The Naked and Famous - Button Factory gig (March 5th)

'Sold out? WTF!?' Says an incredulous Thom Powers to the packed out Button Factory on Saturday March 5th. New Zealand's five piece, The Naked and Famous were touring their electro-pop/rock outfit ahead of the release of their debut album, 'Passive me, aggressive you'. Should he really have been surprised though? Their single 'Young Blood' debuted at number one in the New Zealand charts last year and was on heavy rotation in this hemisphere on radio along with equally strong singles 'Punching in a dream' and 'All of this'. They were also featured on the BBC sounds of 2011 list.

They were an interesting looking bunch and to blatantly pigeon-hole their style there's a nerd, a jock, a pretty indie girl, a rock n roll drummer and ... a mullet haired 70's style rocker. They got straight down to business and offering up early on a few of their singles, 'All of this' and 'Punching in a dream' to an ecstatic crowd, singers Thom Powers and Alisa Xayalith sharing the vocals mostly in unison over their pumped up synth-pop.

It's clear these antipodeans are talented in the art of writing summery anthem-like songs, with 'Young Blood' being the penultimate. Instantly recognisable intro leading you in, building the excitement, then they hit you with the sugary electro-pop with just enough guitar and thumping bass to rock out to and with a catchy, sing-a-longable chorus. They could probably boast the best use of the word 'yeah' this side of hip hop, breathing new life into what is the most commonly used and meaningless lyric filler. A perfect and uplifting crowd pleaser.

Though they're great at melting into dreamy echos not all their tracks achieve the same dizzy heights as the upbeat numbers so they may need to pull another few gems out of the bag and be wary not to disappear under some of the more subdued tracks where the use of high pitched, floaty but muted vocals can get a bit sam-ey. Basically a can we have a little less of the passive and a bit more of that lovely aggression.

Hercules & Love Affair - ruin St Patricks day

Booo to Hercules & Love Affair for cancelling their Paddy's day gig at the Button Factory. I was looking forward to doing something more interesting this year than just hitting the pubs in town along with half the population of Dublin. I even had a ridiculously glitzy outfit picked out that would only really do for a Hercules & Love Affair gig that's supported by Bitches with Wolves. Now I am just going to look silly down at the local.

Restrepo

I watched the brilliant documentary "Restrepo" on the weekend by photographer Tim Hetherington and the journalist Sebastian Junger. They follow the day to day lives of a platoon of American soldiers in the Korangal Valley in Afghanistan in 2007. A place so dangerous that they faced daily and numerous gun battles, so dubbing the valley the 'most dangerous place on earth'. The alien landscape renders them open targets much of the time, never knowing when the next attack will be. They manage to gain ground and build a small fort which they name 'Restrepo' after one of their own men who dies shortly after arriving.

The tension they face everyday is unbearable, the cameras capture them truckin' on regardless becoming a sort of family in the process. We are shown a disturbingly realistic portrayal of army life including a chilling gun battle where they are almost helpless amid the trees and hilly terrain when they are ambushed by the Taliban, losing one of their best soldiers in the process.

This documentary is really about post-traumatic disorder though and it's heartbreaking to see these young men trying to make sense of what they have seen and though they do not question why they are there we cannot help but feel angry for senseless waste of life on what seems like a doomed mission from the start.

A call to arms

I wish my sister Leah would take some more of her beautiful photos. This one below is one of my favourites and is of my other sister Ellen taken in my old apartment. Ellen has always been the dancer of us three. She used to do ballet when she was younger and you can still tell from her slender shoulders and movements. Leah is definitely the feminist dancer of us though, she likes to dance but there will be absolutely no 'look at me, look at me' sexy moves, much more contemporary is she, or is it old school ... Her friend once told me that Leah's her favourite dancer as she doesn't dance like she wants people to watch her, like so many do. While I hate the way female pop stars gyrate in their videos myself and Ellen are guilty of the most disgusting dancing years ago to annoy and freak Leah out.  We would blare out Wu Tang, Dre and songs like Mary J Blige's 'Family affair'. This was when she listened mainly to Manu Chao and Lemon Jelly. I think she was very ashamed. We did this ALL the time. That was also one of the first times I met Ellen's boyfriend. He had come around the back of the house to park his bike and saw me grinding through the kitchen window, trying to make Leah puke, doing the tackiest bump n grind dancing I could muster. So I clearly wasn't going for the cool first impression.

In So Many Ways - Computer Magic

I can't stop listening to this lovely lady that I saw listed on the Nialler9 blog.

Trend Alert for Songwriters - Get on it!

So your writing a song, and you just don't have enough words to fill the chorus, or you cant think of anything catchy enough to pho-net-i-cal-ly fill the melody. If you only could just squeeze in another syllable into that last verse it would be bangin! Unfortunately your singing range is less Mariah Carey and more Tom Waits. Hmmm.

Well I'll give you a heads up. Just spell the lyrics out y'all!! Just pick a word, it doesn't even have to make much sense. Everybodys doing it.

Well maybe not everyone, but a couple of indie bands are like Warpaint - Billie Holiday, and Noah and the Whale - L.I.F.E.G.O.E.S.O.N. The fact that at the moment their both H-O-T is all the more reason to hop to it right now. While it's a little like bringing out a clip art designed CD single at Christmas with a slightly different spelling to the X-Factor winner to confuse some mummies/grannies, it's still all above board. 

Anyway it started trending way back with Arethra Franklin's R-e-s-p-e-c-t, and then a group of blue collar workers, a cowboy and an Indian jumped on the bandwagon a few years later. 

Probably the greatest example though is that cool little monkey, Ian Brown's The Fear ... Be honest, how many people of our generation have you met that can't spell the word 'Fear' now? Not many if any.
Coined a catchphrase too . I am so aware of 'the fear' now when I'm hungover that I think bring it on myself.

NB- good idea to try to coin a catchphrase.

I do have a word of warning though - get somone to r-e-a-d-o-v-e-r-y-o-u-r-l-y-r-i-c-s or at least run a quick spell check on it to be safe, I cannot stress this enough, you DO NOT WANT TO SPELL IT WRONG, it's career suicide. Look at what happened to poor, but sloppy, Ashlee Simpson?

You heard it here first people (sort of). 

P.s. Can you think of any other spell-y out-y songs ?