When I was young I used to love to stay home, but now I just get bored and irritable. It has given me the chance to listen to some music for the first time in ages though…

HELLA Falam Dynasty 7″ (5RC)
I’m yet to hear a bad word said against this band. Dave Stockwell very kindly got me their LP which for me will rank highly in the upcoming diskant 2002 review thingy. Word has it that these guys are 20 and 21, which makes me feel very lame indeed. Some of the most intricate and keenly executed sounds I think I’ve ever heard. Can’t recommend this, and their LP enough. Seriously, get on it.

THREE MILE PILOT s/t 12″ (Gravity)
Been meaning to get this for some time, and now I have, I’m a little dissapointed. I went off 3MP for quite a while, but recently Another Desert Another Sea has been reminding me how great they are. This, on the other hand, is really just lacking that edge that makes a lot of their other stuff so amazing. If nothing else though, it did remind me that I need to get the new Black Heart Procession album.

GET HUSTLE Earth Odyssey CD (5RC)
Took me a while to get into them, but the general sexiness of this band has won me over big time. They somehow manage to sound laid back and full on at the same time, with lots of piano and the odd wailing vocal. Get Hustle also feature on…

DYNAMITE WITH A LASER BEAM comp (31G)
Lots of weirdo bands playing Queen songs. Sounds like it should be shit, in fact I was apprehensive for a while, but thankfully it rocks. My favourites are probably rather amazingly The Oath (punk, oh no!) doing We Are The Champions and The Locust doing FLASH!! (aaaargh). The Locust will always be a rather silly novelty band in my eyes, but the crappy sci-fi element of band and song works here very well.

I still think us staff should have wishlists because we’re very important and deserve to be given stuff, so here’s mine:

Melt Banana’s new 6″ on Level Plane
The Hudsucker Proxy region 1 DVD
Train tickets to Nottingham so me and Kim can get to see Fugazi and Wolves of Greece on the 23rd
Hell, I’m not picky. If something’s free I’ll take it. Go nuts.

just read ross mcgivern’s column on iraq. very informative, and very important. i’d love to say that i was off down to the demo next saturday, and spend my time doing something i really believe in, rather than being my usual indifferent self. but i really don’t think i could bring myself to actually take part in something like that, and i blame it solely on where i live.

cambridge can be a great place to live, but, like many other things, political demonstrations have very little meaning to me any more. and it’s all the student’s fault. in years gone by i felt i could relate to the “alternative” crowd, the section of society (often students) with the messy hair and the torn clothes and “radical” ideas, but things have changed. maybe i’ve just seen one too many dreadlocked rich kids blowing whistles heckling police, thinking they’re the baddest thing since bob dylan (yeah, i blame the hippies too), but i cannot even begin to take any kind of demonstration seriously any more. this is a truly bad thing, because it’s just to easy for myself, and no doubt many others to assume that real beliefs and views are the last things on these people’s minds. maybe it’s a phase a lot of people go through when they reach a certain age. they suddenly realise that they can go around making a racket and disturbing the straights, therefore they must.

please don’t assume i’m saying that anyone who chooses to go out and voice their political beliefs are simply charlatans. i agree that there’s a great number of things in the world that must change. but there are too many people who just cannot grasp the responsibility they are undertaking by sitting in the road yelling about animal testing. i don’t like the idea of animals being hurt and killed any more than you, but if it was going to save my life, or the life of someone i care about, i wouldn’t give a second thought to what had happened to make this treatment available, and neither would you. these days too many people protest simply because they can, and all it does is undermines the work of those who really are devoted to their cause. there are people in the world dying every day for what they believe in, and you’re worried because you saw some pictures of little bunny rabbits, or because roads are the scurge of the earth. people go to protests as a social event in cambridge. who cares what it’s about, you can go and smoke a spliff and the police won’t care! not only do these people undermine those who really are protesting about the lives of the millions of opressed people in the world, they even undermine the people who fight for student grants to be reinstated. why should the government pay for you to develop a bloated sense of moral decency for four years? answer me that, you fuck.

christ, sorry. went a bit off track there. but to sum up, i deeply dislike people who manage to damage the hard work of others, so that they can feel like they have political beliefs.

any feedback is welcomed :)

been watching lots of films lately, most notably vanilla sky and brotherhood of the wolf…

vanilla sky was semi-surprising, as there were enough unexpected elements to keep you guessing (cameron diaz’s freaky slut routine was entertaining). the major downfall though, apart from the weak final scene, was the fact that tom cruise’s character was such a prick, that you really didn’t care if he sorted things out or not. for some reason, i can’t help but compare it to fight club in my mind, but it loses out each time to edward norton’s rich guy turned crazy loser. the total recall thing was kinda cool though.

next, brotherhood of the wolf, a horror/kung fu/period drama/swashbuckler. quite a mix, i’m sure you’ll agree, but a very good one. vincent cassel is possibly one of my favourite actors, mainly because he only ever seems to be in great films (dobermann, la haine) and he steals the show here as the crazed gothic….oops, i almost gave the whole thing away there. in fact i probably have already, but go see it, it stands out to me as being one of the most original films i have seen in some time.

we went to see filthy sludge fuckers eyehategod the other night. it was quite a good evening all in all, but then it’s hard not to enjoy yourself when surrounded by lots of behemoth looking men going “grraaaaarrggghh” and hitting each other. the highpoint for me was probably the white trash between-song banter; “we hate everyone”, “fuck everyone” and “you got a pretty mouth”. for the uninitiated i recommend you check out “southern discomfort”, a singles and rareties compilation, and an old album called “dopesick” both on century media.

I’ll try and avoid a repeat of my Six By Seven blog, which hung on the fact that “they’re not as good as they used to be”, but Mercury Rev sucked last night. I’m aware that my tastes have changed greatly since i was really into them, like 4 or 5 years ago, so that has as much to do with it as anything else, but I was still bored rigid throughout their entire set. It’s all so safe, so middle-aged, so fucking….lame! Where once I found Jonathan Donahue’s weirdo Mark Almond-esque dancing mysterious and unusual and cool, I now just want to yell “get a job!”. Grasshopper! The man could very well play in Michael Bolton’s backing band, sneaking off for a quick wank over his stupendous fretwork every couple of minutes. Not one song had any hint of the kind of dynamic that once made them great. They’ve been playing them all for so long and they’ve got them all so polished that to hear them now, it’s hard to distinguish one song from the next in the continually plodding mid-tempo cabaret. If last night’s gig was represented on a cardiograph machine, it would be a flatliner. All the ingredients were there for a fucking awful gig; rediculously expensive ticket, rediculously shite support band who are the current NME hypes, but in reality are a bunch of posing schmindie losers (Minuteman, in case you hadn’t guessed already), and last but not least a tired old middle-aged band, and their middle-aged fans who follow them round blindly applauding for years after they released anything decent.

I listen to a lot of unpleasant gloomy crap, but I now know that as long as I keep going to see The Flaming Lips every couple of years, there will always be some musical balance in my life. I had seen them twice before last night, and both times had been spectacular epic occasions, the kind of thing you look back on with a teary eye and a grin in years to come, so my expectactions were high as they rolled into my fair city for the first time. Race For The Prize has to be one of the best songs it is possible to start a show with, it’s absolutely huge. Unfortunatly it came second last night, but seeing as they’re touring for their new album you can hardly blame them for keeping it fresh. They still came through with all the crazy stuff though, fake blood and monkey hand puppets and giant rabbit costumes and a truckload of confetti, and even though it was practially exactly the same as every other time I’ve seen them, they still made me feel like all was right with the world, they made me want to dance and smile and run around barefoot and have water fights and…yeah, you get the idea. It may well have been the wrong side of cheesy on a few occasions, but it was still an event, which makes a huge change from the posing introverted sixth form post-rock dirge I find myself watching with alarming frequency. I’m sure if I saw that kind of thing all the time it would get old pretty quickly, but as long as I can go on seeing The Lips every once in a while, then I get the feeling that everything will be just fine.

I’ve been buying Super Nintendos and eating King Size Snickers. What a week.

So it says on the back of the new Lightning Bolt DVD, entitled “The Power of Salad”. And I’m happy to confirm that the rock contained on said DVD could indeed sink ships. It’s a film made by Peter Glantz and Nick Noe which follows the Rhode Island band around on their 2001 US tour, with lots and lots of great live footage, interviews with fellow freakboys Pink And Brown and a bunch of ker-ay-zee animations that do bad things to you if you stare at them for too long. I know I’ve gone on a bit about this band on this weblog before, but they really are fucking tremendous, the most refreshing and original band I’ve heard in a very long time. Stupid fucking noise. With cats. Luke says they’re meant to be playing here some time soon, which will make me very happy indeed.

it has been some time since my last blog. i have been busy getting married and buying furniture and things, but i have also seen a few bands. i missed all the post-atp fun due to crappy computer things, so i was determined to be first to blog about arab on radar, who i saw last night. they were lots of fun, very silly, very weird, and very noisy. lot’s of shrieking and dribbling. support came from sweden’s kid commando, who were ok, but not amazing. they did however uphold the theory that men with moustaches shouting is always entertaining.

it was also good to see reynolds the other week, it had been a while. if that new album does ever see the light of day, i’m sure it’ll be a belter. there’s lots more bands coming up too, with oxes (maybe) on thursday, and ten benson next week. i was also very happy to discover that both mercury rev and the flaming lips are playing in my fair city in july. hooray for gigs that aren’t in london.

i’m sure this won’t come as news to any of you, but six by seven are shite. four years ago they were one of my favourite bands in the whole world, but after seeing them tonight i have finally given up all hope. basically, i have put it down to the loss of their two critical elements: the saxophone, and the drumstick/guitar action. since the departure of guitarist sam hempton a couple of years ago, things have been getting progressively worse, but i was determined to reserve judgement at first in case they were just going through a “bad patch” or some crap, but alas, as tonight showed me, it just ain’t happenin’. i struggled through the barrage of mediocre, lack-lustre new songs, ever optimistic that any minute they would tear into brilliantly cute, and my faith would be restored, but i was left dissapointed, wondering what went wrong. they played the same venue last november with the same line up, and while i knew then that they weren’t the same band they once were, there were still moments that captured my imagination, and kept that flicker of hope burning in my heart (sniff) but tonight there was not one single moment that really made me stop and think “wow”, which essentially is what they were all about. their gigs in 98, just before the release of their first album were something to cherish. they seemed so incredible, so…vital to my 16 year old ears, and the “wow” factor was quite considerably higher. they were crucially ever on the brink, and the thrill was watching them avoid it, holding onto every last chord like their lives depended on it. and now it seems they have gone over the brink, and are spiralling into the chasm of indie oblivion.

so, i’m just confirming to myself what i’ve known for some time, but maybe some of you will know what i’m talking about, if not with this band, then someone else that seemed so perfect when you were younger, who now have just become in your mind, the same as every other dull shmindie outfit dragging themselves round this nation’s less glamourous venues.

support came from british sea power, who should never be allowed to play to people again, ever. thankfully, local band the visit opened, who were quite charming with their brand of wonky pub rock (and at least three songs about cocks). they were the perfect band to play first at a gig like this, it’s just a shame six by seven didn’t feel like finishing the job.

still, atp next week, so it’s not all bad.