ONE HUNDRED HITS

IMPORTANT EDIT: I completely misunderstood the hit-counter: the one I was looking at was in fact profile views, a very different beast to blog views. Rather than a poxy 100 views, I actually have 1600+, which I'm rather chuffed about. There's a really neat feature that breaks down page views in more or less every way you can think of, and while I won't go into much detail - I don't have enough time and I can't imagine it interests anyone but me - I'll still put a few of the most noteworthy down.

My most popular blog post by far is the castle blog, with 450 or so, a fair way ahead of number 2, my Everything Everything review (that said, the Everything Everything review is much younger). It's nice that the two that I consider to be my strongest have garnered the most attention.

The UK and US are exactly tied for most views at 484.

Erm, that's pretty much it. Ignore everything hereafter.

YES!


Twenty months after my first blog post, way back in February 2009, I have hit the big 100 blog views. That's one every six days, how amazing!


Okay, that is pretty pathetic. I herby declare I will embark upon an extensive campaign of blog-plugging, i.e. linking to it in all my online profiles. Let's aim for 200 by this time next year.


Blog Breakdown:


Duration: 20 months
Posts: 54
Monthly Average: 2.7 posts
Monthly High: June 2010, 9 posts
Monthly Low: April May 2009, 0 posts; August 2009, 1 post.

By genre:
Music: 18 posts
Sport: 13 posts
Film: 5 posts
Other stuff: the rest

Trends: Over the course of my blog random pieces about random things have become far more scarce, with the focus now being on music, sport or film. They are also longer and more coherent. My best one? The most fun to write was the first one about the Tour de France, but looking back on it now my writing is pretty poor. In that case, the recent review of Man Alive must be the best, and is actually the only review on the reasonably highly-trafficked SputnikMusic.

Other thoughts: Sport is really easy to write about. Weighty issues are far harder. I should write about literature more.

The Long-Lost Art of the Guitar Solo

In a time now sadly passed, any rock act worth its salt had a guitarist with some serious chops. We're talking Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix, Deep Purple, AC/DC - all bands with great guitarists that knew the difference between tasteful licks and self-indulgence, who didn't rely on pure speed in their solos, as many guitarists do nowadays. (Why did I accidentally put so many food-related words in those two sentences? I just ate an' everything). But barring the few survivors from those better times (Iron Maiden, Mark Knopfler) there has been nothing in the past ten years with anything to the aforementioned guitar Gods, except The Darkness.

Despite scooping four Brit awards in 2004, The Darkness were a band that few people could take seriously. They saw the spandex, the castrato, the high-camp, and for a glorious few month everybody embraced rock, and make no mistake, Permission To Land is rock at its best. Not since Back In Black had a band wielded distortion as capably as Justin Hawkins and brother Dan. But then people began to feel a bit guilty about it all. Did we really like this lot? They are sooo unfashionable! The Darkness were swept under the carpet, and the (admittedly inferior) follow-up album, One Way Ticket To Hell sold poorly in comparision, and unlike other artists and bands that rose to prominence in the early 00s, such as the Libertines and Franz Ferdinand, The Darkness spawned no immitators. They were abandoned and left to plow their own lonely furrow until they disbanded.

I think there is also a case to be made for the guitar solo being replaced by a rap break. In the 70s and 80s many pop acts featured (bad) guitar solos, just because it was the done thing: verse chorus verse solo verse outro. Nowadays a good percentage of pop releases have some sort of rap breakdown, but there are musical and not juststructural similarites. Both are largely self-indulgent, not brilliantly skillful and often incongruous to the style of the song. Now while I don't particularly miss the fashion for songs with bad solos, it is indicative of the shift away from the use of electric guitars in mainstream music.
Okay, I'm not entirely telling the truth when I say there has been no other great guitar work. Early Muse albums dripped with Matt Bellamy's signature guitar playing, though it was less soloing and more excellent rhythm playing. Then there are the metal bands, though despite being a genre that relies entirely on the guitar, bands have tended to descend into the drop D chug of, say, Meshuggah or the aimless tragic wankery of Dream Theater. The only one that springs to mind is Opeth, and while metal isn't my forte, I know enough about it to make sweeping statements that disregard the whole genre of metal. Er...

Shredding, the art of playing a stupid amount of notes in as short a space as possible, has become the dominant form of the guitar solo. It is crap. Shredding is the guitar equivalent of X Factor melismatic, gymnastic singing that people seem to think is good nowadays. It might seem a strange comparison, but it holds water. Take Alexandra Burke. She has a good voice: it's powerful and she can hit notes accurately, but has absolutely no concept of melody. Instead of finding a note and sticking with it she blasts up and down the scales, leaving you unsure as to what tune she is supposed to be singing. This approach exists on the guitar also, for instance wank-King Steve Vai and his equally bad mentor Joe Satriani. Look them up on YouTube and it won't take long to see what I mean. When Vai tries to give his playing some space à la Pink Floyd, it just sounds dreadful: see For The Love Of God. Put it this way: I can shred. Not very well, but once you know a few scales, and have quick fingers it doesn't take much imagination to play like these guys. However writing solos like the two in Comfortably Numb, both of which are fairly easy to play, takes more than just speed.

Is good guitar playing a thing of the past? Are the likes of the Hawkins brothers, Tom Morello of RATM and Absolution era Muse the last of the old guard? I really hope not.


EDIT: Just looked up For The Love Of God on Youtube and the first video is a perfect example of what I'm talking. Fret-wankage made literal at 4:30, so bad.

Everything Everything - Man Alive

After watching from afar for far too long, I joined SputnikMusic, a music reviews site where users can post their own reviews. I blogged about Everything Everything a few months ago, and their debut album is now out, and it's pretty decent. Find my review here.


Like a comic who chains complex pun after complex pun, leaving the brain scrambling to catch up, so goes Man Alive, the debut album from Everything Everything. It is an album unlike anything you've ever heard before, a true original, and at times, to borrow a lyric from Two For Nero, will leave you as "giddy as a baby in a centrifuge". What sets Everything Everything apart from the crowd is Jonathan Higgins' sugary falsetto: he delivers frequently baffling lines, "And I wanna know what happened to your boyfriend because he was looking at me like 'Whoah!'" at speed with constant octave-leaps. It can be quite bewildering.

Full disclosure: if the lyrics actually mean anything coherent it is beyond me. That isn't to say they are bad, far from it, in fact as little sense as they make Higgins has the power of an arresting turn of phrase, juxtaposing 1980s videogame nostalgia, "It's like Sega never died" with echoes of Nazi Germany, "You goosestep around the garden" in Two For Nero. He also on occasion plays with verbal jokes; decide for yourself whether the refrain in album highlight Suffraggette Suffraggette scans "Who's gonna sit on your fence", or "Who's gonna sit on your face".

The vocal hi-jinx does begin to grate by the start of Come Alive Diana. It's one falsetto-leap too far and feels like an attempt to inject some life into an otherwise stale song. Indeed, the last four songs are largely forgettable affairs, with the exception of NASA Is On Your Side, showing refreshing restrain in a slow-burning build-up over solemn keys, before peaking with an exultant chorus.

The focus of this review has been thus-far on the vocals, but there is some really excellent musicianship on display. Guitarist Alex Robertshow is reminiscent of Radiohead's Johnny Greenwood: it's unobtrusive, varied and deft, and also provides one of Man Alive's highpoints. From nowhere Suffraggette Suffragette is illuminated by a dirty great slab of driving distortion, an isolated moment of untempered rawk. It's a fabulous addition, but it's something of a double-edged sword: the other tracks are diminished ever so slightly. Their highly polished arty and intelligent exteriors, particularly Final Form and the closing duo of Tin (The Manhole) and Weights, have their lack of fire and warmth exaggerated.

That said, with such boundless invention it was always likely that Everything Everything would take a few mis-steps, but successes outweigh weaknesses in this superb first effort.

7/10