"unlike the late noughties genrists"

Music And so we return to Sarah Blasko, whose interpretation of "Seems Like Old Times" from Annie Hall I posted last week. In his email, her publicist suggests that “she's adorable and quirky and evokes references to Regina Spektor and PJ Harvey” and since that’s a description which just about fits any of the manic pixie dream girls who’ve been releasing albums over the years I was intrigued enough to cheekily ask if he would send over a review copy of “As Day Follow’s Night” so that I could hear what was really different about Blasko in comparison to the Nash, the Allen, the Golightly, Spektor or any of the other anti-folkists. Which he has. I’ll know to be cheeky more often.

I should have an affinity for the album, since, according to her online biography Blasko wrote it whilst also working on the score to the Bell Shakespeare Company’s 2008 production of Hamlet (even appearing on stage). She says: “It was good to have something alongside the album writing that had a deadline because it made me slightly more disciplined. It was sort of like exercise that kept my energy up for the task of writing the album,” she says. “When I did the performances for Hamlet over two months last year, in between the time I was on stage, I would sit at the backstage piano and write my album songs.” I can't detect any direct influences (without entering an extrapolation fantasy), this isn't a concept album but tonally (as her bio suggests), the main key is melancholic.

This is Blasko’s third album, having begun recording in 2002, the first two huge award winning hits in Australia, so against appearances, unlike the late noughties genrists this isn’t a debut album, it’s the tricky third. What that means in terms of the sound I can’t tell, having not heard the whole of the first two (#spotifyfail) the extent to which her direction has changed. Her bio suggests this is a development, but "incremental" which is intriguing, since it does at least suggest she's willing to try something different, though from the couple of early tracks it doesn't seem to be in the order of trying some entirely new sound (available at her videography). What I can say is that this is a singles album with at least four or five good tunes that could stand alone with a B and a Tin Tin Out remix.

The bouncy Hold On My Heart which has a good repetitive dance hook would work well alone and the She & Him alike Over & Over in which the trill in her voice (think Melanie) is put to good effect. It’s unfair, of course, to simply drop comparisons, but in this crowded genre, everything sounds like everything else to some degree, so it’s impossible not to. There is the suggested Spektor and Harvey influence in these eleven tracks, the willingness to mess about with unusual instruments, Blasko’s trademark it seems the musical saw, slightly mangled piano and multi-track vocals. And strings. Lots of strings. That gives it a nostalgic element, but without joining Duffy on the rap sheet and stealing Dusty Springfield’s coat.

The other point of division is lyrically; these are not narrative songs replete with pop culture references and if they’re autobiographical they trade in generalisations, only now and then, as when she asks “Is My Baby Yours?” that we wonder if there’s some tale being suggested between the lines (assuming that isn't a huge hidden Hamlet reference). There are few moments to leave you grinning at the linguistic acrobatics required to fit a rhyme around CSI or macaroni. Mono-syllables abound. Which also makes it much easier to listen to oddly which is probably why I’ve had “As Day Follow’s Night” on repeat these past couple of days.

Yet in places, she’s deeply effective. “I Never Knew” seems initially to be a standard break up song, but there’s a sense that the source of her pain isn’t even aware of her existence and that she’s actually letting go of an unrequited love after realising that she has little chance, which is something I’ve had to deal with, oh, lots of times, usually with manic pixie dream girls and assuming I haven’t misinterpreted that’s the first time I’ve heard that sentiment or something similar voiced in music since Airhead’s “Funny How” (unless I haven't been paying attention). Many of the songs, which on the surface sound fairly straightforward, contain this inner ambiguity which suggests that what’s important to Sarah Blasko is below the surface.

the obligatory Spotify post.

Music Over the past couple of days, two questions seem to have been bouncing around the interweb, one more rhetorical than the other. The first is “How great is Obama?”, as so far, in just sixty odd hours, he’s already the President we’d hoped he’d be, offering a timetable for the closure of Gitmo and for pulling US troops from Iraq, firm decisions on how America should treat both its allies and enemies and generally making everyone feel rather more positive about the world than we did even last weekend. I’d very much recommend subscribing to The Guardian’s Barack Obama RSS feed or you favourite news source’s equivalent and watch the world become a better place, one update at a time.

The other, probably more frequent question is “Does anyone have an invite for Spotify?” I asked it myself on Tuesday of all days and Pete offered this link which seems to actually work without an invite. That’s this link. Within half an hour, I’d tweeted back “Thanks very much. That's amazing. Why would you ever need to buy music again?”

That is quite a review considering I had one eye on the Mall in Washington and BBC News’s desperate attempts to have a correspondent get through a sentence without the line going down. It’s very easy to become blasé about new software releases, since most of them are simply new or free versions of venerable warhorses, or in the case of Microsoft new ways of fucking up processes which worked perfectly adequately before, thanks very much. The bloody ribbon in the new version of Office, for example. It's like they've gone out of their way to hide some things. Why would I need to count the number of words in a document?

For the uninitiated, Spotify, is iTunes meets Last.FM though better than both. After registering, download the client, type your favourite musician in the cream search box on the otherwise very grey interface and watch as probably every song they’ve ever released pops up on a list. Double click on something, and (depending on your connection) seconds later you’ll hear that song pulsing from your speakers. It’s gloriously easy, so easy in fact you feel that it must be illegal in these litigious times.

What stops it from being illegal, what pays for the service, is that, assuming you’re using the free service, about once an hour of listening, an advert pops into the music stream or a banner ad becomes part of the interface, the revues from which presumably go both to the company and to pay royalties. There is a premium ad-free ten pounds option too, though the audio ads aren't that annoying and on the uk service are so far only government sourced (tax returns and direct.gov) which gives the whole exercise an even greater legitimacy than something like the original Napster which was fundamentally anti-authoritarian.

That’s it. Suddenly a whole world of music is at your fingertips. Almost. Spotify is still only in beta so although the aim is to have everything ever recorded available, there are omissions, some record companies aren't involved yet, and deleted music tends not to be there. It’s not very good with film soundtracks either or world music and now and then an album is missing from a discography. For better or worse, every top forty album is included, except oddly for Roger Whittaker (in at number 16 this week). I’m listening to Beyonce’s This is Sasha Fierce as I type and thinking about something else.

I said last night that I think this is going to revolutionise music, which it is. Once this remote version goes mainstream and proper favourites storage has been sorted out, we’ll never have to mess about with music mp3s in portable devices again and if the service adds podcasts or talking books in the future, assuming the cost of using the web drops, that’s the mp3 market dead with some types of music radio looking depressed (here is a rather good investigation into these issues).

The idea of working your way through 1000 Recordings To Hear Before You Die has potential or you can spend a couple of hours listening to Nick Hornby’s 31 Songs (ish). Students who’re studying a particular composer can call up whatever piece of music is being considered, no longer having to hope that it’ll turn up on Radio 3/be returned to the university library/pop through the letterbox from Amazon before the assignment’s due. And since compilations are also included, you can finally hear that track whatisname recorded for some charitable cause a decade ago.

The treatment of music online changes too. Each track, artist and album has a unique URL which means that if Spotify catches on, and I can’t imagine why it won’t, and everyone’s assumed to have a copy, when music websites review albums, they’ll be able to link to Spotify so that we can listen to them. I recently read this interview with Siobhan Donaghy on the occasion of her previous (and probably last) work Ghosts being voted the most underrated album of all time [via]; it’s heavily out of circulation but now you can click this link, Spotify will open and you can decide for yourself.

There are some drawbacks. If you’re on a limited plan, it is expensive data usage wise. I’ve only been listening for an hour and already racked up 100 mb. But as you listen, a cache is created on your hard disk which keeps a encrypted copy of the track so that if you listen again you don’t have to stream the thing more than once (and you can set how big this cache is).

It’s also hellishly addictive as before you know it you find yourself discovering how various artists have covered your favourite and not so favourite songs; Blossom Dearie knocks Blue Moon out of the sky just as Avril Lavigne should not have been allowed within a planet’s diameter of Imagine. Last night I linked to this jazz tribute to the music of Star Wars which I think might be the most exciting bit of noodling I’ve heard in a long time.

As if all of this wasn’t enough, you can also create playlists of your favourite tracks, for your own pleasure and to pass on to other, like a guilt free Muxtape. As well as this Nick Hornby playlist (which usefully shows the gaps in the database -- no Zeppelin, a predictable lack of The Beatles), I’ve created this to deposit some of the music I’ve written about on the blog, last year’s mystery music project and the old soundtrack. You can have collaborative playlists too, Pop Justice (where I first read about Spotify) has one and so have I, should you want to recommend something. I think I’ve written more than enough. You really just need to go and try this – how you listen to music may never be the same again.

This has been the obligatory Spotify post. Because every blog will have one. Assuming they haven't already.

Update: I've since posted some tips on finding new music.

"Saturday night, I watched channel five, I particularly liked CSI." -- Kate Nash, 'We Get On'

Music For over a year, Guardian Unlimited has been running a New Band of the Day column in which they talk up some new singer or group. It's actually a great way for some unknowns to get a fragment of exposure, much needed in the post-John Peel world. It's also been surprisingly successful in predicting some successes. The Wombats are in there, as well as Amy Macdonald and All Angels. And, nearly a year ago when she was still with an indie label, look who's knocking about at No.20 -- it's the artist behind one of my favourite albums of the year, Made of Bricks. It's Kate Nash:

"And talk about fate. Less than a year ago the aspiring actress was rejected by the Bristol Old Vic theatre, so to cheer herself up she saw Brokeback Mountain in Harrow, where she fell down some stairs and broke her - no, not back, foot. Her mum and dad bought her a guitar, and, stuck in bed for three weeks, she wrote songs and recorded them on her laptop."

The title of this post features what might be my favourite lyric of the year. The album's full of them.

" It is sobering to think that when Mozart was my age he had already been dead a year." -- Tom Lehrer

Music Posting brevity tonight can be explained by the fact that I'm watching opera's Die Zauberflote or Mozart's The Magic Flute. It's a 1991 production recorded at The Metropolitan Opera House in New York with designs by David Hockney. I'm really quite enjoying it, probably because it has the atmosphere of a Christmas panto, including a fairy tale princess in the shape of Pamina and the comedy relief bird, Papageno (who might as well be called Buttons) and a fairly rubbish adventurer. So far, it's the fairly simple tale of the adventurer falling in love with said princess on the basis of a painting and then heading off to a castle to save her, with titular instrument and the anthropomorphic fowl to help his quest. As it stands they've been sent into some kind of punishment room and I best get back to see if they survive...

"'Me mam goes. She goes at Christmas. Apparently, she took me there once when I was a kid." -- Voxpop from article linked below.

Music An interesting piece by Stephen Moss trying to discover why and if audiences are 'returning' to classical music suddenly became even more interesting, at least to me, when I read this:

"I went to two concerts in Liverpool. An enjoyable Grieg evening - the piano concerto and the incidental music to Peer Gynt - and, the following lunchtime, a recital by Boris Giltburg, the previous night's soloist. Giltburg attracted a small audience for his recital - perhaps 250 - and made a valiant attempt to drown out the pile-drivers that currently surround the hall. The Grieg concert drew the Liverpool Phil's most traditional audience. As I arrived at the hall, the coaches and mini-buses were disgorging groups of mainly elderly music-lovers. The Liverpool Phil has close links with Classic FM, and here was the tuneful fare that station prefers." [my italics]

I attended that recital -- and wrote a semi-review of it on here. It's intriguing that Moss only mentions what the audience looked like for the evening concert -- perhaps it's because or two-fifty were a far wider cross section -- older people certainly, but also students, people in my generation and slightly above, and not all as far as it's possible to tell these things 'white middle class' -- I'd consider myself 'lower middle-class liberal' for what that's worth. There were three girls from St. Hilda's School at the back too.

I've already bored you with my road to Damascus but that was why I was sitting at the front of that recital. But then I was listening to George Michael (and I should preface this by saying I've never been a huge fan) on Desert Island Discs this morning and as well as turning in a Radio One playlist as his selections, talked about how he became curious in music. It seems he received a bang on the head when he was young and it completely changed his interests. The Proms began just a couple of weeks after this happened to me. Connected?

“[The piano is] able to communicate the subtlest universal truths by means of wood, metal and vibrating air.” -- Kenneth Miller

Music I spent lunchtime at the Philharmonic Hall in Liverpool in the company of piantist Bors Giltburg as he gave a recital of Beethoven, Rachmaninov and Chopin and apart from the banging noise from the basement which was audible between movements, it was a treat. Since this was my first live classical music concert since the Proms, I felt like one of the stooges on What Not To Wear at the end when whoever’s presenting that week takes them around the clothes shops so that they can demonstrate what they’ve learnt. Coupled with the music appreciation text book I’ve been reading I could see where the pitch and rhythm where and why the composers did certain things and it didn’t totally destroy the experience.

What was surprising was how different the music sounded live. I’ve become very accustomed to listening to music on my headphones which means in some cases it can feel as though I’m standing in the middle of the orchestra or at the very least from the conductor’s spot. In the hall, obviously, the sound is emanating from a single area but what I think you lose in terms of being able to hear every nuance of the composition you more than make up for in the ability to simply concentrate on listening to what you’re listening to with far less distractions, the difference between watching a film in a cinema and at home perhaps.

If I’d listened to Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in C minor (Op. 111) at home would I have noticed the heart-rendering brief appearance of a melody in the first movement which would become The Ode To Joy from his Ninth Symphony. I love that I’m gradually noticing these things, being able to see classical music as a series of periods rather than a great amorphous collection of pieces and how the composers and musicians influenced one another, and also how like writers and painters they’d often try out notation in one place and expand it elsewhere, or shelving some ideas in one place and use them elsewhere.

I love too that as Giltburg spurt into Chopin’s Ballade No. 1 in G minor (Opus 23), I recognised what I was hearing and it was like greeting an old friend. I’m listening to a different recording as I write by Bella Davidovich which I co-incidentally borrowed from the library this week and I can see why musicians love Chopin -- he gives them room for some personal expression the softness of textures and tempo when required. Giltburg was less deliberate than the version I’m hearing, although it could simply seem that way -- I was sitting at the front of the hall just metres away from the piano.

As I left (the woman along the aisle from me in the long blue mac having been woken up by the final burst of clapping) I heard a couple of twentysomethings enthusing about what’d they’d seen and I had to agree with them. It is amazing that the pianist is somehow able to shift both hands across the keyboard and often have them doing completely different things. I can type and pat my head while I stroke my tummy but I can’t imagine ever being able to create chords with my right hand and shift my other up and down the rest of the keys with that kind of dexterity. If only I’d listened to my parents on the night before secondary school began when they asked me if I’d like to try a musical instrument…

"This is how it feels, now I'm finally smiling on the inside." -- Natalie Imbruglia, 'Glorious'

This one‘s for Annette.

Music Natalie Imbruglia’s wikipedia biography includes an extremely detailed recording history. After the seminal White Lillies Island in 2001, she recorded a third album ready for 2003 which was rejected by the record company as being too rock orientated. She refused to record to fluff with some Scandinavian pop producers to placate her masters and left that company in 2004. Counting Down The Days was released in 2005, and whilst not quite as striking as the earlier two, still had enough power to make you wonder what she’d be doing next. She began work on the official album four at the end of that year and we’re still waiting -- but then you can’t rush perfection. That work is slated to appear early in 2008.

In the meantime, coming this September we have a singles collection which as is the custom nowadays, also features five new songs. I hate that ploy. If you're a fan and a supporter you will have already bought everything else that the artist has produced so you're essentially forking out a tenner plus some coins for a couple of new tracks. Then, beforehand, the record company will release one of the new tracks as a taster, in this case Glorious which you'll inevitably buy making the whole best of proposition even less attractive. Is, then, Natalie's new single, good enough advertising for everything else?

I’ve been desperately trying to avoid the video which has been getting airplay across freeview so that could enjoy it unsullied straight from CD. I think it’s best described as grower. It sees Natalie in happy mood, describing those moments when you discover that yes, actually it is possible for you to know what it’s like to be in love and indeed what it’s like be in love in that special way. In the first verse it’s walking along Frith Street (in Soho?) in the early morning glow in the second verse it’s at home drinking wine and dreaming.

Happy pop is a tricky mix to pull off. As people who listened to Alanis Morissette’s recent albums, being in a good mood and happy does not good records make. On the one hand you’ve got Natasha Beddingfield’s mixed messages in I Wanna To Have Your Babies which is catchy if scary and on the other the cool P45 that was Sheryl Crow’s Wildflower album, eleven Diane Warren-style ballads apparently inspired by her love for now ex-boyf Lance Armstrong which at no point seemed like the work of the somebody who produced any of the previous albums (new rock album coming soon apparently). This is probably somewhere in between, happy without being too cloying about it and with some atmosphere.

It’s also a fairly brave to produce a single like this when the rest of the pop world looks like the Sugababes, Girls Aloud, Lily Allen, Amy Whinehouse and Kylie and I don’t think it’s going to pull over that crowd. But it does make a change to hear pop music purposefully and resolutely unaffected by R&B, D&B or dance music, taking its cues from rock music instead. From the opening acoustic guitar chord onwards, the kind of pop music that can be played with a band on stage sounding much the same, but still making Avril Lavigne sound hardcore, but with an obvious thought and maturity and despite the multiple writing credits somehow very personal. The b-side, That Girl is also pleasingly old school, looking back nostalgically in the direction of Sandie Shaw topping off a package which is just enough to convince me that the singles collection is worth looking forward to after all.