KATHY'S CHOICE

Ona piše onako kako ja volim da čitam. I posle kraće pauze ponovo je tu

The net never vaporised last week and we didn’t throw away this computer and it’s all brilliant and we’d’ve missed hearing Jaz organising the ONLY EVER non-excrutiating HappyBirthday-crowd-singalong - and my favourite moment on the live Killing Joke double-bloody-album ninety-bloody-minutes twenty-bloody-tracks thing is when he goes something like “Prince Andrew off to meet Colonel Gadaffi, what the fuck is

THAT all about ?” and then IMMEDIATELY they’re into Wardance. Wardance is part of the “canon” now - up there with Beethoven’s late string quartets. My ears said that KJ’s recentest studio album was atrocious. Maybe KJ agree. Almost every track at this gig was ancient-old stuff. It sounded like Wardance played 19 times, then finally something new during the encore exit-dash. Jaz hasn’t changed since Iceland. KJ haven’t changed since their decision to sound like Motorhead at half speed. What’s 27 years nowadays ? It used to be the age musos died at. Now it’s the distance between a band’s 6th and 7th album. I hope this goes ond older than me and while he still lives I know everything is going to be fine. forever. Jaz is a ta

Always want this ROTW email to Yotal to be about NEWNEWNEW stuff and it always ends up about Killing Joke and Bauhaus and old Pink Floyd albums. And PiL. My planned cool music career zero’d when I told bands with vacancies that PiL’s first album was their best and Metal Box was boring and one day the History books would confirm it. I’m still waiting. Watch out bozos!!! - maybe it’ll be ME nME nME nME nME ME writing the history books. PiL’s first album sounded nonsense at a time when it was a whole week of compulsory repeat-plays till the next new thing arrived in the bedroom. No classic companion can bear such intimacy. Only Faust. But today, when there is no time to hear First Issue at all, just to imagine it, it is fantastic. It is theee best 40-minute example ever of that unique guitar sound I adore …. maybe only bettered by/on Siouxsie’s Join Hands, which I loved more than The Scream - another lapse of taste that stymied my career. It was the gtr sound of UK-1979, maybe only also done by Can and Captain Beefheart and me and it was unknown before 1978 and banned after 1980. I almost wish the internet HAD been destroyed last week, to once more lie on a bed with an old copy of Sounds and hear PiL’s first album 7x17 times - what a week!!!!!!

Continuing the fascinating theme of music made before any other members of our favourite blog was born, I adored Steely Dan - thanks to having older brothers with semi-cool LPs who took all the flak when punkYearZero arrived and I became like Peter and denied everything and then the cock crowed three times and now I can admit that e.g Steely Dan’s Aja and first album are my eternalest-ish things ever …. drink scotch whisky all night long, and die behind the wheel … or something. The Darcys couldn’t win with their version of Aja. But they merely lose 7-0, and it could’ve been 30000000-0. And that’s okay. But without Donald’s voice it’s merciless. Solo-Don is something delightful too. Hardly anyone loves Kamakiriad(?) as much as I do. It’s true. There’s a bit at the end of one of the main central-ish tracks where the bleakness splits apart and warm blue lushness breaks through just for a couple of minutes, and that contrast turns the whole album beautiful too - like the beautiful brief plainchant respite in NWW’s Insect/Individual/Silenced, or the way the boredom of the film Ratcatcher is transcended when that tiny bit of Nick Drake suddenly blows in on the bus journey through the countryside.

NEW MUSIC AT LAST !!!!! - but still made by old people. After the goosebumpy instant-dance beauty of Psychic TV’s previous thingy you HAVE TO forgive them their latest proggy-horrific anatnaS, backward Santana, and zero and profligacy are heavenly too - either have no family or have plenty, and another week another Richard Youngs album. I don’t know what to make of it. I think I like it. I don’t know what to make of the Leonard Cohen album. I think I adore it. By being barer and more “even” than most of his albums it ended up in my twice-heard ears sounding lusher and more confident than ever. This is why Len and Jaz and other “old” people should still be made to feel welcome on our rock’n’roll planet - and yes I’ve seen “In Time

” and it’s not great. Here is a list of ALL of the rock’n’rollers who give good interview - Mark E Smith, John Lydon, Morrissey, Jack White … that’s it, that’s all, the end - average age: 74.

This morning we re-watched The L Shaped Room - a kind of mirror image of Breakfast At Tiffany’s - grey and English and squalid and with no rain at the end and no one sings a nice song and it’s good and probably most famous nowadays for containing the bit of sing

along which starts The Queen Is Dead, and I love that new EP by The Holiday Crowd and it never b

others me if bands sound exactly like other bands - Gene were brilliant, and Violens are - if Oasis had decided to copy the Smiths instead of the Beatles they’d’ve done more than two good albums. The Benjamin Damage album is very good too - loads of excellent pop this week

I thought - Spleen Utd and Virtual Boy and Bright Light Bright Light and Tennis and Tenniscoats too with that simple beautiful cover - it’s all you need in life, a simple barely-furnished room.

Richard Y and Leonard C and there was that Graig bloke last week so suddenly there are tons of good male singer-s. And sometimes if a muso chooses a really difficult name I delete the album rather than etc etc but I persevered with O-Arc - there is a goddess, cos it might be better than everything mentioned so far, even Wardance. It might be a band. If it is, there’s masses of people standing around doing nothing. It sounds like just a bloke and a guitar. It sounds beautiful. It sounds like all its bits are conventional enough, with all the same pleasure-points as previously experienced. But afterwards it’s hard to describe what happened when we were together - and what is the point of even trying, when you’ve heard it already or can DL and hear it sooner than I can get to the question mark here ?

Azure performs her wonders. That beautiful album by Kevin Greenspon has kept alive the ambient-love. To me there’s two types of ambient. There’s the stuff that sounds like leaking gas and it’s a real turn-off and not something you want to hear behind the double glazing or in the double bed. The other type is the layered keys and shimmerings and maybe even vibrations and pulsations and Kevin does that, and at the end of some tracks he spurts out-of-ambience convulsions and spasms noisily. He really does. It’s different. It’s ambience for disturbed siestas. I adore it. I think everyone would. We’re all the same aren’t we. I think so. But I’ve never met anyone who’s confirmed it yet. I loved the piano-y lusher by Bhu Geran Tynanby or someone - the crap Asda marker pens are so thick and wet and useless that I can’t read my scrawl on the crap cheapo shiny Asda CDRs. Joint most-amazing-album-of-the week in my head was/is by Oren Ambauchi - a headbutting mix of head and light and everything all at once and sometimes almost nothing at all - lots of cheap-jazz glitch-imitations and dronings and a feeling of distant orchestras and Boyd Rice amateur electronics and it’s the kind of thing that lazy people like me lazily describe as “Krautrock” though I don’t know of one k-rock album that ever had stuff like this. It’s very like that Zomes album, which I also loved in idem amazement.

Unexpectedly, I liked that Bardo Pond etc live (?) album, which is also similar-ish-ish-ish-ish.

Ryan Teague’s Causeway was an Album Of 2011 - even visitors here who hated it secretly loved it - clean simple bold guitars sounding like the very best of American minimalism - the way it can rescue films like The Squid & The Whale. It’s a struggle to like his new/latest album. Sometimes with its trolloping piano and romantic up-and-down orchestrations it goes all Downton Abbey. I don’t know where that buzzy Darkhalo album came from. Same old rhythmic dubby electronics that’ve been done a million times before. And hearing them you understand why they’ll be done a million times more. They work. They do the job, resonate rightly. Something by TeemuT was almost as effective. That was the best week ever - and one 3-45am morning on about Thursday Richard Allison played Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is and I got up and in seconds Chicago’s first album was DLing and all the days ever since its second track has been on repeat - god won’t we miss that. With music, I could almost bear losing it - I lost the paying-for-new-music habit YEARS before the internet - back when the vinyl-dumping bootsales started at the end of the 1980s, back when doing a crap one-word one-page one-issue one-copy photocopied fanzine could get you a lifetime of promos from every label on the planet - and like anyone with all of Joni Mitchell’s albums, we’ve already got all anyone really needs. The seven thousand fantastic new albums we hear each week are just a fabulous bonus. But with films, it’ll be a bummer. You cannot trust film reviewers. They are always too kind. You need to trust serendipity - seeing a random new film each day is the only way to find the four films per year that are worth anything - Drive and Tryannosaur and Wasted On The Young and Snowtown are mine.

Too often my ROTW is some wanky poncey bit of hip-dipstickery which I’ll never hear again, if I ever heard it the first time. But this week is different. It ought to be the album by O-Arc. Because it is genuinely GORGEOUS. If it was the only album all week that Barack Obama had allowed me to DL it would have been enough. But instead I’m going for the album by Tenniscoats. It’s less obviously gorgeous, but that only adds to the sleekness - when the suede denim police call and extradite me and I’m in a cell with Clint Eastwood and Burt Lancaster it’ll be okay cos each new listen will bring me closer. And it has my favourite cover for ages - perhaps in the whole history of this computer.

kathy