I'm ill - my throat hurts, my ears hurt, my kidney area feels odd and I haven't had more than an hours sleep since Saturday night. And yes, I'm going to moan about it - it's spoiling my enjoyment of Soul Caliber 2!

first season inspired one line reviews...



Bad Brains - Banned in DC: Bad Brain's Greatest Riffs

My slightly skewed introduction to the US hardcore scene: Rastafarian Punk Rock!



Branches & Routes

Kid606 does gentle and plently of interesting left-field groups to investigate.



Peaches - The Teaches of Peaches

Hirstute lady does electro filth.



A Perfect Circle - Thirteenth Step

Byronesque metal, and rather good at it too...



The Wire Tipper 10

Adventures in Modern Music, includes excellent collaboration between Dalek and Faust.



Thirsty Ear Presents: Blue Series Sampler

Includes taster from El-P's forthcoming jazz album.



Aesop Rock - Bazooka Tooth

Stunning new Def Jux release, El-P executive produces - not sure what that means.



Peaches - Fatherfucker

More filth!



Muse - Absolution

Apocalyptic Baroque Rock?

Pics!

In case anyone is wondering Darth Phil exists in the real world - not Hollyoaks... he does not cope very well with melodramatic crap from over emotional people (even if they are under the influence of alcohol). This is definitely something worth remembering if you feel the urge to start being abusive about anyone Darth Phil knows.

"And where the hell have you been! Your dinner's gone cold!"



Well, I've been in Coventry for pretty much the whole month - and oh how I have enjoyed that, it's been...a...blast...



So, anyway between fun filled trips up North I've been to my company's belated tenth anniversary get together (ate lot's, drank more, spoke to a few old chums, didn't take enough pictures), watched Glenn Hoddle's last game as manager of Spurs (after three everybody! We're the Park lane!... sorry, minor slip of the tongue there), and acquired plenty of CDs (and there are a hell of a lot more on the way!).



And that's about it I'm afraid, not much else to say really. Managed to finally watch the last episode of Buffy, which was frankly a bit shite. I mean, come on folks! Where exactly was the ending? OK, Sunnydale go boom, Xander goes a bit pirate, Angel pops up for about 30 seconds and a couple of half major characters kick the bucket - but in reality not that many loose endings were tied up were they? (...I just spoiled the ending there, didn't I? Oooh! little old evil me!).



And speaking of major events in motion picture history (yeah yeah, screw you I'll be as tenuous as I damn well like) can I just say a few words about Citizen Kane, which I finally got round to watching on DVD recently. Now I agree it's an important and influential film (although in a fairly dry technical sense), but can I be controversial here and say that it is by no way the best film ever. Casting aside the obvious Star Wars obsession in this neck of the wood I can think of plenty of films which are better: Laurence of Arabia, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Matrix, even the Muppet Christmas Carol! All those film critics who put Kane at the top of there lists are so wrong it hurts.



But getting back to the Star Wars obsession, the DVD has a documentary presented by, well I'll be blunt: That Twat Barry Norman who has the nerve to get all cynical about the original Star Wars trilogy. Now I'm only going to say it once: You do not diss the Holy Trinity! It is a sacred thing and as such beyond criticism... except maybe for the Ewoks, and the crappy bat things in Empire...



Ok that's enough I think, nothing else to do except welcome Phall Master to the fold. Nice comment, I liked it.

Love is in the air!

Stuck in Coventry again, posting via wap, but how much did i like Leicester's result last night! Ph34r 0ur l33t 5k1llz!

If you know me, and have been on holiday recently, where's my present!



And if you've been away and want to know what I've been up to, well I've been up to this.

...and here's another one: "Why can't you just masturbate like the rest of us?" (said by a girl! the sort of girl I want to marry!)



I swear this is the only way to watch Buffy properly, how people watch one episode and then patiently wait a whole week (or more!) for the next one is beyond me.

The Buffy binge continues, although I'm alternating with Angel... Another quote that deserves being immortalised on a web page: "Come on, Everybody loves foetal pigs!"

I'm just having a bit of a Buffy binge, and Spike has come up with a quote which I may adopt as my new personal mantra: "get up, get out, get drunk. Repeat as needed"

Time to take a moment I think and remember The Man in Black. Damn shame really...

Back from Coventry with the distinct impression that this month is a bad one. Last Tuesday a car landed on it's roof about two metres away from mine, not a very pleasant experience. I'm stuck with having to work in Coventry, and this Sunday... which... sucks... ass... hard, and my sister's cat (Oh God no, I'm writing about cats on my website, sorry!) got ran over.



Still, maybe some sort of karma will kick in and the rest of the month will be more tolerable.

Back in Coventry, posting via wap... Isn't technology great.

A bit late, but finally here are some thoughts on the Prefuse 73, cLOUDDEAD, Cex and Why? CDs I got the other week.

bit late...



cLOUDDEAD

Someone has already described this album perfectly on the Amazon.com user reviews, I'll quote from that review now: This album has a blender solo. If that frightens you, avoid this at all costs. ...it bloody well does too! Probably one of the finest examples of kitchen equipment based solos I've ever heard. Seriously though, this is an astonishing CD from the Anticon crew, specifically Dose One, Why? (more of him later) and Odd Nosdam. It has tracks - but often these will contain several completely unrelated tunes; it has rhymes - but they are more like another layer of ambient texture, the lyrics appear as a stream of consiouness, often the vocals are reversed making the lyrics even more obscure; it has beats, but never too harsh to take away from the gorgeous ambient layers used elsewhere in the songs. Anyway great CD - if you need a quick dirty frame of reference, think Boards of Canada with vocals.



Why? - Oaklandazulasylum

Why? is one of the vocalists in cLOUDDEAD, in some respect this CD is even further away from hip-hop territory than the cLOUDDEAD one - it's more in the realm of the vaguely singer/songwriter world of Fog, maybe due to the use of instrumental samples it could be described as folktronica. Frankly, who cares how it's labelled? It's good, a proper album that needs to be appreciated in one go - and it has some great lyrics, my favourite has got to be "I just found out today, the girl I have a crush on is a lesbian"... Says it all really.



Cex - Being Ridden Instrumentals

This is more like it Rjyan! As much as I like Cex's vocal talents, they are far more suited for live freestyling and I think can detract from his instrumental work. There is some great stuff on this CD, most of the songs are lead by an acoustic guitar riff while various beats, clicks, whizzes and pops fill out the background - I get the impression most of the tracks have been composed on the guitar which gives the whole collection a much more melodic structure to many recent 'electronica' (for want of a better word) albums.



Prefuse 73 - Extinguished

The previous Prefuse 73 CDs I've owned are characterised by a very much cut and paste attitude to sampling, this CD answers the question of what happens when you take this methodolgy to the next level, basically this is the previous Prefuse 73 album and all of the out-takes cut up, re-arrranged. This CD contains 23 tracks spread over about 35 minutes, although essentially the number of tracks is irrelevant, this CD needs to be listened to in one go - I'd go as far as saying it's better than the album it's remixing.

I swear they should put a limit on the number of times I'm allowed to visit play.com, or at least add some sort of time limit to how long I'm allowed to stay there for. I've just spent £137 £145 on Cds... However I've got a small degree of justification: first the releases of all the CD's I've ordered are spread over about two months, to put that into perspective I'm looking at an expenditure of about £17 a week - less than I spend on nicotine, and half as much as I'd spend on alcohol on a Friday night out.



Secondly all of the CDs are completely and utterly necessary, and I will obviously suffer psychological damage if I don't own them all... Sad isn't it? Anyway if you want to know what I've been wasting spending all my hard earned wages on, the details are on the newly formatted future CD page.

I'm back... and pretty much everyone else I know is on holiday. You have to admire that sort of timing.

I hate Coventry!