David Emery Online

Music music

26 July 2005

Yes, it’s finally time for the inevitable music post.

Everyone in the world has a different opinion on music (and most of them are wrong), and equally everyone with a blog seems to think that it would be a great idea to broadcast there particular music obsession to the world. Sadly, nobody actually cares what you think about music – if people read your blog it’s because of what you normally write about (blogs, normally…), not due to your ever growing country and western collection (yee-ha!). Hence, I have tried to keep my particular musical obsessions off this blog, but I’ve now decided that it might just be a better idea to let it all out in one go, possibly on a yearly basis, just so that when I sit down to write it doesn’t always pop into my head as being the thing I should write about.

So…

I’m currently listening to a heady mix of the new Subways album (which has some really nice simple punk rock on it, but maybe a little bit too much filler), the Art Brut album (much, much better then I was expecting – really very good, if only for having the line: “I want to write the song that makes Israel and Palestine get along”, which is joyfully optimistic and all the more wonderful for it), the new Foo Fighters album (disappointing, only a handful of good tracks), the Arcade Fire album (exceedingly good – also better than expected), the new Sleater Kinney album (my album of the year so far – brilliant lyrics and guitar, coupled with interesting and varied song structure) and the latest White Stripes album (very good, but slightly disappointing – I like the experimentation, but I’m not sure it’s entirely successful, and being a long time White Stripes fan I know they can do better). Also, I very much liked the recent Queens of the Stone Age album, but then I’m a huge QOTSA fan anyway (which includes all the QOTSA offshoots as well, including Kyuss, Desert Sessions, Eagles of Death Metal and Mondo Generator).

Who should win the Mercury music prize? Either M.I.A, who’s doing some very interesting stuff (which is really the whole point of the prize, I think), The Go Team who’s album is really good in places, but I don’t think will last too well or maybe Bloc Party who’re really quite good, but are a little too derivative really. As long as it’s not Kaiser Chiefs (haven’t we done britpop already?) or Coldplay (‘cause they really need the exposure…) it’ll be ok.

Ah, that’s better…