Au Revoir

I'm going back to Manchester tomorrow, where I'll have no internet, and then shortly after I'm heading to Spain, so I'm going to leave you for a while, with this cover version as a parting gift. Incase you haven't noticed, I love La Roux. I want to marry Elly and have androgynous children with hair that doesn't obey gravity (I don't know about her, but mine does that naturally every morning). I'm less certain about how I feel about White Lies, but this version of Farewell to the Fairground is far cooler than the original.

La Roux - Farewell to the Fairground

Here's the news from the BBC

I saw Fangs supporting Sons and Daughters in Manchester Club Academy once. After I left, I saw the members drinking out of a big bottle of Strongbow on a bench outside. I knew I shouldn't have been impressed, but they managed to do common with style. I hadn't really given them a second thought in the past two years, and now I find them recording really super cool music. I love their attitude, I love that the singer calls herself "The Queen", and I love this song. I like to think they're still swigging cider outside venues.

FANGS - S.I.C.K.O

(I actually bought this with my money, so you should too.)

Fashion is architecture: it is a matter of proportions

audrey tautou

Circumstances kept me in Manchester for longer than anticipated but I'm back in Runcorn's cold embrace for a few days now, with that fibre optic broadband we've all been hearing so much about. Samuel L Jackson wouldn't lie to us.

I stumbled across this gem pretty quickly. I've tried desperately to get into Architecture In Helsinki, I listen to them for hours but I just tend to go through passionate love affairs with one track at a time. Whilst my time with Do The Whirlwind has long passed, this Yacht remix has me dancing at the family computer desk.

Architecture In Helsinki - Do The Whirlwind (Yacht Remix)

Also everyone should go and see Coco Avant Chanel when it comes out next week. Il est très beau.

We've been holding this moment for you

Giulieta Masina

I've just done a big long post, but this track deserves it's own one, it's so adorable and bright. I wake up with it in my head.

Yacht - Psychic City

I'm moving back home for a while so expect little posts more frequently.

These are a few of my favourite things

The only thing in the world at the moment that is cooler than me and my bffl, who will be hitting my favourite Manchester dancefloor with me tonight, is Kitsune. I know, I state the obvious, but their 7th Kitsune Maison compilation is crazy cool and as I've already blogged about my favourite track from it, I'll go for my second favourite by NY duo The Golden Filter (I just love a good male/female duo). It's electronic music at it's sexiest, breathy female vocals listing her "favourite things", a list straight off the facebook pages of the coolest vintage clad dancefloor kids. It's music for kissing strangers in the darkest corners of clubs to.

The Golden Filter - Favourite Things

Isn't it lovely when you a support act puts the headliner to shame? I went to see AutoKratz last night and Chew Lips really outdid them, though given the quality of AutoKratz's performance, it wasn't that difficult. The singer was adorable and simultatiously full of attitude, she had brilliant stage presense. With the influx of brilliant female fronted electropop acts in the charts they're bound to get much bigger very quickly.

Chew Lips - Solo (from Kitsuné Maison Compilation 7) (buy it on itunes)

Summertime

So I've finished my exams, and I'm going headfirst into summer with this beautiful remix of a Bombay Bicycle Club track. It builds up into the most blissful thing. It's so perfect for warm summer heartbroken nights.

Expect me to actually write things over summer. I have 4 months with no university, and music always sounds better in the summer.

Always Like This (James Rutledge Remix)

As seen filling up my entire recently played on last.fm

Mourning

It's a sad affair when a band you like splits up. It's been months since Elle S'appelle left us, but it's something I'm still not quite over. I was lucky to see them as much as I did - they were everything fun and joyous about music.

I really loved that band.



That's all.

You Better Run

Anyone who's met me could probably guess that I would like Florence and The Machine. I try to work against my own stereotypes, but in the end this just leaves me months behind everyone else when I begrudgingly admit that I do like most female artists.

Whilst most people fell for Florence and The Machine when Kiss With A Fist was used in an advertising campaign for 4Music, it was The Dog Days Are Over that did it for me. It's such an uplifting piece of music, the cute little mandolin at the start is just the beginning. The lyrics are so imaginative and full of wonderful images, you can almost see horses. I'm still not that fussed about anything else she's done, but this really is a masterpiece.

Did I ever tell you I been struck by lightning seven times?

I know it's nice for a film to have a moral, but does it really need to be spelled out in a montage at the end of the film? I was thoroughly enjoying The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and was getting abit weepy at the end, when I was bombarded with messages. And why was it set during Hurricane Katrina? It just seemed completely irrelevant.

Other than that, it's an excellent film. Wonderfully acted and beautifully shot.

c’mon let’s get high

Some forgotten person once said, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. To that person, I give Tonight: Franz Ferdinand. The really peculiarly sexy (is it just me?) Scots have taken everything that was working about their indie formula and mixed it around abit. The result is still undoubtably a Franz Ferdinand cd, but like nothing they've done before.

They've always been something abit new and exciting, and in a time where there's too many Kooks-a-likes being played in hmv, they refuse to settle in that rubbish guitar band stereotype. The album opener, Ulysses, takes all expectations and goes beyond them. It's addictive, it's sexy, and it'll get your sholders moving. They're dipping their toes into the sizzling waters of dance music and the result is a seductively dark album. The second half of lucid dreams, an 8 minute long track that starts out as your run of the mill Franz Ferdinand track and descends into pure electronica half way through, wouldn't sound that out of place in a dance club.

It's not without flaws though. Between the stand out tracks, everything blurs into one track. It's all good, but it's all kind of the same. After four or five listens, I still couldn't put a name to some of the tracks. Alot of them offer promising starts and then fall into the same format as the rest, and it's a real shame because this album could have been something truely great. It could have been a pop masterpiece that sent the boys back to the chart success they achieved with their debut.

For now, Franz Ferdinand are still firmly on the shores of indie, and I doubt true electronia fans will be rushing out to get their copy, but it should get some indie kids on the floor.

How I Learnt to Stop Worrying and Love Scarlett Johansson

Ask me a few months ago about Scarlett Johansson, and I'd tell you I hate her, with probably more than a little jealousy for her perfect pout and beautiful hair and flawless sense of style. I'd rant on about how miserable she is, how all her characters are the same miserable frustrated women and she's probably not even acting very much when she plays them.

I really didn't like her. So her releasing an album was just another reason to dislike her. Oh god, another celebrity that thinks just because they have one talent, they're talented in every creative area. I expected it to be awful, told everyone I knew as such, then promptly forgot all about it. It was fairly recently, when I learnt that all the tracks were covers of Tom Waits songs, not to mention that Nick Zinner and Bowie were involved, that I became interested, and I downloaded the album. Strictly out of curiosity, you understand.

I never expected to fall in love. But that is the best kind of love. I was so determined to dislike it, yet within the first thirty seconds, with the melancholy, discordant noise washing over me, I let go.

Her voice does leave a little to be desired, but maybe that's just part of her charm, because everything else about "Anywhere I Lay My Head" is amazing. It's haunting and dreamlike. Tom Waits originals seep through every song, but with Scarlett's femininity and less-than-perfect but distinctive voice it truly becomes a masterpiece. The tracks are deliciously dark, 'Green Grass' is almost scary. It’s music you'd expect to hear on an abandoned old fashioned carousel, probably haunted by the ghosts of dead children. Just when you’re slipping into this perfect nightmare, 'I Don't Wanna Grow Up', snaps you out of it into this wonderful world of electronic pop that’s even better.

The whole thing is beautiful, and if it can convert me, it must bring existing Johansson fans to their knees.

Asking a friend of mine if he had "Wake Me Up Before You Go" by Wham! at a party, I was only half joking. I'm probably alone in thinking this, but it's such pure catchy pop. Yes, it's abit cheesy and if you put it on your Mum is probably more likely to dance to it than you are, but it's a such fun song. The lyrics are brilliant ("You make the sun shine brighter than Doris Day" being a favourite.) I don't know if it's physically possible for me to listen to it without at the very least wiggling my sholders. If you're open to being a little bit eighties and camp, pull it out of your Mum's record collection and dance around your bedroom to it right now, you'll feel better for it.