Haven’t switched theme for a while, but this one looks a lot less clashy and readable than the last one. Advice welcome.
It’s not perfect, but then what is?
Music matters
- Still very much enjoying on a regular basis Neon Neon (Stainless Style, a rather lovely 80s-influenced concept album about John deLorean by Gruff Rhys and Boom Bip), M83 (Saturdays=Youth, now with more vocals and yet much better than Before The Dawn Heals Us) and Nine Inch Nails (The Slip, a new Nine Inch Nails album). If you haven’t downloaded The Slip yet, now is the time to do so.
- The new Ladytron (Velocifero) is pretty decent. Not Witching Hour quality, but well worth your time. There was a crap-quality Myspace stream, but not any more. Album’s officially out at the beginning of June and I shall be buying.
- The Dan le Sac vs. Scroobius Pip album features a hilarious and unexpected Dizzee Rascal backhand and a tribute to Tommy Cooper but an inferior – less spontaneous, I feel – rerecorded version of Thou Shalt Always Kill, which is a shame. It also sounds really odd on my PC, so I need to work out over the next few days if it’s my system (I’m playing most of my music ReplayGained with foobar2000, files encoded as lame 3.97 -V2, to a pair of Sennheiser open-backed headphones plugged into the high-quality stereo output port of my Envy24-chipset sound card; must try on Xbox->hi-fi and original CD->hi-fi) or if it’s just bad production. Still, good stuff on there.
- Edit after listening to the CD in my separates system: Nah, it’s just really bad mastering compression – Scroobius’s vocal clips obviously through the spoken word intro and it gets worse from there. You can make “loud” albums that don’t sound wrong – Primal Scream XTRMNTR, for example, an exhilarating rush of an album – but it’s just bad for this album.
- I’m still getting used to Portishead’s Third. But it’s really growing on me. (Machine Gun really was an odd choice for a first single, wasn’t it? Damn good though.)
- Went to the last Triptych gig a few weeks ago – Mogwai and pals in the Tramway in Glasgow. Mogwai left my ears ringing for pretty much the next day. The new album material they played is, well, new Mogwai material and that’s always fine by me. Malcolm Middleton really surprised me; absolutely fantastic set. Only one completely duff act, which out of nine bands is pretty good going. Nice Rock Action sampler CD, too.
- All this good music out there, even some with tunes and poppy and glorious, and none of it’s selling that much (although Portishead’s chart position is pleasingly steady.) Meanwhile, Scooter are #1 in the albums chart based on some shitty advertisements on music TV and an audience of idiots. There’s a lesson there, but I don’t think I like it.
Two years, two months and 100,000 hits
Not bad, really. Thank you all.
It’s been a bit slow of late, to be honest, but there’s more to come later.
I’m speechless
The Media Guardian “Media Monkey” section (may need free registration) reports on the ‘Shaftas’, a negative award ceremony for the worst sort of hack…
Heat magazine won worst magazine of the year for their infamous tasteless stickers stunt.
This was a sticker featuring a picture of Katie “Jordan” Price’s profoundly disabled five-year-old son with the insignia “Harvey wants to eat me!“. This was so amazingly dreadfully out of tune – and, what’s more, widely reported – that Heat were forced into apologising. Words cannot describe how uncommon an event that is.
Media Guardian then however report an incident that didn’t make it to the press at large, unless you’re a reader of Loaded “magazine” (a publication that, all else being equal, should have been snuffed out at birth):
But they failed to show up so the award was given to Loaded instead for the magazine’s “110 birds we’d like to bone” feature. Even the hardened Shaftas audience shook their heads at Loaded’s inclusion of Kate McCann in this list, with a caption which read: “Sensitive one this but there’s nothing more erotic than a pained woman in need of some good lovin”. Hmmm.
Hmmm is about right. “Sensitive one this”? Kate McCann? That’s gall. That’s so amazingly tasteless I’m actually mostly speechless. Even most b3tans won’t go down to that level, and those that do at least are usually trying to be funny rather than creepy.
And that is creepy. It’s practically on ‘sick stalker’ level.
Loaded editor Martin Daubney bounced onto the stage to accept the award, saying: “I would love to blame a reporter but I wrote that myself.” After it was pointed out that made him a “truly dreadful human being”, he countered: “And I’m paid for it.” Monkey predicts future Shaftas greatness for this man.
Why do people buy Loaded magazine anyway? It’s not even very good porn, and it’s obviously from this not at all funny, so why bother?
The rest of the awards are interesting, bashing Richard Desmond and the usual suspects; worth a look.
For your convenience
A little frustrated right now: not only have my Radiohead tickets been held by Special Mail Service (the people who posted my passport to the wrong address a few years back) with the reference number I need to arrange redelivery spoken once by an automated voice over my mobile with no pen handy and no physical evidence they’ve been, but I’ve got a parcel from an online vendor sent through Initial Citylink which they failed to deliver.
I didn’t get carded, but a check on the tracking system told me that the parcel had attempted delivery; I call Citylink and they tell me that they don’t card in “secure” doorways (although mine isn’t very secure, and neither FedEx or Royal Mail have a problem carding me at all). This wouldn’t be a problem normally because Citylink open their depots quite late and I expected to be able to quickly go to the one at South Gyle (a number 22 bus away) and pick it up.
But there isn’t a South Gyle depot; it closed two months ago. They’ve moved to Livingston. As if that’s efficient for the Edinburgh area; it makes it inaccessible to anyone without a car or a tolerance for long, roundabout journeys on First Bus. And since I’m at work all day and since Citylink won’t change my address over the phone to my workplace my best hopes of getting the parcel are leaving it with my neighbours, which I’ve gone for as the least worst option.
There was an article in the Guardian business section yesterday about Citylink making large losses and dealing with it by… closing depots. Which will make people hate them more and try even harder to avoid them. I certainly won’t make the mistake of buying computer kit from a Citylink-only vendor again; and that without a bad experience before.
(And Radiohead, why SMS? You know they suck from the discbox experience; mine took way over a week to get here. Why continue with them? Why?)
Get it while you can
Maplin are offering an unusually good cheap soundcard right now: £19.99 gets you what is effectively the Chaintech AV-710 in a white box with a two-page manual and an old copy of PowerDVD. I’ve just got one from my local branch in Edinburgh (code A46CC); there’s still a few on the shelf.
This is properly 24/96 capable, has a high quality Wolfson DAC on the rear surround out, and has absolutely no Creative Labs circuitry on board (hence, it works fine on Vista.) And since there’s no clicking noise on my headphones whenever I do anything with my hard drives, it’s already some way superior to the Realtek onboard AC-97 and worth every penny.If you, like me, have no need for EAX et al but want quality music out, get one while Maplin are still doing them.
Rock Band pricing takes ripoff Britain to a new dimension
Rock Band is going to cost £179. £179. It’s $169 in the States for an identical package, that is to say £85. No way that VAT can explain this one.
I was actually considering buying an Xbox 360 and Rock Band was one of the main reasons. Paying £100 to Electronic Arts’ special party fund means that that pretty big reason has now been taken away. They won’t have a good explanation for this either, I’m betting…
When asked why the game will be so much more expensive in the UK than it is in the US, Kay cited VAT and the higher price of consumer electronics generally. “These are definitely not excuses so much as contributing reasons,” he stated.
“I can’t talk to the explicit pricing – how it gets split down between retailers and distributors and the whole chain – because I don’t actually know that much about it.”
In other words, no.
Is the new WordPress admin UI really meant to look this awful?
Egads. It’s still got the same feature set, but it’s a good deal uglier – plus it’s harder to access useful things like categories and tags, which have to be scrolled to. There’s a lot of wasted white space too. Bit of a step back, I think… supppose I’ll get used to it though.
True nepotism
Patricia Hewitt is joining BT. This would of course be the same BT that is currently screwing up the NHS IT system to a cost of £2bn previously administered by… Patricia Hewitt.
It’s almost as if she was working for them all this time. Yuck.
If this actually happens…
Virgin Media can get fucked. I am not having every web site I visit sent to China so some server can send back ‘targeted’ advertising, “anonymous” or no. It’s effectively unavoidable, ISP level spyware with a crap “anti-phishing” (read DNS hijacking) justification. The first thing I will be doing if this happens is getting a BT phone line installed and any non-BT ADSL ISP that doesn’t subscribe to this shit, probably Be.
This is of course assuming that this is even legal, and if it is it shouldn’t be. Who the hell thought this was a good idea, and why the hell haven’t they been fired already?
Edit: See here, here, here and here (the latter two contain a lot of great detective work about how dodgy Phorm actually are.) Let’s hope resistance isn’t futile on this one.
