Following in my great tradition of discovering exciting things roughly three years after everyone else, I’ve been listening to a lot of bands hailing from the Providence area of Rhode Island. For years I’ve been blissfully unaware of this little community of super creative type people who all seem to either a) paint interesting, beautiful and often disturbing pictures or b) play in fantastic bands whilst wearing balaclavas. The hub of all this activity would appear (or have appeared) to be Fort Thunder which was founded by hooded crazies Lightning Bolt. So they, along with Thee Hydrogen Terrors, Men’s Recovery Project, and Mindflayer have been fulfilling my desire for scary noisy stupidness, while The Eyesores and The Iditarod have been providing me with some more subdued (but no less dark and twisted) folk/country type stuff.

One day I’m gonna be ahead of everyone else and find a great band who are actually still releasing records and might possibly play within 500 miles of where I live. But not yet.

The stupid thing is they did the same thing a few years back. Highlighting Jade Tree and Jets to Brazil et al. It’s just more of that lazy fucking journalism that seems rife these days. They even interview The Mars Volta who the NME say are making a concerted effort to distance themselves from the EMO label and in the same section they go on to say that the band have taken emo on an interstellar journey. The band are obviously not EMO yet they must be because the NME says so. Made me laugh too that they are pushing Pedro the Lion as one of the next wave. They’ve been around for fucking years, for christ sake. EMO to me was always bands like Mineral, Christie Front Drive, Jawbreaker, Texas is the Reason, maybe Braid and The Van Pelt, most of these bands have now split and members have gone off to form other bands. Yet there’s no credit given to the fact that these bands and the bands that came before them have been releasing albums for years and touring their asses off, rather suddenly NME should be getting some credit for ‘discovering’ them. Same goes for the labels like DeSoto, Jade Tree, Crank!, Caulfield who were putting out 7″s from Jimmy Eat World and Mineral for example years ago. On a slightly diferent tack I was a bit disappointed with Careless Talk Costs Lives too. Great idea but pritty annoying the way it was written. Anyway it’s an improvement on the NME so can’t complain too much…

Sorry this struck a nerve…

I went down to Nice’n’Sleazy’s last night to witness this new Emo craze I read about in the NME. Actually I haven’t seen this infamous article yet but I intend to pick up a copy today. I find it hilarious that the NME will be seeing a sales increase this week as previous readers like myself will buy a copy purely for the amusement of laughing at how out of touch the NME is. Maybe they should relaunch the NME as some kind of music satire publication.

Anyway, I did go out last night in some horrific weather conditions to see Death Cab for Cutie. I’ve still not gotten over Ian Scanlon calling me a wuss for not coming out to see Econoline during a blizzard and hey, I only got partially drenched. Wouldn’t have wanted to miss this gig anyway – it was an emo-fest like I’d never seen before. Never have I been in a room with so many people wearing emo jumpers [hang on, surely all jumpers are intrinsically emo?] and with unbelievable haircuts. It was kinda fun really.

So the support band was Roads To Siam who were pretty good indie rock. They reminded me of Colin’s songs in Eska. Which is probably why Colin from Eska was right down the front with his emo jumper on. hoho. sorry Colin…

I love Death Cab for Cutie and I’ve been listening to their last album way too much recently so I was hoping for great things. And they were perky and cute and the songs were great and they rocked out but the sound was so appalling that it wasn’t really that enjoyable. Hero of the night award to the guy in the audience who shouted for, and got, the vocals to be turned up. After that, it got along a good bit better with them playing the new single and the classic ‘Company Calls’ double song. Songs from the new album were sounding cool as well but the night was a little bit disappointing all round. Shame.

Now once again it’s been a while. But the main reason for this is that I haven’t doing anything sufficiently exciting to blog. However last Saturday I went to see Check Engine. Purported to be a poppier Sweep the Leg Jonny I was a little dubious as I wasn’t sure what that would be like. Anyhow went along and was amazed. Firstly by a solo chellist who was the only support act going by the name Mrs Pilgrimm. She managed to create this whole sound with various effect pedals and loops with a kinda odd vocal. Not quite haunting but definitely unusual. After that Check Engine wander on the stage and start up with a disjointed shouty number with a noodley sax playing over the top of two guitars, a bass and some great drumming. While one of the guitar amp’s packed up, this continued all the way through the set. Ending up sounding a bit like a poppier Sweep the Leg Jonny. Anyhow go see them if you get the chance, come on you know you want to, besides you should trust me I am the event handler after;)

i went to see amelie yesterday, free ticket clutched in my paw, only to find it was full. still, i did manage to get abused by what i loosely refer to as ‘skaters’ when i came drove down their ramp in my car. i wouldn’t have minded, but honestly – get off the rollerblades and get yourself a fucking skateboard. then i won’t try to run you down. fuckers.

So much choice last night. I wanted to go and see The Incredible String Band, Kate Rusby and the Radio Sweethearts. And I decided to… stay in and listen to my new records instead. I was tired.

Best thing I learnt last week was that Stina Nordenstam isn’t mad or dead (Dynamite had me worried, it was morbid as) and she still writes songs. It felt like she’d been gone for ages. The new album (This Is…) is more pop than before, it’s got a Motown style 3-minute rule going on and some happy songs, but it’s still the same Stina and it feels like a logical progression. The jazz influences are almost entirely gone and there’s less space, fewer pauses but the lyrics and the singing are still exquisite. (And that’s not a word I bring myself to use easily, too precious.) There isn’t anyone else who can make “standing in the fucking rain” sound sweet so naturally. I love the album and it’s great to have her back (maybe she didn’t go anywhere and I just was looking the other way but hey). Tour please.

I went to see My Neighbour Totoro yesterday and it was the best thing I’ve seen in ages. Japanese anime but the charmingly cute kind. Basically the story of 2 sisters who move to a new house in the country where they wait for their mother to be allowed out of hospital. And they discover all these spirits of the forest: sooty dustbunnies in the attic and a family of Totoro in the forest who live in a camphor tree. There’s two little Totoro who collect acorns and a big enormous Totoro who appears at various times and helps the older sister Satsuki to find her little sister Mei when she gets lost. There’s just lots of really funny bits and the big Totoro has the most fantastic beaming grin. There’s also a huge fluffy catbus with torchlight eyes which the Totoro travel on. And the animation looked amazing and really brightly coloured. I just loved it all. I want a Totoro now!

Here I was going to write about going to see Glasgow’s finest purveyors of good time Rock (that’s The Cherrykicks, by the way). BUT I’m not in the mood. Some evil chav who must live in the same building as me has took half my bike from the landing outside my door while I slept, never mind the security door or anything.

I hope the seat gives you piles and the wheels burst on a corner.

And if I find out you are who I think you are I’m going to superglue your front door closed.

On the plus side, my U -lock obviously works but has anyone got any ideas what to do with a naked bike frame? I think I’m going to turn it into a voodoo doll.

I went to see Lord of the Rings last night on Simon’s recommendation. I’d been quite keen on the idea of it about eight months ago but once all the hyper-publicity got going it went a bit ‘just another Hollywood blockbuster’ in my eyes. I should maybe mention here that I’ve never read Lord of the Rings and the nearest I get to fantasy is Star Wars and the Narnia books, having as I do a horror of faeries and goblins and all that nonsense. However, I was drawn in really quickly and found myself totally believing it: because they’ve made the film in such a historical way it’s as easy to believe in as cavemen and dinosours [heh, dinosours, they’d be a new type of sour fizzy sweet in the shape of a dinosaur], dinosaurs and giant squid. They just managed to keep away from most of the cliches of fantasy stuff like magic potions and talking trees and instead focused on the characters who acted for the most part like humans, having no supernatural powers [except for the power of good etc.]. And though the story was basically a group of good people delivering an important item to a faraway place while hordes of bad people tried to kill them and take it, every new event still felt exciting as they travel through some of the most astounding locations imaginable. That’s the other strength of the film, that they mostly use real locations with the CGI effects used only to add spectacular and believable touches or to build the complex cities. There was a slight reliance on near death [every good character nearly dies about 12 times in the film] and knife edge thin pathways for thrills but it sure worked. The one thing that would have made the film better would have been to not have a ten minute intermission half way though. I’m sorry, but are they allowed to do this? I know it’s a long film but it totally broke my concentration and reminded me that it’s not real. I’d definitely recommend you go see it soon, not least because it won’t look even half as good on your little tv screen.

There’s also something to be said for walking home at night eating half a packet of LoveHearts so thanks to Orange Splifffish for those. Let’s hope your demo is better than your name but at least you have good taste in confectionary bribery.

I went to see Mulholland Drive last night with Chris and his friend whose name I don’t want to spell wrongly. I really liked the film but the idea was initially supposed to be for a tv series and I think that’s the major flaw in the film. Everything happens too fast and it’s all a bit too condensed. There’s all these great characters that you don’t get introduced to properly and who only get maybe one proper scene before they disappear and they could have almost been the main character in the film. Even the actual main three characters you don’t feel you get to know much about them. I just felt that almost everything in the film could have been built up into something much longer and when it finished I was kind of expecting more. But other than that there’s some really beautifully shot bits and it’s intriguing and as long as you don’t struggle to keep hold of everything so you can feel clever when it all starts to tie together at the end then it’s really enjoyably odd and a bit scary.

Also nice to know that it takes 18 minutes to walk from the 13th Note to the GFT as long as you don’t mind tearing some ligaments.

When I got home I found a newly-delivered box of Careless Talk Costs Lives magazines sitting on my bed. It weighs an absolute ton and must have cost a fortune to post. I was too tired to think of opening it though so opinions will come later.