withpaperwings

They've gone downhill with every record. Some bands are just meant to be fast, raw and ragged.

Can you really claim that The Bronx pre-date The Wildhearts?

How old are you? That sounds like a uni student playing at being adult. Have you just stumbled across Bukowski, Steinbeck and Hemingway? Are you worried about how you can ever truly call yourself a man if you've never been in mortal peril?

Which is what The Hold Steady sound like.

Neurosis and PMFS are much more mature than HS, and they're not "grown man shit" either.

If your response to a band is constructed entirely around what the singer looks like then you won't ever 'get' Les Savy Fav.

I think they make great music.

After listening to them for many years I discovered at Primavera that the singer is fat and likes dressing up on stage. This didn't ruin the great music, but it did add a daft charm to their live performance.

p.s. I think it's classy that you think; fat guy who dresses up at a festival = terrifying serial killer.

tells you everything.

She's not wrestling with Earth Died Screaming or Eyeball Kid, she's covering Fawn.

Whatever you think of their current stuff Domestica, Burst and Bloom and Such Blinding Stars For Starving Eyes were ace Emo albums from the period.

Oh, the nostalgia!

Unprovoked attacks are made against convenient targets. They didn't (directly) attack her for being a goth. They attacked because they wanted to attack someone (to prove something to each other?) and a convenient target came along.

When I was younger I got harassed for being at a grammar school, then when i took off my uniform i got harassed for being a punk/rocker/gay/whatever/in the prodigy, apparently...
Then when I put on scruffy clothes for work I got called a twat, and when I was walking to the rugby club in my kit I got abused as a "rugger bugger".

Mostly I didn't get abused my people in tracksuits - it was people in smart shoes, ben sherman shirts and ironed jeans who liked to throw a fist or a few verbals my way.

Not that popular; I'd never heard of them.

It doesn't really work, claiming to be a Muslim and then coming out with the kind of gibberish people only spout when they're pissed...

Yanks can't even spell Scepticism correctly, so what do they know?! More generally, i don't think American cultural mores are going to serve as a weapon to lambast British culture (especially as you have to reduce us to crude, clumsy, irrelevant stereotypes to do it) when it's international cultural reputation (however fair) is a by-word for superficiality, lazy derivation, and a low opinion of the audience.

In all honesty, the indie dorks i know don't worship at the altar of any one genre and might look down on Sigur Ros whilst praising the latest EITS effort. The music they're most likely to jump about celebrating would be Green Acre types bunging as many notes, time signatures and patterns into one song as possible.

Isn't art when people take a cultural form (music, painting, writing, ship-building etc.) and try to give it a deeper meaning than the purely functional (you can sing along, dance to it, it's pretty/colourful, it describes something, it floats...).

So pop isn't necessarily art, any more than any other musical genre, but it can be - it all depends upon the intentions and skill of the maker.

Of course, that's a purely subjective interpretation; feel free to disagree.

Pride is one of the seven deadly sins - it's not a virtue, it's a failing - rein it in.

i can't imagine anyone liking the Hives - so i guess we've all got to expand our imaginations a bit.

Maybe with hallucinogens...?

made me grumble and i'm relieved someone else noticed...

Some of the writers on this site seem to think that you can sling separate metaphors and similies together with reckless abandon and not mangle their meaning.

I know most magazines and newspapers have a style guide; if DiS has one would somebody please write KEEP A HANDLE ON YOUR CONCEITS in fat, red marker pen on the front page.

his musical progression has stilted, and even gone backward.

And his lyrics have got even worse.

...has already given *the* rant on this subject.

The term may have been appropiated by horse-breeders but it means 'second year undergraduate' and comes from Cambridge. Americans use it to mean the second year of high-school as well.

The implications of growing maturity and experience make it an apt metaphor to use for a band whose music and/or performance is developing in their second album. Perhaps it's over-used but it does have a richness of meaning which 'second' lacks.

obviously

After getting very bored by Arcade Fire's first few tracks I went for a wander and ended up watching Gotan Project, who were wonderful.

They created a real sense of having wonder into a different, better reality for an hour. And the music worked better live than on record. Ace!

The comedy tent was a complete washout though; bunch of people camped in there all day and nobody else got to see or hear anything. Luckily there were a lot of comedy shenanigans in the Literary Tent to make up for it.

Greatest moment of shadenfreude came when Kate Nash played to a handful on bored sunbathers.

I think that's called damning with faint praise.

There's some pretty countryside but the city itself has only one redeeming feature; The Vic.

wowser!

blue lines
protection
maxinquaye
pre-millenial tension
angels with dirty faces

end of debate.

chock full of punches?
weighty plague?

mixed metaphors make a muddle of meaning.

and stop spouting bilge that is, quite frankly, insulting to the intellect of the British voter; then why should record labels have to?

When's his next book-burning party?

OMFG!

Oh yes, what a sorry state modern culture is in.

Shouldn't you be too busy building a time machine to get you back to whichever halycon days your dreaming of to review albums?

that headline (sort of) tells us that "Fopp has been contained within its own expansive agenda". Subsumed is not a fancy synonym for consumed.

more like - over-ambitious businessmen shoot selves in foot.

ah, well - still got Selectadisc here.

everyone in england knows that the Mail is a bag of tosh - Prince has probably only heard of the London Times (sic).

I like that the music retailer guy is so up to date he still thinks that Prince is still going under the <symbol> moniker.

no connection to Josie Long's Adventure club then...

eurgh!

How can i say "social", but come across as some kind of lame middle-manager? I know, i'll add an unnecessary syllable to create a really inelegant stutter of a word. That'll do it.

that gets written on the assumption that everyone already knows the song.

i don't, so this review fails me.

everyone likes this song and is just claiming to hate it to look 'cool'.

yeah.

that's a sly trick they're pulling - clever old you, well done for spotting it - I wonder if anyone has ever done that before and had it pointed out by the honest, decent folk like yourself?

well, well, well. i've had a look around DiS and it turns out that people are doing this lying-and-claiming-to-dislike-songs-that-they-actually-like-to-be-cool quite a lot.

Fortunately there are many wise heads such as yourself who refused to get sucked into this 'cool' prattle and can point out the error of everyone else's ways. You should all get together and write a menifesto of musical honesty and rejecting modern notions of 'cool' - that'd be great.

blatently (sic) they do.

ranting person.

Drab Is The New Mulch.

i was expecting Britain's Atari Teenage Riot - but what i get is a toned-down, de-politicised The Rise...?!

i don't understand how this could be so polarising?

Has totally cleared the field for me.

Accomodation - an apartment just of Las Ramblas.
The Bands - loads of great stuff, wall to wall music and i only saw once bad act.
The Experience/Non-Music stuff - BARCELONA!!!!

easy win for the Catalans.

i shall be buying this.

do save the enthusiast the trouble of tracking down all the odd singles and compilation tracks and paying over the odds for them. I paid £16 for Hello Kids by Fireside. You can add another zero if i'd wanted to gather the contents together myself...

Mudhoney stuck their odds n sods on an extra cd with the 'best of' which is less useful for the obsessive, but still a fairly reasonable way to get it all out there (and perhaps remind the listener how good they can be whilst you're suffering some weak covers).

even her best albums (moon pix, you are free) wouldn't have trumped Beirut or Tom Waits' latest.

Brian Harvey Machete Strike!

red and black attack - ink and dagger
mono - drive like jehu
penance soiree - supporting primal scream incessantly

classic piano guy did two cds...

why aren't they all inspired by radiohead to do something original?

everyone's on first name terms!

"cocking a snook" not a snoop, perhaps "cock-a-hoop" is leading your typing fingers astray...

"i'm loath to do this..."

Push, Let's Go and Desire were also great singles (probably better than body baby) - but damn he's dragged out the album release.

the only problem was the cost of beer (3 euros for half a pint of so-so lager...) but the supermarket was selling cheap Stolichnya and the free flavoured water proved a perfect mixer - yay for strongs socks and wide-legged troosers!

Pelican were properly amazing, as was ted leo, and battles, and lots of other things. and the thursday night dj set on the atp stage was simultaneously awful and great fun - good show those men.

and so we're willing to give them a chance to come good once again.

the only thing annoying about the review is the description of lions as pioneers...

however very little could put me off exploring a musician i've not previously heard as much as pipppp's brook-no-dissent ranting.

just because you disagree with someone, doesn't mean you have to lose your rag.

Neurosis - Given To The Rising

but then given last years Tom Waits fiasco perhaps DiS has given up on reviewing truly great albums...?

so maybe he had to get a shitty office job to make ends meet, like the rest of us.

oh no, he was just keep you hanging on as a wind up...?!

muppet.