No.361- Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Various Artists, 2004

Purchased at MVC, Gatwick Airport, January 2005

I hate this film, I really do. The music in it is quite nice, though; there are some lovely Jon Brion instrumentals, Lata Mangeshkar’s eternally glamorous Wada Na Tod and- though it shames me to admit even the vaguest liking for it- ELO’s Mr Blue Sky. The only reason I bought it, though, was to get my hands on Beck’s absolutely stunning version of The Korgis’ Everybody’s Gotta Learn Sometimes. It may well be the most luxuriantly depressed take on a break-up song I’ve ever heard, beating even Spiritualized’s Broken Heart with its elbow-deep emotional wallowing. It’s heaven.

No.355- Up the Bracket, The Libertines, 2002

Purchased at Woolworths, Petersfield, October 2002

 

Ten years ago, my class at school was not a great place to be a fan of Indie music. Fred Durst and Korn ruled, anything else was effete and slightly weird. In a year of around fifty, there were only two of us who got excited when the NME started championing The Libertines; one of them is now being touted as the future of Rock’n’Roll; the other is now, er, me. Two years later, everyone was mad for anything Doherty-related; I felt extremely pleased with myself, if a little bored of hearing Can’t Stand Me Now blasting out of the common room windows.

So I was there- sort of. I never saw The Libertines live, and I didn’t live in London back then. I was thirteen and pathetically susceptible to anything the Conor McNicolas-era NME told me. How horribly embarrassing.

After Heroin, Kate Moss, Dirty Pretty Things, Confessions of a Child of the Century (which, being a closet masochist, I’m dying to see) and that godawful second album, it’s hard to believe that The Libertines were ever anything but a tiresome tabloid soap opera. Believe it or not, though, Carl, Pete and… the other two were a genuinely exciting proposition back in 2002; I knew The Strokes’ album by heart, and was aware of the Shite Stripes, but I’d never heard music as louchely scrappy, as tantalisingly dangerous as Up the Bracket; I loved every song on it, and in a nostalgic kinda way, I still do. This was something that I- and every other soi-disant bohemian teen in Britain- could buy into. The purchase of a fucked-up second hand Trilby and my first pack of fags came only a matter of days after I got my hands on this record, and so began my descent into wankerdom.

Up the Bracket is sort of perfect, I think; only a churl would deny that Time For Heroes, Death on the Stairs and the title track are first-rate bits of romantic pop-punk songwriting, and the incompetent charm of Horrorshow, The Boy Looked at Johnny and I Get Along renders irrelevant the cat-calls that beset the group around the time the album came out (“Fackin’ Posers”, Mockney accent exaggerated for impact). My favourite is Boys in the Band; it sounds as though it could fall apart at any moment, but manages to hold itself together, changing time and key almost at random whilst remaining as catchy as Swine Flu. God I feel nostalgic.

 

No.353- Kid A, Radiohead, 2000

(This copy) Purchased at Reckless Records, Berwick Street, 2009

And so, as far as I’m aware, the World didn’t end yesterday. Ace- what a total fucking anticlimax that would’ve been. I’ve yet to hear how the doom-mongers reacted to this complete and utter non-event, but I can’t wait to see what date they revise the Apocalypse to. Who are these people who seem to fall for a different doomsday theory every year? I’m an inveterate pessimist about almost everything, but honestly… do they (can they?) have more time on their hands than I do? Do they actively will the end of days? Do some of them look normal or are they all beardy kaftan-wearers? I’m stumped. One thing I do believe, though, is that they are all hardcore Radiohead fans.

If any pop group were ever to take any satisfaction from the planet’s last moments, as the Heavens swallowed up the Earth and the Oceans swelled up over Civilisation, it would be this fun-time fivesome from Oxford (where else?). Thom Yorke’s inscrutable yet incessant finger wagging would be enough to redesign the Richter scale on its own as he frantically typed out blogposts with words to the effect of NA-NA-NA-NA-NA- TOLD YOU SO! They’d probably release a means-priced glitch Techno single to accompany the catastrophe. I wouldn’t buy it, though.

For me, the only Radiohead record worth buying, owning or listening to is this, their none-more grumpy follow-up to 1997’s OK Computer. It is their sole claim to greatness- but what a claim.

Every song on it (bar perhaps The Morning Bell) is a masterpiece in itself; the slithering OCD-anthem Everything in its Right Place, the beautifully blank title track, the brutal outsider Rock of National Anthem, the gorgeously subtle rises and falls of How to Disappear Completely, the melancholic ambiance of Treefingers… I could go on- no wait! I’m enjoying this, so I will; Optimistic isJoy Division soundtracking Moonraker, In Limbo is the lifestyle-show incidental music from Hades, Idioteque might be the most exciting hi-jacking of Dance Music in the name of paranoia in the canon, and Motion Picture Soundtrack is our rescue remedy, the perfect, non-descript conclusion to this millennial masterpiece.

My conclusion may sound slightly glib, but I believe it: I’ve owned three copies of Kid A, and none of them have cost me over 3 quid. This means, I suppose, that it is the best value cultural milestone money can buy- and given this, you’d be a fool not to. Just don’t, whatever you do, get tempted into investigating its “sequel”, the riotously appalling Amnesiac- you’ll be on the Armageddon bandwagon before the first track has even finished.

No.351- West Coast, Studio, 2007

Birthday present from George J. Haugh, December 2007

Studio… I mean, come on… has a band ever had a more boring name? Even with the excuse of being from Sweden, these chaps really did go out of their way to emphasise their dullness. Look at the sleeve of the album- it has less in connection with Rock’n’Roll than it does with an O-level Maths textbook cover from 1973. Whoo. You guys are having a party, obviously.

But then you listen to Out There, and for a full sixteen minutes, the “vee are scientists” approach makes perfect sense; it’s the most satisfying bit of hypnotic, looping, Krautrock pulsebeat since the hirsute days when Neu! skulked the streets of Dusseldorf. There is no personality here, but it doesn’t matter- these geeks appear to have perfected the art of impersonally good grooving. A single guitar line hovers tantalisingly over circular pattern of bass and drums for about ten minutes- and then, just as it starts to get a bit background-y, an all-conquering I Feel Love synthesiser whirr rips in and elevates this stellar piece of Balearic-Disco to celestial heights.

What a shame that Studio didn’t keep it up; like The Durutti Column before them, Studio were at their best when they kept their mouths shut. While the dizzying spirals of Out There seemed to hint at perfection without personality, the singing on the other tracks is charisma-free but introduces the horrific spectre of the Rock’n’Roll ego. The vocals are Robert Smith without the make-up or the panto-Goth hilarity. They’re just embarrassing. Face it, boys, you chose to hide behind a non-image- for christ’s sake, stay put!

 

 

No.349- Overpowered, Róisín Murphy, 2007

Purchased at Rough Trade, W11, Autumn 2007

This is going to sound a little young fogeyish, but it’s Monday morning and I’m slightly disgruntled and confused- you must forgive me. Anyway, here goes…

We live in a shouty age; the Internet has allowed everybody a voice, and I’m not sure I like its pitch. Fuckheads yell about their brilliance from the rooftops, morons fail to understand the 15-minute fame principle, cretins prance about like superstars in drag. It’s almost impossible to smell yourself rot, such is the mass-attention deficit ego trip. Who needs the public gaze, anyway? Wait! Come back! I didn’t mean that… I need your approval. Honestly, I do, sweet readers… I’m just a bit tired, that’s all.

The cover of Róisín Murphy’s second solo album strikes the consumer for several reasons. As an image, the above composition screams LOOK AT ME louder than an X-Factor runner up from three years ago caught in a beef mincer. It’s a woman in crayzee clothes in a transport caff! How mad is that, eh? I bet that blew some fuckin’ minds when that came out, yeah?

Except that it is a good cover; aside from being a striking image, it does everything a good record sleeve should do, namely project an image onto its protagonist. This noted, it balances grimy familiarity with Internet-Age flamboyant weirdness, and pretty much sums up the content of the disc within.

Overpowered is not a great album, but it is rather a lot of fun. The title track is- not to hold back on the superlatives or anything- one of the best singles of the last ten years, a joyously unsubtle stormer that bubbles and clanks its way directly into the epicentre of the listener’s frontal lobe. It finishes and you sit back, thinking to yourself: ‘did I really just hear that?’. You have to skip back just to check, and the process repeats until you feel you’ve spent the last five months bingeing on foie gras.

By comparison, the rest of the album suffers a little; there are a few too many undistinguished handbag-dance numbers (Cry Baby, Checkin’ on Me) to sustain interest throughout, but this is not to say Overpowered is a one-shot non-repeater. In fact, songs like the Prince-gone-J-Pop Footprints and the polished Throbbing Gristle of Dear Miami would on their own be cause to celebrate the album as a cult classic, were they not so comprehensively outmanoeuvred by its peerless opening track.

Róisín Murphy should be a proper pop star- she’s got everything. ‘Trouble is, though, that for all the aggressively defined persona in the world, there will always be someone with a bigger budget and lesser ideas out there to shout louder.

No.344- The Kings of Electro, Various Artists, 2007

Purchased at Sounds of the Universe, June 2007

I’m going to see Kraftwerk! But more of that later. Now I’m drunk. This is a record I might have many things to say about…  but, as I say, I’m drunk. It does, however, have Whodini’s Mr Magic’s Wand on it. That is cooool.

 

No.336- Dressed up for the Letdown, Richard Swift, 2007

Purchased at RPM, High Bridge, Newcastle, Summer 2007

Sorry, this post should’ve appeared yesterday; I was busy. I’m also busy today- sorry again.

For what it’s worth, this is a nice album- maybe a bit boring and twee in parts, but a nice album nonetheless. How’s that for music criticism, eh?

 

No.329- Sleepwalk: A Selection by Optimo (Espacio), Various Artists, 2008

Purchased at Rough Trade, Talbot Road W11, December 2008

Wuuuuh. I’m knackered. This may sound rather backhanded, but this is a very, very good compilation to fall asleep to. The caveat in this is that it is guaranteed to provoke some extremely strange dreams. It’s not boring (well, at least not in the good bits), but it nonetheless justifies its title completely: 19 somnambulantly creepy pieces of music from names as diverse as Coil, Raymond Scott and Duke Ellington. Phew- I could drop off now, were it not for the frankly mind-boggling prospect of Lee Hazelwood covering Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On to the backing of a full Swedish porn orchestra: yes, it really does have to be heard on repeat for about seven hours to be believed… if you’re not traumatised by the sheer indecency of all the Jazz Flutes here, you’ll probably like it almost as much as I do. Shit on a stick is it seedy, but my gawd… whose barn? What barn? MY barn… enough said, I think.

I’m off to bed.

No.327- The Mouse & The Mask, Dangerdoom, 2005

Purchased at Reckless Records, Berwick Street, November 2011

Nobody believes me, but I swear this is true; I have used my University’s Library more times since I finished there than I did in my entire five years as an undergraduate. Before you infer that I’ve become some kind of autodidact, let me assure you that I have only visited the UCL Library twice since May- you can probably see where this is going. How I ever got a degree remains a mystery to me, too.

I did mean to go and do my research… sometimes I even wanted to: trouble was that with Soho a couple of blocks away, I found it impossible to resist the lure of the Berwick Street shopping experience, and if it was after 5, The French House beckoned, regardless of whether or not there was anyone else about to get pissed with. I bought this record, a collaboration between MF Doom and Danger Mouse during a break between seminars in which I should’ve been analysing a post-colonial reading of the photography of Eugène Sue and Nadar. The essay I came to write about it turned out pretty disastrously, but at least I had a decent soundtrack to type it up to.

I think of The Mouse and The Mask as the evil twin of Gorillaz’ Demon Days: the two albums share the same basic ingredients (Danger Mouse, a bunch of cartoons I don’t really have any interest in and a super ’70s pop-funk template), but this is a decidedly more cultish affair. While I can’t pretend to be familiar with Doom’s work outside of the gloriously offensive ’90s crew KMD, to call him macabre might be the understatement of the decade: ‘Just because some people wear a mask… don’t mean they did something!’, he growls at one point, indignant at being demonised by someone or other. The indie-rapper doth protest too much…

I like The Mouse and The Mask a lot, perhaps more, even, than Demon Days. The unrelentingly grumpy deadpan of Doom’s delivery is a tremendous foil for Danger Mouse’s breezily modish production, which itself is interspersed with intriguingly weird skits sampled from what the liner notes tell me is ‘Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim channel’. I don’t know what that is, but it works well enough here. TV themes feature heavily as source material, but are only ever momentarily familiar: there’s a snippet of music on Basket Case that’s going to make me tear my hair out if I don’t identify it soon, and another couple of seconds on Sofa King that for some reason takes me back to the afternoon in 1996 on which I figured out that chicken nuggets used to be chickens. I feel a little traumatised- this is all a bit of a headspin. Whatever- any album that features a Handbag-House Jazz rap entitled Vats of Urine must be doing something right.

No.323- Jil is Lucky, Jil is Lucky, 2009

Retrieved from the detritus of the STANDARD Magazine mailbag, early 2011

I was thinking about Paris the other day, and how great it was to be able to get all these amusingly shit Europop CDs for free. This has changed my mind; no degree of ironic detachment and casual xenophobia can excuse the name of this band (I can’t bring myself to type it out again), nor the jaw-droppingly rubbish cover. Whilst the latter might be excused on the grounds that it seemed like a good idea for three-MDMA-buoyed minutes in 2009, the music… oh christ, the music… in a word, don’t.