Falldog

Something happened yesterday which I honestly expected never would. The Mrs and I were listening to the new Rufus Wainwright album in the car, when he admitted that it, too, has broken pop music for him. And I’m not even sure he actually likes Rufus all that much. Just like me, he can’t now listen to anything else for more than four bars without thinking, “No, you know, I’m just going to put the Rufus album on again…”

News from my side of the musical divide: I think I’ve found an album that could break my addiction. It’s Fantastic Playroom by New Young Pony Club, and it’s great. There’s shades of Bow Wow Wow in there, bits of the B-52s, a female Lou Reed vibe, and (probably my favourite thing about it) a woman who really can sing choosing, for most of the album, not to.

Herewith, a publicity pic for the new Tori Amos album:

Who let Nicola from Girls Aloud in?

Over the last month or so, I’ve been re-listening to a lot of Tori Amos. I guess I had sensed in my waters that a new album was just around the corner. ‘American Doll Posse’ was announced this week, to my General Joy (a joke for three people there). The new photo accompanying the announcement on her website – possibly the cover, it’s hard to tell – sees Tori dressed in a glittery dress, hands open in a Christ-like fashion, one holding a battered leather-bound Bible, and with some I-think-we-can-all-guess-what-type-of-blood dribbling down the inside of her leg. Nice. But at least there are no suckling pigs, so we can all sleep easy.

To this: Hooray! I’m very pleased she’s back. Over the last couple of years, I’ve begun to realise that she’s probably taken the place as my favourite musical artist, the one whose music I love re-listening to the most, the one whose new material I get most excited about. Her last two albums – ‘Scarlet’s Walk’ and ‘The Beekeeper’ – have been huge, glittering epics, delicate and lovely, melodious and slippery. Just wonderful things. What they don’t have is any of the spiky, shrieky edges of the pig-suckling ‘Boys for Pele’ album, or any of the dark distorted corners of ‘From the Choirgirl Hotel’. By which I mean, what they have is the ability to be played in the car without the Mrs kicking off.

Anyway, those two albums’ fine craftsmanship, coupled with the fascinating read of her biography ‘Piece by Piece’, have cemented what could be called a worrying obsession with Tori. And how, exactly, does this makes itself known?

Remember the story of the fan who saw Gary Numan on stage and vowed to herself, “I will marry that man…” – and then did? (A creepier thing in the world of pop I really don’t think there is.) Well, that’s kind of like me and Tori. Kind of.

Anyone who’s been following the miserable witterings of my Mrs and I will know that we’re keen to move away from London in a couple of years, and that Cornwall is top of the list of places to move to.

Tori Amos lives in Cornwall, you know.

My criteria for a home in Cornwall would therefore be: a space in which to write, a nice garden, a nice view of some countryside and maybe even the sea, and Tori Amos next door. These stipulations may not be compromised upon.

I daydream about dusting the living room to the (loud) strains of ‘Cornflake Girl’, hoping she’d notice, pop over and say hi. Or reading ‘Piece by Piece’ in the back garden on a summer’s evening, when I know she’s having a barbecue. Or of knocking on her door and asking to borrow a cup of sugar. We would be friends, you see, and perfect neighbours. I could babysit her little daughter while she and her husband are down the Tesco. I’d watch their cat (she must have a cat… or at least a piglet) when they were away on tour. I’d listen to all her new material and let her know what I thought. I’d even sing on it, if she wanted me to. Or if she didn’t. Loudly, from outside the recording studio, if necessary.

One day, this will come to pass.

Maybe I should phone Mrs Numan and get some pointers.

Mystery solved. That thing in the case for the second Scissor Sisters album last year? That wasn’t what it claimed to be. I’ve just found it, and it’s inside the sleeve for the new Mika album. Quite where the Mika album is, though, I’ve no idea.

Popjustice has brought this to my attention:

Dear God. Reach out and touch a clue, would you?

Some people who have commented on that page at YouTube have, fairly, asked if the person who made that video was just having a laugh. Because surely – surely – no one is that stupid or ill-informed? It goes to follow: if you care enough about pop music to make a silly little video alleging plagiarism, you would know who wrote the song in the first place. Surely. Surely? Surely you couldn’t just be that stupid?

Let’s just take a look at some of the other videos posted by that user. There’s your unsettling but conclusive answer.

(Also? Pink? For an emo? Really?)

1) Pan’s Labyrinth

Finally got to see this the other night. Afterwards, as we returned home to bed, I was worried that what I had seen may give me nightmares. The following morning, I woke up after an undisturbed night’s sleep to realise what I should have realised at the time: the movie clearly had all my nightmares for me while I was in the cinema; I was so purged and free to sleep easy.

First of all, it’s the best film I’ve seen in ages. It is also easily the most graphically violent film I’ve ever seen. By the time the evil fascist captain is smashing in a poacher’s face with the heel of a bottle (and we see every strike, and every resulting mash-up of the man’s nose), I realised this wasn’t quite the film I expected it to be. I was expecting dark fantasy: what I got was dark, dark reality, with a side order of fantasy. The incredibly sad ending then confirms that all the fantasy was just that, and all we’re left with is a pile of dead bodies and a hollow feeling inside. Brilliant.

2) Scritti Politti’s White Bread, Black Beer

I came to this album very late, having read a lot about it but just continually forgetting to actually buy it. But a quick raid on iTunes over Christmas saw me furnished with it, and the grey skies of this week see me falling ever more in love with it.

I wouldn’t describe myself as a Scritti Politti fan exactly, but I was the one who bought his last album (Anomie & Bonhomie), and I still think that’s a minor work of fey-white-boy-meets-LA-hip-hop genius. Green Gartside’s voice is a national treasure, and to hear it thrown against a wall of funk and rap was a unique experience. On the latest album, that voice is given room to breathe, set against sparse, surprising musical backgrounds: slippery, evasive beats (there is one song where Green’s singing is half a beat ahead of the rhythm, making it curiously unsettling listening); songs which have unpredictable shifts, from gentle ballad to thudding groove and back, via icicle-delicate bridges. Sorry to wax cathedral-of-sound lyrical, but it really is splendid, rare listening. Hugely recommended.

3) World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade

News has reached me that Game are about to dispatch two copies of this to our house. They are, apparently, being “picked and packed”: I didn’t know games were like vegetables, but there you go. I’m excited, and Jon is, too, though he’s doing a good job of hiding it.

Batman wins! But probably not in the way you’re thinking…

I found mention of a 1954 report bracingly entitled The Seduction of the Innocent in this wired.com report this morning. Following a link, I found this page, where the whole thing is explained. Well, I say ‘explained’… It’s described; I don’t think there is an adequate explanation.

Turns out that a frothing Dr Frederick Wertham told the US government back in 1954 that comic books were the root cause of juvenile delinquency, saying that Hitler was “a beginner compared to the comic book industry”. You’ve got to love stuff like that. Nowadays, of course, it’s computer games: much of Wertham’s writing quoted on that page has echoes of the Daily Mail’s endless rants on the subject of the latest GTA clone and its threat to the moral bedrock of today’s polite society. Veils, hoods or d-pads… It’s all one to Middle England’s favourite paper.

As the writer of the page says, it would be funny if it wasn’t meant in deadly earnest. But at least those very echoes give me hope that, one day, such find-evil-in-everything people will move on to the next thing, and leave poor computer games alone.

… then Universal must be the Devil! How many more of those curvy-cornered albums am I going to buy this autumn? I have long suspected that UMG owns most of the world’s richest seams of pop, and it seems like I’m right.

On the subject of this, a few words about the Girls Aloud greatest hits collection – specifically the special edition*, with the extra disc of rarities. (Russell, are you reading? Have you exploded yet?) Obviously, the whole package was going to be amazing, it being the distilled, concentrated version of the 21st century’s finest band’s finest output. But it’s only when you sit down and listen to the whole thing – 13 stunning singles, and the oddest of oddities to go with them (a cover of ‘I Predict a Riot’, anyone? In this, they borrow a pound “for the bus home”… lying harlots!) – that you realise, by God, Girls Aloud are, without the slightest scintilla of doubt, the dog’s bollocks. I can’t think of a single person who shouldn’t own this album.

* Of course, that’s another thing UMG do: slap a ’special edition’ label on every album they’ve released since Pulp’s We Love Life in 2001. It’s like when DFS tell you that they’re slashing prices on their sofas, when they’ve only ever sold the bloody things at full price in one shop in Doncaster. Where they are too backward to even know what sofas are.** There are, of course, trading laws against that, but no equivalent laws to stop UMG’s ’special’ frenzy, when they don’t seem to ever release a ‘normal’ version of anything to go along with it. I wonder if some secretary, five years ago, wrote the wrong number down on a order form for these stickers (they are amazingly ubiquitous - have a peep the next time you’re in HMV) and they’re still trying to justify her accidental overspend by slamming them on everything that leaves their warehouse doors. Oh, I criticise, but Universal… I love you. Keep it up.

** I mock, but the town’s branch of Next was burnt to the ground for witchcraft.

Robbie William’s Rudebox
It’s about 54 tracks long, so I’ve not quite been able to fit in a listen to the whole thing, but… There seem to be about four or five tracks that are utter dross, while the rest is fabulous, in a slightly irksome way. Its pop literacy, for want of a better phrase, is amazing but it wears its influences on its sleeve to a degree where cries of ‘rip off!’ are the only correct responses. But the sources, oh, the sources… You name it, it’s there: Gorillaz (a lot), Dead or Alive, Xenomania, even – impressively – Future Bible Heroes. When the Pet Shop Boys aren’t actively involved, Robbie’s love of them is still very evident. It is, in places, the finest stuff he’s ever done. But the dross is truly awful.

The Aloud
Talking of Xenomania, last night Jon and I listened to the demo of Girls Aloud’s Love Machine, which appears on the new Popjustice compilation album. As it’s musically identical (apart from a few new synth bits at the end) but lyrically completely different, it’s a most unnerving experience. Meanwhile, the Aloud’s new single, Something Kinda Ooooh, is just astounding. “Shoulda recognised the plan of attack when he turned and called me baby,” indeed.

Battlestar Galactica
This just gets better and better. I don’t know if I’m spoiling anything for you here, but when Battlestar Pegasus turns up… Well, by that point, I had no idea who to trust, who I liked, or even who was really real. It’s a headfuck of a programme. It goes out of its way to make it hard to like and enjoy, which only makes it all the more compelling. I plan to continue to gorge further tonight, though I’m literally afraid to watch the next episode as I’m so worried about what on earth could happen next.