my favourite albums of the decade #11

Tweet This albums of the decade list is a killer, a world of pain. I'm a fucking husk. But, ya know what fans? I can still beat this fucker. I'm holding on. And I gotta say, I wouldn't be here without my livestrong rubber bracelet and your continued support. Really. I mean that. Ever since my powerhouse lists THAT FUCKIN OWNED THE YEARS IN MUSIC 2007 AND 2008 you guys have consistently come out expecting a big effort from me, needing me to FUCKIN DELIVER. C'MAWWWN!!!! That's it. I can feel it. YAAAHHH!!! It's that hunger, that electricity, that spinning Animal Collective song fucked over the bar in glorious slow motion HD! SKY+ THAT BITCH. IT'S THE LAST FIFTEEN MINUTES OF DA GAME YOU FUCKS.

#11 Farben - Textstar (2002)

Nice album cover don't ya think? It's a sturdy looking design too. If you were a kid you could probably play with it, dribble mashed liga on it, drop it on the floor and wipe it dry. Textstar, like a few other works on this  list, is technically not an album at all. In fact it's a selection of brilliant EPs released by Jan Jelinek, each one a slab of pure colour (Farben is German for colours). Alone, the EPs sound great and look class with their bold sleeves. But together they are stronger. Visually, they coalesce into a pure design slam-dunk, a geometric colourgasm. As for the music contained therein? It shall henceforth be described as emotional glitchno (TM). Texstar is a Sistine chapel of manipulated static, swarming drifts of popping, crackling, engineered texture, that ebb and flow around a complex, waltzing network of warm sounding samples drawn from Jelinek's collection of jazz and soul records. Vilallobos and Luomo are perhaps more highly renowned for this sort of stuff, but in my mind Textstar is the perfect pinnacle of microhouse.

MP3: Farben-Farben says so much love

Go to this, I implore thee!

Tweet Well look who's coming to town to help me celebrate/commiserate my PhD viva on March 19th. Only mysterious dubstep-chiptune-ardkore-masked-enigma Zomby, that's who! Why thanks Colin from IT, ahem, sorry, Zomby - you really didn't have to do this man and your gruesome secret is safe with me.

It's an Analogue night, and the details are below...

Analogue presents Zomby - March 19th
Twisted Pepper,
Abbey Street,
Tix €10 or €8 if you get presale.

townlight on the hill

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I fucking hate this bridge.

Most lunches I eat in a deli which is located in a small shopping centre in the middle of Drogheda called "Drogheda Town Centre". It's one of those funny little pre-Celtic Tiger shopping centres - the sort that have green and yellow colour schemes, shops that sell nothing but kitchen roll and pepsi max, more shops that sell hoodies and t-shirts cunningly emblazoned with sex-words made from numbers and backwards letters (e.g. FU73k ME I3ITCH), even more shops that sell flower bulbs and biros, and, amidst this giddy glamour, little desks featuring lank-haired dudes who can convert your gold into cash. Kinda like the Ilac centre back in the day when it was all weird and gloomy. Or, indeed, Donaghmede shopping centre today.

Made to be laid. Like a brick? An egg? If, like me, you cannot do without this clever t-shirt you can find it and many more like it at tshirtsforreallysoundpeople.com.

During the run-up to Christmas, the music playing in Drogheda Town Centre between the hours of 11.30 and 12.30 was varied if somewhat predictable, a generic - albeit heavy on that Eurosaver bargain of all seasonal songs, Chris De Burgh's 'A Spaceman Came Travelling' - mix of Christmas hits old and new. Then, one day shortly after Christmas, they switched the CD. Someone put on the Saw Doctors 'Greatest Hits' and thus it has been ever since. Every day, during my lunch, the Saw Doctors' Greatest Hits goes through about 0.9 of a cycle. For people working in "Drogheda Town Centre", I'd imagine it goes through about 7 cycles in a shift. The Saw Doctors' songs are earworms too, conducive to auditory hallucinations and madness after one exposure on MWR-FM, nevermind multiple doses across one day in an oppressive working environment. Altogether now, "THE GREEEEYYYNNNN AND REDDD OF MAYYYOOOOO".

I work in a school for children with autism and implement behavioural interventions for them based on rigid reward systems, token economies, and praise. A few of the children, at the less communicative end of the autistic spectrum, have a special sensory room they get to chill out in as a reward for completing small tasks in their education plan. It is a black-walled room decorated with tube lights, tinsel, and a lava lamp. I took one of the sensory room kids for a walk over the town the other afternoon because the weather was fine. We managed fifty yards before he started hopping around and hammering on a shop window with his eyes out on stalks. He was utterly transfixed. The shop? 'Headonism'. He thought the headshop was a sensory room. I let him scrunch his face against the window and stare in at the molten lights for a short while. He loved it. We moved on quickly though, as there was a unspoken standoff brewing between two rodenty young lads and an old woman who knew their mothers.

I got the bus from Drogheda to Navan today. It takes about 55 minutes and passes through Duleek. Most of Duleek, like huge swathes of Navan and Drogheda, looks like it was randomly fucked together from a bunch of cream coloured geometric shapes and a Supermacs in 2004. The man in the seat behind me was making furry nappy farts and burping through his teeth with soft little hissing noises. Ray Foley was turned up loud on the bus radio. I kept nodding off in the seat. Every now and again I'd bob out of a sickening half-dream and feel like a tiny part of my soul had been peeled away somewhere around the tummy. The fields running parallel to the bus looked strange and grey. The awareness of having to get off in Navan kept me half awake. Somewhere out in the grey fields a thin and springy scarecrow detached himself from a post and started to jog parallel to the bus, flickering through bare hedgerows and leaping power-lines. I woke up again as the bus pulled into Navan. "Stand Cleeeyurr....luggage doors opening" said the bus in a Navan accent. I used to believe it was a recording of John Bruton. I yawned my way down the steps, leaving tiny peels of me behind me, and sleep-walked into another weekend.

MP3: Eluvium-The motion makes me last

Eluvium (the dude whose name I do not know so I will call him Eluvium) disappointed me with an aspirational quasi-classical album called 'Copia' a few years ago. It was well-written but ultimately dull. Before said album, said dude recorded 'Talk amongst the Trees', one of the most tonally layered guitar albums I ever heard. I think his new album is a happy medium between these two poles. I never heard him sing before last week. I think he likes Brian Eno.

My favourite albums of the decade #12

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#12 The Microphones - Glow, Pt.2 (2001)

I never really thought about the weird juxtaposition of flora and fauna on the cover of this album until tonight. Okay, it's an African elephant putting out a fire; yet, going by the looks of things, and by songwriter Phil Elvrum's origins, said African animal seems to be chilling out in a pine forest in America's Pacific Northwest. Let's discuss the significance of this... surely wot we have here is a privileged North American songwriter appropriating an African animal for his album art? Fucking culturally imperialistic shit like this sickens me. He should stick to drawing fuckin' mooses - the nerve on the bollox. Appropriation, and that is what this is, turns my fucking tummy. I mean what will these fucked up 'indie musicians' appropriate next? Notes off a musical score? A culturally superior combed-over fringe? God knows what these privileged degenerates are capable of doing.

Ahem. Like Neutral Milk Hotel's 'In the Airplane Over the Sea', 'The Glow' pt.2, with its spluttering, disarming, yet beautifully expressed honesty, is an album which preemptively annuls all but the most reflective and surefooted critical evaluation. It is offered up to the listener pure - without a single false flourish or rococo bit of instrumentation to tart up its sentiment. The album just is. It's a bit young, lost, existential, and romantic. And Phil Elvrum is a romantic in the purest sense of the word. Musically and lyrically, he expresses himself through imagery drawn from his homestead among the mountains and temperate coniferous rainforests of America's northwest states (places where mountains are named 'Eerie' and 'Rainier') - a theme that runs through his more recent and slightly more experimental music as Mount Eerie.

When I listen to the overblown, regressive, and often disingenuously emotive rot that passes for true expression in 'indie/alternative rock' (more often than not, the most craftily untrue type of music), I feel protective and defensive about albums like 'Glow, pt. 2'. Not that the album needs any sort of minding, mind you. It's just that it would be a shame to see something this precious lumped in with the trash.

MP3: The Microphones-I want the wind to blow

Hundurthzzz and thousunthzzz

Tweet Well now, look here. Hi Fi Popcorn has just spluttered back into a fancy new lease of life. So that's what Bobby looks like. A right handsome young man isn't he? With a full set of teeth too, I'd wager. Nowhere near as hydrocephalitic and green around the eyeballs as I imagined.

January was very quiet around the 'Heap. Here are some reasons why:

(i) I was scared of my grotesquely distended albums of the decade list.

(ii) I was, and still am, working a temporary job in the centre of Drogheda until I sit my viva on the 19th of March. Drogheda drains the life out of me. I try to see the good in the place, but even now, in my minds eye, I picture are soggy McDonald's takeaway bags stuck to gutters outside shops that sell runners, wet slate, young fellas in anoraks queuing obediently but jerkily outside a shop called 'Headonism' which has a back-in-five-minutes sign on the door, and lots of dun coloured anoraks and perms shuffling through the dilapidated Main Street which is called 'Main Street'. Yesterday, in a shop in Drogheda, I saw a child repeatedly interrupt a transaction involving 40 Superkings to beg her Mam for a Dora the Explorer comic. After a few attempts to placate said child with the promise of a freddo, Mam eventually dropped the bombshell "Daddy kill't Dora the Explorer last night".

Hi I am a woman from Drogheda. Listen to me say Mars Bar in my sexy voice: "Mahs Bah"

(iii) I was reading a 1,100 page long book with a tiny font called infinite jest (for good reason. It is the literary equivalent of an everlasting gobstopper).

(iv) I was often on tumblr writing posts about food n' art n' shit - like this 

(v) January is depressing.

Here's to February. 

P.S. If you are one of the five people in musicblogworld who haven't listened to this track by Beach House [i.e. me last week] - please do it now. It's all sorts of mega. Album appraisal coming soon.

MP3: Beach House-Norway