I want my lips to blister when we kiss

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Sometimes - and you all know this to be deeply true, if you are being honest for once - the only gesture required or demanded at those kind of times is feeling a soft, warm head falling deep into your electrified scapula and a matching pair of loving, tentacled arms reaching around your naked, shamed body, to say, actually, it's all going to be alright, forever.... and I do feel that the Wild Beasts need such a warm, tight embrace, right about now. "It's alive", indeed. Sigh.
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Wild Beasts - 'Bed of nails' (Live, Later with Jools Holland, 17-05-11) (3.43)
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Like snakes in the grass. One to buy. The injustice... it does hurt.
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I can take a road that'll see me through

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So, you were drunken in the haze of a less than happy hour, I know, but is that really a valid excuse eighteen years later? Sigh. I don't suppose you remember this song? Or the band? It was a strange time after all; 1992 was it? Nothing but Mega City 4, Midway Still, Leatherface and The Senseless Things playing local tiny grubby venues, attracting all the spotty late-teen boyz ('pop kids'), bad drugs and haircuts that could be used as weapons of mass destruction within their respective gigathon shrines to 'Powah Pop'. They ate all our chips as well. And snogged our ex-girlfriends as they had shiny wheels and could play three chords, with delay, reverb, delay, reverb, delay, reverb... etc. Nobody wore trousers, did you ever stop playing with yourself to even notice that? It was all baggy shorts and obscure indie T-shirts. Except for Wiz, of course, as he always wore that slightly manky Hüsker Dü shirt. Life in a transit van, eh? It's funny, just a little bit, how you look back at those strange times - you know, way back then - and when you look up at yourself now, in a forced hallway mirror making sure you've no toothpaste on your chin before you head off out for the day, kind of way, you realise that you've somehow ended up living the kind of life your Dad can't even begin to imagine. Or perhaps he can. But you'll never ask him, obviously. A line in a movie script would have it that 'every passing minute is another chance to turn it all around'. I'm not so sure that's actually true though, for some things. I mean, some actions, events, can't be turned around or forgiven. Water and bridges, and all that (it has long sailed out to the polluted ocean now anyway). Life. In an instant. You got it all wrong, you know, it's not all about my mother, it's all about my father. Him.
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Drive - 'Go out - be happy' (3.52)
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Nostalgia can be a terrible thing, but not always. Buy a copy of the album, go on now. You look at the photographs and just wonder: what the fuck were you thinking about, son?
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Ps. My rather vain and lame attempts at documenting the wonderful life of Sarah Records continues, by the way. That occurs over here. It's happening every Sunday from a few weeks ago until I get bored, we run out of singles or JC evicts me from his castle. Hopefully the middle option will rule the school. :)
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Tell us a story from before we can remember

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So, yes, I admit it, I would have liked 'The Tree of Life' a lot more if the soundtrack had included Moscow Olympics on it. However, even so, I still can't wait for Part 2. Erm, there is a Part 2 coming along soon, right? Like, 'The Shrubbery of Death', or something?
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Moscow Olympics - 'Second Trace' (3.43)
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Go make friends!
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The killing jar

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'Death is not the end' proclaimed the ill-fitting, turning black-to-grey, T-shirt. And you stare into this iron cage, a grasping void of self-doubt, knowing the reasons why (and your certain fate within it) but you just can't back away. Tip-toes on the crumbling edge, staring down. There is no love lost here, no hope of escape. And yet.... in you go, happily so. A moth into the light, in opposite formation. Deep down, spilling and twirling and longing to be let go. It requires an explanation, in a sense, but there aren't enough letters in the alphabet to form the words demanded by such horrors. How could there be? For this sound, such images, and the feelings generated... they are not of this world; Lynchesque in plot, narrative, angles, set design, acting. All of it. An identity, a long-player, is shaped in the knowing of what needs to be unlearnt and then built up again, reconstructed to a new set of plans. Past mistakes, no more, but the experience and biography shapes you. New foundations need to be established. Roots secured, in hope and promise. Room to grow, a nurturing. It's a farewell, to you, and then...

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Conquering Animal Sound - 'Wasp' (3.48)

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Visit / Buy / Watch (on tour)

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And resentment rides high

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All I should say, at this point in time, is that I do appreciate the very slight tip of the cap to 'Love will tear us apart' in this song (whether accidental or on purpose). And, in saying these words, I don't particularly care if no one else can hear it but me. But, do you hear it, as I do? The thing is, J. Tillman (who is not just the drummer in that band) is my new post-Kozelek love(r), for sure. And, erm, The Horrors? Who? Jeezo, that's just so, like, yesterday.... meaning, of course, 1983-84. ;)
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J. Tillman - 'Occurance at the River Jordan' (4.16)
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All things real. One to watch.
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I wish that we could talk about it

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'And it keeps coming, and it keeps coming, and it keeps coming... until the day it stops.'
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There is something about the interpretation of this LCD Soundsystem song that just cuts me down, every-single-time. Emotions, associations and memories, to the song itself of course (when I left the big house, years ago now, early morning, this was my soundtrack as I walked to the railway station in the glinting sun with a stuffed sports bag over my shoulder for company) but, also, it's the sheer talent and skill that is on display here that is just breathtaking (thank-you, Andrew). It's all picking, fingering, tapping and bowing of the cello and the useful employment of some fancy technology as well; the building up of sounds, layers and loops and then their eventual downfall. There are no spoken words involved this time around, they are just not needed, as you find yourself mouthing the words anyway. 'The coffee isn't even bitter'. I love that part. It seems to matter the most these days. Not so long ago it used to be 'I miss the way we used to argue'. But the truth is, I just don't anymore. Those days have been and gone.
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Andrew Carter - 'Someone Great' (LCD Soundsystem cover, Cello instrumental) (6.43)
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Go visit Andrew. See him play, loop and play again. One to watch. And the original, of course.
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It starts out quickly.

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'It's all a matter of perspective' mouthed the seven-foot tall goalkeeper to the nervous penalty-kick taker, attempting to stare him out at this most critical of all moments in the ninety-something that have been on offer. And, it's also an expression I'm getting used to hearing these days, this sense of relativity and unknowing, even without that physical twelve yards necessarily being involved. Needless to say, the shoe will fit so I'll slip it on. I'm very much the person that needs to kick the ball into the less than open net. Gulp. This is a challenge. And whilst I appreciate the importance of such an act, of enacting an active agency, so to speak, this doesn't prevent that fear running through the dark spilled blood, chilling it to a slow-motion replay where the metaphorical waterfall floods are actually tiny drips and the journey stops and starts in lost and abandoned railways of the heart. And whilst I gather an inner-strength, of a kind, the soundtrack comes from somewhere otherwordly; a place where what end of the street you stand at really matters, where what you say cannot be taken back. It all begins with one solitary note on a piano. And if you can't even play that note as it should be played then why bother at all? This is not a practice session or a 'jam'. This is real life.
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Glissando - 'With a kiss and a tear' (7.06)
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Searching delicate sounds / A slow burning secret / Buying worthy Gizeh
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Tell me you feel this fire

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Oh Glasgow, I do love you. Yes, I fucking do. Especially when the sun shines brightly, the graffiti gives good LOLZ (praise be to the 12 year old boyz with marker pens about town!) and, amongst all the high horse shite that is being hurriedly pushed through your disciplinary letter box of late, the new 'Young Team' (so tae speak) are finally sent out to find their inspiring 'selves' with their loved ones, both big and small, looking on. I do <3 Graduation Day and I can't help myself, in a traditionalist kinda way. But, you know, it's just nice to see a lot of people coming together, all scrubbed up clean and dressed to the High 9's, to be happy, right? Big smiles and white teeth. Cameras at the ready. And yes, ok, even if it is just for a morning or so and the all-familiar drudge-drudge-drudge of the wordly ways returns in the form of a hangover the very next day. But just believe, for a day or two at least, that the future is a lot brighter than you think and it pays to keep some fingers and toes crossed (but not the ones you stole from Sukie at the graveyard, please no, no, no...).

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Stereolab - 'Les Yper Sound' (live) (4.13)

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Not writing, just thinking.

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A monopoly on the legitimate use of violence

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I know, it's not very amusing, really, but the more I read Weber (let alone Marx!) and, in particular, the more I listen to a band like McCarthy, the less I understand how we actually put up with what we put up with in terms of the socio-economic world we are forced to endure and play a small part in. In other words, yes, I am having a slight crisis of political (not musical) faith and I'll be taking a wee break from this rather bourgeois indulgence to consider my material options and focus on the things that matter most. And by that I don't mean the forthcoming public sector revolution (shame on fucking you Miliband; what your Dad would have made of it all I can't even guess). Or do I mean that public revolution? No, I think I have to mean a more personal revolution, one involving the people; the good souls. Well, that and possibly, if the news arrives, trying to find another job (along with two and half million other people forming a winding line around the revamped dole office).
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McCarthy - 'Governing takes brains' (4.16)
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One for the weekend. Storm those barricades, comrades.
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PS. Speechless. Open mouthed. I don't know about you, but this song has just blown me apart into a million different pieces. The Horrors are taking it beyond a question of mere 'progression' or 'levels'. They are now wholesome giants in a minature, scaled-down world. And we are better for this transformation, absolutely.
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Your mind blossoms, mine is withering

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It's all over then, I guess. A final curtain has come down, amidst a stage of occupations and withering, silent applause. We tried. And we failed. Escape routes, sadly, will now need to be planned; a big exit is coming in from the West heading South. Just wish I knew what 'reconfigured' actually meant though. To be kept? Abandoned? You know, I might need to ask Mark to write a song about University restructuring, then maybe I'd actually hear what they are saying; I'd pay attention to the brutal words a little more if he was whispering them in my second-hand ears, whilst those nylon heart-on-strings scatter acoustic sound, like minature paint brushes being put to good use by an army of hipstah centipedes on a canvas that appears to have no edges or centre. It just sits there, waiting to be made known, to be completed.
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Mark Kozelek - 'Third and Seneca' (live) (8.03)
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'On Tour: A Documentary' is released on August 16. See here for full details. It just might save your life, as well.
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