Extreme Listening Mode!

There has been some great music this year, sure, but the one thing missing has been a truly great summer record. Which is apt, I suppose as we’ve been missing a summer.
Apologies to anyone who can’t share in my misanthropy due to geographical differences, but this summer has been grim. Nostalgia dictates that every summer when I were a lad was sun-kissed, balmy and glorious, as opposed to this continual firestorm of pissing rain, grey skies and fat people. It’s like something from Morrissey’s imagination, though obviously with more tolerance to the ethnics.

So it sends one into somewhat of a depression. And that might explain why the best stuff of the summer has been the darker stuff, like White Denim and Santogold. You don’t necessarily want to kick back with a beer and listen to ‘Walkin’ on Sunshine’ when the main street outside your flat looks like Tewkesbury in a downpour.

But the mainstream music really hasn’t helped much. Things got so bad I actually found myself listening to the last Coldplay single and thinking ‘I’ve heard worse’. I mean, for fucks sake. That’s one stop away from knowing where things are in B & Q. The singalonga hit of the summer has been American Retard Kid Rock’s merciless and systematic destruction of two great songs in the turgid ‘All Summer Long’. In the UK, Rock’s about as relevant as rabies, but that hasn’t stopped desperate radio producers playing him. Duffy had us all begging for mercy from her radio-led ubiquity months ago. Noah and the Whale were quite charming at first, but then I found out they were Australian, which kind of put me off them. You know I’m right.

And then, when you think it won’t, it can’t possibly get any worse, you get hit by the triple whammy; Dido’s back. Paolo Nutini’s back. And Keane are warming up with their tracksuits off.

Read that back. All of it. Force your face to the screen in a Clockwork Orange style and read that back. The only thing that could possibly be worse is if I’d chucked in a Bedingfield album of duets. Which, given the way the year is shaping up, may well be a possibility.

They say that music is cyclical, and that the return of bland music for dinner parties is a response. To what? What life changing, edgy threatening sound has bolted overground and challenged the established order? Were we all out when it broke?

Paolo Nutini. If I heard the guy singing in the street – a possibility since he looks like a drunken student someone has accidentally pissed on as he lay sleeping at a party – I’d throw a shoe at him.

Dido. The doyenne of dismal, the worthy of wet. The woman sounds like a diet of ryvita. Why oh why do we allow these dullards to prosper?

And even then, they are just the warm-ups for Keane. You shouldn’t hate Keane just because they are successful. That would be like hating the British Olympic winners. You are just carping about their success. Well, you know what? I fucking am. I’ve never tried to swim up and down in a kind of fast way, so I’m sure I’d be able to do it better than all of them. Dressage? Just making a horsey dance about a bit isn’t my idea of sport, posho. Similarly with Keane. I’ve never tried to make an insipid piano-led fuckpig of an album. I’ve never then tried to go all modern by appropriating U2′s sound from Achtung, Baby and pretend I was all, like, dance and shit. And yeah yeah, I might be a ‘never try, never fail’ type fellow. But Keane have tried. And have failed. And now they are back. So who’s laughing now, you hamster-jawed c*nt?

Fucking Razorlight will be back next. You just know it. I’d say wake me up when September ends to end this just to be clever, but that just opens the door to Green Day.

Screw it – roll on winter.

Filed under: General Stuff Tagged: | dido, Keane, music, paolo nutini, radio