Are you made of stone?

I am seriously unable to bring myself out of this obsession Ive had for the past 2 days. Every part of me just wants it to be 1990 and to be 16 and be living in the UK and going to Stone Roses shows every day.



Yes I cannot save myself from wishing that I was miles and miles and away and in another time dimension. When you listen to certain songs it just makes you want to be a part of the everything. It's like you feel so utterly left out of something that stirs you so much to just get loaded and jump around to such greatness and be amongst a masses of adoring fans who are 1000% mad for it.



Oh, why is it that it always seems that the fan level of hurrah seems so much better in GB than here? I feel completely wrapped in nostalgia and yet Ive never had the opportunity to see the Roses live, and yet I watch it all and feel like Im there with a best friend and I can recall from memory how super fantastic this was.

I have had moments with friends dancing around to these songs as if soaked in the grace of these concerts, and ven cars late at night blasting these songs and feeling like I was there, as the lights above stream fast passing and you are lost in the lyrics just singing away as if your adolescence is the most precious and outrightly eternal thing in this world.



So for now I sit here at my desk at work bobbing my head side to side and pretending to be in a greater place than I am. COupled with the sense of sadness of knowing that this beautiful moment died for so many when the Roses split...and my last passing memories of all of this was in 95, reading all the issues of NME and Melody Maker making jokes about them playing to support their non existant careers, and how Mr Squire was out and about playing his guitar for food. It was just so sad...

Watching it all just makes me sad and anxious and filled with so many things about the joys of youth and nostalgia and how its all gone. That great tapped sense of lost youth. Sad.

But, shit, enough of that reverie, lets dance!

Les Jouets

I bet you didnt know that Echo and The Bunnymen had one 7" in french? Its true and its sitting under the guise of a band called Little Nemo, and the song is called Les Jouets.

Heavens to Betsy, if they weren't listening to those first two Echo albums when they recorded this, talk about a Les Pattinson bassline, gosh! But its a great track! But you will be expecting Mr McCulloch's voice through the whole thing!

So, you wanted more Little Nemo demo's and you got 'em! Here is the sought after Froide sessions... I enjoy these even more because they include some pretty poppy dance tracks, and that means a great listen while you work.

Yup, while you work on those happy designs as you learn about behaviors in Dreamweaver CS3, and you stare at the clock and wonder when you will get to leave...you have to get home, so you can exercise.

Oh how you wish your gym played the music you listened to so you wouldnt need headphones all the time... That'll be the next thing of hipster culture, a dj at a gym... I'm sure somewhere this exists...and if not, then who ever does it now, has ripped me off...

Yes, Little Nemo is great! :)

LINK : Bed in Summer, Bed in Summer
[its so darn dancy! the lost track from Japanese Whispers, ha!]

Future Is Now...

Demos! Demos! Demos!

A follow up to the previous Little Nemo post, this week I'm going to add as much Little Nemo as I have, since I am greatly indebted to the nice and generous sir of Phoenix Hairpins, whom has musically aided me this week!
{thanks a bunch!}

I prefer the demos to the album versions because I really do enjoy the earlier versions of songs. There is something about the raw quality of a song that touches me more than many album versions, save for bands like Cocteau Twins that I prefer to listen to after Mr. Guthrie has flushed it out with all the acoustics and wall of chorus...its simply better that way!

That aside, please enjoy these if you don't have them already!

LINK : {Be Seeing You}

Impressionable Youth

Is there any reason that children born prior to the start of MTV were taken in by goth culture? For crying out loud look how many videos were all steeped in cathedral like phenomenon. Granted the Bonnie Tyler makes the biggest joke of most of it, but how is it that every director sought for the cathedral...all of these could have in essence been filmed at the same place...

You want a hit? Make the video with a cathedral in it! Oh the joys of the early 80s and MTV!

But what do they all share as well, that perfect crap quality lighting...this is what I want to recapture in video again, I love that blown out detail. Here are the other two greatest videos of that time for lighting.
(dont laugh, you know you love it too! Especially the smacking face and floor drum!)





And to be cool you must dance very angular and make gestures to every lyric. An absolute neccessity....hmmm, anyone else that does this.... hmmmmm.



I tell you Richard and Cy should go head to head!

This concludes my regression down memory lane when I was young five year old engrossed with the introduction of MTV to the world.

You Make Me Smile....

Youuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu were alwaaaaaaaaaaays the fiiiiiirrrrrrrrrrrrrst personnnnnnnnnnn too stohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhp, to stoohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhp..........

Is it Solid Space or DuetEmmo which truly resonates the elements about why the opening sequence of Dr Who strikes some of us in such a way that the music they later get into sounds the way it does? I think any synth adorer within the coldwave spectrum will have to confess to feeling that there was really something special about the empty, chilling, slightly scary, way that intro left them as children.

I was always trying to find this in songs in my childhood because I liked that feeling that a song could have over me. I wanted to feel like I was permanently stuck in a chilly, gray day somewhere, in the outskirts of Iceland, or just what I perceived that to be. There would be a place with much snow and barons of frozen land and the most gorgeous views upon the chilly world that could be imagined....permanently overcast though.

When you eventually hear that music that brings you there, you feel like everything from your early years of visual confusion and hypothetical delusions has been made reality and you are not so alienated. There are even others out there that share in this music aesthetic, there must be, because it has been created....maybe they have the same image in their minds as you did. How could the music so perfectly fit that landscape you dreamed of? Surely these people have tapped your four year old brain and took your illusions as inspiration.

The most popular track on this album is Or So It Seems and with good reason, its brilliant and its the track that brought me to that childhood fantasy land that put a smile on my face of the largest kind. Yet this entire album is so bleak and chilling, so cold and minimal for an "industrial" album. We can all call it whatever the genre we prefer, but we are familiar with the pursuits and projects that the Wire camp made post Wire, and truly if ever an ensemble of 4 men were to have found each other and formed so many amazing projects afterwards, well I can only think of one other group from that time period to have created so many post "band" projects on their own, and that would be the experimental post punk outfit called Swell Maps.

I could almost wonder if perhaps the two bands could have put their efforts together what would have happened? The piano and natural sounds that Epic Soundtracks was so into and how he adored sounds and environments, well it almost seems, that it would have been a given, considering how much the Wire folk were impressed by the same things. I could see a Jowe Head in this as well.

On the track The Long Sledge.....tell me this couldn't have been some crazy B side to a Swell Maps 7" during the Jane In Occupied Europe era....

Im just in awe....Oh happy MUTE, oh happy DOME. :)

LINK : { In Time In Dreams Or So It Seems }

The Resonating Strings of Autumn

I love this album. I have to say that You Or Sidney by Rise and Fall of a Decade is definitely a great album and utterly appropriate for the autumn of this land. Its moody, but yet great for the sense of sunshine bliss in a cool moment. The second greatest thing about this album, is that its one of those albums that you can listen from start to finish and not feel apt to skipping tracks, which is always the sign of a solid and great album.

The song that grips me the most about this album, that I feel a cinematic moment for is Hold Me. Sure I can be a cheesy dramatic quasi post ethereal goth, its not too hard to drift every now and then into some fantasy novel motif that runs rampant in the genre, but its really quite a compelling song, when played loud. Otherwise its kind of lackluster, but when you are feeling a bit sentimental and little sad it just makes you long for a hug of confidence so terribly.

The title track, You or Sidney is superfun, and when I eventually get around to DJ'ing again will assuredly be in there, because its such a song full of pep and all the good things that great songs have. Its a great driving song, and those always make for awesome spinning tunes.

I dont want to get caught up in thoughts right now, Im just listening to it and it seems right for the day and they mood Im in. If you are unfamiliar with this album, then I highly suggest grabbing the download and giving it a listen!

LINK : One Of These Days

Fear In Colour

When you feel that sensation of moments that you have not experienced but you feel them through the imaginary person you live inside, whom is many miles away and its as if you are seeing things behind their eyes/// Does that make sense...?

Pretend if you will that you have a close friend whom lives in a city and country far away from you, and while you have a familiarity with that place, their experiences there now, are different than what you are acquainted with. Somehow though, one song that plays within your ears makes you feel as if you are them, and you are seeing things through their eyes as if you were them...because emotionally you feel an immense connection to them. Perhaps it is because you have linked certain songs to that person since they sent them to you and because of that, these bands and songs will always resonate THAT person whenever you hear them.

Enter Little Nemo...

City Lights, was the first track I heard by them and it flipped me upside down. This was all during the time that I was being familiarized to the french coldwave catalog and was feeling the start of something great and amazing. A new discography of bands I didnt know, and a world of lyrics that would amaze me, when I understood them, and music that would provide more landscapes to dream in and around.

City Lights was the start of something in me, and from the dear person who sent it to me, I felt as if it connected to their new experiences in a new city. I was wondering about their new life, and this song provided the swirling backdrop for it all. More songs by Little Nemo followed into my ownership and as I kept listening to these songs I kept associating them with that person. It wasn't so much a wonderland that was being created but a friendly familiarity with this band because of a relationship I had had with the person, that I felt like Little Nemo was something from my past and of my new present that felt right and not strange.

When I listen to Marine, from this album, I am brought to that sentimental memory of how it felt when I first looked out the french doors from the bedroom of the hotel when I first arrived in Paris and felt completely elsewhere and absorbing the feelings in the air of a place with such a rich history and such a splendid moment that I was having.

So much of this album are moments of watching things through the supposed eyes of others. There is something about the voice in all these songs, which is do to the slight echo effect on it, but it makes it all very sentimental, and there is a longing and remembrance to so much of the lyrics, especially like Sandcastle where you can all but just picture the person roaming the shores in the haze of the thoughts and aspirations of someone...Fickleness, Tales Of The Wind and Blue Years are other tracks that feel wrapped in the memory of a place in a day left alone to ponder about all of it as if it was s movie in sepia that was looping about behind your eyes while what you were truly looking at was the shoreline just moving slightly about.

The most important thing to be noted about Little Nemo, in stepping out of my sentimental carriage for a moment, is that they were the creators of the Lively Art imprint within the New Rose label, and thankfully for that, so much of the french coldwave/touching pop catalog of artists were able to co-exist as a bountiful hospice of emotions and music that all coincided and raised the bar on this genre. (Not to mention that one off project called Teepee, which is BRILLIANT! to say the least...does anyone have the other track that is paired with Erosion?)

LINK : {Precious Days}