Ten questions from my fried musical brain

How many songs do you have to write in an endless chase of perfection before you go back to the early ones and realise they are actually really good?

Do we need drums any more?

If the end listener will never know, does the story behind the song matter anyway?

What is more commercially profitable, happiness or misery?

What is more artisitically profitable, happiness or misery?

When does repetition become a bad thing?

At what point does construction become deconstruction?

Why is the glockenspiel, essentially a childrens toy to most and at best a horribly linear instrument, capable of conjuring up more in the mind than any other instrument.

Does the glockenspiel conjure up more in the mind than any other instrument?

Will this post be a source of embarassment when sober?

Free Spiritualized rarities, in three easy steps!

1 – Go to http://www.spiritualized.com/

2 – Sign up to the “Admissions” section.

3 – Go to the “Complimentary Medicines” department and download two CDs worth of alternate versions and rehearsal takes from the Lazer Guided Melodies sessions.

Huzzah!

The Beastie Boys – The Mix Up

The concept of the Beastie Boys making an instrumental album didn’t fill me with a great deal of enthusiasm, but the tracks I have heard are outstanding.

The good people over at Goodheads have a couple Youtube’s for your listening and viewing pleasure.

When great bands make bad albums. Part 1

The Beta Band – The Beta Band 

Following massive critical acclaim for The Three EPs, the full length debut album was something of a disaster.  So bad, in fact, that Steve Mason himself declared it to be “fucking awful” in an interview shortly after it came out.

What exactly went wrong?  Mason claims the band were given a ridiculous deadline to finish the record (at the time the music press were hyping them up to be the new Radiohead) and thus couldn’t refine it, but really – the songs just aren’t there.  Tracks such as Simple Boy sound like half finished demos of songs that weren’t any good to begin with.

Coldplay – X&Y

Is anyone actually capable of listening to this the whole way through?  Possibly the most over-produced album ever made, listening to large sections of X&Y is like attempting to swim through a pool of space-age treacle while doing a Rubik’s Cube.

The songs are there, in fact it’s probably their best collection of songs, but everything has been glossed with so many NASA style whooshes and reverb and other needless distractions that all but the very best tracks (Fix You) are rendered impotent and soulless.  The refreshing anture of the secret acoustic track at the end only re-inforces it all.

A stripped-down remake of X&Y using some acoustic guitars a drumkit and a piano would be astounding.   As it is, it shall forever be the Emperor’s New Spacesuit.

The Flaming Lips – At War With The Mystics

It’s just all a bit rubbish, isn’t it?  Admit it!  (Ok, the first two tracks are pretty good)

Synesthesia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia

That’s all well and good, but it still doesn’t explain why hearing “Dogs Got A Bone” by The Beta Band has forever made me visualise the Kalamari Desert level from Mario Kart 64. It’s a stomach-churningly powerful case.

Tour ‘07

It is now only 26 days till I leave to work in Canada. That’s less than a month!

I really wish this toy had been around when I was a kid

“I wanna do it with three bullets!  Three bullets!  One, two, three!”

I have a rotten cold

In the middle of fucking MAY!!!  Little else to say, other than I must have listened to the Sentaur EP by Troubles at least 20 times in the last few days, and Liverpool really really should have won last night.

Here instead are some amusing videos of that bit in Mogwai Fear Satan by Mogwai:

B3TA’s Bumper Book of Sick Jokes

http://www.sickjokebook.com/

Now available for free download in pdf format if you are too cheap to buy it!

What an age we live in!

(I’ve just figured out how to embed Youtube videos!)