Mark Richardson must be fucking livid. As Feeder drummer he seemed to be on a one-man mission to re-enliven the band and to drag them kicking and screaming out of their mopey phase, primarily by hitting the skins hard enough to drown out the sounds of sweeping strings and Grant’s heartfelt vocal swells. For this the man is to be saluted. Then, as soon as he fucks off back to Skunk Anansie, they release Renegades, probably the band’s heaviest release since the Swim EP.
That’s not to say the band have gone completely back to basics. They’ve lost some of the irreverence that marked their earlier releases, specifically songs like Women In Towels. Or, more accurately, they’ve lost the intentional irreverence of that period. Renegades features some of the most disposable lyrics you’ll probably hear this year. Frankly Grant Nicholas needs to be punched square in the face for the line “if you want to hear this song, you won’t have to wait too long,” from the album’s first-single and easy contender for worst song Call Out. You’d hardly call Left Foot Right a lyrical masterpiece either… and don’t even get me started on the “sitting on the bus, sitting on the bus” chorus to City In A Rut.
Still, lyrics aside, Renegades is a really good album with the band sounding, for the first time in years, like a proper 3-piece outfit. It’s clearly an album designed for live shows, full of short, fast and easily recognisable tunes. Nothing life changing, but a quality 40 minutes of music.
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Holy shit! Only forty minutes to collect together a bunch of neat links from the past 30 days and arrange them in a new and easier to pick through format before the month is over! Can I manage it? Well, yes because even if I don’t I’ll just change the publish time and pretend that I did. Ah, deadlines: they only exist for the people who are paid for this sort of thing.
7pm: The umpire climbs down from his chair and starts mildly slapping the net cord with his right hand. No one knows why. John Isner winds up for a backhand and misses the ball entirely. No one knows why.
What’s going on here? Once, long ago, I think that this was a tennis match. I believe it was part of a wider tennis tournament, somewhere in south-west London, and the winner of this match would then go on to face the winner of another match and, if he won that, the winner of another match. And so on until he reached the final and, fingers crossed, he won the title.
That, at least, is what this spectacle on Court 18 used to be; what it started out as. It’s not that anymore and hasn’t been for a few hours now. I’m not quite sure what it is, but it is long and it’s horrifying and it’s very long to boot. Is it death? I think it might be death.
Okay, so one news outlet didn’t have a great month. Would you be surprised to hear that it was the Daily Mail?
Has apocalyptic fiction killed off the enthusiasm and excitement that we used to feel for the future? Jim Rossignol explores the issue.
“At some point around the 22nd hour without sleep – as I forced myself to play Hannah Montana: The Movie: The Game whether I liked it or not – I asked myself, ‘How did it come to this?’”
Remix albums. Generally they’re not very good, especially when they’re remix albums for industrial bands. At their worst they’re basically an unlistenable stream of noise, trying hard to appear challenging to the listener, but coming across like a confused mess of pretentious guff. Nine Inch Nails first couple of forays into the remix business, in particular, were fucking awful.
More often remixers will simply take an existing track, speed it up, stick a trance drum beat underneath and pull the “generate club choon” lever. A couple of the tracks on AMERICAN PORN SONGS // REMIXED – the obviously titled remix album for 16Volt’s really rather good American Porn Songs – fall into this trap. Surprisingly though, a lot of the 22 tracks that make up the album actually take the source tracks and do some interesting things with them, accentuating underlying themes hinted at in the originals. Essentially they do what a remix album is meant to do.
Well, except for the Heroin Jazz remix of To Hell, one of my favourite tracks off the original album. It sounds like the Richard Cheese version of the song, putting a slow lounge backing underneath Eric’s vocals. It’s fucking bizarre.
Luckily To Hell also gets a good remix, alongside multiple versions of all the other tracks. Except Blessed, which no-one seems to have bothered with. Shame. Anyway, here’s the Everything Goes Cold remix of Alkali which pulls the trick of adding strings and such to the song. Bastards, it gets me every time.
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You can get American Porn Songs // Remixed from Amazon. It’s the best industrial remix album since Chemlab’s Rock Whore vs. Dance Floor. Yeah.
Slash, former guitarist for Guns ‘N’ Roses and Velvet Revolver, has made a new album. It’s quite good.
The highlight is the song Doctor Alibi, featuring Motorhead (I can’t be bothered to go and get the umlaut) singer/bassist Lemmy. We saw them perform it at Download festival. Then rain happened. More on our festival-going weekend at the end of the week, if I can be bothered.
Until then, here’s what Doctor Alibi sounds like:
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There’s been a bunch of stuff released over the last month or so that I meant to post about so I’m going to have a week of catching up.
First up is something linked from the RPS Sunday Times yesterday; Amanda Palmer’s ukulele cover of Radiohead’s Idioteque. It’s a handy sampler for the upcoming album of ukulele-based Radiohead covers because Kid A was probably the last of their albums I liked before going off the band completely.
The song can be bought from Amanda Palmer’s website for a minimum of 40 cents and the full album will be out on July 20. Expect it to sound like Radiohead performed with a magic ukulele.
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It was something of a surprise to me just how funny it was because, aside from the general feeling from certain corners that Chris Morris has “gone shit now” there also seemed to be a move from certain people (I’m looking at you Kermode listeners) to not only claim that it isn’t very funny, but that there was something wrong with the people who did find it funny because they didn’t “understand” the emotional centre of the film.
Bollocks. To. That.
The other night I saw it for the second time and it’s still a great comedy film. One of the best I’ve seen in a good few years. Yes, there is a humanity to the film. Scenes – especially between the lead character’s family – are quite touching in a warped kind of way but they never stop being funny. They can be both. That’s how absurdest black comedy works. It’s kind of the point.
I think what’s happening is a general fear of being seen to find the subject matter too funny. “Oh, it’s brilliant and well researched,” these people seem to be saying, “but heaven’s no, I didn’t actually find it very funny. Perish the thought!”
Of course humour is an entirely subjective thing and maybe I’m just picking up on an elitist-Guardian vibe in these assessments and projecting. The thing is, subject matter aside, Four Lions is a pretty traditional comedy. The central relationship between Omar and Waj reminds me a lot of Ted and Dougal from Father Ted. Waj is the idiot (in fact borderline-retarded) manchild who trusts Omar completely; Omar thrives on this, coming across as the straight man in his own group but, when out in Pakistan, shows himself up to be just as foolish as the rest of them. Throw in a touch of Peep Show with its tendency to push the limits of what you can make jokes out of (unsurprising as it’s co-written by Peep Show creators Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong) and you’ve got a fair idea of what to expect.
Generally I attempt to keep gaming news from dominating these posts. This month I failed. Oh well, maybe this gaming info-splurge will distract everyone from the fact that I only added one post to City 16 this month. I have failed you all.
Ed McMillen writes a couple of articles for GameSetWatch dealing with difficulty and risk/reward and how he’s built on lessons from old-school platformers in the creation of his upcoming Super Meatboy.
Charlie Brooker writes about the pressures of live TV after his appearance on Channel 4′s Alternative Election Night coverage. He may have pissed himself. A little.
It must be hugely frustrating for those game journalists whose day to day activities involve posting endless rumours and press releases. It can make a man go a bit funny.
How To Destroy Angels is a new band containing Mariqueen Maandig, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (who in my head, but probably not in reality, shares his first name with the Latin for attic.) They seem to sound like latter-era Nine Inch Nails but with a female vocalist. This is pleasing news because:
I like Nine Inch Nails
About 70% of music I’ve listened to this last year has had a female vocalist
Their first single, A Drowning, is available from Amazon as an MP3 or from iTunes as whatever the fuck file format they use these days. They’ve also produced a video for another song, The Space In Between. This is handy, because it gives me something to embed.
Final thought: I keep writing their name as How To Destroy Angles.
In November last year the Cumbrian town of Cockermouth suffered disastrous flooding. During the following clean-up operation it was visited by David Cameron.
"See David, it really is called Cockermouth."
Inevitably at some point during the visit Mr. Cameron was forced to cross a road. Clearly though he never saw Darth Vader’s lessons in road safety when he was a boy, because he walked straight onto the road after the crossing light had turned red. Setting off from those very traffic lights was my mother who saw him in time and resisted the urge many Britons would have to just speed up regardless.
That’s right. The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland doesn’t pay attention to basic road safety.
IF he can’t even cross the road properly WHAT hope does he have of tackling a complex problem like our economy?
…Sorry, I slipped into some misleading The Sun rhetoric there. Actually I doubt the skills required to manage a financial crisis are anything like the skills required for getting from one side of a road to another without walking in front of moving vehicles.
As for my mum… I’ve forgiven her for putting the brakes on. You have to really.
Phil Savage posts here in the hope that one day he can fulfill his dream of usurping former Cleveland Browns' General Manager Phil Savage as the top Phil Savage on the internet.
