So I was farting around on Twitter – what else do you do on there? – and I came across this image.
So I figured I’d do it. I worked the first post up and someone commented, saying you could crank out the whole month in a day, if you had a mind.
I don’t have much of a mind, but I do have bookshelves requiring filling that I desperately need distraction from, so I did all 30 days (why not 28 or 31?) in one go.
And here they are. (more…)
Well, in a minute. There’s been a lot of Goodreads reviews popping up here, largely because I’ve been churning through the Preacher trades. I’ll write on other stuff soon, no doubt, but until then enjoy something missed from my ’90s challenge posts – non-Australian music. This album was one I listened to a lot and it still remains one of those with no volume ceiling: no matter how much you turn it up, it could always go just a little further.
More anon.
A little while ago my friend Andy made a fairly lengthy Facebook thread detailing his favourite David Bowie songs from each of Bowie’s albums. It sparked a bit of conversation, and I figured I’d like to do the same, as it would give me – if nothing else – an excuse to play all the albums again. (You know, as if I needed one.)
What I learned from this endeavour is: 1) post-anaesthesia listening is weird (I did most of the thinking in the days after a brief hospital trip) and 2) that fucker makes it difficult to choose one song on an album. Let alone articulate why you like the bloody thing in the first place
Let’s go. (more…)
OK, so thanks to the Facebook chain post doing the rounds, I’m doing that song-a-day-for-a-week thing where I post a song I like and write a bit about it. You should do it too, eh? (Seriously, if you like the post, go write your own, and tell me in the comments, as I’d like to read your picks.)
This is day four. My pick for day four is a song that I have for years kind of thought was a personal anthem: Tom Waits’ “Goin’ Out West”.
This is, as with many others, a song I’d heard on Rage one late evening. This wasn’t the first Tom Waits song I’d heard. I had some of his earlier stuff, I think perhaps the two Early Years albums which were very acoustic, and much more singer-songwriter. But this. This. Look at the filmclip – a guy who looks kind of like a monkey plays a midget guitar with a brakeman’s glove, in a world where everything is on fire. He high-kicks, singing about some kind of pornographic Big Rock Candy Mountain life that’s better out west, in the land of suntans. He’s not a bit player, baby – he’s a leading man, a lover man, a ruler and a fighter. Power chords fade in and out beneath tremolo guitar, while the percussion sounds like (and probably was) someone beating the shit out of furniture.
Later on, he gets devil horns. What the fuck was this? (more…)
OK, so thanks to the Facebook chain post doing the rounds, I’m doing that song-a-day-for-a-week thing where I post a song I like and write a bit about it. You should do it too, eh? (Seriously, if you like the post, go write your own, and tell me in the comments, as I’d like to read your picks.)
This is day three. My pick for day three is a song that properly introduced me to what’s become one of my favourite (if not the favourite) bands, the Dirty Three.
Now for a bit of history. I had heard this band before – I think from the live clip of “Dirty Equation” that used to get a spin on Rage in those late night/early morning tunefests – but it hadn’t done anything for me. I hadn’t then really discovered much noisy stuff beyond Einstürzende Neubauten, and the Dirty Three are very much a live band, so it’s not surprising that this rough-arse clip didn’t grab me. I knew from the street press that the band were pretty popular, but I didn’t go out of my way to check them out. (more…)
OK, so thanks to the Facebook chain post doing the rounds, I’m doing that song-a-day-for-a-week thing where I post a song I like and write a bit about it. You should do it too, eh? (Seriously, if you like the post, go write your own, and tell me in the comments, as I’d like to read your picks.)
This is day two. My pick for day two is a song I first heard – or more correctly, first paid attention to – when it featured on the soundtrack to Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers.
(Fun author fact the first: I went on a fairly disastrous first date while in first year at university to a double feature – Natural Born Killers and A Clockwork Orange – at the old Valhalla cinema in Glebe. It ended in a very arts student way, with long discussions in a cemetery. The next weekend, the person in question told me they’d started taking heroin. Coincidence? I THINK NOT.)
Anyway, I was a literature student when I saw the movie, and I couldn’t believe it was Cohen, at first. I mean, I’d flogged the arse out of his Best Of album for years, as anyone vaguely interested in poetry and being a mopey arts student was wont to do, and this was a world away from fingerpicked guitars and tea and oranges that come all the way from China. (more…)
OK, so thanks to the Facebook chain post doing the rounds, I’m doing that song-a-day-for-a-week thing where I post a song I like and write a bit about it. You should do it too, eh? (Seriously, if you like the post, go write your own, and tell me in the comments, as I’d like to read your picks.)
This is day one. Today’s song was probably the first Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds song I saw, thanks to Rage, the late night/early morning music video show here in Australia. Actually, the first I ever saw may be the fairy-lit cover of ‘In the Ghetto’ but this one stuck more in my memory. For my money it remains one of the strongest songs the band has done, even though lyrically it’s less leaning on Faulknerian gloom for inspiration and more wearing its skin as a jacket. Still, plenty of grim mud-sloshed words to go around, indicative of the whole And The Ass Saw The Angel thing, and some good Leadbelly vocal rips to go along with it. (more…)
It appears Luke Haines has a solo album coming out, and it’ll be all analogue synths. So snark and synths? Sounds like my kind of thing. In the lead-up, though, he’s chosen his favourite electronic albums, and one of my absolute favourites is one of his picks: Klaus Schulze’s Irrlicht.
So have some drone, folks. Be sure to play it at neighbour-hating volume.
Christmas is my excuse for December’s paucity of posts. I’m sticking to it.
Not quite yet, but the hair’s almost there.
Yeah nah. 