lukowski

I think it was quite worthwhile revisiting the early albums - the remastering on the murkier albums was very good - and those early live concerts on Reckoning and Murmur were amazing, but I'm not really sure there's much else to do here besides small tweaks. I think if OOT has the Bingo Handjob or MTV Unplugged concerts it'll probably be worth it just about, but it seems fairly pointless really. Suede were an incredibly prolific b-sides band, which REM just weren't, and most of the worthwhile stuff in the vaults came out on the second CD of In Time.

I think I genuinely thought it was the year 2113 when I wrote that

I really, really liked it but by dint of only hearing it when I was drunk in indie clubs it took me something like three years to work out who it was by. And then I got the record and the rest just didn't measure up for me, though I guess I didn't give it the fairest of chances.

Quite like this format, though maybe there should be a bit more too and fro, I dunno.

I do wonder if the fact Bradford is genuinely weird - like, a lot weirder and loads more difficult than most 'eccentric' frontpeople - has maybe been part of it, I think they probably haven't had the level of mainstream press coverage you'd expect from a band of their stature. I mean, in all fairness they're a PRETTY big band as modern indie acts go, it's just compared to a lot of their peers I don't get the impression that there's a huge amount of awareness of them beyond their fanbase and people who read P4K.

(and I was joking about 50,000 sales) but even so, I do think for all the acclaim Deerhunter have notched up they've never really had a full on 'moment' - though re Halcyon Digest it could be a simple fact of timing, in that it came out around the time all hype resources were being channelled into the Kanye album. But I dunno, Sigur Ros are doing arena tours now, I don't see Deerhunter as having less potential than them...

think It's Blitz! suffers more from second half sag and Show Your Bones is the one that goes a bit meh in the middle

I commissioned the reviews as a pair (rather than singly) because I thought a comparative piece might be a bit more fun than running two pieces and having blah blah OMG Relationship of Command (especially as Diver did such a good piece on it two years ago). So that put a bit of a word limit on it. In all honesty I hadn't quite twigged the fact that there was no remastering and no extras (and possibly I wouldn't have bothered if I had!), but I think it's always interesting to talk about Acrobatic Tenement a bit.

everybody liked the first half and then sort of didn't worry too much that the second was a bit gash, it's the same way everybody kept calling it an 'electronic' album when that was basically just the first four songs and then everything else was a bit hey ho.

the middle of Show Your Bones and the second half of It's Blitz are coherent but boring, I think the messiness is good here.

one of the limited advantages of the digital age is that it's possible to sort of completely ignore an album cover. But it is a shame after the cover of It's Blitz! was so amazing.

I didn't really think about it, but insisting the names are lower case when the names ARE SO SHIT is a bit rich.

they went a bit mental on the parenthesises on Isn't Anything, but those are mostly pretty solid names

I was probably a bit dramatic describing it as a nadir (I mean, it is for me, but I don't actually HATE it), but to expand a bit, I think edging Shields' vocals higher in the mix is the real problem - considering how much he purportedly labours over the sounds, there is a definite banality/laziness/wallpaperiness to a lot of the lyrics that's fine buried in the mix, but feels really exposed by the way it's been brought to the fore here.

some of it looked alright, to be fair, but the extremes (notably his Brit Awards get up) were very silly indeed, and in general the fact he was trying to look a bit sinister didn't really pay off. Earthling and the Union Jack frock coat was pretty silly, but it was sort of intentionally a bit tongue in cheek...

his clothes were AWFUL

the whole 'I'm going to do a trilogy of albums with Brian Eno, I'm even going to give the second one a name' was sort of endearingly lame (I don't really mean 'crap' as a big insult)

people may disagree with me, but I thought the PSB remix of Hallo Spaceboy was pretty rubbish, seemed to go entirely against the spirit of Outside in order to get a hit, felt very cheap of them just dropping in the Major Tom reference

Given the choice now I would never take the 'story' bits out of Outside as I've just lived with them too long, but objectively speaking they're pretty silly and probably stopped a lot of people getting into that record (their loss, but as I recall none of the reviewers could get past it, really)

not sure about advance listens, it's not on Chemikal Underground for whatever reason, Melodic instead

I reckon. Like a little bit of overlap between his accent and that weird way that Martin sounds a tiny bit northern on some of his songs.

we did have some debate as to how much to drop the reissue of a great album for having an inessential bonus disc, but as it's being fairly explicitly targeted at people who already own the original then lopping off a fair few marks seemed reasonable. If that needed explaining, I dunno.

but I do think it was overstretched as a double, good as motherfucker=redeemer is. The first two records and EP were so incredibly good that I think it did feel like a stumble by comparison, I do think it's their weakest record, even if that's a relative statement.

is something Bernard Sumner famously shouted on stage at a Joy Division (maybe actually Warsaw) gig

I think it's probably good that there was a dominant partner, it's probably what makes it so successful, I can imagine a 50/50 split might have come across as a lot messier...

the writer cleary thinks it IS one of the greatest albums of all time

I have to say this band's music has never done anything for me at all, but this is a lovely piece of writing.

has he just been totally incommunicado over the whole thing? Shockingly poor form from what I understand of the whole business.

Lana Del Rey is a pseudonym, so I guess it doesn't feel that odd using it, but it'd just read really strangely if you only referred to Chan Marshall as 'Cat Power', it's the name of the project, not her stage name.

at the risk of this all being a bit DiS's dirty laundry, I think Sean was writing as a music fan first and foremost and I hope Hayley doesn't take the above as anything more than a fan with strong feelings about the record wading in with his tuppence.

We actually had some behind the scenes discussion of this, and while I won't bore you with the entirety of it, I've not been blown away by this album and actually find the context here helpful, as it's the emotions I've been having problem finding beneath all the studio slickness...

done any good bullying recently?

changed

it's not over-compressed or anything, but Graham's parts are a bit more distinct in the mix. It's not really revelatory, though, I think the nature of Stephen Street's production is that they're very balanced, it was always a well-recorded album, and quite gentle...

I've listened to most of the remasters now, and I think it's probably fair to say it's basically generally the case of a spit shine to make them a splash louder and a tiny fraction crisper, they're not labours of love or redressing old wrongs, just a bit more like a 2012 CD. Blur's albums are very well produced, basically, and there's not been a lot of tinkering.

each to their own, but I mean, I find it hard to really see how you could say they don't have strong album tracks (which I guess isn't quite what you're saying)... and the Great Escape the single that aren't the Universal are the worst thing about it... to join in with Scorpio's fun I'd go:

Leisure - 6
Modern Life is Rubbish - 9
Parklife - 10
The Great Escape - 6
Blur - 9
13 - 10
Think Tank - 8

I think that was purely record company sequencing though... it's all academic now but I imagine it could have been made to work if Blur had wanted it on there... I wouldn't want to lose Advert but I could imagine Popscene might work quite well in that sort of slot...

I just think it's not quite in the same league as Parklife (much as it's a very different album) and there are a few tracks that are good rather than amazing.

you're right, changed

probably everything is multi-platform anyway... Planescape Torment probably had the best plot and characters of any game I've ever played (to the point it was almost slightly irritating that there wasn't really any fighting to do in the last hour or so of it). Baldur's 2 in particular just had a nice balance between accessibility and total EPICNESS, wd maybe seem a bit dated now though...

fuck me that was an amazing game

ghey

and I opted to be a monster

both the writer of the article and Jon 'The Rev' McLure attended (and garduated from) exactly the same respected South Yorkshire university, so, er, yeah.

anybody who calls a review they didn't like a 'review' is in danger of calling the kettle black when it comes to cliche.

in some ways it's a great loss to music journalism that Spinal Tap had that idea before anyone could actually do it in real life...

as a rule music journalism these days is infinitely less scathing and 'indulgent' than the heyday of the music weeklies (sort of mid '70s to early '90s) when outrageous snarking was the norm.

The implied suggestion that a reviewer owes the subject some sort of personality free, job interview-style feedback assessement is pretty depressing; equally I don't think the fact your curiousity has been piqued by the vehemence of the panning means that the review has somehow failed...

for such an interesting man and musician, he does a remarkably good job of giving the impression that he's really boring, when he's just not.

when I got sent the album as a download the tracks weren't numbered, so they just came out in alphabetical order - the album actually feels a bit stronger and subtler like that, the real tracklisting feels distractingly frontloaded with all these rock songs that as John says, aren't really the record's heart.

As I say near the start, their early records are becoming a relatively hip influence on newer bands, but the decade or so they spent being absolutely massive has left almost no cultural impact whatsoever.

The PR has said it's definitely an EP, though the chaps from Gringo have said they're 'promoting it more as an album', plus it is almost half an hour long... I think it's one of those records where the distinction isn't necessarily that helpful...