best new music 2007

thanks to my friends and to emusic and pandora i listened to more new (to me) music in 2007 than for ages ... here's my assortment of music which was actually new in (late 2006 or) 2007 which transformed my days and drives and dreams ...

First, my major discoveries of the year!
Yellow Fever, 'Joe Brown', from double-A side single
Maryrose Crook with the Renderers, 'Under the Sea', from Ghosts of our Vegas Lives
HollAnd, 'Boolean Misery Index', from The Paris Hilton Mujahideen

Next, other great stuff that was new to me!
The Ballet, In My Head, from Gay Secret
The Good, the Bad, and the Queen, Herculean, from The Good, the Bad, and the Queen
Imogen Heap, Glittering Clouds (Locusts), from Plague Songs
Kingsbury, The Great Compromise, from The Great Compromise
Klaxons, Two Receivers, from Myths of Near Future
Late of the Pier, Space and the Woods
Of Montreal, The Past is a Grotesque Animal, from Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?
Kutiman, No Groove Where I Come From, from Kutiman

And last! brilliant new work by the greatest musicians of our time:
Chris Matthews and the Robot Monkey Orchestra, In My Craft and Sullen Art, from The Map of Love
Kristin Hersh, Day Glow, from Learn to Sing Like a Star
Patti Smith, Changing of the Guards (Dylan), from Twelve
Emma Pollock, Adrenaline, from Watch the Fireworks
Radiohead, Weird Fishes/ Arpeggi, from In Rainbows
PJ Harvey, The Devil, from White Chalk
Blonde Redhead, 23, from 23

Beat Rhythm Fashion release, and Barry Plankton puzzle

Yayy this week arrived my copy of Failsafe Records' new CD collecting the lost singles of early 80s Wellington band Beat Rhythm Fashion with their vast echoey chilling postpunk sound. The iconic, bewildering, gloriously dark song 'Turn of the Century' from 1981 is more distant from the insistent early 'Seventeen Seconds' Cure model of some other tracks. Great work by Failsafe.

But here's a puzzle that some Melbourne and Kiwi postpunkheads must be able to settle. Peter at dub dot dash passed on here the second-hand news that the brothers in Beat Rhythm Fashion, Nino Birch and Dan Birch, 'ended up in Melbourne, playing in a band called Barry Plankton'. Is this true? This link was how I found BRF in the first place, searching for Plankton time and their (equally lost, or more so now) 1991 record Sea Brains, which is sunny and magical and utterly diverse, 17 swirling pop songs just janglysmart enough, with three or four transporting tracks at the heart of the album - 'Walking Alone', 'Everyday', 'Dreaming is Easy', 'Major Drug' - which outdo There She Goes or any of the other perfect pop of the era. I saw Barry Plankton with their five singers in 1992 playing their guts out for maybe 20 people in Adelaide at the fringe club but I didn't say 'thanks!'. Anyway my Sea Brains album doesn't give the names of the band members, and the problem with the Birch bros story is that insistent googling comes up with four other guys who were in Barry Plankton: Bryan Colechin (Hugo Race), Des Hefner (Birthday Party), Wayne Drury, plus a Marty P. So unless two of those are the same person, then the two Birch bros couldn't have been in the 5-piece too. What's the truth?

Thirteen Moons

At last there's an online presence for strange lost Swedish band Thirteen Moons, whose 1986 album 'Little dreaming boy' is almost my most prized surviving piece of vinyl, aching mystery jazz and huge yearning fragile threads and broken slivers of song (thanks, Jörg!) ... 'A True Story' which you can download there is the heart of drama, the beginning of wonder. Jörg says that Göran, the boy with the voice, is now a sommelier.

cool as

17 wickets, no-one understands cricket

It looked like a sweet deeply hard track, all ready for runs. Right. Sure. We're all out 145, Auburn 7/83 (scorecard). All to play for on day 2, even money and a fair lot of cricket to come.

It swung early, ok; the 4 Auburn seamers were spot on, sure, with us only failing to pick up the odd leg-side gimme as they knocked over the top and middle orders not with the standard wide waiting lines but with tough straight stump-to-stump bowling, Papanis outstanding with 6/33 off 17. But so where and what were the demons? From early the odd one zipped and bounced and shimmied, mostly harmless; there are wrist and thigh and chest bruises, but were there so few drives because of the miserly length or because it just didn't come on? Few of our wickets, as ever, fell to the wild zippy bouncing odd ones, which instead just held us up cautiously until we got ourselves out, till Captain Sensible, low at 9, gloriously smote 43 off 22 balls and our top order bewildered themselves as to why it wasn't so easy earlier.

Even still, none of us at heart thought 145 defensible, because we haven't been winning all that much and last year's premiership-winning 4th-grade side which defended 160s and 170s at key moments with ludicrous catching seems from this distance a mythical dream rather than the dirty practical collective joy it was at the time, yet our marvellous U-19 wibbly seamer Jason took 5 for nothing and never looked like not rolling them after his first magical c & b to whip out the dangerous opener. He has to come off after 8 overs, them's the rules for youngies, he'll be back with the still new ball next week, but the boys whipped round and snaffled two more leaving just Auburn's oldies - averaging 46 and 47 respectively from 8 and 9 in 3rd grade, it must be said - to worry through the week. Whew. What other days might've happened?

Beauty regimes for the senior cricketer

Beauty regimes for the senior cricketer
But I'm not even the youngest in the team!

pushing out the fielder on the point boundary

Graeme Smith has lost this (glorious, fascinating, wonderfully typically gripping) 2nd Test at Port Elizabeth simply by pushing out the fielder on the point boundary. A South African team with Ntini and Pollock bowling like gods should not lose, get this, Pakistan chase 191 and are 5/92 just after lunch with Yousuf and Inzi just gone after marvellous pressure bowling and fielding, winning those stories, so game over, no? with no Pakistan tail and another couple overs from this pair just so tight and no runs in sight, till Pollock drops just one short, over 41.3 check it out by scrolling to the bottom of the cricinfo match commentary page, right, before that ball it's 5/96 and the Africans are winning all up for sure Inzi gone Yousuf gone go home 2-0 thank you Smith mouthing off as ever from slip, don't get me started, ok, then the dumb defensive skip thinks 'O! Polly's getting tired! He's so old! Let's push the man back even though we're about to take the 6th wicket and run through the tail and win!' and next ball - look at the commentary, it's true, as a tedious bowler I know the pain - there's one, straight to deep point, wouldn't have been a glimmer of a run without the guy pushed back, and then next ball Kamran Akmal slices (a beauty) through the empty 3rd slip, then gets 1 off the last ball, and it's all on, and just look at the next few overs how many go through backward point for 1s and a couple 2s and suddenly they need not 99 but 69, then *more* go through backward point until Akmal stops messing and slicing and plays some glorious pull shots to go with Younis's matchwinning dig. And how could Smith not bring Polly back instead of gruesome Nel for the 51st or 53rd or even 55th over when they still needed 31?? The worst captaincy I've seen for a while.

Venetia's Vipers on the Radio

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NOTE: Sad!! pandora.com has been taken off air for those outside the US 'due to licensing constraints'. No more vipers for now. Maybe if you're reading this in the US you can still get through ... let me know if you can and if you like what you hear.

Venetia's Vipers on the Radio at pandora.com
Venetia's Vipers on the Radio ... by way of signs and half-seen changes ... enter the liquid empire ... find music you never knew you loved ... Venetia will dance across your corpuscles ... jangling, joyous, jilted ... let Venetia apply her ointments to lift you free from time and place ... tales of mystery and romance ... viper's wine served with bats, muses, chameleons, and even triffids ... weeping alone in the best bedroom ... guitars to drown the will ... stir your fleeting animal spirits ... whisperings in the wood, symmetries on the surface ... swirling sax to melt through ... colour of poppy, scent of salt ... join Venetia with her mayday moods, roaming her walls of sound ... happy forgettings ... madness, memory, and magnetism ... much more than juicy vipers on the dancefloor ...
Venetia's Vipers on the Radio at pandora.com
(hit the 'play now' button top left)

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Venetia's Vipers on the Radio ... by way of signs and half-seen changes ... enter the liquid empire ... Venetia will dance across your corpuscles ... jangling, joyous, jilted ... let Venetia apply her ointments to lift you free from time and place ... tales of mystery and romance ... viper's wine served with bats, muses, chameleons, and even triffids ... weeping alone in the best bedroom ... guitars to drown the will ... stir your fleeting animal spirits ... whisperings in the wood, symmetries on the surface ... ... colour of poppy, scent of salt ... join Venetia with her mayday moods ... happy forgettings ... madness, memory, and magnetism ... much more than fat snakes on the dancefloor