in which I hit a new low on self-obsessed venting

But only a new low for me, I say in my own defence. Anyway, I don't know why I was in this stupid facebook group (yeah, I'll call it stupid now I've been booted out) but it got up my nose that they made a little post about the Magazine single 'Rhythm of Cruelty' and claimed the song was 'penned' by John McGeoch and Barry Adamson. Well, McGeoch and Adamson wrote the music, but Howard Devoto wrote the words. So I felt the need, for no good reason, to point this out. There then ensued an argument between myself and a fellow member who seemed to think I was debating that to 'pen' meant to write/compose; in fact this was how the original anonymous poster reset the terms - that 'pen' meant to write music. I mean this is demonstrably untrue. Anyway, the last person in this exchange, whose name I have scratched out, then went on to tell me (this is cute) to 'F. O.' because I was wrong about the meaning of 'pen', and that everyone knows to 'pen' is to 'write' something. Some more argy ensued accompanied by some bargy and then, as far as I can tell, I was booted out.* Works for me my dudes. 

 *I realised later that I wasn't booted out, it was just fb being glitchy. There was more rancour. The other party has not conceded defeat as of 11/3. I have to not get involved in these idiotic arguments with nobody. 

5 shiel st north melbourne and the time is right for romans, baby

This building is coming down rapidly in Shiel St. If I lived in those flats behind, facing east, I'd be a bit concerned about what was going to replace it. Well I'd be massively concerned. 

The place was never functioning as anything all the time I've lived here which tbf isn't a massively long period of time. People used to use its forecourt to park in in ways that looked like they were parking each other in. More strangely than that, there are often people waiting in cars in the street immediately outside. 

In other news I have to confess my Pintandwefall obsession has only grown, after a brief pivot to renewing my acquaintance with Big Star. I got another Pintandwefall album in the mail last week, the first one they released on vinyl I think. 

It's called Time is Right for Romans, Baby and it takes that obscure pun a little further by including a drawing of a centurion on the lyric sheet but that's it (otherwise, the actual song that starts the album is called 'Time is Right for Romance'). So you assume that the whole thing is some kind of tossed-off in-joke, which by the way I've never been against from an artist. Oddly TIRFRB isn't streamable, I think possibly their only album that isn't, yet it features at least a couple of songs for which they made videos (there's also a ten-minute Youtube video called The Making of Time is Right for Romans, Baby which is intriguing but entirely in Finnish, so, unintelligible to me). TIRFRB is, on preliminary listens, more rugged and seems to push the envelope a little lyrically (songs that seem to be about domestic violence etc though don't quote me on that). But then I flipped it over to side B once and I was taken aback - it seems like the second side of the album is a real departure in terms of sound and style and is going to take time to absorb. Will report, hold your breath.

At the age of 57 one is meant to not get heavily into new music (by which I mean music made after the time you turned 25) and this album in any case is from 2011 but also I am consistently in awe of their 2022 album Seventh Baby which I can't stop playing either. In fact it's basically an ongoing competition to decide which of the four Pintandwefall LPs I own is going to get played today (and right now I'm exploring another I have never heard, Be My Baby from 2013, on spotify). 

For the last few days I've actually been getting to know the first one I got, Red and Blue Baby, which was released in 2017, better. I liked it well enough when I got it, enough to also purchase Seventh Baby which I instantly thought was far superior (my real major objection to RABB is that it has a song about a killer dolphin, called 'Killer Dolphin', which really gets up my nose). There were elements of RABB which just sounded kind of affected to me and perhaps even like they were trying to paper over the cracks of being slightly uninspired, by overdoing the gothic / histrionic vocals (eg the ending of 'Yours', which is just a silly rave-up). But I've made peace with it now. 

I have to admit a major component of my intrigue here is why isn't this band massively huge?! Why aren't they, like, touring the world every other year at a (say) Courtney Barnett level, appearing on late night TV in the US like CB has? The actual possibility (I may have countenanced this here already, sorry if so) is that they might sound massively like a whole slew of bands, they're just an example of something, and so they're purveyors of a product that you can get more easily in other ways and there's nothing too special about them. Maybe I just don't know that some group / bunch of artists already do this, arguably better, because I am so removed from the mainstream (or the mainstream of whatever now passes for 'alternative') that I don't know about its breadth and capacity. Another possibility is that Pintandwefall are drawing on the same basic musical styles and sounds that I liked as a child (and as mentioned previously, they do throw in that reference to the first Magazine album on the cover of their most recent record, which suggests not only an awareness of the past but extremely good taste) and I take on these retro tropes as manifestations of something new. Ugh, I don't know. 

It's interesting that all their songs are in English too which is obviously something that you do when you think you're going to go places internationally, but from what I can see they've only played about three shows internationally - a couple in Germany ten years ago and one in St Petersburg a few years before that. Weird, weird, weird. 

I mean they're not a 'hot new group' like Wet Leg or whatever, they've been around for 15 years or more, they are clearly ensconced in their particular scene, which btw is I think centred around Tampere? Which goes to show that when I was in Tampere for a month in 2016 and trying to figure out (not very concertedly, it's true) what constituted the 'scene' there and getting nowhere, there was a lot more going on than I could glean. 

Anyway I am sure at some time soon the scales will fall from my eyes, which will be completely disgusting, and when you have non-scaly eyes suddenly you can see again, and what you see is the scales that just fell, presumably on the ground around you or on the table or whatever, gelatinous as I imagine them but drying out, and you are like, I will have to clean this up, and then you'd be thinking, fucking hell, should I keep these scales and take them to the doctor because we should probably get them analysed in case I grow eye scales again? Then again, scales are always falling from people's eyes, maybe it's a common enough problem that the doctor would just know how to deal with it and anyway it's possibly simply a waiting game - scales will fall from your eyes eventually. The whole thing makes me feel queasy. I don't think I have eye scales but none so blind as those who will not acknowledge eye scales. 

magic, murder and the weather

So I don't know what happened to my Magazine albums, because I had all four (of the original version of the band's) LPs for a long time - I may even have bought a few of them when they came out* - and now I only have two, The Correct Use of Soap and Magic, Murder and the Weather. MMatW is the poor relation out of them all and generally considered to be not very good but actually I have listened to side two of it today about seven times and well actually it is really good, particularly the song 'Suburban Rhonda' but also the song that opens the side, 'The Great Man's Secrets'. I think probably the reason it's thought of as not a great record is that John McGeoch left after TCUoS and he was a golden boy, but they had other boys, of many glittering hues. 

I'm into Magazine today because after purchasing the Barry Adamson memoir a few weeks ago and having it sitting on my coffee table in the hope that guests would think I was interesting I realised I have basically no guests, well one, who thought I was interesting anyway without some British bass player's autobiography on the coffee table, so I figured, may as well read the thing. It's pretty good though I found it very odd that he claims he could not play the bass when he auditioned for Magazine he just played, like, one note and Howard Devoto decided he was ideal. That one note was what he played when he first heard 'Shot By Both Sides' and obviously by the time it was recorded, like a week later (exaggerating) he's doing a pretty remarkable job on it. Well, I don't mind. It's a decent book and I'm enjoying reading it. 

* Obviously this one's second hand because someone, Graeme Parker perhaps, has written Gram Parsons' initials on it.