8/13 - Guess I Got My Swagger Back

A good list for getting up in the morning, going out and doing your best, all to the beat.

Nilsson - Gotta Get Up
I've traded my party nights for routine and rising with the sun. Strangely enough it's pretty wonderful. Harry Nilsson, subverting the 60s mainstream and being as wonderfully at-odds as ever, catches the feeling of simultaneously regretting happier days and bouncing around to uplifting trumpet blows perfectly.

Brian Eno & David Byrne - The Jezebel Spirit
This is how you make a brilliant avant-garde album; you gather samples of street preachers, radio broadcasts, arabian folk music, and as here, an exorcism; you scatter it throughout the funkiest post-Talking Heads-grooves you can muster, you perfect every little sound in the mix and then you name the whole package after an experimental Nigerian novel. Boom! A milestone in music and an infectious piece of zeitgeist music.

Madvillain - Great Day
What I've really been listening to during the week are the Four Tet-remixes of this album. As great as the originals are, the remixes are pure bliss to me. A meeting of geniuses. The instrumental versions are masterpieces in themselves, but when you add Doom's tumbling, reference-peppered rhymes on top it it does indeed get "groovy like stuff you'd put on movie food".

He just came from over there; the grass IS greener 

Roisin Murphy - Night Of The Dancing Flame
What can you say; more awkward beats, more horns. More joyous work-mode.

Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds - We Real Cool
This man; does he ever misstep? Maybe with Nocturama, but otherwise? Nah. The new album offers menacing ballads for the IT-age. It's pretty amazing. I could have chosen any of the songs, but this just seems to capture it all; the vast scope, the aching beauty, the anachronistic collisions:

Sirius is 8.6 light years away
Arcturas is 37
The past is the past and it's here to stay
Wikipedia is heaven

A couple of embellishments this week:

Jamie Lidell released a new album, and though I haven't listened to it yet, this brilliant rendition of my favourite tune of his was a good reminder that I should do so:

And David Bowie's new video, although not as good a song as the last one, is a great little film: