The Metro Club

On Wednesday evening I met up with Sam and Robbie, a couple of ex-housemates from Norwich. James was in town for work and a mate of his was playing in a band at The Metro too. Unfortunately, the band his mate was in was the worst of the night for me. Perfectly bland, safe music. Sorry James.

The other three bands were all very good and I’d recommend them all if I could remember their names. King of Spain were the last band on and I would certainly go see them again. They have an album out on March 31st and I may just buy it.

Another song you should buy is Alex Cornish’s track Untied. It’s out tomorrow on iTunes. I wouldn’t usually recommend iTunes but it’s not available on 7digital. Alex hopes to get into the charts by the end of the week. Best of luck!

Sigur Rós take over YouTube

Sigur Rós’s first feature length documentary film gets a full length release on YouTube. Heima is the first full length DVD to be put hosted on YouTube.

Antifolk Winter Music Festival 2008

Didn’t have a plan of where to go last night. Alan requested music. The 12 Bar Club it was then. We saw 4 out of the 11 bands on the bill. Two bands that were simply fantastic live were Extradition Order and David Cronenberg’s Wife.

There was a really annoying old bloke who stood out like a sore thumb. He was way beyond his gig going years but has refused to admit it to himself, growing long thin grey hair, wearing a long sleeved black t-shirt, sitting on people’s shoulders, and generally being a twat. It turned out the old fart was the guitarist for the next band, with the other member being a female guitarist who attempted to sing too. They were way too confident for my liking, solely because they were shit but with loads of mates in the audience.

We left promptly and missed out on 4 more bands.

Radiohead Videocasts

“Bodysnatchers”

“Faust Arp”

“Jigsaw Falling into Place”

“Ceremony” (New Order cover)

See more at pitchfork.

Buy Alex Cornish’s new album

I don’t know about you but I’m gonna buy Alex’s new album, which is out today. It’s called Until The Traffic Stops and is available at all good recordshops, online (Amazon, HMV, Virgin) or off.

Baby Tiger on Thursday night anyone?

Alex Cornish is playing at Baby Tiger on Thursday night. The gig is based in The Den at Cafe Royal on West Register Street.

Cassette Covers

I have about 200 audio cassettes taking up prime shelf space at home. I don’t listen to the cassettes much anymore, they have become ornaments, ugly ornaments.

Today I’ve started to box them up and have kept only a few of the non-labelled cassettes out as I’m intrigued to find out what’s on them. May be there’s a long lost gem that my band recorded back in its heyday. No really, I was in a band, and no, we never had a heyday but its always fun and self-indulgent to listen back and wonder what if… what if we had some talent.

I was gonna scan all the covers of the cassette singles, just the ones that came in a cardboard sleeve rather than a plastic cassette box, but the scanner wouldn’t do its magic autocrop function because the scanner lid was too high above the scanning element. In the end I just scanned the cassettes I got free from the Melody Maker, NME and Vox magazine. These tapes got a serious amount of playtime in my walkman and on my dodgy Aiwa stereo.

Metal Hearts – Socialize

Take a few minutes out and listen to this tune. I love the structure of this song, how it builds up around a repeating riff, is stripped bare, sparkles for a bit in the middle, then ends with the chanting chorus… sooo-she-liize, sooo-she-liize, sooo-she-liize…

WordPress now support Odeo so below is a past that starts of with the tune linked to above, only it is at double speed for some reason. Still sounds good though.

[odeo=http://www.odeo.com/audio/624826/view]