Duo / Duet

12 March 2008

I thought I’d shake it up a little and talk about music for once; I don’t seem to have done so for quite a while. I keep meaning to integrate my Last.fm profile – which thanks to MobileScrobbler is now kept up to date – into the sidebar of this site but I still haven’t found a good way of doing it. At some point I’ll give in and write an RSS mangler that’ll do it, unless someone can point me in the direction of a nice Textpattern plugin that’ll do it (I couldn’t get this one to work).

Anyway…

I’m really liking the new The Kills album, Midnight Boom; it’s (obviously) got a certain level of pretension and self obsessed cool about it but I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing – don’t we want our rock stars to be cool and slightly arrogant? The music is all interesting beats and interrupting guitar combined with the wonderful male/female vocal split which always ends up working well.

Male/female duets are are winning combination for my ears at the moment, as the new Blood Red Shoes album has also completely won me over. It’s proper Pixies/Sleater Kinney/Nirvana/Sonic Youth style garage rock and it’s exceptionally good. It’s really good to hear some full on proper guitar these days…

I was always going to like the Foals album, it has to be said, but I like it in a completely different way to how I expected. I had been anticipating something not ‘poppy’, but something along the same lines as Hummer, Balloons et al, but the final album is not really like that; it has far greater depth and subtlety. I wonder if it’s the Dave Sitek influece – certainly the abundance of horns must be – but I think that would be selling the boys a bit short.

I have the feeling that it could well be received fairly poorly, or at least not sell as much as expected, but I could see Foals going on to be an exceptionally strong band in the future. It really reminds me of early Radiohead…

Otherwise, I’m still liking the Pete and the Pirates album which is wonderful indie pop; the new Nick Cave album is so far ticking all the boxes as is the Nine Inch Nails album (which if it had vocals would be utterly stunning); the Bon Iver album is a work of subtle beauty that needs serious listening time devoting to it and the Black Keys album has got groove. Oh and please, please go out and get The Teenagers album on Monday – it’s a work of sleazy comic genius.

Finally, here’s a lovely video from the Mystery Jets – a band I’m not normally fond of – featuring Laura Marling:

From: Articles

12 March 2008