yeah.

The new Death Cab for Cutie album seems to have far too many songs on it about wearing jumpers and mittens. Didn’t hear anything about milkshakes or kittens or park benches but I’m still a little worried about where this is heading. Errrr, not that I’m listening to the new DCfC album when I’ve still got eight records to review before tomorrow afternoon. erk..

And can someone help me with this:

April

16th: Dianogah at the 13th Note

16th: Blectum from Blechdom at Nice’n’Sleazy’s

24th: Trail of Dead at the QMU

24th: The New Year at the 13th Note

27th: Do Make Say Think and Hood at King Tut’s

27th: Smog at the 13th Note

Sometimes living in Glasgow is just too good.

ok, so i’m drunk and in no state to blog, but marceline insisted. when the overlord calls, what can you do?

um was, as ever, a lyrical genius, and managed to get through his own set, despite there being a crowd of about seven people, quite superbly. this man deserves awards. give them to him. now.

sunnyvale, despite 15 minutes of technical problems,. managed to get their groove on quite severely. hats off to smint and stu.

and then crs*, while playing a very short set, managed to charm the pants off most of the audience, and they even got some bookings on the strength of their set. so, yeah, rock!

so, an all dayer. i managed about five hours before scuttling home, inebriated and exhausted. take heed kids. entering your 20s does bad things to a person.

Things I did included looking at the Warhol exhibition. Some amusing things about it:
* The sculpture of replica Brillo boxes was a replica of the sculpture of Brillo boxes.
* The film of the Empire State building (supposed to last all night) is the edited highlights.
* You aren’t allowed to take pictures of paintings made from photographs ripped out of magazines.

Still not sure what I think of Warhol. The pictures I like and you’ve got to respect how ubiquitous they’ve become (I can’t see Marilyn Monroe without thinking of the yellow hair and pink lips silk-screened on). The other stuff, the celebrity worship and glossy surfaces, I’m suspicious of. It feels like he is used to justify all sorts of annoying tedious crap, a fig leaf for artists that revel in their own pointlessness and vapidity. Once he did that he left no further for artists to go down that route and if the route wasn’t so commerce-friendly it would be seen as just a pretty little cul-de-sac.

this wednesday i went to system of a down‘s third and final night at brixton academy. support was provided by dillenger escape plan who were energetic as hell but didn’t go down very well with ‘the kids’. or me. i imagine they would have been a lot more impressive if i’d gone along armed with knowledge of their songs, but for the uninitiated, they didn’t leave a lasting impression. system, on the other hand, were fucking awesome. and i’m not talking awesome as in like, radical, dude, i mean i was in frickin awe. they played for well over an hour, putting everything they had into it. the atmosphere and the crowd were great, it was gosh darn mind bogglingly fantastic. i ain’t had that much fun in ages. i’m very sore, strapped for cash and feel like i’m getting ill, but it was so worth it. absolutely astounding. apple pie, mutherfuckers.

I went to check out the Body Worlds exhibition thing in London today, and I gotta say that it was BORING. For some reason I was expecting some kind of artistic event, which would leave me shocked and intrigued, but instead I was faced with a Natural History Museum-style exhibit of bodies and body bits in glass cases and unimaginative ‘poses’. I’m as interested as the next person in seeing bodies preserved through the magic of ‘plastination’, with nerves, muscles and bones exposed to varying degrees, but I found this to be a confusing and hastily-prepared show. Maybe it’s because the bodies, despite being real, just didn’t look real, so there was no sense of ‘oh, so that’s how I look inside’, or maybe it’s because it was so busy and full of people who seemed to think that having read one article about how one organ works gave them the right to loudly lecture the other visitors on the ‘precise’ workings of the body, but it was a disappointment. It’s not like you get to see a skinned horse carrying a bones’n’muscles person who’s holding two brains every day, but Body Worlds made me feel like I do. Gah.

Me again I’m afraid. If you’ve got any spare opinions or anecdotes can you forward them to the rest of the diskant staff?

Well, I dragged myself out last night to see Les Savy Fav, The Mars Volta and The Apes despite being exhausted beyond belief. So actually I missed The Apes. I heard they sucked. My impeccable timing had me arriving just as The Mars Volta started their set and I prepared to give them an open mind since I had some respect for At The Drive-In without really being very interested in them. Turns out they ruled, I was well impressed. There was still some elements of At The Drive-In: the sharpness, the fluidity, the action, but there was also a much more relaxed mood with the heavy keyboards and drawn out grooves. I guess it’s very similar to the change between the Nation of Ulysses and the Make-Up, right down to the addition of a supercute girl bassist. Except that I’ve never been too keen on the Make-Up. I can’t forgive them for not being the Nation of Ulysses any more and I imagine there’ll be some ATD-I fans feeling the same way about The Mars Volta. I’ll be intrigued to hear some of their recorded material to see if it’s as good.

The highlight of their set though was when when a bearded guy rushed through the audience and started whooping and dancing with the enthusiasm of a child in a balloon shop. Cue half the audience looking bewildered and wondering who the crazy man was. Tim from Les Savy Fav of course. LSF are just infectiously great, a spectacle of hilarity. They demand your involvement but with such charm that you participate without question. People will dance, people will hug the crazy man, people will allow him to wear their coat, rummage in their handbag and spray breath freshener in your mouth. If you are the security man you will attempt to keep things safe and correct but eventually melt a little and let the fun continue. Les Savy Fav laugh in the face of sense and order and have a bunch of tunes to make anyone dance. They just rock the house well past the curfew and leave you still dancing the next day. You have to see them.

My sleep-addled brain slowly dismissed possible causes [poltergeist, death metal band playing gig outside my window, local death metal fan committing suicide with chainsaw] and settled on workmen cutting down trees and/or mowing grass while listening to death metal on car stereo. but at 8am? it all seems very unreal now and I’m almost convinced I imagined it.

Certainly wasn’t what I needed after my evening of eclectic avant jazz at the 13th Note anyway. I went mainly to see the rare public appearance of Empire-Builder but also because Late Night Foreign Radio have put a lot of effort into making their residency at the Note as interesting as possible [themed nights, videos, record swapping]. Empire-Builder were testing out a new direction: no live drums, less guitars and instead centred round computer beats and bass-driven melodies. It was a bit sketchy at times but there’s just something about loud electronic music in a live environment that makes my heart pound so I was very happy. I want them to do a remix album and call it ‘Empire Rebuilder’ or ‘Re: Empire-Builder’.

Before this we got George Burt and friend who were amusingly jolly and possibly teach physics in their spare time for fun. As the fingers flew up and down the frets and the bits of metal were applied to the strings I had a horrible flashback to Sonic Youth at ATP2000. Shudder. I guess Sonic Youth are the nearest I’ve got to this kind of improvisational art jazz. Mostly I was in two minds as to whether it was a lot of pretentious twaddle or whether it was enjoyably odd. I think likely it was both. They did have a nice line in detuned riffs that I could have listened to all night. The headliners, Late Night Foreign Radio themselves, did a kind of similar thing but with less art and more ROCK. It again trod a very fine line between ‘yes!’ and ‘nooooo!’ but came out mostly on the side of the former.

Overall, it was kind of like being trapped inside a copy of The Wire for the evening. Except that The Wire would never deign to attend such a low key gig that isn’t even at the top of Mount Fuji or in the middle of a desert. More fool them.

The Morning News like me

I’m having a great deal of trouble coping with this news story about how the police are having a demonstration outside parliament. Who’s going to police the protesters? If they get out of control will they send in some riot police to kick in the normal police? And some of these police think they should try and win industrial reforms like the right to strike! So will they have to employ cheap labour police scabs to beat up the police pickets? Will the police on the picket line be shouting abuse at the police? I don’t think they’ve thought this through…