Guillemots front man Fyfe Dangerfield:
“A lot of the reviews have sort of indicated that we’re too clever for our own good and get really quite annoyed by the way that we go off in different directions.”
I challenge anyone to name another album that starts with an electro-indie number, then goes r&b, then has an acoustic guitar track. Clearly the result of a game involving creating an album where no song can come before or after another in the same genre, the second album from a band who I already knew were bonkers isn’t going to be everyone’s cup of tea (for an example of this, see nme review). That said, it won’t stop your foot from tapping along and it doesn’t mean that some of it (see ‘words’ or the string arrangement on ‘Cockateels’) isn’t pure genius.
Yes, it is an Athlete lyric. Original Photo.
Hold the presses, I’ve just discovered that not only is time travel possible, but I’ve been living it for the last week. Not only that, it all happens by email. Today I got an email from Universal Music (actually I got two, one on each of my two email accounts, and don’t ask how they got both addresses as I certainly didn’t give it to them) thanking me for recently registering to receive updates from (the band) Boy Kill Boy. The message says this:
We have not received registration confirmation from you as yet. If you are happy to receive the updates, please click on the link below. This will ensure that your email address has been recorded correctly and has not been submitted by someone else.
– Link Here –
If you do not click the link, you will NOT receive messages from Boy Kill Boy.
Now let me say right now that I’ve no intention of clicking the link. Sure I saw them play a couple of weeks ago (supporting Athlete) but I thought that they were rubbish. That’s not the point. The key sentence is “If you do not click the link, you will NOT receive messages from Boy Kill Boy.” which is very interesting, because I got one last week (actually again two, one to each address but I digress) at which point I went to their site and unsubscribed from the mailing list, after all they’re a major music company and they can surely be trusted with a tiny little mailing list.
Which all proves that time travel exists and it also proves that alternative futures exist because I’m living in one right now where I don’t even ask for the message that I’ve already received. It also proves that Universal’s mailing list policy really isn’t up to much.
Guy Garvey:
“It almost feels at the moment that we’re holding a torch which needs holding up, you know what I mean, the album is dying as an art form and it needs revival, it needs looking after, it needs protecting, internet music companies like iTunes need to let artists present and sell their music in the way they want to.”
In some ways I can disagree, occasionally I’ll hear an album track on the radio and head over to the iTunes store to buy it. However I overwhelmingly support Mr Garvey on this. Albums aren’t wrong - they’re just misunderstood, and when an album is crafted to be more than simply a collection of songs I can’t see a problem with the artist requesting that it be sold as such. This is an argument for another day. What isn’t up for argument is that Elbow are an album band and they’re very good at what they do. Put simply, the seldom seen kid is brilliant.
Like their previous offerings, this needs to be listened to (at least initially) in one go, straight through, from the build at the start of ‘Starlings’ to the last lingering note of ‘Friend of Ours’. The album is a journey, through the single ‘Grounds for Divorce’ and stand out tracks ‘The Bones of You’ and ‘Weather to Fly’ it’s part classic understated elbow, part dovesy, part sigur ros. It also features lyrics which if they were written by anyone else would be held up as genius and a true understanding of ‘real life’.
However this is what Elbow have been doing for 10 years. The masses ignored it then and they’ll probably ignore it now. It’s a shame but perhaps that’s part of the charm.
This will come as no shock to some of you, but it turns out I don’t know everything and I certainly don’t understand some of the things that I do know. Most of things that I don’t understand can be divided into two categories, things that I don’t understand and am fascinated by and things that I don’t understand and am frustrated by.
File browsing in Vista is one of the things that frustrates me. The Linux machine on my desk at work can display files in a folder as either icons or as a list. Vista can handle both of those, but can also show me the same information is 5 other formats. This is fine, I can set how I want to view a folder. Except that it seems to have to be set on a per folder basis, or perhaps it works by sharing a setting with any child folders, unless I’ve specifically set them differently, I just don’t know. I also don’t know why, and as far as I can tell this is completely random, a folder will just change it’s view setting of it’s own accord. Does it know something I don’t, is there reason behind the madness? Answers on a postcard because I’ve really got no clue.
Excellent, phase 1 of my grand vision is making progress. Now put the iplayer download function in the appletv and we’ll really be making progress.
UPDATED: Useful links:
- For viewing, point your ipod straight at bbc.co.uk/iplayer
- For downloading, I use the iPlayer Downloader
