Archive for February, 2009
General election
Saturday, February 28th, 2009
Punk-pop songs are subjected to more snobbery and derision than any other genre. They don’t have the clever chords of the underground indie royalty, the romanticism of the bedroom troubadour, the cool kitsch of manufactured pop or the menace of hairy rock. Or perhaps it does and you’ve just not scraped the surface to find out.
If you look at your local gig venue’s listings there’s a very easy way to tell which nights you’ll hear some punk-pop – they’re the ones marked ‘over-14s’. So what do the teenagers know that everyone else doesn’t?
Accessibility has something to do with it. For the past few years the best records of their type have been exclusively American-made and often only available on import, presenting the kind of investigative research challenge that earns maximum kudos in music conversations down school corridors.
The biggest misconception is that pop-punk bands don’t make classic albums*. And it’s an entirely understandable one if your diet of this genre is served by daytime Radio 1, who deem that the likes of McFly and Busted should represent the sound of the UK.
GENERAL FIASCO may be about to change all that. The young Belfast trio have yet to make anything other than slick, catchy, accessible songs available on their MySpace and the group are on their way to Scotland next week to prove they’re the real deal. And, yes, 14-year-olds are most welcome.
*If you want to hear how well the Americans do it, buy any or all of the following albums: Blink 182 – Blink 182 (2003), Green Day – American Idiot (2004), Motion City Soundtrack – Commit This To Memory (2005), The Academy Is – Almost Here (2005), Angels & Airwaves – We Don’t Need To Whisper (2006).
4 General Fiasco – Something Sometime
4 General Fiasco – Start At The Top
b March 2, King Tut’s, Glasgow (tickets)
b March 3, Doghouse, Dundee (tickets)
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Closed for business. Pleasure continues.
Monday, February 23rd, 2009
You only have to cast an envious glance at the awards ceremonies that seem to be happening every other night to realise the entertainment business is a world of profit and excess. And if you’re making plenty of the former, you can never have too much of the latter.
Yet make no mistake, the music industry is currently fighting an increasingly desperate battle to reinvent itself in whichever direction maximises its need for financial exploitation. The supposed saviour – live music – isn’t an indestructible cash cow after all, certainly not in Scotland given the recent deaths of the Connect festival, Tennent’s Mutual project and Glasgow Barfly.
It’s somewhat ironic that money is rarely the main motivation for the employees who actually hold the entire music scene together – the artists. Theirs is a domain populated by the have-nots, driven by an irrational fairytale in which the happy ending is usually staged in a very large field. It’s no surprise the most common prefix for musician is “struggling”.
So that’s why we feel heart-sorry for young local bands such as MAKE MODEL and SERGEANT, who had no doubt been promised fame and fortune when they signed to major labels, yet were both dropped before the public had a chance to hear their done-and-dusted debut albums.
The cynic in us would normally chastise THE BLUETONES for deciding to devote their second tour in four months to playing 1996 debut record Expecting To Fly, but seeing as they’re actually giving the punters what they want, who could blame them?
4 Sergeant – Counting Down The Days
b February 27, Room At The Top, Bathgate
b March 7, The Arches, Glasgow (tickets)
b March 8, The Hive, Edinburgh (tickets)
b March 13, Viewfield Hotel, Arbroath (tickets)
b March 21, Velocity, Dunfermline (tickets)
b March 28, Fat Sams, Dundee (tickets)
4 The Bluetones – Slight Return
b March 4, QMU, Glasgow (tickets)
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As seen on screen
Friday, February 20th, 2009
The main problem with using YouTube to watch live concerts featuring your favourite bands is that quality control is non-existent. So when you find that beloved Arcade Fire anthem reduced to a two-inch cameraphone screen being held by what seems like a Parkinson’s sufferer doing a Nazi salute, there’s a good chance you’ll be left feeling a tad underwhelmed.
It goes without saying that you’d rather watch live music videos that were closer to a high-definition cinematic experience. It would also be nice if they were filmed by professionals using, say, a couple of dozen cameras simultaneously. And why not make them all free to view on a single website that you don’t even have to register to use?
Sounds too good to be true? No, too good to be true would be if the company behind such a venture decided to rock up to East Kilbride with all their state-of-the-art equipment, build a multi-million pound venue/studio and invite some of Scotland’s finest up-and-coming groups to act as guinea pigs for their technology.
Believe it or not, this is precisely what has been happening for the past couple of months thanks toPOPMORPHIC. We suggest you head to their site and check out the sessions from local luminaries such asThe Xcerts, Dananananaykroyd and Le Reno Amps – but as a taster, at the top of this post we’ve embedded a video of Keeping Warm, one of five heavenly WE WERE PROMISED JETPACKS songs recorded exclusively for Popmorphic.
If you want to go along and be part of the audience while a performance is being filmed then pencil in March 20April 23 in your diaries, which is when there will be a special Electric Honey showcase featuring some delicious sounds from WOODENBOX WITH A FISTFUL OF FIVER, THE STATE BROADCASTERS and WAKE THE PRESIDENT.
To get your hands on a pair of tickets for this free show just email your name to electrichoney@popmorphic.com – tell them The Pop Cop sent you and they might even pick you up on the Popmorphic bus!
4 Woodenbox With A Fistful Of Fivers – Fist Full Of Fivers
4 The State Broadcasters – Our Favourite Park
4 Wake The President – The Security Place
b March 20 April 23 (rescheduled), Popmorphic studio, Linwood Avenue, East Kilbride
WE WERE PROMISED JETPACKS
b February 22, Cabaret Voltaire, Edinburgh (supporting The Spinto Band) (tickets)
b February 27, Tunnels, Aberdeen
b February 28, Room At The Top, Bathgate
b March 8, Oran Mor, Glasgow (tickets)
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