Now Playing:

The brilliant Aussie hip hop outfit, the Hilltop Hoods are back with a new album State of the Art. While I’m not usually a fan of this genre at all, these guys win me over with brilliant construction. Their backing is varied and very closely linked to jazz and funk. The vocal timbre for their rapping is more light and bouncy, more rhythmic and humorous than the forward-pushing angry vocals typical to the genre.

Here’s some standouts:

Track 1 - The Return
This album builds from the opening notes. The introductory track commences with a suspense-laden motif that changes context immediately as a funky main guitar riff enters, becoming a fill support for the overall groove. At times the entire backing will drop out unexpectedly, and then return full swing in order to emphasise certain lyrics. Nicely mixed, there’s a little jazzy keys improvisation at times to fill out the complexity in the backing.

Typically Australian in lyrical content, we have humour mixed with politics - The System is broken/the cistern is broken/the shit is just floating. As I mentioned before the vocal style is rhythmic and bouncy, fitting with the funky backing.

Track 3 - Chase That Feeling
How can I resist a track that includes a syncopated violin ostinato? From the outset, a piano (ahem, keyboard) riff sets the scene for this to be a far more serious song than the others. There’s a sung chorus, incredibly well built up with orchestral backing which is inspiring to say the least. And I will take that feeling/Take that pain and replace that feeling comes out under the chorus, emphasising the point of the song.

Of all the tracks, this is worth the most attention. If you’re Australian and own a television, you might have already heard it, since it’s already been [abused] appropriated by Channel Ten for station advertising.

I find it hard to listen repetitively to this album. The vocals in hiphop always tend to get to me after a while. But for a once off listen every now and then this album is brilliantly thought out, funky and definitely worth playing at high volume.

More Meme Slackness (Deal With It)

"Here's the rules--mention the person that tagged you (did that). Complete the lists of 8's (see below). Tag 8 of your wonderful blogger friends (usually don't do this, but I will!). Go tell them you tagged them (if I have time)!"

Now we all know that this is Vic's World.

Vic says:
Fuck the rules.
This is Blogville after all.
In a world without boundaries, rules are somewhat irrelevant.

So I'm not tagging. If you want to be as pathetic as I am and do the meme, go ahead and steal it. I did. Go ahead. Trust me, it feels good.

8 Things I Am Looking Forward To:

1. More sunshine. I was driving along with my arm hanging out the window this morning, feeling right and summery. The tunes were good and the weather was fine. Now it's all up and pissed off in order to make way for a preview of winter.

2. Watching LittleTyke continue to grow and learn. Auntiedom... It's made me fall in love with a baby. LittleTyke is the best. She can do no wrong.

3. The invention and wide distribution of intravenous coffee.

4. Making fresh gourmet pizza. Who knows when, but every time I think of it my mouth waters.

5. Gardening. I don't have a veggie plot yet, but the ideas are germinating. Let's hope they hurry up and take root because I need to get some seeds for winter crops germinating, too.

6. Losing enough weight to be able to look in the mirror and not think ugh, for fuck's sake you have to lose some weight

7. Beer. Always.

8. The day after tomorrow.

8 Things I Did Yesterday:

1. Yet again scored a free ride on public transport. I love that my station has no ticket machine. I get to raise my middle finger to the authorities and also spend the money I would have spent on a ticket on something far more worthwhile, like sushi.

2. I walked into a local photography gallery. Not much of a surprise, really. But this one was holding an exhibition of works by local photographers who are members of the flickr community. I got out of my shell enough to strike up a conversation with the founder of the gallery about it. We had a really open, easy conversation in a setting where normally I would have feared intimidation. I think how easily the conversation came kind of took me by surprise and made me forget to be self-conscious. The outcome: the guy looked me up on flickr and told me that he liked my work. I'm pretty chuffed.

3. Sadly, I did not invent intravenous coffee.

4. Drank tea instead.

5. Cursed my manager many, many times. I try to make an appointment with his boss, and he gives me every excuse under the sun as to why I can't. I try to resolve issues with him instead, and he palms it off on to his boss, who he has made completely unreachable. Good stuff. Much appreciated.


6. Ate sushi.

7. Grinned like a fool for having eaten sushi.

8. Resolved to continue to lose more weight.


8 Things I Wish I Could Do:

1. I wish I could settle on a plan for a garden and just get to it. I spent hours today doing drawings and contemplating where the sun goes the most. I need to revert to a good gardener friend's method of "just stick it in and if it grows it grows". As Nike says, Just Do It.

2. For one week I wish I could actually have a penis. I would have so much fun being given a whole new body part. I'm bored with all the other bits.

3. I wish to invent intravenous coffee. It's a winner, for sure.

4. Wave a magic wand and make it spring. I wasted summer and now it's raining and cold. This signifies icy mornings, multiple layers of clothes, miserable drizzly short dark days and massive power bills. The only positive I see being offered up by winter is the prospect of snuggling up under more than one doona. In fact a mound of them.

5. Retire the poor old Fuji FinePix for a more superior model camera.

6. Dammit, but I wish I could play guitar and sing simultaneously. Occasionally it works out okay, but I could never get a gig doing it. What's weird is that I can play and sing a little on guitar, but give me bass and all ability to even speak while I'm playing just disappears.

7. I wish I could be travelling. Right now. Tomorrow. Every day.

8. I wish I could think of something else to write.


8 Shows I Watch:

Huh? I don't even own a television. I worm my way into other people's lives to watch hours of Bones and the occasional other crime type show.

Stupid, stupid question.

It's Vic's World, so let's change it.

8 albums I'm granting listening time to lately:

1. Jason Mraz - We Sing, We Dance, We Steal Things
Okay, so it's a bit poppy/easy listening. But it's just appealing that way. The music is cruisey enough to flow right into your soul and make something move inside you with you even being consciously aware that it's going to happen. Worth a listen on a warm summer evening.

2. Dave Matthews Band - Everyday
I keep coming back to this album, even though I am really only rocked by roughly half of it. The rest is clever but doesn't stick me right to the core in the way that some of the more brilliant Dave Matthews efforts do.

3. Lily Allen - Alright, Still
She cracks me up. The music is tongue in cheek. The lyrics are sassy. I'm in love... but I think she'd slap me.

4. Lily Allen - It's Not Me, It's You
Latest album: Sadly, not as good as the first. There are still golden moments on this effort, just they're less in number than on the first album. In adolescent style, I've fixated on one track with a sweetly sung little chorus of Fuck you, fuck you very, very much. The plus is that I'm not the only one. It's now our work anthem.

5. Medeski, Martin and Wood - Note Bleu
A nice best of album that just keeps me coming back. Funky, interesting, sometimes completely weird. It's everything I like to be, with a little more confidence.

6. Counting Crows - August and Everything After
This is an old friend that I bring out like a well-worn pair of jeans. I can slip into it like a second skin and feel completely at home with every inch of it.

7. Panic at the Disco - Pretty. Odd.
Apart the fact that Nine in the Afternoon shits me to absolute tears, I've been pretty clinically fascinated with this album. There's a real Sgt. Pepper feel to it. I'm not happy with committing to liking it yet. I think it's more one of those things you have to stare at and poke for a while to work out what it is, but you cannot just walk away from and forget about. Eventually you figure it out and make the decision to go with well that was a complete waste of time or perhaps the opposite of hey, that's really cool. Judgement is pending.

8. Black Eyed Peas - Elephunk
This is great for just rocking out to when you come home from work. I tend to like funky sounds when I hit the shower, but not overly complex ones. This is perfect. I challenge anybody to listen to Let's Get Retarded and not be moving along with it. You're just not human if you don't.


8 People I Tag:

This is Vic's World, remember? Steal away. You know you want to.

Album Review: James Morisson's Songs For You, Truths For Me

James Morrison - Songs for You, Truths for Me
Lately I have been picking up anything I can and giving it a listen. This is an exercise to sharpen my ears, broaden my musical experience and hone my ability to communicate about what I hear. Not all the music I listen to I am going to enjoy or respect.

When I looked this guy up on Wikipedia, I got a few choices to pick from. Interestingly, James Morrison the trumpet player from Australia was labelled as musician whereas the James Morrison responsible for this album was labelled as singer. I love the implication there.

The overall impression is that this guy should give up and let somebody else do it. I actually heard him on the radio a few weeks ago, and not knowing who I was listening to I thought Holy Shit is Simply Red still kicking along?. James Morrison appears to be Simply Red attempting to be Joe Cocker at times. His vocal huskiness he attributes to a bout of whooping cough when he was a baby. It would have impressed me far more to conjure up a tale of drinking addiction recovery, or stick a cigar in the guy's teeth for every photo shoot to explain it. I can see this album appealing to the cliched mid-fourties housewife who needs something to listen to while doing their digital scrapbooking - escaping from the teenage nightmares they have spawned and wish to have no more responsibility for.

Tracks of note on this album:
Track 1 - The Only Night
Firstly, the piano is far too defined in the mix. We have Late Show sound from bar one. The track tries to smack you in the face with full on brass/rhythm entry first off and almost succeeds. Funnily the vocal ad-libbing reminds me of a cross between Hanson and Joss Stone.
The chorus here is a disappointment after a nice brassy prechorus section. It builds through the prechorus section then all drops out to what seems like a completely different style - very straight in the rhythm with heavy and predictable vocal harmony. A fitting opening track for the album, showing potential laced with cliche and ultimately disappointment.

Track 6 - Nothing Ever Hurt Like you
The accompaniment has the potential here to be a nice down and dirty groove in the style of The Letter and some of the Tom Jones covers. It builds nicely but then leads straight to disappointment with an immediate lowering of volume in the bass as soon as the vocals enter. What does that do? It makes it feel like the balls have dropped out of the track.
The chorus features more driving rhythm in the drums - snare hits on every beat pushing it along, a direct juxtaposition to the laid back feel of the verse. Vocally, there is some backup harmonising happening. It's at a tasteful level, but still the choice of harmony is not fitting to this style at all.
Overall this track would fantastic live, with pumping bass, a kick-arse session band... and with Joe Cocker performing it instead.

Track 9 - If You Don't Wanna Love Me
Vocally, this is a pretty solid track. The melody is still pretty damn predictable. It's the rest that is letting it down.
The track starts out as a duet between electric guitar vocals - the guitar with a slightly dirty tone, heavy on the mids. Oh, potential! But there's not much imagination in the accompaniment. It's more powerful in the first chorus than the verse to match the step-up in the vocals, however there could be a lot more use of space overall to highlight the occasional fill.
Second verse - drums enter after a brief and extremely pitiful taste of strings (a warning of things to come...). The drums seem to be mixed too clean - they stand out as seperate from the rest of the band enough to bring on the impression of being a midi track.
Then some truly trite and unimaginative string arrangement for the second chorus onwards and it's game over. Forever relegate this track to ballroom dance shows trying keep up with the times by playing the music of somebody who isn't dead yet.

Track 10 - Fix the World Up For You
Ahhh, MERIT!!! Everything seems to fit well in this track. The instruments are well mixed, the vocal harmonies suit the style of the song. There's some wavering in the brass entries during the introduction, however rather than showing up as unprofessional it gives a human quality to the performance.
It's a classic pop soul piece, and well done for what it is.

Track 12 - Love is Hard
This track is one that would be far better live and acoustic. It has fallen victim a little to the temptation of multilayering in the studio. Just because you can have a shitload of layers doesn't mean that you should. A friend once said to me that if you can play a song with just acoustic and vocals, and still have it hold it's own, then it is truly a good song. This track can quite easily do that.
It starts off with a simple high-pitched guitar accompaniment that allows James' rough vocal quality to shine through. He has room to let loose in the chorus a little without his vocals being muddied by anything else that is going on.
It's sad that this track is relegated to last position on the album. It's of quality that I would like to see more of from this singer. Acoustic and vocal is much more suited to this man than a bad arrangement with a few brass instruments thrown in.

File Songs For You, Truths For Me to the left of Michael Buble and Harry Connick Jnr, and to the right of your Michael Bolton and Simply Red. Play when your mother comes to visit, and accompany with a mug of budget-label tea with too much milk in order to match the lack of complexity and predictability of this album.

Album Review: Snow Patrol's A Hundred Million Suns

Snow Patrol don't seem to do space. Silence. It's always a wall of some sort of sound. Though I guess this structural complexity is their signature, sometimes your ears would be glad for a break, just some sort of break. It would be a far more effective method of creating contrast to introduce some gaps, some of moments of far less clutter.

In listening to their latest album A Hundred Million Suns, I have mixed feelings. Initially I diagnosed it a s same old, same old. There was nothing that stood out as immediately brilliant to me. But then, I think about my exposure to the last album, Eyes Open. There were only two songs on that one that stood out to me, however I ended up loving the entire thing through constantly exposing myself to it. The hook seems to be in the poetry of the lyrics more than the song construction. Once you're familiar with the words, the other nuances seem to come out, too.

Track 3 - Take Back the City
Ah, the single. The guitar introduction to this is quite nice and spacey, which I complained about a lack of overall. The vocals, especially within the verses, are less whiney than normal. This, I think, is because singer Gary Lightbody ventures into the lower range a little more often. This is something I would like to hear more often throughout. Swapping the registers also gives more contrast to the verse.
Both verses and chorus have a relentless quaver strumming in the guitar part, bordering upon the boring, but relieved extremely well by the use of a completely different rhythm for a prechorus. The prechorus is long enough to serve as a break from the relentless strumming -rive of the verse and chorus.

Track 5 - The Golden Floor
How blatantly annoying. This song starts off with a nice little fingerpicked chordal motif on an steel-string guitar. We hear it once, for four bars, before it is overlayed with a percussion motif that would be more appropriate to some pop trash that Shakira would pump out. It stays there, unchanged, throughout choruses and verses until the final eight bars of sound, where we are once again teased with the gorgeous guitar part that could have been.

Track 7 - Set Down Your Glass
A nice, slow, potentially beautiful song. This is where I am having difficulty with the constant background sound that this band insists on. I wonder does the keyboardist, Tom Simpson, feel he needs to justify his presence within the band by providing some sort of humming wash in the background of absolutely everything? This gorgeous song would have been much better presented as purely vocals and steel-string guitar.
I think this is something that bands have to learn from orchestral composers - especially this run of emo/indie bands that proliferate at the moment. Just because you have a wide breadth of musical sounds and effects at your fingertips it does not mean you have to use them all at once. A sensitivity and interplay between instruments - a conversation/contrast approach - is far more effective that having all voices speak over each other at once.

Track 11 - The Lightning Strike: (i)What If This Storm Ends? / (ii) The Sunlight Through The Flags / (iii) Daybreak
What an epic! I love the emphasis on the piano within this piece as a whole.
In the first section (i) What If This Storm Ends, the building of rhythms over the initial piano part is brilliant. Vocally, the same melodic idea is used throughout to great effect. It's a captivating melodic motif, mesmerising just like the intent of the lyrics. There's some great lines here. In particular - Be the lightning in me/That strikes relentless
On to the next section: (ii) The Sunlight Through The Flags
The introduction to this reminds me of the piano pieces of composer John Adams, and also the compositions of Steve Reich. It's layered, cross-rhythmic, mesmerising stuff. More and more gets added to it , changing the rhythmic direction and emphasis. When it comes to the chorus, the introduction of a straight rhythm on distorted electric guitar is frankly disappointing. It detracts from the complexity of the rest of this section of the piece.
Finally, for the third section: (iii) Daylight
This a disappointing conclusion to an otherwise brilliant piece. The verses are boring slow and uninspired, but redemption comes from the chorus with a lot more movement and far less bleeding heart sappiness. Overall it's okay, but would be better as a standalone song rather than being bundled in with it's outstanding predecessors.

On the whole it's quite a complex album. There's some brilliant moments, offset with some downright emo whinginess. Best listened to on a cold cloudy day with at least two glasses of red wine in hand.

Now Playing:

I've finally got the shits with mainstream radio. It serves it's function at work - something that most people will put up with listening to, and a bonding factor because eventually all the people will know all the songs and sing along.

But why we know all the songs to sing along to them is the problem. We hear the same four new songs all day interspersed with pub rock classics. Even after a day of listening to this you've got a fair chance of knowing the choruses to anything they play.

I've swapped back to my old favourite station, where they play non-mainstream pieces and with a heavy emphasis on the Australian local content. The announcers tend to get into the backgrounds of the songs and bands, so there's more talk but it's informative rather than advertising bullshit.

So why am I talking about this? Swapping stations has brought me back into the mood for appreciation of new music. I've got hold of a bunch of albums that are out now and I've been systematically listening to them. What a breath of fresh air! It doesn't matter if I don't like them or not - doesn't matter much at all really. The fact that I am listening critically to what is going on in them has given my ears and my brain a new lease on life.

Now playing on the familiarisation list:

Sara Barielles - Little Voice
To me this is pop-oriented jazz. Joss Stone without so much in the ballsy voice department. However I love it. There's a big emphasis on piano in most of the songs, mainly as chordal rhythmic accompaniment. I like this style of piano accompaniment - punchy, heavy in the bass. I'm not much of a fan of flowing, arpeggiated piano accompaniments - and anyway that would not be fitting for this style.

The hit list for me on this album:
Track 1. Vegas
Despite there being too much emphasis on the single chord hits on the piano within the first verse (this could have been mixed with more importance given to the vocal lines) this song is a winner. The chorus and bridge more than make up for it. At times Sara Barielles lets loose, whereas for most of the songs on this album you can tell she's holding back, reigning it in. It's nice to hear the chains being let go on occasion.

Track 9. Many the Miles
Oh so soul. Vocal harmonies in the chorus, slow groove, a capella section. It's all there. In a way the song is commercial, but it's easy to identify with and I'm loving it. The last line should be an echo for my life at the moment:
There's too many things I haven't done yet/There's too may sunsets I haven't seen. This is the kind of song I would listen to twice in a row because it doesn't seem to last long enough for how much I like it.

Coming soon in the album review list:
Pink - Funhouse. - From first listening it will probably be a quite scathing review.
The Screaming Jets - Do Ya. - Classic Aussie rock returns. Similar enough to their old albums from way back when to still be The Screaming Jets, but different enough not to be accused of releasing the same old songs with different titles.
The Presets - Apocalypso. - I'm undecided on this ablum. Very mood-oriented, there's elements that impress... but are they aiming too low?
The Living End - White Noise. - The Aussie boys are back with a mixed-feelings album that has some absolutely brilliant moments.

All this keeps bringing to mind a line from a song by Aussie intelligent pisstake electronica group TISM (standing for This Is Serious Mum). The name of the song is Lose Your Delusion II. The song itself is taking a dig at switching away from the ideals of non-mainstream and returning to mainstream bum-fodder "like some inner technical hitch".

Don't change your life - Change your channel

So true, whichever way you go.