Dillon

There's a Dadblogger sad-eyedness to my liking for this kind of Tumblr thing but it doesn't give up - it's Unnamable "You must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on" - and Dillon here should get extra credit from diverting from the tried and true path (the plucky acoustic yearning morphing into the chilled-out cosmic in the remix) and the bierkeller tuba-parping backdrop (part Tom Waits circa Rain Dogs and part Ubu Roir) to this track separates it from the fold:


Or I'm hearing things again.

Roll The Dice

There'll be a full review of Roll The Dice's In Dust over at Freq soon (subject to Editor's approval, though to be honest, he lets me write any old crap) but this will do for now.

And, for anyone vaguely interested in what I might think about albums, there's also a review of Miminokoto and Billie Ray Martin's new project The Opiates which I'll probably get around the remixing on here when I get the time (at present that looks to be circa 2013)

In other news...

Chloe Lattanzi

Olivia Newton John's daughter striking out on her own and doing a leather Sandi... kind of annoying, actually... and nowhere near as dark or disturbing as Xanadu...

Barbara Panther

sourced of sorts from the bare bones of Fredgeogblog, which will apparently turn into a horticulture/music blog: what is the best music for mulching?

BP is clearly syntactically/visually related to Bjork , a slicing and dicing of some of her best popbits, with maybe a smile of Lykke Li about the edges...

Lyrics seem Bjorkish too... oddly-hinged flights of fancy and a fascination with tropes/archetypes

She dances better , though.

On The Floor Considered As a Downhill 3yr Olds Birthday Party

It’s a new generation (who inbvited that kid? He's been scratching for 15 mins now and I swear his hair is moving without him)(everyone here)
Of party people (what do you mean we didn't order a Clown? Who the hell is that then?)

Darling get on the floor (security services suspect terrorism)
Darling get on the floor (security services suspect press invasion/paedophilia)

Let me introduce you to my party people (I invited Randy, but he's dressed as a bear)
In the club… (aka in the soft play area)

[Pitbull]
I’m (on) loose (women)
And everybody knows I get off the train (after watching that documentary with the guy from Merlin and One Foot In The Grave)
Baby it’s the truth (we lost a child down the back of the inflatable; I'm pretty sure he's stopped breathing)
I’m like inception I play with your brain (like the snow scene in Inception perhaps; now, where's the motherfuckin' wotsits?)
So I don’t sleep I snooze (one eye won't shut due to some awful neuralgia; you try being glamorous and trying to keep Calpol on the spoon at 4.30 in the morning...)
I don’t play no games so don’t get it confused no (quadruple negative here is perhaps some attempt at Neural Linguist Programming; the intention is clearly to remind the children that musical statues is coming up)
Cos you will lose yeah (we've rigged pass the parcel so that our kids win)
Now pump it up (the bouncy castle's fading...)
And back it up like a Tonka truck (we decided not to afford an actual Tonka truck, here's one made by Bruder instead...)




[Jennifer Lopez] (interesting move here to a variation of the never-used monoryhme scheme... perhaps a comment on the self-imposed drudgery of filling party bags?)
If you go hard you gotta get on the floor (assumed to be directed to cleaning staff re: fallen savoury hazards)
If you’re a party freak then step on the floor (the only kid here not a party freak is filling his ears with M & Ms)
If you're an animal then tear up the floor (talking to you, face-paint boy; anyone know if Sharpie washes off? I got these as a shop-spoiled lot from the Beckhams)
Break a sweat on the floor (mispelling; should read 'sweet' - the appropriation of the English term rather than the American - 'candy' - is perhaps a significant move towards Global certainty)
Yeah we work on the floor (the cleaning staff retort)
Don’t stop keep it moving (We don't pay 3 cents over minimum wage for nothing!)
Put your drinks up (directed towards the Dads at the back, some of them already slipping into Kestrel Super comas)
Pick your body up and drop it on the floor (How come concussion isn't on my predictive text? This is gonna be in all the papers tomorrow if we can't figure out how to bury the body...)
Let the rhythm change your world on the floor (I think this is just a commentary on the appropriation of the Lambada theme; the world will change if you squeeze it enough - in fact, let's just get rid off this troublesome World Music tag once and for all eh?)
You know we’re running sh*t tonight on the floor (every parent with small children will understand this feeling)

Brazil Morocco
London to Ibiza
Straight to LA, New York
Vegas to Africa(the wonders of positive discrimination, the paucity of American Geography teaching)

[Chorus]
Dance the night away (until we pack up at 6.30)
Live your life ,and stay young on the floor (Mummy's staying young, look, she can still do the... oh... Can someone call the ambulance?)
Dance the night away (in a hospital waiting room)
Grab somebody drink a little more (fuck, the coffee machine dispenses drinks at a thousand times hotter than the surface of the Sun)
Lalalalalalalalalalalalalala (the morphine kicks in...)
Tonight we gon’ be it on the floor (though I'll be sleeping on an old sliding door, trying to realign my vertebrae)

Lalalalalalalalalalalalalala (Morphine, Morpheee Richards, Keith Richards, Keith Harrisand Orville... Is that a pig?)
Tonight we gon’ be it on the floor (I've just brought up some alveoli; I think there may be internal injuries, after all. What does a spleen look like?)

ETC

Xylitol

Loving the latest Xylitol double 3", one of my favourite things released so far this year. It's not a remix album. It's a reimagining. It's a remix album in the same way that Aphex Twin remixed Nine Inch Nails on Further Down The Spiral i.e. it's not a remix album. It sort of is a remix album, even though I don't generally like remix albums (that Neubauten one put me off forever). It is maybe perhaps isn't.

It's varied but it's more or less all wonderful... though see here for a review of a track (not saying which one but you might be able to guess) by my wife (she's right, and i like it because it sounds like that...)

Lots of unusual suspects here, all on top top form: Nochexxx, Kek in Intangible mode, Belbury Poly, Pete Um, Woebot and many others...

Highlights: The NWW circa Rock N Roll station snare tumbles w/added Groove Is In The Heart bounce; the odd choirs, violin scratches and Cosey Cornets; the glacial kosmische melting soundtrack; the ever-so-slight Trance touches; the snatches of detourned Krautrock - a little feathering of rock era Kraftwerk added to the lunatic electo fizz; the stuttering vocals, eating themselves whole; the gentle Radiophonic loping; the supremely mental rapping; even the pops and crackles between the lines of some of the more superficially straightforward tracks...

sleevnotes, gutter press ramblings from Martin, photographs (apparently, I can't see any!) by Nina Power...

The 2 x 3" format is a slight bit annoying but I'm guessing this is either a) a deliberate attempt to engage the listener with the music by forcing them to confront the lack of symmetry on the 'sides' or b) a consequence of someone winning the 'shed load of 3" CDs' item on eBay...

Still, I've already listened right the way through four times and I can't think of many recent albums that I could say that about.

Tiny little moments of genius lie here.

Hong Kong In The 60s = Mad Men ?

Quick disclaimer: this is based on only about 3 tracks I've heard. The album itself could derail all of this...

Again, this is something I'm just not sure about. I like it. I mistrust it. It's beautiful but echoic, a mental echo of a Phantasy...

(the title suggests they know it, but I'm not sure if this makes me like them more or less)

...it's imitating sound and it's a great imitation: the soft burr, the perfect Mad Men glass clinks, the predictably heart-melting beauty; you can't see the joins and you wouldn't to - the joins would creak loudly, would call bullshit on the 60s... this is music of a time when men were men and women were grateful...

Now, I like Mad Men, watch it (in every sense of the word) religiously but it's the perversion that I like. It too is a lot dishonest but the style and the psychosexual dribbling appeals... It seems to exist solely to allow us to simultaneously sneer and indulge; how funny we (God, they) were, with their sexism and their racism and their funny little ways...

I feel a little the same way about Hong Kong In The 60s except that it seems to be pretending to find sweetness in it's sources; the resonances here are Razorcuts twee, Flatmates twee, Vaselines twee... i.e. lovely, sweet, gentle, empty... music for our 16 year old selves

Contrast with, say, Momus, who attempts similar tricks, off and on, with added (sweet) malevolence and much more honesty. Much more commentary?

Warren Ellis is quoted as saying it's “a charming summoning with a weird sheen of degraded international glamour” and that's a good starting point for discussion, except that it doesn't feel degraded to me. I think I'd like the degradation.

The band's name is perhaps revealing: my parents were in Hong Kong in the 60s and the casual, soon to be supperannuated, sexism (not that soon) was endemic and regarded as a cultural resource... the girls can't just sing sweetly, they must sing sweetly; they can't just wear pretty dresses and headbands, they must wear them, their hair must be... the world was like that but it seems Hong Kong was particularly like that: East and West meeting and dragging the best and worst of both worlds... a constant of the past and the present, a forward lancing unreal jet-age trail that derives from the Mad Men of the 60s and finds itself, 50 years later, as reality, as the heart and brain-melting echo of a past that wasn't.

I'm going to keep listening. I like it. I'm not sure of it. It's-

Hong Kong In The 60s - You Can Take A Heart But You Cannot Make It Beat*

As a Thought Experiment, extrapolate the title of this track: is this a meta-commentary? I kind of hope so.

The Bran Flakes Revisited

In the early days of the blogs, I got a lot of innocent, spazz-dancing fun out of these guys and then kinda forgot about them. In the meantime, slightly less psychotic successors like The Go Team have been Mercury nominated and hosts of bright-eyed, (Kate)Bush(y)-tailed sonic clusterers, appropriators and sludge-fiends have come and gone, beat-digging the life out of every genre imaginable.

But there's something just.... further out about The Bran Flakes. They seem resistant to categorisation (contrast those artists - they know who they are - who seem resistant to not being categorised, lest they miss out on being included in the latest Pontone mix or something) and lost in the music itself... I'm pretty sure The Bran Flakes started off being ironic but have now found themselves trapped/immersed into a kind of Rainbow Hole, a soundworld where nothing can escape, where the teeniest hint of hipster funk is pulled apart by rabid toys and where the only sex is the sex-o-lettes.

And if this stuff is all sampled then fuck knows where they dug these beats up...

The Bran Flakes are as unselfconsciously odd as anything Drag or Witch or whatever. This music which makes me want to go score some Crystal Meth in double-quick time. Now, where's that guy in the Chelsea tracksuit...

Woebot Goes Pop

Woebot: Argos from Matthew Ingram on Vimeo.

Don't imagine this will need much interweb promotion but Woebot goes a bit Dangermouse on this track, this little slice of Funkadelica; all subsex yows, gentle guitar licking, bass slaps and shimmer...even a slight Hair Metal slutiness about the drums and guitar interplay. He might not appreciate it (he might love it) but there's a hint of, gulp, Primal Scream about the eyes here...

For the record, I'm not a Primal hater, quite like the gruff little guy's drawl through americana, have even considered getting my 'rocks' off, at one point in time, when the lights were flashing, when synapses were snapping, when hot girls in cowboy hats were bouncing off the walls...

Primal Scream were also tough-looking guys; we tried to steal their rider once and dthey chased us right out the Festival. Looking behind, you tell a glasgae bolga was not far away from their minds...

Oh, the flips and fancies of the internet... I'd like to see where he's going with this... or where everyone's going with it...

It seems bold to go clean and musical in amongst the fluorescent grey sludge of yawnology, hypnodiscogs etc.

Joanna Newsom's Loose Limbs

In interviews, Joanna Newsom seems refreshingly down-to-earth (not normally a trait I admire, as it happens but perhaps more essential for her music than it is for her) but it's the choice of photos that is more revealing. The photo above is the exemplar, I think: a mix of sex and angularity; an awkwardness of poise that was certainly absent from the photos in the CD booklet of Have One On Me, which for a moment turned her into an indiescent nymph, an artfully splayed Balthus chick, a woman of these times...





Contrast the Medievalism of Ys...



the folk innocence of The Milk Eyed Mender...



And there's something else that appears when you start looking at the album covers - she really is emerging. Almost hidden in the mix of symbols on the front of The Milk Eyed Mender* then turned into an actual artform on Ys (perhaps as a response to those who couldn't let the music do the talking - we loved her music yes, but we loved her more and this perhaps made her rightfully uncomfortable) and then onto Have One On Me, where there's a kind of 'ah fuck it' shrug and a dash towards sex, albeit still through a slightly otherworldy, 1920s Anais Nin erotica gauze...

*even in the publicity photos she's hidden slightly, or hiding...



But back to what I wanted to say, which is maybe lost now and that's related to the first picture; the way those arms are slightly misaligned, slightly Masonic, oddness paired with sweetness - Out Of The Strong, Came Forth Sweetness - which in turn is paired with an oddly jarring homeliness... crochet sex, homespun drop-necks, a sex position with the addition of some vague time-keeping (is she looking at an invisible watch while we're, you know, while we're... Oh God. Why can't I see that watch? Why is she time-keeping now...?)

Joanna Newsom playing with the latent (fuck it, manifest) male horror of timeliness and sex (too soon, too late, too much)? It's obvious isn't it? I mean, if we're not supposed to take this from that photo, then what are we supposed to take?

Is this just me?

Oh.

Fuck.

Back to the football, I think.

For what it's worth Have One On Me is mostly excellent I think. I'm keeping with it. I like the tales she's spinning. It's a grower, definitely. It's a sing-a-long.

Spazzlings

Well, I haven't downloaded this yet but the picture of Ozz is enough to get the juices flowing. Ariel Pink wreaked (no, really) brother. And what the hell's Jimi doing not taking over? Browse around the site a little more and there'll be plenty of things the readers here might recognise, half-remember, find at the bottom of their tape drawers...

Dead Music (or Jello does Jazz Hands)

Jello Does Jazz Hands

...watching the Synth Britannia at the BBC thing on Saturday in a slightly hypnafug, itchy-eyed, drowned state and Bryan Ferry kept morphing into Jello Biafra... watch again, they've got the same drawl with only a slightly different accent, the same head movements ( Ferry is 1/3 of the pace, is less frenetic), they dance the same.

When Jello gets all croony, like on:

The Dead Kennedys - Saturday Night Holocaust

the spirit of Ferry takes him, makes him an awkward, flip-haired, jazz lounge ghoul... it's where Jello should have gone; gone some way inbetween the spazz chords of The DKs and his spoken-word pops of the later years (I love them but they're not keepers... or at least they don't get much play)... maybe something like the Steven Jessie Bernstein album, with more singing... more eruptions (The SJB album has it's moments but it meanders rather than propulses).

Yeah, I know he did stuff with Country dudes and HipHoppers (the Coldcut stuff was excellent, I thought) and dabbled with the WaxTrax boys but his singing didn't really go too many places and I thought that voice of his, that Ferry Ghost, could have pulled us all along into some odd places...

Big Stick - Drag Racing

"Speak softly and carry a big stick..."



...i liked the outfits and the hair...

Children gone bad.

And Crack Attack was pretty, brilliantly, wasteful...

Bought the singles from a bucket in Acorn Music, sun-drenched Yeovil. Maybe a coupla years too late. There was something about these guys that makes me think Big Stick are due a comeback any day soon.

Dusting down the wig-outs and clumping up the beats...

This was Mnml for a while. The Phrases. Cut. Out. To. The. Fucking. Point.

Big Stick - Drag Racing

Stolen from here

Then...

Just after posting about my disco-demons below, I was looking for these, after seeing some of this person's work in, er, Mixmag...






When I came across this.

Disney-La-La-Landings

ittttss a smaaaall whirled, after alll....

Emeralds - Damaged Kids

In Disney, sound is everywhere... utterly controlled... ideologically sound and yet ripe for cherry picking... wishes merge with dreams... the attention to sound detail is exact; you'd think the songs would merge more than they do, you have to make a real (accidental) effort to stand in the right place for the harmonies to drift together... and then everything does start to sound like Vodka Soap or the messier bits of Emeralds or the cleaner bits of The Skaters, even Kylie Minoise...

And then there's Pocahaunted, of course; Disney's tangles slowed right down... their feminine fuzz is the sound of places here, you just need to know which way the wind is blowing...

Pocahaunted - Hideous

Pocahaunted - Demon

it's a world of laughter, a world or tears
its a world of hopes, its a world of fear
theres so much that we share
that its time we're aware
its a small world after all

And Disney is scary; there's masses of people here of course but look closely and you'll see that there's not masses of children...

Where have they all gone? How have they grown up so fast?

So, instead of childlike wonder and simplicity you get something akin to Children Of Men; imagine this place with the fugue of War, Disney as Crass Collage or else everything turning into brightly-hued rubble and sand-art; Europe After The Rain...

The place is full of Notre Dame gargoyles; turning this bright star into a Current 93 album cover; you can't quite see them but you know they're there... The Daemons... Jon Pertwee's Dandy Doctor would fit right in here, would slip seemlessly alongside the Mary Poppins guy, the nu ravers pumping out Mickey's Magical Party Time...

I've seen Bessie.

God knows why people would come here without children but they do; groups of teenagers (emogoth kids with Disney ears - brilliant), groups of adults, couples... yeah, for sure some are with groups of kids, students, whatever; some are just kicking their heels, some are pretending towards irony (though I wonder how many can sustain it to the end of the day?) but many many others are here because they want to be, because they understand that it is for them...

its a small world after all
its a small world after all
its a small world after all
its a small, small world

This is a brilliantly conceived adult environment, pretending to be for children...

We spent a lot of time secretly cursing the adults in the queue, turning into Parent Fascists ("...they shouldn't let them in without a child. Ban the fuckers..."), watching as people old enough to drive pretended to drive in tiny sports cars or space ships...

The space stuff is Jules Verned steam-punk space not the cleanlines of its American Cousin. The space of Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, of Tesla coils, of Howl's Moving Castle...

There is just one moon and one golden sun
And a smile means friendship to everyone.
Though the mountains divide
And the oceans are wide
It's a small small world

Take the adults without children out the place and the queues would just disappear... $$$$$$$$$lide... Disney would die... Walt's head would unfreeze, tumble out and frighten the children into playing football...*

It's a small world....

*cf. the loss of Sanity Points in Call Of Cthulhu when witnessing a gigantic severed head falling from the sky...

Martyrs Review Mix: Sunday's Glastonberries

Eyes closing; the drugs don't work; no verve... Racing away from everything... Somewhere, midway through the day I discover Bacon Rolls are my Spirit Food, the only thing I can now chew, own lips excepted, others lips excepted... May as well be skinned, eyes curled into the head, staring at your own neuranatomy... the NDE tunnel, flipping into a Reindeer piss-stained Shangri La taxi rank... It's relentless; hits the ground running... amphetamine fuelled at first and then gradually succumbing to a Ketamine (Special K) dissociative state before heading towards, but never quite getting to, an ecstatic, endorphin-soaked bliss...

Before that there's desert rumblings and electronics from Tinawaren and Tuung; melodies slipping between the 2 bands like a Roman priest reading entrails...

Tinariwen - Toumast

Tinariwen - Mano Dayak

...girls covered in dirt... and, yes, Eat Static playing out into familiar territory in The Glade...

Eat Static - Pharoh

Eat Static - Gulf Breeze

we're just a walk away now from Glasvegas who more or less blow it because the dialogue gets mumbled and the messages missed... there's freakery and feedback but on a Sunday night, with the light fading, words are needed...

Glasvegas - Geraldine


...Blurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.... Black Eyed Peas (I'm with a girl): shift pace, a giant green, skinned head looks right at us... knees are busted open at the seams... 14 year old girls going torture porn apeshit behind me as every bassline kicks in... their arms and legs going in all directions (even the ones you can't point to)... we are pummelled...gasp..pummelled again...you'd expect Martyrs to go out with a bang but it's not that bang... there's not the eye-pop scene you might expect from such spawn...but it does end in words; Martyr - from the Latin martyr < Ancient Greek μάρτυρ (martyr), later form of μάρτυς (martys) "witness".

TAZzing Media Death: Thursday's Glastonberries

...Glastonbury used to make you feel disconnected from the real (RT) world... the festival was a temporary autonomous zones, a dry flip into

Organize a strike in your school or workplace on the grounds that it does not satisfy your need for indolence & spiritual beauty

an area sufficiently iridescent and grey to send people off on new tangents, happily waving goodbye to their old lives and jumping on a different bandwagon each hour - "this is the best band ever; no, this is the best band ever...and the best curry... and this guy is the coolest guy ever, with the coolest flag...".

Glastonbury was a semipermeable membrane; every ion, every molecule could travel one way - OUT. Tiny little bands accidentally caused waves. Others realigned themselves. Some bulked up and found themselves a place in the zeitgeist.

Obviously, Glastonbury is a mirror (which is why the 'Glasto' tag to was a hard thing to take; not because it had spoiled Pilton but because the world had been spoiled) but the outside influence stopped on the Wednesday night, as if the media artefacts from the past year hurled towards the Festival and then found themselves trapped, with the door shut and locked behind them, while the people inside mangled them into new shapes.

Kidnap someone & make them happy.

The real world could be let in only very selectively - I can remember a few World Cups, a European Championship, a massive Jeremy Paxman head scaring all the acid kids - and that was partly the point; better not know what's happening out there because this world of mud and songlines and brain-frying sun and fluttering flags and bangles is all there needs to be.

Things are different now, not necessarily worse but irretrievably changed.



It doesn't take long for the ripples about MJ's death to start; people's phones are flashing information at them at a pace too fast for them to take; the slowburn of Glastonbury is being assaulted by the information, a Burroughs word virus, spinning off through the fields - shops start playing Jackson records (everyone can see him in the Thriller video; a media zombie at the beginning of his zombification - an image that reminded me of Bill Hicks:

“A lot of Christians wear crosses around their necks. You think when Jesus comes back he ever wants to see a fucking cross? It's like going up to Jackie Onassis wearing a rifle pendant.”

Gossip rifles past: "Samuel L Jackson is dead? Michael Barrymore is dead?" Information is streaming over the membrane, contaminating the performers - Dizzee Rascal, the Black Eyed Peas - shout outs everywhere. T-shirts and badges are being printed and by Friday the disrespectful ones (MICHAEL JACKSON WAS ALREADY DEAD, I KILLED MJ, WE KILLED MJ, MJ IS SNIFFING COKE OFF PRINCESS DI'S BARE ASS (WITH SHERGAR)) they are already being vandalised by bloodshot, shelled fans armed with Sharpie pens and recently whittled Drune daggers...

The Festival is glistening with change: ghost music is everywhere - the Thriller bass, the Billie Jean guitar, the generalised ums and ahs of Michael's electrified inarticulacy...

But still, other things push through:

Kap Bambino is the first thing I see and the crowd jump around like Skins extras - these guys are flashing like strobes, a 32 bit Crystal Castles...

Kap Bambino - Dead Lazers (Maton Remix)

Then we hear just a drifting of Billy Nasty's dubstep set before kicking off towards the odd Neverland that is Shangri La where I seem to have lost the hours between 1 and 4 AM...

The Subways @ Bridgwater

Well, I need to revise my bitching about no one dancing at indie gigs... at The Subways in the legendary Palace nightclub in Bridgey everyone danced, kind of... the place just erupted, like irony never happened... about 50% of the people there knew every song (maybe they'd been cramming on Spotify) and belted out every word inbetween breathless oldschool moshing of the kind that lesioned your occipital lobes with enough accidental enthusiasm to trigger long-suppressed King Kurt fascinations...

Crowd surfing? Yep.
Stage diving? Of course.
Small girls being flung across the room like small dogs blown over walls by the wind? Plenty.

Maybe it's something in the water, down here in the hart of the wud, where the littl shining man lies...



Best fun I've had at a gig in ages. We'll see how The Mighty Diamonds compare in Exeter tonight....

Lux Interior RIP

Lux Interior has died. People won't be that surprised. The last time anyone I knew saw The Cramps was about 5 years ago and they said in the first 5 minutes he'd stage-dived off an amp stack and landed on his head with the microphone wedged into his mouth. They've got blood flecks on their jeans to prove it.

The Cramps were one of my first 'indie' groups; an ideal introduction to life as a 13year old, a transition between the tubthumping and camp clowning of childhood (late period Adam and the Ants) and the easy worthiness of The Jam. The Cramps were both Pre-Cardinal and Cardinal for me and there must be a least a dozen of their songs that have distinct memories attached to them; burned like flashbulbs...

I'll get to them later.

The Cramps - I Aint Nothing But A Gorehound

The Cramps - Goo Goo Muck

The Cramps - Surfin Bird

Great stuff about these guys at Uncarved.

Deer Tracks

This came through the door yesterday from these fellows, the latest in the long line of Scandinavian synaesthetic sure-pop; clean lines, glacial mints...

That they come from Galve is inadvertently (or deliberately, through some Freudian psychogeographic wrangling) significant; they sound re-invented, as if they'd been down a few sparse avenues before they slash and burned themselves into this form - and it works well; they seem to be building up a little blog steam...

(((((1869 and Galve burns; people team out of their houses as the flames roar; a giant goat stands watching spewing fire from it's guts... the homeless stare into the future and keep yelling:


"The goat does not exist yet"


but everyone whirrrsclicks and decides that, later, much later, the goat's gonna have to get it... from the embers of the town and the thousands of dispossessed souls comes Galve as now, tree-lined kindling streets( no one fears the fire or else the fire will consume them), USA style gridlines; new hopes and fears - the old displaced by the frightening new...

And the goat comes and is burned and comes again.)))))

And yeah, I'm not going to buck the trend because the influences are out there: the clicking and whirring and soft burring of Mum, the poptasms of Mew and even a little of Annie in the slight sleepiness on some tracks, the serenity and occasional majesty of Sigur Ros - you can hear them especially in some of the longer tracks, when the trumpets and brass kick and melodica all kick in at once; it's all in the build, their idea of cacophony is a pleasant, immersive experience, very seductive...

Elin Lindfors has a voice that plays on the non-Scandinavian soul; it doesn't matter what she's singing, we'll drift anyway, turn to the side, smile softly, think of Auroras; turn our skys red and green... it would be hard not to like the fact that this music is playing, hard not to let it creep around the edges of your head...

It's pop as we know it.