two punk bands + a girl group = ECLECTICA, YO

Ah, the early (well, before noon) browse through my regular haunts for cool new bands to check out. The receipents of a quality review on Punknews are The Sorely Trying Days, who describe themselves as a "deadly storm of pure rage, half fun and deafening volume". There's bits of whatever stoner rock is (was) with some crust and I even hear a bit of melodic punk in there. Definitely worth checking out their myspace, as well as the video below, which has them playing "About the Good Times" off their Useless World debut Survival Mode. Check 'em out.



Also on the receiving end of a favourable review on The Org are new No Idea signees Dear Landlord, a band containing members of The Copyrights and Off With Their Heads. They've been receiving some type of hype due to their allegedly superb live shows and incredibly catchy songs, and their debut Dream Homes is pretty much living up to the hype from what I've heard so far. Check them out by clicking on the link above and check out the live footage of them playing "Lake Ontario" below.



And courtesy of the ever-snarky Popjustice, Girls Can't Catch and the video to their first single "Keep Your Head Up". It's catchy and allows whoever writes Popjustice to make posts like this so really, everyone benefits here. (Go to their Myspace page and check out the Starsmith remix of the single - it's great, even if the vocals are pretty much buried by everything else in the mix.)



Sorry for the lack of mp3s. You'll have to deal with the Youtube videos for now!

Well, FUCK IT'S FUCKING CHRISTMAS DAY!!!

Beastie Boys feat. Nas - Too Many Rappers
via Hypebeast, via illRoots

Hot Sauce Committee Pt 1 out September 14th (for all the UK cats). Drowned In Sound had a first listen recently - read up on it HERE.

rappers shouldn't wear fedoras

So, Nigo and Pharrell were in London town the other day and Skateboard P wore a ridiculous hat to the proceedings. The lazy fashion-related blog post writes itself.

Cadence Weapon - Your Hair's Not Clothes

BONUS: Pharrell - Despicable Me

Wow.

1:50 onwards > Illmatic

what i loved most turned to distant ghost

Carve The Future are an Edinburgh-based hardcore band who sound a bit like stonking Japanese band FC FiVE and have a lot of gang vox. The vocals sound a bit flat at parts but they're pretty good, especially on the song "Stand Tall". Basically if you like melodic hardcore, you'll dig their "Avoid the Fall" EP, which is up for download here. If you missed that: HERE it is. HERE.

NIIIINNNEEEE. EXXXXXXX. EMMMM!

Y'know, the thing about not having a full-time job is that you find yourself eating breakfast for up to three hours due to watching Brit Asia Music or 9XM. And being pretty unfamiliar with British Asian music or famous tracks from Bollywood movies, the whole thing is always really interesting for me. I found some pretty neat stuff this morning while I ate my cereal, especially the two videos below.

The first is the debut single from Mumzy Stranger, a British Bangladeshi vocalist under the tutorage of producer Rishi Rich (a bunch of Jay Sean beats that you'll probably recognise if you watched MTV Base a while ago) and, hell, "One More Dance" is very much of its time - Stargate-style synths and drums, trilbys, flashy lights, but hey, I'm a sucker for stuff like this, no matter how calculated. The video is below and if you don't feel like watching it, hey, it'sgot a cute girl in it. It'll be stuck in your head by the end of the day, even if it's pretty piecemeal.



The other video is from the film Anwar, a drama about an artist who is mistaken for a terrorist in modern day India. That's pretty much all I know about it, but after hearing this (absolutely gooooooooorgeous) song from the film, it's gone on my Lovefilm queue. Hope it's good.



Ah, TV. Is there anything you can't do?

so, late pass on something prince did

Wrecka sto

So, I'm an awful blogger. Awful awful awful at this. However, I thought I'd write about this odd film I saw today (and hey, I'll write about films too, it's my blog dammit) by the name of Under the Cherry Moon. If you didn't know, it's directed by Prince. It's a weird one.

The follow-up to over-extended music video Purple Rain, Cherry Moon has Prince playing an actual character (!) rather than Purple Rain's Kid and, eh, he gets on as okay as somebody with that much natural charisma has. He plays Chris, a gigolo who steals money from rich French women with the help of his half-brother Tricky (Jerome Benton, now and forever the guy from The Time who holds the mirror up to Morris Day during "Jungle Love"). For their latest heist, they hear about an heiress by the name of Mary Sharon (Kristin Scott Thomas in her first screen role) and decide to take her $50 million trust fund. Then there's some stuff about her father and his corruption, as well as Chris' gig as a pianist, but really now, all that stuff, pssh, it whizzes by.

People hate this movie. Hell, Kristin Scott Thomas hates this movie: "When I left drama school...I was more afraid of not working at all than of the actual material I was being offered. And if you look at my very first film, you'll understand exactly what I mean." It won (is "won" the right word to use here?) five awards at the 1986 Razzies. It can't quite decide what film it ever wants to be: it is a screwball comedy, a rom-com, a heist film, a melodrama, and Prince is pretty much doing whatever the hell he wants at any given time. Nobody is really acting on the same quality level at any given time (when Prince cries, it's always funny) and the script is, er, an acquired taste. Oh, and did I mention that it's set entirely in Cannes during a time period that mixes together the 80s and 40s without ever truly deciding on which decade?

But because I'm weird and like films other people hate, I turned out kinda liking Under the Cherry Moon. It reminded me of Idlewild, the OutKast vehicle from a few years back, and Prince's film was probably a massive inspiration on that film for the idea of making a film set in a total fantasy world. Sure, the movies do that more than anything, but both Idlewild and Cherry Moon are obsessed with artifice, with cliche, with movie people doing movie things that only ever happen in movies. There's no need for the heiress' father to have the cops on his payroll and basically be corrupt, but hey, it's been done before - same goes for Benton's hysterical sidekick (he yells his way through this film and I really dug it) and Scott Thomas' totally inconsistent vamp/virgin/rebel. The main reason I liked Under the Cherry Moon is because it is a total fantasy, an illusion, a true movie. Mash cultures and times together, mash the characters together, mash the genres together. It's messy, but it's devoted to the artifice that we all kinda take for granted by watching better films.

Oh, and the soundtrack's great (released under the name Parade). Here's some songs from it:

Prince - Life Can Be So Nice
Prince - Mountains
Prince - Sometimes It Snows In April