Here's some music...

I call upon the sane and rational...

In the Guardian today there is a story about the race for the Christmas number one. Turns out that Alexandra Burke (Winner of TV "talent" contest X-Factor) has released a cover of the Leonard Cohen track Hallelujah despite the fact that the only cover of Hallelujah is by the one and only Jeff Buckley.

In the name of fairness I actually hied myself over to Youtube and listened to Ms Burke's version and what did I find? That it sucks so much there's a chance I may hunt the bitch down and strangle her with piano wire.

And in case you think I'm overreacting I present to you the same choice I have just made.

Firstly (and in order not to make you biased by making you hear the better version first) I give you Alexandra Burke's version.



And here is Jeff Buckleys version.



Light dawns and the choice becomes clear. Alexandra Burke's version makes you want to kick a kitten across the room in an apoplectic rage and Jeff Buckley's version sets your emotions in gear and can easily reduce a grown man to tears.

So I call upon the sane and rational of the world to go out and buy a copy of Hallelujah by Jeff Buckley in order to send a message to the world of music moguls that states categorically "Talent is more important to the people than soulless, ball-less tripe put together in order to make Simon Cowell and the rest of Satan's little horde rich."

And finally to end this little screed I would like to point you in the direction of the guardian story where a spokesman for Sony BMG (who represent Ms Burke, Mr Buckley and the songs original composer Mr Leonard Cohen) said that the company hoped Burke would take the top spot but conceded:

"Obviously it would be brilliant if Jeff got to No 2."

Which goes to prove to me, and probably to you also, that Sony BMG doesn't have any idea about what qualifies as good music and is only interested in stealing money from the pockets of teenagers. What do teenagers know about good music? About as much as the Burkes at Sony BMG do.

It's a braw bricht moonlicht nicht the nicht...

That's the kind of thing that people say to you when they find out that you're Scottish. And quite frankly it pisses me off. To a whole new level of pissedoffedness.

Therefore I have decided that in order to address the whole "Scottish people are all ginger haired, are tight with money and drink too much." situation I'm proposing that Scotland makes the Dropkick Murphys version of Scotland the Brave as the official national anthem in order to scare the living piss out of anyone who even thinks about throwing around any of those stereotypes.

The Dropkick Murphys version of Scotland the Brave is a mix of the old and the new and has the added bonus in that there are no words to learn, which is an advantage for the football fans who are usually too drunk to sing anyway.

So, Ladies, Gentlemen and unknowns... I give you the Dropkick Murphys...

Cadence To Arms/Scotland the Brave.

Skateboarding...

Isn't for everyone but no matter who you are you have to admire the dedication required to develop the skills involved.


Fully Flared from Sturge on Vimeo.

I'd much rather hear a major dropping to a minor...

Than a major dropping bombs. So here's a small list of songs that sing of hope sung by musicians with a conscience.

Imagine - john Lennon.

The Internationale - Billy Bragg.

Midnight Oil - Beds are Burning.

Ian Brown - Illegal attacks (feat Sinead O'connor)

Country Joe McDonald - "Feel Like I'm Fixing To Die"

Enjoy.

Read all about it.

So, there you are...

With a nice shiny Ipod and very little music to drop onto it. So what do you do? You give it to your friend and they drop a load of their music onto your Ipod until you can build up a half decent library of your own.

And that's when the problem starts. You've build up your own library of tunes and movies but there are some tunes of your friends that you have discovered are in your taste and want to keep them. Itunes won't allow you to rip from an ipod to your library and you are now faced with downloading the tunes from wherever you downloaded your own songs from (Everyone say Piratebay) and there goes some more of your precious time.

But worry no longer folks because there is a nice little program called Idump that takes care of this problem and enables you to rip from an Ipod to your PC with ease. Grab it now, before apple finds out and shits all over it.

Blast away the Monday morning blues...

With this small playlist of songs...

The Smiths - What diference does it make.
Fishbone - Lemon Meringue.
Johnny Cash (ft U2) - The Wanderer.
The Art of Noise - Moments in Love.
the Foo Fighters (Live in Hollywood) - Everlong.

Have a Happy Monday.

Last night...

I was raving on about how impressed I was with the website drop.io and decided that I should spend an hour or two today getting into the thing and seeing what was what.

But as the saying goes, the best laid plans gang aft agley and after less than a minute I was distracted by another site and felt I should let you all know about it. Cooliris is a neat little plugin that allows you to view the media from a site in a nice 3D environment.

Particularly nice for Google Images, Picasa albums and media rich websites, Cooliris and Coolpreviews speeds up your browsing and works with Firefox, I.E, Safari, Bebo, Myspace, Facebook, Youtube and many, many, more.

I may not know the words being sung...

But the music itself is the thing.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Abdel Hadi Halo and the El Gusto Orchestra of Algiers performing "Win Saadi" (Recorded Live on Jools Holland.)

Ladies and gentlemen...

This is possibly one of the most heartwrenching songs I've ever heard.

I've heard it so many times in my life that I could sing along if it wasn't for the fact that I couldn't carry a tune in a bucket but never realised what it's about. Now that I know it's about child abuse it breaks my heart listening to it. But listen to it I will. And so can you...

Ladies and Gentlemen, Suzanne Vega - Luka (Recorded live at Abbey Road studios).

Music review. The Ting Tings - We started nothing.

If upbeat and catchy pop is your bag you should check out The Ting Tings album "We started Nothing" as it's as upbeat and catchy as you can get without stepping over the, very fine, line between good music and aural torture.

If you're anything like me the first song on an album can make or break it and in this respect The Ting Tings do not fall short. The first song, Great DJ, is possibly the catchiest song I've heard since The Farm released Groovy Train. Great DJ is followed by That's not my name, a tune that defies even my jaded old pop pallate and manages to make me join in on the chorus.

From then on in The Ting Tings manage to produce a finely honed album that does what all good pop music should do, make you tap your feet, and does so with a touch rarely seen these days when music is churned out through a giant music mincer in a factory where Simon Cowell is the head slaughterman.

More often than not the second and third album are what a band ends up being judged by and if We Started Nothing is anything to go by then we're going to be hearing a lot more of the Ting Tings. Watch this space.

It was small mercys...

that kept me going at work in the last few weeks.

Small Mercy's like a wireless connection to the Internet which allowed me to escape from the miserable surrounds, even more miserable decor, and still more depressing customers whenever the doom and gloom got to me and I felt like walking out.

The other way of escaping I found was the jukebox. Which, despite being mostly populated with the latest dance chartoppers, golden oldies, seventies music and the eighties big-hair-and-make-up shit that was dull then and is even duller now, actually managed to keep me sane.

Top tunes these last few weeks have therefor been as follows...

Jeff Buckley - Lilac Wine.
Peter Gabriel - Biko.
Madness - Our House.
Queen - Killer Queen.
David Bowie - Starman.
Pink Floyd - Wish you were here.

Relax...

Whack these tunes on and chill out.

William Orbit - Adagio for strings.*

Sigur Ros - Milano.

Groove Armada - At the River.

Jimi Hendrix - Little Miss Strange.

REM - All the Right Friends.

Elliot Smith - Because.

Jeff Buckley - Hallelujah.

Foo Fighters - Aurora.

*Mum, download that and let Dad hear it. It's a piece of music I said was brilliant and he got Stuart to get him a copy of it. Sadly it was being played on the bagpipes. This is the version that doesn't make you want to shove freshly sharpened pencils in your ears.

Inspiration...

Can come in many guises. People can inspire you to be better than the masses, books can inspire you and music can also inspire you. So my question for today is...

"What has inspired you?

In the name of fairness I shall list the things that have inspired me.

People...

Bill Hicks.
A comedic giant who never once shirked away from letting his audiences into his deepest, darkest inner thoughts. Bill Hicks inspired me not to kowtow to other peoples ideas of what is right and wrong to talk about. No subject should ever be taboo, silence will only ever make the subject in hand develop into something that it never was in the first place.



Martin Luther King.
Martin Luther King should have been the first black president of the United States of America. Had he not been assassinated MLK would have united the people to create a fairer place for people of all races. His seminal "I have a Dream"speech is an inspiration to me whenever I listen to it. One day I hope to see MLK's dream of races around the world uniting in the name of humanity.



Hunter S Thompson.

Mentioned in the same sentences as such authors as Ernest Hemingway, J. D. Salinger and Jack Kerouac, Hunter S Thompson inspired me to write. Fair enough I'm nowhere near these literary giants but that's not the point. The point is that I'm writing. *See Update Below*

Thanks must go to...

Rach for pointing me in the direction of playlist.com.

My playlist page can be seen by clicking here.

Fab Five Freddy...

In the spirit of open communication without borders or boundaries I give to you a small sample of music that floats my boat, rocks my world and makes me shake my tailfeathers.

• The Stone Roses - Shoot You Down (Soul Hooligan remix)
  
• The Foo Fighters - Aurora.
• Groove Armada - At the River.
• Jeff Buckley - Mojo Pin. (Live at Sin-é)
• Jimi Hendrix - Little Miss Strange.
• The Pixies - Where is My Mind.
• Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds - Dig Lazarus Dig.
• REM - All the Right Friends.
  

*Disclaimer*
All music linked to from this site is provided for review purposes only.
Should you wish to own any of the tracks listed above please support the artist in question and buy a copy.

Some songs are smooth and soulfull....

others are as dirty as a cut price crack whore in a Las Vegas alley.

This is one of the latter.



And this is one of the former.

Daddy don't do pop music...

Or so I thought until the other day when I got in his car and found, for once, he wasn't listening to some blowhard on Talksport witter on about a game where eleven grown men chase an inflated pigbladder around a field, instead a tune I recognised as being modern was bouncing out the speakers and he was tapping his fingers along to the tune.

My first reaction was that I was hearing The Voices again but no, my old man was listening to pop music. Amy MacDonald to be more precise. Which kinda stunned me more as she's exactly the type that I expect my old man to call Teenyboppy Shite.

I remarked that it wasn't like him to listen to music made after the death of Elvis in 1977 and I hadn't ever expected him to listen to pop music unless he was at a party and had no other choice. He said, and I quote... "It's not pop music. It's Amy MacDonald."

"It fuckin' is pop. It's in the charts now." I replied, knowing this to be true as I had read about it the day before in the music section of The Guardian. "It's blatantly pop. It couldn't get more poppy if it tried." I continued.

"It's Scottish music." The bearded one retorted.
"Balls man..." I said.

"Scottish music is some choocter bampot droning on about the Misty Blue Hills of Tyree while more choocter bampots shag the haggis behind him... It's Highland weirdies singing about their long lost love o'er the sea and the boat that they fucked off in... It's small poofy looking Frenchmen on Shortbread tins, See You Jimmy hats and cacky tacky Kiltie dolls in plastic tubes... In short, it's everything Scotland should be stamping out as it perpetuates the worldwide view that all Scots are Ginger haired, wear kilts and fuck sheep when in actual fact we were the nation that gave the world such wonders as anesthetics, Brownian motion, pneumatic tyres, the decimal point, the Kelvin scale, Logarithms, Paraffin, TV and the ability to communicate globally using the telephone." I spat, getting quite riled at the thought of foreigners perceptions of the Scottish race in this day and age.

The very same night I downloaded a copy of Miss MacDonald's album* and must say it was surprisingly good. The girl can sing that's for sure.

* Amy, should you read this and think me evil for not purchasing a copy of your album rest assured that if you want payment for it whip me off an email and I'll arrange to meet up with you to give you the cash.

Music reviews...

Takk - Sigur Ros.

Let Sigur Ros take your hand and guide you to where the mock turtles live, where The Mad Hatter has tea with the sleepy dormouse and where Alice found that sometimes all is not as it seems. This album conjures up images in your mind of flight across barren Icelandic wastelands where deep fissures scar the earth, sulphurous pools form and molten rock bubbles to the surface. An ambient dreamscape made real, this album is a joy to listen to and should be in everyone's collection.

Grace. Jeff Buckley.

Possibly one of the best albums ever made. Containing lapel grabbing hard rock and mind blowing moments of melodic musemanship, Grace encapsulates the dichotomy of being human and makes it into music for the soul. Anger, joy, peace, hatred and love all play their part in this album. Leaves you feeling like you have been through the whole of human expression in a second spanning a lifetime. Gone too soon, like so many who deserved to live, Jeff Buckley lives on in this album.

Smile. Brian Wilson.

Supposedly thirty years ahead of his time, Brian Wilson seems to encapsulate the sixties when surfing went global, peace and love threatened the establishment and youth threatened to take charge from the order of old an oppressive. Full of melodies similar to the beach boys, this album is better than it should ever have been. Pull on a Hawaiian shirt, buy a VW Beetle, grow your hair long and take up surfing. Brian Wilson has finally arrived in the here and now. Welcome back Brian.

The Amazing Charlatans. The Charlatans. (USA)

Acid was certainly an influence in the making of this album. And it's great that it was. Without the influence of Lysergic acid diethylamide it's easy to imagine this group singing about moonshine, chewin' tobacco, dungarees, and inter-family marriages. Thanks to Albert Hoffmann however, this album isn't a tribute to troglodytes and instead is an album that has a similar sound to early Neil Young albums tinged with a little Jefferson Airplane. Well worth listening to.

As I can't think of anything to write about right now...

I thought I'd take the opportunity to list the music currently knocking my hearing into the dirt.

So here we go...

• Brian Wilson - Smile.
• Fear and Loathing - Official soundtrack.
• Foo Fighters - There is nothing left to lose.
• Groove Armada - Soundboy Rock.
• Groove Armada - The Best Of.
• H G Wells - The Time Machine (Audiobook)
• Happy Mondays - Bummed.
• Happy Mondays - Pills, Thrills and Bellyaches.
• Jeff Buckley - Live at Sin e.
• Jeff Buckley - Sketches for (my sweetheart the drunk)
• Jimi Hendrix - Are You Experienced.
• Jimi Hendrix - Electric Ladyland.
• Monty Python - Greatest hits.
• My Chemical Romance - The Black Parade.
• Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan - Various.
• Orbital - Various.
• Pearl Jam - Ten.
• Pearl Jam - MTV Unplugged.
• Pearl Jam - Live in Salt Lake City.
• Peter Sellers - 20th Century Genius.
• Nick Drake - Pink Moon.
• Placebo - Meds.
• Prince - Sign O The Times.
• Radiohead - Kid A.
• Ramones - Greatest Hits.
• REM - Eponymous.
• Sigur Ros - Agaetis Byrjun.
• Sigur Ros - Takk.
• Sigur Ros - Von.
• The American Charlatans - The Amazing Charlatans. (US Charlatans)
• Foo Fighters - Best of.
• REM - Best of.
• The Flaming Lips - At War With The Mystics.
• Timothy Leary - Turn on, Tune in, Drop out.
• White Stripes - Elephant.
• ZZ Top - Deguello.

I'd recommend listening to any of these albums as they are all good but you might wanna give Timothy Leary a body swerve as it's a bit trippyhippydippy and may not be to every ones taste.