In session tonight...

In the comments after a recent post about the weather, Adam from the inestimably brilliant Bagging Area made the observation that "Dew Point would be a good name for a band or project - something ambient maybe." C from the always-wonderful Sun-Dried Sparrows added that she would "give Weather Underground a listen too." I added the usual jokes required whenever something sounds vaguely like an obscure band name, talking about imagined Peel Sessions, and fantasy signings for Rough Trade. I probably patted myself on the back too.

Anyway, it all reminded me of the time I tweeted about seeing Abundance Mindset open for The Fall, on the strength of this cartoon...

Lots has changed since then. I don't use Twitter/X any more, simply because Elon and his audience raise too many antibodies in me. Dilbert cartoons like the one above are much harder to find online now too, since the cancellation of cartoonist Scott Adams. He died as well, of course, which probably doesn't help matters. What hasn't changed, since I work in the world of higher education, is that my salary still doesn't keep up with inflation, and that I'm still peddling the same simple jokes to a readership I can probably count on my fingers. Christ!

A song, then. Here's the actual Fall, in session for John Peel, a mere 46 years ago. This is Container Drivers, for no other reason than it makes me smile more than my own predictable jokes.

Randcamp: Easter

Searching Bandcamp for "Easter" has thrown up quite different results to previous searches that, on the face of it, might be thematically similar. There's quite a lot of techno songs with Easter in the title; ditto long moody synth pieces. But I've chosen to eschew those for today's random threesome.

Mydolls have been around since 1978, apparently, plying their post-punk trade out of Houston, Texas. They even made it into the Wim Wenders film Paris, Texas, though not with this track, Easter.

I love the name Basement Kirk - it conjures the idea of a cut-price starship captain, does it not? Snow on Easter Monday has literate lyrics and a vaguely Byrdsy feel to the opening bars. Not what I expected from a Berlin three-piece.

The Sisters hail from Morehead in Kentucky. Easter Sunday dates from 2014, yet is still undecided what it wants to be: soft, ballady MOR or rock wig-out... so it has a bit of both.

Three Randcamp choices for your Easter. Which, if any, do you find egg-cellent?

Music Assembly: Caprice No. 24 by Paganini

If you're about my age (and let's face it, if you're here then you probably are), when you hear the opening bars of Paganini's 24th Caprice you'll be looking for a couple of giant hands to touch fingers and for Melvyn Bragg to hove into view. That's because The South Bank Show used Andrew Lloyd-Webber's Variations as its theme... and that was very much based on Caprice No. 24.

Paganini's source material was composed for strings, but here's an arrangement for classical guitar performed by Japanese guitar prodigy Haruna Miyagawa, in which her hands defy the laws of physics. Whether you like the music or not, if you are any kind of guitarist you know that this is almost unbelievably exceptional.

Blue Friday: Videotape

Don't need a weatherman...

...to know which way the wind blows.

So opined Sir Robert of Zimmermanshire. Similarly, I don't need a weather station in my back garden, but I have one anyway because: (a) the weather is interesting; (b) I like data; and (c) I guess I'm just a massive nerd.

Anyway, the night before last, weather was happening fast.

You know when Tomasz Schafernaker gets on the TV in front of his weather map green-screen and talks about a cold front moving in? Well, this is what it looks like when it happens quickly.

Yes, this is data from my weather station, which gets uploaded to Weather Underground in near-real-time. Look at that drop in temperature, around half ten. I believe the technical term for that is "fell like a stone". From 10.6°C at 10.28pm to to 7.1°C at 10.49pm. That isn't usual. And the wind, which had been building since 9 o'clock, really ramped up, peaking with gusts of ≈30mph.

I know, this is boring, sorry. I remember learning, in O-level Geography, that a weather front would pass over you entirely in 24 hours. But it can also move quicker. I'll spare you the barometric pressure graph for the day, that pointed to this happening. Let's have an appropriate song instead.

More soon, when I take a deep dive into why the pump don't work (spoiler alert: the vandals took the handles).

There's no track like a soundtrack

I've been watching Mr Mercedes on Amazon Prime, the 2017 adaptation of Stephen King's novel. It's okay, rather than spectacular. Brendan Gleeson is reliably excellent as our hero, retired detective Bill Hodges. Harry Treadaway is a standout as the antagonist psychopath Brady Hartsfield. There's a perfectly serviceable supporting cast too. But the real star is the soundtrack.

Example, you say? How about three. These were all in one episode.

Okay, so the T Bone Burnett track is the theme tune, so is in every episode, and Tunefind tells me the Donovan track is used in a lot of film and TV. But even so, there's hardly an episode of Mr Mercedes that doesn't have me scrabbling for the Internet to ID one tune or another.

It doesn't take much, still

Neil knows.

Randcamp: The Ides of March

Poor old Julius Caesar, he didn't beware the Ides of March enough, did he? Not even when he got the point... in his back. Oh well. If he were here now, he'd be wise to beware the quality of some tracks on Bandcamp named after the Ides (or the 15th of March, in new money). Here are three I don't mind.

Birdmask are/is from New York. Beyound that, I'm not sure how to describe them. Props to this song, though, for the first use of "pulchritudinous" in lyrics that I can remember. He/they tagged this "chamber pop", whatever that may mean.

Miles Kennedy's Ides of March starts off with a musical rip-off of Shape of my Heart by Sting (really, compare). Then it changes course quite dramatically into soft-rock MOR toss and gets much less interesting, in my book.

Lastly, juules.gif from Chicago (her lack of capitalisation, not mine). This one is tagged "bedroom pop" which amused the linguist in me when compared to "chamber pop" earlier. This is a lovely acoustic short story that sounds like it grew out of Covid lockdown.

Three Randcamp Ides of March conspirators. Which is your Cassius and which, if any, is your noblest Roman of them all, Brutus?

Sticky songs

I was listening to the radio recently and the DJ was playing songs with Welsh connections, in honour of St David's Day. Yes, the 1st of March. So that's 11 days ago, right? The thing is, one of the songs that got played has been stuck in my head ever since.

There's nothing exceptional about it, musically, and the lyrics are cutting in places, funny in others, but that's all. It's not Dylan- or Morrissey-level wordsmithery, that's what I'm saying. And yet...

...certain lines, and one couplet in particular, have lodged in my hippocampus with the tenacity of bathroomn sealant sticking anywhere you don't want it to go.

This is why, eleven days later, I'm unexpectedly writing about the late-Britpop era nonsense that is The Ballad of Tom Jones by Scouse try-hards Space, featuring the Marmite-vocals of Cerys Matthews, on-loan from Catatonia. And why, eleven days later, I'm still finding myself unexpectedly crooning both halves of the "I've never thrown my knickers at you ... and I don't come from Wales" distich... It's a sticky song, and a sticky lyric.

So here it is, in all its, ahem, glory, in a great ToTP performance. Cerys really sells this, I think, and everyone concerned seems to be having fun. Weren't we all, in 1998?

For the avoidance of doubt, I've never thrown my knickers at anybody, however much my singing in the kitchen might suggest otherwise.

TLAP: Brewdog Punk AF

Thought I'd better hurry up and review this one, in case it disappears from sight given Brewdog's much-publicised financial collapse (and utter shafting of their "Equity for Punks" small investors...)

Brewdog Punk AF

What's it like? You can see what they've done with the name there - it's alcohol-free (actually 0.5%), but also Punk AF! And that's all well and good, but what's it like to drink? Well, it majors on citrus notes (grapefruit?) but minors on tasting like an ale. Don't get me wrong, it's entirely pleasant and genuinely quite refreshing, but it struck me, half-way through, that I didn't really feel like I was drinking a beer. And that's a problem, given that this is marketed as an IPA. The fact that I was drinking it straight from the can, and so didn't have the visual reinforcement, probably didn't help. But I just felt like I was drinking a nice, light, refreshing soft drink... which makes you start to question the price, and your life choices. Or is that just me?

Would I drink it in a pub? Yes.

Would I drink more than one? Probably.

Would I drink it all night? No.

Stats: 0.5% ABV. Calories 15 kcal/100ml. Currently £5 for 4 x 330ml cans in Sainsbury's

Stars: ★★★☆☆

Does sort of feel like Brewdog missed a trick not licensing Do The Dog for use in their ads. No wonder they went bust...