Japanese Music: Shinsei Kamatte-chan

This is what you miss out on, not having Tower Records in the rest of the world any more, suckers! I went to Tower Records in Sapporo, I forget what I went for, but I was wandering around listening to pretty much everything that looked interesting and there was a pretty big display for the two new albums from Shinsei Kamatte-chan. I had no idea who that was (despite them getting an assload of press last year, I don't keep up with everything, though I've been working on feeds and readers to make keeping up with anything easier recently) but they had albums by Midori on the same display, who were great but split up recently, so I gave them a listen. And then I bought both of their new albums

I cannot remember the last time I've been sold, so completely after the first few tracks of an album. It turned out I was listening to Tsumanne ("Boring"), their major label debut, but that they'd also released an album on their original indie label on the same day at the end of 2010. TWO ALBUMS ON THE SAME DAY? It's been done many times before, but let me tell you I cannot help but eat that shit right up. It hits my 'artistic follies' sweet spot just 'so'. Also it brings their total for 2010 to three albums and a separate single, which is a more than respectable output.

Another awesome, ridiculous thing they do is hidden tracks. Their debut has an unlisted track, their single (which is two tracks, one being an instrumental of the other) has more music stuck on the end of the second track after a silent gap. Best of all 'Tsumanne' has an unlisted track that's actually THREE more songs put into one twelve-minute track. It's so stupid, but it's so great.

A lot of people seem to like to flail around trying to describe Shinsei Kamatte-chan's music, and if that's good enough for everyone else, well... anyway. They're a noisy, messy, arty, avante-ish punk pop band, with good tunes and a chaotic approach to... pretty much everything it seems. They've got a massive youth following from live-streaming, uploading shitloads of videos and generally working the internet for all they're worth. And the videos often seem to be entirely different mixes of the songs to the ones they end up releasing (like the one at the top there). The frontman doesn't give interviews, and a lot of their songs pitch-shift his vocals so much that I really did assume that they had a female singer too at first.

Wow, this sounds like an utter puff-piece so far. But, I mean, they're not the best thing ever in the world. Just calling their albums 'Tsumanne' ("Boring") and 'Minna Shine' ("Everyone Fuck Off And Die" as jrawk.com wonderfully translated it) makes me want to not like them, even though it's almost important to have somebody taking that approach to things. I can see why their first album, 'Tomodachi Koroshite Made' was so popular: it's catchy and aggressive and crazy and fun. But when they lean on the piano for songs it makes me think of Midori - but less-so (the single is probably the worst offender for that I suppose). I think it's a good album, so's their other indie record 'Minna Shine', but I don't love either of those records.

I fucking LOVE 'Tsumanne'. For me, musically it's like a quantum leap forwards. It sounds like nothing else, despite bringing to mind a load of music I like. There's still shreds of that simple, snotty punk sound, bits of Midori, but it's drunk, woozy, smothered with deranged, over-chorused vocals and stranger melodies than before. Oh, ok, when I first put it on and was blown away I thought - Holy shit, it's the punk-rock Yapoos I've been waiting for. And now, jrawk says (in the review linked above) that they've been hanging around with Togawa Jun of Yapoos? Makes perfect fucking sense. Then, the best thing is that in the end after living with it - it doesn't sound like Yapoos. It's entirely its own thing, but it has that same, weirdly other-worldy vibe to it. Maybe it ate a bunch of Yapoos vinyl before it turned up to the party, I don't know, but I do love it.

And for all I know whatever they do next will be completely different and that will be awesome too. They're a great fucking band and I think I've been paying too much attention to pop music recently. Time to pick up another free zine and check out every band in it again I guess. Also, check out all the albums on jrawk's best of 2010.

Alex's Book Club - The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Ah yes, just to bring you down from Christmas with a bump, a quick post about a notoriously depressing masterpiece:


In fact I found Cormac McCarthy's The Road (coming soon with extra Mortensen to a cinema near you!) to be not nearly as depressing as I'd feared. The story is bleak for sure, but it's so beautifully written as to be almost uplifting. It's a wonderful book and I would certainly recommend it to anyone who can avoid getting hung up on the apocalyptic nihilism of the story.

Moments from It's A Wonderful Life

Well, that's just one of the best movies ever isn't it?






God damn you Frank Capra - playing me like a man-sized fiddle.

Merry Christmas everyone!

Moments from Southland Tales

Man, I'm not afraid to tell you that I was waiting to see Southland Tales for a lo-o-ong time. As one of the many people who fell head over heels in love with Donnie Darko, when I heard that Richard Kelly's second movie was going to be a crazy ensemble piece about the end of the world, starring The Rock, Sean William Scott and Sarah Michelle Gellar, that would be prefaced by three graphic novels I was 100%-no-refunds sold.

Then it got mauled at Cannes, scaled back, recieved what might charitably be called "mixed reviews" and most people seem to think that Kelly pretty much blew it. The only review I've read of his latest one has been bad too.

Well, y'know. I finally picked up the DVD for cheap when I was back in England and finally sat down with it this week. And of course it's awesome.

I mean, it's a mess, but it's awesome.





I've read two of the three prologue graphic novels (could never seem to track down the last one, and wasn't even sure that it came out, but now I see that it has) so the insanely rushed synopsis at the start actually jogged some memories for me and then I could pick it up pretty well, but I can understand why a lot of people might not. He just tries to pack so much stuff in there, and yes, the story is told in an confusing way, but Jesus there are two strikingly different cuts of Donnie Darko and this was easier to follow than both of them. It's just that Donnie Darko was hung around a 1980s coming of age movie, it was an underdog movie, and people were lured in by that a lot I think. Southland Tales is an apocalyptic sci-fi farce (and there was far more straight comedy than I expected) starring an ex pro-wrestler, an actor known for peurile comedy, a pulp TV actress and a pop star. Unless you like the willfully eclectic (like me, and probably a lot of other people too) it's a pretty hard sell. Worth noting that I thought all the performances - and yes, a lot of the time it seemed like people were acting in entirely different movies - were perfectly pitched for this movie.

I really did love it. I kept thinking it was going to take a nose dive into the unwatchable, but it never did. The weakest point was that terrible opening, where a whole other movie was summarised in voice over and via faux news reels. In the end that stuff played out and was essential to the story, but even I've gotta admit you're asking a lot of your audience to follow that and then jump right into part four. But once it got going the way the story played out, tricky as it was, became a real strength. Kelly wasn't sloppy in telling the story, he was just asking the viewer to keep up, and that's never a bad thing.

Comics Stuff: The Sublime Genius of Brandon Graham

Ok now, seriously. Everything Brandon Graham does makes me happy to be alive, and just... makes me feel like making stuff. He's like a five hundred mil bottle of inspiration whenever I need one. I've bookmarked his livejournal on the right here, and I've read this issue of King City about five times already:


It was the only one I could find when I went back to England, but I'm desperate to get everything I can. I want his babies basically.

Alex Listens to Every Girls Aloud Album For You

So, Girls Aloud - the TV manufactured girl group of (I suppose) debatable talent, the majority of whose oeuvre has been written and composed by the sugar-pop-warlock-surgeons at Xenomania. Their songs being so good that they gave a "Get Out of Authenticity Free" card to almost every indie listener in the world. Myself, of course, included. But still you bump up against the ugly wall of prejudice: Girls Aloud? No! Manufactured! TV show! Pop music! MUST DISMISS!

Gah, some people can take no joy in life, can they?

Should I mention that I'm delighted that Rage Against The Machine got to Christmas no. 1? Putting aside every other issue and purely based on the fact that the song they chose for Joe McElderry single to sing was so utterly shit. If he'd been doing a Xenomania track I'd probably have been in his corner.

And while I'm digressing... did he fuck Cheryl Cole? Because the video seems to be narrating some kind of torturous love story between Joe and Cheryl, lots of eye contact, tearful hugging, begging for their lives in front of a massive audience and finally being granted a reprieve. I don't know, maybe I was misreading it.

Anyway, astonishingly they hit five albums this year, and I finally decided to step up my love from listening to The Show and Biology on repeat and actually listen to each of their five albums from start to finish. Many times over. Interestingly while I admit my love is mostly based on those unstoppable melodies I hadn't thought much about the members themselves. I mean, not being in the country for a couple of years means that I don't really get to see them perform or appear on TV, and my impression before I left wasn't so great - they were just the faces the songs I liked came out of. That said, listening to a lot of their music together... their voices don't sound autotuned or post-polished to death (I mean, not as much as some other pop artists), and that actually adds a lot to the whole.

Anyway, I did not regret my undertaking for one second, and I'm sure neither will you.

1) Girls Aloud - Sound of The Underground

What an oddly cheap looking album cover! Mummy, is that what the underground looks like? Is that the resistance? The first album was a strong start but is by no means the peak of their career so far. The singles are great, but my favourite track here must be Some Kind of Miracle, which didn't even get picked as a single. That, my friends, was the kind of gold I was mining for. It's worth noting now, early on, that while occasionally there are clearly different voices singing (as different girls pick up the mic for different verses) I have absolutely no idea who is singing what, and while there are five girls, there are only two or three different voices that I've been able to discern... I mean at least they aren't Exile though, where you have two singers and twelve dancers. Also worth noting that titling a song "Girls Allowed" on their first album really... wasn't necessary. We... we get it.

2) Girls Aloud - What Will The Neighbours Say?

Oh, now I see what they were going for with that cover but I'd say they probably failed in... everything? The type is quite nice I guess. The second album, featuring as it does The Show (one of my favourite Girls Aloud songs) and Love Machine (one of everyone else's favourite Girls Aloud songs), is where things get really good. The first album is solid, occasionally inspired, but wouldn't have been enough to make me a staunch defender, y'know. This one starts (with some assist from a couple of covers) with a straight five track blast of brilliance. And after that there's still Graffiti My Soul, which just... wow. A song so good that the tyros of youtube have been compelled to slap the music on top of every other Girls Aloud video in some cack-handed attempt to magic a Graffiti My Soul video into existence.

3) Girls Aloud - Chemistry

Probably their best cover, which tells you how shit their covers are in general. Honestly, making cover art for Girls Aloud should be like hitting the ground when you fall over, and yet time and again... Anyway this makes two classics in a row. It starts with a trifecta of ass-kicking, and still the structure and majesty of Biology gets me every goddamn time. So good. It's difficult to pick between WWTNS and C (hmmm... abbreviations not working quite so well there), because while I think the second album has better highlights - the lesser songs on Chemistry are greater than those on 'Neighbours'. Anyway, best non-single is probably the track that kicks the album off - Models. Wow, I should watch more Girls Aloud live stuff on youtube, then I can see who sings what!

4) Girls Aloud - Tangled Up

Ah, the classy album. Actually, probably just as good as the previous two now that I think about it. This was one of the albums they released after I'd left the country so I have no idea about the singles, the promotion or the videos - I just listened to the whole thing as an album and it was interesting to see that minimal (still crappy) cover art and hear the (slightly) more mature, restrained sound that they aimed for. The first track, Calling The Shots, is especially impressive for capturing a kind of longing that they had occasionally aimed for on previous albums but fallen far short of, landing in kind of emoticon territory. Close To Love could be an Annie song at the start (while the Xenomania tracks on Annie's last album could have been Girls Aloud songs) which is nothing but good. Sexy! No No No... is amazing, and even the slow single Can't Speak French is a killer on this album. Wow, and then there's Blackjacks and Fling and the insanely awesomely titled (sadly not all that awesome) Control Of The Knife... Let's just say that on reflection this one is up there with the previous two.

5) Girls Aloud - Out Of Control

Well, I don't want to be too damning here, after all it might be a grower, but this still feels like their worst album so far to me. I guess it's tough (as a chart pop act) to keep up the insanely high level of quality that they'd displayed until this point in this career, but whereas before their songs had stomped you to the ground and demanded your attention, on this album they're just kind of... ok. The album cover is even not-bad, in a hideous way, but the music... I was disappointed. In a way, despite the title, it's even more classy and restrained than Tangled Up, there are no truly up-beat singles even! Love is the Key is worth a listen, but feels pieced together from bits of other, better songs. I'd probably pick Miss You Bow Wow as my favourite track on this rekkid (the live version behind that link is actually better than the album version), and even then it only really sparkles in the chorus, and thinking about songs like Biology where every part individually shines... that's quite a step down. I don't know, the whole thing sounds... a little lacking.

But still! I have hope and they might have a new album "Back in Control" next year? Not sure about that but... that might be a return to their previous standards? Here's hoping. In the mean time Girls Aloud are awesome and if you find you don't agree with that, I can only encourage you to check yourself... most thoroughly.

The Genius of Neil Hamburger

My recent brush with British stand-up's had some kind of knock on effect whereby I went and hunted out a bunch of American stand-up. Not quite sure how that works, but still: Paul F. Tompkins' live CD is awesome (there's nothing to match in on youtube though, sadly), and it also helped me remember America's Funnyman - Neil Hamburger:

That I sat through a whole hour of a comedian being deliberately unfunny, is a sign of some sort of twisted genius. Also:

Ah, jokes.

Comics Stuff : Thanks for the geekgasm Jason Aaron

So apparently someone gave Jason Aaron (a writer who has been impressing me greatly recently with his quality, manly, comics) the keys to my comic geek subconcious, because he picked out pretty much my favourite two semi-obscure recent Marvel characters to star in his spuriously titled "Wolverine" one shot. I mean, Wolverine doesn't exactly do a great deal, while the limelight is comprehensively stolen by Fantomex:


...the French (or faux-French), gun-toting, amoral, mutant, super-thief with the external nervous system; and Marvel Boy, the fascistic, half-insect, super soldier from another dimension:


Both of whom were created by Grant Morrison during his brief tenure at Marvel where he almost turned the X-Men into the powerhouse of ideas and excitement that they should be, before someone screwed something up and he went back to DC. I mean, considering the absolute farce that surrounded the lead-up to Infinite Crisis, DC aren't much better at utilising his talents, but at least they're letting him do exactly what he wants on the books he's writing.

Anyway, Marvel have built massively on the work that he did for them in recent years, but every time they pull out a character like Fantomex or (especially) Marvel Boy, I hold my breath because I really love those characters and while I try not to be unreasonably geeky about these things I don't want to see them fucked up. Jason Aaron fails to fuck the pair up in this comic so spectacularly, that it ends up absolutely amazing.

Seriously, if the world could be twisted to the extend that I could get a Fantomex / Marvel Boy monthly team-up written by Aaron, I would buy the shit out of it.

Greatest Living Englishmen #17 : Luke Haines

I'm currently reading, and enjoying the good goddamned hell out of, Luke Haines' "Britpop" memoirs Bad Vibes, in which he comes across as something of a cunt, but a glorious one, and cements his position as one of the greatest living Englishmen.

On David Gray:

"Gray also has a nasty tick for lengthy onstage guitar-tuning sessions. Deoowwwing. String goes down. Boowwang. String goes up. Time passes, somewhere a life flickers out, and somewhere a new life begins. Yeah, strum a chord, see if it sounds OK. Murwaaang! No improvement then. Christ"

On The Boo Radleys:

"I didn't think it could get worse than Gray. I have a lot to learn. Tonight we are sharing the bill with the Boo Radleys."

On Pulp's early albums:

"Pulp's career has run like one of those silent movies showing man's early attempts at aviation. Each Pulp release is like a preposterous flying machine trundling toward the cliff edge, only to break up like balsa wood as it flops into the sea."

He's clearly well aware that he was an absolute bastard for a lot of his career, and a lot of the vitriolic, splenetic ranting can be picked apart, or treated as one man's snooty opinions I'm sure, but he still makes a great many good points about all the shit that was released under the banner of Britpop. And it's great fun to note how many people he takes to just because his hated cellist doesn't like them. For me his best album might be the one as Baader Meinhoff, but I like his entire catalogue, and because I'm only a third of the way through the book I'm on an Auteurs kick at the moment.

Here they are playing a song about Lenny Bruce dying of a drug overdose and dreaming that he's in Rudolph Valentino's funeral motorcade on Jools Holland (who now has two shows a week? sign of the end times people, I swear):

Grand song, and as Haines points out, releasing it as a single made it a great record too. And here's a pretty fantastic video for Rubettes from their last album:

Love the way he's integrated into the video there. And finally he makes the excellent point, that I have seen made before, that deep in every Englishman's heart there is a gaping whole that no love can fill, and a hunger that can only be sated by conquering an empire.

Moments from Wild Zero

Wild Zero is a fantastic zombie b-movie starring the Japanese Rock 'n' Roll legends Guitar Wolf.

What's it about?




It's about Rock 'n' Roll.

Those are actual subtitles from the movie by the way, which is amazing on so many levels it's like God's own multi-storey car park.

A Week Late, A Tenner Short

This post, whenever it's supposed to be dated, was written on Tuesday 29th October. Phew, man, not sure I'm going to be able to paper over the gap this time! Sadly with more time I can actually spend time doing things I want to do rather than forcing myself to write a blog just so that I'm doing something other than work. So we'll see how this goes. Also Andy came to stay a couple of days ago so it's going to be harder than ever to fill the yawning vacant content-hungry boxes of this "blog".

Many good things have happened though. Me finding that there's an amazing animated video for Shiina Ringo's Tsugou No Ii Karada for example:

Awesome. More tomorrow. I mean today. I mean...

E-e-e-edit!

A) As pointed out in the comments, I mean September 29th. Not that I can't travel forwards in time when I want to, it's just that I didn't do that this time.

B) Youtube took down the Ringo-chan video, which leaves me with the option of trying to find a new streaming link, or just telling you to track it down yourself. Guess which one I'm going to do!

It's worth the effort!

Comics Stuff: Grant Morrison's Batman & Robin #3

So good.


So, so good. I've been reading Grant Morrisons work on Batman over the last few years only sporadically, but I'm suddenly possessed with this desire to find and consume all of it all over again.

It's so good.

I might have been born yesterday, but I stayed up all night.

GodDAMN that El-P record that came out two years ago (I'll Sleep When You're Dead) is good. Really, really good.

His production still sounds like I believe regular hip-hop will sound in twenty years time and when he's dropping lines like the one in the title of this here post he's pretty much unstoppable. Fantastic video too. I wanna go back in time to 2007 and slot it into my best of the year list.

More hip-hop I've been listening to this week: Eyedea and Abilities. Now that I'm using Media Monkey to listen to stuff I keep digging up old rekkerds that I haven't listened to in forever, and one of them was their self titled second album. When I got it I was hooked in by Now (it's streaming on their myspace, check it out), which is just by far the best track on a pretty solid album that didn't really blow me away. There's too much posturing, and it's really hard to put my finger on why that doesn't work for me there, I mean, posturing is in no way a bad thing in hip-hop terms. I think it's maybe something to do with the fact that they most certainly have the skills to pay the bills, but being a champion battle rapper and champion scratch artist, it's like they set out to make an album that played to their strengths, that maximised their potential and... maybe they could'a just made a better album if they relaxed a bit and not locked themselves in a classic, but limited, hip-hop paint box. Anyway, after five years or whatever off doing a million different things they're back, and the press release says back to the battle rapping and scratching, which is entirely misleading because they've made a much more interesting album than that.

That's not even one of the better songs on the new album By the Throat, which is a blast. It's short, punchy, it obeys no formulas, it's not in any box (well, kinda the modern indie hip-hop playpen I guess) and it sounds like a record made by people with inspiration rather than people toiling to make the most of their gifts within the genre in which they're expected to perform. Everything's messier and noisier, nothing fades out and songs are cut off before their natural end point, there are lots of fuzzy guitar noises that never lapse into actual rock riffs (barring a couple of shaky straight-punk sections) and great beats and good lines and most importantly of all they get the most out of every track and then they kill it. The previous album, like many, many rock and hip-hop records works with the assumption that a track should be yay-long, regardless whether the song is good enough to keep the attention for that long. This is one of my biggest personal bugbears in pop music - the so-so chorus that still gets repeated four times at the end of a four minute song in the hope that momentum might give it extra mass; the third or fourth verse in a song where the point's been made in the first, filled out in the second and there's nowhere else for it to go. Christ I wish people would think about what structure would make the song better, rather than dragging the song out to fit some trad-skeleton. By The Throat is execptional in that way. There's a track about gun control and he makes his point in the first verse and that's it. Done in one verse. One minute forty four seconds, and it's as complete as every other song on the record. Awesome.

Heh, white guys rapping. Now for rock, Pitchfork, god bless it's little cotton socks turned me onto Health, and their second album Get Color is very good. This is the best song though, and the video is exceptional:

So it might be slightly downhill after that. Apparently they used to be accused of jumping on some noise-rock bandwagon (oh man, they must've smelt the billions in gold bullion you can make from noise-rock these days!) but while you can see their influences, I think the sound they've carved out for themselves here is pretty unique. Despite sounding like a car-plant trying to romance a circular saw and play the dums at the same time the record flows really, really well. They keep up the same sonics almost all the way through and there's a great balance of focus and freedom.

Wow, I had a good music week. I also got the Beta Satan album (you can buy it easily, not just through itunes! off their myspace there) which is fantastic. Some of Beta Satan used to be Tiger Tunes, who made Denmark awesome with their electronic indie music, and Beta Satan are just like Tiger Tunes except ROCK and with a lot of swearing and a hilariously surly attitude. Their NSFW video is:

I mean, I saw NSFW, but as always it depends where you "W" and whether you care what people think of you. They have a song called Maths and Chemistry with a repeated refrain of "Politics Politics" that I find incredibly amusing for no reason I can consciously fathom.

Pitchfork (and some guy on a message board) also told me to get XX by The XX but in this case I can't be all that enthusiastic about it. I mean, it's a good downbeat electro pop album, and I'll certainly listen to it for background music when I'm trying to do something else (oh! backhanded dis! I don't mean that as bitchily as it came out), but it really, really sounds like The Blow to me. Except it's more downbeat and it's really trying to be classy and aloof and touching and down to earth at the same time, and The Blow are much more carefree and, frankly, much better. Hmmm, I wonder how much of it comes down to the fact that the girl who sings for The XX sounds exactly like Khaela Maricich of The Blow? Maybe my senses are being misled by that. It is funny that on a couple of duets the slightly affected vocals of the boy from The XX make him sound exactly like Har Mar Superstar. So, essentially, if I hadn't known what I was listening to when that track came on then I would've sworn on my pirate ancestor's grave that it was an old Blow song with guest vocals from Har Mar Superstar.

Oh man, that's a lot of writing about music! It was fun though. See you around!

Mark Mulcahy

Mark Mulcahy is one of the finest songwriters in the world, a personal favourite of mine and, I would dare to say, a genius of sorts. Thanks to the fact that every piece of news about Radiohead is headline news, I found out this week that he's having a hard time at the moment (his wife passed away suddenly last year, leaving him to raise two kids on his own), and that there's a tribute/benefit to him coming out at the end of the month.

The Radiohead connection is that Thom Yorke, smart cookie that he is, is a huge Mulcahy fan and often gives him little shout outs (I like to imagine a chain of fandom from Kanye West to Thom Yorke to Mark Mulcahy to ???). He's contributing a track to the album, among an impressive list of other artists including Michael Stipe, Dinosaur Jr. (J Mascis contributed guitar to his last solo album), Ben Kweller, Josh Rouse, Vic Chestnutt and most excitingly for me Frank Black. The rhythm section who played on some of Mulcahy's earlier records (late Miracle Legion I think, and the amazing one time band Polaris that lived in your TV) Scott Boutier and David McCaffrey (and how much of a Black/Mulcahy superfan do I have to be that I didn't have to look up either of those names) went on to be the spine of Frank Black's Catholics. Frank's gonna be doing Bill Jocko, which is one of my favourite Mark Mulcahy songs, and by chance I was just listening to it last week.


My band, Devil and Casey Jones covered the classic Pete & Pete theme Hey Sandy repeatedly and unapologetically, and I saw Mulcahy play live in the UK four times I think, one of those being a completely surreal endless gig in Nottingham where, because no-one stopped him he just kept playing long after the legal curfew. He's also one of the very few people for whom I've shouted out requests during his shows, only to have them refused both times. Here's some youtube "contentz":

I like the guy with the eyepatch in that one, and assume this next one is by the same team:

And now, a fantastic live duo performance:

So, the point being go and check out Mark Mulcahy's music (that's his label/site, here's his myspace). He's a scruffy guitar-pop God, and I myself am going to go drop money that I don't have at his web store and pick up the tribute album as soon as I can. I'm also crossing my fingers that they're filming the tribute concerts and footage of that will be coming out.

Comics Stuff : Gillen & McKelvie's Phonogram

The last issue of Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie's Phonogram (issue 4 of volume 2) was just incredible. I've said it before and I will go so far as to say it again - if you're a fan of pop music you should be chasing after these books with both arms outstretched and your fingers kinda opening and closing, like you're already imagining them in your grabby little palms. That's the exact pose you should be adopting.


If you are British, and have a taste that originates in 90s indie and (dare we say) Britpop, that goes quadruple. It's a special kind of genius.

J-Pop - Ladies and Gentlemen... Yasutaka Nakata

Yasutaka Tanaka makes wonderful electronic pop music.

I just wanted to say that.

Greatest Bands Ever #652: Future of the Left

Yeah, yeah - Mclusky'll be in there too, but I just picked up the new Future of the Left album Travels with Myself and Another and it's phenomenal:

This is off their first album:

And so is this, although here it's a piece of hilariously loud, jerky phone-cam footage:

I went to Tower to see if they had the new album and not only did they but they also had the live album that I'd completely forgotten had come out for a prince's ransom. Seriously, I opted for just the new album and went and ransomed me a prince instead. He was kind of grateful but he fucked off pretty quick.

Wish I'd bought the live album now.

Alex Recommends Comics! Morrison & Quitely's Batman and Robin

Hey! Happy 400 posts everyone! Let's look at comics again!


That is a picture of Robin (as in Batman and Robin, yes) getting kicked into a wall by a siamese triplet martial artist. "SMASH". It's from the second issue of Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's new Batman and Robin comic book. You can't buy it in actual, regular, non-niche bookshops at the moment, it's still being published as floppy issues and only two have come out so far, but I'd hazard a guess that once it's collected it'll be one of the finest Batman stories in a heavily oversaturated field.

I don't want to get geeky about this (n.b. this is a lie, I absolutely DO want to get geeky, but my self control is... just astonishing, I'm like fuckin' Ghandi or something) but this is a book in which Batman himself... doesn't actually appear. This is about someone else taking up the Batman name while Robin is the real Batman's psychotic son. And of course, normal service will eventually be resumed, but this book is so good at the moment that I'm not really looking forward to that. Reading this comic for me was sheer comic book joy - no scratch that, sheer joy. Everything is wonderful, the action and the pacing, the toying with the coventions of the medium, the characters and dialogue... Morrison and Quitely are so at the top of their game that they are the game. That barely even makes sense, and it sounds like something Fiddy Cent would come up with, but I don't care. This is amazing.

TV Times? Berry & Flucher's Snuff Box

I have like, this huge man-crush on Matt Berry. I mean, mostly it's that voice - both honey-roasted and salted at the same time - but also he seems fairly darn talented.

I finally got to see Snuff Box that I believe was one of those amazing pieces of culture that Britain held onto until I left the country just to gyp me.

It's wonderful and insane and disturbing and is one of those comedy offerings that at times is so obtuse that you doubt whether you're even watching a comedy show. Again it hits my buttons because of the maleable internal logic that is sometimes strong as steel, sometimes as weak as jelly.

I cannot recommend it enough, nor the other works of Matt Berry. Oh gosh, I just found out he has actual albums! There must be some way to get ahold of them...

God damn you Matt Berry. And God bless you too.

Alex Recommends Comics! Enki Bilal's The Nikopol Trilogy a.k.a down the Nikopol Hole

In a way, my love of comics is all the French's fault. I mean, I have a single Spider-Man comic drawn by Erik Larsen which my parents bought me as a kid and which accounts for my love of that guy, but when I was in my formative years the books that I repeatedly got out of the library and read again and again were the Asterix and Tintin books.

So put the blame on French language publications (as if you weren't already).

Enki Bilal's Nikopol Trilogy (ususally published as a single volume, but a check on Amazon looks like the English language version is out of print right now) is much more "grown up" than Asterix and Tintin, but equally awesome. Also, his name is awesome - it's Serbian, though he's French. C'mon say it. Enki Bilal. Enki Bilal. If you were called Enki Bilal (whether you're a boy or a girl) you'd be getting a lot more action - if you know what I mean.


Roughly, it's the story of an astronaut who was frozen and shot into deep space as some kind of punishment and who returns to a future-fascist-dystopia-Paris only to be possessed by the Egyptian god Horus who wants to use his body to take over the world. But in the Nikopol Trilogy, no-one's plans ever progress smoothly. There's mistaken identity, double crossing, poltical machianations and a violent god who solves every problem by zapping people's brains with his god powers. Most of all there's a sense of utter chaos on fast-forward. In fact, I'd guess that could be one criticism levelled at it. Bilal has so many ideas and his world is so perfectly realised that at times it feels like you're just being given a tour of his imagination and the characters trapped inside, vivid though they are, are just being bounced around like pinballs. For me that wasn't so much of a problem, I just loved the whole batty rollercoaster ride.

It reminded me a little of Grant Morrison's recent work too, in that it demands the reader keep up and doesn't pander at all. At many points we join the story in progress, and an apparent narrative gap is half explained with a throwaway line that makes us do some of the leg work. I like that, and it adds to the sense that everything is a little out of control in this world.

Even though the narrative is twisted and spiralling and doesn't exactly have a particularly neat ending, apparently this trilogy of graphic novels that was published over ten years in the 80s and 90s was recently adapted into both a computer game (Nikopol: Secrets Of The Immortals) and a movie called Immortal. The movie, directed by Bilal himself just shot up my ones to watch list even though it apparently got mixed reviews. It's based on this stuff, it's gotta be crazy as a box of nuts.

Also also also - there's chess boxing. Chess boxing is a crazy futuristic sport that Bilal includes in the final part of the trilogy - a game where people box, then play chess while beaten and bloody - and some genius decided to make it into a real sport. Man, seriously, I pray that life imitates art and in the 2200s that's the most popular sport on the planet. The ultimate test of brains and brawn.