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The Music 2005 (tracks 50-11)

The Music 2004 was a relatively easy list to compile. This list, for 2005, was much more difficult. It demonstrates the class of music made and released this year, and some classic tracks which I didn’t uncover or appreciate until recently. I took the tracks of the day of 2005, rated them, compared them subjectively, made some side by side assessments, then added a dozen or so others that weren’t on my list, but which made an impression on me.

Much to my surprise, this year’s most important artist to me, Emm Gryner, only appears on the list once, and that song is a cover version. Tori Amos makes repeated appearances, reflecting my rediscovery of her music. The top 10, which will appear in a separate post is a rather unexpected collection.

So here are numbers 50 to 11. As per 2004, some of the entries include comments.


50 Texas Get Down Tonight
49 Tom Novy & Lima Take It (Dani Koenig Remix)
48 Saint Etienne A Good Thing
47 DT8 Project featuring Andrea Britton Winter
46 M.I.A. Galang
 

Mathangi Arulpragasam’s debut album was one of the most important albums of this year. Strangely, none of the tracks became a ‘track of the day’. Arular is not an album you listen to when working. It demands your attention and the music is simply unclassifiable. But it is undeniably brilliant.
45 Emm Gryner Shining Light
 

My best new find of this year, Emm Gryner writes and lives music exactly the way all genuine musicians should. Emm’s possibly the only person who should be allowed to do cover versions, because she’s the only artist I know who can reinvent them effectively, and make The Corrs listenable. This version of Ash’s Shining Light turns it head over heels from a straight-on rock song to a perceptive, emotional piano-led masterpiece.
44 Ladytron amTV
43 Adrienne Pierce Death By Water
42 Ellen Allien Sehnsucht
41 Texas Can’t Resist
40 Bjork Isobel
39 The Kills Love Is A Deserter
38 The Streets Turn The Page
37 Ladytron P.A.C.O!
36 Yellow Blackboard Superfly (Andy Moor Remix)
35 Underworld Two Months Off
34 Amerie 1 Thing
33 M.I.A. Fire Fire
32 Juliet Ride the Pain
 

The line "ride the pain into the pleasure" can mean so many things. It means something specific to me which I’ll probably blog about early next year. In my mind a curious twin to Simple Mind’s Somebody Up There Likes You. And just as important.

31 Azur Stay With Me Till Dawn (DMA Club Mix)
30 Mariah Carey We Belong Together (Reconstruction Club Mix)
29 Juliet Puppet
28 Cinerama London
 

I recently praised this in my review of all the Cinerama albums, so I felt I had to consider it.
27 Nerina Pallot Sophia
26 Fiona Apple Oh Sailor
25 Kathleen Edwards The Lone Wolf
24 Kathleen Edwards Pink Emerson Radio
23 Tori Amos Spark
22 Tori Amos Cornflake Girl
21 Sophie Ellis-Bextor Circles (Just My Good Time) [Busface 12"]
20 Ellen Allien Washing Machine Is Speaking
19 Kristin Hersh Milk Street
18 Lady Sovereign Random (Menta Remix Ft. Riko)
 

The music is classy in a completely non-classy way. The lyrics and delivery are hilarious in a very serious way. And "Biggest midget in the game, can’t get rid of me" always makes me smile.

17 Tori Amos Witness
16 Kelli Ali Graffiti Boy
15 Kristin Hersh The Letter
14 Black Box Recorder These Are the Things
13 Miss Kittin & The Hacker You And Us
 

Retro chic. In an ideal world, Miss Kittin’s tracks would probably be the only soundtrack to Fashion TV. Which would at least make it watchable. “This is what our music is about: you and us.”
12 Pendulum Streamline
11 Mike Foyle vs Signalrunners Love Theme Dusk (Mike’s Broken Record Mix)
 

From the moment that walking piano line comes in you know it’s going to be huge. Then everything goes classical. Then it doesn’t.
1 Comment | Permalink | Music of 2005
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A new broom

My Christmas project finished early. After just a day and a half of work it was finished. All before Christmas got started. So I needed something new to occupy myself.

When setting oneself a project you need to consider your environment. I always spend Christmas with my dad, bringing my iBook and iPod with me. I always do the cooking. We always watch the Boxing Day test match – this year coming from Australia, so it’s on video to watch at more suitable hours.

I decided that my new project would be twofold: to prove that you can do professional web design on an iBook, and to re-skin this blog. And now it is finished. Much of the graphic design was done whilst cooking Christmas dinner and raving to Voices of Summer 2005. The CSS work was done whilst watching the cricket, and that was quite a challenge – when CSS works, it’s brilliant. When it doesn’t work, it’s a pain to fix. This blog currently looks fine with Safari and Firefox. It may work in Internet Explorer. It may not, because Internet Explorer doesn’t currently support min-width.

Keep an eye out for the changing lyrics at the bottom of each page. Well, they will change once I’ve done the code and found suitable lyrics. At the moment you’ll have to make do with Serene.

1 Comment | Permalink | General Musings
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Mac Explorer

I’ve always had a lot of trouble with musings from Bill Thompson. In fact I’d probably need a whole blog to rant about the issues and suggestions he makes. But this one is weird to the umpteenth degree.

It’s not bad news that Microsoft are dropping Mac support of Internet Explorer. For something that hasn’t been updated regularly for over four years, it’s a relief to know that its time has come. Make Internet Explorer open-source? What a ghastly thought.

Microsoft have lots of commercial and absent-minded technical reasons for adding browser-specific functionality to its Windows version of Internet Explorer. But my view has always been that if developers use or demand specific technology for a public-facing website it’s their problem, not mine. It looks bad for Microsoft, but it looks even worse for the people that own the site. Frankly, if a public-facing site requires a specific browser or at worse a specific operating system, it never gets a second chance with me.

Historically, ActiveX on web pages came into existence in Internet Explorer because there was a perception that web technology wasn’t rich enough to provide the level of interactivity expected by web users. Java was so ‘out there’ as to be a non-starter for Microsoft, and besides, all they had to do was tweak their pre-existing OLE controls which started life in Windows 3.0. As it turns out now, Ajax and XUL demonstrate that web applications can be sufficiently interactive and cross-platform, without the need for ActiveX components. Microsoft are still unfortunately locked into their own way of thinking, using XAML instead of XUL for Vista. Bah!

So it looks like there will be another fight in the future. Something to which Mac users won’t be invited. It’s obviously time for developers to switch to supporting the standards developed by W3C, ditch Internet Explorer wholesale and use Firefox.

And Safari can go too.. As my friend Mark remarked, Apple did pick a wrong’en.

1 Comment | Permalink | General Musings
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We love me

This year I came to realise that I have a lot of comments in code that refer to ‘we’ – even if I’m the only one developing software. Perhaps this is part of my manager’s training that it’s not me and them, it’s all of us, together. Wouldn’t you rather have code comments that were involving, friendly, accurate and succinct, than non-existent, terse (or verbose), annoyed, angry or irrelevant? Another part is that I’ve always felt there’s another voice I have. Honestly. It’s not bipolar or anything, just that I like to consider things from multiple viewpoints.

But today, something really surprised me: I have a list of all the things I need to do today, before Christmas hits. One of them is ‘chuck our rubbish’. Hang on? There’s only me here.. no one else. So why is it our rubbish?

No Comments | Permalink | General Musings
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XUL Rules

There are many annoying things about rendering web pages with HTML. When you are writing corporate web applications, being stuck with HTML for showing lists of things is a problem. Especially when you need to allow users to select items in a list or otherwise perform operations on them. You end up resorting to one of three solutions:

  1. Render everything as a paged table, adding checkboxes to each line;
  2. Use a huge unwieldy Javascript library to provide grid-like functionality, then hope that it works;
  3. Render the list as a select, then lay everything out with monospaced fonts and loads of non-breaking spaces.

Until now, we’ve used the third option. But this has four drawbacks:

  1. It’s slow to load due to the amount of time taken to format each item, and the overhead in creating specific option tags for each line;
  2. Adding or removing columns is time consuming from a development viewpoint;
  3. Lists cannot readily reformat to cope with the size of window;
  4. You can’t double-click an item.

Earlier this year we made an important decision to only support Firefox for the administrator backend of a web application we are writing. This took a load of worry off of us, and allowed us to concentrate on the application. But this decision has one unexpected benefit. So, I present The Christmas Project That Never Was:

Firefox and Thunderbird use a lot of XUL. This is the XML User Interface Language. Usually, entire web applications are written using XUL, pulling data from an RDF file. RDF is great for huge or static lists of information that need to be shared or used amongst different types of users. Amazon have an RDF feed. Mozilla histories and bookmarks are stored in RDF. You get the idea. RDF sensibly uses the concept of templates to render repeating sections of content. So basically, you create your RDF, and point the XUL file – which contains the template – at the RDF.

Now, my idea was to replace the HTML select for one of the views in our application with XUL. There were a couple of technical hurdles that needed to be covered:

  1. How to embed XUL inside HTML;
  2. Creating the RDF feed;
  3. Interacting with the application.

Embedding XUL inside HTML. This is easy, just create an IFRAME and point it to the XUL source file.

Creating the RDF feed. Hmm.. have you ever looked at an RDF? It’s an XML file, which means loads of descriptive stuff identifying every nut and bolt. This web application could either a) create an RDF everytime the corresponding database is changed, or b) create a specific RDF file on demand when data is requested. Both of these are crap ideas. The application database changes frequently. Much more frequently than, say, the RDF feed from Amazon. After all, books don’t change their price every five minutes. Then there’s the caching. Oh yes, RDF’s are cached. Great. Not. So you have to invalidate the cache and rebuild the XUL view. Grr..

My next thought was to populate the XUL programmatically. But instead of the overhead in bringing all those pesky non-breaking spaces to the client, you have all the treeitem and treecell stuff. No great benefit.

So I ended up binning the RDF idea and went for Javascript instead. XUL trees, like all XUL, have their own bunch of scriptable objects. This allows you to write Javascript to populate XUL. Furthermore, XUL trees can have their own custom tree model where you basically write Javascript that satisfies all the interfaces. The approach I chose was to define a tree model. This would allow re-use throughout the rest of the application, whilst ensuring a very low-overhead in the amount of Javascript required to populate each tree. All the XUL file has to do is call a parent Javascript function to do the population.

Interacting with the application. Provided that you work out how the parent HTML page and the child XUL need to find each other, interaction is easy. The only difficult arises when passing results of selections from a tree to the application. PHP passes multiple selections as an array, but of course with the XUL tree this isn’t going to happen because there is no concept of a form with XUL, so you have to retrieve the data and populate the form for yourself, ready for sending back to the application. I admit, there are better technical solutions, but none would have allowed such easy integration. The bare minimum is to have an event listener registered to the select event and find out what has been selected.

Once all of this is sorted, the final step is the CSS. And, getting around all the default styling provided by Firefox. Especially the change in colour of selected rows when a tree becomes un-focused. The result is something like the following:

xul1.jpg

There are plenty of other things you get for free, if you want: fixed or variable columns, column dragging, hiding and resizing, tooltips. All and any of these can be made to persist, thereby allowing specific users to customise to their viewing requirements. You know Thunderbird, right? Same difference.

1 Comment | Permalink | General Musings
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Clever DOM

It’s only the W3C DOM, but I like it. Convinced you can’t tell whether form content has been changed, without adding billions of onChange or onBlur events to each of your form elements?

One big web application we’re development gets around this problem by saving forms every time they are submitted. The trouble with this is that there’s a lot of time spent saving un-necessarily, and there is potential for saving an unchanged form over the top of changes made by someone else.

The W3C DOM however supports event bubbling, which means events propogate through the DOM hierarchy until captured by something. In addition, you can add multiple event handlers to the same event on an object. So, instead of ludicrous numbers of onChange tags, you can do something like this at the top of your page:

function markDirty() {
    document.sale_edit.dirty_b.value = 1;
}
document.addEventListener('change', markDirty, false);

Anything that triggers an onChange event will set dirty_b to 1, and on the server you can check its value to decide whether to save the form. What’s more, any event handlers you already have associated with elements on a form will still be triggered, although the order of triggering is undefined.

No Comments | Permalink | General Musings
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Free Music

It’s out now. 50FootWave’s “experiment” at releasing music that’s free. No charge. High quality MP3 or loss-less FLAC formats, plus two choices of cover art, the all important Music Facts, PR Sheet and guess what: Lyrics. Free.

If you like it, or even if you don’t, stick it on a Torrent feed and share it with strangers.

No Comments | Permalink | Music | Music of 2005
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Cinerama

Number 1 of 2004 — Cinerama

torino.jpg

Something has to be really good to enrapture me. To quote someone else: “Is It Just Me or Is Everything Shit?”. Way back in my indie-discovering past, I bought an album by Dead Can Dance and I was suitably impressed. Much to the surprise of my flat mates, I bought their entire back catalog. A ready made collection documenting their evolution from their first penny-pinching synth-approximations of acoustic instruments that they could only afford on later releases. Paving the way for Lisa Gerrard’s career as a acclaimed soundtrack composer and vocalist.

I felt the same way about Cinerama last year, so my favourite album of 2004 is not just one album, it’s five.

Formed after David Gedge put The Wedding Present on hold in 1997, Cinerama came into being with David and his girlfriend Sally Murrell. Possibly the most appropriate name that a band such as this could have, simply because everything they have written seems made for films, either as musical accompaniment to the films of the 1960s and 70s that are quintissentially of their time, or because the lyrics are visually arresting that you can make up the scenes in your head whilst listening to them.

My introduction to Cinerama came with their 2002 (and latest) album Torino. But for a full appreciation, it’s best to start at the beginning: Va Va Voom, and then move forward.

Released in 1998 Va Va Voom features the core Cinerama duo, plus The Church’s Marty Wilson-Piper and Emma Pollock from The Delgados. As someone who isn’t (wasn’t?) a fan of The Wedding Present, Va Va Voom is a revelation as it exposes David Gedge’s incredible songwriting skills which were, to my ears, hidden amongst the noise and choppy guitars of The Wedding Present. I despair at all the popular music of today that simply cannot compare to the mastery presented on this album.

Cinerama covers the same themes as The Wedding Present, expanding into other areas gradually over successive releases. So, the opening track of Va Va Voom, Maniac starts with a telephone message and the break up of a relationship. Comedienne swaps roles around “You want to leave him and you’re looking for excuses” and introduces Sally’s backing vocals. But it’s not until the third track Hate that one comes across the initial trademark Cinerama sound: strings, brushed drums, acoustic guitars, organ and vibes “Because I hate your lies and the guys you call friends / In fact just everything’s telling me this is where the love affair ends” all wrapped up brilliantly in just over three minutes. There are overheard whispered conversations retold in Kerry Kerry, the wah-wah loving peacefulness of Barefoot in the Park: “And the world before I met you / I can’t remember now, what was that like?”. You Turn Me On sounds to me like New Order without the basslines and keyboards. Ears is a slow duet with Emma Pollock, beginning with “Gone as far as I can go with this crap” and then moves into territory that quite possibly shouldn’t be recorded. Rarely are the lyrics explicit, but you get the feeling that you shouldn’t be listening to these private thoughts. Me Next takes things further. A part of me knows those feelings. And it shocks me. Dance, Girl, Dance turns reality into fantasy on one phrase: “But of course none of this has happened at all, yet”. And so it goes on…

By now you’d be right to assume you know the kinds of things that Cinerama are about: love, sex, fidelity, infidelity, break-ups, jealousy, fantasies. Va Va Voom sets the environment for the remainder of the albums. And it’s those later albums where things really start to happen.

By the time the second album Disco Volante was released in 2000, the band had settled on a core team of Gedge, Murrell, Wedding Present guitarist Simon Cleave and Goya Dress bassist and drummer Terry de Castro and Simon Pearson. This album was recorded by Steve Albini in Chicago, with more acoustic overdubs added afterwards in London. I like to think of this album as the Should I, Shouldn’t I? album. Because most of the lyrics on this album centre on decisions which you probably shouldn’t say ‘yes’ to. But we’re still on familiar territory. The Morricone inspired 146 Degrees opens with “You’ve just walked in this room but things have changed forever now” and teases for the remainder of the song… except this time there’s a crushing guitar solo that bursts out, and everything sounds more coherent – part of the development of the Cinerama sound. Please keep notes.

“You shake, I sweat, it stings / I ache, you’re wet, I cling” (Lollobrigida)

You were keeping notes, weren’t you? Your Charms, about a woman who is seemingly unaware of her feminity has the buzzing guitars that characterised The Wedding Present. There lies a key for the future. Lyrically, things evolve too: Heels moves from infidelity to serial infidelity. Unzip documents one of those aforementioned decisive moments: “Just unzip your inhibitions, but, honey, leave on those shoes”. And Aprés Ski is a one night stand between an older woman and a younger man, and the corresponding fallout: “She gets what she wants but still ends up losing”. Already I’m missing Sally’s vocals. Fortunately, they come back on Because I’m Beautiful (about which others have written whole paragraphs, but you’ll just have to listen to it yourself instead) and they’re there again on Let’s Pretend (as in “Can we pretend we never met? / Pretend there’s nothing to forget”). There’s more WPG (Wedding Present Guitar) with the extended version of Wow. The strings, horns and flute lifting it to euphoric levels, perfectly matching the rush of the storyline.

About now, you’re probably thinking that Cinerama are a one-trick pony. The same song written dozens of times. But you’re wrong. Musically, each track varies distinctively from its peers, and the endless variations of similar scenarios are compelling.

But Cinerama were (are?) perhaps as much about the singles as the albums. Indeed, you can judge the strength of a band by the quality of their b-sides. In 2000, This Is Cinerama compiled their first four singles, followed in 2002 by another compilation Cinerama Holiday. The b-sides of the singles shows Cinerama in more playful mood. Love is a lush overlapping duet of lists which join in the line “And please, just believe me, when I say Don’t ever leave me”, and then swap around. Model Spy is an instrumental with cooing vocals. And I probably don’t need to say much about Au Pair, so I won’t. It’s really that obvious. Shiny happy vibes abound in Mr Kiss Kiss Bang Bang which unfolds just the way it should do. And it’s bliss. Crusoe starts off with “You can’t start a sentence like that and not end it”, and then uses that TV theme tune as a break between verses. Pacific – yes, it’s a b-side, and quite possibly their best track. There are plenty more wonders on these two compilations. Take Manhattan (no pun intended Leonard Cohen fans). I might be a sucker for harpsichords, but it’s the guitars and the vocals that do it for me, and this time, the protagonist says No. It’s a triumph. London is marvellous too, hooked around an unanswered telephone call, a grinding bass drives the song and it blooms into a deeply moving musical finale. The 2002 compilation Cinerama Holiday launches with the single version of Wow, but the remainder of the tracks are equally brilliant. Piano, string orchestration and handclaps all combine on 10 Denier and it makes me melt. Everything sounds fuller and more musically focused on these tracks, and songs such as Girl on a Motorcycle, Starry Eyed and a cover of Yesterday Once More point the way to the future, being heavily guitar oriented.

From 2000 the Cinerama line-up had Finnish drummer Kari Paavola replacing Simon Pearson and Sally Murrell stopped performing live. So here we are at Torino, released in 2002. There’s worry, confusion, dread, guilt and despair in the lyrics, driven by more WPG than before. It’s certainly the darkest of their albums. There’s no pussy-footing around problems, no winks, no hints, no sly suggestions. Everything is out in the open:

“You are perfection personified
While, frankly, she’s undignified
Trust me, she disgusts me, she dares me, she scares me
She bites me, excites me, annoys me, destroys me
And if I say you’re beautiful and kind
I can hear her laughing in my mind
Because she mocks me, she shocks me, she sours me, devours me
She chokes me, provokes me, she hates me, she devastates me”
(Two Girls)

Thankfully, guitars aren’t everywhere. The short, but sweetly poignant Airborne is accompanied only by strings: “So now, you’re airborne / But I could have sworn / That you’d be here forever / That wasn’t so clever”.

David Gedge has this knack of writing great first lines: “And when you said: “I’ve got nothing on beneath this dress”, that was such great flirting! / I usually find such candidness sort of disconcerting” (Quick, before it melts) The witty follow-up is completely unexpected.

The remainder of the album rediscovers various themes and ways of being unfaithful, and the consequences. Okay, you can write albums about relationships. But there are few bands that seem so singularly hooked on a specific subject, at least not through an entire career. In some respects, I shouldn’t be praising these albums: sometimes things are really crap, but this makes great songs! Still, isn’t that what the whole genre of country music is based upon? Plus, not everyone likes, has or needs happy songs – take Kristin Hersh’s Murder, Misery and then Goodnight. In any case one should pay respect to the music and the performance. Because with these albums, and Torino in particular, the music is stunning.

And what of the future? At the end of 2002, Gedge and Burrell broke up after 14 years. He moved to Seattle and wrote a new Wedding Present album – Take Fountain, which was released in 2005. It turns out, at the conclusion of Cinerama, that that band was not much different from The Wedding Present. For Take Fountain is a musical successor to Torino. But for the review of Take Fountain.. well, you’ll have to wait.

Special mention must go to The War Against Silence which I discovered during the writing of this review.

No Comments | Permalink | Music of 2004
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