Fifty approaches, and I’m
Settled.
More like a building into its foundations
Than a bee on a flower.
My bucket list is emptied across the sand;
All my youthful potential,
which was squandered,
has got its second wind.
A late summer breeze;
A reprieve.
A sigh of relief that I’m finally filling my wings.
How did it get on my wishlist?Every now and then, I wonder about the bands I listened to in my teens, and what they’re doing now. Remember Spiders by Space, that album that your girlfriend wouldn’t buy because of the cover? I discovered that they’re still active, so figured let’s slap their latest album on my wishlist and see what comes from it.
On first listening, the album basically sounded like regret. It sounded like the sound of my pen on paper writing a letter to Karen’s dad saying “I’m so sorry that I put this album on my wishlist because you spent your money on it and now I feel really guilty.” The songs are musically uncreative and the lyrics devoid of any wit or cleverness. Most of the choruses are just the title of the song repeated four times.
As I played it through for a second time, it wasn’t quite so bad – with a little familiarity behind me, I could start to appreciate one or two nifty little pop hooks here and there, but still there is nothing that I would go so far as to recommend to a friend. Maybe to someone I didn’t like, someone whose time I wanted to waste.
The best bit of this album was the bit where I felt like I had definitely given it as much time as it deserved, and unceremoniously removed it from the car to make way for the next CD. Normally at this point I’d rip it to MP3 and add it to the archive, but I might not bother on this occasion.
The Fault In Our Stars soundtrack by Various Artists. I sense that reviewing this will be tricky, so I’ll just do my usual stunt of just blathering on for three hundred words without actually reviewing anything. Damn, I’ve just given away all my trade secrets, haven’t I?
How did it get on my wishlist?I first heard of Stornoway when they played on Jools Holland in 2009. Quite why I was watching that specific episode, I’m not sure – it might have been because Foo Fighters were also on it, which offers a nice and completely unplanned link back to the previous review in this series! Stornoway were absolutely stunning, and they had a very rare united quality about them – not just a bunch of musicians on a stage, but a single organism. We then found out that they were playing a gig locally in February 2010, so Karen and I went to that. An interesting thing happened at that gig – towards the end of the show, there was some sort of technical problem that resulted in the power being cut. The band proceeded to play the next song unamplified. The audience watched in silence, of course, and the intimacy in that room was electrifying. The ever-cynical Karen theorised that the power cut had been a stunt, orchestrated by the band to deliberately create that tender moment. And maybe it was, but fuck, it worked. Anyway, for some reason we then forgot about Stornoway for a while. Until recently, when Gammidgy (who has always been a fan of theirs) brought this album to my attention, and also bore the sad news that they split up earlier this year. I realised that this here was a remarkable band who I had somehow, despite being offered all the opportunities, allowed to slip through my fingers. So it’s time to catch up.
Stornoway are a very difficult band to categorise. They’re a bit indie, a bit folk, a bit pop, a bit rock. A lot of reviewers find them to be twee, a little bit in the vein of Belle and Sebastian. I can see why they get that impression – Brian Briggs sings with pure, high, almost choirboy-esque voice, and writes lyrics of sometimes endearing naivety about, or inspired by, nature. It’s certainly not sex and drugs and rock’n’roll, and the prejudiced reviewer might dismiss it as immature. But it’s touching, and clever, and thought-provoking, and in many ways this album is reminiscent of early work by The Divine Comedy – I can easily imagine Neil Hannon’s voice singing a lot of these songs.
In recent months, both my home ISP (A&A) and my mobile network (GiffGaff) have increased my monthly bandwidth allowance. For which I am grateful, but having adopted a frugal approach to ensure I stayed within the previous allowance, I suspect that I’ll rarely end up actually making use of the extra that’s now available to me.
Yes.
You know what, I’m bailing on this question. Which is very unlike me, but honestly there is so much well-written eclectia on this album, I could just go round and round in circles.
How did it get on my wishlist?This is almost the wrong question to be asking. Given that I own all of the Foo Fighters’ studio albums, the question should be “why did it take me 3 years to get round to owning this album?” to which the answer, I suppose, is “lukewarm reviews”. I got the impression that this was one that I could afford to miss. But then, as my birthday rolls around, I get a little nudge from Karen to remind me to make sure there’s plenty of stuff on my Amazon wishlist, because apparently I’m very difficult to buy presents for, so hey presto.
The thing about Foo Fighters is that they’re undeniably popular, but I think it’s also fair to say that they’re not exactly the most musically adventurous rock band in the world. When you hear a new Foos song, you never have a moment of doubt where you wonder if your ears deceive you. And while lots of their songs are great, a lot are also Foos-by-numbers.
I had high hopes for this album, because I knew that each song was recorded in a different city across the USA and the album was intended as a homage to the musical heritage of each of those cities, so I was expecting a lot of diversity (you know, a country-ish song from Nashville, grunge from Seattle, and so on). But sadly it’s just got a lot of the Foos-by-numbers on it, and after a few listens, I was a bit underwhelmed. But to end the review there would be doing it a disservice.
Back in 2013 Dave Grohl made a documentary called Sound City about the Sound City Studios in Los Angeles. As part of that documentary, he gathered a whole heap of musicians together to make an album of 11 songs, with one day spent on each song. And it was pretty good, and Dave enjoyed showcasing the historical context around the music, and wanted to do more of that sort of thing, so the idea for the Sonic Highways album-cum-television-programme was born. The next Foos album would be recorded in eight different cities, with one week on each song, along with a companion documentary series that talks about the musical history of each city.
After listening to the album a few times I felt compelled to discover what value the documentary added, if any. So I’ve started watching it, and at the time of writing this review I have seen four of the eight total episodes.
It all becomes a bit clearer now. The band would actually roll up to each studio with the song in a mostly-written state. With the exception of some last-minute changes to arrangements, the only influence that the specific city would actually have on its respective song was the lyrics, which would be heavily inspired by the interviews in the documentary, and often a guest musician appearance (which was generally fairly subtle in its impact). The documentary itself is actually damn interesting, excellent at immersing you into each city’s culture, but the songs end up feeling like a bit of a rushed afterthought. There is a small amount of footage of the band during each episode, and I could be wrong but I get the impression that some of Dave’s bandmates aren’t as enthusiastic about this project as he is.
One thing that is made explicitly clear in the documentary is that doing eight songs from different genres was always something that they strictly wanted to avoid, so that explains why we didn’t get the genre fruit salad that so many people were anticipating. Dave didn’t want to end up with a clusterfuck album (my words, not his) that jumped around all over the place – he wanted to make sure it remained, at its core, a Foo Fighters album. Which is commendable, but I think they played it a little bit too safe. My opinion (and maybe the rest of the band felt the same way) is that the process of making the documentary, far from unlocking fantastic new opportunities for the music, through its demands actually forced them to compromise.
Interestingly though, the experience of watching the documentary does improve the experience of listening to the album. Knowing the background behind the lyrics gives them a lot more weight, and the songs themselves feel more familiar, in the good way. So I’m glad that I did decide to watch it, as it has improved my sentiments towards the songs considerably.
In my opinion, Subterranean stands out, but if I’m brutally honest it’s (like everything else on this album) still just an amalgamation of half a dozen previous Foos songs.
This is the pole
That centres our dance
On a white-knuckle ride,
A meeting by chance.
We stand, disconnected, always looking down,
Swaying together under the ground.
Closer than lovers, breath in my face;
A zipless encounter that we’ll soon erase.
Absorbed in our phones
We glide to our homes
Past oystercard zones
And adverts for loans –
Our fingers meet, chance-like
Our gazes slip, trance-like
The lightning connection
The foreign inflection;
No dangerous smile,
No risk of rejection.
Holding ourselves in complete isolation,
Blanking blank faces at every station.
The pole stands between us, keeping us straight
Where hundreds before us held on;
It’s hardly the moment to ask for a date:
Mind the gap, it’s time to move on.
[Written 23.5.17]
I woke you from your hot nest of sleep;
I had hardly taken in the headline.
One kiss, and I slip back to my bed
To hear grave tones of shellshock and shrapnel
Refusal to despair.
The low thud again.
Children gone.
Makes me not want to let you out of my sight
Nor to forget your sleepy heat on my lips.
Follows on from here
I didn’t think that I’d be writing this so soon.
On Saturday morning, I put the disappointing new alarm clock in the post to send it back to the vendor. Looks like they’re not going to pay for return postage, so I’m down £3.90. But I’m not salty, because things are about to turn out just fine (edit: look at that, they have refunded me after all!)
Saturday night was date night – my dad was down for the weekend, and Karen and I wanted to check out a new-ish restaurant that has been receiving glowing reviews. I’d mentioned that maybe the key to finding the right alarm clock was to go somewhere where I could actually check them out “in the plastic”, so to speak, so Karen suggested that we go out a little early and drop into John Lewis before it closed.
The range on display was very promising, and so we set to work assessing the options for suitability. I initially took a somewhat scattergun approach, and then decided on a different tack, which was: start with the one that looks sexiest, and see if it has all the features I need.
Unfortunately it can be difficult to find out exactly what features each model has. The little price tag next to each demonstration model supposedly lists 4 or 5 features, but it tends to say something useless like:
Sometimes the box has a handy feature list on the outside, but in this case the design was clearly from the minimalist Apple school – ie “here’s a picture of the product, and we’re done.”
Before I know it, cheeky Karen has cheekily cracked open a box and is cheekily perusing the instruction manual.
“But my goodness, you’re a cheeky one,” I gasped.
I then spent a few minutes reading the manual, each turned page causing my smile to widen. I had a play with the demonstration model, using the age-old technique of setting an alarm for one minute in the future. “Yes, it’s definitely loud enough,” shouted Karen from four feet away from me.
A shop assistant sidled over and sat down casually nearby. I suddenly became very conscious of how I must appear, with a box cracked open, leafing through the manual like I was at a library.
“Can I help you sir?”
At this point, the poor guy was subjected to my entire life story to date. I basically recited my previous blog post on the subject. At the end of it, I realised that I’d taken up enough of his time, and the shop was going to be closing soon, so perhaps I should just get on with it and pay for this bloody thing.
So, you’re all itching to find out – what features does this little doozy have, and why is it so bloody perfect? Let’s start with the things that the last one got wrong.
Next, some other good things about it:
All in all, I’m overjoyed with this device. It’s got absolutely everything I’m looking for.
And so this period of turmoil comes to an end, at least where clock radios are concerned.
When I get an idea in my head, I can sometimes become unhealthily obsessed.
My latest quest is for the perfect alarm clock. Let me take you back in time briefly.
I’ve owned two alarm clocks that I can recall. Throughout my teenage and university years, I had a white Morphy Richards radio alarm clock with an integrated light. The light was very nifty, good for saving space on the bedside table. If the light looks a bit like a phone handset, then you should know that that’s no coincidence, because they also produced a near-identical model with a phone instead of a light.
When I moved out on my own, one of the first things I treated myself to was something with an integrated CD player so that I could wake up to music of my choice. It’s the device that I use to this day, though I don’t tend to use it for its CD-playing abilities, nor as a radio. This is because Karen insists on a needlessly complicated and error-prone morning routine whereby her radio comes on at 7am, my alarm goes SQUAWK SQUAWK at 7:30am, and then we actually get out of bed at 7:48am when radio 4 tries to foist Thought For The Day upon us. So I don’t need something that can play sweet music, just something that can make a noise.
However, while it’s good, it could be better. I’ve decided that it’s time to find the perfect alarm clock, and here are the features I’m looking for:
I recently tried ordering a new alarm clock off of Amazon (hey, remember that debacle with the car stereo?) but am having to send it back, as it has the following flaws:
So the search continues. Sadly, it looks like Morphy Richards don’t make alarm clock radios any more, which is a shame as my experience with them so far has been pretty good.
Tell me about your alarm clock and why I should get one.