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I love this. It’s their usual shimmering synth with spacey squeaks, and then at some point it just seems unable to contain its excitement and goes all-out eighties sax. It’s one of the best things to go. The MP3 is free to download if you sign up for their newsletter or whatever. | ||
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Great new music is being released rapidly and randomly. Let me review some of it and give you some tracks.
Architecture in Helsinki – Moment BendsHelsinki seem to reinvent themselves a little with every album these days. That Beep, the first single from this, has been out for almost three years, and is so funky and divergent that I’ve been itching to hear the rest of their latest experiments for way too long. Surprisingly, Moment Bends is more conventional than their previous stuff: That Beep is nuts, but it’s more or less alone. The rest are polished pop, obvious but effective hooks and sometimes openly sentimental lyrics. Yr Go To is narrowly the best, for blending that with a slightly spacey feel, as if they got distracted while idly producing a great pop song. Despite the loss of quirk, it’s a great album and easily the best of these three. The only bad track is Contact High, which they’re inexplicably using to promote it. It’s not just the worst track here, it’s the worst thing they’ve ever done. It has a last-verse key change, for Christ’s sake – why is that still legal? Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
The Sounds – Something To Die ForI only just got this, but Yeah Yeah Yeah is an instant favourite. The Sounds are usually pretty straightforward rock, but here they’re going a little more electronic – some tracks feel more about rhythms and samples than the conventional structure they’ve stuck to before. On Yeah Yeah Yeah it’s excitingly new, but the rest of the album isn’t standing up to Rubicon yet (see I’ve Got Confessions To Make).
Low – C’monA few highlights here, not least the tumbling Try To Sleep (below). Especially Me (and probably you, the chorus adds) is another – disarming and gorgeous. Nothing But Heart is the one with the gut-wrenching distortion in what I guess you’d call a trailer for the album, but in the rest of the song the endless repetition of the title grates enough to distract from the wall of guitar. The former two would have been at home on The Great Destroyer, a freakishly perfect album, so C’mon is a step up from the bleaker Drums & Guns. | ||
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James: AIH are one of my favourite bands. I'm going to see them next week for the second time, they are absolutely brilliant live.
cheers for the recommendations. I quite enjoyed The Sounds but Low not so much. anyway, try out some of these. Northcote by The Bedroom Philosopher (http://www.youtube.c... ...xZiae16Ry8) so it's a comedy song, but it's catchy and bitchy and I love it. Black Bugs by Regurgitator (http://www.youtube.c... ...CA7--Qcp78) so the song's 14 years old now, and Regurgitator haven't released anything of quality since the early 2000's. but the first two albums are wonderful, and more than make up for their current crap. Greg! The Stop Sign! by TISM (http://www.youtube.c... ...wI2NrVYqIE) my absolute favourite band of all time, the chorus of this song just sticks in your head. they put on some absolutely insane live shows, but they broke up after their guitarist died. | ||||
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If you’ve been dissatisfied with any of the government whales you’ve been using lately, I can recommend the Freelance Whales. When an album starts with a song like this, you know you’re in for some pretty fucking gentle glockenspiel-banjo times. Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser. The whole album is good, I got it from here.
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Jason L: Wow, yeahhhhh. Hot Chip and Architecture In Helsinki have a baby?
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About the only new music I got into in 2010 was Said the Gramaphone’s round-up of the best music of 2009. So a while back, I asked Twitter for help, scoured The Onion AV Club, sifted through Spotify lists, and then pretty much went with Said the Gramaphone’s round-up of the best music of 2010. Since I’m embedding a bunch of tracks from their site, I’ll also copy their referral codes for the buy links so any kickbacks go to them. Apologies to anyone who recommended me something that didn’t make this top ten – I listened to over 700 tracks over the course of three weeks, so it’s likely I overlooked some good stuff.
1. Tennis – SeafarerAudio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser. The gentle crooning of Cape Dory would have made as much sense in the forties as today, and it’s about the prettiest concept album I’ve ever heard. The whole thing is a half hour holiday to a series of remote isles, each track a different nautical adventure among deserted beaches. Marathon is the track Gramaphone picked – an almost too-sweet finger clicking ballad about exploring a coastline, and my favourite at first too. I ended up prefering Seafarer for the way it keeps shifting – I lose track of the number of hooks, and every time I find myself humming Tennis it turns out to be just a different part of this song. 2. Joanna Newsom – Good Intentions Paving CompanyAudio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser. I’ve never disliked a Joanna Newsom song, but they’re all so gentle and nice that I can’t distinguish between most of them. This is the one with a hook, and like a lot of artists who don’t usually do them, she turns out to be brilliant at it. The sharp curl of the chorus catches so beautifully on the way she rolls her unstressed syllables – she’s like if Holly Hunter was an elf. It’s still sweet, and funny, it just happens to be catchy as well. So much so that I’m even happy to sit around while it takes a few meandering minutes to wind down at the end. 3. Sleigh Bells – Rill RillAudio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser. I love a song that can’t shut up, like there’s some itch in the vocal chords that tickles in every instrumental moment. Crown on the Ground was in last year’s Gramaphone roundup, but its poppiness is filtered through such a vicious assault on the ears I assumed the rest of their stuff would be something like a western Masonna. Sleigh Bells are nicer than that, though, they just like seeing what your speakers can do. Rill Rill is a tumbling, clashing pop song with no unwanted teeth, which makes it the most listenable on the album. Elsewhere, Run The Heart has fun blending chorals with an oscillator and cutting in thick chunks of fuzz. Then Infinity Guitars jitters without momentum for most of its length before throwing itself through an unexpected brick wall of gut thumpingly thick noise. They love to play with the texture of sound, and I love to hear them do it. 4. The Decemberists – Down By The WaterAudio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser. The King is Dead feels louder and brassier than the stuff that got me into the Decemberists in the first place. But that gives high points like Down By The Water a big, crisp satisfying sound that’s just fun to have around. 5. Menomena – TAOSI had never heard of these guys, I have no idea what TAOS stands for, I don’t like anything else I can find of theirs on Spotify, but this track… God yes. Just the right mix of powerful riffs, fearless vocals and self-effacing lyrics that slowly turn sinister as the insecurities reveal their source. 6. Matt & Kim – Good for GreatBeep beepbeepbeepbeep beep. Beepbeepbeepbeep beep. Beep. 7. Belle & Sebastian – I Didn’t See It ComingAudio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser. About the only one on this list I was able to figure out for myself – oh, Belle and Sebastian have a new album? You think I should listen to that? Good idea. I Didn’t See It Coming is an anthem written to be shouted, a punch on every syllable, but sung as softly as possible. It’s really nice. 8. Cee-Lo Green – Fuck YouAudio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser. I love Fuck You for its incoherent impotence. It’s not a song about bragging – despite a disastrous ‘official’ second video that manages to miss both the point of the song and the video that made it popular. It’s not about self-pity, it’s not about betrayal, and it’s not even about putting someone down. It has plenty to say about the girl he’s lost, but she’s not the point either. The chorus is addressed to someone else – the guy – and it’s a chorus for when you know why you’re pissed off, you know who you’re pissed off with, and you have absolutely no point to make about it. You’re not like, “Oh yeah? Well she’ll leave you too.” You’re not like, “Oh yeah? Well at least I’m better looking.” You’re not like “Oh yeah? Well I’ll get rich some day and make her jealous.” You’re like… fuck you. 9. Hello Saferide – LundAudio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser. A gorgeous band discovered via Duncan Geere’s excellent collaborative Spotify playlist: Sparse and Wintery. You can listen to the lovely Arjeplog there, and it was a close toss-up between that and Lund for my pic. Lund wins purely on music, that trickle of piano has a really distinctive atmosphere that reminds me of a time and place I can’t quite name. 10. Radio Radio – Nine Piece Luggage SetAudio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser. I can’t stand hip-hop that’s about self-aggrandisement, money, violence or sluts. I am 100% behind hip-hop that’s about suitcases. I can only understand about half the Acadian French in this song, but enough of it is in English to suggest they are, on some level, mocking the puerile materialism that leads hip-hop culture latch onto random accoutrements of anachronistic wealth ideals. But I love it for being so beautifully deadpan that after a few listens, you actually kind of lust after a really nice piece of luggage. | ||
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omry.hanegby: Hey Tom,
TAOS (by Menomena) stands for The Art Of Seduction. They're actually a great band, I don't know what's up on their spotify, but you should look for a track called "The Pelican" (from 2007). | ||||
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This section of preaching is directed at me rather than you, but I want to write it publicly to force myself to make sense. I’ll probably include some irrelevant music or photos with each post to distract you in case you get bored – this one’s the first big win of 2011′s adventure into the music other people discovered in 2010. Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser. I spend my downtime in life analysing things, trying to identify comprehensible systems and figure out ways to beat them. Then I forget again. So this is a notebook of that stuff. It’s what got me interested in philosophy, but since uni, my interest has shifted to the more practical consequences of it. It’s not hard to figure out the meaning of life, it’s harder to figure out how to pursue it. Hence, Advice. The meaning of life is there isn’t one, which is to say there isn’t one other than the obvious one, which is to say be happy. It gets clearer if you think about what you’d want for your kids: you might want them to have kids themselves, but that really only gets you back to the drawing board a few decades closer to the destruction of the planet. What you probably want, overall, is for them to be happy. Apart from anything, it’d make you happy.  This hedgehog agrees with me.It’s probably not an exaggeration to say that some people have written a bit about how to pursue happiness, but a lot of it trips over a pretty basic hurdle at the starting line. We’ve noticed we are happy when we get things we wanted – love, money, sex, kids, shoes – and concluded this stuff is related. Or we’ve noticed we are unhappy when we can’t get things we want, and concluded we should stop wanting things. At the heart of it there’s an assumption that we want what’ll make us happy, with a certain margin of error for when things aren’t what we expected. We think we’re almost rational that way, wanting things because of the happiness they’ll bring, or our estimation thereof. We are way, way off. This won’t sound terribly profound, but we just want shit. It just happens. It’s not a decision, it’s a set of drives built into us by evolution to ensure we survive and reproduce whether it’ll make us happy or not. The desire to have kids has nothing to do with any felicific calculus about the happiness and sadness they’d bring, in the same way that hunger isn’t a judgment about how enjoyable food would be. Other desires that are less primal stem from these, usually via power, safety and status. The upshot is: your brain, gut, heart, genitalia, and whatever other organs you want to assign desires to, are not trying to make you happy. When they say they want something – whether it’s true love or a breakfast burrito – it doesn’t mean they’ll thank you for it. And the question of how to make yourself happy has really very little to do with getting what you want. These posts will be about what it does relate to, and sometimes how. | ||
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Analysing Happiness, by Tom Francis: [...] of reminders to my future self about what I’ve figured out about happiness. The gist of the last one was basically [...]
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You probably don’t want to hear about my year, particularly since it was good. So I’ll do what I did in 2009 and just pick some shots from it, and a track to listen to while you browse. Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser. 
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Jason L: Thanks, At Random widget! I forgot to mention before that computer multiplayer Dicewars exists: KDice. http://www.kdice.com/
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The first entry of a Minecraft diary I’m starting just went up on PC Gamer – it’s just a short one to start with, but this might turn into a long-running thing. It’s about playing with a sort of permanent death rule: if I die, I have to delete the whole world and everything in it, then start again from scratch in a new one. It’s also starting from when I first played the game, so I know virtually nothing about how it works. The next entry will go up first thing tomorrow, and it’ll probably be every other day from then on. Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser. I’m not going to harp on any more about how good Terriers is – it actually had a bit of a dip around episode 9, getting too bogged down with its heroes’ personal problems to investigate any clever plots – but I am going to give you the full song the ridiculously catchy theme tune is taken from. It was written by the series’ composer Robert Duncan specially for it, but I like that he wrote the full song too.
My Call of Duty: Black Ops review also went up on the site this week. I reviewed both the Modern Warfares, and it sometimes felt like I might be the only one not having his mind blown by the unending B-movie combat. Both those games had a saving grace: the first had a few really smart sections, and a level of dazzle that was new at the time; and the second’s co-op mode is still the best thing the series has ever done. Black Ops has neither, and its multiplayer is too glitchy to get much out of yet, so it’s the first time the score really reflects how much fun it is to aim-and-squeeze your way through a badly written action movie. Amusingly, the only other review on Metacritic with a score close to mine calls it “Truly a magnificent single-player experience,” “the best single-player campaign that the series has ever had,” and “stunning”.
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The Cheshire Cat: Any plans to do another Minecraft diary with the release of the new version? According to Notch's twitter, he actually just added in a hardcore feature that does the same thing you were doing - deletes the world when you die.
Your game diaries are always awesome. | ||||
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This is a thing I do now. Most of this stuff I mentioned on Twitter, but it’s not an ideal channel and I don’t like that I never link stuff here anymore.
Craig Mullins’ extraordinary BioShock 2 tribute art: ’1959′. The first image in years to immediately become my desktop background at home and at work. I love that he can make such a concealed place feel spacious and calm, and it makes me want a game where we see Rapture in its glory – even if it has to be without the people. He’s a concept artist who’s worked on Halo, Fallout 3 and one of the Matrix films. Hard On, by Withered Hand. The name would have put me off, but this came up on shuffle when I was going through Said The Gramaphone’s songs of the year. I love the friendly advice tone of the lyrics. Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser. Amazon customer reviews of a steering-wheel mounted laptop desk: everyone’s a comedian, most of them pretty good ones. Man earns every World of Warcraft achievement: I won’t link it, but this was one of those strange stories where the only thing about the story isn’t true, and the people reporting the story all know it isn’t true. If it were mainstream sources, you’d assume it was ignorance. If it were the guy himself, you’d assume it was mendacity. When it’s disinterested parties who know their stuff, you can only imagine its borne of some kind of news desperation. It’s okay, guys, there’s plenty of news out there that actually did happen! You could report that! Long story short, he hadn’t got every achievement: a bug caused his total to be reported one higher than it is. The story therefore becomes: … The Onion named Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind their film of the decade. An interesting choice – it would have been easy to go with There Will Be Blood without really thinking about it. They also make a good case for their equally surprising #2, another film I love. My list would be Memento, Serenity, Adaptation. Just Cause 2 Vehicle Stunts Trailer: on top of everything else, I’m really excited by how good Just Cause 2 feels – the first game was only really fluid when you were parachuting. Here vehicles seem to have that same smoothness and momentum. Watch for the awesome jump at 2m52s. Just Cause 2 Island In Chaos Trailer: Worth it for what he does after the end titles. Jonty explains the London Underground’s mysterious Inspector Sands. I love codes. Star Trek Online gives you ridiculously good in-game stuff for pre-ordering at various places. The worst use of game content and development time – as bribes to take sides in the puerile retail wars. Got me so annoyed I started an argument about it, which’ll be in the next issue of PC Gamer. IGN’s Rogue Warrior review: “the hit detection is extremely hit or miss”. A Claptrap in a tux. I just like this shot. I still haven’t played any of the Borderlands DLC. Andy Dufresne is tweeting the Shawshank Redemption in first person, in order. “Oh dear God.” is a common update. There really is a gnome of Noam Chomsky. Sad news via @icouldbeahero. LightBox’s Trent Polack finds there’s a thread on the Avatar forums to help fans cope with the depression of returning to the real world after the awesomeness of the movie.
Cute but dark short by a Pixar animator, via Waxy. roBurky notes that Calvin and Hobbes did the ‘where’s the future?’ joke everyone’s been driving into the ground back in 1989. As an eight year old, I don’t think I was actually tired of it then. @ex0′s stupendous Captain Forever ship: like a flying cathedral made of rainbows and pain. Facebook is now the size of the entire internet ten years ago. The average Facebook user spends 55 minutes on it a day.
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Jason L: Hm. Interesting. I'm not sure I'd go as far as 'good', but interesting. If it had been entirely alternate rather than alternate and obfuscatory, I think it would have crested the hill.
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Blood Money And Sex
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I followed your link here ages ago but I've dropped back to comment now because you can listen to the full (Double) album at:
http://www.blog.urba... ...atures/m83
And fuck me if the whole thing isn't every bit as good as this track. Amazing.