Babybird: the English Eels, sort of

It’s not hard to find common ground between Babybird and Eels. Both are ostensibly bands, but in reality they’re solo efforts that may or may not involve other musicians. They both tend to use the same recurring musical motifs (or, if you’re not a fan, both keep releasing the same bloody song). They both tend to depth-charge their chances of commercial success (one of Eels’ most beautiful songs is called It’s a Motherfucker, while Babybird’s comeback single starts with the line “I will kill you, said the five year old” and moves on to talk about feral kids and kiddie-fiddling). And if they’re known in the outside world at all, they’re known for the One Big Hit – Novocaine for the Soul in Eels’ case, and You’re Gorgeous in Babybird’s case.

Where they differ is in personality. Despite the horrific things E from Eels sometimes sings about, there’s always an aw-shucks, self-deprecating humour behind it all. There’s humour in Babybird too, but it’s much darker, much bleaker. Eels’ humour is survivor’s humour, gallows humour. Babybird’s is a maniacal cackle, the sort of noise the mad scientist makes before pressing the big red button that unleashes the killer monkeys. Or something.

Actually, they differ in another way too: quality control. I love Babybird, but of the 4 billion albums he’s recorded and released I reckon there are four really amazing albums in there.

I’m thinking about all of this because Babybird’s got a new album out, Ex-Maniac. If you don’t like Babybird you’ll bloody hate it, but if you ever liked the band there’s a lot to like here. Unless, that is, you’re a fan of You’re Gorgeous – a fan in the “it was our wedding song” sense, because it does seem that a lot of people bought it for the title alone and didn’t listen to the rather horrible words. Ex-Maniac’s happiest title is “Bastard”.

Ex-Maniac is very Babybird, both in good ways and in bad ways. The bad: it’s patchy, and when it’s bad it’s self-indulgent and pretty tuneless. The good: there’s some great stuff here. Like Them nails the paranoia and anger of (some people’s experience of) fatherhood, while the Failed Suicide Club is heartbreaking in the same way so many Eels songs are heartbreaking. Drug Time is both funny and sad, and Unloveable – with long-time fan Johnny Depp playing guitar – is almost funky. Apparently Depp largely paid for it too, although while Ex-Maniac was recorded in LA – the same place Eels hail from – the sunshine clearly hasn’t cheered Babybird’s Stephen Jones up at all.

I hate reviews that say “If you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you’ll like” but… if you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you’ll like.

Here’s a link to a live version (or at least, live pictures stuck on the studio audio) of the cheery single Like Them. I’m going to the Glasgow gig on March 18th. Do say hello if you’re there too. I’ll be the overweight bloke blubbing to If You’ll Be Mine. Or more likely, one of the overweight blokes blubbing etc etc etc.

Ear mutations, why it hurts when I Wii, a completely unbiased review of the new Eels album, and a quick thing about iPhone 3G coverage

Hello there. Sorry for the lack of blogging recently, I’ve been taking a break from the computer. Here are a few things that have been occupying me lately.

First up, headphones and mutating ears. I’ve been reviewing some high-end headphones – in-ear ones – and while I can’t put any details up here until the reviews hit print, I can say that once you start spending £80-plus on headphones you end up with something pretty amazing. Such phones deliver so much bass that even the nicest, prettiest acoustic number feels like somebody driving an 18-wheel truck into the side of your head.

My existing headphones weren’t quite as dramatic as that, but they were pretty good – until recently, when they stopped delivering any bass at all. The problem is the seal. With in-ear headphones, once you get a good seal you get bass; if the seal isn’t perfect, you don’t get bass at all. If you ever see user reviews of £150 headphones where an outraged punter accuses the cans of being a bass-free zone, you can be sure the problem was that either the phones didn’t fit properly or the punter didn’t put them in properly.

The problem with my ones, however, is a bit different. I can’t get a seal any more. I’m not putting them in any differently, there’s no damage to the headphone covers. They just don’t fit any more, and because I’ve thrown out all the other spare covers, there’s not much I can do about it. I think the problem may be that I’ve been using earplugs quite a lot recently – our neighbours have a new dog, which can be noisy, and I often need to nap during the day – and the earplugs have widened my ear canals slightly. Not hugely – I’m not able to put, say, a large carrot into my lugs – but enough that the headphones that did fit, don’t. Very annoying.

Next up, the Wii. If you played Dead Space on Xbox, you’ll love Dead Space Extraction on the Wii – especially if you can get it for £15, as I did in ASDA. Unfortunately while it’s a brilliant game and superb fun, it’s absolutely hellish to play if you’re using the Wiimote. I was diagnosed with carpal tunnel syndrome the other week, and playing with the Wiimote makes the symptoms appear pretty much instantly. I don’t know if things are any better if you use the Wii Zapper, the gun-shaped holder for the Wiimote, but it’s probably not a good idea for me to try.

On to phones. If you’re getting crappy 3G coverage from your current provider you might find that switching makes a huge difference. According to their online coverage maps both O2 and Orange deliver great 3G coverage to my bit of the world, but in reality I can’t get an O2 signal in much of my house, anywhere near the gym or in either pub I frequent. I switched to Orange this week and I get full-strength signals everywhere.

It’s worth thinking about if you’re switching and taking a number with you: to do that you need to hand over a code called a PAC code, which your new provider uses to transfer the number. If I were moving from Orange to O2 I’d be bloody furious at the coverage in my neck of the woods, but having transferred the number over there would be a lot of hassle if I wanted to go “your coverage is crap! Shove your contract!”. The moral? Make sure the coverage is good enough and *then* hand over the PAC code.

The new Eels album, End Times, is very good. If you like music made by people with beards, you should buy it.

Last but not least, I had a complete mental blackout today on the radio and couldn’t remember which key press gets a right-click on a Mac when you don’t have a two button mouse. The correct answer is, of course, the Windows key.

A-ha-ha-ha.

“Why I don’t listen to demo tapes”

An interesting post by David Hepworth of The Word magazine:

experience has taught me that if I say I like the demo people will then expect me to do something to make them successful; if I say I don’t like it then I am an unfeeling, heartless bastard.

Ticketmaster and Live Nation: spot the difference

October 2009:

The Competition Commission’s provisional findings on the multimillion-pound merger, published today, said that the deal would make it harder for new entrants to break into the ticketing marketplace. The commission also warned that combining the two major players in the music market could mean the price of tickets went up, or result in concert-goers receiving a poorer service.

December 2009:

The commission announced this morning that it no longer believed that the public will suffer if the two companies combine forces

That’s not a paywall. That’s a taking-the-piss-wall

After reading Mupwangle’s comment regarding The 4 of Us (in the Anorak’n'Roll thread further down the page), I decided to try and find out from the horse’s mouth why the band went completely off the radar in the mid-90s. There isn’t much online, but I did find a link to a recent interview in Hot Press (Ireland’s equivalent of the NME) that might have been worth reading. Unfortunately it turns out that the piece is behind a paywall, and there’s not even an extract, not even a paragraph, to indicate whether it’s going to be worth paying to read. So how much does Hot Press expect me to pay?

This article is now part of the hotpress.com archive. To access this article you need to subscribe to hotpress.com for the bargain price of €20 or be a subscriber to Hot Press Magazine.

Even by Irish standards, twenty euros seems rather pricey.

I’ve fixed music piracy. Next week, the Middle East

Me, on Techradar:

According to BT and the Carphone Warehouse, it seems that implementing the proposed three-strikes system would cost at least £2 per connection per month – an enormous amount of money that will have little or no effect on file sharing.

Wouldn’t it be smarter to subsidise Spotify?

Technology will save music

Oh yes it will.

Lord Mandelson’s draconian anti-filesharing plans are designed to save the music business. But does it need saving?

Thanks to evil music pirates, sales of singles in 2009 are, er, higher than they’ve ever been. “This truly is the era of the digital single,” Martin Talbot of the Official Charts Company says.

“The UK Top 40 is now almost entirely comprised of digital singles,” the British Phonographic Industry says. So does the music business really need saving from technology – or is technology saving it from itself?

A rather unhelpful gig review

I went to see Massive Attack last night and they were good.

What’s wrong with banning file sharers?

I thought this comment on The Guardian website was a pretty good explanation of why the proposed three-strikes rule is a bad one:

The specific problem with FAC, FACT and this government is that they are colluding to (1) turn a civil allegation into a crime, (2) make the taxpayer foot the bill for prosecuting it, (3) impose a summary punishment without an opportunity to argue the case in court, (4) licenses yet more intrusion and snooping on personal internet usage

There’s a fifth point, but I don’t agree with it, heh. There’s also the fact that connections are per-household, not per-person…

Lily Allen, Halo 3 ODST

Today’s Guardian reports that Lily Allen’s blog had been removed due to online abuse, but neglects to mention that the abuse was over her own copyright infringement.

Earlier in the day Lily Allen, one of the few younger artists to speak out against online piracy, said she was dropping her public campaign against copyright theft because “the abuse was getting too much”. She had set up a blog “It’s Not Alright” – in reference to her first album Alright, Still – collating artists’ views after her comments that “filesharing is a disaster” for new talent. In its statement last night the FAC, expressed support for Allen and condemned “the vitriol that has been directed at her in recent days”.

Anyone else spot the irony of artists criticising the vitriol directed at, er, copyright thieves? It’s hard to disagree with my esteemed colleague Karl Hodge on this one:

http://bit.ly/4xE2qg – Lily’s blog down, comments gone, her wolf-cry of abuse taken at face value, discussion ends, revisionism begins.

The link he’s included is to The Word magazine, which shouts “misogyny” – even though the abuse was largely on other sites, not Allen’s; the abuse only became intense when she ignored reasonable comments; and the abuse is a fraction of the shit heaped on Lars Ulrich over Napster. As far as I’m aware, Mr Ulrich is not a lady.

It’s pathetic, really: the official story is already that brave copyright fighter Lily Allen had to take down her blog after the nasty internet people called her names, when the real story is that confused copyright infringer Lily Allen deleted her blog in a fit of pique after internet people caught her “stealing” other people’s content.

Fuck’s sake.

Meanwhile, the turkeys have overwhelmingly voted in favour of Christmas. Or rather, the artists have voted in favour of three-strikes against file sharers. This will, of course, mean the end of illegal file sharing and the return of bloated musical profits, and is in no way a Canute-esque stand that won’t change a bloody thing. At least Canute was trying to prove that he *couldn’t* stop the tide.

On a completely different note, Halo 3 ODST is an interesting (flawed) experiment. I don’t think I’ve played a first-person shooter inspired by Rashomon before, and it’s an interesting way of telling a story in an action game. But by god, it’s a short story. If someone as crap at gaming as me can get through it in a few hours, l33t players will no doubt get through it in ten minutes. As Mupwangle has rightly pointed out, that’s because it was originally a Halo 3 expansion pack; unfortunately it hasn’t been priced accordingly.

It’s still fun though, if you like wandering around in the dark listening to jazz.