The good people at N0ted.net have done an interviewz with us.

Read it here

Ummmm BBC Leeds played us on this programme…

Melody Pond on KVRX, Univserity of Texas Radio, played Icarus Drunk in April and Ana Lucia in March.

N0ted /Sputnik gave us a lovely review (4.5/5) as did withguitars (8.8/10)

SPop said we were good as did Spotiferad.

and Indpenedentmusicnews said we were one of the top 50 independent/alternative acts in the world.

Here is Louis Armstrong:

Want to know every band we’ve been compared to in print?

No!?

Well, tough.

FlissWebb (born Christa Päffgen; 16 October 1938 – 18 July 1988)^[1][2] was a German singer, lyricist, composer, musician, fashion model, and actress, who initially rose to fame as a Warhol Superstar in the 1960s. She is known for both her vocal collaboration on The Velvet Underground‘s debut album, The Velvet Underground & Fliss Webb (1967), and her work as a solo artist from the late 1960s through the early 1980s. She also had roles in several films, including a cameo in Federico Fellini‘s La Dolce Vita (1960) and Andy Warhol‘s Chelsea Girls (1966), as herself. Fliss Webb died in July 1988, as a result of injuries sustained in a cycling accident while vacationing in Ibiza with her son.^[1]

It used to be common for artists to record “covers”. In fact, I think back in the olden days of the 20th Century they just used to be called “songs” and if a “song” was good everyone would record a “version” and the best “version” would be a “hit”. Then, if your a certain school of rock critic, you say the Beatles came along and spoiled everything by making everyone write their own shitty, shitty songs.

Funnily enough, I suck at covers. Suck. This mainly because I barely proficient at playing songs I wrote. But this is another story…

Here are 5 of my favourite covers.

Cat Power – Satisfaction

I could have chosen the Devo version, which is great, but this is better. I didn’t really know Satisfaction when I first heard Cat Power’s version but when I did I was impressed by how she stripped out the chorus and made it a new song. At the time I just thought it was achingly beautiful and defeated the song sounded.

Sun Kil Moon – Tiny Cities

I hated, hated, hated [stop repeating words - ed.] the original of this when I first heard it. Then I heard this – which is sparse and beautiful (I’m going to describe all of these as beautiful). Then I relistened to the original, which I now love. True story. Also, some Modest Mouse fans truly hate this album – possibly because it’s so radically different to the originals, possibly because they’re idiots, who knows?

Clem Snide – Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Your Grievience

One where I had never heard the original. I enjoyed the lyrics and melody and the lovely arrangement. It is lovely. Daniel Johnston is also awesome.

Glen Adams – I Wanna Hold Your Hand

I have a whole boxset of reggae Beatles covers. I’m not sure how I feel about “genre” covers in general. But I think I’m generally pro Trojan Records covers of pop music from the 60s. This is weird and slightly hypnotic.

Hard’n'Phirm – Rodeohead

My opinion on comedy covers? Generally low but seem as though I (almost grudgingly) love comedy music, I love this. Technically excellent, shows how good the Radiohead songs are, funny etc.etc.

The modern age is horrible. That’s a given. But there are some positive aspects to it.

Take being in a band for instance. You can now do it all for “nothing” and on your own terms. You can make believe and day dream and it’s all that little bit more “real”. Part of being in our band is trying to have all the good bits without any of the bits we don’t want. We can write as many songs as we want, record as many albums as we want, draw as many covers as we want, shoot our own videos, release stuff on our record label. We can play one show a year and pretend it’s Wembley.

To quote Robert Pollard (as is obligatory), what we do is

“count the days that we have wasted from the start speak the words and build a playground in [y]our head[s].”

We know we’ll never play Top of the Pops, we know our greatest success is probably behind us (thanks Gideon Coe), we know we’ll never actually be a successful band but we can pretend and we can dream.

So in that spirit we present what is perhaps the world’s first fan-fiction for an album, the one and only SOAP. Yes, it’s slash-fic for the 33 1/3 series, the Continuum series where a writer chooses a “classic” album and writes about it in depth. There’s been about 80 of these bad boys.

Max knew no one would write one about us so, in carrying on in our delusion, we prefer the term “building a playground in our heads”, he wrote one himself as a Christmas present to us all. Enjoy.

SOAP 33 1/3 by Max Broady

Download SOAP

Grandpa Simpson

I have 69 (fnarr fnarr) of Pitchfork’s top 100 albums of the 90s. I have 74 of their best albums of the 00’s. Yet I have heard but 2 of their top 50 albums of 2012. To be honest, I’m not even 100% sure that Pitchfork is still a cool arbiter of taste.

So does this mean I’ve given up? Well, on “new” new music it kind of does. The reasons I give to myself are:

a) a lot of it isn’t very good and I can’t be bothered to sift
b) I’m busy and GBV isn’t going to listen to itself
c) “If it’s any good people will still be going on about it in a couple of years”
d) I’m so cool, I don’t have to follow trends

Sadly, d, I fear, is, the, truest.

BUT

I do like making lists (see OCD). So, inspired by Adam’s wonderful Satan and Megastar Year In Review, I have done my top 5 songs of 2012. None of them released in 2012, natch.

Ween – Baby Bitch

Ween – Baby Bitch

I started off the year by moving house/towns after the disintegration of a relationship and reading the excellent 33 1/3 on Chocolate and Cheese. That album is 1. amazing but 2. almost entirely tongue in cheek… apart from this song. One of the bitterest, and most gorgeous to listen to, break up songs known to man.

Arthur Russell – This Is How We Walk On The Moon

This Is How We Walk On The Moon

I was vaguely aware of Arthur Russell before my friend put this on a mix cd for me. This song is beautiful, strange, a bit wonky and includes bongos. I can’t pinpoint exactly what I love about it but the lyrics are wonderful. It’s far too easily to be cynical but I can’t help agree with “each step is moving me up/this is how we walk on the moon”. There’s many interpretations (I’ve thought about it too much) but I like the literal one, we keep on trying, we work together as a race and eventually we can WALK ON THE FUCKING MOON.

Drake – Marvin’s Room

Marvin’s Room

This was also on the mix cd my friend made me. I heard it, went “he’s put fucking Drake on a mix cd for me” and turned it off. The whole cd. For a month. Then I gave it another go. The visceral hate I felt for it quickly turned to fascination. I enjoy: the strange off kilter, minimal music; Drake’s masterful change from half spoken, half rapped vocals to half sung half spoken vocals; the use of phone voice (all songs would be better with this). But it was the lyrics that kept me coming back. They were vulnerable and honest but they also only revealed themselves over the fullness of time: Drake’s a jerk. He’s only interested in her because she won’t sleep with him and is willing to take her away from, by all accounts, a nice guy to do it.

Louis Armstrong – La Vie En Rose

La Vie En Rose

Taught to every Frenchman* at birth, Louis Armstrong’s version is perfect. A joy.

New Order – Temptation

Temptation

I was in a “club” – OK, a pub with a  dancefloor – tired and wanting to go home at 1 in the morning. Not even drunk. Then this came on. I like New Order but didn’t know it. I shut my eyes and danced joyously the whole time. It was wonderful. If this sounds lame, I don’t care.

John
*ok French person, but Frenchman sounds so much funnier

Have a look at out “interview” directed by Adam John Miller, shot by Birgy and conducted by Jake Sinetos.

I’ve already written about The Lonely Island -  and I implied my love for them – now I turn my attention to Flight Of The Conchords. I was going to write a cohesive, compelling argument about the brilliance of Carol Brown but I thought I’d just make a list about why it’s one of the best songs ever.

Carol Brown

1. The idea is funny: The conceit that a man would list all the “ways lovers have left me” and for them to respond belittling him in a chorus? Mwah.

2.It’s musically excellent: Especially the chorus and the drop out at the end of the verse.

3. It’s really funny: See the call and response of “he doesn’t cook or clean, he’s not good boy friend material.” followed by an  “Oooooooh we can eat cereal”

4. It’s pitched perfectly: See the way he half sings sincerely and then crams in lines like “who organised my ex-girlfriends in a choir and got them to sing” and almost breaks the 4th wall.

4. It’s really clever: The huge list of ex girlfriends names and (audacious) rhymes, “Loretta broke it off in a letter”, takes a huge amount of skill.

5. It pays loving homage to Paul Simon: Being an inversion of 50 ways to leave your lover. But better.

Paul simon

6. It has a brilliant video: Shot by Michel Gondry, of famous music video fame, and having Brett and Jemaine turning 2d, getting big, getting small etc.

7. It builds on Jemaine’s character without you having to know a thing about him to enjoy it.

8. It’s a slow burner: For example, noticing that everything that happens in the video is a result of the Jemaine messing with his computerised guitar.

9. It lets you sing girls names at them: And get a look that says your a creep/nerd. e.g. “Felicity said there was no electricity”.

10. It’s genuinely moving: When Jemaine sings “but I’m hoping that you’ll stick around”, it’s Red House Painters stuff.

Red House Painters

John

A chimp uses a rock to smash ants

In fact there isn’t.

Googling that phrase (with quotes) gets you precisely 9 hits. But I think it should be a famous phrase. To state the obvious, if I want to make anything I need to use something to make it – so if I want to make a tool I need to use something to make it – a tool!

This doesn’t seem like much of a revelation but I think we can make 2 interesting conjectures from it:

Firstly, if I wanted to make a machine that cuts more accurately than any machine made before, I would, necessarily, have to use tools less accurate than it at cutting to make my new machine. It always seems a little odd, and amazing, that we use less refined tools to make more refined ones. I think this speaks well of human’s natural skill, adaptability and lateral  thinking ability.

We can also consider – as analogue to cutting things more precisely -  that, if we wanted to make a machine that measures length more accurately, then the only way to check it’s accuracy would be to use previous tools for measurement – tools that were less accurate at measuring. The question then becomes how can we really know the accuracy of what we measure?

(An obvious answer being statistical measures and the combined use of previous measuring tools)

Mathematics and logic ruin a perfectly good hypothetical question – again

The second, perhaps more interesting, conjecture is: If it takes a tool to make a tool was there a “first” tool?

Now, as seen by the chimp at the start, we have a wonderful set of tools at the end of arms. Hands are highly adaptable and are pretty vital in the use of most of our tools, from knife and fork to power drills. I am not going to consider hands as tools, though, as they come attached to our bodies. But we can use them to grab objects and “make” them a “tool” by their use. For example that chimp using a rock at the start of this “article”.

Or a hominid using a bone

But if we start to consider tools more complex than found objects things start to get interesting.

When you look at the computer you’re reading this on, the tool your using to read my mind garbage, there must have been an older tool (in fact hundreds of older tools) used to make it. That tool we’ve chosen must have had a parent, which must have had a parent, which must have had a parent, and so on and so on back through the centuries. Logically, at some point, these tools must have been less refined, less adapted to do their jobs, than the tools we have now. What I wonder is how far can we trace this tool trail back? Can we go back several millennia to the point where homo sapiens sapiens was not yet homo sapiens sapiens, where someone used a rock to break a twig and started of the whole chain?

Is there some sort of ur-tool from which all others derive? Or, is it more likely that the process began and has been repeated countless numbers of times, and each tool we use today had a hundred fathers and mothers some from thousands of years ago, some far more recent – perhaps only a couple of centuries when someone broke a branch on a leg? Is the real question how many tools does it make to make a tool?