A Hi-Fi Hallowe'en.

HALLOWE'EN MIXZIP


Click here to download my spooktacular Hallowe'en mix. Give it a spin to fend off evil spirits from your party, or you could of course come along and jive to them at the Hi-Fi Popcorn Hallowe'en Ball.

Tracklisting:
1. North American Hallowe'en Prevention, Inc. - Do They Know It's Hallowe'en?
2. Vic Mizzy - The Addams Family
3. Final Fantasy - The CN Tower Belongs to the Dead
4. Neutral Milk Hotel - Ghost
5. Daniel Johnston - Casper the Friendly Ghost
6. Treehouses - The Trick or Treat Serial Killer
7. Bobby Boris Pickett - Monster Mash
8. France Gall - Frankenstein
9. Unicorns - Ghost Mountain
10. The Shaggs - It's Halloween
11. Pixies - The Thing
12. Volunteer Pioneer - Funeral Scene
13. X-Press 2 - Witchi Tai To (featuring Tim Delaughter)
14. The Paper Chase - We Know Where You Sleep
15. The Immediate - A Ghost in This House
16. Animal Collective - April and the Phantom
17. The Zombies - Butcher's Tale (Western Front 1914)
18. Evangelicals - The Halloween Song
19. The Marketts - Out of Limits
20. The Polyphonic Spree - Town Meeting Song

Some obvious exclusions from the mix include Ghostbusters, Thriller, Pet Semetary, Ghost Town, I Put a Spell on You, Scary Monsters and Devil's Haircut, as well as more recent vaguely-linkable-to-the-season treats from the likes of Jay Reatard, No Age, Patrick Wolf, The Libertines, Islands, Jape, The Mae Shi, TV on the Radio, thinguma*jigSaw, Nobunny and Wolf Parade.

Actually, I was just the other day pondering as to why the only bona fide Hallowe'en HIT is the bonkers Monster Mash. Almost five decades after its release, no other popular song has appeared which really comes close to being as widely-associated with the holiday. The immense Do They Know It's Hallowe'en? was an admirable effort, but that was only available on a painfully-limited seven inch vinyl! What the hell's that about? There's a niche market if ever I've known one! Louis Walsh, you reading this shit? Get off my blog!

Idiocy is bliss.

THE IDIOTS


The following review was originally written for the first issue of Underground Wires. All of the albums reviewed within the zine were released in 1995 and were thus required to be written about from the perspective of one stuck in the dead centre of the nineties.

I’ll immediately assassinate the elephant in the corner of this room by mentioning a young group of upstarts called My Bloody Valentine. Four years on from the release of Loveless, The Idiots - a dreamy Dublin trio - release a record seeped in the influence of Shields and company. But it has also been seeped in a vat of uniquity and goes to great lengths to try to make both progress and a solitary work of stature. Although this self-titled ‘mini-album’ counts only seven tracks amongst its ranks, it clocks in at around 35 minutes long, testament to the band’s effort of design and liberty of structure.

The opening track ‘Slow’ is the most traditional and accessible song here, but it too is inventive through its usage of layers of filthy duelling guitars, effects-laden with varying levels of fuzziness. One of them is played to provide a beat (on top of the already pounding drums) and another is severely altered in order to convert its sound into that of a synthesiser. But the real success of this tune is its chorus, where lead singer Brian Mooney stretches a simple and everyday first person pronoun into an impossibly catchy six-syllabled refrain. I defy you to rid your cranium of the phrase “I have had enough” for quite a while after having heard this.

From hereafter, it becomes evident that the three Idiots like to shun conventional structure and the wordy cramming of songs, instead preferring to spend their time oxymoronically building spaces wherein they can then litter their chunks of tasteful noise, waves of reverb and fits of vocal repetition. At times - like on ‘Screwdriver’ - the thumping drums and high voltage riffs can make them sound almost like a metal band, but there’s also an underlying fragility buried beneath the bed of sound and intimate vocals. Exhibit A is the haunting game of hide-and-go-seek that is ‘Pinned’. The drum beat’s B.P.M. replicates human running and the tone of the music suggests a dark woods, late at night. To add to this canvas of fear, Mooney’s breathless and creepy “I’ve found you” is enough to strike fear in even the bravest of listeners.

As a fascinatingly inventive piece of art music, this album is one which needs to be allowed to wash over you (despite the hygiene-related worries I’d have in doing so) and stands in direct juxtaposition to its humbley-monikered creators. Although much of what is to be heard here is militantly challenging and wondrously deep, it’s also possible to listen to without supplies or a shovel. Constantly dynamic and mysterious, the only obvious thing about it is the lack of idiocy involved. Then again, ‘The Genii’ isn't quite as good a band name, is it?

I Should Go
Slow

1997 interview
Beautiful Unit myspace - the current solo project of Mr. Mooney.
Trust Me I'm a Thief - an excellent record label founded and run by two of The Idiots.

Ghosts Die

A HAUNTED NIGHT OF LO-FI AT THE LOWER DECK


I'm putting on a fun night of music in The Lower Deck this All Hallow's Eve. It's a third of the price of the Phantom FM Hallowe'en party. Come in costume, see five bands and dance to the Monster Mash til early November. Find it on last.fm here.

A Series of Dark Caves
An ideally named project for a Hallowe'en concert comes courtesy of David Ferguson, a young musical messer with a penchant and a dab hand for constructing tense, lushly layered slices of curious suburbia which suggest a formidable partnership between Noah Lennox and John Darnielle.

Although on 'To The Kids' he heartbreakingly declares "I wanna know what's killing me", I can't help but get the feeling that he has no interest in genuinely knowing the answer to this mystery, with his catchy compositions being also as reverb-soaked, puzzling and open-ended as they are.

Download: This Year in a Nutshell EP
myspace

Treehouses
It brings me great pleasure to draw a comparison - however slight and unfounded - between an Irish act and the marvellous Californian indie-hop outfit Why?. 'Abandon House!' fires up with the thick beat-and-bassline combo and intimate stream-of-consciousness poetics which my mind has come to associate with Anticon's finest sons, but it's also so freeform and capricious that any mild contrasts are fleeting. The chiming metronome which rings throughout cleverly mimics the persistent doorbell which is being bemoaned by our narrator as he attempts to peacefully retreat from society in the way in which his pseudonym 'Treehouses' would suggest.

Download: Abandon House!
myspace

How Will They Cope?
The one time that I saw the cryptically monikered How Will They Cope live, it was a glorious mess. 75% of the band were... pie-eyed... and the remaining percentage (lead singer Davy Kehoe) was left to be the night's designated paperclip as the promoter tried desperately to pull the plug on their delayed and chaotic set as soon as possible. Fortunately, this kind of carry-on is totally my thing. They also answered their own question and coped quite capably, by allowing to seep out of themselves their intriguing collection of oft-meandering synth-inflected tunes with a spirit and energy sadly absent from so many of our island's feet-superglued-to-the-floor cool dudes.

'Mistral' - named after a violent French wind, shame on you for not knowing - finds Kehoe in a meditative mood in a meadow (hence its original punning title 'Meadowtations', I wisely assume), his dynamic alto vocals leaping and bounding over the band's Pavement-esque patterns, as together they gust towards a killer chorus and a sweetly lilting breakdown.

Download: Mistral
myspace

Dublin Duck Dispensary
I don't know much about these.

Download: Mamma Mia (Abba cover)
myspace

Secret Special Guest
Who knows!

I Know A Place.

JEREMY JAY


Jeremy Jay's A Place Where We Could Go opens with one of the most pointless tracks in music history. It's not some terrible lengthy self-indulgent 'experimental' noodling which Jay will refer to as his defining work while everybody else sneers, nor is it filler spat out on the last day of mixing to make it to twelve tracks. No, it's a super-brief clip of him saying the words "night night". It's so short that when selected on my iPod, it results in this weird glitch where it just plays a sudden and paltry excerpt of whatever I was last listening to before firing straight into the album's second track, a shimmeringly romantic moonlit-stroll-and-red-wine tune which, funnily enough, is called 'Nite Nite'.

This reiteration of the naming of the period which exists between 9pm and 4am does, however, allow for the musician to recommend the ideal time for listening to his gorgeous wandering minstrel meditations. To these ears, Jeremy Jay is the colourful Venn intersect of Jonathan Richman, Andrew Bird and Mark Bolan (during the stray moments when he wasn't being crap), but the K Records stamp on his album sleeve is a quiet and friendly reassurer as to his idiographic and self-styled talent.

Nite Nite

His myspace

Bogman Jason.

JASON THE SWAMP


A swamp can't walk, a swamp can't talk, a swamp can't smile, a swamp can't cry and a swamp can't die. All a swamp can do is sit there being wet and dirty. Are we genuinely expected to believe that a marsh named Jason is a regular producer of sweetly bouncing ditties such as those contained on the Mice in the Mouse Organ EP from earlier this year? It's not even as though 'swampish' would be a suitable descriptor of his crisp and clean stylings. 'Running Around' sounds like he travelled back in time to 1983 Texas, visited Daniel Johnston's sister's basement, washed the gunk and grime out from Johnston's tatty old chord organ, figured out how to multi-track vocals and lobbed a giddy kitchen sink drumbeat on top.

Some of the other tracks on the EP are spacious flashes of beauty; brief and twee will-o'-the-wisp instrumental pieces which resemble the pretty little melodies that often crop up in a good movie score and disappear near-instantaneously, meaning that you forget to do the necessary further research to find the responsible artist. Maybe Jason the Swamp is behind each of these sweet moments? If he isn't, he should be.

Red Flannel Soup

Download two free albums and an EP at Rack and Ruin Records. His song featured on We Love You Too! - A Rack & Ruin Covers Compilation is a terrific version of Man Man's 'Van Helsing Boombox'.

His myspace

Bar Bar Bar Bar Barbara Ann

THE BARBARAS


Personally accumulated knowledge is leagues more reliable than that which is discovered offhandedly from browsing the world wide web, but it's also likely to be markedly less interesting. Here's a quaint factoid which I can offer to you having listened to The Barbaras' 'Summertime Road' 7" record a few dozen times over the summer: I love it, it soundtracked the season. But here are two tidbits of information which I picked up from blogs and other such modern rumourmills: 1) Jay Reatard's bassist and drummer are in the group (this one isn't arguable, or controversial), and 2) Mr. Lindsey/Reatard apparently pleasured a "disabled" member of the band, who happened to be sleeping at the time.

For fear of beginning to sound like a red-top, I should now blast into a cavalcade of metaphors, similes and adjectives which help me convey the muddy and static yet irrepressibly melodic noise that these guys make. But holy shit! One of them's disabled and Jay Reatard gave him a handjob???? That's flippin' mental!

Summertime Road
Live at Gonerfest mp3s
Buy the Summertime Road 7"

Their myspace

I Can't Stand the Sound of Flesh Hitting Bone.

GRAND POCKET ORCHESTRA


I count the odds as highly unlikely that Grand Pocket Orchestra is a band which formed through a notice in a supermarket or a guitar shop or a parish hall. It's obvious that the thing which connects this 'riot pop' quartet is not a slim field of common influences ("everything from the Foos to the Chilis!") nor an impulse to combat boredom in the suburban evenings. Instead, I can imagine the four young hooligans of the group having being beamed down from outer space like Rowan Atkinson in the opening credits of Mr. Bean. There's the multi-tasking lady with neon pink candy floss hair, the punk drummer whose bare arms are a blur, the bratty, yelping lead singer whose movements suggest that he's permanantly engaged in a Nintendo Wii game within his head, and 'Flesh', the darkly mysterious Boris Karloff guitarist. These foreign beings then stumbled upon the music shelf of a branch of Formative Fun and, mouths agape like the guy on the escalator in those bad "he don't belong here!" comedies, began to make their singular and unbounded racket.

Their new EP 'Make Happy War' consists of the eight finest concurrent minutes of audio to reach my ears this year. And I'm not being silly. It's such thrilling and unpredictable lunacy. There are melodies catchier than the expression "catchier than the plague" and indeed catchier than the plague itself. There are drumrolls to roll with, gangshouts to shout out and lyrics to lyricise, despite their largely incomprehensible nature. On an infuriatingly regular basis over the past three weeks, I've had lines such as the following (which are unlikey to be genuine Grand Pocket Orchestra lyrics) barge into my head uninvited: "I bet you wish you'd never bit the head off Italy", "Joe paints new pictures/they look so pretty", "in a river of cherry paths/oh yeah/I saw him/he was wearing next to nothing" and "everyone everyone everyone rock/let's all go to a Nokia stop". What the fuck! I don't know.

Over the past year, Grand Pocket Orchestra has made nine songs available for public consumption. They have yet to release a single millisecond of junk. And judging by their live set and the album turnover rate of the music industry, it could be a number of years before they do, if ever. Everyone everyone everyone rock.

Using the Body (from nialler9)
Little Messy
Odd Socks

Their myspace