Defiled Goats

Well, what else would be the opposite of a Sacred Cow? I'll probably do a Sacred Cow thing, I have so much hate for the perceivedly wonderful (yes Bob Dylan, I'm looking at you, you massive Nuclear-Powered Whiny Nasal Astro-Tramp. I'm also looking at you, Ringo "Thomas the Tank Shit Drummer" Starr, too. And the rest of the cocking Beatles), but for now I have a urge to address the opposite. Hence, Defiled Goats. Everyone automatically says they're shit, but they aren't, and they only say that because the Herd's brain-gonads instruct them to via the power of shit thinking and cloth ears.

Kingmaker (yay! it wasn't safety matches after all!). I liked them at the time. That time being the time they were making records. I also liked them at other times, but the time they were making records is the time I'm referring to atm the minute. Then I carried on with my weird and possibly, occasionally wonderful life and forgot about them a bit. I went through a couple of financially driven record purges, went out with a few people, lost a parent (turns out he was hiding behind the sofa. Bit after that he died, that was a lot sadder), trimmed a hedge or none, became obsessed with The Dubliners, went off them a bit, went to University two and a half times, drank my own weight in Rum, drank Rik Waller's weight in Rum, decided the Rum deserved a capital letter, found enjoyed betrayed lost and lamented largely the luminous love of my life, ate some cheese, had umpteen cups of coffee, owned upwards of four cars, expanded my jacket collection towards three figures, had a feud with the retards living opposite, got threatened with a machete in the name of work, spoke to about fourteen elderly South Asian doctors, renewed my hatred of public transport, passed thirty, obtained an extensive knowledge of cryptids because of millie (yeah, thanks for that. I also know what Pareiodal means, but I probably can't spell it. It's not Jesus, it's a shit photo), passed 37 (quite recent that one), boycotted a shop because they were mean to a remaining parent, smoked a bazillion cigarettes, swanned around displaying my awesomeness to the world, lost weight, put it back on again, proved that children's literature doesn't exist, subjected myself to all but one of the Harry Potter Books, and developed a burning, deep, abiding hatred of Russell Howard.

In short, I forgot about them. Then I remembered them (somewhat before a number of the things above happened - I couldn't stop, I was having too much fun). Then I remembered them, and had a listen to them. And they were just as good as I recalled, the most British of all the American sounding bands ever. If Grant Lee Buffalo, Buffalo Tom, or any large bovine themed American "alt" rock plaid wearing band had been subjected to a childhood in Hull, they'd sound like Kingmaker. A vast swathe of subsequent bands owe a huge debt to Loz and his cohorts. Yes, even Radiohead. Fair enough, no one does irritating sub-sixth form poetry lyrics better than the demented arse-weasel Thom Yorke and his chums, but Loz managed slightly above sixth form poetry lyrics. Neither are particularly impressive or deep, but Kingmaker's are decent percentage closer to being as clever as they think they are than Radioshed's are. And tunes? They had tunes coming out of their ears. Which probably caused a signifiant problem of its own, can't have been easy recording mighty impressive songs with shit cascading from your ears.

Thing is, when I reacquainted myself with their own, inimitable wonder, an esteemed associate of mine saw fit to comment (on one of my many organs of internet expression. Yeah, I'm cool. And no, you still can't touch me) something along the lines of "Kingmaker? Even Kingmaker haven't listened to themselves for fifteen years". Said esteemed colleague has, to my mind, quite a reasonable taste in music, but this wasn't enough to prevent the parrotting of a perceived mis-wisdom. Ears of cloth, and typing fingers made of battenburg. Or possibly battenberg, I can't be arsed looking it up.

So Kingmaker. Not shit at all, when you think about it. They had their moment, and then they had to endure their anti-moment where they mattered less than Midway Still (on another day, I'll point out why their version of "You Made Me Realize" widdles on My Bloody Valentine's original from the point where the top of the WTC used to be. I'll also mention how their autographs also reduced the retail value of one of their records. What the lord gives with one hand, he has a bunch of angels mercilessly mug you for with another). And now, I reckon, they should have another moment. A Kingmaker moment. I'm having one of them right now. It's quite pleasant, if a bit disconcertinly middle class. I'll be moving on to Husker Du (umlauts. now. bitches) shortly, no chance of them being underrated. Mainly on account of Bob Mould being a football headed corporate bottom feeder. Yes, he feeds on bottoms. It's fuelled by his anger at the fact that Grant Hart did Bob Mould singing better than Bob, and wrote better songs (apart from Bob's manic wailing on Eight Miles High, that's awesome that is. Even if it's by a spherical money grabber).

But I digress.

Kingmaker. Clinging to the fading Kingmaker moment, here's a slice to tickle your sacculus with.



Yes, I'm too good for you and yes, I suspect my choices are determined by my ongoing lament.

GET OUT.

Conundrum

No, not the kind that Carol Whoreface Vorderman would do inbetween flogging debt and margerine-based phantom cholesterol cures to poor people in adverts. Do I do a post about the awesomeness of Grant Hart (erstwhile drummer from Husker Du [apply your own umlauts, fuckers], heroin addict and top-drawer musicker), or do I do a sPazTune?

Poor Grant has less than a thousand listeners on Last.fm. I find this utterly criminal, as I secretly passed a law making not registering your love for Grant Hart on Last.fm a crime. It also makes me sad, as he's a talent that your ears crave, cleave to and generally want to have ear sex with.

Well? Hurry up, cementdudes, it's already gone midnight. Oh, you can't suggest until I've posted, can you. By which time, I will doubtless have decided, and the whole matter will be redundant. Oh well, much as I hate to disappoint my readership (hi millie, if you're still reading. If you are, why? Go and have your head felt), I shall plough on regardless and you will doubtless see the fruits of my ploughing in the next post. I somehow doubt it will be a crop of turnips. Crock of shit, maybe, crop of turnips, less likely.

Alternatively I could do something about the persistent box-based irritant that is safety matches, or wibble on about Kingmaker.

Oh, decisions, decisions.

Johnny Brainstorm!

That would either be brilliant, or the worst cartoon ever. On the one hand, it could be a massively hazy and drug-fuelled superish hero romp through the galactiverse, on the other it could just be a half an hour of someone called John sat a table thinking really, really hard about something. Either way, it's a line from my favourite Mad Sin song, second best purveyors of fine German psychobilly.

So anyway, yeah. I'm not inventing a new cartoon superdrughero (again, that could be ace, or just someone preventing a robbery in an inferior Boots rip-off shop), I'm just burbling about things sloshing about my head. In type form. The burbling, that is, things aren't sloshing about my head in type form. Oh no, they slosh in lurid, sleazy, all-too-graphic detail. No matter what I'm thinking about. Thinking about red leicester cheese? Lurid, sleazy, all-too-graphic detail. It's both a blessing and curse. And a load of old tossy waffle, too.

To business, though. I reckon it's time for a sPazTune. Yes, you heard me right, a sPazTune. Not a sPazAmp, a sPazTune. Why? I heard you shout in an incredulous fashion (utilising my special set of internet enabled ears, ears that can even detect made-up sounds. Yes, I have used that line before. Sue me, bitch). Well, I'll tell you. See, my car, little Adolf the Audi A3 (1.8t sport, if you must know) is a little elderly. S reg elderly, to be precise. And, like all similarly elderly audis, he suffered from a very specific ailment. Namely, the stereo volume control. See, in their infinite teutonic desire to enslave europe wisdom, they decided that it should have an electronic volume control, one that would necessitate writing all changes to memory, to make sure the little car stereo knew how loud your ears liked your music. Nothing wrong with that, you might think. Except they wrote it to an eeprom chip permanently. Permanently. Giving you a finite number of volume changes - about 10,000 or so, to be inexact. At some point in the past year, Adolf reached his 10,000 and could only remember three volumes - average, TOTAL, and really tiny. Average was slightly too loud for sitting in your car outside your house, way too quit for the motorway and/or drowning out the unwelcome whining of car guests. So I replaced it, as a treat for Adolf on my birthday.

All well and good you might be saying (you probably aren't, because you aren't reading), but what on earth does that have to do with the price of sPazAmps? Well, see, I thought I'd be technoclever. I bought one that went with the old iPod (well, not that old, that was also a self-present, replacing the giantist original one with the vastly decrepit battery. I lent the interim replacement, a splendid little Sony thing, to a man going to Iraq). And I couldn't be fussed with sPazAmping with an iPod, so I bit the horrible Apple bullet and reinstalled sPazTunes.

So there you go. The reversion to sPazTunes. Except I took so long about this (I was distracted by facebook and things. I'm so cool. No, you can't touch me. Get off) that you don't get an actual sPazTune. I listened to lots of psychobilly, trawl back through previous efforts and compile your own. There's enough of them in there. Christ, do I have to spoonfeed you EVERYTHING, cementheads?

BEGONE.

Bim Jeam

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you...the one word sPazAmp. Guaranteed longer titles than comments, all of the time. Fun, meet your redefinition. Tedious Irritation, put Fun's coat on and do your best impersonation.

1. Mark Lanegan - I'll Take Care of You
Whiskygruffgravelsex.

2. Roxy Music - Both Ends Burning
Pyroarse.

3. Robbie Williams - Life Thru a Lens
Cockfarmer.

4. Cliff Richard - Congratulations (in Spanielish)
Bumwipe.

5. The Move - Useless Information
Bostin!

6. Bryan Ferry - Piece of My Heart
Ventricle.

7. Air - Talisman
+4Str

8. Kingmaker - End of the Line
*sniff*

9. Daniel Johnston - Love is Like a Toy
Vibrofilth.

10. Hayden Thompson - Blues, Blues, Blues
Blues.

Okay so this is about as much fun as listening to the Stephen Nolan phone-in show for Angry Retards on Radio 5. Which is, in turn, about as much fun renovating your rectum with a pencil. In light of this, the second half will be a regular sPazAmp - no increase in fun for you, a two percent swing to fun for me.

11. Los Gatos Locos - Someone's Gonna Get Their Head Kicked in Tonight
Brazilian. And awesome. A bit like everybody's favourite retard-faced midfielder, the wonderful, and wonderfully gormless, Anderson.

12. Bobby "Boris" Pickett & the Cryptkickers - Monster Mash
Especially nice with Ghoulash. Sorry. Really, really sorry.

13. Blyan Felly - Tokyo Joe
Lacist.

14. Roxy Music - Serenade
Look, it's a genuine coincidence. Honest, it is. Stop it.

15. Pearl Jam - Who Are You
I'm David. Hi.

16. Soft Machine - Why am I so Short?
Because you've only got little legs, E.T.

17. Bill Allen - Please Give Me Something (to Remember you by)
How does herpes grab you?

18. Isaac Hayes - By the Time I get to Phoenix
They'll have moved it. You can practically guarantee it.

19. Psychic TV - Just Like Arcadia
Only without the former members of Duran Duran, I suspect.

20. Twilight Singers - Number Nine
It has Mark Lanegan's whiskygruffgravelsex voice noises, and then it has Greg Dulli's soulfulseedysex voice noises. It has all the sensibilities of a classically epic Dulli tune, with a seasoned dash of Laneganisms. It may lack the brutal confessionalism of "Be Sweet", and Greg may have mellowed (well, more sort of marinaded) from the urgency of "Miles iz Ded". If you need more from music than Greg letting rip at the three minute mark, then to be quite frank you don't deserve to have your own ears, you spack.

GOODBYE.

The Greatest Song in the History of the World #1

Today, that song is the one this post is about. Yesterday, it was something else. Tomorrow it will be something else. Hell, it might even be something else by the end of this post. That, my little cementheaded readers, is the infuriating beauty of music. If The Greatest Song in the History of the World was always the same song, it would be really, really dull. Duller than a barrel of cheese on a broken treadmill, in a dark room. At night. Duller than making a scale lego model of a piece of lego. Duller than the combined wits of Ashton Kutcher and Josh Hartnett. Duller even than the unnecessary bits of the Lord of the Ring trilogy (cinematic version) - and that is a whole heap of fucking dull.

But enough of the dull, onto the sparkly, shiny, seductive, engorging goodness. Today, at approaching ten in the evening, The Greatest Song in the History of the World is...





Yes, that's right. It's "Serenade" by Roxy Music and yes, it really is that good. A tiny aural slice of munificent magnificence, put on this earth to tickle your ears in a good way and occasionally make bits of your insides to try and swap places with other bits of your insides. A reasonable indicator of a contender for a temporary seat at the head of the Greatest Songs in the History of the World table is when a single listen just isn't enough. And at 2m59s, "Serenade" is one of the reasons why they invented digital music and a repeat button (they tried it with record players, but you could never be sure that the needle wouldn't slip the wrong way and end up trying to burrow to China through your slipmat).

It's one of the sneakily best kind of songs - the secretly sad song. Full to the brim of pop jauntiness, striding along Bryan's typically oblique lyrical path, you can happily trot along with it, enjoying Thommo's enthusiasm at being let of his drum leash and letting go with the occasional energetic fill, or ol' Phil's reliably strident strumming. And, for two minutes or so, this works - Bryan's archetypally individual vocal stylings (no, it isn't technically singing. At least, not as we know it. But hell, it works, so stop arguing cementhead) carry the lyrics along with a certain, seductive bravado - after all, it's a song about Bryan casually slinking off from one passionate encounter to another, isn't it. He's not bothered, he's just slying pondering whether she will be or not - although really, it doesn't matter whether she does or not. Life's too short, dude. Then, at about two minutes, the jauntiness eases, Bryan's piano driving the guitar into a melancholy-tinged moment - like the song had just caught sight of it's own reflection and felt unnerved for a second or two.

The bravado slips ever so slightly, turning on the lines "maybe I'm wrong for seeming ungrateful, unforgiving/oh how it hurts, now you're finally leaving/I couldn't take any more".

The jauntiness resumes almost immediately, but it's just not the same. It's punctured, coloured with a tiny glimpse of emotion. Not bravado anymore, it's almost clingy desperation. Posturing, but needy. Almost touching, especially in "now's the time, let's hide away/sacred hours, safe from yesterday" - it may well be a plea for one more shag, but the song's let its guard down, you know it means it. This is just driven home by the incongruity of the "boo hoo willows", rather than alleviated. It's certainly no accident that it's followed on side 2 of Stranded by "A Song for Europe". It all turns on the near-falsetto of the two minute mark and the word "finally". As derided as Mr. Ferry can be (not always without good and laudable cause, it has to be said), his genuine deftness with words and their evocation of emotion is criminally underrated to such a degree that they should open a special court in The Hague. Some songs spend tedious hours clumsily yanking on your heart-strings like a ham-fisted shot-putter trying to knit vermicelli, "Serenade" flits in, takes a scalpel to them, and flits out again.

Of course, you're free to disagree with me. But that would, of course, mean you were an idiot. Just rejoice in the new category and it's splendid new tag. And the song, rejoice in the song. But be careful, it won't always make you happy. Depends on how you feel, innit.

BYE.