Ready? Steady? Review!
Some insults
Listen, eloquence is all well and good, but an insult only really stings when it’s delivered in 10 words or fewer. I could right this second string together a sequence of overly florid couplets about how your mother resembles the dwindling of the autumn light, but is it ever really going to top that teenage girl declaring that Kristen Wiig’s character in Bridesmaids “looks like an old mop”? Of course not. Likewise, I’m sure that the lengthy email screed at the centre of this chapter from Iraqi-Canadian author Elen Ghulam’s novel Graffiti Hack (recited here, as all great works should be, in front of an old drum kit and some tinsel lights) is very caustic and cutting – I zoned out at around the six-minute mark – but it will never, ever come close to matching the impact of Liam Gallagher calling Wayne Rooney “a f**king balloon with a f**king Weetabix crushed on top”. BUUUUURRRRRNN. GM
Some trumpets
@guideguardian here's some 'creative guffery' Paul Edis Sextet - Knight Errant: http://t.co/FlrqUQMXAD - can send you the album if you like!
— Paul Edis (@PaulREdis) October 17, 2014
The Paul Edis Sextet have got their act together. The name might scream middle of the road, middle aged, middle class jazz troupe, but that’s just a carefully constructed veneer. Knight Errant is far from something uncle Edwin would pop on while doing the weeding; this is more like the soundtrack to a forgotten kids’ show from the 80s. The lads will have you dreaming of Mysterious Cities Of Gold interspersed with flashbacks of gunge tanks from Going Live, while managing to come off like the missing link between A Hawk And A Hacksaw and Mariachi El Bronx at the same time. Look out for the trumpet breakdown halfway through – it almost makes you want to go on a quest around South America on a trusty steed called Martha and with Andi Peters as your sidekick. LB
Some posh tweed
Hoping that you guys @guideguardian will #ReviewAnything #BrokenBridges from Boundless Brothers debut #untoldEP http://t.co/vXnDrODjTe
— Riverfish Music (@RiverfishMusic) October 13, 2014
You’ve got to feel sorry for all-male English folk-pop groups nowadays. Since Mumford & Sons’s frankly inexplicable rise to glory, every “testosterone folk” act (a sub-genre name I coined years ago in relation to Seth Lakeman, even if I can’t prove it) – ie randomly bearded young men strumming banjos and the like while singing earnest harmonies all at one pitch – will be tarred with the same brush. So it is with Boundless Brothers, a Cornish group that may contain real-life brothers (where are Mumford’s actual sons?). They sing and play well enough, and the video’s pub backroom ambience – a fug of rough shag pipe smoke, wall-mounted pewter tankards and Inside Llewyn Davis-inspired Arran sweaters – matches the easy-on-the-ear simplicity of the tune. It’s just too Mumford-esque: a Mumford mini-me in Mumfordworld selling Mumford T-shirts. Tarring over. SW
Some lecturing
@guideguardian #ReviewAnything See what you make of this. Burke & Hare Ballad Sheets: http://t.co/ihwNIiefTn.
— Paul Slade (@PlanetSlade) October 11, 2014
This “audio slideshow” is 45 minutes long so I’m obviously not going to watch the whole thing. I’ve got stuff to do. But that doesn’t mean I won’t skim-review you right into next week, Paul Slade, so pucker up. It’s a lecture on Georgian corpse-pinchers Burke & Hare, so the subject matter is fine. The speaker, Paul, actually breaks into song towards the end, which is surreal to the point of ultimate tripping. One slide is entitled “ALAS! JAMIE’S PICKLED,” which, even without context, is literally the best slide title I’ve seen today. And everything appears to have been correctly spelled. But – criticism – the yellow-and-green colour scheme chosen for the slides makes the imparting of knowledge look like a cross-section of a gangrenous wound, the soporific voiceover is like Steve Coogan’s pool supervisor only on a night where everyone died, and there don’t appear to be any moving images, wry references to Wiz Khalifa or creative swearwords. Come on, Paul. It’s 2014. Get widdit, fam. With these plusses and negatives taken into account, and having had time to deliberate, my review is thus: I can honestly say, hand-on-heart, that this is a YouTube clip about a thing on which a man says some things about it. LH
Some miserable poetry
Love.
As I stand here in silence
And stare death in the face,
My mind starts to wander
And I think about space,
The existence of nothing beyond The limits of my mind,
This leads me to consider
The futility of man kind,
The limits of logic abandon me now,
I know I must cheat death
But I do not know how,
Though her eyes hypnotize me I start to feel free,
I accept the conclusion that this is the end,
And I stand in acceptance that death is my friend.
TGI Friday, guys! Definitely what you need before heading out on the lash before spiralling into a weekend of deepest regret is this, a piece of rhyming miserablism. Technically it’s not great poetry, more simple verse, and you might say that some of the ideas are a bit, “I’ve read a bit of Camus, me”. That said there are some interesting questions raised like: why is death a she? (maybe it’s Death from the Sandman); and why the capitalisation on ‘The’ in the second half of line five - is it a physical manifestation of the limits of the mind on the actual page or are we just a missing line return? Finally, though, one question looms greater than any other: R U OK? PM
Some falsetto
bully RT @screamingparent Retweet this bad boy! All 28 of you followers! Hit tune - https://t.co/suR5pn3Th4 *watches internet quiver*
— Dudley Colley (@thecorpo) October 14, 2014
There’s much talk of “swimming against the tide” here, and it’s apposite. If you can imagine Hot Chip shipwrecked with Brian May, with only his massive cloud-like hair acting as a buoyancy aid, and his old fireplace guitar being put to use as an oar, this is what it might sound like. The pained falsetto vocal even loses puff late on, as if Screaming Parent/Hot Chip and Bri are losing their brave fight and surrendering to Davy Jones’s broiling undertow. Which is a suitably music journalist wanker’s way of saying: lo-fi Hot Chip. With guitars. MH
Some ‘fresh beats’
Oh, here we go, some new music from a label I actually know something about. Thanks for messing up my plan to slag off Korean acoustic folk forever, Sonic Router. Sonic Router is the kind of label that puts out records that are a little bit danceable, a little bit “whoa, what’s that noise?” and a bit, “Arg, my faaaace” and this, from Brixton beatsmith B£ams, is not much different. I know that it sounds like Flying Lotus’s new album spun around in a Magimix (foggy jazz!), or like Actress has remixed the Bob The Builder theme (weird crunchiness!), or as if you’re listening to hip-hop blaring from a car stereo on the other side of a car park in the sleet (drizzly rap!). In other words: the kind of music that could un-gentrify Peckham with one DJ set at the Bussey Building. But then again, what do I know. KH
Here is me reading a single chapter from my novel
Most Eloquent of Insults
http://youtu.be/I9YcfnBGk-Q
Can you handle all that literary wit?