[insert witty title]

Been far too long since I’ve done one of these…

Rachel’s - Selenography

there are very few other bands doing what these guys are doing– that being modern chamber music with an indie rock sensibility. [...] violin continues to occupy the foreground, but the bottom end has filled in a bit, more tracks were recorded with a drum kit, and there’s freer use of samples and other goodies. Tracks range from the vibraphone- and bleep- filled ambience of “Artemisia” to the more simple and lush piano/ strings/ trumpet combo of “Cuts the Metal Cold” to “Honeysuckle Suite,” which despite being a solo harsichord piece amazingly manages to avoid sounding like Mannheim Steamroller.

Rachel’s - Water From the Same Source (Takes a while to get going but is absolutely stunning)

Swod - Sekunden

If there’s been one positive trend emerging from the ruins of what just to be called electronica over the last couple of years, it has been the comeback of acoustic instruments, especially the piano. There is a whole new generation of young musicians belnding their electronic visions with their acoustic visions, their software tricks with the sheer craftsmanship of playing traditional instruments. Swod without a doubt are among the founding fathers of this new, almost neo-classical approach and the success of their debut “Gehen” only proved them right.
“Sekunden” is more than a simple follow-up, more than what bands just do keep on recording and eventually coming up with a second album, even though it is made of the same ingredients: Wöhrmann’s piano and drums, Doerell’s guitar bass and electronics. “We worked the same way like we did on ‘Gehen’”, Wöhrmann says. “I would record the piano and pass the the files on to Oliver. Then he would add something on top, give it back to me recording Swod is like playing pingpong.”

Swod - Nein (Youtube)

Ugly Kid Joe - America’s Least Wanted

Because seriously. What day couldn’t be made better with the addition of some good-time rock’n'roll made by borderline retarded twenty-somethings?*

As far as I am concerned this album defines the sound of the early 90’s

*the answer is none.

Ugly Kid Joe - Everything About You
Ugly Kid Joe - Cats In The Cradle
Ugly Kid Joe - Panhandlin’ Prince
Ugly Kid Joe - So Damn Cool
Ugly Kid Joe - Madman (”Madman sure is loose in Disney LAAAAAND!”)

About a week ago I put out a call for people to suggest ‘ultimate party songs’ on the geometricrate wiki. Unlike 95% of my experiments in internet collabaration this was actually successful! I have no idea who contributed most of the tracks (although I proudly take the blame for Kenny Loggins - Danger Zone being in there). Some of the songs are pretty unexpected but every one deserves its place in the mix.

With no further ado here is the full double album tracklisting (along with links to youtube promo vids) for possibly the most awesome party album ever created:

Disk 1

1. Beastie Boys - Fight For Your Right
2. The Clash - Rock the Casbah
3. Madness - Baggy Trousers
4. Fine Young Cannibals - Good Thing
5. The Sweet - Ballroom Blitz
6. Ian Dury & The Blockheads - Hit Me
7. Depeche Mode - Just Can’t Get Enough
8. Bon Jovi - Living on a Prayer
9. Mental as Anything - Live It Up
10. Kenny Loggins - Danger Zone
11. Journey - Don’t Stop Believing
12. ABC - The Look Of Love

Disk 2

1. Abba - Gimme Gimme Gimme
2. Aerosmith - Walk This Way
3. Guns N’ Roses - Sweet Child O’ Mine
4. The Jam - Beat Surrender
5. Soft Cell - Tainted Love
6. Elvis Costello - Pump It Up
7. Duran Duran - Wild Boys
8. Europe - The Final Countdown
9. David Bowie - The Jean Genie
10. Thin Lizzy - The Boys are Back in Town
11. Housemartins - Happy Hour
12. Elton John - Tiny Dancer

Yes. I know. I’m not going to deny that 80’s homoerotica/cheese is vastly overrepresented. Currently I am in the process of collating mp3s and this is seriously shaping up to be the most toe-tapping collection ever to be placed on an mp3 player.

(sadly a couple of the youtube videos have been removed. I have swapped in various live/TV performances)

Two separate music related topics today:

Ultimate Party Album

I want to make the definitive party album and think the best way to do this would be in collabaration with the internet. I have set up a “party album” page on the wiki (here) on which we can thrash out the tracklisting (RAC, JPS & JEG you guys are going to be in your element)

To give you some sort of idea what flavour of music we’re aiming for I have started proceedings by adding four tracks:

Beastie Boys - Fight For Your Right (this is probably the worst song ever, and I love it)
Aerosmith - Walk This Way
Depeche Mode - Depeche Mode - Personal Jesus
Kenny Loggins - Danger Zone

The only requirement is that the songs make you smile and laugh. This is music to put people in a good mood! I want even the most stone-hearted bastard to be grinning like a loon and rocking the fuck out by the time this album has played through.

So: Please contribute!

When we have managed to collect enough songs I will track down high quality copies of all of them and then listen to the album nonstop in the office. Next time I host a party the music will be 100% awesome. Guaranteed!

late edit: The albums are coming together very quickly thanks to a whole lot of good suggestions, I think the finished product is going to be a masterpiece of the compilation album genre

The Arcade Fire

After spending the best part of an evening chattering rather overexcitedly with Kat and RAC about music I promised to send links to a couple of songs their way. I originally discovered these two songs via Nick’s blog and they are glorious:

The Arcade Fire - Intervention
The Arcade Fire - Keep the Car Running

I’m really looking forward to hearing the album in full!

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It has been far too long since I have made a music related post (see old posts), and I really do enjoy writing the “This week…” posts.

As per usual most of the text is nicked from online reviews of each album, and the links take you to Youtube promotional videos for each artist.

Various Artists - International Sad Hits, Vol. 1: Altaic Language Group

Compilations like this are hard to come by, discs that genuinely have a reason for existing rather than being a lazy collection of music celebrating one thing or another (The Totally Very Absolute Best of xxx Vol.450); it just doesn’t happen often. And that’s exactly why ‘International Sad Hits Vol.1’ stands out so much – rather than sloppily throw together a bunch of world music, the album’s curators Damon & Naomi (Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang) have selected a host of tracks that genuinely hold meaning for them. Almost twenty years of touring (with Galaxie 500 and as a duo) has left Damon and Naomi with more than a sizable collection of musical oddities – the pair are hugely interested in sad songs, no matter the origin, and here they present sixteen tracks by four different artists which take sadness to dizzy new heights. The artists included are Fikret Kizilok from Turkey, Kim Doo Soo of Korea and Tomokawa Kazui and Mikami Kan both of Japan, who are all linked by the Altaic linguistic group.

It’s a bit hard to find example videos for obscure eastern singer-songwriters and I could only track down two of them:

Tomokawa Kazui
Fikret Kizilok

Joanna Newsom - Ys

There is no getting around the fact that Joanna Newsom is an enormously hard sell. [...] it’s hard to imagine Newsom getting further than most record company’s receptions. Here is a 24-year-old Californian singing harpist, who wears her hair in braids, seems to have a thing about depicting herself as a medieval wench on her record sleeves [...]

Indeed, Newsome’s second album seems to be going out of its way to repel what shopkeepers refer to as passing trade. Its title is literally unspeakable - apparently, you’re meant to pronounce it “ees”. It comes in an embossed sleeve featuring a heavily symbolic painting of Newsom holding a sickle and a mounted butterfly. It features five songs, the shortest of which lasts over seven minutes and the longest nearly 17. The lyric book goes on and on like the Gobi Desert. It may well be the most off-putting album released this year. After playing it, there seems every chance it is the also the most astonishing.

The opener, Emily, shifts from brooding to gleeful to sinister to playful and back, Newsom’s harp augmented by Parks’ wildly inventive orchestrations, which, like the songs themselves, never quite do what you expect. Meanwhile, it’s hard not to feel that the topic of Newsom’s voice has been a bit overegged. Child-like and breathy, it certainly doesn’t sound like anyone else, but you could say the same thing about Ys as a whole, and mean it as the highest praise.

Joanna Newsom - Sawdust and Diamonds
Joanna Newsom - The Book of Right-On

The Decemberists - The Crane Wife

In the lyrically impaired alt-rock world, Colin Meloy is lionized for his literary prowess because his reading predates Bret Easton Ellis and he knows what "picaresque" means. That was the title of the Decemberists' 2005 Kill Rock Stars album, which came complete with such arcana as a barrow boy, an infanta and a veranda. Supposedly inspired by the Japanese tale of the same name, The Crane Wife makes no concessions to its major label, unless engineering counts. Among its ten tracks are two song cycles that exceed ten minutes; among its topics are a Civil War romance, meat-cleaver murderers and a damsel dispatched with saber and pistol.

The Decemberists - O Valencia
The Decemberists - Sixteen Military Wives

The Decemberists - Los Angeles I’m Yours

Calexico - The Black Light

The perfect soundtrack for a summer roadtrip in an old car across Death Valley. Calexico's musical textures are woven out of a dazzling array of instruments and styles, including mariachi trumpets, countrified pedal steel, Latin jazz percussion, and carnival organ, just to name a few. The songs move at siesta speed, casually looping and loping along, never getting overheated. Bandmates Joey Burns and John Convertino have their hands in so many musical pies--including projects with OP8, Giant Sand, Victoria Williams, Giant Sand, and Richard Buckner--one wonders how they find the time to create the sun-soaked music of Calexico. But thank God they have.

I remember seeing Calexico live in Nottingham. I think the audience was made up exclusively of Guardian readers.

Calexico - Cruel
Calexico - The Crystal Frontier (live) (this song is all kinds of awesome)

It has been quite a few months since I’ve gotten around to writing one of these posts, and I do enjoy doing them (here are links to the first two installments: 1, 2)

As per usual I have picked out a few albums I’ve been listening too recently and nicked quotes from reviews around the internet, so if the grammar and spelling beyond this point look really good it’s because I had nothing to do with it! I’ll also apologise in advance for all the Myspace links; for a couple of the bands I couldn’t actually find any mp3s or videos on the net, so had to resort to using ones embedded in the band’s myspace pages!

As per usual the choices are all over the place. I must be like some advert for ADD.

Carrisa’s Wierd - Songs About Leaving

Musically, most of these songs reside in chamber-folk territory, with violins swooping over quietly plucked acoustic and electric guitars and barely-there percussion. The opener, "You Should Be Hated Here", sets the sepia-tinged tone for the rest of the album, with Brooke and Ghetto sinuously complimenting each other's voices over a creaky bed of droning guitars. From there, "Silently Leaving the Room" waltzes in with a similarly autumnal mood -- tinkling piano briefly takes the forefront before being subsumed in a fog of swooning violin and Mat Brooke's dejected, half-broken voice.

Practically every song here has some defining, ear-catching moment. Whether it’s the gentle guitar arpeggios of “Ignorant Piece of Shit” that morph into a rolling drumbeat, then swan dive onto a soft bed of violins, where Brooke and Ghetto are harmonizing on the words “I like the way you roll your eyes right before you fall down”, or the utterly dramatic combination of Ghetto’s voice and reverb-laden, claustrophobic-sounding guitars on “Sofisticated Fuck Princess Please Leave Me Alone”, this album will drag you into its world whether or not you’re prepared to go there. However, one way or the other, it’s virtually guaranteed that you’ll enjoy the trip.

Carrisa’s Wierd (myspace link, four songs in the little embedded jukebox. I particularly enjoy “The Color That Your Eyes Changed With the Color of Your Hair”)

Sympathy Bush (live video)

Ignorant Piece of Shit (fan-made video using footage from Brokeback Mountain, so feel free to ignore the video and listen to the music)

Supersuckers - The Evil Powers of Rock’n'Roll

thankfully, for all of us who crave drug-inspired, misogynist punk rock, the Supersuckers have torn up their contract with the artistic gods and re-upped with Satan. And the world is a better place because of this.

Any concerns about the direction of the ‘Suckers sound are assuaged as soon as their new album, The Evil Powers of Rock ‘N’ Roll, begins. Eddie Spaghetti screeches out a chorus that says exactly where his heart is — with the devil — while a riff thicker than week-old syrup chugs on behind him. Two tracks later, on “I Want the Drugs,” he’s praising narcotics more than football players thank God in press conferences. It’s classic Supersuckers, and a smile spreads across your face that is only slightly bigger than the gutter that is swallowing your mind. And the tempo never slows down.

The Evil Powers of Rock’n'Roll

Rock’n'Roll Records (Aren’t Selling this Year)

Julian Fane - Special Forces

"Special Forces" is the latest in a small but impeccable selection of records that have dared to dip into hugely accessable AND uncompromisingly experimental terrain with one and the same breath. It employs the same hazy distorted instrumentation that can be traced back to My Bloody Valentine and that has typified the likes of Fennesz, Sigur Ros, Dntel and the more ambient stretches of Lexaunculpt over the last few years. There are moments of vast, modified orchestral greatness (Freezing), Harold Budd influenced ambience (The Birthday Boys), Piano-driven late night reflections (In Space) and choral, new wave synth soundtracks (Exit New Year). Julian composes and sings with a beautifully broken fragility that belies the hugely wide scope of his production technique and understanding of new forms and shapes in music. It’s a remarkable debut, one that’s well worth investigating immediately. Highly Recommended.

Julian Fane (myspace link, four songs in the little embedded jukebox. I particularly enjoy “The Moon is Gone”)

The Youngblood Brass Band - Is That a Riot?

you could call it part hip-hop, part New Orleans brass band, part football halftime show. This nine member ensemble features two trombonists, three trumpets, tenor saxophone, a hip-hop bass drummer, a snare drummer and sousaphone - not exactly your typical rock group line-up.

Nuclear Summer (live)

Nuclear Summer (live, but in this one you can see how much the tuba player looks like a fat version of Craig Charles)

I was woken early this morning because Gem got up before her alarm went off and forgot to disable it before getting in the shower. At 5:50am her alarm clock switched on Radio 1 (ugh) and started playing music at me.

More specifically it played this:

It was not a very good radio and there was a noticable amount of static and warping in the background giving the whole thing an old time, ghostly, fragile feel. I could imagine finding this song on a dusty record, wrapped in an unmarked but creased white paper slip, stored in an attic since the 1930’s. It was an absolutely enchanting (and impossible to describe) way to be woken up. At the time I just wished it could last forever, with me half-in half-out of the dream world, listening to music from another time.

The moment was ruined only by the radio presenter bursting in at the end (”Good morning and welcome to radio 1, listeners! On the phone we’ve got Barry from Barnet with a request!”). I have listened to the song about a dozen times today and although I preferred how it sounded coming through a really cheap, badly tuned radio I still think it is quite beautiful.

Just thought I’d share a little moment from my life with the world, because hey! What’s a blog for if I can’t be all self-indulgent every now and again.

I have trouble getting out of bed in the morning…

…especially when it’s cold outside. All I want to do is wrap up warm in my nice duvet. However, the Cosmos isn’t going to observe itself, and I have to get to work at a decent hour. Until now I have relied on my mobile for the soothing tones of “wake up Jim… open your eyes” - repeated in a mechanically soothing voice over and over till I get up (or turn it off). But now I have got an alarm on my computer which can play a song from my iTunes library at a set time. At the moment I have it set to start at zero volume at 7am, then ramp up over a period of 2 minutes. If I’m not up in 15 minutes, it turns off. I love technology (thank Jobs).

This was really nice this morning - I awoke from my slumber to the sounds of Air (La Femme d’Argent). That was very relaxing, but didn’t really have the desired effect of motivating me to actually get out of bed and into the shower. Instead I lay there and dreamed away for a little more (I had one of those infuriating dreams where you dream you have woken up and are going about your business. I was livid when I realised I had to re-live the whole thing again!). My question - what songs would be ideal to wake up to? I have a “Songs to wake up to” playlist which is sampled randomly, but they’re all pretty mellow at the moment, e.g.:

• Tequila Sunrise - The Eagles
• Easy - The Commodores
• Wages Day (unplugged version) - Deacon Blue
• Here Comes The Breeze - Gomez

I don’t want to be blasted out of bed by death metal, but I need something to gently rouse me… then to inspire me to face the day. Any ideas?

Just sayin’

Labels: music

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I had a lot of fun writing the last ‘This Week…’ post so though I’d try my hand at it again. Once again most of the text is stolen from reviews with the occasional comment from me.

Bohren & Der Club of Gore - Geisterfaust

Imagine a very attractive stalker. This is his/her soundtrack. Slow motions in the shadows, barbituate guitar slipped you a mickey and now you’re conscious but not really awake. Your pulse slows to a faint snare slap twitch every 5 seconds. You cannot tell where one track starts and the next begins, nor whereone disc ends. Monsters are scarier the less you see of them, thus this music is more frightening with fewer and fewer notes played. This nightmarish (and all instrumental) beauty was originally released by this German project back in 1995…they’ve since added a sax player; one hopes he can breathe deep enough to play notes slow enough.

Bohren make jazz so slow that I feel my blood pressure drop through the floor every time I listen.

Bohren & Der Club of Gore - Prowler (YouTube link)

Venetian Snares - Rossz Csillag Allat Sznletett

[...] shattering breakbeats and post-Aphex Twin poetics, [...] although Funk’s juxtaposition of drill’n'bass beats with chamber orchestral sounds has been done by others for more than a decade, most notably on Aphex Twin’s I Care Because You Do. But to his credit, Funk takes a chipped, charcoal pencil and illustrates a forest of leafless trees filled with the pigeons that he daydreamt of while watching the birds at Budapest’s Royal Palace. Even better, his beats work with the orchestration instead of pulverizing it for an ironic counterpoint. Funk’s baroque strings fittingly strike the air, while just about every melody is played with grinded teeth and bloodshot eyes.

I don’t normally get on very well with Breakcore, but for some reason this album has a very fond place in my collection

Venetian Snares - Szamar Madar

Sufjan Stevens - Seven Swans

Seven Swans easily does the job of securing Sufjan Stevens as one of those songwriters you must become familiar with. It does so not only by proving his ability to turn out consecutive incredible albums, but also by showing his fluency in another medium. Stevens has tried his hand at a variety of jobs and instruments now, and he's been successful. Most of all, though, Seven Swans reveals what Stevens truly is: an inventive songwriter with an abundance of spirit.

Sufjan Stevens - Into the Devil’s Territory

Death From Above 1979 - You’re a Woman, I’m a Machine

You're standing in line outside a club on a crisp autumn night, wondering why the queue isn't moving any faster. By the time you get within 30 feet of the door, the sound of crowd chatter and DJ music is interrupted by low, guttural bass tones, the incessant kickpedal explosions of a bass drum, and deafening cymbal crashes. After 10 painful minutes of waiting, you finally get into the building; by now, the sound is deafening, the full bass tones bouncing off walls, and but it's so crowded, you can't see where the noise is coming from. After carefully winding your way through the mass of humanity, there onstage, you see two sweat-drenched musicians thrashing away with a feral intensity, commanding the attention of every person in the room. One guy is on bass, spewing fast, distorted notes, while the shirtless drummer hammers on his kit and screams into a microphone.

Proof that you need nothing more than a bass guitar and some drums to make a lot of noise.

Death From Above 1979 - Black History Month
Death From Above 1979 - Pull Out

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I really can’t believe what I just found… R&B ’superstar’ R Kelly has made an R&B opera. It’s the funniest thing I have seen all week.

Imagine what it’s like when a toddler begins telling you an aimless, meandering story that goes on and on and on with no discernable structure or coherence.

R&B opera is just like that except R Kelly sometimes goes ‘yeaahhh eahhh eahhhhhhh’, which just makes the whole thing even more terrible.

To get everybody just as excited about this work of terrible genius as I am I’ll summarise the first chapter. Imagine what Rob did with the first act of Othello, except obviously this is loads more intellectual.

R Kelly - Trapped in a Closet (chapter 1 of 12)

Mr. Kelly wakes up in an unfamiliar bed and a woman walks into the room. The insinuation is clearly that R Kelly and the nice young lady have just spent the night together. R Kelly wants to get back to his wife at home so he puts his clothes on and heads for the door…

She said “please don’t go out there”
“Lady I’ve got to get home”
She said her husband was coming up the stairs
“be quiet, hurry up and get in the closet”
She said “don’t you make a sound or some shit is going down”
I said “why don’t I just go out the window”
“yes, except for one thing, we’re on the 5th floor”

Think, think… “quick put me in the closet!”
And now I’m in this darkest closet trying to figure out
Just how I’m gonna get my crazy ass out this house

So there we have it, R Kelly is hiding in a closet when the woman’s husband comes into the room and begins to kiss his wife.

You’re not even going to believe how retarded the next ‘plot’ twist is…

I’m in the closet like man, what the fuck is going on?
You’re not going to believe it but things get deeper as the story goes on

Next thing you know a call comes through on my cell phone
I tried my best to quickly put it on vibrate
But from the way he acted I could tell it was too late

The husband’s suspicions are aroused because R Kelly couldn’t get his phone on vibrate quite quickly enough. The search is on…

[the husband] Checks under the bed (bed)
then under the dresser (dresser)
He looks at the closet (closet)

I pull out my berretta (berretta)
He walks up to the closet (closet)
He’s close up to the closet (closet)
Now he’s at the closet (closet)
Now he’s opening the closet (closet, closet, closet)

End of chapter 1.

OH GOD WHAT IS GOING TO HAPPEN NEXT DO NOT LEAVE ME HANGING LIKE THIS CRAIG.

I love the way that the husband actually checks underneath the little dressing table, almost like he was expecting to find a midget under there or something. Hilariously enough, in a later chapter R Kelly finds his wife cheating on him with a midget.

It would certainly be pretty surprising if you came home, opened your cupboard and R Kelly came barrelling out of there packing heat.

Luckily for us there are another 11 chapters of this drivel (lasting nearly an hour in total), and they are all available on Google videos here

One thing I need to drive home is that this wasn’t written as a joke, R Kelly is serious throughout as he tells his tale of love, loss and cupboards. I think it says something quite profound about the human condition.

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One massive part of my life that hasn’t recieved a single mention on the blog yet is music. Music is my companion for fully half the time I’m awake and I’d be pretty much lost without it.

In this post I’m going to introduce a few albums that I have been listening to over the past week. This isn’t a list of all time favourites by any means but it is a nice cross section of what is powering my life at the moment.

Maybe you’ll find something you like, maybe you’ll think I’m a little bit weird for listening to this… Who knows, but let’s have fun finding out.

Each entry is just a snippet from a review followed by links to various videos and mp3s.

A quick note for those of you unfamiliar with YouTube: No need to worry about codecs/media players/linux being a rubbish; All videos on youtube are converted into flash files, so if you can see flash animations you can view these videos.

65daysofstatic - The Fall of Math

People say 65daysofstatic sound like Mogwai with a bit of Squarepusher, or Slint played at 78rpm remixed by Aphex Twin, or Godspeed! mixed with M83, or any other number of insightful muso.crit.com comparisons. And yeah, they do, insofar as anything sounds like anything else on drugs, but it’s a reductive method of description. What 65daysofstatic actually sound like is three men making a fast, wordless, angry and occasionally redemptive noise, part guitar, part drum(machine)s, part piano, part scree, part fuck-knows-what. They’ve built up a ferocious live reputation, adding a live drummer who propels them way beyond expectations of “three guys with laptops playing solitaire,” and turning them into a seriously fucking heavy ROCK proposition.

I’d guess that not many people are going to get on well with 65dos but I absolutely love them. Anyway, here are a few samples:

65daysofstatic - I Drove Through the Ghosts to Get Here (YouTube video)
65daysofstatic - I Am Robot
65daysofstatic - I Swallowed Hard, Like I Understood

The Dresden Dolls - The Dresden Dolls

the Dolls' proper debut, following the out-of-print primer A Is for Accident-- runs the gamut from theatrical to poppy, from oldies to showtunes. Remember that piano and drums were all that Jerry Lee Lewis needed to record "Great Balls of Fire", and the Dolls can match that frenzy. The world is full of songs about depression, but isn't it a relief to hear someone act manic for a change-- as on "Girl Anachronism", where Palmer pummels the keys like her skirt's on fire while Viglione clatters like a drawerful of razor blades? Palmer's voice drips and chills through the damaged-little-girl songs, but she can also melt into confessionals with melodic melancholy, like Tori Amos' punky younger sister.

The Dresden Dolls - Girl Anachronism

STARS - Set Yourself On Fire

[Stars] have again created a near-masterpiece of a pop confection. In fact, as far as entries into the keyboard-heavy electro-pop epics category go, it’d be fair to say that Stars have created this year’s outstanding entrant.

It’s not that the male-female duo vocals make it or even the moments where the group channels the Delgados in their sublime use of strings and horns; it’s more that Stars has gotten tighter since their last outing. Codas don’t sound like tacked on reasons to wank, parts of songs fit together more intimately and, most importantly, there doesn’t seem to be wasted moments.

STARS - Your Ex-Lover is Dead (YouTube video)

M83 - Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts

The power of music to seemingly construct, alter and distort space can be staggering. Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts, the second album from French electronic duo M83, nicely epitomizes this: The sound is absolutely huge, its relentless attention to detail eclipsed only by the stunning emotional power it conveys. For fifty-seven glorious minutes, its impossibly intricate tapestry of buzzing techno synthesizers, distorted electric guitars, cheesy drum machines, and subdued vocals generate a sense of bodily movement through a landscape of beauty, disappointment, glory, and decrepitude.

I love M83. It’s not often I describe things as beautiful, but M83 definitely are. ‘America’ in particular is completely glorious.

M83 - America (Youtube video)
M83 - 0078h (YouTube video)
M83 - Don’t Save Us From The Flames (Youtube video)

Dragonforce are metal as fuck. Seriously. Metal. As. Fuck. It’s like they’re channeling the very spirit of Iron Maiden and Megadeth. To help everybody appreciate exactly how metal dragonforce are I’ve created the following metal checklist:

• Big hair? check.
• Lyrics about dragons and goblins and shit? check.
• Trousers that are slightly too tight? check.
• V shaped guitars? check.
• Solos so awesome they make your eyes bleed? check
• Headbanging? check.
• Fans permanantly throwing the devil horns gesture? check.
• Spinal Tap style retarded sexuality? check.
• Absurd song titles? check.
• Cheesy album covers? check.
• ROCKUMENTARY? check.

Dragonforce make me want to capitalise RANDOM words and say things like BODACIOUS because they’re just THAT awesome. Also they LOOK like this:

I challenge you not to find this to be the most toally awesome video you’ve ever seen. Just look at it, every single thing is perfect, from the closeups of their hands whilst they’re doing solos, to the guy just drinking beer throughout, to the v-shaped guitar, to the weird heavy metal pose and facial gestures that they pull. BADICAL!

Dragonforce - Through Fire and Flames
Dragonforce - Valley of the Damned

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