Wednesday 29 August 2012

Play To Z: Away We Go to Bitches Brew

Some Observations

"One Thing" by Amerie remains one of the most irresistible slices of R&B pop this century. I know it owes a huge debt to "Crazy In Love", but that doesn't mean it isn't just as good (if not better - yeah I said it!) Just because The Magnificent Seven is Seven Samurai with cowboys doesn't mean it isn't a great film.

The Ting Tings first album was pretty good (I haven't checked out their new one) but their finest work remains "Patience" by Dear Eskiimo, their earlier incarnation. It's a fantastic, multi-structured duet that builds up layers and layers of instrumentation to a brilliant climax.

If you haven't listened to Beautiful Freak by Eels in the last month, it's time to go back and listen to it again. You won't regret it.

The Best Band Your Teenage Self Never Formed

Most people's formative experiences with pop music happen when they're teenagers (I'm no exception) and it's only inevitable that a thick slice of those people will swiftly move from the consumption to production side of music. The heightened emotions, attractiveness of rebellion and need for identity make adolescence a perfect storm for many a prospective rock god.

  Even since the legendary zine "Sideburns" published the iconic "Now Form A Band" picture, punk has been the genre of choice for the teenage garage band, the DIY ethos of the scene and the simple energy of the music complementing the teenage world-view perfectly. Most of these bands don't go anywhere, and the few that do often evolve into something different very quickly. Be Your Own Pet are the band all these other bands wish they could be.



  Be Your Own Pet's self-titled debut from 2006 (when all the band were in their teens, of course) has enough beautiful raucous energy to power a small town for a year. The songs are all about causing chaos, having fun, getting your heart broken and, in the final track, zombies. For the most part, the rhythms are simple and the melodies basic, all echoing drums and thrashing guitars, but by Jove they hammer at you until you're ready to run through the streets for the hell of it.

  It's all held together by the wailing voice of Jemina Pearl Abegg, all arsonist's soot and honey, screaming "I'm a independent motherfucker and I'm here to take your money" over "Bunk Trunk Skunk" like it's a warcry and a promise. She's Iggy Pop in a young Gwen Stefani's body with the Tasmanian Devil's energy - in fact, Iggy later guested on her solo album on the wonderfully named "I Hate People". In short, she's the kind of girl you wish you could have got to front your band in high school.

  Be Your Own Pet is one of those albums that I'll forever associate with the year I spent in America (I picked it up for cheap there in a closing-down Tower Records) and the sense of freedom and potential for adventure that year carried. The band's follow-up, Get Awkward, had some great songs, but struggled to capture the same sense of youthful exuberance their debut carried. The songs about food fights and teenage homicide felt a little forced, reaching for a place they no longer inhabited. They had left the perfect storm of youth, and couldn't quite find that magic again. But Be Your Own Pet remains a testament to the sheer fuck-you attitude of adolescence and the joy that comes from it.

Rediscovered Gem

"Hot Venom" by Miniature Tigers

Saturday 25 August 2012

Play To Z: All Summer to The Avalanche

Some Observations

Radiohead's "Pyramid Song" off Amnesiac makes life feel incredibly cinematic, and like I should be moving in slow motion while something very sad happens.

Equally, it's hard to listen to "Thou Shalt Always Kill" by Dan Le Sac vs. Scroobius Pip without feeling like you want to stop doing photocopying and instead start spitting truth like bullets and burn down the office to the ground.

I've only got a couple of tracks off of Annie's more recent album Don't Stop. Listening to her debut Anniemal makes me desperately want to rectify that before I get to the "D"s.

The "Be My Baby" drumbeat (BOOM BOOMBOOM TSSCH) makes it's first appearance on Kenickie's "Millionaire Sweeper". I'll try to spot it every time it kicks off a track.

In other Kenickie news, the opening of "Come Out 2Nite" will never not make me want to drum along.

At War With At War With The Mystics

  The Flaming Lips are less a band and more an experience. I'd love to see them live, if only to see front-man Wayne Coyne traverse the audience in a giant plastic bubble, or manifest from a swarm of butterflies, or climb inside his own beard, or whatever he feels like doing at that particular point in the evening.

Inside Wayne Coyne's beard

  They bring a sort of anarchistic big top feeling to their music, with absolutely everything thrown at the audience in a free-wheeling sensory overload.

  2006's At War With The Mystics feels, at it's best, like the soundtrack to a rock opera made by people who grew up on Sesame Street. The band have always had a deeply narrative approach to lyrics, and by weaving themes through various songs and creating consistent characters who appear more than once, they create the impression that a larger story is being told. I'm not sure it qualifies as a full blown concept album, but it straddles that divide quite comfortably without ever feeling awkward.

  Where awkwardness does sneak in is in the album's political content. I don't think anyone could deny that The Flaming Lips are a big bunch of hippies, and this album, released in the middle of President Bush's second term, before Barack Obama had emerged as an optimistic, uniting figurehead, is dripping with frustration with the Bush administration's neo-conservative agenda.

  The trouble is, there is very little subtlety or even depth to the politics contained within the record. It essentially amounts to "Hey man, you think you're so great, but what you're doing isn't groovy, and it'll bite you in the ass one day." The album's worst point is "You Haven't Got A Clue" which builds a chorus around the refrain "Every time you state your case/The more I want to punch your face", which is about the most un-nuanced political statement you can make.

  The political content of the record doesn't ruin it, and there's still a wealth of songs to enjoy, but I think it shows to merits of sticking to your strengths. As much as I'm an evangelist for bands pushing themselves musically, The Flaming Lips have never been low on innovation when it comes to their sound - perhaps it's worth them staying on safer ground with their lyrical content.

Rediscovered Gem

"Metrorail Thru Space" by Cut Chemist

Play To Z: Mapping The Future With Music

In what I'm sure will be the first of many serendipitous co-incidences, Janelle Monáe's The Archandroid leads directly into M.I.A's Arular (putting aside an RAC remix of Phoenix's "Armistice"), and listening to these two stellar albums right next to each other set my brain spinning. Produced 5 years apart, by very different artists, and with profoundly different sounds and aesthetics, they nonetheless feel like a vision of the future.



  When Arular arrived in 2005 it was a wake-up call, at least to my ears. We talk a lot about the shrinking globe, how technology and 24-hour news cycles are bringing an increasing awareness of the world beyond our doorstep both on a large and small scale, but Arular felt like the first record to capture what that means in the 21st Century. It carried a wider awareness, speaking to the experiences of people across the planet, dealing with topics like immigration, terrorism and the global economy without ever getting bogged down in preaching. It was about human stories in this new world, filtered through a hip-hop/electroclash/punk mix. Politics you can dance to.

 Arular is about the future that is now, a grimy, sweaty world forged by the Internet where the voices of people stretch from Haiti to Hackney to Hanoi. It's worth remembering that Arular arrived before Twitter was launched, in a time when things like watching the Arab Spring unfold in real-time, not filtered through the BBC but in the words of the people who were actually there, wasn't exactly commonplace. It showed a vision of the world to come, where our connections to people across the planet become much more visible and explicit.



  The Archandroid is, of course, more about the far-future than the near-future, but it still tackles a lot of the same themes. A huge sweeping concept album, encompassing Suites 2 and 3 of four-part story of a messianic android leading a revolution, The Archandroid draws influences from Fritz Lang's Metropolis, the works of Philip K. Dick and a thousand musical genres. In her story, Monáe positions the androids as an underclass, the "other" that are oppressed by the wealthy and slowly rise up to revolution, and there are explicit links between their fight and the contemporary struggles of minorities and the working class. The album exists in the tradition of Afrofuturism, which fuses the political allegory and utopian ideals of science fiction with the issues facing people of colour in society today.

"Speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of 20th century technoculture—and, more generally, African-American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future—might, for want of a better term, be called Afrofuturism.
African-American culture is Afrofuturist at its heart, literalizing Gibson’s cyberpunk axiom, “The street finds its own uses for things.” With trickster elan, it retrofits, refunctions, and willfully misuses the technocommodities and science fictions generated by a dominant culture that has always been not only white but a wielder, as well, of instrumental technologies."
                                                                                          - Mark Dery, Black To The Future

  Monáe's album (and the larger story it forms a part of) are both a critique of contemporary society's racism and a vision of a world beyond it. Like M.I.A., she fuses a huge grab-bag of musical influences, moving between hip-hop and film score-like orchestration with ease and forging a coherent whole from the jumble of imagery. More importantly, she makes fantastic, hook-ridden, propulsive pop music, and to paraphrase feminist anarchist Emma Goldman, if I can't dance, it's not my revolution.

Thursday 23 August 2012

Welcome To The Broken City

Amongst my nerdy interests, which are many and varied, is pen and paper RPGs - you know, Dungeon and Dragon-style games with weird shaped dice, impenetrable rulebooks and incomprehensible character sheets. My love for these games grew out of my teenage years spent playing Games Workshop's miniature war games, but I was always looking for more ways to include depth and story in the game, and role-playing games were the natural route.

Like many before me, Dungeons and Dragons was my first introduction to the world of RPGs, but it wasn't until I picked up the Buffy the Vampire Slayer game by Eden Studios that the story-telling possibilities of the games became clear. More importantly, I found some friends who were equally interested in using the games as a mechanic to tell stories, rather than a race to the highest level and the biggest treasure.

I've played RPGs and run them over the years, and thoroughly enjoyed being on both sides of the table. For those completely unfamiliar with the concept, one person (called the games-master or something similar) plans out a scenario for the rest of the players to tackle. Each person has a single character that they play, who will change and develop over time, apart from the GM, who portrays everyone else that the group may encounter, from enemies to allies.






My latest attempt at running a game is The Broken City, using White Wolf's World of Darkness system, and more specifically their Mage: The Awakening game. My players' characters are all residents of London who have suddenly developed magical, reality bending powers and find themselves being drawn into the secret mystical underworld of the city, which is rife with gang war, treachery and betrayal. So far, I've run 5 sessions (we play every fortnight for about 4 hours) and between them, my players have managed to scorch their eyebrows off, accidentally cause a localised hail-storm, super-accelerate a raccoon, have an acid trip and repeatedly hit one of the supporting characters (who, if you remember, is played by me). It's been a good start.




The game is a little different to my usual style because I'm leaving the plot super-loose. Most games I've run have worked a bit like TV shows, with individual games containing complete adventures but also contributing to longer arcs. This game is going to operate a bit more like a sandbox-style video game. I've put a lot of work into building my alternate vision of London, and there are plenty of stories out there to be found, but I'm leaving it a lot more in the hands of the players. Their interest will drive the direction of the plot more than any game I've run before, so there's a lot more of a collaborative dynamic at play.

I'm aiming to write regularly about the game, hopefully avoiding spoilers if any of my players decide to read this, detailing the thoughts and work I've put into building the game world and retelling any interesting events from the games as they unfold.

Tuesday 21 August 2012

Play To Z: Abbey Road to All She Wrote

Here are the rules:

  I'm going to listen to every song I own, in alphabetical order by album. Every track gets listened to once, and once only. I won't listen to any songs out of order. If I get new songs, they get slotted into place - if I'm already passed where they would be, they are placed at the front; if not, then I have to wait to listen to them.

  It begin, quite appropriately, with The Beatles.

"The Beatles are generally seen as the single most important rock band of all time, allegedly because they wrote all the best songs. Since both of these suppositions are true, the Beatles are rated properly by everyone."
                                                                                                                - Chuck Klosterman

  Abbey Road is a great album. The Beatles, much like Doctor Who, seem to be one of those cultural institutions that people just absorb as they grow up. I always had a respect for them, but I never truly appreciated them until a couple of years ago, when my friend and Beatles superfan Nick loaned me his Beatles mono boxset. Listening to their entire discography, the sheer skill of their songwriting is astonishing. More importantly, the way their sound evolved over their seven years of putting out studio albums is mind-blowing. I've often railed against bands like Red Hot Chilli Peppers and Foo Fighters that find a sound that works and just stop trying to push themselves. The Beatles had the opposite attitude, continually pushing at the boundaries of pop music and bringing in new influences.  

  Abbey Road, from close to the end of their recording period, exemplifies this, covering a huge amount of ground and swirling genres and song styles together in a brilliant whirlwind of noise. The interlinked series of songs from "Sun King" to "She Came In Through The Bathroom Window" moves effortlessly from one to the other while still maintaining musical themes. It's a virtuoso piece of songwriting, brilliantly realised.

Sigur Rós And Earning Your Fist-Pumps

  I don't speak Icelandic. It's my one and only flaw*, but it definitely impacts my enjoyment of Sigur Rós. Most people (especially their fans) would say that you don't need to understand the words: it's all about the vast soundscapes that they create, the harmonised vocals that conjure images of Icelandic plains and mountains. However, they seem to largely trade in that feeling of fist-pumping triumphalism that makes people wish they were surrounded by their friends in a field at sunset; the kind of thing that works well under TV montages of athletics or music festivals. I like that feeling (who doesn't?) but I'm a big believer in earning your happy endings. Bands like LCD Soundsystem and Arcade Fire create similar emotions, but their songs also tap into loneliness, anger and despair. Sigur Rós' songs might do this, but I have no way of knowing that. To me, it's just noise, and to that end it feels oddly calculated in the way it looks to trigger an emotional reaction.

Always All Day

  I've written a fair bit about All Day by Girl Talk in the past, and I've read some great articles (check out this piece by pal Alex Spencer with links to some other great writing) so I'll just go ahead and say that I listened to it while doing the washing up with a friend who hadn't heard it before, and by the end of the first track, the kitchen had turned into a dance party and I was burning her a copy to take home. It is a perfectly constructed piece of party-starting insanity.

Rediscovered Gem

"Golden Slumbers" by The Beatles



*This may be inaccurate.

Where I Am Today

My name is Tim Maytom. Right now, I'm sprawled in bed in Norwich, England, writing by candlelight. It's August 21st 2012. The temperature in Norwich today was "too damn hot" and I've just finished killing a spider that made two of my best friends run shrieking up the stairs.

This is my blog for long-form writing, mostly analysis and discussion of stuff I'm interested in; from music of the pop and indie varieties to feminism, films to cookery, television to gaming.

You may have followed me here from my Tumblr http://trivia-lad.tumblr.com/ or my Twitter account https://twitter.com/trivia_lad or you may have just stumbled across me; whatever the case, welcome! Hopefully you'll find something here to entertain you.

To start with, I'll have a couple of regular articles. The first will be a bi-weekly check in as I listen to every album I own in alphabetical order. I'll be writing about rediscovering songs or whole albums I've forgotten, and the joys of the whole record in the age of the shuffle. The second will be a sort of director's commentary on a role-playing game I'm running. It revolves around a group of newly-empowered mages in a London torn apart by secret magical gang war. I'll be writing about my thought processes, how I've been building up the world in preparation, and how the various sessions unfold.

Right now, you can head over to my Tumblr to get an idea of where my interests lie (right now - banknote design, Debbie Harry and Russian cosmonauts shooting bears) or head over to esteemed friend Alex Spencer's tremendous blog, where he's just put up a podcast where he, I and three other friends pick apart the second wave of DC's New 52 comics, when we're not being distracted by American Ninja Warrior adverts.