I Feel Love

Ha ha, “but you have to like them. They’re gay!” = actually a very cogent argument and top marks to Jon for (almost) conceding this!

(As you can see I’m experimenting with one-word post titles.)

Talking of things I’ve found in the JB’s bargain bin (I could write a whole essay on these), tonight I gave DJ Hell’s ancient X-Mix 5 CD a spin. I bought this quite recently, really only out of curiosity, but it’s become one of my favourite mix CDs. It was released in 1995, when electroclash wasn’t even a twinkle in Hell’s eyes, and when mix CDs weren’t yet the slick productions they are now: the mixing certainly isn’t digital, and look at that cover! K7’s design has come a long way. Of course being DJ Hell the overall feel is dark verging on apocalyptic, but it’s an incredibly exciting mix to listen to, tons of early Chicago house and a bit of Detroity stuff, all very minimal, a testament to the primitive power of the unrelenting 4/4 boom-tick. Revisionism be hanged, when you listen to this music and imagine yourself hearing it for the first time, everything comes flooding back.

(Do I get a prize for not using the words “Proustian” or “madeleine” in the previous sentence?)

Coupla quick links: if you’re not already subscribed to Earplug you should be; the latest issue is especially good with no fewer than five record reviews by Philip Sherburne, and even the one that’s not by him is of the Robag Wruhme LP and therefore of great interest. That Captain Comatose remix album sounds terrific; I just relistened to Going Out, the album proper, the other day, realised I had been underrating it somewhat because I picked it up for a fiver at JB’s! (Spotted it for $35 in HMV tonight too…) It’s ace if you’re in the right mood, house that manages to be sleazy without really sounding like the extremely large contingent of already-existing sleazy house (ie electroclash).

Andy Kellman, the man with the best taste in music ever, and mastermind of the recent changes to the allmusic.com interface, has a(nother) new blog. KIDDING about that second bit obviously, you can see from the design that Andy could teach his masters at allmusic a thing or two. (Yes, you probably do need to point out when you’re being ironic if it could result in death threats to the subject.)

I’ve been very restrained about OzBB4, haven’t I? To be honest it’s been difficult to muster much enthusiasm, but following the sensational eviction of Ryan tonight you can expect the drought to break soon. (And posts on Australian Idol will start when it starts getting interesting, ie the semi-finals; the audition shows are always the most boring to me.)

Ooh, a mention on Skykicking! Tim’s right of course, the only way you can hear tracks like “Timecode” and “Prototype” as “big-room anthems”, let alone disco anthems, is if you’re “grading on a curve” as the Americans say. Trust me, next to most of Blind Behaviour, “Timecode” might as well be “Young Hearts Run Free”!

Tim’s precision in evoking the essence of a sound amazes as always–I can only look on in envy, I just don’t have the kind of metaphorical way of thinking that could come up with something like “The forward propulsion and sheer largesse of ‘Prototype’ imagines the excitement of first seeing a metropolis etched out against the skyline…” My favourite ever Finney moment though (if I may continue to gush a bit; and why not, k-punk does it with Luka after all, might as well big up the Melbourne boy) was his description of Girls Aloud as “the end result of all youth culture dialectics” to the no doubt startled readers of Beat magazine (I’m quoting that from memory but I think it’s about right). Priceless!

“I suggested we take out our wet pants and wave them in the air to see how long they would take to freeze solid, which we did.” Great article on Siberia in the LRB by James Meek. I love reading about very cold places, and have always had a vague desire to visit Siberia. No doubt it would actually be dreadful. The reports I’ve heard about the food you get in isolated parts of Russia aren’t encouraging. Maybe I’ll just settle for visiting Alaska and Norway before I die, along with Antarctica (the last is my Big Ambition, the only kind of “adventure” travel that really appeals to me). But even the idea of being exiled to Siberia never sounded that bad to me; my sense of horror is more stimulated by the unbearable heat of Australia’s own gulag at Woomera.

“Did you see the Beastie Boys on the MTV Movie Awards? I love them!”
“Yeah, they’re OK, but I prefer the Pet Shop Boys.”

–Teenage girls overheard on the 4.12 train from Frankston

Boomkat is a very good online record store, I’ve ordered from them a few times and their service is excellent, but they have a reputation for being a bit of a bastion of IDM/indietronica anti-populism. See for instance their review this week of the new SCSI-9 12″ on Kompakt, where they talk rather sniffily about “‘You Are My Monster’ hitting the Progressive House genre with its crashing cymbals and preset sounds and feel, not the most profound release on Kompakt, but that probably means it’ll go even bigger.” In other words, the dumber it is the more the proles suck it up.

So why is one of their albums of the week a record of lounge-style covers of post-punk and new wave classics? Could there be a concept more calculated to raise the shackles of purists? I can’t quite imagine them declaring such a thing a “modern day classic” if it was an all-English effort promoted via appearances on Parkinson, rather than a French production released on (of all labels) the impeccably “intelligent” house stalwart Peacefrog!

It’s no skin off my nose, really; I’ve listened to a few of the tracks and I quite like them. But then again, I’ve no objection to lounge covers in general, I even like that Jamie Cullum version of Frontin’! (I have a feeling I’ll regret admitting that.) It’s just a bit of a volte-face from Boomkat; what are they going to be gushing over next, the Buddha Bar series? “Manchester: The Sex, The City, The Music“?

Finally found the Luciano LP in JB’s today, so I snapped that up as well as the debut single from my girl Paulini, even though I have some weird infection type thing where I seem to have gone completely deaf in one ear, so I can’t actually hear anything properly. First impressions though: I have a feeling the Luciano will grow on me, although it’s all very polite isn’t it, I do wish he’d kick it a bit more sometimes; for that reason I think Robag still has the slight edge in microhouse albums this year for me.

As for Paulini, WHY is Sony releasing this piece of absolute CRAP as her DEBUT? It has absolutely no tune, it’s called “Angel Eyes” which must be the least original title of the decade so far, and overall the whole thing comes across as third-rate Delta Goodrem. It pains me to say it but the Shannon Noll single, which beat it to No 1, is second-rate Bryan Adams and therefore actually better.

Still, I’m not about to abandon Paulini after one false step; still got my fingers crossed for the album, love.

That new Eamon single is BAD! Surely even those who tried to string together a case for that tedious “fuck” song must admit as much. If I may be permitted a Hornby moment, someone who takes something as sublime as The Flamingos’ “I Only Have Eyes for You” and samples it (lamely!) for a single that rejoices in the title “I Love Them Hos” really should be soundly horsewhipped. Little oik! Now, pass my pipe…

I saw Andrei Zvyagintsev’s The Return today. Lovely film, a psychological thriller on kind of Dostoevskian themes (by which I suppose I mean that it’s about a father and sons and it’s, er, Russian. Well, and one other thing but that would give the plot away.) Amazing landscapes along the shore of, um, is it the Caspian Sea, terrific performances from the child actors, and so on and so forth, but one thing that struck me was the credits, which were partly written in cursive Russian handwriting. It occurred to me I’d never seen this before or even knew it existed; I guess I always assumed Cyrillic lettering was always separated. Anyway, it looks like this:

…which makes me grateful I never tried to learn Russian.