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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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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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.
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Except louder and using the Club Academy’s somewhat bizarre overhead speaker set-up to make the electronic distortion of that track actually build up toward you in one of the few examples I’ve seen of a 3D gig.
It was pretty fucking good. My ears have only just recovered.
Some notes from the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club gig I went to on Tuesday, although they can be applied to almost any gig I’ve ever been to.
Crowds: You know when isn’t a good time for a conversation? In a gig during an acoustic song. [See also: The cinema.] Luckily we have these places called anywhere fucking else so next time you feel the urge to compete with the band to be heard just fuck off there.
Bands: That 5 minute guitar solo in your song? Cut it for the live performance, it’s not as interesting as you think it is. You’re not Led Zeppelin. You’re really not. Unless you are, in which case, carry on.
For the last year or so myself and Adam (who sometimes comments on the blog under the name ‘Adam’) have been trading songs on a collaborative Spotify playlist. This playlist was called The Vault.
The Vault’s purpose, although never expressly written down, was “Ooh, look at this,” a means of highlighting new or recently discovered music to the other.
Over the last couple of months it’s started to stagnate, so now seems like a good a time as any to show what we’ve collected so far. I’m not about to open up the main playlist because, active or not, it feels like a weird kind of sacrilege. Instead I’ve copied what we have so far into a separate list to be shared here. There are 150 tracks broken into 5 unofficial sets of 30 songs.
A little meta game for those who know either me or Adam: try to work out who added what song. Adam seems to gravitate toward guitars, men singing and tracks that go on for over 5 minutes. I tend to be a little more all over the place, but electronic distortion and humans shouting seem to feature heavily.
So if you’ve been anywhere near an Internet enabled electronic device in the last couple of weeks you’ll have seen this video for OK Go’s This Too Shall Pass. Hey, sometimes it’s worth posting something here just so I don’t have to bother looking for it in the future. Okay?
If, by some miracle, you haven’t seen it yet, know this: It’s one of the best Rube Goldberg machines I’ve seen in years. Also, the song’s pretty good too.
I didn’t want to see The Book of Eli. Due to the timing of its release, and the trailer used to promote it, it came across like a poor-man’s The Road (I didn’t do a review of The Road but here’s the short version: really good but a bit heavy going.)
I’ve since seen reviews the suggest The Book of Eli actually has some pretty interesting things going on but it makes no difference. I still don’t want to see it. Why? Because of its soundtrack.
Around the time the film came out there was a mass buzz from the various sources that I follow through Twitter and Google Reader about how good the soundtrack by Atticus Ross was. On checking out the first track, Panoramic, I have to agree. It paints a chilling, melancholic soundscape of loss and sorrow and, honestly, I don’t want to see the film that it was made for; I want to see the film that it was meant for.
And that’s just the first track. I’ve not even listened to the rest of the album yet.
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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.
