The Smaller Picture

Top 10 Albums of the Year

2010-12-22T14:46:00.000-08:00

In classic reverse order...

The twenty-seventh of May and the fourth of June, 2010

2010-06-06T14:36:00.000-07:00

When you were satisfying your thirst for success
And you looked older than I did,
I didn't think that that was you at your best.
We were only lonely little kids
Amidst stacks and stacks of slacks and black platform shoes,
We were little kids.
And you could say sorry ten billion times,
But sorry didn't do what you did.
I threw myself at you and I threw myself away
Amidst stacks and stacks of slacks and black platform shoes.

Johnny Cash died today and you say, you say things,
Lovely things, to lovely other people,
And I'm not invited.

But I love the back garden at my parents' place,
And I love the view out of my Glasgow window,
And I love waking up on the floor of a flat in New York,
And you don't know any of these things.

And I've seen you selling shoes but you've never heard me sing,
And I used to hate your boyfriend and the things you did.
Somehow I found out and I was disappointed,
But I don't need therapy because I have cigarettes,
And I don't have any bad memories only bitter regrets.

Johnny Cash died today. And I could take a train
And take an hour to think on the way of what I would say when I saw you.
And I could walk into the shop and buy myself some black platform shoes;
Talk to all the other girls and just ignore you.
Or I could rush into the shop and tell you that I adore you,
Because I adore you.

Johnny Cash died today and you'd say, you'd say
"It's not like Elvis though is it?"
And you would be right

They won't do what you tell them

2009-12-16T17:04:00.000-08:00

There's been a great deal of eye-rolling in certain quarters lately regarding the campaign to get Rage Against The Machine's 1992 single 'Killing in the Name' to the U.K. number one spot in time for Christmas. The push is less to do with the band or single itself, more a reaction The X Factor's perceived stranglehold over the Christmas number one spot. Despite the 'protest vote' nature of the movement, the song itself unfortunately presents an easy target for smart-arse music journalists in all sorts of ways.

Firstly, 'Killing in the Name' is, and always will be, the angsty schoolboy tirade par excellence ('Fuck you I won't tidy my bedroom' etc). Everything about it screams melodramatic, testosterone-flushed door-slamming. Which is fine, were it not being held up as a genuine pillar of rebelliance against the current pop establishment - unarguably represented by The X Factor - as if a seventeen year-old song about racist authorities could somehow remedy an entire generation's renewed embrace of pop music as light entertainment.

The other, by now much-vaunted problem is that Rage Against The Machine are signed to Epic, a subsidiary of Sony Records, who also own Simon Cowell's SyCo label. Therefore the perceived middle finger raised to corporate pop is dealt something of a blow by lining Sony's pockets in the process, just as purchases of The X Factor's winning artist do. So pop critics get a field day pointing out just how deluded the Rage-downloaders are in thinking that their plan is subversive, and pat themselves on the back.

I took this line of thought myself originally. After all, the only thing more depressing than the steady thrum of repetition is the squeal of false rebellion, and there is something nauseating about the thought of hundreds of thousands of bum-fluffed adolescents feeling smug about sticking it to The Man. But no one's actually listened to what the people downloading 'Killing in the Name' are saying, and, in a way, they are doing just that.

A quick glance at the responses to blogs on the subject reveals a pretty unanimous school of thought. One NME blogger, Luke Lewis, wrote a piece entitled 'Rage Against The Machine For Christmas Number One? Who Cares?' which basically puts forward the points argued above: namely that both acts are ultimately owned by Sony, the band did very well commercially first time around, and that 'Killing in the Name' can't possibly beat X Factor winner Joe McElderry's single to number one because of the relatively small numbers in the RATM Facebook campaign group (the group number doubled quickly). While a small fraction of the responses fall into either the 'Intellectual Pop Critic' or 'Dunderhead' category, the majority are people who have downloaded the Rage Against The Machine song, and wanted to explain why.

The typical RATM supporter doesn't give a flying one that their band share a mother label with the X Factor contestant. They don't even care a great deal about the song or its message, other than that they think it's better than 'The Climb'. They're just sick and tired of The X Factor contestants being a shoe-in for Christmas number one every year, and they want to try and do something about it. The CD release of Joe McElderry's single will inevitably boost sales, and if it swells to anything like Alexandra Burke's 576,000 last year than the opposition probably won't have a chance. But the facts are that, as I type this, 'Killing in the Name' is ahead of 'The Climb' in the midweek charts. Laugh all you like, but this is people power in action.

Jeff Buckley fans gave it a good shot last year, but if fans do propel Rage Against The Machine to Christmas number one, it will be a historic event in pop music. Of course there have been word-of-mouth hits in the past, but nothing that quite demonstrates the game-changing power of a new internet generation, whose access to such vast amounts of information means they increasingly need not rely on advertising campaigns being forced down their throats to make consumer decisions. If nothing else, it would amount to a genuine, public-fuelled challenge to The X Factor's tedious commerical hegemony. And whatever he says to the contrary, it's hard to imagine Simon Cowell wouldn't be galled to see his enterprise come second.

The victory would not be one against pop music, or Simon Cowell's personal bank balance, and the fans are well aware of all that. The 'fuck you' is aimed squarely at the assumption that utterly mediocre pop singles can dominate the charts every year because of their patronage by ITV's Saturday night light entertainment froth-fest, and I for one would be glad to hear it ring out on Christmas day.

R.I.P. Sugababes, 1998-2009

2009-09-27T05:36:00.000-07:00

On a related note, am I the only one who thought Siobhan Donaghy's solo stuff was brilliant?

Yes. The answer there is yes, isn't it.

There's a pretty young thing in front of you

2009-09-23T11:37:00.000-07:00

I'd forgotten how good Rilo Kiley are. I mean, the last album was a bit Fleetwood Mac, but you know.

Perhaps one of the most brilliant moments of my life was Rilo Kiley related. I was dancing at Manchester's best 'alternative' nightclub (or as my friend Joe more correctly terms it, 'pub with a disco upstairs'), the Star and Garter. 'Portions For Foxes' came on and I went a bit mental. About halfway through it must have become apparent that someone else was also singularly enamoured with the song, and was bouncing about in my general vicinity. There must also have been some kind of mutual recognition because, without warning, at the moment Jenny barks '... C'MERE!' we both grabbed each other by the collar and yelled those words at each other, then fell apart laughing. It sounds impossibly twee to recount, and close friends are probably sick of hearing about such a seemingly inconsequential event. But the spontaneous joy of it stayed with me.

I couldn't find the PFF video though, so you're lumbered with this rather tacky yet endearing early video for 'The Frug'. The song's a bit lightweight but it's interesting to see (a) a young and ever-beautiful Jenny Lewis, and (b) how incredibly '90s' the whole thing looks.

Pavement Reunion / World Tour Announced

2009-09-17T13:04:00.000-07:00

'Shit just got real.'

I've banged on about Pavement way too much over the last month or so (albeit not in great detail), and if you're reading this there's a good chance I'd be preaching to the converted anyway. But seriously... World Cup + Pavement = 2010 already shaping up to be a corker, no?

The sound of your own heart

2009-09-09T11:25:00.000-07:00

Los Campesinos! have released a new track, 'The Sea Is A Good Place To Think Of The Future'.

The group are audibly maturing into the kind of band I always thought they were capable of being. Not that I don't adore the yelping, sugar-rush pop of their first record, but it sounded a lot more refined on We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed, with hints of darker sounds as well as a greater focus on Tom and Harriet's songwriting and arrangements. It also started to align with the more complex sounds of some of their primary stated influences.

This is certainly the darkest thing they've done, and possibly the best. I'll be going back to my seaside hometown this weekend, and this shall certainly be on heavy rotation. Download from their equally brilliant website.

Slow it down, the song is sacred

2009-09-07T14:38:00.000-07:00

When I saw that Yoni Wolf had covered a Pavement song, my initial reaction was that it was going to be a horrible fucking racket. Don't get me wrong: I love Pavement, and I've got a lot of time for WHY?, Yoni's main musical project. But what can you do with a Pavement song, really? WHY?'s recent single 'This Blackest Purse' should have been a clue, but I never could have imagined that kind of treatment working so well on a Malkmus number. It does though, and transforms 'Shoot The Singer (1 Sick Verse)' from a fairly Pavement-by-numbers EP track into a tremulous piano ballad. Sounds terrible on paper, but I've had it on repeat since I heard it a few hours ago.

MP3: Yoni Wolf - 'Shoot The Singer (1 Sick Verse)'
(via Stereogum, right click & save as)

2009: The Pains of Being Pure at Heart

2009-09-07T12:09:00.000-07:00

There's still a good sixteen weeks of the year left, I know. Then again, this came out at the start of February, and nothing's quite managed to surpass it since: not Animal Collective's critically adorned breakthrough, not Jeffrey Lewis' most brilliant album to date, and certainly not the overrated Veckatimest. Many will be inclined to disagree, not least because all of those albums are a great deal more inventive and sophisticated than The Pains of Being Pure at Heart. But none of them are as good.

I've already waxed lyrical about this lot a fair bit. Original, they ain't, but to adapt a quote from someone else: 'How are you supposed to know it's a Pastels rip-off if you've never heard the Pastels?' Call it faux-naiveté on their part if you like, but that wall of distorted, powerchord-driven indie-pop remains the perfect template for the lyrical narratives of awkward youth. 'Come Saturday' is, in this respect, the album in miniature: feedback, fuzzy guitars, cooing backing vocals, and a tale of summer love that cares for nothing but the moment: 'I can't see into the sunset / All I know is that you're perfect right now.' Absolutely wonderful.

2008: Saturdays = Youth

2009-09-01T10:31:00.000-07:00

This was the hardest pick by far. Maybe I'd started paying closer attention, but I like to think that 2008 was just a great year for releases. Deerhunter's Microcastle / Weird Era Cont., Wild Beasts' Limbo, Panto and Johnny Foreigner's Waited Up 'Til It Was Light were all serious contenders; there were also corkers from British Sea Power, Okkervil River, Cut Copy, Bon Iver, Elbow and No Age; and two excellent records from my old pals Los Campesinos! saw them rapidly promoted to the indie-pop A-list.

One album captivated me more than any other that year though. If Daft Punk mined a euphoric nostalgia for a lost childhood, their compatriot Anthony Gonzalez casts a more wistful, melancholic glance back at juvenile days, to no less dazzling effect. Torch song 'Kim & Jessie' sounds like a joyous tribute to the 80s film soundtrack - insert your own John Hughes reference here - singing of 'kids outside worlds' who are 'crazy 'bout romance and illusion,' but the chorus evokes a much darker scene: 'Somebody lurks in the shadows, somebody whispers.' It's all the gusto of youth, infused with the accompanying bouts of paranoia, self-doubt, and confusion as to one's place in the world.

It is this classic pop juxtaposition, which characterised the 80s of Gonzalez's youth, of lyrical anxiety set to glorious, often upbeat electronic music, that is realised so perfectly on Saturdays = Youth, and which makes it such a success. 'Graveyard Girl' is another fine example, the guitar-led rush of the chorus breaking for a spoken word part, heralded by a ringing schoolbell: 'I'm gonna jump the walls and run. I wonder if they'll miss me? I won't miss them... I'm fifteen years old, and I already feel like it's too late to live. Don't you?'

2007: Sound of Silver

2009-08-29T11:53:00.000-07:00

That's how it starts.
We go back to your house.

We check the charts
And start to figure it out.

And if it's crowded, all the better,
because we know we're gonna be up late.
But if you're worried about the weather
then you picked the wrong place to stay.
That's how it starts.

And so it starts.
You switch the engine on.
We set controls for the heart of the sun,
one of the ways we show our age.

And if the sun comes up, if the sun comes up, if the sun comes up
and I still don't wanna stagger home
Then it's the memory of our betters
that are keeping us on our feet.

You spent the first five years trying to get with the plan,
and the next five years trying to be with your friends again.

You're talking 45 turns just as fast as you can,
yeah, I know it gets tired, but it's better when we pretend.

It comes apart,
the way it does in bad films
Except in parts,
when the moral kicks in.

Though when we're running out of the drugs
and the conversation's winding away
I wouldn't trade one stupid decision
for another five years of life.

You drop the first ten years just as fast as you can,
and the next ten people who are trying to be polite.
When you're blowing 85 days in the middle of France,
Yeah, I know it gets tired only where are your friends tonight?

And to tell the truth.
Oh, this could be the last time.
So here we go,
like a sail's force into the night.

And if I made a fool, if I made a fool, if I made a fool
on the road, there's always this.
And if I'm sued into submission,
I can still come home to this.

And with a face like a dad and a laughable stand,
you can sleep on the plane or review what you said.
When you're drunk and the kids look impossibly tanned
you think over and over, "hey, I'm finally dead."

Oh, if the trip and the plan come apart in your hand,
you can turn it on yourself, your ridiculous prop
You forgot what you meant when you read what you said,
and you always knew you were tired, but then,
where are your friends tonight?

Where are your friends tonight?
Where are your friends tonight?

If I could see all my friends tonight,
If I could see all my friends tonight,
If I could see all my friends tonight,
If I could see all my friends tonight.

Pitchfork voted this the second best song of the decade. I think they were one place out.

2006: Atlantis: Hymns for Disco

2009-08-28T15:11:00.000-07:00

Being the first hip-hop album I really loved. I was introduced to this not long after it came out by my friend Omid, who lived in a student house with myself and four other young men at the time, each of distinctly questionable hygiene and industriousness. Omid and I were the two big music geeks in the house, and regularly took turns to burst into each other's rooms waxing lyrical about the latest thing we were all excited about (before settling down to the number one pastime of the modern undergraduate, Pro Evolution Soccer). Usually we liked what the other had to share. Tougher was finding something we could play communally that all six of us enjoyed, a goal that would have been reached much sooner if I hadn't been the stick-in-the-mud who insisted that Jamiroquai was, in fact, crap.

In the end it was Canadian rapper k-os' third long player, Atlantis: Hymns for Disco, that was the first to be met with unanimous praise. In a genre commercially saturated by hyper-produced superstars, regurgitating the same tired clichés of guns, bitches and bling over Timbaland's ever-thinning beats, what appeals about Atlantis is its organic feel. There are few if any samples, most of the tracks are built around guitar riffs, and the whole thing is blessedly autotune-free. Best of all is that the album rewards repeated listenings, which seems contrary for such an instantly accessible album. For all this, and a man of Kevin Brereton's lyrical flow, skill, verbosity and intelligence, it is a continuing source of puzzlement that he remains relatively unknown outside of his native Canada.

2005: Broken Social Scene

2009-08-28T14:04:00.000-07:00

When The National's Matt Berninger sang in 'So Far Around The Bend' of the song's protagonist 'humming in a haze forever / praying for Pavement to get back together,' he could have been describing Broken Social Scene. The Canadian ensemble craft a far more textured, dreamier sound than Stephen Malkmus' artfully dishevelled rock, but they share the latter's indie spirit, never more so than the moment when this album kicks off proper with 'Ibi Dreams of Pavement (A Better Day)'. When I bought this record I knew little of either Pavement or the eponymous Ibi [Kaslik], but I knew the song fucking rocked.

It was also indicative of what seemed like a new-found swagger. While the first record noodled along contentedly, and the wonderful breakthrough LP You Forgot It In People took strides towards more traditional song structures, Broken Social Scene feels like the band's all-singing, all-dancing pop record, and probably - though I'd love you to prove me wrong when you get around to it, chaps - their masterpiece. Put this on in the morning, when the sun's shining and it's your day off work. Listen to the impossibly joyous trumpet crescendo that brings '7/4 (Shoreline)' to a close, the irresistably catchy 'Fire Eye'd Boy', the boundless energy of 'Superconnected', and all the classic BSS tender moments inbetween. That's the sound of several of this decade's most creative indie-rock musicians pitching in to make something that sounds utterly cohesive, and having a whale of a time along the way.

2004: Funeral

2009-08-26T16:32:00.000-07:00

This is the only album I still listen to that has very specific memories attached to it. I can picture the room, my then bedroom (in 2005 actually), the fact that the curtains or curtain rail had broken, so that even late at night the room was lit by the streetlamps outside. Two or three nights at most, she walked over, and we just lay there and talked 'til we fell asleep. Wonderfully innocent, even though it wasn't a good idea practically. Obvious in the daytime but oblivious in the night. Funeral was the soundtrack, but specifically the first track, 'Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)'. No matter how many times I've listened to it in less magical surrounds since, at work, in different bedrooms, alone or with someone else, that first chiming piano melody never fails to take me back to that time. It's a great record, regardless, but it's possibly the best album of the decade because it has the ability to capture those fleeting, ethereal memories of childhood, of being sequestered from the outside world in 'our bedrooms, and our parents' bedrooms, and the bedrooms of our friends.'

2003: The Decline of British Sea Power

2009-08-26T15:52:00.000-07:00

So one night a friend had come over to stay, and the night had been spent (as I recall) flitting about various bars and houses in Cardiff, the day's alcohol intake having begun at 8.30am with a can of lager to celebrate a friend's birthday awakening. After a day spent ingesting a variety of things I shouldn't have, we ended up in my room, listening this album's mind-blowing fourteen-minute climax, 'Lately'. I was slumped against my door frame, eyes shut tight, mouthing every word. When those words include, 'Do you like my prehistoric rock? Do you like my neolithic rock?' and so forth, it can make one look a little daft. Just saying.

That's the kind of kick I get out of this record though. It is, quite frankly, bloody epic. Starting off with forty-two seconds of Gregorian chanting - as you do - before kicking the doors down with a four-minute punk-rock sonic assault across two songs, the album finally settles into something of a stride with 'Something Wicked'. From hereon in it's sort of like this: breathy vocals, soft, Galaxie 500-esque acoustic melodies, sighing backing vocals... to be interrupted as often as possible by really loud distorted guitars! It's not a particularly new formula for indie rock, but boy do this lot do it well. Fact: 1.53 through 2.06 on 'Fear of Drowning' is the best thirteen seconds of music ever recorded.

2002: Turn on the Bright Lights

2009-08-25T13:28:00.000-07:00

Interpol spawned a slew of imitators in the 00s; that they haven't received more credit for their influence is probably due to the fact that most of the copy-cats ranged from merely half-decent (Bloc Party, She Wants Revenge) to actually terrible (Editors, White Lies). Even Interpol started to sound like a poor imitation of themselves towards the end of the decade.

Okay, so most of the lyrics make no sense. Some are downright terrible, notably the now-infamous line: 'Her stories are boring and stuff / She's always calling my bluff.' What was great about Turn on the Bright Lights, though, was that it was a rock record with little of the bluster associated with that concept: typically, 'meaningful' storytelling lyrics attached to boisterous, balls-out instrumentation. There was nothing remotely shambolic here. The slick, suited look of Paul Banks and co. matched their music to a tee: a neurotically tight rhythm section, mostly clean guitars, and unassuming vocals. Listening to 'Obstacle 1' again, the word syncopated doesn't do the verses justice: drums, bass, and guitar each seem to work frantically to fill every available space in the sonic meter, and yet it all combines to sound effortlessly classy.

Some complain, partly for these reasons, that Interpol are boring, that the songs lack emotion. I say if you're looking for hearts on sleeves, you're missing the point of the record. For me, listening to this album reminded me of hearing Young Marble Giants' seminal Colossal Youth for the first time: a masterclass in sparse, minimalist post-punk, not to mention one of the finest debuts of its era.

2001: Discovery

2009-08-25T12:45:00.000-07:00

It sure was. Though Daft Punk had already been heard around the world following Homework, this was when they seriously blew up. Though James Murphy hadn't yet claimed to be 'the first guy playing Daft Punk to the rock kids', they'd certainly hit a level to justify that kind of boasting. And though it came with a new sound, sleek 'n' smooth enough that you couldn't turn on the television without hearing one of the songs advertising the new Picasso (or whatever), there was nothing sell-out about Discovery whatsoever.

It was simply the sound of a band in love with the pure, blissful pop-rock ballads of their youth, giving those already polished grooves an electronic once-over. I recall one writer saying that 'Digital Love' reminded them of a kids cartoon theme, which seems about right to me, because these songs sound like they've been around your whole life, each tune artifially created by robots in a French computer lab. I guess that's the idea of the whole look. It was only when I was listening to this album a few weeks ago, though, that it occurred to me: someone played that shred guitar; a real human sang those hypnotic (albeit heavily autotuned) vocals; and holy shit, a real pair of humans sat down and wrote these songs. That was when it dawned on me just how special Daft Punk are. And everyone, not least the rock kids who sold their guitars for turntables and synthesizers, continue to dance in agreement.

2000: Kid A

2009-08-25T10:18:00.000-07:00

It's one thing to scoff that it's really not that brave or experimental at all - the band themselves were the first to point out that their own listening at that time was far more obtuse - but let's put things in context here. Radiohead's previous two albums had catapulted them to the level of worldwide, stadium-creaking rock ubiquity that Kings of Leon currently enjoy. And then they dropped this, to the sound of a million fifteen year-olds scratching their heads.

I was one of them. Kid A was just like nothing else I'd heard before. A lot of the songs lacked verses, choruses, guitars, drums, rhythm, singing, or all of them, and yet it was beguiling because of that. It seemed to occupy a world of its own, not least because all the other music I owned at the time sounded more or less like the stuff that filled up the radio, and the CD players of my friends. It was also the first time I really started to think about an album as being not just a collection of songs, but a 'long player' musical experience. The album swells and ebbs with the rhythm of a piece that was meant to be heard in one sitting, though the centrifugal force that is 'Idioteque' undoubtedly stands out, a career highlight for a band whose career is more or less one long series of highlights. It was the turn of the decade and Kid A was to be incredibly influential in the years following its release, as much on the type of records I listened to as the artists who made them.

Sweat, nudity, and Morrissey: that was a good weekend

2009-05-25T14:29:00.000-07:00

I'm skint now. Well, more so. But I'm happy.

My good friend John, who I have not seen for yonks, came up from London on Friday. John is thirty-nine years old, lives on the dole, and gave up on romance three years ago. He is, in spite of all this, the coolest fucker I know. A while ago, he tried to count how many gigs he'd been to in his life and gave up around the 2,500 mark. Amazing.

Friday night we ventured into Chorlton for the 'Friends of Mine' indoor festival thang going on at the Irish Centre, principally to see The Pains of Being Pure At Heart, a band we saw together supporting the Wedding Present last year and fell in love with from the off. I realised when we were on the bus that I'd forgotten my ticket (I'm blond on the inside), so John went in and I spent an hour knocking around Chorlton bars waiting for my flatmate to arrive, who kindly brought it along. It was worth the wait.

The first band we saw were pretty atrocious, one of those odd mis-billings where someone decided that a mad-fer-it, lad-rock outfit in Courteeners haircuts would make a good warm-up for a decidely less macho Brooklynite indie-pop gang in cardigans. 'This one's for anyone who's dropped a pill tonight!' the singer declared before one of the songs, to an audience who one suspects would equate that sentiment with losing their hayfever tablets sooner than swallowing illegal substances. The next and final support act, however, were astonishingly good. Dutch Uncles are a local band I'd heard some good things about, but nothing that prepared me for the wonder ahead. They share a rhythmic kinship with Field Music, and there's a bit of the Foals about them, but they nonetheless create something quite in its own league. What really impressed me was how tight and musically accomplished they were as a band. There was nary a 4/4 in sight - in fact, they work in constantly shifting, ridiculous time signatures - and yet that rhythmic dexterity served to underpin the quality tunes they have, rather than to compensate for a lack of them. This is borderline math-rock, but it's fun and quite, quite brilliant. Also the singer's attire and dancing have to be seen to be believed. Check out Dutch Uncles if you get the chance.

Then came the Pains of Being Pure At Heart. I've waffled on enough already, so I'll try and keep it brief. This was possibly the best gig of my life. I'd just been offered a ticket to see Morrissey the following night, which was the perfect giddy tonic before they came on. When they did, they all looked a little nervous. As soon as they launched into the set though, the crowd went for it. Just as I had upon my frustratingly brief first glimpse of them last year, the audience fell in love with the Pains, and the feeling was apparently mutual. 'This is the best night of our lives... you guys are awesome!' was Kip Berman's response to the delirium in front of him, before dedicating the next song to Manchester. About ten minutes later, still reeling, he was dedicating his second song to the city. I was at the front row, singing, pogo-ing, dancing, whooping, arms aloft. So was more or less everyone else. By the time a bewildered Berman and co. returned to the stage for an encore - in an Irish Working Men's Club, I remind you - band and audience alike were drenched in sweat. We walked back to Withington elated, stickier than most, but most certainly happy.

The following day, I had work at nine. (I worked all Bank Holiday weekend, which, along with the gigs, contributed to my general frazzlement as I write this.) After getting home from work, I longed for nothing more than a nice long nap. Nothing more, that is, than perhaps the sole exception of going to see Mr Steven Patrick Morrissey perform in concert for the first time.

I used to pretty much hate Morrissey's solo stuff. When I lived in Didsbury last year, the two blokes I shared a flat with played his solo stuff all day and all night. I found it all a bit flimsy, twee, too much emphasis on clever words and not enough on interesting music. Recently, that changed big time. Probably because it wasn't blaring out after getting home from a long day's work for the hundreth time, I actually listened to his music for the first time. I discovered his 1994 classic Vauxhall and I, and majestic songs like Speedway and Now My Heart Is Full. I went back to Ringleader of the Tormentors and was bowled over by how much it impressed me, when once I couldn't see its charms. I suddenly saw what made people obsess over the man, and I began to as well.

Bad timing I guess. Standing in the swelling crowd of paunchy, bequiffed men in their thirties at the Apollo, I waited to see the man I had grown to idolise. And thusly he arrived, as an idol in the classic sense: a relic. A Smiths-heavy setlist, while joyous to hear for the many fans there who, like myself, never got a chance to see the short-lived but legendary band, added to the sense that we were watching a tribute act, each audience member colluding in a slightly tragic nostalgia-fest. The contrast could not have been starker. Last night I had seen a band who were at the other end of their career, ferocious in their raw, youthful vigour, and very much at the top of their game; young, beautiful, wide-eyed, and fucking brilliant. It was the kind of gig you immediately felt proud to have witnessed, as I imagine many of the early Smiths concerts were. And, twenty-four hours later, that was just the problem. Morrissey looked bored, washed-out. When he twice tore his shirt off before the crowd, it struck me as a little unnecessary, undignified even, for a man who had just turned fifty the previous evening. And while the older material sounded great, beefed up by the heavier guitar sound of his new band, the songs from his new record fell distinctly flat. No Suedehead, no Everyday Is Like Sunday. I left feeling no less affection for his music, but a tinge of disappointment at what had become of the man himself. Your idols always let you down in the end I suppose.

After this, sweaty once more, we trundled into the city centre to see my friend and co-worker's excellent band, Six 10 Repeater. Terrible name, but great songs, as evidenced by the fact that I have endeavoured to see them every time they play in Manchester. This time they put in as stunning a performance as ever, throwing about every rock shape and pose in the book, but this time there was no adoring crowd to recieve them. Nine Black Alps had been on before them, and Stuart was shitting himself about going on in front of the large audience that had gathered to see them. After NBA added to their label of 'Nirvana tribute act' the prefix 'failed', the room emptied. About seven people watched Six 10 Repeater, of which I constituted the entire front row. Shame, but another great live show nonetheless, marred only by the drummer's repeated insistence on revealing his own chest. Having seen quite enough half-naked men for one evening, I trundled home again.

Which brings us bang up to the present, wherein I am mercifully showered and fully-dressed. No more sweat and nudity for a while ta. Still plenty of Morrissey though, and his successors in indie fandom.

Arms around the stereo: 15/05/09

2009-05-15T01:54:00.000-07:00

227 Lears

2009-03-14T12:33:00.000-07:00

Perhaps it's a generational thing, or perhaps it's a personal foible, but I struggle with history. Or rather I struggle to acquire it: to horde it obsessively, to assemble it within a linear chronology to be reeled off like a stretch of Pi, or to gather up a cache of names, dates, places and other capitalised chunks of data that demonstrate the knowledge of a subject. I think it's just because I've always had a terrible memory, especially for facts. I'd really make a poor historian.

I have, however, always been fascinated by the process itself. I think the human obsession with story-boarding the past is astonishing. Where does it come from? Although history is associated with documenting the past, it could just as easily find its origins in more selfish motives. Ancient Egyptian pharoahs insisting upon stone-carved biographies of their lives were presumably not thinking of the past, but of projecting their own egos into an imagined future, where generations to come would know of their legacies long after their physical death. And it worked. History, from the ancients through to David Irving, seems to be 'done' for a number of reasons, but always with one more or less constant desire: to put the present in some kind of logical context. Rather than leaning too heavily on absolute relativism or absolute imperialism, history has always seemed to me to represent a dialectic between the two: a compromise between recorded events and personal attempts to colour the world with one's own beliefs. Certainly both exist and inform the process of telling the past.

It's in this spirit that I find myself thinking about what is a simultanously tedious and interesting idea: namely that things were better in the past. Of course one could point to the simplest explanation, that it is a belief fostered and propagated by older folk, who need (or choose) to see the generation following their own as deficient in order to bolster their own collective egos. Douglas Adams called it 'clique maintenance'. That's true and real enough.

But it seems to be an increasingly popular attitude among younger people, in Britain at least. For these people the fabled 'golden generation', be it of music, art, cinema, national cricket, or anything else, is always tantalisingly out of reach. It is immaculate because it arrives to us fully formed, a coherent narrative that cannot be tampered with. It is a morbid fascination for sure, and one that finds its apogee in death. Much has been written about the immaculate figure of the youthful corpse. River Phoenix, Jeff Buckley, Ian Curtis, Rimbaud, Aaliyah, James Dean, so on. Even the messiest of lives, such as Kurt Cobain's, prove attractive by way of fossilising so compactly. Morrissey, himself idolised and written about extensively, put it rather bluntly in 'Munich Air Disaster 1958': 'They can't hurt you / And their style will never desert you / Why? Because they're all safely dead.'

Why do even the young now feel the need to reject their own present for a past they weren't alive to experience? It seems as though the teenagers of the 1950s and 60s, those who rejected their parents values and formed their own, are now idolised by a generation reluctant to think for themselves. And yet that isn't quite the case. The truth, I think, is that a great deal of people felt the same way then. History does not remember the dull and the reticent. It is an ironic facet of the historicising process that those who reject the past are destined to become part of it. Marx's dialectical materialism in action.

The history of modern history, then, seems to tell a story in which the hero rejects received opinion and forges a new philosophy. It seems a shame to use it in order to knock current social, cultural and political endeavours in this light, but the appeal of doing so will presumably endure. If history is about making sense of the past, we will surely be drawn to its book-ending qualities ever more feverishly as the present splays into a frayed knot of potential endings. We do not know where we may go from here. The 1958 Manchester United side eulogised in Morrissey's song never won the European Cup they were competing in that season. Their potential was unknown then, though much feted. Death, however, now renders that potential infinite. It is the blessing of the dead that their portfolio will forever remain unsullied. Who knows? Joy Division's third album could have been crap.

It is important to remember the past, just as it is important to remember that it was once the present, with uncertainties and a weight of history upon its own back, as we carry the weight of theirs now. It is always difficult to love something in the present, perhaps because we are increasingly too insecure to develop an emotional attachment to something which might fail, or die, or, worst of all, disappoint. The best we can do is to take a chance on what seems right, and maybe carve a little history of our own.

Single of the Year 2008

2008-12-26T11:24:00.001-08:00

I can't speak with all these words in my mouth

2007-09-23T16:40:00.000-07:00

“The next real literary ‘rebels’ in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point. Maybe that’s why they’ll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal:shock disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the ‘Oh how banal.’ To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law.”

– David Foster Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram” (1993)

I like this quote. I like Cold War Kids for reproducing it in a full-page ad in NME. And yet I'm hesitant to champion its sentiments for a number of reasons.

At first Wallace's essay comes across as completely, almost mind-blowingly, refreshing. Don't you cringe at ironic t-shirts? Isn't sarcasm the dullest form of humour? (I'm reminded of the time that, about an hour after the gig, it finally sunk in for my friend that I really did think Kate Nash's performance at the Dot to Dot Festival was brilliant. A bit like the episode of The Simpsons, 'Homerpalooza': "Oh, here comes that cannonball guy. He's cool." "Are you being sarcastic, dude?" "I don't even know any more.") Aren't you a little worried that you tend to work out life events through examples from TV shows?

Actually these aren't new questions at all, are they? What Wallace taps into is something that a lot of people have been feeling for a long time, probably since transtextual postmodern irony became the native tongue of a new so-called 'Generation X' society some time in the 1980s. And I say transtextual, because Wallace's use of the phrase 'double-entendre' merely implies one extra meaning, when a lot of the time many layers of textual reference are at work. This picture would merely be a Wallacean (Wallacist? whatever) double-entendre if it weren't for the fact that it was also parodying the Roy Liechtenstein cartoons employed in Douglas Coupland's Generation X, which in turn parodied pop art, which in turn parodied comic strips...

Is your head spinning? It should be. But even if what I've written above sounds like garbled nonsense, that is the process you go through every day, reading irony. You recognise and applaud when TV shows are ripping on other TV shows, or even their own show. It's automatic. When we speak, our generation speaks in a thousand voices.

And yet, isn't that pretty much the way it's always been? Is a 'single-entendre' really a purer, less adulterated way of communicating? I don't think so. I'm not as sure anymore, as I once was, that people hide behind irony and postmodern discourse, or that pop culture references are used as a substitute for humour. Not always. Sometimes we yearn, like Wallace (and Cold War Kids), for clarity of expression. But here's the clincher: Cold War Kids quoted Wallace to get their point across. Sometimes the language we speak is garbled crap - I apologise if mine is in my clumsy attempt to get a point across - but sometimes it's just richer.

Otherwise there'd be no poetry.

Daily Express, 05/09/07

2007-09-04T15:40:00.000-07:00

Daily Express, 04/09/07

2007-09-04T15:09:00.001-07:00

Daniel Kitson

2007-09-02T11:21:00.000-07:00

"We must reclaim the night from the cunts and the slags because the night is when the adventures happen. Moonlight, starlight, candle light and torch light: those are the four adventure lighting options."

'The liberals can be just as bad...'

2007-08-31T14:19:00.001-07:00

Another quote plucked from the (electronic) lips of Ms. E.A. Black, and just something that's struck me as true lately. Or, in some cases, it might be more apt to say that the conservatives can be just as bad. It all depends upon what quadrant of the political compass the status quo lies really.

First case in point.

Wheen makes a lot of good points about political beaurocracy, purposefully opaque intellectual posturing and pseudo-scientific mysticism. Unfortunately chapter after chapter is crammed with abominable non-sequiturs, offering his Mail-reading fanbase a chance to dismiss anything that is difficult to understand by tarring it with the same bullshit brush waved at much easier targets, such as astrology.

Let's just say there is a lot of intellectual foul-play on Wheen's (and his peers') part at hand. One of the most dishonest critical, intellectual, even scientific practices is to take the exception and hold it up as the rule - or to take the extreme and present it as the commonplace. So critical theory takes a bashing by way of some daft excesses in the field of feminist theory (Luce Irigaray's notorious criticism of E=mc2 as a 'sexed equation' because it values the speed of light over other equally necessary forces is just one example of her barminess) and linguistics (the otherwise groundbreaking Saussure, who equates the 'erectile organ' to the square root of minus one). Writers such as Wheen and Dawkins, and no doubt many more, have followed this with some kind of withering reference to 'trendy French philosophers', usually namechecking Foucault or Deleuze/Guattari. And just like that, in a breath, the whole French tradition has been swept under the rug. Barthes' accessible, emotionally frank and at times moving works, gone. Foucault's extensive histories of sexuality, dismissed.

Second case in point. (Be sure to read the liner notes at the bottom of the page.)

Critical and cultural theory is a much maligned field of academic study, and the embarassing truth is that a lot of it is dismissed simply because it is goddamned hard. Derrida is infamously capricious in his thinking, and certainly not one I would put forward as an ambassador for the the utility of cultural studies, but even this trickster offers a wonderful glimpse into the way we order the world, if persevered with.

A lot of it is also dismissed, however, as part of a trend (sometimes) mistakenly labelled as 'postmodernism', misconstrued as a kind of 'anything goes' philosophy where everything is relative and there is no truth. There are thinkers like this, but again, they are not representative. This is what I meant in the opening paragraph. The liberals can be terrible for all sorts of reasons - I'm applying it to something of specific interest to me here - but mainly because they can be too easily lost in theory. The conservatives are too wary of theory, often describing what is essentially their own worldview, with its peaks and troughs of knowledge about that world, as 'common sense' or 'the real world' (the latter will grate particularly on graduate students!).

Why does cultural theory come in for such a hard time? So much political writing is dross, and yet we count it as an essential part of human intellectual endeavour. English Literature is an outdated institution (especially the way it is currently taught) and yet we cling to it and defend it, even if a degree in English Literature is as relevant - or, I would suggest, less relevant - than a degree in Cultural Studies. There is one reason I would dare to suggest, and it is this: Cultural Studies is new, which means that (a) it is treated with hostility and derision, because it does not carry the historical distinction of better aquainted academic studies, (b) it is simply less understood. There is a lot of crap written under the banner of Cultural Studies, like there is for any of the Humanities. And yet, as I have only very briefly pointed towards, it already carries a rich history of its own, in danger of being ignorantly washed away under the tidal wave of 'anti-postmodernist' rhetoric.

Never has the baby been thrown out for the sake of so little bathwater.

Sound & Vision

2007-08-01T15:43:00.001-07:00

Mark Ronson plays Phil Spector for the day. No wait! It's good. There's no trumpets or anything... I think. Candie Payne has a wonderful voice, it's a shame she wasn't in the Pipettes, and that the Pipettes didn't have more good songs.

This is a song that was included on that actually-quite-good NME cover CD, Canadian Blast. Reminds me of Radiohead's 'How To Disappear Completely' a little bit, especially the bassline that sort of starts to meander its way into it, as if it were drifting itself do you see.

This band are amazing and I'm just gutted it took me so long to find them.

Ditto. This even has guitars in it. Distorted ones. Rar.

This is quite similar to the Weakerthans, but equally brilliant. Ellen probably now regrets texting me about three months ago saying, 'I've found this band I think you'll like,' because every time I went round to her place I put this song on. For a good long while. N.B. Los Campesinos! supported them in Newport too, back in May I think. Probably the most fun gig I've ever been to. I think me and Ellen possibly barn-danced during this.

Part III.

2007-07-22T16:09:00.000-07:00

'I thought it classic...'

Idealizing, Part II.

2007-07-22T15:15:00.000-07:00

From Always Merry and Bright: The Life of Henry Miller:

'Typically, during the years that Henry was catching the clap and learning about women from burlesque, he also built up an intense idealism about love and was always looking for a woman to worship. His mother always told him how much he had adored her, and he seemed to be seeking another woman to serve. Cora Seward, a schoolmate at Eastern District High, seemed to meet his need fully. He was thoroughly intimidated at first glance by the physical Cora - with her firm upstanding breasts, full mouth, and apple blossom cheeks - but he was completely annihilated by the image of her which his yearnings created. She seemed too perfect ever to be possessed. Everything about her appeared radiant, romantic and distant; her porcelain blue eyes shimmered like icebergs, mirrors of her Arctic soul; her hair was perfectly blonde, like Guinevere's in The Idylls of the King. He was as helpless as Galahad. . . All he wanted to do was adore her from afar.

'Though the other boys thought it easy to jump in front of her and give her a squeeze in the dark before she could resist, Henry could never treat Cora in that common way. He made no progress in his love affair: he really didn't want to make any. After all, for sex there were plenty of beery old sluts slinking around Herald Square - Henry needed a woman to worship.

'In the summer of that year, Cora went to Asbury park with her family while Henry began his drudgery at Atlas Cement. With Cora physically removed, he liked her all the better, and he wrote long, serious letters to her. She answered him only a few times during this bitter season, but whether or not a letter waited on the mantelpiece for him, he experienced a lot of romantic anguish.

'Several times he had the same dream. He and Cora, a perfect Cora, were at a party together. As usual, Henry played hard to get, ignored her and even treated her disdainfully, until George Wright announced that Cora, disgusted with his behaviour, had fled the house. Wild with grief, Henry rushed out to bring her back. But it was too late! Repeated, the dream became wearisome. Worse, the dream was true - Henry was driving her away. He said that he wanted Cora, but he wanted a divine ideal; he could not accept the fleshly Cora and rejected her by his reverence.'

Idealizing, Part I.

2007-07-22T14:51:00.000-07:00

I was browsing through films to rent the other day, with my mother, and we got onto the conversation of horror films. She can't stand them and can't watch them. Not the gory ones anyway.

The gory ones, of course, aren't the scary ones. You see one as a kid maybe, and you're terrified. But you become desensitised. I've seen Hostel, all of the Saw series, etc. I find the Saw franchise particularly interesting, and, unless I'm being terribly naive, to me those films realise (or at least attempt) the zenith of the genre. They all more or less rest on the same basic premise, which is this: What if you woke up in a situation of unparalleled horror? A horror beyond words, too terrible to imagine? And what if it wasn't a dream, but a reality? Your chest/jaw is going to be ripped open by a reverse-bear trap, unless you can fish out a key from corrosive acid/a dead person's stomach? What if the series of events could lead to revenge on the people who you consider to be variously accountable for your young child's death? And so on. It's the height of visual and psychological torment. And yet I, and many of my friends of various dispositions towards the genre, can watch these films and not be haunted by them. Why?

Because horror is, of course, not about what is shown, what is said or done; it is precisely about what is hidden, unspoken, undisclosed - and yet teetering on the parameters of your consciousness. Hitchcock has been spoken about as the 'master of suspense'. He may not have had the special effects budget (or capabilities back then) to create the graphic spectacles we are presented with today, but this worked to his advantage. 'Suspense': meaning, literally, to suspend; not to remove, or obliterate, but to captivate the audience by evoking feelings in them that the worst is always just around the corner, a monstrous apparation that is omnipotent in the mind because it can only ever be cauterised by realisation. Scary, in other words, is that which you know exists, but which you refuse to confront. If you confront it, if you throw off the sheet and say, 'This is your monster,' it is no longer as terrible.

It can never be as terrible as it was in your mind.

Snakes on a Barge

2007-07-21T14:39:00.000-07:00

Edit 15/03/09: In the absence of the photographs taken that day, which I used to weave this crazy tale together, the story itself makes little sense. They seem to no longer be online. For sentimental reasons, though, I'm keeping it up.

It was a gloomy day in Bristol, and a group of friends were attending the 2007 Dot to Dot festival. Drinks were quaffed, cigarettes legally smoked, and a good time had by all.

Waiting for the next band to start, the crew couldn't help but notice a mysterious man sitting next to them. He was toying with something in his hands, and kept looking into middle-distance, as if towards a camera. Thankfully I'd brought my special hooded top, designed to camouflage against the Bristol skyline. I donned my hood and watched with interest, trying to work out the nature of his endeavours.

I couldn't see what was going on. It looked innocent enough, but on closer inspection I could see that some process was already underway before our very eyes.

He's building something! But what, and to what nefarious ends? It appeared to me like some kind of grotesque butchery carried out in the name of medical science. I saw limbs, heads, eyes, all the subtle hues of the rainbow. Yet the weather was darkening; no rainbow in sight, only a diabolical bungle of twisted body parts and ideology. As the fingers worked frantically at the bloody mess before me, I could only imagine what manner of evils were finding new shape and life in the ovarian promise that his hands were delivering.

Then it all became horrifyingly clear.

A reptilian army. And he was breeding them. Yet still I could not fathom in what name this abhorration of nature had been so bastardly wrought. My mind was racing at the speed of danger, trying to piece together the parts of this terrible jigsaw puzzle - but nothing would fit. Just then, as the barge jolted my senses and sea-nausea took hold, I saw in an instant a terrifying vision flash before my eyes...

I saw their innocent heads, full to the brim with hopes, dreams, desires, thoughts of love lost and love anew, all dashed. This villain, this progenitor of abomination, was planning to release his army unto the unsuspecting heads of the gig-goers!

I knew I had to think fast. The next gig was in less than ten minutes, and if I didn't act quickly, that reptilian army would have seized a strangehold over the ship, and its inhabitant's necks, that would surely prove impossible to break.

I watched closely. There was undeniably a communication of sorts passing between this man and his evil army. I maintained surveillance under my hooded disguise. It wasn't spoken communication, nor any sign language i recognised. I looked closer. Surely not...

Of course!

I took a moment to compose my thoughts. It made sense, and yet I was loathed to believe it. The reptilian army was being controlled by his posing!

There was no time to think up a plan; already we were being ushered into the venue, the place where it seemed we would all meet our makers unless something could be done - and fast.

We took our places amidst the throng of music-lovers, and I broke the news to my accompanying friends. After much hushed deliberation, no response was forthcoming. The band came on stage, and I silently prayed. The situation was utterly hopeless. Just then, the diminutive Emily grabbed at my waist:

"The reptilian army is controlled by his posing, right?"

Sure. Where was she going with this? The band continued to tune their instruments, a sound of unparalleled menace to my ears.

"Well, he seems to master them by way of his indomitable ability to pose all the time and with greater breadth of expression than any man I've seen. If all of us pose as hard as possible, maybe we could sway the army into our powers!"

It seemed crazy, but things were about to get a lot crazier. Without hesitation, I began to rally the others. After explaining the situation as quickly as possible, they all agreed. It was now or never.

Ellen and Emily posed with all their might, biting their cheeks til blood spilled, pushing their lips out til their upper jaw strained.

"It's not working!," Emily cried out in despair. The wicked genius' posing ability was too great, and the army remained poised on the ceiling, waiting to strike. The girls' efforts were producing a visible effect though, as the army writhed and twitched in confusion. Ellen stepped forward.

"We need your help Matt. Our posing is distracting the reptile army, but they remain under his sway. You have to join us."

"No problem" I replied, and stepped in to join them. But as I moved, I felt Ellen's hand on my shoulder.

"Wait. If we're going to break his power over the reptiles, we need to summon all our posing power. Matt," she sighed, "we need you to pull the gayest face ever. This isn't about MySpace or Facebook. This is about saving mankind."

I turned around and looked her in the eyes, then smiled. "Don't worry about that." But I was worried. Deeply worried. Even still, I knew that what Ellen was saying made sense. I looked around to see Emyli and Keiran had already begun.

As soon as I saw Keiran's face wracked with effort, I knew that I would have to emulate that level. We all would. I joined Emily and Ellen and we turned around. Ellen began to count.

"One... Two..."

"Quickly, there's no time!" I shouted across at her, as the first frogs and snakes began to drop from the ceiling.

"Three!"

A flash of light.

I looked up in disbelief. We had not succeeded in swaying the reptilian army into our powers. No, the sight that stood before me was far more remarkable.

Covering the ceiling was a thick layer of green, yellow, orange and black goo. The army, to our astonishment, had exploded.

"Damn you!" cursed the evil genius. "Now I have to sit through this sub-Klaxons shite for the next forty minutes!"

"You're insane" I called out across the room. "For while that is now true for all of us, did you stop to think about the consequences of releasing a reptilian army into this room? Did you really think that your posing was controlling the creatures, or just driving them to destruction?"

The man stood in shock, the raw substance that he used to craft the army now dripping, lifeless, into his hands. Dust to dust.

Then we saw Kate Nash, who played an awesome set and then had sex with me for twelve hours afterwards.

Back on the deck of the barge after my romp, spirits were high. The clan had defeated the evil spawn and saved Bristol, and perhaps humanity. The evil genius, who turned out to be some guy called Michael, was released from the mania that had previously saturated his thoughts, and joined in with the ensuing mirth.

"Just one question, Mike. How did you get all those reptiles to breed with each other so easily?"

"Ah," he responded, "that's simple. I gave them some frog's-porn!"

Monstrum In Fronte, Monstrum In Anime

2007-07-13T05:56:00.001-07:00

The new effort from You Say Party! We Say Die! who will, delightfully, be making up numbers (and indeed, exclamation marks) on the forthcoming Los Campesinos! UK tour.

It's only the ruddy single of the year, innit.

Pure Morning

2007-06-14T17:33:00.000-07:00

And it's all the mornings we missed for sleep
As the sun glides over our apartment

Contrary to habit, I am a morning person. The quality of my mood throughout the day is proportionate to the time at which I get up. One of my fondest memories of recent times is getting up at 6am to drive to a car boot sale with my mum, where we'd offload bric-a-brac (or rather, she'd offload our unwanted household crap while I wandered around picking up cheap albums and books). But my memory is of standing in the kitchen before leaving, bathed in the iridescent red of that day's sunrise.

They honestly seem like two different worlds to me, the dissonant noise and chatter of day-time (along with the dissonant noise and chatter of night-time) and the sheer tranquility of early morning, a few hours where, blissfully, nothing at all seems to be going on.

Maybe it's a corny sentiment (though a sentiment shared, as it turns out, by the man who took the excellent photo above), but it's a wonderful experience. I feel sharper in every sense, intellectually and emotionally, and it's surprisingly liberating.