Crackerwax

Ladies and Gentlemen, The Donnas!

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Great riff that don’t you think? At one point they were the only girl band in Palo Alto (don’t say I don’t love you fact fans) and peddled a high energy punk-pop sound, things changed though and most of the influences have been polished out of The Donnas now.

In the early days they sounded like The Ramones on helium, those days are now well and truly gone and what we’re left with is tight bubble gum rock of the highest quality.

Not that I’m complaining though, after all there are only so many times you can hear teenage girls shout 1-2-3-4!

Swedish eclectopop princess Stina Nordenstam released And She Closed Her Eyes in 1994, not that you’d know it but she did. It’s a neat little album and it contains this soothing groove here:

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Ambient smooth sounds, yet at the same time working in a bit of sax, how did she do it? Mark Radcliffe I recall played this to death. Those were the days though, Mark and Lard on the late shift playing brilliant alt-pop, it was like John Peel’s show but with tunes.

It was great being able to listen to the radio and know that you were going to hear new stuff, non-mainstream stuff that you knew you weren’t going to have heard anywhere else.

Having said all this some of you may have already heard this as part of the soundtrack to Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo And Juliet, which as I recall was one of Craig Armstrong’s works. He’s good too you know?

Anyway enjoy this for now but remember to buy And She Closed Her Eyes, it’s great!

How’s this for a slice of fried gold?

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The song’s off Boards Of Canada’s first proper album Music Has The Right To Children, and it’s a stonker.

I was introduced to this song by Scott Sinfield of Portal fame, an ex-housemate of mine. It came to me on MiniDisc, ah MiniDisc I miss your highly compressed 74 minutes.

Little known L.A. band Dragster Barbie released one self-funded EP in 2000 and then promptly disappeared.

Demos, Live And Other was its title and it was a belter! The track below is the title track from said EP and it too was a complete cracker!

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Listen to it and let me know what you think.

Was watching Orange Playlist the other night, Jake Shears from Scissor Sisters was on and it was great! That is if you can bear to watch a hugely talented individual being interviewed by a thick geordie.

While I was watching Mr Shears (not his real name one suspects) mentioned his love for David Bowie, this lead to a quick montage of Bowie moments, one of which bore the following subtitle.

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Compass? Interesting concept, what happened there then? Was he concentrating on traveling North and ended up walking into something? Perhaps the magnetic field of the compass caused some kind of mutation? Or could it be that they’re just really fucking stupid and actually meant pair of compasses?

While we’re at it the phrase ‘enhanced by an unfortunate school accident’ makes no sense, for three reasons. Firstly it should read ‘unfortunate accident at school’ and secondly how can something be unfortunately enhanced, an enhancement suggests good fortune to me.

Finally the whole wonky eye business has been the basis of his look for his entire career, so it wasn’t that unfortunate anyway was it?

Former ‘glamour model’ Middlemiss clearly had a hand in this.

This is the business.

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How good is that? The answer is very good, me predicts a hit!

The best song Bernie and Elton wrote.

‘I finally decided my future lies beyond the yellow brick road.’

Fantastic.