Avril or PJ Harvey would also likely have worked out better crowd wise.
Avril or PJ Harvey would also likely have worked out better crowd wise.
Went to see Taylor Swift last night. I like some of her music (mostly Lover/Folklore/Evermore), but as a show it was genuinely a spectacle.
I’m going to see Busted this evening. Never seen them live before.
Recently become obsessed with Microdisney. Town to Town and Singer's Hampstead Home are awesome.
Going to see The Magnetic Fields perform the first half of 69 Love Songs on September 8th. They're playing two nights to perform the whole thing, but I can't go to both, and if made to choose, I'd say disc 1 is the best one, so it all works out (1>3>2, fine margins though). I'm not entirely sure they're performing it in sequence anyway.
Saw them last year as part of a mini-festival, one of the weirdest atmospheres at a gig I've experienced. None of them seemed like they wanted to be there in the beginning apart from the drummer, but the vibe became friendlier and friendler (and the songs better) as time went on.
Really looking forward to it.
Some effort to perform all that live as older people, considering half of it is experimental guff. The good 40% of it though is so fucking good.
Hitchin has travelled back to the early 00's this weekend:
Fucking Dizzee Rascal rocking up in Hitchin, Jesus.
Get those De La Soul tickets booked.
In much better news than some Mancunian shite returning, Linkin Park have returned and are moving forwards with a female lead singer.
Obvious move is obvious and all that, but she sounds pretty good in the live stream they're doing at the minute.
Yeah she's actually not half bad. New song sounded kinda lifeless overall though.
Toggle Spoiler
Someone replaced her with Chester via AI.
I'm a twit
Given the beef around her (scientologist who allegedly supported/backed that rapey Jordan Masterton bloke), they may as well just have replaced Chester with an AI bot.
How long before an AI supergroup gets a residency in Vegas?
Not sure why but I got a houseboat docked at the himbo dome is a corker of a line
No it isn't
I'm loving the new album (perhaps his best yet?) and this is definitely my favourite. Weirdly anthemic in places. He manages to mix his folkier elements with harder edged guitar parts seamlessly. He's very Neil Young-esque in that regard, to me at least.
I'm going to catch him on the tour for this one.
It's still in fairly regular rotation for me too, I keep coming back to it.
He seems to be filtering a lot of my favourite music as influences. I mean I don't know that, obviously. But at a guess. I saw somebody on Reddit describe it as "like Stephen Malkmus covering American Stars n' Bars", which is a far more neatly put summation of why I like it than anything I could come up with myself.
I did get tickets to see him too. I'm in Dublin that weekend and coincidentally he's on stopping there on tour at the same time.
Yeah I'm raging I wasn't aware of him before, because I would have absolutely gone down to Dublin for that. It's sold out now. I'm enjoying the album Rat Saw God by Wednesday which he is part of too.
Speaking of gigs I'm going to Will Sheff and The Antlers in Dublin on the 26th. The setlist seems to be split and I think they play each other's stuff. Cannot wait for that.
And, funny, on your Malkmus point I did think to myself recently that there's that lo-fi sound of early Built to Spill to his stuff, plus some of those heavy riffs like in On My Knees.
Sheff should be great. I saw him at a Folk festival last year and while most of the other acts there were in the expected range of flannel-wearing crooners or women in fluffy sweaters playing mellow love songs and sipping tea in between, Sheff just came out with a replacement Okkervil River band (judging from their average age being around 25) and really went for it hard. Was great fun watching them jump around on stage in front of a crowd that was all-seaters for the first ten rows or so.
New Smile album is a lovely bit of business.
Saw Nick Cave the other week in Amsterdam. Immense gig and he was sounding great. Really liked the new stuff and also a couple of tracks on overlooked (by me) albums, specifically White Elephant from Carnage. Heck of a song.
There's a new Bright Eyes album out as well which seemed ok but didn't really have any standouts on the first listen. Often these things take time though.
14 fucking years ago this came out. Damn.
Lots to take away from the track (and I'm sure Zed Pain will release follow-up records to which I'm looking forward) but among them is that if you gave the lyrics of most hip-hop/black music to dweeby-looking white men then it suddenly starts just being about straight sexual assault. The vibe is king.