Well we came home empty handed from this years Irish Blog Awards. Analogue had been shortlisted for best group blog, and ultimately lost out to the girls from Beaut.ie. It was great for such a new blog to get so far in any case, and to be honest, we didn’t deserve a win based on the content that we had on the blog section of the site - at the time the site was nominated / judged.

We’ve stepped it up since then, and I’m really proud of the material everyone’s consistently producing, so who knows, if we’re lucky enough to get nominated again next year we may do better. Congratulations to Beaut.ie, who also won best designed blog last year, and cheers to whoever nominated us in the first place!

In other news, Twenty Major picked up best blog again this year; and the inspirational Robin Blandford picked up the best tech blogger prize for his Byte Surgery blog, Nialler9 picked up best music blog, and Sinead Gleeson received the best Arts and Culture prize, for her excellent Sigla blog.

My good friend Mr. Simon McGarr received a much deserved special recognition award for his services to the Irish blogosphere - it only surprised me to learn that Simon’s found the time to do for others as much as he’s done for me over the years - from kindly (but ignored) warnings about liable, to inspirational ideas about the future of publishing, and other things I hope one day to be able talk about. When not running the McGarr Solicitors blog, editing his online culture magazine Tuppenceworth, or providing free legal advice to Digital Rights Ireland, he’s saving Journalism from itself, and reinvigorating democracy.
Lest this list seem insufficient praise for the man, let me just state that Simon is also the smartest person I’ve ever met in real life.

Check out Daithi’s excellent live blogged coverage of the awards.

Now back to your regularly scheduled musical babblings.

This is kind of old, but so god damn awful it bares repeating. If you’ve ever wondered why the record industry hasn’t tapped into dissonant outsider punk and folk, excreting thin attractive Daniel and Calvin Johnston clones to mime angst free pop noize, you haven’t been looking hard enough. The prosecution presents item 1. ‘Black Out Band’ ’s 2007 flop ‘Video Games’, combines everything you tolerate and come to enjoy in say Jandek - the inability to sing, compose, record and or indeed perform, with the crass commercialism of a mid 90’s Sega of America Marketing Video.

For once, the liner notes really say it all.

“This comic ballad mocks the stereotype of today’s youngsters as spoiled rotten video game addicts. It’s all clearly tongue-in-cheek and these hard working boys appear anything but spoiled. Most surprisingly, Hunter Watson’s performance is Mick Jagger cool despite a refreshing absence of explicit lyrics. But what really makes the song stay on replay in the listener’s mind is the catchy pop-style melody, with it’s wry references to a diverse group of artists, from Dylan and the Monkees to the Black-Eyed Peas.”

Indeed.

Hotpress darling Glen Hansard and child bride Marketa Irglova were the recipients last night of the Oscar for ‘Best Original Song’, for ‘Falling Slowly’, a track written for their ‘Swell Season‘ album and featured in John Carney’s slight but touching film ‘Once‘. Congrats guys!

‘Falling Slowly’, from Once..

Acceptance Speech..

‘Falling Slowly’, performed at the academy awards..

“There are two kinds of music. Good music, and the other kind.”

- Duke Ellington

Fantastic rock webzine Crawdaddy! have an interview up with rock critic Carl Wilson, author of the latest book in the legendary 33 1/3 series of album critiques. Rather than reviewing a new or ageing classic, Wilson decided to do something original, to attempt an irony free appreciation of the 1997 Celine Dion album ‘Let’s Talk About Love‘. Writing the book as an analysis of elitism and class related rock music prejudice, Wilson seems to have become rather the Dion apologist.

“When you start getting to know her biography and her persona, it’s clear that she’s kind of helplessly sincere. Yes, she works the pop game—to her, that’s her job. And she has people around her whose marching orders she takes, primarily her husband. But she cares about her job, has a strong work ethic; that makes her work personal to her. She probably doesn’t conceive of herself as an artist-with-a-capital-A at all. She’s more like a very conscientious, enthusiastic craftsperson, like a terrific plumber. (An analogy that comes to mind because people are always talking about her “pipes.”) That may not meet with our expectations, but it’s a long tradition in show business, and none of us disrespect, say, Judy Garland for being primarily concerned with being a great performer rather than a creative original. It’s just that in many ways that social role has become disreputable.”

I haven’t yet read the book, but judging by the interview Wilson seems to have missed the point. Dion is disliked in part because of her nasal voice, uncreative interpretation and blandly unoriginal pop sensibility, but also because of her palpable lack of sincerity - describing her output as skilful is all well and good, but it does not forgive the offensively banal turf that she produces. Wilson argues that class and taste are inextricably interlinked (which is a little like saying ‘it’s not their fault, they’re only trailer trash’), in a manner reminiscent of left wing cultural relativists shying away from criticising African female genital mutilation.

“So there’s a tone of contempt that we adopt about what we consider inferior music that I think is contextual: “This music doesn’t make sense within my life.” And maybe that does mean it’s second-rate, or maybe it means that it’d be first-rate within another kind of life. The background sense that what we’re debating is ways of living might make us slow down a bit in our snap judgements. It’s probably not a way any of us can think all of the time, but like any sort of moral thinking, it can be a check upon our worst instincts.”

Perhaps in Wilson’s hipster milieu, musical tastes are worn almost exclusively as socio-political badges, but he might be surprised to learn that others genuinely appreciate music because of it’s innate quality. Post modern claptrap about how all taste is culturally relative is a tabula rasa rejection of the last half century of biology. Our tastes may differ, based on developmental factors (e.g.: growing up learning a language in which prosody expresses meaning rather than merely emphasis - why Chinese opera can sound so strange), innate differences (the frequency response range of our ears), and experiences (our parents looping a Carpenters Best of, or exposure to the quarter tones of Middle Eastern music), but fundamentally those of us who enjoy music for it’s aesthetic qualities, in addition to it’s anaesthetic or phatic utility, share an appreciation of quality and creativity, and more importantly agreement about their lack, even when we differ on the specifics of a given artist (most of the time!) or genre. Pretending that all work is equally valid has killed fine art, and it’s possible to underestimate the potential of the same sort of thinking to fuck up music (read the M.I.A review in last years Electric Picnic Foggy Notions for an example of this kind of muddy thinking). Whatever your perspective, it seems an argument worth having. I look forward to reading Wilson’s book.

New York Times article - Tasters Choice
Crawdaddy Interview - Carl Wilson: Tastes Are Composed of a Thousand Misunderstandings

Whatever your opinion of the movie, this clip of actors Ellen Page and Michael Cera ’spontaneously’ composing a song in honour of director Jason Reitman is sheer awesomeness.

The science fiction writer Larry Niven used to have a rule. Niven used to say (I’m paraphrasing), if you’re going to eat chocolate cake don’t waste those calories on inferior Leon confections, consume only the finest, creamiest, 80% cocoa Belgian sensation. Never waste calories. Niven called his rule his ‘Fuzzy Pink Law’ (after unsurprisingly, his wife), and it’s equally well applied to pop music. If you’re going to listen to pop, it should be fuzziest pinkest pop ever made. This is where Twee comes in. A later day descendent of Riot Grrrl and 1997, Sweedish alt pop, and pre-Britpop UK Indie, contemporary indie pop bands labelled ‘Twee’, share some things in common - Electropop or lowfi production, high pitched whisper soft or off kilter vocals, and a focus on sweet catchy melodies.

I’m sure there are bazillions, but the only Irish twee act I’m familiar with are Mark Cullen’s (Fixed Stars, Pony Club) briefly feted Bawl, though the band would likely have puked at the label. Elsewhere Twee is undergoing a revival of sorts, and recently indie darlings Los Campesinos (Interviewed in Analogue Issue 3) though not a twee band by any stretch of the imagination, released a single ‘International Tweecore‘ referencing and in part covering British Twee legends ‘Heavenly’ (not to be confused with the humourless but entertaining Operatic metal group of the same name).

A lot of stuff, has been mislabelled Twee, from Daniel Johnston’s outsider baroque folk pop, to post punk / proto-grunge acts like Beat Happenings (whose lead singer was involved in founding both Sub Pop, and my favourite label K-Records / K-Punk) or the Vaselines; but somewhere in between the Decemberists and Belle and Sebastian, between surf rock and anti-folk there’s twee, sparkling, unpretentious and unmistakable.

Tullycraft - How to Stuff a Wild Bikini

Indonesian Tweesters, Annemarie - Suicide on your Stereoset

The Besties - Prison Song

It’s Friday, and you know what that means. Absurdly brilliant Brittany Britney Spears cover day. Today we bring you, hit Spears club tune Toxic. Here’s one from Youtube yuke genius sweetafton23.

For bonus lolz, pop on over to Pop Culture Will Eat Itself for another Toxic cover, this time from Israeli solider and folk songstress Yael Naim.

Courtesty of Nialler 9, comes the new video from perhaps Ireland’s only decent hip hop act, Dublin’s smart, literate and grimy Infomatics. The boys have had a busy few months, backing up heavyweight acts like Ice-T and Nas, and their self released début album ‘Kill or Create’ is done and due sharpish. Nice one lads! Check out the video for ‘Wake up’, below.

A little late notice I know, but in the spirit of unfettered nepotism, I’d like to give you keen readers a heads up. My ol’ mate, the very lovely Mr. David Power is performing with his band ‘The Dead Flags‘, at Radio City in Dublin tonight. Admission is 9 squids, or a mere 7 if you print off the flyer below. If you make it Dave promises ‘a night of uplifting indie rock with overtly sexual and misogynistic lyrics…oh yeah!’

I’ve been following the untypable Duø for quite a while now. The Dø’s debut album ‘A Mouthful’ is a dazzlingly delicious if poorly balanced meal. A treat for fans of squeaky voiced diva’s everywhere, here’s the (rather dull) video for their (excellent) debut single ‘On My Shoulders’.