So besides me there is someone else getting excited about this Welsh punk outfit somewhere in between the Pixies, the Jesus Lizard and the Sex Pistols:

Via Colin Newman's (head of legendary art punks Wire) ten desert island discs at Pitchfork I found out about McLusky, a Welsh band from Cardiff making very raw, powerful and energetic music between punk and emo with a grain of blues. Besides the Pixies (esp. on Medium Is the Message from McLusky's first album) I hear Jesus Lizard and the New Fast Automatic Daffodils. The lyrics are often rather rude and simple but that goes well with the edgy music. I am not sure if they master their instruments very well but this makes their punk sound even more authentic. My only reproach would be that the singer whose voice I rather dig yells a little too much for my liking on their first album. The most exciting of all the new retro rock bands I have heard yet. British Sea Power, Clinic, Gomez and Interpol have their moments though.

Strange that British retro bands seem to appeal more to me than most of the American ones be it The Strokes (not as bad as I made them in my old blog but still not amazing), Black Rebel Motorcycle Club (blatant Jesus & Mary Chain rip-off), The White Stripes (I liked them at first listen but Jon Spencer did this better), The Liars (kind of annoying), The Walkmen (the music would be better without the irritating high-pitch voice of the singer), The French Kicks (boring harmonic post-punk) etc.

Audio: The song To Hell With Good Intentions as mp3 from their new album McLusky Do Dallas. Six songs in real audio from their first album My Pain and Sadness Is More Sad and Painful Than Yours at Vitaminic.

Dandy Warhols I have always liked this eclectic band from Portland. Though the singer is supposed to be an arrogant asshole on stage and their drug consumption shows in their psychedelic music. They do lots of drones, they have a certain relaxedness and coolness around them I adore. I am listening to five mp3s which were available on their site recently:

• Hells Bells: great AC/DC cover on sleeping pills, in the melodic Dandy version which uses a nice horn section this song reminds me a lot of Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven.
• Ohio: one of Neil Young's most popular and best songs, in a synthesizer-heavy version, with the usual detached mumbled vocals. Rather spooky.
• Bohemian Like You: grooving instrumental, weakest of the 5 tracks.
• Dub Song is a chaotic hypnotic dance track reminiscent of The Happy Mondays in their heyday. Primal Scream's Screamadelica comes to mind as well.
• Retarded: nice powerpop tune, sparkling and light, Beach Boys meet Velvet Underground.

Unfortunately only Retarded and Dub Song are still in the mp3 section of the Dandy Warhols homepage but there are eight other songs which I didn't listen to yet: Head, One, CCR, White Gold, The Wreck of Edmund Fitzgerald (Gordon Lightfoot), Free For All (Ted Nugent), Kinky and Phone Call.

Some lame jokes on a band I don't care about At I Love Music there is some Grateful Dead bashing going on. I found the following jokes there which possibly give an idea of the band and especially their fans:

Q: What do Grateful Dead fans say when they run out of drugs? A: God this band are shit.

Q: Where do you hide your money from a Deadhead? A: Under the soap...

Q: How can you tell a Deadhead has been at your house? A: They're still there!

Q: How many Deadheads does it take to change a lightbulb? A: None... they just wait for it to burn out and then follow it around the country.

Jerry Garcia and Eric Clapton are captured by cannibals one day. Before they are about to be cooked for dinner they are granted one final wish. Jerry says "hand me my old guitar and let me play Dark Star one last time...". Eric says "please kill me before he starts".

And to finish off this not so serious morning post a programmer's joke I found at jc-log: "There are only 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary and those who don't."

Nick Drake Via my referrers I discovered the weblog letting loose with the leptard with a transcription of a monologue Nick Drake had spoken into a tape recorder in 1968 after having been to a party. I couldn't have put the analysis of Drake's words better myself: "I posted the Drake monologue yesterday because I'd heard it for the first time the day before. Sitting down and listening to it was something of a revelation. First impression was that there was something faintly eerie about it, but that's only because I'm a fan of Nick Drake. To anyone else hearing it, they'd probably take it at face value: a young man, well spoken and well educated, having come home from a party a bit buzzed, staying up to play a bit of piano (as you do!) and watch the dawn come in, finally rambling into a tape recorder at five in the morning, enjoying the view. Even as he's sobering up he minds his p's and q's. And so to bed...." Discovering people with similar interests who can write better about them than myself is always a revelation for me. That is what I like so much about the internet. That it connects my brain with other brains out there. And even if I am not able to write about the music I love as I would like to I at least often can find someone on the internet who can.

Goose pimple voices David Thomson in The New Republic on Deep in a Dream: The Long Night of Chet Baker by James Gavin: My Unfunny Valentine: "In the early hours of a May morning in 1988, a body was found on the street outside the Hotel Prins Hendrik in Amsterdam. Its skull was crushed from having landed on a spiked post; the body seemed to have fallen from a window of the hotel... ...Chet really had only two things in life: playing the trumpet and doing drugs." One of the most touching things in Jazz is Chet Baker singing. When Chet sings he sounds like a ghost, like a spirit. His voice is celestial and unbelievably sad at the same time. There is only one other singer who moves me as much as Chet Baker. That is Billie Holiday. A good place to start with Chet is the excellent documentary Let's Get Lost which came out shortly after his death. But be prepared Chet's life was more about self-destruction than anything else.

Why I like depressive music Sad music has always had the strongest impact of all music on me. I guess it really got started with Nick Drake whom I discovered in the late 70s when his box set Fruit Tree comprising his three studio albums was released in Germany. I made a post on him a while ago (a search should find it but I am too lazy to look it up now). I usually listened to his music on headphones as it was too intimate to be shared with the outside world. He only sang for me with his gentle pure voice and told me about the beauty of life and love and the hopelessness of it all. It was the soundtrack of my growing-up. A 1-1 identification, a comprehension beyond words. After having listened to Nick Drake I did not feel alone in this world anymore. I knew that there had been somebody who had had very similar experiences to my own and who could write and sing about them which I obviously couldn't. It may sound stupid, but he was my teenage the idol of my teenage years. Later on I listened to Nick Drake with my best friend who was on a similar trip as me. But it wasn't the same anymore. I felt awkward to listen to this music with somebody else. It was almost painful and very uncomfortable. I could not share Nick Drake with anybody else. The thing with sad music is that I love to listen to it when I am sad and though it does not make me happy it gives me a relief. There is a hidden power in it which gives me strength. Afterwards I discovered other music in a similar vein but the impression was less intense. Joni Mitchell's incredibly poetic songs, mostly on lost love. The Smiths melancholic tuneful pop songs with their witty and weird adolescent lyrics. Neil Young who made me overcome my first real lovesickness with After the Goldrush. Mark Kozelek from the Red House Painters who sings as if it is his only chance to survive. Idaho's first album Year After Year, another slow dive into darkness. The Tindersticks' First Album full of passion. The Gun Club's energetic psychobilly: Jeffrey Lee Pierce's doomed voice. Joy Division, maybe the climax of it all. Punky and rough in the beginning, gloomy, claustrophobic and atmospheric in the end. I have to stop now, there are so many I have forgotten and go back to the beginning and give the word to Jody Beth Rosen from Freezing to Death in the Nuclear Bunker who describes the effect of Nick Drake's music better here than I ever could: "I'm not the most fervent Nick Drake kneejerker, but I've always considered Pink Moon one of those albums -- one of those special, private experiences that signal a communication between someone in distress and another whose ship drowned years ago. It's like drinking tea when you're sick, and you hold the cup to your nose so the steam can come up through your nostrils and make your eyes tear -- that tea is a remedy, it's homeopathy, your best friend when you're grouchy and curled into an antisocial knot left on the sofa to be otherwise choked on by your stupid cat. It's not modern medicine, not a multimillion-dollar miracle of research and development, not shelling out kickbacks to charlatan medics, no apple-cheeked actresses breathing easy on mountaintops as African music zoom-zoom-zooms away. And that's what I find hard to stomach about this Volkswagen business."

To get an impression of sad music just listen to Nick Drake or Bright Eyes: Haligh, Haligh, A Lie, Haligh (whom I just discovered and whose tortured vocals are sadness in nuce) More on the still quite young Conor Oberst and Bright Eyes here:

• Bright Eyes: There Is No Beginning to the Story EP: Pitchfork Review (7.4/10)
• ILM: Bright Eyes: Worth a damn?

Early Joy Division I posted the following message to the I Love Music discussion forum today: "It was a sunny public holiday (Pentecost) today in Frankfurt and as so often on bright days I felt like relistening to one of my fave (not so sunny) bands: Joy Division. I started with the first four tracks on the third disc of "Heart and Soul" which are identical to the "An Ideal for Living" EP recorded in December 1977. The tracks are: "Warsaw", "No Love Lost", "Leaders of Men" and "Failures" (the weakest of the four songs). And suddenly two things I hadn't noticed too much before struck me:

1. Ian Curtis does not sing in his grave mannered graveyard voice, he sings more "naturally" (one could say human) and
2. Joy Division sound much rougher, punkier and more energetic than on the later studio albums produced by Martin Hannett. There is hardly any trace of this gothic, claustrophobic and oppressing sound for which they became known later on and which turned me off initially when I discovered them about ten years ago.

The following three songs on disc 3 of "Heart and Soul" ("The Drawback", "Interzone" and "Shadowplay") which stem from the RCA LP later released under the name Warsaw produced by JD and others neither have the classic JD sound. The same is true for the first BBC session for the John Peel show from January 1979. Though Curtis has already changed his voice to lower spookier registers on the last song "Transmission". On the live recordings, especially "Les Bains Douches" from December 1979 JD are punkier and more dynamic but Curtis sings low as well. My question: Does anyone know how much Hannett is responsible for these two major changes in JD's music, namely the lower singing of Curtis and the less edgy, more controlled and more lugubrious sound for which they became famous? How much did Hannett influence the (tragic) direction JD took later on? Looking at the artwork of the two studio albums designed by Peter Saville I ask myself how much it expressed how Hannett wanted the band to be and how much it reflected JD themselves. Especially the cover of "Closer" seems to be very artificial and premeditating. I quote Momus "Thought for the Day" here: "Already posthumous when released, Peter Saville's sleeve for Joy Division's 'Closer' shows a necrophile scene of sorrowful keening cast in marble. Death becomes part of the album's power, a part of its marketing." I'd also like to know if there are live bootlegs flying around from before the recording of "Unknown Pleasures" in April 1979. By the way I think I prefer their early, unpolished, thrashier intonation and sound which was probably more intense though maybe a little less unique than their later one." Answers can be found here.

Discovery British Sea Power is a rather new band from Brighton I had only heard from hearsay. There are two mp3 tracks on their site (via the Dutch connection prolific). The first one The Spirit of St. Louis is a dark, angry post-punk song sounding like a crossover of Gang of Four and Gallon Drunk. The Lonely is totally different, a tuneful, light and rather sunny ballad in the vein of what the Australian Apartments did about 8 years ago. Apparently their live shows are quite wild . A band to watch. I started a thread at ILM on them. Short Motion review of their three song EP Remember Me.

Premature judgements It is terrible whenever I buy any new music and I start listening to it I form an opinion almost instantly. When my first impression is negative I quite frequently do not listen to that music again and it gets buried in my cd pile. In many cases this is justified but in others it is not. Luckily I had not yet filed Ryan Adams second album Gold in my alphabetically sorted cd shelves from where it would have been very difficult to get back into the cd player (there are 1,000+ contenders). A couple of days ago I had dismissed it as mainstream and bland. I relistened and must admit that it is definitely one of the outstanding releases in this for me up to now quite poor year in terms of pop/rock music (another premature evaluation?). I won't go into details here but Ryan Adams album is very impressive. It is amazingly varied and consistent at the same time as each song is an entity which fits very well into the flow of the whole record. There are 16 tracks on the main disc (70+ minutes) plus 5 tracks (another 20 minutes) on the bonus disc. And there is no really embarassing track and hardly any really outstanding tracks neither. The music is in the songwriter folk jazz country rock vein. Very eclectic with influences ranging from Bob Dylan (Firecracker with some very competent mouthharp play), Van Morrison (Answering Bell) to Mick Jagger (the bluesrocker Tina Toledo's Street Walkin' Blues). The music only holds together because of Adams voice. It is so versatile. Even if Adams uses many riffs and arrangements from rock history (especially the 70s I feel) this guy has already created his own style. He makes me think a little bit of Jeff Buckley without the opera singer attitude touch (which I always hated). More down to earth and settled. I still prefer Adams first album Heartbreaker as more heart blood flowed into that disc. But even here Adams who is only 26 years old shows that he is probably THE songwriter voice in these times. Apparently in concert he is drunk and brilliant. One of my favourites from the main disc is the ballad Nobody Girl which does not get boring in the 9 minutes and 39 seconds it lasts. The bonus disc alone is worth the money as there the music is less polished and more like I would have liked him to sound after Heartbreaker.