#musicmonday : The Echo Wall – The River

I’ve been procrastinating on the new Echo Wall EP, Navigable Darkness, because it’s that super-awkward thing when you’ve quite vocally supported a band and you don’t really like the new one. Nothing they’ve done wrong – they’ve not suddenly started to suck or anything – but it’s just not putting those chords together in quite the right way to tingle your spine. Until you get to the last track. From the opening bars, it’s an ahhh yes, that’s better, as you remember what reeled you in to them last time.

Since I’ve wasted my evening doing one of those “20 random tracks” circulars, here they are

ipod on shuffle, blah-di-blah … [I used last.fm and my whole MP3 collection]

Sufjan Stevens – I Walked

Watch Sufjan Stevens’ ghoulish festive animation

“Radiohead is because it’s like this total triumph of short people”

We’ve been having fun with Googlism, a website that filters descriptions from Google to tell you what Google “thinks” of you. For example:

princess stomper is normally represented as a small pink bunny
princess stomper is a former magazine contributor and music researcher
princess stomper is making way too many assumptions in this article 

This is not a love song

The Atlantic Wire reports that 92% of top 10 Billboard songs in 2009 were about “reproductive messages”. If you’re getting shagged out by all that aural sex, here’s some songs with some very, very different themes.

PIAS labels spreadsheet

Sean at Drowned In Sound has helpfully uploaded a spreadsheet listing the labels and some of the bands whose stock has been destroyed in the PIAS warehouse fire.

Among those on the list are Sufjan Stevens, whose Asthmatic Kitty label was affected, and Buke and Gass, whose label Brassland tweeted earlier about their loss. So, if you’re looking for a way to help out, purchasing a CD or MP3 off that list would be a good place to start.

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Here is a recommended list of releases on the affected labels, with an A-Z list with purchase links here, and you can keep up with developments via the #labellove hashtag on Twitter.

Why Everett True is wrong

Written for Collapse Board

“Mostly only art created by women has any validity. The male experience has been created and recreated so often” – Everett True, 1992

That is such bulls***. It’s like saying that only Tuvan throat singing/rock hybrids have any validity because you don’t get much of that, either. (And, f***, it’s good stuff.)  I don’t flip the sleeve over to check the gender before I’ll listen to the record, any more than I’d think too much about whether they were, say, Turkish. And, yes, a Turkish act does bring a certain flavour to the mix that you rarely get with non-Turkish acts. It’s informed and shaped by its Turkishness but not wholly defined by it because it’s more than that and to reduce it to that is to insult it.

Take Aylin Aslim, for example. I don’t know who she is, but I love her. I don’t have the slightest clue what she’s singing about (though Google translate tells me it’s called “ghoul”). There’s definitely a Turkishness to what she does, but I don’t set out to listen to Turkish folk. I just like this one – her – because she has such a don’t-give-a-f*** attitude and playful energy that makes her an absolute joy to listen to.

Sufjan Stevens – You Are The Blood

As usual, I’ve left it far too late to write anything meaningful, so here’s the last thing I listened to before going to bed tonight. I’m pretty glad he abandoned his plan to write 50 albums – I’d be bankrupt!

Structurally Unsound

Listening to MGMT yesterday, I began to wonder if people had forgotten how to write great songs. “How can you say that?” I hear you cry. “Electric Feel is a great song”, to which I’d counter, “Electric Feel has a great hook; it is not a great song.”

Great songs have rules – surprisingly rigid ones at that. It’s not that the songs that obey those rules are automatically good, but that the ones that break those rules are almost universally bad.

#musicmonday: One year of Reinspiration

As we approach the first anniversary of Reinspired, here are some of my favourite tunes I’ve talked about here – one for each month we’ve been going.