Its been a while since i did any single reviews. Have we seen a new dawn of brilliant music? What do you think....?
Alexis Jordan - Good Girl
Deep joy. Another bland American songstrel has come along and seems prepared to build a career on making the same song over and over. This sounds practically identical to her previous portion of dripping Happiness.
Avril Lavigne - What The Hell
My thoughts exactly. What the hell is a woman in her late twenties doing making teenage angst music and dressing in a similar manner? Horribly predictable and sounds like every other Avril Lavigne record.
Dr Dre featuring Eminem and Skylar Gray - I Need A Doctor
Its the comeback we've all been waiting for! Dre is back and he's made his first record for a decade.... Or has he? Most of the record is given over the Eminem for one of his current trademark whiny, self pitying raps, most of what is left is the tedious and highly repetitious chorus and finally we have one short rap from Dre. Its a very weak comeback.
Jessie J - Price Tag
Even if it was free, i wouldn't.
Lady Gaga - Born This Way
Ignoring the obvious comparisons to Madonna's Express Yourself for a moment, this isn't a disaster by any means. Gaga seems to have (probably only temporarily) weened herself off the stupid earworms that blighted Telephone and Bad Romance in favour of recording a straightforward modern disco floorfiller. Surprisingly gimmick free.
Rihanna - S&M
Oh deep joy. Rihanna has released another record about Making Sexys With Boys and this time she's decided to sing about how whips and chains excite her. Except she doesn't most of the time because most radio stations are playing a heavily butchered version of the song, which is endlessly looped and repeated throughout in order to appeal to eight year olds, because ultimately every parent wants their eight year old singing "Sex in the air, you know i love the smell of it". Unlike Gaga's latest offering, there is no way of interpreting this in an innocent manner. Vile and despicable.
Take That - Kidz
Oooooh! Aren't they hardcore?!? Putting a "z" on the end?!? Actually, this upbeat protest warning themed tune is Take That's most interesting single since Shine and it comes from an album which is quite short of TT's now trademark epic anthems. Far more appealing than it deserves to be.
Breakage & Jess Mills - Fighting Fire
I'll probably end up loving this, but at the moment i simply can't decide on a conclusion about it. It feels like it should be a slow burning, crescendo building electro dance track, but never quite gets anywhere beyond its opening pace. If it does achieve anything, it is the sense of menace which runs all the way through it. Its certainly interesting and i find it confusing whilst familiar, which has to be a good thing.
The Strokes - Under Cover of Darkness
Lead vocalist Julian Casablancas has lost his vocal distortion effects machine and there are one too many flat notes in this. For a band making so much noise about how creative they are since they've reformed it sounds like old Strokes by numbers to me, except without the massive riffs of songs like Reptillia and Last Night.
Clare Maguire - The Last Dance
I don't get it. Clare Maguire is supposed to be one of the big new things of 2011, but this dull pop dance record could have been released any time in the past fifteen years and nobody would have cared.
Friday 25 February 2011
Sunday 13 February 2011
The Circus comes to town
Every so often, something breaks in the media which is so calculated in order to cause outrage and anger that i can't believe there is so much in depth analysis of the happening because it is so damn obvious that the whole incident is a gratuitous show to sell newspapers, promote a person or event or just generally make money.
The recent Top Gear "incident" where Jeremy Clarkson and Richard Hammond roundly laid in to the Mexicans as a race was clearly the "moment" for this series which was engineered to get massive press and wider media coverage and thus higher ratings and raised profiles for the personnel involved. There is a moment like this in every series of Top Gear, perhaps it'll be Jeremy Clarkson saying that all murders are committed by truck drivers or alledging an electric car has broken down when it in fact didn't. You know the sort of thing - it'll wind up the left wing press something rotten and spark the sort of outrage that is normally reserved for pension mismanagement. The right wing red top press will have a field day as it is precisely the sort of thing their readership will love because they are the people to whom Jeremy Clarkson is the holiest cow.
Now lets take a moment to look at the evidence to this theory: Richard Hammond is normally the giggling child in the background of all the dumb schemes come up with by ringleader Clarkson and rarely has anything deeply offensive the say, yet in this particular segment of the programme he went completely overboard and crucially out of character. He simply doesn't do rants of that length in the previous episodes, which leads me to believe the whole thing was closely scripted, if not word for word.
What amazes me is the sheer level of gullible idiots who are taken in by the circus coming to town and will head out into their newspapers casting utter damnation upon the perpetrators of the controversy. Steve Coogan wrong a long diatribe in the Observer about how offensive his chums at Top Gear are to ultimately gain nothing except people all over the country reading about how he had written a long diatribe in the Observer. It barely added anything to Coogan's fairly low profile, but it did keep Clarkson et al in the media spotlight for another couple of days.
The incident and associated playground chattering also found comment from other lazy journalists such as the awful Julie Burchill in the Independent (and offshoot i), who managed to turn it all around to how its fine to make jokes about women and the disabled.
It wouldn't surprise me if the Coogan article had been organised by Clarkson and Top Gear producer Andy Milman to gain some media coverage for the both of them.
So in summary, look forward to the next controversy next time Top Gear is on. It'll be a couple or three episodes into the series and it'll gain coverage in every newspaper because ultimately it benefits everyone - the newspapers will sell more copies with "CLARKSON'S NEW CONTROVERSY" teased on the front and Top Gear will get more viewers. Everyones a winner, eh?
The recent Top Gear "incident" where Jeremy Clarkson and Richard Hammond roundly laid in to the Mexicans as a race was clearly the "moment" for this series which was engineered to get massive press and wider media coverage and thus higher ratings and raised profiles for the personnel involved. There is a moment like this in every series of Top Gear, perhaps it'll be Jeremy Clarkson saying that all murders are committed by truck drivers or alledging an electric car has broken down when it in fact didn't. You know the sort of thing - it'll wind up the left wing press something rotten and spark the sort of outrage that is normally reserved for pension mismanagement. The right wing red top press will have a field day as it is precisely the sort of thing their readership will love because they are the people to whom Jeremy Clarkson is the holiest cow.
Now lets take a moment to look at the evidence to this theory: Richard Hammond is normally the giggling child in the background of all the dumb schemes come up with by ringleader Clarkson and rarely has anything deeply offensive the say, yet in this particular segment of the programme he went completely overboard and crucially out of character. He simply doesn't do rants of that length in the previous episodes, which leads me to believe the whole thing was closely scripted, if not word for word.
What amazes me is the sheer level of gullible idiots who are taken in by the circus coming to town and will head out into their newspapers casting utter damnation upon the perpetrators of the controversy. Steve Coogan wrong a long diatribe in the Observer about how offensive his chums at Top Gear are to ultimately gain nothing except people all over the country reading about how he had written a long diatribe in the Observer. It barely added anything to Coogan's fairly low profile, but it did keep Clarkson et al in the media spotlight for another couple of days.
The incident and associated playground chattering also found comment from other lazy journalists such as the awful Julie Burchill in the Independent (and offshoot i), who managed to turn it all around to how its fine to make jokes about women and the disabled.
It wouldn't surprise me if the Coogan article had been organised by Clarkson and Top Gear producer Andy Milman to gain some media coverage for the both of them.
So in summary, look forward to the next controversy next time Top Gear is on. It'll be a couple or three episodes into the series and it'll gain coverage in every newspaper because ultimately it benefits everyone - the newspapers will sell more copies with "CLARKSON'S NEW CONTROVERSY" teased on the front and Top Gear will get more viewers. Everyones a winner, eh?
Wednesday 9 February 2011
One product, many different flavours
Now i don't travel around the country as much as i'd like, but this past weekend @forkinabucket and myself travelled up to Liverpool for a long weekend. Out of interest, we spent the trip up listening to BBC local radio stations, retuning when we lost contact with each frequency.
We left home listening to...
BBC Somerset, Emma Britton (0900-1200)
Now i'm already familiar with the Emma Britton show, often tuning to BBC Bristol or Somerset in advance of the brilliant Steve Yabsley show at midday. There isn't a marked contrast between Bristol's Graham Torrington and Somerset's Emma Britton; Torrington is a traditional laid-back local radio jock (he even does a Saturday night Late Night Love show just to complete the cliche), whilst Britton is a rather parochial, but enthusiastic broadcaster who is able to demonstrate interest in the tedious, compassion to the dramatic and a smile to the foibles of county life. If i'm being totally honest, i was of the opinion that because the differences between Bristol and Somerset were so slight that the rest of the country would follow the same template of gentle, easy-listening and often twee programming.
BBC Hereford & Worcestershire, Andrew Easton (1200-1600)
New Zealander Andrew Easton carries the mammoth four hour afternoon shift on BBC Hereford and Worcestershire. The stretch of the show we listened to felt like a bit of a timewarp to Radio 2 in the 90s with a fairly standard guess the year quiz featuring music and reminiscences of the 1960s. After that, the show continued on in a fairly lighthearted and irreverent manner with good humoured wit and lively presentation. Overall, a well recommended and entertaining show.
Somewhere around Birmingham, we started losing H&W and i did a quick scan up the airwaves to find not the expected BBC Birmingham, but...
BBC Leicester, Jonathon Lampon (1200-1500)
Despite not really being anywhere near Leicester, we came up with the BBC service from the city and decided to stick with it. Lampon's show contains a fairly well balanced current affairs discussion (today concerning standards of language), introduced with a well thought out collection of potential avenues of continuation. The depth of the material varies considerably throughout the show, but Lampon manages to deliver it consistently throughout. Imagine the Jeremy Vine show without the anger and bitterness and you're pretty much on the level of where this show sits. It serves a worthwhile purpose, i found it very informative and interesting.
We lost contact with Leicester as we were approaching the Potteries and after a couple of ILRs, we unsurprisingly came in to reach of...
BBC Stoke, Paula White (The Afternoon Show, 1300-1600)
The first show we had heard which includes a catchphrase ("Hiya Duck"), which is used at the beginning of every message or conversation and becomes somewhat irritating after a while. We know you're a local radio station broadcaster, you don't need to ram it down our throats. To my ears, Paula White doesn't sound like a natural radio host and her delivery is a bit stop-start a lot of the time and she can get a bit whoopy whilst laughing at her own jokes. Her show is very conversational, which might stand a better chance of working if she had somebody else in the studio to bounce off because there are far too many awkward silences. On the whole she is overdoing the "local lass" thing a bit too much and the result feels very contrived.
BBC Merseyside, Billy Butler (1400-1700)
I'll admit an interest here, as i've heard several previous Billy Butler shows (including his legendary Scouse quiz spoof Hold Your Plums) and always found him to be an affable and likeable character. BBC Radio Merseyside is a station which very much caters to its audience and feels very much more cosmopolitan than anything else we'd been listening to on the way up. After being subjected to Radio Stoke, Billy Butler's show is remarkably slick and well put together.
More on the Mersey...
Over the rest of the long weekend we listened to Radio Merseyside a lot and found the output at times to be quite challenging. I don't think i've heard radio output with such a high level of genuine interest in the fundamentals of politics and policy outside of the likes of Radio 4 and the contributors to the phone-ins and open forum style shows (particularly 1200-1400) seem far better informed than the average joe calling in to most programmes.
On Saturday night, Linda McDermott hosted a well-promoted event "Come Dine at Mine", which encouraged listeners to hold simultaneous dinner parties as part of a fundraising mission for Clatterbridge Cancer Centre. Considering it was a one-off, the show was an absolute delight with plenty of guests in the studio, good humour and an entertaining food quiz. The whole programme captured the convivial dinner party style atmosphere perfectly and demonstrated remarkably good planning and preparation.
We left home listening to...
BBC Somerset, Emma Britton (0900-1200)
Now i'm already familiar with the Emma Britton show, often tuning to BBC Bristol or Somerset in advance of the brilliant Steve Yabsley show at midday. There isn't a marked contrast between Bristol's Graham Torrington and Somerset's Emma Britton; Torrington is a traditional laid-back local radio jock (he even does a Saturday night Late Night Love show just to complete the cliche), whilst Britton is a rather parochial, but enthusiastic broadcaster who is able to demonstrate interest in the tedious, compassion to the dramatic and a smile to the foibles of county life. If i'm being totally honest, i was of the opinion that because the differences between Bristol and Somerset were so slight that the rest of the country would follow the same template of gentle, easy-listening and often twee programming.
BBC Hereford & Worcestershire, Andrew Easton (1200-1600)
New Zealander Andrew Easton carries the mammoth four hour afternoon shift on BBC Hereford and Worcestershire. The stretch of the show we listened to felt like a bit of a timewarp to Radio 2 in the 90s with a fairly standard guess the year quiz featuring music and reminiscences of the 1960s. After that, the show continued on in a fairly lighthearted and irreverent manner with good humoured wit and lively presentation. Overall, a well recommended and entertaining show.
Somewhere around Birmingham, we started losing H&W and i did a quick scan up the airwaves to find not the expected BBC Birmingham, but...
BBC Leicester, Jonathon Lampon (1200-1500)
Despite not really being anywhere near Leicester, we came up with the BBC service from the city and decided to stick with it. Lampon's show contains a fairly well balanced current affairs discussion (today concerning standards of language), introduced with a well thought out collection of potential avenues of continuation. The depth of the material varies considerably throughout the show, but Lampon manages to deliver it consistently throughout. Imagine the Jeremy Vine show without the anger and bitterness and you're pretty much on the level of where this show sits. It serves a worthwhile purpose, i found it very informative and interesting.
We lost contact with Leicester as we were approaching the Potteries and after a couple of ILRs, we unsurprisingly came in to reach of...
BBC Stoke, Paula White (The Afternoon Show, 1300-1600)
The first show we had heard which includes a catchphrase ("Hiya Duck"), which is used at the beginning of every message or conversation and becomes somewhat irritating after a while. We know you're a local radio station broadcaster, you don't need to ram it down our throats. To my ears, Paula White doesn't sound like a natural radio host and her delivery is a bit stop-start a lot of the time and she can get a bit whoopy whilst laughing at her own jokes. Her show is very conversational, which might stand a better chance of working if she had somebody else in the studio to bounce off because there are far too many awkward silences. On the whole she is overdoing the "local lass" thing a bit too much and the result feels very contrived.
On to the content of the programme. A lot of it was fairly inane local radio call-in fare (how to get children off to sleep) and weak competitions (one line of a film - name the movie) without a great deal of material appearing to be particularly planned. In contrast to the formatted layout of some of my local programmes, one topic seems to suffice for at least half an hour with minimal effort to build anything else around it. Perhaps listening to Steve Yabsley has left me with high expectations of how much effort people should put in to their programmes.
But anyway, the most disturbing aspect of the show was a short segment at around 1310 where the host followed on from the sleeping children phone-in and was left to read out (apparently almost word for word) some knee-jerk story from a right-wing daily newspaper in the same tone as had been used for the rest of the show. It all felt incredibly judgemental and wrong in the context of the otherwise light and fluffy programme, especially as she immediately snapped back out of it and in to a delightfully unoriginal whinge about a chatty woman on the bus.
On the day we were travelling, Comic Relief was launching all over the country and various comedians and comic actors were giving interviews to practically every outlet of the BBC all over the country. Stoke's guest was Stephen Mangan, who proved that Paula is far more at ease when she has somebody else to bounce off of.
Now if i'm being totally honest, we hadn't fully lost contact with Stoke, but i could feel myself getting irritated by the stilted presentation of Ms White and the erratic nature of the show, so we scanned again and found...
BBC Merseyside, Billy Butler (1400-1700)
I'll admit an interest here, as i've heard several previous Billy Butler shows (including his legendary Scouse quiz spoof Hold Your Plums) and always found him to be an affable and likeable character. BBC Radio Merseyside is a station which very much caters to its audience and feels very much more cosmopolitan than anything else we'd been listening to on the way up. After being subjected to Radio Stoke, Billy Butler's show is remarkably slick and well put together.
More on the Mersey...
Over the rest of the long weekend we listened to Radio Merseyside a lot and found the output at times to be quite challenging. I don't think i've heard radio output with such a high level of genuine interest in the fundamentals of politics and policy outside of the likes of Radio 4 and the contributors to the phone-ins and open forum style shows (particularly 1200-1400) seem far better informed than the average joe calling in to most programmes.
On Saturday night, Linda McDermott hosted a well-promoted event "Come Dine at Mine", which encouraged listeners to hold simultaneous dinner parties as part of a fundraising mission for Clatterbridge Cancer Centre. Considering it was a one-off, the show was an absolute delight with plenty of guests in the studio, good humour and an entertaining food quiz. The whole programme captured the convivial dinner party style atmosphere perfectly and demonstrated remarkably good planning and preparation.
And while we're on the subject...
For some time now i've been listening to the Toby Foster: Bigger at Breakfast podcasts of BBC Radio Sheffield and it seems only fair to add a brief comment on this as i'm doing the other local radio i've been listening to. There was comment passed on the Radio 1 Breakfast Show when the last set of listening figures came out that they struggled for popularity in South Yorkshire and i think this show is the reason why - Toby Foster and his accomplices are delivering a product similar to that of the Radio 1 show with plenty of irreverent chat and comic diversions, yet tailored to the local audience. Its a no-brainer that Foster's show will attract a higher number of local listeners than a national show fronted by a man from the home of the arch rivals of South Ridingites, Leeds.
But what about ILR?
Most of it is crap, which is a shame because it never used to be. Star Bristol has just been dispensed with in favour of "Breeze 107.2", which has been advertised on billboards all over the city by a pair of legs. Quite how a pair of legs is supposed to signify a radio station, i don't know. Breeze effectively takes over the format of the failed Original 106.5, which was owned by the same group. All they have done is swap around the frequencies of the two stations and rebranded them, which is ultimately costly and pointless.
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