dag 1152: The Fearful Symmetry of Life

I had to drive 22,222 miles in order to take this photo.

dag 1133: Where do baby beams go when they die?

I have been buying music lately and in some sort of real breakthrough for me it isn't Swedish music.

Månen hänger lågt

Bill Nelson - Getting the Holy Ghost Accross ****:

I originally bought this on prerecorded cassette and it quickly became one of my favourite albums. I tended to only listen to tapes in the car and this was without doubt the tape I played the most. Since I got my first CD player I have been on the lookout for this on CD but no shops ever seemed to stock it. Some years ago I found out it had never been released on CD and that there was a group of fans trying to get people to sent requests to the record company to try and get them to do the right thing and release it on CD. I sent them an email and kind of forgot about it until a few weeks ago when I spotted it in HMV in Leeds. I had been considerring getting a Ramstein CD (because the bass player plays a Sandberg bass), but when I saw this I felt duty bound to buy it as I had sent the record company that email some years back. I hadn't heard it for many years and although it did sound somewhat dated I had heard the songs so many times first time round that it seemed instantly familier to me. It reminds me very much of the Simple MInds album Sons and Fascination. If you liked that album you will definately like this.

Nine Inch Nails - Downward Spiral **:

I was busy trying to think of a good name for my new musical project and each time I wrote one down I googled it to see if anyone had already used it. One of the names I came up with was Downward Spiral. It turned out that it is the name of a Nine Inch Nails album so I looked it up on Wikipedia and read a few reviews on amazon where in general people were saying it was one of the all time best albums of al time. I saw that there were 2 version of the album available at the moment. One was the standard one and the other was a 2 disk special edition. The special edition was quite a bit more expensive and I knew that if I ended up really liking this I would kick myself if I didn't get the special edition. The album was recorded in the house where Sharon Tate was murdered by Charles Manson and that kind of made me feel that this album might actually just be someone trying to be controversial. I opted for the lower cost version and after a couple of plays it was the right choice. There are a few good moment on it but mainly it comes accross as someone trying to break a few bounderies. I was looking forward to hearing Hurt (the last track) as I realy like the cover of it that Johnny Cash did and that is saying something as I have never liked anything else I have heard by him. Unfortunately the NIN version just isn't a patch on the Johnny Cash version. I may play it again occaissionaly but on the whole it was a bit of a let down, whcih is a shame as I liked the Quake music that Trent Reznor did.

Muse - Absolution ***:

Since getting my new bass I have joined the bassworld forum and really enjoyed reading a lot of the threads. One thread had a few people discussing how good Muse were so I thought I would take their word for it and give them a try. They both said how good they thought the album Absolution was and as it had a song called Stockholm Syndrome on it this seemed the best one to give a try.

The openning track was amazing and I had to play it over a few times before moving on. I got as far as Stockholm syndrome and thought it was all great. It was one of those albums where I keep getting to the end of Stockholme Syndrome and then having to start again from the beginning. I have to admit that the first 5 songs are so good that I haven't actually played th whole thing through yet. The music seemd to me to be pretty unique, but then I realised that it did remind me of another group - one that I didn't know particularly well, and then it came to me, it was Queen. They remind me of Queen, only they are heaps better than Queen were - in my opinion anyway. So well worth checking out if you don't yet know them.

Emmerhoff and the Melancholy Babies - Electric Reverie *****:

I spotted this CD when I was browsing through Virgin Records in Leeds last week. I was looking at the ELP CDS and this was next to it. I liked the cover picture and I liked the fact that the name had the word Melancholy in it as I seem to be really into melancholic music at the moment. I was sensible and didn't buy it there and then - I went back to work and looked for reviews. The reviews were all good so I bought it the next day and was not at all disappointed. The album features a cover version of the song Cowboys by Portishead and it has to be on the best songs I have heard. I feel that it surpases the original. It is worth buynig the album just for this track, but the rest is really good too and it gets better with more plays. I decided that I just had to send them a myspace friend request and not only did they accept, but they put a message up on my myspace page which I think is pretty decent of them. I should also add that I felt that the trees on the cover looked like Scandinavian trees and I was right as they are from Norway.

Robin Guthrie - Continental *****:

I first heard one of the songs from this album when I spotted Robin Guthries myspace page. It sounded just like the Cocteau Twins but minus the exquiset voice of Elizabeth Fraser. I new it was only a metter of time before I bought this and I ended up downloading it from iTunes after failing to find it in Leeds. It is great music to listen to while working so that what I have been doing. In fact it is possible that I have listened to this album more than all the others reviewed in this post. I should also add that Mr Guthrie has a jolly enjoyable blog.

Big Star - Third***:

This Mortal Coil covered a couple of songs from this CD on their first album (It'll End in Tears) so I thought it would be good to hear the originals. There are 2 tracks from this album on the "It'll end in tears" TMC album and as the TMC covers are usualy pretty different from the originals I had no idea what to expect of the originals. It turned out thet the originals were pretty similar to the ocvers and wher I thought Howard Devoto was probably being pretty left field in his singing on Holocaust - it seemed to me that he was just trying to be as close to the singing on the original as he could. All in all I liked both the songs that TMC covered and I quite liekd a few others, but this is not an album I have felt compelled to return to much. I prefer listening to It'll end in tears as the other songs on it are beter than the others songs on Third.

There are a few more new bands I have spotted and may be making a few more purchases pretty soon. Reviews will no doubt follow at some point.

dag 1126: The world is sinking through the ground

A few recent internet related problems in the Nelson Mandela building at the Björk Bjiggler Critical Mass HQ (Northern) combined with a general lack of available time have prevented me from posting over the last few weeks. Things seem to have sorted themselves out a bit so I can once again put finger to keyboard and produce some more prose full of insight and thought - or maybe not.

First of all it is about time I drew your attention to the fact that we now have a new blog layout which, to the non internet savvy, means that it doesn't look the same as it used to do. As with most things that happen in my life, it did not come about due to me being proactive, but reactive. I logged in to write a post one day and was presented with a message saying I could either carry on with the blog as it is, but miss out on the all the new features that are being introduced or upgrade to the new format and be able to make full use of all the wonderful new features. There was an inviting link to click on to start the upgrade process and a message next to it warning that all template customisations would be lost. As our template had been heavily modified over the years I thought about this for a bit (ok for quite some time actually - I am not very good at making decisions at the best of times). Eventually I came to the conclusion that the only way forward is to keep up with the times and move on rather than staying stuck with the old ways and getting left behind. So I clicked the link and ended up with what you now see before you. At the same time I decided to start using blogger comments (these weren't available when we first set it up), which means we have lost all of the old ones I think it is better to have them integrated rather than being separate and its probably better to do it now than in the future which would mean even more comments getting lost. If you can remember any comments that are missing please feel free to re-enter them against the appropriate post.

Since the last instalment my new Sandberg bass arrived from Germany. It seemed to take quite a while for my order to get processed, but once it had been shipped it only took 2 days to arrive. The box was huge and filled with airbags which surrounded and protected bass, which was inside the Sandberg gig bag that is supplied with all Sandberg basses. Opening up the gig bag was pretty exciting as I finally got to see my first glimpse the bass I had been waiting for for the last week or so. I chose the bass based on the picture on the left, though I new mine would have a black rather than a pearl pick guard. I thought the bass looked good in pictures, but in the flesh I think it looks even better. The first thing that struck me was the quality. Every component just oozes quality in both design and build. I just had to have a play and was also amazed to find that the bass was practically in perfect tune - I only had to adjust 1 string slightly. The violet burst colour is much darker in reality than the picture and will go perfectly with the type of music I will be playing with it. I was a bit worried about how I would get on with 5 strings as I had only ever played 4 string basses before, but so far it hasn't seemed any harder to play because of that extra string. Now I want to get a smallish bass amp (got my eye on a Phil Jones briefcase) and I must say I also wouldn't mind getting a few of these EBS pedals (their amps look pretty good too) - nothing to do with them being Swedish of course!

I've also got to think up a name for my new band - then I can start recording stuff.