So I’ve just got home from the Dome and the Led Zeppelin gig, so hopefully you’ll forgive me for the fact that my thoughts aren’t quite as neatly organised as usual. First off, I have to point out that, at the risk of sounding smug, they were fucking great.
I’ve just got home from the Dome and the Led Zeppelin gig, so hopefully you’ll forgive me for the fact that my thoughts aren’t quite as neatly organised as usual. First off, I have to point out that, at the risk of sounding smug, they were fucking great.
Mildly deranged vibes here today, as I prepare my body and soul for the Led Zeppelin gig tonight. I'll be posting a review of the show on this blog when I manage to get home from Greenwich, but you can follow the action throughout the evening as Farah Ishaq will be reporting non-stop from Greenwich on our Live Reviews blog.
Not much time to post today, so here's an office playlist for your delectation. Thanks to everyone who posted their playlists last week - we can definitely do that again here if you're in the mood. I should also mention a few things I'll try and blog about before Christmas, if only in a fairly unsavoury attempt to book some return visits from you over the next couple of weeks.
As I write, I’m listening to the second disc of “In Rainbows” for, I think, the third time. First impressions, then. The eight tracks shouldn’t be considered as offcuts, as inferior cousins of the songs that made it onto the first set; in fact, I’ve a hunch that some Radiohead fans might actually prefer some of the songs here.
News reaches me from my house that the Radiohead discbox has turned up, with another CD of new songs to go with the ones we already know from the "In Rainbows" download. I'll try and get my head round those in time to blog tomorrow.
Feeling a bit queasy right now, after watching five minutes of Jean Michel Jarre's new DVD while wearing 3D glasses. I can't vouch for the whole disc of "Oxygene", but Jarre seems to eschew the youthful sort of 3D stunts and go instead for shots of him and his mates playing some lovely old synths. Quite strange, not least because it seems to have had the unusual effect of making me both bored and dizzy at the same time.
So I arrived at work this morning with the plan to write about the pretty fine new Wu-Tang Clan album. I’ve been momentarily distracted, though, by the discovery that Def Jam are streaming the entire new Ghostface Killah album on their website.
I guess it’s still fairly early in the morning, but I’m struggling right now to think of many players around at the moment who are as slippery and compelling as Will Oldham. He’s had, by his standards, a relatively quiet year. But the other day, a new mini-album turned up unexpectedly, a few days after it had actually arrived in the shops. Like a big American urban star or Radiohead, clearly Oldham has abandoned the niceties of advance releases for hacks. Which is fair enough, if a bit frustrating.
There is a man in a flat cap standing in the middle of the stage, looking pensively at some large twigs while his bandmates work up ten minutes of bleary musique concrete. Eventually he picks up a bass and the six of them lumber into a passage of magisterial, martial psych. It mutates into waterlogged beatnik blues, then a kind of splenetic krautpunk. One of the guitarists, incidentally, now has a cardboard box on his head. There’s a mannequin’s head on top of the box. After a while, he conscientiously ties a scarf round its neck.