Listening Party: The Streets - Computers and Blues

Words by special guest Franko Fraize

If you haven’t listened to The Streets’ new and final album yet, then go and listen. If you have listened and only made a quick passing judgement, please go back and listen nine more times. I say this because in this day and age it’s too easy to listen briefly to a record, form an opinion, then quickly move on. In this world where everything we desire is just a click away, there is little time anymore to let things grow. When I first listened to Computers And Blues I thought it was ok but after listening ten times I truly appreciate it for what it is: a very decent record.

Computers and Blues is the Barnet-born/Birmingham-raised Mike Skinner’s fifth and final album of his five album record deal with Warner. Mike has stated in interviews that he wanted to end The Streets on this album as it felt right to fulfil five albums on the same label, thus creating his discography on one label over roughly a decade.

The interesting thing about Computers and Blues is that last year a small part of it was released for free via Twitter, albeit in demo format. The tracks ‘Trust Me’, ‘Blip On a Screen’, ‘Outside Inside’, and ‘Roof of Your Car’ were released in late 2009. Mike Skinner also released the album online a week prior to the official release date via a Soundcloud stream, a stream on the Guardian website, and via Spotify to premium members – a very interesting thing to do in my opinion. At face value, a move like this could deter people from buying the album, simply taking it for free instead. However, the album went in at number eight in the UK charts, which either tells us free music doesn’t directly affect record sales as much as we think, or that if you get a name as big as The Streets you will always sell records.

Most people will agree that the first two records were the best. When Mike got to the point of writing Everything Is Borrowed, many felt he went wrong by leaving the straight-up narrative of a twenty-something English male and going on to tell his own story with a more personal approach. For most fans this didn’t hit home like the albums before and he was criticised for doing so.

With Computers and Blues, Mike has managed to amalgamate the two styles. It’s almost as if he listened to every one of his past releases then made this as a reflection of them all. He talks of things a lot of people encounter and relate to, such as going out raving, going to the football, and relationships, but also adds a very personal message to a lot of the tracks – a message that is perhaps missed on first glance. Tracks such as ‘Trying To Kill M.E.’ explain how his dedication and work rate led to him becoming exhausted and suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome. The final track, ‘Lock the Locks’, is a very fitting end to a decent career. It talks of him leaving, using the image of an office worker leaving the office and his work life behind as a metaphor for him leaving The Streets behind and parting the label. I believe that Computers And Blues is everything Mike Skinner aimed to achieve. It is a nicely rounded album that comfortably puts to bed the brilliant outfit that was The Streets.

Other Streets related information:

In January 2011, Mike released Cyberspace and Reds, a free mixtape containing recordings made since Computers and Blues was recorded, which shows him working with the current cream of the UK rap scene. It’s available here: http://soundcloud.com/the-streets/sets/cyberspace-and-reds-deluxe-edition

He also produced an interactive film on Youtube to help advertise the new album: http://the-streets.co.uk/2011/02/computers-and-blues-interactive-film/

‘Going Through Hell’ video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_ulRwXIzbo

Space Coast

David Ryle works for a number of major clients in the corporate world including BMW, Nike, Alfa Romeo and Fiat, but it’s his personal series’ of photography that really caught our eye.

Space Coast is a series depicting the area around the NASA Space Centre in Florida and the series of space shuttle launches that he witnessed. They are incredibly simplistic shots, that often highlight an off-beat oddity within them such as a patriotic sole waving an American flag while everyone else is sunbathing, an incredibly lifelike group shot of NASA astronauts on an everyday billboard or wandering, metal-detecting man in a crowd of beach bathers.

Check out David’s brilliantly minimal website here: http://www.davidryle.com

Psychedelic Treasure Trove: Nirvana - The Story of Simon Simopath (1967)

In the first instalment of our brand new regular feature Psychedelic Treasure Trove, music journalist Jon Chapple opens the lid on some of the sixties and seventies most obscure moments of music history. This week he explores the original Nirvana. No, not that nineties grunge band!

Words by Jon Chapple

“Little swallow in the sky, permit me to entice you with a bargain / I will give you all my sweets, a comic book, a clock that sings / if you will let me have your lovely wings.”

And so spake Simon Simopath; deranged dreamer, modern-day Icarus and eponymous hero of the original Nirvana’s début long-player, The Story of Simon Simopath. Yes, you did hear correctly; do not adjust your sets – this 1967 album, the first item in our shiny new Psychedelic Treasure Trove, is subtitled A Science Fiction Pantomime and has a hero, because it’s probably pop’s first ever narrative concept album. And it’s a trip.

Now, young Simon isn’t your typical hero of old. Well, not really – he is being tested, I suppose, in a way, and he does have a gargantuan task to overcome, but our protagonist’s problems are of his own making. You see (as you may have already guessed from the opening paragraph), Master Simopath’s got a hankering for flying.

And boy, does he have it bad. So bad, in fact, that his all-consuming obsession with taking to the sky leads – as you’d expect – to a complete nervous breakdown and subsequent incarceration in a mental hospital untactfully called ‘Bendersview’. Luckily, however – owing to the fact that our hero apparently resides in a world where the mad are regularly cherry-picked to be sent into space – Simon is able to become an astronaut, blast off to a verdant intergalactic paradise via a chance encounter with centaur named Cedric, drink from a fountain of immortality and wed a stunningly beautiful extra-terrestrial goddess named Magdalena. Oh, and become King of his perfect astral abode. Nice.

A certain Mr. Townshend would no doubt prefer to use the term ‘rock opera’ to describe the song cycle of Simon Simopath, but I’ve shied away from doing so, with the reasons being two-fold. Firstly, this was the era of the ‘pop group’ – in 1967, the strange neologism ‘rock band’ was just a sparkle in its anonymous coiner’s eye, plus, I’m a sucker for slightly archaic slang at the best of times – and secondly, and marginally more importantly, by no stretch of anyone’s imagination can Nirvana’s science-fiction pantomime realistically be called a rock album.

Nirvana were a multi-instrumental duo, Irishman Patrick Campbell-Lyons and Greek Alex Spyropoulos, and a rotating line-up of hip London session musicians, who – in spite of sharing a name with a trio of plagiarising, unwashed grungers (if that’s still a word) – created music frequently so featherweight it could make Freddie and The Dreamers sound like Black Sabbath (if they’d existed in 1967. Which they didn’t). Embracing the freewheeling, experimental spirit of the post-Sgt. Pepper epoch like no other, Nirvana decided from the outset that their music would consist of a then-unique melding of orchestral sounds with a pop sensibility (unlike a number of other ‘Underground’ cousins, who often saw rock albums given the ‘classical’ treatment at their record companies’ behest once recording had finished).

The result is that their first album sounds nothing like any of its contemporaries. Whimsical, starry-eyed and often disarmingly twee (even by the standards of a year that spawned the likes of Excerpt from a Teenage Opera), The Story of Simon Simopath is ostentatious baroque ‘n’ roll at its most gentle. There isn’t any guitar-work to speak of, but, hey, who needs those brutish stringed things when in their place you’ve got pianos, strings and assorted wind instruments? Think you need male vocalists that sound like men? Think again! Fey, simpering Irishmen are where it’s really at.

Now, I understand all this may sound a bit alarming, and on first listen most will find at least certain aspects of the LP unbearably sappy, but fortune favours the bold, and those who persevere will soon uncover an underrated selection of soft popsike gems. Opener Wings of Love (the one about the little swallow) is a bewitching baroque pop toe-tapper with a chorus you’ll be whistling for days, oboe ‘n’ xylophone-fest We Can Help You has a dense, lush wall of sound production that H.P.S. himself would no doubt be proud of was he not such a crazy bastard, and Pentecost Hotel, a soaring, immaculate micro-symphony serving as both a lead single and our introduction to Magdalena, really is just too lovely for words.

It’s not all so rosy, of course – I Never Had A Love Like This Before is a pointless, maudlin dirge that goes nowhere, and the jury’s still out on weird, out-of-place, boozed up honky-tonk number 1999 – but the peaks far outweigh the troughs, and, taken as a whole, The Story of Simon Simopath makes for very enjoyable listening indeed.

And it’s just as well, really, because – as unique and diverting as the narrative aspect of the album is – it’s really no more than just that; a diversion. There aren’t any spoken passages, for instance, and there’s no way of really knowing what on Earth (or space) is going on, story-wise, without following along in the liner notes, so it’s still the music that counts for the most here.

That music certainly isn’t going to be to everyone’s tastes – I suspect you’ll either dig it whole-heartedly or hate it with a passion – but you’ve still got to admire them for having a go. After all, lame, generic guitar rawk is no fun. Kurt.

Ravings Of A Film Fanatic: The Room

Words by Nicky Dean

What is The Room? A film with the passion of Tennessee Williams? A sexist, misogynist vanity project, acting as catharsis for its writer/director/star, Tommy Wiseau? One of the worst films ever made? A confusing, self-absorbed mess of cinema? One of the greatest cinematic experiences of all time?

The Room is all these things and more. Admittedly it requires a predilection for bad movies, but for those who can stomach such experiences The Room is a thoroughly entertaining ninety minutes. For everyone else, it’s a complete waste of time – a mind-numbing, baffling excursion through the delusions of a control freak. But what do they know?

The Room follows the ups and downs of the saint-like Johnny (Wiseau) as he goes about the business of being a misunderstood, genius bank-employee and fiancé extraordinaire to Lisa (Juliette Danielle), the love of his life. Sadly, Lisa – being a wicked harlot – is dissatisfied with her lot. Johnny is so attentive to her needs and is such an amazing lover that she feels suffocated and bored, and uses her feminine wiles to seduce Johnny’s best friend Mark (Greg “Sestosterone” Sestero). As the wedding approaches, tempers fray, vicious rumours are spread, mothers look disapproving, doggies are greeted, and the bank continues not to listen to Johnny’s plan to make them a ton of money. How will it all end? (Clue: definitely not the way you think it will.)

The film apparently cost $6 million, although you’d be hard pressed to work out exactly where all the cash went. There are no big-name actors (some would argue there aren’t even any actors) and the sets are few and simple. Perhaps Wiseau’s decision to shoot simultaneously on 35mm and digital explains a lot of the cost. Presumably the rest went on bad CGI, inexplicably used to provide backdrops for rooftop scenes. Why Wiseau opted against simply filming on actual rooftops remains – like much of The Room – a mystery.

To list The Room’s many problems is to give away half of the fun, but to get a sense of just what you’re dealing with, here are a few choice tid-bits. Wiseau constantly uses establishing shots of San Francisco between scenes, just in case you forget where you are. (It should be noted that being in San Francisco is of absolutely no consequence. It’s not like there are any car chases through its streets or anything.) Characters turn up and take part in important exposition (or have sex) without any introduction or subsequent establishment. The music is some kind of awful early-nineties R&B, although the film appears to be set in the present day. Possibly the most heinous crime is the lengthy, dull sex scenes, some of which even re-use footage from earlier.

The Room opened in America in 2003, doing little to no business; not even the offer of a free CD soundtrack was enough to draw the punters in. Yet with its terrible production values, abysmal acting, appalling script, and sub-plots that disappear just as suddenly as they appear, The Room soon found a cult following amongst those with a penchant for So-Bad-It’s-Good movies. Responding to its peculiar quirks and charms, audience participation quickly became a staple of screenings The Room, with fans devising a series of rituals to go with its many bizarre faults: plastic spoons are hurled at the screen; cries of “focus” or “who are you?” are heard frequently; American footballs are tossed back and forth; the list continues. As far as movie experiences are concerned, it’s in a world of its own, surpassing sing-a-long musicals and fancy dress screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

I was fortunate enough to see The Room at the Prince Charles Cinema in Leicester Square, where most of the audience were already pretty clued in; those that weren’t managed to pick up the calls and their cues quickly. The atmosphere was euphoric, with more laughing and cheering than most genuine comedies can achieve. Bewildered by its sheer inanity and desperately trying to understand exactly what was going on, everyone became united, staring agape at Wiseau’s odd perceptions of male friendship and female trickery, uncertain quite how to take it.

Wiseau now claims that he intended it to be the way it is – that in reality it’s a black comedy – and even attends screenings, giving a Q&A afterwards. While it’s easy to mock the film and Wiseau’s about-face, in interviews he comes across as charming and somewhat naïve, and there’s a certain braveness in the way he offers himself up onscreen, exposing all his misunderstandings and feelings of betrayal, which ultimately make it hard not to root for him. Beyond all the ill-conceived notions of how to make a movie lies a man who feels somehow wronged by the world, and is seeking to make sense of it, hoping to put right what once went wrong or at least gain some kind of acceptance from those around him – a friendly hand on the shoulder, reassuring him that we sympathise. The fact that the results are so catastrophic makes it a joy to behold, but perhaps its enduring cult appeal is buried somewhere in this sadness.

The Prince Charles Cinema continues to hold monthly screenings of The Room and I urge you strongly to go. It’s a truly unique experience that really cannot be replicated at home. Forget 3D – if ever an argument were needed to get up and go to the pictures, The Room is it. And if you ever figure out which room the room is, I’d love to know.

WU LYF - Spitting It Concrete Like the Golden Sun God

Little is known about WU LYF other than that they're from Manchester and aren't very open about themselves to the music press. From what we can surmise, they are a collective of musicians and artists that have surrounded themselves in a fog of mystery through the use of their own D.I.Y. art and design, leaving very few explanatory details along the way. If you visit their website www.wulyf.org (with the domain name itself hinting at them being an organisation), you are simply presented with a video, no information, no photos of the band members, just a music video.

All over the internet they have been described as sounding 'like Tom Waits' crossed with a number of old guitar heavy band references, which is incredibly lazy journalism. Below is a beautifully made video washed with powerful imagery and dreary colours. It acts as the perfect introduction to WU LYF's world, their ideas and their mysteriousness. So sit back for a couple of minutes and let the presence of WU LYF enter your consciousness.

Lets Dance For Comic Relief

Image courtesy of DigitalSpy

Words by Alastair Ross of The Sun

A SIMPLE question, just to check we’re all singing from the same whatsit - How much of a flying one do you think Katie Price gives about the street children of Uganda?

Correct. She doesn’t.

And nor, I hope you’ll agree, do too many of the other celebrities involved here.

In fact, it would be hard think of a show that appeared to give less of a toss about Africa than this four week shin dig.

Let’s Dance For Comic Relief.

A joint BBC1/S4C production, by the sound of things, presented by the self-styled “driver of the groovy train” Steve Jones and “the (reasonably) lovely Alex Jones,” who are doing it: “In aid of all those people who are having a rough time.”

Africans, children, women, victims of abuse, Penny Smith’s agent, TV critics and BBC1 viewers, who must be really starting to resent comedian Robert Webb.

Two years ago the irresponsible berk dragged up to do a Flashdance routine, on this programme. The acclaim was huge, the laughter genuine and they’ve been cross-dressing for Africa ever since.

Week one, this year, we had Katie Price playing Freddie Mercury, Rebecca Front’s Bjork (Cherie Blair shoplifting) and Russell ‘Crazy Legs’ Kane doing Beyonce Knowles like a Fonzified Sarah Jessica Parker, with brittle bone disease.

Saturday’s second episode was more unfunnycomediansindrag.com. However, we also had dear old Penny Smith tip-toeing through the tulips in Britney Spears’ Thunderbirds Three clobber, which added a hint of Let’s Dance For Age Concern.

The really weird thing about both shows, though, was that the most disturbing images were the mental ones.

Katie Price, bless her, started it by announcing “I’m hairless all over,” judge Jack Whitehall followed suit by claiming Charlie Baker looked like “A 16-year-old who’d found porn in the woods,” and the daughter of Waterloo Road’s Philip Martin Brown finished nearly everyone off by revealing “Dad’s been cracking it out in the living room.”

With images like that rattling around your brain, it’s mighty hard to focus on Africa and work out if the charitable ends justify the self-publicising means.

I’m going to say they don’t though.

It’s partly the drag, it’s partly Katie Price, but it’s mainly one of the presenters who’s to blame.

Steve Jones. Not a man troubled by self-confidence or subtlety issues, yet I’ve seen flash floods with better comic timing.

It’s not his fault, of course. He’s part of TV’s new HIMBO invasion (See also Vernon Kay and Matt Johnson). A presenter chosen by women, for women.

They’re a stupid sort of equality and trade-off for Tess Daly, I guess.

But the fact is, just as a great presenter can rescue a bad show so a bad one, like Jones, can push it over the edge. And part of me thinks it might be a pity to lose Let’s Dance For Comic Relief.

It is, after all, a show that bans Lulu from singing, prevents Russell Kane from talking and forces Steve Jones to link, from a film about dying Africans, with the words: “Jack Whitehall. I’d like to apologise.”

Which was awful sweet of him, but it really is Mr and Mrs Whitehall’s responsibility.

Fifty & Fifty

50 and 50 is a collaborative project where fifty designers are selected have been selected to illustrate their American state's motto.

The designers selected have illustrated the motto's with a limited colour palette of the Star Spangled Banner's red, white and blue. They often focus on distinct parts of the chosen state's identity and often poke fun at it, rather than being overly patriotic.

The pieces are currently being uploaded once a week to the 50 and 50 website: http://statemottosproject.com/gallery/

(Thanks to Building A Wolf for this post)

South Carolina - Fuzzco

New York - Dan Cassaro

Nevada - Katie Lee

New Jersey - Mayaan Pearl

Minnesota - Erik Hamline

Florida - Two Arms INC.

Connecticut - Meg Hunt

Radiohead: The King Of Limbs

Originally written by Al Horner

The King of Limbs, the eighth studio album by Oxford titans Radiohead, will be “the world’s first newspaper album” according to the group’s website. After a frenzied day following the early digital release of the record, this now seems riddled with an irony I suspect Thom Yorke and friends would quite appreciate.

The online furore that stirred this morning as the hotly-anticipated collection of new songs leapt onto people’s hard-drives underlined the problems faced by print journalism - a medium increasingly sliding towards becoming obsolete.

The mere existence of the record was announced on Monday with its imminent release slated as Saturday. For reasons unknown, it arrived a day earlier, forcing music scribes to drop what they were doing and frantically issue their hurried opinions. Reviews began to surface within minutes of the album emerging online.

By the time tomorrow’s newspapers print their reactions they will probably appear dated. NME readers will have to wait until Tuesday to hear the thoughts of Emily Mackay and company. The music-monthly Q magazine must wait a fortnight to register their thoughts in cold, hard, physical copy.

These are the publications - scratch that, institutions - that popular music fans would once turn to for advance word on what awaited me on a new release, leering longingly at the privilege being a music journalist once held. No longer though. There were no advance copies of The King of Limbs.

As a result, you could practically hear the stampede of critics racing to blurt out their initial thoughts online, desperate to remain fresh and relevant. The advent of live-blogging and Twitter has clearly brought with it an urgency to what the press would typically report on - music journalism included.

It prompted founder of the popular Drowned In Sound web-zine Sean Adams to speak out on Twitter:

It’s an interesting and arguably legitimate comment on a day which saw the ancient art of the music-review reduced to a sort of knee jerk, first-time-round decision making. Thumbing through my record collection, I notice that the albums I continually return to years after their release - Radiohead’s ownKid A included - I had difficulty warming to on initial listens.

It’s dangerous ground to tread for those who look to music reviews (perhaps foolishly) as something oddly special - the beginning of a sonic debate, the setting of a listening rhetoric for what will follow.

Should bands follow in Radiohead’s steps (all fifteen of them…) in turning to instantaneous digital publishing of music, I hope there will still be room the sort of considered and informed reviews that Sean speaks of amidst all the chaos and impatience of web 2.0 culture.

Disposable Streets

Designer & Photographer Ben Gardiner captures streets of Barcelona in an energetic manor. The use of the disposable camera quickly depicts his subject in full dynamism, whilst light leaks and distortion in the imagery relates to the European city.

View more of Ben Gardiner Work Here. PORTFOLIO

Scott Hunter: A Hazy Youth

Scott Hunters photography takes a critical view of social, political and cultural issues. Hunter states his photography style often leans towards his experiences as a youth, often focusing on time as a graffiti writer and stencil artist in the mid 90’s, whilst also taking inspiration from the people and street artists he met during time traveling Japan and Germany.

The series of photos below were shot on a Polaroid with expired film.

Check out more of Scott Hunters photography here: PORTFOLIO

Ravings Of A Film Fanatic: Slacker

I finally came to watch Richard Linklater’s Slacker on a dull, grey Saturday afternoon with nothing else going on in town after it was recommended to me by many of my friends and even past tutors at University. The entire film was made in 1990 for under $23,000 and shot on 16mm film. After a small cinematic release it gained a cult status and gradually gained a domestic gross just over $1,000,000.

Stripped to its bare bones, Slacker is a series of meandering conversations between caught on film. It follows many characters who are essentially separate in their own existence yet are conjoined by the eye of the camera. This series of very small and irrelevant events is all ignited by the first character we meet – played by Linklater himself – who travels into the film and, in a sense, the narrative structure on a coach from an unknown location. When picking up a taxi from the coach station he immediately begins to discuss his thoughts and feelings of his previous journey to the taxi driver:

“There was this book I just read on the bus…well you know, it was my dream so I guess I wrote it or something…The premise for this book was that every thought you have creates it’s own reality. You know like, every choice or decision you make, the thing you choose not to do fractions off and becomes it’s own reality…You know in the Wizard Of Oz? When Dorothy meets the Scarecrow and they do that little dance at the crossroads and they think about going all those directions, and they end up going in that one direction? I mean, all those other directions, just because they thought about it became separate realities - entirely different movies, but we’ll never see it because we’re kinda’ trapped in this one reality restriction”.

This initial conversation blows the ideas behind the rest of the plot wide open, and interestingly as introspective as they are, the taxi driver that Linklater is talking with is completely un-interested in his intellectual ramblings. A trait which constantly comes back into play throughout the film, exposing light on the idea that everything is based on opinion and what can be an amazing point of view to one of the characters is also the ramblings of a madman to another.

Many of the conversations within the film centre around very vast, philosophical and often left-wing anarchistic subjects such as dreams, reality, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, conspiracy, freedom and working life.

Slacker shows how completely interesting life can be, and not in a Hollywood, tall-tale, ‘Feel good film’ manner. It presents everyday life in a small town as a series of often un-connected events – people wake up, go to a newspaper stand, buy coffee, have lunch together, go to the cinema, go to bars clubs and events. Slacker doesn’t look for or create interest around these everyday occurrences, it shows it how it is. People ARE interesting, they have interesting things to say, they have stories to tell and they do interesting things.

This opening scene shows the depth of ideas present throughout the rest of the film:

Travel: The Essence of Barcelona

The heart of Barcelona is swamped with art and culture at every turn; the city is blessed with some of the most spectacular architecture from designers such as Gaudy. However, among all this beauty Barcelona’s back streets are filled with grimy kebabs shops and frantic hookers either grabbing your arm or for your wallet.

Below are a series of photos capturing the streets of Barcelona.

Gracias

Photos by Aaron Kitney