It's taken me far too long to write this, and given that it's not very long or well written, that's a sad indictment of my ability to write. But here it is....

2008 Music In Review

Once again, it's time for me to pretend that people read this and let you know my favourite albums that I bought last year. If you want to know what those were, you can check that out here (it's 'How Strange, Innocence' by Explosions In The Sky down to 'Lust Lust Lust' by The Raveonettes).

In the past I've tried to liven these lists up a bit, but this year, not so much. It's just going to be a simple list "in no particular order".

The Listing

• 'Enjoy Eternal Bliss' by Yndi Halda

  It's "typical" post-rock (or crescendo-core as I've heard it described using the X-core form of genre naming that seems so prevalent nowadays) and I do just lap that stuff up. I bought quite a lot of this sort of thing on eMusic last year, but this one was probably the only one that I've listened to more than a couple of times.

• 'Heart' by Stars

  Given that I rated 'Set Yourself On Fire' so highly in 2006 it should be no surprise that one of the 3 Stars albums I got this year would feature. We picked up this album at the merch stall of their gig at the end of January, which was one of my favourite gigs last year. This might be slushy, romantic, and a little bit naff but dammit - 'Elevator Love Song' and 'Death to Death' are just freakin' awesome songs.

• 'The Face That Sunk A Thousand Ships' by Strike The Colours

  You should recognise Jenny Reeve as the backing vocalist and violin player in the background of so many great Scottish albums of the past few years. The most recognisable would be the tracks she fronts on either of the two Reindeer Section albums. This mini-album is easily as good, if not better, than much of the stuff she's helped out on in my opinion.

• 'Saturdays=Youth' by M83

  'Car Chase Terror' from 'Before The Dawn Heals Us' is one of my favourite songs. Not because it's a good tune or anything, just because it's so batshit insane. There's nothing so intense on this album, and in fact it's very unlike the darkness of 'Before...', or even the sci-fi moodiness of 'Dead Cities, Red Seas And Lost Ghosts'. It's a much more upbeat affair (at least on the face of it although 'Graveyard Girl' does point us in a darker direction). I'd say it sounds like the bastard offspring of 80's synth pop and 90's shoe-gaze indie, but what do I know?

• 'Loney, Noir' by Loney, Dear

  I dropped this onto my amazon wishlist some time ago but really can't remember where I got the recommendation from. I do really like it though, so I'd love to be able to thank whomever (or whatever) it was that made me do it. Whiny-voiced Scandinavian acoustic-influenced pop, if you like Mew et al, you'll like this.

• 'Fur And Gold' by Bat For Lashes

  I listen to this album an awful lot. There's something about it that clicks with me; it's a little bit operatic, it's a little bit dark. I know my listening habits, and it's clear that I might tire of it sooner rather than later, but for now, it's glorious.

• 'O' by Tilly And The Wall

  Tilly And The Wall use tap-dancers instead of "proper" percussion and on it's own that's a weird enough affectation to give them a chance. Lucikly their twangy, teenage sounding pop is catchy enough on it's own that you forget the affectation and listen on it's own merits. At least, that was true of their previous albums, on "O" they've supped from the 80's synth cup and brewed up something a bit different. It's still twangy and teenage, but the addition of synths (or maybe they were always there, but they've boosted them a bit more) gives it something a little extra. I'm not sure I'd be up for another album by them that was the same as this, but this one is great.

• 'Scribbled In Chalk' by Karine Polwart

  When I first bought 'Ballad Of The Books' I wasn't that impressed with it as a whole album, and tended to stick to the few standout tracks that I liked on the first couple of listens. However, I gave it another go this year and I was struck by how good the Karine Polwart track was, which I'd totally missed before. I sought out one of her albums and it's been a fairly consistent companion ever since. If you've heard her track from Ballad Of The Books then you'll know what to expect, if not then my attempt would be intelligent, political folky stuff of the highest order.

Thoughts?

It's not a very indie looking list this year. Although I bought loads of typical indie-rock stuff, none of it really floated my boat a huge amount. Instead I apparently got caught in a timewarp and became obsessed with 80's synth-influenced albums, or sweeping romantic pop. That's a bit troubling. Who knows what transgressions 2009 will bring.

In terms of the actual / digital stuff I warbled on about last year I constantly flip between thinking, "this'll be my last month, there's just nothing on here I want" and "dammit, I've used up my quota this month... and there's still stuff I want to download" so I'm not sure anymore. I still prefer the cold comfort of an actual CD, but that eMusic sub is so convenient.

200 Days Later

I missed the 100 day blog lapse and the 150 day lapse due to sheer laziness and it felt like my return to blogging needed to be after a big round number. Something dramatic, so I had to wait until the next one, 200. It just wouldn't have felt special otherwise.

Except, I don't have anything to say. This may have been the cause of my lapse in the first place, and indeed most of you would no doubt say I've never had anything to say.

In my defense during this lapse I've been µblogging my face off on Twitter. I've also been busy getting married, going on honeymoon and putting on a conference (with help from James) all stuff that normal folk would blog about, but not me.

This post is a bit meta and apologetic, but I needed to break the drought with something. I'll do another music roundup post later in the week and see if we can come up with a theme or raison d'blog for 2009. Perhaps not as absurd as 2007s attempt to become the Internet's premiere news site for bees.

Spreading Myself Too Thin

About a month ago the blogosphere was abuzz with links to a video of Clay Shirky's talk, "Gin, Television, and Social Surplus"^*, from the Web 2.0 Expo. The main point that I took away from it, possibly not the main point that Clay wanted us to take away from it, was that I should become a more discerning consumer in my spare time.

Let me paint you a picture with words of a typical week-day evening chez h-lame. Tree and I will come home, one of us will make dinner whilst the other maybe does the dishes or some other domestic chore. We'll then sit and eat dinner with the TV on. There's nothing on that either of us wants to watch in that 19:00-20:00 timeslot so chances are it'll be on E4 (or E4+1) showing endless re-runs of Friends and Scrubs. If we're being particularly lazy that evening, it'll stay on until we go to bed. To freshen up this slightly depressing image of vapid consumption, I have to point out that we won't just be sitting in silence staring at the old goggle-box. We'll chat about stuff, occasionally we'll be browsing the internet trying to organise wedding stuff, or playing scrabble or something. However, the norm is that the TV will be on, playing something we'd not actively chosen to watch, and more often that not, at some point in the evening, we'd just sit there. Watching.

I figured that there's loads of good media out there that I don't need to just sit and watch whatever happens to be on the TV at the moment I choose to switch it on (typically an episode of Friends). To this end, for the past few weeks, since I saw Clay's talk I've been trying to actually choose what I consume.

• TV: Trying to watch good shows when they're on (like Dr Who.) or making better use of our LoveFilm subscription (we've been known to let things linger unwatched for weeks).
• DS: Thanks to dsvideo I'm able to watch shows on my DS. Currently: 30 Rock. There's also using the thing as a gaming device, but currently I'm not playing any games on it. I did just complete Ultimate Spider-man and Open Tyrian though).
• Laptop (as TV): Downloading Battlestar Galactica and Heroes.
• Laptop (as Book): I have a list of links to read as long as my arm, just waiting for me to take some time to read through them. I also download comics to read on my mac with FFView (recent / current: Preacher, The Invisibles, Transmetropolitan, X-Statix, Lucifer & Seven Soldiers - and there's bound to be more.
• Books: Whatever I'm actually reading in dead-tree form (shown in the sidebar)
• Comics: I still buy dead-tree comics too, and there's a bunch of them to be read: Y: The Last Man, Fables, The Walking Dead & Ultimate Spider-man.

And this is just the list of whatever I happen to be consuming right now. The list of TV shows I could choose to watch next is huge; The Wire, Deadwood, Twin Peaks, Flight of the Conchords to name a few. There's also lots of other stuff I could be doing at home, like coding or organising. Not to mention the range of activities I could be doing outside by taking advantage of all that London has to offer.

Suddenly I feel that every moment I'm not doing something I've chosen as being worthy of my time is a moment wasted. My spare time suddenly became complex. I might not be watched as many episodes of Friends as I was, but I'm not sure I'm happy enough about it.

^*Also available from Clay Shirky's own blog as a transcript. Sometimes I'd rather read something than watch a video. High bandwidth is killing the written blog, it's all podcasts and screencasts and no-one types anything anymore. It's shit.

Pixar Films

In order of enjoyment vs. obvious "ooh look how good we are at doing X with computers"

1. The Incredibles - being a goth is bad for your social life vs. cartoony violence with a hint of realism
2. Toy Story 2 - get over yourself, you ain't all that vs. close ups of cheezy puffs
3. Toy Story - don't be mean to the new guy vs. well anything really
4. Cars - ain't old-timey American road trips great vs. realistic dust particle effects
5. A Bug's Life - standard hero journey vs. something that's not Toy Story
6. Ratatouille - joke-free cookery romp vs. fast moving action scenes
7. Finding Nemo - boring family / coming of age / finding yourself story vs. flowy water
8. Monsters, Inc - terrible billy crystal routines vs. swishy hair

E.g. the more the film is obviously about a certain effect (trying to win yet more SIGGRAPH kudos) the less enjoyable it is. With the exception of A Bug's Life, which (as far as I can remember) was wholly about not being Toy Story.

This list would be different if we added the Randy Newman song scale into it (e.g. those without such travesties against our ears would score much higher).

Muztape

Seems like everyone and their dog is creating a muxtape right now. I fancied myself as a bit of a DJ too, so I thought I'd create one also. The problem is that I'm rubbish at building mix tapes properly with good thematic linkages between the songs, or nice segues from outros to intros etc, or basically, anything that would make the aural experience gratifying.

Still, that didn't stop me making one anyway. It won't flow aurally, but I think the little story I'm telling with the titles works quite well, although I might tweak it some when I have access to other music.

A Disturbing Fe-Tea-sh

It'll come as no surprise to anyone who has worked with me over the years, but I seriously love a good cup of tea.

I weaned myself off sugar in my tea about three years ago when I realised that drinking about 5 or 6 cups of 2-spoon sugary tea a day was probably a bad thing. It took me about a year because I was being pathetic about finally cutting it out entirely. I even cheated a bit by briefly switching to soya milk after I quit sugar (soya milk is significantly sweeter than normal milk).

Anyway, at the start of last month, I met my mate Gordon Noble who was down in London presenting at an archaeology conference in the British Museum. It was a warm Sunday afternoon, I didn't feel too good and Gordon didn't want to fall asleep and miss his flight back that night, so we settled in to a cafe for a few cups of tea instead of into a pub for a few pints. After a couple of cups we went for a walk and then went for one more whilst we waited for Tree to turn up then we could go for some food. Unfortunately at this second cafe, our teas came without milk as the guy behind the counter seemed more interested in talking about Egypt to some girls that had come in after us. We didn't complain, because, well, we're British, and you just don't do that sort of thing. So we sat and chatted over just tea.

And fuck me if it wasn't tasty as hell. Seriously, I was amazed, I expected it to be a bit bitter and horrid, whereas this was anything but.

As we all know, due in no small part to the efforts of The UK Tea Council^*, tea is super healthy as long as you don't load it up with milk. It seemed a no-brainer to follow their advice and just cut it out entirely. What surprises me most is that it took me all of 1 cup of tea to decide, unlike the 1,000,000 or so it took with weaning myself off sugar.

Of course, there is a downside to this new world of tea that I've entered. There's now no real reason to get one of these.

^*It's not the first time I've mentioned the Tea council, so I can't make any comments about the lady bathing in a giant cup of tea as I've made them before.

Reasons For Doing

More and more, I find myself doing stuff, not because I want to do it, but because I can see that if I don't do it the eventual solution wouldn't work out so well for me. I can't help but wonder if these are the most selfish acts I've ever done, which doesn't fill me with awesome glowy feelings. I also suspect that this might be the reason that totally inept people find themselves in positions of power making terrible decision after terrible decision, and I don't like the map that this plots for the rest of my life, should I continue along this path.