Guess who's back with some brand new tat?

Even a leper with sub-par numeracy skills could count on one hand the number of days since the last The Hardcore and The Gentle post that I haven't been pestered by a pleading cohort of distraught readers, desperate to know when the next post will be hitting their cyber-doormats. Well, without meaning to stick my tongue too far down the fully waxed blog hole of The Rt Hon. Dan Boadan, I read his excellent new blog post earlier today (http://bit.ly/9VZL2R) and was inspired to get back on to the blogging circuit myself. Plus it's too rainy for hopscotch, so a lad's gotta entertain himself somehow.


In an inglorious return to the early days of this blog, I'm not actually sure exactly what I'll be writing here, but I'm fairly sure that I'll be writing it nonetheless. One thing's for certain though: whatever it is, it'll be rambling tat. Rather than carry on reading this, you may instead find an iota more interest in an interview I did with veritable bad-ass Detroit dweller Kyle Hall which is now online, but which I will refrain from linking to here because last time I did something like that it resulted in all kinds of grief, not least the misjudged creation of a Facebook group for this blog. The interview is basically just more rambling, but this time it's me channelling the rambling rather than perpetrating it myself. Google "Kyle Hall Sound Revolt" if you enjoy a) Detroit-style house/deep house, b) interviews, AND c) me (it's gotta be all or nothing I'm afraid, there's no room around here for interview-loving deep house fans who don't have a shrine to me in their kitchen).


Always one to fart in the face of well thought-out and coherent blogging, I will now proceed to fill up the next half a page of your sorry little lives with possibly my laziest and worst quality bit of blogging to date - and regular readers will know that that's really saying something. A while ago, like many other people wot write on the internet, I knocked up a blog post about things that I'm looking forward to in 2010. That was near the start of February, already pushing the boundaries of acceptable timing for 'Beginning of the Year' lists. It's now almost April. I'm not entirely sure why I never got round to publishing that post, but in the spirit of recycling and unimaginativeness I've now decided to crop two of the entries from the list - one now horribly outdated, the other horribly pointless in the first place - and will post them in this blog entry. I'm not even gonna update them. Not one bit. I'm literally just gonna copy and paste from the un-posted post and leave you to wallow in the resultant misery, hopefully cursing the day that you ever laid eyes on this blog.


To mock you even further, I'll change the two extracts in to different coloured text, meaning that the most eye-catching parts of the page will in fact be the most atrociously lacklustre. Oh, and the reason why these two sections have been chosen over the rest of the list is that I felt some parts of them were amusing - so please prepare yourself to enter the biggest laughter-vacuum known to man for the next handful of moments.


Bestival


I'm writing this two days after the first acts for this year's Bestival - easily the best festival on the face of the planet, bar none - have just been unleashed on the world, and it's already looking to be yet another excellent few days on the Isle of Wight. At this point you may wish to find a quick crossword (no cryptics, please) or easy-to-medium level sudoku to partially fill in, as all that this poor excuse for a blog has to offer for the next few seconds of your life is a list of acts that have caught my immediate fancy from the line-up, which will of course be of less interest and benefit to anyone than a lecture by Ian Wright on how to correctly attach a mackintosh to a dog. If you don't happen to have a newspaper or puzzle book to hand, then why not distract yourself with a flick through this BBC News gallery of pictures of pot holes, which should also prove sufficiently more interesting than what I have to say. Anyway, from the first acts announced, I'm eagerly looking forward to: LCD Soundsystem, Flying Lotus, The Gaslamp Killer, Vitalic, Chilly Gonzales, Nathan Fake, Dixon, Joy Orbison, SBTRKT, Untold, and, of course, ROLF MOTHERFUCKING HARRIS. And when I say that Bestival is the best festival, I'm not just saying it's "the best" as someone might say "OMG Creamfields is THE BEST FESTIVAL, it always has all the biggest DJs" or "OMG Reading is THE BEST FESTIVAL, it's a great opportunity to get really pissed and watch The Enemy whilst surrounded by 14 year olds" - Bestival is the best because it has a really great and diverse line-up, with just the right amount of top names so that in most cases you'll be able to see everyone you'd wanna see (unlike somewhere such as Glasto, where there'd be more clashes than a West Ham vs Millwall fans' Monopoly marathon), plus there's been a huge amount of effort put in to the little details so as to give the festival a brilliant atmosphere, plus it has the fancy dress theme which adds further fun and quirkiness to proceedings. Now all that's needed is for the mysterious female artist that Rob Da Bank is being coy about to turn out to be Bjork, and for the weather to be a repeat of 2009's glorious sunshine, and hey presto - I'll be in festival Valhalla. And although she'll probably be slowly rotating on a spit in one of Hell's finest ovens by then, it'd also be pretty cool if Lady Gaga was the mysterious female. Just no way near as cool as if it were Bjork. Actually, yeah - fuck off back to Hell Lady Gaga, you whore-foreheaded hussy.


For that last part about Lady Gaga, I'm making a reference to this news release from the good folks at Westboro Baptist Church, which I'd posted earlier in the post. Except I didn't post it. If you know what I mean. Anyway, I think it's fairly safe to say that that extract wasn't as good as I'd remembered it, so we'll move swiftly onwards and downwards to this one:


Electrik Red

Not that anyone, including myself, wanted my thoughts on this particular matter, but Electrik Red are my tip to be the next American pop group to make it big in the UK. Having released their début album in the U.S.A. last year to critical acclaim, the likelihood is that they'll follow the typical pattern of attempting to break the British market sometime this year, and to my mind they've certainly got the goods to do so. Although I'm not exactly the most devoted fan of sassy, female-empowering R&B, Electrik Red have got some great beats and tunes, and the lyrics are akin to those of Destiny's Child, leaving me feeling like a natural born woman. They have an arsenal of tunes that are easily head and shoulders above the majority of dreadful pop and R&B that currently resides in the UK chart - here might be a good point to nominate Jay-Z & Mr. Hudson's 'Forever Young' as an early forerunner for biggest heap of (barely) musical shit of 2010. Jeez that song sucks.

Electrik Red - W.F.U.

Electrik Red - Freaky Freaky

And that was also thoroughly not worth the effort of holding down CTRL + C, CTRL + V. I do apologise, hopefully the normal level of only slightly shit blogging will resume soon, and, if you're really unlucky, on a more regular basis.

Songs I'm Currently Loving

I have a little system of collating the songs that I whack in this section, whereby any song that makes me go "oooh" when it comes on in my music library gets copied in to a little folder in a dark and dusty corner of my hard-drive, where it sits until I get round to writing a new blog post and upload the songs in the folder on to Mediafire. As it's been donkeys years since the last post, a fairly hefty pile of tunes which, according to myself, I'm "currently loving" has accumulated in said dark and dusty corner, and as is often the case with any song or small child, it doesn't take long before one stops loving it. I've trimmed the collection a bit, so you're now left with a bunch of songs that "I am or have previously been loving". To give you an idea of what was once loved but has now been trimmed, let's just say that '3 Words' by Cheryl Cole feat. Will.i.am was recently reported skulking round the dark and dusty corner. Hmm...

• Gonjasufi - Ancestors - Gonjasufi's album came out a little while ago, with production credits going to The Gaslamp Killer, hence the album title 'A Sufi and A Killer'. It's very good.
• Ikonika - Idiot - Ikonika's album is out soon. It's very good. 'Idiot' is probably my favourite track of hers to date, and for those of you who who live in the Sheffield area and possess a functioning set of eyes, my review of her album 'Contact, Love, Want, Have' should be in the forthcoming April edition of Now Then.
• Actress - Crushed - Actress' new album, 'Splazsh', is out soon. It should be very good. His first album 'Hazyville' is a gem, with 'Crushed' being a particular delight.
• Hot City - No More - Hot City are hot shit(ty) at the moment, having released many-a killer tune already and with a brand of bouncy house/techno that makes me utterly gutted ("Utterly Gutterly"?) to have missed them when they hit Sheffield a few weeks ago.
• Nathan Fake - Bored of House - someone I did manage to catch in the City of Steel recently was Nathan Fake, one of the residents of the 'Blog Favourites' section on the right-hand side of this blog. His sound has changed somewhat since he first burst on to the scene, and while he continues to impress on his releases my favourite of his records is probably still the 'Watlington Street EP' from which this track cometh.
• José James - Blackmagic (Joy Orbison Remix) - someone who no-one will be catching in Sheffield any time soon is Joy Orbison, thanks to Metropolis & Wax:On's undying uselessness. Having been on the original line-up for their next event, he's now mysteriously disappeared and has been replaced with Emalkay, which is like someone chopping off your penis and replacing it with an adder. And when I equate Joy Orbison with a penis I mean he's a source of warm pleasure, rather than a knob. Or, in my case, a massive knob. WHEEEY!
• Omar-S - Strider's World - the man largely responsible for elevating the aforementioned Kyle Hall in the world, Omar-S has never been too bad at the ol' song making himself, with this track from a while back being the very embodiment of the word "dope".
• Nat King Cole - Lush Life (feat. Cee-Lo) - I recently had the good fortune to stumble across an album of hip-hop reimaginations of Nat King Cole by a range of top producers, and this is a particular beaut. The album's called 'Re: Generations', well worth tracking down.
• Freeway & Jake One - Know What I Mean - hip-hop albums can be very hit and miss, but in the case of Freeway & Jake One's 'The Stimulus Package', it's most definitely a hit, with this song a prime example.
• The Laughing Windows - Beta Test - if you scroll down the comments on the MySpace for The Laughing Windows, you'll find one that says simply "BRUTAL SHIT!", left by none other than perennial bad-ass motherfucker, The Gaslamp Killer. And that's really all that needs saying.
• Broken Haze - Block - The Hardcore and The Gentle's favourite member of the Canidae family, the mighty Terror Wolf, recently pointed me in the direction of a natty free album from Jus Like Music and Apple Juice Break, which can be downloaded here: http://juslikemusicrecords.bandcamp.com/. It features a host of good but unfamiliar names from the worlds of dubstep, hip-hop and general electronica, with this track by Broken Haze providing some excellent whomps and glitches. And while he's being mentioned, make sure to check out a recent mix from the one and only Terror Wolf here: http://www.zshare.net/download/73596754e3f019f2/

Never Mind The Boris, Here's More Counting Down

After the songs listed as 50 - 40 in my Top 50 Favourite Songs of the Year were announced in the previous post and immediately saw sales of said songs rocket (Chris Moyles got so excited that he played Shackleton's Moon Over Joseph's Burial seven times back-to-back during his show on Friday), I felt that I'd try and press on with the rest of the list as quickly as possible, if only to snap Moylesy out of his atmospheric dub trance.

So here are 10 more aural masturbation aids for you to erotically rub against your eardrums, just remember to give them a wipe after you've had your way with them:

39. Sub Focus - Rock It

38. Mount Kimbie - Sketch On Glass

37. Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Zero (Erol Alkan Remix)

36. Dusty Kid - Here Comes The Techno

35. Slagsmalsklubben - Brutal Weapons

34. Mount Kimbie - 50 Mile View

33. Bullion - Young Heartache

32. Lazy Jay - Float My Boat

31. The Ian Carey Project - Get Shaky

30. Joy Orbison - Hyph Mngo

Seeing as this is just a titchy little post so far, I'll take this opportunity to encourage you to leave your thoughts - whether they be good, bad, or just plain ugly - on my choices of songs for the Top 50 Favourite Songs of the Year (or anything else in this blog for that matter), by using the comments section below. I think it's quite easy to do, and I don't believe you have to sign up for a Blogger account either. So, why not give it a go eh kids?! I think there's the option of posting anonymously, so you can spare yourself some blushes by not having to reveal that you're a reader of this blog, which I'm fully aware has been the cause of many marital splits and coup d'etats in the past.

Classic Track

The second in this new and already widely revered 'Classic Track' section takes us hurtling back to the mid-90's, and to one of hip-hop's all-time classic chilled out anthems. A gentle piano melody loops in the background while New York's finest lay down some tough truths about the dependence on and continual struggle for money in the city - Cash Rules Everything Around Me, it's:

Wu-Tang Clan - C.R.E.A.M.

Songs I'm Currently Loving

• Boris Dlugosch - Bangkok (Dub) - I'm thoroughly atheist when it comes to believing the hype about Boris Dlugosch's Bangkok (original version here). I've read people waxing lyrical about it, anointing it as THE track of 2009. My ears picked it up twice during the course of Annie Mac Presents at the Warehouse Project, and I can imagine pretty much every electro club the length and breadth of Britain/the World is rinsing a bit of Boris pretty heavily these days. Well, I THINK IT'S A BIT BORING. It's certainly a pretty catchy tune, but I just feel it lacks that extra bit of punch - when the hook drops, it drops a bit flat and limp, and the whole song sounds like it's the wind-down to itself, as if the real dance floor-smashing element of the track has actually occurred before the track's begun and now we're just left with the shadowy outro. It's basically a less emphatic version of Pon de Floor, from which it seems to steal both a similar sounding hook, and at one point an almost identical drum pattern. And I know it's primarily intended for dancing to in a club, but if you listen to the full original mix just through home speakers or headphones it gets bloody tedious after not too long at all. I'm still waiting to find a remix of it that really adds some oomph to the track, but for the time being this 'ere dub version from the EP is actually a superior cut to the original if you ask me.
• Four Tet - Love Cry (Joy Orbison Remix) - Four Tet's latest track Love Cry makes it's second appearance on the trot on The Hardcore and The Gentle, this time having been rubbed down with a hot towel by Joy Orbison, a producer who's really at the top of his game at the moment. This remix focuses attention on the lush vocals from the track, and makes for equally (if not more) pleasurable listening than FT's original.
• Ellie Goulding - Under The Sheets (Jakwob Remix) - a track in a similar mould to the likes of Emalkay's When I Look At You (but less overplayed) or the Joker remix of SMD's Cruel Intentions (but without the irritating lead-singer of The Gossip on vocal duties), Jakwob has here sliced up Ellie Goulding's vocals for his second top notch remix of one of her tracks, and given them some whomping bass for company.

That concludes this particular post, the next tracks in the Year's Best Songs countdown will appear soon enough, as will the list of my Top 10 Favourite Albums of 2009. Oooh I do spoil you something rotten, don't I?

B

Y

E

(remember, don't be afraid to leave a comment!)

Random album review #4

If you don't mind, I'm gonna kick off this post with a short review of The Event: How Racist Are You?, which I've just watched on 4OD. For a programme that primarily announces itself as "the event", I'd struggle to think of a bigger non-event that I've ever seen in my life. What could've been a thoroughly interesting and potentially harrowing piece of television was in fact an hour of volunteer douchebags arguing with each other and the experimental teacher Jane Elliott, and completely scuppering the whole experiment through their own obnoxious pig-headedness. The show was designed, through a micro-recreation of apartheid which divided people with brown eyes and people with blue eyes, to demonstrate how all of us can be perceptible to racism while not realising that we're actually engaged in discrimination. However, this was pissed upon by the cloth-brained middle-class twerps who were determined to turn the programme in to an opportunity to get up on their high horses (or remain on them, having probably rode in to the studio from their Surrey country homes) and assert that they weren't racist in the first place, and had clearly reached the limit of human learning capacity as there was nothing new anyone could teach them that was of any value. These people are a prime example of what the experiment was trying to teach - that you aren't always aware of racism until you're the victim of it yourself - but these wealthy white pillocks couldn't even stop downing pints of their own sexual ejaculate long enough to GET THE FUCKING POINT, and the programme leaves you feeling very depressed at the end as you know that the volunteers weren't going to be put through another experience of apartheid - lynching. Two women in particular really grinded my gears: some chick called Wanda (seemingly named after a fish, and needs to be battered like one too) who completely sabotaged and screwed up the final part of the experiment that was shaping up to be the most interesting section. And the bitch to end all bitches - Terry Taylor. I really fucking hate Terry Taylor. I hate her so much that I felt compelled to add another section to the side of this blog (on the right-hand side somewhere) of people I hate, just so that if she ever googles herself (which she probably will, the stuck-up cow) then hopefully this blog will appear in the results and she'll know how much I want to shove a nail bomb up her arse. She will of course have to filter through the results for Terry Taylor the ex-pro wrestler, who I'm sure is a decent bloke and whose back-side shall hopefully remain nail-free for ever more. I'm not gonna waste much more precious blogging time on this vile hag by detailing every fucking annoying thing she does (I recommend watching the programme yourself, if you want a thoroughly unrewarding hour's telly), but probably her worst part is where she tries to belittle one of the mixed race volunteer's account of how he feels ashamed to pick his daughter up from school in a white middle-class area because he fears his daughter's friends will judge the way he looks, by comparing it to how her rugby playing husband has to wear a suit to work each day instead of his rugby tracksuit. DEAR TERRY TAYLOR, PLEASE USE THE TIP OF ONE OF YOUR HUSBAND'S RUGBY BALLS TO GOUGE OUT YOUR EYES SO THAT NEVER AGAIN CAN YOU DO YOUR OBNOXIOUS AND PATRONISING EYE-ROLLING, THEN KINDLY THROW YOURSELF OFF A CLIFF. I HATE YOU. THANKS, BYE.

Stupid cow. Anyway, on with the random album review.

Spank Rock - YoYoYoYoYo

If you're unaware of the delightfully filthy and smut-filled world of Spank Rock, then a brief skim of their MySpace will soon give you a good idea of what to expect. At the time of writing, the songs in their music player are called 'Loose', 'Shake That', 'B-O-O-T-A-Y', 'Pu$$y' and 'Bitch!', while they describe themselves as sounding like:

"Fat girls in a hot tub, popping bubbly, after a long night of playing slots at Caesar's Palace. We sound like the X rated Motorcycle Diaries meets Kweli on crystal meth"

Apart from a love of crystal meth, there are other things that Spank Rock and Andre Agassi have in common. Namely, they're both fucking good. YoYoYoYoYo is both an absolute pain to type on a keyboard (try it) and an absolute banger of a Bmore hip-hop album. In my experience rap/hip-hop albums are notorious for being very hit and miss, with a lot of miss. Often filled with skits and filler tracks where they've clearly come up with a half decent beat, thrown some half-arsed vocals on top and said "yep, that'll do to pad out our album alongside our one or two genuine hit tunes", several of the hip-hop albums in my iTunes tend to have play counts of "0, 22, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0" - and usually those '1's are the result of library shuffling. Spank Rock's debut (and to date only) LP, however, is packed full of good tunes. Part of what sets them apart from other hip-hop groups is the electro-club element to their tracks, which may be becoming increasingly non-unique through the growth of the likes of Mad Decent and the Bmore and UK Funky scenes in recent times, but when it was released back in 2006 YoYoYoYoYo was, and probably still is, one of the finest examples of a 'hip-hop meets electro house' album.

It's audio porn in two senses. The rapping is pure smut from start to finish, with the emphasis very much on sex, drugs and fillin' holes, but the album successfully sidesteps turning in to a gimmicky all-sex-no-substance record and delivers some quality beats and samples to truly arouse your ears. For me the finest moments of the album come from the second halves of the two songs in the middle, Bump - Amanda Blank takes over with a groin-shuddering flow of deliciously dirty bars ("my rhymes are painful and fresh, my pussy's tasting the best") - and Sweet Talk, which drops the beat completely with about a minute left and the tune morphs in to an euphoric chorus sung by sugary sweet female vocalists, as well as anyone else who happens to be listening to this infectious breakdown. My other top tracks on the album are Touch Me, which heralds it's arrival with a fanfare of trumpets, and Rick Rubin, which must surely sample some '80s 8-bit video game for it's primary tune. As I said though, none of this album disappoints, and if you don't already have it then I'd highly recommend adding it your music library. I'd also highly recommend shooting Terry Taylor on sight, so you can tell that I can be trusted as a man of impeccable taste.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Do you ever get that feeling that your precursory rant about an annoying volunteer on a Channel 4 TV experiment is actually longer than the album review that was meant to be the main body of the post? I'm getting that feeling now, not sure why...

Anyway - Postmen nationwide are striking for it. Somali pirates are demanding it in return for the safe release of a couple of British hostages. There has been fervid debate over it by the members of the EU for the past week or so. "What is it they all want?!" ...I hear you ask. Oh you jokers, as if you haven't been eagerly anticipating it yourselves: It's time to discover which random album we'll be reviewing next!!

Reet, here we goo... shuffle shuffle shuffle...

THE JAPANESE POPSTARS - WE JUST ARE

This group aren't actually pop singers from Eastern Asia (unlike this little fella), they are in fact electro producers from Northern Ireland. So there. Here's a track to wet your appetite for the next post:

The Japanese Popstars - Face Melter

I feel obliged to add that despite what previous random album reviews might suggest, I do actually have non-dance music albums in my iTunes. The good ones just seem to be rather shuffle shy. Yeah, you heard me 'Astral Weeks' - the GOOD ones. Fuck you Van Morrison, fuck you.

Songs I'm Currently Loving:

• Joy Orbison - BRKLN CLLN
• Terror Danjah - Green Street
• The Juan MacLean - One Day
• Brackles - Rawkus
• Fauna - Zombie - perfect tune for if your Halloween party has a tropical funk theme
• Ms. Dynamite - Bad Gyal - she's still "the same little girl that grew up next door to you", but just a bit more, er, ragga sounding

Some of you are probably asking: "Jack, are the next two songs two of your favourite songs of the year so far?"

Why, yes! They are! How did you know??

• Clark - Growls Garden
• Few Nolder - Chika - we always like to promote both excellent songs and excellent artist names on The Hardcore and The Gentle