11th March, 2010
A cartwheel is the closest you ever get to snowfall.
Feelings are the things you talk about when you have nothing left to say.
A diamond in the rough is vastly inferior to a single shoe sitting in the snow.
If human beings could mind-read they’d never let an animal into their house.
It is in the imagining of such atrocities that we might avoid them.
Don’t hate Phil Collins because his voice sounds like the air being let out of a whale carcass. Hate him because he’s a tax-exile, Tory cunt.
It is time to go to somewhere else where it will be time to go.
By all means seek perfection but don’t ask me to admire it.
Next summer is always better than this one.
I’d rather hear the din of a tap-dancer in an empty skip than a poorly played saxophone.
They say the drums must never stop. True. But should the bagpipes ever start? I like…—More Untruths
10th March, 2010
Chime, chime, chime. A swirl of harmonies, maximum compression – I am stoned in this slow whirlpool of crunching gravel. Electric guitar cream. Wah, Aah, Ba-pa-pah…
Non-stop pop. Chugging: dum dum dum – drang drang drang. Lovers’ songs, leavers’ longing, pain and needing – she’s back again, your heart is bleeding.
Strumming and picking, the ocean’s lapping and the stars’ blinking. Electric guitars built in a bank of colour. Words sewn into streaming tunes flutter like ribbons. This truck is tuned and humming, growling, gunning.
Riffs write themselves on the air like titanium ticker-tape, chords plunge and swoop. The rhythm section lays a lazy line under all this sunshine. I stagger from song to song sticky with nectar. I am happy.
Can I hear a doubt in these sweet intimations of love, or feel a discouraging breeze? In all this pretty chiming can I hear a sour bell call from the darkness?
Is your love…—More Rants/Slates
5th March, 2010
A single snare beat in its spring reverb halo hits and the whole world comes tumbling in. A waterfall of wires, a mass of roots seeking something in the soil. He is callous, weary and unforgiving, a bitter agent sent here to do somebody’s dirty work. He is here to give the folk some news: You’re nothing, so rot in hell.
He sings across the sky like a heretic in a minaret. The band can barely contain the anarchy, they talk over one another like a table of drunks. They fight like cats to break through the jungle of sirens in the sound. The voice weaves between them like a rope of disgust in a barrel of snakes. Whistles blow, absurd postcards are thrown in your face. You are hustled down hallways and dragged into doors to be presented with the grotesque like specimens in a gallery of the damned. Laughter…—More Rants/Slates
2nd March, 2010
2010 saw Justin Currie, erstwhile singer and songwriter from collapsed Scottish pop-rock group, Del Amitri release his second solo album, The Great War. This relatively airy and accessible record followed 2008’s What Is Love For, an album noted for its grindingly indulgent conflation of unreconstructed self-pity and wearying disgust.
These two competing strands within Currie’s output have led many to compare him to Haribo’s Super Sour Monsters – garishly packaged sugar coated jelly that remains, nonetheless, bitter and very hard to swallow. However, he maintains a (dwindling) devoted following despite having written nary a hit since 1998, partly due to his music’s enduring appeal to losers, misfits and obsessively bitter divorcées.
Currie lives in Scotland with his cat, Abdul, remains unmarried and quite possibly infertile.
—More Untruths