No Apologies For The Infinite Radness 1.2.16 - "Leif Erikson " (Interpol)

The thing about Interpol’s debut is that it sounded so much like Joy Division. The thing about Joy Division is that I only really liked them when they weren’t sounding like Joy Division.

You can see the problem.

Sure, points for honesty. The brief, tyrannical reign of New Wave 2.0 was always about extrapolating what could have come after the 1989, had the music industry not chosen instead to wholesale recycle the Seventies with far worse fashion. If we hadn’t had the gall to mock trousers that were needlessly wide at the ankles while wearing T-shirts that changed fucking colour. If you goal was a do-over, who better to base that on than one of the greatest what-ifs of the eighties or any other decade? Let other bands hide their guiding lights under a bushel. As their first album declared, Interpol was letting you know exactly where the flame spilled out from.

Not that light is in evidence here. Even the night is blind here, finding what might be pinpricks of illumination through heat alone. The one mode that Prelimterpol tended to get right for me, as we’ve discussed, was the cavernous soundscape. The alien world described over a distorted connection by a feverish, dying astronaut. “Leif Erikson” nails that mode perfectly, from the title outwards; an insomniac always on the verge of falling asleep, experiencing the flow of time as a moonless sail across an infinite, glass-flat sea. Trapped in the liminal prison where everything thought circles, ripping your skin with each rotation. What was it she said about me? What if she shows up early? What if I’m as dead as she thinks I am? Everything repeats, everything hurts, nothing resolves, nothing heals.

There are songs you should only listen to at night, and songs you mustn't listen to at night. This is both. A hymn for the gloaming. A warning of what’s coming, on those nights where sleep is an ocean away.

B-side:

New Load Of Balls, Please

Predicting a close one for the snooker this year, lads, though I'm even less certain I'm getting this right than I usually am - yesterday just felt too crazy to properly parse. Ah well.

Selby 18 - Brecel 16.

Good Friday 40K

Jesus! He'd probably be into 40K, innit. Likely play as Chaos, too, really wind up the SO-CALLED religous authorities. Just how he rolled.

I've been busily chipping away at the same Assault On Black Reach mob of Orks that I've had on the go for well over a year now. Another five of them have fallen off the end of the conveyer belt.

Along with the three I'd already done, that puts me almost halfway through the squad.

I also finished my last Advaned Space Crusade Tyranid Warrior too, still clinging doggedly to my bare minimum/ham fisted incompetence colour scheme that has graced my 'Nids for almost three decades now.

The other big development in my hobbying is that I've finally got enough glass display cabinets to house every miniature/scenery peie I've painted since I was sixteen. I had planned on photographing them to include in this post, but one of the shelves collapsed on Monday, dropping three metal Strike Cruisers on my collection of resin Imperial Defence Platforms, causing some pretty aggravating  

I've managed to salvage two of the crusiers and all the platforms (though one of the latter looks like its had a brush with the Warp that it won't be coming back from). The last ship should also be fixable, but it's going to need pinning, and for that I need to find a drill-bit that I haven't spent a decade using to re-open superglue nozzles that have gummed themselves shut. Until I've managed that, I don't have the heart to show you the 99.5% of my collection which isn't smashed to bits.

Anyway. Happy Easter.

A Tale Of Cocktails #61

South Side

Ingredients:

50ml gin
25ml lemon juice

25ml simple syrup
5 mint leaves

Taste: 8
Look: 7
Cost: 8
Name: 6
Prep: 7
Alcohol: 5
Overall: 7.2

Preparation: Gently muddle mint leaves and lemon juice. Add other ingredients and shake with ice. Garish with a mint sprig.

SURPRISE! We are EXTREMLY BRIEFLY back!

A south side is a mojito without the faff or the dead wood. Half the time, twice the strength. MATHS.

No Apologies For The Infinite Radness 1.2.15 - "Love Will Tear Us Apart " (Joy Division)

Roddy Woomble once said “Love Will Tear Us Apart” was Joy Division’s best single, if only because it’s the only one that captures the band’s live energy. I was four months when Ian Curtis killed himself, so I had to take Woomble’s word for it, but it certainly feels unusual – almost unique - within the band’s songs. This is one of those contrary takes wearying dickheads pretend are “unpopular”, or – heaven forfend! – “cancellable”, but I’ve never been able to get next to Joy Division. I don’t quibble with Peter Hook’s contention their music seemed to come from some other place. It just wasn’t a very enticing place, cold and distant and half-illuminated with polarised light. Extraordinary doesn’t have to mean engaging.

“Love Will Tear Us Apart”, together with equally late cuts “Atmosphere” and (so late Curtis was dead before it was recorded, and it came out as a New Order joint) “Ceremony”, represented the band moving into more interesting territory. Or, given the previous metaphor, perhaps I should say they represented a shift in how the band processed the territory they were already exploring. Songs about how it felt to traverse this strange, alien world, rather than terse reports about what it contained.

It’s not that this isn’t still minimalist (part of why it’s almost impossible to cover), though it wasn’t common to hear Curtis on guitar to free Sumner up for keys – the song is built around a D chord both because of its versatility and the ease with which Curtis could play it. But there’s an energy here that’s purposefully held back in the band’s two studio albums. A sense of release, as Curtis channels his disintegrating marriage, the stress of juggling new success and old commitments, and a recent epilepsy diagnosis into a piano-wire tight growl of exhausted desperation. The cliché contrast of how good/poor luck in life matters nothing compared to poor/good luck in love is rewritten to something much more interesting: “Everything is awful, but all that really matters is my marriage – which just so happens to 

also be fucked”.

There are all sorts of offensively self-centred ways to link Curtis’ last months with the quality of the song. All of them we shall ignore. No song is so good it is worth a human life, and no band is so good them losing one among their number is primarily sad because the music stops. Instead of inferences, then, let’s stick to the one certainty we have in this: “Love Will Tear Us Apart” is one of the greatest songs ever recorded. That should be - HAS to be - enough.

B-side:

End Of Year Progress Roundup

Another quiet year on the blog, and this time I don't even have the excuse of moving house, changing jobs, or having to keep grinding out content for Geek Syndicate. So what have I been doing?

The short and entirely unsatisfying answer is "not a lot".  My new work/living combination doesn't afford me quite the same amount of unclaimed time as I once enjoyed. Much of what spare time I've been able to claw back from domesticity/capitalism has gone into starting a book version of IDFC, something I assumed would be relatively painless until I remembered I hate everything I've ever written approximately six months after I write it. I'm almost done with the first three essays, with thirty more stretching out ahead of me in various stages of NOPE.

There's been a little progress on the painting front, at least. I do mean little, as well, but I've accelerated over the last few months, which is encouraging. My 'Nid army is now at around 4500 points, with these two lads rounding off a third Warrior Brood (as always, I've deliberately painted them in the same absurdly simple colour scheme I've been employing since my mid teens).

(Also pictured: a piece of battlefield detritus I painted during a D&D session, just to give my hands something to do).

I've also been chipping away at my Black Reach Orks, last seen here back in August. Since then, two more Boyz have dropped off the end of the assembly line.

The assembly line itself has moved on fractionally as well, with every Boy below precisely one step closer to completion than they were four months ago.

There is one exception, as the particularly attentive may observe - the lad at the front left has a head that's nothing more than undercoated. This is due to a savage, unpredented and deeply upsetting betrayal, in which two of my family members conspired against me. First, my cat knocked the miniature to the floor from where it sat on our kitchen table, whereupon my dog swallowed the head whole.

Which reminds me: we have a dog now. Here he is:

JUST LOOK AT HIM HE'S AWFUL. Except more canine-related excuses in the future, because this lad CANNOT BE TAMED. He makes Zoltran Hound of Dracula look like Lassie on general anesthetic. It's like living with a chaos god hiding inside a smelly rug. As with essentially every dog since the beginning of the domestication process, it's a good fucking job he's cute.

ANYWAY. Next up on my list of things to do is another No Apologies... post, this time on a song which a) I have no strong specific connection to and b) everyboday already knows their position on, so you won't want to miss that. Afterwards, maybe I'll do a bit more work towards finishing my critical tour of Mike Carey's Lucifer, given I have at least two more other Carey/Gross collaborations to bore you about. The next essay in the book is calling me too, though, so who can say?

Right. then Happy New Year for those as recognise it, and I'll be back with more musings in 2023.

D CDs #472: Things George Michael Has Gotta Have

Faith just isn't for me. I simply don't care what George Michael thinks about sex, or how George Michael wishes he were having more sex, or how getting more sex as George Michael can get complicated by the fact that George Michael is George Michael.  It's not Michael specifically; I'd put myself as a 9.8 at least on the horny/revenge scale of "Why make art"; horny songs just don't do it for me. It sounds like a cheap shot under the circumstances, but nevertheless, it all feels a little too much like listening to someone masturbating.

Michael's debut album isn't exclusively about sex, though after being bludgeoned by Michael's libido for fifteen solid minutes via "Father Figure" and "I Want Your Sex", it's hard to think about much else. There's a sense of vulnerability here which at least seasons the horndog panting. Which makes sense, given Michael a) had just torpedoed a band that had sold thirty million albums and - via a China tour - changed the international political landscape, and b) was trying to challenge Prince and Michael Jackson on territory they didn't so much own, as had sculpted from the planet's bedrock through sheer force of will. You can see why he'd be nervous - there must have been times while recording the album where Michael was wondering whether unseating Hu Yaobang would have been the easier job.

So it's not fair to call Faith one-note, though comparisons to Prince and Jackson do rather underline the album's lack of range. It's probably not helped by the fact Michael just completely, perfectly nails what he's aiming for on the opening track. "Faith" is glorious, as tight and bouncy a package as Michael's denim-sprayed arse in the accompanying video. A rollocking stab of lust and nervousness, set to a rhythm like the heartbeat of God. The vid even sees Michael sport a jacket emblazoned with the word "REVENGE" on the back, as though the guy gets what art should be after all. It's also the shortest song on the album by a minute and change.

Once you've heard it, though, do you really need the icky metaphors of "Father Figure", or the knackered randiness of "Hard Day", or, the fear Michael's own success is cock-blocking him in "Kissing A Fool", or etc. etc. Given Michael's later coming out of the closet, we can at least retrospectively cast "I Want Your Sex" as an attempt to literally sing the praises of gay sex, but even so - dude, it's nine minutes long.

The album works best when it moves into different themes. "Hand To Mouth", a pulsing condemnation of the failures of the American dream built around a skeletal, looping keyboard riff and Spanish guitar, offers a breather from the heavy breathing. "Monkey" is a superior example of 80s Gabriel-tinted synth-funk, a desperate plea to a a friend to kick the drugs, and huge fun both as written and when you doggedly insist on taking the lyrics literally. 

Neither are fit to buff "Faith"'s leather jacket, of course. Nothing else here is. Faith both proved Michael could write and sing with the best of them, and that there was no guarantee he necessarily would. So I says, anyway. What do I know? The album and its many singles did absolutely ludicrous numbers, and netted Michael critical acclaim and multiple awards. All the cold water I can muster thirty-five years later isn't going to make a difference to what caught fire here. Michael's Faith had paid off.

Six tentacles.