Firstly. Ticketmaster are utter, utter bastards.
Tickets for Arcade Fire's gig in the Olympia were due to go on sale last Friday at 9am. 8.55am Friday morning found me at Ticketmaster's website with my credit card poised and my mouse-clicking finger outstretched and trembling.
The very second the link to book tickets became active, I pounced. I then spent 40 seconds or so watching one of those wonderfully soothing AJAX loading animations that bear no actual relation to any sort of server-side activity. To be followed by a screen that told me curtly that tickets for this event were no longer available.
Back button. Refresh. Click. Wait.
"Tickets for this event are no longer available. What, you didn't believe me the first time? Now, fuck off and stop wasting my time. I've got Bryan Adams tickets to flog.".
This was 9.03am. No way do a thousand or so tickets sell out in less than 3 minutes.
But, hey, I think. There's a 2nd date. I'll just get tickets for that when they become available. It's mid-week, so maybe there won't be much demand. I wonder when the tickets for the 2nd date become available?
9.15am on Friday apparently. By the time I find this out (2 minutes later), they're sold out too.
WTF?
There are dark mutterings on some corners of the interwebs that Ticketmaster "forgot" to put their usual limits of 4 tickets per person on this sale - blaming a computer glitch. So, apparently, they were being bought by touts in batches of 50 (and there are those that allege that Ticketmaster employees get a cut). Since they're already going for 400 quid on ebay, I'm tempted to believe this.
Bastards. Utter bastards.
The only upside of this is that
Neon Bible, the forthcoming Arcade Fire album, sounds like it might be even better than Funeral. Improbable, I know, but based on samples and streams available on their site and the extremely weird (flash heavy)
Neon Bible site - they've managed to attract lightning a 2nd time. I might be biased, since they roped in an old church organ for
Intervention (unfortunately not used in this rendition) and I'm a huge organ fan. Stop sniggering. And I can't be the only person who thinks that "Black Mirror" (the lead-off single) should have been the title song for the last Bond movie rather than the shapeless grungy mass contributed by Chris Cornell.
Anyhow. My other greatly anticipated album release of 2007 was Bloc Party's Weekend In The City. It's not going to be released for a few weeks, but I...er, encountered it providentially over the weekend and I've had a chance to listen to it a few times.
As before with Silent Alarm, it has all the hallmarks of an album I shouldn't like. It's a concept album based around a lost weekend in London. It aims to capture all that Ok Computer-ish alienation of modern life - but in a much less abstract way. "East London is a vampire/it sucks the life out of me" is a good bit more direct than "Kicking squealing Gucci little piggy". I've never been particularly fond of prosy lyrics. In the wrong mouths they always sound a bit heavy-handed (why yes, I do like my metaphors mixed).
Anyway, so it's a prosy concept album. Also, it's a more "mature" second album. Which, to me, is generally a euphemism for self-indulgent. And, sure enough, there's a string section. And all manner of electronica. And the whole thing is slower, and denser. Half the appeal of Silent Alarm was the stripped back bass/guitar/drums vibe and the frantic pace. I kinda like the wide-eyed innocence of Helicopter and Like Eating Glass. Slower, dense and mature is everything Silent Alarm wasn't.
Lastly, and this one's the kicker, the album is produced by Jacknife Lee - the guy who turned Snow Patrol from brittle buzzy indie losers into lush Coldplay wannabees (although, admittedly vastly more successful). I swear, I just can't see the appeal of Chasing Cars, although it seems to have every Irish radio station in a chokehold.
Well, I was wrong again. Weekend in the City, is a little slower to catch fire than Silent Alarm, but it really does work. It's still Bloc Party, although parts of it reveal just how surprisngly similar they are to Muse in many respects. They share an interest in arpeggiated guitar riffs, fuzzy bass lines, strange time signatures and tremulous vocals. Of course, Muse are barking mad (more about this later) and deeply unfashionable - unlike Bloc Party, who rival Arctic Monkeys for thing-of-the-whileness.
The kickoff track lifts its entire structure, tempo and more than a few riffs from Muse's
NewBorn - softened with more textured vocals and better lyrics. The resemblance to NewBorn is uncanny though, verging on lawsuit territory. Apparently the song is inspired by a character in a Bret Easton Ellis book (yay!, literary pretensions). Still, it's very, very catchy and I like the chorus, "our parents suffered for nothing/live the dream/like the 80s never happened/don't be afraid to/merge on the freeway". You gotta admire a band who make lyrics like that sound even remotely poppy.
After that, we get the London bombing song, Hunting for Witches. This is more like it. It's the sister song to
Helicopter and starts promisingly enough with "So, I'm sitting on my roof/with a shotgun/and a sixpack of beer". It's even more mechanized than Helicopter with choppy breakbeats and heavily processed guitar. Again, the chorus is puzzlingly catchy given that it revolves around the lines "I was an ordinary man with ordinary desires/I watched TV and it formed me". The more direct lyrics actually work better than the slightly strained lines on Silent Alarm.
The album stays catchy and intense all the way through the middle.
The Prayer sounds more like a
Kanye West song than anything else (which is no bad thing) and Uniform is another Muse referencing track - epic and weirdly similar in structure to Bohemian Raphsody. It's got about 6 separate sections building to the kind of driving riff that dominated
Positive Tension on Silent Alarm. Again, I really like the lyrics. Although, I kinda wonder why someone wrote an epic song about hoodies and teenage goths with lines like, "No-one can be trusted under the age of 14" and "MTV taught me how to sulk and love nothing/And how to grow my hair long". Hilarious stuff.
"On" is Bloc Party's go at David Grey's Babylon. It starts off kinda dubby and soars towards the end. I guess no weekend in the city concept album would be complete without a drugged up Saturday night song. Again with the weird chorus, "You make my tongue loose". Indeed.
After that, things get a bit non-descript. This is probably due to the concept though. After six firey songs building to a drug soaked apex, there has to be a comedown. It's a little bit too close to Snow Bastard Patrol in some places for comfort though.
"Where Is Home?" is a jerky off-key protest song about the plight of 2nd generation immigrants in London. If you squint at it just right, you can kinda make out a fatter version of Radiohead's I Might Have Been Wrong. The lyrics are again bizarre, at one point he laments the fact that he can't break the fingers of judges and cut the feet off of ballerinas. I'm assuming (hoping) that this has some meaning I'm just too stupid to penetrate.
Kreuzberg seems to be about East Berlin in some way (and I'm a little hazy on how this connects to the London theme of the album...). It's kinda Auchtung Baby-ish and floats along pleasantly without making too much of an impression. But, for what it's worth, I have a feeling it might be a bit of a grower.
Then we get to the album's highlight
"I Still Remember". It's got a new-wave 80's synth/guitar/bass thing going on which isn't a million miles from Tiffany's I Think We're Alone Now (note: this is a good thing). It's insanely catchy. Musically there's an echo of Snow Patrol's Spitting Games in there somewhere too. It even covers similar lyrical ground - a teenage crush. But here it's a same-sex teenage crush. It's strange how startling it is to hear what is essentially the basis for every Ash song ever written - with 2 schoolboys instead of the usual star-crossed hetero lovers. Especially with Bloc Party's way with a lyric "And our love could have soared/Over playgrounds and rooftops/Every park bench screams your name...I kept your tie". I don't know why, but the tie line just gets me. There's a part of me that thinks that this song should be creepy - but it just isn't. Especially since I've heard a million songs sung by guys in their 30s about schoolgirls.
Anyway, after hitting that peak, things meander into full on Snow Patrol territory, but I guess I can forgive them that. They've managed to hold all the things working against the album at bay until track 10. Which is no mean feat, given how much the deck was stacked against them. All-in-all, it's not as energetic as Silent Alarm...but it is a good bit more interesting. Worth waiting for (even though I didn't).
Oh, and before I go. Muse's Black Holes and Other Revelations. Overwrought, bombastic, excessive and completely brilliant. I'm not a huge fan of Muse, but this won me over. It's massively silly and barking mad in places, but it's great. I highly recommend it. Much as I love the Bloc Party album, I've spent most of the last few days listening to this.
Knights of Cydonia (horses, laser beams, Martians, trumpets, synths, massive riffing, choirs and christ knows what else) is the most ridiculously stupid thing I've heard in ages. And yet I keep hitting repeat...
