Bookmarks: Pins

Drowned In Sound meets Pins. Along with the excellent album, pronunciation is on the agenda:

DiS: You've had quite a lot of high-profile support slots. You've had The Fall and Sleater Kinney... or Slater Kinney as it's apparently pronounced... [the girls laugh] Yeah I didn't know that...

LM: Yeah I didn't know that either. Someone said "Slater" Kinney and it sounded weird.

FH: I kept hearing - what's he called on the radio on 6Music? Steve...

LM: Steve Lamacq.

FH: Yeah he kept saying "Slater" Kinney. I was like, what???

Bookmarks: Parade of The Paddingtons

Over on Drowned In Sound, they've been discussing "forgotten buzz bands", which has resulted in a Spotify playlist that gathers the tracks by the next big things that weren't.

Some are a little unfair - The Long Blondes were laid low by illness, and I'm not entirely sure Louis XIV, good as they were, ever really got tipped for big things. But on the whole, it's actually a fairly acute list of broken dreams.

Drowned In Sound no longer drowning in music news

Drowned In Sound have withdrawn from the rush to be first with the news (in the spirit of which, it's taken me the best part of a month to get round to mentioning this):

We are becoming increasingly aware at DiS towers that what people want from us isn't more reviews, more information (or "news" as some sites call it), more more, MORE! People want a hand to hold, and someone to whisper in their ear ideas as to what to focus their time on.

We hear your screams for a refined sense of recommendation, but we want to try to deliver it without seeming like the boy who cried wolf awesome... We're working at ways to do this better (with our limited resources) in an attempt to save you time ploughing through the overwhelming slew of releases which hit the shelves each month. Basically, we're trying to turn down the volume and put quality first.

This is why we've stopped running news that you probably already got from direct from the artist (or festivals) mouth or saw retweeted seconds after it was announced. This is also why we've given up on trying to fight with the PR industry for "exclusives" which for about five minutes generate traffic, before the same info or video gets republished on 3000 other music sites (some even remember to link back to the source). The traffic this sort of thing generates isn't worth the time and compromises that getting into bed with labels is worth.

It must be an intractable problem for a commercial music website - there's an awful lot of places pushing music news out, and once it's out, it's everywhere.

I'm not sure the correct response to this is what DIS are doing - you now get a monthly news mixtape. Because if news gets stale in seconds, there's nothing like waiting a month to hear it again, presumably.

The funny thing is that Drowned In Sound know that their role, if they're to have one, is meant to be that of curator - shouldn't they be bringing that approach to the news as well as music itself? Nobody has to just chunter out every press release they get, or link to every other site's album streams; in a sea of noise, isn't it the role of a news site to wisely select the items that their audience will find useful?

Drowned In Sound appear to have thrown the Marilyn Manson Eats A Live Baby out with the Tour Dates From Band As Dull As Bathwater..

Bookmarks: Some stuff to read on the internet: John Foxx & Gary Numan

It's a pity it doesn't end with Gary Numan saying to John Foxx "me, I disconnect from you", but other than there's much glorious about Thatcherite flying ace Numan talking to Foxx from the 'vox John Foxx in a Drowned In Sound brokered Electronic Pioneer meet-up:

GN: Why did you record Systems Of Romance in Germany?

JF: England was all Alf Garnett punk. It had gone from squalling brat to grumpy old man with nothing in between. The scene in Europe was much more rich and interesting. Held far more potential. No one in Britain at that time was making anything resembling the sort of sound I wanted, so Germany was really the only choice.

Bookmarks: Some stuff to read on the internet

Drowned In Sound have had a first listen to the new TV On The Radio album, Dear Science:

High, jangly guitars, bouncy bass and a relentless snare-heavy beat whisk you swiftly from stillness into a heady, sinister danse macabre. There are dark allusions to “the ploughshare and the sword” and an invitation, or maybe a demand, to “come pay witness to the whore of Babylon”. Horns, marimbas, cowbells and all manner of jungly squawks and clatters fill the air like mosquitoes, only to be cleared away by a kick-ass cymbal clash straight out of Kool & the Gang.