If someone were to film Memory Sticks (and have I mentioned, you can buy it? I haven’t? OK. Well. You can buy it), this is the sort of thing that should be over the closing credits. I think the video is not good, endowed with the seductive emptiness of glossy style magazines like i-D (in fact, why not go do something else and listen to the song playing in the background? I recommend that). I do not know why I like the song. I mean, it’s not the sort of thing I normally like.
Maybe it’s because Marina (there apparently aren’t any Diamonds, really) has a voice that appeals to me. I don’t know.
I haven’t posted so much recently, for all sorts of reasons.
While I think of something else to write, here’s some music I like. Look. I gave up trying to tell people about my music some time ago, mostly, because people are like, “what kind of music do you like?” and I tell them and they say “what?” and I say, like this, and the people say “what?”
So. A rundown. Some of these things are more obviously rockist than others, but I make no apologies.
Identikit one-name FHM pinup singer? Check*.
Doing the sexy office drone thing? Check.
Getting a sexy cyborg upgrade in a lift? Check.
Branded to all buggery (”Energiser™ Playboy™ Bunny,” anybody)? Check.
Crappy “Street” rapper to appeal to the urban demographic? Check.
Veneer of shiny efficiency, no soul allowed? Check.
Vast carbon footprint (check out the exhaust on the suggestive motorbike)? Check.
Unintentional glass ceiling misogyny? Yeah, I think so.
“If you work hard for your money, you’s a go girl.” Quite.
Edit: Graham also noted the heavy use of auto-tune in the song, an effect which serves to drain any individuality and rawness from the singer’s voice (and which may also disguise an inability to sing).
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*This is Ciara, like it matters.
In the last six years, John Darnielle, the man behind The Mountain Goats, has released six albums. I like the Mountain Goats. I do. But I’m really ambivalent.
Were I really clued about music, I would no doubt pretend to have been following Darnielle’s music since he was releasing cassettes recorded on a tinny boom box in his bedroom. I am not, not really, and to be honest, having heard one or two of his songs recorded in that style, I’m sort of glad. But more on that later.
John Darnielle’s music depends on the words. Which is just as well. He can only just about sort-of sing, really. As a musician, he’s no Nick Drake. But his lyrics are truly amazing, about as close as pop music gets to real poetry. Although not oblique in any meaningful sense, the songs present pictures of difficult childhoods and break-ups, paranoia and desperation. I know that sounds bleak, but Darnielle’s best lyrics. although miserable, are also laugh-out-loud funny.
Here is the video for “Sax Rohmer #1″ from his most recent album, Heretic Pride. It’s a song in which he uses metaphors from a pulp fiction novel to portray the resigned acceptance of the narrator to a sudden upheaval in his life.
The video itself more or less presents in visual form what matters in Darnielle’s songs. It’s all about the lyrics.
I can’t pretend to understand all of what Darnielle sings about, but his words are evocative. I first heard the Mountain Goats three years ago, thanks to Daniel. In a few weeks, I’d picked up three albums, and have bought every new release since.
The first album I heard in full was 2004’s We Shall All Be Healed. It portrays people who are witnesses and bystanders, people who seem to have missed the world: a man who writes thanking a friend for electrical equipment and stage make-up (”Letter From Belgium”), a man who sits beside the intensive care bedside of a friend or lover who has fallen in a gun battle with the police (”Mole”), a convenience store assistant who shoots an armed robber in self-defence and who denies he’s guilty about it but still goes down to the Catholic church on a whim and prays the rosary (”Against Pollution”). In “Quito” a man makes drunken resolutions about his homecoming that ring hollow; in “Palmcorder Yajna” someone goes on a wild bender with friends… but thinks he’s being watched.
It’s a good album, with crap production. It’s tinny; not easy listening. It sounds like it was recorded in a toilet. But We Shall All Be Healed is lavish compared with 2002’s All Hail West Texas, which was recorded on a tape player so rubbish that you can hear the motor whirring away. Notwithstanding the fact that it has at least one solid gold song-parable in “The Best-Ever Death Metal Band Out of Denton”, I find All Hail West Texas near-unlistenable. I know some people who fetishise crap production, as if it’s more real somehow, more honest.
I think that’s often elitist, in the worst possible way, a means of excluding people who can’t be prepared to work through waves of tape hiss and echoey vocals to get to the music. I have heard far too many joyless indie-pop bands with off-key vocals and sound levels all over the place to sympathise with that. It’s actually a pose, more often than not - they don’t have to produce their records in a studied-yet-deliberately-inept fashion. They just choose to. I mean, I don’t think that music needs to be dumbed down
Does my desire to see Mike Leigh’s new film Happy-Go-Lucky stem from my respect for the work of a great British director and his emphasis on truth and realism and humanity and stuff, a desire to go to the cinema and see that rare thing, an artistically worthwhile film that both Wood and Mrs Wood are likely to enjoy, or does it stem from a sad thirtysomething man’s aesthetic appreciation of Sally Hawkins?
Guess (clue: two of them are true).
It’s academic, anyway, since - big surprise! - it’s not showing in Swansea.
Sigh. Maybe the arts centre’ll have it… in like six months’ time…
This means a lot more, personally speaking, to Daniel (who put it together) and his friends over in Texas than it does to me, but it’s beautiful.
Daniel’s album, recording as Johnny Citizen, is, I understand it, imminent. He was good enough to give me a copy when he visited, and I like it a lot. Go have a listen and see if it works for you, too.
Blogging in the style of Robot Hero: thanks to some stuff given me back in September by Daniel, I’ve been fascinated with Texan singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Annie Clark, who has this rich, full voice, and a fascinating way with words.
She’s quite lovely to look at, too, but I’m shallow like that.
Anyway, here’s the video of her song “Jesus Saves, I Spend” from the album Marry Me:
And better still, here’s her doing it live, her only accompaniment being the trappings of a Paris flat.
Wood is, though. He's a freelance writer, based in Wales. He writes for magazines and things, and even edits one. His work has appeared in nearly forty books for a very well-known publisher of tabletop role-playing games, the ones with the funny-shaped dice and everything, but that doesn't make him a bad person. His driving licence says he's called Howard.
Some other people write here, too, sometimes. Some of them are real.
We started this as a fiction project, and although we've descended into the world of blogging, our regular bite-size serials still persist, if only for the sake of our sanity.
Recently, we started publishing. Here's our storefront.
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