Steve Coogan but he seems all over the place in this one.  I also heard about and checked out a very cool mix-up on Youtube, which is the visuals from the trailer for Toy Story 3 with the audio for the new Christopher Nolan film 'Inception', which is actually very very strange a mix but very well done, as seen below:



My recent shopping spree also yielded the cut-price DVDs of 'Paranormal activity' (watching the director's commentary in the background as I type) and 'It might get loud', which I am curious about and think my eldest son, who is learning guitar, might like, as long as it does not turn him into a Led Zeppelin fan.
On TV, I have been working my way through recorded episodes of 'The pacific' but finding it a bit bleak and hard to follow, in terms of characters and action scenes (most of which are at night); I think I found 'Band of brothers' more accessible and watchable, but maybe this is just an accurate reflection of the nature of the relevant military campaigns.  Also trying to watch BBC's 'Outnumbered', which comes very well recommended but keeps putting me confortably to sleep. 

Perhaps surprisingly, my TV highlight of the week (and year so far) really has to be the finale of 'Grey's anatomy'.  I have been watching this fairly casually for most of its run, but this week's episode with the shootings really caught me off guard and made my jaw drop.  I am an appalling spoiler, who cannot resist checking out the ending of coming TV series and movies (although I try and resist every time, my will is not strong enough to hold back my curiosity) so real surprises in movies or TV are really rare for me, which made this such a treat and so gripping and unpredictable.  I found a set of clips from the finale set to Snow Patrol's 'Run' here:


So, that is a lot for this week (although I missed a post last week).  Still waiting eagerly for the launch date for MY iPhone 4.0 in Ireland, and starting to think (unbenownst to myself) about the iPad, due to launch here around the same time, so will have to see if I can be tempted when I get my hand son it for real.

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Monday, June 14, 2010

Bearing witness to never forgotten favourites

Music

For some reason, perhaps the fine weather, perhaps the fact the my wife's iPod found it on random recently, I have been listening a lot to an English band called Witness, who I discovered through Uncut magazine and who released two albums, 'Before the calm' (in 1999) and 'Under a sun' (in 2002) and split a few years later. Witness are, for me, one of the best bands I ever heard of that hardly anyone else has ever heard of, with all the nerdy pleasure that statement entails. For background, you can read about Witness on  Wikipedia here, see the band website here,read their NME page here and find singer Gerard Starkie on Myspace here.

Their albums are absolutely great, and blend the cloudy English indie depressed claustrophobia of Radiohead and many more besides with the American widescreen epic sensibilities of Counting Crows and many others more (although the singer's voice always most reminded me of Adam Duritz). This combination of my soft spots seems an obvious strategy for grabbing my attention, and that of others besides, but relatively few have tried it (although arguably the National have exploited the same conceit to wonderful effect). The albums have several fantastic songs each, and the first tends towards the English end of the spectrum above, while the latter hoves close to the far side of the Atlantic.

To give a sense of their wonderfulness, I will include below a clip of 'Hijacker' from both Jools Holland and their debut:

I also found a video of 'Scars' from the same album:


Clips from the less claustrophobic and more widescreen 'Under a sun' are harder to find on-line, but I did find my overall favourite of theirs, 'Closing up' (basically audio only) below:


Now that hopefully ye are so taken as to want to immediately buy their music, the requisite links from Amazon are below (note the gorgous still life cover of 'Before the calm'):















Movies

About the only movie development of the week is that I watched 'Lakeview terrace' on TV, which was actually a pretty effective thriller.  Let's face it, it is not exactly perceptive to point out that no-one does scary-ass better than Samuel L. Jackson, but at the same time Patrick Wilson is somehow unlikeable enough to make the conflict less than one-sided and simple, and the ratcheting confrontation was very nicely built up, even if the final driveway confrontation mid-inferno was somewhat melodramatic.  The clip below shows Sam in typically unfriendly mode:


Gadgets

Needless to say, I am currently obsessing about the iPhone 4.0. Last Monday, I watched Steve Jobs' keynote here live on my laptop, and I have definetely made the decision to dump my N95 (taking the refund the Carphone Warehouse are kindly offering) for this piece of really cool hardware.  I was impressed by all the specs, particularly things like the video editing, but was actually pretty disappointed that the max memory seems to be 32 gB, which is the same as my iPod touch, which is bursting at the seams and which I have to make weekly calls on what to uncheck to make room for new stuff.  I think overall the time has come for me to join the iPhone world still, though, and I will just haave to learn a whole new sort of memory discipline (if I don' forget how).  A video on the iPhone, for anyone living in a box for the last week, is below:



Other stuff

The book 'Storm of war' which I am reading on Kindle is absolutely captivating, with a great mix of opinion, anecdote and historical and epic sweep, mixing the personal with the strategic in a very unusual way. Best book I have read in ages!  Otherwise, not much else to report, but sure more will follow next week. Click Here to Read More..

Sunday, June 6, 2010

The Cure, Stornoway, War and Emo Phillips

Quite a few updates this week, so straight into it:

Music

Have been listening to the Cure's 'Disintegration' special edition quite a bit, in another very nice package as shown below (trying the new Blogger Amazon functionality).  The album is really great, just epic and grand and great guitars and keyboards, and some of Robert Smith's finest lyrical performances, and I just don't remember it being so good at the time.  Several songs are really making a new impression all over again, but in particular 'Plainsong' just has an epic quality which is like the entire oeuvre (!?) of Sigur Ros foreshadowed:

Disintegration (Deluxe Edition) (3CD)

Of the albums I mentioned downloading last week, I am quite liking Stornoway, more than I expected; although it is a little folkie twee, there is a nice quality running through it.  I will show a good version of 'Zorbing' here:



I am also enjoying the unusual sound of the McAlmont and Nyman album, and the combination of that voice and those classical-sounding strings is really cool.  My favourite by a long shot is 'City of Turin' but I could only find a clip of 'Underneath the hessian bags':



The last video I will show this week is for Josh Ritter's 'The curse' and was made by his drummer, showing an unexpected flair for puppetry:



Finally, I read a really interesting and mysterious article in the Irish Times by Brian Boyd  here about an incredible new album the identity of which cannot be revealed.  Had a poke around on-line and no clues but wondering based on it being someone really big of maybe David Bowie? 

Movies

My only movie news this week is that I was very disappointed to hear that Guillermo Del Toro has pulled out of directing 'The hobbit'; I found an interview with him below and think he would have brought a very interesting vision to the project:



Other than that, I have started watching 'Drag me to hell', which I recorded a while ago from Sky Movies - interestingly yuck so far and lots of cringing and squirming going on.....

Books

I finished 'My brain on music' and really liked and would recommend it, a great mix of music theory for the uninitiated and great anecdote, reference and scientific background.  It certainly has made me think about music and my reaction to it in a very different way. 

I have since started reading 'The storm of war', shown below, which seems a fresh and highly readable new history of WWII.  It is very readable and has sprung quite a few unknown facts on me, like realising how much inconvenience Ireland's bloody-mindedness regarding its neutrality and allowing Britain to use its ports caused for the allied navies.



Other bits

There was a really interesting New scientist article on language here, with some great examples of bizarre phrases from other languages.  My favourite of these is 'Rawa-Dawa' from the Indian dialect Mundari, which apparently means:
the sensation of suddenly realising you can do something reprehensible, and no one is there to witness it
This is clearly a massive gap in the English language - why do we not have a word for this, if for no other reason than to encourage people to think like this??

I also heard that the iPhone 4 will be announced on Monday, which I am excited about, and definetely plan to retire my trusty N95 for assuming (a) memory at least 64 gB and (b) better camera than on previous iPhones; I quite like the idea of replacing two gadgets (and possibly three if I count my Blackberry) for one most of the time. 

I also listened to some more Emo Phillips and my favourite sketch by far is the following:
Once, when I was in New York City, I went to the library. I said, "I'd like a book on the Heimlich anti-choking maneuver," and the guy said, "Look at the card catalog. I'm busy." So I go to the card catalog. I look under Heimlich and choking and maneuver. It's not any of those places. And I see this first aid book with the section and I take it and that guy said, "It's a reference book. You can't take it out; you have to Xerox it." I said, "Do you have change for a dollar?" He said, "It's not a bank, it's a library." So I go to this souvenir stand and I said, "Do you have change for a dollar?" They said, "It's not a bank, it's a souvenir stand." So I go to this bank, and they said, "Yes, this is a bank." And they give me the change and I go back to the libary. By this time there's a line of students Xeroxing their books and whatever and I -- finally get to Xerox the Heimlich. As I go back the guy says, "Put it back, now that you've used it." So I put it back. And as I leave, he says, "Thank you." I said, "Well, thank you! I'm never coming to this barn again." And I went back to my car. Now by this time, my sister's almost purple from the chicken bone...
Finally, after getting uncomfortably hooked on the damn show for the last few weeks, was delighted that Spelbound won Britain's got talent.
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