I like the Pope, the
Pope likes soul on a roll but he treats it like soap on a rope. That aside,
here are five great things to look at/listen to while you fail to finish your
work in time for the pub.
1 Kanye’s Free Fridays Shabby is a little ashamed of being nostalgic this week. But we also
remember 2003, when we saw Kanye West at the Forum before his album came out,
before the hits, when he was full of himself because he had so much great stuff
to get out. No autotune. No ramblin' man tweets. Loads of great lines, loads of
great times. It looks like Kanye's remembered that too. He's doing Free
Fridays, where every Friday until his album comes out he's dropping an MP3 on
the internet, and so far they have all been storming. Big beats, funny rhymes,
ace samples switched up and spun back like we know it. But it's not nostalgia.
It's just what he's good at. Listen to the Power Remix and smile 'cause the guy
you loved is back. And you know sometimes, sometimes someone deserves to have a
massive ego.
2 Talk Talk/Spirit Of Eden Twenty-two years ago this week, Talk
Talk released a bolt of blue. Spirit Of Eden cast off their glossy 80s history,
instead concentrating on jazzy intricacy and forensically controlled rock
power, and set a tone for Balearic ambience and post-rock to come. It's a
masterclass in the space between chords, between hooks and drama, yet way more
accessible than surprised rock hacks would have had you believe and - in
hindsight - a purely natural progression from the considered pop-rock of 1986's
Colour Of Spring. Evolution in revolution.
3 It’s The Rub Nostalgia, eh, it's
not as good as it used to be, is it? Nope, it's better. Brooklyn DJing trio The
Rub have been love-labouring over something phenomenal since December 2007.
They've put together mixes of each year of recorded hip hop history since 1979.
Representing the best, the most influential, the most popular, without any kind
of head-nodding rap-bore prejudice or now-that's-what-I-call-rap! wackiness
either. Listen to your favourite year and remember where you was and what you
was doing (mine's 2003) or listen to them in order and give yourself the most
enjoyable history lesson since Andrew Marr put on all those funny voices and
pretended to be Queen Victoria. Scroll down on the link to their website and
just left click and d/l on the ones you want. (The specially designed covers
are beautiful too.)
4 Brian Eno/Small Craft On A Milk Sea Your favourite chatty egghead surfaces with a new album on Warp on 1 November,
teaming up with Leo Abrahams and Jon Hopkins. It's his first 'solo' effort in
five years, but - as per - he's been awfully busy. Check out the clip as Bri
natters about his multimedia (man) project 77 Million Paintings in 2006.
5 The Phantom Band/The Wants It's
not out for a few weeks (18 October, if you must know) but we've got a
perfectly legit copy of Glaswegian folk-motorik rockers The Phantom Band's
second album, and are here to tell you it's immense. Spend money on it when it
finally arrives and feast on lengthy, electronica-tinged spacerock that
actually has tunes. OK, yeah, we're having difficulty describing it.
Yes, it’s the
now-very-nearly-weekly Five For Friday, sifting through the wreckage of our
broken lives to find some good stuff to contemplate, listen to and enjoy at the
end of the slog.
Fever Ray/Mercy Street Until Fever
Ray told us, we didn't actually know that Peter Gabriel's Mercy Street (from the still meaty So)
was about Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Anne Sexton. Maybe we should have read
the sleevenotes, or actually engaged brain. No matter, Fever Ray aka Karin
Dreijer Andersson aka one half of The Knife has swelled knowledge and fevered
up and knifified the song, and will release it on download and fashionable
7"on 6 September. It's pretty special so you should buy it and not just
nick it.
DJ Fresh/Gold Dust Don't really care
about the song - it's DnB, innit, nice bit of DnB, with some bassy bleeps and
useful drop-outs. But the video is WICKED. Really, really wicked. Imagine
something wicked, right? Got it in your head? Concentrating? Yeah. Wicked, is
it? Not as wicked as this. It's skipping. Really good skipping. In some sort of
gritty, realer than real American project, where the rest of the day is
probably spent slinging and giving snitches what for. But not while there's
skipping to be done. Remember the last time there was really good skipping in a
video? It was Malcolm McLaren, wasn't it? Double Dutch. And where is he now, DJ
Fresh? He's dead. So think about that, DJ Fresh. And watch the skipping.
Cee-Lo/Fuck You When you read this,
this song will be over. It’ll be old, overplayed and irritating. People will
tut when unimaginative DJs wheel it out at Christmas parties. But for one
glorious minute, just like you, Shabby Culture heard it without context,
marvelled at the video and just plain loved it. For once in union with the
zeitgeist, we were on top of the world. Thank you Cee-Lo. Thank you.
Truth/Puppets No doubt the more
narrow-minded among us associate New Zealand with Crowded House,
sheep, wine-tasting and acid reflux - and not a dark sense of urban ennui. But
here are Truth to lay some, er, truth on us. This Christchurch trio release their debut album
Puppets this week, and it's a thrilling dubstep collection that marries gloomy
atmospherics with what we believe the kids are calling "banging
tunes". Let's call that a winning combo and say no more about fush and
chups.
Peggy Lee on Radio 2/Blonde On Blonde Radio 2 have got husky media omnipresence Mariella Frostrup to present this,
but don't let that put you off/turn you on so much you'll only listen for three
minutes. This is another in the countless arguments for keeping the BBC and putting a single bullet in the
temple of anyone who voted Tory in the last election. Just one. If they
survive, they'll probably struggle to get a job, but there'll be a welfare
state to look after them. What? Oh.
Anyway, putting The State Of Things to one side, this is an excellent
introduction to Peggy herself and her cracking tunes and voice. Going from her
origins as beaten-up Norma Deloris Egstrom to beautiful sophisticate Peggy Lee
in an hour, with some choice stories and tremendous tunes, and some words that
would be very racist today, but weren't then, what's the world coming to, eh,
when the BBC and the liberal media conspiracy can use the word "spade"
in context, in a documentary, but they let anyone into this country, and they
only have babies for the hand-outs, don't they? I want my licence fee spent on
a station where I can talk about football and my racist beliefs. There is one?
Oh. I want two.
Yes, it’s our
*cough* weekly feature on the good shit rocking our collective boat – and all that stuff
we thought of two minutes ago while trying to fill the list up.
1 Stewart Lee/How I Escaped My Certain
Fate If we were clever here, if we were clever, yeah. If we... at Shabby
Culture. If we were clever, we would review this book, yeah, this book by
Stewart Lee... we'd review it, wouldn't we Glasgow, we'd review it in the style, in the
style of, the style of Stew, wouldn't we. There'd be long reflective pauses, there'd
be in-jokes, extensive enlightening footnotes*, and you'd feel, that you were
part of it, Glasgow,
but at the same time, that you were five steps behind. We wouldn't say that
Stewart Lee is Jesus - that's not for us to say - but if he was Jesus, if he
was, and he might be, this would be His Gospels according to Him. And lo, it is
good.
*Which are all much funnier and longer than this footnote.
2 Anthony Beevor/Stalingrad Shabby
Culture isn't only reading about endless painful struggles against a seemingly
inevitable failure turned around at the last by an uncrushable tenacity and
hate in Stewart Lee's book. We've also been reading Stalingrad.
Remember in Peep Show when Mark keeps referring to it? How it was a comic trope
suggesting how flawed he is, that he takes refuge from his pointless life in
historical horror, and how that makes him much, much worse? Well when Shabby
saw all 512 pages staring up at us from Crouch End Oxfam, we knew this was a
line we shouldn't cross. We asked our girlfriend - yes, we have a collective
girlfriend - we asked "If I buy this, will I look psychotic?" The
fateful answer came back "No". It was polished off in three days,
like a prone Panzer corps in the Kessel, and we are now so knee-deep in History
Porn, we don't know who we are any more. But we do know we'd like to be a
sniper when we grow up. And wear epaulettes.
3 South Park/Seasons 10-14 Shabby
Culture hasn't only been unable to tear itself away from the chronicle of a
continent descending into terror, horror and farce in Stalingrad. We've also
been watching SouthPark do the same for America. Unlike The Simpsons, which
somewhere along the way became little funnier or smarter than a 'Bart Marley'
top bought in Camden Market in 1994, or Family Guy which has ploughed the same
furrow so hard that an eight-year-old knows when the joke’s coming and what
it's going to be, South Park has got better and better year-on-year for five
years. Any issue they look at - the etymology of the word 'fag', wrestling,
modern-day pirates - are addressed with more nuance and laughs in 22 minutes
than Rory Bremner has managed in his overlong, wasted, empty life. That John Major
is a bit boring, isn't he? Go on the site above and learn how and what to think
about everything.
4 Damien Jurado Richard Swift,
chronicler of poor record deals and twilit romance, has been parachuted in to
turn Damien Jurado's folky tales into dense, Spectoresque drama. For a taste we
have a couple of free mp3s, Arkansashere and Cloudy Shoes in the box, luscious breakouts from recent album Saint
Bartlett (probably about Jed). Swifty (as he obviously isn't known) will be
hooking up with Jurado on a UK tour this September.
5 Vexed, Sunday, BBC2 9pm Fuck you,
Radio Times. You humourless shit bags. Here's a part of their review: "[Vexed]
appears to be a Valhalla for dated jokes. The
phrase ‘ginger pussy’ sends Toby Stephens's DI Jack Armstrong into paroxysms of
mirth. Nice to know the spirit of Mrs Slocombe lives on in 2010. Never mind,
though, because there's something to offend everyone: women, women with cancer,
gay men... By the end you will be begging its two horrible main characters to
please SHUT UP!" The fact that he finds the joke funny is funny. Not the
joke itself, you total twats. Vexed is quality stupidity that is approximately
a third as sexist and malign as shit piles like Pete versus Life. So, once
again, Fuck You, Radio Times. Blimey, that was cathartic.
In veneration of Talcy Malcy, we dedicate all of the worryingly
occasional Five For Friday to the eminence grise of UK pop culture.
1 Buffalo Gals McLaren joined forces with Trevor Horn and Anne Dudley to
create the proto-Art Of Noise project Folk Dances Of The World that eventually
became his debut solo album Duck Rock. It was led by Malc’s extraordinary
Buffalo Gals which teetered on that thin line between novelty and visionary,
bringing hip hop to the masses in the guise of a cub scout square dance. That’s
one way of sugaring the pill. A deranged way.
2 Double Dutch Improbably, giddily
joyful stuff. A No.3 smash full of found music, late night radio chatter, African
guitar, skip-chanting and Malcolm's somehow-not-creepy narration about the gals
from New York City.
An amalgam of all sorts of strands of what the hipsters in febrile downtown
Manhattan were digging, and another early taste of hip hop for the hip hop
generation on this side of the Atlantic. The video makes you wish you were
still spry enough to get to skipping. Or commission one of those
dance-against-the-odds movies set in The Bronx in 1982 about a chick who skips
her way to glory, overcoming doubting parents, bullying classmates, and helped
along the whole time by that crazy redhead Briddish guy who never stops
believing in her.
3 Madam Butterfly (Un Bel Di Vedremo) Heartbreaking electro hip popera, this. Rarely one for the small gesture,
McLaren used his 1984 set Fans and classic single Madam Butterfly to realise
the chart potential in the aria. This bears the whiff of grand folly, but
succeeds through clarity of vision and pop sensibility.
4 Something’s Jumpin’ In Your Shirt By 1989, our Malc seemed pretty convinced he could pull off any dunderheaded splicing
of form, and this time he fashioned Strauss-house. The Waltz Darling album felt
a bit like Italo Hooked On Classics, but no less loveable for that, and
Something’s Jumpin’ was its silliest, most charming single.
5 Magic’s Back Prompts the question,
“Whatever happened to Alison Limerick?” while suggesting no one could ever come
back from this – or from an anthem like Where Love Lives. The latter could
sustain a career through occasional trend-dictated remixes, but Magic’s Back is
the kind of recklessness to kill your livelihood stone dead. From the mad
Ghosts Of Oxford Street concept album/TV movie (also featuring Happy Mondays
dirtying up Stayin’ Alive), it’s a Yazz/Italo-house stormer tainted by its very
setting and arrangement. Still, at least they were having a go.
Our favourite things today, and possibly for the weekend too.
1 Steely Dan/70s Beach Boys/Gentlemen's Agreement Having witnessed the mighty
Gentlemen's Agreement a few weeks ago supporting the New Royal Family's
triumphant exit from the World Stage (aka the Islington Buffalo Bar), Shabby
Culture has developed an unquenchable thirst for immaculately produced 70s
rock. Two sides to this coin. There’s the pure and unironic beauty of the Beach
Boys’ Brother Years, where honed and immaculate harmonies came together with
the warm, smooth production of the best studios and made the finest music of
their career - The Trader being the pick of a phenomenal bunch. The flip is the
uber-obsessive Walter Becker and Donald Fagen's Steely Dan - ironic jazz rock
blues intricacy anyone? Anyone? Oh go on. They are also enormously funny men,
as their imbroglio with Wes Anderson shows.
Gentlemen's Agreement are in concert tonight at the Wilmington Arms, if you
want your funked-out smoothness within walking distance of Farringdon tube.
2 Vincent Delerm’s Cosmopolitan Pretentious?
Nous? God though, Vincent Delerm is great. There are so many songs we could
have chosen, but this is belle beyond belief. For those non-French speakers,
it's written by a man re-reading Cosmopolitan as a cup of tea goes cold,
filling in the love quiz and failing to answer the question, “Have you cheated
on your lover?”
3 Duke Special’s Our Love Goes Deeper Than
This Vincent worked on Favourite Song with Neil Hannon, which reminded us
of this video, where Neil Hannon enters the room as he starts singing in an
extremely satisfying manner. Duke Special has an album out, which one member of
the Shabby office is travelling around with.
4 Andrey Arshavin answers your questions By day (and some evenings from around 7.45 to about 9.51), Andrey Arshavin is a
prodigiously skilled, scurrying little attacking midfielder for Arsenal and Russia.
The rest of the time he is an agony aunt, philosopher and raconteur, addressing
fans' questions on his website with a healthy mix of direct and gnomic replies.
Nothing flummoxes this fox in the box.
5 Arguments About Music Online Shabby
Culture has been busy working at work recently. This is a terrible state of
affairs. But this afternoon we've been engaged in THREE simultaneous arguments
on three different sites about the relative value of Lady Gaga and Grizzly
Bear. This is an argument no one can win, that means nothing to anyone, and
will be as anachronistic as a Hummer spray-painted with a triptych of Nixon,
Bush and W. Bush in about three weeks. But the ancient siren call of a good old
barney about music on a Friday afternoon when Shabby should be working? It's
too much to resist.
In veneration of Talcy Malcy, we dedicate all of the worryingly
occasional Five For Friday to the eminence grise of 
Our favourite things today, and possibly for the weekend too.