This is a test post using the Blogsy app on my iPad. This is taking a little time to get used to as not quite intuitive but I am gradually getting the hang of it. This combined with my Zaggmate keyboard will hopefully mean the iPad becomes my blogging device of choice, and I might even get back to more regular posts than so far this year (although 2011 seems to be turning into quite the year for quality music).
One thing which seems quite useful is the ease of embedding Youtube clips, like this one from TV on the Radio:
I discovered TV on the Radio through their last album 'Dear Science', the title of which was almost enough to ensnare me (occupational hazard), which was a case of the least expected like of the last few years for me, as terms like art rock and funk could readily be used to describe it but I still really liked it. I first listened to 'Nine Types of Light' (another cool title) on a train to Dublin by headphones and was to be honest a little disappointed first run through, as it lacked the dramatic punch of 'Halfway home' or 'Dancing choose' (where they added rap to the list of things I did not expect to like in their sound), but a little patience allowed the songs time to grow and breathe, and now I really like quite a few of them. 'Keep your heart' is an obvious one, but 'Will do' (seen above) and the closer (bonus track?) 'Troubles' are really good, the latter in particular a great pop song.
The next one ('Exile Villify') apparently comes from a video game ('Portal 2', about which all I know is that I am pretty sure the original game came bundled with 'Half-Life 2', which gives it immediate credibility in my book, even before The National became involved). I am not sure whether being associated with a video game is either really cool or slightly odd, but as The National can never be less than cool let's assume the former. Anyway, the song is slightly less of an immediate love than the one above, but perhaps it needs more time....
The next music I want to talk about is Glasvegas' 'Euphoric heartbreak' (I can't bring myself to repeat the bizarre titular solidus-assault), for which advance press and reviews had been, frankly, pretty unenthusiastic. I discovered Glasvegas through their debut in 2008, which I actually only bought in its reissue form, when my curiosity was sparked by the review talking about Jesus and Mary Chain meets Phil Spector doing a bunch of Christmas songs (as bundled in the reissue with the debut). While I found some of their slower songs a bit too lifeless, I loved the energy of "Flowers and football tops', 'Geraldine' and the quite astonishing 'Go square go' (the bit where the singer first intones 'Here we f***ing go' is just heard-stopping), and loved the macho sloppiness of 'A snowflake fell and it felt like a kiss' (who could resist that title?). Anyway, the new album came with more health warnings than a pack of cigarettes (somehow that analogy just seemed apt) but my affection for the debut carried me through to trying the new one.
To be honest, it is not as bad as the reviews led me to expect (talk about damning with faint praise!) but there does seem to have been something of the honesty, modesty and raw passion of the debut lost in the process, perhaps due to the inevitable pressures of fame (stories of the bands drug-induced woes invariably feature in reviews and profiles), and the songs do seem a little lost inside huge production (one review compared the sound, unkindly but not necessarily inaccurately, to Simple Minds) and a bit more formulaic and polished. I think songs like 'Euphoria take my hand' (below) could benefit from a more stripped-back sound to bring that wonderful guitar riff out of the swamp in which it has become submerged, while the stand-out 'Lot's sometimes' (also below) just about survives the production and, more fatally, the appallingly placed apostrophe, to deliver an epic builder which comes closest to the spirit of the first album.
I am also thinking about downloading Jamie Woon and Radiohead based on the reviews, and will probably take a chance on Fleet Foxes when the new album comes out (especially as it will be on eMusic), although much of their debut did not really grab me.
In other culture-related news, I am nearly at the end of the second series of 'The West Wing' and it really is the pinnacle of televisual wonderfulness. This has pretty much dominated my TV-watching, so no other DVDs to report on, but a few box-sets lying in need of attention (although I watched and actually enjoyed 'Hellboy 2' on my iPad between some train journeys).
Books-wise, I read another book on Wikileaks (Greg Mitchell's 'The age of wikileaks' - interesting but a bit short and feeling rather rapidly flung-together) and a fantastically ascerbic book about the emergence of stupidity as a major dominating force in American society and politics in particular ('Idiot America: how stupidity became a virtue in the land of the free' by Charles P. Pierce). The latter was simultaneously funny, wise and enraging, with great analyses of the response to 911, the rush to war in Iraq, the Dover Intelligent Design case, climate change and more, starting with a great piece about a creationist museum which features dinosaurs with saddles. Dear lord, need we say any more.I am currently reading a really interesting book about how a new generation of biological hackers are trying to beat major labs at their own game ('Biopunk: DIY scientists hack the software of life' by Marcus Wohlsen), and have also downloaded what looked (from a Kindle sample) very interesting, which is Joseph Wilson's account of the Bush Administration's use of dodgy intelligence (besides their own) regarding Iraqi attempts to obtain uranium in Niger ('The politics of truth'), which was recently dramatised in the film 'Fair game', which I didn't see.
Technology-wise, I am gradually moving away from hard-copy newspapers, being quite happy to read my favourite bits of the Guardian on the iPhone app I paid for (especially Alexis Petridis' wonderfully caustic culture columns and Peter Bradshaw's film reviews) and I have paid for a trial of the Sunday Times on the iPad (the demise of the Sunday Tribune has left my Sunday reading bereft, and the physical copy of the Times is just intimidatingly huge and induces savage guilt for the environment every time I chuck half its weight in paper, unread, straight into recycling). The Times app actually works really well, and I am going to pay my monthly sub to read the best bits on screen on a Sunday, as I finally think both subscription and on-screen news papers could actually be the thing of the future. On the subject of on-screen news, the Irish national station RTE has a news app which is very good (and, at certain times, quite surreal, as in their live blog during this winter's snow storms when the writer inserted many great jokes and off-the-point ruminations into the mundane updates), but the entertainment section is just bizarre; perhaps it reflects how little I dip into a certain fetid corner of celebrity 'news' but recent relevations about how Peter Andre or some other loser fell asleep in the cinema on a date and how some girlyband singer I never heard of had a dream that old-style Irish singer Mary Black released a disco track make me dispair for what passes for entertainment in certain quarters today.
Swerving away to much harsher stuff leads me to a somewhat sombre conclusion to this post, regarding the death of two celebrated war journalists in Libya, including Tim Hetherington, whose 'Restrepo' I watched recently and found very powerful. The trailer is below:
I have always held huge admiration for war reporters, being constantly aware that every time we see a battle or other hostile situation on Sky News or whatever, there is someone unarmed there with a camera, recording it all for us to watch. This to me is another form of real heroism, and the sad events of last week made me think once again what real guts it must take to do what they have done, and how sad it is when they die in the line of action on our behalfs. One of the things I read on the Sunday Times app yesterday was a very moving piece by Margarette Driscoll about Hetherington, the roles of war reporters, and the fact that he was far more interested in the effects of war on those caught up on it than the gruesome details which others favoured, which is well worth checking.
[By the way, I gave up on Blogsy part way through this post, when I couldn't work out how to position the video clips reasily, moved onto the Blogpress App, and finished off the polishing (such as it is) on my PC - still a bit of practice to move completely to iPad for posting, alsas.]
No comments:
Post a Comment