I reviewed Soundwave for FasterLouder

SPOILER ALERT: I probably didn’t see your favourite band

SPOILER ALERT 2: I didn’t like Iron Maiden. What of it.

It may be a bad international phone line, but Walter Gervers is in good spirits. With good reason: being the bassist for Foals has its benefits, from supporting the reunion shows of seminal Britpop band Blur to releasing one of 2010’s most acclaimed records, Total Life Forever.

Coming to Australia later this month to headline the St. Jerome’s Laneway Festival, they arrive for the second time in less than a year with a reputation that precedes them. It’s a reputation, he tells me, they’ve learned to deal with easily, despite the small things getting in the way.

So I interviewed Foals

It was about three months ago now, but the guy was a great interview. If you are going to any of the Laneway shows/sideshows, try and see them. At least for my sake.

“I think we came about 20 or 25 years ago because we were students of records. We were DJs who paid great respect and paid homage to recording artists, the recording process and the records themselves.”

For a man who spent a large chuck of the of 80s and 90s creating and innovating, Chuck D has been doing an unusual amount of reflection to the uninitiated. In Australia for his second album-themed tour with Public Enemy, the group he founded in 1982, the often-outspoken rapper is keen to remind the world that his influence – even outside of rap circles – was, at best, derivative.

I interview Public Enemy for FasterLouder

U2, ANZ Stadium, 13th December 2010 

First the good: Jay-Z. My spirit animal delivered. 99 Problems was epic, as was Encore (even if he ended the set with the putrid Linkin Park remix, Numb/Encore). Well, he delivered as much as he could. Watching him pour himself out in front of a crowd who didn’t give a shit hurt me. The only people who cared was the seating bay directly to the right of stage, full of Oprah’s entourage. Not a good sign. He didn’t even play a full set. The $90 price tag on a Jay-Z hoodie that was essentially a $5 hoodie with three red stripes on it sealed the deal that the night was going to go down in infamy.

So anyways, the U2 show. It sucked massive balls. Let’s try to dissect this one by one. They played songs mostly off their last three records. They constantly felt the need to act like they care about worldly matters. The gave these embarrassing shout-outs to Oprah, Kanye, Bob Geldof et al.. Jay-Z’s had this ridiculous verse in Sunday Bloody Sunday. Bono sang In A Little While to a groupie he picked out of the crowd. Larry Mullen Jnr.’s  wore strap-on bongos. The stage made me feel at least a billion metres from anything going on. I couldn’t tell how the band sounded or looked or even if they felt comfortable on stage, because the stage swallowed them whole.

I mean what was the point? This constant need to make things “bigger” and “better” is neither succeeding at the stated goal of providing a decent show for their fans, nor at the actual goal of distracting us from a decade’s worth of shit releases. Sure “The Claw” is an architectual marvel, but at best it hurts the neck to constantly looking at it and at worse it’s a poorly-designed eyesore that doesn’t do a single thing to improve the viewing experience. During their Vertigo tour, they had somehow made the entire place feel at once big stadium party and intimate at once. They got the whole stadium rock thing right; they played with both excess and subtlety (Or maybe me, at 16 year of age, was too young to notice that I was crap then as well).

Why couldn’t they just stick with that? Why even do these “big” shows anyway? To show off to your celebrity friends? Because about 90% of the crowd - the part that consider going to this and the Powderfinger Farewell Tour to be “supporting the live music scene” - would be happy with anything you give them. Stick yourselves on a stage, put a scene behind you that shows nothing but whatever you are doing and play the fuck out of your good material. In fact, book the Annandale Hotel out for a month and show us what you’ve got on a sticky pub stage, where the threat of being glassed by unappreciative fans is as real as your business plans to exploit poverty as a marketing tool.

At least they did the Batman Forever Song.

Muse, Acer Arena, 9th December 2010

This was the third time I saw Muse this year, which is kind of awkward. I really, really didn’t like their last album The Resistance, Black Holes and Revelations was more my thing when I was 16 and I wasn’t keen to go through the paces of this all again.

The problem with Stadium Rock is that it all feels the same after a while. It’s take some real extravagance or the type of patience only fangirl-like devotion can give you to sit through any more than 45 minutes of the stuff. Otherwise, you want to shoot yourself.

Luckily Muse have enough of both the extravagance and the fangirls (the crowd was young, so very young) to satisfy both criteria. Hell, they even played Citizen Erased, arguably their best song after The Small Print, which made me go all fangirly. 

One thing Matt Bellamy and Co. should learn, however, is that they have little to no skill in the classical, techno and synth-pop genres. And of their successes in this area are flukes. It shows when the crowd goes wild more for mid-song jams than for Undisclosed Desires, which is the worst excuse for anyone to have a keytar ever, or any of those other annoying piano ditties they’re recently written. More Hysteria/Stockholm Syndrome please.

For the review I wrote for The Dwarf, click here.

P.S.: Biffy Clyro were okay but the sound mix hurt my ears so I left halfway through to get churros and a coke. They had a weird guy in a business suit dancing and playing rhythm guitar for them, though. Made no sense. Everyone clapped politely. The end.

keflex:

albertinho:

saimagery replied to your post: You do not like the Tame Impala ? Oh why is that ?

Yeah, but if we applied that logic to music critics, there’d be about three left. Tame Impala aren’t hurting anyone. Let’s attack Far East Movement and blow them up like a C4.

That last line everyone. Gold. Fucking gold.

While distracting people from valid criticisms is all well & good, the criticism is still valid. By your logic, I don’t need Nevermind because I have Doolittle and Zen Arcade. I don’t need Since I Left You because I have Endtroducing and The Three EPs. I don’t need The Pipettes because I have The Ronettes and Girls Aloud.

Seriously, I don’t get it. One concept can be broken into two existing ones, and therefore it has no purpose existing. Fuck.

As we discussed, to address the critique directly, then: it’s not so much the rationale alone but the sentiment Tame Impala draws. The fact that all I want to do after listening to Tame Impala is listen to the two bands that both precede and sound like them instead of listen to more Tame Impala or maybe seek out music of similar quality shows that they are much like what KISS is to glam rock: nothing more than a gateway band.

Damon Albarn - I Need A Gun

In 2003, Damon Albarn released a very limited vinyl pressing of tracks he recorded in hotel rooms during Blur’s Think Tank tour. Democrazy sounded more bedroom musician than any of his previous works (or any of his works to date) and was panned upon release for being just that.

The album itself is a collector’s item now; a quick eBay search brings up some ridiculous figures for some mint copies. But the tracks themselves are almost Nostradamus-like in the progress Albarn made as a musician since its release. The above track, for example, was later tweaked into the Gorillaz hit Dirty Harry.

I’m yet to give the Gorillaz new album The Fall a proper listen but it’ll be strange trying not to compare it to Democrazy. Both were spur of the moment ideas created during touring and released frantically, at the end of the day.

Would be good to know what apps Albarn used on his iPad, though…

The Hottest 100 is fucking predictable

So here is what I believe will end up in the Top 10, with reasons:

1. Cee Lo Green - Fuck/Forget You I don’t I know a person who doesn’t know this song. My mum knows this song and sings along. My sister sings along. My friends sing along. Guys who think they are superior to me because they know the entire back catalog of Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti sing along. They had the uncensored version playing in Westfield Bondi Junction the other day. The placed was packed with Christmas shoppers. People weren’t complaining and threatening to call Channel 7 about this. No. They were mouthing along. Shoe-in.
2. Yolanda Be Cool - We No Speak Americano Every time I pass or enter a nightclub I hear either this or Barbra Steisand. This year’s Parlez Vous Francais.
3. Birds of Tokyo - Plans I swear a year ago this band was playing mid-afternoon sets at regional festivals and doing video interviews with me. Their success is testament to the fact I know this song exists. Also it’s kinda okay #losingindiecred
4. Ducksauce - Barbra Steisand See No. 2
5. A&J Stone - Big Jet Plane One of the most boring songs of all time but I guess the masses think it’s okay because it’s all about the imagery of laying in grass with your summer dress taking polaroids of things
6. King of Leon - Radioactive Every vote for this song will actually be for Sex On Fire.
7. Washington - Sunday Best See No. 5, but replace “laying in grass” with “dancing awkwardly”
8. Kanye West - Runaway In terms of the music world as a whole, looking past the releases this year, Kanye West is challenged only by the Glee Cast for MVP Of The Year. Votes for this song will be more for Kanye himself than for Kanye’s music.
9. Tame Impala - Solitude is Bliss Two reasons: 1. They’re the new Wolfmother in which they’re the Aussie act getting credible reviews overseas. 2. Channel V uses this song as their ID music
10. Arcade Fire - The Suburbs JJJ listeners like to pretend they like good music. If history serves us correctly, this position is taken by whoever was the most “critically praised” or “obscure” artist to be loved ironically by JJJ Listeners (Daft Punk, Soko and Gotye have all taken No. 10 before)

And for the fun of it…

100. Big Boi - Shutterbug One of my favourites of the year and it only gets 100 D:

If you are up for it, you can enter the FL forum competition that inspired this post. The winner gets a decently sized CD pack and bragging rights to being better than a music forum (the latter is not that hard tbh). Likewise, if you want to do the whole democratic thing and place one foot forward towards proving me wrong, click here.

"We toured with U2 on their Zooropa Tour. We knew we had to do something big. So we hung a Klansmen from a noose atop of the stage. They let us. They helped us hoist it up."

Chuck D of Public Enemy, just then

Great interview, or GREATEST INTERVIEW?

And another unpopular opinion…

I’m surprised Justin Bieber, a child who may as well be the most successful merger between the Internet and Corporate American Music this year (Lady Gaga, while a better example, was really 2009’s news) and a sign traditional models of moneymaking in the mainstream recording world are still viable, was snubbed. I know TIME got shat on by The Onion when giving Taylor Swift her fifteen minutes of faux-credibility, but isn’t this award about someone who has affected the way we see the world over the past 12 months more than any other?

Sure he wouldn’t have won the whole deal. But still, this kid caused Twitter to invest in a whole new server devoted entirely to him. Who can say that about themselves? “Hey, I made the fifth-biggest website on the planet expand to contain me.”

lenier:

I had to do this.

IN WHICH ALBERT SANTOS DISAGREES: You know, just because someone embodies the basics of free speech and the Internet’s true purpose and is “fighting the good fight” for us all despite how morally complex he may or may not be, it doesn’t make him better than the guy who over the course of 5 years reinvented not only the Internet but the way we interact with people to serve his own needs and got all of us eating out of his hands in the process. You want to know the last time I got someone’s number BEFORE getting someone’s facebook, upon first contact? I can’t remember. It’s been that fucking long. I know a total of two people who don’t have facebook. One is my brother-in-law and he technically doesn’t count as he runs a business account. I found out my brother was engaged via facebook. My friends have outed themselves on facebook. This all makes you cringe but if you were honest with yourself you’d have just as many experiences. And by “honest” I mean “took note of all the subconscious shit that you do via that website already”.

tl;dr The idea of protesting trans fats is all well and good but you still eat at McDonalds. Zuckerberg deserved it for creating the Internet’s Fast Food.

With breast cancer and now child abuse solved, I offer facebook some ideas for future causes it can eliminate and how it can be done:

• Starving your Farmville account for agricultural issue awareness
• Posting pictures of your most respected female for violence against women awareness
• Posting pictures of your hair for cancer awareness. Because people getting treated for cancer have no hair, right?
• Quoting Lindsay Lohan films in your status update for awareness on substance abuse
• Tagging your friends in a picture of that douche from The Mummy for bullying awareness (because no-one likes getting tagged as a jerkface, geddit?)
• Making peace with everyone in Mafia Wars for anti-war awareness
• Making only vegetable-related meals in Restaurant City for veganism awareness
• Ignoring people on all social networks until they donate one million dollars to Alicia Keys for AIDS awareness. Wait, this doesn’t make any sense at all.
• Devoting an entire Sunday morning to posting albums of pictures of what you do instead of getting drunk for binge drinking and alcoholism awareness. This one is great because facebook walls will be infiltrated by pictures of nothing.
• Making a Starcraft-related status update for Korean Conflict Awareness.
• Making a status update about where you last ate for obesity awareness
• Only updating your profile whilst on the toilet for bowel cancer awareness (Though I’m sure everyone already does this so we’re already on our way guys!)
• Saying yet another pointless thing supporting Julian Assange unanimously to support victims of rape allegations that actually have quite some backing behind them and kinda prove the guy is actually a rapist O WAIT!
• Deleting your facebook completely if you fall for any of these including those already carried out, for stupidity awareness.

Something that we all need to admit now

The films look timeless, are perfectly cast and based on some of the greatest young adult fiction pieces of all time.

But the Harry Potter film series, as individual films, don’t work because unless you’ve read all of the books beforehand and can remember the major (and sometimes minor) details of the prior films, you have no fucking clue what’s going on half the time.

We can’t see this now because at the moment to us (Gen Y, I’m talking about here) reciting the tales of the Wizarding World comes more naturally than riding a bike. But even Roger Ebert has pointed this out already and it’s a fair point; especially when a lot of the last few movies has been spent dealing with complex histories and intricate magical customs.

It’ll be an inevitably sad day for all of us when we start looking back at this series decades from now and wondering what the hell is going on. We’ll blame ourselves then, but let’s save ourselves the trouble now and blame the producers while we still can.

Watching Crowded House last weekend was more a sentimental exercise for my emotions than an actual show I could “enjoy”. Not to say it wasn’t great, I’ll get onto that later. But the fact remains that I’ve attached so many emotionally heavy ideals and memories around their music it kind of makes it hard for me to distinguish between Neil Finn the Musician and Neil Finn the Surrogate Father.

The feeling is definitely cliched, conceited even, but it ran through my head endlessly as I was at this show. I’ll save you the recounts of harsh moments but Crowded House being at least the implied impetus for survival during those times is a running theme ever since I was introduced to the band at age 13. I sang along to every word like it was a gospel recital, the last stages before confirmation into a religion that may have formed more of who I am than the actual one I had been baptized in.

I think what defined this show though, for me, was that unlike some bands who have written life-changing music (sup Smashing Pumpkins), Crowded House were both comfortable with their place in music lexicon and willing to escape the clutches of their greatest hits. I didn’t mind when I Feel Possessed or Four Seasons In One Day were not played, when an extra-long jam session broke out during Private Universe or when new song after new song ended up on the setlist because it lacked any sense of spite between band, audience and themselves to the music made. Everything was done as a soft introduction, or re-introduction in some cases, instead of a forced push.

Was this one of the best gigs I’ve ever been to? It’s definitely one of the better ones, and while there were some objective negatives (Neil saying you can’t sing a song than playing it perfectly is just showing off), but it’s hard to judge from where I am with these guys. I’m inclined to say no, only because I want to remove myself from the judging panel entirely in this case. And maybe that’s what’s brought them their place in Australian/New Zealand cultural canon; their ability to speak so deeply with the listener that they forgo the usual critical and commercial masquerade.

In other news, I missed Oh Mercy but I’m pretty sure they’ve played every support gig ever for everyone so good on them for that. Also this crowd had an average age about twice that of your usual OAF show.