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- New music: Slime feat Vondelpark – 2 Player
We reviewed this track because it's subtle and seductive, not because the person who wrote it sent us a polite email (though that helped)
Yesterday an email arrived that was polite and succinct. The perfect email, in other words. It also contained links to some good music, which only made it better. The email went like this: "Hi, my name is Will Archer. I'm 19 years old, living in Brixton and I make music as Slime. Would you like to write about my song?" It helps when said song – the minimal 2 Player – also features vocals by Will's friend Lewis, aka the mysterious Vondelpark, a man so coy about sharing any information that he doesn't even have a MySpace page and the only interview he seems to have done is this fairly awkward exchange with Vice.
Over a simple guitar figure and distant drums, the song ebbs and flows with Lewis's forlorn vocal. It's not a big, showy number packed with production bells and whistles – instead it relies on gaps and spaces to lure you in.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - Maggoty Lamb: Nostalgia gets a digital makeover
Smash Hits is gone, Melody maker a thing of the past. But digital archivists are giving defunct music mags a new lease of life
In an otherwise perfectly level-headed summary of the current state of Eminem's career, the Independent's Nick Hasted recently reminisced about the fringe benefits of even the most tangential association with Slim Shady at the height of the Detroit motormouth's early-noughties notoriety. "For the first and, to date, last time," Hasted remembers fondly, albeit with a wistful undercurrent, "I was offered sex for my ticket when he flew into Manchester ..."
Hasted does not explicitly reveal his response to this once-in-a-lifetime immodest proposal, but readers with suspicious natures won't fail to notice that the rest of the article makes no specific reference to the (musical) performance in question. Is this the kind of conundrum Slavic literature professor Svetlana Boym had in mind when she wrote: "Nostalgia speaks in riddles and puzzles, so one must face them in order not to become its next victim, or its next victimiser"? It's hard to be sure. But either way, Boym's The Future of Nostalgia – the classic 2001 study of that backward-looking tendency the author helpfully terms "hypochondria of the heart" – is a vital source of enlightenment for anyone exploring the guerrilla music-press online archive scenario.
With the competing claims of rival cloud-drives and personalised ether-lockers rising to a virtual hubbub, it makes perfect sense that perhaps the most cumbersome of all pre-digital information storage processes – the mouldy stack of music mags gathering dust beneath the bed – should be subject to a digital upgrade. And there's something charming about the idea of communally-minded individuals painstakingly scanning entire copies of Smash Hits and relevant sections of fin-de-siecle Melody Makers and NMEs for the emotional sustenance of their contemporaries. (Apparently, there's also another site devoted to early/mid-90s Britpop bible Select somewhere, but it seems to have gone offline.)
As big Brownie point-earners go, surely saving your peers from that most feared of domestic ultimatums – "Either that huge pile of Mixmags/Mojos/Wires/Kerrang!s goes, or you go" – must be right up there with grass-phobic footballer Mario Balotelli handing £1,000 to a representative of Manchester's homeless community?
Also on a karmic note, it's interesting that the person bringing the former of these two philanthropic phenomena to a wider audience should be Sam Delaney, himself a former editor of Heat – arguably the first significant magazine in the evolution of British popular culture that no one in their right mind would ever want to keep. I found an old copy while cleaning up some dog-sick in the back of the car the other day, and somehow its merciless zoom lens focus on the vestigial physiognomic foibles of a hapless underclass of highly groomed cyber-celebrities made the prospect of disentangling partially digested kibble from ancient crisp packets seem strangely appealing. Factor in unofficial Melody Maker and NME archive supremo Charles Batho's day job as a "digital creative director" and it becomes clear that what we're dealing with here are individual acts of analogue atonement.
In Batho's case, the diminishing frequency and volume of new postings since his website started three years ago suggest that – in his case, at least – the urge to preserve Taylor Parkes's live reviews for posterity may be growing fainter. But having set off at a steadier pace, Brian McCloskey's Smash Hits archive seems to be keeping its promise to add a new edition of the magazine every fortnight, "on the 30th anniversary of the original publication date".
Back in the 1890s, Louis, a patient of the great French psychiatrist Dr Arnaud, thought that each event of his life repeated an identical one of exactly 12 months earlier. I'm not saying that fact has any direct bearing on those revisiting the pleasures of their Smash Hits-reading youth at regular 14-day intervals, but it may well be relevant to Boym's quest to "grasp the rhythm of [nostalgia's] longing, its enticements and entrapments".
At this point it should probably be noted that Dr Arnaud's final diagnosis, Louis-wise, was not – as might, perhaps, have been expected – of a patient suffering from abnormally intense deja vu, but of someone obsessed with the idea of deja vu itself. Of course, the feeling prompted by looking at old music magazines you haven't seen for 30 years is not in fact "deja vu" (perhaps best defined – before the term itself had even been coined – by the US novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne as "that odd state of mind wherein we fitfully and teasingly remember some previous scene or incident, of which the one now passing appears to be but the echo and the reduplication") but its opposite.
Does anyone out there have a name for the sensation of revisiting something you know you experienced first time around and finding it not exactly as you'd remembered? If so, I'd love to hear it. In the meantime, all those horrified by the possibility of drifting off into a trance and waking up to find themselves halfway through a 1995 Blur cover story in which Damon Albarn tells Steve Sutherland "if Kurt Cobain had played football, he'd probably be alive today" are strongly advised to give the excellent online archive of the now sadly defunct Arthur magazine (of which more next month) a try instead.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - New music: Fleet Foxes – Helplessness Blues
Listen to the new album by Seattle's finest purveyors of baroque harmony
Three years after Robin Pecknold lead his band in a charge of "I was following the pack, all swallowed in their coats", Seattle folkies Fleet Foxes are back with a new album, Helplessness Blues.
The 12-track, 50-minute album comes after the kind of relentless touring that often accompanies a successful debut album. As a result of this hectic schedule, the recording of Helplessness Blues was heavily delayed. As Alexis Petridis wrote in the Guardian last week, the album may betray a certain "weariness with life", but the music is almost "laughably beautiful".
Well, Helplessness Blues is embedded above, so have a listen and let us know your thoughts.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - Poly Styrene – an optimist to the last
Even while battling cancer in a hospice, the former X-Ray Spex singer was talking about writing new songs and fighting cynicism. Here was a pop star who truly made a difference
The internet is already melting with the warmth and love extended towards Poly Styrene, who died yesterday after a brave battle with breast cancer. As the singer with X-Ray Spex, her songs such as Germ Free Adolescents and The Day the World Turned Day-Glo were among the most memorable of the punk era.
Born Marianne Joan Elliott-Said, she was also a feminist and "misfit superstar" who paved the way for everyone from Kim Gordon to Karen O. Beth Ditto credits her with "shaping my identity" and her fans include Boy George and David Baddiel. But for generations of followers, the unassuming singer was more than an icon: she was someone who felt like one of us, and who will be mourned like an absent friend.
When I was 13, she had a huge impact on me because as a small, ginger-haired kid struggling with identity she was the first pop star I could identify with. Mixed race, young and wearing bonkers outfits and dental braces, her simple but powerful message was that it was OK to be different because everyone is special.
During the punk explosion, I owned just two punk albums: the Sex Pistols' Never Mind the Bollocks and X-Ray Spex's Germ Free Adolescents – and I played the latter most. Poly taught me about subjects that school didn't: identity crises, genetic engineering, and consumer society. Even today, those lyrics – and her wonderfully untamed phrasing – are burned into my brain: "I live off you, and you live off me, and the whole world lives off of everybody ... see we're gonna be exploited, by somebody, by somebody."
Back then, I could never have imagined that I'd end up interviewing her in a hospice as she battled breast cancer. Bed-bound after a fall broke her back in two places, she accepted the illness with incredible grace and I was struck not just by her bravery but also her humour. We spent much of the interview chuckling, beginning with her telling me she had once been taught by future Queen guitarist Brian May. "We used to heckle him. 'Sir, are you married? If you are married, why doesn't your wife iron your shirts?'"
She explained that her distinctive worldview had been formed by a mix of seeing the Sex Pistols and living off the land for a summer before returning to London and finding "everything seemed to be made of plastic".
X-Ray Spex were about "not trying to be like anybody else, but being yourself. High energy, youthful music, creativity. Better than expressing yourself through crime. Being in a band, saying what you want. It was better than being in a girl gang."
She explained how, as punk turned from liberating force to straitjacket, she'd quit the band – after being pelted with tomatoes during a gig in Paris. "We'd tried to change our sound," she explained. "They didn't like that, the anarchists in their black leather jackets. They thought it was the French revolution all over again."
But she admitted to not realising the significance of what she had started: "I didn't really think about it. I just went steaming ahead, like a bull in a China shop. I'm quite discerning about what I get behind, but when I really get behind something, I give it everything."
To the last, her optimism and energy never waned – and she was even talking of ideas for new songs coming to her in the hospice. Her new album, Generation Indigo, – uplifting, playfully opionated pop and her best music since the 70s – was "something really positive" she could leave behind, should the worst happen. Not that she feared it.
"I try not to be negative or cynical," she explained. "Even though we're in a crazy situation, economically, and with wars, when things go far right, they will have to swing left. We have to become more caring and sharing. Generation Indigo are the people who will protest peacefully, and it's happening already."
And then she smiled: the smile of a woman fighting a terrible personal situation, but thinking only of the world she had yet to leave behind. The smile of someone with no regrets, who had a lot of fun, and made a difference.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - New music: Depeche Mode – Puppets (Röyksopp remix)
This reworking of a track from Depeche Mode's debut album turns Vince Clarke's paean to paranoia into something sparklier
In June, synth-pop legends Depeche Mode will release Remixes 2: 81 – 11, which, as the title suggests, is their second remix collection (the first was released in 2004). It features new and classic reworkings, including Stargate's take on Personal Jesus, plus contributions from Eric Prydz, Unkle and M83. The three-disc edition includes arrangements by Peter Bjorn and John, Dan the Automator, and original members Vince Clarke and Alan Wilder. For Puppets – taken from Depeche Mode's debut album, Speak & Spell – they've enlisted Norwegian duo Röyksopp, who turn Clarke's paean to paranoia into something sparklier, fleshing out the icy synths with intricate beats.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать
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