I listened to Flutterby this evening for the first time in months. It’s still as good as when I first heard it three years ago. She has a new one ‘in the can’ and is currently working out which will tracks will be singles.
Slashdot has launched a competition for the redesign of their website. Andy Rutledge thinks that it’s a shot at getting the design for cheap. And he’s right, this undermines professional designers.
We’ve sometimes had enquiries from companies that asked us to come up with ‘a couple of designs’ before placing work with us. Needless to say, we didn’t, and we didn’t get the work. Because customers like this aren’t worth the hassle: they obviously don’t understand the effort involved, nor do they appreciate that professional web design exists.
As Seth Godin writes “If the customer is wrong, they’re not your customer any more.”
Number 9 of 2005 — Kelli Ali: Psychic Cat
Kelli Ali’s career launched when she became the lead singer in Sneaker Pimps. Their debut album, Becoming X was an album that pushed the trip-hop sound more into the mainstream, to critical acclaim, but not commercial success in the UK. The US however, lapped them up, and one year of touring left the band’s relationship in tatters, culminating in Kelli leaving. She spent time travelling then sat down to start writing songs. Inspired by co-writing songs with Satoshi Tomiie she started sending demos to record companies. Most wanted a facsimile of Sneaker Pimps, but Derek Birkett from One Little Indian offered her the opportunity to make her own music. Her debut, Tigermouth, was released in 2003. The follow-up, Psychic Cat, inspired by a meeting with a psychic cat on 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica, came in 2004.
Kelli writes that “I wanted to try and capture a spirit of freedom and beauty that I felt was always there”. The opening two tracks, Hot Lipps and Psychic Cat meet these objectives. The first is psychedelic 70’s rock which leads into the second track: acoustic guitars, half dark trip-hop, half techno bashing. Both underpinned by girly choruses and breathy vocals.
Speakers is buzzy anti-capitalism rant: “Where’s the love? Where’s the love? Inside the melody that’s lickin’ your speakers?”, or as Kelli writes on her website “Greed and ignorance is what they want to feed us, need to feed us so that in our comfortable lethargy, we dream of one day being rich and famous and perfect instead of lost and bored and confused, the fat cats can sneak out into the big old mother world and rape her for all she’s worth. They treat nature like a whore and make justice and liberty a joke.” But there’s no stopping the tunes. The entire album is simply a collection of expertly crafted songs. It eschews commercialism, whilst being effortlessly commercial.
Case in point is Home Honey I’m High. A truly stoned immaculate song grabbing handfuls of Vienna, Cars and sneaking in a bit of a nod to Soft Cell: “Run baby run / I’m your setting sun / Hello, goodbye / Home honey I’m high”. Essex electro via Altered Images.
There is experimentation. Ideal features visceral guitar work from Primal Scream’s Andrew Innes and more techno bashing (Joey Beltram plays pop?) before an unexpected drop into two minutes of acid dub. In Praise of Shadows exploits Kelli’s dreamy vocals with an exhaled intro, providing a nice balance to the previous song. But despite the kitchen-sink “let’s try this” approach to each song, there is an overall continuity throughout the album. No track feels wholly out of place. And there’s attention to detail, lyrically and musically. Graffiti Boy features the opening line “Hey man, you shake my heart like a spray can”, subtle extra hi-hats on the second verse and one-off backing vocals. It’s exquisite. Voyeur is even more loved-up.
Groupie has more rainbow smiles, taking the psychedelia of earlier songs and weaving a chilled ambient love song. The extraordinarily beautiful chorus is unexpected, as is the use of Detroit-techno style strings.
However, the closing track Last Boy on Earth doesn’t quite work as a final track. It’s an acoustic number, being thematically out of place with the preceding tracks. Perhaps it should have appeared earlier on, with the closing tracks being Voyeur and a faded-out mix of Groupie. But this is a minor issue, because Kelli Ali’s second album is particularly impressive.
Biography
Psychic Cat [iTunes]
Writing Psychic Cat
Recording Psychic Cat
I feel I have been used and am being used as a scapegoat. They have abandoned me and hung me out to dry. I have been left completely alone.
As in, “alone with £100,000”, I presume.
Excuse me whilst I go and get my barge pole.
I give you this website for a pub in Sidmouth.
It’s 1995 all over again.. but this time the entire site is written in Javascript, created with “LMSOFT Web Creator”. Gasp at the consistency of each page.. marvel at the design.. buy them a dictionary. Where did it all go wrong?
On Thursday afternoon one of our clients cancelled a meeting that was to take place on Friday. As a result Friday became free for me to work on other business. Late Thursday I had an idea for the landing page for one of our future prospects: a site for exclusive holidays to Scotland. I scribbled the idea down on a piece of 3×3 paper, then slept on it (not literally!)
During Friday I used Macromedia Fireworks to outline the original idea, but I decided I didn’t like it. It didn’t exude enough exclusiveness. At this stage I would usually wait for another idea, or go back to sketching some alternatives – but this time I didn’t.
Instead I decided to find out exactly what I didn’t like about it, and what techniques and motifs I could use to make this landing page better. Rather than start on a new document, I created a new frame in Fireworks, copied over some of the design ideas that I did like, then worked with it.
I ended up producing a total of 14 iterations of the landing page, and I’m pleased with about 3 of them. When our client comes to visit next week, I can take them through the story of their development, hoping that she agrees with my strategy. I’ll post the iterations up here following the meeting.
Today I worked on a page layout based on the clues given by the best landing page and it looks lovely.
Kylie Minogue’s seventh album, Light Years was a rebirth from her dour times at Deconstruction Records. The two albums released between 1993 and 1998 – Kylie Minogue and Impossible Princess (confusingly called Kylie Minogue in UK) were critically and commercially unsuccessful. The latter of these two remains my favourite, but the first album on Parlophone, Light Years, is fine once you break through the kitsch.
Light Years is the final track. Its arpeggiated bassline and Kylie’s flight attendant vocals build the track before lush audio-aerodynamics lift the song smoothly into a extended denouement and comedown. Pop meets Spacemen 3.
This week sees the re-release of Nerina’s 2005 album Fires, which contains re-masterings of some tracks and a few extra bits and bobs on others (including a stringified Idaho, and better mixing on the acoustic guitars). The first track Everybody’s Gone To War is doing the rounds on music television, and Nerina’s been on TOTP.
Halfway Home is the second track on the album. It contains some great vocals from Nerina, but the bit I like the most is a one-off 5 note piano sequence that’s just dropped in as a little fill.
Throwing Muses:
I never asked you to pay my rent
copyright ©2006 and so on, ninthspace.org, except quotations, lyrics and some images which are the rights of their respective holders