Wednesday, February 13, 2008

It's all very simple.

In one of those "it's my birthday but you get the presents" kind of moments, I would like to engage in you, the members of my blog republic, in an experiment. I would like you to send your postal address to the following email account:

an.unexpected.gift@gmail.com

In return, I will send you something in the mail. That's it. Call it a gift really.

And yes, it is my birthday so I can make all the bad puns I like.

Thursday, February 07, 2008

Useful advice from Alexander Stainthorpe of South Australia.

"Am I surprised? Yeah, I'm surprised that... I get to go to the next level, because there is a real bias against fictional people. Especially with reality tv, because they want it to be really real, but I can connect, you know. There's some real moments here, even if I'm fictional, you gotta get over that."

(Belated) Australia Day resolution, 2008.


australian_barbeque

two_screws

Build less barbeques.

Current adventures in pop music: "he scratches his beard"... then wonders what the hell is going on?

It's difficult to say whether or not the world needed a cover of The Sugarcubes' song Birthday by The Mars Volta, but we have one nonetheless. Stranger still [that says a lot considering pretty much everything to do with this song is somehow odd], it's somehow popped up as an "exclusive" on amazon.co.uk [admittedly I first stumbled across it via Pitchfork's forckast section but we won't split hairs]. Some digging around has discovered that the track is a bonus on the Japanese edition of their new album The Bedlam in Goliath. Score!

As far as it goes, despite The Mars Volta's leaning toward apocalyptic melodrama with guitars, their version of Birthday is painfully faithful. Cedric Bixler-Zavala isn't Bjork, but he knows this, choosing a series of electronic mumbles for the chorus as opposed to the original's proverbial primal scream. The overall result is strangely alluring, but I'm not really sure if it's any good. A friend of mine described it as "like an underwater elevator nightmare". Even with it's slightly negative slant, that's still the best description of the song I can offer.

The morbidly curious amongst you should proceed here. One thing's for sure; no matter how horrible you think it might be, it beats 30 Seconds To Mars' version of Bjork's Hunter by a long shot.

I know that reads like a cliffhanger, and you're going to want to know more, but trust me, just leave it alone.