Genius loves Arcade Fire

I got a 32-gB iPod touch in September 2008. It is my third iPod, after a White 20 gB Classic and a Black 60 gB Video; the first was retired when it ran out of memory, the second when it ran out of coolness in the face of the newest touch machine. The new Touch was just so overwhelmingly cool looking that I was prepared to accept a cut in memory and be more mature in terms of exactly how ridiculously overloaded a music collection I absolutely needed to carry with me everywhere. It took a while to get over the nightmares of being caught suddenly in public needing the second Triffids album or a particular Depeche Mode track, or an obscure live Lambchop song from a free CD off a magazine cover, and having complete strangers scream at me ‘he couldn’t fit it on his iPod, the low-memory loser!’, but I managed it (with therapy, but not on my iPod, because 'Troublegum' wouldn’t fit).



I actually came very close to buying an iPhone last March, had even put down a deposit, before a newspaper article caused me to veer unexpectedly into buying a Nokia N95, for its better camera and much more besides; no regrets there at all. But then the new iPod touch came along, and it was everything the iPhone was without the bits I didn’t need, like the phone and camera.

So, I bought (direct from Apple on-line, saving a shocking amount, up to €100, compared to several major stores I checked prices in), and I love. It is shiny and sleek, like a miniature musical stealth bomber, and it does bloody everything. I know I will come back on future occasions to explain just what it does, and does so well but, for now, I just want to talk about Genius.

It has been said that a true genius is someone whose powers are just like magic, to such an extent that most of us couldn’t hope to match their abilities, no matter how hard we try – they are beyond mortal, unknowable and enigmatic. I am not sure if Apple’s Genius fits this description completely, but it certainly thinks it does, and so, I'm sure, does Steve Jobs.

The idea of Genius is simple: pick a song from your library and it will randomly select 25, 50 or 100 songs from those on your PC or iPod (you can do it on either) which it believes match it well, thus generating a random playlist of tracks linked by the ethereal threads only the Genius can see between them. Setting up Genius for the first time causes your PC to have a good think for a while, as it analyses your library, presumably tut-tutting at some of your less inspired choices, and going on-line to compare notes with others' libraries (it seems to do this every few weeks afterwards, as if to see if there is any new intelligence out there to help it in DJing your own private calamity of a music collection, or gazing wsitfully at other collections it regards as so so much better than yours). It then smugly announces that it is ready to take your best challenge and offer up its answers, like an ancient oracle.

I like Genius a lot; I like the non-quite-random randomness of it all, and the way it throws up songs you may never or rarely have listened to. With over 9,000 songs on my PC’s hard drive, I guess it can rummage deeply enough to find a few surprises for me. The biggest surprise, however, has been how much it loves Arcade Fire, despite there being only 2 CD’s worth of material (21 songs) on my PC. The evidence for this obsession is as follows, based on playlists Genius generated for several songs I have tried:

Apartment Story (The National) – 5 Arcade Fire songs out of 50
Blood (Tindersticks) – 4 out of 25
You are my sister (Antony and the Johnsons) - 3 out of 50
Munich (Editors) - 8 out of 50
Are you the one that I’ve been waiting for (Nick Cave) – just one, Black Car, out of 50

What clues does this offer to how Genius works? It is clearly not working on simple tags like era (mixing 90s with 00s) or nationality. The songs are clearly linked by tone, however, and I am sure I would not find Arcade Fire songs appearing if I tried Genius out on Kylie Minogue or Madonna tracks (even if I had any, and much as it pains me to even type the names). Presumably, the songs are mainly linked by the fact that there are some/many others with broadly similar tastes to mine and, while we were drawn to the ecstatic reviews of Arcade Fire like moths (or should that be ex-goths?) to a flame, our libraries show our proud lineage, that which has made us the miserable bastards we are today.

One other act that Genius likes to taunt me with mysteriously is Big Country (of whom I have exactly four songs on my iPod, mainly out of fond memories to jumping up and down at college discos to the bombastic majesty of ‘East of Eden’); despite their representing less than 0.2% of my collection, one of the songs still ends up on just about every vaguely 80s-themed playlist I conjure up. Many of us will admit to our Arcade Fire fetish – exactly how many closet Big Country fans will put their hands up out there today?

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Actually, I give a f**k about an Oxford comma!

In one of the best songs on the self-titled debut album by Vampire Weekend, the song 'Oxford Comma' (hear it here) poses the age-old question of who actually cares deeply about the importance of the aforementioned grammatical element, or words to that effect.

I would like to timidly respond that, actually, I do care about the Oxford comma, while at the same time acknowledging clearly that I may be in a very very small minority indeed in this regard. I take a stand here for the lexicographers, grammarians and other custodians of the English language whose lives have not yet been enriched by the exuberant afropop of Vampire Weekend, but who I am fully sure would stand shoulder to shoulder with me if they had.



I am quite fond of (or, let's face it, pretty obsessed about) commas in general, and worry constantly about their endangered species status within today's society. The Oxford comma, then, is the most endangered of all, being the black sheep of the comma family, and a long-besieged member of that illustrious armoury of punctuational weapons (see the Wikipedia article here). Interesingly (and, yes, I know I must use the word 'interesting' cautiously here), it is also known as the Harvard or Serial comma; I am bemused as to why the US-college-bred band neglected their local university of high repute for its English antecedent (it even works fine if you switch the words and sing the song again - try it!) but I can see why the Serial option was not used, as it makes it sound like a grammatical element that routinely murders random sentences.

Anyway, the Oxford comma is used just before the final entry in a list of items, just before a conjunction like and or or; it is a sort of grammatical traffic cop, telling the reader when to pause and making sure the words and ideas don't pile up gruesomely. It is overkill to use it in a simple sentence list like 'A, B, C and D', but very handy where stuff which otherwise could wander all over the place needs to be kept in neat groups . For example, if I said that last year I enjoyed songs by 'Iron and Wine and She and Him' it is hard, in theory, to tell how many groups or individuals are involved, from two to four, whereas a carefully placed Oxford comma, as in 'Iron and Wine, and She and Him', to my mind, sorts it out easily.

As another example, consider a long and complex sentence like:

Vampire Weekend are clearly influenced, if mostly in a good way, by learning too much about military history, bus routes and architecture, listening to too much Paul Simon and afro-pop and reading too much highbrow literature and poetry.

Ouch, look at all those 'ands'. Now, remembering what the nuns beat in to me many years ago, which is that the function of the comma is to to give the reader a chance to pause and take a breath, lets try it again with two clear and helpful Oxford commas inserted, to minimise the risk of cardiac failure while reading the line.

Vampire Weekend are clearly influenced, if mostly in a good way, by learning too much about military history, bus routes, and architecture, listening to too much Paul Simon and afro-pop, and reading too much highbrow literature and poetry.

Much better? Well worth giving a f**k about?

All I can say is, thank God they haven't gone after the semi-colon (the more majestic cousin of the comma) yet; this summer's Guardian article here worried me enough as it was.

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Accidentally swept away by the mainstream?

Some thoughts on the best music of 2008

I have long grown accustomed, when asked what kind of music I listen to (by the majority of casual askers), to muttering something about it being stuff they wouldn’t have heard of. This time every year, I read every single critics’ top-whatever list, in magazines, in newspapers and on-line, and usually find only one or two which I have in my own list, and often experiment by buying the commonly-agreed best album(s), if I did not already have them.



This year, however, much to my surprise, I discovered a startling overlap between every best-of list and my own list, and that in almost every case I owned at least half the relevant top ten. Either I have finally been carried from my own meandering tributaries into the mainstream, or the mighty Nile has altered its course to join my little stream. It’s a bit of a shock, and I am not sure whether to feel comforted in affirmation of my taste, or worried that my tastes are becoming populist (although I have never been a believer in obscurity for the sake of it).

Anyway, here are some thoughts on the top albums of 2008:

Glasvegas, discovered late and downloaded with the Christmas EP based on the reviews of the package, was album of the year without a doubt and led me to the shocking realisation that young guitar bands from my large neighbouring island, which I had ignored for most of the last decade, could make brilliant music occasionally. The combination of sweetness, noise, heavy accents, and beautifully-written words of tender love, sadness and hooliganistic vulgarity, sometimes in the same sentence, were completely new for me and blew my socks off.

TV on the Radio was another startling discovery, as almost everything written about them and ‘Dear Science’ raised my heckles – funk, art rock etc. However, this was simply great stuff, and songs like ‘Halfway Home’, ‘Family Tree’ and the wonderful ‘Dancing Choose’ had me re-evaluating my entire musical belief system, like an agnostic suddenly witnessing an undoubted miracle.

I also mostly loved Vampire Weekend, and ‘Walcott’, ‘M79’, ‘Campus’ and, in particular, the goofily mad ‘Mansard Roof’ never fail to bring a smile to my face when I hear them; it's a pity some of the rest of the album, despite the overall brevity, failed to excite me as much. I also tried hard with Elbow and a weird thing has happened; while, for me, the whole album has not yet lived up to its reputation, some individual songs, particularly ‘Weather to fly’ and ‘One day like this’ keep breaking out of various playlists and grabbing my by the throat, demanding to be worshipped and mostly succeeding. This one seems to be a slow grower, and I fully expect to have to reconsider the whole package from scratch in the future.

Closer to home, Cork’s own Mick Flannery established his own sound on ‘White Lies’ and moved away from his debut’s debt to Tom Waits and, while his noisier moments still do little for me, he wrote his first true pop song in ‘Tomorrow’s papers’ and produced three atmospheric late night classics in 'Safety rope', ‘California’ and ‘Arise now’.

I was less excited than most critics about Nick Cave’s ‘Dig Lazarus Dig’; there is no artist for me in such erratic touch with the better angels of his nature, and more capable of swinging between extremes of darkness and light, and so each album for me must be judged individually on whether he is Jeckel or Hyde on the days of recording. ‘The Boatman’s Call’ is surely one of the most beautiful albums by anyone anywhere, and is at one end of his spectrum; ‘Lazarus’ has arisen at the far end, barely visible from the warm heights of ‘Are you the one that I’ve been waiting for’ and ‘There is a kingdom’, and too far into his noisy place for me.

Fleet Foxes and Bon Iver, who between them hovered up a lot of high best-of chart placings, both brought out good debuts, each of which bore a different sound and a couple of really interesting songs, but would not have been at the top of my list. Interestingly, my one-off download of the year was Fleet Foxes and Wilco covering ‘I shall be released’, put out to encourage young voters to come out for Obama in the US Election; this directly or indirectly led to one of my two most emotional TV moments of the year when he was elected, the other being Glen and Marketa winning the Oscar for ‘Falling Slowly’.

Old reliables like REM, Lambchop, The Cure and American Music Club all produced albums which, while in every case comfortingly familiar and reminiscent of their finest hours (all of them having provided me with some particularly fine hours in years gone by), felt somewhat disappointing and not up to former peaks of glory. I did try hard with Portishead, but must admit it scared me more than wowed me. The Killers and Coldplay adhered to the '50% principle' and the 'single song syndrome', respectively, the former producing an album which was half brilliant pop songs, half forgettable filler, and the latter producing an overhyped album with one fantastic song only, the irresistably stirring orchestral pomp of the title track.

The year also produced my favourite line of music journalism in a long time, if not ever, when Brian Boyd of the Irish Times, in his end of year review, described Sigur Ros’ album (another thrilling discovery for me this year) as the music Tolkien would have heard in his head when he was writing The Lord of the Rings – an absolutely perfect description.

Finally, the song of the year has to be the bizarrely-named but utterly beautiful ‘Boobar come back to me’, from Tindersticks’ ‘The Hungry Saw’. The bit near the end where Stuart Staples begins to duet with himself just takes my breath away. The 'irresistibly addictive tune of the year award' goes to the magnificently titled ‘Sequestered in Memphis’ by The Hold Steady (the quiet bit with the horns and handclaps alone would make the most cynical smile).

All in all, a great year for music, and time will tell whether my taste has really changed for good – or just the rest of the world’s!

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Inbetween years

We all know about soulmates, people who are perfectly on one's wavelength in a way that no-one else can be, who just have that special place and connection, whether friend or spouse. I often wonder if a song can be a soulmate because, if it can, mine is 'Inbetween days' by The Cure. No other song in the 4,000 or so on my iPod comes even close to that kind of intimate relationship. Physicists talk of resonances between things or forces, when one can trigger under certain conditions effects and changes in another; there is undoubtedly a spooky resonance between this song, my heart, and my brain.



Call me a philistine (you wouldn't be the first) but I would actually claim that the first second of this song means more to me than the other thousands of hours of music I have at my fingertips: that rumbling tumbling, chaotic yet perfectly controlled avalanche of drums that kicks off and stands majestically alone until, just as a second appears on the song timer, the bass guitar kicks in. That kind of dramatic entrance, unequalled ever, sets a dizzying standard that is luckily almost matched by the stepwise ushering into place, in perfectly timed sequence, of acoustic guitar, cheesy synth, and finally Robert Smith's gloriously morose voice, all sounding more perfect in that three-minute symphony than they ever have for me in any other context (sort of like the way most of the actors in the Lord of the Rings films, on those three magical occasions, simply acted above and beyond anything they had done before, or might ever do again).

I have listened to that song at least once a week for fifteen years and it never fails to stir my spirits, to sound fresh and new and exciting. I have listened to other music, of course, falling as so many of my contemporaries did under the benign influence of Uncut magazine and spending the 1990s and beyond exploring a world of American music I would otherwise never have found. The Cure of the 1980s (very specifically), however, remain top of the heap as my favourite band ever, and have ingrained in me a soft spot for large bands of serious men, in dark suits worn casually, making superficially gloomy music shot through with wit and eccentricity (prime examples are Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Tindersticks and, erm, Reservoir Dogs).

‘Inbetween days’ was released in 1985, which makes it 23 years old, which occasionally beings me close to a vertigo-like state of amazement at a generation gap which has opened up, like an earthquake tearing a gash in a road. Let’s, just for a moment, use 1985 as a fulcrum around which to pivot time, a tipping point in pop music’s admittedly short but occasionally glorious history. Pivot one way by 23 years and we land in 1962, not just the past but 7 years before I was born, in other words, when real time began. Years like 1962 just don’t even register on my musical radar – what the hell was anyone listening to? Doing a little archeological excavation on the Internet suggests that this was the year Bob Dylan released his first album, Elvis was balancing movies and music, and the year’s top songs were by Bobby Vinton, Ray Charles, Chubby Checker, Acker Bilk and the Four Seasons. That is old music, old old old, just incomprehensibly far back, to a 39-year-old as much as a 16-year-old. This terrifying sensation of a gaping generation chasm is even more dizzying when I wonder if the 16 year-olds of today view 1985 as being that far back, and might think that The Cure could have been sampling pounding dinosaur feet to catch that magical drum sound.

Even now, with my theoretically greater maturity, my iPod hasn't stretched back that far, and my sole dalliances with the 1960s remain early Leonard Cohen and frequent unsuccessful attempts to see what the point is about Bob Dylan. It really troubles me to contemplate that, to today's teenagers, my song could seem that old, that much of a whole different world, era, separated across an unbridgeable chasm of time from today. To me it is timeless, ageless, deathless, and will never get so old that I felt like it could die.

Jumping back to the present on our 23-year pivot, during the inbetween years, as I have implied, my relationship with the Cure was never monogamous, and as time goes on, I have flirted with other songs and artists thinking they might be a serious prospect for my soul, but it has never been serious. However, quite recently, one band has finally come close and may yet have it in them to produce a piece of music that could threaten the supremacy of ‘Inbetween days’. That band is The National, and last year's Boxer contained some moments of pure beauty, again led by astonishing drum performances; the passage around a minute into Fake Empire when Bryan Davendorf announces his presence by slowly cranking up as the piano takes a breather is simply astonishing and, lacking the proper terminology to explain technically what they are called, the drum patterns in Apartment Story just don’t sound like anything else I have ever heard. Drums have bridged the gap for me, and The National are battling for control of my musical soul; hopefully, peaceful cohabitation will be the solution.

Interestingly, one other common feature bridges the gap from Cure to National, and that is fantastic videos, from giant fluorescent socks chasing the band while a drunken camera swinging from a rope captures the action for Inbetween Days, to the National gradually winning over an indifferent wedding crowd in a beautifully shot piece for Apartment Story.

The circle is closed, the bridge is strong, but can the bridge bear another giant arching span backwards too to 1962 and finally swallow up the other generation gap? We will just have to see.

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