Another few days of intense travelling. First to Stockholm, then to Amsterdam. As a result there has been precious little music. In the car back and forth to Holland I looped PJ Harvey's
Stories ... . It's not my favourite disc of hers. Fairly smooth and approachable it misses the raw energy and vampy excess of
To Bring You My Love and the mystery of
Is This Desire. It's not a bad disc. In fact, it's eminently listenable. But I feel there is a lot of potential wasted. Songs are too short to start with. Most of them just over 3 minutes, recycling the same old ABA template, and sometimes boil down to just an AAA crescendo. I would have like PJ to take a little more risk and dig a little deeper.
The Mess We're In, a duet with Thom Yorke which features quite beautiful overlapping vocals, is a case in point. It's starts promising but then stagnates into a repetitive rant. PJ's parlando vocals just sound corny here. Anyway my favourite tracks are
A Place Called Home,
The Whores Hustle and the Hustles Whore,
Kamikaze and
Horses in my Dreams.
A few months ago I've also been tempted in buying Arcade Fire's
The Suburbs, at that time the hype of the moment. It's one of the dumbest things I have heard in a long time. Gee, what a stupid, shallow, overproduced piece of junk. And horribly recorded at that. It's barely listenable on the car audio, let alone on the living room hifi. Quite unbelievable frankly how this ended up as record of the year in many critics' Xmas shortlists. I'll think I'll use it as a coaster.
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