Arseholes

Every now and again at work, everyone comes across a person who it seems is going out of their way to make your life more difficult. When things begin to go wrong they revel in it, even if it will make their life more difficult later on. Anything that goes wrong is someone elses fault and they will accept no responsibility. Anything that people suggest is a stupid idea even if it is a method that has worked time and time again.
In live music, teamwork is one of the most important skills you can have. The ability to get along with people is as important a part of getting people to trust you as having the skills or the experience. There's no place for massive egos when you're working as part of a team, where anyone can make a mistake and it will effect the running of the event.
Being an arsehole is counter intuative, and to everyone around you, makes you look like the fool, not to mention unexperienced.

A few albums I can't wait for this year.

Jonsi- Go
I'm not entirely sure where I first heard Sigur Ros, probably on a BBC ad for some wildlife program, but I remember the first album I listened to, and I remember how I felt after. The odly named "()" was one of those few albums that comes around that really does change how you think about what constitutes good music, and makes you wonder what else you'e missed with your particular brand of snobbery. Oddly it was probably this mental shift that got me listening to more music, completely unrelated to the post-rock ambience of Sigur Ros.
Sigur Ros haven't released anything now since 2008, but Jonsi released the interesting if slightly disappointing Riceboy Sleeps with his boyfriend Alex last year, which was essentially a solo effort, with alex proiding the visual art for the album. I was only disappointed with Riceboy Sleeps because of what came before it, which was in my opinion the best Sigur Ros album to date- Með Suð Í Eyrum Við Spilum Endalaust, the perfect compromise between their spacey atmospheric older music, and a more traditional rock band. Also, this album holds a special place because it was on this tour that I saw them on, which is one of the best gigs I have ever seen.

So here we are in 2010, and Jonsi is releasing a solo album, two tracks of which, Boy Lilikoi and Go Do, were released as teasers and sound up there with the best bits of Með Suð Í Eyrum Við Spilum Endalaust. Boy Lilikoi sounds like pretty typical Sigur Ros, but Go Do is something completely different. It's Produced by Peter Katis, who also produced fantastic records for Fanfarlo and Frightened Rabbit. If Jonsi can match some of the stuff he has done before, I will be ecstatically pleased.







Frightened Rabbit- The Winter of Mixed Drinks
OK OK I know this was released March 1st but I'm still waiting for it to come in the post so its going in. Midnight Organ Fight was an album I only heard about halfway through last year even though it came out in 2008. Frightened Rabbit are a band that encompasses everything I love about british indie rock at the moment. Thick vocal harmonies, interesting folk instruments, catchy but not annoying songs, all mixed up with interesting accents.
This album was written and mostly recorded in Scotland unlike their previous effort, and the band has said that this has effected the sound of the record a great deal. It's been a much more meticulous studio effort, less of a live album than Midnight Organ Fight, with each instrument being tracked individually this time, which front man Scott Hutchinson insists is the way he prefers to make records.
It's been receiving some pretty good reviews, although not in the same kind of way that Midnight Organ Fight did. I'm really excited to hear it.









MGMT- Congratulations

If you were alive in 2008 I don't think I really need to introduce MGMT. In case you were asleep, they were very much the sound of 2008 (along with Vampire Weekend). Incredibly catchy drug inspired indie rock with a heavy 70's psychedelia influence. This time they're in the studio with Pete Kember of Shoegazing band Spaceman 3.  Don't expect any big singles like Electric Feel or Kids though because for one thing, the band has been pretty adamant that they don't want to release any singles from this album. Quite how much difference that will make in these days of iTunes a la carte style purchasing but its refreshing to hear a band talking about how they want their album listen to as a whole. That and the album is by all reports, completely different to the first half of Oracular Spectacular.

Stone Temple Pilots- Stone Temple Pilots

I'm gonna come right out and say it, I hated Velvet Revolver. I could tolerate Slash's wankey guitars and the pomp rock of it all, but Scott Weiland drove me nuts. The problem I think was that as shit as Axl Rose is, Weiland pretending to be Rose is twice as bad. But at least he can still sing which gives me hope for this, Stone Temple Pilots' first album in nine years. I don't have very much to say about this. Core was one of the albums that shaped my childhood listening habits and I assume this will sound nothing like Core (you'd hope not in 2010) but it sure as hell can't suck as hard as Velvet Revolver. It's also the first STP album not to be produced by Brenden O'Brien, which should be interesting.

Devo

An album which surely can't be bad is Devo's yet to be titled comeback record. Mark Mothersbaugh said of the new album that"These new songs are pretty true to what we would be doing if we would have gone into suspended animation 20 years ago and just woke up". And if it's anything else, we'll forgive them, because they're Devo.

My New Phone!

I reached breaking point the other day with my old phone, the INQ1 which I can quite safely say is the worst phone I've ever owned. After owning it for six months, the battery would last around about six hours when left alone in my pocket, or about fifteen minutes during a phone call, or mild to moderate usage. Besides the battery life, which I would have been perfectly happy to solve with a new battery, the phone crashed from the day I got it, simply surfing the internet, or opening a Java app would cause the screen to flicker and die, or the phone to reboot of it's own accord.
Now there was one thing I liked about that phone, and that was it's integration with Facebook. I'm not a great user of Facebook, but everone else is. The INQ1 did a great job of integrating people's Facebook profiles with their profile on the phone, meaning you could see their photos, birthday, etc straight from the address book. Also, the INQ1 having a tiny internal memory, and the mind blowing move of putting the memory card slot under the battery so that you couldn't switch it over without cutting the power (despite the fact that the sim was above the battery!) was made into much less of a problem by the fact that any pictures taken could be automatically uploaded to Facebook.
Now I was pretty set from the start that I wanted a phone that runs Google's Android operating system, because I use all of Google's services, from Blogger, to Calendar, to GMail, to Reader and I assumed that these services would be better integrated into this platform better than any other. Also, after the success of the iPhone's app store I wanted a phone with an active community making apps for it so that I could do some of the fun things I see my iPhone equipped friends playing with. I wasn't interested in an iPhone, mainly because everyone has one, but also because of the lack of multitasking, and Apple's stranglehold on their app store.
The three Android phones which seem to get by far the best reviews are the HTC Hero, the Google Nexus One, and the Motorola Droid/Milestone. I flat out could not afford any of these out of contract and I'm not due an upgrade for a long while yet.

What I settled on in the end was the HTC Tattoo which is essentially a stripped down version of the Hero, but unlike the hero, it is currently half price at Amazon. The screen is much smaller than the Hero, and it is resistive rather than capacitive, which means that it isn't as sensitive (although it is much more responsive than I expected). The other thing which has been cut back on is the camera, there is no flash, which doesn't bother me too much, and no auto-focus which does. No auto-focus, as well as meaning that I take blurry photo's like the ones above, also means that apps which rely on a good picture, such as barcode readers and retina scanners can't work, which something I didn't think of before purchase.
A pleasant surprise was that the Facebook support I so loved on my INQ1 is one of the features added by HTC's Sense interface included with both this phone and the Hero. I would go so far as to say that HTC's implementation of Facebook integration blows INQ's out of the water. Photos can be uploaded not just to Facebook, but also to Flikr, Picasa, and to the native Twitter app, Peep which in turn can upload them to your choice of Twitter image site.

An odd little extra that the phone has, is a dedicated website from HTC so that you can design your own covers for the phone (like a real tattoo I guess). I'm not going to do this, because I'd make it look stupid I suspect, that and it's a waste of money, but  maybe someone would like this feature.
All in all, I adore it, even though the screen is too small to type in portrait orientation, and the camera flat out sucks, all the strengths of the software and the not by any means shabby build quality totally make up for it. One of the main advantages over the iPhone is that, while it does have an app store (with far more free apps than Apple's) you are by no means locked to apps just from the store. Just like any computer, you can open up the browser, find an app you like the look of and install it from a .APK file (similar to a .exe installer file). All of this means that there are an awful lot of fantastic apps to extend an Android phone with. Here's a few of my favorite ones that I've found so far. They're all free, although some only for a limited time, or with limited features.

Firstly, The best IM client I could find is Meebo IM.  It is essentially a version of the popular browser based IM client, in an application. It supports Facebook chat, MSN Messenger, AIM, Google Talk, ICQ, Jabber, Myspace chat and YIM. I cant claim to have used all of those as I only use Facebook, MSN and Google but it sure beats booting up three separate clients
An app which has come in very handy is Total Recall, which is only free for a certain time, then you have to pay for it. The app basically records either all of your incoming, or outgoing calls, or both. This has come in handy for my dissertation research, so I can record my phone conversations without the need for any extra equipment. The sound quality is good, but my voice was recorded much louder than the person's voice I was talking to. It also only records in .MP4, .AMR or .3GPP formats. Luckily Audacity can import MP4 audio, which allowed me to compress the audio so that I could hear the other person and save the file as a .wav or .mp3 so that I could play the file in programs other than Quicktime.

Shazam is a program that can tell you what any song playing is simply by recording a short snippet and then matching it to it's library. Surprisingly, this works almost all of the time. Another cool feature is that after it has told you the song name, it can link you to copies of the song on You Tube, or Amazon mp3. It also saves a log of all the songs you "tag" so that you can look them up later.

Layar is an augmented reality app where you look through your camera and it uses your phone's built in GPS system and digital compass to overlay a layer. Layers include one to show you who has tweeted nearby, information or architecture, London underground info, restaurant  reviews, or directions to things like post boxes, hotels, pubs and golf courses. It's pretty interesting, although I suspect it would work much better in a big city, and would be dull out in the country.
All the Google apps are great (as you would expect) these include maps (which can give turn by turn spoken directions),  Google earth, Google sky map (which tells you what star you're pointing your camera at), Gmail, Calendar and You Tube. Interestingly there is no native Blogger app, so I'll have to stick to the web based client unless I can find a third party app.

Whilst multi-tasking is one of the strengths of android, It's also a weakness. Apps running in the background you may have thought you closed will eat up your processor power and RAM, but there is a solution. TasKiller is an app dedicated to closing other apps. You can either go through a list of apps and close what you want, or add a widget to your desktop that you can click to close all non-essential apps when you feel your handset getting sluggish.
All in all I'm thrilled with my new phone and I would definitely suggest it to anyone looking for a smart phone for under £200. And I'm hooked on Android now, good going Google.

Recording Science Vs Romance

Its been a while, I need to post more often really but uni is starting to get really busy now. my dissertation is well and truly under way, I've had a fair bit of work recently, and Mass Effect 2 came out which may well be the best game I have ever played (although thats probably a tie between it, the original, Metal Gear Solid and Psychonauts).
On top of that I've been in the studio with Science Vs Romance, which was my first time in the studio in about a year, and my first real experience with Pro Tools 8 (despite me buying it months ago, as I said, it's been busy).
SvR have had a slight change in direction with their new material, it's much less pop-punk meets Minus The Bear and much more indie rock meets At The Drive In. 
We've had two weekends so far of tracking and most of the editing has been done at home on my LE system. The first weekend was split between pre-production and tracking drums, bass and rhythm guitars. We've been fortunate in being able to get a band made up of such great players that we could blast through all of that in two days, I certainly wasn't expecting to get so much done. Tracking at the university's new studios has given me my first experience with an Icon desk, which is beautiful, and much less daunting than the three interfaces I've previously used (the C24, Digi 002, and the Control 24) and yet far more powerful.
Comping afterwards was made infinitely quicker by PT8's new playlist track view, which if you haven't seen it yet allows you to see all your playlists for one track at once, solo them one by one, and send sections to a new playlist at the top. This is pretty similar to the way logic takes care of it, except that it doesn't necessarily insert auto-cross fades for you.
On the second weekend, we recorded all of the vocals and Stu's twiddley guitars which is now the bulk of the session recorded down.
I'd love to show you some of the stuff we've recorded but you'll have to wait until it's all mixed I'm afraid. This is definitely the best recordings I have produced to date and I wish SvR all the luck in the world, they could do great things.
In other news, I got a new phone the other day to replace the atrocious Inq1 I've been struggling with for what seems like an age. Its great, I'll give you a run through some time this week.

Happy new year!

Holy crap, its 2010! If anyone is interested, my resolution is to remember more birthdays this year because last year, I was terrible.
2010 is also the year that I get back into the studio, this time with Stourbridge based alt-rockers Science Vs. Romance. Scott, Darren and I are hoping to get some great stuff out of them, they sound fantastic live.
I'm preparing to start my primary research for my dissertation now, it's going to be about work-flow issues in digital consoles when moving from analogue mixing desks. Should mean I get to talk to some really interesting people and learn some useful stuff

My Top Albums of 2009

Looks like it's getting towards the end of the year, so maybe its time for the obligatory top lists of 2009. Never having been a slave to tradition, here's my top eight albums of the past twelve months.

8) Hazards Of Love-The Decemberists

This one is an album that is as much an annoyance of mine as it is a love. I'm a big sap for any music so much as hinting at prog-rock which I think is why I listened enough to get past Meloy's whiny annoying vocals. Once I was past that, I was left with an album I fell in love with, grew tired of, stopped listening to, put back on a month later and realized why I loved it so much in the first place, a pattern which repeated through most of the year.
The builds are glorious, the guitars sound fantastic and the musicianship is pretty faultless. The lows are monotonous and the soppy sections are over sentimental.
Still, the peaks more than make up for the troughs and perhaps wouldn't seem as glorious without the arduous slog up hill to get to them.




7) Riceboy Sleeps-Jonsi and Alex

I'm gonna say from the top that I adore Sigur Ros, and that anyone who doesn't like their breed of Icelandic post-rock is going to loathe this release by their lead singer Jonsi and his boyfriend Alex. It sounds an awful lot like Sigur Ros, but even more so, with a whole lot more of the tranquil soundscapes and less of the actual "music". It's gorgeous, its meandering, it's what helped me concentrate on most of my essays this year and it's got me very excited about Jonsi's debut solo album "Go" which sounds all together more like you would expect it to sound. If you love Sigur Ros and you haven't already, you owe it to yourself to give Riceboy Sleeps a good listen. If you're not sold on Sigur Ros yet, give the free track on Jonsi's home page a listen.



6) Octahedron- The Mars Volta

This is by no means ground breaking stuff, I remember reading reviews of this album saying that The Mars Volta had drastically changed their style and being reluctant to listen to it. It is true however that this is a much quieter album than all of their previous efforts. In my opinion, this is a nice middle ground between Omar's meandering solo guitar doodle albums and classic Mars Volta.
All of the slow quiet numbers like Since You've Been Gone make for more intense crescendos into the fast loud tracks and sections such as Cotapaxi.
After two albums that struggled to hold my interest, its nice to see The Mars Volta trying a new direction, even if it did upset a few. There's nothing more boring than a band scared of taking risks




5) Far-Regina Spector

This is an album that, if I had heard earlier in the year, would no doubt be way further up this list, its growing on me like some beautiful voiced fungus.
The simple enchanting melodies sung over a minimal backdrop of mostly drum machines and piano, beautifully arranged and recorded. It makes me feel guilty for not listening to this earlier.
Anyway, listen to this.




4) Backspacer-Pearl Jam

Pearl Jam are an interesting band in that they are one of the only existing grunge bands, due in no small part I'm sure to the fact that they haven't made a grunge record since Vs in 93. There's nothing more embarrassing than middle aged men screaming their teenage angst out (I'm looking at you Green Day) which is why the idea of PJ returning to their punk rock roots worried me.
But that isn't what this album is like at all, it's not all fast, it shows PJ's full range of sounds, from the corny pop-rock, to a few ballads, and yet, those few fast, loose punky tracks which are the best tracks on the album.
It isn't a bunch of old men trying to be hip, as with all of their releases, this is good intelligent American rock music. If their last album hadn't been twice as good this album would likely have been my number two choice this year.


3) Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix-Phoenix

Yet another album I heard too late in the year. Catchy hooks, tongue in cheek lyrics, its much deeper than you might expect from the first listen, but from the first listen I was stuck on this album. Something truly unique, yet pleasingly familiar. Just a well written indie rock album from France.



2) Resevoir-Fanfarlo

A lesson should be learned here by artists struggling to shift units, you're not gonna make a fortune until people know who you are. When I found out that the digital copy of this album was on sale for $1 at their website, it caught my interest, and after some listening I realized that it is a glorious album worthy of a full price purchase (which by the way, their album is selling at again now).
This is an unmistakably British rock album with some really interesting instrumentation and some thoroughly well written songs. Horns and strings are as big of a part of the sound as the guitars and they are used very tastefully. I simply love the atmosphere of this album, from emotional low to dramatic highs. I wish these guys all the luck in the world.



1) Veckatimest-Grizzly Bear
This album grabbed my attention like no other this year. If I love the atmosphere of Fanfarlo's album then I adore the atmosphere of this. Big four part harmonies, dirty bass tones, massive drums, subtle use of strings, and loads of gorgeous reverb. Great dynamics, great musicianship and most of all, terribly ambitious.
All of this note perfect arrangement around a thoroughly interesting and catchy set of songs that I've been listening to religiously since the day it was released back in May. Each song is so very different from the one before it and yet these album sounds very cohesive.
This is very different and utterly brilliant. Couple that with the brilliant videos the band has released for the singles from this album and you have hands down, my album of the year.

Microsoft and the BBC are both stubborn arses.

So it seems that the reason PS3 and Wii users get iPlayer but us 360 owners don't is down to an argument which has ended in stalemate. Apparently, Microsoft want the iPlayer on Xbox Live, but only to gold subscribers, but the BBC has decided that people shouldn't have to pay a premium to get iPlayer as it's license fee funded. So what about people like me who already pay both fees? I couldn't care less if people could get it for free if they were silver members, and I also wouldn't care if it was only available to us gold subscribers. I see why Microsoft want to add value to their gold subscription, although you can already make this work for free with a bit of tweaking if you have a Windows machine (not that I can test that), and I do see the Beeb's problem with people having to pay a subscription to watch it, but what about what their customers want? I cant see any 360 owners getting angry at getting what the PS3 and Wii has had for a while now, and I can't see license payers getting angry at having to pay a gold subscription to use a free service.
The only person looking stupid here (apart from us saps that give both of these companies our money) is Microsoft. If i was looking for a games console now, and I wanted games rather than keep fit activities and gimmicky kids games, I'd have to get a PS3. It wont break, I don't have to pay a subscription to play online (although I would have no friends to play with), it has a Blu Ray drive (not that I'm interested in buying any Blu Rays), built in wifi, cheap HDDs, and it's essentially a DVR for the BBC (and what other British networks ever make good TV anyway). And now after a price drop (at last) its not much more expensive, much cheaper if you factor in however much you will pay for gold subscription, and repairs once it goes out of warrenty.
Its reasons like this that the PS3 is gaining back market share, and why I feel less and less happy paying my TV license. I'm not moving from my Xbox for a while though, I need to play Mass Effect 2.