Inside Nokia Music

I’ve actually had dreams that were less good than this.

Gaslight Anthem are out on a US tour to support the new album, American Slang. Gruff punk legend Tim Barry is supporting, and they’ve been covering Lucero’s “The War” on most of the dates. Luckily a fan posted the video on youtube so the rest of us can share in the greatness.

So, watch and behold. Tim Barry, Lucero and Gaslight. It’s like the holy trinity!

Somewhere in between Glastonbury and the work I’ve had to catch up as a result of being away for it, The Smashing Pumpkins sneaked this beauty in below my radar and as a result, I feel a little violated for missing out on a few extra days of absolute bliss!

If you haven’t heard Freak yet, the first track from Vol.2 of the one-track-at-a-time mega 11 EP 44 song project Teargarden By Kaleidyscope then do yourself a favour and stop reading this, do not pass go, do not collect $200 and listen to it immediately!

Freak is classic Pumpkins with murky overdrives, Zwan-like optimism and Na-Na-Na-Na sing-alongs. Having thrown countless hard earned reddies at The Smashing Pumpkins for half my life now, I’m completely stunned that tunes of this quality are up for grabs free for the anticipated 5 year duration of this project (if it’s seen through to the end).

It’s worth pointing out that 19-20 year old drummer Mike Byrne is beginning to show signs that he may well be capable of filling the horrific void of Jimmy Chamberlin’s departure and that The Smashing Pumpkins 3.0 are about to hit their stride.

The Smashing Pumpkins are available to download from the Nokia/Ovi Music Store and if you’ve got Comes With Music download the lot for free!

Don’t you just love how accessible music is nowadays? Having access to multiple music sites has enabled me to download old favourites and reconnect with tunes that have moved me over the years. Having accounts with Spotify, YouTube and  Come With Music (and others!) has allowed me to be really diverse in my search for music that shares the influences of artists I deeply admire. And also share and experience the playlists of others… happy happy days!

I have been YouTube-ing a lot lately reconnecting with old favourites and discovering new ones and just had to share these tunes with you. I’ve been listening to these loads lately and they all raise a smile.

Devendra Banhart – Carmensita

Devendra Banhart… if you have never heard or listened to him before, stop what you’re doing right now and check him out! : ) Carmensita is one of my favourites as it’s catchy, colourful and unique. The video also has an awesome cameo from the actress Natalie Portman.

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Recently there have been a load of confessions from various Nokians about their guilty music pleasures, so I thought to follow up with my own rather dodgy arena of music taste.

For me it’s the 70s, especially Funk and Disco. Bands like George Clinton , BT Express, Rose Royce, Ohio Players and numerous others. Big hair, a splash of slap bass and outrageous styles, it’s music that certainly defined an era and features in one of my favourite films, “Undercover Brother”. The story of a “Soul Train reject, with a Robin Hood complex”, it is silly but underneath, there is sharp humour and in-jokes about the era.

So here are three songs that I find defines my guilty pleasure. Rose Royce of ‘Carwash’ fame, Suzy Q with a funky disco number and a really hard to find tune from Swamp Dogg.

And as Undercover Brother might say:

“There are times for falling apart, and there are times for getting funky. This is one of them funky times. So whats it gonna be? ”

You dig?

You can download George Clinton , BT Express, Rose Royce, Ohio Players and loads of other Spells approved disco at Nokia Music Store. If you’ve got Comes With Music download the lot for free!

ShazzaMJ wrote a wicked article the other day about ‘When Guilty Pleasures Turn Good’ which inspired me to find out more about my current guilty pleasure and share the tune with you.

Plan B is not everyone’s cup of tea and to be totally honest has not been mine until very recently. Reading up on the artist, real name ‘Benjamin Paul Ballance Drew’ I have been shocked and then amused by the comparisons that have been drawn ranging from Bret Easton Ellis (author of American Psycho) to Damien Rice meets Eminem. Listening to his back catalogue I don’t think any of the comparisons are wrong. His tunes are thought provoking, shocking, amusing and I have to give credit to a very astute narrator who can spin a perfectly horrible tale of the darkest side of life.

My guilty pleasure is ‘She Said’ from the album The Defamation of Strickland Banks. The song draws on all of Plan B’s widely publicised influences and has a strong soul and R&B core backing awesome British hip hop/rapid fire rap. It’s so catchy I have found myself whistling this sat on the bus on the way to work.

‘She Said’ is delivered in first person narrative and tells the story of a rejected fan who has accused the soul singer of god only knows what and he is in the courts pleading his case. The song is ‘Sesame Street’ compared to some of his other tunes that make you think of an unwritten Quentin Tarantino movie or a follow up to ‘Trainspotting’.

Anyway, give it a listen. Like the fruit pastille challenge I dare you not to chew.

‘The Defamation of Strickland Banks’ and Plan B’s debut ‘Who Needs Actions When You Got Words’  are available for download at Nokia Music Store or if you’ve got Comes With Music get them both for free!

Do you ever get that thing where you have a song or even a snippet of what maybe could be a song but you’re really not sure (is it just that jingle from the Lidl advert?), stuck in your head and you have no idea what the hell it is or where it came from? I’m sure you do. Well I do, frequently. And it normally turns out to be something cool that I’ve heard playing in the office or at a mate’s house or something. But then sometimes, the worst times, it turns out to be something Off The Radio.

This week my tiny little brain has been rattling with the words and chorus of Jason Derulo’s ‘Whatcha Say’. Didn’t even know who the bugger was until I warbled the chorus to a colleague who then went on a mission to find out what it was. Turns out he’s a new ‘R’n’B sensation’ (aren’t they all?) from the US of A.

So I found the song, listened to it on repeat for roughly 2 and a half hours, then thought – what does he LOOK like…and this is what I discovered:

Just terrible isn’t it? It’s SO 90’s! The posing he does, the awful acting and the terrible story, his Craig David esque beardy thing! Still I felt compelled to watch it at least 4 times…is this normal?

Then I thought, hang on, I’ve listened to this pretty bad song now for about a day and I don’t know what he’s even going on about. Onto www.lyrics.com and I find to my horror he’s actually explaining how he cheated and now wants the girl back and that ‘cos he’s a big pimping American star, then really she’d be foolish to say no. URGH. Horrible man.

Horrible man he may be but I still can’t stop listening to it (this is now day 3 of the obsession). It makes me feel all summery and nice and I like to feel both of those things. I’m sitting in work with my headphones on just praying that no one finds me out. They might sack me, or worse, laugh at me. But this is my guilty pleasure and because sharing is caring I thought I would blog about it and let you all know that you are NOT ALONE in liking terrible songs. We all do, it’s natural!

Then, as I was doing some more research  *cough entering Jason Derulo into Wikipedia cough* imagine my delight when it tells me that the BEST BIT of the song is actually a sample from an Imogen Heap track ‘Hide and Seek’!! Wowzers! So this basically means that even when I’m being uncool, I’m still cool.  All I need now is for someone to tell me that ‘Babycakes’ is actually a song borrowed from the Beatles and I’m laughing…

Is Shazza right? See what you think – ‘Watcha Say’ from Jason’s self-titled album is available for download at Nokia Music Store or if you’ve got Comes With Music get it for free!

A few years back, before I joined the auspices of Nokia, I spent some time in Sri Lanka for a job.

It was an interesting experience, the work colleagues were great and I integrated with some really interesting characters. On the first day, they thought I needed some comfort food and so ended up in a McDonald’s! Still, I was soon into the curries and local foods that were just fantastic, such as Lamprais, Vada, Kothu Roti, String Hoppers and Curd. If you are a seafood fanatic then its worth going to Sri Lanka for that, the lobsters and crab were fantastic!

I still remember some of the escapades that we got up to, including trying to all get into one of those 3 wheeler “tuk-tuks” with about 6 people. It was late, we had quaffed a lot of drinks, and so I’m surprised I didn’t lose my legs as there sticking outside the vehicle for most of the journey.

A tight squeeze with 6 in the back!

But back to music, which was a big thing there. Even the PA system in the office piped music from our resident wannabe DJ. One thing that I found was that a lot of the nightclubs had this fusion of Western and Asian tunes that was just great.

When I left, one of the colleagues gave me a compilation CD that had some of those tunes. Still have it somewhere although much has been transferred to my computer.

One of the hits at the time was Flute Fantasy by DJ Nasha. My main memory (or lack of!) with this song is being at a beach nightclub near Galle. We had just finished a seafood supper of lobster with French fries (delicious!) and had moved to this club from drinks. One wall of this place had been removed so that the dancefloor rolled into the sandy beach and out into the ocean. Very surreal experience especially after drinking what I suspect might have been locally brewed vodka or arrack. The hangover the next day was truly spectacular!

Other stuff on this compilation included Bollywood hits. One favourite I picked up was “Chaiya Chaiya” from the film Dil Se. It’s notable for the music video being filmed on a moving train.

The final song that I picked up was by the Bhangra Knights. The backing tune was used in a rather popular car advert here in the UK and involved someone taking an Elephant to a car, so that he could convert it into his dream vehicle.

I have several memories of discovering a number of new bands during my formative years. My music tastes expanded rather rapidly during a period of my life just before I went to university.

Gone was the dogmatism about what was good or not good. And in came eclecticism. It was an exploration of a wide range of styles and musical genres. Access to music channels like MTV, Star TV and VH1 helped to broaden the horizon.

An example of this journey was discovering No Doubt, Gwen Stefani’s band before she went solo. A big hit at the time in the Asian region was “Spiderwebs” and it used to play a lot on Star TV.

I also became interested in how music creates a “family tree” of inter-related artists. You explore one group and from that you come across others that are just as good. From No Doubt I discovered another band called Sublime. Great tunes, although the groups output was tragically cut short when the lead singer died from an overdose.

They played a fusion blend of reggae/ska and other genres. Tracks like “What I Got” and “Santeria” are the sort to play on a sunny afternoon, perhaps on the beach with some surfing action! Or maybe to play in the car with the top down, driving down some sunny boulevard with palm trees and a surfboard in the back. Hmmmm… Think it’s time to plan my next holiday.

Anyhow a couple of tunes to slide into the weekend!

There’s loads of No Doubt and Sublime albums available to download at Nokia Music Store or if you’ve got Comes With Music get them all for free!

Jerome recently posted about the new Tron: Legacy film and the music being done by Daft Punk. So it got me thinking, what other movies, games or anime of the “cyberpunk” genre had memorable music. Cyberpunk has perhaps evolved a lot from the dystopian novels of William Gibson (Neuromancer, Mona Lisa Overdrive and Count Zero) to a genre that has pervaded a lot of sci-fi movies and other media like games and animation.

As an aside, it’s interesting to note that as the internet developed (25 years ago the first dotcom domain was registered) Gibson’s next series of Novels (Virtual Light, Idoru, All Tomorrows Parties) changes tack slightly, portraying a future that was perhaps less darker in its dystopian outlook than Neuromancer. Likewise, films have moved on. Films today seem to involve lots of holographic display technology and the “computer is everywhere” paradigm, as well as nuances towards the surveillance state.

So here are a few thoughts. Its not the most exhaustive list, but a list of what I think are the most influential in my exploration of this genre.

Vangelis – Bladerunner

Probably the archetypical cyberpunk movie with its dark, foreboding atmosphere and the claustrophobic tension of the city it portrays.

Ghost in the Shell – Movie

Ghost in the Shell is, I think, a classic animation that came out of Japan, portraying a world where the internet is all pervasive, cybernetics commonplace and asked what happened when soul and machine meld together to the point you can’t tell each other apart. I tend to think of it as a spiritual successor to the Bladerunner ideal of a dystopian future governed in part by the technology that has been created. The opening title sequence with the below haunting chant involves the lead character being “built” in the cyborg manufacturing plant.

Ghost in the Shell – Stand Alone Complex

This was a spin-off series from the original movie. They made two series each with its own story arc. Again it is compelling viewing exploring the world that was set up in the movie.

Wipeout 2097 – Fluke

A computer game that launched on the original Playstation. I remember it for the song Atom Bomb by Fluke which played repeatedly on MTV, which took the premise of the game (a high tech futuristic race) and melded it into the music video.

I came across a nice little website for the band Labuat, a Spanish group that play a fusion of styles. The website is an interactive one that allows you to draw or trace a pattern in time with the music that’s playing. It plays out a story with the inky style and the various animations which I think is quite relaxing.

http://soytuaire.labuat.com/

Appears (although my Spanish is rubbish) that you can record the traces you make and replay them.

Inevitably had to go onto YouTube and check out what their other stuff is like. Have to say, I think they’re rather good. Definitely will be adding to my collection! They apparently supported Beyonce when she played in Barcelona in 2009 and were the first act onstage.

Here’s another track – a good slide into the weekend methinks.

You can download Labuat’s album ‘Labuat’  from the Nokia Music Store - if you’ve got  ‘Comes With Music’, it’s completely free!