Iconocaust

Trax

Thu, 26 Jul 2007 07:35:52 GMT

Graham Coxon - "Spectacular" Former Blur guitarist Coxon has turned his lo-fi thrashing into a surprisingly healthy career, and "Spectacular" is more of the same in the best way possible. The only downside is the fact that I can't listen to it without getting the nagging feeling that this'll be soundtracking an iPod commercial before long, but hey.

Lightspeed Champion - "Galaxy of the Lost" Even if you overlooked their name, Test Icicles were hands-down one of the worst bands in Britain at a time when bad bands were all but swarming over the UK music scene. That they broke up was a blessing and of itself, but their demise has had the unexpected knock-on bonus of giving us Lightspeed Champion, fronted by ex-Icicle and general weirdo Dev Hynes. Taken on its own merits, their debut single is a pleasant little indie tune -- what's really unmissable is the utterly mindbending promotional video featuring both kittens and an explosion of carnivorous Muppets. Kudos, sir, kudos.

Foals - "Mathletics" Speaking of Test Icicles, here's Foals's lead single, which just happens to be a dead ringer for the now-deceased noisepunks' putrid output. If that's not a compelling reason to give this band a wide berth, I don't know what is.

Happy Mondays - "Jellybean" Reunions may be great for the nostaglia factor, but let's be brutally honest here: the second a band decides to record new material, the jig is probably up. As long as you're cruising enormodomes playing the music that made you famous, it's smooth sailing; once you start churning out new tracks, however, you stop reminding people of how great you were and start reminding people of just how long it's been since you last had a hit. Like its namesake, "Jellybean" is all empty calories, calluously engineered for maximum stadium impact in open defiane of the shambolic dancefloor wigouts the Mondays built their careers on. Sad, but not exactly unexpected.

XXV

Mon, 23 Jul 2007 03:33:37 GMT

Though my 25th birthday officially rang in on the 18th, scheduling conflicts and other considerations meant that celebrations were postponed until the 21st. Fortunately, the wait was more than worth it.

We kicked the day off on the back porch with a grill-out. Unfortunately, I somewhat underestimated my own fire-starting skills and fumbled for twenty minutes trying to get a blaze going before Kim took mercy and seized control of the operation. Adding insult to injury, I drastically overestimated the amount of meat consumption at the table, leaving nearly two-thirds of the food uneaten.

After lunch, we settled down for a few games of Lunch Money. Here, Siragan, Jen, and Stephen face down Ari's onslaught over ice cream.

Siragan provides valuable strategic advice.

The gathering in its entirety. From the left, clockwise: Mark, Eric, Kim, Siragan, Stephen, Jen, Lisa, Ari.

Jen gets feisty with a Dollar Store special.

Ari throws down the gauntlet.

Mark takes a beating...

...while others amuse themselves at his misfortune.

Lisa's cookies went over well.

After three rounds of Lunch Money, Ari bailed while we retired indoors to play Unspeakable Words, a card game best described as "HP Lovecraft meets Scrabble." Arrange your letters to form the highest-scoring words possible, but beware! Your very sanity is at stake! Siragan's mulled apple cider proved to be a good complement to the mind-destroying action, but after three games, it was time for a little outdoor activity.

So we trooped down to Stop and Shop, and -- after getting into trouble at the Dollar Tree -- nabbed a frisbee. Siragan, ever environmentally conscious, promptly put the packaging to good use.

Meanwhile, Mark's interest is fixed firmly on the frisbee itself.

Now armed, we headed off to Ringer Park and chucked our newly-acquired projectile around with varying degrees of accuracy until sundown before heading back. Our original game plan was to follow up with Malaysian food and karaoke, but Lisa had a train to catch. So we settled for Malaysian takeout and poker instead.

After Lisa left, we hunkered down for a game of Jen's devising, a fusion of Pictionary and Chinese Whispers that involved writing a sentence on a piece of paper and passing it to the person seated next to you. The receipient then illustrated the sentence, folded the paper over so that only the illustration remained, and passed to the next person, who in turn wrote an appropriate caption. Four rounds of this mangled the original sentence beyond all recognition, with predictably humorous results.

Afterwards, Jen, Stephen and Siragan called it a night. Kim, Eric, Mark, and I cracked open the last and most disappointing game of the day: High School Drama, a surprisingly uninspiring take on a hugely fertile subject matter. Make friends, build bonds, collect signatures -- high production values, zero depth. Thanks to the lengthy set-up time, we got a mere two turns in before Eric and Kim had to catch their T ride home, finally calling it at day at 11:40.

A good day all in all, and certainly the most memorable birthday in a near-decade. Now all that's left to do is plan for the 26th...

Trax

Mon, 16 Jul 2007 08:36:24 GMT

Manic Street Preachers - "Your Love Alone is Not Enough" Most serious music fans know by now that if a band claims that their latest harkens back to the sound of their classic albums, dimes will get you dollars that they're lying through their teeth. So it's inevitable that while the Manic Street Preachers believe newie Send Away the Tigers is nothing less than the triumphant return of the pansexual socialist glam rock of yore, lead single "Your Love..." blows the lid off that scam like TNT. Listening to this thudding exercise in paint-by-numbers rock beggars belief that this band could have ever cranked out a fierce post-punk gem like "Revol" -- here, mindlessly repetitive melody flops and dies like a goldfish out of water, complicitly murdered by some of the lamest lyrics this side of an Interpol album. The Cardigans' Nina Persson shows up to enliven proceedings, but even she can't perform the miracle it would take to bring this one back from the dead.

Manic Street Preachers - "Autumnsong" Sandwiched somewhere between a nagging intro riff -- imagine The Darkness assaulting an Irish folk band -- and a chorus straight out of Queen's playbook is a song that would almost pass for filler on an Andrew WK album. Extra bonus points are due for the video, which manages to make the concept of a scantily-clad girl with angel wings playing air guitar for four minutes seem genuinely boring.

Babyshambles - "Á rebours" Pete Doherty's band may exist for no other reason than to fund its lead singer's extravagant drug habit(s), but you'd be hard-pressed to guess it from their output, which has never peaked from "middling." Which makes "Á rebours" a pleasant surprise indeed: chipper, relaxed, and unusually musical despite some so-so vocals from the group's resident heroin ghoul, it's the best Babyshambles track yet, soaring miles above their usual absinthe-fuelled punk-rock rackets.

The Coral - "Who's Gonna Find Me" Still struggling to fulfill their potential after three albums and the gloriously-titled Nightfreaks and the Sons of Becker EP, "Find Me" see The Coral take refuge in what they do best -- skewed, ghostly psychedelica with a flair for the dramatic. Problem is, it's been more than ten years since James Skelly and company started slinging guitars and at this stage, novelty factor alone isn't enough to lift this one beyond competent mediocrity.

Clor - "Love and Pain" Britain may be flooded with guitar groups barely capable of playing their own instruments these days, but there are times when the lo-fi aesthetic pays off. "Love and Pain" is one of those times, a neat aural approximation of your brother's garage band discovering '80s synth-pop and running with it all the way to the finish line.

The Rank Deluxe - "Style" Not so much music as the sound of football hooligans picking a fight at your local pub -- to call it "amateurish" is to give amateurs a bad name. If your idea of a good time involves two grown men endlessly bellowing "I don't like your choice of style!" over the most rudimentary guitarwork imaginable, this might be right up your alley, but you'd probably have better luck with electroshock therapy.

Life's Little Victories

Sat, 14 Jul 2007 06:05:56 GMT

Working the counter has fast become about anticipating the rhythms in retail activity; the spaces between customers aren't even so much downtime as rare moments when I can actually play at mucking out the proverbial Augean Stables and get on with what I'm supposed to be doing. In an ideal world, we'd have at least two people upstairs at all times -- in other words, just about enough labor to man the phones, do database work, stock shelves, field inquiries, inventory, clean up, play concierge, and any of the legion of other things that are keeping me from the work I'm actually being paid for in theory.

On the other hand, there's a certain pleasure in the little things you can only learn from clocking your hours behind the register. One thing that's been hard to miss is the sudden influx of folks from Harmonix -- yeah, the Guitar Hero guys -- who work in the company offices just around the corner. Guess rhythm game superstars need d20 books as much as the next guy -- who knew? The demise of Games Workshop in Harvard Square has also brought a lot of new faces to the store, as well as a much-needed revamp of the play area downstairs. While I can't exactly claim to be over the moon about those bare DIY tables that seem to have sprouted up overnight, things in general look a lot more put together, even prosperous. I've never held much truck with feng shui, but I am a firm believer in retail space design, and as far as I'm concerned, this is definitely a step in the right direction.

Meanwhile, my ongoing boycott of Hollywood's summer offerings is still bearing fruit; Henry and I caught a late showing of Hot Fuzz down in Somerville and came out converts to a film I'm prepared to flat-out call one of the year's best. Director Edgar Wright and actor Simon Pegg rose to international prominence off Shaun of the Dead, a zombie movie that just happened to be a comedy. Hot Fuzz, the duo's second film, hews close to the same template; in this case, it's a buddy cop action-cum-slasher movie that somehow still elicits its laughs without descending into out-and-out parody or selling the comic elements short. It's an unusual feat, accomplished through Wright's genuinely stylish direction -- and when was the last time you could praise a comedy's cinematography? -- and a setting that's so down to earth that it may as well be trussed up in lead weights, populated by a grotesque yet believable ensemble of British character actors led by none other than ex-James Bond Timothy Dalton as a sinister supermarket owner. There's not one bum performance on the screen here, though Pegg in particular deserves kudos for investing supercop Nicholas Angel with equal amounts of intensity and sad vulnerability; he's an unconventional lead, but far more believable as a human being than many of the summer's 'genuine' action heroes. What's more, the balance between the film's various elements is nigh-on perfect; the action is exciting, the comedy witty without feeling forced, and the transition between drama, pathos, and laughs is amazingly seamless. Those with a weaker constitution may be put off by the scattered yet surprisingly gory deaths, though all in all, this is classy stuff and desperately needed in the current summer wasteland.

Trax

Wed, 27 Jun 2007 16:20:01 GMT

Jet - "Rip It Up" Identikit rock from an identikit rock band -- vaguely catchy, but good luck picking it out of a lineup.

The Rakes - "The World Was a Mess, But His Hair Was Perfect" What a title, eh? The song's not bad either, an agreeable slice of buoyant post-punk that serves as a neat capsule summary of where British guitar music is at these days.

Bloc Party - "Hunting for Witches" If you were among those who enjoyed the 'Party's "Banquet," you're in luck -- "Hunting for Witches" is the exact same song, with the added bonus of some murky mutterings about immigrant scapegoating. Not much of an upgrade, but there you go.

The Electric Soft Parade - "Misunderstanding" Speaking of blatant ripoffs, here's The Electric Soft Parade stealing Weezer's "Island in the Sun." With the last vestiges of the White brothers' playful psychedelica firmly shoved out the window in favor of radio airplay, they may as well have titled this thing "Give Us Some Money" and called it a day.

Album Rack

Wed, 27 Jun 2007 06:17:31 GMT

ASH - TWILIGHTS OF THE INNOCENTS
The fun machine took a shit and died.

So it ends -- not with a bang, but with string ensembles and Libertines guitar, mid-life crisis writ large on everything from the album title onwards. Operating as a three-piece for the first time since 1998's Nu-Clear Sounds, Ash seem subdued, even hesitant in places, floating in some weird orbit miles removed from the furious nu-metal/arena rock thrusts of Meltdown. Make no mistake: opener "I Started a Fire" is lead vocalist Tim Wheeler firing on all cylinders, annointing Ash's trademark romantic longing with some of the band's finest creative chord work. Yet by the second track, trouble has already reared its ugly head; "You Can Have It All" wastes its excellent opening riff on a witless pop-punk dirge, "Blacklisted" wiffs of Blink 182, second single "Polaris" radiates about as much excitement as any piano ballad written in Bono's mansion on a rock star holiday could possibly muster. And on it goes, through gutless ballads, soulless pop-punk, and creepy '80s revivalism, slog broken up by a bare handful of interesting twists -- a Metallica riff here, a Brian Wilson harmony there. That it takes such blatant filching to rise above the mediocrity on display here should be telling; the only other genuinely homegrown thrills come from "Palace of Excess" and its skyrocketing chorus, though the whole thing is rather spoiled by Wheeler's ill-advised Suicide Girl namecheck.

Ash have always been a guilty pleasure redeemed by their uncanny knack for writing pitch-perfect pop, music beautifully formulaic right down to the obligatory mid-song guitar solo. Stripped of that predictability, Wheeler's music is almost perversely uninteresting -- it'd be tempting to dismiss the whole thing as a lazy grab for Snow Patrol dollars, were it not for the fact that the album's promoters squandered its only redeeming track by making it a free download. Grab that and skip the Twilight -- this is one career slump you're better off sitting out.

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