Bruce Springsteen - Magic

The Boss and the E Street band are back together for a new album and new tour. Devastated doesn’t even cover my anguish at not getting tickets for the tour, and now them horrible tout cunts are trying to make me re-mortgage my house if I want to go and see one of the few people who actually means anything to me anymore.

Springsteen just gets older and older, more wise, more thoughtful and reflective. You’ll not catch The Boss skipping along the street with a pair of Converse on for iTunes like that horrible 85 year old cunt McCartney did. You’ll be more than likely to find him on the stage with his kicked to fuck acoustic, making everyone around him smile, singing and dancing, and putting just as much of a shift in as a panel beater.

People slag off Springsteen and say the music is overblown, pompous and whatever else a thesaurus might throw your way. But that is the whole fucking point. Pure unadulterated escapism. Where else can you find the saxophone bearable, apart from when it’s in the hands of man mountain Clarence Clemens, and where else can you find a band that has one of the coolest characters to ever appear on TV (Silvio from The Sopranos) strutting around in full rock regalia.

I absolutely adore this album, from start to finish. The album is sentimental and testament to how good the musicians are. From the opening “Radio Nowhere”, which I admittedly disliked on first listen, but now sounds somewhere between Husker Du and Blue Oyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear The Reaper”, to the final remorseful “Terry’s Song”.

With every listen, the honesty, romantiscm and sincerity echoes through. The album is a fantastic sing-a-long, overblown, pompous piece of work. And that’s the fucking point.


Here's a bit classic Boss...........

Black Kids

Don’t be taken aback or offended with the title of this post. I’m not making some sort of racial attack, this is the name of the band who are currently red hot on the radar, apparently.

Whenever I think of black kids, I think of this little kid called Mohammed who moved back to Bangladesh when we were 8 or 9. Good little kid, but we never ever seen him again. No idea what happened. I always remember Mohammed for the snotty crust around his nostrils. He always had it. It became even more prominent when we’d get our milk at playtime, and the focus was brought up to his mouth area, so you could always see the dried snot from behind his blue straw. Shouldn’t have drank milk, Mohammed, didn’t do his look any favours. Massive head as well actually, for a kid. The only other thing I think of, when I think of black kids, is the fact they only ever ate fish fingers when we got our school dinners. Doesn’t make them bad people like, just saying.

From now on though, when I think of black kids, (I’ll just stress, not in a noncey way) I’ll think of this absolutely brilliant young band from Florida.

I’ve come to find, by the powers of the internet and actual written words in magazines, that this band may well be the “next big thing”. On listening to the stuff they have on their MySpace and from the general “buzz” from the articles I’ve been reading on blogs and the like, I can certainly understand why. Although the sound is far removed from the type of David Byrne delivery that Clap Your Hands Say Yeah! offered us, I still get the same sort of feeling about the music when I listen to it, as if they are about to “happen”. They have a similar sort of delivery and excitement about their music that makes you feel like you’ve really discovered a band that you’re going to follow for years to come.

The comparisons are there for all and sundry, with the likes of The Cure, My Bloody Valentine and The Go! Team regularly name checked in the same breath as Black Kids.

These scamps are a very good band. Bands don’t just get younger and younger as I get older, they get better and better. Somehow, in the past few years, the world has started to produce young kids who can make amazing music. Gone are the days of sitting with a Musical Youth LP on, or teenybop wank stains Hanson appearing all over the TV set. Nowadays it’s became quite cool to like kids, again, not in a noncey way, and kids have became better and better at making music which isn’t just flash in the pan commercial, novelty shite.

The rumour mill suggests that they’ll be over to the UK in November and maybe releasing something at the same time. My luck tells me that they’ll probably just play one date in London, or they’ll support someone shite and come nowhere near where I live.

The band is still unsigned, but that shouldn’t be for much longer. So eyes peeled and keep a look out for Black Kids. It’ll make a pleasant change for a lot of people to start enthusing about Black Kids, rather than being mugged off them and accusing them of being terrorists.

Seriously though, go to their MySpace, and listen to “I’m Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How To Dance With You”. What a fucking amazing tune, absolutely amazing. Actually, fuck that, every song they have up there is amazing.



Here's a bit of Musical Youth to keep you going........

Stars - In Our Bedroom After The War (Arts & Crafts), Published in NARC. #19

Stars perform the futuristic type of music you might find in some sort of spaceship based romantic drama in years to come, a time when music rules the universe and people have blue hair and silver suits. Not the type of future where two cretins called Bill and Ted heal the world with their air guitar and shite catchphrases. No, this is a good future.

The Montreal based band seem to have the incredible ability of creating music that almost transcends comparison with any of their contemporaries. Choosing to create layers upon layers of amazing intricate electronica, duelling poetical vocals and melodies to melt the last remaining icebergs, Stars create intelligent, articulate and wonderfully expressive pop.

However, Stars do lose points in places. As much as most of the album is all lovely, warm and challenging, we do still have a couple of stinkers that wander the realms of Prefab Sprout at their crappest, and dare I say it, a little bit of Maroon 5, with The Ghost Of Genova Heights. Despite my ears not having complete agreement with a couple of the songs, no fool, no matter how crap their ears, can deny the glory and loftiness of Take Me To The Riot, Window Bird, My Favourite Book and the albums title track couldn’t be any more uplifting and triumphant if it tried.

For the most part, this is an absolutely cracking album, ignore my slight negativity, it’s just my way. This is certainly something that I’ll continue to listen to in the future. Whether or not I’ll be dying my hair blue and wrapping my fat torso in tin foil is another thing.

4/5



NARC. is currently available in all good record shops, pubs, practice rooms etc. etc. View more information on NARC. magazine, including outlets, at their MySpace, and at their website.

Bone Idle

Paul Westerberg of The Replacements once wrote, "a person can work up a mean mean thirst after a hard day of nothing much at all". And that more or less sums up the past 4-5 months for me. I've basically done fuck all apart from yawn and drink.

However, things will hopefully now change. My days of sitting round the house in shorts, drinking Budweiser and getting all tearful as Dog The Bounty Hunter gives his speech to some Hawaiian crack head, are numbered. As of today, I'm back at the big school, which means that sooner or later I will need to get my finger out. Which also means that I should get a bit more stuff up on here, which is the most important thing after all.

Over the past few months, I've pretty much just wrote stuff for NARC. and neglected this place a bit. So within the next few weeks, I'll hopefully be totally recharged and I'll have kicked the drink a bit, and so I'll be able to post more shite on here that all four of you readers may be interested in.

Right now, I'm off to get pissed.

The Life and Times of Christopher Aguilera

It's always been tough for Aguilera. Growing up as the only boy in a small New York family, he took to dressing as a woman at an early age. Yearning for acceptance, he'd put his cock and balls between his legs, lifting up his cheerleading outfit and shouting to the coach of the football team, "suck my fadge!", a phrase which would later haunt him.

As time went by, young Christopher would force his mother to call him Christina. Many botched self attempts at penectomies were carried out in his schools science labs, with the sharp point of a compass and rough edge of a protractor leaving vile and crude scars across his scrotum. Finally, Christopher managed to save enough money up from dressing as a girl and performing fellatio for a nickel at the local psychiatric hospital. The money raised and the blowjobs performed, allowed Christopher to purchase a flight to Thailand and consequently the penectomy he'd hoped for his whole life.

On arrival in Thailand, Christopher was met by a small doctor with a glass eye, much like Charles Dance from "The Last Action Hero". The doctor was able to perform a successful operation on Christopher, and so finally he could become Christina.

With his new found confidence, Christopher returned to New York, where he pestered record executives with indecent text messages and fax messages penned out in the blood from his penis that he kept in a leopard skin purse. And so he returned to the dark days of his past, sending a message to the boss of RCA Records saying "lick my twat". The return to those demon days was complete when he daubed the side of a Walt Disney van with the words "shoot your muck on my foul disfigured Frankenstein gash". However, by some stroke of luck, and completely unbeknownst to Christopher, one of the head bosses at Walt Disney was a paedophile, who liked the cut of Christopher's jib. He was soon signed up to appear in seasons 6-7 of The Mickey Mouse Club, where he again carried out his love of dressing as a woman.

His career soon progressed and he soon afforded the right and the acceptance within the industry to officially change his name to Christina. Many more blowjobs and trading of venereal diseases would help to catapult him to the top of the charts, and buy himself the prettiest dresses and the most outrageous of wigs.

Christopher now lives with another man and has taken to wearing a false stomach, filled with chop liver and egg whites, to make himself feel and look pregnant. His mental problems do still continue, but it hasn't stopped him from being one of the most fantastic performers of recent times. His hard work and enthusiasm is a shining example to us all.

Dissection:Singles, Published in NARC. #18

Shy Child – Summer

It’s the noise of a mental scientist in a lab coat, running around his underground lair whilst the machine he created explodes around him. Sparks fly into the air, random cogs and gears whizz from the top of the machine and stick in the ceiling, wires loosen and start attacking like vipers, smoke engulfs the hodgepodge of disaster. Summer is the sound of electro chaos and pandemonium pop. They’ll get likened to Klaxons and called “new rave”, but don’t let that put you off. This deserves to be tearing up the dancefloors of our coked up kids across the country.

The White Stripes – You Don’t Know What Love Is

Where previous single, Icky Thump, nodded its head to metal, this new single is again deeply rooted in what went before. No matter how many times I listen to this song, it starts sounding more and more like Bad Company or The Eagles, with the little bridge before the chorus sounding too much like Dylan’s Quinn The Eskimo. It’s all very familiar anyhow - pounding drums from Meg, Jack does a little riff then a big chord, then another little riff and another big chord. Most will lap this up and get their lighters out; I’ll stick to the original records.

I Was A Cub Scout – Our Smallest Adventures

“Postal Service vs. Digital Ash-esque Oberst” seems to be the tag line that this band has given themselves. Actually reading the tag line is where the comparison ends for me. Although the vocal does slightly ape Oberst, the lyric certainly doesn’t benefit from Oberst’s wit and charm. As for Postal Service, well, I suppose both bands have the same amount of vowels in their names if you put the “The” in The Postal Service. This doesn’t do anything for me. Typical crap you’d get from a support band, whilst you stand and talk at the bar, waiting for the band you actually want to see to appear.

iLiKETRAiNS – The Deception

The band who like to write about historical people and events have a new single. Going off the lyrics, I think this one is about Nelson. It’s the regular sort of thing you’d expect from iLiKETRAiNS. When I was talking to somebody at work once, they said, “Is it ‘Gloomy Rock’ like Stereophonics?” about a band I was talking about. That might well be the best way to describe this band. So, more Gloomy Rock from a Post Rock band who are referred to as Library Rock. Depressing, pretentious shite is my best take on it. iDiSLiKETRAiNS.

The Orange Lights – Click Your Heels

This single will probably find its way onto the Radio 1 playlists. It’s the type of stuff that Embrace or Richard Ashcroft come out with. People who don’t like music will love it. I can’t stand it, personally. I’d love to get behind a Newcastle based band, but it’s not my cup of tea. It’s like Del Amitri doing The Seahorses, or a post-McCabe Verve singing Crowded House songs, that’s about it really. Very unimpressed. If this doesn’t hit the mainstream radio radar immediately, it will when it’s re-released in 9 months time.

SixNationState – We Could Be Happy

I could be happy as well, as long as shite bands like this stopped making records. This sounds like a crap local band trying to sound like The Smiths. They remind me of every local band across the UK, who think they’re already massive because of how many friends they can spam on MySpace and thinking they can change the world with their bulletins and slogan based T-shirts. This song makes me feel completely uninterested in being alive. We Could Be Happy bores me to tears. They Should Be Sorry.

It Hugs Back – Carefully

This is more like it. I was contemplating death a few minutes ago, but this has got me back on track to a long life of slowly going mental and losing control of my bowels. I like this a lot. These Kent based tinkers have a lovely warm American sound about them. It’s a bit like an I’m Wide Awake Bright Eyes or a Baby I’m Bored Dando. The song belongs in a small dustbowl town, where slackers meet up with a bunch of drugs to write songs in a barn full of hay on lazy summer nights. Think Wilco, or glorious lo-fi college rock that it’s cool to like. We have a winner.


NARC. is currently available in all good record shops, pubs, practice rooms etc. etc. View more information on NARC. magazine, including outlets, at their MySpace, and at their website.

Thurston - Trees Outside The Academy (Ecstatic Peace!), Published in NARC. #18

Twelve years has passed since Thurston Moore released solo album Psychic Hearts. The Sonic Youth frontman has now returned with another solo attempt.

I’m not a fan of Sonic Youth; I’ve always found the music to be inaccessible. I bought a couple of records ten years ago, thinking that I had to get Sonic Youth into my life. I ended up returning them after one listen.

However, this is very accessible. I’ve always considered Moore as a talented guitarist but never really held his writing in high regard. The first five songs of the album totally changed my opinion.

In parts it’s a glossier Roman Candle-era Elliott Smith, with the stripped down acoustic guitar and bass.

First song Frozen Gtr is a laid back affair, with J Mascis closing the song out with his instantly recognisable “shredding”, whilst next track The Shape Is In A Trance seems to borrow the riff from REM’s The One I Love, with violin creating the pathos.

The stand out track is easily Honest James, a haunting song which could’ve been taken from Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan’s Ballad Of The Broken Seas, with Moore being joined by the amazing Christina Carter of Charalambides.

The album starts to lose its way a little after the beautiful Silver>Blue and the merrier, macabre Fri/End. The remaining songs seem to be made up of impromptu jams, as well as unfinished sketches.

It is a decent enough album though, if it wasn’t for the instrumentals, it really could’ve been one of the albums of the year. I certainly wouldn’t take this back after one listen.

Released: 17th September, 2007


NARC. is currently available in all good record shops, pubs, practice rooms etc. etc. View more information on NARC. magazine, including outlets, at their MySpace, and at their website.