Why I hardly post here right now// Whilst no-one's looking.

I've been thinking, this is my proper online home. It's a blogspot address, with the 'heyrichey' moniker. The ultimate in internet presence. Fuck you livejournal, fuck you twitter, fuck you tumblr, Blogspot will always be the definitive place for reeling off page after page of opinion.

So I guess I better use it as such. For now I give up the whole review blog thing, my mind has hit a brick wall, nothing's sinking in much more than skin deep now, how do you analyse something in a captivating and witty sequence of sentences when your eyes and brain can hardly decipher a paragraph on a page without jumbling it all up. Yeah it's just apathy but here and now apathy rules supreme.


The subject of this blog anyway. Here in this quiet little country backwater nothing much happens for me, beyond going to work, getting extremely peeved by the hundreds of people I encounter there each and every day, coming home, downloading a bunch of music, listening to it, and eventually sleeping. Every time I try and put pen to paper, nothing comes out. Of my thoughts I mean, it's not that all the pens in my house have run out of ink or anything.

I'm currently making plans, which will either result in me returning to University in January and finally finishing my Literature degree course after a 6 year break, or returning to London in February, to live, work for a year, and come up with some kind of purpose and life plan, which I'll then take to University the following year, complete my degree after a 7 year break, and then continue onward to become a fully fledged latecoming member of real world society by the time I'm 30.

So, until my plans are in place and wheels start turning I'm afraid I don't have much to contribute. My brain is too numb and sedated from the blankness and boredom of sleepy smalltown living to spout forth anything much groundbreaking and entertaining.

As a parting shot, here is a little list of what's currently tickling my fancy:

Weezer- Raditude
Tegan & Sara
The Catherine Tate Show
Drag Me To Hell
Watching fireworks from the bedroom window
Julian Casablancas (ok the album isn't amazing but he's still the man)
Kanye West
Alphabeat
White belts (the kind you stick round your waist, not some band)
Train driver caps
Crimewatch.

With that, I bid my goodbyes,

Don't have nightmares, do sleep well xx

LOOK WHAT I DONE :))

Brand new layout, graphics, everything!
Up uploaded and sparkley looking.

Needless to say I am nice and proud of this blog now. Took me a whole afternoon to sort it all out. Hopefully the graphics look right on other screens and whatnot, I'm not too clued up on it all to be honest, am actually amazed I managed to use photoshop well enough to turn my little black and white doodles into what you see on your screen!

Enough.

Enjoy :)

Big Plans

Updates haven't halted here, I'm just coming up with some major plans for this bloggy woggy.

Designing some snazzy graphics using my own hand. Also been rediscovering my lust for everything indiepop. Hold tight.

*shouting into the abyss*
*echo*
*echo*




*echo*

Chester French// She Loves Everybody

This band are in a curious place as far as public perception goes, as they are yet to release a record in the UK, have only released one official EP in the US , but are already staple tabloid fodder due to one half of the bands recent shotgun wedding and divorce to Peaches Geldof. It seems though that there might be something more substantial to them than a couple namedrops in the News Of The World showbiz pages. The few tracks of theirs that have made their way onto the internet suggest so anyway.

Having signed to Pharrell Williams Star Trak label, their sights are probably set on Fallout Boy style levels of chart success, but there's no denying their last single She Loves Everybody's sheer pop brilliance, and who said indie credibility should come in the way of a straight-up choooon anyway?

I suggest you get it down your earholes here, complete with a fantasticly sado-masochistic vid:


And while you're at it have a search for their track The Jimmy Choo's, available from blogs, youtube and filesearching sites the world over. Another belter.

New stuffs!!!!

How lame am I? I knew I'd be absolutely hopeless at keeping this kind of thing regular.

Expect some more reviews over the next couple of days anyway, amid driving theory test revision and hammerings of Wario Land: The Shake Dimension on my Wii.

Anyways, over the last couple week's I've been listening to...

Cablecar Catastrophe, Pretty Jacks, Screaming Lights and others// The Hub// Exeter// 30/01/09

please note:// i am not a photographer, the snaps included are awful, i am highly aware of this, just squint whilst looking at them, they look a bit better then (:

Tonight we find ourselves in one of Exeter's dingier, lesser known venues, The Hub, for a bit of a ramshackle collection of bands, from Exeter, North Devon, and Liverpool. A very chaotic night ensues, more about that later...


First up, Barnstaple's brilliant Cablecar Catastrophe take to the stage for a quick opening set, bringing out their Bright Eyes, Dashboard Confessional, Automatic, Libertines mash-up rock, trying their hardest to get the small crowd who've turned up already dancing, carrying on like indie troopers regardless of the fact their ill singer threw up three times on the way to the venue. Even with a somewhat miniscule audience the set goes down well, which is more than can be said for the following band The Adventures Of...

Performing with the concept of a Victorian circus act The Adventures Of... appear to be playing a dumbed down show tonight, whilst still sounding like a fetal Kaisers Cheifs playing Horrors tracks, they seem to be missing the stage dramatics that would complete their set, leaving the few people watching looking pretty bemused and unimpressed.

Exeter Americana band Count To Fire are next to take the stage, in an attempt to turn around the slow evening, with a waistcoated, corduroy trousered, plodding set, like a lacklustre Ryan Adams And The Cardinals, think it's best we move on there.

And onto much better things, Liverpool's Screaming Lights manage to reignite the evening. Having been demoted from headliners, in a cynical ploy by the venues management to keep the crowd of mainly Pretty Jacks fans propping up the bar for as long as possible, they still manage to get things moving with a firey selection of urgent, shoegazing, Interpol, Joy Division style numbers, the band looking nonchalent and unshakeable throughout.

Finally South Molton's Pretty Jacks finish off the night with a franctic, drunken brawl of a performance, managing to bang out some brand new tracks, amidst the mess of one too many drinks (due to their late start time), and still able to thrill as much as ever, their Bloc Party riffs and rock'n'roll persona cause mayhem right up until the moment the band are ejected from the venue by the promoters, following a slight skuffle, and a lifelong ban, citing criminal damage to equipment, making for a nicely chaotic end to a nicely chaotic evening.



//Pretty Jacks - The Ripper//------------

please note:// sound is majorly distorted, my bad, be prepared to whack your volume down, or risk temporary hearing damage. ta (:

Emmy The Great// First Love// Absolute// 02/02/09

For the past four years singer-songwriter Emma-Lee Moss has flooded the internet with a steady stream of anti-folk ditties, whether they've been official self-released EPs, free download only EPs, or the odd MP3 uploaded to her website, so it seems like a lifetime coming, but here finally, after picking up a full band and songwriting collective along the way, we have her debut album proper, and worth the wait it most definitley is.

Ranking alongside Kimya Dawson, Martha Wainwright, and Diane Cluck as a more lighthearted Laura Marling, Emmy treats us to a mass of emotionally charged tales of young love and heartbreak. In title track First Love, we're told a story of a meeting and doomed romance between a girl, and a boy obsessed with Leonard Cohen's original 'Hallelujah', in 'MIA', the story of a couple in a car crash, the boy dies a gory death, with the girl remaining in the car, listening to a compilation, which includes a song by the artist in the track's title, and she reminisces, amid the blood splattered scene "I always liked this singer, I remember/ how you were the one who/ told me that her name/ was either Mia, or M.I.A".

An anti-folk luminary in the making Emmy The Great certainly is, as an introduction of her/their talent to a wider audience, this album is more than sufficient. Expect to hear me, and soon the rest of the world, wittering on about her for some time yet!

Lightspeed Champion// Falling Off The Lavender Bridge// Domino Records// 21/01/08

In mid-2007, Dev Hynes, formerly one third of indie-hip-hop-thrash-metal-punkers Test-Icicles bounced back onto the scene with the single Galaxy Of The Lost. A world away from the sound of his previous band, this record had much more in common with the introverted strummings of Ryan Adams and Bright Eyes than, well, the sound of a dozen guitars smashing up a roomful of Atari 2600s. A lament on the singer's physical inability to drink, due to a billion ailments and health complaints, soothed only by the object of his affection, performed over a bed of swooning country guitars and Emmy The Great on backing vocals (more on her in the next blog post, or maybe the one after that), the single and a whole host of downloadable demos hosted by Dev on his own website would set the tone for the album that followed 6 months on.

The record itself, although sounding calmer to the ear, was just as adventurous as Test-Icicles' release, moving from Devil Tricks For A Bitch, a four minute, strings drenched croak in which the singer rants about wallowing in his room for days with only a guitar for company, to the ten minute epic, Midnight Suprise, a dreamy, cascading tune, supposedly written about The Legend Of Zelda. As the music meandred from indie pop, to lush orchestral arrangements however, the lyrical themes revolved mainly around Hynes' geek rock universe of Weezer, emotional awkwardness, and comic books.

When promotional duties for the album ended, Hynes took off again to the US, where the record had been previously written and recorded, and it's currently unsure whether another Lightspeed Champion record will be released. So, for the time being, make the most of this one!

The Rakes// Walk Home, Come Down, Retreat To Sleep, Wake Up, Go Out Again, Repeat

Came out of London in 2003/2004, with debut single 22 Grand Job, followed up by debut album, and their finest work yet, Capture/Release in 2005. Their early demos and first album managing to sum up the life of disatisfied city boys in the early 21st century with the odd injection of Eastern Europen romance, jumping from tracks boasting the mundanity of applying for 22 Grand A Year bank jobs, to 'just drifting along with no focus or meaning' in the succinctly titled Work Work Work (Pub Club Sleep), and then schizophrenicly flitting to odes to German spy stories in Strasbourg.

This writer here first came across them in 2003, at the Metro club in London, supporting Bloc Party, where they rammed through nearly fifteen songs in twenty minutes, a trait they never lost right up until 2006, when this writer saw them yet again, in Exeter Lemon Grove, only this time they played for forty minutes, with about twenty five songs, just as urgent, just as foppish.

Their second album Ten New Messages was a slight dissapointment, but still included a number of gems, an early outing for the fantastic, but then little known, Laura Marling in Suspicious Eyes, a tale of post 7/7 tube paranoia, a new version of track The World Was A Mess But His Hair Was Perfect, previously a 20 minute epic recorded especially for a Dior fashion show, the Eastern Bloc indebted fury of Trouble, one of the tracks most similar to Capture/Release, and Leave The City And Come Home, the culmination of all the slurred disillusionment they'd been singing for the past two records.

And that was all we heard, for two whole years. Until now, as their new album 'Klang' is to be released on 23rd March through V2/Co-op, with a new single '1989' due out on the 16th, much to my excitement!

So in preperation for that, I recommend we spend some time listening to these highlights of their career so far.

Strasbourg


Retreat


We Danced Together


All Too Human

Video O'Clock// Easing Myself In

It's gonna take me time to get used to this malarky, one below par review down... it's all good.

What's excited me music-wise this past week? Emmy The Great's album leaking... well a promo copy anyway, according to her myspace blog, and a couple other internet posts, it's going to be remastered before it's release. Also got a hold of the BPA album, Norman Cook aka Fatboy Slim's new project, featuring the brilliant Emmy The Great, Jamie T, Dizzee Rascal and David Byrne of the Talking Heads amongst a whole load of others, could make for good listening!

As a bit of a taster, I bring to you Emmy The Great's new First Love single, and The BPA featuring Emmy The Great 'Seattle', in video form. Enjoy!

Emmy The Great - First Love


The BPA feat. Emmy The Great - Seattle

Morrissey// Years Of Refusal// Polydor/Decca// 23/02/09

Finally, after a series of false starts, and phantom release dates, indie icon Morrissey's latest offspring is upon us in the form of Years Of Refusal, his ninth studio album, his second, and sadly final, album recorded with the late punk pop mastermind producer Jerry Finn, also producer of his last great album You Are The Quarry. And worth the wait it most definitely is.

Fighting back against the mixed reception of previous release Ringleader Of The Tormentors, Morrissey finds himself willing to eek further more of himself into the public eye this time around, against a harder backdrop, with a few surprisingly Mexican flourishes, most notably in ‘When Last I Spoke To Carol’, and ‘One Day Goodbye Will Be Farewell’.

From the offset it seems the singer is ready to be a little more personal with this bile filled homage to anti-depressant medication ‘Something Is Squeezing My Skull’, a theme which seems to follow throughout, as the album covers, in typical Morrissey fashion, suicide, rejection and never wavering arrogance. But it is possibly in the second half of the album that an even more personal message is revealed, as the singer seems to hint that his time in the music industry may be coming to a close, ‘One Day Goodbye Will Be Farewell’ indicates this initially, with the obvious title reference and the line ‘so grab me whilst we still have the time’, but also rather more obscurely in the song ‘You Were Good In Your Time’ as Morrissey appears to take the side of his harshest critics who claim that, although once he was the voice of a generation, he is no longer relevant, an opinion that he seems scarily ready to accept might hold some weight. If this does turn out to be the full stop to Morrissey’s solo career, he leaves it with the statement he has surely been trying to word to the world for the past twenty five years, that regardless of everything ‘I’m OK By Myself’.

Whether or not this does turn out to be Moz’s swansong, it cannot be denied that the man is on top of his game, back to his solo best on Years Of Refusal, right down to the talking point artwork, pictured holding a baby, with a caesarean section scar on his wrist. Classic.

False Start// Here We Go

Apologies for the year long delay since my last post. This will not happen again. This is where we start for real.

What's been tickling my eardrums the past few weeks? I'd say...

Morrissey - Years Of Refusal
Kanye West - 808s And Heartbreaks
Franz Ferdinand - Tonight: Franz Ferdinand
Britney Spears - Circus
Thomas Tantrum - Thomas Tantrum
Sky Larkin - The Golden Spike
Rivers Cuomo - Alone II
Ladyhawke - Ladyhawke

to name but a select few. Reviews are on their way, as and when they're written.
Laters x