Wednesday, April 16, 2008

OUT TO LUNCH


Due to an acute case of food poisoning, Hot Lunch is taking a break for - ohh - about two months, but promises to return with even more badly written observations about nothing in particular oncehe learns the lesson that you cannot eat a carvery lunch after 1.40pm.

In the meantime Hot Lunch was delighted that his wild predictions for the Electric Picnic line-up last month were taken as the real thing by so many credible journalists, bloggers, message board posters and people in the music industry. Hot Lunch spent about ten minutes carefully cobbling a list together from acts who were playing festivals and who may have been close to Ireland in late August, and threw in a couple of curveballs for good measure. To see it reprinted as the real McCoy a day prior to the unveiling of the dismal real thing gave him a similar feeling of joy that eating three Tunnocks Tea Cakes in a row would bring.

On the subject of Tunnocks Tea Cakes, why can you get them in TEN PACKS in the North of Ireland and only in SIX PACKS down South? And how come Tunnocks Snowballs have yet to make it to Ireland?

Anyway, see you soon, in June, or maybe earlier.

Thursday, April 3, 2008

The Jimmy Cake "Spectre and Crown"


Here's an excitable review I wrote for a few regional papers about the best album I've heard in a good two years - The Jimmy Cake's awesome "Spectre and Crown" which is out on Pilatus Records on April 11th.

_______________


Get a slice of this – Third time lucky for The Jimmy Cake


If you only buy one album this year that has no lyrics, mixes classical music with the epic windswept post-rock and features some of the most beautifully structured music recorded in Ireland in decades, then make sure it’s “Spectre and Crown”, the long-awaited third album from the 18-legged groove machine that is Dublin instrumental collective The Jimmy Cake.


It is the best album yet from the instrumental leviathan, and it’s worth every single one of the five difficult years it took them to create it. The album is a moving, sweepingly beautiful, orchestral epic with nine life-enhancing tracks of such diversity and scope that it’s hard to fathom that just nine people made it. Listening to its most epic moments, you can picture over a hundred people crammed into a studio, perhaps with an orchestra in one corner, a string quartet or four in the other corner, a drummer, bassist and guitarist in the other corner, and a classical concert pianist or ten in the other corner.


“Spectre and Crown” opens with “Red Tony”, the deceptively calm first two minutes of which are just soothing piano and the threat of atmospherics. It then transforms into a lush, guitar and string piece, sliding in with such consummate ease that you’d swear it was made of feathers. As openings go, it’s as near to the opening of Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” as you’re ever going to get without a singer inviting you to “breathe in the air”. But you might as well, because as things just keep on getting better and better and better as the rest of the album opens out, you’ll drown in its lush aural embrace.


Alongside numerous classical music references from composers whose names I cannot spell, and operas I have never heard, there’s elements of the music and idealisms of bands such as Mogwai, The Cure, The Orb, Sophia, Can, The Who, Godspeed You Black Emperor, KLF and Explosions in the Sky scattered throughout this gorgeous disc; and hidden away you’ll find little elements such as a plucked banjo, an accordion, and more that gives the game away that this is actually an Irish band and not a state-funded musical experiment from the East.


The piano of Paul G. Smyth is the key to most of the tracks, especially “Jetta’s Place” which jaunts along to one of the most emotional crescendos The Jimmy Cake has ever put its name to. Their trademark brass section overload makes this one of, if not the best, tracks you’ll hear all year. Honestly.


As well as possessing the best song title in years, “The Arms That Came Out of the Wall” possesses a melancholic but surprisingly smooth juxtaposition of two bass guitars which recall a peaceful Alpine train journey up and through a mountain with The God Machine warming up in the next carriage. They guide it to the orchestra pit via a detour with a little self-contained acoustic rock band within a band and some synchronised slow hand-clapping. Please don’t allow that put you off though. When the accordions kicks in it all makes sense. Its seven minutes give the band barely enough time to arrive back to where they began, and when they do, you want them to start off on the journey again.


The album is all breathtaking, epic music, delivered with such belief and cohesion that it’s hard to believe that three of the members of the band are new guys, still being bedded in following the departure of a trio of founding members.


Still, the spirit of previous releases by the band - their gentle debut “Brains” and their schizophrenic and disappointing follow-up “Dublin Gone, Everybody Dead” - is there in all tracks, especially the five slow-burning minutes of the sweeping “Haunted Candle” which is extinguished by an orchestral build-up led by accordions. Elsewhere, “Collapsing Cloud Night...” is possibly the sweetest love song you’ll ever hear without lyrics, whilst “The Art of Wrecking” is one of the saddest pieces of rain-soaked string quartet music one will hear for quite some time. You could soundtrack 50 great movie deaths with it if you wanted to. The nine minutes of the rampaging“Hugs for Buddy” should evoke fonder memories, and no doubt will soundtrack years worth of artful nodding in the homes of anyone lucky enough to buy and fall in love with this beautiful album. It sounds like the conclusion to a concept album or rock opera The Who or Pink Floyd always wanted to make, but never could, as their roots were with rock and blues and not with the sweeping classic The Jimmy Cake were fed on. Instead they ended up producing flawed masterpieces such as “Tommy” and “Atom Heart Mother”. What sets The Jimmy Cake apart is that their roots are classical, and when they allow their multitude of other influences into the mix they end up making epic tracks like this.


Few bands have mastered how to melt the orchestral sweep of classical music with something that nearly resembles rock music, but The Jimmy Cake has, and with “Spectre and Crown” they have set a stunning template for other collectives, quartets and bands to follow. As it is, few records will reach the heights that this royally brilliant piece of work reaches. An instant and longterm classic.


Ten out of ten.

Weblink: www.thejimmycake.org

Please Queens of the Stone Age - give up now

I've been a QOTSA fan for pretty much all of their existence, and a massive Kyuss fan before that, and over the last couple of years I've kinda grown used to my beloved band losing the plot, particularly with the pretty hopeless "Era Vulgaris" album and the unfocussed mess that is "Lullabies to Paralyze". But I've stuck it out, as to me QOTSA represented everything great about American rock music, their first three records are unlike anything any band has released before or since, and they always delivered, even if the majority of the payload in recent years has been pretty weak material and an ever-fluctuating line-up. Still, there was the odd moment of magic on each disc, and the Desert Sessions has always been a welcome excursion. But when the parent band is eclipsed by the Desert Sessions collective something must be wrong.

Anyhow, I've tried to catch QOTSA every time they've been in Ireland, and even in such poxy surrounds as the Main Stage at Oxegen they have never failed or disappointed. But I've noticed a gradual decline in their stock, their interest, and and in Josh, their ginger beanpole leader, in recent years. Sure, the hired guns give it socks, but the band has been a shadow of its once great self for years now, and despite assuring myself that they will one day return to reach the heights they once did with consumate ease, it's been difficult to muster any enthusiasm for them as I once did. I can't even listen to the last two albums anymore they're that bad.

But the news that QOTSA are supporting LINKIN PARK in the RDS in Dublin at 70 QUID a ticket is the final straw for me.

The last time LINKIN PARK played Dublin it was at the same venue was with Metallica, The Darkness and a few others and they were bottled off the stage from the second they walked onto it. 40,000 people booed en masse during their set, the "DJ" goaded the crowd to try and hit him, and almost in slow motion, a beer bottle then curled through the air and hit him right on the forehead. So poor was the reception and the degree of hatred shown towards them when Chester Copperpot or whatever he's called unfurled a shop bought Irish tricolour that their set had to be cut short. It was magic stuff. Like Donington in the good old bottle of piss days. Even James Hetfield took the piss out of them when Metallica came on.

So, it's a sad end to a once great band like QOTSA to be playing second fiddle to an outfit like LP, and a it's a sad way to end my relationship with a once great band... but this is just the pits, and to me it sadly represents what QOTSA is about nowadays: Money. It's fuck the fans, fuck credibility and fuck their legacy. I wish Josh Homme would do the decent thing later this year and split the band, as support slots with the likes of Linkin Park undermines everything they have ever set out to achieve and represents the nadir of a decline into cliche.

I wish at this stage that Josh would just give it up, and stop pretending that QOTSA is a band. We know it's a nice cheque he's probably getting for the RDS but it's going to cost you a lot more in street cred.


So goodbye Josh, my lovely friend, your band means no more,
I hope we'll meet again, I've lost you now for sure
Goodbye my lovely friend, I loved you from the start
I knew that it would end, but didn't have the heart to see us part
No I must go.