It’s New Music Monday. An occasional series, which I just thought up because alliteration is the future.
Seafret are back (you may remember them from such posts as Wildfire and Atlantis) with a new song, a new EP and a new tour which once again sadly omits the entirety of the African continent.
The music, thankfully, is readily available worldwide. Here’s their latest offering, Can’t Look Away:
…nothing happens at all.
The needle returns to the start of the song
And we all sing along like before
And we’ll all be lonely tonight and lonely tomorrow.
Driving home from town the other night from town I found myself sitting at a red robot* while precisely no vehicles went the other way.
And it reminded me of Del Amitri’s 1989 single Nothing Ever Happens, which includes the line:
Now the traffic lights change to stop, when there’s nothing to go
Not 100% accurate, in that my issue was that the traffic lights had turned to stop when there was something to go: me. More like the traffic lights had turned to go, when there was nothing to stop. Which is equally irritating.
We can put a robot onto the surface of Mars (and not get it stuck at traffic signals), but we can’t have traffic lights that are able to see if they actually need to allow no cars to flow freely across junctions.
Anyway, that got me thinking of all the other lines in that song. There are several.
As an observational piece about modern, urban society, it’s pretty accurate.
And pretty damning.
And pretty depressing.
What did intrigue me was that although this song is now basically 30 years old (eina!) – an entire generation on – and given the progress we have allegedly made in that time, nothing has really changed.
American businessmen continue to snap up Van Goghs for the price of a hospital wing.
Bill hoardings go on advertising products that nobody needs.
Bachelors still phone up their friends for a drink while the married ones turn on a chat show.
And we’ll all be lonely tonight and lonely tomorrow.
Obviously, this is erroneous reportage: you can’t play the a-ha hit Take On Me too loudly. There is no upper limit to the volume for that particular track. Windows must rattle.
Filthy language aside, I think it’s pretty impressive that Mr Boros is on first name terms with the council official whose unfortunate task it is to come and ask him to turn it down a bit.
He’s wearing those sunglasses “because the bright light would trigger his migraines”, which is very much in the same vein as his insistence that he was playing his music so loudly simply “to block out his crippling back pain”.
Unsurprisingly, this cut no ice with the court:
Ouch.
Still, I bet his neighbours are glad that he’ll be gone, for a day or two.
I thought that given that we were Coming Home today, a Coming Home tune might be in order.
But then I found that I’d already featured the Coming Home tune I was thinking about in this post, entitled Coming Home.
Damn.
Still, deep in the aforementioned Coming Home post was this line:
Next up from the album is my favourite track: the rather Killersy Meanwhile Up In Heaven, whose video will almost certainly get a blog post of its own here.
I looked. And, as far as I could see, that suggestion had never been followed up upon. Until now:
Boom.
Ricky Wilson wanders around an ethereal fairground, which – it becomes clear – is populated by those whose loved ones have thrown a seven, kicked the bucket, shuffled off this mortal coil, joined the choir invisible.
Snuffed it.
Great song. Good video. Wholly inappropriate for a post about coming home after a holiday.
Remember Alright from 1995? You know, Oxford (or was it Wheatley?) band Supergrass riding the Britpop wave with a pearly king banging out the staccato intero on a seaside upright piano (was it in Portmeirion?) before the boys were towed around town on a double bed?
Of course you do.
That was all so long ago, but now Supergrass frontman Gaz Coombes has given us a much more mature sound with Walk The Walk.
A great, bass guitar-driven pseudo funk offering with gliding strings in the middle 8 and featuring an interesting video set at a poker evening.
It’s good stuff, and it’s my Quota Video for today.
