#bihl

St.Andrews Is Ours Again!

we can all agree that being a Birmingham City fan is testing, pretty much everything that can happen to a football club has pretty much happened to  us!

Promotions, Relegations, Cup Finals, Pen shoot-outs, Last day drama’s, money troubles, criminal owners and so much more!

Having seen all these things happen to our club its almost forgiveable to be flippant enough to say that nothing can surprise…

le nouvel article à été publiée http://www.franceorchestre.fr/blog/2014/11/agnes-bihl-et-grand-corps-malade-en-duo/

Agnès Bihl et Grand Corps Malade en duo.

WJHU's DRUNK ROCK presents: DRUNK ROCK "WHITE LIGHT/WHITE DOG", which is when emily gets her ass around to reviewing something that's still sort of current, as opposed to ancient shit that nobody cares about except when they're loaded. Enjoy.

Vampire Weekend's Modern Vampires of the City

Lyrically, Ezra Koenig is at his best when he’s judging people. This album has some of that, and it doesn’t disappoint when it appears (“And punks who would laugh when they saw us together/ but they didn’t know how to dress for the weather”), but for the most part, it’s surprisingly absent.  What we get instead is a whole lot of existential soul-searching and, relatedly, sort of a creeping feeling that maybe—just maybe—Ezra got his heart broken sometime between Contra and now. It’s sort of like finding out one of the mascots at Disney World is actually an 85-year-old alcoholic or discovering that your favorite baseball MVP used uppers or bennies or whatever it is that people get upset about (I don’t watch sports). In past albums, he’s given the impression he spends most of his time either avoiding women or accusing them of being Nicaraguan guerillas…That’s the Ezra we know and love. Now we get the sort-of-regretful “Everlasting Arms”, the sort-of-fed-up “Hannah Hunt”, the unconvincingly-named “Worship You”.  I don’t know about you, but even if the songs themselves are sort of endearing and still-catchy, I’d prefer to continue believing that Ezra is some kind of human experiment to create a living, breathing human based on Evelyn Waugh characters, engineered by the Ivy League. Tell me more about your favorite seersucker bowtie, Ezra! Or where in the city to pick up some deadstock 1900s throw pillows. Everybody I know just goes and listens to The National when they’re having real feelings, anyway.

  But in terms of Vampire Weekend’s other trademark moves, Modern Vampires of the City is pretty much in line with the band’s preceding albums.  You get all the preppy-chic name-drops you’d expect (Kennedys; Tarrytown and Rye), plus a lot of insanely obscure other references that are (presumably) meant to show you just how much of life you’ll just never understand because you didn’t go to Columbia. The Paul Simon influence is still very much alive and kicking, with some fun bongo accents, but so, too (unfortunately) is the predilection for auto-tune that VW seems to synonymize with “progress”. The digitized aspects of the album are definitely dialed up—single “Diane Young” is a good example of what I mean, even if it isn’t a good example of a song.

  One of my favorite moments comes after one of the album’s two weird soliloquys—in the unfortunately-named “Finger Back”. “I don’t wanna live like this, but I don’t wanna die” recalls the delicious hooks (maybe something from “Walcott”?) of earlier albums. Considering that the rest of the song is a total mess, I’d say this is important. For reasons. I do love the part in the spoken-word bit about “averting her eyes to the laminated poster of the dome of the rock”, because hello, that’s every Falafel shop on planet earth in one sentence, right there.

  The most interesting song to talk about on the album has got to be “Step”, which I will address in typical Drunk Rock fashion by not talking about it.

  My least favorite song on the album is the penultimate “Hudson”, because it’s so incredibly dirgey—which, granted, could be part of the point considering the “wrap me in the flag” reference to military burials, but this is just one of those situations where being clever doesn’t make for good music—a place that, I sincerely hope, Vampire Weekend doesn’t fall into later on. Talking about this song with sometimes-contributor, always-commenter Richard, I was promptly informed that I am dead wrong and “Hudson” is actually the best song on the album. I credit this (mistaken) opinion with the fact that our good buddy has been down with the flu recently and probably was thus incapable of enjoying any music paced quicker than whale calls. IMO, the best track is the worst named, “Everlasting Arms”.  As usual, Richard and I are in diametric opposition.

  HOWEVER. I still give this album a solid rating—it’s a little more “down” than I like my VW to be, considering I still use “White Sky” as coffee substitute in the morning, but I’m stamping Modern Vampires of the City with “Good But Not Quite As Good As Contra”, a rating that I’m coming to find that absolutely nobody understands because I’m apparently the only person on planet earth who enjoyed Contra more than Self-Titled. Whatever.

  Final thoughts: We’ve all already independently acknowledged how weird it is to include the word “Vampires” in the album title, right? So we don’t have to talk about it? Okay, great. Second: as an avid Vampire Weekender, I’m also realizing how many times you can listen to something and still think that RapGenius’ lyricists were listening to an entirely different song. I wish that I, too, were paid to make up inane shit about popular music and embed Talking Heads videos and reaction gifs into everything…but alas, I’m just doing this for free.

Drinking game: Drink every time a religious reference is made over the course of this album. Feel free to stretch non-religious lyrics as far as you like to make them religious (that’s what the analysts at RapGenius are already doing, anyway). Anyone still alive when the album is over is now the new head of your Vampire Weekend suicide cult.

I originally thought the chorus was saying “We workshopped you”, which I thought was a) more interesting, b) more prep-school-plight-y, and c) more hilarious in conjunction with the melodramatic line “Who will guide us through the end?” that follows it. It reminded me of how class generally ran when we were studying The Catcher in the Rye back in high school. Back then it was always very clear who among us would even be capable of guiding us through the end, and it was always that one pretentious Republican asshole with the snapback. As a graduating English major, I can tell you that these things don’t really change. That guy probably has a retainer now with RapGenius.

Which, coincidentally (?) is where I’m from. So either Ezra is trying to reach me through his music, or….? Perhaps relevantly, it’s been pointed out to me on several occasions how short a drop it is from appreciating Ezra Koenig in the way I currently do to actually stalking him*. I maintain that I teeter endearingly on the edge of that chasm, but…some people are just mean.

*Footnote-in-footnote: In a recent GQ spread, Ezra wore a chambray necktie by New York menswear label Ernest Alexander (where I used to work) which was (presumably) a sample and thus I (presumably) at some point touched. This brings my count of enchanted objects to one. It’s also somewhat amusing to me that that’s the sort of thing GQ assumes Ezra Koenig should wear, because up until now I’ve never known what the fuck he was talking about when he referenced clothing in his lyrics (sweaters on the ocean floor? Is that an allegory?) and obviously I know what Ernest Alexander is. Moral of the story: I forget.

This is sort of unfair to say, actually, considering that most of my complaint with the album in general is that it’s not very peppy, and I’d probably be pretty happy with an album of 12 “Diane Young”s. The wordplay, too, is sort of endearing, if a little on-the-nose.