Friday, 14 March 2008
All my favourite writers are American, as is most of the music I listen too, in fact it’s difficult to think of a culture outside of our own that has given my life so much pleasure. I re-read Steinbeck’s work over and over in the same way that I’ll be listening to Sonic Youth in thirty years time. I love the place, even though at the age of thirty five I’ve never been further west than the Gower Peninsula.
In terms of culture, technology and history they’ve given us so much to be grateful for. Yet when it comes to the task of government they have always failed to live up to expectation, now we’ve reached a point where even the idea hope has about it an air of failure.
Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Obama. These names have never been capable of anything more than the repellent self interest of their own celebrity. But after everything, even after the Bush family and giving up hope of the Whitehouse ever being able to live up to Jed Bartlett, I still refuse to believe that America can’t produce a set of individuals capable of government.
Monday, 10 March 2008
I was going to write about ‘Brave Prince Harry’, the ‘Homecoming Hero’. But I’ll just end up getting angry and spoiling what would have been a perfectly good March Monday afternoon, albeit a wet and windy one.
I find that one of the main problems of playlisting in apps like WinAmp or iTunes is that the same set of songs tends to get listened to over and over again. Eventually the above mentioned playlist ends up like a huge comfort zone, a predictable and somewhat tedious musical backdrop to a Saturday afternoon. This defeats the object of embracing the technology in the first place, it also means that we’ll spend the rest of our lives listening to Six By Seven.
After searching for music like At The Drive In online the first band it threw up was The Fall of Troy, a three-piece experimental post-hardcore band from Mukilteo, Washington in the USA. The site also describes them as having Mathcore tendencies, Mathcore?
The Fall of Troy are a great band. Complete with wailing metal guitars, howling vocals and sexy chords. Mathcore.
“Me? Yeah…….I’m kinda into the whole Mathccore thing at the moment, it’s like, a US post-hardcore scene. There’s some really cool stuff going on.”
And that’s just the kind of bullshit I’ll be spinning by end of the week.
Anyway, they’ve been around for a while, have three albums out and they’re all great. You should ‘Check them out’.
