Musical Snobbery – Page 35

Hottest 100 2009 – Folk Rock Uber Alles!

The results are in…

Well, the leak was right (although it was hardly a stretch) and Mumford and Sons have won the Triple J Hottest 100 for 2009. I can’t say I’m jumping up and down with joy or anything, but it’s a decent song, so good on them.

Three of my selected songs got in, specifically Blue Juice with Broken Leg at number 5, Lisa Mitchell’s Coin Laundry at number 7 and John Butler’s One Way Road at number 39. On the other hand – in a fine showing for the irony department – most of the songs I trimmed from my shortlist actually made it.

I’ve done my usual analysis of the results (expect some kind of exciting graph soon!) and the average score for the entire countdown this year was 2.77. This works out as between “An alright song but nothing special” and “I heartily endorse this tune or composition”. The country breakdown is 36 for Australia, 29 for the UK, 23 for the United States, 4 for Canada, 3 for New Zealand (all of the courtesy of the Conchords), 2 each for Italy and France and 1 for Sweden, which is a nice spread.

OK, that’s all I’ve got to say for now. My brain is fried after nine hours of serious radio listening (and cleaning, which I was doing during the serious radio listening).

Oh yes! It’s also Australia Day! I really must get some of those inane car flags and a southern cross tattoo. Maybe I can even put a FOWF sticker on my vehicle! Hooray!!

*sigh*

I want Hermione Granger and a Rocket Ship!

Take a ride on Rumbleroar!

I’m definitely coming late to the party but if you’re any kind of Harry Potter fan you owe it to yourself to check out A Very Potter Musical – an incredibly silly, completely unauthorised musical “reinterpretation” of Harry Potter put together by students at the University of Michigan last year. I could go on and on about how great it is, but all I really need to say is that it features a tap-dancing Lord Voldemort. You hear me? A tap-dancing Lord Voldemort. What the hell are you waiting for? (And what the hell is a Hufflepuff?)

The downside is I now have a crush on Draco Malfoy. Before anyone gets out Scarf of Sexual Preference I should point out that I have a crush strictly on the AVPM version of Draco Malfoy who is played by the very cute and downright hilarious Lauren Lopez (I have no idea why was she continually rolling around the stage but it was extremely amusing).

Anyway, tomorrow’s Australia Day (Boo! Hooray! Boo! Hooray! Call me when you’re finished) so you can expect an entry on how crap the Hottest 100 turns out to be at least 😉

Roman Robots (that clean the floor)

Have you ever been told that you look like a Llama?

Well it’s that time of the year again when I desperately try to face down the reality of my own aging by voting in the Triple J Hottest 100. The process was actually fairly easy this year – in fact the only problem I faced was filling in two slots left over once I’d picked out my favourite songs. That’s never happened before, obviously music is getting more and more crap as time wears on (No! It’s not because I’m becoming old and irrelevant! Honestly! 🙂

So my top ten picks for this year (in alphabetical order of artist) are…

Ben Harper And Relentless 7 – Under Pressure (Like A Version) – Brilliant cover.
Bluejuice – Broken Leg – Official theme of the 1985 world skip-rope championship!
John Butler Trio – One Way Road – Rockin’ hippie music.
Kid Sam – We’re Mostly Made Of Water – Dark, spooky and not on YouTube.
Lady Sovereign – So Human – Messing with the Cure should be blasphemy, but I can’t help liking this 🙂
Lisa Mitchell – Coin Laundry – The funny thing is I find her voice annoying in everything else she sings, but it seems to work on this song.
Metric – Gimme Sympathy – Canadian pop-rock with an impressive single continuous shot video.
Mos Def – Auditorium – Ford Prefect raps.
Royksopp – The Girl And The Robot (Ft. Robyn) – Scandinavian electro epic.
Very Best, The – Warm Heart Of Africa – Cheery music from Malawi.

Two songs that almost (but not quite) got into the final two slots…

A few more notable tracks from the year…

And that’s your lot!

Their Eyes Never Blink…

Channelling H.P.Lovecraft in song!

It must be getting close to Christmas. It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Fishmen has been playing in my head for days.

Oh wow, there’s a video!

An Arabian Moon

Must be a devil between us or something…

Hey by the Pixies always makes me think of being cooped up in an economy seat, flying across the deserts of Arabia, watching a full moon – bloody red with dust – suspended in the sky, eyes heavy with grit and lack of sleep.

Well it does.

Skype Games for the Stupid

It was Pringles

Player one sings the ingredients list of a food product to a randomly selected piece of Bach. Player two tries to figure out what the food product is.

God damn we’re a sad bunch ;D

Tlot Tlot Tlot Tlot Tlot Tlot Tlot Tlot Tlot (Should I go on?)

A musical diversion

I was thinking the other day about Tlot Tlot.

Tlot Tlot were a Perth band from (I think) the 1990s. I don’t know that much about them to be honest, in fact I only know one of their songs. But that one song is a doozy.

Imagine you put the members of They Might be Giants and Barnes and Barnes in a room with a honky-tonk piano, a mixing desk and several sound effect CDs. Then got them slightly drunk. They might come up with something like that one song – a work titled Box of Gods.

Box of Gods is hard to pin down. It seems to be some kind of attack on either religion, or the commercialisation of religion (or maybe both). It’s stuffed full of wacky sound effects, distorted vocals and lyrics so nonsensical that it’s hard to tell if you’re hearing them right. But it’s energetic, crazy and catchy as hell.

Now, your odds of finding a copy of it (or the album it’s off Pistolbuttsatwinkle’atwinkle) are probably pretty low, but because I’m a generous guy I thought I’d post the lyrics (insofar as I can make them out). This will also have the effect of increasing Tlot-Tlot’s web presence by at least 10%, which has to be a good thing 🙂

So here we go…

Box of Gods – Tlot Tlot

(Playing tennis, in the Herald…)

(Bop! Bop! Bop!)

You bought me a box of gods,
I brought you down, I brought you down,
You bought me a box of gods,
I brought you down, I brought you down,
You bought me a box of gods,
I brought you down, I brought you down,
You bought me a box of gods,
I brought you down,

Now wouldn’t it be funny, if you could purchase,
Religion on a stick?
And wouldn’t it be funny, if you could buy,
A god to get you by?

(Playing tennis, in the Herald Sun)

You bought me a box of gods (Bop! Bop!),
I brought you down, I brought you down,
You bought me a box of gods,
I brought you down, I brought you down,
You bought me a box of gods (Bop! Bop!),
I brought you down, I brought you down,
You bought me a box of gods,
I brought you down,

Now wouldn’t it be funny, if you could purchase,
A god soap on a rope?
Wouldn’t it be funny, watching your father,
Break down into a lather?
And wouldn’t it be useless, to buy a used car,
From a man with an honest face?
And wouldn’t it be horrible, to scrub the bathroom floor,
With holy water purchased by the case?

(Just make sure, you wash behind your ears!)

(Bop! Bop!)
(Bop! Bop!)

Now wouldn’t it be funny, if you could purchase,
A costume just like this?
And wouldn’t you be better off, if you weren’t,
All thumbs and two left feet?

(Pin yourself, on the cross, in the Herald Sun)

(Bop! Bop!)

That’s your lot for the day! 😀

Found in Space – Again

Another entry…

By the time a species achieves interstellar flight it has usually developed a sense of aesthetics so refined that exposure to poor design causes nausea, lethargy and (in extreme cases) death. As such the post-humans of Nova Eritrea had long divested their culture of all but the very highest in art and architecture, and had no inkling of the dangers contained in the ancient data device they found in a derelict spacewreck orbiting a nearby star… A year later fourteen billion Nova Eritreans were dead, taken by what the chroniclers would call “The Plague of the Lovely Lady Lumps”.

— Boing Boing 100-word fiction competition

What a lucky man he was!

This is your whale. This is your whale on drugs.

Hmmm, well I haven’t done much posting recently have I? I’ll put it down to getting back into the swing of work and spending much of my time uploading and annotating photos from my UK trip. I’ve almost finished the first day’s worth!

I’ve also got caught up in a writing challenge on Whitechapel. It’s the first time I’ve tried writing anything but mindless blog drivel and role playing material in ages, so we’ll see how it goes. The deadline is November 1st – with luck it’ll actually be readable by then.

Kraft has come to it’s senses and realised that “iSnack 2.0” is one of the worst marketing decisions in history. They’ve posted a bunch of more popular names to their website for the public to vote on and will be announcing the replacement name this week. I didn’t bother to vote – I’m just happy that clueless tech-speech abomination is being banished. Anyway, the only name I would have voted for is ‘Voldemite’ and that wasn’t on the list.

Before I go I’ll direct everyone’s attention to this song, which I discovered over the weekend – “Lucky Man” by Emerson Lake and Palmer. The song itself is (in my opinion) nothing special, a fairly dreary rock-folk dirge about a guy who goes off to war and gets shot. What makes it remarkable is the play out, the only explanation for which I can come up with is that they got a humpbacked whale in to do guest vocals and dosed it up on LSD.

Listen to the first 20 seconds or so to get the scope of the piece (it’s all like that), then jump to 3.20 to be astounded by the assorted wails, shrieks, groans and howls you get when you pump twenty litres of hallucinogens into a giant sea-going mammal!

That’s all I’ve got to say.

I can’t stop listening to this…

I’m not very good at singing songs but here’s a try…

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch,
You must first invent the universe,
Space is filled with a network of wormholes,
You might emerge somewhere else in space,
Somewhen else in time,

The sky calls to us,
If we do not destroy ourselves,
We will one day,
Venture to the stars,

A still more glorious dawn awaits,
Not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise,
A morning filled with four hundred billion suns,
The rising of the milky way,

The cosmos is full beyond measure,
With elegant truths,
Of exquisite interrelationships,
Of the awesome machinery of nature,

I believe our future depends powerfully on how well we understand this cosmos,
In which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky,

The brain does much more than just recollect,
It intercompares, synthesises, analyses,
It generates abstractions,
The simplest thought like the concept of the number one,
Has an elaborate, logical underpinning,
The brain has its own language for testing the structure and consistency of the world,

A still more glorious dawn awaits,
Not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise,
A morning filled with four hundred billion suns,
The rising of the milky way,

The sky calls to us,
If we do not destroy ourselves,
We will one day,
Venture to the stars,

For thousands of years,
People have wondered about the universe,
Did it stretch out forever?
Or was there a limit?
From the big bang to black holes,
From dark matter to a possible big crunch,
Our image of the universe today is full of strange sounding ideas,

How lucky we are to live in this time,
The first moment in human history,
When we are, in fact, visiting other worlds,

A still more glorious dawn awaits,
Not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise,
A morning filled with four hundred billion suns,
The rising of the milky way,

The surface of the earth,
Is the shore of a cosmic ocean,
Recently we have waded a little way out,
And the water seems inviting…