Gigomaphone

hi, this album is realy cool :-). it is reall new and they are btr than empore of the Sun. they are are also beter loking lol. their songz are sic and so is their hare. i like their voices a lot 2. they sound a bit like boys and girls at the same time ;-). i have electric Feel as my ring tone. my friend dave tries to dres like the one with the longer hair but he doesn’t look much like him. dave’s older brother is 22, his name is Steve (but we coll him jingo ROTFL) and he went to meridith to c them but he sed they were fucking shit becuz they just played guitar fro ages and u couldn’t danz 2 it :-(. the best songs on this cd is electric feel, kids and time 2 pretend. i downloaded all them from itunes. mum paid for the,. i am a fan of them on facebook and i am a member of their fb group 2. i went to a party last week and when they played kids we all started dancing on the table. dave took heaps of fotos on his iphone and we uploaded them to FB strait away. older people like them 2, my gf tanya’s cousin is 28 and he thinks they are cool and even bougt and Daves dad plays them in the car sometimes which sux but they are still cool lol… anyway download those 3 songs i sed cuz they are sic, bye…

The S-s-s-s-stones had something of a quandary way back in 1973. How do you possibly follow up Exile on Main St? Kinda like ’so what does Michelangelo do after the Sistine Chapel?’ except the Sistine chapel is like the naff tag on my old flat in Collingwood compared to Exile.

They followed it up alright by making this album which (I will admit with a slight hint of begrudgery) is mildly underwhelming; but (and this is a monumental ‘but’) it does have the honour of also being the last great Stones album (great in a broad sense of the word of course, like “your new fence looks great”).

Some old crusts might tell you Some Girls is their last great album but it’s not, it’s like a disco hangover, other crusts may even say Tattoo You is, but it has like 2 decent songs and a shit 80s cover and some even more cloth-eared crusts may even dare to think Voodoo Lounge is significant, it’s as significant as say, a new Terence Trent D’Arby album.

Forget it, this is it, raw rock n roll, country and blues. What the Stones do best, Mick was already looking like the preening socialite he would later become, Keith was falling deeper into his crack hole, Charlie and Bill were Charlie and Bill and Mick Taylor really again shows why he is one of the more underrated guitarists of the era. Go and listen to A Bigger Bang and skip to ‘Sweet neo-con’ to find out what a joke they are now.

In ‘73 they were losing fans, Led Zep stole the guitar geeks, Pink Floyd had nicked the stoners, The Stooges and The NY Dolls had the disaffected white Kids and Lou Reed and Bowie had pilfered the gay crowd. The Stones were entering the grandaddy realm, becoming something in the ballpark of passe. In reality, they were being crucified by the scene they had created. Before these cats belted out Not Fade Away, rock was four mop-topped wusses that your mum (and her Mum probably) used to boogie down to. The Beatles even got O.B fucking Es from the queen (the irony has not gone unnoticed but Mick was knighted well after the Stones were any good/had any self respect left/made an album entitled Dirty Work).

This is the their valedictory effort before they succumbed to the creative drought of middle age and the naff stigma of stadia. A last minute gift from rock n roll gods that shouldn’t be dismissed with 3 and a half stars like it’s “not too bad” or something (again I will refuse to rate this album despite the new-fangled allure of having quarter stars at my disposal). It ain’t Sticky Fingers sure, but what is? After this album they did ‘It’s only rock n roll’ which is mediocre at best, Mick Taylor left, Mick discovered disco and ahem… reggae (WTF!?!), Bill married a child, then left, Charlie got old, Keith took more drugs and that alcoholic with the dodgy haircut from the Faces came on board.

Oh yeah, the album; Heartbreaker, Silver Train, Winter and Star Star are all top tier Stones, worthy to be listed on (almost) any of their albums while Hide your love displays how good a band must be when despite so obviously being in cruise control, the blatancy of this demeanour lends itself so perfectly to a song. Class! Dylan is about the only other guy who does this as well as them Stones. Angie was also their last single that gave FM radio a fat lip rather than a hand job. Although GHS isn’t laden with depth (it does however have a fair deal more than Raw Power or Transformer but then again depth in rock n roll is pretty overrated anyway), it is so often overlooked and is one hell of an enjoyable listen, if only Mick had overdosed on crystal meth after this……

Oh yeah Interpol… Y’know when you go to a restaurant and you’ve been starving yourself all day and you order a meal that sounds delicious in the menu and the wait is excruciating but you know it’ll be alright when you have that first bite and then the meal arrives and it tastes like shit? Yeah well that’s kind of how I feel about Antics.

It doesn’t quite taste like shit but it’s still substandard. I’m not even comparing it to TOTBL either in which case it would be fucking awful. The latter was an exercise in austere genius (For all their Joy Div comparisons, TOTBL wiped the toilet floor with either JD effort but mythology goes a long way in defining music legacies). I was into these guys a long time ago (not that I care or anything…) and I used to wax lyrical to anyone who would listen (or do me the service of feigning the courtesy) how they were the only band worth listening to (I hadn’t heard The Libertines at this stage).

I had to fucking import the CD at one of those backwater wanky 2nd hand (which actually means 15th hand) record shops (in NZ I’ll have you know so double the torrent of backwater) that only sells minor labels (they were exclusive to Domino at the time) because no other shops (ones that sell shiny first hand compact discs) had heard of them (I’ll back off on the parentheses now).

So yeah, here’s me, a normal dude who just happens to be unlucky enough to be an Interpol fan, hanging out for a new release so I can hear something like Obstacle 1 or Leif Erikson and they go and put out this wretched collection of maudlin tunes fused with a bit more contrived energy so the kids can mosh at their live shows (the kids don’t mosh anyway, they just stand there and Interpol are quite possibly the worst live act I’ve ever seen) and they don’t feel like being in their 30s is all bad, gimme a break you glorified anglophile Noo Yawk hipsters.

I’ll be fair, there are some gems on this album, a couple of which may even stack up against their debut. But alas, we have to wade through no end of boring, boring, boring, boring whining (his voice sounds like somebody doing a spoof of Paul Banks and don’t even get me started on the production) and naff riffs to which you have to at least give the credit of being original because they are way too shit to be nicked off any other band, and yes this includes Slow Hands.

What happened? Their arses used to be beautiful. In saying that it took me about 20 listens to fully appreciate the first record but after racking up a double ton of listens and realising there’s all the depth of a puddle of my dehydrated cat’s piss, I lost hope. The good thing is that the band is middle aged and comfortable and they’ll keep putting out records to pay groupie child support so methinks that in 20 years time we might have a solid ‘best of’. And there’s always Joy Div.

Oh and for the record, here is my review of Our Love to Admire - “bleeeeaaaaawwwghhhgggg!” – That’s a phonetic depiction of me throwing up……

The first incarnation of Traffic (the one minus the baroque penchant for all things prog) was always the superior one, the true pioneers of the folk rock movement (forget those Byrd pussies, that was country). Their 2nd coming as a fusion band in the 70s (seriously, who wasn’t a fusion band in the 70s?) was a pretty far cry from the acid-haybarn sound they created in this incredibly underrated album in ‘68 with an intricate melding of The Stones, the (then nascent) Fairport Convention and early Pink Floyd (prior to losing themselves up their own arses).

Less psychedelic than ‘Mr Fantasy’ and less patently Celtic/ overtly rural than ‘John Barleycorn must die’ (the other great albums by Traffic Mark I). Steve Winwood sheds his tonsils shamelessly throughout but the real star of this album is flautist Chris Wood. If you can name another rock album where a flute has so assertedly shoved pure class in your face like it does on this, then you’re all the better for it (Jethro Tull fans, sit down). I could name highlights but I don’t feel like it although 40,000 Headmen is tough to beat, just do yourself a favour and buy it, oops, I mean download it from itunes, oops, I mean steal it from the intenet….

Travis and Coldplay were choking on bedwetting, vegetarian whine. U2 were saving the world, Radiohead were scratching their chins behind the studio dials looking for their riffs. Oasis? They were doing another sh!t album. So a right pitiful lot the UK had (”and still have” he whispered gingerly) before that handclap resuscitating beat of Vertigo started and rock ceased to be so earnest.

Taking on a litany of influences (The Clash, Sartre, Lester Bangs, Joyce, Patti Smith, The Beatles, Tony Hancock, The Jam, Dylan Thomas, The East End, The Pogues, Proust, Wilde, The Smiths, Camden, Yeats et al) with two fervent hedonists hell-bent on marking a mark in the toilet that is London when your pockets are empty. The whole ‘indie’ scene you have now (the bleary eyed 17 year olds decked out in Chucks, skinny jeans, skinnier ties, Fred Perry’s and faux product-assisted Weller lids squashed into Trilbies) owes a monumental debt of gratitude to Up the Bracket, even if half the songs indulge in gentle jabs at the scene it nurtures.

This is one of those albums, that’s right one of them, the likes of which will litter rock mags’ efforts to rejuvenate falling sales by releasing four top 100 all time most amazing album lists a year. And it will because this album is pure. This album (like VU & Nico, Exile on Main St and The Clash) uses its sonic (and occasionally vocal) shortcomings as redemptive qualities. Production=Compromise.

The reason this album is so popular is the reason live music is so popular. Because Pete twangs a string halfway through Radio America and sings too close to the microphone on The Boy looked at Johnny, because he’s incredibly out of key in Horrorshow and Carl pronounces the words in the second verse of I get Along so quickly he ends up yelling plain gibberish.

This is triumphantly ragged, you can smell the JD laced with sweat spilled over the guitar. You can smell the crack cooking in the spoon. It slashes the mind numbing, dress rehearsal, wallpaper music with which ‘Indie’ (there hasn’t been a moniker for a genre that is more of a misnomer since R&B) is under threat from. This album truly milks every groove of vinyl on which it is cut, it inks the fading soundwaves from Gary Powell’s cymbal with smoke seconds after impact, it bleeds over the feedback laden solo on Begging.

This is not the greatest album ever made, those house-ridden Q subscribers using top 5 album banter as a palliative to the renewed adolescent confusion of middle age are better served coming up with that. It is an album with spirit though. One of very very few.