THE LUCKSMITHS SAVED MY LIFE

except they didn't. but i love them, and if i was in need of a lifesaver i think i couldn't do much better than marty and the gang.

why do i love the lucksmiths? i honestly have no idea how i even got into them, i vaguely remember liking there is a boy that never goes out and their cover of there is a light that never goes out, but am not sure how that even came about. i remember i was aware that they existed for years before ever hearing them - they come up when you search for the smiths on songmeanings.net, which is still my go-to site for indie lyrics and general emo lolz at the comments to a lot of the songs. if you want people going really overboard about american emo/pop punk, go and read what some people have said about brand new songs. go on, i dare you.

anyway, back to the lucksmiths. i don't know much australian music really - it's bad, but i mainly seem to listen to american/british/swedish/canadian stuff generally. but the lucksmiths are sooo good, i should really check out more from australia and other countries in general. the lucksmiths aren't my favourite band, as much as i can have a favourite band, but they're pretty close - they manage to have a really recognisable sound without being boring or too samey, which is pretty impressive are being around for as long as they have. their songs often have such great melodies and tunes that they make me feel like my heart is about to burst, or something - they're so great at the pop, it's awesome. and then... it's like, they could just be a great guitar pop band but not much more. but the lyrics are amazing.

i think marty writes most of the songs. what marty's great at is the rhyming. now, rhyming in english is fucking hard - way too easy to get stuck in a rut where you use the same predictable, clunky rhymes as everyone else. but he is so good - and often really funny with it. i mentioned in a bit a while back that i liked his rhyming fiction with kitchen, and he's like that in most songs. it's just lovely, whether it's better with weather, consonants with consequences, meant and government... it's just generally good stuff.

i also really love tali's voice. marty sings a song or two, but tali is the singer, and his voice just suits the songs so well. it's really expressive and technically good, i think, although to be honest i have no clue about any of that. and it suits the music. i also love his accent! australian accents are nice, usually, and here it's no different. i also love that he drums and sings at the same time - he makes up for phil collins, okay, he does it well, like it's meant to be done. look up live videos on youtube - it's so great!

and then after all that they're just ridiculously cute and smart and happy and sad. they've got a song for most moods. they sing about fiction and scrabble and summer only they call it 't-shirt weather' and they're never cloying but always pretty honest and sweet. it's good stuff generally.

6

sufjan stevens - chicago

everyong likes this song, right? it's sufjan, and people love him. and it's one of the best on the album. i found out the other day that until quite recently, chicago was the second biggest city in the USA. it's called 'the second city' still, despite LA having taken it over sometime since the 80s. this song is pretty beautiful though, in pretty much all versions... i'm kind of partial to the acoustic one, but the regular is great of course, and so are the other variations.

his voice just sounds so sweet! and gentle. and the song is great, really great - i love songs that namecheck cities and driving to them, anyway, i'm just a loser like that, so to have them being part of this lovely little song is just... really nice. it's so well-written, and kind of... light and high but really listenable and just pretty awesome. he's a good songwriter and his voice is lovely. sorry this post is so rubbish. but i love this song. it's understated, and that works.

and another

5. neutral milk hotel - two-headed boy pt 2

this is a pretty obvious pick, huh. and also a pretty stupid one. what can i say about neutral milk hotel that other people haven't? okay, i'm going to start with a confession: neutral milk hotel are not my favourite band and this is not my favourite album. it doesn't make me want to cry or join/form/destroy a religious cult. i do not hate it. try as i may, i cannot love it. maybe i have come too late to join the party and i've heard so much about the party and seen so many awesome posters and heard so many awesome rumours about it that all i can taste is the slightly gross punch instead of the amazing times to be had (oh, extended metaphors in the early hours, how i love them. apparently). but i don't know. it's good, certainly - jeff's voice works very well, obviously, and i think the songs are very well-written. it's just, er, not a religious experience for me. maybe i just don't get that involved with music.

anyway i'm not really here to externalise my internal debate about neutral milk hotel because frankly, it's boring. the album is a very fine one and i like all of the songs on it.

this is a 'pt 2', so that makes it sound a bit like it comes second after the other one and so won't be as good. this is not true. it's the best song on the album as far as i'm concerned - it's gorgeous and not too busy, you can hear all the words and the lyrics are just so gorgeous, all your tongue in his teeth and sounding only at night as you sleep. it's one of the ones that has stuff about anne frank in, which a lot on the album do, and he talks about how she's alive in his dreams but she's crying. one of jeff mangum's strengths that's on display in this song is that his lyrics are weird and beautiful and strange but he delivers them in a very direct, emotional way... though he's singing things like she will feed you tomatoes and radio wires he's not being weird about it, he's singing it like it's natural, not like he's being clever and arty. not that there's anything necessarily wrong with that, i wish i was clever and arty, but it means this song never feels lightweight or like an exercise. and few songs contain moments as moving as the moment towards the end of this when he sings god is a place you will wait for the rest of your life and i'm not sure what it is but that just gets me every time. the ending's great, too.

it's the best song on the album. he's drawing it all to an end and the song is so... unfuckwithable. he speeds up and slows down and sounds as if he knows where he's going, he can see it all and he's just letting us know. amazing.

and again

4. none of you will ever see a penny - final fantasy

i'm afraid i can't find a video of this. you can probably download it pretty easily though. or buy it. anyway. BUT THAT IS NOT WHAT I AM HERE TO DISCUSS. final fantasy is one guy and his violin a lot of the time, and it sounds like that for this song. when i first heard owen pallett it was in a youtube video (before i'd really heard of youtube, i was like, oh, what's this website? oh how hilarious things were, in retrospect) and he was covering bloc party. people said it was patrick wolf. they were obviously wrong. anyway, he's actually write different to patrick wolf, or at least patrick wolf as he is now - in this song he relies a lot more on just vocals, not a lot of instruments and other stuff as well. i mean, there's violin and it's beautiful, but it's largely great because of the vocals, which are so gorgeous at the beginning of the song. the only patrick wolf reference point that makes sense for this is the first few seconds of to the lighthouse and that's a good reference point, that's possibly my favourite bit of any song that patrick's done. this song isn't very forceful, it's quite spare, the recording, anyway, and it sounds kind of haunting, a bit like a chant that's being sung. okay maybe that only makes sense to me because it it 00:43, but seriously. this is so lovely and i love his voice in it, it's really catchy without being overproduced or particularly pop, it's just lovely.

more

I'm posting again! It's all very exciting.

3. WHAT DO YOU GET FOR THE MAN WHO HAS NOTHING - THE BURNING HELL

I found out about The Burning Hell through a list of bands playing a Canadian festival earlier this month... I was going through the list and they were the first lot that REALLY grabbed me. Have a listen - Grave Situation is awesome too. Anyway they're very dark, remind me of Nick Cave & Leonard Cohen at the same time. Really funny in places, mind, but quite bleak too. I love the chorus of this song, all the vocals piling on, and then in the verses it's just the man with his half-spoken vocals talking about not owning a lawnmower or any air-conditioning. The lyrics here are just excellent, as they seem to be generally from this guy/band... I don't think they're well known at all, and definitely not outside Canada, but they should be. Listen to this song and everything else they have up there. It's so good.

I also like the while thing where there are loads of instruments and loads of band members but it just works together and makes it sound really atmospheric and enveloping and great without being too much or too distracting. Although they don't really sound much like them this is sort of how I've always wanted the Arcade Fire to make me feel, but with them I've always felt a bit like there's something I'm missing. Here I just love it, I really engage with the songs and it's just so much fun. Try them.

I AM BACK

Wonder if anyone noticed I was gone? Anyway I don't really have any excuses for not posting in this for ages, I don't have a job or anything and I've left school, I just guess I haven't felt like it. Today I do.

To ease myself back into this whole blogging thing, I'm going to write up two of my current favourite songs. I will do two more in another post, and so on, until I have a top 10 right now. It will be fun. Here goes...

1. TRADING THINGS IN - VOLUNTARY BUTLER SCHEME

I found Voluntary Butler Scheme when I was looking at some acts that were doing Latitude. He might have been the only act we went to see that we only discovered because they were doing Latitude, but I'm not sure? Richard can correct me if I'm wrong. Anyway by the time we got to see him doing his thing on the Lake stage I knew the chorus to this song and would have been properly singing along if I hadn't lost my voice. He's really interesting live, too - it is just him, he doesn't have a band, so you see him recording loops and stuff on stage, like he'll tap a beat on his violin into a second microphone and then that beat will repeat through the song. I hadn't seen anyone do that live before, I thought it was awesome.

It's really, really, well, twee - I don't mean that as an insult, hey, I'm the one who still finds "twee as fuck" really amusing and loved The International Tweexcore Underground before I'd heard a note of it - but like, really good. I like this sort of love song - it's really cute, yeah, I mean he does actually sing the line "if you were broccoli I'd turn vegetarian for you", among others, but that's why it's so brilliant. It's sort of why I still love Umbrella so much - he's not just like I LOVE YOU PLEASE DON'T PICK SOMEONE ELSE OVER ME, he's all like here are all the silly things I'd do to be with you, now please don't go for anyone else? Umbrella uses the umbrella instead of "I WILL PROTECT YOU" or whatever, VBS uses tea, coffee and paper planes. Also the chorus is really fucking catchy in a really nice way. I hadn't seen the video before, too, how cute is it?! I love when he laughs at the end.


2. THE LUCKSMITHS - FICTION (link to a cover by salambo31@youtube)

I've linked to a cover because I really like the cover and there's only a live version up by The Lucksmiths and I don't like listening to live versions on youtube much because the quality sucks most of the time. Maybe it's good though. Yesterday I was in the back of the car on a long drive home - we went on a family holiday for a week to just outside Lancaster, which is quite far away from Ipswich - and this song came on and while I've pretty much always loved it, I hadn't realised quite how much. Musically, it's pretty much standard Lucksmiths, and probably lyrically too - but it's just awesome. The lyrics have got to be some of their best, whatever, and it progresses so nicely... he sounds so nostalgic, sort of down and hushed, but can't hide the rhyme of kitchen/fiction and from then on the song is just so well done, so well made. I write poetry and I hardly ever rhyme because it's so hard to do but it's managed perfectly here, not one rhyme makes me go ouch and several make me go I WISH I'D THOUGHT OF THAT. It's so understated. I also sort of want a tattoo of the word fiction now, is that wrong?

hi from the other side

I sort of abandoned this for most of June, sorry. After believing that I didn't need to get stressed about the exams this June, as soon as they started I sort of went to pieces and found that I could barely even listen to music, let alone write about it. It wasn't a very nice couple of weeks, but I'm feeling better now, largely because my exams are essentially over.

An article I wrote went up here, it's about lyrics and poetry. That's at a poetry magazine I'm involved with, but it's more about lyrics than poetry really.

The Guardian, of course, has since decided to publish lyrics of the 'greatest' lyricists ever or something, and they've got a really boring, predictable list of people that everyone basically already knows. Problem is, I was thinking what I'd put in my own list, and it's impossible. Seven? No, you can never only have seven greatest lyricists ever. I mean, a quick list of some bands/singers with lyrics that I like can't really be done, because that's pretty much all the music I listen to. Like, most people wouldn't really consider Kenickie a lyrics band in the same way they'd consider, say, Okkervil River, and maybe they're a bit less about that - but I still like their lyrics a lot, and don't want to dismiss that bit in Come Out 2nite when she sings "we don't have time to be sad / come out tonight you've got to grab it / if you want to have it" or Classy's pretty awesome "WE'RE CLASS WE'VE GOT CLASS". They're good in different ways to like, Okkervil River or The Hold Steady or whatever, but is that a bad thing? I don't think so. But lyrics like theirs will never be published in booklets, and probably shouldn't be. To be honest, I think the whole idea's a pretty stupid one - you need to hear them.

Also, who chose which songs to put in the booklets? Irish Blood, English Heart over, say, pretty much everything else Morrissey's written, except for the other few that were included? For serious?

SUNDAY MISCELLANY

it's time for another round of the recurring feature that requires less effort than a track-by-track! wahey!

...

Why did no one tell me that BARR were unmissable until today? I mean, I'd known that they were meant to be good, but evidently I'd never heard that they were so amazing that I had to check them out. BARR are incredible. My favourite at the moment is Summary, the title track of their most recent album, but pretty much everything I've heard has been really good. It's spoken word, really, over music, but it's so great and compelling. There's this amazing bit in Summary where he talks about rules and something about it just hits me full-force.

...

I think Johnny Foreigner have actually become my second favourite band. My actual favourite band, who I don't go on about as much here for some reason (it's not for lack of general zeal) is Los Campesinos!, but JoFo are drawing in. Er, not that it really matters where I rank bands, but still.

...

I tried reading some Daphne Du Maurier to BARR today and it wasn't a very good idea. I could read to Fleet Foxes still, though. They're growing on me, I think, but very slowly. At this rate, I might start really rating the album in about a year's time.

...

Camera Obscura's Let's Get Out Of This Country is a bit of an anthem (in a good way), isn't it? I keep playing it and dreaming of getting out of this country.

...

I borrowed my Dad's headphones so now at least I can listen to CDs again. Johnny Foreigner and Robyn are good for listening to on ther bus on the way to the library.

...

On Friday I was sitting on a picnic bench at some nowhere place in the country, CD player and lit magazines in hand. I read all of the latest issue of Succour and then listened to Bikini Kill's In Accordance To Natural Law at an extremely high volume. It was amazing. I love Bikini Kill, although not all of their songs. Carnival's my other favourite by them.

...

I want to make a mix of songs about buses, and maybe another one about trains. Suggestions? For buses I'm thinking Routemaster by Fear of Flying, The Chinatown Bus by Bishop Allen, On The Bus Mall by The Decemberists... for trains, Lua by Bright Eyes, Train from Kansas City cover by The Shop Assistants, Steaming Train by Talulah Gosh...

WAITED UP TIL IT WAS LIGHT IN CONVERSATION

because it's gone 1am and i thought, why the hell not, right?


"Surely all the shops are closed by now?"
"No, I'm just, just getting this one thing, wait, I'll call you back, just a minute-"
"You might not be able to get through. Shopping centres are black holes."
"Wait for me outside, it's busy, I've had a long day, my early shift-"
"Ran late, I know, I know. We're on the guestlist for the gig tonight but we don't have to go-"
"I don't have any money and there's no such thing as a free night out."
"Are you hungry now? I could meet you in the foodcourt-"
"We've got our friends in the city, will they feed us?"
"We can seat in cheap plastic seats and watch fights break out-"
"I was tripping over bottles at the club last night-"
"I bet the barstaff see it every night-"
"They all wear misfits t-shirts and big gold rings-"
"Do you want to talk about it?"
"I can't talk about it. You can't talk about it."
"I have enough money for a veggie burger to share, are you-"
"Are you hungry now? Are you hungry now?"
"Am I breaking up? Are you hungry now?"
"Just wait for me outside the shopping centre-"
"I'm biting my lip, it's cold outside, the buses are all leaving and we'll have to get a taxi-"
"My lunchbreak lasted for ever, I was lighting cigarettes just to wait time and I just need to buy one more thing. I will wait for you outside carparks, busy shopping centres, clubs and bars and after free nights out. There's just one thing I need to do. See you in a minute."
"Wait-"
"***"
"THE OTHER PERSON HAS HUNG UP"
#####

MUSIC

I haven't updated this that much over the past week or so, partly because I've been caught up with other things - I left school on Friday, then spent the weekend in London - but partly because I've been listening to music that probably doesn't fit here. Like, the Spanish entry to Eurovision (I can't help it, it's so catchy!) or my latest obsession, John Barrowman singing 'Sunset Boulevard'. Doesn't really fit with Johnny Foreigner.

But then I decided that I'd make a post mentioning both of those. Not entirely sure why.

Anyway, my other obsession at the moment is Lykke Li, oh goodness. I saw her perform Little Bit on Jolls Holland a while ago, and thoguh I'd listened to her before I had never really got it. When I saw her doing it on Jools Holland, I got it. I'm so so obsessed with this song, it's a bit stupid... also like I'm Good, I'm Gone a lot and pretty much everything i've heard by her, but I love this one song so much. She has a fanatstic voice, too, which helps.

I watched Eurovision with some friends on Saturday night, which was the reason that I was in London for the whole weekend (as opposed to just Saturday) and Sweden's entry was so shit and I was well outraged. No country does pop better than Sweden, I cried!

Then again, seriously, pretty much no country enters their best or most credible pop stars, do they? There was Sebastian Tellier doing something that no one quite understood, I suppose, but awesome as he was he didn't do very well when it came to voting. Israel's was a reality TV star (I quite liked him, actually) and Spain's was a joke entry by a comedian chosen through Myspace.

The thing is, I guess I don't really expect Eurovision to be anything other than ridiculous, both when it comes to the music, the presenters, and even the voting. I think the outcry about 'bloc voting' is bullshit; political voting has always been part of Eurovision, and this year Western European coutnries were voting for Eastern European just as much as anyone else, so it's stupid to complain about it. Russia sucked and shouldn't have won, yeah, but Armenia and Greece both had amazing, fun entries and deserved to be in the top 3.

So, Terry Wogan, shut up and stop moaning and if you really hate it that much then let someone else do your job. You're not as funny as everyone seems to think, anyway. Yeah, I said it.