Control

I've been meaning to blip these flats again from this angle (I did them before from further into the park) so I took the opportunity of a stroll back from the vets in Sherwood this afternoon. They're not actually the flats used in 'Control', obviously, but those are elsewhere in our fair city and these always remind me of them.

Music-wise, I thought I'd better give John Grant's new one a try today, if only to keep middleman happy. The last one failed to impact on me, despite being a big critical hit, as I recall, but I'm rather enjoying this new one. There have been one or two interesting artists mining the eighties for inspiration just recently (Destroyer and Bon Iver spring to mind) though I still find it odd, as a forty-something now myself, to think of those songs as 'oldies.' The pop canon currently seems to be finding room to re-assess a certain shiny, intelligent, sometimes slightly camp, strand of sounds from the early/middle years of the decade that taste previously forgot (Prefab Sprout, the Associates, Kate Bush, Scritti Politti, XTC, that kind of thing...) Obviously, you can mess it up terribly, and replace your tried and tested seventies NY leather jacket insouciance with an apparent belief that A-Ha were the height of cool a decade later (hands up, Julian Casablancas and co.!) but there are plenty of others doing more than just adding a Miami-Vice production sheen. I suppose if you're twenty-four now your 'eighties' are my 'sixties' - scary stuff, indeed! It's a bit like that point in the early nineties when the previously sixties-obsessed Creation bands suddenly discovered the seventies (the good, non-prog, stuff, that is, that came out between the Velvet Underground and punk - I'm thinking Big Star, Mott and the Faces, the cocaine-era Stones, etc...) Not that all of this applies to JG, anyway, given that he's actually the same age I am, but certainly he's revisited some eighties themes here and updated them with subtlety and impact. An example I particularly like is the instrumental/long fade on 'It Doesn't Matter To Him' that comes across a bit like 'Abacab'-era Genesis tackling a Morricone soundtrack. Good stuff.

All that said, Mount Kimbie announced the details of their new album yesterday (out in May - looks like a good 'un) and are giving away a free track at their website which is rather good, so I'm going to prove how down with the kids I am by linking to that instead. For me, it's always been all about the dubstep!