Last week we saw Lambchop at the Barbican. Halfway through the set Kurt Wagner had an epiphany, “I just realised something – this song sounds just like all the other songs.” He was probably on to something, but on that night’s evidence it is not necessarily a bad thing. Read the rest of this entry »
The other week marked my first wedding anniversary – an opportunity to look back on a wonderful day and a wonderful first year of marriage. And my wife, being the awesome wife that she is, bought me a great anniversary present. Two tickets to see The War on Drugs was the perfect present for two reasons. Reason one, Slave Ambient was my record of 2011. Reason two, the tickets were obviously made of paper[1], paper is the symbol of a first wedding anniversary, and so here was a present that was both incredibly thoughtful, and incredibly apt. Read the rest of this entry »
I seem to have been doing more than my fair share of hand-wringing over the ol’ curation versus creation debate, worrying that there is too much sharing and not enough making of stuff to share. Yet here I am, after dabbling for a while, expanding the Wait Until Next Year empire and starting an off-shoot Tumblr blog. Hypocrite, fence-sitter or latter-day renaissance man? You decide, reader! Read the rest of this entry »
Really sad news coming through this morning that Christopher Reimer, the guitarist in the band Women, has died. Thoughts obviously with family/friends at this time. Women are/were one of the few truly exciting bands to emerge in the past few years, a band not afraid to be abrasive, uncompromising and to have a little mystique around them. They could be challenging, but were nearly always rewarding if you put in the effort. Their last album was sequenced in a way that took more than a little work – some pretty difficult songs upfront, then the most accessible song kept right until the end. Reimer’s guitarwork was integral to the sound, weaving nagging melodies, adding strange textures. A very sad loss.
Amongst all the goodness in the first issue of the New Inquiry magazine, one article in particular stood out – The Resentment Machine, by Freddy De Boer. It is available in full in that link back there, so you should probably read that rather than this, but anyway, it challenged me in all number of ways (I should probably offer some sort of summary here, but even after multiple readings I won’t do it justice and you’d be better off just reading the real thing, or failing that reading what follows in the next paragraph…), but one quote near the end particularly got to me. Read the rest of this entry »
Wait until next year 