And I thought that all Sweden did was cutesy-pop.
Lizette &’s fashion might allude to crunching gothic terror, but their (her?) music is anything but. Breathe is one of the best constructed songs I’ve heard this year. It’s power lies in its simplicity and attention to detail. Match this with an equally simple but mesmerising video and you have a track of the day:
Proof that whilst you can get somewhere with automated recommendations from Last.fm, there’s nothing like a real live person rooting through your listening charts to come up with suggestions. So I thank jadedingenue for pointing me towards the rather marvellous Saint Eve.
Lead by L. Gabrielle Penabaz, Saint Eve’s biography deems itself theatrical rock (perhaps referring to the performance aspects of their shows), but judging from Elixir, the sound is more electronic rock veering more towards the dancefloor later in the album: somewhere between Ayria and Danielle Dax for the 21st century, with large doses of Poe. Frankly the number of influences is bewildering.
Almost a throw-away track on 1984’s Body and Soul 12” – being the predecessor to the rightfully indulgent Afterhours – Train revels in the electric whip-snare of Doktor Avalanche. Andrew Eldritch’s vocals are mostly bottom-end, sitting amongst the murky guitar riffs. The rest of the track is left to the drums, the hisses, screams and ‘train’ sighs, all with ludicrous overuse of delay. Correspondingly, it’s my favourite track on the single, but bettered by the extended version Long Train which appeared on 1988’s Lucretia, My Reflection.
It’s totally shocking to me that Google and Microsoft are just letting Amazon take developers over this way.
So writes Robert Scoble. And he’s correct, but their behaviour isn’t surprising because Google and Microsoft are not in the same game. Unfortunately, this could be their undoing.
Google and Microsoft are driven by technology, by things that they think are ‘cool’. This is evident in their scattershot approach to product development, either by releasing products that contradict and supersede their own, or by random purchases of other companies, or by ‘innovating’ through ‘emulation’. Their suite of internet offerings are for people who use the internet.
Amazon however have had several years’ head start when it comes to their web services. They’ve had to solve problems whilst building up the company and their increasing customer base. The result is a set of architectures that support their massive e-commerce system and they have realised that these architectures can be packaged and used by others. Their suite of internet offerings are for people who build the internet – developers and innovators. It’s these people who can disrupt Google and Microsoft’s agenda.
What do Google and Microsoft need to do to prevent this from happening, or at least ensure it doesn’t affect their long-term revenue? Buy Amazon. It’s interesting to note that in Wikipedia’s definition of Googlezon Google has the storage infrastructure and Amazon the social networking. In reality, the opposite is becoming true.
Perhaps the most critical of missing pieces to Amazon’s suite of web services launched yesterday. SimpleDB is Amazon’s database service.
Some people think that this is competing with enterprise database systems or the plethora of web-friendly databases such as MySQL. This isn’t really the case because SimpleDB differs in a number of respects:
You might wonder after reading this, what good is SimpleDB? Well, if you need fast access to fuzzy data sets, SimpleDB would suit you fine.
Ernesto vs. Bastian are the Dutch duo responsible for 2005’s Dark Side of the Moon – a track which I found mildly interesting on first listen but which quickly became tedious.
Thrill is their new creation, released to the world on 21 January 2008. If you recoil at the brain numbing spiralling synth line from 1990’s The Age of Love, you’ll probably do the same for the hooks in this vocal-less trance track. The best I can come up with for these is what you get when you stick a slap bassline and an acid drone in a blender. One might be enough, but this track overlays them. And just when you can’t handle it any more a blue elegiac pad arrives to temper the situation. However this respite is short-lived.
After all the joyous congratulatory news items that welcomed Radiohead’s decision to release In Rainbows as a ‘pay whatever you want’ download, the skies have cleared and Radiohead have decided that it’s time for this to stop.
Yes folks, we’re rolling back to the traditional outlets and traditional paid-for downloads for the CD release of the album – via XL Recordings – on 31 December 2007. According to c|net News, Radiohead are even negotiating with iTunes, which they’ve previously avoided because they reckoned they were obliged to sell tracks individually (which was a wrong assumption).
Next step? Radiohead sign to major label and normal service is resumed. Remember folks, follow the money..
Mute Drivers’ second album, Waiting For World War Three, was my first and only foray into their music. Looking back at this album, released in 1989, I’ve now decided that they were the post-punk equivalent of Galaxie 500. Dean Wareham’s gang were more about their instrumentals than their lyrics, and my admiration of Mute Drivers (David Rogers and Steve Wright) similarly focuses on the caustic, jangling and furious distortions created by their guitars, the incessant heavy bass-lines and the terrifyingly hypnotic drum machine rhythms. Wonderful stuff.
Throwing Muses:
Strange time to be hazing me
Breaking me
Shaking me awake now
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