Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the Gloomydrome. This week two titans of tristfulness have drawn swords after a combined sixteen years of inactivity, two monsters of melancholia have lined up their newest songs and released, quite coincidentally on the same day, two albums of deepest desolation, facing off, in sadiatorial combat if you will, for the title of Most Miserable Band In Britain. Let’s meet the contenders.
Hooray! There’s a new Tindersticks album coming soon. The Hungry Saw will be out in April on Beggars Banquet.
Tindersticks are the best band in the world - shut up you cloth-eared fool, they are - so this makes me very happy indeed. Even though the group appears to have shed no less than half its members in the five years since their last proper offering, Waiting for the Moon, the new preview track is authentic Tindersticks from start to finish. Curiously entitled The Flicker of a Little Girl*, it sounds grand to me, which bodes well for the album. Amongst my friends I know of only two other fans, and far more people who actively dislike them, so I don’t really expect you to share my opinion, but you should give the new song a couple of listens anyway. They’re one of those bands who, precisely because of the idiosyncrasies that put people off initially, inspire quietly lunatic devotion in their fans. It is, I think, well worth making the effort to acquire a taste for their music.
* Sorry if that link doesn’t work properly, I’m unsure of all this newfangled MySpacery.
Back in the last millennium I used to spend much of my free time messing about with programs like Cubase and Sound Forge and a selection of analog synth emulators, making agglomerations of sound that could, loosely, be termed music. Making bleepy music is, in fact, what first got me into computers*, and it was ace fun, but I got out of the habit after I started sharing accommodation with human beings whose tastes did not encompass listening to fragments of amateurish breakbeat-based instrumental electronica over and over and over again.
Earlier today, however, I was pleased to rediscover a stack of old CD-Rs containing a multi-volume zip archive from the old Windows 95 PC upon which I composed my masterpieces. For your listening pleasure, then, here are four tracks that I have managed to salvage from the depths of history:
I’ve had this on my to-read list for years and years, since I read High Fidelity, which must have been in about 1997 or so. The main character in Nick Hornby’s novel cites it as his favourite book, as I recall, and for some reason that stuck with me, and made me think that this must be a definitive work of rock’n'roll literature, and that I must, some day, get round to it. My sister-in-law and her husband bought it for me this Christmas, so I finally have. (more…)
That’s about it, see you next year.
Some lovely animated music videos for your viewing pleasure:
I don’t normally like Flash-only websites, but I have to make an exception for www.songsfortheyoungatheart.co.uk because it’s rather splendid. A project by two members of my favourite band, Tindersticks, it’s a collection of children’s songs and poems performed by a selection of talented indie miserablists, you know, for kids, ostensibly at least. You’d have to be a pretty sophisticated five year old to appreciate the Stuart Staples version of Hushabye Mountain, for example, but personally I really like what I’ve heard so far.
Click on the dragon’s tail to see a video of Jarvis Cocker reciting The Lion and Albert, and click on the train to hear all the songs; Will Oldham’s Puff The Magic Dragon is fantastic.
Just in case the preponderance of waffling about Literature on here has led anyone to believe that I’m labouring under the misconception that I’m some sort of intellectual, I would like to share the following YouTube.com links to 14 minutes of early 1990s promotional music video material, representing four of my favourite compositions of all time:
SL2 - On A Ragga Tip
2 Bad Mice - Bombscare
808 State - In Yer Face
The Prodigy - Charly
They don’t make ‘em like that any more. (more…)
Money being so hard to come by, classical musicians today rely almost entirely on the financial support they receive from foundations, the idle rich, no-show jobs at music schools - or Daddy. Because John Q Public has had so little to do with advancing their careers, there is absolutely no incentive for contemporary composers to write music that ordinary people might enjoy. So musicians write music for other musicians. Anyone else, you couldn’t pay them to listen to it.
Not entirely fair. I can think of several* pieces of contemporary classical music that aren’t completely unlistenable tosh, less enjoyable than a performance from a tone deaf chimpanzee with a toy piano.
* Three. No, sorry, I jest. Four.