“People said his brain was infected by devils” – GZA Live & New Irish Music

And so the blog slips quietly into 2012, a full month after council workers cleared away the New Year’s naggins from church steps and celebratory pools of kebab sauce-laced puke from urban footpaths. In the meantime, I’ve moved to Barcelona for a few months. There are many great things about the city, not least the ubiquitous and overwhelmingly rich architecture and the equally ubiquitous lizard-like individuals who will kindly sell you six cans of beer for €4 at 5am while x-raying all of your pockets and considering whether some loose coppers, a card with a few metro journeys left on it and a stone-age Nokia are worth doing life in jail for. More on all this later. For now, an Irish music post is in order, but not before a gig ‘review’ of a certain New York rapper…

 >> Gary Grice, more commonly known as the GZA or Genius, turns 46 this year. Is that alarming? That the driving lyrical force behind Wu-Tang Clan and the maker of some of the most charged and exciting hip-hop of the mid 90s is closer to 50 than ever before is definitely an interesting thought, but one that becomes clear after considering some key dates. It’s been 17 years since Liquid Swords was released, 19 years since 36 Chambers and longer still since the GZA’s first release, Words from the Genius, way back in 1991. Wu-Tang still get mad reverence around the world, but those making the bulk of interesting new rap these days – the likes Kendrick Lamar, A$AP Rocky, Odd Future, and even Curren$y – probably barely knew what a record player was back in 1993. Rock, metal and even indie dealt with this baton-handing decades ago, but for some hip-hop fans, coming to terms with the fact that most of the protagonists of the late 80s/early 90s ‘golden era’ of hip-hop are now close to hitting the 50 candle mark is still somewhat weird. I’d consider myself a big GZA fan, but I’ve always accepted that with the Wu-Tang Clan for some reason more than any other group, it’s the idiosyncrasies and characteristics of the records themselves that you fall in love with rather than the musicians. In short, I know Liquid Swords inside out and back to front – exactly as it is on record. So when I saw a poster for a live performance of the album literally doors down from where I now live along the broad stretch of Avinguda del Paral·lel, I was pretty excited.

Barcelona’s hip-hop community was out in force on the night, and most of these people were white American exchange students wearing flat-peaked caps and drinking over-priced plastic cups of Estrella. The rest were nearly all skaters and people wearing checked shirts buttoned all the way up to the gullet, bar a few wistful looking older guys, some of whom were clutching battered LPs for signing (at one stage I also noticed someone brandishing an original (?) 36 Chambers cassette, which either showed admirable and touching devotion or nauseating hipster sensibilities.) Once the lights went off and the guy on the decks came out scratching and screaming, everyone just lit their joints and went nuts. During the whole gig I only saw one security guard, a timid shell of  a man who stayed at the back of the stage throughout, merely flashing a torch at the over-zealous head-bangers being crushed into pure sweat up front while the hall slowly filled with green smelling smoke.

Then he came on, instantly easing into ‘Duel of the Iron Mic‘. ‘Easing’ being the operative word here. He sort of ambled on and listened to the beat for a minute, then hopped on top of it. Initially I thought that his delivery was disappointing, that he lacked energy and failed to recall the rough, hard-as-fuck atmosphere of Liquid Swords that made the album so beloved of, say, even black metal fans. Then I realised I was being ridiculous. GZA didn’t lack energy – he was just dispensing it prudently. Most of the instrumentals on Liquid Swords don’t need a shouty MC to be effective or inspiring, but showy, chaotic rap performances seem to be an  expectation that seems de rigueur of many gig-goers these days. It didn’t matter. Suddenly we were on ’4th Chamber’ and it was like listening to rap for the first time again and thinking ‘fuck yes!’, with the only difference being that the architect of the feeling was right up there, genially fist-bumping folks up front and generally looking like he was having the time of his life. A few songs later – during ‘Crash Your Crew’, a cut from his underrated 1999 album Beneath the Surface – he hopped off stage and wandered all the way to the back of the hall with his mic, surrounded by sweaty t-shirts and DC hats, without missing a single beat. It didn’t take long for him to glide into some of the other classics of the Wu canon including a leftfield rendition of ODB’s ‘Shimmy Shimmy Ya’ and various other anthemic choruses. I think his flow was best on ‘Reunited’, but then again, I can’t really remember and should have written this a week ago. He spent the guts of 30 minutes after the show signing shoes, arms and beer mats, which was sort of nice given that he looked pretty flaked and there were about six girls jumping around excitedly back-stage. Thumbs up to GZA’s live show then, even if just for an honest and touching up close look at one of rap’s truly brilliant and modest heroes.

 >> Galway/Donegal band Rural Savage have definitely featured on this blog in the past. Can’t remember why, but it’s possible that it was a post alluding to the arrival of their long-awaited debut album. Turns out I was lying back then, but we finally have good news on that front. An official album launch takes place in the Roisin Dubh, Galway, on February 18, with support from Squarehead, So Cow and Dott. Free entry and loads of shouting and drunk people guaranteed, so if I wasn’t busy bartering with the lizards of Barcelona I’d say that this has the potential to be the best Galway gig of the year.

On that note, a quick word on Dott, a Galway band who have just released their first single, the rollicking garage peach ‘Leave Tonight’. It’s a song that pays tribute to some of the great tenets of guitar pop while staying fresh – and it has a fucking whopper of a hook.

 >> Meanwhile, two-man act It Was All A Bit Black And White (featuring chronically over-worked Rural Savage and Depravations drummer Mosey Byrne) have announced details of their forthcoming six track debut EP. Until then, we have one track, the delicate ‘Birds’, which is accompanied  by an impressive stop-motion video animated by Matthew Sutton and Steven McGovern and edited by Brendan Flynn.

 >> Dubliner Gavin Redmond makes blissful and somewhat ethereal indie under the moniker Twin Terrace, a project he initiated after returning home after living in Vancouver for a time, “under the spell of a lot of Flying Lotus and Dusty Springfield”. A newly released split ‘You Keep Coming Back/To Belong’ makes for rewarding listening and is available for free download below. There’s something about the artfully construed ebb and flow of ‘You Keep Coming Back’ in particular that hints at greater things for Redmond and bodes very well for the hopeful emergence of Twin Terrace.

Twin Terrace Soundcloud

 >> Ghosts: Two guys from Cashel making cool and (probably inadvertently) ideal bus music. While it’s got some of the shuffly drum pattern elements of some ‘post-dubstep‘ stuff, I amn’t sure that that’s solely the sound that Ghosts are pursuing. Delicate keys and some endorphin-releasing vocal samples definitely justify the free download of their debut Night EP and attention to whatever follows.

Ghosts – The Night Out

Ghosts Soundcloud

The ‘and ever onwards to prudery’ 2011 mixtape

Artwork by Aishling Costello

Another year’s end, another selection of some of the best music of the 12 months just past. This took a while, apologies. For two weeks three tracks lay queued up sadly on my laptop, waiting to be joined by their peers, but I didn’t cop on properly until yesterday afternoon, putting in a marathon session in front of the screen as tinsel, wrapping paper and a growing mountain of Roses wrappers wilted at my feet. From a personal point of view we lost some musically this year – Gil Scott-Heron, Hubert Sumlin, the Small Hours and Altered Zones to name a few – but did pretty well out of the gains too. Has 2011 been a ‘good year for music’? Is that a relevant question?  What is good music? Hopefully this will help you decide.

and ever onwards to prudery 2011 mix

Download, share and most importantly, listen. Tracklist after the jump.

An echo from the hosts that profess infinitum – Featuring 2011 Rap & R n’B

Prelude – Winter deepens, we pass the solstice and turn quietly. Bears continue in hibernation, hungry-looking foxes can be seen in fields and hedgerows as the scent of roast root vegetables, mulled wine and turkey wafts low across the countryside. People are friendly, catching up with old friends, and merriment and goodwill creeps up from the cracks in our broken society.  No newspapers for a day, the radio hums agreeably with the story of Bethlehem and Wham. Bloggers sit in dark rooms squinting at laptop screens and making lists.

I intended to do some sort of list with all my favorite albums of the year, but it quickly turned into an absolutely unholy mess and I’m a bit too late with it now anyway. Not wanting to throw all this out, I decided that the best way to proceed was to post on some of my favourite rap and R n’B releases of the year, because rap kicked indie’s arse in terms of exciting releases this year and I listen to a lot of it but feature hardly any on the blog. The post comes complete with an incomprehensible amount of links and pictures and videos in an attempt to mask the fact that this is an extremely poorly conceived ‘list’. End-of–year mixtape to follow. LOADS OF LINKS TO DEADLY FREE MUSIC BELOW. 

Danny Brown – XXX (Fool’s Gold Records)

Danny Brown – XXX

Detroit rapper Danny Brown turned 30 this year, so he named his new tape XXX. Thirty is supposed to be some sort of seminal age, right? So Danny raps about income tax (“that income tax swag”), he raps about growing up in industrial Detroit. He raps about drugs – dealer turned dealed (“I use to turn these drugs/Now these drugs turn my life”) and his various substance abuse problems. Oh, and he raps about his sexual preferences in toe-curling detail too. And by ‘raps’, I mean snarls, growls, yelps and croons, and all with skinny jeans and a half-shaved head of hair. Turning up on any number of guest verses and generally getting himself out there, it’s fair to say that Danny Brown was indie rap in 2011.

Danny Brown – Fields

Quelle Chris Ft. Danny Brown & Roc Marciano – Shotgun

 - Download XXX for free here.

Shabazz Palaces – Black Up (Sub Pop)

“Black Up – the film”

On the third verse of Wu Tang Clan’s seminal ‘7th Chamber (Part Two)‘, Inspectah Deck pronounced ”my rap style has the force to leave you lost, like the tribe of Shabazz…” Eighteen years later, the tribes of Shabazz have been well and truly found. Today, if in some sort of bizarre and values-inverted alternative reality, should someone back me into an uncomfortable corner with an unpleasant-looking implement demanding an album of the year, there’s an excellent chance the words ‘Black Up’ would crawl their way from my mouth. It’s a triumphant celebration, with bongos and other strange percussion, hooks, growls, compelling lyrics and absolutely immaculate production. It’s sort of Bedouin, it’s a movement, deserts and oases, goats’ shit cracked in the dead heat and soaring trumpets. It’s a feeling.
Shabazz Palaces – Swerve

Big K.R.I.T. – Return of 4eva (self-released)

When people talk about this guy, the phrase ‘real southern rap’ gets thrown around a lot, which was something of an alien concept to me until I saw Ludacris casually eating chicken in this video. Return of 4eva has some very rewarding moments, not least on the powerful ‘Dreamin”, which samples ‘Dream‘ by the Brothers of Soul and shows that the premise of ‘southern rap’ is a shifting paradigm. 

 - Return of 4eva was originally released as a free download but it seems to have been withdrawn since. You can download a ‘chopped and screwed’ version for free here.

Death Grips – Exmilitary (Third Worlds)

When you listen to an album that opens with Charles Manson spitting some mad shit about “dealing the cards” and “rolling in nickels”, you know you’re onto something pretty special. This is aggressive Sacramento punk-rap accompanied by live percussion and screams and if you don’t like it, just keep listening to Drake’s new one.

 - Download Exmilitary for free here.

Cities Aviv – Digital Lows (Fat Sandwich)

Cities Aviv is 22-year-old Gavin Mays who, on his breakout 7″, ‘Coastin’‘, boasts that “by the time I’m 25, the world is mine”. An indulgent  claim perhaps, but judging by the quality of the tracks on his May album Digital Lows, not one that I would be entirely opposed to. Not only did he produce one of the smoothest tracks of the year with the aforementioned ‘Coastin”, but the guy admits to having experimented with sampling My Bloody Valentine and increasingly crops up in the same sentences as ‘RZA’. Need any more reason to pay attention? Just listen to ‘Fuckeverybodyhere’.
Cities Aviv – Fuckeverybodyhere

 - Download Digital Lows for free here.

Lil B - I’m Gay (I’m Happy) (self-released)

Ok, ok, ok. Let’s be clear here. I’m Gay is hardly ‘album of the year’ stuff. Far from it. For most of the 12 tracks, Lil B sounds like he has no idea what he is rapping about. While this is ‘positive’ Lil B – ie, he isn’t ‘rapping’ about eating Wonton Soup or being Bill Clinton – some of the wisdom proffered here is purely childish. Capitalism and greed has detrimental effects on how we live as a society? Wow, never thought about that particular theory before.
HOWEVER, I’m Gay did produce one enormous tune in ‘Unchain Me’, a Clams Casino-produced, ‘Cry Little Sister’-sampling groove that genuinely is probably one of the best things Lil B has ever done. Sure, yet again, the lines are somewhat contradictory and naive – he raps “Man the rap game is the slave trade/No time for meditation/Turn into robots/The Devil is money/It’s not even human/The people die for a piece of paper/It’s so stupid,” before stating “Man, just live, however you do it” – but you just know the intention is good. Good intentions alone would not suffice for almost any other artist (can you imagine having the same patience with a new ‘electro-indie’ act? The reek of pretentiousness would be too much), but with Lil B it’s different. ‘Unchain Me’ and ‘Game’ took some heavy plays on my iPod from June on, and by September it was clear that the former had gained an exclusive spot on my soundtrack to summer 2011. I did some seriously mad funking out to that track in the kitchen while eating breakfast on those wet July mornings before cycling the 13 windy and raw kilometres to my unpaid work placement. ‘Unchain Me’ will forever remind me of walking past Tuam livestock mart on lengthy rambles around the town during my lunch-break. If that isn’t ‘rare’ and ‘emotional’, what is? Below is the song’s video – shot in classic Lil B style (poorly), and licence from the man himself to grab the whole thing for free.

http://www.mediafire.com/?o4z4ebht1gettlh CUZ I LOVE YOU IF YOU DONT HAVE 10 DOLLERS TO BUY MY NEW PROJECT HERE IT GOES FOR FREE- Lil B :+)—
Lil B From The Pack (@LILBTHEBASEDGOD) July 02, 2011

A$AP Rocky - LIVELOVEA$AP (self-released)

Yeah the whole $3m debut record deal and the ‘Sound of 2012′ tag means that the 23-year-old Harlem rapper has all the ingredients to a classic backlash/meltdown/disappointment situation round about April next year, but that doesn’t change the fact that 2011 was a very good year for those subscribing to the motto of ‘Always Strive And Prosper’.

A$AP Rocky – Bass (prod. Clams Casino)

 - Download LIVELOVEA$AP for free here.

Frank Ocean – nostalgia,ULTRA (self-released)

When Odd Future started to blow up in stratospheric fashion sometime around late February, their oldest member, Frank Ocean, got little of the attention. Around the time that Tyler, the Creator and Hodgy Beats made their break-out debut on TV, the New Orleans ‘singer-songwriter’ (a term he prefers to ‘R n’ B artist’), quietly dropped nostalgia,ULTRA, an album that had originally been intended for a Def Jam release but was shunted online for free download after Frank tired of the label’s lackadaisical approach. Initially it seemed to be overlooked beneath the growing, growling wave of OFWGKTA’s march on the music industry. The ‘Yonkers’ video arrived, SXSW came and went and finally Tyler’s Goblin came out in early May. The peak of the wave. And then, for Tyler, and some other members of the crew, there was an eerie moment of deafening silence before a barely perceptible dip in public opinion. Listening to Goblin at first was great, largely thanks to the enjoyment that fans got from the bombastic resumption of the personal saga that started with Bastard. After a few listens however, it became clear that Goblin was not the album that had been expected. Not long after, I downloaded nostalgia,ULTRA and spent a day moping around the house eating stuff with lots of salt in it and blaring songs with titles such as ‘Lovecrimes’, ‘Songs for Women’, ‘American Wedding’ and ‘Dust’, and instrumentals from the likes of The Eagles, Coldplay and MGMT. Put like that, it sounds as though it could have been a contender for one of the most depressing days of the year, but the reality was different. It was great and this man is going places.

Frank Ocean – Swim Good

 - Download nostalgia,ULTRA for free here.

The Weeknd – House of Balloons (self-released)

It’s possible that this was my most listened to album of 2011 and if you had told me last December that particular accolade would go to a fucking Rn’B album thick with narcissism, sex and cocaine, I would have laughed and called myself a loser. House of Balloons and everything The Weeknd touched in general was an internet sensation this year. Within the space of a few months, Abel Tesfaye had gone from underground Tumblr crooner to collaborating with Drake and apparently providing every single YouTube browser with their favourite heartbreak ballads. Anyway, this is a very cool album. Don’t be fooled by the glib or washed-down connotations of the genre either – House of Balloons is a glorious nod to that nasty feeling of acute self-awareness and disgust that comes over the room at 5am when the sun flickers off stained walls and the first stabs of a crippling headache rise from the sticky sea of empty cans on the floor…

 - Download three 2011 mixtapes from The Weeknd here, including House of Balloons.

Others;

Kendrick Lamar – Section 80 (Top Dawg Entertainment)

Freddie Gibbs & Madlib – Thuggin’ EP (Stones Throw Records)

Curren$y – Weekend at Burnies  (Jet Life Recordings)

Mr Muthafuckin’ eXquire - Lost in Translation (Mishka)

Short but not at all sweet – Budget shuts disability group

Pretty much all of the posts on this blog between now and the first day of the Last Year of All Time (New Year’s Day) are going to be heavily music-based. However, last week’s budget did raise some prickly social injustices, not least the closing down of the People with Disabilities in Ireland group for good. This is a development that has been lost beneath talk of VAT increases and cigarette levies, which is a real pity. The group was run on a voluntary basis and needed less than one million euro a year to keep going, just over ten times the annual take-home pay of a minister for state, or a minuscule fraction of the $1 billion that the government paid out to private Anglo bondholders a month ago. The below is a short piece that originally appeared in last week’s Galway City Tribune, but I thought it was sufficiently note-worthy to warrant re-posting here.

 

Cuts included in this week’s budget mean that one of Galway’s most active disability groups will be forced to shut down for good on December 31st.

People with Disabilites in Ireland (PWDI) has had all of its annual €900,000 in funding withdrawn for the coming year, meaning that the voluntary organisation will be forced to cease all activities at the end of the month. Chairperson of the Galway branch Adrian Reidy says that the group had only been informed of the complete cuts to their funding in a two-page letter from the Minister for Justice and Equality Alan Shatter at a meeting last month. “The news really came as an enormous shock. We have been working with disabled people for 15 years and have been very active in Galway during that time. We invest about €1 million worth of volunteer time in the organisation every year. We have done everything right and have been punished for that,” said Adrian.

He added that while the group accepted that cuts had to be made, disabled people were “a vulnerable and easy target” who had no one to speak on their behalf. He said that there had been added disappointment that no attempt had been made to merge PWDI with another disability group. It is thought that between 400 and 500 people with disabilities in Galway used the local branch’s services in the past year. The Galway branch has a committee of 15 members, including local councillors, and is based in the offices of Galway Bay FM.

“We acted as a voice on behalf of disabled people across Ireland, and now that’s all gone. We had so much more planned, like the opening of a new mobility centre and courses in sign-language, but none of it can go ahead now,” said Adrian. He also revealed that while PWDI will no longer exist in its current format, he will be attempting to launch a new replacement charity for people with disabilities in Galway in the coming weeks, an outlet which he describes as “vital”.

In a statement released in response to the budget cuts, PWDI said that they believed that the disability agenda in Ireland had been set back by 15 years with the news. 25 other PWDI branches around the country will also be forced to close as a result of the budget cuts. PWDI is the only umbrella group for people with disabilities in Ireland, and included members affected with physical, intellectual and sensory disabilities.

- www.pwdi.ie

- PWDI statement on announcement of the closure of the organisation.

And it’s good night to the Small Hours

Last Thursday night/Friday morning saw the broadcast of the last ever edition of the Small Hours on Today FM. Since 2004 (and since 1997 in a different format) Donal Dineen’s graveyard shift show had been the best and most exploratory music show on Irish radio. Years of late nights spent zoning out to the weird jams presented by the softly spoken Kerryman were an introduction to a wider musical world for many Irish people, including myself, over the years. All day you’d have the chart drudge, the ‘rock classics’, news-and-weather-on-the-hour, gimmicky PR-driven giveaways and then, the other side of the witching hour, DJ Shadow kicking off the show’s intro and a sudden swerve into the deepest and most fertile undergrowth of music new and old. Reggae, UK garage and regular garage, blues, hip-hop, funk, folk, every type of electronic music…Donal didn’t discriminate. Four nights a week you’d have music lovers all over the country drifting off to sleep with new sounds washing through their room. Then, on the cusp of sleep, the tranquility would be shattered by an arm flailing wildly through the still night in search of phone or paper with which to take down the name of a track. I often woke up to a jumbled mess of letters indicating some act to check out in the drafts folder of my phone, and sometimes those acts turned out to be the producers of my favourite music. It wasn’t uncommon either to wait anxiously for days after a show for Donal to update the playlist details on his blog. The advantage of listening to a DJ like Dineen is that the osmotic process of soaking up new music is involuntary. While skimming through blogs, it’s not really practical to hit play on every single widget, so eventually you start to just click into the familiar names and genres. At times, the information overload is just too much. When Dineen joined ‘Radio Ireland’ (as Today FM was originally known) to present the Small Hours’ precursor, Here Comes The Night in 1997, the concept of music blogs and downloading was still very much in its infancy. That’s why the show at first was such a revelation for Irish radio, and Dineen managed to keep up the appeal and incentive to listen well after the proliferation of the Irish music blog scene, Twitter and the spreading influence of international music sites. And while Dineen’s DJing peers on other stations (particularly 2fm) offered little beyond conventional guitar rock, the Small Hours consistently brought new genres, particularly electronica, to Irish airwaves.

You couldn’t get a more atmospheric show than the Small Hours, with Dineen’s whispery commentary bubbling over the keys of some contemporary classical composer or German techno artist as rain lashed the windows and cars streamed past outside. Doing Leaving Cert biology homework to the Small Hours was an intense experience. It was nice to think of people all across the country, from the narrow rural roads of Buncrana to those looking out on yellow streets in central Dublin from tiny apartments all tuned in to the same vibes, as the finer details of the photosynthetic process or lymph system winded into memory. And as beats from the likes of Flying Lotus, Pantha du Prince, Burial, Boards of Canada and Four Tet piped from radios in cars, bedrooms and fuel stations across the country, the night grew late and quietened and listeners chilled hard.

Last week’s four shows were a pleasure to listen to – a particular highlight came in the first hour of Wednesday night’s show with Moths’ live set (some tracks cleverly reworked with vocals) –  as Donal brought in musicians such as Patrick Kelleher and Solar Bears to perform and talk about music in the last days of his Today FM residency. While Dineen has a number of side-projects – notably Parish Records – he really belongs on the airwaves. With luck, he will not go unnoticed for long and the chance now exists for some station to prove its seriousness in the business of Irish radio and offer Donal a slot. Time for Lyric FM to make a brave stand perhaps? In the meantime, 504 of Donal’s shows over the past three years have been archived here. Do yourself a favour and tune in to the last ever show to see what a unique broadcaster Donal Dineen is and was. Be warned though – if you start listening, you might regret what you can no longer have. Onwards and upwards Donal.

Four Tet/Burial – Moth (Parish rework)

The mid-November randomiser

Last week The Field came to Galway with his Kompakt labelmates Walls. Both acts are touring off the back of excellent new albums and The Field is probably the finest electronic producer to visit the west of Ireland in a very long time. I had been salivating over this gig for about a month. His latest album, Looping State of Mind, has been lighting up diodes and frying circuits in my brain since it leaked nearly three months ago. I listened to the first album, From Here We Go Sublime, about 382 times in the space of a week, including, mildly embarrassingly, once on the bus when my headphone jack wasn’t inserted properly and the mild-mannered woman on the way to the hospital beside me was unwillingly treated to an earful of Sweden’s finest minimal techno. I had decided that I was going to try to approach Axel Willner after the gig and do something cringeworthy – such as tell him how much I enjoyed his music or the like – before blitzing him with Swedish idioms read phonetically from the palm of my hand. Maybe then, in the cool, yellow air of the Roisin Dubh smoking area, he would reveal to me the looping secrets of his enormous tunes. I fretted about him not playing ‘Everday’ live and the possibility of a power-outage. I was so worried about all this that I started drinking just before 5 pm on Friday evening. I have been telling myself since that I will see The Field some other time.
The Field – It’s Up There

Meanwhile, as the youth get drunk and zone out, the nation continues to lilt eerily up along the ever-narrowing passage of public austerity. The passage is coming close to its most treacherous pass yet – Budget 2012 – and it’s uncertain whether anyone is going to survive. The rotten timber boards of the Republic will scrape slowly against the stony and unforgiving bank, and after some panic, the whole sorry thing will go down in a broiling fury of gnashing and back-stabbing and pensioners found frozen dead and stiff in their bedsits. Monday marked the first anniversary of the IMF bailout and one year on, the country is suspended in a strange two-tiered wedding cake. The top-tier is still fresh and spongy – the politicians proud of being in charge of the country’s ‘model bail-out’ and granting themselves the right to drive in bus lanes. This tier is good and covered in tin-foil. Beneath it lies hard, semi-stale lumps of rank, crumbling raisin-crud. It’s soaked in flat Heineken and there’s saliva and bite-marks everywhere. It’s going nowhere apart from the bin, or to be used as food-fight fodder by the Coke-addled kids whose parents are drunkenly waltzing in the bar and are now free to tear up everything. This part of the cake is everyone else. The children are fascists. Soon the lights in the function room will go off and as the adults’ muffled laughter tinkles through from the next room, these violent brats will descend on the buffet and cake and fuck things up. Much like the freaks in I Am Legend, they’re getting bolder and braver all the time. Yesterday one of them stuck his head above the parapet entirely, although he was a bit too early yet. The Fine Gael mayor of Naas, Darren Scully, seemed content to dismiss an entire race of people live on radio – but of course he wasn’t a racist.

“When you look at the word racist in the dictionary you could probably say it’s wrong of me to make that decision but I’m only going purely on experience and every single case I’ve had that’s been the outcome of it,”

he said, speaking of every black African of all time, ever. He’s stood aside as mayor now, but stays on as a public representative and member of our largest government party. Here comes Kristallnacht.

The Depravations - Old Love Song (Live)

Some good news did emerge over the weekend though. Galway band The Depravations apparently started recording their debut album this week. Posting their EP on the blog last March garnered one of the greatest responses I have ever had to anything on this cyber wasteland, so I presume regular readers (all two) will be pleased to hear this. On Saturday the band did a live set thing for 2fm in Eyre Square. The sky was grey and the Toulouse fans visiting for the city’s biggest rugby match ever were somewhat obnoxious, but the set was as good as ever. This forthcoming album is definitely one to mark down…and buy.

For the past few weeks I’ve been meaning to post Nicolas Jaar’s new two-track EP, Don’t Break My Love. Normally a release consisting of just two tracks could hardly be labelled an EP, but this breathy, clicking wonder embarks on such a ridiculous electronic journey that by the end of the second (last) track, it feels as though you’ve passed through a series of futuristic eras. On the subject of Jaar, it’s interesting to look at how his year has panned out alongside that of his British counterpart James Blake. Both had massively anticipated and critically acclaimed albums at the start of the year, but diverged strongly as the year went on and the hype grew. Blake’s style verged sharply into the realms of those still vocals, culminating in his latest (and God awful) EP, Enough Thunder, while Jaar maintained a lofty distance behind his laptop and ends the year with something completely manic like the last minute-and-a-half on ‘Don’t Break My Love’, or the drop on ‘Why Didn’t You Save Me’. The EP is available for free download.

Next month the blog is hopefully going to publish a detailed series on the music of the year. There will be more mixtapes, although my laptop has been dead for a week, rendering my rudimentary mixing software and large swathes of my music library inaccessible. I’m sure my effort to hoover the keyboard and carefully put the machine back into its bag will do the job, but I amn’t going to check for another week yet. In the meantime, make room on your hard-drives for a proper jaunt through some of the shadier lanes and more resplendent avenues of 2011′s musical estate. A sample of what is being touted as the world’s first ‘trance hip-hop instrumental’ album, and some incredibly rare collectible based music. Wisconsin dub and if the Beach Boys had grown up drinking cans in the Phoenix Park and learning Irish in school. Honey-glazed Rn’B and colon-rattling bass. Add some exuberant, vitamin C-packed House and indie heroics and this will absolutely go off. Stay tuned.

Albums from the year I was born – Part Five

My Bloody Valentine – Loveless (Creation)

“So let me get this straight…you want us to give you a quarter of a fucking million to make this record and you aren’t even sure when it’ll be ready?”

Kevin Shields nodded.

“Fuck…”

We missed a pseudo-important date on the blog last Friday week. It had nothing to do with the continuing downward spiral of the eurozone into chaos and doom, although a new generation of Leaving Cert students will definitely be learning off the names Papandreou, Venizelos and Rehn for a question on ‘The Age of Austerity’ for European history in a few years time.

Nope, the date marked a quiet and inconsequential anniversary for music fans. November 4 was the twentieth anniversary of the release of My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless, an album which probably should not be written about for another 20 years at least, due to its tendency to draw out awkward metaphors and abundant reams of well-intended but meaningless prose and praise. As a piece of music it provides much to comment on (enough for one Florida State University student to write an interesting thesis on) – words such as ‘swirling’, ‘shoegaze’, ‘guitars’, ‘tremulous’, ‘dreamy’ and ‘ethereal’ will feature strongly – before the sumptuous backstory to the album’s creation is even touched on. It’s a fascinating story, but not one which stands to gain much from being churned out again by someone who was one week old when it was first released. However, given that I rather inexplicably decided to feature 1991 albums earlier this year, passing over this giant would be somewhat of a gaping anomaly. Plus, guitarist Kevin Shields recently launched a new record label, which got me thinking – and hoping – about the band again. Personally, I think it was the best album of that year, and challenges strongly for the premier position on that constantly rotating and ultimately pointless ‘favourite albums of all time’ list of mine. Seems as though I’m far from the only one that thinks this way, so just what is it about this commercially unspectacular and sonically uneasy LP that was released with little or no fanfare, massively over-budget and two years late by a band that had thus far failed to make any substantial impact in their seven years together that makes it so revered?

My Bloody Valentine – I Only Said

For me, Loveless is one of those albums that has heavy associative connotations. At home when younger, we had an amazing big hardback book called A Day in the Life of Ireland. It’s out of print now and I wanted to upload some scans of the pages but when I went looking for it for the first time in years last night I couldn’t find it. I have no idea where it came from either. The concept behind the book was a simple one. One morning in May 1991, 75 of the world’s best photographers started shooting all across the island. From shipyard workers on their morning shift in Belfast to children making their communion in Mayo, the whole spread of Irish life was compiled into a large hardback book of maybe 100 pages. There were nuns and priests, teachers and students, old men and dogs and paramilitary volunteers. (Where are these people now? Do they remember that day? How did the nineties and new millennium treat them? What is the full story behind their photos?) But it was the places that stuck with me the most. It was an effective geography lesson. Each photo was accompanied with a small map of Ireland in the corner, with a dot indicating where the photo had been taken. And some of these photos were remarkable. It’s an Ireland that you’re inevitably going to miss if your entire year consists of commuting along the likes of N17 or M50, or crawling out of bed at noon with a headache and a 4,000 word politics essay due in a few hours. It’s an Ireland that took a bit of a bashing in recent years but still exists, waiting to be camped in and to induce awe and contentment.

Flicking on the likes of ‘Soon’, ‘When You Sleep’ or ‘Only Shallow’ has the immediate effect of summoning the pictures in that book to my mind – sea-sprayed passengers on a small boat off the west coast, watching grey clouds eat mountains in Connemara, people’s bare and muck-flecked feet on the top of Croagh Patrick. The association makes little sense – I first mauled that book with sticky fingers when I was seven or eight, long before I had ever heard of things like ‘reverse reverb’ or ‘tremolo bars’, never mind the album itself. There wasn’t all that much musical reference in the book, although I remember some jubilant action shots of a gig in a Dublin basement and the boozy smiles of bodhran and accordion players in a dark pub, hardly the stuff reminiscent of an indie shoegaze classic. Furthermore, it’s not as though the members of the band were making the record with Ireland’s scenery in mind. It’s probably fair to go so far as to say that the Irish members of the band couldn’t care less about the country during that bleak period in the late 80s and early 90s. They had emigrated years before, on the advice of Gavin Friday, and at the time intended never to have to return. Despite all this, Loveless still sounds like the perfect soundtrack to that book and its moody Atlantic coastline shots and buoyant social portraits.

The real substance of the photographs lay in their collective message. In isolation, photographs of fishermen unloading their catch at Killybegs or a snap of punks chatting to an old lady on a Dublin footpath can be powerful enough, but it was the idea that all these photographs had been taken on exactly the same day in the same country that made the idea of a the book being a real, physical ‘snapshot in time’ so intriguing. It’s a concept that I haven’t seen replicated to such a powerful effect ever since. However, the music on Loveless is definitely woven from the same sort of collective fabric, rich strains which wander down so many different paths but ultimately sprout from the same source. Loveless was nowhere near ever being recorded on the one day, week or even month (it eventually took about two years), but the long echoing tunnel of its tracklist feels like enough of a single entity to qualify. As a full LP, its power is immense. What can be said about Loveless 20 years on? It’s still music to grow up to. It still suits emotional turmoil and moments of dire directional loss. It still acts as a benchmark with which to measure new albums. It’s still great. Every time that paralysing sense of dread, fear and sorrow grips as you watch some small local band set up their miniature city of a pedalboard onstage you can think of Loveless and remember that shit-loads of pedals do have a place in music. It could be ok. And every time the clicking introductory segue into the body of ‘Soon’ sounds out, you know it’s going to be great and things will be fine. The Atlantic won’t go away, and neither will Kevin Shields’ recorded chronicles of that amazing horizontal strata of groaning guitar, which stretch off like seams of grainy rock through a beautiful landscape consisting of Belinda Butcher’s sexual vocals, Jazzmasters and Jaguars, and slowly nodding dinosaurs. Play it loud.

Twenty years later and we’re still waiting for the fabled final instalment.