Well, I'm back, everyone! The Bar Exam has been taken and - hopefully - vanquished, and now I'm back home, searching for jobs, swimming in pools, rediscovering reading for enjoyment and generally being quite cool. Here are a few bits and bobs to warm you up for what I hope will be more regular posts in here from now.
- I was in severe danger of failing my exam because of PFT and Kid Jersey's discussion about the Gathering of the Juggalos. It's been a long time since I've laughed this hard. Listen to it here - it's the fresh-ass-est comedy you'll hear today.
- After the first day of my two day exam, I returned to my hotel in Tampa, feeling a little deflated, turned the telly on, and was greeted with Southland Tales on Starz. A film that I rather like despite everything. It is just insane, and I appreciate that. Once I played it for my (now-former) housemates, and one of them got up and left within six minutes.
- Saw 'In the Loop' - it's very very funny. Maybe I'll write more about it another time. Weird to see all those people from 'The Thick of It' as different characters, except for Jamie and Malcolm.
- Charlie Brooker's newest column contains the phrase "Nic Cage: My Life as John Lennon the Cow", which is very funny, but his TV show 'You Have Been Watching' is surprisingly not very funny. I blame the involvement of other people.
- Friend-of-a-friend Ross appears in this music video as Edward Cullen. It needs to be seen to be believed. The band is so earnest! None of the deliriously silly fun of Harry and the Potters.
- These STFU facebook sites are pretty funny. Some more than others.
- We got rid of Adebayor and Kolo. We'll miss one of them.
- There was a great series that just finished on UK television called Inside Nature's Giants, which enabled me to say "That woman is knee-deep in whale" for the first time and hopefully the last time. Look it up on youtube, it's amazing.
- Got rid of a bunch of old CDs through SwapaCD.com - turns out, someone wants my neglected Blue States albums.
- Congratulations to Slipknot for winning big last night.
- Guerrilla is ten years old! I still remember when Nico bought an advance copy, and we all listened to it while studying for our GCSEs. Here's my copy signed by the artist Pete Fowler. What a great, summery album.
- Last week some relatives came over, and one of my nephews asked "How OLD is this?" in reference to my Game Boy. When I told him it was from 1992, he said, and I quote, "Wow, that's three years before I was born". I felt old.
[download Super Furry Animals - The Teacher]
Can't wait to come home from school because it's a drag
First impressions of 'Dark Days/Light Years'
As you may remember, I thought the last Super Furry Animals album 'Hey Venus!' was pretty good, but all-too-often lapsed into what I called "pretty-but-slow" territory. So, when they announced that for this album they'd be leaving the slower songs behind, I was over the moon. So one 204MB download later, let's do this thing...
Crazy Naked Girls: Reminds me of that Beck album where he went all Prince. Midnite Vultures? But far more weird. Not a bad start at all. Mad, psychedelic, falsetto, with some crowd noise, chunky guitars. Welcome home, SFA.
Mt: They already have a show-stopping song about mountains, but this one is worthy addition to the canon. Sounds like Bunf on lead vocals - strings, simple melody. And welcome, profanity!
Moped Eyes: A little more gentle. Didn't do too much on first listen, but that's okay.
Inaugural Trams: Heard this one before, features a rap in German from one of Franz Ferdinand. Upbeat, light and very fun. "They say the future of cement is set in stone". [listen]
Inconvenience: Yes! Finally, a heads-down, no-bullshit rocker. "Tory scum / Stole my fun". Something about "holy wars". Starts and stops. Singalong chorus. SFA of old peeking through for the first time.
Cardiff in the Sun: Lots of filters over the vocals, Krautrock drums, echo chambers. Can't make out a single lyric, but the crescendos are kickin'.
The Very Best of Neil Diamond: First ten seconds - Sounds like a sitar? This is terrific! A mention of a "crystal skull". Song goes in a few different directions, but I like them chaotic.
Helium Hearts: If this was a band that cared about singles, this song would be one. Does the guy from High Llamas still do their string arrangements, because these are outstanding. I'm sure Gruff just sang "Get drunk and taste the Vegemite". Another great song: short and catchy.
White Socks/Flip Flops: Most assuredly not channeling the Velvet Underground. Bunf singing again: "I look like a loser coming from the gutter". Actually, this does sound very 70s. Chuggin'. Some nice hey-hey-heys.
Where Do You Wanna Go?: This one is okay. A little lightweight. But pleasant enough.
Lliwiau Llachar: Even though this song is in Welsh, I'm sure I picked out the phrase "Howard Devoto" in there. Maybe I'm wrong. Good song, though.
Pric: Mostly instrumental, very layered. Definitely a head-shaker. Loads of sounds on top of each other. Recalls 'Shoot Speed/Kill Light' as a great album closer. Cian brings out all his electronic toys towards the end.
--
All in all, it's solid, more upbeat and will almost certainly be played to death by me. Hooray!
The Lord take Peth away
I posted an early version of this song a year and a half ago (!) and now The Peth are here, this time to stay. As you may be aware, the Peth consists of Daf from SFA, Rhys Ifans from Notting Hill, and a gaggle of other Welsh talent. Their album 'The Golden Mile' has been long-awaited (I guess) and is out next week. But they've made the single available, and here it is!
[download The Peth - Let's Go Fucking Mental]
[The Peth myspace / youtube / official]
Live vault: SFA at Ocean (repost)
Man, you guys really destroyed my bandwidth on this the last time around. So here it is again, as two zip files. Get it while it's hot.
Tracklisting again:
(part 1)
[01 (A) Touch Sensitive]
[02 Sidewalk Serfer Girl]
[03 (Drawing) Rings Around the World]
[04 Receptacle for the Respectable]
[05 It's Not the End of the World?]
[06 Nythod Cacwn]
[07 Presidential Suite]
[08 Run! Christian! Run!]
[09 Fire in my Heart]
(part 2)
[10 Juxtapozed With U]
[11 The International Language of Screaming]
[12 Golden Retriever]
[13 Do Or Die]
[14 God! Show Me Magic]
[15 Calimero]
[16 The Man Don't Give A Fuck]
[17 Gwreiddiau Dwfn / Mawrth Oer Ar y Blaned Neifion]
Part 1 / Part 2
Burn your hands on the stupidity machine
- Fluxblog put up another snippet from The Best Show on WFMU, my latest obsession. When you're done listening to that, here's another - Tom's review of recent thriller Mr Brooks. It's both spoiler-heavy, and hilarious-heavy.
[download The Best Show on WFMU - Tom Reviews Mr. Brooks] - Jamie's doing his comprehensive-discography thing again, this time the focus is on Mansun. They're ok, I suppose, but even he acknowledges that sometimes their lyrics were "so bad that they're actually sublimely awful", so enjoy that.
- Hey Venus! made it into the album charts at #11 today, which isn't that bad, but Show Your Hand didn't even make the top 40? That's disappointing, innit? I know people don't really care about the charts much anymore, but still.
- Alex James has been writing a column for the Observer about cheese. I can't tell if this is more or less interesting than his recent autobiography, but it's probably more smug.
- There is a new series of The I.T. Crowd, and the first couple of episodes thereof have been funnier than most of the first series. Still running with Noel Fielding's "goth dude that hangs out in the office", though. Check out eps (if they're working) on tv-links.
- I saw Superbad recently. It was funny enough - always appreciate a good Orson Welles joke - but it didn't really have any heart. Jonah Hill's character was really unlikeable, and the whole "If we don't have sex before the end of high school, we will DIE" idea a) has been done before, and b) doesn't really resonate with me, maybe it's an American thing. There were plenty of funny moments, which I suppose is all you can ask for, but I've mostly forgotten about it already.
- Also caught The Bourne Ultimatum and it was every bit as bad-ass as you'd expect. I've talked about this summer's blockbusters already, so the fact that this one had a cohesive plot and wasn't just made for the money, and had Paddy Considine and David Strathairn makes it ace. Plus Paul Greengrass directs the shit out of it (This is praise).
- Candie Payne's new album is dead good, and I'm playing it quite a bit at the moment. Somewhere between good-period Concretes and Dusty Springfield, she's well worth a listen. Read an interview here, and watch her new video below.
- That's all! Enjoy the holiday tomorrow, Americans, and enjoy working tomorrow, rest of world.
First impressions of Hey Venus!
My main concern about Super Furry Animals' eight album was that there'd be too many slow-but-pretty songs. The last three records have seen many, many such songs (off the top of my head: Fragile Happiness, Frequency, Atomik Lust, Bleed Forever, Ohio Heat, Presidential Suite, It's Not the End of the World?, Run! Christian! Run!, Hello Sunshine, Walk You Home, Alternate Route to Vulcan Street...) and precious few mental fast ones. Now, I don't dislike songs from that list, I really love a few of them, and their arrangements and such are often fantastic. And I also understand full well that bands evolve, and can't be playing dumb, fast songs with names like 'Focus Pocus' forever. They've just played slow-but-pretty a lot lately, and I was just jonesin' for some songs that sounded like they were recorded by crazy people again.
First things first, 'Hey Venus!' is a good fifteen minutes leaner than anything they've done in years, so things don't get boring, although they could've trimmed a minute of special effects off from 'Carbon Dating'. There are still a few slow-but-pretty songs, which are all alright - 'Suckers' is especially strong - but I'm most interested in the middle segment, beginning with 'Neo Consumer', which heralds to early SFA, reminded me of 'Chupacabras' and 'Bad Behaviour' which is no bad thing. I really think this song would've made a better lead single than 'Show Your Hand', which is very safe and pleasant enough, I suppose, but 'Neo Consumer' would have people saying "Whoa, this new record might be awesome".
'Into the Night' is a more straight-up rocker, from whence the album gets its title, and is more fuzzy than most things they've released in a while. Next there's 'Baby Ate My Eightball' which isn't as good as its title, but still is pretty weird. Then aforementioned 'Suckers', the token Bunf-led song 'Battersea Odyssey' which isn't much cop, and finally closer 'Let the Wolves Howl at the Moon', which is, you've guessed it, slow and pretty.
After three listens, this isn't really a big departure from the trend of the last few albums, but I'm heartened that they've remembered to include something old-school sounding. I'll be listening a lot more in the coming weeks, and I'm sure it'll become as much of a friend as all the others.
I'm not putting up any of the album tracks, but you could go here for three from Glastonbury, or here for a full live set from 2002.
Born in a manger...
Sure enough, the glut of live recordings and videos from this past weekend's Glastonbury festival has begun to hit the internet. This site, in particular, has done a nice job of collecting them all in one place. Kudos for that.
From all that footage, there was only one band who I was interested in, and here are three songs from their set. They happen to be Super Furry Animals, one of my all-time faves. One's a new, guitar-heavy reworking of their 1999 single 'Northern Lites', and then there's two songs from the upcoming 'Hey Venus!' I can never say a bad word about SFA, so you might as well just listen to the songs for yourself.
[download Super Furry Animals - Northern Lites (Glastonbury 2007)]
[download Super Furry Animals - The Gateway Song (Glastonbury 2007)]
[download Super Furry Animals - Show Your Hand (Glastonbury 2007)]
[pre-order 'Hey Venus!' (UK)]
Holy holes make homeless moles
Good news from Camp SFA...
Super Furry Animals have titled their forthcoming album 'Hey Venus!'.
The record, the follow-up to 2005's 'Love Kraft', will be released at the end of August.
Frontman Gruff Rhys told NME.COM earlier this year to expect a "speaker-blowing" LP, though no further details have been made available at the moment.
I can't wait for my speakers to be blown. I miss the days when SFA would rock like crazy people. Nice, title, too. Always nice to have exclamations. But what would the other turtle, Serena, think? Or maybe she understands.
[download Super Furry Animals - Venus and Serena]
Wherever I lay my phone that's my home
Hello. What's new? Just a quick post this evening. Mostly just links to other sites, to be honest. They can't all be "The first time I saw Super Furry Animals" you know.
First up, The Times' Entertainment section may well be following this very website. First up, there's an interview with Louis Theroux, ahead of his brand new Weird Weekend in Las Vegas, airing in the UK in early February. And the same site's music podcast is great. Not only is it great, but the last two editions focus on Gruff Rhys and The Hours. The latter is especially fun - listen out for Antony Genn's story about jumping off a bridge in Sheffield.
Sticking with the 30-minute-plus downloads, go over to Fluxblog and check out the clip from the Best Show on WFMU, which is fantastically funny, in a demented caller kind of way. There's a description of Shakespeare which is best described as inaccurate.
The latest edition of Observer Music Monthly is up - there's a feature about the best gigs that various people have seen. Maybe I'll do a post in here soon about mine. And Akira the Don, who's written a few interesting articles for the Guardian Blogs, has a new one about drugs in music.
And last for tonight, cos I want to go to sleep, Status Ain't Hood does well to articulate all I love about the new Bloc Party record.
Today's embed: Super Furry Animals, from their 1999 peak, with two songs live. Enjoy!
Dreams can come true, nightmares can also
I’ve posted some Super Furry Animals here before, on account o’ I love them. I’ve seen them live more times than any other band – fourteen at last count. The shows were always brilliant, but ranged from the sublime (Especially the four in 1999 – at Glastonbury a tank drove through the crowd at the end, but incredibly it wasn’t their tank, and Mogwai were dressed as Chewbacca) to the very odd (like the time someone had to be lifted from the front of the moshpit in a stretcher, or when Gruff came out in a Power Rangers mask, or the celery chewin’, videos n’ surround-sound extravaganza of the ‘Rings Around the World’ years). Their last record, ‘Love Kraft’ began with the sound of a drummer diving into a swimming pool and featured a song about a chicken who worries about getting hit by asteroids. And they put out an album entirely in Welsh. There’s always been more to them, though, than just ‘mentals in helmets with lots of ideas and weird accents,’ because they actually have plenty of tunes-with-a-capital-T to back them up.
Their singer, Gruff Rhys, has a new solo album due out early next year called Candylion, and a couple of songs are available on these Internets. It’s not quite as low-key as his Welsh language record, but it’s definitely gentler than you might expect. NME write about the title track here, but it doesn’t really mean anything. Apparently, he’s playing in Buenos Aires on Saturday, so, uh, if anyone’s down for a road trip, let me know. Enjoy!
[download Gruff Rhys – Candylion]
[download Gruff Rhys – The Court of King Arthur]
The future is in your hands
I recently got a new laptop, and I’m in the process of copying my music onto it. Today I noticed that I have over 900MB of Super Furry Animals tunes. Now, some people might say that’s a little excessive. These people are hoodlums, plain and simple. Anyway, that was pretty much the entire reason why I thought I’d post some SFA here on Are You Gene Hackman? That and the fact that Bring Me The Heads just posted a gargantuan live recording of their profanity-tastic ‘The Man Don’t Give A Fuck’. Further, the whole world seems to be undergoing some sort of genetically engineered super-summer, so the song ‘Ysbeidiau Heulog,’ which means sunny intervals, sprang to mind. But that’s in Welsh, and this is an English language website.
So, here are two SFA songs for you. One is a b-side called ‘Foxy Music’, possibly based on a true story about a farmer who shot a fella. If you only take one moral from a song you download this week, make it “just because he’s got red hair, it doesn’t mean that he’s a fox”. Secondly, and even more obscurely, there’s ‘Charge (Theme from Das Koolies)’. It was the b-side to Ysbeidiau Heulog, and it features samples, fuzzed-up bass, and shouting, so you should love it. Also, there are chimps. It’s how I imagine a zoologists’ rave would sound. This is a very high endorsement.[download Super Furry Animals – Foxy Music]
