We Hate the Same Things

One of the songs I heard on the radio in 2015 that caught my ear was 'Woeful Small Town' by Faerground Accidents. I'd grown up in such a town, and the song struck a resonant chord with me. I would have acquired a copy, but it was only available as a download, or on a CD-R, whereas their debut single 'We Hate the Same Things' / 'Back in Town', was obtainable on an inexpensive 7" piece of bright pink vinyl courtesy of John Robb's 'Louder Than Bombs' label, so I bought that instead.

Fortunately, I liked 'We Hate the Same Things' too. Although clearly not a high-budget production, there was a propulsive beat and poignantly witty lyrics (e,g, "I've got too many demons / and too many people with opinions about my demons"), delivered with aplomb by singer Bomar Faery. Fans optimistically compared them to the likes of Pulp and Suede, and I thought they had great potential.

Evidently, though, the obstacles to success were too many and the opportunties too few, with their 2017 debut album co-morbid making no kind of a splash at all. Indeed, I wasn't even aware it had been released until years after the fact, but have just now belatedly ordered a copy.

Comments

Complete String Quartets

While the string quartets of Nikolai Yakovievich Myaskovsky (1881-1950) were all published in the Soviet era, a few of them had pre-revolutionary origins. Two quartets he wrote in 1911 and '09 while a conservatory student re-surfaced some twenty years later designated as Quartets Nos. 3 and 4. An even earlier "schoolboy" piece was later re-worked more radically as Quartet No. 10, premiered in 1945. Myaskovsky partook of an ample share of the turmoil and tragedy of his times: he was wounded and shell-shocked after service on the front line in World War I, and his father, who had been a high-ranking military engineer, was brutally murdered by a revolutionary mob. Despite that, his music, even at its most sombre, hasn't the black bile or biting sarcasm of Shostakovich's, or of his friend Prokofiev's. Of the works collected here, in excellent early '80s performances by the Taneyev Quartet, only Quartet No. 1 has any significantly metallic tang of early S...

All Wrapped Up

Here's another of the compilation cassettes I bought this summer, having taken home a Denon twin-deck hi-fi cassette player from the local charity shop. All Wrapped Up is a 1983 compilation of singles by The Undertones, with Side One filled with A-sides, and B-sides on Side Two. A cassette must be the least desirable medium for such an arrangement, with a long rewind required if one just wants to hear the hits repeatedly. The Undertones were unapologetically provincial and anti-fashionable, with their songs sharply-written slices of life that pointedly avoided any mention of politics, or of the then-continuing violence in their native Derry. My favourite tracks are the obvious choices: 'Teenage Kicks', 'Jimmy Jimmy', 'Here Comes the Summer', 'My Perfect Cousin' & 'Wednesday Week'. Their later singles showed increased sophistication but lack the some of the straightforward charm of their earlier work. The B-sides, not unexpectedly, are mo...

Ein Schattenspiel, etc.

Georg Friedrich Haas is a contemporary Austrian composer of "art music". "Haas's style recalls that of György Ligeti in its use of micropolyphony, microintervals and the exploitation of the overtone series; he is often characterized as a leading exponent of spectral music" says wikipedia. Only a relative few of his many compositions have been issued on CD - many more of them can be found on YouTube. On this 2020 disc are three of his works in which standard classical instrumentation is augmented and altered by "live electronics". Two are string quartets and one is for solo piano. Is a string quartet still really a quartet if there are meanwhile some other people with laptops busily twizzling the sound? There is a live performance video of the 'String Quartet No. 7', the first work on the disc, where the JACK Quartet are supplemented by a trio of sound boffins to realise the composition. Whether it's properly a quartet or a septet is neithe...

This is a Recording

Search This Blog