Fuckin' A Man

It's been a while since I've written on here but, yes, I shall give it one more try.

Firstly there has been a shit load of music (new and old) that has held my very unstable attention over the last few months. To categorize it in time periods: April-May was a Bob Dylan time for me; the release of "Together Through Life" shook me TO MY VERY CORE. Not in any biblical sense, it was just a very, very good album. Because of this I spent the majority of aforementioned months bathing myself in Dylan's entire back catalogue. "Highway 61 Revisited" was declare the GREATEST POP ALBUM OF ALL TIME in hilarious fashion with me attempting to learn every track on the album at least 3 times (except for 'It takes a lot to laugh, it takes a train to cry' for no real reason). Attached to that I began to read "Chronicles" written by the man himself and began to listen to his "Theme Time Radio Hour". But enough about Dylan, June was dedicated to Shakey...

Shakey of course being the nickname to the great lonesome Canadian, Neil Young. His set at the Isle of Wight festival 2009 was life-affirming and as such I spent the majority of that month listening to (mainly) "Harvest" and "Harvest Moon". No real reason, I quite like "On The Beach", "Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere" and "Rust Never Sleeps" too, but those two CDs are everything frail, imaginative, cocky, reassuring and creative that the man has produced. Contradictory, perhaps, but all the while exciting and nevertheless a weird yet wonderful summer soundtrack.

JULY was the month of my birth and a weird concoction of sounds filtered through like an unholy ghost. Because it has been such a long time, I really can't remember much of what I was listening to. However Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds stick out due to me watching them perform (again) at the Latitude Festival. They were phenomenal and probably the best musical act of the weekend; top five being: The Bad Seeds, 1990s, Joe Gideon and the Shark, Jeffrey Lewis and the Junkyard and Spiritualized although Turin Brakes' midnight set gets a special mention for being the most improved show (from the last time I saw them) and Jarvis Cocker performing with beat-box wunderkind Schlomo was nothing short of awesome. July finished with repeat listening to various Nick Cave albums and a sordid mental affair with the Berlin post-punk scene of which the Bad Seeds inhabited.

Obviously, June and July was not just about festivals and musician philosophers. Two peculiar instances involving wooded areas and lots of walking opened my eyes up to the wonders of the Grateful Dead. Before this, my main connection with the group came from listening to the Dylan & the Dead LP of which I must be one of just a handful of people to claim they enjoyed it, so to listen to their catalogue, especially "American Beauty" and their incredible collection of live music, was incredible. Those days of interest also sparked a healthy obsession with The Band and Janis Joplin. All in the name of music, m'afraid.

On to August; an odd one this. August began as a dipping into uncharted territory (for me), being the world of hip-hop. It started by thinking about different lyrical styles. I have, in the past, enjoyed Run DMC and some rap and various other types of urban sounding music. In this instance, Jay Z's most recent release, 'DOA (Death of Autotune)' sparked a love of hip hop. I begin with two albums; one of which I liked and one that I did not. These were, respectively, "Three Feet High and Rising" by De La Soul and "Planet Rock" by Afrika Bambaataa. I enjoyed the playfulness of De La Soul and the really hard drum beats but I felt that Bambaataa's electro styling's had no pulse and it was all show and no tell. On then I delved into Hip Hop with the Beastie Boys, Public Enemy and Edan's "Beauty and the Beat" (a soulful stand-out if there ever was one). However, this didn't last too long and soon I was back on my way to the 'pioneer', but this time, it was a much younger one, being Jeffrey Lewis.

I had already seen him (twice) at Latitude and thought he was fuckin' a. So I got "It's the ones who've cracked the light shines through" "city & eastern" and the most recent album, "'Em are I". My obsession continued right through till last week when I saw him in Southampton. It was a great show, but the fakes and phoneys at that show made me realise that music is inevitably a fools game and that shows are purely a popularity thing. So I went to a metal gig. This was yesterday, and I say metal but it wasn't really a metal gig. It was a show run by the lovely Hong Kong Gardner's Sarah and Abbie, but it wasn't really 'there's' as much as it was the Demon's who took over proceedings. The first band was a group called Elapse-O and oddly enough I have supported them in the past (I shall be getting on to that in another post) and they were good, but not mind-blowing like the band that went on next. INVASIONNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN....now THEY were MIND BLOWING. and weirdly, in the conventional sense. I thoroughly loved their EP "Moongazer" so I knew I would like them live, and I did. Lots. Their songs are great for people with no attention span as they take about two minutes to groove up and then pull away, leaving you starved and wanting more. It was also had one those WTF moments. I fazed out and started staring into space for a moment or two and when I turned back to the stage, the drummer (a girl) had taken her top off. Like my friend said, she had a cracking pair of tits and when he did say that I kept giggling everytime I repeated that phrase in my head and had to resort to looking away like a teenage girl at a Blue concert. Horribly by the time they had finished and the final band (the DEMONS!!!) went on stage, I had to leave to get my train. I did see two songs, but that was enough to make me annoyed that I had to leave early. Motherfucking trains.

Anyway, the reason why my title says 'fuckin' A man' is because before the show last night I watched "Burn After Reading". The end credits played a track I vaguely remembered from the last time I saw it (or the time I saw it at the cinema). I had a look to see who it was and it was the FUGS!!! a band that Jeffrey Lewis swears by. Anyway the track is called 'CIA Man' and the chorus line is "fuckin' A man...CIA man"...and it was the last song I listened to before I began writing this but now I'm listening to the Clash...

take it easy

MATTHEW THE HELIUM LORD