21 Guns is a Green Day single that featured on the Transformers 2 soundtrack. It’s hard to imagine that anything could ever live up to a billing that shite, but Green Day give it a damn good try. To put it briefly, Billy Joe Armstrong appears to have just heard Pablo Honey and decided that welding some quiet/loud whinge-rock on to emo-based pop-punk is the Olympian pinnacle of musical endeavour. If you’re 15 or mentally incapacitated, you probably think that sounds just dandy.
Thursday – Common Existence
0 CommentsJuly 14, 2009 – 7:38 am
You know, I really wish this band didn’t exist. No reflection on their music or anything – I just wish they’d bloody well made their minds up and bitten the big one when they said they would. I say this because, before they kissed and made up I had what was, very nearly, officially The Last Ever Interview with Thursday.
Delirious – My Soul Sings (Live Album)
27 CommentsJuly 13, 2009 – 6:00 am
So. Delirious. Who? What? More importantly, why? Well – this is rock for Christians: rock with roll, sex and drugs removed using surgical precision. Music to speak in tongues to.
Ornette Coleman: Reflections of the Shape of Jazz to Come
4 CommentsJuly 9, 2009 – 7:26 am
Flea and Patti Smith get their shuffle on while Bachir Attar’s Master Musicians of Jajouka perform in the front room of the Queen Elizabeth Hall. They were performing as part of Ornette Coleman’s Meltdown festival.
My friend Charlie described the Master Musician’s strange percussive Moroccan ditties as the soundtrack to dying of malaria in the desert. He isn’t far off. When they joined Ornette Coleman on stage at the end of his ‘Reflections of the Shape of Jazz to Come’ performance we were witness to an auditory assault of stunning proportions.
Coleman’s musical genius is not in any doubt but it sure as shit wasn’t an easy listen. If it was an album you’d have to spin it front to back several times before it began to sink its teeth into you, but once it chomped down it wouldn’t let go until it was sure you’d paid your pound of brain-flesh.Patti Smith herself joined Coleman’s band on the night for an improvised drunken romp which, while not as spectacular as his later collaboration with the Master Musicians of Jajouka still had us nodding our heads in quiet approval.
Ultimately, Ornette Coleman’s ‘Reflections of the Shape of Jazz to Come’ was an excellent but difficult performance by an incredibly important player. Those of us lucky to have seen it were left with more questions than answers, but I get the feeling that’s just the way Ornette Coleman wanted it.
Throbbing Gristle – Live at Heaven, London
2 CommentsJuly 8, 2009 – 8:31 am
Throbbing Gristle were formed by Genesis P’Orridge and Cosey Fan Tutti in 1975 amid the soon-to-be disbanded art performance movement COUM Transmission which P’Orridge founded in 1969. Having opened for Hawkwind and after impressing John Peel, they recorded their first album in 1977 and the rest, as they say, is history.
Well not really.
