I am not a fan of Christmas music, as this countdown from last year may illustrate. But I am a fan of weird mormon “slowcore” types Low. They did a splendid mini-album called Christmas a few years back which melted even my ice-glazed innards.
This year, as if to even things up, they’re coming at the whole Christmas thing from a different angle. There’s nothing explicitly disturbing about “Santa’s Coming Over”, but the foreboding melody and plaintive lyrics, alongside a video of cherubic/sinister kiddies, does a nifty job of boiling the whole Santa thing down to its actually-rather-scary bare bones: an old man breaking into houses and creeping around kiddies’ bedrooms.
Kind of more suited to Halloween than Christmas, when you look at it like that… BE SINISTERED AFTER THE JUMP
If you’ve been passing your cold winter eves the same way as me, by watching ITV’s I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here, you will no doubt have been transfixified by the insight into the songwriting process provided by new best buds David Van Day (ex-Dollar) and Timmy Mallett (ex-Wacaday).
When they’re not engaged in a seemingly endless battle to be crowned THE MOST ATTENTION-SEEKING PRICK ON TELEVISION, the pair have been pooling their ageing brains as dynamite pop due Croc Idol. So far, they’ve come up with this:
Dear dear dear dear dear me. It all seemed such a lark, didn’t it? Some bright spark at Dr Pepper promised to give everyone in the U.S a free can of their delicious beverage if Chinese Democracy saw the light of day in 2008.
Then, when the album was in fact released, Dr Pepper chose to make good on their promise through an online redemption scheme that saw their servers more or less EXPLODE from the demand.
Now Guns N’ Roses’ lawyer has brought the verbal smackdown, labelling the promotion “an unmitigated disaster which defrauded customers”.
My favourite bits?
“Yo, where do I put it at?”
“Yabba dabba do!”
“This smell gooood, what is this again?”
“You using white pepper? Step yo’ game up!”
“I wanna taste yours. I don’t trust mine.”
Check it out over the page.
Orange unsignedAct continues to crush bands’ dreams for our entertainment every weekend, bless its little heart. I spoke to Alex Zane about the show, Burt Reynolds and his approach to to playing Scouting For Girls records.
Hello Alex Zane. In this day and age, do bands really need reality TV exposure and a record deal to be successful?
Well, TV is just a different medium for bands to exploit. Bands like Arctic Monkeys used MySpace to launch their careers, and with MySpace you can be presented with a band as you lie in bed hungover on a Sunday morning. Orange unsignedAct does that as well at the moment.
What acts are you a fan of on Orange UnsignedAct ? I quite like Glass Shark, we’ve played them on the office stereo recently.
Glass Shark are really nice guys and I thought their song was fantastic. They’re out of the competition now though - they had other stuff bubbling under already for them, and acts on the show have to remain completely unsigned. They chose that option rather than to continue with the TV show.
There’s a great guy called Tommy Riley, from Glasgow. He’s a singer-songwriter with a passion onstage you don’t tend to see much nowadays. He’s only about twenty years old but he swallows all the atmosphere in a room and spits it back out. I love Hip Parade as well, they’re a really good rock n’ roll band. Jolly good. Now, Orange is clearly the best mobile phone network in the galaxy.
I’ve heard that too.
If you were to enjoy an Orange Wednesday, who would it be with and what film would you go to see?
If you read Popjustice you’ll no doubt have been following the rise of Frankmusik over the last year or so. If this is the case you might as well move along now, as I am about to tell you literally nothing you don’t already know. Although there is some gratuitous swearing later on, so maybe stick around for that.
If you haven’t heard of Frankmusik, I hereby present you with a menu I have decided to name “The Frankmusik Three-Course Num Nums Liplicker”. After swallowing this lot you will be quite, quite full.
If you know someone who is an ironic/unironic/”oh God I don’t even know if I’m being ironic anymore” David Hasselhoff fan, you might want to bookmark the shit out of universalposter.com. And/or cut said David Hasselhoff fan out of your life like mould from a block of cheese.
But you can’t really do that if said fan is your Nan, can you? What you can do is get a special message wroted onto a poster of (sigh) “The Hoff”. Because that’s what universalposter.com does - it takes messages and prints them digitally “on your poster in handwriting style that accurately mimics the celebrities’ writing style, accompanied by a digital facsimile of their signature.”
See after the jump for some of the lovely poses The Hoff strikes on his posters.
Sad news, power-pop fans - Phantom Planet are to call it a day. Sadder news - as this article illustrates, they’re probably forever going to be referred to as “actor Jason Schwartzman’s former band”.
And if it’s not that, it’ll be as “the Californiaaa” band. At least they’re being remembered at all, but I was shocked to read that Phantom Planet have actually been around for fifteen years. Kind of makes me wonder if they were really trying pre-2003.
Their last show will take place at the Troubadour in L.A, where they played their first gig in 1994. I was always fond of the track “1st Things 1st” from the album Phantom Planet, so rather than “that one from The O.C.”, I’ve posted a live performance of it after the jump.
