Foreword: I’ve been out of education for so long that I think I’ve forgotten how to spell and those tricky little buggers like full stops and that so bear (bare? blurgh…) with me.
Well… I guess I sort of have to admit that I started writing this post as a reaction to the BBC’s Sound of 2011 longlist announcement, which was whenever that happened, most of the days have blended into one so I’m not too hot with months and weeks anymore which is equal parts liberating and cripplingly impractical for all of its romantic attraction. Most of the trouble is that I now live here and get paid this to do this, and clearly have been spending the rest of my time learning how to abuse wordpress to waste your time in mildly-amusing, vaguely off topic wanderings.
Speaking of abusing wordpress, if that wasn’t a satisfactory excuse then let me go for the sympathy vote – as always, always happens whenever I set foot outside of a trusty internet connection, wordpress detrousered itself and waved through a hacker of a moral-less, talentless capitalist from Slough (fair enough, he’s probably depressed). He (and we’re assuming it’s a he for stereotypical-villain convenience) thought that it would be a bright idea to trick people looking for new music on a web site into giving said music web-site their credit card details. If depressed Slough resident is reading: you could probably hack this site hundreds of times, but that is never going to work seeing as the success of music blogs is based on the fact that you can get music for free, so that plan is pretty fatally flawed from the start… Cheer up and get a job, or at least steal from the government instead of the general public. Is there no integrity left in thievery?
Anyway… Just to direct us slightly towards what this post was intending to say; yesterday the BBC shocked all in the world of music-dom by announcing the Brit-schooled woman with past chart success as a writer, and present chart success with her own song (which, as far as I can tell, is only popular because Stephen Fry made it so via twitter) as the “Sound of 2011”. Call me cynical, because I am, but… Becky who is 10 and from Milton Keynes and loves X Factor and Zac Efron could have done that for them. This gave me an opportunity to pretend that I had been waiting for the announcement to unleash my own list upon the world, but I think that that dishonesty would probably put me on a level with my friend from Slough, so, instead, have it for what it is; here is a list of artists, all of whom I love, some of whom I think are going to sell some records to Becky next year, and all of whom are well worth spending 3 minutes working out whether or not you like them. You don’t even have to put your card details in, trust me, it’s a brilliant deal.
As a rule; free things are always, constantly and without exceptions absolutely depressing. By definition, they’re usually designed to make you buy other things which, obviously, is detestably sneaky and therefore worthy of hate. They’re almost by some unwritten rule of thriftiness underwhelming and weak, like that Chemical Brothers “album” of remixes by drugged up bedroom hermits that the Sunday Times seems to give away every week, and that watered-down free shot of beer brewed solely to force you to feel guilty about not buying an entire bottle. In fact, the only free thing that I’ve received recently that packed a punch was, literally, a punch in the face from a terrifyingly furious chav for trying to protect my idiotic friend who, quite predictably, had made some sort of perhaps unnecessary comment about said chav’s mother. I preferred it to the shot of beer, anyway.
I’ll have to admit at this point that I am actually lying. The term “without exceptions” above was probably misleading. There is an exception. Now, I think you probably know where this is heading. Except I’m not going to lead this into an anticlimax by giving you away a free impotent remix of a fey, untalented indie band who’s manager happens to be an old friend of mine. Downloading music for free, legally, is no longer new or exciting. Thousands of artists are struggling to grab your attention right now, each one trying to convince you to steal their music with their consent like some sort of musical self-flagellation that has become necessary to build a following of interneted music geeks, but I can barely remember the last time that a free EP was worth the listening time alone, let alone two enormous paragraphs of frankly irrelevant pre-amble.
London’s rising producer of the minute Entrepreneurs has definitely changed those perceptions. Of course we’d seen the name flung across all of the right places, and recently come across him again in the guise of FOE’s producer, but not once did we consider that it was possible he’d release an EP of ball-swallowingly terrifying industrial pop that, quite simply, is the most original, breathless and focussed EP we’ve heard all year. Somehow, it manages to be both as accessible as Lady Gaga pummelling her record label execs to death with the heel of her shoe and weirder than, well, Lady Gaga. For that feat alone you are sort of obliged to download the EP. And if you don’t agree with us, well, you can have your money back; because this is 100% guaranteed to be better than a punch in the face, but hit you just as hard.
RSS
Newsletter
Twitter
NetworkedBlogs
