TOM FRANCIS
REGRETS THIS ALREADY

I Eat What I Slaughter

Hot Chip, who sound like a fifties phrase for expressing pleasure at your current situation, are kind of exciting. I’m listening to a song from their latest right now, one I’ve listened to maybe five times before, and I just caught myself flicking through my Firefox tabs to see if one was auto-playing something else underneath because it sounds so completely unhinged.

Oh wait, actually one of them was: I forgot I fired up Last.fm to see if this same track was on there in full, and it is. Every post a rollercoaster!

The best I can do for a genre is glitch pop – it’s bouncy and infectious, but frequently revolves around some catastrophic audio error that ought to grate but doesn’t. This track, Shake A Fist, just outright breaks halfway through, then explodes, then spends the next few minutes trying to pick the original melody back up out of the shrapnel. Once it does, the shakey reassembly of that simple tune layered over the aftershock of its bizarre phase shift is weirdly comforting, like an old friend returned.

This is not a musical convention I’m familiar with, so as I say, it’s kind of exciting. Even in the fairly straightfoward opening track, the key word of the chorus “weather” is chopped into progressively looping chunks, so his voice stutters the length of the word like a backfiring hatchback on a traintrack. His voice is kind of whimpy, too, so it jars compellingly with the gusty things they do with it.

I get to give you quite a lot to go on if you’re interested in Made In The Dark (which sounds to me like a polite way of saying “ugly”), because although Fluxblog no longer carries Shake A Fist (though his write-up is still great), Last.fm has it to stream, I’ve uploaded Bendable Poseable (my favourite, above), and someone on YouTube has already done precisely what I was going to do: recorded himself Audiosurfing the opening track, Out At The Pictures. “The Pictures” is olde English for cinema.

He’s playing it on a harder mode than I would dare and doing a lot better than I would, but he still screws it up twice. I don’t really like the harder modes of Audiosurf – the stress of getting overwhelmed interrupts your attunement to the song, which for me is the whole point. So I’m glad this dude beat me to it. Thank you, er, LethaLImpuLse? It seems like every time I have to address a YouTube poster by name on James these days I have to precede it with a nervous hesitation.

Audiosurfing The Shipping News

The B rides the least exciting soundscapes he can find, including our own PCG podcast and Yahtzee’s Zero Punctuation.

On Rock

Okay, you know – perhaps you don’t – how I hate all console games and don’t even really play Guitar Hero unless someone makes me? And how I’m more resistent to SingStar than anyone who isn’t Scottish? I am now officially excited about Rock Band. From Wikipedia’s soundtrack list:

The New Pornographers – The Electric Version
Jet – Are You Gonna Be My Girl

So Electric Version is kind of a weird choice since it’s probably the worst song they’ve ever done, but that’s still better than pretty much everything else the human race will ever achieve. The New freaking Pornographers are in a mainstream game! I think this is the first time I’ve ever been able to check both the “Games” and “Music” categories in my WordPress dashboard.

The Jet song is just hott, and it takes a lot to make me spell that with two t’s. If it had Maxi Geil’s Makin’ Love In The Sunshine I would buy the goddamn console for it. And a TV.

Weirdly, You’ve Been Tanned – Suspicious For The Winter

This is mostly about the new Architecture in Helsinki, so I’ll get the other new albums out of the way quickly:

Rilo Kiley – Under The Blacklight: Okay, well this album has a statutory rape apologist song on it, so that’s hardly fair to the others in this round-up. It’s called 15, and you can pretty much take it from there. The trouble is, like all Rilo Kiley songs with slightly unpalettable lyrics, it’s incredibly good. It makes me worry about what Jenny Lewis could convince me of if she sang it well enough, because the “only, only, only fifteen” refrain here is so sweetly intoned that you find yourself thinking “Yeah, how could he have known?” Next up: The Manslaughter Blues.

There’s masses to love about Blacklight, and somehow its biggest appeal is that much of it doesn’t sound like Rilo Kiley. More like a Rilo Kiley inflection on a few of their favourite bands. I’m not well-listened enough to name any, but Give A Little Love sounds like nothing else on this or any other of their albums. And Silver Lining has a soulfulness that is at once theirs and also teasingly someone else’s.

The Go! Team – Proof of Youth: Now that I’ve given it a fighting chance, their second album has stopped irritating me and switched to just being slightly weak and noxious and flat, like week-old coke. The title’s unfortunate – they sound more tired and strained than on Thunder, and there’s just less life in the output. This album’s Bottle Rocket is clearly the jubilant Wrath of Marcie, and Universal Speech has the same electrified schoolyard chant feel of The Power Is On. But neither really recapture the velocity or glee of the first album for me. Grip Like A Vice and Flashlight Fight are just trash; dour self-aggrandising recited with no hint of irony or fun.

Architecture in Helsinki – Places Like This: I haven’t listened to an album on such a relentless repeat since Come On Feel The Illinoise. This has nothing to do with that, and it’s a terrible point of comparison, but I was attempting to illustrate the point that this is awesome. It’s what happens when the geeky indie kids try to be cool, when a huge band forget to bench anyone, and a group with more styles than songs forget to pick one. And like Lister’s triple fried-egg butty with chilli sauce and chutney, the wrongness of the ingredients is what makes it so right.

Like It Or Not explodes into what feels suspiciously like ska, Feather in a Baseball Cap’s descending synth-beep intro is almost seek, and Hold Music is outright sexy. These are (mostly) the same guys who did the chocolate-sweet What’s In Store and the kitten-soft Like A Call, but something’s happened to them. But if you’ve never subconsciously wanted the sweet-voiced girl from Architecture in Helsinki to do a song that calls for her to sing “Give it to me, baby give it to me,” a lot, you’re a better or less imaginative man than I.

The shift does feel like the logical combination of the opposite directions Frenchy I’m Faking and Do The Whirlwind hinted at, and in fact Heart It Races pulls a strand directly from the latter and writes a new song around it. That would be a problem if it wasn’t so much better: electric with force, bristling with hooks and almost offensively quirky. I’ve heard people say the exact opposite, and I just can’t work out what these people are doing with their ears. It doesn’t seem like this sound could possibly fail to tingle the brain if it gets there.

They can’t even manage every album’s Obligatory Three Boring Tracks, screwing it up each time by adding a ridiculous twist like the “Ay yah yah, woo woo!” chant toward the end of Lazy (Lazy), and livening it up irreparably.

Their demented frontman has always let his vocal affectations get the better of him at their songs’ most energetic twists, but here it’s easier to look at it the other way around: in Places’ quietest moments, he sometimes slips back into what could almost pass for a normal human voice. By the spastic climax of album highlight Debbie, the sounds he’s making seem like they wouldn’t fit through a mouth. It irritated me at first, but now I can’t see why I ever liked them without it. Getting carried away and sounding silly is what Architecture in Helsinki is.

Oh, scores? B, C, A; 8, 5, 9.

Quickly

Before it vanishes from the dirty little corner of cyberspace that these legally questionable – but morally laudable – offerings dwell in, you must hear the latest Sissy Wish track on Fluxblog. Usually it takes me so long to realise how much I like a Fluxblog track that it’s gone offline by the time I’m ready to recommend it, but this one’s instantly great. I’d say more, but the truth is I’m still kind of a musical retard.

I don’t have the language to talk meaningfully about what songs are like or what’s good about them, and I frequently have to listen to something ten times or more before I even know if I like it, let alone how much. This is why people like Matthew Perpetua know I’m going to like something even before I do, and why my favourite tracks on a given album are only just now starting to line up with those of the person who recommended it to me five years ago.

I need to know stuff like, what’s the word for the rhythmic structure in the chorus to Yayaya? There’s something in the way she sings that string of nonsense that lets you know she’s just leading into the real line, and something about the systematic structure of the latter half of the couplet that leads logically up to the rhyme, even if you can’t make out the words. It’s logical to the extent that if you’d paused the chorus halfway through the first time I heard it, I’d still be able to hum the next bit for you. And I don’t know how, or why, or what you call that.

This is also why I get confused and scared when people I normally agree with suddenly hate a band like The National, who seem to be a) great and b) just like all the other awesome stuff we both like. I start to think it’s just been coincidence that our tastes line up a lot, and really they’re appreciating this stuff on a higher intellectual level I don’t understand, and I’ve just fallen for some crass commercial knock-off because I’m too stupid to know the difference.

The awful truth is that I only ever liked this artful, worthy stuff by smart, emotionally fractured geniuses because it sounded pretty and didn’t irritate me. And, of course, because not many people had heard of it.

Cloak And Tagger

I’ve had this vision for how music should be played in the future for ages now: tagged and sorted by mood, style, and speed. You’d click a few words – ‘fast’, ‘instrumental’, ‘electronic’ – and a playlist would be auto-generated from a randomised selection of tracks fitting all three criteria, weighted towards highest-rated and newest. Then you’d chuck it on your MP3 player and cycle downhill to work. Or I would.

I decided that since we’re already pretty much in the future, there must be something out there that already did this. The trouble is that searching for anything to do with tags and anything to do with media players gets you a billion results about ID3 tags, even if you add a “-id3”. Results are still talking about ID3 tags, they’re just not calling them that.

But I remembered Tony saying Winamp’s media library was really good. I’d already tried it, shortly after he said that, and hated it, since I didn’t really have a use for a media library beyond the simple big playlist I already have. And it doesn’t support custom tagging in the way I describe. But since I do already use Winamp for everything – and I just found a new skin that makes it look like the future – it couldn’t hurt to fiddle around and see how close I could get.

Very close indeed, turns out to be the answer. I can do all of what I mention above except the selection ‘weighting’. I can make the list only things with a rating of three or higher, or only things two weeks old or newer, but not a random mix weighted towards those things. Essentially I need a biased shuffle, and I don’t know of anything that can do that.

But custom tagging can be done, in a stupid sort of way. Winamp is nice enough to let you create your own custom ‘views’ – essentially filters for your music library. The default ones are things like “Never played”, and you can then drag everything that comes up in that View to the Playlist section and it’ll make a playlist of them. What you can do with the custom views is to specify that you only want tracks whose Comment field (a part of the ID3 tag) mentions ‘fast’ and ‘electronic’ and ‘instrumental’. Then instead of having an external tagging system that your media player would have to keep track of itself, you write your tags however you like in the Comment field, and they’ll stay with the file if you ever do change media players.

The stupid bit is that you have to create a new ‘view’ for each combination of tags you want to filter by, so it’s a few steps rather than just clicking a word. If anyone knows of anything that can do this better, do share.

I’m not trying to deconstruct my entire music collection into Pandora-like musical properties, I’m trying for a more teleological approach. That is, they’re tagged after what I might want to use them for. So there’s no “mild tonal syncopation” tag, because I’m rarely specifically in the mood for mild tonal syncopation, but there is a “wistful” one. There’s a “chilled” one for working to, and a “cool” one for playing games I’m good at to. Combinations thereof create a smaller playlist that more specifically nails the mood you want from the music, and you can even sort by ‘Times Played’ and select the fifty you’ve heard least often.

Yes, the theme for this week is Scientifically Quantifying Art. Because you can. The rest of the week I’ll be away quantifying a big chunk of art in a great deal of detail, and I look forward to not being able to tell you about it when I get back.

New-Album Deathmatch

Masses of new stuff by great people out now, so much that one might feasibly need them to be listed and detailed in ascending order of greatness. Now with links to pretty much everything! And prettier!

Ted Leo – Living With The Living

This one isn’t actually great, it’s mildly okay. The reggae-style track I linked a while back (I can’t do so again, it’s been taken down) is so sumptuously mad that everything else on the album sound frustratingly structureless and unremarkable. A couple have wonderful moments – the chorus refrain in Army Bound, the tightly rhyming lyrics of Colleen, the steady sunny riff of Costa Brava, and the anthemic outtro of the okay-pretty-good Lost Brigade – but none hold together as a full and perfect pop song the way Me And Mia, Walking To Do and Where Have All The Rude Boys Gone did. I find myself listening to Unwanted Things more often than every other song combined. :(

Score: (

Low – Drums And Guns (streaming MP3 and video, ‘Breaker’)

This is great, but coming after the dazzlingly great The Great Destroyer, seems profoundly less great than it ought to. The main reason for that is that it’s about the war, and therefore unspeakably bleak, slow and grim. The other main reason for it is utterly bizarre: all the vocals come entirely from the right-hand channel. This makes it completely horrible to listen to on headphones, and I’d assume there was something wrong with my copy if I hadn’t also listened to someone else’s. It’s feels like you’ve got Swimming Ear, which certainly adds to the atmosphere of unease, but hardly captures the full impact of being shot to death on a baking hot oil field. And it’s really just annoying.

I have plenty of room in my heart for bleak, and Low do it every bit as well as Godspeed, You Black Emperor! (oem), but Low do every mood as well as its undisputed masters. And when they do pop-put-through-the-meat-grinder, as they did on Destroyer, they’re like nothing else on Earth.

Score: \

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah – Some Loud Thunder (mp3s here and here)

Most people find the CYHSY guy’s voice annoying, including a lot of their biggest fans. I think I do, in fact. It’s just incredibly addictive, even when it’s annoying you, like tapping a pen against the desk. It seems to scratch some phantom itch that can never quite be sated, so you never quite get your fill of it. It’s hoarse, scraping, often tuneless, but I think I would need to take up smoking if I had to stop listening to it.

The new album’s nuts. I love it. I find Yankee Go Home annoying in a non-addictive way (slightly cloying), but elsewhere the honking, rattling, sing-song mess of Satan Said Dance, the conversational rhythm of Mother Won’t You Keep The Castles In The Air And Burning? (oqm, and a great title), and the Fridmannesque crackling booms of Emily Jean Stock all do something to my brain that I find most agreeable. In fact, those fuzzy booming kick-drums sounded so Fridmannesque that I looked it up, and sure enough, the album was produced by Dave Fridmann. Ha! He’s the guy who made the Flaming Lips’ Soft Bulletin sound so good, but deserves far more of your respect for making The Delgados’ career highlight The Great Eastern what it was.

Score: Fridmannesque

Modest Mouse – We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank (video, ‘Dashboard’)

I sense that a lot of Mouse fans were nervous that their uncharacteristically optimistic single Float On had become such a hit, because it’s the angst and bile we love them for. I wasn’t, I loved Float On, I love it when grouchy people find something they can’t help but smile at, but even I’m kind of glad that Dead has plenty of spite to go around. The opening of March Into The Sea is every bit as spittle-flickingly violent as the angriest moments of Cowboy Dan, and the “Ah-ha-ha”s are just barely controlled. Elsewhere vocalist Brock sounds like he’s about to lose control even on the “Shake-shake-shake-shake-shake” of the otherwise upbeat Missed The Boat, and that’s the vital thing. It’s that ill-concealed energy that makes Modest Mouse so cathartic to listen to, whether it’s exultant or vitriolic, and Dead simmers with it throughout.

Feist – The Reminder

I’m repeatedly appalled at how many people don’t know Feist. I came by her via an unconventional channel – I think it was the only time ace tech blog Waxy.org took a break from talking about social web stuff or his son to mention music, and link the video for the extraordinary Mushaboom. You’ll probably be told at some point in your life that she’s from Broken Social Scene, which is offputting (they’re okay) and misleading. She shares nothing musically with them, she’s somewhere between Cat Power and Beth Orton.

The rest of her first album wasn’t anything like as juicy as that wild nonsense, but the new one is triumphant throughout. Even some of the tracks that seem understated on first listen – Limit To Your Love; Past In Present; My Moon, My Man (video) – turn out to be full of fantastic moments you didn’t notice (how did I ever miss the “Whoa-wha-who!”s in the former?). And when she wears it on her sleeve, as she does on the fleeting-but-ecstatic One Two Three Four (video), it’s impossible not to succumb to the virulently infectious joy.

It might not be the revelation that The Greatest was for Cat Power, but it shows the same sudden confidence, and it’s just as satisfying for it. Quite apart from actually shouting “Ha!” in the middle of the lovably fearless I Feel It All, she takes on the old Nina Simone song See-Line Woman, wryly retitles it to Sea-Lion Woman (video), then proceeds to do such a staggering reworking of it that you’re left wondering what the hell the point of the original was. I couldn’t tell you with regular words what happens when she stops singing for the second time in this song, but something like ‘climactoplectic’ would be in the ballpark.

Only a couple of songs are too ponderous for their own good – Intuition and So Sorry don’t give you much reason to go back to them – but more often she finds a way to make the sparse remarkable. The soulful Brandy Alexander is soothing where it ought to be boring, Honey Honey gets indecent mileage out of a simple vocal filter elegantly used, and even The Park’s 16-bit mono atmosphere sounds inexplicably sunny. The only other criticism I could possibly level is that, when I noticed the album playing in a Seattle Starbucks, acknowledging it to the barrista failed to get me into the kind of brilliant conversation I’ve become accustomed to having with beautiful strangers in America. Her friend had put it on. She had thought it was Bjork at first. And much as I love Bjork, I could no longer feign interest.

Score: Best

 

Blonde Redhead – 23: like it.

Sondre Lerche – Phantom Punch: don’t like it.

The Bird And The Bee – The Bird And The Bee: fuck!

 

Arcade Fire – Neon Bible
Bloc Party – Weekend In The City
They’re both fine, if you like stuff that’s fine, rather than, say, awesome. They’re good news for people who like okay music.

 

Peter, Bjorn And John – Writer’s Block
These guys are hugely exciting, and I have no excuse for not having noticed them for the first five or six years of their existence. They did come up occasionally on Joy’s podcast, but there was usually something more immediately shiny like The Sounds or PAS/CAL to distract me. They’re exciting because the many fantastic tracks on this album are all fantastic in completely different ways. That icy whistle of Young Folks (video) is pulling Groove Armada’s trick of hanging a whole song on a single, carefree hook, and still managing to make it sound vital and fresh. The muffled cathedral echo of the vocals on Chills is as serene as Readymade at their best. And Up Against The Wall’s steadily mounting drone sounds like a homage to American Analogue Set.

I guess what I’ve ended up saying here is that they’re exciting because they sound like everybody else, but that’s obviously not it. The sleepy vocals (all three of them) set them apart, as the one consistent thread throughout, and it’s hearing them against such fresh backdrops each time that make it work.

 

Maxi Geil And Playcolt – Making Love In The Sunshine
Hottest song ever. It might be too sharply written to be truly romantic – “This kind of love is like the Red Brigade / What was so scary once is now a little bit quaint” – but even the call-and-response bit just sounds like violent, wild sex. It helps that it’s about violent, wild sex, but it’s more a case of the music being expertly crafted around the subject matter than any kind of inference on the part of the listener. The crescendo itself actually makes things happen to me that aren’t supposed to happen from just listening to something.

Wild Beasts – Brave Bulging Bouyant Clairvoyants
I’ve talked about this here before, so I won’t again, but in case anyone missed it: imagine if Scooby Doo could sing, and sing so beautifully that a little piece of you died each time you heard it. That is the Wild Beasts.

Siobhan Donaghy – So You Say (mp3)
The chorus in this blares, like they switched a whole other set of speakers on. It seems to come from somewhere else entirely, without stopping coming from the regular place, by which I mean to say that it is loud and great and all over the place. I was listening to it on my MP3 player on the way back from Al’s wedding, in the car, admittedly still slightly drunk from the previous night, and found myself almost unable to believe that no-one else in the car was hearing it full-volume when it hit the “Don’t say a thing about me” line.

All three of these found on Fluxblog, the best thing to happen to music since John Peel.

Whoa

There’s new Low, new Ted Leo and new Modest Mouse, and all of them got As from The Onion? Why was I not informed?

I don’t often think of Low when I’m asked my favourite bands, but I really should. They’re probably third or fourth, something completely ridiculous like that. Their last, The Great Destroyer, is one of the most perfect albums ever recorded, up there with Come On Feel The Illinoise and The Greatest.

Seriously, though, is there a way I can be informed of this stuff? Is there some music release-tracking site out there where I can subscribe to each of the bands I like as an RSS feed, to be notified each time they release something? It seems like something Amazon, if no-one else, ought to do.

I Don’t Know About You Folks

I’m ill, in the way where nothing seems real. I’m not sure what to do about it, because I was already doing everything I normally do to recover from illness when I became ill – in fact, the former followed from the latter so directly that it’s hard not to assume they’re causally connected. I’m getting more sleep than at any point in the last five years, getting more than my RDA of every vitamin known to man, eating actual food more than twice a day, and keeping warm at all times – not hard because it’s unseasonably warm anyway. I’m at a loss, body. What do you want from me?

I hate getting more than seven hours’ sleep, too. Apart from giving up a chunk of precious consciousness-time, and waking up more tired than if I’d had four hours, my brain spends all its REM-sleep time trying to think of the worst possible things that could happen, then informing me very vividly that they all have. Last night I got cancer, and had huge, dark lesions all over my face, then I was attacked by spiders. Thanks, brain! That was a fun nine hours! The physical tortures are actually the highlights: the rest of the time my subconscious invents new mental and emotional traumas, and these are much, much less enjoyable than being repeatedly stabbed then flayed.

Being ill doesn’t make the nightmares any worse, but the groggy detachment from reailty makes them harder to shake in the land of the conscious. It wasn’t until I dressed this morning and caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror that I realised I wasn’t mutilated and terminally ill. Anyway, all that is by way of explaining why this has lain dormant all week; I don’t like wasting your brainspace with this stuff and it’s hard to concentrate on anything else. Instead, now that I’ve done so anyway, I’ll append a less gloomy note to compensate.

(A Man’s Gotta Know His Limitations) Briggs, from the new Robyn Hitchcock album, is wonderful, and would be even if I didn’t have a thing for short-titled songs with massive parentheses. It talks about “Riding in [Briggs’] car in San Fransisco” and later addresses a girl called Mel, all of which sounded very specific and not the kind of thing you make up for rhymes, to me, so I decided the song must have an interesting origin in someone Hitchcock knew. I was a imagining a couple, Briggs and Mel, the former hot-tempered but well-meaning, the latter confused and isolated by his erratic behaviour. It turns out I may have been over-romanticising a little: Briggs is the villain in Magnum Force, a Dirty Harry film Hitchcock kept catching half of on TV.

He doesn’t particularly like the film, it’s presumably just the kind of thing that creeps into your head when song-writing. “A man’s gotta know his limitations” is Clint Eastwood’s catch-phrase in it, and the next line in the song “Or else he will just explode” refers to the final scene, in which Briggs – a corrupt official – is killed by a car-bomb Eastwood planted. For some reason Clint then utters his catch-phrase, although it’s not clear which limitation Briggs should have been aware of: inability to detect car-bombs? I haven’t seen the film, so I still don’t know who Mel is. Other songs inspired by films the songwriter doesn’t really care one way or the other about: one of Miss Black America’s, I think it’s Infinite Chinese Box. Apparently the guy was watching a film, then suddenly decided to stop and write a song about how he thought it was going to end, instead of watching it to find out. I applaud this kind of behaviour.

A Weak Russian Sunset

It’s Sunday night, but I’m on holiday! I am spared that awful Sunday night feeling, somehow so much worse than Monday morning, when I realise that I actually like my job. I wasted the first two days of my holiday sleeping ten hours a night to recover from my three-week binge of sub-five-hour nights and an inescapable drowning feeling. The only upside of that sorry cycle is that I get the wholly wonderful song Feather By Feather stuck in my head, by the increasingly wonderful Smog, largely thanks to the gallingly wonderful opening verse:

The reason I’m telling you of all people this is that losing an irreplacable chunk of the next day – particularly in winter – gives things a weird, sad atmosphere. I’m waking up to weak yellow sunsets, a beautiful but incredibly bleak light that seemed to last all day in Moscow. Hang in there a little longer, we’re approaching the point now. There’s a map in Battlefield 2142 set in Minsk, Belarus, and the sky texture captures this exact sight, light and feel magnificently. I find myself loading it up, alone, and flying a futuristic airlift craft to the top of a skyscraper to get out and admire the view. It’s built for forty-eight players, but the testers have stopped playing so there are no multiplayer games going on. Not that I’d want gunfire spoiling the mood.

By divine coincidence I only just this week realised how much I like Two Dots On A Map by the Russian Futurists, another gem from the Fluxblog mines. Not only does it have ‘Russian’ in the band name, but it’s also magnificent, majestic, sweeping and unbearably sad. I don’t know what the backing vocals are saying, but the last lines are:

I choose to hear “If we knew we were” as implying that we are, but aren’t facing it. Which is true, and awful.

I actually thought this mopey wistfulness might be a sign of age, but I just now found a text file on my hard drive describing exactly the same thing, written by me in 2002. So I’m just repeating myself, which is worse.

So… I think I was trying to lead in to the subject of game-music associations, which are brilliant. My favourites:

Half-Life 2 and The Great Destroyer, by Low: two of the best things about planet Earth released at the same time – it was a good November. To this day I’ve never actually listened to Low while playing Half-Life 2, because I like Half-Life 2’s in-game music, but I alternated between the two so reliably that the connection forged nonetheless, and now I can’t stop at those weathered, deserted seaside shacks overlooking the glassy sargasso without hearing the exultant Walk Into The Sea, nor whack that childless dangling tyre with a crowbar and not hum a few bars of California. This is another sad one, isn’t it?

System Shock 2 and Cobra And Phases Groop Play Voltage In The Milky Night, by Stereolab: ba-ba b’dow b’dah. Bubbly futuristic electro-pop played over paranoid dystopian futuristic action RPG. I subconsciously reconciled the two by identifying this album’s off-kilter jauntiness with the hollow optimisim of Xerxes’ pre-recorded broadcasts to the long-dead crew of the Von Braun. Good save, subconscious!

Deus Ex and Voodoo Wop, by Clinic: itchy stompy scary medical drone punk played over a nocturnal interactive conspiracy theory? Well, they’re both uneasy, inaccessible and dark.

Hitman: Blood Money and Deep Cuts, by The Knife: sheer coincidence, I assure you, that I got into these at the same time and that the last screenshot I posted of Hitman was of cutting someone deeply with a knife. There’s no connection between music and game beyond the violent overtones – The Knife aren’t even that sinister, a lot of the songs are upbeat or simmeringly sexy.

Yeah, so they’re a little sinister.

Too Zune

My MP3 player has finally, inevitably broken beyond repair. It’s stuck on record, it won’t stop recording everything, so it’s just what you want lying around the White House Counsel’s office. And in an odd twist, Apple’s recent MP3-player announcements were more appealing than Microsoft’s. I say odd because Microsoft and Apple are sort of like Churchill and Hitler to me: I wouldn’t want to hang out with either of them, but there’s “not nice” and then there’s the holocaust. I could never buy either, but I really like that Apple have made each of their models dramatically better in at least three ways each, and reduced the price. I always like it when a company goes further than strictly necessary to maximise sales.

Microsoft’s MP3 player, apart from looking like a seventies TV set (update! Or a complicated biscuit, as Tom puts it), is a festering hive of digital rights-management restrictions. It has the cool-sounding ability to wirelessly share tracks with other Zunes (sans PC), but restricts the sharee to three listens of the track before it’s deleted. To do that, it actually infects your music with its DRM chastity belt, even if it’s an MP3 you recorded your damn self. Having grown up with computers, I’m afraid I’m one of these techno-hippies who regard data as sacred. It seems fine to me to offer services like iTunes where you buy music with restrictions built in, but my stuff is sacrosanct. Your seventies TV has no idea what it is, where it came from and what I’m entitled to do with it.

So I somehow found room to be offended by that even though I didn’t want the feature and knew I wouldn’t buy one anyway. The core reason I can’t use a Zune or iPod is that both insist on their own evil infection of your machine. iTunes is the reason I don’t flinch when comparing Apple’s products to the holocaust. The Zune, like anything that wants to support Microsoft’s DRM stuff, uses the Media Transfer Protocol to talk to your PC. That means it isn’t a storage device you’re free to use as you please; everything you transfer to it has to go through Windows Media Player 10. This is disastrously unreliable, slow and restrictive. MTP will actually stop you from copying a file type that Windows Media Player doesn’t recognise to your player, even if the player itself specifically supports it. MTP devices show up in Explorer, and are mocked up to look like storage drives, but you’re restricted to the default view, your right-click options are taken away, and you can’t open files directly from the device. Explorer is about the only part of Windows that still almost works intuitively, though XP tried its level best to obfuscate it and mollycoddle new users into misunderstanding their system, and they’ve specifically crippled it to be less logical and usable with respect to MP3 players. I will enjoy watching you fail, Microsoft, even if it is to a greater evil.

Some brands pointedly boycott MTP, or at least pointedly include a UMS option – USB Mass Storage, an older protocol from the days when things were built to work rather than monitor and defy you. Sandisk’s Sansa players have had an aggressively anti-iPod campaign, and bragged about their ‘just works’ driverless storage device functionality, but they do lose marks for also supporting MTP as an alternate mode (“I’m clean, but also support herpes as an alternate mode”) and only supporting video in Quicktime format. Their contempt for Apple’s proprietry restrictiveness would ring truer if they hadn’t co-opted Apple’s own grossly inefficient, poor-quality, bloated, slow and disgusting QuickTime format. More admirably but more cumbersomely, bovine-sounding Cowon make UMS-only players, proudly support OGG (an open-source music format, more efficient than MP3), and have a ridiculous 35-hour battery life on their larger model. My favourite musical gadget site Anything But iPod specialise in alternatives, and are good about specifying MTP or UMS in their reviews. My hope is that Microsoft having their own player to pimp will mean they stop putting pressure on once-cool companies like iRiver and Creative to cripple their players with MSDRM-friendly FFS-inducing MTP, and that Anything But Zune launches soon.

Porn Shoes

What I love about Porn Shoes by The French is that almost nothing happens in it. It’s about a date, but describes only the moment at which the girl arrives. It’s completely unromantic – they’re not entirely into each other, and the guy’s feelings are neither idealised nor entirely boorish. It’s about small, normal emotions instead of soul-consuming love or crushing loss. The lyrics are plain, so it poeticises the affair solely with music, letting the electric blips and synth ebb suggest the mood and significance.

“I tried to place as many brand names in there as possible,” Hayman notes, “in the hope that it might get me advertising work.”

Not Lasting

“Last.fm is a service that records what you listen to, and then presents you with an array of interesting things based upon your tastes — artists you might like, users with similar taste, personalised radio streams, charts, and much more.”

I guess my only problems with it, at the moment, is that it doesn’t record what I listen to or present me with an array of interesting things based on my tastes – artists I might like, users with similar taste, personalised radio streams, charts, or anything else.

It’s installed two plugins – one for Winamp which Winamp doesn’t recognise and which doesn’t work, and one for Media Player which Media Player recognises but which doesn’t work. The only time it understands that I’m listening to anything at all is when I use their dedicated player, which doesn’t know what to play me because it doesn’t know what I like. When it finally did play something I liked, I discovered there’s no way to tell it I like a track once it’s finished playing. It knows I heard it, but all it seems able to do with this information is display that fact on my profile page.

What on earth is this thing? What does it actually do? I keep hearing it compared to Pandora, but the way Pandora works is that I tell it what I like, it plays me things it thinks I might like, and I tell it whether or not I do. So far every stage of that process appears to be impossible with Last.fm.

Pandora’s Checkbox

Because it ignores all social stigma and other people’s opinions, because it’s quite often right, and because I’m playing it on my speakers in the office, it’s choices are sometimes a little embarrassing. It’s like someone suddenly pointing at you and saying “Somewhere, deep down, you’d quite like the fucking Cranberries.” No matter how fast you skip it, everyone knows who that was, and that it was picked for a reason.

I fear Pandora’s ambitious experiment may be doomed by fickle human whims, though. I loathed the first song it played to me when I rediscovered it recently, and when I went to give it a thumbs down, discovered that I’d already given it a thumbs up the last time it came on. Mind you, it’s just started playing Duran Duran, and it does have the appropriate button for that.

New Ritual

It’s been a good month. I’ve spent most of it chronically exhausted from nightmare-induced sleep deprivation, ill, or feeling like I’m drowning in a treacle comprised of my own meaningless words, but still somehow a good month. Despite feeling like I’m getting nowhere with anything, I’ve written twenty-six pages of articles for the next issue to hit the shelves, and two of them have been the result of investigative digital tampering to acquire information no-one else has, something you could almost call journalism if it was about something serious. It wasn’t; it was about robotic aliens and death Gods; but that just made it more fun.

Now I’m sitting in my newly tidied room listening to the bluesy new Cat Power with my window open and bare feet, freezing slightly but enjoying the night air too much to do anything about it, and idly researching a link between avian flu and a fictional virus dreamed up last millenium.

I used to have a ritual, once I’d finished the disc each month, of stopping at Shakeaway for a carrot cake milkshake on the way back from delivering the masters to the postroom. Since I’m no longer a disc editor, I’m enstating a new ritual for when my work on an issue is done, based on a throwaway line by Amy Gardner from the West Wing:

Amy: I fought you, I lost, I went home, took a shower, had a drink. You know what I do when I win? Two drinks.

This month: two drinks!