I went to the Laneway Festival in the middle of the city late last month, and although I have to admit that the single most lasting memory will undoubtedly be Issy, Lucy and I drinking beer and breezers in a derelict carpark in Chinatown during a break from the festival proper, the music itself was all pretty bloody good. Wally DeBacker’s (Gotye) set was the best I’ve seen of his – his new visuals are amazing, and I finally got to see Manchester Orchestra (even though I missed ‘Wolves at Night’). Hell, even the bloody Panics were alright, but the show stealers were undoubtedly The Presets, who played the last set on the main stage. It was the third time I’ve seen the Presets in as many years, and was easily the best, what with the excitement of their upcoming album ‘Apocalypso’ in a couple of weeks time, paired with the phenomenally popular single ‘My People’. The crowd was energetic and the boys played a killer set – mainly ‘Beams’ tracks with a few hints as to what is to come. Brilliant stuff – especially my favourite ‘Girl and The Sea’, and the perennial crowd pleaser ‘I Go Hard, I Go Home’ which the boys finished with.

Anyway one song they didn’t play, but which has been bandied about the radio a little bit in the last week or two was ‘This Boy’s In Love’ – the new single. It’s a more low key song – not as much a pumper as ‘My People’, and I have to admit I was uneasy about it when I first saw it on jTV a few weeks ago, but after hearing it a few more times I have to admit that it has warmed on me. I think it may have been the homo-erotic fighting-in-milk cutaways. Utterly bizarre, but then so is playing keyboards in a soot storm.

I think I’ll reserve complete judgement for a couple of weeks and see how the song fits with the rest of the album, but in any case here’s the new video for you to make up your own mind…

Pete

I find it interesting how over the last 15 years or so my music tastes have slowly changed. From 60′s psychedelia to 00′s electro-rock to 80′s new wave to classical music, there have been times in my life – generally in the last five or so years – where I’ve ‘discovered’ these incredible genres and been immersed in them for months. I’d like to say that these experiences are broadening my musical experience, but I suppose that goes without saying – I am afterall growing older.

And this is where I get onto this evenings topic – although I’ve noticed this growth in my own taste, when I look at my parents and their peers, and what they listen to I never really considered that they do – or ever did – listen to anything other than the few CD’s my parents own. Admittedly audio CD’s have only been around en masse not much longer than I’ve been alive, but Sgt. Pepper’s, The Dark Side of The Moon and some trash by Lionel Richie were the only CD’s that my father owned, along with a collection of Gregorian Chants, Barbara Streisand and a horde of Classical CD’s that he had ammassed since meeting Mum. I know both of them owned reasonable record collections, but both got rid of them in their 30′s, either through moving house and not bothering taking LP’s with them, gifting them (in this case the entire Beatles anthology!) to friends who would later turn out to be arsewipes, or in the case of Dad throwing a very respectable collection into the skip when he bought his first CD player in 1983, his last splurge of freedom before marrying Mum in November.

Anyway due to this I’ve never really thought of the two of them as having much musical taste. Admittedly this was short sighted, and perhaps I was being a bit harsh on them because they are afterall my parents – they CANNOT EVER be cool. I also suppose that I could justify such a thought – the invention and proliferation of the internet has made listening to music a much easier thing to do, and my parents both grew up in environments that would have made leisurely listening to music quite difficult. So, perhaps the most unfair extrapolation I have ever made, for most of my life I’ve regarding my parent’s entire generation as being cultureless, soulless oldies just waiting to fall off the tree.

However things changed radically a couple of weeks ago. We had a cousin of my dad’s and his wife to dinner. They had lived in England for most of their lives, but retired to southern WA a few years ago. This was the first time Dad had seen his cousin since Dad himself had migrated to Australia in the late 60′s, but they turned out to be remarkably nice people, and what blew my mind was this cousin of Dad’s – an English retiree had one of the most impressive and broad musical taste’s I’d ever known. We got onto the topic due to him asking Richard and I what we were upto that week. We were both off to see Maximo Park play in the city on the Wednesday, so I told him we were going to see ‘a band’. Laurie asked which band, which set off an hour long conversation which included stories of him seeing The Police in a cinema-come-venue in London by climbing into the bio-box; pretending to be roadies for Ozzy Ozbourne; and then for a bit of local flavour touring with The Cat Empire while they were doing vineyard concerts throughout Western Australia a year or so ago.

So, in light of this conversation – which I do realise could have been completely made up, but in any case proves Laurie listens to more than just Bach and the Beatles (please don’t get angry at me if all you listen to is Bach and the Beatles, I love them both!) – I would like to publicly make an apology to all Babyboomers. I have clearly mislabelled you: some of you are cool afterall.

Pete

Wasting a bit of time today I was reading through a few articles on the ridiculous-but-informative cracked.com including ’10 endangered animals that aren’t endangered enough’, ’10 Lamest Dinosaurs’ (who knew there was a Dracorex Hogwartsia? More importantly, what a shit name!) and finally ‘The 12 Awesomest Games of 2010‘.

Although I’m not sure how many of the games are actually in production, I laughed at one of the paragraphs describing some Starcraft game:

I realize that knowing all this makes me some kind of sci-fi geek. But that’s OK, because the whole world knows a sci-fi geek is about six steps up the social ladder from a fantasy geek and studies show they have more sex.

He makes a couple of very compelling points.

Pete

Maybe it’s the whole easter thing, or maybe its something much spookier, but today after having a blood test I discovered that once again a face had been stained in blood on the cotton wool used as a swab at the end of the test.

This time it’s a silhouette of a facial profile, and just like last time I would bet large amounts of money that it is in fact Jesus himself.

That’s right bitches, it looks like lightning can strike twice – as can blood-Jesuses.

[EDIT] Also of note is the fact that compared to the last time I had Jesus blood I’ve stopped biting my nails. Now that is a sexy thumb!

Pete

One thing that has upset me for years, and is really getting my goat at the moment is the public perception of interest rates, and more specifically the blame governments seem to cop regarding them. Why is it that every time there is an interest rate rise, all you find in letters to the editor and talkback radio is how evil the government is and how completely unnecessary the rise was? I’m not a callous bastard – I do feel for those people that have borrowed to the hilt, then get floored by rate rises and then a compounding effect in the form of a business downturn or even worse a laying off as a result of other people’s tight belts – but the fact is that most people don’t fall into this category (infact employment in the last polling period hit a 33 year low, even though rates have risen constantly for over a year), and in any case if it weren’t for the rate rise in the first place inflation would get the better of us all and make things undeniably worse for everyone.

Although I can’t profess to know anything about economic theory, the whole varying interest rate system strikes me as common sense. I have trust in the powers that be that the RBA heads are not sadistic egomaniacs who hate happiness. Although come to think of it, they are bankers….

While on the subject of Australians and our ridiculous concepts, what is it with all this Earth Hour rubbish? I hate to be lumped into the same category as the frankly cringe-worthy Andrew Bolt, but who honestly thinks that turning the lights off for a single hour on a single night will make any difference whatsoever? Awareness is one thing, but hyping such an event to the incredible levels that Earth Hour is enjoying is frankly ridiculous, and what’s worse is the amount of extra energy and carbon that is being used to bloody advertise it! Honestly, when I opened The Age today a 40 page full colour, stapled magazine fell out. The readership of The Age is about 600,000 per day, which means twenty four million pages were produced and printed on with full colour ink JUST IN MELBOURNE, on JUST ONE DAY to advertise the event. I’m not quite sure what the power consumption is for printing presses, ink manufacturing, paper pulping or distributing over half a million papers around the place, but I’m going to hazard a guess and say not a huge amount less than a few thousand people turning their lights off for an hour next week. Call me a cynic (although not a sceptic!), but I’d much rather see greener (and I’d consider nuclear greener in this regard) electrical generation, far more research into renewables, and practical projects like genetically engineering cattle to photosynthesise, thereby offsetting their huge methane output.

Sometimes I wonder why I don’t just run the place.

Pete

Even though the Albert Park F1 track is a mere 4km from my home, and the fact that that fact is drummed home every year with the incessant whining of finely tuned engines, I’m a big fan of Formula One. So much so that one of the highlights of my year in Africa was the fact that I could lie on the couch, hungover on a Sunday afternoon and watch the live F1 coverage from Europe, when back in Australia I had (and still have) to battle through that same hangover, last until the evening, struggle through that, and then stay up until 2 or 3am on Monday morning to see a delayed telecast of the European legs of the F1 calendar…

Anyway, two happy outcomes regarding my various (but related) problems:

That means that not only can I watch the races live, but I can do this:

Thats right – watch the race AND the interactive time-scorecard-thing. I tested it out on Saturday during qualifying (which I could both watch on TV and hear out my window) and guess what? It was freakin’ awesome. I bet you’re jealous. To be honest, I would be if I wasn’t me…..

Or if I didn’t like F1…

Pete

One of my (and I would hazard a guess to say most young Australian’s) small joys of the last ten years or so has been occasionally flicking on the TV after coming home late on a Friday or Saturday night and whiling the time away with Rage – ABC TV’s music program which airs from about midnight on Saturday and Sunday mornings, right through to about 9am. The program has, for those not familiar with Rage, been a stalwart of Australian and Independent music for over 20 years, and even with the hours upon hours of toneless R&B rubbish these days, a couple of hours before going to bed can be a really rewarding experience, and can also be a stunning source of new music.

Anyway last year was my little brother’s final year at school, and in an effort to help him study harder television was banned in the household for about 6 months. Although there were glaring holes in the implementation of the ban (the signal booster in the roofspace was removed which meant that although there was no signal to the TV, DVD players were not banned, so Dad and Mum spent their time going through the local video shop), the semester went very quickly, and I’m almost ashamed to say that I really didn’t miss television that much. That said, come November last year and the return of TV to the house, I almost immediately bought a HD tuner for my computer, on one of those impulsive purchases that is almost immediately regretted. Although I have a pretty funky online guide system going with Windows Media Center and epgstream.net, I still don’t watch much TV, so the card sits there unused most of the time, save recording the trashy British show Skins each Monday.

So a couple of weeks ago I was staying home one Friday night, bored out of my skull as Uni hadn’t gone back yet, watching old episodes of Arrested Development, when I saw the EPG popup in media center, and more specifically the fact that Rage was starting in less than half an hour. Not having the patience (or drugs) to stay up all night I decided to record the show, and inadvertantly found the next morning that I’d recorded one half of Triple J’s Hottest 100 (the videos of the songs from 100-51). Stoked with my recording, I did the same the next night for the second half of the 100, and spent the weekend merrily watching Rage during the day – something I’d never done before but was tickled pink about. Since then I’ve made a semi-regular habit of recording at least the Friday/Saturday show (tends to be better music) and watching it over the next day.

So here it is: the inaugural ‘Pete’s timeshifted Rage find’. The winner of this coveted award is Manchester electro-pop band The Whip, and their new single Trash, which roughly translates as poppy electronica a la NYPC/LCD Soundsystem/Presets with hints of 80′s New Wave. Admittedly it was as much drummer Lil Fee (what is it with female drummers that makes them so hot?) that got me interested in the song as the music itself, but the song is very good – although from what I’ve heard over the last couple of days Trash is easily their best song to date. The Whip’s debut album is out next week in the UK, but can be found online with a little effort and is worth a listen. I’ll leave you with the video of Trash, as recorded by yours truly (sorry I couldn’t put it up in HD for you, but a single song at full resolution is about 300MB) on Friday night. Enjoy…

Pete