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This might sound a bit strange to Pitchfork regulars and Swedish readers (do I have any, other than my girlfriend?) but Jens Lekman was the support act here. This is a man whose second album proper just earned a hallowed 9.0 on the notoriously stingy reviews site and topped the album charts in his homeland. Granted, Josh Rouse is an established artist with a billion albums of gentle adult-orientated Americana under his belt but Jens Lekman is clearly a songwriter whose star is in the ascendency. Of course 90% of the crowd were there to see Rouse, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the majority left the venue talking about the weird Swedish guy who ditched his guitar in the final song, turned on a sample and performed a synchronised dance move with his sole band member, percussionist Tammy Karlsson.
One of the most interesting aspects of Lekman’s performance was that playing as a two-piece really didn’t seem to limit him or detract from the songs. He used a loop pedal to record and trigger the playback of backing vocals and later in the set I presume a CD player or an iPod was called upon to play a more complex sample. It was innovative without sounding stale or overly mechanical, and the music benefited as a result.
Prior to the show I hadn’t spent a great deal of time with Jens’ latest record, Night Falls Over Kortedala. In the twenty four hour period since the show finished I’ve listened to it four times. It’s a dead cert for my end of year top ten already. That says it all really. Oh yeah, I nearly forgot about Josh Rouse. He wasn’t bad either.
As predicted, it seems that I’ve fallen a little bit behind in my quest to comment on every new film I see. My excuse? Well, it’s a combination of the usual culprits – laziness and poor time management. And I should probably include spending too much time watching films while I’m at it. I haven’t got the time to compose inspirational critiques on all of these movies but I’m going to have a stab at condensing my feelings into a couple of lines for each. If nothing else this will give me a record of what I’ve seen in the past month.
Atonement (Dir: Joe Wright)
In a nutshell, this adaptation of Ian McEwan’s book is a tragic love story set against the backdrop of WWII. I imagine quite a lot of critics and viewers would add a clichéd “but it’s so much more” to that description. I’d rather not. While the Dunkirk scenes are brilliantly filmed, the second half of Atonement is far too long for its own good and after twitching in my seat for half an hour thinking “when will it end?” I felt somewhat cheated by the ultimately predictable climax. (A fairly lukewarm 6)
Joy Division (Dir: Grant Gee)
Written by journalist Jon Savage and directed by that guy who did the Radiohead film, Joy Division is an exhilarating and entertaining look back at late 70s / early 80s Manchester and the defining local band of the era. The talking heads involved are generally worth listening to (Hooky in particular offers some interesting insights) and the live footage, though of varying quality, is fantastic. As a fan (rather than a fanatic) I certainly hadn’t seen most of this and I was pleasantly surprised by how visceral and raw Joy Division were in the live arena. In the pre-film Q&A session Hooky described Joy Division as an answer to the questions posed in Control. I think that sums it up pretty well. I’d recommend this to anyone interested in Manchester or even British music in general. (9)
Elizabeth (Dir: Shekhar Kapur)
Not the best. Some have criticised this film for its historical inaccuracies – fair enough, I remember covering the Elizabethan period about fourteen years ago in a first form history class and it certainly didn’t quite go like this – but that’s a minor point. Of far greater concern to me is that fact that nothing really happens. Except some wooden acting from Clive Owen and a somewhat warped portrayal of the Spanish Armada, which I admit is shot pretty well but bears no real resemblance to fact. Yes, Cate Blanchett is pretty good but isn’t she always? If you want to feel bored, patronised and particularly if you fancy a good laugh at Clive Owen then go and see Elizabeth. But don’t say I didn’t warn you. (3)
Death at a Funeral (Dir: Frank Oz)
Who could imagined that the man best known as Yoda would create one of the comedies of the year? My expectations for this Brit-com were fairly low, I must admit, but the lively script and its frequent flirtations with bad taste really won me over. There are multiple coffin jokes for God’s sake and unlike many most contemporary comedies, Death… doesn’t veer too far into sickly sweet territory at the end. The stiff and lifeless Run, Fatboy, Run, for example, looks somewhat ghostly pale in comparison. (8)
2007 has already been a great year for shoegaze fans and it just keeps getting better. Last month Swervedriver – in my humble opinion one of the most underrated bands of the nineties – announced that they are planning a reunion tour and now we have the return of My Bloody Valentine to get hysterically excited about.
Kevin Shields has announced that a new MBV record will see the light of day very soon and, at the time of writing, seven UK dates have been confirmed for June/July 2008. Please forgive me for feeling slightly smug but after a few hours of uncertainty and frustration I managed to bag my ticket for the second London date yesterday afternoon. And although it’s over seven months away, I couldn’t be more excited about the prospect of hearing the likes of “Soon”, “Only Shallow” and “Soft As Snow (But Warm Inside)” in the live setting.
I’m pretty sure there are limited numbers of tickets left for the Manchester and Glasgow dates so if you want to join in the fun hurry over to www.mybloodyvalentine.co.uk for details.
In the last month or so I’ve seen the biopic (Anton Corbijn’s Control), read the book (Deborah Curtis’ Touching From A Distance) and listened to lots and lots of the music. All I’m missing, it seems, is the obligatory Unknown Pleasures t-shirt.
Spurred on by the current resurgence in interest in all things Joy Division, I’m paying the band more attention than I have at any point since my introduction to them in about 1999, when my good friend Peter went through a phase of playing the Heart and Soul boxset on repeat. Ah, those were the days. Our teenage garage band did a mean version of Transmission.
In light on my renewed JD fascination, I couldn’t resist picking up tickets for tonight’s European premiere of Grant Gee’s Joy Division documentary at Sheffield’s Showroom cinema. It’s the opening night of the 2007 Sheffield International Documentary Festival and Gee’s film is the main attraction. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m excited by the prospect of more live footage and thoughts/anecdotes/lies from the surviving band members, but I wonder just how much more I can possibly learn about Ian Curtis and this admittedly great band? I guess I’ll find out tonight…
For all his editing tricks and gimmicky tactics, Michael Moore certainly knows how to make an entertaining documentary. Sicko takes a long hard look (through Moore’s tinted glasses) at the American health service, focussing particularly on the care that those with health insurance receive. The examples he uses to illustrate his points are typically shocking and certainly effective. In the first hour Moore delivers tears, corruption, CEOs on seven figure salaries and, of course, a deluge of George W. Bush gaffes – it’s very much a case of so far, so good.
The second half of the film sees the globe-trotting Moore examining health care abroad, primarily as a tool to support his own clear beliefs that USA should pursue a system of free universal health care. The idea is very much “look how much fairer the health service is in that country”, and as Moore visits France, Cuba, Canada and Britain it’s hard not to feel the facts are being twisted somewhat. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m as proud of the NHS as the next man, but the scenes that take place in a London hospital give the impression of a flawless, perfectly oiled machine. Anyone who’s worked in the system will understand that this isn’t quite the case. It might not be convenient for Moore’s polemic, but inequality in healthcare is very much alive and kicking here in Britain (as I’m sure it is to varying degrees in the other countries he chose to visit).
Rather than trot out the same argument over and over, I’d have liked to see Moore’s film delve deeper into different health specific problems – Sicko focuses on profit hungry HMOs but what about the pharmaceutical industry? Surely its deviant practices were worth 20 minutes of screen time? Wouldn’t this have been more relevant than parking a boat outside Guantanamo Bay and demanding free healthcare over a megaphone? But that’s Michael Moore for you: he prefers the grand gesture to the hard fact, the manipulated sob story to the honest account. This is why, ultimately, even if you agree with his arguments, it’s often difficult to agree with his methods of presenting them. (7, for entertainment)
No Ripcord Falls To Pieces, Collapses and Dies
November 30, 2007 in Comment | 1 comment
Click here and you’ll be confronted with a truly horrible vision – No Ripcord has been replaced by a pale, white, motionless error page. It’s sickening.
For the last three hours (please bear in mind it’s a Friday night and I’m apparently in my mid-20s prime) I’ve been trawling the Internet, hitting brick walls in my quest for answers.
I tried to log onto the FTP: access denied
The control panel: unable to log on
Any chance of some SSH access to back-up the database? Dream on! (and this is why you should back up more often you disorganised idiot)
The site is hosted through an old school friend (Rob) who rents server space/MySQL databases etc. from a British company called Fasthosts. Thirty minutes ago I discovered that they have reset a large number (all?) of their customer’s passwords due to a major security breach. My understanding is that this includes database passwords, which is why my site has crashed – the site’s Drupal CMS cannot access the article database because it’s password has changed. Now I hope this is the case. A more frightening alternative is that some deviant hacker has stumbled into my FTP space and callously destroyed my humble little music website.
As I can’t access the FTP (Fasthosts are sending out the passwords by snail mail, thanks guys) I can’t determine what the status of the site is. I can’t even let the long suffering No Ripcord readers know what is happening. My hands are tied and it’s very frustrating indeed. I’ll keep you posted…