Synthesizer Patel

so this increase in mccain's approval rating of bush compared to the american people is not supposed to be showing mccain in a negative light? ie. how shit he is / will be. what does this say about the party that made the ad? apart from that they have an unhealthy fascination with what the other party is doing / has done, as opposed to what they're going to do / would like to do if they were in power. what happened to this whole campaign of 'change', or whatever it was? i guess a little change is good, but too much is scary and not worth the risk. no. plus, i'm english.

i'm quite a big hater of the idea that saying how shit someone else is must therefore mean that you'd do a better job by contrast. it only leads to disappointment. so i'd say that was a bad ad.

do you think steam remembers and laments its time as water when the kettle boils?

was that what the album was called in america, or are you just talking about the song? in the uk the album was called hq. that is a great song, though - brilliant lyrics which are actually kind of sad, but certainly remind me of what it's like playing cricket on the village green with the farmer labourers, old-timers, landed gentry and us youngsters too. those old boys who came out to bat at number 7 would always be the hardest to get out too - poking the ball around the corner for a single and scoring 40 in 2 hours. anyway, great lyrics (by the way - geoff = geoff boycott, english batsman &am

ah, well i wrote this piece of guff a while back - and it's in my list of 10 'lost' classics from the 1970s - so some people like it (well, me). so, i'll include that ten on that list of for my underrated choices, and add: iixii by the cowsills (actually maybe not, but people should at least know they're not a one hit wonder) the texas / jerusalem crossroads by lift to experience simple pleaures by the tindersticks the super furry animals in general (simply because they should be concidered at least as good as radiohead - as they are just as inovative - & certainly better known than oasi

whenever anyone ever says a new band sounds like the beatles or bob dylan that seems to be a sure-fire guarantee that they'll be shit and that level of shitness seems to increase the further away from the 1960s we get in terms of when such a claim upon a new band is made. whereas, on the other side of the coin, whenever someone says a new band sounds like the beach boys i can normally assume they'll be good. so being influential can be negative too. and this has nothing to do with the greatness of the beatles or bob dylan - who are obviously both great - it's to do with what other artists take

what don't you understand? if you do a google search on 'the golden mean' in classical music, you'll see how important composers once took the mathematics of music to be, but just because people don't quite do the same today doesn't mean that mathematical laws aren't being employed - they just might be without the musicians knowledge. actually, this page is quite interesting: here basically my point was that if all these elements of music can be broken down into little equations of what is good and what isn't - say, playing c, f and then g7 together is a very simple progression that works (

01 bob dylan | john wesley harding 02 the kinks | are the village green preservation society 03 fairport convention | liege & lief 04 super furry animals | guerrilla 05 beach boys | holland 06 john cale | paris 1919 07 the band | the band 08 randy newman | sail away 09 judee sill | heart food 10 wilco | a ghost is born 11 smithsonian folkways recordings | anthology of american folk music 12 scott walker | scott 4 13 joanna newsom | ys 14 the zombies | odessey & oracle 15 the kinks | muswell hillbillies 16 bob dylan | love & theft 17 doris duke | i'm a loser 18 animal collective |

stick it up your p.o box!

Don't feel too sorry for me, I'm not the one that has such a negative view on all this. When things are placed on an equal plane of value, that doesn't mean they have equally high value, it just means they become equally worthless - there's no good or bad, right or wrong, they have nothing to offer except to act as a relective surface for our inner selves. I don't know where you got all your thoughts and beliefs from? You must surely have been born with them.

i wasn't really trying to comment on sbs being good or bad, i was just talking about the whole "music is subjective" thing. which, i strongly disagree with. i think you can be subjective about what is the best of the best kinds of art & music - but there is an objectivity to what's bollocks and what's not. i'll have to check that book out, thanks for the tip. looking at it from that point of view, it doesn't help the whole subjective arguement. it shows that the ability to sell records or be liked comes from outside forces rather than a persons internal/subjective beliefs on the mus

harmony, rhythm - time signatures/tempo etc... - are all mathematical, whether that's in the lyrics or the music. mathematics is not subjective. the really intersting thing is how many variations you can achieve with such a small amount of variables (eg. the 12 notes of an octave, or the structure of a single bar), but it's when you combine these elements together that you produce an infinite number of results. however, those core elements have to each be "good" and then, together, have to be in some form of harmony for the end results to be "good". a good example of mathematics at work in mus

i think this year, so far, has seen better reissues of old/lost albums than new stuff. i can't really say any new material is incredible or necessarliy anything i'll be listening to in years to come - whereas 2007 had strawberry jam and person pitch, for me; and then there's 2006 which had ys & trials of van occupanther - all of which i still play a lot and can't see a time when i'll stop doing so. anyway, some goodish stuff so far includes: beach house - devotion el guincho - alegranza neon neon - stainless style my morning jacket - evil urges bonnie prince billy - lie down in the lig

Modesto Lord Only Knows Nitemare Hippy Girl Sing It Again Sissyneck Fuckin With My Head (Mountain Dew Rock) Beautiful Way Broken Train Cold Brains Bottle Of Blues Electric Music And The Summer People High 5 (Rock The Catskills) Scarecrow Girl Strange Apparition Atmospheric Pressure I've Seen the Land Beyond Painted Eyelids Lost Cause Guess I'm Doing Fine It's All In Your Mind Puttin' It Down Rowboat Blackhole Runners Dial Zero

what critics are we talking about here? i've not seen the film yet, so i can't exactly say if it's good or not, but i think the prospect that it and wall-e really are the 2 best films of the year makes me a little sad inside.

seeing as you're up in leeds to start with, you've really got to go to the lake district for a day or two. oh, but it's got nothing to do with punk - it's just the most beautiful part of the country - maybe lake coniston, where donald campbell died trying to break the world water speed record in the 60's is pretty punk rock (although the lake is one of the worst to look at). a lot of those things you said, i presonally wouldn't bother with, although things like 100 club is on oxford street (which is the main street in central london) so it's hardly hard to find. really there's nothing to see

he's starting to sound like george lucas or something. why on earth is he so bothered about sound quailty? let someone else worry about that - ultimately i'd rather have "after the gold rush" in shitty 128kps than anything he's done in the last 10 or 20 years in some mythical crystal-clear format, but he doesn't seem to be spending a 15 year learning curve trying to sort out that short-coming in his output. the man's gone to piddle.

it did. i'm on my first listen and i don't think i like it at all. i'd only heard a live version of modern guilt (the track) before listening to this, and comparing this with that i'd say beck needs to stop fucking about with all the knobs and just put down the songs as they were written. it all just sounds so lifeless.

no. i got this though: fats domino - the complete reprise recordings if you ever see it cheap, i'd recommend picking it up.

I bought It Still Moves - thought it was alright, but nothing that special. Then Z came out - didn't bother finding out about it straight away, but when I did I loved it. So went back and bought their older stuff. Evil Urges finally proved to me that they are one of the best american bands around at the moment; although it's not as good as Z in my eyes, it certainly showed they were willing to try and make interesting music - and that wins half the battle for winning me over to any band. Now that I've read that that cock-of-the-walk Greg Kot doesn't like it, I think I like them just that littl

is there a part 2 or did you just type it wrong?

ok, obsess over this! the bootleg series volume 8, out in September; a partial track list:

it is really good packaging. if we're doing favourite dennis wilson songs, then i'll go with this: