The Doghouse v.II

Bulldog · 03-27-2011, 02:35 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bulldog

Basically, as soon as I've got the moolah together for the necessary equipment, I'm gonna try and put some video reviews in here and see how they go down.

^ Not so sure about this anymore. We'll see how things turn out I guess.

Seeing as my schedule's cleared up a wee bit recently, I think I'm gonna try and get three more album posts in here over the next week for a lack of anything better to do.

In the mean time, it's about time I threw some more videos at you...

Artist: The Corrs
Tuneage: Breathless

As much of a dull hipster with delusions of grandeur I'll always be, there'll forever be a part of me that has a soft spot for music that's totally at odds with my outlook on what predominantly makes good music into good music, the kind of person I am, the amount of sugar I take with my tea, which way I look first when I cross the road...you get the picture. I can't claim to know a lot of people here personally, let alone in that big, scary-arse world out there, but I'm sure it's the same for everyone.

All that's just a fancy pants way of saying that we all have guilty pleasures, and the Corrs are one of mine...to an extent. There are a lot of absolutely woeful songs that they've been responsible for, and it's not stretching the truth when I say that I think most of them sound like shyt. Where the Corrs shine for me though is when they play live. Beneath the glossy veneer of over-zealous studio production and execution methods, at least a few Corrs songs are just really good, catchy and upbeat pop songs with a Celtic twist to make things more interesting. It's why their Unplugged live CD is the only one of their's I actually listen and enjoy...for the most part. I mean, don't get me wrong - there is some ghastly, mushy corn on there too.

But it's songs like Breathless here which, when stripped down to their bear bones, are just really fun pop songs being performed by a very talented bunch of musicians who are clearly truly enjoying what they're doing.

Not to mention the fact that Andrea Corr is hot to the nth degree as well.

Ready for a mood shift? You know you are!

Artist: Third Eye Foundation
Tuneage: Corpses As Bedmates

Ah, Third Eye Foundation! To be honest, great as this album is and all, I didn't really sign up for something that sounded like this when I first got hold of it.

There I was, listening to the pounding basslines of Cyantific and London Elektricity one night before heading out to town to some place that'd play shit music all night where I'd proceed to tell myself that I'd be having a good time. I thought it'd be a good idea to get hold of some more drum 'n' bass. It was at that point when I started looking to the mighty RYM's top albums lists that I remembered how cool that LTJ Bukem album I once listened to was. Atmospheric d'n'b was what I'd seen called. So I had a look.

I guess in my blind, blissful naivety of being two weeks younger than I am now, I didn't really cotton on to the fact that there can in fact be more than one kind of atmosphere. What LTJ Bukem reminded me of, and therefore what I was expecting from the Third Eye Foundation, was a kinda delicate electronic music which fell somewhere in a middle-ground between downtempo trip-hop and liquid funk. What I got instead was an album that may well have provided me with a soundtrack to my nightmares for the forseeable future.

Not in a bad sense, of course. The album this is off is far, far from poor, and well deserving of its reverence among RYM's users. I can't really think of much more to say about it, but if you're up for a pretty creepy thrill-ride of an album, give this a few spins. It'll do you a world of good

Zer0 · 03-28-2011, 03:07 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bulldog

Artist: The Corrs
Tuneage: Breathless

As much of a dull hipster with delusions of grandeur I'll always be, there'll forever be a part of me that has a soft spot for music that's totally at odds with my outlook on what predominantly makes good music into good music, the kind of person I am, the amount of sugar I take with my tea, which way I look first when I cross the road...you get the picture. I can't claim to know a lot of people here personally, let alone in that big, scary-arse world out there, but I'm sure it's the same for everyone.

All that's just a fancy pants way of saying that we all have guilty pleasures, and the Corrs are one of mine...to an extent. There are a lot of absolutely woeful songs that they've been responsible for, and it's not stretching the truth when I say that I think most of them sound like shyt. Where the Corrs shine for me though is when they play live. Beneath the glossy veneer of over-zealous studio production and execution methods, at least a few Corrs songs are just really good, catchy and upbeat pop songs with a Celtic twist to make things more interesting. It's why their Unplugged live CD is the only one of their's I actually listen and enjoy...for the most part. I mean, don't get me wrong - there is some ghastly, mushy corn on there too.

But it's songs like Breathless here which, when stripped down to their bear bones, are just really fun pop songs being performed by a very talented bunch of musicians who are clearly truly enjoying what they're doing.

Not to mention the fact that Andrea Corr is hot to the nth degree as well.

Ready for a mood shift? You know you are!

Ha! I do admit that I used to love listening to their album Talk On Corners around 1999/2000. I remember going on a family holiday in the summer of 2000 when I was 13 and I brought that album with me to listen to on my personal CD player. There were a good few songs on it that I enjoyed quite a lot at the time. I'm not sure where the album is now, I think my older sister has it somewhere or other.

Yeah Andrea Corr was seriously hot material back in the day. She still is! Her slightly gothic image and smoldering eyes always got me.

Bulldog · 03-29-2011, 05:04 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zero1986

Ha! I do admit that I used to love listening to their album Talk On Corners around 1999/2000. I remember going on a family holiday in the summer of 2000 when I was 13 and I brought that album with me to listen to on my personal CD player. There were a good few songs on it that I enjoyed quite a lot at the time. I'm not sure where the album is now, I think my older sister has it somewhere or other.

Yeah Andrea Corr was seriously hot material back in the day. She still is! Her slightly gothic image and smoldering eyes always got me.

I've just got a thing about hot brunette's with Irish accents

That woman was pretty much my first celebrity crush when I were a nipper.

I don't know if I could muster the courage to listen to an actual Corrs studio album. I think the unplugged gig's good enough for me. I mean, I love the acoustic versions of So Young and Radio for instance, but almost had a panic attack when I tried to listen to the versions of them they released as singles.

Anyway, before I get on with what I feel I should post here, here's another song that's been on my mind lately;

Artist: Iggy Pop
Tuneage: Isolation

I believe I've stated my love for Iggy Pop's divisive Blah Blah Blah album of 1986. I probably won't go on too long about this one, as you can no doubt see my opinion of it every 5th post of mine around here. This is just a fantastic pop song though, and it's everything that's good about that dated, 80s pop/Trevor Horn style. Overdone as you may think the synthy backdrop, echoey drumbeat and overall production are, everytime I get round to this song on one of my daily random music binges from the bowels of my collection, I can never listen to this less than...oh, I dunno...15 times.

Now that I think about it, it's really just that chorus that does it for me. Iggy's sorrowful croon, his buddy David Bowie's fractured 'i...so...laaaaay-shun!' backing vocal, the sax that underpins it - B-E-A-utiful!

I won't pretend that Blah Blah Blah's a truly great album or anything, but it's certainly very overlooked.

So then, I thought I might as well let anyone who's particularly interested know what they can expect in the coming 2 and a half weeks from this thread. Maybe if I actually have it in writing here, I'll actually stick to my word

In this next week, I'll be going over these albums;

Bitter:Sweet - The Mating Game (2006)
Kris Kristofferson - This Old Road (2006)

And in the fortnight after that;

Loretta Lynn - Van Lear Rose (2004)
µ-Ziq - Lunatic Harness (1997)
Prince - The Gold Experience (1995)

^ Maybe not in that order exactly, but either way I know what I'll be doing this week.

There might be the odd deviation from the format in between, but that's basically the plan.

Watch this space!

Bulldog · 03-30-2011, 01:10 PM

So, now for one of those deviations from the format I was a-talkin' about...

3 Reasons Why You Should Listen To David Bowie's 90s Material

In addition to endlessly long posts about albums you couldn't give a monkeys about, or showing off a bunch of different individual tunes I'm quite the fan of, I'll be doing this kinda thing. These are basically going to be three closely-related albums, be they in the same discography, from the same musical scene, subgenre or whatever, all having a very brief eye cast over them by yours truly. I'm gonna try and keep these coming from my own personal 'why can't everyone else have the same opinion as me' folder...stuff I think is pretty underrated in general, then. There'll be plenty more of these in future, don't worry

And here we are, starting in Obvious Territory with 90s Bowie. If you're not in the know, allow me - by the time the 90s were in full swing, Bowie was just beginning his efforts to emerge from a pretty dark time in his career, that being the constant ridicule he'd been subjected to from about the mid-80s to the early 90s. He'd well and truly imploded artistically by not only releasing an...an...an adequate album (Tonight), and not only taken his credibility behind a toolshed and beaten it half to death with a baseball bat (Never Let Me Down), but he followed all that up by forming the loud, noisy and allegedly pretty crappy Tin Machine (I actually think they have their moments myself). After flapping about at rock bottom for almost a decade then, a new Bowie was ready to emerge and show himself to the world.

And that didn't really start so well to be honest with you. 1993's Black Tie White Noise - Bowie's first solo album of the 90s - had two of my favourite songs on it (the cover of Nite Flights and Jump, They Say if you must know), but other than that was only really half-good. It was a definite improvement on all four of his preceding albums, but far from a classic. It did though signal the true second coming of Bowie, and pointed the way forward for one easily his best successive trio of albums since the Station To Station-Low-'Heroes' one of the 70s.

Now, here's why...

The Buddha Of Suburbia OST
1993

It all started rather inconspicuously with what was until its re-release only a few years ago something of a hidden treasure of Bowie's discography. This was the soundtrack to the excellent Hanif Kureishi's the Buddha Of Suburbia...although in essence it was a soundtrack in name only. True, the title track can be heard in full, and you can hear snippets of the rest of this album here and there, but otherwise this was no TV soundtrack - it was a full-length studio album by Bowie almost full of new and exclusive songs. The fact that for some bizarre reason it was marketed as a soundtrack album meant that the music industry pretty much regurgitated it on sight, like a hot bombay mix when you've had one too many at your local.

Anyway, musically this album is just beautiful, and asking me to describe it as some lame-arse record company genre label would be like asking Joe Rogan to accurately describe his last DMT trip. That's not to call this album trippy or psychedelic or whatever - to be perfectly blunt, it's not. I could be a lazy bastard and call it alternative rock, and I'm sure I'd put it in that section if I worked in HMV or something, but there's a lot more to this album than that. There are two amazing new age (yes, I said it - new age!) instrumentals, there's a full-blown jazz instrumental...besides that you can tell that this was a rock album recorded by three guys (Bowie, Erdal Kizilcay and Mike Garson) recording all the instruments themselves, and...just listen to it yourself.

If it weren't for the lame duck final track (and it's about as lame as ducks get really), this would definitely be in my top tier of favourite Bowie albums. Highly, highly recommended.

1.Outside
1995

And then there's its followup - the mighty, mighty Outside! Without being too much of a randy fanboy about it, this album is just fantastic. You could hear a progression from Black Tie White Noise to the Buddha Of Suburbia, and just like that you can hear the artistic progression from the Buddha Of Suburbia to Outside here. While the more ambient and even new age portions of the preceding album are basically totally done away with the same, no doubt jam-oriented approach to writing and recording songs in the studio is opted for, as opposed to David Bowie demoing them in his living room and talking about them over coffee and donuts with the session musicians. Given that there's a very, very loose narrative to the songs here about a sadistic cult of outsider artists murdering a teenage girl for art's sake, a much darker twist is given to the overall sound. The jazz influences are used a lot more here and there's a very metallic, industrial rhythmic method that underpins most of the songs here. Did I mention there's quite a lot of funky bass too?

What we've got at the end of the day is another one of Bowie's most criminally underrated albums...coming to it as a newbie you'll probably think of it in one of these two ways.

1. Holy crap, this is the best thing I've heard all week! I'm going to go give my Simple Plan CDs to the pub down the road for use as ashtrays and spend this weekend locked in my room with this album, a jar of raw coffee and a pair of headphones.
2. What is this pretentious bullshit (which I guess makes it kinda fitting for a thread by a fella called Bulldog)?! Is David Bowie seriously trying to sound like a 70 year-old man for this spoken word track?!

Again, just listen to it, as it's awesome and has plenty of Bowie's better songs on it. Another album that without it's flaw (being a tad overlong and having those bloody stupid segue tracks in this case) would be one of the man's very best. It's as scary as it is catchy, as lively as it is pensive...and so on.

Earthling
1997

Here's an album which, to be honest, isn't quite as good as I once thought it was. Don't get me wrong; it's still a very, very good album, and is again very underrated. I would say that it's the weakest of this little trilogy though.

Regarding the sound, often the combination of sounds that Outside threw at us would end up sounding a tad like big beat electronica or even jungle music (tracks like I'm Deranged and We Prick You, especially), and this album is basically fully-fledged...big beat electronica and jungle! Well, to be fair only three of these songs sound at all like jungle/d'n'b, and labelling it as such would be unfair to an album which is essentially the David Bowie sound of old being re-wired with a type of contemporary pop motor for the day.

Again, it's home to some of my favourite Bowie songs ever, but overall it's just not quite as good as the two albums that preceded it. I don't what it is...maybe it's that Union Jacket on the sleeve art that reminds me too much of Geri Halliwell, or that a version of one of its songs was on the soundtrack to that steaming pile of shit known as Showgirls. Either way, it stands as a good Bowie album but not an essential. It is though a necessary part of this trilogy, and definitely worth having. Much more commercial than the two albums before it, but at the same time a lot better than the MOR twaddle called Hours that was just around the corner.

Bulldog · 04-02-2011, 07:04 PM

Hey guys. If anyone particularly wanted to see what I had to say about Bitter:Sweet and Kris Kristofferson by now, your luck's out! I've had an awful lot of non-interwebz stuff catch up with me and raise a bit of a ruckus lately, so haven't really had the time or mental energy to write anything fitting about them for this thread. From Monday onwards things are definitely gonna clear up though, and since it's been far too long since I last stuck an album post in this 'ere thread, you can expect something like that around about then.

In the mean time, here's a random video to make up for lost time;

And now for a couple of epic choonz...

Artist: Midnight Oil
Tuneage: Read About It

Another one of those artists I may as well flag up with every 5th post here - they're just that immense. If you missed it, I got most of the overblown fanboy worshipping over and done with here...I think. I don't really read back on the posts I make here y'see

Whatever it was I said, I'm pretty sure I didn't call that Oils album my favourite - that'd be between this and two or three others beside it. I'm sure I also said way back when that along with fellow Sydney...ers the Celibate Rifles, the Oils here were far and away the most consistently decent band to emerge from the Australian punk/garage scene of the late 70s. I'd probably ranks these guys above the former though - as generally good as their albums are, the Rifles basically sound the same on each one. The Oils had a way of shaking up the formula a bit, basically.

Anyway, this one's from the magnificent 10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1 album of 1983, and it's one where you can sense a kinda bridge between the band's loud, punk-centric roots and the more commercially-aimed pop stylings of, say, Diesel and Dust. This here was the song that brought 10-1 to my attention and, subsequently, was responsible for my getting reacquainted with them about 5-odd years after first hearing Beds Are Burning and casting it off with a resounding meh. Not only home to one of the most typically student-lefty lyrics I've ever heard, but also one of the best riffs too.

Artist: Graham Coxon
Tuneage: Bittersweet Bundle Of Misery

Here's another one that takes me waaaaaay back. I'll just get a bit more comfy in my rocking chair, wait for my mug of cocoa to cool down a bit before I get right down to the real nitty-gritty...

I remember hearing this in...what was it, 2004? 2005? Whenever it came out. Anyway, I was still smarting from a) Blur's splitting up and b) the notion that a miserable piece of junk that sounded so clanky and robotic it might as well not have been recorded by warm-blooded mammals (Think Tank) was to be the last album that Blur would release. It was the sad end of an era for me. Being the spunky, red-blooded 90s kid that I am, Blur and Oasis were basically my musical education as I grew up...barring the kinda stuff I'd here my parents listening to, but that's a different story for a different time.

Anyway, there was this song here that made its way onto the airwaves back when I was only just forming what would become my current musical taste and, needless to say, I remember just falling in love with this thing. Although you could say it's a pretty damn cynical song about a character being pissed off with his high maintenance girlfriend, this song just seemed to me to ooze the kind of joy and colour that I loved in the Blur sound of old, and was missing from the awful Think Tank and their half-good self-titled album (13 was the only album where that sound worked for me, but again, different story, different time).

And so I hunted down the album this song belonged to - Happiness In Magazines. Although it was met with the kind of universal praise every Christopher Nolan film seems to get these days, I didn't really like it so much when I first heard it. It was good, yeah, but songs like People Of Earth and Freaking Out just annoyed me. Bear in mind though that that was 6 or 7 years ago, and that I haven't listened to this album since. In fact, I was only reminded about it when a flatmate had this very song on the go while we were playing FIFA 2011 (which I totally beat him at by the way

).

And...yeah, that's it I guess. Check back for mor albumness later in the coming week, as all that's definitely in the pipeline.

Bulldog · 04-04-2011, 12:06 AM

Bitter:Sweet
The Mating Game
2006

genre: trip-hop,downtempo,nu jazz
1. Don't Forget To Breathe - 3:14
2. The Mating Game - 3:24
3. Overdue - 3:34
4. Heaven - 3:48
5. Bittersweet Faith - 4:19
6. Moving Forward - 3:36
7. Moody - 2:39
8. Dirty Laundry - 3:20
9. Our Remains - 3:34
10. Salty Air - 3:02
11. Take 2 Blue - 2:40

Usually, I like to think of something vaguely personal to relate to an album I choose to prattle on about for however long in this thread - whatever anyone reading it may think, it's definitely got a funny old way of making things a bit more interesting from this end of the equation. Otherwise it boils down to something like, I dunno;

x = 2 good songs + 5 mediocre songs - 4 piles of crap
x = alright, I guess

And that'd end up being just as dull to me as it is to you, if not more so. Therein lies my problem with announcing that I'd be talking about this one in this thread - as Bitter:Sweet are an artist I don't know a lot about and haven't been listening to for that long, there's not really much of a personal spin I can put on things. Still, I guess I'll do this thing anyway. Might end up being a shorter album post than usual though.

Anyway, about these guys...all I've really been able to gather about them are a couple of names behind the moniker, the fact that they're from LA, some RYM genre tags and my kinda liking this album. Bitter:Sweet is basically the name of a Thievery Corporation-esque dynamic duo of modern trip-hop and downtempo electronica. Again, it's two figures behind every instrument and a very slick production sound, in this case being the ultra-cool uncle you never had by the name of Kiran Shahani, and the steamy redhead chick on vocals by the name of Shana Halligan.

So, yes, it's another rag-tag bunch who peddle a downtempo vibe and are fronted by the soft, breathy vocals of a pretty hot vocalist. I've already compared them to Thievery Corporation and, really, there is more than a slight echo of the sublime work of Rob Garza and Eric Hilton over both the albums that Bitter:Sweet have been responsible for (this being the debut). Same cool, laid-back beats and atmospherics with a touch of neo-psychedlia about them, same night-listening 101 stuff.

Now, I hope you're ready for a bit of a curve-ball, because I've my arm raised and I'm poised to throw one right atchya. This album is far from being the bland, unoriginal tripe that the paragraph above this one in particular might have led you to believe. Yes, you can hear a lot of the work of other artists in this album and their next and yes, it lacks the quirky originality of someone like Lamb. But seriously though, are we gonna start counting a lack of originality against artists now, because if we are I'm gonna have to delete about three quarters of all the music I've ever heard, go have a shower and spend hours washing the unclean off me. I don't ask for ball-breaking originality from the music I listen to really - as long as there's some element to the music that keeps me hooked, some sense of character that makes an artist stand out from the crowd in its own unique way.

And as for that sense of character, I didn't add that nu jazz tag to the genre disclaimer for no reason. While it's true that it's a breezy, effortlessly cool and calm vibe that flows through most this record, a) that's not really such a bad thing and b) it's not the whole picture either. Despite the overall mood of the album, there's a very nicely-implemented jazzy swing that pervades other sections of it, particularly on the title track, what with that samba-like burst of colour that certainly seems to come out of it for me.

Also, I don't know if you noticed, but this album is sexy as hell. Another artist this album sounds like something of an echo of is Mike Patton's Lovage project, which is just fine by me as I've been looking for quite a while for similar-sounding music to it. In fact, I think I've found a good way to sum this one up - imagine Lovage crossed over with Thievery Corporation, only minus the dub reggae vibes of the latter. That's what you've got here.

As a work of trip-hop/downtempo then, it's far from bland and actually pretty damn catchy in places. Never does this album stray below the bar set for it by its influences, and it's even home to one of my new favourite songs in the shape of the opening track Don't Forget To Breathe. It flows perfectly well from beginning to end, with not a single note out of place, but on the other hand it's a bit too short really. I'd definitely recommend this to any trip-hop acolytes on the boards, not to mention their good-but-not-quite-as-good-as-this followup album. I'd give you the low-down of which tracks are better than others, but I guess I'll leave that bit to you

Here's what I think of it;

Gavin B. · 04-06-2011, 06:36 AM

I agree with you on your comments on Bitter:Sweet. Their music is spotty but on a few occasions they hit the mark. Their best songs are the ones that sound like themes from old 60's movie soundtracks. Bitter:Sweet also has a lot of competition from other bands who also do that sort of music.

Another group, the Postmarks were good enough at 60s themed soundtrack music to have one their songs considered as the opening theme for the 2006 Bond movie, Casino Royale.

I managed to find a copy of the alternative opening credits for Casino Royale shot with the Postmarks' song No One Said This Would Be Easy . Unfortunately the movie's producers selected Chris Connell's You Know My Name as the opening track for Casino Royale, even though the Postmark's song is better. The digital animation on the Postmark's alternate version of the Casino Royale opening theme is fantastic.

Bulldog · 04-06-2011, 05:02 PM

Yeah, I think I'm gonna knock down Bitter:Sweet's rating by a star. Still a good album that I'd recommend getting, but I'm gonna try to be as sparing as possible with the 4+ ratings for this thread. Plus, as you say, their songs are generally pretty good even when they sound a lot like Thievery Corporation, but that they hit the heights when they produce that tracks that give off a good, swinging kinda vibe.

Cheers for flagging up the Postmarks as well - much as I loved Casino Royale, I've not heard of them before. Definitely sounds like it'll be my kinda thing all the same though. I'll check them out.

And, while I'm still around, here's a song that's been on my mind all day;

Artist: New Order
Tuneage: Ceremony

As some of you reading this may know, New Order's back catalogue basically means the world to me. After all, back when my voice was just starting to get deeper and blotches of acne started popping up on my skin, New Order were one of the bands I listened to regularly, and they're one of literally a handful of artists I loved when I was 12 or 13 years of age that I still listen to just as much to this day.

It was on a strange kinda whim that I first started listening to them. I vaguely remember talking to my history teacher in high school of all people about this awesome new song I'd heard called 60 Miles An Hour by a band called New Order. He told me to listen to Blue Monday, which I downloaded from the virtual sewer of the p2p file sharing networks and did so that very night. I had two reactions to it; 1) wasn't this synth motif on that American Express advert with Alan Shearer in it? and 2) awww hell yeah!

New Order's compilation of singles, b-sides and remixes by the name of Substance was the next port of call, of which this is the opening track. I'll admit that I never did like this song as much as, say, Temptation, Bizarre Love Triangle or True Faith until a few years down the line when I started listening to Joy Division, and thus got a taste for this kinda song. After all, this is one of two songs on New Order's debut which has a posthumous songwriting credit to Ian Curtis on it. These days (teehee) I think is pretty much the perfect piece of music. True, Bernard Sumner's far from the best singer on Earth and a terrible lyricist too, but his guitar and deadpan vocal delivery really make this track into something else, along with that beautiful, typically melodic Peter Hook bassline and that robotic drumbeat from Stephen 'the beast' Morris.

Basically, this song is one of many reasons why New Order were, to me at least, Manchester's greatest gift to music.

And, yeah, there'll be another album post coming up soon...hopefully tomorrow...

Bulldog · 04-07-2011, 02:44 PM

Kris Kristofferson
This Old Road
2006

genre: Americana, contemporary folk
1. This Old Road - 3:58
2. Pilgrim's Progress - 2:13
3. The Last Thing To Do - 2:58
4. Wild American - 2:25
5. In the News - 3:28
6. The Burden Of Freedom - 3:23
7. Chase the Feeling - 4:03
8. Holy Creation - 4:35
9. The Show Goes On - 3:17
10. Thank You For a Life - 3:41
11. Final Attraction - 2:56

Well, this album should be slightly easier to talk about than the Bitter:Sweet one I just covered, as there's actually something of a vague, personal connection between me and Mr Kristofferson here. There are three things Mr Kristofferson here did to stand out for me before I ever actually got hold of any of his albums and thus made any conscious effort to listen to his music. In order of appearance if you will; 1) I thought he was pretty badass in the first two (and therefore the good) Blade movies. 2) He did ok in the leading role of Heaven's Gate, lighting up a movie that was otherwise so dull I might as well have listened to Ingrid Michaelson for 4 hours.

Thirdly, there's a little song called April 5th which I just happen to love. It was 2 or 3 years ago that I started making an effort to hunt down Elvis Costello rarities and show them off in the Costello thread here in a bid to be that little bit more pretentious (which more often than not I'd just never get round to and make do with uploading some random bootleg and inexplicably call it 'the best live recording ever'). As I sifted through piles of interview recordings, 5 second-long demos and MP3s of Nick Lowe farting into a can, I saw this little April 5th ditty, written and recorded by the trio of Elvis Costello, Rosanne Cash and Kris Kristofferson. At its full length it remains unreleased to this day since its recording on 2007 or 2008 (I forgot which one exactly), as the only version available is a 130 second excerpt downloadable from an nytimes.conm article. There's a live version recorded on Costello's Sundance Channel talkshow, but if truth be told it doesn't match what I saw as the sheer beauty of the studio version I've heard. Put simply, I'd give anything to see the Costello/Cash/Kristofferson trio record a full-length album together.

So then, back to reality...here lies the first album of new, original material from Kristofferson after an 11 year silence following the ok a Moment In Forever...almost anyway (there are a couple of re-recorded songs on this, but otherwise we're walking up New Song Street here). And...actually I should probably just say it now and get it done with - if you don't like country music of any sort, you probably shouldn't be reading this post.

There are several reasons you should probably listen to this album though. First of all, you might just be a bit curious about Americana in general and wondering which angle you want to approach it from. If you happen to be clinically insane and not like Sweetheart Of the Rodeo, Our Mother the Mountain or the Gilded Palace Of Sin, this here's a great place to get started as it shows off the diversity of Americana nicely, what with how it lacks any steel guitar (so if every one of those twangs feels like someone clawing one of your teeth out with their bare hands, this'll do for you nicely).

There's a lot more in common with good old-fashioned folk music here, as most of this album is the sound of Kristofferson with his acoustic guitar, a harmonica and the odd mandolin track to back him up. That leads me nicely onto my second reason you should listen to this, as it's the storytelling side of Americana at its finest, being a deeply introspective and fairly autobiographical album. It's about as far from pretentious as you can get though, being a very easygoing listening experience - at points you just feel like you're sat in a smoky bar with an endless supply of whiskey coming your way as one of the old-timers provides the musical entertainment for the night.

Third is that it's Kris Kristofferson for god's sake - what's not to like

While it's far from the Townes Van Zandt-esque sounds of his earliest work, it's definitely an absolutely golden album and one I've probably listened to about 50 times in the last 5 or 6 months since I've had it.

Gavin B. · 04-07-2011, 10:09 PM

Thanks for posting Ceremony which is the last song written by Joy Division & the first song recorded by New Order. The first time I heard the song was New Order playing it live at a club in Boston called the Underground. It was supposed to be Joy Division's first American tour. Ian Curtis died on the eve of that tour but Bernard Sumner held the band together.

My ticket for the show actually said "Joy Division" on the face & I remember the doorman was offering refunds to ticket holders who had come to see Joy Division with Ian Curtis. A few folks took the refunds but I'm glad I didn't. It is still the most memorable rock show I ever attended. No one who came to the show even knew of Ian Curtis' death because it wasn't reported in the American press. In May of 1980 the band was completely unknown in America even to most of the music press. I bought Unknown Pleasures as an UK import album because Joy Division wasn't even signed to an American label.

The Underground was basically an old laundromat with a capacity for only about 100 people. There was no dressing room & the band was congregating at the bar before the show. Bernard was telling the story of how the band had nearly all of it's equipment stolen the previous evening in New York. He said they showed up in Boston having to rent or borrow all of their equipment for the show. I felt sorry for the band, having to face the loss of all of their equipment even as they were still grieving the loss of their singer.

As things stood at the time of that Boston gig, the band's future as New Order was uncertain. Sumner said the band members were only committed to completing the original Joy Division tour itinerary & upon returning to England, they would decide the longterm future of New Order as a band. I'm glad they decided to carry on.

At that Boston gig, less than a month after Curtis' suicide, New Order played a basic set list of Joy Division songs from Unknown Pleasures & Closer. The sole exception was Ceremony a song that the band was just completing when Curtis died. A few months after their American tour, New Order released Ceremony as their debut single.

Bernard did a great job of singing all of Curtis' vocals. The Underground didn't have a stage and the performers were all at floor level and I was standing face to face with Sumner about 4 feet from the band during the entire show. To the handful of people that attended the show, it was something they would talk about for a long, long time afterwards. It's 31 years later and I still remember the show like it was last night.

04-02-2011, 07:04 PM	#55 (permalink)
Bulldog why bother? Join Date: Sep 2008 Location: UK Posts: 4,840	Hey guys. If anyone particularly wanted to see what I had to say about Bitter:Sweet and Kris Kristofferson by now, your luck's out! I've had an awful lot of non-interwebz stuff catch up with me and raise a bit of a ruckus lately, so haven't really had the time or mental energy to write anything fitting about them for this thread. From Monday onwards things are definitely gonna clear up though, and since it's been far too long since I last stuck an album post in this 'ere thread, you can expect something like that around about then. In the mean time, here's a random video to make up for lost time; And now for a couple of epic choonz... Artist: Midnight Oil Tuneage: Read About It Another one of those artists I may as well flag up with every 5th post here - they're just that immense. If you missed it, I got most of the overblown fanboy worshipping over and done with here...I think. I don't really read back on the posts I make here y'see Whatever it was I said, I'm pretty sure I didn't call that Oils album my favourite - that'd be between this and two or three others beside it. I'm sure I also said way back when that along with fellow Sydney...ers the Celibate Rifles, the Oils here were far and away the most consistently decent band to emerge from the Australian punk/garage scene of the late 70s. I'd probably ranks these guys above the former though - as generally good as their albums are, the Rifles basically sound the same on each one. The Oils had a way of shaking up the formula a bit, basically. Anyway, this one's from the magnificent 10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1 album of 1983, and it's one where you can sense a kinda bridge between the band's loud, punk-centric roots and the more commercially-aimed pop stylings of, say, Diesel and Dust. This here was the song that brought 10-1 to my attention and, subsequently, was responsible for my getting reacquainted with them about 5-odd years after first hearing Beds Are Burning and casting it off with a resounding meh. Not only home to one of the most typically student-lefty lyrics I've ever heard, but also one of the best riffs too. Artist: Graham Coxon Tuneage: Bittersweet Bundle Of Misery Here's another one that takes me waaaaaay back. I'll just get a bit more comfy in my rocking chair, wait for my mug of cocoa to cool down a bit before I get right down to the real nitty-gritty... I remember hearing this in...what was it, 2004? 2005? Whenever it came out. Anyway, I was still smarting from a) Blur's splitting up and b) the notion that a miserable piece of junk that sounded so clanky and robotic it might as well not have been recorded by warm-blooded mammals (Think Tank) was to be the last album that Blur would release. It was the sad end of an era for me. Being the spunky, red-blooded 90s kid that I am, Blur and Oasis were basically my musical education as I grew up...barring the kinda stuff I'd here my parents listening to, but that's a different story for a different time. Anyway, there was this song here that made its way onto the airwaves back when I was only just forming what would become my current musical taste and, needless to say, I remember just falling in love with this thing. Although you could say it's a pretty damn cynical song about a character being pissed off with his high maintenance girlfriend, this song just seemed to me to ooze the kind of joy and colour that I loved in the Blur sound of old, and was missing from the awful Think Tank and their half-good self-titled album (13 was the only album where that sound worked for me, but again, different story, different time). And so I hunted down the album this song belonged to - Happiness In Magazines. Although it was met with the kind of universal praise every Christopher Nolan film seems to get these days, I didn't really like it so much when I first heard it. It was good, yeah, but songs like People Of Earth and Freaking Out just annoyed me. Bear in mind though that that was 6 or 7 years ago, and that I haven't listened to this album since. In fact, I was only reminded about it when a flatmate had this very song on the go while we were playing FIFA 2011 (which I totally beat him at by the way). And...yeah, that's it I guess. Check back for mor albumness later in the coming week, as all that's definitely in the pipeline.

04-04-2011, 12:06 AM	#56 (permalink)
Bulldog why bother? Join Date: Sep 2008 Location: UK Posts: 4,840	Bitter:Sweet The Mating Game 2006 genre: trip-hop,downtempo,nu jazz 1. Don't Forget To Breathe - 3:14 2. The Mating Game - 3:24 3. Overdue - 3:34 4. Heaven - 3:48 5. Bittersweet Faith - 4:19 6. Moving Forward - 3:36 7. Moody - 2:39 8. Dirty Laundry - 3:20 9. Our Remains - 3:34 10. Salty Air - 3:02 11. Take 2 Blue - 2:40 Usually, I like to think of something vaguely personal to relate to an album I choose to prattle on about for however long in this thread - whatever anyone reading it may think, it's definitely got a funny old way of making things a bit more interesting from this end of the equation. Otherwise it boils down to something like, I dunno; x = 2 good songs + 5 mediocre songs - 4 piles of crap x = alright, I guess And that'd end up being just as dull to me as it is to you, if not more so. Therein lies my problem with announcing that I'd be talking about this one in this thread - as Bitter:Sweet are an artist I don't know a lot about and haven't been listening to for that long, there's not really much of a personal spin I can put on things. Still, I guess I'll do this thing anyway. Might end up being a shorter album post than usual though. Anyway, about these guys...all I've really been able to gather about them are a couple of names behind the moniker, the fact that they're from LA, some RYM genre tags and my kinda liking this album. Bitter:Sweet is basically the name of a Thievery Corporation-esque dynamic duo of modern trip-hop and downtempo electronica. Again, it's two figures behind every instrument and a very slick production sound, in this case being the ultra-cool uncle you never had by the name of Kiran Shahani, and the steamy redhead chick on vocals by the name of Shana Halligan. So, yes, it's another rag-tag bunch who peddle a downtempo vibe and are fronted by the soft, breathy vocals of a pretty hot vocalist. I've already compared them to Thievery Corporation and, really, there is more than a slight echo of the sublime work of Rob Garza and Eric Hilton over both the albums that Bitter:Sweet have been responsible for (this being the debut). Same cool, laid-back beats and atmospherics with a touch of neo-psychedlia about them, same night-listening 101 stuff. Now, I hope you're ready for a bit of a curve-ball, because I've my arm raised and I'm poised to throw one right atchya. This album is far from being the bland, unoriginal tripe that the paragraph above this one in particular might have led you to believe. Yes, you can hear a lot of the work of other artists in this album and their next and yes, it lacks the quirky originality of someone like Lamb. But seriously though, are we gonna start counting a lack of originality against artists now, because if we are I'm gonna have to delete about three quarters of all the music I've ever heard, go have a shower and spend hours washing the unclean off me. I don't ask for ball-breaking originality from the music I listen to really - as long as there's some element to the music that keeps me hooked, some sense of character that makes an artist stand out from the crowd in its own unique way. And as for that sense of character, I didn't add that nu jazz tag to the genre disclaimer for no reason. While it's true that it's a breezy, effortlessly cool and calm vibe that flows through most this record, a) that's not really such a bad thing and b) it's not the whole picture either. Despite the overall mood of the album, there's a very nicely-implemented jazzy swing that pervades other sections of it, particularly on the title track, what with that samba-like burst of colour that certainly seems to come out of it for me. Also, I don't know if you noticed, but this album is sexy as hell. Another artist this album sounds like something of an echo of is Mike Patton's Lovage project, which is just fine by me as I've been looking for quite a while for similar-sounding music to it. In fact, I think I've found a good way to sum this one up - imagine Lovage crossed over with Thievery Corporation, only minus the dub reggae vibes of the latter. That's what you've got here. As a work of trip-hop/downtempo then, it's far from bland and actually pretty damn catchy in places. Never does this album stray below the bar set for it by its influences, and it's even home to one of my new favourite songs in the shape of the opening track Don't Forget To Breathe. It flows perfectly well from beginning to end, with not a single note out of place, but on the other hand it's a bit too short really. I'd definitely recommend this to any trip-hop acolytes on the boards, not to mention their good-but-not-quite-as-good-as-this followup album. I'd give you the low-down of which tracks are better than others, but I guess I'll leave that bit to you Here's what I think of it; Last edited by Bulldog; 04-06-2011 at 04:43 PM.

04-06-2011, 06:36 AM	#57 (permalink)
Gavin B. Model Worker Join Date: Jan 2009 Posts: 1,248	I agree with you on your comments on Bitter:Sweet. Their music is spotty but on a few occasions they hit the mark. Their best songs are the ones that sound like themes from old 60's movie soundtracks. Bitter:Sweet also has a lot of competition from other bands who also do that sort of music. Another group, the Postmarks were good enough at 60s themed soundtrack music to have one their songs considered as the opening theme for the 2006 Bond movie, Casino Royale. I managed to find a copy of the alternative opening credits for Casino Royale shot with the Postmarks' song No One Said This Would Be Easy . Unfortunately the movie's producers selected Chris Connell's You Know My Name as the opening track for Casino Royale, even though the Postmark's song is better. The digital animation on the Postmark's alternate version of the Casino Royale opening theme is fantastic. __________________ There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff. Townes Van Zandt

04-07-2011, 02:44 PM	#59 (permalink)
Bulldog why bother? Join Date: Sep 2008 Location: UK Posts: 4,840	Kris Kristofferson This Old Road 2006 genre: Americana, contemporary folk 1. This Old Road - 3:58 2. Pilgrim's Progress - 2:13 3. The Last Thing To Do - 2:58 4. Wild American - 2:25 5. In the News - 3:28 6. The Burden Of Freedom - 3:23 7. Chase the Feeling - 4:03 8. Holy Creation - 4:35 9. The Show Goes On - 3:17 10. Thank You For a Life - 3:41 11. Final Attraction - 2:56 Well, this album should be slightly easier to talk about than the Bitter:Sweet one I just covered, as there's actually something of a vague, personal connection between me and Mr Kristofferson here. There are three things Mr Kristofferson here did to stand out for me before I ever actually got hold of any of his albums and thus made any conscious effort to listen to his music. In order of appearance if you will; 1) I thought he was pretty badass in the first two (and therefore the good) Blade movies. 2) He did ok in the leading role of Heaven's Gate, lighting up a movie that was otherwise so dull I might as well have listened to Ingrid Michaelson for 4 hours. Thirdly, there's a little song called April 5th which I just happen to love. It was 2 or 3 years ago that I started making an effort to hunt down Elvis Costello rarities and show them off in the Costello thread here in a bid to be that little bit more pretentious (which more often than not I'd just never get round to and make do with uploading some random bootleg and inexplicably call it 'the best live recording ever'). As I sifted through piles of interview recordings, 5 second-long demos and MP3s of Nick Lowe farting into a can, I saw this little April 5th ditty, written and recorded by the trio of Elvis Costello, Rosanne Cash and Kris Kristofferson. At its full length it remains unreleased to this day since its recording on 2007 or 2008 (I forgot which one exactly), as the only version available is a 130 second excerpt downloadable from an nytimes.conm article. There's a live version recorded on Costello's Sundance Channel talkshow, but if truth be told it doesn't match what I saw as the sheer beauty of the studio version I've heard. Put simply, I'd give anything to see the Costello/Cash/Kristofferson trio record a full-length album together. So then, back to reality...here lies the first album of new, original material from Kristofferson after an 11 year silence following the ok a Moment In Forever...almost anyway (there are a couple of re-recorded songs on this, but otherwise we're walking up New Song Street here). And...actually I should probably just say it now and get it done with - if you don't like country music of any sort, you probably shouldn't be reading this post. There are several reasons you should probably listen to this album though. First of all, you might just be a bit curious about Americana in general and wondering which angle you want to approach it from. If you happen to be clinically insane and not like Sweetheart Of the Rodeo, Our Mother the Mountain or the Gilded Palace Of Sin, this here's a great place to get started as it shows off the diversity of Americana nicely, what with how it lacks any steel guitar (so if every one of those twangs feels like someone clawing one of your teeth out with their bare hands, this'll do for you nicely). There's a lot more in common with good old-fashioned folk music here, as most of this album is the sound of Kristofferson with his acoustic guitar, a harmonica and the odd mandolin track to back him up. That leads me nicely onto my second reason you should listen to this, as it's the storytelling side of Americana at its finest, being a deeply introspective and fairly autobiographical album. It's about as far from pretentious as you can get though, being a very easygoing listening experience - at points you just feel like you're sat in a smoky bar with an endless supply of whiskey coming your way as one of the old-timers provides the musical entertainment for the night. Third is that it's Kris Kristofferson for god's sake - what's not to like While it's far from the Townes Van Zandt-esque sounds of his earliest work, it's definitely an absolutely golden album and one I've probably listened to about 50 times in the last 5 or 6 months since I've had it. Last edited by Bulldog; 04-07-2011 at 07:11 PM.

04-07-2011, 10:09 PM	#60 (permalink)
Gavin B. Model Worker Join Date: Jan 2009 Posts: 1,248	Thanks for posting Ceremony which is the last song written by Joy Division & the first song recorded by New Order. The first time I heard the song was New Order playing it live at a club in Boston called the Underground. It was supposed to be Joy Division's first American tour. Ian Curtis died on the eve of that tour but Bernard Sumner held the band together. My ticket for the show actually said "Joy Division" on the face & I remember the doorman was offering refunds to ticket holders who had come to see Joy Division with Ian Curtis. A few folks took the refunds but I'm glad I didn't. It is still the most memorable rock show I ever attended. No one who came to the show even knew of Ian Curtis' death because it wasn't reported in the American press. In May of 1980 the band was completely unknown in America even to most of the music press. I bought Unknown Pleasures as an UK import album because Joy Division wasn't even signed to an American label. The Underground was basically an old laundromat with a capacity for only about 100 people. There was no dressing room & the band was congregating at the bar before the show. Bernard was telling the story of how the band had nearly all of it's equipment stolen the previous evening in New York. He said they showed up in Boston having to rent or borrow all of their equipment for the show. I felt sorry for the band, having to face the loss of all of their equipment even as they were still grieving the loss of their singer. As things stood at the time of that Boston gig, the band's future as New Order was uncertain. Sumner said the band members were only committed to completing the original Joy Division tour itinerary & upon returning to England, they would decide the longterm future of New Order as a band. I'm glad they decided to carry on. At that Boston gig, less than a month after Curtis' suicide, New Order played a basic set list of Joy Division songs from Unknown Pleasures & Closer. The sole exception was Ceremony a song that the band was just completing when Curtis died. A few months after their American tour, New Order released Ceremony as their debut single. Bernard did a great job of singing all of Curtis' vocals. The Underground didn't have a stage and the performers were all at floor level and I was standing face to face with Sumner about 4 feet from the band during the entire show. To the handful of people that attended the show, it was something they would talk about for a long, long time afterwards. It's 31 years later and I still remember the show like it was last night. __________________ There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff. Townes Van Zandt

03-30-2011, 01:10 PM	#54 (permalink)
Bulldog why bother? Join Date: Sep 2008 Location: UK Posts: 4,840	So, now for one of those deviations from the format I was a-talkin' about... 3 Reasons Why You Should Listen To David Bowie's 90s Material In addition to endlessly long posts about albums you couldn't give a monkeys about, or showing off a bunch of different individual tunes I'm quite the fan of, I'll be doing this kinda thing. These are basically going to be three closely-related albums, be they in the same discography, from the same musical scene, subgenre or whatever, all having a very brief eye cast over them by yours truly. I'm gonna try and keep these coming from my own personal 'why can't everyone else have the same opinion as me' folder...stuff I think is pretty underrated in general, then. There'll be plenty more of these in future, don't worry And here we are, starting in Obvious Territory with 90s Bowie. If you're not in the know, allow me - by the time the 90s were in full swing, Bowie was just beginning his efforts to emerge from a pretty dark time in his career, that being the constant ridicule he'd been subjected to from about the mid-80s to the early 90s. He'd well and truly imploded artistically by not only releasing an...an...an adequate album (Tonight), and not only taken his credibility behind a toolshed and beaten it half to death with a baseball bat (Never Let Me Down), but he followed all that up by forming the loud, noisy and allegedly pretty crappy Tin Machine (I actually think they have their moments myself). After flapping about at rock bottom for almost a decade then, a new Bowie was ready to emerge and show himself to the world. And that didn't really start so well to be honest with you. 1993's Black Tie White Noise - Bowie's first solo album of the 90s - had two of my favourite songs on it (the cover of Nite Flights and Jump, They Say if you must know), but other than that was only really half-good. It was a definite improvement on all four of his preceding albums, but far from a classic. It did though signal the true second coming of Bowie, and pointed the way forward for one easily his best successive trio of albums since the Station To Station-Low-'Heroes' one of the 70s. Now, here's why... The Buddha Of Suburbia OST 1993 It all started rather inconspicuously with what was until its re-release only a few years ago something of a hidden treasure of Bowie's discography. This was the soundtrack to the excellent Hanif Kureishi's the Buddha Of Suburbia...although in essence it was a soundtrack in name only. True, the title track can be heard in full, and you can hear snippets of the rest of this album here and there, but otherwise this was no TV soundtrack - it was a full-length studio album by Bowie almost full of new and exclusive songs. The fact that for some bizarre reason it was marketed as a soundtrack album meant that the music industry pretty much regurgitated it on sight, like a hot bombay mix when you've had one too many at your local. Anyway, musically this album is just beautiful, and asking me to describe it as some lame-arse record company genre label would be like asking Joe Rogan to accurately describe his last DMT trip. That's not to call this album trippy or psychedelic or whatever - to be perfectly blunt, it's not. I could be a lazy bastard and call it alternative rock, and I'm sure I'd put it in that section if I worked in HMV or something, but there's a lot more to this album than that. There are two amazing new age (yes, I said it - new age!) instrumentals, there's a full-blown jazz instrumental...besides that you can tell that this was a rock album recorded by three guys (Bowie, Erdal Kizilcay and Mike Garson) recording all the instruments themselves, and...just listen to it yourself. If it weren't for the lame duck final track (and it's about as lame as ducks get really), this would definitely be in my top tier of favourite Bowie albums. Highly, highly recommended. 1.Outside 1995 And then there's its followup - the mighty, mighty Outside! Without being too much of a randy fanboy about it, this album is just fantastic. You could hear a progression from Black Tie White Noise to the Buddha Of Suburbia, and just like that you can hear the artistic progression from the Buddha Of Suburbia to Outside here. While the more ambient and even new age portions of the preceding album are basically totally done away with the same, no doubt jam-oriented approach to writing and recording songs in the studio is opted for, as opposed to David Bowie demoing them in his living room and talking about them over coffee and donuts with the session musicians. Given that there's a very, very loose narrative to the songs here about a sadistic cult of outsider artists murdering a teenage girl for art's sake, a much darker twist is given to the overall sound. The jazz influences are used a lot more here and there's a very metallic, industrial rhythmic method that underpins most of the songs here. Did I mention there's quite a lot of funky bass too? What we've got at the end of the day is another one of Bowie's most criminally underrated albums...coming to it as a newbie you'll probably think of it in one of these two ways. 1. Holy crap, this is the best thing I've heard all week! I'm going to go give my Simple Plan CDs to the pub down the road for use as ashtrays and spend this weekend locked in my room with this album, a jar of raw coffee and a pair of headphones. 2. What is this pretentious bullshit (which I guess makes it kinda fitting for a thread by a fella called Bulldog)?! Is David Bowie seriously trying to sound like a 70 year-old man for this spoken word track?! Again, just listen to it, as it's awesome and has plenty of Bowie's better songs on it. Another album that without it's flaw (being a tad overlong and having those bloody stupid segue tracks in this case) would be one of the man's very best. It's as scary as it is catchy, as lively as it is pensive...and so on. Earthling 1997 Here's an album which, to be honest, isn't quite as good as I once thought it was. Don't get me wrong; it's still a very, very good album, and is again very underrated. I would say that it's the weakest of this little trilogy though. Regarding the sound, often the combination of sounds that Outside threw at us would end up sounding a tad like big beat electronica or even jungle music (tracks like I'm Deranged and We Prick You, especially), and this album is basically fully-fledged...big beat electronica and jungle! Well, to be fair only three of these songs sound at all like jungle/d'n'b, and labelling it as such would be unfair to an album which is essentially the David Bowie sound of old being re-wired with a type of contemporary pop motor for the day. Again, it's home to some of my favourite Bowie songs ever, but overall it's just not quite as good as the two albums that preceded it. I don't what it is...maybe it's that Union Jacket on the sleeve art that reminds me too much of Geri Halliwell, or that a version of one of its songs was on the soundtrack to that steaming pile of shit known as Showgirls. Either way, it stands as a good Bowie album but not an essential. It is though a necessary part of this trilogy, and definitely worth having. Much more commercial than the two albums before it, but at the same time a lot better than the MOR twaddle called Hours that was just around the corner.

04-06-2011, 05:02 PM	#58 (permalink)
Bulldog why bother? Join Date: Sep 2008 Location: UK Posts: 4,840	Yeah, I think I'm gonna knock down Bitter:Sweet's rating by a star. Still a good album that I'd recommend getting, but I'm gonna try to be as sparing as possible with the 4+ ratings for this thread. Plus, as you say, their songs are generally pretty good even when they sound a lot like Thievery Corporation, but that they hit the heights when they produce that tracks that give off a good, swinging kinda vibe. Cheers for flagging up the Postmarks as well - much as I loved Casino Royale, I've not heard of them before. Definitely sounds like it'll be my kinda thing all the same though. I'll check them out. And, while I'm still around, here's a song that's been on my mind all day; Artist: New Order Tuneage: Ceremony As some of you reading this may know, New Order's back catalogue basically means the world to me. After all, back when my voice was just starting to get deeper and blotches of acne started popping up on my skin, New Order were one of the bands I listened to regularly, and they're one of literally a handful of artists I loved when I was 12 or 13 years of age that I still listen to just as much to this day. It was on a strange kinda whim that I first started listening to them. I vaguely remember talking to my history teacher in high school of all people about this awesome new song I'd heard called 60 Miles An Hour by a band called New Order. He told me to listen to Blue Monday, which I downloaded from the virtual sewer of the p2p file sharing networks and did so that very night. I had two reactions to it; 1) wasn't this synth motif on that American Express advert with Alan Shearer in it? and 2) awww hell yeah! New Order's compilation of singles, b-sides and remixes by the name of Substance was the next port of call, of which this is the opening track. I'll admit that I never did like this song as much as, say, Temptation, Bizarre Love Triangle or True Faith until a few years down the line when I started listening to Joy Division, and thus got a taste for this kinda song. After all, this is one of two songs on New Order's debut which has a posthumous songwriting credit to Ian Curtis on it. These days (teehee) I think is pretty much the perfect piece of music. True, Bernard Sumner's far from the best singer on Earth and a terrible lyricist too, but his guitar and deadpan vocal delivery really make this track into something else, along with that beautiful, typically melodic Peter Hook bassline and that robotic drumbeat from Stephen 'the beast' Morris. Basically, this song is one of many reasons why New Order were, to me at least, Manchester's greatest gift to music. And, yeah, there'll be another album post coming up soon...hopefully tomorrow...