nuttyxander

As part of the continuing August gigs extravaganza I’ve seen two great American Indie bands, both of whom gained plenty of fame last year for contributing large potions of soundtracks for films that I completely failed to get around to seeing. First off was Spoon, who I came across via the excellent yet sadly cancelled US TV seriesVeronica Mars where they used their excellent I Turn My Camera On as backing to some late night telephoto snooping scenes, which was also used in the trailer for and actual soundtrack of the film Stranger Than Fiction.

Their set was lengthy, nearing two hours, and focussed largely on their most recent album Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga which I have enthused over before. However, they played lots of their earlier hits, and I’ve become completely besotted with Kill The Moonlight, one of their earlier albums thanks to their stunning live versions of Stay Don’t Go and Paper Tiger, and they opened with a great version of Small Stakes. Their whole sound is very tightly produced but their live act replicates and improves on almost all of it. Though I was disappointed that they didn’t play The Ghost Of You Lingers they did do a great You Got Yr Cherry Bomb even without horns.

In the days after I started listenning a lot to the music of Devotchka wondering to myself if when I saw them live they could possibly make their sound even approach the rich sound of their albums. I realised early on that unless they had some kind of virtuoso violin/accordion player, crazy drummer/trumpet player, powerful bass/sousaphone player and manic front man there wouldn’t be much chance of that. (you can guess that this is my kind of band already, can’t you?). However, from the very first bar of their theme song, Devotchka, it was clear that they were every bit the swaggering act you’d expect of a band that started as a backing troupe for the likes of Dita Von Teese.

There sadly aren’t many videos around online or live concert recordings that come close to capturing the experience of seeing Devotchka live, though this capture of them performing We’re Leaving (which I think was first encore) is not far off. I think they pull off bringing in Balkan and other eastern folk influences far better than Beirut or Gogol Bordello, though Beirut at least is always fun if a tad earnest.

How It Ends was easily their crowd pleaser of the evening, though I have a massive love for Queen Of The Surface Streets if only for having the lyric “that’s when I love the accommodations in a urine smelling transit station”. I’m simple that way.

And I haven’t even mentioned how well their singer plays the Theremin.

Tags: gigs, live, music

There’s a really good two part interview with John Flansburgh (of They Might Be Giants) over at GearLog which lets him ramble over all kinds of technical topics. Most interesting of all is his talk of the early days of dial-a-song, their pre-answering machine phone service allowing their fans (and just the curious) to call and hear their latest songs. Kind of a proto-myspace.

The thing that was interesting doing Dial-a-Song was that we could find an audience in the daytime. They could experience our music at their jobs, on the phone.

Tags: mobile, music, tmbg

photo by Mr November (CC Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0)

I went to see Fog play their only UK gig for their new album Ditherer last week at The Luminaire (a rather nice venue in Kilburn). It was a really good evening, with some especially strange support from Napoleon 3rd and Team Brick. Both of whom were interesting and pretty damn fun, I certainly have the line

This is not my life, it’s just my day job.
The way I pay the rent

still stuck in my head from Napoleon IIIrd’s Hit Schmooze For Me. It was an evening of indie worker boy anthems.

You can stream the whole album here, in fact you bloody well should. It’s great!

It’s easy to capture how Fog’s sound has evolved on the album opener We Will Have Vanished where the song seems split into three even thirds lasting ninety seconds which build slowly up to a chaotic and complex arrangements. However, unlike in previous outings where there would be structures of pop songs giving way to free-er jazzier arrangements there is much more thought here (for once these songs were extensively demo’d) and thus each song hangs together in a way that earlier works didn’t Obviously there’s some loss of the organic and sparse genius that made much earlier Fog so intriguing but it does make the whole thing about three times more rocking and twice as memorable.

Might just be my album of the year, at least until Misty’s Big Adventure’s new record appears. Go and listen!

And if you want further reading, MusicOMH have a reasonable review and there’s a great interview with Andrew Broder (essentially Fog until recently) at Audiversity.

Tags: gigs, live, music, new music

You may be a little confused yourself as to how exactly New Labour has managed to go from abandoning almost every road scheme when they came to power over ten years ago to spending the ungodly sum of £13bn expanding the roads network. Well, it turns out that it’s all the fault of some quite bonkers economic calculations in the DFT. I strongly recommend you take a look at the article because it’s a really good example of why sometimes you have to stop thinking in terms of numbers and calculations to reach a decision and instead take a look outside the window and breath in. Or even in this case, bother to take a look at the oil price. If they’re right that the Eddington review was based on a 30$ price for a barrel of oil then pretty much all transport policy is suspect and beyond contempt. Here’s a fair example:

How does this work in practice? Look, for example, at the scheme to widen a 56km stretch of the M1 between junctions 30 and 42. The cost to the taxpayer is £1.5bn, which sounds like a lot, but the Highways Agency has used the Nata system to claim that, over the next 60 years, the widening is worth no less than £4.5bn because of the time it will save travellers. Since this supposed “benefit” to the economy far exceeds the cost, the scheme has been approved.

Just how biased this system can be is set out in the Nata rules that assign lower values to other types of traveller. A minute saved on a cyclist’s travel time, for example, isn’t worth 44p but just 28p. A bus-user’s time is valued at 33p a minute. The implicit assumption is that cyclists and bus-users make less contribution to the economy than car drivers.

But I guess we knew this, and I don’t say this just because I want a bullet train to Edinburgh.

Tags: news

Currently BAA are attempting to get a massive injunction against Airport Watch to try and stop them protesting at Heathrow.

However, I think for all the endless free publicity BAA have helped them get nothing is as clever as their Cheat Neutral spoof which has a big go at carbon offsetting schemes.

When you cheat on your partner you add to the heartbreak, pain and jealousy in the atmosphere.

Cheatneutral offsets your cheating by funding someone else to be faithful and NOT cheat. This neutralises the pain and unhappy emotion and leaves you with a clear conscience.

Which pretty neatly skewers the notion that offsetting is a way to deal with your behavior. Funding (or better still taking part in) schemes and actions that are good for the environment just as part of your own every day life is pretty obviously a better idea than trying to offset certain portions of your carbon footprint with extra managed forestry.

In other news, did you know that the UK is planning to use offsetting as 70% of the reduction planned for meeting its long term carbon targets? And of course, those targets ignore emissions from aviation. More interesting still are the complex disagreements about how to measure aviation emissions in the UK, most figures quoted seem to be for flights departing the UK only.

Whatever your position, it’s pretty clear that you have to look beyond any headline figures and look to the finer detail to get any sense of what’s really going on. But also, for all that flying may have a major effect, it’s what you do year round that makes the difference. One carbon offset holiday a year does not a green life make.

Anyway, enough of this, time to sign up for £2.50 a month to remain single – though clearly by supporting a green agenda I may only have a limited amount of time to earn if Nuts magazine is to be believed.

Tags: news