How's this for some year-ruining news?

Bloody hell.

:(

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Be safe, be seen

Enthusiastic newcomer B-xentric! has been in touch, offering us a listen of his latest mix, a spiky blend of highly fashionable electro, which you yourself can download (or just listen to, it’s up to you) here.

Very good.

What do we know about B-xentric!?

:: He’s basically just started out.
:: He’s played at Nottingham’s famous Stealth club
:: He’s supported Andy George and Jaymo
:: Hopefully those names mean something to you

B-xentric!‘s next gig will be on the bill at Sankey’s on the 6th June, more details of which can probably be found here on ’the MySpace’.

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This is the NNNEW (hmm)

We’re a bit (ie shamefully) late with this one but well-informed alt.clubbing website Northernights recently got in touch to tell us about a new mix they had made. We had a little listen to it and can once again vouch for its amazingness.

However, if you’re the sort of person who doesn’t trust anything they read on the internet, even on quality pop blogs like this one, here is a tracklist for you to make your own mind up, or something, or whatever.

1. Consistent – ‘Crazy’
2. Consistent – ‘Sing Along Record (Oliver $ remix)’
3. Lee Mortimer – ‘Fully Automated (Oliver $ remix)’
4. Oliver $ - ‘Hotflash (Jacob London remix)’
5. Idiotproof – ‘The Deacon (Oliver $ Made To Play dub)’
6. Idiotproof – ‘The Deacon (Duke Dumont Live From Brooklyn remix)’
7. Jesse Garcia – ‘Off Da Hook (Duke Dumont remix)’
8. Justice – ‘Let There Be Light (Duke Dumont mix)’
9. Ghostface Killah – ‘Charlie Brown (DJ Mehdi remix ft. Mapei)’
10. Style of Eye – ‘The Big Kazoo (Nacho Lovers Limb By Limb edit)’
11. Cortney Tidwell – ‘Don’t Let Stars... (Ewan’s Objects In Space remix)’
12. Oliver $ - ‘Hotflash (Lunar City Express remix)’
13. Busta Rhymes – ‘Woo-Ha (Jacob London remix)’
14. Chemical Brothers – ‘Boot It Again (Mowgli remix)’
15. Yo Majesty – ‘Club Action (Tetsuo’s All Out Yo mix)’
16. Armand Van Helden ft. Nicole Roux – ‘Je T’aime (Riva Starr ACID 80 mix)’
17. Robyn – ‘Who’s That Girl (Drop The Lime vocal)’
18. Robyn – ‘Who’s That Girl (Drop The Lime dub)’
19. The Count & Sinden – ‘Stinging Nettle’

Literally very good. You can download the mix and look at some words and pictures and stuff by going - wait for it - here.

RESIST THE URGE TO CLICK THE PUBLISH BUTTON JUST FOR THE TIME BEING, OR WHATEVER THE MODERN EQUIVALENT OF ‘STOP PRESS’ IS!!!

Why?

Because word has just reached us that there’s ANOTHER new mix ‘up for grabs’ here, featuring literally a whole host (five) amazing old stroke new records.

Hrrh.

Q: Northernights very kindly sent us a cardboard envelope with a shiny plastic disc in it. The disc had a hole in it, was silver on one side and labelled ‘CDR’ on the other - does anyone know what this is or what it does??!!!

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Space and the vastly improved song structure

Here is the video for ‘Space and the Woods’ by Late Of The Pier, the first song of theirs to actually reach its conclusion without breaking into a five-minute wood block solo. We are posting it here for that reason, and also these:

:: It’s been tinkered with by Erol Alkan, not in a hugely banging and massive way but in a ‘this sounds better than the demo’ kind of way.
:: It’s got good lyrics.
:: The chorus may be danced to.
:: For this, they’ve chosen to ignore the precedent set by Klaxons, MGMT et al for mind boggling promos that fry the eyes and simply shoot a black and white performance video.



Or not.

Ps. Have a bash on ‘Space and the Woods’’ entirely amazing flipside, ‘Focker’, which sounds like the best prog-based Eighties kids TV show theme tune never written, by clicking here (it’s a zshare link, like).

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Gwen will this end?

The furore surrounding Ashlee Simpson's Gwen-aping efforts (scroll down a bit) continues to roll on, moving some people to tears and others to violence.

Amazing and soon-to-be-regular (fingers crossed) HYG columnist Holly C felt so strongly about the issue she 'fired off' this 'missive' in our 'direction'.

Don't you think the 'trying too hard to be Gwen Stefani thing' (identikit video for identikit song) has gone a bit far? What with her

a) marrying a rockstar
and
b) getting herself up the duff just because Gwen is?!

What next, a farmyard-inspired clothing line (C.A.L.F., P.O.N.Y., B.U.L.L. etc etc)?!? All we need now is for it to be revealed that her new husband is in fact the estranged father of an up-and-coming British catwalk queen...

Quite.

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It looks like Madonna is having a massive shit on the back cover of 'Hard Candy'

It REALLY does.

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Birds Need Trees needs you (possibly)

Here are some photos from the second Birds Need Trees, featuring amongst others the indiepop-tastic Stars Of Track And Field (pictured). If you haven’t been, BNT is a new night at Urbis, where art and music collide in a posher-than-we’re-used-to locale.

The theme changes each month and submissions are being sought for future dates (the organisers’ motto is “If it can be projected, we want it”). They are also looking for unsigned bands to play on upcoming bills. Have a look on Facebook for details.

In further Stars Of Track And Field news, the Carlisle 5-piece have been involved in MTV’s Get Seen Get Heard competition, a sort of corporate wheat/chaff separator, which is why you might have seen lead singer Jen woo-wooing all over TMF recently.

ALSO!

The band might be changing their name soon, for all sorts of boring legal reasons involving Americans which we won‘t go in to here. They have come up with a brilliant new alternative, but we’re not sure if we’re allowed to tell you about it so we will not.

Now, pictures:

The second one is of the floor in Urbis, in case you were wondering.

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Imagine that!

Feeder (song about lemons and CD players) are still going.

With a new album out, too.

Oh dear.

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GGID OWWHTA MA HIDD!

This is the video for Ashlee Simpson’s Santogold-written, Timbaland-produced, not actually terrible* new song ‘Outta My Head (Ay Ya Ya Ya Ya Ay Ay Ya Ay Ya)’. We meant to post it during our hiatus but since we weren’t posting anything at that time we did not.

Anyway - long story short - we recently went on a trip to Calderdale’s fashionable Hebden Bridge (very nice) and got into a very long conversation with a dear friend of ours about the song and video and how it makes a change for Ashlee not to be shit, which ended with our fellow interlocutor uttering the immortal phrase

“The video’s pretty good but I don’t like how she’s trying to be all Salvador Dali”.

Let’s have a little look:



She’s got a point, viewers. Sadly this is probably the first and last time a Simpson sibling will be referred to as trying to be “all Salvador Dali”, which is a shame.

* In a sort of sub-Gwen Stefani’s first album kind of way, obviously.

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Mobile DJ

Live Review

DJ ANON
Route 454 Rochdale - Stansfield
13 May 2008

It’s 2003 and every crusty fucker with a guitar is busy staging guerrilla gigs in whatever pub, park or pisser they can find. Crowds gather, eagerly anticipating some sort of cultural epiphany. It never comes. Drifting from the party, the misled sods that paid ten pounds to be allowed near a bandstand realise they have been sorely duped.

Fast forward five years and the guerrilla revolution is still alive and well. Only now the tools of the musical insurgents are not battered acoustics and burnt spoons, but mobile phones.

These days, with some basic MP3 playback technology and a volume level that goes up far too high, anyone can be a DJ. Sets are taking place nightly; on buses, outside shops, even near swings. The parties rattle with an intensity lacking from many of their more organised, four-walled counterparts. The excitement - the frenzy - is tangible.

Tonight’s example is no different. Set up within seconds of leaving the station, this impromptu bus party already feels like a suspension-tester. Cries of “Support the grime!” and, bizarrely, “Socks pulled up to the knees!” ring out as the collected homegoers are treated to a banging-but-tinny mix of bassline and grime remixes. It’s explosive stuff.

One woman - unaware that buses now, far from being places you might expect to hear yourself think, are churches of pure liquid euphoria - tries in vain to hold a conversation on her phone. As the BPM and temperature rise in unison, conspiring to mark the greatest revolution in clubbing for over twenty years, she should heed this warning: phones down, hands up. You don’t want to miss this.

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Woeful indie band sighting of the week

IN MANCHESTER: The Metros, at Smile last Saturday.

“Even uglier in the flesh and slightly ginger”, says our spy.

Oh dear.

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BROKEN BRITAIN: A Special Report

Norman Tebbit, or some other old cunt, once claimed that untidiness with language led inevitably to an inability to dress oneself and a life filled with crime and poverty.

Despite this being ABSOLUTE BOLLOCKS, we can’t help but look around and wonder what has gone wrong in this country.

Obviously we know fuck all about the written word so we got our lit-loving friend, the amazing Holly C, to conduct a special report. She done this:

The sun is shining and right about now the yoof of the UK are preparing to tear themselves away from Skins-esque drink, drugs and sex binges in an attempt to gain some qualifications.

With tabloid doomsayers braced to deliver damning reports on ‘slipping standards’ and bad GCSE results being worse than genocide, we were curious to discover whether this worrying 'trend' had got its underachieving, happy slapping claws into the music industry.

Here is a quote from The Courteeners’ ‘What Took You So Long’.

‘I’m like a Morrissey with some strings.’

Firstly, VERY bad grammar, unless he’s referring to Morrissey as an indefinite article, suggesting therefore that he has no unique value and is really a fairly bog standard, run of the mill, unremarkable entity. Basically, Morrissey is like the colour beige.

Fray might also be suggesting that he himself is a Morrissey copycat, one amongst many, and therefore has no artistic merit other than as an imitator of a third rate, overrated and under talented singer.

A third possibility is that the Morrissey comparison is not connected to the music but simply implies that Fray sees himself as an overweight, pie eating vegetarian with a rapidly receding quiff. The ‘strings’ reference also casts Fray as an indie Pinocchio, desperate for a fairy godmother to make him a ‘real’ musician…

So, in conclusion, not the best showing from the ‘new Manc Messiah’. He may claim to be ‘not nineteen forever’ (despite having been 22 for at least five years) but after a lyrical offering like that, he’d be lucky to reach Key Stage 2.

(Thanks to Holly C)

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For the m4a

Here is The Ting Tings’ iPod advert, featuring a clip of their new tune ‘Shut Up And Let Me Go’. If it worked for Feist, etc…



About ‘SUALMG‘. You know it sounds like something. We know it sounds like something. Everyone knows it sounds like something. BUT WHAT? Is it that one off the Honda advert with the bassline and the sequence of meticulously engineered but ultimately pointless events? Did the Sugarhill Gang ever rap over it?

Is it that one?

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teenagersinpiccadilly

Here are some expertly taken shots of the literally quite good teenagersintokyo performing at Keys Money Lipstick last month. FYI they were shot at this distance for artistic effect and not because our zoom is fucked or anything.

If you haven't heard it, 'Very Vampyr', by the aforementioned band, is very good.

It's Keys Money Lipstick again this Friday. Details here.

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Back, Back, Back

Apologies for the busiest month ever on ‘your very own’ hip young gunslinger. To be perfectly honest we’ve been busy weighing up the pros and cons of actually being alive, never mind writing a terrible pop blog that literally nobody reads.

Rest assured, normal service will resume as of now. Which means you can expect one or two pointless and stupid posts about records that have been in ‘the blogosphere’ for the last two years every week instead of none.

If (when) this sort of thing happens again, here are some websites you might prefer to read instead:

Popjustice
Northernights
No Rock And Roll Fun
Never Till Now
Come Alive Diana

Very good.

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