50 quid bloke

- “The Alternative To Love” by Brendan Benson

- “Ambulance Ltd.” by Ambulance Ltd

That’ll do for the moment…

Along with the normal day to day joys that life brings, I’ve been slightly distracted recently by a hair-brained bandwagon-jumping scheme in the form of ‘The 50quid bloke podcast’. More news on this in a couple of weeks (betcha just can’t wait). In the meantime I’ve been ploughing through a fair old bit of music - some of which is actually quite fine.

It’s quite old now, but The Eels’ Blinking Lights and Other Revelations has been something of a revelation for me over the last few months. I’ve never really listened to them before, and sometimes you get to a stage with a band that you feel you can’t really get into them this late in the game - there’s just too many experts in eelsology to compete. Then it arrives, and I know it’s been six years in the making - and it’s got 33 tracks on it (five and a bit tracks a year: nice work if you can get it!). So I did something that I very rarely do with CDs: I listened to it start to finish, repeatedly. This is a rare privilege, and I just hope E and his friends appreciate it. Anyway, there’s loads of reviews all over the place, and you probably own it already, so what can I tell you that you don’t already know? That it’s good but could have been a brilliant 18 track cd (which is what everyone says about all double albums)? That in the midst of some very missable noodling there’s half a dozen complete gems here? Anyway - it’s one of those that you just have to own.

“Pajo” by Dave Pajo is also a few months old. And very lovely it is too. Sort of Elliot Smith meets Simon and Garfunkel (ie it’s got a bit of harmony on it). In other words - don’t expect to dance to it. The puff on his website says the album ‘reads like a musical parable with its delicate juxtaposition of beautiful sounds and bruised lyrics’ which is somewhat over dressing it. You can catch a couple of his videos here.

Would I recommend it? Well, it’ll do no harm…and if you like your music gentle, you’ll like it, but if you’re trying to economise, I reckon you should buy “Illinoise” by Sufjan Stevens as your quiet album of the month instead. He ticks all the mellow boxes, but he’s also something of a story teller as well, and he also has lots of silly song titles (’ A conjunction of Drones Simulating the Way in Which Sufjan Stevens Has an Existential Crisis in the Great Godfrey Maze’). I assume you know he’s doing an album each year based on a different state. Personally, I’m not so sure how far I’ll follow the experiment as it’s already teetering on whimsy…but here and now it’s really quite engaging.

Talking about story tellers, I even (legally) downloaded Devils & Dust by Bruce Springsteen. I can see what people see in him, but it doesn’t really do it for me. The title track’s quite nice…worth downloading.

What else? Well, I bought “Give Blood” by Brakes - although I don’t know why. It’s basically Yet Another Indy Band…and nowhere near distinctive enough to compete with some of the really rather excellent stuff that’s come out over the last 18 months.

I also dabbled with “Ham” by Chap , which musically doesn’t really belong in this roundup. Now, I like any band that names a track after our local park (’Clissold’),and this is quite good knockabout indie/electro stuff…but just a little bit too clever for it’s own good. It lacks the full-on squelchy fun of LCD Soundsystem, or the melodies of My Computer’s No CV. The result is that it’s just a little bit too much of a racket a little too much of the time. I sense that Nathan Barley would love it.

Veering back to the world of quiet, the Observer had “Nolita” by Keren Ann as their album of the week a while ago. So I bought it. I think she’s meant to be a sort of french chanteuse with a twist. It’s very nice, I just can’t find the twist.