ripping good fun

So a few weeks ago I invested, probably unwisely as I have yet to get that credit card statement in full, in an MP3 player. I have already berated myself utterly on the important subject of conspicuous consumption. I know full well the only advantage of the MP3 player is one it’s light and small and two it’s got a capacity to store a lot of music. I mean big deal. The problems are already manifest in the one I bought. One is while I like to put it on random, it incessantly goes to the same thirty (? Haven’t counted) songs and ignores pretty thoroughly whole album’s worths of tracks. It is, basically, petty. I have to physically take things off there to stop them coming up again and again. I’m not going to mention which things I’ve yanked off there after they came up often enough for me to realise I have never liked them in the first place. Here are some of the things however that I have really enjoyed on the MP3 player since I started with it:

Cam-Pact: I purchased this CD a few weeks before Christmas and have found it an endless joy. I guess my understanding of ‘blue-eyed soul’ was always a bit vague and this sounds more to me like the classic Australian pop-rock of the 60s a la Easybeats but I don’t really care about the category, it’s just great Melbourne sixties guitar pop. Even the really silly songs (I mean, ‘Monkey Time’?!) are rad – my favourites probably ‘Drawing Room’ which is a group composition and was a b-side. Like a lot of groups from their time basically the group just sound tremendously inspired, happy to be doing stuff, commercially ambitious but also artistic.

Alastair Galbraith: always a pleasure, I have most of Talisman on there. I thought it would be good in gothic New Zealand but actually enjoy it more in New Holland.

royalchord: practically all of Nights on the Town still on there, I have recently had cause to snip a few tracks out because the MP3 player favoured them relentlessly and they were so pop they were grating. I still love the overall genre romp of rc, one of my favourite groups of all time – Tammy and Eliza are dedicated, craftswomanlike songwriters.

New Estate: Rock Shop is all over my MP3 player, although I have lately chopped a couple of the more thundering live tracks as they distort in my plugs. I particularly love ‘Fool for Fashion’, ‘Palm’, ‘King Rump’ (that still makes me laugh, not bad for an instrumental track, and I laughed even before I knew it had that rude name), and of course ‘Hergé’.

Sunnyboys: I had the Sunnyboys compilation last year and listened to it to death so wasn’t sure if I should rip it (alright, as Mia says, even when I use this stupid term intending to be mildly funny, I can’t do it with any commitment and come across not as a middle-aged person making fun of a middle-aged person trying to use hip technological terms but just as a middle-aged person. Something I guess I should avoid drawing attention to). Anyway I did and I have greatly enjoyed it since, testament to the skills of Jeremy Oxley’s writing – he’s a jewel. ‘My Only Friend’ playing as I write.

Clare Moore: Liquor. Listened to the Graney/Moore Hashish and Liquor when it came out and liked it a lot but it is only after ripping it that I have more of a feel for the contrasts and qualities of both. It’s not a competition but I feel at the moment that while Hashish has terrific hits – ‘My Schtick Weighs a Ton’ for instance is as great as anything DG has ever done – it’s Liquor which gets the award for overall quality. I loved Clare’s first album but over repeated listenings it started to seem too synthesised in a midi way (I have to confess the smell of midi turns my stomach a bit). This one however has the perfect balance.

Panel of Judges – this album has been a long-awaited godsend and I still enjoy practically all of it (there is a bit of repetition lyrically which makes me occasionally impatiently press the ‘forward’ button). I still constantly enjoy it.

If I may indulge another memory from the distant past: when Walkmans first came in I was excited; we’re talking here about someone who used to make a mix tape a week based on whatever he really loved that week, and would carry it around regardless of the fact he had nothing to play it on, and would then graduate to the same kind of concept only four times as long with his first show on public radio in ’83. I thought Walkmans would be great for people like me to indulge in my private music peccadilloes. I was shocked to hear someone on the radio parodying the people who were probably not then called yuppies. In this person’s sarcastic world view Walkmans had made the snowfields an eerie experience because they were now filled with yuppie skiers all listening to Buck’s Fizz on their Walkmans and singing along unaware that all anyone else could hear was their voices. Yeah, one of those things that has stayed with me needlessly.