Break in service

Sorry for the short hiatus on the blog - but I'm away for a week on an alcohol research project. Normal service will be resumed on Monday, 3rd August.

Toodle-pip!
Mrdiscopop

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IT'S A RUBBISH VIDEO BY LITTLE BOOTS

"It was very easy to film," Victoria Hesketh told the BBC.

You don't say.

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Muse return with unhinged sound collage

It's Queen! It's Andrew Lloyd Webber! It's a Cossack Dance! It's Frank Sinatra! It's a Bond Theme! It's the deranged rantings of a paranoiac! It's Chopin!

In other words: Business as usual for the Museketeers.

Muse - United States of Eurasia


For those of you paying attention, the accompanying video has something to do with Muse hiding bits of the song all over Europe. Fans have spent the last week tracking them down like they were secret agents (not the glamourous ones who do the killing, the other ones who keep notes about what time they turn the lights off in Westminster).

Once all the pieces had been collected, they were stitched together and - hey presto! - a literally quite good album track was theirs for free.

Some people have too much time on their hands, eh readers?

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Madonna - mistress of message

How long can you resist the evil forces of advertising? Thirty seconds? A minute? Two minutes?

How about five seconds.

That's how long Madonna thinks she needs to brainwash you into forking out for her new greatest hits compilation, Celebration. This is the one that will re-package the songs already available on The Immaculate Collection (amazing) and GHV2 (as bad as the oh-my-god-it's-2001 name implies) with all the best bits from off of Confessions On A Dance Floor and Hard Candy. A mixed bag, in other words.

Here she is, pushing her product into your face via Youtube (Youtube). If you're easily influenced, look away now.

Madonna - Celebration trailers 1, 2 & 3


Reversing the tracks is incredibly clever. "If you can recognise this song, in five seconds, after we've fucked about with it," the advert implies, "it must be pretty damn recognisable."

I suspect it's also a very Madge-esque two fingers to the people who have accused her of hiding satanic messages in her songs over the years. For example:



Question for people with working ears: Does it really sound like Madonna is singing "Hear us, save us, Satan" in this clip? To me, it sounds like "Hear us, save us, Sat Nav" - which is pretty impressive, given that Like A Prayer predates GPS navigation systems by an entire calendar year.

Wait a minute... What was the point of this post again?

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Cornershop make record

It's no Brimful of Asha, but the new Cornershop record is a decent rip-off of Primal Scream ripping off Joe Cocker covering T-Rex.

Cornershop - Who Fingered Rock and Roll?


Is there any song that can't be improved by a trio of wailing divas screeching "yeah, yeah, yeaaaah" over the chorus? (Hint: No).

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Passion Pit partake in peel perversion

Passion Pit's new single, To Kingdom Come, features the following lyrical couplet:

"So now I hide in piles of princely orange peels
It feels the way you told me how it'd always feel"

Tautology aside, we're confused. How does it feel to hide in orange peel? Do the stringy bits get in your hair? If you had recently sustained an enormous amount of paper cuts in a tragic stationery cupboard incident, would the citrus sting? If there were also rose petals and cinnamon sticks available, would you be a human pot pourri?

In any case, why would someone have to hide in a pile of orange peel? I'm guessing it would have to be pretty situation-specific - like carrying out industrial espionage at Del Monte, or taking paparazzi shots of the Munch Bunch.

But the disguise would never work if you were, say, stalking some girl you fancied. Sooner or later, she'd be bound to say to herself: "Hang on, there isn't normally a massive, festering heap of oranges outside my house. How did that get there?"


And what would she think once she'd discovered your body inside the rapidly composting food waste? If you were very lucky, the pigment would have seeped into your pores and she'd some filthy attraction to Dale Winton. More likely, you'd end up on the sex offenders register, receiving disturbingly explicit emails from blubbery Tory politicians.

Passion Pit offer no resolution to this quandary in their video, which features the Massachusetts' quintet dressing up as mad scientists and doing mad sciencey things with a conical flask.

It is very disappointing.

Passion Pit - To Kingdom Come


PS: Passion Pit were particularly good at the Latitude Festival last weekend, even though the singer looked a bit like Rory McGrath. There was practically a stampede when they took to the stage. Nobody did that for Nick Cave.

PPS: Did I mention I was going to Latitude? That's why there were no updates at the end of last week. But you can read all about my "adventures" here, and here and here and here and here. Ta-ra!

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