Goddamn I am tired. I'm now two thirds of the way through one of those 'blink and you'll miss em' weekends having done precisely nothing with my down-time. The past 24 hours or so might as well have been spent in an airport waiting room staring off through the soundproof glass at the coming and going of planes, transfixed by the grim monotony of it all.
In fact the only thing I recall about yesterday is a curry and spending far too much time reading of the ins and outs of the 'News of The World' phone hacking scandal and the 'newspapers' consequent closure. Wow is RebeCCa Brooks evil. I don't care what she says, she is either a liar or incompetent, either way she needs to go the fuck down with her ship. For somebody 'of the media' she is handling herself nothing short embarrassingly. Forget her past actions, I am talking about the scowl, the out of control King Charles the First ginger pubic hair explosion on her head and pouty lips. Seriously love, just for once tie your hair back, think about what you are wearing and try not to look like you are trying to make the camera melt with your demented black witch laser eyes.
In fact I hate the woman's hair so much that it got me thinking about other people's hair that I hate: Rob Tyner of MC5, the fat speccy one out of the Turtles and this guy... The one with the center parting from Euphoria. Seriously, fuck your hair. I had to put the CD on to remind myself why I own an album featuring such a hideous folic abomination.
Euphoria's 'A Gift From Euphoria' is another great reason for buying a CD player. When you do see a vinyl copy (there was one on the wall of Minus Zero records in Notting Hill last time I went in) it's always more than you would like it to be. Don't think I've ever seen one go for less than about 120 quid (around $200).
Anyway, tired of searching for a cheap playable copy I settled for buying a CD from Amazon about ten years ago, but not even that was as simple as it might have been. Turns out there's some kind of dance music organization called 'Euphoria' so you have to trawl through page after page of shiny and stupid looking compilation CDs.
Another reason for coming back to this of late is the anniversary of Mercury Rev and their 'Deserter Songs' album, that game changing Disney inspired soundtrack to a comedown. I was a big fan of 'Deserter Songs' and like many others it took me completely by surprise. I had hated everything else the band had done with a passion but I found myself won over by the strained honesty of the vocals and the mind-blowingly lush string arrangements. So where did it come from? Had the band succeeded in inventing a new genre, a musical hybrid the likes of which the tired and weary world of music had not yet heard?
No. As much as I'd be more than happy with that series of events the reality is that 'that sound' began here with the album's opener 'Lisa'. It makes 'Deserter Songs' sound like a facsimile, a glorious copy and paste. Unfortunately the rest of the album is a different matter, it's a cluttered exercise in attempting to sound like various hit (and non hit) makers of the day. The over all impression is of a band trying to find it's sound, dipping it's toes into the realms of everyone from IRA sympathiser Van Morrison to the Moby Grape. Because of this it has a similar feel to the Turtle's 'Battle of the Bands' album.
What makes this all the more frustrating is that they give the world a song like 'Lisa' and never throughout the rest of the album go back to revisit the magic. If only they had realized what they had done we might not have had to wait thirty something years for Mercury Rev to complete the picture.
So basically, get the CD, listen to 'Lisa' then move on to 'Deserter Songs'.
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