Haha, welcome to Kick Christian Bale While He’s Down Week, here on the internets.  Now the Mae Shi have jumped on the bandwagon with a snazzy little number celebrating the great artist’s work on the set of the Oscar cert, Terminator 4.

I know it’s a bit daft, I know it is now my turn to grow up and get over it, but this maelstrom of silliness in the wake of Bale’s uber-tantrum is genuinely quite funny.  Do you think he’s sitting at home laughing, holding his head in his hands or…

…throwing crisps about the place and swearing angrily at the whole world?

And, alluding back to this comment about when I oh-so-much less significantly lost it and swore long and loud at someone for really not very much at all, just imagine having your most childish, least gracious moment made into the subject of a pop song.  At that, I hope, he would at least break into a snigger.

The Mae Shi – R U Professional (4 Xtian)

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Here is a rather comical mp3 of Christian Bale going nuts at the Director of Photography on the set of the new Terminator film sometime last year.  After getting over the amusement of the rant the slow creeping sensation of wanting to kick him in right in his clearly excessively tight scrotum began to overwhelm me.

What a fucking licker of monkey nuts that man seems.  Particularly the bits about being ‘professional’.  I admit that I am the last person to talk about professionalism, given I spend three quarters of my working day cunting about on the internetz like a spastic, but I am pretty certain that I have never been in a professional situation that included an over-paid prima-donna squealing at some junior colleague like a pre-menstrual hippy who has just discovered that her organic tampons might not actually be made of one hundred percent free range llama wool.

The bit where he gets threatening is even more pathetic.  I have been around a lot of actors both at school and when visiting my brother at drama school and I guarantee you not one of those attention-starved, mincing nancy-boys could even come close to ‘kicking someone’s ass’.  At best you might get a girly little slap, a high-pitched squawk and a hasty retreat, which I think even an unusually tired octogenarian with bones like balsa wood might well be able to withstand with little more than a contemptuous snigger.

This is the worst thing about celebrity culture at the moment.  You can be certain that absolutely everyone in that room was thinking ‘Okay, we get it, sir is displeased.  Now can you please just grow the fuck up and get on with the job.  Preferably within the next half an hour, you hysterical ninny.’ and yet no-one can say it.  Why?  Because Mr. Bale occasionally goes on the telly and pretends to be other people for a bit.  Ooo, what an important person that must make him.

Christian Bale is a Big Girl

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And the rather brilliant DJ remix by this chap.  I hate DJs and I hate remixes, but I tip my hat to this gentleman.

RevoLucian – Bale Out

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Fortunately the results weren’t quite as Special Branch-alerting as they might well have been.  I heard about this band both from Ed over at 17 Seconds, and from Colin who writes And Before the First Kiss, and put them on his 2008 Mixtape which he gave me at Christmas.

Oddly, this is a band which has been blogged to death by everyone from here to fucking Timbuktu, but all they really seem to have is a couple of tracks, a seven inch single and a clearly pretty fearsome black belt online marketing strategy.  This may be related to the fact that, despite being a Glasgow band almost entirely unheard of in this part of the world (correct me if I’m wrong on this, please), the single itself has been released on the really excellent Slumberland Records.

This expertise has resulted in the record being enthusiastically fellated by Pitchfork and many of the more influential US blogs, before the band seem to have built up that much of a reputation over here.  Certainly they have no live dates posted, and people I know who have tried to book them have found the band to be elusive, to say the least.

Still, the facts are fairly independent of all this nonsense.  Sisters Are Forever is a superb pop song, infectiously enjoyable, plundered right from the twee end of the eighties indie revolution and plopped happily into our laps here in 2009.  It’s not musically all that inventive, but it’s incurably catchy and bags of fun, and if this is the kind of trick these guys can pull off then fair play to them – they deserve the success.

Their other songs appear to be a little less overtly poppy, however, and I would actually say that this is a good thing.  There’s a bit more blank, flat tweeness, and a bit less bouncy, grinny poppiness which makes them seem a little more moody.  I’d say that this is actually suggests that there might be more to this band than just an irrepressible tune or two, and I hope this turns out to be the case.

Sexy Kids – Sisters Are Forever

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Sexy Kids – In a Box in a Bag

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MySpace Page | Buy from Slumberland Records

I never know what to do with singles.  This song is utterly brilliant, and I really really want to make it available for you all to hear, but it seems obviously silly to make available for free that which someone is attempting to exchange for sheckles.  I’m not sure it would be a big deal though; I get the impression that vinyl buyers are collectors and that downloading Where My Fortune Lies from here would have little to no impact on their decision to buy the single, beyond the obvious opportunity to really see if they like the song or not.

And like it I believe they would.  A lot of the rest of the Auld Lang Syne material, at least as far as I can tell from their MySpace page, is verging on the morose, and often the funereal.  On Where My Fortune Lies, however, they fire up to a more rousing gospel holler, evoking a style more familiar to readers of Toad from the likes of Mumford & Sons.

This one of the things I love about seven inch vinyl: two perfect songs and that’s all you need, and here we have it.  The songs I have naughtily ripped from their MySpace have numbers on them which imply an approaching album, and an album perhaps slightly lacking in this kind of rising glee, but when a single is this perfect then you don’t waste your time arguing about things like that.  I have ordered a copy and I will be taking it with copious amounts of gin and an irrepressible urge to twirl around the room with my eyes closed looking like a total imbecile.

As is often the case on this blog, I owe massive thanks to Campfires & Battlefields for the tip off.

Auld Lang Syne – Diamond Mine

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Auld Lang Syne – For the Love of Mrs. Thomasen and the Four Rivers

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MySpace | Buy from Viper Bite Records

Here I sit on the train back up to Edinburgh, marvelling at the snow-covered countryside and wondering idly to myself  at quite how effectively a couple of centimetres of snow seems to have brought the entire country to a total standstill.  It is, after all, just snow.  Lots of people have snow and somehow manage to keep their infrasructure from completely grinding to a halt.

Mind you, to complain seems a little churlish, and very very English, when there is snow to be enjoyed.  We are warm and on the train and it is pretty out.  Unfortunately the snow thwarted my plans to meet up with Rough Trade and Pure Groove this morning and see if they were interested in stocking the Meursault album, but now I will have to do all that by email and phone.

You’d think it was Cabaret Voltaire that burned down, not the Liquid Rooms, given how sparse their calendar has been since Christmas and once again there is nothing really going on there.  Elswhere, Limbo are very much back in business after a storming gig last week, and other than that,well, precious little as far as I can tell.  There’s Born to Be Wide on at the Voodoo Rooms before the Limbo gig on Thursday, with getting your music played on the radio being the theme this time around.  Other than that, in a live sense, I can’t find very much.  Enlighten me, please, because there appears to be bugger all going down in the capital this week.

Thursday 5th February 2009: Found, Over the Wall & Inspector Tapehead play Limbo at the Voodoo Rooms.

Both Found and Inspector Tapehead combine the acoustic and the electronic really nicely, although Found are a little more boogielicious, whereas Inspector Tapehead have a little more of a ‘bluegrass gone horribly off the rails’ sort of vibe.  Throw in the infectiously exuberant Over the Wall, and we have a truly excellent lineup.
Inspector Tapehead – Pherenzik Tear

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Friday 6th February 2009: Glissando, The French Quarter & The Japanese War Effort play Trampoline at the Wee Red Bar.

I’m recommending this gig specifically because after his performance at the Song, by Toad Christmas Party I am rather keen to see the Japanese War Effort play a fuller set, with all his electronic gizmos, having been very much impressed with the more streamlined electric guitar performance in December.
Japanese War Effort – Punk is Not Dead

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Oops!  Sorry we’re late.  Thankfully, we’re not pregnant.

What a couple of tech-fart heavy days.  Firstly, the show we done prepared/recorded for Wednesday 29th done got killed dead by our glitch-ridden editing software (now retired & replaced) as we were transferring it from one format to another. Gone, it were, plain old gone. To compensate & salvage some professional pride we put the show back to Saturday 31st in order to allow room to breathe & re-record the entire thing (essentially a re-record of the pre-record).

Secondly, we took it as a given that the show was all uploaded & ready to air, via an auto-post for 10pm Saturday 31st, so we turned the computer off & took a much needed relax/sleep.   Imagine our aghastness, then, when today, late afternoon, Sunday 1st February, we discovered the damn auto-pilot had (again) failed to launch.  Buggeration.

Thirdly, we forgot to bloody write the post for this here site – jetlag, see. A contemporary middleclass disease, I’ll have you know.

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The Mysterious Production of Eggs and Weather Systems are two of my favourite albums in the world, so what do you do when someone who is such a favourite becomes very good instead of pupil-dilatingly inspired?  Well, inevitably you end up feeling slightly disappointed, even by excellent albums like this one.

Since Eggs, Bird seems to have pushed towards a more thickly layered sound, rich with instrumentation and somewhat at the expense of some of the clarity of his earlier recordings.  Where previously every violin pluck or guitar strum was audible to the listener, now there is so much rich, textured swooning going on that I find myself missing the sparser early records.

There is, of course, a lot to love in this album.  He lilts and sways his way through songs that tease the borders of sadness and whimsy, rarely entirely abandoning one for the other.  And his musical virtuosity means that the actual listening experience is very rewarding, well beyond the casual ‘Can I hum this?’ reaction to a standard pop song.

Nevertheless, I do find myself thinking that the last two albums don’t quite match up to the genius of the two which preceded them, and although you can never expect a musician to simply repeat a successful formula ad nauseum, I am not sure I am a hundred percent in tune with the direction in which this Bird is currently flying.

Andrew Bird – Oh No

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Andrew Bird – Effigy

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Website | More mp3s | Buy direct from his website