favourites iii

parte the thirde

the delgados - domestiques lots of delgados fans swear by peloton, which i like, and is definately more sophisticated but it just doesn`t catch the energy of their debut album. next to the cure, this has to be the best guitar album ever made. every song is an absolute gem. the production on it is amazing... it`s so jangly and loud and homemade, and there`s so many thrashy out of tune bits, weird strings, alternating male/female vocals, impenetrable lyrics, and unashamed scottish accents! i guess technically it shouldn`t work, but man, i wish all albums sounded like this. i remember when this came out i went to see a chemikal undergound night at the jaffa cake in edinburgh... delgados, urusei yatsura, and one of the first live shows by mogwai. delgados came on last and just blew the other two away. unlike those before, it was so dirty and rough and inspiring and completely unpretentious. i guess one of the good things about the delgados is they were constantly evolving, and changing their sound. but personally i wish they had done just a little bit more in this era. guess they were too busy setting up chemikal underground. all the singles and b-sides from this period are wicked too... i wish they would put out a `deluxe` cd (like everyone else) including monica webster and lazarwalker, cinecentre etc. it`s one of the few i would definately consider buying again. overall delgados are easily my favourite band, they didn`t recorded anything shite and they had the good sense to split up before they did recording anything shite. actually, i heard they split up because they were "fed up putting so much time and effort into something they never felt got the recognition it deserved". it`s such a shame, if you have time please drop them a line and remind them how much we do appreciate them, and how much they are missed!


the auteurs - after murder park the cover of this album is just amazing. it`s printed on this really rough card, and just looks, smells and feels like one of those scary blown-up black and white murder scene photos you find on late night documentaries accompanied by eerie piano numbers. you totally get the atmosphere of the album before you even put it in the player. (incidently, the inside photo features an early work by chris cunnigham, and the photo luke haines claims chris based his whole career on…) a concept album about a small town child murder... it`s a wonder luke haines doesn`t have more fans. a lot of people are put off not by the content, but by his gruff almost 80s soft-rock metal voice. but i never hear it that way, and i think it`s just perfect for the hardened mariner style tracks near the end of the album. i love the atmosphere of this album, dusty small country town at the turn of the century, during the dawn of early aviation. goggles, leather hoods and jodphurs. pilots and sailors facing each other off, drinking until sunrise in smokey pubs with petrified swordfish hanging on the walls. everyone gossiping about the missing child, knowing that the killer is probably among them. i always think of the town in the original `village of the damned` movie, or the country back-roads in tintin books. the cello is beautiful on this album, i wish more people would use one in rock music. there`s so many great lines in this album too... `came in contact with a svengali.../ he choked on a whalebone in a cantonese resteraunt / his nervous system had broken down` or how about `more hatemail through the door, didn`t know that sunday`s could be useful after all`. why this doesn`t make it into everyones top ten albums is beyond me. cuz we`re not all closet goths, huh!


pj harvey - to bring you my love here`s a trick... buy yourself a 90 minute tape, stick after murder park on one side, and this on the other and you have the perfect collection of murder ballads. it`s freaky but this album seems to compliment after murder park in every way. the same atmosphere, same production sound. even the original jackets were printed on the same rough stock. if you look hard enough you might even say a lot of the songs mirror the auteurs album in theme and storytelling. like pj and luke sat down over an ale and planned to write the story of small town village life from male and female perspectives. ach, maybe it`s all just coincidence for buying them both on the same day way back when... i still get a shiver down my spine everytime down by the water swims in. my one regret is the c`mon billy b-sides and the later that was my veil collabaration with john parish weren`t included on this album. but thanks to itunes, they do now! anyone else edit and combine their own albums out there?! cut out the duff tracks and bring in the forgotten b-sides... not to mention trimming guitar solos out of songs n` the like. i seem to be doing it all the time these days, that`s no dobut why all the shitey albums i`m listing here sound good to me...


oasis - definately maybe i`m not sure i really trust any british person, who was a teenager to mid-twenties when this came out, and doesn`t agree it`s probably the best and most influential album of the 90s*. it changed everything, for the better! and one of the few albums from the time that still sound good today. * (along with maybe nevermind and music has the right, i suppose...)


stereolab - emperor tomato ketchup the best album i never bought. i went into woolworths one day, with this really old copy of guns n fuckin roses lies lies lies! (which happened to be one of the first cds i ever bought). told them it was an unwanted birthday present (that`s why i didn`t have the reciept you see). i got really cocky about it too, saying things like my mum and dad do their best, but really they just don`t understand young kids tastes. and then asked if i could swap it for something else! to my surprise they said ok. even more incredible, they took me on my word when i said it had cost 14.99!!! the hardest part was finding something cool in woolworths to swap it for. but amongst the shelves of reduced indie and eurodance one hit wonders, to my surprise i found stereolab... for only 12.99. i don`t know why it was there. perhaps someone`s out-of-town cousin had tried to put them onto good music and bought them it for a birthday present, but they hated it so pulled the same trick i did and swapped it for eiffel 66 or something? anyway, i snapped it up immediately and i think i even grabbed some maltesers or a reduced menswear single or something to make up for the price difference. i took it back home, and this was another one were the inclusion on this list is largely down to the fact the first time i heard it was when i was home alone and could crank the volume up until the walls shook. if you don`t believe me, and havn`t heard it before, grab a copy yourself and do the same thing... it`s got probably the best intro to any album! so anyway, i think i had the guts to go back the next day, and try the same trick at john menzies. i tried to swap another shitey old cd for a copy of eraserhead or something. unfortunately i didn`t reckon on two important points: 1. they had a computerised cataloguing system with no record of any copies of fuckin crash test dummies being sold at any point in the last three hundred fuckin years or so. and 2. that whinging prick security gaurd they used to have pure fingered me as a troublemaker on account of having gotten myself thrown out of the shop (along with a few other members of this mix exchange i might add) for causing a ruckus at the magazine department a week or two ago (i think we were scanning mags for game cheats, which we used to always be a valuable way to kill time on a saturday afternoon). that security gaurd man, he was a prick. he had this weedy pencilly shoepolish brush moustache and he pure modelled himself on fuckin don johnson in miami vice or something. i wish i could remember some of the bad boy lines he used to throw at us. i seem to remember something like `if i ever catch you boys in a dark alley late at night, i`ll show you what for!` earning an instant reply (from guess who? not me!) that went something along the lines of: `aye right ye fuckin arse-bandit bufty bawbag` to the shock of all the onlooking middle-aged mothers. that left us all in his badbooks anyway, and he wouldn`t let me weedle my way out of it. so i ended up going home with crash test dummies (which i still have to this day) and having to pay the full ridiculous `art cinema classic` price of 16.99 for eraserhead. still, it was an 18-rated video and they didn`t even notice, the fools! and a couple of weeks later, i fuckin half inched dazed and confused from the same place just to learn the bastards!

the verve - a northern soul it took me a while to get into the verve. they were never really that popular back in the day, and not many people listened to them. it was niall on the exchange who had been into them since the first ep, and he gave me a copy of northern soul on a 90min cassette filled up with all the b-sides and some other stuff. i never even played it, until one day, my family were moving house, and they had driven over to dundee to puruse home stores and look for furniture, and i got bored and decided to wait in the car and listen to music. the car was parked in an odd place with not much too look at but corrugated iron, and i was fed up with the chemical brothers dj tape so i put this on. and i felt guilty at not having listened to it before because it was just amazing! my parents took so long i almost got all the way through it twice, and not having any other distractions at all i just kinda half dozed off and let the whole thing wash over me. the first few tracks are like a kick to the head, and it just keeps on going. i love it because it`s another album that sounds like a well constructed whole, with lots of musical and lyrical repetition and references. and there`s so much going on in all the tracks, i still listen to it and hear new sounds. i have to say my favourite track on the album (other than this is music and lifes an ocean) is the piano version of on your own which is actually a b-side niall tacked on the end. it`s so sad and beautiful, and true, it really rung home when i was sitting alone in the car on a sunny afternoon waiting for my parents to stop shopping. don`t take my word for it, just listen to it sometime. i remember rushing over to nialls house later that night and telling him how good it was and how we should go and see them live, and he told me something like they were just about to release their last single, history because they had just split up. i was gutted. until a few years later it turned out in fact they hadn`t completely split up, and came back with another album which to this day i have refused to listen to just on account that nothing could possibly live up to the first track, which, next to imagine, is undoubtably the best song ever written...


the doors - strange days never really sure where to put this one, so i`ll use it to round off today`s selection. doesn`t every teenage boy go through a stage where they listen to nothing but the doors constantly for three months on end? i think girls do it too, only with david bowie. i love every one of the doors real albums, but none as much as this. it`s so dark and moody and brilliantly put together. and again such a great cover. this is an album that even these days still finds it`s way to my cd player, and i don`t think i will ever tire of hearing it. that`s all I can really say.