I never quite know what to write about anymore.

I think I’ll save this blog for sparse revelations, or times when I need to express the utter misery I’ve mastered at bottling up. I’d write about happier times, but when the serotonin runs high, the ‘doing’ tends to beat the ’saying’.

But maybe random blogs on the internet shouldn’t run that deep.

James Joyce’s follow-up to Ulysses, Finnegan’s Wake inspires splenetic loathing and accusations of pretensious drivel, gobbledigook and utter gibberish from the hive mind of Amazon.com.  Did a drunken Joyce just bash his fists on the typewriter like a confused child, or was he pushing the limits of literature to its, er, limits?

As Douglas “Douglas” so memorably puts it: I can’t imagine being the person who had to proof-read this drivel, I would sooner plunge my hand into a vat of boiling oil.

A devisive tome, then.

49 out of 200 Amazon reviewers could not be woken by Joyce’s lexical gymnastics.

Best Review Title:

Belongs in an anthology of abnormal psychiatry, July 22, 2000

By A Customer

This reviewer is unwell:

this book rocks!!!, July 30, 2003

True, Joyce’s many masterpieced work of profound interjectional superiority has at last brought the final jigsaw piece to this unChristianly magnifique port-en-tois ouevre…

But that’s why it’s sooooooo good?!

Hello, my name is Rajish. I am an 8th rank student from The Calcutta Institute of Fine Literary Works. Tonight, we will take a journey of unprecedented backwardness and desolution. When I was 4 years old, my friend and I went to the local book shop to buy our first copies of Finnegan’s Wake (FW as we affectionately called it). When we came home we read our copy of FW with the greatest of zeal and devoured the conduit imagery and allusion in this densely conceived and lightly told work. The effect, of one who studies it as my friend and I do, is of entrancement and utmost vermisiltude. By the end, we feel so lost and alone, so dissapointed by literature and its pseudo-world of false authoritarianism, we vow to never read again. Except for Eddy Said that is. Please read this book and join us postcolonially. Peace.

Alterative Take:

Kind of light and fluffy., March 21, 2000

By	Jun-Dai Bates (San Francisco, CA United States) – See all my reviews

This book is very entertaining, and has maddening pace, kind of like the Matrix. In fact this book is a lot like the Matrix. It’s about as complicated as The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. I take dumps more dense than this. Reading this book will take about and hour and a half, though it will only feel like 20 minutes. Think Curious George. I can’t wait for the movie (I hope Spielberg directs it, and finishes the last sentence).

Succinctity:

Meaningless gibberish, March 13, 2004

By	David Gulbraa (Costa Mesa, CA USA) – See all my reviews

There is nothing worse than an illiterate writer.

And the Brainslop Gold Star Award for Comedic Critiquing goes to…

an unusual writing technique, May 5, 2005

By	Freston (USA) – See all my reviews

Joyce was quite understandably frustrated when his magnum opus, “Ulysses,” did not immediately receive the critical attention he felt it warranted upon its publication in 1922.

Thus it was that the artist, while composing his next work, “Finnegan’s Wake,” got into the habit of periodically banging his head against the typewriter keys, a poignant expression, obviously, of the searing torment boiling within him.

Happily for us, the result of these repeated cranial collisions can be viewed in the contents of this volume.

I’ve been told (I can neither confirm nor deny “the voices’” involvement) that since I haven’t been posting much and can’t use APs as an excuse anymore, that I should at least post something. So I think that I’m going to start posting music for you to listen to when I’m not going to get around to posting anything else.

To start off the inaugural post, I think I’ll go with one of my favorite versions of a song that’s pretty good to start with:

It’s just an all around amazing song. I could go into the personal stuff about why I love it especially, but I really don’t feel like it, and it pretty much doesn’t need explanation anyway.

Next, another song you probably know (I do have somewhat more obscure ones I’ll do eventually too, don’t worry )

This one bears a little more explaining, if only because the band themselves have said they have no idea what it’s really about, and that it’s up to their fans to decide.

“How many special people change, how many lives are living strange, where were you when we were getting high?”

The way I interpret that bit is that it’s saying how many of the brilliant, awesome, amazing people out there end up changing to fit in and not have to always feel strange and weird, and how if only even one person get it and see them as they are, then it’ll work out. This ties in with:

“Wake up the dawn and ask her why, the dreamer dreams, she never dies, wipe that tear away now from your eye.” Same deal. If someone is there to understand, then they don’t have to change, and they can be themselves.

And finally, I’ll leave an Icelandic band, Sigur Ros. Takk and Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust (two of their albums) really defy description, so I’ll just give a pair of songs from each, because description doesn’t do them justice. (Yes there’re naked people in the third, Gobbledigook. Get over it. Just listen if you have to)

Let’s open the case file of “Great Moments in the Pot Calling the Kettle Black”, shall we? A couple of weeks ago, while doing  a radio interview to promote No Line On the Horizon, Bono (he’s in some band or other… can’t think of which one) apparently called Chris Martin (for the heterosexual males in our audience, Chris Martin is the guy from Coldplay) a wanker on the air. The DJ tried to wrestle an apology out of Bono, but didn’t really get one. Which is ostensibly good because, come on… Chris Martin is a wanker. But so is Bono. In fact, I’ve come to feel that Bono and Chris Martin are engaged in some kind of Highlander-esque battle of wankerdom that will culminate in one of them beheading the other on a mountain top and becoming the Ultimate Wanker.

My cyncial side (which is about 75% of all of my sides) says that Bono was trying to drum up a little controversy to boost album sales. There was a massive media blitz to promote No Line On the Horizon before it came out, including a five night residency on Letterman and the afore-mentioned live BBC Radio interview. When you’re hustling that hard to promote a U2 album, there’s a reason. And the reason is that No Line On the Horizon is a complete meandering mess of a record.

This was touted as U2’s Big Change Album, the one where they set out to radically change their sound. Apparently, that meant hiring Brian Eno and jamming some songs into 5-Plus minute territory. No Line On the Horizon is the kind of change you make at U2’s age – a safe, calculated “change” that’s mostly in the wrong direction. There’s still The Edge’s annoyingly chimey guitar tone (although it’s buried in some of the songs), Bono’s histrionic vocal spams, and his lyrical cliches (“Only love can leave a mark like that,” he sings on “Magnificent”), which are getting lazier by the day (see all of “I’ll Go Crazy if I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight,” if you can stand it). The only really surprising thing about No Line On the Horizon is its uniform awfulness. But even that’s not much of a stretch in my mind, because I’m one of the only people on earth who didn’t like How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb (I thought “Vertigo” was a pretty embarrassing song, but then I heard “I’ll Go Crazy  if I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight” and “Get On Your Boots”).  In fact, when I think about it, Achtung Baby is the last U2 album that I still listen to from start to finish and I only do that on occasion.

There’s some new musicality to be found on No Line, a few more keyboards and electronic noises, but it’s not compelling enough to help you forget the tossed-off lyrics – it’s almost as if Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois were brought in to try and hide the fact that Bono is becoming a worse writer by the day. Not only does “Get On Your Boots,” weld the vocal melody from Elvis Costello’s far superior “Pump It Up” to the melody from that 80’s song “Wild Wild West” (who the fuck did that song? I can’t remember for the life of me. Was it Culture Club? Who cares?), it features the not-at-all-revelatory statement, “You don’t know how beautiful you are”, a line I was putting in songs back in the 9th grade. For the record, those songs have been destroyed.

“Be careful of small men/ with big ideas,” Bono warns on “Stand Up Comedy,” a song that makes me sorely miss “Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me”, and that seems like a credible warning for someone who is going to brave a listen to No Line On the Horizon. For all its attempts to shake things up, it only reveals that U2 is incapable of the radical departure that they think this album is. If they really wanted to shake things up, they’d make an acoustic blues record, or a stripped down punk album, recorded live in one take (in other words, they’d plug The Edge straight into a Marshall amp with no goodies, forbid him from playing clean, and see what he’s really made of. I suspect the answer is that he’s less than the sum of his annoying effects pedals), or… well, it doesn’t matter because they can’t do it. Take Bono’s Coldplay-baiting radio comment. It’s exactly the sort of faux-controversial comment you make when you’re incapable of being really challenging. I’ve no doubt that Bono really believes Chris Martin is a wanker and that’s kind of my point – everybody believes that Chris Martin is a wanker. Bono – and his bandmates – are buried too deep in their own innocuousness to come up with something really radically different. For instance, Bono could’ve gone on the radio and said, “Gordon Brown is a monkey-fucker” or “I’m sick of Morrissey’s bullshit and I hereby challenge him to a pistol duel at dawn,” or really anything more interesting than pointing out something that is already ingrained in the public consciousness as firmly as the absolute knowledge that Chris Martin is a wanker.

In their day, U2 was a really great pop band and there’s nothing at all wrong with being a great pop band (The Beatles, anyone?). I can understand the band’s desire to change their sound a bit, but they don’t have to sacrifice good songs to do it (again, The Beatles, anyone?). The biggest change that U2 has made between How to Dismantle a Decent Band and No Life On the Horizon is that they’ve gone from ignorably bad to actively terrible. No Line contains three of the worst tracks I’ve ever heard from U2 – “I’ll Go Crazy if I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight,” “Get On Your Boots,” and “Breathe,” which apes Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man” on the verse and doesn’t get much better on the chorus.  Granted, I’m not the biggest U2 fan in the world (can you tell?) but there is one test that U2 should be able to pass with flying colors: my beautiful girlfriend, who can fully acknowledge and forgive both Chris Martin and Bono for their inherent wankerdom, likes both Coldplay and U2. Her take on No Line On the Horizon? “It sounds like Old People music.” I can assure you that she has no greater perjorative in her vocabulary for music (she’s much nicer than I am) and I’ve cringed with despair when she’s leveled that charge at some of my favorite acts. I used to think that only 2 things were objectively true about music: 1) everyone’s girlfriend loves Coldplay and 2) everyone’s girlfriend loves U2. Number 2 is on shaky ground at the moment.

There’s something about this song that makes me feel a bit more alive.  Strange name, great song.

Gobbledigook

Need I say more?

Click on the picture for the album.  There are also some hilarious professional photos here.  You can search for the Polar Plunge and then go to Plunge or search for our photos starting at ID 49016-068-003.  Seriously they’re funny.  And seriously, I still have the mullet and moustache.

Listening to Gobbledigook by Sigur Ros.

This upbeat little diddy is from Sigur Ros, a band from Iceland and one of the most innovative, unique bands I’ve heard.  Using a mixture of languages united and called Hopelandic, most of the lyrics are indecipherable, but the music is moving and emotional.

El quinto album de Sigur Rós lanzado el verano del pasado año llegó con unos cuantos cambios en la carrera del grupo. Lo primero es la luminosidad que rodean la mayoría de canciones, incluyendo el primer videoclip del disco que luego comentaré. Eso atrajo a nuevos oyentes, y alejó en cambio a otros que habían escuchado sus primeros y más gélidos discos, con un aire más acentuado de Post-rock ambientado en paisajes de Islandia. Ante todo siguen siendo muy buenos pero se entiende que estas diferencias puedan chocar a algunos.

Además incluyeron una gira en México aunque algo accidentada, un detalle igualmente de la banda a pasar por esos lares pues tienen mucha comunidad latinoamericana fans de su música. Mallorca no creo que nunca aun esperando pasen por la isla para poder verlos.

Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust

(Con un zumbido en nuestros oídos tocamos eternamente)

Lo primero que escuchamos al poner el CD es una animada melodía con un aire bastante desenfadada.

Gobbledigook: Lo reconozco, escuchar esta primera pieza me asustó lo bastante para pensar que el disco no habría nada que me gustase. Es la pista que menos he escuchado, y de entera menos.  Es un aire un tanto hippie y movidito que pensaba que habían secuestrado a la banda y unos tíos semi-desnudos o enteros no paraban de tocar con palmas. El videoclip es el primero que salvo un mensaje inocente, dejan de lados a niños y nos ponen ante la cámara unos jóvenes desnudos en pleno bosque. Los integrantes del grupo tambien desnudos se perfilan solo en ocasiones tocando la percusión. Se puede ver alguna que otra pareja desnuda dandose caricias y senos de todos lados, sin ser erótico aunque ya sabeis como es youtube, dejan años videos violentos pero en cuanto se vea una teta o lo quitan o hay que certificar la edad del usuario de la web.

(Dar doble click para ver el video en la pagina de youtube)

Por eso dejo claro que esta primera pista no me gusta, tampoco diré que horrible pero no habría comprado el disco si todas fuesen así.

Inní mér syngur vitleysingur [Dentro de mí canta un lunático]: Esto ya es otra cosa, siendo una melodía alegre me parece de  mis favoritas del disco.  El acompañamiento musical es magnífico (en el de viento es bastante clásica y elegante y vistosa, además de la banda femenina amiga del grupo: Amiina, con sus violines) y sería de las que disfrutaría escuchar en un concierto de su gira actual.

Sample de disco e imagen de concierto, el siguiente video es en emotivo directo:

Góðan daginn [Buen día]: La tercera pista se pasa a un toque mucho más clásica dentro de la obra del grupo, más pausada, onírica y con acompañamiento coral de niños, concretamente grabado en el famoso estudio de grabación Abbey Road de Londres. (En la séptima pieza, de mis favoritas, es donde el acompañamiento coral infantil reaparece con mucha fuerza y majestuosidad).

Við spilum endalaust [Tocamos eternamente]: Pasamos de nuevo a una pieza tipo la segunda del disco en tema de bastante rítmica y acompañamiento. El videoclip es una sucesión de imagenes de su gira del 2008 en plan película de 8mm y algo anticuada algo psicodélica.

Festival: ¿Quien decía que no tendría este album piezas como sus anteriores trabajos y más en concreto de sus primeros discos con mas toque Post-rock? Empieza hasta la mitad del disco con la tranquila voz del vocalista, bastante intima, para llegar a la segunda mitad de la canción donde empieza con fuerza una parte de percusión que evoca a lugares remotos pero más cálidos que parajes nevados.

Með suð í eyrum [Con un zumbido en nuestros oídos]: Llegando a mitad del disco, se entremezcla el aumento de ritmo del disco actual con la personalidad de sus intimistas primeras canciones de hace tiempo. El climax final es bastante c´pmodo de escuchar.

Ára bátur [Barca]: Para mí una de las excusas para tener este disco, una majestuosa pista que no me impide siempre que la escuche no me llegue a subir la sangre de emoción en mi persona.  El acompañamiento idéntico de la tercera pista se refuerza y aumenta su protagonismo a partir de los dos últimos minutos de la cancion, siendo bastante emotiva. Sin video oficial con la canción entera, paso enlace de youtube de algun buen video de un fan para dejar constancia de alguna manera para ser escuchada:

Illgresi [Mala hierba]: Intimista canción que recuerda a las penúltimas o últimas pistas de otros discos.

Fljótavík [Nombre de algun lugar de Islandia]: Otra pista bastante más intima aunque con mas fuerza y emotiva, una de mis favoritas del disco, realmente engloba lo que me gusta del grupo.

Straummes [Nombre de una montaña cerca de Fljótavík]: Una continuacion de la anterior pista, una clásica pieza corta sólo instrumental habitual en sus discos.

All allright [Todo bien]: Acaban el disco con una más intimista canción con la diferencia que canta por primera vez en inglés el vocalista. Pese a ser una buena pieza no la suelo escuchar mucho sin quitar que me parece mucho mejor que la primera pista del disco.

Aquí concluyo con los discos que tengo del grupo, albumes. El primero de todos no lo poseo y desconozco como es. Ahora lo que me interesa es ir alguna vez algun concierto que hagan en España. Un quinto disco más alegre, más abierto al público en general, pistas muchos menos largas y la verdad es que Takk, ( ) me parecen más redondos. Eso no quita que sea un buen disco del 2008 . Sigur Rós debería bajar muchos enteros para no gustarme en el futuro nuevo disco.

Después de estar presente en el munco del arte, del cine y de la prensa, el chico malo Ryan McGinley, uno de los beautiful losers, colabora en el último videoclip de Sigur Rós. Disfrutad de la desnudez y la frescura de este joven fotógrafo estadounidense rodado por el inusual e imprescindible director de fotografia christopher doyle.

RYAN MCGINLEY - GOBBLEDIGOOK

By nachoduerme.

]]> http://killingmytime.wordpress.com/2009/01/02/desganitarse-con-ganas-vol-1/ Fri, 02 Jan 2009 19:13:08 +0000 mightychick http://killingmytime.wordpress.com/2009/01/02/desganitarse-con-ganas-vol-1/

Para empezar el año con buen pie os propongo una bonita compilación para Desgañitarse con Ganas, obra de mi amiga Violeta (muchas gracias, Doppel). De momento os posteo el listado de la primera parte, para que no os ofusquéis con tanto hitazo. Variedad, sobre todo. Hala, a desgañitarse.

1.- Hey Bulldog, de The Beatles

2.- Sunshine of Your Love, Cream

3.-  Boom Boom,  de John Lee Hooker

4.- Aeroplane, de Red Hot Chili Peppers

5.- I know what I know, de Paul Simon

6.- Better way, de Ben Harper

7.- Mr. E’s beautiful blues, de Eels

8.- Sugar-coated Iceberg, de Lightning Seeds

9.- Desperate Andy, de The Cranberries

10.- Morning Glory, de Oasis

11.- Angels of the Silence,  de Counting Crows

12.- Business Time, de Flight of the Conchords

13.- Mushaboom, de Feist

14.- Mouth’s cradle, de Björk

15.- Lose and Win, de Beady Belle

16.- Upa Neguniho, de Edu Lobo

17.- Aganjú, de Bebel Gilberto

18.- Gobbledigook, de Sigur Ros

Sigur Rós seem like they had a really bad day or they are just not friendly at all.

I’ve been on a roll lately with music – well, I’ve made two pretty reasonable beats in 48 hours, so I’m feeling pretty good. I love switching back to hip-hop after making some guitar-music. I just completed a 70’s rock-sampling 3 minute anthem which means I now feel  like kanye.  Also, I have decided on Sigur Ros – Gobbledigook as the official Summer Jam for  me this year. Video above – (I nearly put the official one, before realising there was some nudity involved)

EDIT: Ok so there’s LOTS of nudity involved. And outdoors. Splinters!!!

Deerhunter is one of those bands that I want to like more than I actually do like them. They make sprawling, noisy albums, the kind where the really good melodies float up from the murk and, if you blink, you miss them.  For me, that means I wade through 12 or 14 tracks on one of their albums and come away liking about half of them. With most bands, that would simply not be enough. But with Deerhunter, as with (yeah, I’ll admit it) Broken Social Scene (though not any of their sleep-inducing solo projects), I will always listen to their albums for that fistful of tracks that really please me.

Because those tracks are usually really great.

So for me, Deerhunter’s lastest effort, Microcastle is a real treat. Sure, the first track is a throw-away instrumental, but the rest of the album is actually fairly straightforward, Pink Floyd-infused pop.  Microcastle is, as I make my way through it once again, turning out to be a lot like last year’s offering from The Besnard Lakes – a massive, noisy, harmonic, and beautiful piece of work.

For people who were put off by Cryptograms, Deerhunter’s more-than-mildly schizophrenic debut, Microcastle might appear to be more like what you wanted from Cryptograms. It’s a 12 song album and I like more than half of it, which makes it a total win for me. That’s due in no small part to the more cohesive sound on this album.

You have to be willing to wait for bands like Deerhunter to grow on you and, while that’s less true of Microcastle than it was of Cryptograms, it’s still the case. It took me about five trips through the album to realize that I like a majority of the songs on it. Now, I realize that the national attention span is not that long nowadays and listening to an album from start to finish even once is rare; multiple trips for some people are unheard of. I’m not gonna wax curmudgeonly and blame it all on the I-Pod either; Apple (and makers of lesser known but infinitely better mp3 players) recognized this trend in our country and simple created a means of exploiting it. If you wanna pin the tale of No American Patience for Good Music on any one particular donkey, tack it firmly to The Radio. Somewhere along the line, The Radio started playing about twenty songs day, over and over again, until the songs became an anesthetic to the national soul. Singles became increasingly important (singles used to be a means of getting people to salivate over and then buy albums; now they’re a means of getting people to buy singles) and albums became sets of five singles surrounded by five really terrible songs. Yes, I’m generalizing here, but my rant holds for a large percentage of music these days. I offer as proof Blender’s recent list of the hundred greatest American albums ever recorded which featured a greatest hits comp as it’s number one (Madonna’s Immaculate Collection, which tells you all you need to know about Blender’s understanding of good music). And if you really think that the new double-disc Beyonce album is going to be a perfectly sequenced, articulate album from start to finish – all killer and no filler, as the enlightened refer to it – you might be suffering from some sort of debilitating head trauma. The internet, far from intensifying this problem, has served as a counterweight to it. Bands that might never be noticed otherwise are able to distribute their music online (in many various ways) and the public is able to find out about it by reading things like Bollocks! and some other, probably less shitty (sometimes more shitty) sites that do nothing but talk about great music.

Deerhunter makes pretty great music (thought I’d lost the thread there, didn’t ya?) and no, you’re not gonna hear it on Ryan Seacrest’s fucking countdown show, but for those who are willing to let it grow on ‘em, it’s easy to find. As much as I bag on Pitchfork (and I will continue to do so), there’s plenty of music (most of which they hate) that I wouldn’t know about without them. There are bands that I wouldn’t know about without The Current, America’s best (and in my humble opinion, only) radio station. There are bands I wouldn’t know about if I didn’t have at least one friend who was as obsessed with music as I am.

So what about Microcastle? It’s a pop album, as much as Deerhunter is able to make one. The songs that aren’t that great (“Cover Me” and “Activa”) are brief and easy to ignore, while the great songs (“Agoraphobia,” “Never Stops,” “Microcastle,” “Nothing Ever Happened,” and “Saved By Old Times”- see the ratio there?) are really great and get better with every listen.  Microcastle is the sound of a band getting their shit together and is, I hope, I  prelude to even greater albums.

Recently, we here at Bollocks!were accused of creating (and foisting upon an unsuspecting public) “overwrought prose.”And by “we”, I mean “me”.

So in an effort to be less overwrought (more underwrought, or just wrought, I guess), I thought I’d sum up 4:13 Dream, the new Cure album, as succinctly as possible:

This album is a fucking mess.

Song: “Gobbledigook”

Artist: Sigur Ros

Album: Með Suð I Eyrum Við Spilum Endalaust (2008)

…Reykjavik, Iceland…

I always find this such an amazingly, uplifting track to start an album, shut your eyes and you can even feel the sun come out. As always Sigur Ros’s albums are magnificently crafted and this album has plenty of beautiful moments to make me stop whatever I’m doing at the time, sit back, listen and just try to absorb it all in.  

There’s not a lot I can say about the new Sigur Ros album. I can’t even spell the name of it using the keys on my keyboard and the modest tools provided by the good folks at WordPress. It translates to “With A Buzz in Our Ears, We Play Endlessly,” which is a pretty badass thing to say. I think from now on, when rehearsing with my band (name to be determined), I will start every practice with: “With a buzz in our ears, we play endlessly.”

By now, you’ve probably made up your mind about Sigur Ros and, if you’re smart, you’ve decided to like them. Yeah, no one knows what the fuck that positively elvish fellow is singing about; sure,  the songs can be a bit melodramatic at times, but at the end of the day, Sigur Ros cranks out uniformly beautiful music.

The new record, which I’ll just call Gobbledigook (that’s the name of the first track), continues their trend of making beautiful music and, though I (as previously stated) have no clue what the dude is singing about, the songs have a bit more of a pop feel than the tunes on Takk, Sigur Ros’s best record (and the one before this one). “Goobledigook” and “The Second Song” (Not it’s title, but again, my limited tools prohibit me from spelling it out. It’s, roughly, “Inni mer syngur vitleysingur.” Clears it right the fuck up for you, doesn’t it?) signal the ray-of-sunshine feel of this album and it doesn’t really let up after that. Sure, there are some traditional Sigur Ros tunes on Gobbledigook; “Festival” (that’s really its name! Thanks for throwing me that bone, Sigur Ros! You guys are swell!) is a nine-minute, slow-building epic of the type you’re used to from these dudes who hail from the sunny shores of Iceland.  But most of the album is more concise than Sigur Ros’s previous output.  It’s their pop album, or as close to one as they’re ever gonna make. I don’t think Sigur Ros will ever approach “radio-friendly,” or even all that “accessible” but if they were ever gonna get close, this is the album that does that.

There’s not much else to say about this album; it’s really fucking good, you’ve not heard anything like it, and you should be listening to it right now. Go. Listen. With a buzz in your ears.

Oh, one last thing: It would be impossible to regret getting super high and seeing this band live, outdoors, in the summertime. Impossible.

I have really been digging the Octopus Project for the last bit and they have a new video out for “I Saw the Bright Shinies“. I don’t find anything all that special about this video and I still like “Truck” better as a track, but I still am really enjoying this band in general.

Last week I got to see two fantastic shows. First was Sigur Rós at the Chan Centre on Tuesday the 7th. The venue was great – not too big, not too small, excellent sound and not a bad seat in the house.

Parachutes was the opener. We got there a bit late so I only caught the last bit of their set, but what little I heard sure sounded a lot like the headliner, which makes sense since they are also from Iceland. (I also read that the singers from both bands are actually a couple. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. *dime*)

“Svefn-g-englar” was the first song from Sigur Rós that really stuck with me, with some encouragement, of course, from the most excellent music video. It was my opener into the wonders of Sigur Rós and also the opener that night. The entire show was absolutely beautiful. The lighting was simple yet impressive, and even though there were only a few simple elements to it, every song seemed like it had its own original light show. They played pretty much every song I wanted to hear and it amazed me that only four men could make such full-sounding music live. Jónsi was completely adorable whenever he spoke in his shy, uneasy English but if you know anything about Sigur Rós, you know they are not about being cute; they are all about the music. The crowd was great, sitting well-behaved for nearly the entire show and taking everything in until Jónsi politely asked everyone to stand before breaking into “Gobbledigook“. Parachutes marched on stage in Imperial Stormtrooper outfits and drummed along as they closed with a blast of rainbow confetti that flitted into every corner of the theatre. I swear that a bit earlier they made it snow in there too. As far as religious experiences go, Sigur Rós has Jerry Falwell beat, hands down.

My second show of last week was Black Kids at the soon to be demolished Richard’s on Richards. It was an early Saturday night show but the hip kids all put on their skinny jeans and came out. Opening act The Virgins didn’t really do anything for me musically. It looked like the singer kept falling into a bad, young Mick Jagger impersonation, which wasn’t helped by him wearing a Rolling Stones shirt. I was impressed by his layering over top of a denim jacket though; I had not seen that before. I understand they are from Florida, but he had a lot of layers on. (This was more noticeable since he seemed to shed a layer between every song.) It’s not that cold, and come on – you’re performing and it’s going to be warm. Overall, not much to report on these guys.

On the other hand, Black Kids rocked the shit out of that joint from start to finish. They were tight as can be and the crowd was loving it as they went through most of their catalogue. (They don’t have a lot out so this was to be expected.) They got the crowd moving and singing along and my companion was nice enough to point out the token Asian kid right up front that was really givin’ it. The lighting was very basic. There were four sets of florescent fixtures on stands, set up so they were vertical – two blue and two pink. The drummer was on a riser at the back of the stage and a set of lights on each side framed him in so he looked as if he was in his own dark little room, just rocking out with his headphones on. The band just seems like they are having a really good time, which is refreshing after such an emo era. Vancouver enjoyed Black Kids and I think Black Kids enjoyed Vancouver too. I have a feeling we’ll be seeing them again and I, for one, am looking forward to it.