jog_on_tom

great review. thanks all involved.

also out

respekt all..

i'd fight in the kharas corner

it would be like orwell joining the international brigade

re-releasing Midnight Request Line?!

point?

Where suburbia meets the sky and the underground becomes overground, the ends of Tube lines are magical places. In the last year numerous kids from way out West have wandered East: Laura Marling, Noah & the Whale, Jay Jay Pistolet, and (perhaps the best of these) Mumford & Sons, but these anti-folkers tend not to edge beyond the topics of being young and being lost. The most mature offerings are a result of Johnny Flynn’s wistful way with melancholy and melody.

What makes Flynn different is his breadth of influences and his brevity of emotion. Drawing equally from Americana and British folk, Flynn offers a modern reappraisal of the genre, avoiding the pock-holed clichés that the kid-with-guitar everyman is all too keen to flaunt. As a result A Larum walks a thin line between pretence and restraint; both pastoral and gritty, it is as much Nick Drake as it is Leadbelly.

Much of this duplicity is actually a result of his attempts to carve out a muse of his own. Having attended the same drama school as Amy Winehouse and The Kooks’ Luke Pritchard and toured the world with a Shakespeare company, it is presumably safe to assume that when he sings of poverty and desperation it’s not really coming from experience; it only takes a minute of opener ‘The Box’, for example, before talk turns to “eating from bins in parks” and sleeping betwixt cardboard. But whilst sea shanties are always gonna ring hollow from landlocked lungs they can, at the very least, bring the sniff of salt. This impersonation, or at least juvenile reproduction, doesn’t as much discredit Flynn as merely highlight what he does best. A Larum is, for the best part, narrative-driven melodic folk done near-perfectly.

The songs themselves rely on the strength of Flynn’s words more than they do the simple arrangements. Although his voice is too harsh to carry much of a melody and verbs sometimes flow too freely where silence would suffice, his paced hush is enough to string a certain melody to the narrative, to add beauty to the beat. ‘Eyeless in Holloway’ is the standout track, as gleefully triumphant over small victories as it is mournful for their loss. The charm on which Flynn relies does drag with time, tracks such as ‘Wayne Rooney’ and ‘Tunnels’ are more a reproduction of previous highs than a reinforcement, but with many a morning ahead of him it would be foolish to dwell.

Johnny Flynn: a talent that can only roll on with the years.

with diplo, these new puritans and bonde de role

not a bad show

SE til i die.. etc

t

thats not DiS's fault. it's mine.

.

al

i do i do i do-oo

only the one of them mind you

al

HEALTH @ Mademe Jo Jos

a No Pain In Pop and White Heat show

al

cut out the a4 black and white picture of laura marling in yesterdays independent and stick it on their 'inspiration-space' in front of their desk?

utterly unspeakably amazing.

what are you doing in the hoosiers' picture?

bottum left, swearing...

you're a fucking idiot

Cheer up son.

love,

tom

xxx

but i beat you by a good half decade

love them til my heart goes out

I am pretty drunk though

x

now give me all that shit

.

An Idjat.

Big up FvP.

It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era — the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run... but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant...
History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of 'history' it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time — and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened
My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights — or very early mornings — when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour... booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turnoff to take when I got to the other end... but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: no doubt at all about that...
There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda... You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning...
And that, I think, was the handle — that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply PREVAIL. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave...
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

CONTEXT>MUSIC

call me...

keep yer flares on

??????????????????????

.

blah blah blah Carass should be brought out and blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah ten out of ten blah blah blah. Yip. Blah blah blah blah blah...

the Hawks View night...

are all fucking idiots.

x

Mr Shankly!

But yeah, like Kev says...

strang news story!

10/10

Lets resurrect Lester Bangs especially...

Geek sharkery- 96.4%.

Sweat- Sixth Ninths.

Use of modal third- 7.

Happy?

brilliant.
x

It's not a 10/10 it's a 9.64/10.

But you're all right about Kev being a bit of tit. Not as much as me though.

Hurrah!

x

were astounding.

xxx

rushed to hell.x

That is a terrible review.
x

And his words = "My first press..."

x

Kharas.

"Every number has a meaning"

x