And i thought i had left the elvis costello list behind me. sigh..... emma discovery spoke about the worst elvis costello album ever and how its backing vocals made leonard cohen look really really subtle. yes. then jay said.
PFM is not a *bad* album, and after all, bacharach can do some really good, cool stuff, but when the 80s schmaltz bacharach mode comes crashing down, with tacky keyboards and backing vocals, most incriminatingly on "such unlikely lovers", i really must run and hide.
the funny thing is that my friend is in composition and so for fun this summer he actually sat down and took apart some jim o rourke arrangements and compared them to the readily availble printed baccharach arrangements and the news on the street is: jim o rourke does a better bacharach that the man himself. its this kind of hyperreality that those little men in europe seem to object so much to but there we go. when i said 'better' earlier on of course i meant 'more interesting/complicated without sounding that way' which is the way that composition students think... needless to say, the last two jim o rourke solo records were way better at being over done schmalz than PineFoxMembrane ever was. Working with Burt was almost Elvis' way of getting up on a table and announcing that he had decided to be resolutely past his prime and that he was going to stick to wearing stupid hats and not shaving. I wish he would be taken prisoner by terrorists and be put in a plush terrorist hang-out where he was perfectly comfortable and had all his needs looked after but could not issue any more albums. that would be swell. if elvis costello reads the bogdan and svetlana mailing list here is my message to you from the canals of mars and the great barrier reef: GIVE IT UP!!! Then Jay said things about the last zombies album and that was ok.. rah! the zombies! they were probably the first band to be marketed as nerds. The zombies are gigantic and block out the sun. the many and sundry elephant six people doing that piano thing (so correctly identitified by jay) really do need to find a new gimick. The thing about leonard cohen is that its not the band i hate its the fans so to say....leonard cohen people (sorry there are exceptions of course but...) are really grating. they all want to read me their poetry. they're sort of like leeches. they all want someone from somewhere else to tell them what to do,... it bothers me. that said, my mother likes leonard cohen, so i grew up with his records (also i very much like my mother). but then i also grew up with Neil Diamond who is MILES better than leonard cohen because he not only wrote i'm a believer but also Sweet Caroline etc. when i was young i used to confuse Leonard and Neil. they both kind of looked the same to me...there we'rent many weathered looking whiteguys with sort of poofy hair in my life as a child and they all looked the same to me. *early cohen's hair looks alot like the way that neil;s still does...as a child my survey of album cover fotos was far from comprehensive. rest assured, gentle reader, i am now fully able to discern one from the other. In fact, it was the kind of chuggy accoustic guitars in bass and salmon harkening back to the famous neil diamond rhythm guitar tracks that first triggered the pleasant childhood memories (that kind of plastic that they used to use in car interiors, green carpeting) that made bisque and silverware so appealing to me. not that StooMoo sounds anything like Neil Diamond, but thats kind of a good thing isn't it. He'd never have gotten anywhere in these modern times sounding like Neil Diamond. Neil is the one i really feel sorry for... i'm getting older this week but i don't have a birthday...which sucks...the awful creeping birthday feeling doesn't have a particular day to settle on and destroy so it just ruins my week. whine whine whine.... s t e v e n +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail sinister@missprint.org. To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to majordomo@missprint.org. WWW: http://www.missprint.org/sinister +-+ "sinsietr is a bit freaky" - stuart david, looper +-+ +-+ "legion of bedroom saddo devotees" "peculiarly deranged fanbase" +-+ +-+ "pasty-faced vegan geeks... and we LOST!" - NME April 2000 +-+ +-+ "frighteningly named Sinister List organisation" - NME May 2000 +-+ +-+ Nee, nee mun pish, chan pai dee kwa +-+ +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+