As a celebration of Last.fm’s cool new free on-demand music service (perfect for sampling before you download or buy) I’m going to write something frivolous, fluffy and self centered ala Last.fm’s user journals. Well… I suppose the rest of our site is pretty fluffy and self centered too so in any case it’s a good fit.
Here is the game: I will go through all of the Shins three albums in running order and dish out points from three to one given how much I like a given song compared to the others in its category. As such I will attempt to prove with my ingenius system (patent pending) which is truly the greatest Shins album ever.
By far the highlight of the 2008 Big Day Out was Spoon – it was before I even entered the gate – from the line up, I knew it was them, Billy Bragg, and Arcade Fire, and some other smallish ones for me this year… and so I pretty much set up camp over at the Cons/Green stage for the whole day.
This review is not a treatise on the Youtube age we live in.
The best thing the monstrous advertising blitz behind this movie did was keep things under wraps. You don’t really know anything about anything going in, except that it is a monster movie produced by JJ Abrams and that it’s all filmed on shaky handhelds. Whatever expectations you may have of such a gimmick you will likely come out of Cloverfield impressed by its effectiveness.
All you need to know is that like with the Blair Witch Project before it, the style is effective at creating suspense and getting the blood pumping resulting in a gripping and thrilling movie and something quite different to everything else in its genre (at least until the multitudes of copycats arrive). You might also care to know that the opening twenty minutes of this movie is excruciating. It’s a purposeful build up to the main event, the piddling card tricks a magician employs till he cuts the woman in half. After all you paid to see the monsters, the guns and the people screaming. Rest assured, you will get what you paid for.
So what exactly is Cloverfield?
Do you remember that bit in War of the Worlds where that idiot kid runs after those military guys and begs Tom Cruise to let him follow them? And how all the military guys were busy shooting something on the other side of the hill and you were screaming at the screen “show us what the fuck is on the other side of the hill and not Tom Cruise and the idiot kid”? Cloverfield is what is on the other side of that goddamn hill.
Well, I am going through a little Swedish or more broadly Scandinavian phase at the moment, from learning Swedish to watching the Danish series The Eagle: A Crime Odyssey to listening to any and all music from over that way … well generally the bands who sing in English anyway.
And as part of this psychotic obsession of mine, I have come across Lykke Li. I would normally throw in a similar artist to give you the picture but you should look anyway so I wont. So big shout out to Lykke Li who has just finished cutting her debut record and as such we should see it very soon, but it seems that it wont be released/distributed here in Australia for a while if at all, and so it’s probably an internet grab from wherever the cool kids hangout these days.
So check out her hit – Little Bit! There is also a good acoustic rendition of this done on the streets of Stockholm in what my Swedish girlfriend tells me if the cool area – Södermalm. Linkage for streetside Little Bit.
Despite having a relatively late release in Australia, Juno has been worth the wait. Another film in the somewhat quirky but serious at times, teenager-early adulthood film renaissance (Knocked Up, Superbad) Juno delivers a cast that is very comfortable in each role. Coming from director Jason Reitman (of Thank You For Smoking fame) and writer Diablo Cody, it is an incredibly enjoyable film – but is not one that shouts or blows you away. The scenes are subdued as are the characters much of the time, there is minimal shouting or overflowing of emotion and as such the film’s theme is almost one of suppression.
Juno, Ellen Page, is a 16 year-old quirky indie girl (whatever the hell that means) who has the deranged vocabulary to match. After an armchair encounter with Paulie Bleeker, Michael Cera, Juno falls pregnant. Initially deciding to terminate the pregnancy and “nip it in the bud” and do something “before it gets worse” at a local clinic, she pulls out (excuse the pun) and decides to simply donate her baby “with fingernails” to the picture perfect couple Mark and Venessa (Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner). It doesn’t take long for Juno’s endearing but troublemaking character to show the cracks in the “old school” baby-deal. Juno starts spending more time with Mark, a suppressed music and slasher film lover, who lives under the dominating force of baby crazy Venessa. In turn Mark feels his personality rising up against his oppressor who forces his true self into storage. The somewhat confused relationship that follows opens up a can of worms that leaves Juno disillusioned with love, parenthood, family and longevity.
So our blog/features and reviews site has been up for a week. In that time we’ve completely changed the look of our site four times, changed the banner five times, put up six wholly separate posts and this one will make seven.
We’ve all had moments where we’ve had a few minutes to burn. Maybe you’re in line at the dentists or waiting to get a hair cut, or for your girlfriend to get ready, or you are stuck on a bus to work. What do you do? Perhaps you pick up a magazine, or switch on the telly. Maybe you just sit and scratch yourself. Some of us who don’t leave the house without our iPods and might put on our headphones and tune out to a song or two. Those of us who are particularly restless might pull out the mobile phone and send messages (“im bord i h8 w8ting”), fiddle with phone settings or if you’ve really thought ahead game on a portable handheld. Phase is a video game for the Apple iPod that aims to give you that something else to do during these short spells where nothing much is going on. And it’s pretty good.
An interesting article if you haven’t yet come across it yet, is this Rolling Stone piece from 26th December 2007, on The Death of High Fidelity. Quite ashamedly, I was one of those idiots that sold all his CDs when in a tight spot because I had ripped them all into 192kbps… Not even that good a quality mp3! And ever since I have regretted it – for both the artwork and for the sound quality. If I put on a legitimate CD, and turn it up quite loud, the clarity of the uncompressed audio is great. Do the same with a normally sized mp3 and the whole thing is just a groan. It’s like watching someone else experience your dream in close proximity – you are there, but there is no joy.
However, as Codfour says, both experiences are legitimate but the CD format has more to offer – and this article shows that at least sonically, this is undeniable today.
CDs are just another valid way of experiencing music. With CDs I feel like I’m experiencing a product, but in a good way – a work of art created by artists for an audience, and that is something I consider worth paying for still.
I like discovering all the fine details that are odd and interesting. For example R.E.M.’s Green has a big mysterious shiny number 4 on the cover which you can’t see on your mp3 album art. Nor would you know about their decision to only print lyrics to the World Leader Pretend. Whatever their reasons for making these mysterious decisions, it’s peculiar and I love it. I enjoy coming up with theories about what it’s about, and hearing other people’s takes on it.
They don’t always have to be as mysterious – there is a bit on The Flaming Lips’ Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots on the inside of the spine, hidden and tucked out of the way saying “You have found the secret message, do you have too much time on your hands? Let it go”. It’s little touches like these that makes me feel like some thought and care has been put into this product that’s in my hands (even if the remarks are rather snide!). I even like it when I pull out a Strokes CD and it says “Thank You” under where the CD just was. It’s the little things that count in the CD experience.
but more generally quite laid back.
