I found an album called An Introduction to Masonry by a band called The Illuminati today in Avalanche. Can't find anything about this band apart from this old Mike Diver review. Nothing, nada, zilch. Sometimes the internet sucks.

The Illuminati - The Ballad Of Lee Harvey Oswald

addicted to cris, hooked on don

The internet is a weird place. One minute you're reading Al Shipley's review of Fabolous' Loso's Way, then you're reading Sean Fennessey's piece on the inscrutability of the talented NY rapper, then you find yourself watching the video above. All I'm saying is: Tenchi Muyo GXP x Fabolous x Timbaland. (And the video isn't even garbage.)

PS. Everyone's not big on Timbo these days because, well, he's uninspired as fuck but remember this beat? Just on the sly. Love that guitar that pops up on the chorus and the way that bass suddenly drops in on the second verse. More of this please, Tim.

Summer jam!

Shame that summer's nearly over and that I can't be bothered going outside. Oh well. Fool's Gold are cool, though.

Fool's Gold - Surprise Hotel

Found via the lovely folk at Pasta Primavera.

"this is merely superconductor electromagnetism"

As I sat down tonight to have a late dinner, I noticed that one of my favourite films of all time was on: Street Fighter! Fucking Street Fighter! With Jean Claude Van-Damme! JCVD! As a film, it's inept on pretty much every level - the acting is balls-to-the-wall bad, the script is as clunky as a broken dishwasher, the mise en scene is ugly and the editing does whatever it can to destroy any excitement you may get while watching the fight scenes.

BUT as a piece of entertainment, it's pretty much second to none: JCVD playing the US born-n-bred all American hero with THAT ACCENT, the invisible speedboat sequence (predating 007's ridiculous invisible vehicular shenanigans by seven years), Kylie Minogue's "acting breakthrough" (snicker), Dhalsim's unintentionally hilarious shirtlessness in the last ten minutes, the ridiculous action, the constant failed attempts at comic relief, and this immortal exchange: "For you, the day Bison graced your village was the most important day of your life. But for me... it was Tuesday."

In fact, the only reason I'm going to go see Avatar in December is because the dude that plays Sagat is in it. Just when I thought my life couldn't get any better by stumbling on this unintended masterpiece, I found THIS:


Just... incredible. Incredible.

my slow but rewarding affair with ye-ye, pt fifteen of six thousand

While searching for details on the composer Jean Claude Vennier (who I heard for the first time this week through that awesome Tarantino-influenced mix I posted about the other day), I came across The World of Kane, a blog concerning itself with pop culture of (mostly) a Gallic flavour. Which led me to this post on French pop producer Germinal Tenas and the sweet, sweet tunes throughout. I'll give you this one so far, a track from ye-ye singer Clothilde, who I can only find details about from the post I've linked to and this Last.fm profile (any more info would be great). I've listened to this song a good five times in a row - just check out that telephone-sounding synth line! Brilliant stuff.

Clothilde - Fallait Pas Écraser La Queue du Chat

Don't forget to check out The World of Kane. It's well good.

ahhh, relax

Have a song for Sunday night. Go on.

O Terço - Flauta

courtney love. and marilyn manson.

There's a lot of music that I guess we're really not allowed to like, stuff that may be a bit too hackneyed or ridiculous or, hell, overplayed. This song is all of those things but I heard it at least three times this week on the radio and wasn't sick of it, which is more than I can say for most songs. I give you:

Ahhhhhhhhhhh yes.

harumph, my bad

I’m late in putting this up because I’m a lazy git, but here’s my tiny mobile phone interview with a couple of members from Calvinball and Apologies, I Have None. From last week. Yeah, sorry about that.

FLFD: So first off, where did the band names come from? I know Calvinball is a Bill Watterson reference…

MATT from CALVINBALL: Yeah, from Calvin and Hobbes. Dave [co-vocalist and guitarist] is a big fan and when we were living together, he got me into it and when we had to come up with a band name we thought we’d just rip the comic off and steal it from that. Calvinball is the least organised game so as the least organised band, it fits.

FLFD: With Calvinball the sport, the rules are different every time. Does this apply to Calvinball the band?

M: Yeah. We never sound the same twice because our voices get progressively fucked as the numbers of gigs go on. [laughs]

D: And where does the name Apologies, I Have None come from?

DAN from APOLOGIES, I HAVE NONE: We’ve had a couple of different names since we started and they’ve all been awful. Naming your band is one of the most difficult things to do and I’m glad it’s done now. The name… Josh (the other half of AIHN) and I love Grade, and we ended up getting the band name from one of their lyrics [from "Tension Between Stillness and Motion"].

FLFD: How’s the tour been so far?

M: Really really good but really boozy at the same time. Pretty much every gig’s been awesome – some gigs get more people than others but we’ve had people coming out nonetheless. We’re getting fed, we’re getting looked after, and pretty much every band we’ve played with has been awesome - Burnout 27 were awesome tonight.

D: The gigs have been on the positive side of DIY punk because you’re getting fed and paid every night and nobody’s flaked on us or screwed us over in the ways we’ve all experienced before. The attendance has been up and down but it’s been a positive experience.

M: It’s been a bit of a shambles, but it’s been an enjoyable shambles.

FLFD: Do you think a lot of UK bands are reluctant towards doing fully DIY tours?

M: Well, you don’t really see too many British tours these days – normally a US band comes over and a British band will support them and that’s how it all gets sorted. We just couldn’t be bothered waiting for, say, some band off No Idea to come over for a tour or whatever, so we thought to just do it ourselves.

D: Part of the core of this tour comes from… ONSIND are from Durham [the third band on the bill] which is up north, Calvinball are from Sheffield further south and Apologies are based in London so it’s been a challenge for us all to go north or south and play for different audiences. For three bands from different parts of the country, it’s worked out pretty well.

FLFD: So what’s next after the tour?

M: We’re playing The Fest.

FLFD: How did that come about?

M: We were playing in Leeds and Tony from No Idea was there, and afterwards we were drunk and he said “you guys should come over and play Fest!” We were like, yeah yeah, whatever… and then, we emailed him to find out whether he was joking or not and he seemed pretty stoked on us playing over there. To be honest, I haven’t really got a clue what he was thinking but it’s gonna be good to see a bunch of bands that probably aren’t coming over to the UK anytime soon. Iron Chic, Good Luck…

D: O Pioneers!!!…

M: Yeah, it’s gonna be fucking awesome. Then after that, we’ve been asked to do a couple of split releases so we’re probably gonna do that.

FLFD: Can you say who with?

M: We don’t know yet! Well, there’s going to be a split with an American band and then probably one with Fashanu from the North-East.

FLFD: And what’s next for Apologies?

D: We don’t know at the moment… we’ve really only got plans for constant touring – the thing is to just keep playing shows with good bands. We’ve got no massive plans for world domination or anything and we don’t want to push our band in people’s faces… we know there’s a certain level you can reach in a band like ours but we just want to keep playing to people and having fun. Next year, maybe a full-length.

M: Basically, if our bands can keep on playing shows and getting drunk without going bankrupt, we’ve become a successful band.

D: That’s really as much as you can ask.

After the interview, I handed Matt and Tam a bag of Soor Plooms, the greatest Scottish sweet ever made. Matt gave them 5Ks and Tam wanted to let Kerrang! know that Apologies, I Have None think it’s a shit magazine and that he hasn’t read it since the nineties. Thanks guys and hope you enjoyed the sweets!

butter your popcorn, baby!

Because Tarantino is on the mind after the other day's viewing of Inglourious Basterds and I love the folks over at The Playlist, I graciously point you towards volume eight of the movie blog's Soundtrack Series - If I Were Quentin Tarantino.

The music choice here is just impeccable, so who cares if this is another "late pass" post? (The soundtracks were posted in 2007.) Check out the other ones too, they're cool and worth checking out.

DOWNLOAD If I Were Quentin Tarantino: The Playlist Soundtrack Series, Volume Eight

dayuummmmm

The first track from Converge's upcoming Axe To Fall is now streaming on their Myspace. The song is called "Dark Horse" and it fucking rips... as if you thought it wouldn't.

Well, DON'T BE AN IDIOT AND CLICK HERE ALREADY

Axe To Fall is out on Deathwish the 20th October, probably 19th UK-wise.

ah, the blogger's moan

So, Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds is not an "armor-plated turkey". That's that out of the way, then. Todd McCarthy veers closer to it, calling it "a completely distinctive piece of American pop art" but it never quite reaches the levels of greatness that its script and QT-ness promises. Shame.

Nostalgia time: before I saw the DVD of Kill Bill, Vol 1, I was just another kid who liked the movies but knew nothing of directors, film festivals or really, any film scene beyond the American and British mainstream. Kill Bill and Tarantino turned me onto cinema - now I am totally 4000% in love with the world's greatest art form, and at university studying Film and Media, hoping to shoot my own short films as soon as my pre-production starts making sense. So thank you Quentin.

But nostalgia aside, QT's war movie isn't his best moment. It is, I hate to say, his weakest effort thus far, a long way away from being the pop-culture war movie epic many expected. Where it is merely a good (albeit disappointing) film, it would have made a pretty incredible TV mini-series as was once planned. The fourth chapter, "OPERATION KINO", is stunning and the bar scene within it can be filed as yet another classic Tarantino moment... but with its cliffhanger involving Christoph Waltz' "Jew Hunter", it is unavoidably obvious that what made good cinema here would have made incredible TV. As The Playlist said back in May:

"Inglourious as it stands now does not really flesh out the characters well and even at a longer cut version, it doesn't feel like there's much more you can do (there's a decent amount on the cutting room floor, but not that much). It works on the page, but not the screen. So the right thing to do would have been to follow each story (Shosanna's exploits at the Cinematheque, the Basterds voyage to Germany, a little bit more story on the British Unit and Col Hans Landa's) and then culminate in the same way the script is written. Tarantino's initial instincts to make this film a mini-series could have served the story very well in a "Band of Brothers" manner (a series he himself had referenced as an example)."

EXACTLY. Forget what Luc Besson said, and imagine... one of the best TV experiences ever. Like, literally, EVER. The motives in the final act would have made a bit more sense and the deaths of apparantly important characters would have been much more powerful. And one last thing - I thought Death Proof was fantastic, so all this "return to form" advertising stuff I can understand but noitsnotrightokayokay.

But the music? Well, that's another problem... there's not really many amazing stylistic cues (Charles Bernstein's "White Lightning" cue from Kill Bill is reused at one point) aside from the David Bowie song below and the Ennio Morriconne song that plays over the credits (no mp3 as of yet, sorry). No "Didn't I Blow Your Mind" or "Battle Without Honor or Humanity", I have to say.


David Bowie - Cat People (Putting Out Fire)

You can make your own mind up when Inglourious Basterds comes out this weekend. As far as pitch perfect reviews go, The Playlist and Den of Geek have it covered. And no, I didn't hate the film. It's just... agh, Michael Leader's DoG review says what I think but better.

get stoked

So, that whole furore about new Radiohead material: yes, they have new songs coming (I think). This is one of them.

Radiohead - These Are My Twisted Words

And if you haven't heard it yet (or bothered to download it), here's the better of the two newies, "Harry Patch (In Memory Of)" off Youtube.

it's still illusive

Sorry for not posting the past couple - three day weekend is my only explanation. I saw Inglourious Basterds on Sunday and I have any wish in me to write about it, you'll get it. I also saw - and interviewed - Calvinball and Apologies, I Have None, which should be up very soon - not, like, a month away or anything but DEFINITELY this week.

In the meantime, something I intended to post about ages ago. The shoddy mobile phone photo above was taken by me and the band I'm watching in Diesel's 5th Ave NYC shop are Francis and the Lights, who are the aural equivalent of the "Phil the Shill" episode of Miami Vice. Needless to say, it's to an acquired taste, but they definitely are good live, all stylish posing and James Brown dances. Let's hope they read this and get in touch with me so they can, y'know, dance about in the Air3 studio or something.

Francis & The Lights - Striking

You can download two of their EPs (for free!) at their website, and stream pretty much everything they've ever done at Muxtape. Ignore the Kanye West cover, trust me. No shots.

ps. stalkers, you can see my reflection in this video of them playing live from 2:14 onwards. spooky.

road to snooze avenue

Coming back from the show tonight, I sat on the bus listening to this:

This Town Needs Guns - Gibbon

Then I got off the bus, ran home listening to this:

Matt and Kim - Cutdown

And now I'm listening to this before I go to sleep and I have no mp3s of it just now:

Ghostface Killah feat. Method Man and Masta Killa - Killa Lipstick

Thrilling. Sleep well, everyone.

how long until the british isles...

Fuuuuck, I can't believe I haven't heard about this before - a Chris Morris movie on jihadists. Be afraid, be very, etc etc. Peep the article at The Guardian's film blog here.

ahhh, no sandler

One of my favourite ever songs covered in an even better way. Can't believe I had never heard this before last week... big up Gilles Peterson and Mayer Hawthorne (the podcast where Hawthorne played the track can be found HERE)

Curtis Mayfield - We've Only Just Begun (Live)

where's elvis costello?!

New Fall Out Boy video, and they're sneakily hinting at the possibility of THE END and getting all their big fans flustered and cryin' and shit. Hell, I was moved by the grandiosity of the video... until 4:18. Someone screencap that shit for me, stat. (No shots.)

Starring my new best pal, Andy!

title of post

All the cool kids love The XX. Check 'em out if you haven't already done so but be careful when you google 'em ferchrissakes. Yeesh.

The XX – Crystalised

By the by, their kind-of self-titled album, "XX", is out on Monday but streamable here through we7. Advance word from Obscure Sound is that it's one of the best albums of the year, and I like Obscure Sound a lot so this jawn comes recommended.

lay with me on the ground

Passion Pit make me wish that I had saved up for a festival this year, if only for that sun-drunk sense of total euphoria you get from being part of a giant body, consisting of hundreds of people, bellowing out the words to songs you love. It's better than just a live experience in a club or indoors. Festivals really do make for the best musical moments.

Anyhoo, Passion Pit came onto my radar pretty late but "Moth's Wings", off their album Manners, is pretty much one of the best damn things I've heard all year. Above is a clip from their recent Myspace Transmissions set - you can find the rest HERE - and even though singer Michael Angelakos' voice sounds kinda shot from constant gigging, it sounds great away from the multi-tracked vocals and really loud drums. It's the best Coldplay song that Coldplay never wrote, and I just know I'll be disappointed when Coldplay don't play this next month. If you get what I mean.

DA PIT are playing the Garage in Glasgow on the 23rd of October after hitting Lowlands, Reading, Leeds, Pukkelpop and Rock en Seine. If you're going to any of these, check 'em out and get back to me on what they're like live.

strokin' a thick... [inaudible]

Holy shit, this band I've been listening to on Muxtape has one of the guys from Chariots in them! What're the odds, huh? I always knew anybody to do anything with Holy Roar Records had that somethin' somethin' about 'em...

Check out Gold Blood here on Muxtape and here on Myspace, stat. "Gets You Laid" is pretty much my new summer jam judging how much it's being played in the Casa del Flashing Lights.

ps. Everybody else knew Muxtape was back, right? Cos I didn't. Me dumb.

not the rhythm of the...

I sat down and watched Claire Denis' Beau Travail last night and, yeah, it's gorgeous and like not much I've seen before. I'm not going to say that I absolutely fell head-over-heels in love with it like I did to her recent 35 Shots of Rum (why haven't you seen it, reader? do you want to admit you've not seen the best film of the year?) but it's really good and I eagerly anticipate the next time I cross paths with it.

I tried to find a clip of the musically-charged final scene but due to not being able to (and also not wanting to spoil the delightful surprise of it actually happening), I've embedded Cat Power's video for the song "He War", which includes some of the gorgeous gorgeous imagery from Denis' film. Take my word for it: let the HQ version load.

wake up music

Wake up, it's a new week!

Angles - My Boyfriend's Back

The Slits - Heard It On the Grapevine

Ceremony - Living Hell

stoked

A reminder for all y'all: Calvinball and Apologies, I Have None are playing Glasgow on Friday and Perth on Saturday as the poster above states. In short, DON'T MISS!

Calvinball - You Always Get What You Want

Apologies, I Have None - 100 Club

STOKED.

ps. I haven't checked out Onsind (stands for: One Night Stand in South Dakota) yet, soon will.

john hughes 1950-2009

"If he gets up, we'll all get up, there'll be anarchy!"

Dude made one of my favourite films to this day. If you've ever been a teenager, The Breakfast Club makes total sense to you. In some ways, despite the cheese factor and the fact that I always found Ally Sheedy prettiest before her makeover at the film's end, it still does. Definitely throwing on the DVD tomorrow night in memoriam.

Oh, and he made Ferris Bueller's Day Off - fuckin' eh! Sigue Sigue Sputnik, take it away:



R.I.P. John Hughes, we kinda forgive you for Home Alone now. Almost.

UPDATE: A few excellent memorial pieces have gone up: Astrud Sands lists the best musical moments in Hughes' films for The Playlist here; New York Magazine's David Edelstein writes an in memoriam here ("His vision was consistent, his movies of a piece... a very personal commercial director"); Empire have a tribute up; and if you've not seen it, Hughes' pen pal writes an emotional response. Seriously, check this out if you haven't.

choooooooon

-Photo courtesy of Natalia Balcerska

So La Roux are on the cover of NME this week due to being in some top 50 most amazing things ever list or something or other. It's weird that they're officially massive because I had known pretty much nothing about them until Alan from Scratchin' the Surface dropped this Skream remix one week. Now when I see Elly Jackson's quiff on billboards and the such, I get amazed like "woah, I can't believe that song went mainstream, it's such a fucking banger" and then have to remind myself it's not the Skream version that everyone loves.

No shots fired to Elly and Ben, but this Skream remix - rather than your okayish original - made you guys superstars in my odd wee world.

La Roux - In For The Kill (Skream's Lets Get Ravey RMX)

One of 09's best!

My bad, I've been meaning to post this for a bit - Scottish rappers MasterSystem and their self-titled demo EP. There's a link to it through their Myspace blog but because I'm a kind fellow... HERE you go, click away! It's pretty dope.

If you missed that: DOWNLOAD HERE.

danceeee

Right guys, sorry I disappeared for a couple of days there - hanging with the girlfriend and locking down shifts for work (as well as re-acquainting myself with Battlestar Galactica) took up my time there but I wanted to point you in the direction of this new Rye Rye song, courtesy of the cool folk at Attorney Street. FLFD is in full effect, bringing you the best the net has to offer... or something.

Rye Rye - Rock Off Shake Off

Dope Daft Punk and Santigold samples at the end. Dig it. Don't dig the Myspace page (link above) which just hurts the eyes, so you know MIA designed it- no shots.

I never take my music recommendations from i-D Magazine, no matter how much I love the damn thing, but I thought hey why the hell not and checked out Io Echo (p65 of the Lily Allen/F.U.N. issue if you're wondering) and came across this free download. The link asked me not to share it so I decided to play nice and hand you a link - click HERE and follow the instructions, homeslice.

Some of this band's material does it for me, and some doesn't. Comparisons to one Polly Jean Harvey are unavoidable so I won't say anything else rather than get into writerly clichés.

on yer todd already, weesht

Via Daryl Palumbo's Twitter, ex-Glassjaw guitarist Todd Weinstock dancing to MJ's "Smooth Criminal" at a 1989 talent competition.

Today, I love the Internets.

"the stump serenade"

When the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica finished in March of this year with a pretty polarising series finale - if you're asking me, it was pretty awesome and achieved nearly all of its lofty ambitions, capping the show off pretty damn nicely - I was at once grateful and sad that I was never going to see these characters take another journey along the cosmos. For its flaws, BSG was an achievement, reawakening TV sci-fi (and HARD sci-fi, lo and behold) as a challenging medium where moral, religious and political debate could co-exist with hot robots and gun battles. My favourite show ever, Lost, has arguably done the same thing for TV sci-fi, but the mysterious way that everything is put across in that show makes it less effective at stirring up such topical debate. Ronald D Moore-1, JJ Abrams-0.

But one thing I would definitely miss from watching the show was Bear McCreary's brilliant score, especially when music became so pivotal to the mythology of the show at the end of season three. (If you've never seen BSG before, all I'm going to say is that Bob Dylan may be more important than you ever thought.) Serious, when I wanted to post a eulogy to the show following the finale, I decided to give it up and just sit and relisten to the "Passacaglia" motif a million times in a row.

So some of that awesome Bear McCreary music from the final season is now out in the States, and I've got my copy and guess what? It's great. It all kicks off with a full version of "Gaeta's Lament", the song Gaeta (Alessandro Juliani) sings after he's [SPOILER REDACTED] by [SPOILER REDACTED] after having been [SPOILER REDACTED] by [SPOILER REDACTED]. There's also an instrumental version of the song, and you can check those both out below, as well as this interesting post from McCreary's blog about the writing of the song for the episode "Guess What's Coming To Dinner". (Spoilers, obviously.)

Bear McCreary - Gaeta's Lament

Bear McCreary - Gaeta's Lament Instrumental

UK cats can pre-order the soundtrack here. If you've never seen Ronald D Moore's take on Battlestar Galactica, get to it. You will be seriously hooked once you're a couple of discs into one of the DVD boxsets - and trust me, DON'T LOOK UP SPOILERS. If you know who the Final Five are before you start watching, you're an idiot who hates suspense.