I don’t really need to add anything to this, do I?

Right, it’s about time we had another reader participation event. This one is a good one too, and hopefully should be a lot of fun to take part in. The assignment? As follows:

I would like you to introduce us to your local record shop. Go in, take a couple of pictures, have a chat with the staff or the manager if you can be bothered, and write it up. Email me a post to put on the site, along with a couple of mp3s from albums you have bought there. It doesn’t have to be a great big clever post, just a little bit about a record shop which you think embodies the spirit of independent music that we’re trying to encourage here. And email it, don’t just write it in the comments, because that’s pointless.

Edinburgh folks will have to take first dibs in the comments section, because there aren’t that many record shops around here, so good luck to yez. I may pick somewhere in Austria because I doubt anyone else will pick that and I actually spent a lot of money on vinyl during my Vienna years.

Anyway, get writing, and get them emailed to me by the end of next weekend (the 7th I think) and I’ll post them all over the course of the week. And to commemorate the idea of great record shops, I hated the film and I think Nick Hornby is a risibly bad writer, but High Fidelity is one of the most sincere homages (it rhymes with cabbages so pronounce the fucking ‘h’ you barbarians) to the small record shop going, so here are a couple of songs from the soundtrack.

Smog – Cold Blooded Old Times
The Velvet Underground – Oh! Sweet Nuthin’
Bob Dylan – Most of the Time

You know, I fucking hate iTunes.  I hate i-fucking-Tunes for much the same reason that I hate fucking Macs in general.  They are designed for people who don’t fucking know how to use Explorer, for Christ’s sake.  Or Finder or whatever the bastard is called on a Mac.

It drives me nuts.  If you import photos using iPhoto then you cannot find those files in Finder.  It’s fucking ludicrous.  You have to use the search function and then when it tells you where they are you can’t actually reach that path conventionally through Finder, it will only show you the bloody things through search. Basically, you have to use iPhoto, which I would frankly prefer not to do because then your old, imported photos end up in a different place from your new ones.  “Ah, but they’re all on iPhoto”, say the smarmy, gurning Macintosh twats.  Well I don’t fucking like i-fucking-Photo and I would like to be able to choose not to fucking use it.

iTunes is the fucking same.  It’s a spectacularly stupid program, and it refuses to let you organise your music properly.  It loses files, it won’t watch a folder properly, there’s no Explorer functionality in the left-hand sidebar, it’s fucking dreadful.  All my music in a great big long list, are you fucking joking?  Do you have any idea how much music I actually have?  I’ll get RSI in my bloody scrolling finger, you fucking turkeys.

The worst is the watch folder situation though.  Basically, everything I buy or I get sent to me goes into a folder called On Trial, which is always changing as things either get deleted or moved to another folder, for the keepers, called Music Library.  Winamp and Mediamonkey are both capable of keeping an eye on both of these folders and updating accordingly.  iTunes is incapable of doing that.  Most music fans like to organise their collections and keep things where they want them, but what use is software that can’t keep up with that.  Mediamonkey can’t be installed on a Mac at all, and I am raging because it’s brilliant software, and I want to use it.

Basically, Macs seem do be designed for people who don’t want to use computers and I fucking despise them.  I will organise my own files thank you very much, you fucking keep your playschool cartoon kiddie computer hands off the bastards.

Marc Carroll – Idiot World
Elvis Costello – How to Be Dumb
Close Lobsters – Just too Bloody Stupid

John McCain, is fucking idiot, there are no two ways about it. Anyone who repeatedly refers to a nation called Czechoslovakia is a bozo and it is a masterpiece of the sheer catatonic passivity of the American press, as well as a nod to the audacity of Republican Party dialogue hijacking, that Obama is the one being doubted because of some imaginary relative weakness in areas of foreign policy.

In terms of being a weapons grade global irony whirlwind, on the other hand, the video below deliverys a valedictory masterclass from McCain. I haven’t seen many politicians manage to say anything so jaw-droppingly bald-faced and get away with it before. Perhaps the man is presidential material after all…!

[Video removed, presumably due to hilariously embarrassing content.]

“In the 21st Century, nations do not invade other nations”? You cannot be serious! I am forever being drawn back to Tom Lehrer’s comment about satire being obsolete when I hear things like this. How the fuck is it possible to mock something as dismissively vacant a statement as that. He cannot, cannot surely, be so stupid as to fail to understand the irony of what he just said, and yet he still came out with it.

It amazes me that American politics has become so incredibly partisan that this kind of thing isn’t roundly and widely mocked amongst Republicans as well as Democrats, and all this foreign policy bollocks just laughed out of the room, but it doesn’t seem to be. Just amazing, truly, truly amazing.

I think this is finally reason enough to post this song – finally we have found something ironic enough. Alanis Morrisette – Ironic[audio http://www.matthewjamesyoung.com/sbt/Ironic.mp3]
I guess these two songs will be all over blog posts discussing this particular situation, but they are so approriate I just can’t stop myself:
Willie Nelson – Georgia on My Mind
The Beatles – Back in the USSR

Well the series bumbles on into its final installment.  I am writing this from Vancouver Airport, waiting for a connection to Portland, so what better way to fill the time than with needless blathering about things I don’t really understand.  It’s taken a while to post, but I thought I’d finish this off before getting into all the Portland stuff and forever banishing the whiff of leeks from these pages.  Well, maybe not forever, but erm, well… oh never mind.

Once again, here are the various articles that prompted this little festival of self-indulgence, so you have some idea what to expect:
A Penny For Your Thoughts by The Vinyl Villain (read the comments as well, because some of them are very thought-provoking.
Does the World Need Another Indie Band? by Tim Walker, writing in The Independent.
Why Has Modern Music Lost So Much Impact? by the Kings of A&R.
This comment, from a reader called Alex in the comment thread of my recent podcast – The Tribecast.

And here are the other posts in the series:
1. Fragmentation
2. Over Saturation
3. Hype Overload
4. Quality

#4 Decreasing Quality

Reading JC’s article in particular put me in mind of this common complaint, and some of the commenters pushed the point even further.  Modern music is shit – where are the great bands?  Where, in particular, are the next Smiths, for example?

I can’t, and won’t, argue that there is a current band that I could honestly describe as the new Smiths.  But then, there wasn’t an old Smiths either.  You are talking about the very cream of the crop – that sort of band come along maybe once a decade, don’t they?  Radiohead for the 90s, I suppose, and erm, who for the noughties?  I really am not sure, so I can see where he’s coming from in that respect.

I don’t, predictably enough, agree entirely though.  One of the things JC seems to be doing, as do a lot of the people who criticise a living music scene by comparing it unfavourably to the past, is ignoring the fact of hindsight.  It’s easy to tell that the Smiths were something special, because we can look back on anything and everything that was around at the time and evaluate them in a relatively dispassionate way – something we just can’t do for anything current.  The Stone Roses first and the early Radiohead albums stand up very strongly in retrospect, but as we get closer to the present day how can we tell how good the bands are that we’re listening to now?

A couple of the groups mentioned in the comment thread on JC’s post are DeVotchKa and Calexico, but these bands are both a good solid handful of albums into their careers by now.  Think back over the last couple of years and the records that made real impact: LCD Soundsystem, Arctic Monkeys, Vampire Weekend, Arcade Fire, The White Stripes – all these bands have pretty broad appeal, but only the White Stripes are more than a couple of albums into their careers, and we just don’t know who is going to be remembered from this era yet.  If the Arctic Monkeys continue to peter out, then maybe they’ll be forgotten about altogether.  It would just take one more brilliant album from any of these groups to cement their reputation as one of the really key bands of the first decade of this century.  Do we really think that the riff from Seven Nation Army is going to be less memorable in ten years than Johnny Marr’s equally iconic performance on How Soon is Now?  I know there’s more to genius that a few memorable riffs, but I think the more general point still stands.

The other question is this: who even remembers the Kasabian of the 80s anyway?  We can look back on the 90s now and identify bands like Blur and Pulp, Radiohead and early James as iconic and brilliant.  But how many Menswears and Kula Shakers are we consigning to the dustbins of forgetfullness in order to do so?  If no-one gives much of a fuck about the View now, then their memory may not survive the next full moon, never mind twenty years worth of rosy-tinted nostaligia.

Then again, as popular entertainment has made ever-greater inroads into the world of indie, having realised that there was a sizable market out there that their dancing karaoke whores were not capable of suitably exploiting, it seems that the world of indie is being over-run by preening, prancing piss-artists like the Hoosiers, Joe Lean and the Short Tight Pants, that one who’s pumping, er… Kate Moss.  Whoever they are.  They’re shit, anyway.  This is indie rock as commerical product, but it must be remembered that in no meaningful way is it actually indie.  It’s a branch of the celebrity industry, approached as such, and does not deserve our attention.  The bands are in it for the fame, the coke and the floosies, the music is fucking dreadful, and the marketing spend in proportion to investment in the actual ‘product’ is repellently high.  This last one is always a good metric to use when considering whether or not something might just be fucking rubbish.

At the other end of the scale, there are a lot of piss-poor bedroom bands reaching out using MySpace and the like, and we have a lot more contact with them than before because they can reach us directly.  They don’t need the middle-man, who might just have pointed out that they are shit, and so our MySpace inboxes are clogged with shit by groups that barely deserve to call themselves bands, nevermind command anyone’s ears.

If you’re used to listening to all this stuff because you want the buzz of that one exciting discovery, then you really do have to stop moaning and just accept it.  The people who got to be the arbiters of what was and wasn’t worth our time before the internet all had to wade through this stuff, so if we want to liberate ourselves from being told what to like, then we have to do the work that goes with it.  With great power comes gr… er, sorry, wrong speech.  The other option is to quitchabitchin and just find a few bloggers and a couple of radio stations that you trust and let them do it for you.  If you want to participate, you are just going to have to put the time in to listen.

So although I wouldn’t say that there are fewer great bands out there, I would certainly concede that we have exposure to far more really shit ones.  But as for greatness, I just don’t think we can tell right now what is going to be remembered in twenty years.  And I also think we conveniently forget all the crap that there was milling about on the airwaves at the time we thought the Smiths were so great.  I can see how you would get full, too.  After thirty-odd years scouring the country for great new bands, like JC has, there must come a point where you’re just full up.  There is a limit to the amount of music we can really find special, because if there was more of it then it would by definition be less special, but I really don’t buy the argument that bands then were better than they are now.

And as Mrs. Toad is whispering in my ear, great bands tend to be born into times of economic hardship – it’s what makes the release all the more euphoric – so you never know, we could be on the cusp of great things over the next five years or so.

The Smiths – How Soon is Now?
Blur – Clover Over Dover
The White Stripes – Seven Nation Army
Arcade Fire – Intervention

There’s an intriguing wee scene blossoming down in London around a little indie label called Chess Club Records. Toadfans may well have encountered them already as they’re home to the magnificient Mumford & Sons, who have been received favourably here at Toad HQ both live and on record.

They also look after the affairs of one Justin Hayward-Young, who apparently shares a house with Marcus Mumford, and records under the rockiest of rock’n'roll monikers; Jay Jay Pistolet. His star seems to be on the rise following last year’s release, on Chess Club, of a single called We Are Free, which has been attracting mainstream attention. Jay Jay Pistolet has a lighter, more whimsical style than the thrills and drama of the Mumford boys, but I’m liking what I’m hearing. The two acts share common ground in the deft instrumental work and imaginative arrangements.

The label’s latest release is in less of an acoustic vein. Released on Monday, Australian band Ghostwood’s debut UK single, Red Version, is taken from an eponymous EP that’s already been on release down under, and which seems to have gone down reasonably well with our colonial cousins. They have the sort of epic mid-80s sound that evokes early Cure and U2, which means you’ve already decided whether you’re going to like it or not just upon reading that. It’s certainly a well-worn furrow they’re ploughing, but they could find a healthy market slipstreaming the success of bands like Bloc Party and Maximo Park.

So, interesting times down at the Chess Club. It looks like they’re putting a lot of hard work into finding unusual new acts to promote, and seem to be refreshingly allergic to anything too mainstream. That’s something to be commended if you ask me, and enthusiatically supported. I definitely think this little label are worth keeping a close eye on.

Mumford & Sons – Roll Away Your Stone
Jay Jay Pistolet – We Are Free
Ghostwood – Red Version

Website | MySpace

Disappointingly, however, it’s only two cover versions.

I’m sure Julian and the guys will tell us they’re just whetting our appetite until the release of the highly anticipated new recordings; but don’t believe them – oh no – for I happen to know that they’re evil, evil little scamps who love nothing more than to tease and tantalise us!

Luckily for them they’re one of the best young bands around at the moment, otherwise we might not let them get away with such shenaningans. If Matthew were here he’d give them a piece of his mind I can tell you!

Anyhoo… One of the covers is of Television’s See No Evil from their classic Marquee Moon album, and the choice of this song might offer a hint about a slightly punkier edge to some of The Young Republic’s forthcoming output.

The second is, appropriately enough round here at the moment, a cover of Tango ‘Til They’re Sore by some slippery charlatan by the name of Waits. It’s a splendid rendition of a wonderful song – Julian nailing a Waitsian growl while the band shimmer and scrape menacingly behind him.

The band have also announced a forthcoming visit to the UK. They won’t be stopping off in Edinburgh this time, unfortunately, but they are playing End Of The Road festival and one or two other events. Check out their website for more details.

The Young Republic – See No Evil
The Young Republic – Tango ‘Til They’re Sore

Website | MySpace

Right then, boys. Just leave me a pint of Brain’s Dark over b’there and a Clark’s Pie and we’ll have some proper music up b’yer quicker than Shane Williams can outrun the English!

I won’t lie to you, but, it’s all Max Boyce and Dame Shirl from now on…

Of course, it won’t be anything like that; but Matthew must have been expecting some such nonsense so I thought I’d humour him!

Okay, so I’ve been given the keys to Toad Hall for a couple of weeks, which I’m most grateful to his lordship for, but I’ll admit I’m a little out of my depth here guys. I’ve got a few ideas for posts – well, three - so we’re fine until Saturday; but feel free to chip in with any suggestions for posts, new music you’ve found, favourite recipes, anything really.

So to finish off my brief introduction in predictable, but no less grand for it, style. Here’s some classic Cool Cymru that his lordship would probably approve of.

Super Furry Animals – The Man Don’t Give A Fuck

60ft Dolls – Stay

Catatonia – International Velvet

The third in this series of posts addresses hype, and the excesses thereof to which we seem to be constantly subjected at the moment. It’s certainly a common enough complaint at the moment, but I seem to remember there being plenty of hype overload well before the internet.

Once again, here are the various articles that prompted this little festival of self-indulgence, so you have some idea what to expect:
A Penny For Your Thoughts by The Vinyl Villain (read the comments as well, because some of them are very thought-provoking.
Does the World Need Another Indie Band? by Tim Walker, writing in The Independent.
Why Has Modern Music Lost So Much Impact? by the Kings of A&R.
This comment, from a reader called Alex in the comment thread of my recent podcast – The Tribecast.

And here are the other posts in the series:
1. Fragmentation
2. Over Saturation
3. Hype Overload
4. Decreasing Quality

#3 Hype Overload

Hype overload is something I’m a little divided on. In one sense, an excess of shrill hysterics about how wonderful the brand new somethingorother is had become annoyingly prevalent in modern society. You can see it in just about every form of advertising known to man, and advertising itself has pretty much infested every foetid little nook and cranny of our worthless souls, so maybe it is arguable that excessive hype really is everywhere.

In all honestly though, I just don’t think that’s really the case. Yes, media-wise whatever there is, there’s more of it, but that’s a factor of there being more media in general rather than anything that I would say is particular to the world of music. Is the hype shriller, more bombastic, more needlessly over-stated than before? Well, I don’t actually know, but I genuinely have my doubts. The only real touchstones I have with which to compare this would be the pre-Napster, largely analogue world. I am only 32 and during this period. the early to mid-90s, I was only just evolving into the sort of unbalanced music obsessive I am now.

The first really hysterically anticipated stuff I remember was probably the when The Bluetones and Gene were releasing their first albums. Leaking was far less prevalent back then – or at least it penetrated less far into the popular consciousness – and after the release of two or three blinding singles all we could do was sit and wait. Stoked by the anticipation of the press, the NME in particular, I remember charging off to the record shop at lunch time on the day of both of these releases in order to get my hands on a copy. I also remember the claustrophobic disappointment as it slowly dawned on me that the genius I was anticipating just hadn’t materialised.

Basically, it’s pretty easy to write a couple of great songs, or so it appears judging by the number of groups who seem to be able to do it. Often, inevitably, these are amongst the first couple of songs a group writes, so it can be very difficult to judge whether or not they have any more in them. B-sides help, as do live shows, but basically when you hear a new group you are making wild extrapolations based on very little information. If this couple of songs happens to be brilliant, there is no way you aren’t going to be excited and, nowadays, talk about it.

Maybe the jump from bedroom recording to chart assault is being made a lot faster these days, and this may not give groups enough time to develop, settle and figure out who they are as a band, so perhaps the hype can seem out of proportion with the professionalism or presence of the groups itself. Groups like this can seem like they appear from nowhere, with the weight of expectation around them that you would expect from a band with a couple of records behind them, but then people used to overreact to a promising 7″ single as well. Maybe because music criticism and music dialogue is much more participative now, people feel more caught up in the hype.

Maybe we feel more pressure to conform to media expectations because, with music in particular, often our friends are the media, instead of just friends who make you a few too many mixtapes. I know I find it harder to turn around to a blogger I’ve exchanged emails and comments with and say ‘No, I think your new favourite band are shite, actually’ because it just feels mean, but we’d never have hesitated to sneer at the NME’s latest favourites, even ten years ago when they had a shred of credibility still intact.

In the grand scheme of things though, I remember people getting just as over-excited about new releases in the days of vinyl and fanzines, so I just don’t buy this ‘too much hype’ stuff. Yes people are prone to over-reaction, and yes the big labels are a bit desperate for love at the moment and prone to a bit of leg-humping, but really, I just think humans have always been excitable, particularly where music is concerned.

Gene – Be My Light, Be My Guide
Gene – Sleep Well Tonight
The Bluetones – Bluetonic
The Bluetones – Cut Some Rug

It seems I have all the qualifications required to be a professional writer: i.e. a rather inflated sense of self-importance, impossible levels of preciousness about my work and the ability to swear like a docker with a nasty dose of the clap.

As my good lady asked when she forwarded me this link, were we separated at birth?

From: Coren, Giles
Sent: 10 August 2002 16:41
To: James, Anita
Cc: Wells, Dominic
Subject:

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. how fucking difficult is that? it’s the sentence that bestrides the fucking book i reviewed for you. it is the sentence i wrote first in my fucking review. it is 35 fucking letters long, which is why i wrote that it was. and so some useless cunt sub-editor decides to change it to “jumps over A lazy dog” can you fucking count? can you see that that makes it a 33 letter sentence? so it looks as if i can’t count, and the cunting author of the book, poor mr dunn, cannot count. the whole bastard book turns on the sentence being as i fucking wrote it. and that it is exactly 33 letters long. why do you meddle. what do you think you achieve with that kind of dumb-witted smart-arsery? why do you change things you do not understand without consulting. why do you believe you know best when you know fuck all. jack shit.

that is as bad as editing can be. fuck, i hope you’re proud. it will be small relief for the author that nobody reads your poxy magazine.

never ever ask me to write something for you. and don’t pay me. i’d rather take £400 quid for assassinating a crack whore’s only child in a revenge killing for a busted drug deal – my integrity would be less compromised.

jesus fucking wept i don’t know what else to say.

Alexei Sayle – ‘Ullo John, Got a New Motor?