Desbladet
- Neither decorative nor useful
home archives guestbladet mail host

Something to say? Desbladet wants to hear about it! Please use the guestbladet for comments!

(I know, I know, but it's the way we diarylanders have done it for generations.)

2010-05-10 15:03

Moondag Review of Stuff

Some bloke interviewing Simon Reynolds, a music critic we took seriously back when it still seemed to make sense to take music critics seriously:

In the introduction to Rip It Up and Start Again, you write: �As a rock critic, when you reach a certain age, you begin to wonder if all the mental and emotional energy you�ve invested in this music was such a shrewd move. Not exactly a crisis of confidence, but a creasing of certainty�. Similarly, in Totally Wired, you wonder if the �searching for utopia through music� wasn�t �a mistake�. Aren�t these doubts mainly due to the fact that music no longer occupies the central cultural role that it did during the punk and post-punk years?

These aren't those times, but if you remember them and fancy reliving them or don't remember them and wonder what they might have been like, here is Archived Music Press's scan of the Stud Brother's review of Loop's not-especially-seminal-with-hindsight Fade Out.

When Melody Maker folded a lot of the writers washed up in Uncut, where the Velvet Underground and the Stooges are firmly established in the canon but the greatest rock and roll star of all time is probably Neil Young and many of the duller writers have a distressing tendency to review only the lyrics of songs.

Meanwhile, we're listening to Wolfmother's Cosmic Egg - they're one of those sm�rg�srock pick'n'mix bands - the usual Hawkwind+Sabbath of stoner rock, with just too much prog seasoning for our taste - that Australia has come to specialise in sending out on tour for years at a time until they wear down the world's resistance, and why not?

In particular we're going to see them live, which will be the first time we've done something like that for years. We're curious about the demographic they pull in: are there still pop kids to fling filth at these days?

2010-05-05 11:37 (U to the T to the C plus

Parapetular decephalation

The thing about babies is they make high-maintenance look like hands-off. And when you have a new baby - even if it only looks a little bit like a goblin - as well as a toddler who is really starting to get the hang of the spring weather, you have your hands more than a bit full unless you have either much larger or many more hands than we have.

And along with the domesticity overload comes a severely curtailed interest in pretty much everything else: we hadn't even heard that Kronprinsess Vickan of Zweden had set a date for her nuptuals (19 June, prinsessweddningfans: carve it into your stone of choice).

And when we're off duty we mostly prefer to hack out jazz arpeggios on a red guitar to keeping up with the Internets.

Still, the situation seems to be at least stabilising, and we have an Interesting Fact to report: Britain's LibDem's absurdly over-hyped Nick Clegg speaks fluent Dutch, on account of his mother being also Dutch.

We're not voting in Blighty, though - it would feel frivolous - and we can't vote in the Zwamplands - not having yet acquired citizenship - so it's an especially passive political experience at the moment.

previous, next, latest

Site Meter