MACHIAVEL - JESTER

I really don't want this 'blog' to turn into a worthless list of over-weight fanboy gushings but shit in my hair if this isn't a two in a row of me being nearly lost for words.

I am at work, I am pretending to work, I am staring across an empty car park from a port-a-cabin watching a girl in a green t-shirt limp past the window with the aid of a crutch. My desk is a mess of papers and I hate myself for giving in and buying a bottle of diet coke from the violently over-priced vending machine. I was thinking about how meaningless my existence was, and how if only I could do one awesome thing before this all turned to ashes then maybe things wouldn't be so bad. But then I got thinking, who exactly judges whether something is worthwhile, whether something has succeeded in being awesome, who? Is it enough to do something truly awesome if it is left unappreciated by a wider audience, by the populous, by your piers? And then I got thinking about the album Jester by the band Machiavel.

'Jester' is huge, it's gigantic, it's the worlds biggest shark eating a nuclear submarine.... So why hadn't I heard of it until a couple of weeks back? Okay, I won't profess to be anything more than a keen novice, an ignorant but willing observer of the 'Prog' scene, but surely I should have heard of this already?

Given the endless 'Hot 500 albums ever' lists I have scanned for new music based information over the years, I would have thought that just one person would have thought to include this at some point, but no. After all, as things come in and out of fashion and musical culture is re-assessed such artifacts do find their way into 'best of ever' lists.

Example: ten years ago none of the likes of Mellow Candle, Trees or Vashti Bunyan could get a sniff, but today Acid Folk is something of a buzz word, a hip name to drop to your mates as you sip cider outside the 'Spack and Carrot' in Soho... So why haven't I seen anybody cycle past me on a fixed gear bike wearing a MACHIAVEL t-shirt yet? Okay, it could be the album artwork...

'Jester' will get it's props, Moog and ARP driven folk tinged singer/song writing with drum breaks... it has to. But back to my opening gambit, if everyone involved is dead by then, wasn't it something of a pointless task, I mean male Prog groupies and bad drugs aside? Where exactly is the justification the acknowledgement of awesomeness? Maybe to suggest that acceptance and awesomeness go hand in hand is wrong but if you truly are your own judge then what's to stop you destroying the filter and proclaiming everything you do to be awesomeness? It can't and doesn't work that way either... I mean was it really enough for them to make this album, it be largely ignored, them die, the entire thing be forgotten? Maybe it was. I just know that if I were Machiavel I'd much rather be playing this album in full to a packed out audience at one of those 'Don't Look Back' events than eating beans from a tin and selling carpet cleaning products door to door.

I am of course over analysing this. I should just be happy that I have at 35 discovered and been excited by an album in a way that I haven't in a very, very long time. The down side of course is that if fuels the fire, justifies the endless days spent shuffling between the moldy smelling men, the mutterers, the nut-jobs and the fucking beat collecting 'crate diggerz' for a look at the 'Just In' box.