Mantis Style!

You're a Loose Cannon McArthur

I hope everybody had a nice International Women's Day, especially the ladies. Remember, the other 364 days of the year belong to the men.

I'm just kidding of course. Feminism is a pretty rad thing in general, the only problems that I have with it are a) the occasional crazy lady talking about mandatory castration and such nonsense, and b) the unfortunate spelling all too often found within it's circles. I'm willing to bet that spelling it "womyn" or "womben" really isn't helping things. Spelling like that makes me think that Earth is inhabited by irritable space alien immigrants: nobody invited them, but they're just too damn weird to ask them to leave, or buy a dictionary.

I'm sure that all women hate me now. At least we've got that out of the way. Can I blog about music? I don't think I've done that in a while.

I downloaded the new leaked Mogwai album, Mr. Beast, totally expecting to hate it. I was only half right. I have previously equated this band with the likes of Broken Social Scene, Xiu Xiu, and Engineers. Y'know, ambient shoe-gazing crap bands that only perform half of any song, particularily the boring half. Mr. Beast was kind of like that, except with power chords. Kind of weird, but not entirely unpaletteable. Still, if I was given the power to nuke this useless genre off of the face of the planet, I doubt I'd think twice.

Y'know who is able to actually show off the potential of shoe-gazer indie-pop? The Most Serene Republic, a six-piece from Ontario that's playing tonight at the Warehouse. I'd totally go if I didn't have to work. These guys sound like those stupid songs from Broken Social Scene (where the band has an 8-minute contest as to who can play their instrument the most inobtrusively), and then plays an actual song overtop of that. The resulting music is very cool, I aliken it to a fine wine where you simply can't distinguish each individual flavour at the same time, but you can focus and clearly appreciate each individual fruit/spice that makes up the whole flavour. You can see hints of inspiration from acid jazz, soca, grunge, and all kinds of weird shit. One song even has some kind of Irish folk sound to it. The album to listen to is called Underwater Cinematographer, and is heavily reccomended to everybody.

Getting back to leaked albums, does anybody know where I can find the new Flaming Lips? The blogosphere is totally buzzing with the release of At War With the Mystics, and the first single (Mr Ambulance Driver) is rad as hell, but for the life of me I can't find it on any of the usual haunts. April is too far away.

posted by Tay @ 7:19 AM