5 December 2008

mr writer

Stereophonics, Decade in the Sun, The Best Of Album
The overused concept of a greatest hits album has always been confusing. Just who is it aimed at? One would believe that surely the biggest fans already own all the tracks on the album and then some, so it can’t be for them, and the recent release of the greatest hits of Craig David and Enrique Iglesias has proved that the genre is no longer a celebration of a lifetime achievement in music, so just what is it for? Hmm, quite a perplexing question. Stereophonics perhaps you can help us out?
The convenient Christmas release date of ‘A Decade in the Sun’ safely secured a million stocking fillers for dads around Britain and a nice, fat, end of year bonus for Kelly Jones and co. If there are still people out there without copies of ‘A Thousand Trees’ and ‘The Bartender and the Thief,’ although I really can’t think who, then who are we to judge what was actually a bloody good band for taking advantage and selling out just a little in these dark times of economic hardship?

emo no no

Boys like Girls-Thunder
No, don't do it. Please. Unless of course you are a fourteen year old girl with a penchant for polka dots and a black fringe which renders sight impossible, who just feels like, totally no-one gets you, apart from My Chemical Romance. And you live in Birmingham.

brian wilson would be proud

pacific! A Tree
So you have no job prospects, in all likelihood only got a bunch of IOU’s for Christmas and if you just turn your head towards the City, you’ll see a sky peppered with falling bankers as they plunge to their untimely but self imposed deaths, but hey! Enough of that worrying, pacific! are here! More blissful pop hailing from Scandinavia with enough of a Beach Boys/ Hawaii Five-O vibe to provide the perfect form of escapism. One listen and you’re reclining in a hammock, sipping mojitos whilst an impossibly beautiful island native massages your nether regions. Pure melodic delight.

i think i love her...

Ladyhawke, My Delirium-Remixes
Gee whizz-lucky me, a whole CD of the same song remixed in ten different ways. Not really necessary, but who gives a shit, Ladyhawke rocks, the song’s awesome and anything that can be done to keep her around as long as possible needs to be done, so go, buy, and enjoy, ten times over.

4 December 2008

Asted-way Ittle-ay Eejays-day

The View 21st November, Astoria
It's easy to get complacent after a swift rise to fame. In a difficult music industry to crack, Scottish rascals The View, under 1965’s James Endeacott, went from drinking in bus stops to sold-out tours in what seemed like barely a few months. However, the band’s transformation from underground darlings of the fourteen year old Doherty-alike tribe to drug-addled, Radio 1 brown-nosers has given the quartet a frustrating arrogance of the kind that usually precedes a fall.
It is rare to find a crowd as excitable as dedicated fans of The View. The space in front of the stage is packed to the brim with sweaty teenagers, soaked from flying beer cans, (slightly annoying until someone catches a band member square on his head) they are literally dribbling with excitement. And for the first three songs, the band acknowledge this, for a brief moment it is clear why they garnered such a dedicated following. Their relentless energy on two new songs and old favourite ‘Wasted Little DJ’s’ creates a squirming mess of crowd surfing, fights, more airborne beer cans and strewn items of clothing. The band’s thick accents render their banter incomprehensible to the Southern crowd but to no matter; the teenagers have got their heroes back.
After this brief spurt of energy however, the two front men seem to give up. They stop engaging with the crowd, new songs have clearly borrowed chords from old ones, obscenities are shouted to get the rise out of the audience that their music no longer can. The band stumble on with their well known tunes becoming less and less coherent to the disdain of the crowd desperately trying to sing along. Suddenly after barely fifty minutes and an unrecognizable ‘Superstar Tradesman’ they mumble their goodbyes and slope off stage, leaving the crowd chanting for an encore that never comes.
Most exasperating about the experience is that it was clear from their opening that The View could have achieved the gig of their life. Halfway through a near sold out tour, with an audience of die hard fans filling the prestigious London Astoria and they just couldn’t be bothered. Well, unfortunately for The View, they return to a music world with a very different face than the one they left just over a year ago. The fast-paced, internet driven industry has only got worse, and the fickleness of fans, due to a plethora of free music has augmented tenfold. The View were lucky in that they already had a fan base to come back to, but several more gigs like this one and the Dryburgh boys are in for a rude awakening.