For those of you struggling to download the Mat Payne mixtape, you need to IGNORE the adverts for hotties in your area, pop the little code in the text box and click through to the download.
Honestly, this is a two bit blog run out of a shed in Ancoats - we’re not shelling out on webspace so that you people can enjoy your right-click-save-as jollys.
Manchester-based DJ Mat Payne relaunches his Facebook group today, with an updated biography and the promise of up-to-the-second information regarding upcoming live shows and mixtapes.
What do we know about Mat Payne?
:: He is one of Justice’s favourite DJs :: He is a founding member of South Manchester’s Bus Pass Crew, notorious for wearing giant Megariders around their necks and the catchphrase, ‘Keep It Laminated!’ :: He was on the judging panel for the 2006 Popjustice £20 Music Prize. :: “It was pretty funny”, notes the DJ. :: He has made us an exclusive mixtape.
Yep, to celebrate his revamped Facebook group, Mat has slipped us an exclusive mixtape featuring a display of his not-inconsiderable skills. Quite frankly, it starts with a Tiga remix of the Human League and just gets better from there.
The mix also features something of a scoop - a brand new Ed Banger mix of UNKLE’s ‘Restless’, done by Djedjotronic and Busy P. This tune is so hot off the presses that Mat only got the promo for it last week. The full tracklist is as follows:
Human League - The Things That Dreams Are Made Of (Tiga Remix) UNKLE - Restless (Djedjotronic & Busy P remix for Ed Banger) Kid Kudi - Day ‘n’ Night (Crookers Remix) Das Pop - Fool For Love (Gaetan Remix) The Shoes - America (Brodinski Remix) VHS or Beta - Burn It All Down (Surkin Remix) Dusty Kid - The Twister (Nathan Detroit Edit) Sinden and the Count of Monte Cristal - Beeper (Fake Blood Remix) Mr Oizo - Flat Beat (Radio Edit) Jape - Floating (Bobmo Remix) Outlander - Vamp (Dirty Disco Youth's Rave-work) D.I.M. - Is You (Brodinski Remix) Alter Ego - Why Not? Daggers - Magazine (Zombie Disco Squad Remix) Junkie XL ft. Lauren Rocket - More (D.I.M. Pop Em All Dub Rework) Andy George - Big Dipper (Hijack Remix) Yuksek - Composer (Surkin Remix) Steel Lord - Dirty Mutha (Crookers RMX) Burial - Archangel (Boy 8-Bit simple re-mix)
Girl Talk, despite sounding like one of those magazines full of stickers and posters and girls worrying about being pregnant because they kissed Stuart Dobson during a full moon, is actually the name of Greg Gillis’ sampletastic hip hop/rock patchwork project.
His ‘new’ (it’s actually two years old) album, called ‘Night Ripper’, is made up of over 300 samples, ranging from popular-with-Americans indie (The Verve) to classic slacker rock (Weezer) to obscure tracks of yesteryear, all served over a bubbling bed of hip hop, dance, R&B and pop.
This sounds like the basis for The Best Thing Ever, particularly if you’re a fan of the sort of cut-happy ADHD madness served up by the likes of Pirate Soundsystem et al. However, Gillis’ execution doesn’t quite do justice to the idea, and things often fall a little flat.
Perhaps with fewer samples, and more thought given to their overall synergy, ‘Night Ripper’ would have been a much better album. It’s not without it’s moments - there a clutch of audaciously exciting and/or humour-filled moments - but you wouldn’t buy a vomit-coloured duvet because someone had attached some sequins to it, would you?
Ultimately, the whole thing sounds considerably less than the sum of its parts, and more like someone flicking through the radio stations too quickly on Grand Theft Auto than a groundbreaking sample album.
If, like us, you harbour a masochistic liking for Crystal Castles’ more noise-based moments, you will have been delighted to hear ‘Alice Practice’ ringing out during the duo’s guest appearance in Skins last night.
If you’ve heard it, you’ll know it’s exactly the sort of track that says “my dad died this morning and I’m only just getting round to telling my newly-reconciled best friend about it by breaking down in his arms at a Crystal Castles gig”.
Incidentally, we once walked into a room where CC were performing ‘Alice Practice’ but we didn’t break down in tears because our dad fucked off years ago. We did go slightly mental though.
Anyway. Commiserations to Mike Bailey’s brilliantly-portrayed Sid, and congratulations to the Skins producers, for another heartstopping moment of audiovisual synchronicity.
Now let’s have a picture of the band.
Very nice. Crystal Castles’ album is out soon and if you’re not already a fan of their 8-bit techno thrashracket then the sparseness of supposedly-poppier moments like ‘Air War’ or ‘Untrust Us’ on this album will do little to convince you.
Most of it sounds like the result of chucking a SNES, some mobile phones, a drum kit and a woman into one of those massive human-grinders out of the computer game Quake. Messy, but entertaining.
And now - because we love you - here is an MP3 of something that isn’t on the album; the fantastically-disturbed ‘Knights’. It’s like being trapped in an episode of Jam.
The furore surrounding Nadine Coyle’s no-show at the BRITs continues to rumble on, with the vowel-mangling pop warbler today describing the awards as “one of those things I never wanted to go to”. This would appear starkly at odds with Fascination’s claim she missed the show due to having “lost her passport in LA”.
Nadine’s sudden bout of the Mutyas has caused several sources, including Popjustice, to question her position in the group. After all, it’s not often a band member gets away with such blatant duty-shirking. Most indie musicians get booted within minutes of sighing “pfff, do we have to?”; why should Nadine be any different?
The question, however, might already have been answered. A statement today on Girls Aloud’s MySpace page, publicising their new show The Passions Of Girls Aloud (which presumably is somewhat different the Mel Gibson brutalo-epic of similar name), reveals:
“The series will follow Sarah, Cheryl, Nicola and Kimberley as they each undertake a personal challenge ranging from creating their own make up line to learning to street dance in America. To find out the other two, you'll have to tune in!”
No mention of Nadine. Has the first meaningful crack appeared in the lineup of history’s greatest girl group? WATCH THIS SPACE.
Not wanting to be outdone by Metronomy in the colourful video stakes, here’s Alphabeat, with a Dulux-drenched promo for their amazing new single ‘Fascination’.
It’s been a year since Hadouken! first painted the world’s door neon then kicked it down with ‘That Boy That Girl’, during which time the band has failed - despite outrageous hype - to have a hit single or even release a proper album.
Now it looks as though their cautious approach may come back to haunt them in the shape of the brilliantly-named Fabio Lendrum, who looks set to steal their ravepop thunder with ’Rebel Rebel Go Go’, a song which sounds like Max Gogarty doing a mashup of H!’s own ‘Tuning In’ and ‘Yeah Yeah’ by Bodyrox.
The challenge now for Hadouken! is this: hurry the fuck up, or fuck the fuck off.
Boisterous party rockers JOON show their softer side today with the release of new single ‘Can’t Make It On My Own’, a piano ‘n’ heartbreak-based ballad that sounds like checking your mail to find that Meatloaf has sent you a declaration of his undying love.
It is available to buy through itunes (although apparently there are some problems with that at the moment) and something called Ditto Music (we have no idea either).
The band played on Channel M this morning, an event which we would have told you about sooner, were it not for the fact that we spilled water all over our keyboard at about 5 o’clock on Saturday morning and therefore could not write anything all weekend.
Further details of all the above are available at JOON’s MySpace.
Here is a picture of a popstar before she was famous:
Very nice. But who is it? Obviously it is someone called ‘Aimee’ (we think it’s pronounced ‘Amy’), but who could it be? Here are some clues:
:: She is not American :: She is a singer :: She is not dead :: She is a ‘divisive talent’ :: It is not Alexis Taylor
Have you guessed it yet?
THAT’S RIGHT! It’s Duffy, before she dropped her ridiculous forename and found herself some decent stylists. Look at that hair. The picture is taken from the website of S4C’s ‘WAWFFACTOR’, which is a bit like X Factor but with an even higher percentage of people who think they are the next Tom Jones.
This reminds us of the time Chris Martin shaved off his pre-fame curly locks in order to look disaffected ’n’ sexy (instead of just a posh cock) in Coldplay’s early shots. We were so incensed we wrote an email to Planet Sound ranting about it. It was all hugely unnecessary.
Panic At The Disco - Nine In The Afternoon One of the first things we learnt upon becoming prestigious watchmakers is that nine in the afternoon does not exist. Nor does, by the sound of it, a rubbish PATD track. Stuff like this euphoric ELO-tinged stomper entirely negates the need for 90% of all ’breezy guitar pop’.
Eels - Meet The Eels (LP) If we met the Eels, we’d say, “Hey Eels, you’re really good”, or words to that effect.
Darren Hayes - Pop!ular Why wasn’t Darren Hayes more popular? Well, stopping buses just to tell everyone who you are has never gone down too well so perhaps that has got something to do with it. It is a shame really, because this track is amazing. Highlights include the first chorus (00.31), that Miss Kittin-style business about all his friends being in limousines (02.05) and when The Dumper speculatively reverses into the studio during the intro (00:16).
Jordan Knight - Give It To You This superslick dancepop number, despite its accordion ’n’ mandolin sections, sounds spiky and fresh to this day (it was released nine years ago), with a production job that will have you weeping for the late nineties. This is what a lot of R&B sounded like before bloody trumpets got in on the act.
Black Kids - Hurricane Jane (Beige Remix) This remix of the hotly-tipped youngsters gives things a desolate, downbeat feel before a 1000ft skyscraper of a Daggers-style chorus come along to crank up the euphoria. It’s an empty kind of euphoria though, like that felt when it’s Friday night and you haven’t got any money.
2008 saw The Brits School take centre stage at the awards whose yearly corporate buffoonery helps provide it with nourishment. The organisers did their best to keep the elite academy’s existence a secret (those carefully-placed, conceited mentions and frequent shots of current students JUST HAPPENED, okay?) but in the end it shone through.
Yes, The Brits School. We thought it was a new ‘Mind Your Lanaguage’-style sitcom about a group of hilarious immigrants battling to pass the UK Citizenship Test, but apparently it is where our future musical cream is first churned.
It’s past successes? Well, Kate Nash had an album out last year (she actually did - go and check), and Jools Holland mentioned Floetry once, so that’s good. Also, Katie Melua and The Kooks both went there (we know what you’re thinking, but you can get into a lot of trouble for talking about bombs on the internet these days) as did, er, Athlete.
Wait, though, because tonight’s big news is that - fanfare please - a former pupil has won an award! That’s right, Adele, who won the newly-invented (and not just to publicise the School) Critics’ Choice award. You know her, she’s had a song out just recently, something about pavements and that. It was brilliant.
One BS alumni genuinely worthy of praise is Amy Winehouse (who, presumably, couldn’t have achieved anything with the academy’s backing). Despite trying several times to hide behind Mark Ronson and pull her own skirt off, the fragile chanteuse reminded everyone why her voice is capable of eliciting real tears from human beings with a brilliant rendition of ‘Love Is A Losing Game’.
What can be said about the rest of the event? Not a lot, as it happens. The show was at its stalest for years, with not a hint of excitement all night (when you find yourself thinking, “this could do with a bit of Joss Stone”, something has obviously gone wrong). Even potentially heart-stopping, brain-melting moments like Rihanna’s collaboration with Klaxons failed to ignite; that being a bigger missed opportunity than someone throwing something at the floor and not hitting it.
And so on to our headline act: “Mr Sir Paul McCartney”. The one living (and credible) member of the Fab Four picked up an Outstanding Contribution gong, which probably had more to do with his earlier work than, say, ‘The Frog Chorus’. He came, he saw, he may remember some of it.
Two people who will most definitely not remember any of it are Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne, a dynamic presenting duo whose rehearsals had been so bad producers had to draft in - wait for it - Kelly and Jack Osbourne, to ‘rescue’ proceedings.
They were terrible, although not everyone thought so. Clemmie Moodie (just take a moment to absorb the wonder of that name) and Danielle Lawler of The Mirror wrote, “It was a blunder-free and faultless display. Helped by slick scripts and even slicker autocue, there wasn't a fluffed line in sight”. No? Presumably “PISS OFF YOU BASTARD PISSHEAD” was in the script, then.
It is the BRITs tonight. You remember, it’s that awards show that not one person on planet Earth gives a fuck about. Where the prizes are always given out to completely undeserving and amazingly shit recipients. Where Mika is a good thing.
Because we could sit here all week speculating at who could/should win tonight’s awards, we decided to have a look at some of the other things that might happen instead. So finish your lines and sit up straight, it’s time for our BRITs Predictions 2008.
Prediction: Sharon Osbourne makes ‘controversial’ joke to literally no audience reaction. Will it happen? Repeatedly.
Prediction: Ozzy Osbourne fails to make sense of an autocue. Will it happen? Yes.
Prediction: Gordon Smart is seen leering at Rihanna’s breasts. Will it happen? Almost certainly yes. And Kylie’s. But not ‘weird birds’ Feist or Bjork.
Prediction: Editors are treated with the disdain they deserve and announced as “that miserable bunch of cunts with the shit singer” during the Best Group award. Will it happen? No :(
Prediction: Klaxons turn up absolutely wankered and give a terrible performance. Will it happen? About as likely as the next prediction.
Prediction: Klaxons turn up absolutely wankered and give an amazing performance. Will it happen? See above.
Prediction: Winner of Best Group award makes snide and embarrassingly out-of-touch reference to Girls Aloud being nominated. Will it happen? Guaranteed.
Prediction: Cutaways reveal Mika is enjoying his performance more than audience is. Will it happen? Not straight away, but certainly by the bitter, shrieking end.
Prediction: Shots of Ricky Wilson reveal him to be bored/annoyed/angry/drunk. Will it happen? Frequently, and in that order.
Prediction: Rufus Wainwright’s Best International Male nomination met with indignant, anger-filled “who is he?” looks by front row screamers and industry diners alike. Will it happen? It’s a safe bet.
Prediction: Richard Hawley, Bat For Lashes, Feist, PJ Harvey and Arcade Fire are cheered moronically by the very people who just seconds earlier were vociferously pledging allegiance to their chart-based rivals. Will it happen? Probably.
Prediction: Heather Mills turns up to play bass for Paul McCartney. Will it happen? Depends how many drugs you’ve taken by 9.30pm.
Prediction: Something of genuine interest happens during the entire show. Will it happen? Of course not you fucking idiot.
Here are some pictures from Friday night’s O Fracas set at Keys Money Lipstick. As you can see they were taken with the same care and attention-to-detail our resident snapper bestows upon all his efforts.
The verdict on the band is thus: some of their songs are very good and they are obviously nice lads (this is particularly true of the singer, who we accosted outside). Plus, they wore matching t-shirts, which is always appreciated.
HOWEVER.
When it becomes obvious that an audience isn’t ‘having it’ in quite the way they‘d hope, a band’s response should always be to up their game and be ten times themselves. Not drop heads, finish the set and mumble some stuff about 'cool kids' to the promoter. On a better day O Fracas might have blown through the room like a gale, sweeping the resident foot shufflers along on their own jangly breeze. As it was, they came, played some better-than-average indie while looking at the floor, and left. Shame.
A LIVE REVIEW Academy Unsigned 252 Academy 3, 17 Feb 2008
Traditionally, the words ‘unsigned night’ are about as welcome a collocation as ‘war’ and ‘pestilence‘. Put simply, there is almost always a very good reason why the bands on the bill are unsigned. That certainly turns out to be true of tonight’s first two acts, SFR and The Hate Conspiracy.
The latter of these deserve special mention. Bounding onto the stage like the second coming of something at least mildly important, their frontman leaps and yells and for some time looks to be suffering a medical emergency, before the crowd realise it’s his ‘act’.
“WE FUCKING HATE MANCHESTER!”, he screams, as a John Lydon obsession funded by Daddy’s wallet fails to make a significant impact on thirty minutes stage time. Meanwhile, the band around him do their best to stumble through an utterly unlistenable repertoire that must have taken all of the taxi ride up north to write. Less than twelve minutes later, to a hail of indifference, they leave the stage. It’s quite admirable in a way.
Commendable on entirely different terms are JOON, third act on stage and the reason for most people’s attendance this evening. The juxtaposition is almost cruel. Whereas previous acts had poured their energy into posturing and shouting, JOON quickly demonstrate that most of their effort has gone on songwriting and, y’know, actually learning their instruments.
Shorn of their Boss-esque two hour set (the band are restricted to playing original compositions over a half hour slot), the band become stronger and more focused. Without multiple renditions of ‘Addicted To Love’ to get in the way, their songs sound sturdier and more like a tight, complimentary body of work.
It’s clear the band have got a winning sound - even the people with haircuts are dancing by the end - but the challenge now is to ensure that as many people as possible are party to it. If they can turn some of their unquestionable attention-to-detail toward a stint of ruthless and effective self-promotion, 2008 could be a very good year for JOON.
It’s Friday (unless you’re reading this on any other day) which means it’s Keys Money Lipstick time again. This week’s ’session’ features a live midnight set from indie upstarts O Fracas (crazy name, crazy guys). If their MySpace page is anything to go by it should be good fun.
Guests are advised to arrive early and stay the fuck away from the pinball machine.
In other live news, this Sunday sees everyone’s favourite good time power rockers JOON play a gig at Academy 3, as part of the regular Unsigned night. Entry costs a fiver and you can pay on the door. Again, get there early to avoid being a ticketless fool.
:: Huggable choruses :: Great cover of ‘Take Me Out’ :: Fyfe was very funny on Never Mind The Buzzcocks
Now you can add ‘amazing new song’ to that list, as the band have released (for free, via their MySpace) ‘Kriss Kross’, a string-laden, swashbuckling epic that sounds like a Broadway musical version of Pirates Of The Caribbean, produced by Jerry Bruckheimer.
The best bit is when all the high seas high drama eases slightly and a textbook Guillemots chorus comes bursting out of the background like a million Christmases all coming at once.
Amazing poetic popstar Penny Broadhurst is playing a gig in Glasgow (apparently it is in a place called ’Scotland’) on February 24, for which she has made this visually-enjoyable flyer:
Further details are available at Penny’s MySpace.
Penny also tells us that she would quite like to play Manchester sometime soon, but so far the only promoters to take an interest have been the ones with big pound signs behind their eyes, interested only in how many punters she can get through the door and all sorts of boring stuff like that. Clearly they are unfamiliar with the phrase, ‘Look after the Pennys and the pounds will look after themselves’.
Hot Chip - Don’t Dance If you’ve been near the internet recently you will know that Hot Chip are the greatest band of all time (until the next one comes along). This track, off their at-times-more-difficult-to-listen-to-than-people-are-making-out new album, does quite a good job of justifying these claims.
It’s got an amazing snare ‘n’ bass bit in it that sounds like ‘Homework’-era Daft Punk, which then gives way to preposterously intense, mile-high waves of crashing, whirring doomsynth. It basically sounds like taking drugs at the end of the world. It is brilliant.
Bloc Party - The Prayer For some reason we have been listening to this old BP single quite a lot lately. It is essentially the best Gregorian chant-based indie rave mash-up track OF ALL TIME. Not that there’s much competition for that title, but still. Proves that when Kele and Co. get it right, they get it incredibly right (see also ‘Flux’).
Kylie Minogue - Wow (CSS Remix) Here, the feisty Brazilians improve Kylie’s new single ten-fold, using much the same technique that saw them turn the last Cribs single from a load of indie nonsense into a massive dancefloor hit (ie mess about with things ever so slightly but not that much really).
Hercules & Love Affair… …are pretty bloody amazing, are they not? (More on this ’revelation’ soon).
Munch Munch - Wedding This sunkissed slice of indie R&B sounds like a collaboration between Hot Chip, Architecture In Helsinki and a field full of hippies. It also sounds like a right old racket, especially when it reaches the three minute mark. Nevertheless, it is excellent.
Sam Sparro - Black & Gold Upping the sunshine factor even further is this blissfully bouncy electropop love song that throbs and pulses and makes you feel better about all the shit in the world. Meteorologists are yet to find an explanation for the recent warm weather, but druids nationwide are tipping this as the source.
David Jordan - Sun Goes Down Still. Now doubling as a HILARIOUS mobile phone alarm tone (“open your eyes ‘cos another day is dawning”). Oh the fun we have.
When he is not providing entirely amazing remixes for the likes of Kate Nash and Dead Disco, Metronomy (aka Joseph Mount) likes nothing better than covering himself and his mates in paint and then recording quirky-but-catchy indielectro workouts like this.
Tobias Funke would be proud.
Highlights: Absent-minded near-groping of female lead (01.09) and the SHOCK TWIST that comes right at the very end (03.35).
Outstanding geekery blog RockRobotRock (or whatever it is called today - they definitely changed their name to something else and back again recently, unless of course we dreamt it) has ’flagged up’ a promotional mix of The Black Ghosts’ new single (‘Something New’), spliced with ethereal zero-gravity classic ‘I Feel Space’ by Lindstrom.
In it, the casual low-slung warblings of the original (which sounds a bit like pre-Mobile Disco Simian) are turned into impassioned pleas for “something new“, with the addition of some much-needed disco drama courtesy of Lindstrom’s spectacularly eerie crowdpleaser.
The question-du-jour for Duffy - the hot young singing sensation who isn’t Adele - is, “where did you find your voice?”, currently being asked of her at a rate of about four times per interview. Shockingly, people are finding it hard to believe those are her natural tones.
The 23-year old Welsh native recently caused eruptions of laughter worldwide by hilariously suggesting that she’d poached her uniquely-annoying trill from a box beneath her mother’s bed, when really a more honest answer would have been, “I’m just doing a rubbish Dusty impression”, or “this isn’t my voice - I’m only putting it on”.
Her new single ‘Mercy’ (ie some poor soul’s woeful attempt to follow a non-existent Amy Winehouse ‘template’ based on the success of ‘Rehab’) is out at the end of the month, followed by an album soon after. We literally cannot wait.
Last week we asked you to correctly guess how many Hundreds and Thousands Sophie Ellis Bextor was rolling around in to promote healthy, happy childhoods.
The answer was six.
Twelve people got it right, all of whom win 26 seconds of ‘Murder On The Dancefloor’.
Time now for a new feature (ie one off) in which we revisit classic albums (or ’long players’) from yesteryear. Apparently, there are entire magazines dedicated to this sort of thing, but only old people with rubbish haircuts read them. This is much more fun.
In the first (ie only) edition, we go all the way back to the summer of 2007; to a time when Amy Winehouse was better at keeping secrets, BBC3 still had its orange blobs and the price of a pint of beer was only about £2.40.
Classic Album #1 Chunking - Stay Up Forever
‘Stay Up Forever‘, like Dragonette’s ‘Galore’, should finally silence everyone who says pop music and real instruments do not mix. Everything about it - from the title and artwork to the actual tunes themselves - is pop incarnate, and it’s FULL of guitars and drums.
Tunes like former single ‘Love Is Here To Stay’ and the spiky ‘Know What You Mean’ lead the snakebite ’n’ leather charge, with a drum sound last heard during the actual seventies featured on the lovely, ‘frapptastic ‘It Could Be Wonderful’.
However, it‘s not all unkempt rowdiness: ‘Slow It Down’ sounds like the sort of groove Liberty X once excelled at, just with infinitely better singing; while Rachel Stevens would literally remove limbs for something as good as ‘Itch & Scratch’. All the tunes betray a heavy electropop influence, and Chungking really shine when fusing their many rocktronic elements together, like they do on ’Baby’, or the amazing title track.
Choruses like rollercoasters (ie. they go in all different directions and leave you feeling a bit dizzy); hooks more nagging than a handful of nettles; lyrics about going out, dancing and being in love; all these things make ‘Stay Up Forever’ one of 2007’s best pop albums.
They were the ones who had that song about being a rock star that only became popular because of a brilliant remix. No? They started off sort-of Hip Hop and then went a bit AOR?
Come on. Pharrell Williams is in them.
Thaaat’s it, now you remember. Anyway. They’ve got a new song out, called ‘Everyone Nose’ (DO YOU SEE WHAT THEY DID THERE? - Homophone Ed). It is a bit of a strange one in that it is basically shit, but absolutely amazing at the same time.
It bangs and crashes and bounces around in a way not unlike freeform jazz, hanging its jittery beats from a hook about “all the girls standing in a line for the bathroom” and plenty of blingtastic rapping about money and trainers and girls and whatnot from Williams.
It was inspired by Pharrell’s favourite pastime: romancing ladies as they queue for the toilet in overcrowded nightclubs. Apparently it’s more cost-effective, because “if they’re waiting for the bathroom, they aren’t going to want you to buy them a drink”.
The track is skiffling around radio and the usual sort of websites currently. You basically need it in your life, for a weekend at least. So get downloading. By the way, the paragraph above this one is complete and utter bollocks, in case you were wondering.
We like The Real Heat. That much should be obvious by now.
However, there are only so many times you can listen to ‘Hearts Not Innit’ on repeat before your head starts to spin (469328).
Luckily, Shaki, Zaza and Suki know this. Which is why they have made some new songs.
Their filthy sex rhymes take on a new heavier tone with ‘Oh Boy’, a dark ‘n’ brooding bass monster set to soundtrack those three in the morning, pilled-to-the-eyeballs, ‘should I really be doing this?’ moments.
It sounds like the sort of thing the Prodigy always try and do, but the truth is that Liam Howlett would probably sell Keith Flint AND his share in the Appleton sisters to come up with something as dark and raw-sounding as this.
Another new Real Heat production is ‘Tic Tac Bitches’, in which interesting character Tic Tac (one of those East London types) raps a mission statement over more sinister rave break madness courtesy of the girls (FYI another Tic Tac track well worth a listen is ’Gettopop’, an early-90s dancepop workout produced by Frankmusic).
Hurrah.
The new Real Heat stuff can be found via their MySpace.
Here is the video for the new Ting Tings single ‘Great DJ’.
It is good because it only cost £12 to make and is vaguely reminiscent of Gossip’s ‘Standing In The Way Of Control’ video, meaning that by this time next year, The Ting Tings are guaranteed to be as world famous and widely-appreciated as that band are.
The Ting Tings have been getting hyped to high heaven for a while now. Even we did something about them last year and we know literally fuck all about music. Given that the band have found themselves nestled near the top of several critics’ Tips For 2008 lists, we thought we’d have a look at what the man on the street some YouTube users have to say about this year’s most talked about band.
Froths MOOBOOSE: “really brilliant on jools Holland…”
Agrees aislingxmx: “i love theM! yea they were great on jools holland real energy!!”
But wait - not everyone is so happy.
Scoffs GassyBastard: “Hate the accent.”
Opines ht589132: “Rubbish song, rubbish video, but I would love to give the blonde bird a good seeing to.”
Concurs davidmariner: “all this is good for is wiping my ass. tho id giv thebird a going ova lol”
LOL, indeed. It seems the fact that Katie White is both a) female and b) hardly what you’d call ugly has not escaped the attention of the YouTube nation.
Muses cableguy12345: “i wonder if ting is another word for hot. if so katie is ting ting ting”
Quite. Perhaps we should leave the last word on the matter to istara:
“Great video - but some encoding advice - you should be able to keep the audio bitrate much higher while still keeping the file size small enough for upload. Just an extra 20k on audio bitrate can make a video sound normal rather than the very tinny, squashed sound that this one has. I usually set my audio bitrate to a minimum of 48khz for the smallest files.
Otherwise it doesn't really do recording artists any justice.”
Never do things ‘for a laugh’, as it invariably ends up unfunny. Never do things ‘with irony in mind’, because it is rarely worth it. We say these things because on Friday night we headed with a non-local friend of ours to 5th Avenue, both for a laugh and with irony in mind. What a fucking mistake.
The club in question, for the uninitiated, is a cretin-ridden shitheap, where desperate Karen O clones and Faris Rotter wannabes collude with beer-drenched types in ’vintage’ t-shirts amongst the stench of body odour, Roller Red Bull and an annoyingly incessant smoke machine to create probably the vilest atmosphere this side of the planet Venus.
As well as the delight of witnessing countless students bingeing their way to a Desmond on irresponsibly-priced drinks, one can also look forward to 40-minute toilet queues, fights and casual sexual assaults taking place throughout the venue.
That isn’t to mention 5th Avenue’s new smoking policy, which invites patrons to queue for thirty minutes and PAY A POUND, just for the privilege of enjoying one of their own cigarettes, in what can only be described as a vomit-strewn pen, in the alley outside.
Anyone ignorant of this policy who mistakenly steps out without a ‘smoking wristband’ is forced to queue up and pay the club’s £5 entry fee again (and that’s just the lucky ones: we witnessed two bouncers kicking a bloke halfway across Princess Street for this gross act of negligence, despite his repeated pleas for clemency). Truly, money-grabbing cuntery does not come in a purer form.
The ‘security’ at 5th Avenue is old school. Burly bastards prowl the venue, looking for a way of expending their pent-up coke fury, of reconciling their burning self hatred. There is fire in their eyes. Men and ugly women are the enemy. Violence is the only way.
And, luckily for the bar staff, this violence is not just meted out to young male customers. A glass-collecting friend of ours once recounted having his arm ‘nearly broken’ by a doorman while another kicked his leg like a football, all in the name of ‘banter’. Hilarious.
Hopefully there will be another drug war soon and some of them will be shot in the stomach. Then, as they ebb away on the cobbles, a fat man can lean over them and shout, ‘get up and fuck off home, you’re annoying me now’. See how they like it.
Overall, 5th Avenue is a bit like Colditz, only less friendly and inviting. That for six nights a week, our future lifeblood gather there like subnormal, confused sheep, desperate for their fill of cheap drinks and third rate indie, is nothing short of a massive embarrassment.
For this place to have become one of the premier draws for young people means something, somewhere has gone badly wrong. 5th Avenue is a turd smeared across the face of everyone who cares about this city’s nightlife and a shit in the pocket of those who work tirelessly towards its furthering. That its rampant popularity shows no sign of waning is even more depressing.
In our recent article headed ‘League Leaders’, we implied that Phil Oakey, of the Human League, is such a huge fan of pencils that he regularly enjoys graphite-based shopping binges, picking up dozens of the things even if he doesn’t need them.
We now accept that this is untrue. It is actually just the pencils with erasers on the end that Phil is particularly fond of. Apparently, he is very specific.
We are happy to clear up this misunderstanding and apologise to Mr. Oakey and his family for any distress caused by the reporting of this rumour. A donation has been made to the Sheffield Staedtler Foundation.
hip young gunslinger is a blog that bangs on and on about amazing music. Our strict 'NO SHIT OR BORING TUNES' policy means the genre-net is cast pretty wide, but generally, if you can fuck, fight or flail wildly across a dancefloor to it, we'll cover it.
Most of the time we're too lazy to upload MP3s but if we do and you're some sort of record company 'employee' type who wants rid, just give us a shout.
Manchester-based DJ Mat Payne relaunches his Facebook group today, with an updated biography and the promise of up-to-the-second information regarding upcoming live shows and mixtapes.
Girl Talk, despite sounding like one of those magazines full of stickers and posters and girls worrying about being pregnant because they kissed Stuart Dobson during a full moon, is actually the name of Greg Gillis’ sampletastic hip hop/rock patchwork project.
The furore surrounding Nadine Coyle’s no-show at the BRITs continues to rumble on, with the vowel-mangling pop warbler today describing the awards as “one of those things I never wanted to go to”. This would appear starkly at odds with Fascination’s claim she missed the show due to having “lost her passport in LA”.
Music to our ears this weekend.
2008 saw The Brits School take centre stage at the awards whose yearly corporate buffoonery helps provide it with nourishment. The organisers did their best to keep the elite academy’s existence a secret (those carefully-placed, conceited mentions and frequent shots of current students JUST HAPPENED, okay?) but in the end it shone through.
It is the BRITs tonight. You remember, it’s that awards show that not one person on planet Earth gives a fuck about. Where the prizes are always given out to completely undeserving and amazingly shit recipients. Where Mika is a good thing.
Reasons to like Guillemots:
What is fucking brilliant this week?
Outstanding geekery blog RockRobotRock (or whatever it is called today - they definitely changed their name to something else and back again recently, unless of course we dreamt it) has ’flagged up’ a promotional mix of The Black Ghosts’ new single (‘Something New’), spliced with ethereal zero-gravity classic ‘I Feel Space’ by Lindstrom.
The question-du-jour for Duffy - the hot young singing sensation who isn’t Adele - is, “where did you find your voice?”, currently being asked of her at a rate of about four times per interview. Shockingly, people are finding it hard to believe those are her natural tones.
You remember NERD, right?
We like The Real Heat. That much should be obvious by now.
