Another Form of Relief

Thanks to me being a little out of it over the past week (constant painkillers = fun!), I’ve been pretty lazy in my blogging. This means that I haven’t posted about some awesome new band or whatever in over a week now, which is pretty awful. I assure you that this will be rectified in the near future, but for tonight I’d like to present you with Another Form of Relief’s fourth mixtape, entitled ‘Let’s Get Literary!’.

The theme of this one is pretty simple. It’s a collection of songs that have some literary theme, either through their words, their subject matter or in a couple of cases, their titles. It’s not the tightest collection ever put together, but it’s kind of fun, particularly for dorky music listeners like myself who get a kick out of references to authors and books and the such. Best of all, there’s not a Thom Yorke song in sight.

MP3 Belle & Sebastian – Wrapped Up In Books (expired)
Not really a literary song in it’s own right, but how could you have a mixtape of this nature and not include some Belle and Sebastian, particularly when they have an awesome little song called ‘Wrapped Up In Books’? Belle and Sebastian songs always come across as being closer to prose in their lyrics than most pop songs anyway, so I’m happy to let them slide in here, and it does set a wonderful tone for the songs that follow.

MP3 The Pop Project – House Of Books (expired)
The Pop Project are a band from Michigan that I discovered thanks to Bethanne at Clever Titles Are So Last Summer (two shout outs in two posts.. terrible) writing about them. They have a nice, cheerful sound that works perfectly, assuming you don’t mind a little sunshine in your music from time to time. The song is all about living inside a fictional world made out of your books or something. Not that it really matters when it’s this much fun.

MP3 Ryan Adams – Sylvia Plath (expired)
Well you can always rely on Ryan Adams to bring the mood down, can’t you? ‘Sylvia Plath’ is a great song, but by god it’s depressing. The melancholy vocals, the restrained piano, and the general miserable subject matter of wanting someone who is depressed to the point of suicide. That said, Ryan Adams is far better when he’s in this kind of a state than he is when trying to rock, so I’m not going to complain too much.

MP3 Modest Mouse – Bukowski (expired)
One of my favourite Modest Mouse songs, although it isn’t particularly about Bukowski other than the narrator singing about how his life is turning into something out of a Bukowski novel. The song itself is pretty much entirely a slight against the fundamentalist view of what God is supposed to be (“If God takes life, he’s an Indian giver / .. / God, who’d wanna be such an asshole?”). I’m a fan of any song that tries to challenge beliefs or offer up something controversial, and being a proud rider on the Heathen Bus makes me appreciate this all the more. Take away the content though and it’s still a mighty catchy song.

MP3 MC Lars – Ahab (expired)
MP3 MC Lars – Mr. Raven (expired)
A couple of literary adaptations offered up by MC Lars. Being an English major, he seems to enjoy working a lot of literary content into his work. There’s a third song like this called ‘Rapbeth’ but it’s pretty awful. ‘Ahab’ is an awful lot of fun, telling the story of ‘Moby Dick’ from Ahab’s point of view, somehow managing to work in a Supergrass sample for the chorus. ‘Mr. Raven’ does much the same thing for Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Raven’. It also has to be the most stacked pop culture namecheck song ever, managing to work in Paris Hilton, Bob Dylan, Michael Moore, the Fugees, Fred Durst and Nietzsche all into the same song, as well as a fun Vanilla Ice parody. All this and it still manages to retain the story of ‘The Raven’ relatively well.

MP3 Holiday With Maggie – A Girl Like You (expired)
So we enter a little section on relationship songs that somehow connect to literature. Holiday With Maggie are a band that I keep meaning to write about, but never seem to get around to thanks to not really liking their newer material. This song though is from a time when they still sounded like 60s pop crossed with Weezer, and thus is rather excellent. The literary link is tenuous, pretty much just the guy first saw the girl in the library reading. It’s enough for me though, even if half of these are just very poor excuses to get a bunch of good songs in one post.

MP3 Rhett Miller – Our Love (expired)
I know a lot of people find Rhett Miller to be a little too middle of the road for their liking, and I’m one of them on the most part. I like a handful of his songs though, and this is one of them. The choruses are pretty cheesy, but the verses make up for them, with nice little stories about the unrequited love of both Richard Wagner (I originally wrote Robert..) and Franz Kafka. The upbeat style of the song masks the misery in the words (“Kafka in his letters to his lover Milena was alive / But he was waiting for a love that never would arrive”) very well. It’s just a shame that the depth in the choruses couldn’t get beyond the repetition of “our love”.

MP3 Pants Yell! – My Boyfriend Writes Plays (expired)
The point where the relationship with a writer falls apart. The narrator is getting bored of his relationship with his playwright boyfriend (“It’s some sense of purpose for you / Fuck your stories, I’m leaving, it’s true / All your prose and one act songs / Were never meant for me”) and keeps promising to leave. Whether this is an idle threat or not, we’ll never know, that ambiguity adding to the song. I also have a great love for any band that can use the word “fuck” with such seriousness while still sounding so twee. It’s not an easy move to pull off.

MP3 Camera Obscura – Books Written For Girls (expired)
A song from back when Camera Obscura didn’t solely make upbeat 60s pop numbers. Actually, that might be a bit harsh, I haven’t really listened to ‘Let’s Get Out Of This Country’ enough yet. ‘Books Written For Girls’ is a melancholy piece about the end of a relationship between seemingly two very quirky people (“Give me marks out of ten for the clothes that I wear / .. / He reads books written for girls / Prides himself on being a man of the world”). There is always a certain sadness in Traceyanne’s voice whatever the song is, but something like this just brings it out even further.

MP3 Belle & Sebastian – Le Pastie De La Bourgeoisie (expired)
And so we come full circle and end with one of the finest Belle and Sebastian songs. A fun song about a slightly nerdy girl who doesn’t really fit in with everyone and so takes refuge in the worlds of Salinger and Kerouac as a means of a escape. Which may be slightly weird worlds to want to take refuge in, but I guess they would be pretty interesting. Oh how I wish B&S still made songs like this one.

I hope you enjoy at least some of the songs here. I had a lot of fun putting it together anyway. Now I just need to come up with an idea for our next mixtape type thing. They seem to be appearing every two or three weeks at the moment, which is quite a good rate I think. We’ll be getting back to more regular posting following this one seeing as I’m feeling a fair bit better than I have been over the past week, so be sure to keep checking back to actually see some new content!

Boy am I late in posting this up. I was originally going to do it last night but was too tired by the time I got home around 1:30am. Handy tip for bloggers: if you’re going to go to the pub and be out until the wee hours, write your posts before you go as you sure as hell won’t want to by the time you get back. Anyways, then I decided to leave it until this morning, when I got sidetracked after learning that the awesome £3.99 sale in Virgin has now become a £1.99 sale. This meant I had to go and buy another 11 discs from it. I’m finally here now though, and I have a new mixtape type thing for your enjoyment.

Now I’m rather nerdy myself, and I’d hazard a guess that quite a few of you reading are too. I think everyone is nerdy is their own way actually, whether it’s about music, film, politics, sport or whatever, and this is certainly no bad thing. At least I hope that it isn’t given the number of things I know far too much about. As such, today we have a little mix dedicated to appreciating the dorky, nerdy, geeky or whatever you want to call it. If you’re wondering, the title ‘Nerding It Up’ doesn’t really mean anything, it was just something I used to describe a very, very geeky conversation in a pub once, and I kind of liked the phrase.

MP3 Weezer – In The Garage (expired)

What else could I open a nerdy mixtape with other than this? Probably one of the first great celebration of geekdom songs there was, and it’s certainly awesome. Covering the geek staples of Dungeons & Dragons, comic books and rock bands, it’s a wonderful ode to having a space where one can entirely be themselves no matter what anyone else thinks. Of course seeing as it’s Weezer, Rivers has to get in a little negativity about himself and his abilities (“I play my stupid songs / I write these stupid words”). Which is all very ironic given their recent material, but let’s not go there.

MP3 Something Corporate – Babies Of The 80s (expired)

I’ve mentioned my liking of Something Corporate despite their distinct lack of “indie cool” in the past, so you’re just going to have to deal with them being a part of this. Songs don’t really get much more dorky than this, and it’s all the more great by the fact it’s a nostalgic trip through everything of the 80s. Star Wars, MTV, Nick At Night, Toys R Us and a bunch of other stuff is all in here, and it sounds good. I really don’t get what people have against Something Corporate actually, they make some awesome pop songs.

MP3 Mixel Pixel – At The Arcade (expired)

Couldn’t really leave off a song called ‘At The Arcade’ now, could I? Thankfully it’s a good, fun song too. Essentially the tale of a boy meeting a girl at the arcade (she’s playing Pacman) and the awkwardness that follows. Until they get it together and just get stoned together.

MP3 The Rakes – iProblem (expired)

The ultimate in songs that name check other artists. Not only do The Rakes reference Bloc Party, Babyshambles, The Go! Team, The Futureheads and Kasabian, they also manage to mimic some of them a little. All of this while lead singer Alan is talking to Apple tech support about getting his iPod fixed. If you’ve ever spent time on a customer service helpline, this will be so very true (“I’ve been on the line about fifteen minutes now / And I’m starting to get a little bit annoyed / No, I know it’s not your fault / Are you really in India?”). It’s hardly a musical masterpiece, but it rarely fails to put a smile on my face.

MP3 MC Lars – Space Game (expired)

I know I said I wouldn’t post any MC Lars for a while, but the guy has an entire discography that could fit in with this theme. Narrowing it down to one was pretty hard, but it had to be ‘Space Game’ in the end, merely for the fact it references more scifi films, tv shows and comics than I can count. I won’t even begin to cover the references here, but when a song includes lines like “Hey Fry, look, we can still be friends / I won’t ask Leela out again”, I think it’s safe to say that it doesn’t get any geekier than that. Throw in an awesome guest appearance by ‘DJ HAL’ (yes, that HAL), and you’ve got the most gleefully geeky song I’ve ever heard.

MP3 Ozma – Game Over (expired)

This could almost be a sequel to the Mixel Pixel song earlier on. ‘Game Over’ charts the end of a relationship as the end of a video game (“I bet you don’t know how to find / Our extra lives times ninety nine / I know you tried but we still died”). Ozma are another band where there are a whole bunch of songs that fit the theme, so let’s all be happy that they are back together again after a three year hiatus. I also love the video game type music that seems to be in the background through most of the song too, and any song that refers to the other half in a relationship as “2P” is going to win me over.

MP3 Hartley Goldstein – The Mystery Of George Harrison’s Beard (expired)

Is there a bigger geek currently recording music? On the basis of Hartley’s five song EP, “Songs In The Key Of Zoloft”, I think not. In other songs he sings all about his hero, music producer Brad Wood, and sings a love song to the good Woody Allen films of the 70s. This one is all about growing up as a lonely nerd and never really getting past that even in adulthood (“But now I’m old and those days are gone / And everything I used to like now is no fun / I’m 23 and I wish I was a third grade”). Apparently there will be some new Hartley material coming later on this year, which is more exciting to me than just about every other upcoming release.

Bonus MP3 Ozma – Korobeinki (expired)

Honestly, if after listening to this one, you have no idea why I included it, you’ve probably been readng the wrong post.

So on friday we headed down to Tunbridge Wells to see our first concert this year, made up of MC Lars and a bunch of local bands. I’m going to preface this by saying a little about the Tunbridge Wells Forum itself. I should have expected the worst when I was told that it was converted from Britain’s largest public toilets. To say that it probably hasn’t changed a great deal is something of an understatement, leading to a venue that gets massively overhot, is incredibly cramped and looks pretty shabby. Oh, and there’s also the slightly worrying factor that we were about the oldest people there, despite their over 16s policy. Still, complaints about the venue aside, it was a pretty awesome night.

We got there a little late to avoid the massive pile of cloned individual kids outside, meaning that we missed the opening set from Fleeing From Finales. We got in part of the way through the set by Furniture Sound who were pretty solid, but really need to settle on a lead singer. As it stands, each song seems to be sung by a different member of the band, leading to a wildly variable quality level. The final support act was Pictures of Shanghai who were ok if whiny emo that sounds exactly the same is your thing, but it grated a little by the time they played their one song for the sixth time.

It was during one of these support acts that I wandered over to the merchandise booth where MC Lars was selling his own stuff and managed to have a little chat with him. He was incredibly nice and gracious, even if it’s hard to actually hear people when you’ve got Fall Out Boy Jnr rocking their little hearts out in the background. Should have probably got him to sign something, but didn’t give it a great deal of thought at the time. He introduced me to his drummer (think his name was Jake, can’t recall too well) who was also friendly. I’m making a big deal out of this because this is about the closest I’ve ever been to a “celebrity”, pathetic as that is.

Anyways, he eventually took to the stage with his Powerbook full of samples of backing tracks. I’d also like to note that he was wearing an awesome Nintendo jacket, which he took off pretty quickly, much to the dismay of Simon who seemed to think it was the best thing about his act. He got the show off to an upbeat start with ‘Hurricane Fresh’, but after that I’m not too clear about exactly what he played. I know he got through a lot of songs, including ‘21 Concepts’, ‘UK Visa Versa’, ‘Download This Song’, ‘Rapgirl’, ‘Straight Outta Stockholm’ and ‘Hot Topic Is Not Punk Rock’, the irony being lost on most of the audience who would be the kind of to shop at Hot Topic if it existed over here. He even found time for a pretty good cover of The Bloodhound Gang’s ‘The Bad Touch’, which probably got the best reaction of the night. It was a fun set for me given I knew the songs pretty well beforehand, whether or not it was able to win over any new fans is another matter, but it seemed to all go down pretty well. The last song I heard was ‘Signing Emo’, which may or may not have been the last song, but we escaped slightly early to avoid the hoardes of kids on their way out.

Other events of note from the night included me and Adam being recognised by someone from our local pub. This might not seem strange, but given we have no idea who it was and this place was 30 miles away, it was pretty bizarre. Apparently there was also something major going on outside, with rumours of fights and “lots of casulties out there”, which always inspires confidence in a venue. Still, other than that, it was a fun night all round, and reinforced my intent to try and get to more live shows, even if it means travelling a little.

I swear this’ll be the last time that I pimp MC Lars for a little too, I know it’s been a tad excessive lately.

MP3 MC Lars – iGeneration
MP3 MC Lars – Hurricane Fresh

Picture credit: “spacepaul”, taken from TW Forum message board.

As a way of not writing a proper update, today we’re going to talk about the concert that myself, fellow contributor Simon and our good friend Adam will be attending this evening. Tonight will be seeing the mighty MC Lars live. For those of you lucky enough to have a good music scene locally where you get to see a lot of live music, this probably wouldn’t be all that exciting. Given my own track record in going to concerts (or gigs as the kids seem to call them these days), which consists of two (Weezer and Art Brut) in the past five years, this is quite the event.

For those you just joining us who may be unfamiliar with Lars, he’s a “post punk laptop rapper”. You can read my previous entry about him here. At the time I had no idea that he was touring the UK, or more interestingly to me, was playing in a relatively local venue. As such, the three of us will be heading down to the Tunbridge Wells Forum to see him perform. Which should be interesting if only for seeing just how much Simon and Adam think he’s a crime against music. I should think the same really, I don’t like rap and should find all of this rather pathetic, but I find him far too awesome, catchy and nerdy to dislike it. I mean come on, the guy is wearing a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles jacket in that picture. Who could hate him after that?

More standard indie rock fare will be playing the support in the guise of Fleeing From Finales, Pictures Of Shanghai and Furniture Sound. I’ll be honest and say I haven’t heard of any of them previously, but they seem reasonable enough from giving them quick listens, so hopefully they will bring something good.

I imagine I’ll post some detailed report or something tomorrow. I’d promise pictures, but seeing as my decent phone (yes, I’m lazy and take pictures with a phone) is still broken so that probably won’t be happening. Still, hopefully I’ll be able to by the time my next concert rolls around in 2009.

MP3 MC Lars – iGeneration
MP3 MC Lars – Hurricane Fresh

I’m aware going into this that there isn’t a way I can post this without losing at least some credibility with some of the people who read this thing, and I’m comfortable with that.

The man you see to your left is Lars Horris (edit: apparently his real name is actually Andrew Nielsen, proving why I shouldn’t be allowed to write about things I don’t know). He’s a rapper. No, seriously, he is. He raps under the slightly more rap name of MC Lars. My initial reaction was that he must be a joke, but I’m doubting that more and more now.

Lars describes himself a “post-punk laptop rapper”. It’s a reasonable description. All of his songs are created on a laptop, and this seems to be his only backing when he performs live too. As for the post-punk bit, there’s a bunch of punk and rock samplings in his songs, and he even gets other bands to regularly feature in his work. He’s also incredibly post-modern. So much so that he “doesn’t even exist”.

The thing of it is though, to someone who has no idea what represents good rap or hip hop type music, I find his songs to be incredibly catchy. I haven’t quite worked out whether or not this is down to the fact he’s good at what he does, or it’s the nerd appeal that drags me in. By nerd appeal, I mean the slew of clever references to everything dorky, from using netspeak in his songs (LOL, OMG, yo, BRB) to entire songs about science fiction characters (HAL-9000 guests on one track) and a bunch of other things like Myspace, Netflix, emo bands and a new game he’s invented to replace Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, this one featuring Kurt Cobain.

He’s also very, very angry. About everything. The lead off single from his new album, ‘The Graduate’, is entitled ‘Download This Song’, and it’s not in the least bit ironic. The entire thing is a tirade against the RIAA and their ilk. He’s angry about punk posers (‘Hot Topic Is Not Punk Rock’), and the state of the world in general. Hell, he’s still angry about an old roomate from college.

MP3 MC Lars – Download This Song (expired)

MP3 MC Lars – iGeneration
MP3 MC Lars – Hurricane Fresh

The main thing about all of this is that I don’t know whether or not I’ve been had. Even if MC Lars is attempting to be a serious rapper, does he know he won’t be taken seriously in rap circles so is just throwing in all these references just to appeal to the dorks like me? If I’m honest, I probably would give him a second look if he was rapping about the generic crap most rappers do. I suppose it doesn’t really matter in the long run, as I like the songs, and that’s the part that matters.