Problem of conversation solved

Wow, Eircom seem to have turned on my home internet again.

Ladytron Live

If you've been paying attention, you will understand that I have a certain fondness for Ladytron. This was initially born from a hearing of their single 'Seventeen', and then from the album Light & Magic from whence it sprung. That album is still very much my favourite, but there are tracks on their others that also meet my approval. I also use and endorse Softcore Jukebox, their compilation of tunes they like.

But for all my love of the Tron, I have long failed to catch them live. While they had come over to Ireland a couple of times, it was always either to deliver DJ sets at clubs for kewl people or to play at one of those boorish music festivals the young people like. So I was rather excited when they announced a concert in Dublin's Tripod, a short hop from where I live. My beloved and I found ourselves there, where we ran into old pals Justin and Catherine. The old memory is not the best, so I cannot tell you if there was a support band.

I suppose you have some familiarity with Ladytron? They were one of those synthesiser bands, comprising two men and two women. They all play the synths, but the women also sing. In their early days, they really went for it with the whole synthesiser weirdo thing, appearing in photographs wearing uniform tunics. Their look is a bit less extreme now, but still pretty severe. Musically… well, it's synthpop, surely you know what that sounds like? Ladytron belong to the deadpan vocals school of synthpop, though they are not so robotic as the likes of Kraftwerk.

I thought maybe the concert was a bit slow to start, partly down to the sound quality being initially a bit shite, with the vocals in particular being mixed down a bit low. This is a bit problematic in a band where the singing is a key part of the package, for all that even on record it is not very in your face. There was also the curious fact that the Ladytron ladies ended up coming across as being a bit *shy*, something you don't want in a band that is meant to be fronted by implacable sex androids. I thought they could have been a bit more drilled – while 'Seventeen' was totally great, it would have been even better if the two women had been able to dance in rigid formation.

Things did pick up, though, and by the end phrases like "best gig ever" were being uttered by some people. This was basically because the mixing improved, so the vocals became audible. Result. Still, the band did seem to fluff 'Destroy Everything You Touch' (standout track from the Witching Hour album), which they played as part of an encore.

For all that this gig write-up is mainly a load of nitpicks, you must understand that this concert was a big bag of fun, and I can't wait for Ladytron to come back and party down my town (although I probably won't go and see them in November, as I need to spread the love).

Before moving on to the vital post gig loafing in which we engaged, I should mention the crowd. There were plenty of trend people and haircuts present, but there were also a load of seriously ugly blokes in the audience. By ugly, I mean even more muntery than me. I'm not sure if they were there because they reckoned they were in with a shout for some Ladytron lady action, or whether they recognised a kindred spirit in the bloke from Ladytron with the heroically nasty tache. But we are all God's children.

After the concert, we hung out with Justin and Catherine, and the backroom DJ played some long LCD Soundsystem tune about running. It seemed pretty good. There was also some song by Hercules & Love Affair played, these being one of those disco art project get-togethers, that features vocals by yer man Antony from Antony & The Fucking Johnsons. In this context, stripped of the "lovely song" connotations that drag him down normally, his vocal contribution seemed quite impressive, so I may even acquire the H&LA record some time when I want to get down with the kewl sounds of today. And then Justin & Catherine went home to rescue their baby sitter. Before leaving ourselves, my beloved and I wandered into the main area again, now transformed into a dance music night club… and what seemed like a pretty good one, judging by the banging tunes, nice lights, not totally wankerish crowd, and general room to dance. If you are ever in Dublin and feel like an old-school night out dancing, you could do worse than hit the Tripod on a Friday night.

Comics Roundup 5/9/2008

These are actually last week's comics – there were no comics worth buying this week.

Guerrillas #1, by Brahm Revel

This is an odd comic. It is set during the Vietnam War, and for most of it it takes the usual Vietnam War story form – soldier arrives in Vietnam, finds everything very scary, people get killed around him, horrible dehumanising events are witnessed, and so on. And then suddenly it all takes the most bizarre turn, with the kind of thing you would get ending a Tharg's Future Shock jumping out at the reader. Blimey. Frankly, the ending of this issue is so bizarre that maybe it should have ended there and then, but this Guerrillas is actually a nine-issue limited series. I reckon I will give it another issue or two to see if Mr Revel is able to stretch his odd premise over the full run of issues.


Madame Xanadu #3, by Matt Wagner & Ann Reeder Hadley

So I somehow managed to miss issues one and two of this hot new Vertigo title, probably as a result of being in Ethiopia. The main character here is this magician lady who has a job as court mage to Kublai Khan, Lord of the Mongols (with the action being set in Kublai Khan's somewhat mythical capital Xanadu (hence, presumably, the comic's title)). And she is from England or somewhere in Europe. And then Marco Polo and his pals arrive at the court of the Mongol King, and stuff starts to happen.

My initial impressions of this title are favourable. Ann Reeder Hadley's art has a soft and sensuous quality, with the main character having the kind of big-eyed rowrness that appeals to a certain type of heterosexual man but without alienating women readers. The story has the kind of dreamy floaty quality that recalls Neil Gaiman's Sandman. Matt Wagner (the writer) – his name sounds familiar, what has he done before? I'm curious enough as to where he will go with this to stick with this for a while. One thing I wonder is whether the story will always be set in the 13th century (or whenever Kublai Khan lived). It is apparent from this issue that the protagonist has access to secret remedies that make her able to live far far longer than normal humans, so maybe future stories will jump backwards and forwards in time, showing her doing stuff in different historical eras. Or maybe not.

Anyway, I think my mission for now must be to look for issues one and two of this title.

This Week's Star Letter

Comes from COUNT UGLUK, a servant of the Great Grishnackh, who took issue with my comments on BURZUM, MAYHEM, and other weirdo Norwegian metal acts. See here.

evil pandas

v/a "Music from Ethiopia: the central highlands, the desert nomads & Eritrea"

Yeah I know, Eritrea is not part of Ethiopia anymore, but it was when they put this disc together. This record does not have any of that Swinging Addis jazz stuff on it, but is rather a collection of traditional music, split up into those three conceptual parts of the country. It is all a bit ethnographic. The track that makes the most impact on me is the record's opener, a piece of liturgical music from the Ethiopian Orthodox Church (a monophysite Christian church that has developed separately from the rest of Christendom). It consists of people chanting while a priest bangs on some enormous drum, all sounding very strange and otherworldly. I could see how this king of music would make you feel like you were leaving behind earthly things and ascending to the divine, and my current mission is to get an entire album of this sort of thing. Maybe I should have though of this when I was actually in Ethiopia. Mmmm.
image source

The Magic of Joy Division

I went to see that film about Joy Division – the documentary, not the Anton Corbijn one. Having read Deborah Curtis' Touching From A Distance and been exposed to the mass media I am broadly familiar with the story of Joy Division. Essentially, four lads from Manchester form a punk band, and develop their own brooding and hypnotic sound that meshes well with the intensity of their lead singer; just when the band seem like they are on the brink of mega success, their singer kills himself, torn apart by the stresses of incipient stardom, his emerging epilepsy, and his own tangled domestic situation.

The film treads this well-worn path, but a couple of things make it worth seeing even if you know where the road ends. For one thing, sitting in a cinema while Joy Division tunes pump out of the speakers reminds you of just how great the band were. It is also fascinating to see the various Manchester locations associated with the band. For all the grimy grimness of so much of the footage, it really made me want to revisit the city, to an even greater extent than 24 Hour Party People did. And I particularly enjoyed all the to camera chit chat from the surviving members of the band, who have always come across as rather comical characters. Some of the other speakers were excellent too, with Paul Morley surprising me by saying something interesting (for which read something I agree with) – that 'Love Will Tear As Apart' should be thought of as a pop song, and that in other circumstances it could have made its way to number one.

It is also striking how much footage of the band playing there was. I always think of the past as being an era where people went to concerts and just enjoyed them, without feeling obliged to record a two-dimensional version of them for posterity. But with Joy Division it seems like a great many of their concerts were recorded, either on 8 mm film or primitive portable video cameras. This footage reveals a surprising Joy Division fact – that Ian Curtis' on-stage dancing looked pretty comical, kind of like what your dad would do if he found himself fronting a kewl band.

The film took the usual Joy Division route of idolising Ian Curtis. Do not get me wrong, I am not down on his singing or lyrics, and I see his contribution as vital to the success of the band. But his sad end means that the story of Joy Division too much becomes his story, obscuring the equally vital contribution of the others. There is a power to so many of the bands' tunes that exists almost independently of the vocals, perhaps best noticed on something like 'Dead Souls' with its long, doomy, and vocals-free intro. The others were not Ian Curtis' backing band, as their later success as New Order would demonstrate.

Towards the end, I was glad that I was watching this film and not Corbijn's Control. The slow countdown to Curtis' death and then its aftermath was quite hard to bear, and I reckoned it would be a bit much in a narrative film. So maybe this documentary should be advertised as "Less Depressing Than Control"

Fac Panda

Marnie Stern "In Advance of the Broken Arm"

Another birthday present, this time from "Accent Monkey", and it is a record by someone I had never heard of! Imagine. A first listen revealed this to be an mix of girlie vocals and extremely fiddly sounding music. Research revealed that Marnie Stern is famous as a guitar goddess, which was a bit of a surprise as your correspondent had failed to register that the musical accompaniment was guitar and not some kind of crazy synthesiser thing. Mmmm. Whatever way you look at it, this music is pretty in-your-face, and not really the kind of thing you can have on in the background to while trying to concentrate on something else, and it's not the kind of record you want to listen to with other people, in case they say "So what is this shite?".

I had planned to renew my relationship with Ms Stern while my actual beloved was off in Ethiopia, but wooden block board games intervened.

Chic "The Best of The Chic Organization"

I often complain about how there are compilations giving you the best of Chic, but there are no compilations giving you the best of the Chic Organisation (i.e. the peaks of Chic's own music and also the production work they did for other people). But now there is, thanks largely to the miracle of CD-R technology and inernet pal Andrew Sherman. As well as the really big Chic tunes, you also get Sheila B. Devotion*'s 'Spacer', Diana Ross' 'I'm Coming Out', and Sister Sledge's 'We Are Family'. I do kind of miss Diana Ross's 'Upside Down', and feel that the version of 'Lost In Music' included is a slightly ropey dance remix, but getting these songs in digital form has done wonders for my ability to bop down the street grooving to the disco sounds coming from the iPod.

Chic pandas

*I understand that this track is actually credited to Sheila & B. Devotion, but I would rather be wrong than right.

The Puppy Whisperer - slight return

I have previously mentioned the Puppy Whisperer, a chap who sings puppies to sleep. The embedded YouTube video in my last post does not work, as they have turned off embedding on it, or something, but if you want to watch puppies being sung to sleep, click here: Lets see the Dog Whisperer do this!!

Caribou "Andorra"

See concert write-up. On record, Caribou sound more like a psych revival band than anything strikingly original. They are a lot less obviously drum-led for one thing. Still, if all of the music listened to by today's young people sounded like this then the country would not be in the mess it is.

Psychic Panda