Shitney

Even though Britney Spears’ new album is apparently the greatest career resurrection since AD33, she still manages to spend half of the video for Womaniser with her tits splashed all over the screen.

This is because:

(a) she’s so empowered by her own sexuality or motherhood or whatever that she even co-wrote one of the songs on the album – just like a real artist!

(b) sticking the microphone up her snatch and throwing her voice would have been calling a spade a spade, but was probably one step too far for MTV

(c) she has a slightly better grasp of irony than Alanis Morissette and anyway Circus is a much better comeback album than the miscarriage that was Flavours of Entanglement so there

(d) she’s trying to deflect attention from the fact that in the other half of the video it’s obvious she purchased a couple of wigs and at least one outfit from the Tori Amos post-American Doll Posse World Tour Everything Must Go Fire Sale

(e) she’s determined to keep on keeping on despite the fact that somewhere in a darkened cupboard there’s a portrait of Brittney that looks very much like this:

Discuss.

ABBA Revival Revival

Hot on the heels of the celluloid abortion that was the recent Mamma Mia film comes the delightful news that Kylie and Dannii Minogue are teaming up to duet on a cover of ABBA’s “The Winner Takes It All”. Extra points for picking the ABBA song that most sums up their collective careers. Frankly they should retitle the song “The Winner Takes It All… and Dannii gets a TV show”.

Perhaps all the stress of having their fingers firmly on the pulse of five minutes ago as always is getting to them, because they really need to stop whatever sibling rivalry-based botox-off they’ve got going. I mean, honestly:

Kylie’s looking more and more like an overstuffed sausage that’s been scotchguarded from head to toe, and Dannii’s face now has such a high plastic content that that silver halterneck makes her look like a screw top bottle.

Perhaps a more appropriate song choice might have been “SOS”.

Sawdust and diamonds

According to legend, the mythical Breton city of Ys was the most wonderful city in the world. So wonderful in fact, that it gave its name to Paris, “Par-Ys” meaning “like Ys” in Breton. Built below sea level, it met its demise when Satan got hold of the keys to the damn walls and opened the gates. The reference to the city in the title of Joanna Newsom’s new album is apt because «Ys» is one of the most wonderful musical creations of recent times.

At first listen «Ys» feels a bit meandering and repetitive, the tracks blending into each other. But then you discover that the joy of the album lies in the subtle details: the rise and fall of the sonic tapestry and the delicious epic poetry of the five tracks. At the centre of it all is Newsom’s gorgeous voice, hovering somewhere between a young maiden waking in a meadow and a gnarled old crone shoutings warnings and whispering incantations. After a couple of days of listening you wake up and realise you’ve fallen under the spell of Newsom’s magical world.

It’s a world grounded in the delicate and expressive sounds of Newsom’s harp, and decorated with layers of lush orchestration, the polyphony of the instrumentation reflecting Newsom’s magpie eye for language and fantastic stories.

The standout track «Monkey & Bear» tells the tale of two animals who escape from the circus. At first this comes across as a modern day Aesop’s fable – while the Bear thinks they’ve found freedom, the Monkey intends to keep her dancing for money. By the fourth or fifth listen, the Bear dancing on her hind legs while children shriek and throw coins and the Monkey whispers “come on will you dance my darling”, it’s heartbreaking. The beauty of the music makes the album’s moments of emotional intensity – bodies dumbstruck with the sweetness of being, cities reduced to flickering wastelands – all the more poignant.

The bear’s name is Ursala, a nice play on the animal’s Latin name; and «Ys» is full of these references and word games. Much of the language is arcane, but there are as many aeroplanes as there are hollyhock and heather. Newsom’s Ys isn’t some historical artefact. It’s a fantastic city for our own time, at once mythical and contemporary, a linguistic and musical tapestry threaded from the wonders of the universe: everything from the smell of stone fruit being cut open, to the Pleiades, and doves stuffed with sawdust and diamonds.

Hello Saferide

Hello Saferide is the name of a band. Hello Saferide is Annika Norlin, Swedish singer‑songwriter extraordinaire (there seem to be plenty of them going around this year) and a number of friends playing music. I love Hello Saferide – Annika’s lyrics are funny without being trite, but have a fantastic undercurrent of melancholy. She’d be great fun down the pub; happily matching you beer for beer and being carried along on a ride of merry making and frivolity, declaring her teenage crush in “Highschool Stalker”, or shouting out her ode to freedom in the face of contemporary conservatism “You’ve been walking to your bedside table, in the top draw was a knife… San Francisco – don’t you know you’ll never wanna turn back!”

And then when that boozy depressive depressive mood kicked in at 4am she’d pull out her guitar and cello* and strum out Valentine’s Day: “Got my bags packed and I’m taking the dog, I’m going too fast on the highway… Roses are red and violets are blue and sugar is sweet and I’m leaving you”. Her debut album “Introducing Hello Saferide” is barely half an hour long but packs in a ton of emotional sentiment, all carried off with a charming sense of humour that never lets it get too heavy. Melancholy and optimism all rolled into one.

[*No, I don't know how she manages to simultaneously play the guitar and cello and sing while drunk. Perhaps she is some kind of Nordic supermusician.]

Download [mp3] Hello Saferide – Highschool Stalker

Download [mp3] Hello Saferide – San Francisco

Download [mp3] Hello Saferide – Valentine’s Day

Download [mp3] Hello Saferide – The Quiz

Frida Hyvönen

I got a hold of Frida Hyvönen’s album “Until Death Comes” a few weeks ago and it has been pretty much on constant rotation since then. Part manic piano, part intellectual lyrics, part what Joni Mitchell’s ‘Blue’ album might sound like if it was recorded by a Finnish Swede in 2006, it’s one of my favourite albums so far this year.

Pitchfork (whom I don’t like quite so much) have done their review-a-song thing with one the tracks from the album, so I thought I’d take this opportunity to partake in some blatant plagiarism and mp3-leaping:

Her sprightly keys seem a direct translation of the faltering epiphany that colors her lyrics and inflections, so this song moves from uncertainty to strength with symmetrically trebled force. Hyvönen’s piano trips over increasingly insistent phrases; hesitating, it swings back in with thunderous conviction. Her voice, like something recently uncaged, describes the same dogged ascent. Tumbling recklessly through dizzy passages of blue, it sweeps up, tenderly flayed, and vanishes into sunburst vowels. The same flailing motion toward self-reclamation plays out over the lyrics. Hyvönen’s address to a cold-fish ex who said that her love was “just aesthetic” begins as self-castigation tinged with indignant rebuke, then gradually inverts as she realizes some things about transference, culminating in the final stanza’s triumphant light bulb. “You never got me right,” she concludes, and then she’s gone.

Download [mp3] Frida Hyvönen – You Never Got Me Right

Download [video] Frida Hyvönen – The Modern

Download [video] Frida Hyvönen – I Drive My Friend

mix:tape 4 – Everything all the Time

01 Kira Kira Kittens in his Pockets
02 Ø In Wind
03 Vetiver You May Be Blue
04 Xiu Xiu PJ in the Streets of London
05 Blindfold Myrkfalni
06 Anja Garbarek That’s All
07 José González Crosses
08 This is Your Captain Speaking A Wave to Bridget Fondly
09 Audrey Plain Pieces
10 Zazie Rodéo
11 Bishop Allen Flight 180
12 Britta Persson Defrag My Heart
13 French Teen Idol Your Fault
14 Zazie Lola Majeure
15 Mono The Flames Beyond the Cold Mountain
16 Seabear Robin Sparrow
17 Björk Undo

mix:tape 3 — Separatist_Moose@ Third_Millenium

01 Ute Lemper The Case Continues
02 Band of Horses The Great Salt Lake
03 Barbara Morgenstern The Operator
04 Casiotone for the Painfully Alone Young Shields
05 Daníel Ágúst The Moss
06 Swissair Your Good Looks (Will ruin what otherwise could have been the beginning of a beautiful friendship)
07 Anja Garbarek This Momentous Day
08 Seabear You’re Not Strange Enough (Hey, let’s make some mistakes)
09 Under Byen Den her sang handler om at få det bedste ud af det
10 Greater Explosives Archipelago
11 Piana Spring Has Come!!!
12 Hello Saferide Highschool Stalker
13 Anna Ternheim A French Love
14 Zazie Adam et Yves
15 Thunderbear Pas på du ikke frider i
16 Tujiko Noriko マネキンサーファー
17 Iron & Wine Free Until They Cut Me Down
18 P J Harvey Catherine
19 Calexico All Systems Red

mix:tape 2 – The Sound of the Office Splitting

II: The Sound of the Office Splitting Look, part two of an ongoing series! The following tracks have been keeping me from licking the powerpoint or going on a postal rampage in the office the past few weeks. Alas, they weren’t quite good enough to keep me from throwing a brochure across the room this past week. Although I still haven’t blurted out “if I puked in a fountain pen and mailed it to the monkey house I’d get better copy than this!” so all is not yet lost.

01 Sigur Rós Ó Friður 02 Audrey Mecklenburg 03 Ane Brun To Let Myself Go 04 Anja Garbarek Dizzy With Wonder 05 Brooks Man-Size 06 Ellen Allien + Apparat Under 07 Tujiko Noriko むぢんきゅうこう 08 Françoiz Breut La Boîte de Nuit 09 Film School He’s a DeepDeep Lake 10 Pakku Spectators 11 Aoki Takamasu + Tujiko Noriko Alien 12 Joanna Newsom Peach Plum Pear 13 Bear Quartet The Repairing of the Red Sea 14 Apparat Organ Quartet Sofðu Litla Vél 15 Tortoise + Bonnie Prince Billy Thunder Road 16 Barbara Morgenstern + Robert Lippok Kaitusburi 17 Set Fire to Flames Steal Compass/Drive North/Disappear…

mix:tape 1 – Rising Vodka Tide

I: Rising Vodka Tide After toying with the idea of setting up some kind of mp3 blog I finally decided that I had neither the time, the inclination nor the access to new music that is probably requisite for that kind of endeavour. So, instead, here is a tracklist of the cd of recent musical acquisitions that I am currently listening to. Or was three weeks ago before I went overseas. You can even download some of them! Don’t say I never did anything for you.

01 múm In Through the Lamp 02 Stina Nordenstam Failing to Fly 03 Bang Gang Find What You Get 04 Audrey Box, and Fights 05 British Sea Power Green Grass of Tunnel 06 +/- Trapped Under Ice Floes 07 Röyksopp What Else is There? 08 Blindfold Blindfold 09 Deborah Conway Man Overboard [Wicked Beat Sound System Remix] 10 Björk Who Is It [Vitalic White Label Mix] 11 I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness When You Go Out 12 Wir Sind Helden Von Hier an Blind 13 Red Sparrowes Alone and unaware, the landscape was transformed in front of our eyes 14 Windermere You Have it All 15 Giardini di Mirò The Comforting of a Transparent Life 16 Stina Nordenstam Get On With Your Life [Pluxus Remix]

mix:tape 0

0: ¡Viva el Amor!

My own version of cds handed out for various people’s birthday celebrations.

01 Fiona Apple Not About Love [2003]
02 Sufjan Stevens Concerning the UFO sighting near Highland, Il.
03 Love Outside Andromeda Bound by Hurt Disolved
04 Mark Lanegan Band feat. P J Harvey Hit the City
05 Nostalgia 77 Seven Nation Army
06 Lo Roberts Satellite
07 Josh Pyke Goldmines
08 Sigur Rós Sæglópur
09 Françoiz Breut Km 83
10 The Cardigans I need some fine wine and you, you need to be nicer
11 Heather Nova Amelia Earhart’s Last Days
12 Expatriate The Spaces Between
13 Bénjamin Biolay Négatif
14 The White Birch Love is so Real
15 Émilie Simon Ice Girl
16 Martha Wainwright Dis, quand reviendras-tu?
17 Laura Veirs Shadow Blues
18 Fiona Apple Better Version of Me [2003]
19 The Cardigans 03.45: No Sleep