TOM FRANCIS
REGRETS THIS ALREADY

Our Limbs Have Been Asleep

If you’ve been dissatisfied with any of the government whales you’ve been using lately, I can recommend the Freelance Whales. When an album starts with a song like this, you know you’re in for some pretty fucking gentle glockenspiel-banjo times.

[audio:https://www.pentadact.com/temp/FreelanceWhales-GeneratorFirstFloor.mp3]

The whole album is good, I got it from here.

A Minecraft Diary And My Black Ops Review

The first entry of a Minecraft diary I’m starting just went up on PC Gamer – it’s just a short one to start with, but this might turn into a long-running thing. It’s about playing with a sort of permanent death rule: if I die, I have to delete the whole world and everything in it, then start again from scratch in a new one. It’s also starting from when I first played the game, so I know virtually nothing about how it works. The next entry will go up first thing tomorrow, and it’ll probably be every other day from then on. Continued

The Year In Forty Photos

I won’t bore you with any kind of account of my year, but here are some photos I took during it. I guess I didn’t take all of them since I’m in some of them, but I don’t remember so good about those ones.

I’ve been working my way through Said the Gramophone’s 75 tracks of the year with an odd cocktail of revulsion and delight. Among the delight, this wonderful song by Vic Chesnutt. Often songs that aren’t about what they seem to be about never let you in on the twist – it was years before I realised Belle & Sebastian’s Century of Elvis was about a cat. Vic’s is from the school of “Two minutes in, just come out and say it.” Continued

I’ve Got Confessions To Make

The silence here lately has been down to a dangerous daily routine of falling asleep in front of Star Trek: The Next Generation, waking up at 5am and playing Prototype until work. Dangerous, but not unpleasant.

Prototype has caused me to break a mouse, and Star Trek has my brain quietly working on a master formula to generate Star Trek plots for Star Trek Online quests, and ways they could interact with a player-chosen crew. Continued

Lord I Just Don’t Care

I’ve been wondering when and how best to post something of Florence and the Machine‘s for a while, pretty much since I first heard them on Adam & Joe. I didn’t doubt it would be Dog Days, the exhaustingly energetic rollercoaster of a song I heard first, I was just waiting till they had something out for it to promote. I forgot that what they released could theoretically be better. They still don’t have an album, but this is Dog’s B-side: You’ve Got The Love. Continued

I No Longer Feel I Have To Be James Dean

Since John Peel died, it’s gone back to being a weird exprience to hear something on the radio and like it. But Five Years’ Time has been forcefully cheering up this miserable British weekend. It’s by Noah And The Whale, who I am hesitant to look up. It works perfectly this once, but I’m pretty sure you can’t get more twee than this without a special permit.

Weltpolizei

Fluxblog’s just totally saved my ass for slacking on Music Week by posting the exact same Alphabeat song I was going to write about tomorrow. His write-up is also better than I was planning to make mine. I was just going to phone it in.

James commenter Dave McLeod – who’s probably done other stuff in his life, but that’s the highest possible accolade here – was sat next to me in the office the other week when Alphabeat came up on a Muxtape I was listening to.

“I don’t think I’ve ever met another male Alphabeat fan.”
“At least not a straight one, I guess?”

Since I realised they were saying “Weltpolizei” and not “The bullets fly” (the next line is “Twenty-four seven”), all I can picture when I listen to it is an episode of Thunderbirds where they all have moustaches and perpetuate German stereotypes.

In other news, I’m bored of Music Week now and I’ve got lots of other stuff I want to talk about, so James will return to normal programming shortly.

The Prop Cigarettes You Smoke, They Show Who You Are

Eldridge Rodriguez is a bit of a discovery for me. I half-listen to a lot of net radio when I’ve forgotten to bring my MP3 player cable to work, and every now and then something catches my ear enough for me to extract my absent mind from what I’m writing and e-mail myself the track name. This saves me looking them up, buying anything of theirs or ever thinking about them again: I’ve got them on file now, no further action is required. But during this song:

I found myself performing the whole charade three times in a row.

“Ooh, I like this. Who is it? Eldridge Rodriguez, Get What You Want. Got it.”

“Man, I like this song too, who’s this? Still Eldridge Rodriguez, Get What You Want. Okay, I’ll write it down this time.”

“Oh wow, what’s this one? Still Eldridge Rodriguez, still Get What You Want. Okay, okay, I’m buying it.”

He was apparently in a band some people have heard of, called The Beatings, but what I’ve heard of theirs doesn’t grab me the same way. To me, his value is in answering the burning question: What would it sound like if Jarvis Cocker joined A Silver Mt Zion?”

Cutting Verses Down To Size

Photo by Bleak!

This is an odd one for Ladytron – they’re not usually this atmospheric, and the warbling male vocal is a new one on me. But it has a curious feel to it that I can’t shake, so it’s the one I keep coming back to on the new album. Even though I have no idea what the hell it’s about. Kitten versus rain?

Ladytron are one of those bands that produce a thick, inimitable texture of sound, to the extent that they don’t really need to do anything new. It’s enough just to hear that satisfying stream of smooth booming noise again, with a few different inflections.

I mention I have no idea what Versus is about because the other track I was thinking about posting is one of the few comprehensible Ladytron tracks: Burning Up. I’ve uploaded it anyway to make up for missing yesterday.

The Sun Is Shining But We Stay Inside

A geek anthem for the summer if ever there was one. I usually only find out what bands look like when I write about them here, and scour Last.fm for something to draw attention away from this stretch of dry text, so I was amused to find that Born Ruffians look about twelve. Here’s what they sound like:

I suspect staring at this image while you listen probably won’t add to the experience the way it has with the last two posts.

Mrs D Mrs I Mrs F-F-I, Mrs C Mrs U-L-T

If you keep up with these kinds of things – Norwegian electro-pop – you’ve probably already heard Annie’s obnoxiously infectious I Know Your Girlfriend Hates Me. While that was getting its deserved round of blog applause, I was only just discovering her four-year-old first album. It’s almost cockily smart, sharp, sugar-crusted pop, anomalous in a debut. Amusingly, I now discover she’s billed as “The Kylie it’s cool to like”.

With this track, it’s all about the speed-rhyming spellouts, and to a lesser extent the cute anachronisms of the chorus. I think I could like hip-hop more if the lyrics were about people ringing one another’s bells.

I Propose A Less Serious Vote

When, inevitably, I become a super-villain (I find myself buying a lot of black clothing with high collars lately), this is how it’ll end. When my swarm of Gogglesharks march on Beijing, when my jetpack drops me gently in the thick of the clash of Tian’anman Square, bullets pinging off my power-armour, the sky black with my aerial drones, my image burned in phosphor over that of Chairman Mao, China’s Segway-surfing police force shredded like crispy duck.

Someone – probably called John or Jack – will urgently command their technically minded sidekick to Google me, + “fatal weaknesses”, snapping that “There’s got to be something!” The sidekick, who will have spiky hair, a differently coloured shortsleeve outside his longsleeve and a name like ‘Skeeter’, will find this post.
“I think I’ve got it! Routing it through the local police band… now!” And he’ll hit this play button:

The Gogglesharks will stop, mid-chomp, and point their eyeball arms quizzically to me. It will rain deactivated silver drones. Everything will stop dead for three minutes and twenty-seven seconds, forty hectares of carnage shakily frozen like the closing credits of a macabre sixties sitcom, the only sound the opening track from the latest Mates of State album Re-Arrange Us, the groans of the dying and the slightly squeaky wheel of a broken Segway whirring away. When it finishes, I will hang my head slightly and mutter “Okay, I’ll be good.”

So begins music week on James! I’ve got a ridiculous amount of new stuff I’m listening to at the moment, so I’m picking a track from each a day and posting it here until I get bored or you get bored or I forget or the week ends.

And just so you know, Jack and Skeeter, I foresaw this.

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.

Come In

So this is the new layout I’ve been tinkering with. There’s still some tinkering to do, but it’s very time-consuming tinkering about fancy niceties for which I have long since lost my enthusiasm. The only major thing missing is a box with links to friends’ blogs, but the way I wanted it to work relied on some highly unstable technology that I’m not going to be able to code robustly anytime soon. It involves tachyons.

I was going to talk you through why I’ve done some of the new bits, why I scrapped some of the old bits, and why it’s slimmer. But it’s kind of late, and I’m kind of burnt-out on thinking about it now. I’ll edit that stuff in later – for now, let me know what you think, and have a listen to this while you look around: