From: owner-idealcopy-digest@smoe.org (idealcopy-digest) To: idealcopy-digest@smoe.org Subject: idealcopy-digest V9 #177 Reply-To: idealcopy@smoe.org Sender: owner-idealcopy-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-idealcopy-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk idealcopy-digest Friday, July 7 2006 Volume 09 : Number 177 Today's Subjects: ----------------- [idealcopy] RE: OT TV On the Radio/This Heat ["Jason Rogers" ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 06 Jul 2006 11:28:37 +0000 From: "Jason Rogers" Subject: [idealcopy] RE: OT TV On the Radio/This Heat >Date: Thu, 06 Jul 2006 01:53:29 +0100 >From: Tim >Subject: [idealcopy] OT TV On the Radio/This Heat > >Immense new CD from TV On the Radio out this week that should be >required listening for all. > >More immediate than their last LP, certainly louder. >If you don't know the band you could call it Art Rock with a pop edge to >it, but theres a seriousness about these which separates them from the >likes of Bloc Party, Interpol or the Futureheads by some considerable >distance. > I saw TV On The Radio live a few weeks ago when they played here in Atlanta with Bauhaus and Nine Inch Nails. (Nine Inch Nails was the headlining act, but Bauhaus completely took NIN to school and upstaged them shamefully. It was a real pleasure to finally see Bauhaus in concert and they were the highlight by far.) The TV On The Radio set was massively intense for an opening act and, although I have liked what I've heard of the earlier material, I was especially drawn to the newfound ferocity. I'll have to check out the new album. Jason ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 6 Jul 2006 21:49:30 +0100 From: "Keith Knight" Subject: [idealcopy] OT - So far.. Time I think to take stock of good stuff this year: LPs The Trials of Van Occupanther - Midlake Saw this Texan band supporting The Earlies a couple of months back and was taken with the complexity of their songs, the strength of their set and their close harmonies. The album delivers on all this, veering close in sound to all sorts of unmentionables (CSNY, The Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, even Yes's Siberian Khatru at one point) but - rather like Daft Punk appropriating ELO, although with a very different effect - - coming up trumps all over. The lyrics conjure up a strange oblique landscape - like The Handsome Family there are lots of country references and general weirdness and the effect is no dissimilar to The Arcade Fire. Attitudinally the band could easily fit into the Green Man Festival set although they wouldn't sound musically like anything else there. Opening track 'Roscoe' should decide whether you like this - a song which begins rather brilliantly 'Stone-cutters made them from stones' The Drift - Scott Walker I've not yet managed to play this all the way through and I wonder if the day will ever come - rarely has an album been so threatening. But it's one hell of a piece of work. The Life Pursuit - Belle and Sebastian I blow hot and cold with B&S - I couldn't get on with the last album at all - but this seems like a career peak, full of interesting, catchy songs. Return to Cookie Mountain - TV on the Radio Only just got this, but it's immediately impressive, that great musical churn while falsetto vocals fly like angels over the pit. It maybe less demanding than the first album which may mean it has lighter legs but give it time. Whatever they Say I am, That's what I'm not - Arctic Monkeys Not something I've gone back to recently but a pretty consistent slab of songs GIGS Jeffrey Lewis - Brixton Windmill 23 Feb In which Jeff, in what is his most regular London haunt, the corner of a pub up Brixton Hill, was given time - I hour 50m! - to stretch across what is now a fabulous body of work. A great 'History of Punk on the NY Lower East Side', sufficient band noise to create a mosh pit, a new poem about the history of global warming in NY, Cheap videos now projected via laptop.tremendous evening out. The Earlies - Camden Barfly 16 May A critical night for The Earlies, playing five new songs in the set. The new songs I'd heard at last year's Green Man were not up to the excellence of their first album and I was fearing the worst but all of these were great, mostly uptempo with lots of brass, which The Earlies always use well. Coupled with the best of the old set, and that feelgood atmosphere they always bring with them this may have been the best I've seen them, which is saying something. New album out in autumn. KaitO - ICA 5 Jan and ULU 16 March Two blinding sets in two months. While the ICA gig was mostly new songs, by ULU they had stripped out everything else from Band Red and were icily controlled. Dave Lake has even more effects and the band as a whole are on fire. Where this will get them is debatable - still no sign of a new album. TV on the Radio - ULU 15 May In common with The Earlies and KaitO, something of a Year Zero gig - only Staring at the Sun is played from the first album. It didn't matter - the new songs were strong, Tunde ginned, grimaced and leapt and Kyp Malone's afro was even more resplendent. Even then I was constantly fascinated - when I could see him - by the bassist, a Gilbertesque figure rarely appearing to acknowledge an audience is present. Also: Sparks The Nightingales Arab Strap 65 Days of Static The Slits Midlake Hope of the States FILMS Moolade - extraordinary film from Burkina Faso about female genital mutilation - not that you see any and it's actually pretty funny for large chunks. Set in a village with one of the most extraordinary structures I've ever seen (it looks like a huge cactus but is in fact a mosque) and it has the brightest colour palette since Yellow Submarine. The New World - terribly flawed but months after the images just won't leave the mind. United 93 - much better than I ever expected it to be even though I loved Greengrass' earlier Bloody Sunday. As tense as it's safe to get. The Twilight Samurai - a bunch of samurais sit around doing not a lot. Like a Peckinpah film about the end of the West but without the bloodshed (but one great uncut fight scene by a river) The Proposition - another western but Australian this time. Nick Cave writes as well as you'd expect and there are flies and violence everywhere TV 24 - somehow raising the bar yet again. If this is how the US sees itself - corrupt president involved in multiple horrors can only be dealt with by Jack Bauer who by the end is a borderline psychopath (and this is a Fox show!) - then we really are back in 1973 at the depths of the Nixon era and Vietnam. Prison Break - utterly barmy but played which such straight faced cheek that it's totally winning. Wentworth Miller is the new Clint Eastwood. Life on Mars - contemporary cop thrown back to 1973 (that year again!) with lots of opportunity for 'look how awful life was back then' comparisons. And it was. A programme that shows how far our society has matured in the last 30 years. Folk Britannica - BBC4 does the English folk scene proud over three hours Planet Earth - nature pornography. Breathtaking BOOKS In Cold Blood - Truman Capote. Why had I never read this before? A stunning piece of writing. Counting Heads - David Marusek. Cutting edge SF, like seeing society 100 years hence open in front of you Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson. Urgent novel about scientists dealing with climate change in Washington ART The Sultan's Elephant Another the Keith ------------------------------ End of idealcopy-digest V9 #177 *******************************