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Feature: Gig Rig

Afternoon guys and gals, it’s Friday again which means it’s time for the fortnightly lowdown on forthcoming gigs. November is shaping up quite nicely for live music ”“ so far I’ve got tickets to see !!!, LCD Soundsystem/Hot Chip and Sleigh Bells, all of which should be pretty awesome.

Here’s my highlights of the new gig listings this week:

Fear Factory are predominantly an industrial metal band, who formed in the late 80s but then decided to go their separate ways in 2006 to work on individual projects. They have since re-formed, releasing their seventh studio album, Mechanize (not on Spotify yet :( ), earlier this year and will be playing a handful of UK gigs in December.

American indie rockers Band of Horses, whose 2010 album, Infinite Arms, is absolutely sublime will be hitting stages in the UK in January/February time next year.

If you fancy something a little more upbeat and live in the Bristol area, then you can catch Penguin Prison at Start the Bus in November or Metronomy at Thekla in January.

Cheers!

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Live: Levellers Present Levelling the Land Live

Every now and then something happens to remind you that you aren”™t as young as you used to be (and I”™m not talking about the hangover I had this weekend, here). The first thing that made me feel old was earlier this year when I found out Marathon hadn”™t been called Marathon for 20 years! (for younger readers Marathon is the old name for Snickers). The latest thing that reminded me of the passing of the years was Levellers announcing they were on tour again next year. Now, you may ask why such an announcement would make me feel old? Well, the reason is that this tour for Levellers is to mark the 20th anniversary of their album Levelling the Land, and the first ever concert I attended was on the original tour for that album all those years ago.

Levellers, and indeed Levelling the Land, mark a special point in my music growth. Not only was this my first gig, but Levellers were one of the first bands that I introduced to my older brother rather than the other way round. Since then I have, of course, gone on to develop my own music tastes, but this album marked one of the first steps on my journey of musical discovery.

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Feature: The Death of the Festival Headliner

So, another year of festivals completed. Having attended Reading along with a host of smaller local festivals, and having read about and seen the TV coverage of Glastonbury, I was left with the feeling that maybe the notion of the true ‘headliner’ at such events has had its day – either that or maybe this just wasn’t the year for it.

I’ll start with Reading as thats the biggest festival I attended this year, with the three headliners being Guns ‘n’ Roses, Arcade Fire and Blink-182.

On first inspection, only one of these leapt out a bona fide show stopper, which to me is what being headliner is all about; something that will draw people in whether the casual music listener or the die-hard fan, and that was Guns ‘n’ Roses. And, despite all the stories surrounding the band that really should be known as ‘Axl & Co’, things had seemed promising, with reports of a very talented group of musicians playing a bunch of undeniably classic songs, along with some stuff from the recent album Chinese Democracy.

Sadly when the band eventually hit the stage (an hour and half late – thanks Axl!), though the music was there, it was one of the most heartless displays of rock ‘n’ roll I have ever witnessed. This was just compounded by the crowd’s reaction; hearing 80,000 people boo is quite a sound, and sadly many, myself included, were left majorly dissatisfied by the Friday headliners.

So, I thought to myself, that wasn’t so good, but Blink-182 should be a fun, upbeat crowd-pleaser on Sunday.

Maybe I came to this show with rose-tinted specs having attended my first Reading festival in 2000 with the express purpose of seeing Blink, but I don’t think my disappointment can be put down solely to fanciful memories.

While bassist Mark and drummer Travis were both on fine form, the band and the show were let down disastrously by Tom De Longe. Whether he was actually out of his tree, or just acting it, was unclear. And it really didn’t matter, as either way his performance was abysmal. It felt like watching a member of an under-rehearsed teenage band playing their first show. Maybe this was intended as charm to remind us they were a ‘punk’ band in their heyday, but if it was, it sadly didn’t work.

So another headliner and another disappointment.

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Feature: Classics Collected

Hello and welcome to another edition of Classics Collected, where we at Spotisfaction Towers go all Time Team on you and dig up some classic record relics (and Dave would make a good Tony Robinson).

Presented to the experts for valuation this week (purely for insurance purposes, naturally) are a nice mix of styles from Rock through Hip-Hop and Dance to the Tarzan and Jane of Jungle. I’m sure each one will come back from auction as a bobby dazzler and we hope you enjoy them too. As always, make good use of our comments system, let us know our hits and misses and if you have any suggestions for future editions, be they albums, artists or themes, then let us know!

Stereophonics ”“ Word Gets Around – Deluxe Edition – Our first choice this week is an album I’ve long known that I would be including at some stage, but my hand has been forced by its recent re-issue (or at least re-inclusion to Spotify) as a deluxe edition. With many of our choices, the albums represent a great deal to those of us, and indeed to those of you who were of a certain age at a certain time. This album in itself represents a great piece of songwriting, let alone as a debut, with each song expertly spinning its own tale of life. Its impact to my social scene at the time was huge and, as a result, this album and its follow-up will always have a special place in my heart.

Ocean Colour Scene ”“ Moseley Shoals – This album was chosen as it had a similar impact to the above at the time of its release. Helped a little by heavy use on the popular show TFI Friday I’m sure, and spawing a large number of songs, this was a massive commercial breakthrough for the group. It started a miniature mod revolution on the back of it and, for a few summers, you didn’t have to go far to find coverage of Ocean Colour Scene.

DJ Shadow ”“ Endtroducing… – This artist has a massive heritage in the hip-hop production scene and has worked with more artists over his career than I’ve had pointless arguments on internet forums. This was an important breakthrough album for DJ Shadow and as a piece of musical work created almost entirely on samples and loops, it inspired a massive number of bedroom breakbeat Beethovens.

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Feature: Tomorrow’s Sounds Today

Hi everyone and welcome to another edition of Tomorrow’s Sounds Today, where we at Spotisfaction Towers exercise our inner domestic goddess and serve you hot, delicious spoonfuls of the latest and greatest tunes fresh from the Spotify Fridge.

A good mix of music this week, from the eclectic jazz of Afrocubism to current commercial darlings Kings of Leon. As always, we hope you enjoy our choices but I would welcome all your feedback on the highlights, lowlights and slow burners this week. Did we miss a glaringly obvious release? Let us know and it might make a revisited page or even warrant its own full length review! The comment section is below and remember that your voice empowers you (but please be polite). And so, to business!

Kings Of Leon ”“ Come Around Sundown ”“ I’ll be honest and say I’m not the world’s biggest Kings of Leon fan, but they are still very popular despite this, so I am sure that news of the album will be well received in some camps. Musically, this record doesn’t sound a huge departure from earlier work and that’s by no means a bad thing. I almost get the feeling they’ve played it safe, ensuring they hit the same target as before. It’s a competent, enjoyable album but I fear the only negative, if there is one, is that there is not the immediate impact that the singles of its predecessor had.

Belle & Sebastian ”“ Write About Love – So out with the politically neutral review of Kings of Leon, and into the selfish all-praising review of one of my favourite groups… Let’s not say we at Spotisfaction are not about balance! According to my Spotify, all the current Belle & Sebastian albums are 2010 releases so I suspect some contractual wrangling in the background or a mass re-issue. Earlier in the year we spoke about Push Barman To Open Old Wounds and how much I still enjoy listening to that record. This new LP is definitely a shift in direction but not a full-on change of lanes. It feels less relective and has a more dreamy shine to it, for want of a better description. Musically it is as strong as ever and I think will go down just as well with fans.

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Feature: Gig Rig

Howdy folks! The weekend is here and tomorrow night a few of us will be in attendance at the MF Doom gig in Bristol, which I’m rather looking forward to.

If you fancy re-living the ska punk days of the 90s, Less Than Jake will be performing in London, Birmingham and Bristol, as well as a few other locations around the UK.

Dare I say it, Christmas is fast approaching and the O2 Academy Brixton will be host to this year’s Soulwaxmas, which is sure to be a sell-out event – so get your tickets in quick!

There’s plenty of new music on the horizon for the new year that is slowly looming upon us, including Scottish post-rockers Mogwai, and The Go! Team, who will also be releasing a new album, the first since 2007’s Proof of Youth.

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Feature: Classics Collected

Hi everyone and welcome to another edition of Classics Collected, where we at Spotisfaction have a little dig around the archives and bring out some classic records you may not have listened to for a little while. Whilst we always like to hail in the new, sometimes it’s good to blow the dust off an old record and enjoy the wonderful sounds you may have forgotten.

This week’s edition is an all-female edition with four great female artists to tempt your musical palette. In each case I’ve picked what I believe to be their breakthrough record, but for each example, to be frank, there is such an excellent catalogue of work you could pick any one of them and just enjoy their back catalogue for the day!

Tori Amos ”“ Under the Pink – Not her first album but in my mind the best of her early work, classic pianist and songwriter Tori has a lot in common with one of our later choices today, Joni Mitchell. Her sheer volume of work means you could probably spend the rest of the week enjoying her sound alone, she has kept up an unbelievable standard in the work. Whilst not as adaptive as, say, Madonna in changing sounds and trends,  as the core dynamic remains there still is plenty of growth in her work. This album is relatively stripped down compared to some of her later work and focuses on her technical talent on the piano and her simply gorgeous voice.

Björk ”“ Debut ”“ The album that started it all, before the increasingly eccentric costumes, the airport bust-ups and the media battles. This album demonstrated her talent so well it became an instant hit and was a clear disconnect from her previous work with the Sugarcubes. Whilst a musician from a young age, this work has some real human qualities and subtleties that come across as an honest, driven debut from someone out to show her talent. It spawned a number of popular singles and shows a surprising complexity in places with a simple heart in others. It’s not hard to see why it was popular at the time and despite some of the oddness that followed, it remains a timeless work today.

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Feature: Six Degrees

There are several ways of dealing with requests that you do not like when you are working in a night club. Option one; go with the “I”™m not doing requests” theory. This is all well and good on a quiet night, but on a Friday or Saturday you do tend to get abused by the customers and then promptly fired by the management. Not so good. Option two; try saying “I”™ll try and fit it in if I”™ve got time.” Unfortunately though, people tend to figure this out after a while. After all, it is just a polite way of saying “bugger off that song is a load of crap”…

Option three; (an option most DJs avoid at all costs) Just play the damn track. Swallow your pride, dust off your NOW albums, and search. This does, unfortunately, create an all new problem to deal with. That problem being that at the moment you are playing Iron Maiden ”“ Run To The Hills, and the attractive blonde that you want to impress has asked you to play Britney Spears ”“ Toxic. Now obviously you can’t just play it next – that would be a hideous contrast of styles. So what do you do? This is where my game comes in, based on the movie game “The Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” where in theory you can link any actor to Kevin Bacon within six movies. My game of “Six Degrees” is the challenge to link any one song to another within six other songs. For example,

Iron Maiden ”“ Run to the Hills has a similar metal feel to”¦

  1. Korn ”“ Freak on a Leash the Nu-Metal elements link to”¦
  2. Linkin Park ”“ Faint this more up beat track flows into”¦
  3. Hadouken! ”“ Liquid Lives the Nu-Rave dance style takes us to”¦
  4. Pendulum ”“ Granite the more poppy feeling guides us to”¦
  5. Bodyrox ”“ Yeah Yeah and this can finally lead to”¦

Britney Spears ”“ Toxic.

There we are, I have achieved it in five steps.

Now I thought, just for a bit of fun (there will be no prizes), I”™ll give you two songs to connect in the best way you can. Please reply with your entries in the comments section below and we will see what you all come up with. Lets all hope it is better than my attempt above…

Your two songs are Foo Fighters ”“ Monkey Wrench and Jordin Sparks featuring Chris Brown ”“ No Air.

Good Luck.
MOGGY

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Feature: Gig Rig

Howdy folks, and happy binary Friday (for those of you who are geeky enough to know what that means)! Another fortnight has passed, which means that it’s time for the lowdown on the best live music coming to a stage near(ish) you.

Giants of the dance world, Faithless, will be hitting some of the larger venues around the country in December, after returning with their sixth album, The Dance, earlier this year.

A couple of smaller bands that have been doing the rounds lately in the blogosphere are Sleigh Bells and Warpaint, and you can catch them both at some of the smaller gig venues in Bristol and London later this month and in November.

Hit the link to see the full gig listing…

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Feature: Do You MP3?

Hi guys, I have a question for you: Do You MP3?

The other day I was performing some long overdue maintenance on my PC when it occurred to me that the 70-80GB worth of MP3s I have on my hard drive haven’t been touched now for quite some time. A quick peruse of my programs showed that Winamp (my long-time MP3 program of choice) wasn’t even installed on my latest OS install, something I had done some months previous.

I wondered at that point what I should do with them. Should I leave them on one of my drives taking up valuable space that could be used for more useful data like educational videos [Editor’s note: “educational vids” indeed… ahem], or should I pop them into offline storage? Another thought occurred – would it really be a big deal if I deleted them altogether?

It was the fierce protection of my MP3 collection that got me making backups in the first place, a process that I have long gotten out of the habit of, and this leads me to the nub of the matter:

Is the humble MP3 already a dying format? We’ve all been there – I’m sure if many of us went up into our lofts and garages we would find VHS cassettes or (if you’re an early adopter) Betamax tapes, we’ll find old C90s, minidiscs, and maybe even the odd 8-track. Do any of us still have the devices on which to play them? I would say in most cases probably not, so why do we hold onto them? Is it the aesthetic value? Is it habit or is it a strange notion of duty for all the pleasure they gave us?

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Article: Musical Genres… Good, Bad or Ugly?

Image copyright Threadless.com

There are an awful lot of musical genres in the world, but are they A) a useful tool designed to guide people towards a band or artist that they will like; B) a constrictive framework that means bands get tagged with a label that they cannot shake off regardless of how much they try; or C) an outdated irrelevance that helps no one because of the sheer volume of different genres on offer?

Here’s my opinion, and please do feel free to disagree with me in the comments section.

For 5 years between 2003 and 2008 I was a DJ (in the loosest sense of the word) in several different drinking establishments throughout Aberystwyth. I played largely alternative music – rock, punk, ska, metal etc. – but I also worked every Friday night in a dingy (and very sticky) night club called Y Bae (or The Bay for those who do not live in Wales). This, unfortunately, meant I had to dabble in the dark arts, or “popular music” as it is also known. I played all sorts of music from Girls Aloud to Cradle Of Filth. Requests are an unavoidable hazard of the job and quite often, rather than asking for a particular track or artist, the customer would ask for a whole genre of music. This led to the night when someone asked me for “Funky House”. I still to this day have no idea what Funky House is. I can’t name an act that fits into this genre, but the most ridiculous thing about the whole situation was neither could the guy making the request. Turns out in the end he wanted something like Pendulum which I am fairly sure is classed as Drum and Bass, but who even knows any more and this is where the problem lies. There are so many different genres that, for the most part, people don’t know what they mean, and as such they are of little help at all.

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Feature: Gig Rig

G’day chaps and chapettes! I have a confession to make. It seems that when I was transferring all the gigs into the new format I inadvertently missed a whole bunch of them out. But fear not, for I have now added them to the list, along with a load of fresh new ones!

As promised earlier in the week, there are a selection of upcoming Abe Vigoda gigs. Unfortunately, I won’t be able make it to any of them though. One gig I am going to, however, is LCD Soundsystem / Hot Chip in Sheffield. Tickets for that one are now sold out I think but (at the time of writing this) they are still available for the London and Cardiff gigs.

About 10 or so years ago I went through a massive phase of listening to the first three Deftones albums constantly. It was borderline obsessive. Since then I’ve kind of lost touch with their music but I’ve been reliably informed that their recent stuff is excellent, so will have to give it a listen at some point.

Holy Fuck are one of our personal favourites here at Spotisfaction Towers. Their two albums are superb and judging from the reviews I’ve read, their live shows aren’t too shabby either. Fingers crossed I’ll be able to catch either the Bristol or Birmingham gigs.

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Feature: Classics Collected

Hello everyone and welcome to another Classic’s Collected where we at Spotisfaction delve into the archives and blow the dust off some records we think deserve a replay. With the sheer volume of music available to us at our fingertips it is easy for some really great material to get lost under the pile, so we have made it our mission to bring that goodness back into the light!

Each pick we feel was a classic of its age, genre, or if nothing else just a damned good record. We’ve fed a little background into each selection but most importantly we’d like you to give each one a little attention and a real listen. Like everyone these days, I’m sure, I seem to permanently have music on while I’m working and it has occurred to me a few times: how much do I really genuinely listen to a lot of it? Music has so much power to influence, move and warm your soul so with this being a weekly affair, try and take some time out, pick an album a day and let yourself go. I promise you will not be sorry! Now on with the choices:

The Chemical Brothers ”“ Dig Your Own Hole – It’s Monday morning and if you are anything like me, you’ll still be wishing it was Sunday afternoon. Around 3pm maybe, post roast, with a glass of wine and that inevitable digestion-fuelled, snoozy, relaxed, satisfied feeling. Unfortunately the fields must be toiled in and the rent paid, so here we are at work. If there is one record out there to snap you to your senses and get that energy flowing, it is this one. The Chemical Brothers have always been sound engineers of the highest calibre but their 2nd commercial release broke new boundaries, spawned a number of hit singles and tuned many people into a new style of music.

As I have mentioned before, classic albums often standup for me on their ability to be played without shuffle. I am a self confessed shuffle junkie and have whole archives on shuffle but if you can listen to the first few bars of track 1 and be hooked till the end of the final track, that to me is a sign of great things! Pure energy, great beats and hooks and a thrillride of an album.

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Feature: Gig Rig

Howdy folks. The weekend is finally upon us and I’m off to see Muse in Manchester tomorrow, which I’m rather looking forward to. I’m hoping that they’ll play a lot of their older (and better, in my opinion) songs rather than the Queen/Blondie tributes that they seem to be churning out lately, but somehow I doubt that’ll happen. I can but hope…

Anyways, this week the Gig Rig has evolved and has taken on a brand new look, which we’re hoping you’ll agree is a big improvement. Here’s my highlights for the new additions:

Rodrigo Y Gabriela will be playing 5 gigs at the O2 Shepherds Bush Empire in London later on this year. If you’ve not heard their music before then I urge you to give it a listen because it is utterly brilliant. They produce sounds with acoustic guitars that I didn’t even realise were humanly possible!

Following the release of their much anticipated self-titled album later this month, Interpol will be embarking on a brief UK tour at the end of November. They’re one of those bands that has the unique capacity to make music that is both gloomy and uplifting at the same time.

Hit the link to see the full listings.

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Feature: The Pulse of the Maggots

The Pulse of the Maggots.

So… My column then. Where to start? Maybe a brief explanation. ”˜The Pulse of the Maggots”™ is a song by Slipknot. The lyrics are about fighting for the beaten down and oppressed and for the people who cannot fight for themselves. In that vein this column will predominantly be about defending music, albums and artists that have been given a rough time of it by the press or just common opinion. So after that intro we begin with the very people that inspire the column name, Slipknot.

“Aren”™t they the guys who poo on stage?” I hear you cry, and the answer is”¦ well”¦ yes. But there is so much more to it than that. If you look beyond the masks and on-stage antics you discover a wealth of talent and some fantastic tracks. This is a band that has received 7 Grammy nominations and 1 win. All of their four main studio albums have gone at least platinum and the members have numerous side projects which are all well worth a listen. Stone Sour, Murderdolls, To My Surprise, Dirty Little Rabbits and DJ Starscream (unfortunately not on Spotify).

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