Some stuff

Pendulum (remember them?) have seemingly bounced back with a bunch of new tracks (I'm not sure how it is that several of them have leaked already seeing as the album is out in May) and I'm surprisingly liking what I'm hearing so far. I wasn't a huge fan of that nu metal/DnB thing they were trying to do on their last album, so I'm pleased to announce that it seems as if they've gone closer to their roots on the new songs, once again producing some pretty fun DnB (the last album was also way too serious in my opinion). The best of the ones I've heard is definitely 'Ransom', can't get that transformers hook out of my head:



Sorry the quality's a bit shit, but at least the music is good.

Hmm, moving along. The new Pokémon games are out in less than two weeks!

I got a lvl 100 Arceus the other day from an event in GAME.

I went with a friend of mine, she'd hate me if I said who it was. Actually, no one reads this so she probably wouldn't care. Her name rhymes with tether, hahahaha... I am in the middle of a four-day weekend, so no college today and none tomorrow either!

I am 18 in less than a month.

/ORGASM

P.S. I reckon I might start up a tumblr, seeing as I can never update this regularly enough (the posts end up being way too long) and tumblr seems a lot better suited to regular quick posts. I'll still use this (mainly for my 'music journalism', though I can't really call it that...) but I'll probably use tumblr more if I can get the hang of it. It seems like the cool thing to do (oh dear I am so behind) anyway. Oh look, here I am! It's clearly awesome so you should take a look.

Giving guitar lessons

...is a lot harder than one might think. I've started teaching Heather although they're not really proper lessons, I'm more just sort of helping her along as she goes (she's only been playing for just over a week, bless her). Whether or not you'd actually consider it 'proper teaching' is more or less irrelevant anyway, it's a good laugh so I hope today will have just witnessed the first session of many. I don't really see myself as a very good teacher of anything in particular; I've often had difficulty in the past explaining concepts and that to people. All things considered though I think today was pretty much a success, we went through a bit of Zep and I taught her the main riffs of 'Heartbreaker' and 'Whole Lotta Love', as well as teaching her the basic ideas of the 12 Bar Blues. We didn't play around with that too much though, which was a shame (you can vary it a lot so it can end up being very fun to play around with). Hopefully we'll get to do a proper bluesy session another time.

Another thing which hath provided me with joy lately is my friend Chris' vlogs. He actually started making them about a month ago or something, but I only watched them for the first time yesterday. There are 4 now (although the second is split into 2 parts). GO WATCH, they are awesome! You can find his Youtube channel here although because I am nice and generally amazing I'll put one of his made-of-win videos right here, right now. This is his first vid:


If you don't love it then you do not have a soul. Anyway I must be getting on, SO MUCH WORK TO DO. But before I go, here is one last thing:


DERP

Your rhinestone eyes are like factories far away

Plastic Beach gets released almost everywhere today! (Apart from America, lololol). Although you should already be familiar with it, as it leaked a whole week ago now (get with the program guys!). Iddy did her review the other day and its top stuff. You can look at it here, whereas mine is still up on my homepage, just under this post. I seriously cannot stress how much you need to listen to it, to digest it, to take it into your soul! Ah I sound like one of those stupid over the top black priests (I don't mean to be racist...) but it is a very good piece of work, definitely up there for the top album of this year.

I saw the new version of Alice in Wonderland yesterday (by Tim Burton, who else) and I'm pleased to say it surpassed expectations! I've been getting a bit sceptical of Tim Burton lately, his films just seem to be getting more samey and predictable. Alice in Wonderland was a very enjoyable film though, a nice alternative to a sickly sweet stereotypical fairytale, of which I am sick of (not that surprising really). It isn't quite as good as his best films (Sleepy Hollow, Nightmare Before Christmas etc.) but it does seem like he has at least regained his creative enthusiasm, which he had seemed to have lost with recent films. I recommend it to anyone looking for something a little bit different, but still somewhat familiar. I am aware that was a very annoying sentence.

Another thing that is currently awesome is Ash's A-Z Series, which I know I have blogged about before but it is getting very good now. They're currently on K (so 11 main songs plus 'Return of White Rabbit' plus all the B sides and remixes... a lot of songs) with L due to be released next Monday (the main songs are released every two weeks). I'm thinking of reviewing the first half of it (A-M) as an album review, only including the main songs though as that's what it would be like if it was actually an album (I think). They're a bit inconsistent, you get the odd dodgy track followed by a song that just completely blows you away. The overall quality of the new songs is very good though, I reckon some of the tracks are some of the best stuff they've ever done.

Here's a few of my favourites so far:
Tracers (D):

Pripyat (F):

Ichiban (G):

ONE MORE THING. Ffion Mai is awesome and made of win (even though she's Welsh... she doesn't let it hold her back). Cheers Ffi!

Welcome to the World of the Plastic Beach

It's March! The sky outside is purple! I haven't done a post in ages...! Sorry about that... A lot of stuff has been going on and I haven't really had the time or been bothered enough to do anything with this. Not to worry though, I'm still alive! With my general alive-ness I bring you my next music review. This one is possibly going to be published in my college's newspaper/magazine type thing, so I'm naturally excited about that! As for what it is... well it should be obvious.

Gorillaz - Plastic Beach
This is the release that's got me the most excited for quite a long time. Much more excited than Heligoland did last month (and that got me very excited). Probably the nearest thing I have to compare this level of excitement to was Muse's The Resistance all the way back in September of last year (that's a bit weird, I can remember when that came out like it was yesterday...). Anyway moving along, I can happily report that this, unlike the two previously mentioned albums, lives up to all my expectations. That is, it is as good as I wanted it to be, but in terms of what it actually sounds like it is something different altogether.

The first major change comes at the very beginning, where Damon has placed another instrumental intro. But where on Demon Days there is a visceral hell-trip, here we get a lush orchestra that brings to mind a sun dappled beach with the tide lapping away gently at the shore. A clever little reference to the title of the album, eh? (In case you don't know, the 'story' of this one is that Murdoc has holed up on the most isolated point on Earth, made up from all of the detritus and rubbish of humanity. This is the 'Plastic Beach' of the title). The first part of the album from here on in is littered with potential singles; from the beautiful 'Rhinestone Eyes' (if we're making comparisons to Demon Days then this is definitely the album's 'El Mañana') to the downright quirky 'Superfast Jellyfish'. The latter is definitely one of the standout tracks and is without doubt the 'poppiest' thing the album has to offer, despite feeling like a proper old school hip-hop track (De La Soul are heavily featured) complete with bizarre samples and jokey lyrics. The song genuinely made me chuckle the first time I heard it, which is a very rare thing indeed. The previously released 'Stylo' is sandwiched between these two, another of the album's highlights. The song itself is actually quite a challenge for me to write about as it encompasses pretty much everything I love about Gorillaz; from the can't-get-it-out-of-your-head beat to the melancholic but brilliant vocals, even the fact that it features someone completely random but awesome (Bobby Womack was persuaded to sing the bridge part after his daughter told him that Gorillaz were cool). I reckon his vocals make the track, it's really something very powerful indeed.

'Empire Ants' follows the block of radio-friendly tunes and is a very pretty sounding song; it reminds me somewhat of their brilliant epic 'Hong Kong' (a song that was recorded during the Demon Days campaign but wasn't on the album). I'm not really sure what to make of the next two tracks. 'Glitter Freeze' and 'Some Kind of Nature' are both fairly repetitive and bland songs, they're not terrible, they're just nothing particularly remarkable either. Not what I have really come to expect from Gorillaz. 'On Melancholy Hill' is another potential single, it's not really standard Gorillaz fare but the composition is done very well and the melody is damn catchy. It'll be stuck in your head for days afterwards. 'Sweepstakes' is an interesting one, I think. It brings to mind very strongly the sound of the first Gorillaz album; dirty and not very poppy at all. The whole album has a similar sort of feel to it, for Demon Days they decided to go very poppy and mainstream which is fair enough as it turned out very good. For Plastic Beach it feels as if they've taken a step back the other way towards where it all began. It's not quite the same though, the majority of the songs here are a lot more intelligent than anything they've ever done. Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett have been very clever with Plastic Beach, everything from the title of the album itself to all the promotional art and videos feels meticulously crafted and put together for a very specific purpose.

All of this climaxes during the title track. 'Plastic Beach' is a beautiful song and without doubt one of the best things they've ever done. It features none other than Mick Jones and Paul Simonon of The Clash fame but it sounds anything but punky. The song brings together all the themes and ideas from the whole thing and combines them to create a fantastically epic masterpiece. The overarching message is that we should really stop and take a look at how our failing planet is doing before it all goes down the shitter; a message we are all familiar with I'm sure but the track is so powerful that it really does make you stop and think for once about how much we are fucking things up.

I was expecting a closer for this album that lived up to the fantastically pretty title track from Demon Days and with 'Pirate Jet' they almost managed it. It really builds itself up into something epic, but then suddenly cuts short. This is one of my main problems with the album; the last track should be much longer! It's like 'Don't Get Lost in Heaven' from the last one, really good but you want it to last a lot longer than it does. Oh well, you can't have everything.

Plastic Beach is in summary, a very good album. It is completely different to Demon Days however and I think they'll lose a lot of their casual fans for this, but sometimes it's good to have a bit of a change. The big list of guests they got to collaborate with them actually works as well, I was worried it might be a bit all over the place because of the wide range of guests but it doesn't really affect the integrity of the whole thing at all. Well done 2-D, Murdoc, Russel and Noodle (although for this album she's actually been 'replaced' by a robot clone of herself... don't ask). You've done it again.

Rating: 9/10
Released: 8th March 2010