Archive for the british tag

Ou Est Le Swimming Pool: Dance The Way I Feel

About a week ago, Ou Est Le Swimming Pool’s lead singer, Charlie Haddon, walked off the stage after his performance at the Pukkelpop festival in Belgium and jumped to his death from a telecommunications mast.

As the news hit the blogs, a whole lot of people asked not “what would make someone do such a sad thing?” but “who is Ou Est Le Swimming Pool?”. Having released all of three singles, the British synthpop band has made something of a name for themselves touring for La Roux, but were still under most people’s radars. The thing is, though, those three singles were really really good. And like so many bands before them, we’re left wondering what might’ve become of Ou Est Le Swimming Pool, and what great music we’re now missing out on, as a result of one key band member’s suicide amidst a swirl of depression that we can’t understand.

R.I.P. Charlie Haddon, we hardly knew ye.

official website

Colin Meloy: I Know Very Well How I Got My Name

ok ok ONE LAST COVER, ok? It’s time for another tribute to The Smiths/Morrissey tonight, and besides, it’s Colin Meloy…

The album Colin Meloy Sings Morrissey was The Decemberists’ lead singer’s first solo effort, released in 2005 and limited to 100 copies sold only on the accompanying tour, so we’ll forgive you if you haven’t heard of it.

The fact that Meloy finds Morrissey inspiring should be a surprise to no one at all. So much as a cursory listen to both singers’ respective bands speaks for itself. But Meloy is far more than a cover artist, and The Decemberists are far more talented than to be tossed off as yet another indie-rock throwback to The Smiths. Though the storytelling lyrical style might be familiar, The Decemberists reach for a more folksy, Americana tone than their British predecessors, and this is where they shine. Meloy’s covers are no different, but stripped down and backed merely by an acoustic guitar. Applied here to “I Know Very Well How I Got My Name”, it challenges Morrissey’s lyrics to stand on their own.

The Decemberists’ official website
Buy The Decemberists on Amazon.com

Editors: Lullaby

It seems like I’ve been posting a lot of covers lately. I hope you don’t mind, but here’s another, a bit inspired by Nocturna this evening. If you’ve somehow managed to not hear Editors before, go check them out; this may be a cover, but it’s an excellent example of their style.

In a statement about their most recent album and criticism of its tone, Tom Smith wrote, “dark is interesting, dark is exciting, dark can be funny, there’s real life in the dark, real life IS dark…I am so fucking bored of people asking us why we’re so “dark”, or worse questioning our integrity for being this way, this is how we do it, it excites us to express ourselves like this, to be honest we don’t even understand what the alternative is and the alternatives we can imagine are too boring for us to even consider”. Did he just write the Grufti Manifesto?*

Who better to rework a Cure song, then, than Editors? Smith invokes Ian Curtis to make Robert Smith’s lyrics a little more paranoid, but I’m still not buying that he’s really afraid of “the spider man”. In fact, I suspect that he might just be inviting him over for dinner.

This track is taken from the BBC Radio 1 Established 1967 2 disc compilation, released in 2007 and bizarrely listed as being a Kaiser Chiefs album (they contributed the first track). It chronicles 40 years of the legendary radio show with 40 artists doing a cover for each year. Editors were assigned 1989; they certainly did right to choose a song off of Disintegration.

official website
Buy Editors on Amazon.com

*I prefer the word “grufti” because it’s much more inclusive than “goth”. I encourage you to use it as well!

B-Movie: A Letter From Afar

Best known for their single “Nowhere Girl”, B-Movie was an ’80s new romantic could-have-been, never quite reaching mainstream success. Formed in 1978 in Mansfield, they named themselves after an Andy Warhol painting and trudged their way through the music industry in vain until 1985. The unbelievably detailed and exclamation point-filled biography on their website blames their record labels, management, Soft Cell, former band members, and anyone else they associated with for their failures (and frankly makes the band sound like egotistical jerks).

Too bad anyway, since they wrote some great pop songs that hardly anyone remembers now. “A Letter From Afar” was meant to be their comeback single, produced by pop hitmaker Jellybean Benitez, but it never made a blip on the charts. I’m sure it was all Marc Almond’s fault…

Buy B-Movie on Amazon.com
official website

Andy Bell: Call On Me (Hey Champ remix)

Fellow Chicagoans Hey Champ just put out this remix of Andy Bell’s new single “Call On Me” and I quite like it. Keeping the disco elements and most of the lyrics intact, they give it a slick makeover that makes the track even more danceable.

Bell’s new solo work has had it’s fair share of problems, so it’s exciting to see it finally released. Feeling the album sounded too much like Erasure, he at one point ditched producer Stephen Hague and all the songs they’d recorded, and started all over again with Gabriel Pascal. Given that both of them have a long history with synthpop artists and have produced Erasure before, I’m not quite sure I see the point, but then I haven’t heard what Hague did to it, either. I’d argue that the end product does not even sound that different than Erasure, but I’m pretty sure that only Andy Bell thinks that’s a bad thing.

Buy Bell’s new album non stop on Amazon.com
Andy Bell official website
Hey Champ official website

A Certain Ratio: Shack Up

This blog entry is something has been an item that’s been a long time coming, aside from the fact that I’ve been pushed the passed several weeks to do so.  Through technological failures, and alcohol issues, I’ve pretty much sidelined this project (that and I’m a lazy son of a bitch, one must note).  What makes this particular post all the more pressing is the necessity for A Certain Ration to be known by YOU!: the common people, the beautiful people, the wondrous, glorious readers of this blog, and fellow patrons of Atomic.

In a perfect world, ACR would have shared some of the notoriety of fellow label mates, Joy Division. Not that I believe they’re more deserving of it than say later acts :cough: Happy Mondays :cough:, but ACR would find its audience.  The band would find popularity in NYC clubs, falling in with the post-disco/punk, and the short but influential no-wave movements; with other funk-stylized acts, ESG and Liquid Liquid (to name a shallow few).

So, here is where I serve up one of my favorite tracks (there’s also a pretty outstanding remix that should be sought after).  Enjoy!

official website
Buy Shack Up on Amazon.com

Patrick Wolf: Hard Times + Damaris

Patrick Wolf was born in 1983 to famous musicians Siouxsie Sioux and Adam Ant. Shortly after his birth, he was possessed by the ghost of Klaus Nomi. He currently resides in some sort of weird time warp where he’s stuck in mid-’80s England.

Ok, so I don’t know that any of that is true. BUT IT’S POSSIBLE. Siouxsie and Adam are old enough and Nomi died the same year he was born. Also, his biography is SO vague: “Patrick Wolf was born in St Thomas’ Hospital, South London, into a creative family.”
“Creative family“? Mmmhmmm. And what kind of kid is making theremins at 11?! Maybe they just hid him from the press. There’s really no other reasonable explanation for this guy’s existence.

I present to you two examples that I believe back up my claims:

Both tracks are from his 1985 2009 release The Bachelor.
Buy The Bachelor on Amazon.com
official website

The Cure: Disintegration (Live from Entreat)

I was eleven when I accidentally found The Cure’s Disintegration in a pile of my brother’s cassettes along with New Order, Depeche Mode, and Nine Inch Nails. This may come as a shock, but I thought it sucked. I liked “Pictures of You”, “Lovesong”, and “Lullaby”, but the second side of that cassette… man was it long and boring. I tried numerous times to get through “The Same Deep Water as You”, but every attempt failed.

So how did Disintegration become my favorite album? That was an accident as well. I got really into The Cure around 1992 (Wish) and backtracked to the older albums. I also started to collect Cure stuff: magazines, posters, and singles. I bought the “Pictures of You”  single, and one of the B-sides was the live version of “Disintegration”. It blew my away like nothing before or since. I went back and listened to Disintegration. Maybe my taste matured, or maybe I was discovering that life sucked, but I connected with the second half and the whole album like I had found my one and only true love . I knew it would stand the test of time, and in high school I introduced it to as many people as possible. If they didn’t like it, I would insist they listen to the live version of “Disintegration”.

It worked on my friends Jill and Tony. Jill and I would stay up all night trying to decipher the lyrics. There were a bunch of lines added  and a few missing from the album version, and it drove us crazy. Jill suggested I buy Entreat at Reckless Records since the live version of “Disintegration” and almost every album song was on the live disc.  I couldn’t afford it, until the lucky day I found a used copy for $34. I ran to Jill’s car and as I ripped open the case, found tucked into the sleeve inlay card a sheet of handwritten lyrics to the live version. I screamed louder than I have ever before in my life. The coincidence, the luck, the idea that someone out there loved the song so much they figured out all the lyrics and hand wrote them onto notebook paper…and the sadness and shock that this person had parted with it, made me realize how much I loved The Cure, loved that song, and how it made me give that album a second chance and falling in love with that too.

Crazy to think that after all that I went through to save $34 to buy Entreat, it’s now being given away as a bonus disc as part of the 3CD re-release of Disintegration for $32.99. For me and millions of people around the world, this album means re-living great memories, but I hope that some kid out there stumbles upon this release, listens to it for the first time, and is blown away with the greatness of it all.

official website
Pre-order the 3CD deluxe edition of Disintegration

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