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.
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