Helen Nianias muses art, the student stereotype and our supposed intellectuality...
To choose the high life, the low life, or somewhere respectable in between? Helen Nianias pontificates.
Music blogs! The home of music and opinion on the internet - a global force for people's listening tastes and something we dip our toes into every Wednesday. This week it's the sublime and the ridiculous (although not necessarily in that order) with Pop Justice and Music Is Art.
Music! Blog! An very old word and a fairly new one. What happens when old meets new? Find out in our weekly look at two of the internet's receptacles for music and opinion.<br />
"Thank you for that short review of our music blog," he enthused, "Always nice when people notice your work!" He continues, with a level of happiness only available to a citizen of a country with a remarkable energy policy and a population of beautiful blond people, to bring to our attention a couple of discrepancies of the description of his site: "It's not The Beatles. It's actually Sonic Youth and their album cover for "Goo", released in 1995. And the dog. It's taken from the back of a Pixies single."
So there you go, with two of my researchers and a fact checker now looking for a new job, here's this week's music blog update.
Shifting focus to Britain after last week's European excursion, we find one of my most visited blogs, Nothing But Green Lights. Celebrating its first anniversary this week, the blog is an excellent showcase for new British music and breaks many songs that are difficult to find elsewhere. Mike Smith, the sole contributer, is very affable and seems to be going through a transformation in musical taste, moving from whimsically-experimental indie-folk into more electronic climes. Of course, this is a generalisation, and there are variations upon this theme to be found on the blog, but the evolution of Smith's taste is interesting to observe.
Rather usefully Smith has posted his favourite tunes from his first year of blogging, including the "haunting and daunting" Essie Jain, who comes across like a more accessible but equally beautiful Joanna Newsom. More experimental tracks, not highlighted in his year's review, include the zillionth posting of "LDN is a Victim" and the sublime Bibio with "Zoopraxiphone", a cassette-tape mangled acoustic guitar melody dissected and reversed until it becomes more than the sum of its parts.
Even more usefully, Smith collates the best of his findings into a regular-ish podcast called Take Your Medicine, a great way to introduce yourself to his distinctly British musings on brand-new, mostly British, acts. An enthusiasm for British music is a great thing to find in a blogging scene saturated by American and Canadian efforts, and Smith's eye for a great tune or a beautifully arching song structure means that "Nothing But Green Lights" is a gem indeed.
Titles for posts like 'Plz don't shred my face demon kitten' and 'Love//Death//Nice' set the tone for the spiky bullets of opinion and torrents of music that spew forth
From a usually succinct, fairly serious blogging effort to something far more in-your-face and subversive: Brighton's 20 Jazz Funk Greats is an occasionally terrifying, sometimes satirical, but always entertaining look at underground dance music (not necessarily of the electronic variety, but always with a beat). Titles for posts like 'Plz don't shred my face demon kitten' and 'Love//Death//Nice' set the tone for the spiky bullets of opinion and torrents of music that spew forth. The most recent post was a particular surreal moment of genius, tying together three songs with the tenuous link of their relevance in the advent of a cat led apocalypse, culminating in the gloriously insane Extreme Animals, who tear up a piano riff an a tinny beat to create a dance-punk mugging.
The descriptions of the mp3s avoid the journalistic cliche of comparing the artist to a group of other artists, cutting right to the root with comments like '"Eastern psyche beats its naked fists against the doors of the powerful smearing them with blood, the walls of oppression are shaken by the might of a voice, you don't need to understand to understand, just do yourself a favour and get the record, it might well be the best thing you'll hear this year." This forms a heartfelt attack on musical sensibilities, leading to repeated listens to something you would never otherwise have considered in an attempt to understand where the reviewer was coming from: in this way you might just grow to love something new.
