That can only mean the perpetually rumoured Apple Tablet is coming. Except not really. The only thing certain – a professional pundit will complain afterwards that it was not announced, despite almost everyone else (besides shareholders) knowing that it wouldn’t be.

Will Steve Jobs be giving the keynote? Will the iPod Classic finally die the wretched death it deserves? Will the Apple TV get a Take 3 and become useful?

Pretty standard bunch of questions really, but regardless I’ll be on hand to relay the answers to all these questions as the keynote unfolds - answers laced with just enough vitriol to create the impression I’m not some kind of apple fanboy. Which I’m not. Or at least I won’t be after tomorrow if Apple does not announce HD television for the Australian iTunes store!

Seriously Apple. Fuck you. I can see it sitting there on the American store. If I wasn’t so lazy I would buy an American gift card from eBay.

So there it is. If you only read one live blog of this event, then I strongly recommend Arstechnica’s. Because that is what I’ll be plagiarising reading. But if you read two you could probably read Macworld’s because that is generally excellent. I won’t mind because strictly speaking mine won’t be a live blog. More like a delayed-by-ninety-thousands-of-minutes blog.

I’m sure as hell not getting up that early.

One has to wonder exactly how the self proclaimed “God of Fuck” fits in to the ‘noughties’ — an era where one can view hardcore sex and drugs on television and read about the latest supposed terrorist act before leaving for work/school/whatever else in the morning. The sad fact is, he doesn’t. People just aren’t as easily shocked any more: the days where Manson could rip out songs such as ‘Antichrist Superstar’ or ‘Cake and Sodomy’ and expect a serious reaction are long gone, and it shows. That’s not to stop a man from trying, though, and try he does…

The above quote, amusingly enough, sums up most of Eat Me, Drink Me, and exposes the album for what it truly is — Manson jumping around, yelling “HEY GUYS, I’M STILL CONTROVERSIAL, I’M STILL FREAKY! C’MON, SOMEONE PAY ATTENTION TO ME!” Where once lay witty, cutting edge lyrics filled with puns and Nietzschean references, we have… that. Even the names themselves feel like painful self-parodies (‘If I Was Your Vampire,’ ‘They Say That Hell’s Not Hot’). I was about halfway through the album, when finally it hit me: Manson’s best albums have sprawling concepts and story lines, this I already knew… but the main idea of EM,DM is Manson himself.

The lowest point of the album, however, comes in the first single, ‘Heart-Shaped Glasses (When the Heart Guides the Hand)’. The fact that it sounds like ‘Panic! At the Disco’ on steroids is bad enough, but when Manson bizarrely begins to croak “don’t break, don’t break my heart, and I won’t break your heart-shaped glasses” over the chorus, one can either laugh or cry.¹ The worst thing about it all is that he’s not even being ironic; he truly believes that, in this day and age, he can turn a handful of diary entries about his divorce and subsequent Lolita-esque affair into songs and call it a record. He spends half the album trying to convince the audience he possesses a previously unseen emotional depth, and the other half desperately attempting to reclaim his youth.

That’s not to say that Eat Me, Drink Me is all bad. There are some fantastic songs — ‘Are You The Rabbit?’ recalls his Mechanical Animals-era glam stage, ‘Putting Holes in Happiness’ (despite the ridiculous name) is a pounding freight train, and the titular track closes the record in a downright eerie fashion — but it’s too little, too sparse, too late. The fact that the aforementioned songs all recall earlier stages in Manson’s vast career does not bode well. When you get down to it, Eat Me, Drink Me is a muddle… a muddle that by all rights should have been far, far better.

YAY: ‘Are You The Rabbit?’, ‘Eat Me, Drink Me’ — both tracks supposedly based on Alice in Wonderland. Both prove my hypothesis that he works best when he doesn’t allow his own life to “inspire” his music.

NAY: ‘If I Was Your Vampire’ (sprawling six-minute epic track of Manson whining about Dita von Teese), ‘Just a Car Crash Away’ (and I quote: “love is a fire/burns down all that it sees/burns down everything/everything you think burns down/everything you feel/burns down/everything you think” ad nauseum), ‘Heart-Shaped Glasses’ (MANSON: LOL I R DATIN A TEENRGR <33333).

Footnotes

1.

1. The music video is even better; Marilyn and Evan Rachel Woods having unconvincing sex in a rain of blood. Beautiful.

There is no disputing that we live in an extremely wasteful and disposable society and this is as evident in the media as the other branches of society. With more and more sources of media, the lifespan of the average item grows increasingly short. If a TV show doesn’t gain a following in its first couple of weeks, it is cancelled. If a movie fails to pull in crowds on its first weekend in the US, the studio will write it off as a lost cause and not waste another dime promoting it. If a song or album doesn’t make it into the collective consciousness in its brief moment in the sun, it will be immediately forgotten. This pattern is only very loosely correlated with the quality of the show/music/movie.

With this in mind, it is something that I have always been proud of that my music collection contains few albums released before I got into music in about 1997, and almost all of those being the early albums of bands whose post-97 albums I have enjoyed. My theory is that the millennium of written and the century of recorded music that survives thanks to our forebears’ providence will just have to wait while there is such a plethora of brilliant music being created right now that could vanish in a puff of smoke at any instant. But rules are made to be broken and after reading half a dozen reviews raving about the compilation album Tropicalia: A Brazilian Revolution in Sound I had to give it a listen — and boy am I glad I did.

Tropicalia was a Brazilian art movement which lasted little more than the year of 1968. At its core was a small collective of musicians but it also encompassed cinema, theatre and poetry with a strong political current through it all. Indeed it was this perceived subversiveness which upset Brazil’s military dictatorship and led to the arrest, imprisonment and deportation of two of the movement’s leading lights — Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil — bringing the movement to an abrupt end.

Anyway, enough history. How does the music sound? Brilliant. At its core is the kind of psychedelic pop and rock that was coming out of the UK and US at the time, the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper having been released in the middle of 1967. But this is just one ingredient in the mix. What makes this music so fresh and different (unlike much of the other psychedelic music of the day which to the modern ear can sound fairly one dimensional and tired) is everything else that is thrown into the pot. And given that Tropicalia was a movement defined more by the philosophy of its practitioners than the style of the music, this can be pretty much anything from experimental and avant garde music to Brazilian folk and Bossa Nova. Throughout there is a joyfulness which is magically infectious combined with an experimentation that means there is always a surprise around the corner. There is not an uninteresting track on the album while at the same time no two sound the same (even the two versions of the same song, Bat Macumba, which open and close the album). Gal Costa’s Tuareg combines bossa nova rhythms with middle eastern sounds to wonderful effect. Irene, the vocals of which were recorded by Caetano Veloso while in jail is a sparser track with acoustic guitar and flute. The album veers more towards traditional bossa nova on Jorge Ben’s Take it Easy, My Brother Charles which is impossible to hear without clicking your fingers along to its infectious beat, horns, whistle and backing singers. Tom Ze’s tracks are a little slower with a somewhat menacing sense of melodrama created by a soaring horn accompaniment. However it is the tracks of Os Mutantes which really stand out with the band one moment playing Mamas and the Papas style summery pop, a moment later they are immersed in a mess of distortion and fuzz guitars with plenty of outright experimentation and classic ’60s organ solos in between. The philosophical connection with many of the bands I love today for creating innovative new music by combining the best of rock, hip-hop and electronica is undeniable.

That all this wonderfully innovative work was produced of a small collective of artists living under a dictatorship over such a short time is amazing. Sure, there will be dozens of great artists whose work I will miss out on hearing over the coming months while I obsess over the nearly 40 year old work of these Brazilian musicians but it is a price more than worth paying.

With two hundred reviews under our belt,¹ it’s time to look back at what we’ve accomplished and reveal some things about ourselves. There are many things readers of Grapefruit would like to know.² The most common is “Who is this shady character called Tom Charman?” We know so little about him, the most prolific reviewer on Grapefruit. Where does he come from? Who does he serve and who does he trust?

I’ve seen many a crime type show in my time and I’m able to deduce a few key characteristics of this enigmatic figure from his reviews.

Thee Silver Mt Zion Memorial Orchestra | Horses in the Sky

8th July 2005

He is vengeful. While Tom is indeed the most active reviewer on Grapefruit, his reign is by no means unchallenged. Tom has long let the realm of music reviews grow wild under the eclectic tastes of Mr Coulthurst. He informed us about a wide variety of bands, ranging from ‘alternate’ all the way to ‘independent’. Over time he grew confident: despite having reviewed only one percent of his music collection, Mr Coulthurst sought to disturb the status quo and impose his liberal commie pinko views by bringing down Grapefruit. He attempted to expose a flaw in the site by reviewing an album with a long name. A very long name. Longer than Grapefruit could handle! Thanks to emergency coding by Tom, this disaster was avoided. Such defiance would not be tolerated. Revenge is a dish best served cold so Tom bided his time. Two months later Tom struck back, writing a music review…

Triple J’s Hottest 100 Volume 12

20th September 2005

He likes a challenge. Reviewing the entire 100 songs of Triple J’s hottest 100 volume 12 was an ambitious feat. He came close, if you count getting to within 60 songs as close. I don’t. Statistically, he only managed 40%, which is a fail. He might be able to wheedle a sup³ from his lecturer though.

Despite this massive failure in this review by Tom, it manages to be the longest one on Grapefruit. So long, that it’s rumoured to be bottomless. Who here has gazed into this abyss and returned unchanged? What secrets does it hold? Why does it have a panda as its main picture? Does Tom belong to the WWF? Does he just like pandas? Or does he love pandas?

The Return of the King

25th February 2004

He likes danger. His stance on The Return of the King as an average film angered the fanboys and girls and led to a Grapefruit record of 55 comments. He made polemical claims that Peter Jackson uses too much slow motion and Aragorn did not get the character development that was his by birthright. He also excuses the absence of the Scouring of the Shire! Such a view is so blatantly ridiculous that it must be staged in an attempt to provoke the Lord of the Rings faithful into a savage commenting frenzy.

Alias | Mockingbird

25th October 2005

He has no manners. He breaks up with someone in an open letter on Grapefruit. Very embarrassing for all concerned. I didn’t wish to snoop deeply into private affairs — even when they spill out in public — but it sounds like they were into threesomes and S&M. I remember reading about a Rachel who was brought in to spice up the relationship and some violent behaviours.

Since I know you want to know though, I feel that I am duty bound to satisfy your curiousity by reading this letter. For your sake. You’ve forced me. Hmmm. I was wrong about this letter. This girl Tom picked up on the rebound sounds violent. Tom felt that the best way to deter this stalker was by posting this public break up in the hope that she would come to her senses and leave him alone.

He has a dream that one day boobies will be part of the plot. This almost happened in Alias but a high level of plot relevant boobies could not be suspended indefinitely. There was the inevitable sagging of the plausibility. There was foreshadowing in Angel season 4 about the nature of Cordelia’s pair but Joss fumbled it. Let’s hope that someday, somewhere, someone will look at a pair of breasts and think “I could make a movie about these two”.

I ♥ Huckabees

6th January 2005

He is on the Search. The search for the perfect movie. He mentions, in several reviews, the words ‘near-perfect’. This movie was close; so close that he said how much he hearts it and wants to marry it. This review is also marks a PB for Tom: ten footnotes. Tom hasn’t hit double figures again since then but recent 8 footnote reviews indicate that his best form may still be ahead of him. And so he carries on his search; for the perfect movie and more footnotes.⁴

Buffy the Vampire Slayer | Conversations with Dead People

2nd April 2003

He’s ruthless. He’s not afraid to cut someone off⁵ for trivial, unjust, incomprehensible reasons and install a puppet reviewer. An articulate puppet reviewer who thoughtfully explores the decline of the noble art of vampirism in Sunnydale while revealing massive spoilers about the rest of the season.⁶

This one-time reviewing stooge of Tom’s has trouble understanding the nature of the First. Quite simply it’s the biggest bad guy of all time.⁷ It’s like the Emperor Palpatine, Sauron and robotic Hitler all mushed into one ethereal form that can shapeshift and has cultist and ubervamp followers. Its motives, like that of the gods, can not be analysed. Its ways are mysterious. If it wishes to sit on its fat arse for the whole season then it does so.

So in conclusion, while maintaining a facade of listening to the popular opinion about possible name changes, Tom’s grip on Grapefruit remains iron. The website changes to his will. Reviewers come into and fall out of favour, and are never heard of again. I think I can safely say that he’ll be around for the next two hundred reviews.

Hungry for more nostalgia? Continue to part two.

1. We wanted to buy something for our readers as a thankyou but although 60 years of marriage is diamond and 1 million albums sold is platinum, there seems to be no accepted present for two hundred reviews so please enjoy this special look at Grapefruit’s history.
2. For example: Isn’t the plural of grapefruit ‘grapefruit’? Was King Jackson really cancelled because of copyright infringement? At one every 30 seconds since September 2003 I’m owed 2.6 million Andy C episodes. Where are they? Why is there an ‘s’ in the url but not in the title of the website? Was King Jackson cancelled because the lead animator was too handsome?
3. A sup is an abbreviation of the phrase ‘sucking up’ to the lecturer so you’ll get extra marks.
4. And movies with breasts in them, but I exposed Tom’s fascination adequately in the previous paragraph so I won’t keep bringing them up.
5. Someone who is a brave soul reluctantly took up the onerous burden of reviewing season 7 of Buffy.
6. Not that anyone really cared about the rest of the season. Just one hellishly long slow bandaid removal all season.
7. But not the devil. Buffy needed to go out on a high by defeating her biggest foe ever. She has already killed a god and sacrificed herself twice. It’s hard to top.

Ah, but is anything free, you ask? Well, they have a free single of the week (This week it’s ‘Shadowlands’ by Youth Group) and a nice collection of Australian Podcasts too.

So, er, yay. Hopefully we’ll get some TV at some point in the future…

Hello all, and welcome to my in-depth analysis of the alleged hotness of Triple J’s Hottest 100 Volume 12. My judgements will be superficial, subjective and mercifully brief. I will be paying particular attention to lyrics and music. I will be looking especially for those who’ve gathered plenty of secondary sources. I will be listening to these suckers and typing at the same time. I reserve the right to completely miss any irony in lyrics. It’s easy to do. Remember, if these songs aren’t as hot as they’re supposed to be, it’s your fault, because you had the chance to vote for them. Last year. Quite a while back.

Let no one say I don’t have my finger on the pulse of last year’s culture. Anyhow, let’s go! May I point out first that despite the misleading title of the CD, there are only 40 tracks.

1 | Take Me Out — Franz Ferdinand

The start of a song is often one of the best bits, so Mr Ferdinand pulls a cunning trick and starts the song twice. The second start (and rest of song) is much better than the first bit, luckily. Lots of guitar and a thudding rhythm. The song seems to be about a man with confidence problems trying to pick up at a bar. It feels a bit peculiar when rock stars talk about having trouble picking up. I feel they could do more for mankind by telling us all how they became awesome, rather than about how crap they were beforehand.

2 | Somebody Told Me — The Killers

The Killers is an alright name for a band but coming after the ingeniously titled previous band it’s a bit bland. The song, however, is way cooler. The lead singer has a pretty nifty voice that swings about a lot but stays nicely in tune. This song, like the last one, seems to be about picking up at a bar. This feller is marginally more confident, but is letting rumours about boyfriends that look like women get to him. I’d have thought that’d boost your confidence but I may be missing the point.

An awkward line about “February last year” almost mars a good chorus, but the song is so energetic it can take this dead wood and keep going.

3 | Black Betty — Spiderbait

This song is a cover. I don’t know if the original song sucked quite as hard as this one, but there’s only so many times that I can hear “bam-ba-lam” without going mental. The singing sounds a little doctored to sound like a poor quality recording, which works on some songs. Not this one. The banjo — or whatever foul instrument it is — in the background does nothing for me either. Ugh, it’s back on the “bam-ba-lam”s. NEXT TRACK!

4 | The Bucket — Kings of Leon

Mr of Leon sounds a bit like Tom Hanks with a speech impediment which isn’t a particularly good start. If the accent is real then I apologise to him. But there’s a nice bit of guitar running through this track and some good drumming too. I have absolutely no idea what they’re singing about, which isn’t such a bad thing, really.

5 | Take Your Mama Out — Scissor Sisters

These sisters sound disturbingly male. In fact, they sound disturbingly like Billy Joel at the start of the song. This seems to be a bit of advice to men who’s girlfriends have left them. It tells them to take their Mum out on the town and stay out late. This doesn’t sound the best course of action to me but I know a feller called Oedipus who’d be up for it. This song may suffer on repeat listenings from a feeling of awkward grossness.

6 | Beautiful to Me — Little Birdy

Finally, someone on this album has found love and seems to be managing to keep it. From the title I expected this song to be sickeningly sweet but there’s something about Little Birdy’s voice — if that really is her name — which sells it to me. Even if a lot of female singers are singing in a similar style these days. I’m not sick of it yet. Very nice, this one.

7 | Adelaide — Ben Folds

In this song, Ben explains to us why he wants to live in Adelaide. He spends a whole song on it and still doesn’t quite convince me. Still, this is without a doubt the best song about Adelaide that I’ve ever heard. “The air is clear [and] there’s better beer” than in the USA, apparently, but then that’s true for pretty much everywhere in Australia. This isn’t fantastic but it’s about average for Mr Folds. It ends with him relentlessly playing the low keys on the piano, which sounds pretty crummy to me, but if you like pianos a lot that might appeal.

8 | Little Yellow Spider — Devendra Banhart

One verse per animal/planetary body, 11 animals/planetary bodies. This can get a bit draining. It gets a bit gross in places. There’s a sexy pig at one point who I thought must be Miss Piggy but she marries a man so it can’t be, Piggy wouldn’t settle for anything less than Kermit. Towards the end Devendra decides to describe the movement of a squid and makes me feel all ikky for the rest of the song. Cute but irritating.

9 | From the Sea — Eskimo Joe

A really nice opening leads into a great song. I have one caveat in that elements of the melody remind me of something I heard somewhere else — but I might be imagining it so I give this song the benefit of the doubt. The song bounces between loud and quiet nicely and has an awesome chorus. This is another song who’s meaning is obscure but it has some great lines, in particular “The world repeats itself somehow” which makes me think of an amalgam of all the best bits of every Groundhog Day-esque story I’ve ever heard or seen.

10 | Fit But You Know It — The Streets

Mr the Streets has an amusing-sounding British accent but this song doesn’t quite sustain four minutes. I’m not a big one on speaking during songs and this song is a major offender. This is yet another story of a guy trying / not trying to pick up, but this one says he’s got a girlfriend so he doesn’t have all my sympathy. The beat underneath starts to grate after only one minute and Mr the Streets keeps talking annoyingly and… ugh.

At the end, there’s less talking and more singing and it makes me long for the talking again.

11 | Float On — Modest Mouse

A cute little guitar riff introduces the Modest Mouse, who’s voice, unsurprisingly, squeaks a bit at times. Mouse’s style is pretty loose, and the backing vocals are deliberately a bit spread out and messy sounding, which works for the song pretty well. The song lists two reasonably bad things that happen to this guy, who’s response is that he’ll float on alright. I’m reluctant to advocate such a life philosophy, you might end up a doormat. Or a mouse.

12 | Somersault — Decoder Ring

A haunting, Sarah McLachlan-ish song. The chorus is particularly nice, with the Ring holding long notes over a simple repeated set of chords. Finding the lyrics for this song was tricky but I got them in the end. It’s basically one of those ones where a lover is telling her other that he/she’ll always stay in her heart. Which is a bit cliched, but there’s some other nice lines like “I see your breath hanging here like snow clouds”.

13 | Something’s Gotta Give — John Butler Trio

I’m not big into country-style music, so I’ve got to take this into account. But I especially get irritated by country music that tries to make political comments. No, wait, that’s not really true. I wouldn’t mind if this song had a metaphor, or an emotion, or something separating the song from what it was saying. But instead “Something’s Gotta Give” has lines like: “Got the whole world fighting for Texas T” and

God bless the people in New York when they were attacked
God bless the children being bombed there in Iraq
God bless the goddamn junkie with a monkey on his back

It lacks a lot of subtlety. It’s also a pretty overtly Christian song — after all that crap it appears to tell us all to “pay attention to God above” which is very sensible advice for a world torn apart by religious extremism.

14 | Chicken Payback — The Bees

This track has the best start of anything yet on the album. Then it slips into an old-stylee song that reminds me of that one about the guy in the bath when there was a party goin’ on. But better. It comes complete with a crowd to call out selected phrases back to the band, and sounds all tinny as if it were recorded back then. Lyrics-wise it’s another “list-the-animals” song, a category which has unexpected predominance. It keeps telling you to pay various farm animals back. If you’ve been playing poker at Old MacDonald’s place, this is probably sensible.

15 | Coin Operated Boy — The Dresden Dolls

A song about a girl and her quest for a sexbot. If a guy sang this it’d probably sound rather sleazy but from a girl’s lips it doesn’t sound quite as creepy, which seems unfair. I’m a bit uncomfortable at the suggestion that she destroyed all her previous, real, boys. But it’s not a bad idea for a song. The track has a relentless beat that gets annoying very quickly. As if to alleviate this problem it slips into a long bridge which is relieving at first but then mananges to get irritating as well. A Frying Pan to Fire kind of situation. The best bit is when we get the sound effects of making the eponymous Coin Operated Boy. The worst bits are at the start. It all falls apart a bit at the end which is nicer.

16 | Dirty Hearts — Dallas Crane

Dallas must be Frasier’s other brother. This idea made the song a lot more interesting than it initially was. Dallas sings like a slightly worse version of Jimmy Barnes, and Jimmy was pretty bad to begin with. The song concerns a sad girl who is comforted by the singer, who reckons she’s got a dirty heart. Or something. So he sings her a song. If it’s this one, I don’t think it helped.

17 | Gamble Everything for Love — Ben Lee

I heard this a lot on the radio at the time, but luckily just avoided that saturation point where I got sick of it. It’s a nice little ditty with a cute guitar strumming along underneath it and Lee’s soft voice crooning with little variation in volume. The title sums up the song well, it’s just Lee explaining the concept of Gambling Everything for Love in various different ways. The final verse is particularly good: “Tell me, are you gettin’ hurt, is it worth it?”

18 | Lotion — Greenskeepers

I love this song. I’m not entirely sure why but it endeared it to me when I first heard it and I haven’t been able to shake it. It’s got cute little 80s synth cords, it has clapping, and the lead Greenskeeper has an awesome, loopy-sounding voice. But the best bit of this song are the lyrics. Let me give you a sample.

The look inside your eyes drives me from control
Evoking visions of my favourite casserole.
And if I eat your heart
I’ll also bite your soul
And when I’m done with that
I’ll use your skull as a bowl.

It seems to be the song of a psychotic murderer in the same idiom as Patrick Bateman. But funnier. And he keeps dropping Gollum-esque “precious”es everywhere which is extra cool.

19 | She Wants to Move — N*E*R*D

This song is about some guy trying to pick up again, but this time the girl has a boy with her. The song tries to describe how damn sexy the girl is, and doesn’t do such a bad job: “She makes me think of lightning in skies,” “She wants to move,” “She hopes this’ll last forever”. Unfortunately, the backing vocals keep blurting out “She’s SEXY!” which seems rather like having a repeated line in ‘Vincent’ saying “He’s a BEAUTIFULMUSICALGENIUS!” Er yes. That was the point of your song. If you didn’t get it across with your sexy Santana-ish guitar and your latin beat and your lyrics involving asses and eyes and lightning, then yelling it at us won’t help.

This track would be ten times better without that issue, but even then it would still have “Your ass is a spaceship I want to ride in” coupled with a cheesy space-wooshing effect. Perhaps it’s a parody? Hey, that’s it, it’s a parody. Got to be.

20 | Hard Act to Follow — Grinspoon

This one has super-bland verses, but quite a good chorus. The Grinspoon Singers aren’t too bad. Um. I’m stuck for things to say. I think it’s about a guy who leaves a girl because her previous boyfriend was better than him. Or something. I suspect I’ve missed the point though, there’s a few pills floating through the lyrics that might replace any or all of the people in my summary.

21 | Scar — Missy Higgins

We’ve probably all heard this one. Ah, poor Missy. She wants people to cut on her. Ah, no, that’s not right. Actually, looking at the lyrics, this song’s a lot more interesting than I thought it was. It speaks to a common issue — we’ve all had that problem when you can’t get your blocks to fit in the wrong holes. But with people instead of blocks and complicated life roles as holes. Or something. The track’s put together simply, and it works very nicely — the focus is rightly on Higgins’ excellent voice.

22 | Drop the Pressure — Mylo

Ah, some dance music. I always enjoy it when this sort of stuff starts off with one element and then adds a new one every four bars or so. This track does that sort of thing in a way, though occasionally it drops bits as well which is a bit disappointing. And then the words come in, which I will quote in full because it’s easy:

Motherfucker’s gonna drop the pressure.

This is also disappointing, because I heard it wrong when listening to it and thought it was “Motherfucker’s gonna talk under pressure” which made me think of a bunch of cops interrogating some scummy crook. And then I thought, that doesn’t sound like a dance video clip, so all the cops became hot women in poorly-fitting outfits and started cavorting in front of the slightly cleaner crook, bending over in suggestive ways. Which seemed to fit quite nicely. Ahem. Anyhow.

23 | C’mon C’mon — The Von Bondies

This isn’t, as you might have expected, a song about Lleyton Hewitt. It’s actually a catchy rock anthem. You know how some songs have an awesome chorus and the verses just feel like filler? This song seems to have tried to bypass that by being almost all chorus. There are verse-like things but most of the time they sound like the chorus. Good fun, this one, short and to the point. Incidentally, it seems to be a song about nostalgia, but it’s hard to tell. Maybe a war? Vietnam? Nah, I’m lost.

24 | Walk Idiot Walk — The Hives

What a nice name for a band. Mr the Hives has a raspy crazy voice and he and his friends remind me a bit of AC/DC. This may however just be because I don’t know much about AC/DC. It seems to be a tirade against those useless bloody robots that people make in Japan that we see at the end of the news sometimes — though I might be mistaken again. I think I’m losing my edge. Those robots deserve it, though. Ooooh, can you play the trumpet, Mr Robot? Good for you! We worked out how to do that years ago. Go sit down and process boring sums, that’s what you’re good for. Where was I? Ah yes, quite a good song but a bit bland and possibly irritating later.

25 | Don’t U Eva — Sarah Blasko

I want to hate a song who’s title is so badly spelled. But this is one of my favourites. Blasko’s singing is good (although I mistook her for Higgins at first), and the lyrics are awesome. The song’s addressing some boring person who likes to have their reality pinned down, sorted out, neatly placed, and she’s asking him if he can see that there might be some interesting things out there that defy this process. I hope. I’m all nervous now. Let’s have some lyrics before we move on:

You’d raise the door just so you could find the key
…
Don’t U Eva wish for just one thing that you might never see?

26 | Mass Destruction — Faithless

I’m really in favour of songs that take some of the crazy modern language that slips into our minds these days and analyses it. This one takes aim at “mass destruction” and tries to show the root of the destruction we see, rather than the actual tools. It manages a good deal more subtlety than the John Butler Trio: most of the time it suggests rather than comes out and says things. For example, though it namechecks Halliburton, it phrases it thusly:

Whether Halliburton, Enron or anyone
Greed is a weapon of mass destruction

It also has a nice little personal story running through it which grounds it nicely and stops it being too trite.

27 | Common People — William Shatner and Joe Jackson

William Shatner has an awesome voice. That can’t be disputed. He delivers the lines in this song brilliantly, and luckily, Joe Jackson jumps in to sing. It’s a good cover — better than the original to my mind. It’s the story of an irritating rich snobby girl that Bill meets at College, who wants to live with and screw common people like Bill. I don’t know if he actually gets any though, he seems to take her to the supermarket instead. Silly Billy. The point of the song is that you can’t leave your class/past/social status behind and just become something else because you want to. Probably true.

28 | Woman — Wolfmother

A little bit of Led Zepplin-sounding stuff here. With his voice faded a little in the background, the (oddly, male) Wolfmother calls out to a woman while complaining that he has to set her free all the time. It sounds like it might have been inspired by the Legend of Zelda video games. The woman is clearly Zelda and Link is warning the players to listen to him. Yes, that makes sense. Lots of psychadelic organs and heavy bass playing accompany the tragic tale of this man in his green tunic. I especially like the line “She’s a woman, you know what I mean.” Yes, yes I do. Go on.

29 | 10 A.M. Automatic — The Black Keys

First of all, what a stupid idea for a colour of keys. You’d never be able to find them in the dark. How bloody useless. Moving on, this track is a little dull but not actually annoying. Mr Keys has one of those quite interesting raw sounding voices but he comes across like a bit of a bastard, telling someone that they’ve turned deranged and they’ve got pain, and such, so he’s leaving them. At least he’s not trying to pick anyone up, I’m getting sick of that. There’s a pretty awesome guitar solo at the end that makes the whole thing kind of worth listening to.

30 | Godhopping — Dogs Die In Hot Cars

Awesome name for a band. Eighties sound. Very quick and bouncy which makes it even harder to work out what they’re on about, but sounds pretty good. It seems to be about a bunch of people on the way to Bombay. No, that can’t be it. Ah, the clue’s in the title. It’s about people switching Gods so they can be certain of things again, after things didn’t work out with the previous God. Hmmm. OK, that might not be right either. Well, I’ll give you a lyric and move on, I’m out of time.

I’ve learnt that indecision only brings no joy
So much joy to a fickle little world

31 | Not Many [Remix] — Scribe, featuring Savage of Decepticonz & Con Psy of Frontline

Phwoar. What a complicated bunch of people. I’m inclined to like a group that includes “Decepticon” in it’s name but from what I can work out, only Savage is here from that group. Was Savage an actual Decepticon? He must have been, surely, it’s a good name. Perhaps he was one of the Insecticons? Hmmmm.

This is the only remix I’ve ever heard which starts with someone calling out “This is the Remix!” That’s really useful. Rappers talk so fast it’s hard to process everything, especially when I’ve spent a minute waffling about Transformers. There’s lots of introductions, a lot of crowing about being better than everyone else, something about crayons, something about pharmacists, something about celebrating. For rap it seems quite good. I quite like the chorus in an irritating rap-ish kind of way.

32 | Yo Mama — BuTTER Fingers

Oh dear. This song is an extended “Yo Mama” call, suprisingly enough. The chorus is reasonably amusing: “Yo mama’s on the top of my things to do list”, and a bridge in the middle expands on this nicely. The rest of it gets a shade ruder — this kind of stuff is barely palatable when it isn’t about mothers. “She licked my colon cleaner than a clyster” is a good example. But then, I suppose it does what it says on the tin. I can’t really complain. I can not listen to it again though.

33 | Paco Doesn’t Love Me — Spazzys

This song seems to be waiting for a Teen Movie to run as the second song on the credits for. It’s pretty awful. Paco’s an Italian drummer, you see. And Miss Spazzys has a “killer crush” on him.

He hits the skins as fast as Marky
I wish he’d hit my skin that quickly

Um, yes. Imaginatively, she tells him “I wanna hold your hand”. The music is relentless, the singing is bog-standard, and the whole things sounds like an ever crappier version of “Hey Mickey”. Yeah, it’s that bad. NEXT PLEASE!

34 | Slow Hands — Interpol

Mr Pol has a reasonably good voice, and the playing is quite nice, it’s just a bit dull. I’m always in favour of big words in songs and this one does well with “dissipate”, “myriad” and “incentive”. The song could have been good with a solid chorus but even that’s a little dull. The song is about a Spy with slow hands who’s for hire but everyone’s got too many weights around them, so he’s forced to pole dance with stars and go crazy in a violet place.

Nah, you got me, I’ve got no clue.

35 | This Old Love — Liar

Ah, how nice. A soft, slow, sweet song. I haven’t been able to find the lyrics online so it might be about axe murderers but it doesn’t sound like it. I’m pretty sure it’s about a guy and his love and how they’ve been together so long and things aren’t gonna screw up and they’re happy sometimes and sad other times but he doesn’t have to worry. Yeah, definitely not axe-murderers, I feel that pretty strongly now. Nice strings in the background and Mr Liar has a bit of a Simon/Garfunkelish voice. Which one of those folk sang? Ah well, too late now, next track.

36 | It’s Too Late — Evermore

Awesome opening, with short little twinkles and quick guitar chords, building up to the singing. Mr More’s singing is pretty good, a very relaxed near-broken style. It’s about a lazy bugger trying to hide from the world, I think, which appeals to me greatly. The chorus is particularly cool:

Ride on
Ride till early morning sun
Ride on
Like the dawning of the day
Its too late
To let all your feelings show
Go on
Till the night has crept away

It’s like a how-to avoid doing anything with your life. Super-useful. Great song.

37 | Sleepy Little Deathtoll Town — The Panda Band

These pandas¹ are suprisingly good at manipulating our human instruments. This feels like a song from an unmade rock musical, and I mean that in a good way. There’s an awesome middle eight as well. My favourite bit is the clarinet that keeps twisting though the song. This is one that I can’t find the lyrics for as well, but it’s basically about some crummy town, where there are straight, wide streets, bells in towers, and priests, and sailors running around trying to pick up. Probably. Ah, it’s good, anyhow. The lead Panda singer has a lot of character in his voice, which I like.

38 | Push Up — Freestylers

It starts like an old Michael Jackson song. And it kind of continues like one. I’m sure that’s good if you like that sort of thing. I’m glad to get back to the songs about guys picking up, and somewhat more satisfyingly, this time it seems he actually does. And then keeps talking about it for aaaaaages. In case you’re wondering what the title means, it’s Push Up as in “push up your body next to mine”, “push up and shake that ass” or “push up I love when you feel like getting nasty”. Oh, go and get a room for heaven’s sake.

39 | My Friend Robot — Regurgitator

Regurgitator are still around? I thought they were dead! And here’s our second song about robots which is unexpected. This is the soulful story of a man and his Robot friend, and how good the robot is, and how he’s a computer, and how he can’t kiss people, and how he never sleeps or lies. There’s some daggy swirly noises to remind us that the song’s about robots, in case we forgot. The Regurgitator sings reasonably well but the song is somewhat monotonous and can grate if you’re 39 songs into a huge album review and just want to get to the end and finish for the love of god. But it’s probably OK if you’re not.

40 | Memory Lane — Elliott Smith

Really nice guitar playing, a cute melody and great lyrics. The song sketches a picture of ‘Memory Lane’, where the mayor’s name is fear, and his voice rings out from an advancing mountain of cliche. The song would appear to be about isolation and retreating into the past, or something of that ilk, and Mr Smith sings it with a light touch that suits nicely. A good song to finish on.

Analysis

Hah! I intended to write something at the end to extrapolate onto the presiding mood of 2004 and the themes running through popular culture and such, but this thing is FAR TOO DAMN LONG already and also, I can’t be stuffed. So let me simply point out that the man with the Robot forgot to make his into a sexbot, whereas the woman with the coin operated boy sounds much cleverer on that front. And that lots of blokes want to pick up and not many do. And that listing a bunch of animals is a convenient backbone for a song if you’re stuck for ideas. I hope you enjoyed this but in all truth I’m pretty sure no one got to the end.²

1. Only now do you poor fools realise the significance of the big picture at the top.
2. Phwoar. Longest Grapefruit Review Ever. Until some loser comes along and breaks yet another of my records.

I think I just died and went to heaven. I just spent an entire day in a CD shop and still didn’t manage to completely explore it. Amoeba Music is on Haight St — the former centre of hippiedom — and has to be one of the most beautiful sights I have ever seen. It is in a former bowling alley and the CDs stretch as far as the eye can see. It claims to stock over a million CDs although now I have visited I doubt this is still the case. And they are all so cheap — almost everything is under US$15 and I picked up lots of really good ones for only US$2. I was particularly impressed by how well represented Melbourne (and Aussie generally) bands were — there were CDs here that you probably wouldn’t find in JB. Anyway, after seven hours there, with but a half hour break for lunch I was just about musicked out, so wandered down Haight St to a real ale pub/brewery my dad had recommended.

Haight St is something of a bittersweet place these days. It still harks back to the Summer of Love, now the best part of 40 years ago. There are shops full of bongs, tie-dye and everything else you might associate with hippies. It still has the colourfulness and easy-going attitude that were the hallmarks of those days. But, in what must be one of the greatest strengths of capitalism — turning any anti-capitalist movement into a new way to make money — it is no longer about pure motives, it is about the green stuff (cash, not hash). The most melancholic part is all the homeless people — largely those so acid-fucked that they still think it is 1967 and that it is only a matter of time before they bring down the Man. SF has a massive homeless problem — something you’d normally associate with a mega-city like NY or LA rather than one with fewer than a million people. It makes what happened in New Orleans seem a lot more plausible if even a relatively well-off city like San Francisco can have such poverty.

Anyway, back to the pub. I was sitting there reading my copy of the Onion (which I’d never realised was available in print) when looking through the gig guide I saw that tonight Alasdair Roberts was playing in a pub downtown. He, in particular his album Farewell Sorrow, has been one of my favourite artists for the last year or so. (He plays traditional British folk, as opposed to Alternative folk which is what I mainly listen to in the genre.) And despite having scoured both the internet and, since I arrived, the street press for every concert that was on while I was here I was finding out about it in a satirical newspaper. There is just so much happening here — of the seven nights I am in SF I am going to gigs for five of them with three of them by bands that would make my ‘gigs of the year’ list in Melbourne — that some little known folk dude from Scotland falls through the cracks. So, instantly recovering from my musicked-outness, I rushed across to the other side of town, again blessing this city’s wonderful public transport system. The gig was amazing. It was in the tiny back room of a pub holding barely 50 people and two of the supports — Marissa Nadler and Jack Rose — were almost as brilliant as Alasdair Roberts. It is just as well I live in the backwater of Melbourne because I don’t think either my bank account or my relationship with Gisela could survive a music scene like San Francisco’s.

Efrim, lead singer of Thee Silver Mt. Zion Orchestra & Tra-la-la Band (formerly known variously as (amongst others) A Silver Mt Zion, The Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra & Tra-La-La Band with Choir and Thee Silver Mountain Reveries and complete pains in the arse for my filing system) has quite possibly the technically worst singing voice ever put to tape. It is little wonder that his greatest claim to fame is as leader of the instrumental Godspeed You! Black Emperor.

Yet lack of natural ability seems to have hindered him little as is (almost) immediately evident on the first track of ASMZ‘s latest album, ‘Horses in the Sky’. Almost, because the first few moments of God Bless our Dead Marines cause a little concern as he sings ‘We put angels in the electric chair’ over plucked upright bass and screeching strings, sounding more like an electrocuted cat than angel. But things slowly build as more strings and then drums come in. Pretty soon they are joined by hand claps and the whole calamity starts to sound like a traditional Eastern European dance. Cue guitars and increasing tempo, and just as I am about to get up and join in the jig, it all dies away to nothing.

When things re-start we are left with Efrim mournfully singing of ‘Vulgar kings on their dirty thrones’ over the foreboding sound of single piano and string notes. But it is here that things get exciting. Almost five minutes into the song, well after the ‘Radio Mix’ of the song would have finished, the lone bass is back and that most damaged of voices shows what it is capable of. Sounding as if it could all fall apart any moment, he sings:

There’s fresh meat in the club tonight, God bless our dead marines.
Someone had an accident above the burning trees.
While somewhere does stand peacefully our vulgar prince’s slave,
Dead kids don’t get photographed, God bless our dead marines.

All the time piano, drums and then guitars play simple melodies underneath, slowly building. It is here that you realise that for all its limitations, Efrim’s voice is perfect for the song. Its weaknesses provides the perfect representation of the imperfections and faults in each one of us, the repressed masses. For this is not, unlike many protest songs, a sermon, moralising from on high. This is a song from the battlefield by one of the foot soldiers:

Lost a friend to cocaine, a couple friends to smack
Troubled hearts map deserts and they rarely do come back
Lost a friend to oceans, lost a friend to hills
Lost a friend to suicide, lost a friend to pills
Lost a friend to monsters, lost a friend to shame
Lost a friend to marriage, lost a friend to blame
Lost a friend to worry, lost a friend to wealth
Lost a friend to stubborn pride, and then I lost myself

It is all so overwhelming because despite it fragility and damaged nature you can feel the potential power behind it, once again reflecting the protest movement in this post-9/11 world. Nowhere is better portrayed in the outro as Efrim sings over solemn piano:

When the world is sick, can no one be well
But i dreamt we was all beautiful and strong

Slowly he is joined by other voices, until they form a powerful choir which can’t help but leave you with the feeling that we, however insignificant, could together make a difference. God Bless our Dead Marines has to be the best protest song written this side of the Vietnam War.

There are another five tracks on the album. Mountains Made of Steam is very beautiful and at times menacing. Horses in the Sky is a delicate song with just Efrim’s vocals and acoustic guitar. Teddy Roosevelt’s Guns shows that natural ability does count for something with Efrim’s refrains ‘O Canada, O Canada, I’ve never been your son’ and vehemently screamed ‘Teddy Roosevelt’s Guns’ wavering between being annoying and downright unpleasant. Hang on to each other sees Efrim and his choir of comrades singing little more than the track’s title repeatedly over a barely audible organ. Ring Them Bells (Freedom Has Come and Gone) is the track on the album most reminiscent of past ASMZ albums, and is a reminder of how good this can be. Throughout the personal is balanced with the political, the emotional with the intellectual, the unbelievable with the unlistenable. These last five tracks on their own would have made a fine album but never again do we soar to the heights of God Bless our Dead Marines. However that one 12 minute track makes this album more than worth the price of admission.

Some music isn’t. And it sits around on my iPod reminding me that either:

• Love is transitory, or
• I used to have shit taste.

Coldplay are a minor offender in this area. I’ll always like ‘Clocks’, mostly for its first 30 seconds. But the rest of A Rush of Blood to the Head really grates when it comes up in my random playlist, and for a while I banned it from my playlist. And I’ve no desire to buy X&Y — having heard a single from it on the radio, it sounds just like everything I’ve heard before. Perhaps a little more tightly honed.

I get this image of Coldplay sitting around, desperately trying to sound like the platonic ideal of themselves.

But my Coldplay backlash doesn’t even begin to rival my Travis backlash. Every time they pop up on my iPod I have to skip them, even ‘Sing’, which I used to really like. Now, it all sounds like painfully happy treacley ikkiness. I listen to a bit of it and wonder how depressed I must have been to have needed such relentless happiness blasted into my ears.

But then, I may be odd in that I find sad music uplifting and happy music depressing, in much the same way that I like cold blustery days more than shiny sunny ones. I think it’s a contrast thing.

And just to show that my taste now is probably as bad as it’s ever been, the track I’m always hanging out for my iPod to shuffle to is Britney Spears’ ‘Toxic’. Now there’s a single that has everything.