Islands (pop music should be popular)

I have been listening this week to an album of epic, overwrought, pretentious pop-rock that cribs heavily from influential bands and producers of at least four decades. No, not the fucking Coldplay album, a collection of songs best described as a carton of watery bollock yoghurt, wanked off by pedestrian talent to slosh around the ears and brains of motorists who purchase one whole album every twelve months to soundtrack their own soul-suffocating mediocrity. Definitely not that.



I digress. The album I've been thoroughly enjoying is the new Islands release, Arm's Way, a bright and colourful patchwork of classic pop, bulging with ideas, hooks, choruses. Okay, it's not perfect, but it's the sort of album that deserves all the attention that less interesting, infinitely more wanky bands get, and that just winds me up. If half the people who bought the new Coldplay album were to buy Arm's Way, it would still hit the UK album top 10, and Islands would get the popular adulation that they quite rightly deserve. And the radio-listening public should fucking love these songs, they should love love love them, but there just seems to be this permanent block on clever pop music, that it will never quite penetrate the public consciousness in the same way that humdrum drivel by lacklustre songwriters does.

So. This is more a rant than a review. I am unrepentant. This is a constant annoyance for me; brilliant bands with all the pop sensibilities of Phil Spector and Black Francis in a centrifuge are overlooked in favour of flavourless generica. While this is not new, it's a problem that infuriates me all the more since the boundaries of the old industry are supposedly crumbling around our ears, but no-one seems even slightly interested.

Oh, internet. Listen to the new Islands album and hear that it is good. Not flawless, not amazing, but a thoroughly enjoyable romp through pops greenest, spongiest pastures.

(I am now deliberately posting the bleakest song from the album ('though it's still great fun!))
I Feel Evil Creeping In - Islands

Mansun and Serialisation.

I was contacted last week by an old schoolfriend through the magic of Facebook. This is not a friendship I have any particular interest in rekindling, but it is at least notable for being responsible for my ongoing relationship with the Tom, so that's something.

Anyway, this guy, for no reason, messages me through the Facebooks to tell me he's been re-listening to Six by Mansun. Well, we both got it when it came out in '98 and enjoyed it a great deal, so I suppose there's that, but I'm still not sure why he needed to tell me about it. Anyway, with this message came the assertion that if Six was released now, "it would be a major critical success". Now, Christ help me, I can't help but tell people exactly how wrong they are. I do really enjoy it. I am not such a good human being in that respect.

In the course of this deconstruction, I expressed the opinion that Mansun would likely only achieve critical acclaim in 2008 with Six if they serialised the album online; "releasing a song every fortnight with lyrics and maybe additional text to give it a more cohesive narrative. Put it out under Creative Commons license, make individual instrument tracks available in .aif format for remixers, all that kinda thing. They would win the Internet. Cory Doctorow would write a very enthusiastic Guardian piece." (I really do get like this. I am an arsehole, I know.)

Me and the Tom had briefly discussed, only the day before, the idea of recording individual songs and making them available online, complete with artwork, lyrics, .aif files for remixers, but I'm enjoying this idea of serialised releases. I'm imagining having six or seven songs to make up an EP or mini-album, and then releasing it song by song over a number of weeks. Lovebomb the blogosphere, get everyone talking about you, and with a schedule of releases over a specific period of time, you've got more chance of keeping the internet and all its mates interested than if you're posting songs with sporadic infrequency.

With good presentation, and the ability to spread the word to enough people and blogs, serialised releases could really make an impact on the internet and give unsigned artists a boost. As a music fan, I'd love to be collecting albums and EPs on a fortnightly basis. Check my inbox on a Saturday morning, download a clutch of new tunes, and spend a lazy hour poring over the supplemental material online. Whole communities and fora would spring up around this kind of activity. It's what web 2.0 is all about, isn't it?

As always, here is some music.

Outstanding!

Paul McCartney has made "Outstanding Contributions" and has been given a statue for his efforts.



Outstanding contributions to what precisely? The only thing that springs to mind is "abject cuntery". No-one liked Wings, Paul, no-one likes vegetarianism or being patronised and browbeaten with your frankly wrong opinions, and no-one fucking likes Heather Mills, and you went and made her impossibly famous, didn't you, you bastard?

Twenty-seven years since Lennon's murder, and no-one's taken out McCartney. What a sick, sad world.