If I could only get my hands on the bastard who’s scratched up all the Fairport Convention CDs in Swansea Library!! I want to tear the fucker’s eyes out with a fork! I mean, if there’s one musical idiom that most definitely ISN’T improved by constant skipping, stuttering and fuck ups, it’s lovely, floaty, Britsh folk-rock… it causes me pain.

So who saw PJ Harvey on Later With That Strange Furtive Little Man the other night? She was bloody magnificent! Critical opinion on her new record seems to be a bit mixed, but then critical opinion can fuck right off, I think her new stuff rocks hard.

The new issue of Loose Lips Sink Ships magazine is truly amazing, and even if you’re poor, you should go out right now and shell out the requisite £4 for it. It presents much of the same classic Careless Talk.. styled gear as the first issue, but by some strange alchemy it manages to bring together more of my favourite bands/people than any previous single magazine issue.

Both the front and back covers may feature images of grumpy, bearded men, but don't let that put you off. (I’m surely not the only one who finds Steve Gullick’s fixation with grumpy, bearded men rather unsettling?)

But anyway, highlights include;

*Sonic Youth musing on the strange trajectory of their career.

*Aaron North of the Icarus Line conducting a joyously straightforward and informative interview with Kevin Shields (complete with classic Gullick My Bloody Valentine photos).

*Some guy writing about watching Comets on Fire on Mushrooms, with predictably frenzied results.

*The first interview I’ve ever read with awesome femme-blues duo Mr. Airplane Man, in which they talk total fucking sense.

Best of all though is the interview with Ian Svenonious.* His walking of the walk may occasionally falter, but MAN, he can talk the talk better than any other boundary-demolishing, self-conscious rock insurrectionist in history. The single page of text that makes up Ben Myers' Weird War feature, (accompanied by a full page photo of the group that makes them look like icons of cool pulled directly from my dreams, which helps) contains more concentrated idea-sparking, jam-kicking post modern rock-theory rhetoric than the collected monkeys-with-typewriters babbling of a million music bloggers. Svenonious instantly justifies his hyperbolic introduction as "Umberto Eco with an Afro, Marshall Mcluhan with an Arthur Lee fixation.." – in fact, I'll go you one further and tentatively suggest him as the Chomsky of Rock n' Roll. Forget making records, I want this guy to write a book and fully lay down the law on the crazy slogans, images and theories he scatters through his music, sleeve notes and interviews. I find he has an extremely refreshing angle on things, and his cross-pollination of po-mo pop cult style fetish with what seems like totally old-school Marxist rhetoric, always wavering between complete escapist parody and deadly seriousness, is surely worthy of further investigation.

I always found it thrilling the way the kitsch-cool image of The Make-up allowed him to make startling exhortations to his audience to "be aware, be armed" and to "off the pigs in all their forms" without ever coming across as completely ridiculous. Combined with the band’s powerful kick-ass dancing tunes, you could easily engage with his rhetoric at any point along the serious/silly spectrum, taking it as a wholly literal straight-faced calls to arms, or as a bunch of more generalised life-liberation slogans, or as completely ironic retro-revolutionary fun and games.

Similarly, his razor sharp dismantling of current pop culture in the Loose Lips.. interview allows him to slip in a line toward the end about seeing Fidel Castro as a 'great hero', without seeming like a total arse. Which is a lot more than can be said for several other bunches of far more earnest psuedo-political rockers who’ve made similar statements over the years.

I'd imagine lot of people might see Svenonious' dabbling with irony and humour to get his (admittedly incredibly vague) political agenda across as being a bit self-defeating, diluting or destroying his message before it’s even been made, but I'd counter by saying that by recognising the inherent contradiction and shallowness of political rock n' roll, and by cleverly fucking with existing forms and expectations of it, he, at his best, manages to create a music/politics fusion with far more guts and excitement (not to mention shelf-life) than any number of lumpen protest songs.

I realise I could well be preaching to the converted here, and perhaps making points that'll be pretty obvious to anybody who’s already listened to a Nation of Ulysses / Make Up / Weird War record, but as this discussion demonstrates to some extent, a lot of music fans still find it hard to get a grip on Ian Svenonious' various bands, and there are still a lot of intriguing uncertainties about his intentions etc.

( *annoyingly I can't find any current website for Svenonious or Weird War's activities, so if one exists, do let me know )

I’ve listened to the Shins, album one and a half times today, and most other days for the past few weeks.

Friends warn that they sound like Travis, the Guardian compared them to "They Might Be Giants and the Ben Folds Five"(!!). So by rights they should be completely hateful.. & yet & yet.. they’re stuck in my CD player like glue.

I think on one level it's cos the full-scale summer has just gloriously emerged out of the traditional farting around months of 'half-summer', and musically speaking the emergence of summer demands one thing from my wretched kind: floppy haired white boys singing jolly and slightly skewed tunes in an enjoyable manner. And listening to the Shins makes a change from listening to the Byrds 'greatest hits' AGAIN.

More than just that though, the Shins manage to balance everything just right; they’re fun and nice sounding without ever being bland, a bit weird without being quirky, emotional without being whiny - you get the idea. Everything fits just perfectly where it should be.

In his notes in this year’s ATP programme, Stephen Malkmus says of the Shins; "These guys have a lot of songs, in the traditional sense", and that nails it, pretty much. The Shins' songs are like the painstaking works of a master craftsman. Not a note is wasted – every single section of every single song manages to be that-bit-you-really-like, without any that-bit-that’s-merely-OK nonsense to get in the way. These songs should be sold in antique shop windows for £75 each.

But obviously a 'perfect' album does not necessarily equal a truly great album – a truly great album needs to temper it’s soul of genius with uncertainty, confusion and mistakes etc., rather than simply a polished sheen. (A bit of a horrific string of clichés there I'm afraid, but you know what I’m getting at.)

And when I'm not actually in the process of listening to the Shins album, I find myself regarding it with a certain coldness and suspicion. It gives off a message that's kind of like; "Why bother waiting around for unpredictable characters like Malkmus and Westerberg to deliver up their occasional batches of fractured greatness, when you can now rely on these well-trained new pretty boys to dish out the 100% pure 'Crooked Rain..'/'Let It Be' style goods you crave every year for the rest of their lives!"

When I’m in the process of listening to "Chutes Too Narrow" though, all this disappears. "Saint Simon" makes me swoon, "Turn a Square" makes me want to do weird effete skanking dances not seen the days of ‘This Charming Man’, "Mine’s Not a High horse" makes me chuckle, "Kissing the Lipless" makes me conjure some good mental images, "Fighting in a Sack" makes me think of the Replacements, and all the other songs I haven’t mentioned make me smile and nod my head and falteringly attempt to whistle.
Which is good going. 10 songs, just over half an hour, and every single one of them makes you feel happy to be alive. Reservations aside, that's what the concept of 'classic album' ultimately boils down to, isn't it?

(I’ll finish by going for a hat trick of Pavement comparisons in one review by pointing out that it also all sounds VERY Terror Twilight, which is surely a good thing.)

YYYYEEEEE-EEEESSSS!!!

Just when I'm beginning to question the purpose of my existence, it is announced that Arthur Lee & Love is/are playing at a Victorian sea-front pavilion 200 yards from my house.

YYYYYYEEEEEEE-EEEEESSSSS!!!!

NOW PLAYING: Love - De Capo

It is my sad duty to report that the cover-mounted CD on this month’s issue of Terrorizer magazine isn’t up to the usual high standards.
For one thing, there are several tracks on it by bands on Roadrunner Records, officially the WORST RECORD LABEL IN THE WORLD EVER, (home of gut-wrenchingly horrid third rate nu-metal support acts and, even worse, over-enthusiastic ‘streetteamers’ and PRs desperately trying to make them sound interesting). Most of the other tracks are of the terminally uninteresting I-will-beat-you-to-death-with-my-great-testosterone-sweating-bald-head variety of ‘metallic hardcore’. I mean, jesus, how much more pointless, non-specific hardcore man-rage does the world need? At least black metal bands have songs that are actually about cool stuff - like Satan and the end of the world and mass-murder. Stuff which, y’know, actually has reason to sound like the sonic equivalent of a tribe of gorillas tearing each other’s cocks off.
And wouldn’t you know it, the two tracks that go some way towards redeeming this particular CD are the heart-warming satanic rampage provided by Behexen and the indie-friendly weird grindcore of Daughters. For shame, Terrorizer, for shame. (Obviously the magazine itself is still great fun, but it’s the CD that gives me an excuse to spend money on it.)

Now I bet you don’t see any of those other oh-so-trendy music bloggers bothering to write a post about the free CD with Terrorizer magazine!

Actually, there’s probably a good reason for that.

PLAYING AT TIME OF POST: Rough Trade shops Post-Punk Vol.1 compilation

OK, the logo is fixed, so I think it's time to declare this weblog OPEN FOR BUSINESS. I'll deal with the links and comments and stuff like that later.. the basics are all set. Here's some discussion of some largely unpopular music to get things rolling:

Right now I'm listening to an album I bought for 99p in a Virgin Megastore clearout sale. It’s 'Knock Loud' by The Paybacks, a Detroit band based around the talents of singer/guitarist Wendy Case, and it's pretty fucking great actually. Far better than I was expecting at any rate. At its best it sounds kind of like the Dirtbombs playing the hits of Cheap Trick with a vocal chord shreddin', 60-a-day smokin' female singer. At its worst it sounds a little bit 'alternative rock' – I blame the unimaginative production - but still way better than, say, Hole or something. They've got that blastin-from-yr-stereo sugar rush garage rock sound down pretty well, and combined with great power-pop tunes, kick ass guitar solos and a singer who sounds like she cleans her teeth with a broken whisky bottle…… a pound well spent!

Another 99p bought me a 7-track ep / mini-album thingy by the currently trendy
Cass McCombs. Unfortunately it's like a dictionary definition of 'dreary', but hopefully I'll be able to sell it to someone for more than 99p when he inevitably becomes a fully fledged floppy fringed shmindie superstar.

On another garage rock tip, a copy of the Mummies' 'Death By Unga-Bunga' is finally in my possession, and it's everything I hoped it would be. Subhumanly trashy (they coin the term 'belo-fi', which I quite like) and wantonly crazed rock'n'roll shit which is just… more so, and yet simultaneously less so, than most of its competitors in the field of crazed rock'n'roll shit.

Things I love about it:
I love the way that the sound mix manages to be both headache inducingly loud and yet of such poor quality that much of the time you can’t discern the lyrics or tell any of the instruments apart. I love the way that '(You Must Fight to Live) On the Planet of the Apes' is the great world-uniting nerd-rock anthem that Man or Astroman? have never quite managed to make. I love the general 'mental kids screaming and banging pot and pans for the hell of it' energy of the whole thing. I love the fact that beneath all the racket and minimalism, the Mummies are an absolutely awesome rock band with killer dancing grooves, great riffs and awesome early Kinks-style guitar solos, who have clearly spent many years carefully absorbing the history of their art, from the greats of the Nuggets-era through to Billy Childish and Guitar Wolf, and are capable of recreating the best bits of it effortlessly. I love the fact that they do barely concealed rip-offs of tunes like 'Psychotic Reaction' and 'Dropout Boogie' and don’t give a damn if we recognise them. I love the fact that they do theoretically mellow organ-based '60s style grooving songs and make them sound homicidally aggressive. And I love the way they do fantastic surf instrumentals that sound like Davie Allen and the Arrows trying to play powertools. Above all, I love the fact that the Mummies fall into that great category also occupied by such diverse groups as Ex-Models and Venom: Pure unashamed party music which is so intense and demented that no right-thinking person would ever dare put it on at a party.

(Thanks to Saveloy for turning me on to the Mummies.)

Before regular service begins, I'm fucking w/ the design here..

Why won't the picture/logo show?? gimmee hints: thingonthedoorstep@yahoo.com

So I’ve decided to do a music blog. Well why not?

REASONING:

1. It seems like every other fucker’s got one, and some of them actually have ones that other people bother to read, thus making the whole enterprise seem slightly less masturbatory.

2. Whether I like it or not I spend an inordinate amount of time listening to, and collating opinions upon, music, and opportunities to get a copy of my print zine together or post decent reviews elsewhere are few and far between, so what better form than a weblog in which to chronicle my day to day adventures in the world of popular music?

3. Maybe if I prove to be good at it, people might eventually start sending me free stuff (seriously – anybody out there who has the power to send me free records, please, go ahead, I’ll be sycophantic as hell, I promise..)

MY UNIQUE SELLING POINT: whereas most other music bloggers are fairly hip and down with all the latest tunes and able to brush aside huge swathes of MP3s ‘twas if they were matchsticks on a daily basis, my music consumption is far more eccentric and random; basically, I don’t have much spending money, I don’t have a fast internet connection, I don’t live in a cool, hipster-saturated community and I don’t listen to daytime radio. Hence the music I end up digging is almost entirely down to chance most of the time, so prepare for many wild tangents about stuff I recorded off John Peel, stuff I just borrowed from the library, stuff I bought in a clearout sale because I thought it looked cool, pointless mix CD tracklistings etc., as well as the occasional standard drivelling about new releases from my favourite currently active bands and so on..

…maybe sometimes I’ll also write about things that aren’t music-related. Let’s see how it goes.

Right then. Hope you enjoy.