If you haven’t noticed how superb music has been this year then you haven’t listened to a lot of it.

Things started off well, with Mars Volta releasing Bedlam in Goliath to high acclaim. It doesn’t top their 2005 opus France the Mute but…Well…France the Mute is the best musical work in history, so we can forgive them that. Goliath contains their typical proggish glory, but constitutes a development insofar as they demonstrate their ability to write a song that lasts less than ten minutes. Indeed, the results are so good that they got nominated for a Grammy:

Dan le Sac versus Scroobius Pip released the hip-hop album of the decade, Angles:

But that wasn’t enough to get them onto the X Factor:

An interesting development in this years music is the total disintegration of the division between dance and rock. Always a flimsy one it has now dissolved entirely, as the following videos should demonstrate:

Dance bands playing rock? Rock bands playing dance? Nobody can tell, nobody important still thinks it matters.

Another remarkable phenomenon is the sheer weight of fantastic albums released. All of the videos above come from strong albums, with large amounts of great songs instead of the tiresome strong single/filler set-up. Especially worthy of mention here are Late Of The Pier, who with Fantasy Black Channel made one of the most playful and exploratory albums I’ve heard in a long time. It also manages to stage a sonic approximation of an orgasm:

Foals put out quite magnificently, with Antidotes a well crafted, inter-connected piece of tightness which didn’t disappoint despite the (in hindsight not so) absurd expectations built up around it:

Speaking of which, Portishead. How were they supposed to impress after having been away for that long? By released an album like Third.

An even greater surprise than Portishead finally putting out was Mr. Trent Reznor going from “That guy that takes a decade to perfect one drum loop” to “Prolific” in the space of a year. How? Releasing five albums.

Admittedly much of this could have been a consequence of Ghosts not exactly being what the majority of his fanbase wanted (although I for one adore the ambient, abstract moments on Downward Spiral, see them as the highlight and wish that there had been more) but frankly…He’s releasing this stuff for free now. We are in no position to complain.

Slipknot didn’t release their best album by a long shot, but ooh, new masks:

The Kills, however, did:

And then of course there’s Crystal Castles, the band that add further evidence to the theory that Canada must be the origin of the best new band every year, without fail (see also: Arcade Fire, DFA 1979, etc…)

If you haven’t already, try The Ruby Kid. He’s fascinating; combining intelligent lyrics with a radical attitude both to reality and rap. Out goes the macho obsession of much mainstream hip-hop, and in come repeated references to the Coleridge, gender and the relationship between the proletariat and the means of production in Marxist theory. With quite some style:

For all those claiming hip-hop’s pussy is where their cock is,
You’ve got a misogynistic Oedipal complex,
You’re raping your mother,
Just stop it.

I like this, I do…

‘There’s only one man I’m afraid of.’

‘Who is he sir? Name the devil.’

‘It’s you, Charles.’

I saw Treasure Island today after a family friend was kind enough to get us tickets. It’s a superb show and if you can muster the time and money I highly reccommend it. It wasn’t quite a musical yet wasn’t quite a straight adapation (although a good deal of the original dialogue was maintained, much to my delight) and the weird mid-way point it reached was most satisfactory.

So sword fights, singing and swashbuckling. Even ninjas could not have improved it.

Pirate’s Bay are releasing a single. If there was anything to make the music industry feel like it has been fully supplanted instead of merely usurped it was this. I am unsure as to whether there is more to follow, but if they can find more artists of this quality to participate and have the will (and I see no reason why either should be lacking) then I don’t see why not.

Download the song here. Or at least watch it:

Surprisingly good fun, no?

It seems that the music industry has finally struck upon a solution that could save it. I wrote previously that it was becoming increasingly difficult (and soon would become next to impossible) to sell information but I had imagined that the alternative would be people taking to paying instead for an experience. This would take the form of live music, which is not something that can be downloaded fully in MP3 format, a hypothesis hardly debunked for me by the glorious experience I had at Reading last weekend and would have found impossible to recreate using even the most powerful of domestic sonic equipment.

However this suggestion is something else entirely: rather than paying to encounter the musician and witness them recreate songs you encountered in file format for free you will instead fund the existence of those files being brought about. Not the approach which I had anticipated, but one which seems likely to succeed to me. I had previously considered the similarities between the previous system of artistic patronage that funded the great masters and the situation which a recording artist who’s produce could be claimed for free would find themselves in. But this seems a direct descendant, although accessible to almost any: no doubt musicians who appealed to poorer internet denizens could still ensure that their records were produced, so long as their allure was wide enough. In this fashion the “support” shown by fans is not simply emotional but also financial. Those artists who are capable of obtaining a fanbase (or at least interest) will be the one’s who obtain success, thus meaning that the music industry will be willing to take greater risks.

The use of priority tickets suggests that my emphasis on the importance of live performance was not entirely void and it is unlikely that the limited editions obtainable by investors/fans shall be notable for anything save rarity in a format that will prove impossible to upload.

As such I find the conduct of the company behind this far more pleasing than that of the government, which has backed away from windfall taxes.
Predictable as this should have been from a New Labour government it remains a great pity. The profit made by private companies has been simply phenomenal, yet this has been accompanied (and assisted) by substantial increases in the cost of utilities, crippling many poorer families. To tax their vast wealth and return the portion of it taken to those who suffered in order to produce it, forced to feed the cartel that supply their basic need of shelter, is entirely apt.

If this is deemed a “Raid” being “Legalised” then so be it. The impoverished were raided too and this retribution will bring about their salvation.

After Doug’s reference to Dan’s Mises link I thought it timely to share with you this. For those who haven’t seen it already its Lenin losing it and calling The Dark Knight a “the most obviously fascist of films”. Despite the fact that Batman refuses to kill…

WALL-E is, above all else, a testament to the fact that Pixar have no reached the stage where they can do whatever they please and get away with it. Even a consideration of the films It’s half set on a post-apocalyptic Earth, half in some space-bound remnant of humanity space ship capitalist set up and both are excellent but conceptually dark surroundings. Earth has been choked to death by human waste, while the space dwellers live a hollow consumerist facsimile of actual life. Either is a surprising choice: after the carefree romp of Cars, during the publicity of which all questions concerning global warming were laughed off, the Earth that WALL-E inhabits is very clearly wrecked by unsustainable living. WALL-E is left in the futile role of trying to clean up the mess left by billions of careless, callous humans. Meanwhile the banal lifestyle offered to those living on the ship has led to everyone being scantily boned blobs who can not exist without their machinery. A machine tells them across vast screens that they should “Buy blue. Blue is the new red.” and at a flick of a switch their colours change. They are carried everywhere by floating pods, without which they are effectively cripples.

But the film by no means wallows in dystoptopianism. Indeed the mood is usually one of amusement in the face of adversity: the eponymous protagonist faces numerous mishaps throughout the film but, like his cockroach best friend, is nigh-on-invinsible and always endures the most humorous of slapstick calamities. More importantly still Wall-E breaks from his programming in delightful ways: he is instructed to compound all of the world’s rubbish into cubes (his name standing for Waste Allocation Load Lifter Axiom class), which he then stacks systematically. However he decides that a few select items are not rubbish at all, and retains them in his metal box home. This provides him with the remnants of human culture, ranging from light-bulbs to Christmas tree lighting. It is effectively V’s Shadow Gallery compiled by a naive robot with less to work with.

The film begins with WALL-E’s routine, him going about his affairs before being disturbed by the arrival of a new robot from space, named EVE. She is seeking out plantlife, but WALL-E has beaten her to it and when she discovers this and returns to her sender along with the bloom he is forced to pursue her on the grounds that he feels holding hands with her will complete him, inspired by a slock Hollywood film he once found. This, of course, makes perfect sense within the film and it is a testament to the power of Pixar that they managed to make a pair of characters who are only mildly more eloquent that Pokemon have the strongest chemistry I’ve seen on screen this year.

WALL-E infiltrates EVE’s spacestation home and then the two of them are forced to attempt to thwart a plan hatched by robots aboard the ship who do not want the vessel to return to Earth. It is at this stage that the first humans in the film appear and it is strange how harder they are to connect with than the robots. This is despite them being the only characters in the film that can actually properly converse (the robots that do speak use single word sentences, besides the ship’s auto-pilot). As you might imagine, this leads to linguistic silence in the majority of its scenes. Pixar manage to work around this constraint marvellously, using a machinistic mime. WALL-E communicates through his swivelling eye and occasionally his settings, compacting himself into a box when scared. EVE has fine voice acting that manages to draw rich feeling into her highly limited vocabulary, as well as having lit eyes that vary depending upon mood. All of the robots have a carefully crafted soundtrack that uses the apparently incidental whirr and buzz of motion and function to convey feeling. This led to its creator dubbing it “R2-D2 the Movie” and it certainly works as well as that would. Emotional attachment is formed despite the lack of speech, indeed the robots are characters far easier to empathise with than the humans. But then, while robots have become far more sophisticated than the ones we encounter today, humans have become far more simple: before knocked from their chairs by WALL-E a pair of residents failed to realise that the ship had a pool, the ship’s captain spends hours infront of the space-age equivalent of Wikipedia requesting it define phrases such as “Ho-down” and words such as “Soil”.

But the film’s attitude towards humanity is far from blank misanthropy. It is far more interesting than that. Humans live within a system which is based around a space-ship economy apparently devoid of money and based around ultra-sophisticated technology. This allows them to communicate with each other and obtain whatever they desire. It also renders them drones watched over by machines. There are also lots of ship robots, who are largely antagonists or light relief.

WALL-E is notable for the lack of pop-cultural emphasis. Unlike cinematic carrion such as Shrek 2 the importance of external references is highly limited: anyone watching will know what a light-bulb is and find it remarkable that it lights up when EVE holds it. If the blobs of huamnity plunging down the ship is not recognised as a reference to Titanic, or the music that quickly follows to Space Odyssey 2001, then it does not matter in the slightest. The scenes are still fine ones and those are the only occasions I can recall where any outside work was mentioned.

Instead the film is highly original and filled with ideas, a rich seam of enjoyable characters, events and goals appearing from nowhere. The closest Pixar film to it is Finding Nemo, which predictably shared a director, Andrew Stanton. He aimed to show that Pixar was capable of setting a film in space after the success of setting one in water but only a limited time is actually spent in Zero Gravity conditions here. That which is, though, is one of the most enjoyable scenes of the film: WALL-E and EVE travelling around and then into the ship, her using motors and he the propulsion of a fire extinguisher. Stanton is clearly a highly intelligent man and the quantity of thought given to his characters is considerable: WALL-E has such sentience solely because of the prolonged amount of time he has been engaged in a role. EVE is initially cold and dismissive of his affection (their early encounters involve a plasma rifle) because she has not had this history, and required interaction with him both to expand herself and come closer to him. Stanton even went to the measure of adding “Imperfections” into the film’s camerawork to make it seem closer to live action, something which I was unaware of when viewing but in hindsight was a complete success.

WALL-E has been labelled “Pixar’s Ninth consecutive wonder” and without having seen every one of their last films I can not comment. But it is certainly a superb piece which uses the restrictions it set itself to create a fresh and fascinating work. It defies description and I would urge anyone who has not yet seen it to do so and doubt that anyone who already has will require encouragement for a repeat viewing.

Time for another musical interlude, as I need to go and write Sunday’s post. So, we’ll begin with a little gloom:

Before moving onto what’s undisputedly the sound of an electronic orgy:

And finally:

And with that, good night. Normal service will resume on my part tomorrow.

I feel lazy at present. So, this post will act as a musical interlude. We open with the dark:

And move onto the slightly strange and fantastical:

And finally, an entirely superior remix of an otherwise cancerously irritating piece:

A proper bassline makes everything alright, you see.