Heyyyy Sinister, Oh, how could I not post! Those silly Glaswegians are getting me worked up like a schoolgirl. First tour reports, then a new single, then more tour reports, then a fantastic Peel session. It's all too much. I think I may be swooning.... Alright I've recovered somewhat. I got my roomate to tape the Peel session, a somewhat precarious operation involving placing my iBook next to my stereo and hooking them together, running a phone line across the room to the stereo and setting the iBook up to play Radio 1's RealAudio feed. Moreover I had a previous engagement and my roomate had to do all the recording, I'm just glad he remembered. As it was the poor iBook crashed right before "The Magic of a Kind Word," so I only heard the other three. I must say I am by no means disappointed. Also, Peel said none of the four would be on the next EP. The skinny for you who are searching Napster frantically... (My Girl's Got) Miraculous Technique I mention this one first despite its being played last because I love love love it. I suspect it is their take on dub. The culprits - the offbeat reverby piano chords, the warm organ (yes I just said WARM ORGAN), the plodding bass, and Richard going crazy on those skins every so often (although these outbursts lacked the dub-eriffic echoes usually reserved for their traditional dub counterparts). This song is unabashedly happy and oh-so catchy. The only problem is that it's full of snowy wintry imagery and it seems a travesty to hear it in the summertime. But I give it a perfect 10. I keep rewinding it and playing it over and over. It has a decidedly un-dub ubertwee flute/strings breakdown too. Mmmm ok moving on. Shoot the Sexual Athelete Another case of Struan getting more and more self-referential about him and being in a band and all. It's almost like a spoken word rap a la StuD with just bass, drums and Struan rapping and then those guitars kick in. Oh those guitars.... it's like Felt doing a rap song. Lawrence did sort of have a sing-songy way of vocalizing from time to time didn't he? But anyway the song is lovely and fun. Ohhhhh my god and I just figured out a line and realized the whole song is about Robert Forster. I just couldn't understand what he was saying in one line but he spells it all out. It's even got a sort of Forster-ish quality about the singing. Now all the lines later on make so much more sense. Mmm, you've got to love a band that write songs about Go-Betweens. The Magic of a Kind Word Didn't hear it, my roomate missed this one. Is it the sort of electronic-y number? Something in the Silence I've forgotten the title to this one, sorry. Truth be told I've only listened to it twice as it's buried in the middle of the tape and finding it is trickier than finding the other two, and I have to keep replaying Miraculous Technique over and over. It's got Isobel and Sarah singing a duet, and some patently unorthodox instrumentation. i.e. very quiet guitars, lots of vibraphone and harmonica. It's nice but didn't catch my ear as much as the others. Sounds sort of Gentle Waves-ish. I'll have to MP3 them for, ah, my own personal listening enjoyment, and listen to them over and over a bit. So I got Jonathan David the day it came out, walked down a few blocks, checked one record store, didn't have it, checked another, got it there. No fuss no muss. I've listened to it a few times...I must say I was actually a bit concerned about my favorite band starting to get sort of dull. The overwhelmingly upbeat Jonathan David didn't float my boat right away, but I've come to give it a grudging admiration. It's certainly upbeat enough to be the single...anyway the B-sides are lovely too, but not especially exciting. I agree with previous assertions that they dulled down Loneliness a bit too much by burying the guitars in the mix. But it's a damned good song anyway. Oh those organs. But yeah, something in the tension of the song got lost. So now there's a bevy of new B&S songs floating hither and thither and we're going to have to start figuring out how to make sense of them. There's these four tracks from the session, and Big John Shaft (played at Glasgow Uni, equally ace) and the 'Spanish-influenced song' Stevie was asked about by the NME, all of which the band claim won't be on the next EP. Then there's "I'm Waking Up to You," which Stevie said involved 23 session musos in the studio and will be on one of the EPs (so it sounds like it will be on the second...), "I Love My Car," which sounds as though it would be the frontrunner for the A-side to the next single as it's the only new song that they've not specifically dismissed from the EP that they've been playing live. I can hardly imagine them not playing the second single on their tour, and it's supposed to be so catchy and all. I'm excited. Then there's "Lord Antony," which seems sort of forlorn but could still see release. After all, Loneliness finally came out. They seem to have a thing for putting songs that have been languishing on trainspotters' ears on EPs. First Middle Distance Runner, now Loneliness. Who knows. I doubt Rhoda et al will ever see the light of day anytime soon though. Very exciting, that's all I can say. And that's not even counting the whole Storytelling soundtrack.... Brian Pennington | cellophanesky@mac.com | AIM: aVespertineDream Semi-regular observations: <http://mcmcmc.scribble.nu> the Cellophane Sky: <http://www.mp3.com/thecellophanesky/> Sandcastle Records: <http://www.indiepages.com/sandcastle/> "Better a tear of truth than smiling lies." - Duncan Browne +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ 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. 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