Balloons for Dee Dee

From the movie "Up"

Ironing To Fix Latching

We just had a very impromptu get together of old friends, the kind that doesn't happen very often and generally happens more by accident than design. Christmas is always a good time for these gatherings when people are home and their food and wine guards are down a little. There seem to be more and more additions to each of these as they happen in the form of baldy babas. Linda and Siamak also announced they had gotten married recently :) Best news we've heard in a long time so big congratulations to them. Great to see everyone and great to see everyone in such good form. I have some photos but to save the blushes of all involved I won't publish them - let me know if you want to see them and I'll mail them to you directly. A quick plug for Nora's website : http://www.walnutbooks.com/ a great place to go to buy great books. Check it out.

My Grandad

This little lady is really coming into her own. She's gone all solid and sturdy, she smiles at anything that moves and has one of the most pleasant personalities I've ever met. She's recently found her voice, her belly laugh and her hands and has spent most of the Christmas holidays either playing woozy-dextrously with her little grab toy she got from Santa or shoving her fist in her mouth to self soothe. The photo above was taken on the morning of her christening as she awaited the arrival of her gown. Someone said that they have a bajillion photos of their first child and none of their second. I'm trying real hard not to let that happen but it is indeed a struggle. I heard an interesting quote on the wireless over the Christmas break where someone said that while having one child will turn your life upside down, there was no difference between having 2 kids and 9 kids. With 2 children (or 9), while you attend to one, the other(s) tear the place apart. Speaking of tearing the place apart....


Here's D doing a wooden toy | wooden figure mashup on Christmas day. When asked why the 3 kings and Mary had been loaded up onto the back of a truck she said they were going to the shop. What for we enquired - what could be important enough to drag them out on bad roads on the most important day of their little wooden, molded-for-purpose lives.....? To buy milk was the response. Milk and toast. Baby Jesus must have had latching issues. Imagine calling to a modern maternity ward to visit a newborn and mother with the ever practical gifts of gold frankincense and myrrh. You'd probably be sent off immediately to get something more useful like a Hello magazine or ....milk. Yesterday she had her ironing board and little wooden iron and was ironing the tiny wooden Jesus. No idea what was going through her head on that one but I'm liking her take on conventional religion.


Got some really good feedback for the CDs which a lot of you received recently, so thanks for that. I've been grabbing loads of new stuff from the short lived "best of" blogs and I've ordered tonnes of CDs from Amaxon with the kindly received birthday and Christmas vouchers so I'll be busy between places in January filtering out the peanuts from the shit. Can't wait.

Twas The Night Before Christmas....

.... And all through the house, not a creature was stirrin'.... not even D. Just as she was going to bed, we put out some cake and milk for Santa and some carrots for Rudolph and we asked her did she think there was anything else we should put out. She went to the fridge and said "Vimmin". So Santa has some baby vitamins on his plate aswell as the more traditional fare to get him through the cold cold night's work of delivering awkward shaped objects down regulation chimneys around the world.


She's been watching this a lot lately. Can't wait to see her face in the morning. Something tells me tomorrow will mostly consist of tricycles, icicles and feeling so nice-ical :) Poor S will have to jump on the back when she's old enough. For now some waterproof books and a grab toy was all Santa could decipher from her pre verbal Santa letter. Bless.


Happy Christmas to all.

Ingredients for a Wild Goose Chaser...

Goodnight.

Upsetting The Apple Tart I

El Ten Eleven Double necked for your listening pleasure

The first one I've managed to stand up and get out the door before year end while holding down a real job. Irony being it's the biggest compilation yet 77 songs . It's sheer breadth is unprecedented while also militantly limited to melodic oddities from the world of unpopular music. It's a pretty random bunch of songs and I've really squeezed them in there, even though at 4 cds you're probably thinking I've picked them up off the side of the road. But rest assured they're as obsessed over, permutated, combinated and finally differentiated as all of the previous efforts. Got a bit bogged down with dEUS and John Frusciante. There's a lot more information, videos, interviews and songs out there by the bands on this compilation than is strictly neccessary to enjoy the music.

Don't know about you guys but I'm going deaf. Again I've included the cover art and tried to discipline myself to ensure that the cover matches the source of the song, but I have a really low tolerance for bad cover art so sometimes I've chosen a better looking cover instead (always from the same band). (edit : I got undisciplined half way through and started dropping in the nicest looking images regardless). The only case where the covers are so universally bad is Wolf Parade so they get a mugshot instead. I've also included links to myspace pages for further orders. Be careful though, myspace crashes browsers and leads to the appearance of dayglo shoe laces on your dress shoes and the footwear of your loved ones. The incestuous friends lists are telling. Don Cab on Slints page, Sparks on Sandro Perri's page, El Ten Eleven on Spiritualized's page etc. So anyways - herewith, 5+ hours of music to get you over the darkest Christmas of the 21st Century so far and to mark the stark end of a decade which went a bit mad in the middle.

This year's unintentional theme is location with random bands originally hailing from similar locations most of whom seem to have relocated to Brooklyn. Bands from Chapel Hill, Videos of other bands performing in Chapel Hill, Several bands from Athens, Austin, too many from Toronto and a couple from Kentucky. I even turn a blind eye to a couple of British bands coming in from the side which must mean I'm getting old.

Anyway - same rules apply :
- Play Loud
- Sing Along Where Appropriate
- Skip The Ones That Make You Uncomfortable

Previous Compilations
We Send Kisses
Choo-Choo-Choo-Choo Beep! Beep!
Songs For Girls and Boys



1. Fredrik | Black Fur
Lets start Scandinavian and see what happens. Fredrik is the 19th most popular boys name in Sweden. Percussion provided by IKEA Cutlery Department.
2. Electrelane | I'm On Fire.
Speaking of better looking covers - I love this cover version. I could go into a long meandering nostalgic reminiscense about cassettes and Born In The USA being the first original (as opposed to dubbed) album I ever owned but now is not the time. 1984, now that was the time.

3. Winter Gloves | Factories
"From Montreal" health warning. From their biog ....."the band consists of Charles F. on vocals, Wurlitzer and organ, Vincent Chalifour on synth bass and keyboards, Jean-Michel Pigeon on guitar and glockenspiel, and Patrick Sayers on drums" Thats a shitload of keyboards. From the blogs.

4. Why? | Fatalist Palmistry
From the Alopecia album - which had a number of bizarrely catchy bouts of clever, poppy, literary obscenity. No obscenity here just a nice chorus.

5. Noah And The Whale | Five Years Time
From the blogs. I've heard this on the radio in shops and on an ad aswell I think. Catchy ukelele. Oooh, danger here! Turns out they're "British". This counts as shit cover art.

6. Shrag | Forty Five 45s
Which, if you're up on your 45 times tables you'd know was 2025. Also "British". Brighton actually. The photo above is funny. For real life non ironic comparison see here.

7. Rick White Album | Grim Unintention
From the blogs. From Toronto? Also from Eric's Trip a band I couldn't get my head around when I was 17 so no point trying now.

8. The Long Blondes | Guilt (Pantha Du Prince Remix)
This originally lived on the long songs cd but some juggling was required to fit everything in. From The Blogs, Sheffield. This is a remix of a song I've never heard before. One of them had a stroke and they've since split up.

9. Hayden | Home By Saturday
From Canada. It's amazing what you learn about songs or singers you've been listening to for years when you have to write a one line description and come up completely blank. This is one from buck who used to pull together some great compilations in an online compilation club I was part of years ago. Consistently excellent new music through your letterbox until he disappeared. Nurbs.

10. White Denim | Heart From Us All
One of my biggest disappointments is missing their gig in Dublin in July this year cos it crept up and happened while I was in a work blizzard. These guys live in a trailer in Austin TX and use it as their distribution headquarters for whacked out, tight as a duck's arse MC5 meets the Beach Boys musical oddities. I wore white denim to a céilí early on in my going OUT out career. Some really bad shit happened and I never wore white denim or went to a céilí ever again.

11. Sigur Ros | Hoppipolla
Heralding the arrival of daughter number 2.

12. Hella | Hos in The House.
Hella is a town in Iceland. From the delectably uncerebral "Bitches Ain't Shit But Good People" EP . Dont wake the kids.

13. Xiu Xiu | I Do What I Want When I Want
From many places. A very disjointed piece of music that when it briefly, intermittently comes together causes great wonder.

14. El Ten Eleven | Lorge
Doubleneck guitars. Pinbacky to the Max. Why ever not? Listen to My Only Swerving on their Myspace page. I don't have a copy of that one if anyone can oblige....

15. The Mendoza Line | Whatever Hapened to You
Again a buck contribution. "The Mendoza Line is an informal term used in baseball for the threshold of incompetent hitting. Even though Mario Mendoza's lifetime batting average is .215, the Mendoza Line is said to occur at .200, and when a position player's batting average falls below that level, the player is said to be below the Mendoza Line." This was a boy girl band from Athens Georgia who divorced and promptly split the band up.



16. John Frusciante | Murderers
This is from an old four track album recorded before he rejoined the chilli peppers when he was away on a 6 year mega bender. I've loved this song for a long time. He's either had a pretty crazy life or he's one of the more imaginative wikipedia contributors.

17. Asobi Seksu | New Years
It's hard to not like a band whose name translates approximately to "playful sex.". They were originally called Sportfuck. From The Blogs, Brooklyn NY.

18. The Thermals | Pillar of Salt
D's favourite band after Midlake. Saw these this year and it was like a 6th year reunion. Ze Germans were over, Noni, a brokeback Martini, Marconi Van Basten (who fell in love with the bass player), Eri, Carol. Good gig. Nice tattoos :) D learned to headbang to this song. She also fine tuned her influential un-dancing technique.

19. Netherfriends | TAC TAC
From the blogs "Netherfriends are that bastard-psych-pop-catchy as hell band that you’ve been searching for." Catchy singalong chorus for our twilight years sitting around in Vneck jumpers and ill fitting Magee pants upto the gills on sherry and bottles of stout down the Workingman's Club blue rinsed hairs between our teeth misremembering our lives as young sailors. The future involves shared combs I fear.

20. Walkmen | Tonight Will Be Fine
I'm not a Leonard Cohen fan so I didn't know this was a Cohen cover until very recently. From a Daytrotter Session. Lovely.

21. Jason Collet | Charlyn Angel of Kensington
From Toronto.

22. Spiritualized | True Love Will Find You In the End
J. Spaceman returns to earth for a live performance. I usually hate live recordings. But when it's the only version of a great song you own you make exceptions.


23. Micachu | Vulture
No idea what's going on here but it sounds great. Only one word for it... "rowdy". This was supposed to be the opening song on this CD but software has a mind of its own so this cd is presented to you sorted alphebetically by song name. "The key to her unique sound is that she plays tons of homemade instruments, many made from objects found around the house" So, now.