An honest mistake

When I was a kid, I believed that Chevy Chase was Paul Simon for about five years, only realising my mistake when BBC One showed National Lampoon's Vacation one Friday night.

Paul Simon - You Can Call Me Al


I wonder how many of today's children will suffer a similar confusion after watching the new Mumford and Sons video?

Mumford & Sons - The Cave

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A fine four-fendered hip-hop band

Chiddy Bang - great name, great band. They're so street, they eat pavements for breakfast. They're so hip-hop, they only have one leg. They're so rap, they deliver rhythmic rhyming couplets over a mid-tempo drum beat.

The four-piece hail from Philadelphia. This time last year, they were in their first year of college (that's US slang for "university") - and then the music industry came a-knocking.

It's not hard to see why. Their catchy, indie-sampling hip-hop is an invigorating breath of fresh air at a time when the genre seems to have stagnated so much that Mr Hudson seemed like an appropriate and innovative collaborator to every A-list rap star who released an album last year. That's Mr Hudson, a man with so little personality they didn't give him a forename.

For their next single, they've pinched MGMT's Kids. I don't mean they've sampled a bit of it. They have literally taken a huge great chunk of the song and surrounded it with their "flow". You could compare it to a sausage roll, but that would be weird.

It also contains the worst hip-hop brag of all time: "When I park cars, I don't pay for the meter". Hark at Al Capone, there, readers.

Chiddy Bang - Opposite Of Adults


PS: As you may have guessed, Chiddy Bang are named in tribute to children's film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang because one of the group wanted to be an inventor like Caractacus Potts when he was young.

Caractacus Potts would have been a better band name.

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Marina Diamond and the fluttery eyelashes

Marina & The Diamonds' big make-or-break single Hollywood is finally out next week. It's a great big whirling dervish of a pop song, with - as a better writer than me points out - at least three sections that make your tummy go all funny. In short, it is brilliant.

To celebrate the upcoming release, Marina has made a remix video featuring oddball Canadian artist Gonzales (check out his utterly bonkers single "Take Me To Broadway" from 2001).

The flickery, black-and-white footage is, allegedly, recently discovered archive tape from an Estonian pop show. I'm not sure I believe that. But I do believe in Marina's awesomely crimped tresses.

Foxilicious.

Marina & The Diamonds - Hollywood (Gonzales mix)


As an aside, I asked Marina to name her three biggest influences last month. Her answer got cut from the reasulting BBC Sound of 2010 article, but I thought it was an interesting insight. So here it is:

Q: Who are your three musical heroes?
A: Brody Dalle from the Distillers – she’s very strong and has probably the best voice I’ve ever heard. Very, very rough and masculine.

Daniel Johnson, because he’s schizophrenic but he still manages to tour. He has very sweet, innocent, childlike songs.

And Madonna because she has achieved the pop dream, which is to create your own art, to be popular on a mass level, and to do something for feminism, even if it's not in a very obvious way.

Hollywood is out next week, and Marina's debut album, The Family Jewels follows on 22nd February.

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Not new music: The Swell Season

I love it when, after listening to an album for several months, a previously unremarkable song suddenly catches your ear. I don't know what causes it - maybe the track was buried at the end of the record, maybe my ears needed time to adjust, or maybe I'm an idiot who wouldn't know a good song if it bit my ears off.

Whatever the reason, it has happened again. This time, it's a track from The Swell Season's second album, Strict Joy.

The Swell Season are Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova. They won an Oscar in 2008 for the folksy soundtrack to small-budget indie romance Once - which they also starred in. You may remember that Irglova was bundled off-stage before she got to say thank you, but was asked back later to give a beautifully demure speech.

The song that has so belatedly caught my attention, I Have Loved You Wrong, is similarly humble. A delicate plea for forgiveness, its haunting piano refrain and simple, unadorned vocals are dangerous territory for those of you in the middle of a break-up.

I warn you now: If you're feeling a bit weepy this morning, the closing harmonies will literally tear you apart.

The Swell Season - I Have Loved You Wrong


The rest of the album is worth a listen, too. It's been out for ages, and you can buy it here. And if you've never seen Once - sort it out now!

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Hope For Haiti: I watched it so you didn't have to

"Hold up, hold up, hold up," shouted Wyclef Jean five minutes before the end of the Hope For Haiti Now telethon on Friday night. "Enough of the moping, let's rebuild Haiti now!"

If only he'd thought about that message two hours earlier, we'd have been spared some of the music industry's most recognisable names putting on their "serious face" and singing their most po-faced, turgid songs at a funereal pace. If it wasn't Shakira murdering I'll Stand By You, it was Justin Timberlake playing a drowsy version Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah that lasted seven whole years.

Surely the point of these fund-raisers is that the juxtaposition between great, uplifting music and the horriffic human tragedy compels us to pick up the phone and do something. If the stars just sit there sobbing into their mineral water, then the viewers at home will just feel miserable and helpless. (I could be wrong about this, of course, because the televent has raised an encouragingly robust $57m so far).

The only person who seemed to have realised this was Madonna, who judged the mood perfectly with an acoustic choral version of Like A Prayer.

Madonna - Like A Prayer (Hope For Haiti Now)


If you have the stomach to endure the rest of the performances (U2 and Rihanna is particularly bad), there's a helpful Youtube playlist here.

And you should definitely donate to the relief effort if you can. The Disasters Emergency Committee page is a good place to start.

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Sigur goes solo

The frontman of Icelandic quartet Sigur Ros is called Jónsi Birgisson. That's him warbling away in a completely made-up nonsense language on tracks like Starálfur and Hoppípolla. With his delicate, lispy falsetto, he sounds like a children's TV presenter during the rapture.

With Sigur Ros taking a break in 2010, Jónsi has recorded a solo album. To my ears, it sounds almost exactly the same as the material he records with his bandmates - orchestral, celestial, spiritual, elegiac, exhilirating, uplifting and warm. In essence: distinctly non-rubbish.

The main difference between Sigur and Jónsi is that he's supposed to be singing in English. In principle, this means that every so often you catch a snippet of a syllable that you think you might recognise. He might be saying something horribly racist, or claiming to have shagged your dad, or be advocating something really offensive - like imagining Mika naked, or imagining Mika clothed, or imagining two Mikas (*shudders involuntarily*). But we will never know.

No matter what he's saying, the music is wonderful and joyous. The first taster is a song called Boy Lilikoi, which saunters along prettily for three minutes before bursting into a great big sonic hug of strings and harmonies and rolling drums. You can listen to it below, but beware - it'll make you want to do back-flips around the living room.



Right-click here to download the track [link fixed 25.01.10]

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