Here we have a guest post from a new addition to the MCT carousel of scribbling talent. He goes by the nom of Nick Bryan, and he “maintains” a blog called Feeding The Black Dog. GO NICK GO.
Anyone remember Robbie Williams from earlier in the decade? Pop star, successful, rich, prone to whinging about how hard and unfair it all was?
Actually, maybe you’re too young. You only remember the recent Robbie Williams, the less-successful reject member of the unexpectedly popular reunited Take That. He did that bug-eyed thing on X-Factor, while attempting to make a comeback from the Rudebox album no-one liked much. (Except the NME, oddly.)
However you know him, you can’t help but notice that suddenly, Robbie is the underdog.
Not only compared to his former boyband peers, who he once left in the dirt, but in the pop industry as a whole, with multiple too-slick Cowell disciples sitting in his old spot. Indeed, his not-too-bad comeback single “Bodies” was pipped at the chart post by the much-worse new track from Alexandra Burke.
Earlier this year I went all frothy over Two Door Cinema Club’s rather zingful “Something Good Can Work”. I even offered it as a free download, which would seem to be the ideal opportunity for me to link to it again. Only, er, in changing my hosting and whatnot that link don’t work no more. PISS.
Oh well, here it is again:
In’t that nice? (Yes.)
Now they’re back and they’ve got a noo single called “I Can Talk”, the video representation of which you can see over the internet page.
I remember, when I was about fifteen, suddenly arriving at the terrifying realisation that all the good music that was ever going to be written, that ever *could* be written, had been. That was it. Music was over. How, after human beings existing for so long, and with so many great songs having been created, could people keep on producing amazing music?
With a boundless pessimism people who know me in real life will recognise all too well, I settled on the answer: they couldn’t.
Yes, I probably spent a bit too much time in my head as a youngster.
But it’s a notion that resurfaces with me quite regularly, which is a bit of an issue when you’ve got a music blog you’re trying to keep going.
You know, you get the tube to work and rather than go through the hassle of elbowing people in the chin so you can extricate your headphones from your bag, you stare at a Columbus Insurance ad on the wall of the carriage. I mean, it’s only another fifteen minutes before you reach your destination - it’s quite nice just to unfocus the old pupils and space out for a while. It’s the rush hour equivalent of loosening the belt, and it’s far less indecent.
But then you remember times when, not too many years before, you’d get public transport, look at people not listening to music or reading a book - people who were just staring at nothing - and you’d think: “how can they do that?” How can they spend this precious time, when they could be listening to anything they want, reading anything they want, just staring at a cartoon dog holding a pair of skiis?
And you realise that now you’re one of those people, and you blame it on the fact that since there’s so much music out there being flung at/offered to you - in countless emails from PR folk, by music blogs and aggregators, by friends, by the radio, by Twitter, by Spotify - you can’t listen to it all. You can’t do it justice. And so to avoid the heinous mistake of wasting precious time investigating something you might not enjoy, you listen to none of it.
You open 2% of the emails, listen to 2% of the streams, follow up 2% of the recommendations… and if you don’t hear something you like in those miniscule percentiles, that’s it. Your faith in the ability of music to take you out of your world for even four minutes at a time, to transform your mood, is vanquished. All the decent stuff has been produced already. Music’s dead.
THANK FUCK, then, for the days when, remarkably, something makes it through these seemingly insurmountable barriers and reminds you, you bloody dolt, that music will never die. And that, in the same way humans will keep improving technology and medicine and all that boring crap, they will also keep writing beautiful, affecting, unexplainably poignant songs which revive your faith in what - excusez le pretentiousness here pour un second - is pretty much the greatest artform we have. Not that my jaw will ever fail to clench if I hear people refer to it as such.
And *then* you think: how odd to be so passionate about something and have such little faith in it, even after all these years.
I would like to dedicate this self-indulgent brainweep to Julian Casablancas’s “Out Of The Blue”, from his debut solo album Phrazes For The Young, because sadly - or gladly - I literally don’t have the words to say how much and in how many ways I currently love the living shit out of it.
Aw, lookathis. Christopher Cross, Michael McDonald & The Roots. In sailors’ caps. With two drummers. Doing 70s taxicab classic, “Ride Like The Wind”. S’nice!
Posted by
Stuart Waterman on
Tuesday November 3rd, 2009 at
8:00 am
That little snapshot up there is from Snoop Dogg’s new video, “Gangster Love” “Gangsta Luv”. It’s an odd moment - amongst all the usual lady-based booty-quaking and gyrationalisms, there’s Snoop in the back seat of his whip having noodles chopsticked into his mouth by an Asian “lovely”.
I suppose after a few years in the game you probably run out of ways to humourously objectify women, so it’s heartening to see Snoop and his video director switching things up a bit.
Kudos also for the moment when, while zipping along in a speedboat with another buttock-flaunting entourage, Snoop smacks two ladies on their badonkadonks - and knocks them overboard. Nary a raised eyebrow from Mr. Dogg, of course, despite said ladies’ almost certainly not living to shake their bumcakes again.
The first - and in all likelihood last - of My Chemical Toilet’s video tutorials shows how to teach yourself Calvin Harris’s awesome “You Used To Hold Me” on the stylophone.
“RATE AND SUBSCRIBE”
Posted by
Stuart Waterman on
Sunday November 1st, 2009 at
6:59 pm
My Chemical Toilet’s roving review machine John-Scott Croly went to check out some up-and-comers on the latest Levi’s Ones To Watch Tour, so he did.
The band selector for the Levi’s OnesToWatch tour (for argument’s sake let’s call her Jean) is seemingly able to predict with unerring accuracy the bands that will be soundtracking our iPod commercials and adorning our NME-reading teenage relatives’ bedrooms walls twelve months down the line. Given the name and premise of the tour, this surely makes her very good at her job.
Of course I’m fully aware that in all likelihood each tour’s band roster is carefully selected by a team, nay, committee of achingly hip cultural Nostradamuses - but it’s fair to say that whoever these people are, they’re getting something right.
Previous acts to play on the Never-Ending Tour of Denim-Endorsed Musical Foresight™ have included White Lies, Passion Pit, Dananananaykroyd, Black Lips and The Temper Trap. And whether you care for these bands or not, their subsequent success is indie-sputable.
So it was with a curious ear I ventured down the steps of legendary Soho haunt The Borderline. I’d barely heard even whisperings about any of the bands on bill. A friend at the NME had only heard of one of them. Would this night’s show be a non-stop cavalcade of clever clairvoyance, or had Jean been headhunted by the Wrangler Corporation for their forthcoming ‘Next Big Thing’ tour? Well, chuffing well read on and you’ll find out. Continue reading »
Posted by
Stuart Waterman on
Sunday November 1st, 2009 at
5:00 pm
As revelations go, the above is about as surprising as waking up in the morning. But Karin Dreijer deserves credit for not giving up on that whole “I’m going to spook the bollocks out of you” vibe she’s been mining for a while, even if she is tipping over into self-parody.
Not that you’ll be thinking in such an analytical fashion when you see her with a big “V” on her face for no particular reason in the vid for “Stranger Than Kindness”. Nay, you’ll be doing your darndest not to shityapants.
Merry Halloween, everyone!*
*I know it’s not Halloween for a couple of days yet, but the chances of me getting time to post again before Saturday are, how you say, “slim to fuck-all”.
Posted by
Stuart Waterman on
Wednesday October 28th, 2009 at
11:54 pm
John-Scott Croly skipped along to Wimbledon’s Watershed to see Band Of Skulls (above) support some people called The London Punks t’other day week.
Hotly-tipped Southampton blues-rockers Band of Skulls were this show’s not-so-secret support act, squeezing in a quick one on their way back home for a well-earned weekend off. They blew the sweaty roof off the Watershed’s dank back room - not that any of the 20 or so glass-eyed punters noticed.
Without their own following, the trio had to make do with the headliners’ early crowd - a smattering of arm-folders and phone-fiddlers who steadfastly refused to be won over, seemingly out of some kind of fierce-yet-misguided loyalty to The London Punks. Continue reading »
Posted by
Stuart Waterman on
Sunday October 25th, 2009 at
5:27 pm
I’m not one for R&B ballads, really. They tend to be syrupy and over-emotive, which is obviously a generalisation but, you know, given the choice between a ballad and a club “banger” it’s the bangful one that wins me over 85% of the time.
However, like the very best pop songs, Brit soul type McLean’s “Broken” manages to transcend the genre with which it would be most closely associated. It’s a heartbroken, overwrought fist-clencher which, in a landscape of overproduced, autotuned pop spaff with half an eye on ringtone sales, actually makes you believe the singer is properly, hair-tearingly lovewrecked. Marvellous.
It also has a very interesting history, having first surfaced way back in 2006, when McLean went by the name of Digga (since changed because an American artist went by the same name). Unbeknownst to me, it became an online sensation, racking up millions of plays on YouTube and prompting, seemingly, everyone with a webcam to produce their own version. Continue reading »
Posted by
Stuart Waterman on
Tuesday October 20th, 2009 at
8:30 am
Here we have a guest post from a new addition to the MCT carousel of scribbling talent. He goes by the nom of Nick Bryan, and he “maintains” a blog called Feeding The Black Dog. GO NICK GO.![[Post to Twitter]](http://mychemicaltoilet.com/wp-content/plugins/tweet-this/icons/tt-twitter-micro3.png "tt twitter micro3 photo"){kind=icon}
I’m not one for R&B ballads, really. They tend to be syrupy and over-emotive, which is obviously a generalisation but, you know, given the choice between a ballad and a club “banger” it’s the bangful one that wins me over 85% of the time.
