He scares me and makes me laugh at the same time. It's weird.
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Thursday, December 18, 2008
Top 20 albums of 2008
The music boys at work got us compiling our 20 favourite albums of the year a few weeks back – the result, which I think is actually a rather good list, can be read here. Meanwhile, here's my score of LPs, subsequently tweaked, tweaked and tweaked again to account for newbies, pangs of regret, self doubt and so on.
1. Vampire Weekend – Vampire Weekend
2. Santogold – Santogold
3. Music Hole – Camille
4. Flight of the Conchords – Flight of the Conchords
5. Stainless Style – Neon Neon
6. Glasvegas – Glasvegas
7. The Seldom Seen Kid – Elbow
8. Who Killed Amanda Palmer? – Amanda Palmer
9. Oracular Spectacular – MGMT
10. Twenty-One – Mystery Jets
11. Viva La Vida – Coldplay
12. O – Tilly and the Wall
13. Alas I Cannot Swim – Laura Marling
14. Nights Out – Metronomy
15. This Gift – Sons and Daughters
16. Distortion – Magnetic Fields
17. My DNA – Manda Rin
18. For Emma, Forever Ago – Bon Iver
19. We Are the Physics Are OK At Music – We Are the Physics
20. Jim Noir – Jim Noir
Bubbling under: Foals, Oasis, Calexico, Conor Oberst, The Wave Pictures, Los Campesinos!, These New Puritans. Oh dear, I feel bad now.
No prizes for Portishead's Third, which was a bit like being tortured. Or Kings of Leon's horribly mature Only By The Night, which I didn't understand at all and actually prompted me to say, "I prefer their early stuff" out loud. Fleet Foxes are overrated, all atmosphere no tunes. No one was more disappointed than me when the CSS sophomore album turned out to be a bit crud. And the Klaxons, good as they are, have engendered an awful lot of tripe – lookin' at you, Crystal Castles, Friendly Fires, Late of the Pier. By the way, I may take this back later when I realise around mid-April that all the bands I've just dissed are all actually the best thing since the last best thing.
My top ten albums of 2007
My top ten albums of 2006
My top ten albums of 2005 (good grief...)
1. Vampire Weekend – Vampire Weekend
2. Santogold – Santogold
3. Music Hole – Camille
4. Flight of the Conchords – Flight of the Conchords
5. Stainless Style – Neon Neon
6. Glasvegas – Glasvegas
7. The Seldom Seen Kid – Elbow
8. Who Killed Amanda Palmer? – Amanda Palmer
9. Oracular Spectacular – MGMT
10. Twenty-One – Mystery Jets
11. Viva La Vida – Coldplay
12. O – Tilly and the Wall
13. Alas I Cannot Swim – Laura Marling
14. Nights Out – Metronomy
15. This Gift – Sons and Daughters
16. Distortion – Magnetic Fields
17. My DNA – Manda Rin
18. For Emma, Forever Ago – Bon Iver
19. We Are the Physics Are OK At Music – We Are the Physics
20. Jim Noir – Jim Noir
Bubbling under: Foals, Oasis, Calexico, Conor Oberst, The Wave Pictures, Los Campesinos!, These New Puritans. Oh dear, I feel bad now.
No prizes for Portishead's Third, which was a bit like being tortured. Or Kings of Leon's horribly mature Only By The Night, which I didn't understand at all and actually prompted me to say, "I prefer their early stuff" out loud. Fleet Foxes are overrated, all atmosphere no tunes. No one was more disappointed than me when the CSS sophomore album turned out to be a bit crud. And the Klaxons, good as they are, have engendered an awful lot of tripe – lookin' at you, Crystal Castles, Friendly Fires, Late of the Pier. By the way, I may take this back later when I realise around mid-April that all the bands I've just dissed are all actually the best thing since the last best thing.
My top ten albums of 2007
My top ten albums of 2006
My top ten albums of 2005 (good grief...)
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Last night on Channel 4: Country House Rescue
Essentially Changing Rooms for toffs, Country House Rescue sees entrepreneur Ruth Watson spraying on lipstick and mascara with a face stencil and visiting a series of impressive but flawed country homes to transform them into viable money-making ventures. Thankfully, this doesn't involve turning Britain's historic treasures into Burger Kings filled with blackjack tables... Read more...
Tuesday, December 09, 2008
Playlist #7: December 2008
Hi! Here are the songs that have been preoccupying me of late. Highlights? Well, Simon Clayton's delivery of the line "without the light of dawn" in The Indelicates' 'Fun is For the Feeble-Minded' - not on their album, for some reason, possibly because it sounds like a mid-'90s Therapy? song; that isolated and amazing harmony on the Vampire Weekend track ("... to see the dawn"), a riff that nags but gets away with it - possibly album of the year, this, but it's still tussling with Santogold and Camille in my head; the Mama Cass tune, which never fails to remind me of the opening of series two of Lost; The Killers' 'You Read My Mind', with that gorgeous B flat passing note on the "you" of "you don't shine" in the chorus (dare I suggest Sam's Town is a better album than Hot Fuss? Dare I?); the wonderfulness of anything the Hidden Cameras do - ah, even if they only have one song, it's still a great song... And so on and so on: i luvs you mewsick!
SeeqPod - Playable Search
Oh, if Seeqpod's being a bitch, try listening in Internet Explorer. It's temperamental. What can I say, I didn't build the thing.
SeeqPod - Playable Search
Oh, if Seeqpod's being a bitch, try listening in Internet Explorer. It's temperamental. What can I say, I didn't build the thing.
Thursday, December 04, 2008
Tonight on Channel 4: The Fun Police
"It's a lovely autumn afternoon to spend a couple of hours in the garden," says retired health and safety consultant Ed Friend. "But don’t forget that an anagram of 'garden' is 'danger'."
Is this health and safety gone mad? This lot don't think so. Although we see several H&S inspectors at work here – Frank, who patronises his quarry with a smile and Pauline, whose visits to the local nail salons to check they're using the right glue turn into epic battles of thick-skinned reasonableness – it's Ed who's the star of the show.
In scenes that bring to mind Gareth Keenan's health and safety tutorial in The Office, we see Ed telling a group of sniggering workers not to lift things that are too heavy to lift, demonstrating how he arranges his cutlery drawer at home to prevent accidentally cutting himself, or showing the camera a range of H&S leaflets, one called Fatal Traction. In this humourless world, it's hard to know whether that's a joke or not.
It becomes a bit less funny when we start to peer into the inspectors' motivations behind their work. Ed's wife (yes, he is married) hints at preventable workplace fatalities that have affected him deeply, and we also hear about serious burns suffered by his father as a foundry worker. And it's quite a jolt to see his distress at a disgustingly hyperbolic Richard Littlejohn column calling H&S inspectors "the very people who would have been loading the cattle trucks to the concentration camps".
In the hated professions stakes, these guys must surely be ranked alongside, if not above, traffic wardens, serial killers and journalists. But while The Fun Police does its bit to reinforce the stereotypes of geeky, obsessive killjoys, it's also a reminder that whatever Littlejohn would have you think, it's actually not much fun having your hands sawn off by a piece of shoddy machinery.
by Will Parkhouse, Wednesday 3 December 2008
Originally published on Orange.co.uk
Is this health and safety gone mad? This lot don't think so. Although we see several H&S inspectors at work here – Frank, who patronises his quarry with a smile and Pauline, whose visits to the local nail salons to check they're using the right glue turn into epic battles of thick-skinned reasonableness – it's Ed who's the star of the show.
In scenes that bring to mind Gareth Keenan's health and safety tutorial in The Office, we see Ed telling a group of sniggering workers not to lift things that are too heavy to lift, demonstrating how he arranges his cutlery drawer at home to prevent accidentally cutting himself, or showing the camera a range of H&S leaflets, one called Fatal Traction. In this humourless world, it's hard to know whether that's a joke or not.
It becomes a bit less funny when we start to peer into the inspectors' motivations behind their work. Ed's wife (yes, he is married) hints at preventable workplace fatalities that have affected him deeply, and we also hear about serious burns suffered by his father as a foundry worker. And it's quite a jolt to see his distress at a disgustingly hyperbolic Richard Littlejohn column calling H&S inspectors "the very people who would have been loading the cattle trucks to the concentration camps".
In the hated professions stakes, these guys must surely be ranked alongside, if not above, traffic wardens, serial killers and journalists. But while The Fun Police does its bit to reinforce the stereotypes of geeky, obsessive killjoys, it's also a reminder that whatever Littlejohn would have you think, it's actually not much fun having your hands sawn off by a piece of shoddy machinery.
by Will Parkhouse, Wednesday 3 December 2008
Originally published on Orange.co.uk
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Last night on Sky1: 24: Redemption
Call me a nitpicker, but last night’s 24 special really should have just been called 2, shouldn’t it? Although it used 24’s trademark real-time system, had a few split screen moments and featured, of course, a grizzled Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) running around with a gun and a manbag, it covered just a couple of hours, a new departure for the long-running show.
The breakaway from the main series was obviously so the show’s creators got the chance to do a “Jack in Africa” sort of adventure without then having to follow it with 10 episodes of Jack sitting on a plane looking out the window and watching an in-flight movie.
Yes, this way was probably the better option – and it worked. The show kicked off with our hero working in an orphanage in ficitonal African country Sangala alongside old special forces pal Carl Benton (Robert Carlyle in fine fettle), Bauer’s utilitarian approach to saving the world has left him physically and psychologically scarred - although you should’ve seen the other guy.
Meanwhile, a warlord was busy recruiting children for a coup, while over in the US, President-elect Allison Taylor (Cherry Jones) was preparing for her inauguration. (Of course, 24’s black President has been and gone – keep up, America!) Plenty afoot then. Anyway, it wasn’t long before the political intrigue got going in the States, and Jack had a group of African children to save and a gang of African soldiers to shoot.
The America scenes were weird, as usual, all muted and eerie blue, like something out of a dream. In contrast, the vivid action sequences in Sangala were a return to the show’s heartpumping best, and Jack’s moving moment of redemption a finale so good we were even tempted to let him off for the mostly boring season six.
by Will Parkhouse
Originally published on Orange.co.uk
The breakaway from the main series was obviously so the show’s creators got the chance to do a “Jack in Africa” sort of adventure without then having to follow it with 10 episodes of Jack sitting on a plane looking out the window and watching an in-flight movie.
Yes, this way was probably the better option – and it worked. The show kicked off with our hero working in an orphanage in ficitonal African country Sangala alongside old special forces pal Carl Benton (Robert Carlyle in fine fettle), Bauer’s utilitarian approach to saving the world has left him physically and psychologically scarred - although you should’ve seen the other guy.
Meanwhile, a warlord was busy recruiting children for a coup, while over in the US, President-elect Allison Taylor (Cherry Jones) was preparing for her inauguration. (Of course, 24’s black President has been and gone – keep up, America!) Plenty afoot then. Anyway, it wasn’t long before the political intrigue got going in the States, and Jack had a group of African children to save and a gang of African soldiers to shoot.
The America scenes were weird, as usual, all muted and eerie blue, like something out of a dream. In contrast, the vivid action sequences in Sangala were a return to the show’s heartpumping best, and Jack’s moving moment of redemption a finale so good we were even tempted to let him off for the mostly boring season six.
by Will Parkhouse
Originally published on Orange.co.uk
Sunday, November 23, 2008
Brimful of Asa
[previously published in Arise magazine October 2008]
French-born Nigerian singer Asa combines soulful melodies with serious issues, finding her inspiration in the most unlikely places. Here, she talks about the immense love she has for Nigeria - and Africa
Where's the best place to write a song? A nice, quiet enclave, where you can achieve maximum concentration? Not if you're Asa.
"I write in rough environments where I can get inspired, like the bus in Lagos," says the honey-voiced chanteuse, who grew up in the south-west Nigerian city. "They call them molué – they look like school buses in America, you know, the yellow and black ones? Except these ones are bad, bad, bad, bad. It's like they've picked them up off the junkyard and forced the cars to come back to life. But there's so much drama: they're always overcrowded and there's so much noise – hawkers hawking their goods, the preacherman in the corner trying to catch the attention of the people…"
But Asa, she explains, isn't the first singer to be inspired by these incredible, sense-clashing modes of transport.
"Fela [Kuti] sang about it. He said, of course we have 49 people sitting and 99 people standing." She laughs. "But it gets me thinking. You have the reality right in front of you. It might not be fun, because someone might be stepping on my foot or taking my space, but you look back on the day and you laugh. And that's the story of Lagos."
And the story of Asa? Born in Paris, she moved back to Lagos with her family at the age of two. By seven, thanks in part to her father's record collection, singing was a habit that she felt incapable of breaking. She found an opening as a young artist at the French Cultural Centre in Lagos, which helped her learn and hone her craft. It was as part of a French jazz group that Asa returned to the country of her birth and where she's now based, although trips back to Lagos are leapt upon whenever there's a break from touring. Oh, and just in case you didn't know, the name's pronounced 'Asha'.
Despite those cramped writing conditions, the bespectacled 26-year-old still manages to give her music an expansive calmness that makes you want to stretch out your arms and close your eyes; perfect for lying on the grass in a park with an untouched weekend on the horizon. But that's not to say she deals in frivolity or fluffiness. The carefree refrains on her self-titled album, released earlier this year, disguise some serious subject matter, as the bleak world described in her track 'Fire on the Mountain' ("So little Lucy turns sixteen… / She has a lover in her daddy / She can't tell nobody") and anti-slavery melody 'Jailer' demonstrate.
No temptation to write love songs then? "Growing up in Lagos, you have no choice but to wonder and ask why – there are so many questions," she says. "It's just natural. These are things my peer group always talked about. There are so many issues we were meant to assess or fight for. I grew up with it every day – I see it, I hear it, I live it."
In line with the aims of THISDAY's Africa Rising concerts, Asa sees her music as a way of showing the world a more positive side to her country and Africa in general. "As a Nigerian in a foreign land, when I tell people where I'm from, there's always two things that come up: oil and violence. It really saddens me that that's the only idea others have of this amazing country. I just want to tell people that not everything that comes out of Nigeria, or indeed Africa, is bad."
Asa calls her music "soul, but with a fusion of folk, jazz, hip hop and reggae", namechecking musical greats such as Bob Marley and Marvin Gaye as just two of her many influences. But showing how important roots are to this Franco-African singer, Asa also includes Nigerian Yoruba culture in the list.
"My roots are my identity, they're very important," she says. "When I sing I want people to ask 'who is she?'" They undoubtedly will.
French-born Nigerian singer Asa combines soulful melodies with serious issues, finding her inspiration in the most unlikely places. Here, she talks about the immense love she has for Nigeria - and Africa
Where's the best place to write a song? A nice, quiet enclave, where you can achieve maximum concentration? Not if you're Asa.
"I write in rough environments where I can get inspired, like the bus in Lagos," says the honey-voiced chanteuse, who grew up in the south-west Nigerian city. "They call them molué – they look like school buses in America, you know, the yellow and black ones? Except these ones are bad, bad, bad, bad. It's like they've picked them up off the junkyard and forced the cars to come back to life. But there's so much drama: they're always overcrowded and there's so much noise – hawkers hawking their goods, the preacherman in the corner trying to catch the attention of the people…"
But Asa, she explains, isn't the first singer to be inspired by these incredible, sense-clashing modes of transport.
"Fela [Kuti] sang about it. He said, of course we have 49 people sitting and 99 people standing." She laughs. "But it gets me thinking. You have the reality right in front of you. It might not be fun, because someone might be stepping on my foot or taking my space, but you look back on the day and you laugh. And that's the story of Lagos."
And the story of Asa? Born in Paris, she moved back to Lagos with her family at the age of two. By seven, thanks in part to her father's record collection, singing was a habit that she felt incapable of breaking. She found an opening as a young artist at the French Cultural Centre in Lagos, which helped her learn and hone her craft. It was as part of a French jazz group that Asa returned to the country of her birth and where she's now based, although trips back to Lagos are leapt upon whenever there's a break from touring. Oh, and just in case you didn't know, the name's pronounced 'Asha'.
Despite those cramped writing conditions, the bespectacled 26-year-old still manages to give her music an expansive calmness that makes you want to stretch out your arms and close your eyes; perfect for lying on the grass in a park with an untouched weekend on the horizon. But that's not to say she deals in frivolity or fluffiness. The carefree refrains on her self-titled album, released earlier this year, disguise some serious subject matter, as the bleak world described in her track 'Fire on the Mountain' ("So little Lucy turns sixteen… / She has a lover in her daddy / She can't tell nobody") and anti-slavery melody 'Jailer' demonstrate.
No temptation to write love songs then? "Growing up in Lagos, you have no choice but to wonder and ask why – there are so many questions," she says. "It's just natural. These are things my peer group always talked about. There are so many issues we were meant to assess or fight for. I grew up with it every day – I see it, I hear it, I live it."
In line with the aims of THISDAY's Africa Rising concerts, Asa sees her music as a way of showing the world a more positive side to her country and Africa in general. "As a Nigerian in a foreign land, when I tell people where I'm from, there's always two things that come up: oil and violence. It really saddens me that that's the only idea others have of this amazing country. I just want to tell people that not everything that comes out of Nigeria, or indeed Africa, is bad."
Asa calls her music "soul, but with a fusion of folk, jazz, hip hop and reggae", namechecking musical greats such as Bob Marley and Marvin Gaye as just two of her many influences. But showing how important roots are to this Franco-African singer, Asa also includes Nigerian Yoruba culture in the list.
"My roots are my identity, they're very important," she says. "When I sing I want people to ask 'who is she?'" They undoubtedly will.
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Len an ear
Went to a Leonard Cohen gig last night, and he was quite something. Four (or was it five?) standing ovations! Concert aside, that's quite an impressive spectacle in itself, when it's the Albert Hall.
Even better was the delightful sight of pop's most miserable skipping off stage - which he did several times - like a carefree 10-year-old girl. My highlight was 'Bird on the Wire', immensely measured and moving, even from the fourth (or was it fifth?) tier.
Here's a fantastic version of Len-Co doing the song back in the late '70s. Searing Hammond, asthmatic vocals and epic gospel backing all present and correct.
Does anyone else think that Mr Cohen perhaps deserves a co-writing credit for The Rolling Stones' 'I Got The Blues' and Ben Folds's 'The Luckiest'?
Even better was the delightful sight of pop's most miserable skipping off stage - which he did several times - like a carefree 10-year-old girl. My highlight was 'Bird on the Wire', immensely measured and moving, even from the fourth (or was it fifth?) tier.
Here's a fantastic version of Len-Co doing the song back in the late '70s. Searing Hammond, asthmatic vocals and epic gospel backing all present and correct.
Does anyone else think that Mr Cohen perhaps deserves a co-writing credit for The Rolling Stones' 'I Got The Blues' and Ben Folds's 'The Luckiest'?
Tonight on Channel 4: The Devil's Whore
Now that's what I call a salacious title! Although this being Channel 4, it's slightly surprising this new English Civil War drama isn't called The Devil's Whore ON CRACK for that added punch. But hey ho. Read more...
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
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