Bluegrass Rocks!

Who cannot resist the stomping bluegrass melodies of Hayseed Dixie? Well even now, many years on, I am still unsure whether they are a mere novelty act or not, their irresistible mix of banjo, mandolin, guitar, bass and the odd fiddle re-interpreting such great songs as Highway to Hell is simply delicious. Who doesn’t want to hear Scissor Sisters super-camp I Don’t Feel Like Dancin’ as a rollicking ‘popgrass’ monolith?

I love Hayseed Dixie so much simply because they are so adaptable. Their material ranges from indie covers, such as their fantastic cover of This Fire by Franz Ferdinand, to rock classics like War Pigs and Paint It Black, to their own charming bluegrass numbers. However, I really don’t see why they must wreck great covers of songs by adding, among other things, pig sounds and burping. I’m not very familiar with the bluegrass genre, but surely it isn’t common practice to imitate animals while trying to play damn good music?

There certainly isn’t anything more refreshing than hearing a bunch of great rock songs without any drums though. I love what drums add to songs, it’s just really interesting how much more of a spotlight other elements of the music get when there are no drums present. Back In Black, another AC/DC favourite of mine, sounds so different and yet so right without pounding drums. I’m sure the lack of drums wouldn’t work in rock covers of rock songs, it’s just great to see a new perspective on songs that have been hanging around for years.

Tracking Addiction…Tegan and Sara, Dark Come Soon

Tegan and Sara, identical twins and a Canadian singer-songwriter duo  have been in the music business since at least 1999 yet have only recently come to my attention. Dark Come Soon  is a song off their latest album, The Con.
It’s certainly my favourite, mixing great vocal harmonies with lyrical quirks such as “Everyone I love, I need you now” with the other twin responding “So What?“.

It’s a song with multiple layers, a relationship ballad within a quirky pop song. The uplifting tones contrasting with the ominous lyrics, “Dark, you can’t come soon enough for me”.  It’s one of those songs that doesn’t start slow but is always building up to a glorious crescendo, you’re constantly reminded of the coming darkness, then just like that, it’s come. End.

Except…it’s not the end. Imagine it’s a hot summers day and you’re really thirsty, so you buy a drink. You drink the drink but are still just a little bit more thirsty, not enough to warrant buying another drink but enough to bother you. The darkness mentioned throughout the song conjures that same feeling for me, I have heard quite enough of Tegan and Sara’s various problems, but for some reason, I still want that little bit more.

Themes and lyrics aside, this song doesn’t do anything spectacular, doesn’t do anything innovative, it’s just nice. I know nice is a terrible word, but it’s a song that, despite its dark tones, floats along airily; a helium balloon drifting into the sky, a feather wavering in the wind. It should make me feel a negative emotion, why doesn’t it? Am I inhuman?

Darkness is often related to bad feelings, and conventional wisdom states that a whining, pleading song such as this will make you feel bad. Yet the more I listen to the songs lovely guitar twangs and relaxed beats, I feel better and better. It’s pop of the kind that will lift you out of a bad mood, like The Last Polka by Ben Folds Five, it’s not a song with a great, uplifting message; but it is a song that, ignoring the lyrics, will raise your spirit and make you smile.

 

 

A roundabout, somewhere on the left

A quick anecdote. Relatives come up to visit, we decide to take them on a big trip to the big city. Relatives join us in our car. Over-confident, tired and emotional brother decides to provide directions. Get to a roundabout, over-confident, tired and emotional brother shouts “LEFT! LEFT! LEFT!” and so we go left. Aforementioned brother shouts “WRONG WAY! LISTEN TO ME! YOU SHOULD HAVE GONE LEFT!” So back to the roundabout, back down the same left.

5 minutes later…

“You meant right, didn’t you?”  Over-confident, tired and emotional brother replies “No- this is left, if only you’d listened to me!” Families and directions clearly don’t mix.

Tracking Addiction…Bloc Party, Hunting for Witches

One song I’m really loving at the moment is Hunting for Witches by Bloc Party. It is of course, off the second album ‘A Weekend in the City’ which was released back in February and that I have incredibly still not listened to, despite being a great fan of the first album.

I have indeed been afraid to listen to the album, with warnings from my friends of it not being a nearly as good an album as the first. However, it’s inevitable that I will hear a few songs from it. Indeed, I haven’t managed to avoid hearing the singles I Still Remember, The Prayer and Hunting for Witches.

For some reason I find Hunting for Witches a much more enjoyable listen than the other two. It may be the great, catchy riff. It could be the disjointed jittering soundscape at the start. It could even be Kele Okereke’s infectious tones. Most likely though, it’s the sublime joining together of all the disparate elements signified at the start into a cohesive whole.

That cohesive whole is so powerful, so magnificent, that I just can’t escape from it. “I was an ordinary man with ordinary desire” sings Kele with such conviction that you just can’t help notice how far from the truth that now is.

Indeed, this song is far from ordinary. Sharp electronic guitars clash with sharp synthesizer tones as Kele’s elegant voice pierces through the very foundations of the song. When all seems to be approaching order and rock familiarity, the disparate tones from the start burst back into life.

Bloc Party is definitely far from ordinary, yet this song somehow manages to blend ordinary with extraordinary to achieve an anthem for modern life, something Bloc Party always seems to be particularly adept at.

Arctic Soul

Anyone listened to the Arctic Monkeys cover of Amy Winehouse’s You Know I’m No Good – really bizarre, I guess Arctic Monkeys is trying to become serious, trying to get themselves into a wider market.

Ok, ‘become serious’ sounds a bit ridiculous, what I mean is that by going for a cover of a song from an artist such as Amy Winehouse they are trying to appeal to a whole different market, trying to get older buyers as well as younger. I mean, perhaps they’re just friends with Amy Winehouse or a fan of her music, but I’m too cynical to believe that.

Can’t cast them down for having market sense, I just don’t think in this case it particularly works, my mind is split on covers, they are great when they offer a new angle on the song which really works and is original, but often the imitate-in-our-own-style philosophy just causes sub-par, dull versions; and that’s where Arctic Monkeys fail with this cover.

I Know…

This seems to be quickly turning into another WoW blog- but it’s amazing, the other night 10 dedicated people spent around four and a half hours continously trying to kill a boss character with absolutely no success- where does that dedication come from? I amazed myself as well as being amazed at everyone else- and we are trying him again tonight. Such dedication in the face of a veritable brick wall is outstanding. So there we go, another “WoW teaches you life skills” post.

The Radio In the Other Room…

Damn infectious music, damn it to hell. I’m not even in the right room but “I don’t want no body, I don’t want no body baby” is already slowly worming its way into my head. Well, quite quickly actually. It’s supremely annoying- why can’t all music just be dull, senseless and most definitely not catchy…

Real World, Virtual Guilt?

Well in the post below I talked alot about World of Warcraft, as much a social tool as it is a game. Last night, I was ‘running a dungeon’- killing lots of monsters with a team of four other random people, who before that night, I had never spoken to or played with before. It was all going alright, not particularly brilliant, for about an hour. But then we reached a boss character, and it was clear we couldn’t do it- and I was getting tired- and we kept dying- so eventually, I quit the game.

So why do I feel guilty? Well, I didn’t tell anyone I was quitting the game, I gave no signs I was quitting the game and it wasn’t the worst group of random people I had ever grouped with, I even had a friendly chat with one of them. The thing is, I was tired and had work to do and not feeling too well, so just like that…I quit.

Repercussions? Well I don’t know if there will live to be any in-game ones due to it harming my reputation, though I was having connection problems so they may have put it down to that. But personally, definitely repercussions. I let four people down, albeit four people I had never met before, but still four real living souls with emotions and thoughts and minds, and to let them down like that struck me hard, it always does. I’m not saying I do this alot, far from it, but this was a good group and they were good people, and it particularly struck me as a bad example of how I should act.

The consequences for them? Well they probably waited for me for a few minutes, which is the bit that makes me feel really bad. I have done it enough, waiting for others, but the fact that they were waiting for me even though I knew I wasn’t going to come back just makes me feel really deceitful and easy. Hopefully they would have found someone else and continued on, maybe even done better without me, but I don’t know that… they could have disbanded and gone to bed themselves, their evening of gaming wrecked…all because of me… perhaps I should start to do this less, this virtual guilt in the real world really is unbearable…

My First…

This blog is a blog of firsts, the first blog I have blogged for more than one day, the first time I have written a music review, and now the first time I comment about gaming (although I have written a gaming review before). You see, some people’s spare times are occupied my watching TV (so is mine) speaking to friends through texting/social networking/emailing/phoning/instant messaging/real life (so is mine) and sleeping (unsurprisingly, so is mine). However, I also play World of Warcraft. Why? Well if I didn’t I would find myself with not alot to do.

Now, I said I didn’t want to bog this blog down with personal stuff, so that’s enough about my life.  For those that have not heard of/don’t know alot about World of Warcraft, it’s basically a big online game where lots of people mill about talking to each other and questing with each other, doing such things as killing nasty monsters and delivering mysterious packages to mysterious characters. I have been at the end-game (the top level of the game, you progress level on level through the game) for around two months, and partake in what is known as raiding, where a group of ten or more group together and go to special instanced dungeons, where nobody from the main game world out of this group can enter.

It’s time-consuming, hard, and expensive with regards to the in-game economy. But, it teaches me the values of concentration, reflexes and organisation. At its base, World of Warcraft is just a spreadsheet with colourful graphics, but this spreadsheet can teach me alot simply due to the human interaction and therefore randomness  involved. That’s what I love about it, I love talking to people, and I love interacting with people, and gaming for me is not about being a geek or a nerd, it’s about socialising, it’s about learning, about myself and others.

The raid I commonly partake on, maybe two or three times a week, maybe none, is called Karazhan. It requires ten experienced adventurers to complete, but takes many months to complete. An average night of it will probably last around four hours, maybe less, maybe more, and I go mainly for the fact that it really does improve my concentration levels well at the same time, advancing me in the game. I think World of Warcraft shouldn’t be called a game, more a tool, if you wish, just a tool for talking (some people spend all their time socialising) or for learning, perhaps getting a basic understanding of economics (through the relatively basic in-game economy) or improving your maths skills by trying to work out how much you can sell an item for or which item is better for you. As it is a bit of a spreadsheet with graphics, it is lacking a calculator, so if you so choose, it can be used to improve your maths skills.

So there we have it, I play a game which to me, isn’t a game. To someone else it may be, but for me, it’s a tool. A tool to ‘improve’ myself and to socialise, but a fun one nonetheless.

Album Review: Cold War Kids, Robbers & Cowards

One of the first few lines of opener, We Used To Vacation, “Still things could be much worse” immediately sets the mind alight. How could things be much worse? What led to things being so bad in the first place? Robbers & Cowards is very much an album of discovery, each song leading you through with infectious hooks and sublimely paced melodies to the next song, the next story.

Mystery, like stepping into a dark cave, has a firm hold on songs such as the ever-so-catchy Hang Me Up To Dry with its fantastic riff driving all the way through. Seemingly disparate streams of thought echo around the listener’s head, the more you hear, the more confused you are. However, the songs themselves all seem to follow a set path, the odd bit of clashing piano adding a random Maroon 5-esque sound to the proceedings. The problem is, the unexpected soon comes to be expected. It’s an album that is broken and lost while simultaneously being as structured as they come. An album struggling with its identity.

Songs like God, Make Up Your Mind illustrate this philosophy of random yet not so random; the strange lyrics which you just know have a deeper meaning “from New York to New Orleans, played alphabet”; the piano introing deep within the song; an unexpected but seamless transition to a heavier sound, back to chilling out in the summer sun. The lo-fi intro, the slightly whining, slightly relaxed voice, conjuring images of cocktails on a Hawaiian beach; staring at the sky with a content mind yet for some reason, not everything’s perfect.

It’s a good metaphor for the album as a whole, sometimes lo-fi, sometimes rocking, sometimes catchy, sometimes random, sometimes delivering the unexpected, yet something is wrong. It isn’t quite an album of contrasts, although thats what it wants to be, it keeps the listener on rails, delivering song after song in a similar yet crucially just different vein, but an ominous cloud of not quite getting it right is hovering just above.

In fact, it doesn’t know what it wants to be. “There’s nothing to do here, some just whine and complain” in Hospital Beds is quite right, it’s an album that is whining and complaining, but so am I, later in the song “Joy and misery” is mentioned, and that’s what this album truly is. Joy and misery. And that’s why it doesn’t work. Just at that moment when your sensations are soaring, when your mind is on fire with possibilities, when you can see the happiness and the hope, a song or a melody or a lyric will be introduced to dampen those emotions. Yes, life has its ups and downs but Robbers & Cowards is attempting to be two things at once, and to a certain extent, completely failing. You just can’t be a robber and a coward.

 3/5