Spank!!! # 14 (eh?)

Smoking # 34

"I don't know it must have been the roses..."

Richard Hell

Oscar Rodriguez Lopez

Why?

Roses certainly seem to be in bloom in the record label design world at the moment it would appear.

Album review of the year

There is a sense in which fans of Ian Brown are the Bilderberg Group of rock. They are a large, shadowy organisation. No one outside their mysterious ranks really understands their actions or motives, but it’s clear they wield considerable influence: enough at least to keep the former Stone Roses frontman thriving in the music business. His career has survived incarceration, accusations of homophobia and the oft-mentioned but incontrovertible fact that, away from the dulcifying technologies of the recording studio, his voice sounds less like something you’d actually pay money to listen to than something you’d deploy to stop ships crashing into Lizard Point in poor visibility.

On several occasions over the last decade, the present writer has attempted to go undercover, infiltrating their meetings at the Brixton Academy and the Southampton Guildhall, observing their participation in baffling occult rituals, including cheering wildly as Brown sets about a Stone Roses classic with the blunt instrument of his larynx, leaving She Bangs the Drums or I Wanna Be Adored lying insensible in intensive care, with a doctor by its bedside sadly shaking his head and offering grief counselling to its relatives. They appear to be having the time of their lives, but if you are not of their number, you reel away from an Ian Brown gig as you would from an unprovoked assault in a Yates’s Wine Lodge: shaken, confused, unable to work out what possessed you to go in there in the first place.

So perhaps the answer to his appeal lies in his albums, of which My Way – his sixth – is a pretty representative example. While in the Stone Roses, Ian Brown wrote – or at least co-wrote – songs of a swaggering perfection. After the Stone Roses split, he started writing songs like a man who’d never actually heard a song before: My Star, Dolphins Were Monkeys. It’s hard not think something was lost, but a certain naive charm was difficult to dispute. So it proves here. Opening track Stellify sets out his current musical stall, which is nothing if not idiosyncratic: an odd mid-tempo house thud, topped off with electronics and jangling pub piano. The melody ambles along, weirdly recalling the Grange Hill theme, before a vast horn section crashes into view as unexpectedly as a flying cartoon sausage on a fork. It’s a peculiar sonic cocktail on which to base an album, although the most peculiar thing about it might be that it works: on the ebullient Just Like You and the gorgeous lope of Laugh Now.

Elsewhere, there’s a song called Own Brain. As its lyrics helpfully point out, this is an anagram of Ian Brown. You somehow imagine it came about after agonised writing sessions in which he churned out songs called things like Wino Barn and I Warn Nob, but there’s something weirdly gripping about the resulting breakbeat clatter.

Not all of his idiosyncracies are as charming. He wastes the album’s loveliest melody on Always Remember Me, another unedifying comparison of his fortunes with those of John Squire: there’s something about Brown’s endless harping on this topic that recalls the guy who spends the evening loudly informing friends that his ex means nothing to him, then goes home and cries in a candlelit room wallpapered with her pictures. We once more encounter his unique brand of protest song, on which Brown expresses an utterly inarguable point in such a clumsily hectoring way that you immediately feel impelled to start arguing with it: “Save us from warmongers who bring on Armageddon! Save us from all those whose eyes are closed to the plight of the African child!” he bellowed on 2007’s The World Is Yours, causing at least one listener to frantically try to formulate a case in favour of warmongers who bring on Armageddon. This time, it’s a gloomily portentous song called The Crowning of the Poor, which socks it to “zillionaires” and leaves you fighting the urge to demand City bonuses be increased a hundredfold with immediate effect.

It ends with So High, a pastiche of classic southern soul. Given that southern soul is entirely predicated on the singers’ ability to convey raw emotion through the incredible power of their voice, you might reasonably assume that it’s a genre slightly out of Brown’s reach, even if he had the most powerful dulcifying studio technologies known to man at his disposal. But reasonable assumptions count for nothing in the world of Ian Brown: he just ploughs through it, with the reckless abandon of a man piloting a battered Datsun in a banger race. As with the rest of My Way, highlights and lowlights alike, you listen to it struggling to think of anyone else who would do this. And perhaps that’s the secret of the most mysterious continuing success story in rock.

@'The Guardian'

Wave Machines - Go/Go/Go

New AIR album...

You can listen to 'Love 2' online for approx the next 24 hours by going

HERE

Bonus: Audio
How Does It Make You Feel? (Adrian Sherwood Remix)

Alas poor Jude: "I knew her how well...?"

I would guess
not a particularly
happy chappy at the mo...

Not so Naked Lunch

Kim Gordon, Michael Stipe & William S. Burroughs
Via 'This isn't happiness'

Hosh Roshana שנה טובה

A shofar made from a ram's horn

In the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, there is a ceremony called Tashlich. Jews traditionally go to the ocean or a stream or river to pray and throw bread crumbs into the water.

Symbolically, the fish devour their sins.
Occasionally, people ask what kind of bread crumbs should be thrown. Here are suggestions for breads which may be mostappropriate for specific sins and misbehaviors:

For ordinary sins
White Bread

For erotic sins
French Bread

For particularly dark sins
Pumpernickel

For complex sins
Multi-Grain

For twisted sins
Pretzels

For tasteless sins
Rice Cakes

For sins of indecision
Waffles

For sins committed in haste
Matzoh

For sins of chutzpah
Fresh Bread

For substance abuse
Stoned Wheat

For use of heavy drugs
Poppy Seed

For petty larceny
Stollen

For committing auto theft
Caraway

For timidity/cowardice
Milk Toast

For ill-temperedness
Sourdough

For silliness, eccentricity
Nut Bread

For not giving full value
Shortbread

For jingoism, chauvinism
Yankee Doodles

For excessive irony
Rye Bread

For unnecessary chances
Hero Bread

For telling bad jokes/puns
Corn Bread

For war-mongering
Kaiser Rolls

For dressing immodestly
Tarts

For causing injury to others
Tortes

For lechery and promiscuity
Hot Buns

For promiscuity with gentiles
Hot Cross Buns

For racist attitudes
Crackers

For sophisticated racism
Ritz Crackers

For being holier than thou
Bagels

For abrasiveness
Grits

For dropping in without notice
Popovers

For over-eating
Stuffing

For impetuosity
Quick Bread

For indecent photography
Cheesecake

For raising your voice too often
Challah

For pride and egotism
Puff Pastry

For sycophancy, ass-kissing
Brownies

For being overly smothering
Angel Food Cake

For laziness
Any long loaf

For trashing the environment
Dumplings

(Thanx to RobbieM
via Superstar R.J. Lemon from the "krewe du jieux, New Orleans" ~ Happy New Year to you all!)

Moritz von Oswald Trio @ Bimhuis Amsterdam 23062008

Featuring Moritz von Oswald with Max Louderbauer and Sasu Ripatti (Vladislav Delay).

Evolution - Burning Man 2009 Time Lapse

From Red to black in seconds (last week in Australia) "Oh my gosh" & "Holy shit" indeed

“The future influences the present just as much as the past.” - Friedrich Nietzsch

Tack>>Head - In The Area 2008

Doug Wimbish (bass), Keith Leblanc (drums), and Skip "Little Axe" McDonald (guitar) at Sully's Pub & Tiki Bar in Hartford, Connecticut. WIMBASH 2008 (August 9, 2008)
Sharehead, soon come.

Glenn Beck: High as a kite

"Beck was known at B104 as a pro's pro in the studio but was becoming increasingly unraveled when not working. "Beck used to get hammered after every show at this little bar-café down the street," remembers a music programmer who worked with Beck. "At first we thought he was going to get lunch." The extent to which Beck was struggling to keep it together is highlighted by Beck's arrest one afternoon just outside Baltimore. He was speeding in his DeLorean with one of the car's gull-wing doors wide open when the cops pulled him over. According to a former colleague, Beck was "completely out of it" when a B104 manager went down to the station to bail him out. In his 2003 book, "Real America," Beck refers to himself as a borderline schizophrenic. Whether that statement is matter-of-fact or intended for effect, he has spoken more than once about taking drugs for ADHD, and when he was at B104, Beck's coworkers believed him to be taking prescription medication for some kind of mental or psychological ills. "He used to complain that his medication made him feel like he was 'under wet blankets,'" remembers the former music programmer.

Today, when Beck wants to illustrate the jerk he used to be, he tells the story of the time he fired an employee for bringing him the wrong pen during a promotional event. According to former colleagues in Baltimore, Beck didn't just fire people in fits of rage -- he fired them slowly and publicly. "He used to take people to a bar and sit them down and just humiliate them in public. He was a sadist, the kind of guy who rips wings off of flies," remembers a colleague."

Excerpt from Alexander Zaitchik's three part mini-biography at
'Salon'
Via 'Daily Kos'

PS~ What is "White Culture" Glenn?