After quite a few years, I've decided to leave my old account (_inourblood ) behind and start anew with one that can better reflect the way I am right now; after all, an unbelievable amount of things have happened in the last three or four years and I have changed in many different ways, been back and forth, learned, banged my head against several walls, changed my path and I tend to believe I've grown. So now, and in some way celebrating my choice for an Arts major, I'm Cyloning on LJ and downloading myself in kleendinsky .

Friends Only Note: I don't like adding people I don't know or with whom I have no connection whatsoever, so if you're adding me for an actual reason, leave a comment and name it. I will probably think it's a good one and add you back, but I don't want to have random people added as friends with whom I don't even know if I share any interests. Still, I will most likely make various public entries, so you'll have a chance to see if we could match and be friends from that. :)

The new Camera Obscura album has leaked and I had forgotten I liked Scottish twee-pop.

It's a nice change after a week of Radiohead overdose and a few days of obsessively catching up with thirty forty years of Kraftwerk.

Meeting people from the internet is the best thing ever.

It is so even more when you think you'll just meet up for a couple of hours, drink a few mates, chat a while and go home, and you end up having dinner, way too many beers, and laughing your arse off with people you met through Last.fm


Good times!

"Everyone on the balcony looks a bit sad... like some bad news has been delivered; are you alright?". We couldn't really know what their faces were really like, since throughout the film we won't see much of the crowd, but Turner might want to revise his own attitude before he comments on his crowd's. I'm not questioning his heart, I believed him when he insisted he was enjoying himself; but the need of saying it is a bit of a let down.

Arctic Monkeys At The Apollo is a film. Well positioned cameras, careful intense lightning -and lightning changes- and proper editing, including a few transition effects and add-ons, make up for a high quality registration of the live show that took place on December 17th, 2007 at the Manchester Apollo. The film is as neat as the band's performance; tidy and sandblasted. After watching it, I'm thoroughly convinced that this was the right band to record this sort of film of, but is this a good thing?

The first time I heard an Arctic Monkeys record, I was not very impressed. The hype they'd generated was quite the turn off for me, but I still managed to make a positive statement about their music before my second try of them proved I could like them. I thought they could totally bring down the house live. Their songs are a perfect opportunity for guitarists to dive to the floor and kick around, for drummers to go wild and vocalists to scream and exagerate articulation. But I was disappointed to hear, after their one performance in my city (which I didn't attend), that they apparently didn't put up that much of a live show. It seemed to me like a big waste that songs with so much potential should be played so neatly. Then again, I wasn't there to witness it, so there's not much I can say about that.

This time, however, I got to take a look at what the band considered a good enough performance to be released as a DVD (which I believe has got to count for something), and got very mixed feelings while watching it. The nine post-its I wrote consist of exclamations of the likes of "HAVE FUN, TURNER!", "MISS A CHORD, DARN IT!" and "Scared, are we?" as a reaction to the first few songs, as annoyment settled that they should sound so precise and calculated, and that Alex Turner wouldn't show much emotion as he sang nor say much in between songs. But, fortunately, the show took a turn and things began to sound (and look) more interesting, and I stopped caring whether or not Turner took off his sweater. I'm not going to say the band rose to match the excitement of what I could see only by glimpses of the crowd's uproar, but as they advanced on the setlist all four of them seemed to loosen up and start enjoying themselves a bit more, while I stopped expecting guitar-swinging and stage-diving.

So as we -the band and I- met in the middle, things began to be more appealing. The songs and the players became alive and however mild the changes to the tunes might have been, they finally made the songs adjust to the situation's mould and feel fitting to the raging crowd, that made a much-awaited and beautiful appearance during When The Sun Goes Down. The band seemed to enjoy playing rare tracks, surely more fresh to the ear and to the hand, and that gave them renewed energy to bring life to band-classic Still Take You Home.

But however powerful they might have gotten, the most enthrancing and intense moment of the whole show was provided by a change of scenery: friend Miles Kane (also Turner's bandmate in The Last Shadow Puppets and member of The Rascals) taking over guitar and Turner switching to keyboard for a rendition of 505 that created an atmosphere that was precisely what I'd been waiting for. It's the kind of mood and moment that could make Arctic Monkeys a band I would completely fall in love with. But I'm only one woman, and many record-buyers and gig-attendees might feel the opposite way.

After these moments of climax, things seemed to cool down a bit, but that's when the device came in handy. Faded images of older tapes recording performances and time outs interrupted the mildly monotonous flow of images as the end of the show grew near, and a final sequence of increased speed over mismatched audio ended the film in the same way it hadstarted. Lovely images display themselves and the registration of that night at the Manchester Apollo is certainly a treat to the eyes, but at times one can't help but wonder how much neateness can a rock n' roll band allow before it becomes dull. For now, Arctic Monkeys still remain interesting, but I fear this time they've flirted enough with the dividing line.

Battlestar Galactica is the best TV show ever made.



Period.

1. Along Came Polly
2. Vantage Point
3. Twilight
4. Part Of The Weekend Never Dies (Music Documentary on Soulwax)
5. Arctic Monkeys At The Apollo (Live Music Registration of Arctic Monkeys concert)
( ... )

 So yeah, Franz Ferdinand finally got a release date for their album and their single Ulysses sounds amazing and it's all very exciting, but I thought "Hey, I'm over that FF fever now, I'll get the record when it comes out here and be happy listening to it", but then, something HUGE happened...



A special edition appeared with OH MY GOD SO MANY PRETTY THINGS!

According to Pitchfork Media, the package includes:

· The CD
· The whole album spread through six 7'' singles (!)
· A dub version of the album (!)
· A DVD documentary + FOUR filmed performances
· A HARDBACK book with lyrics and pictures
· The thingies to put in the wholes of 7''
· AND THAT NIFTY BOX!

IT IS SO SO COOL AND I WANT IT AND IT'LL BE SO EXPENSIVE TO BUY IT AND HAVE IT SHIPPED HERE BUT I DON'T CARE IT'S SO PRETTY!

 I think I'm getting sick; my throat hurt last night and now I'm all cold and think I might be having a cold (!).

Meh, stupid weather being all crazy and making everyone feel like crap. Or maybe not everyone but still...


mon_starling , I'm with you! :(


(Although I love my "sick" moodtheme Moss picture :P)

 I can't sleep.

I think too much so I don't fall asleep.

I really want to sleep. There's nothing to do at 3 am except sleeping.

Stupid insomnia.

(Good thing is it's giving me an excuse to use this pretty moodtheme <3)

 Thanks to paperbinned I now have a custom moodtheme, and on the show that's been driving me crazy with laughter and geekness and cuteness this past week (!): The IT Crowd!

I love it! <3

I'm going to go study now. Yes.

 I will hate myself for doing this but...

ZOMG Gossip Girl is such a catchy awesome show!

I will need to get myself a good bunch of GG icons like right now, but I don't want to get spoiled on the episodes I haven't seen yet! But the one I just saw killed me. I know it's mostly a silly teenager love and sorrow of the rich show, but maybe that's just what I needed right now or they have some sort of magic potion to make things addictive, but I get so enthranced in the plot and fall in and out of love with the characters and gahhhhhh!! This had to come sometime.

( Pret-a-Poor-J )


 

I went to the theatre last night. It'd been so long! I had actually forgotten how much I love going to the theatre, and it's always nice to discover your boyfriend also likes it very much but doesn't go often for no apparent reason, so that you can think to definitely start nagging to go more often and won't only depend on your parents being constantly tired or your friends living far away and being busy grown-ups with jobs and plays (ahem, that's you mon_starling ! :P). That sentence got me a bit lost; anyway.

I went to the theatre last night, with my boyfriend and my parents, to see The Pillowman. For starters, I knew nothing of the play beforehand -actually, I had heard what can barely be called a review by the most terrible, annoying, want-to-shoot-you-right-now entertainments "journalist" in television, which only talked about how Pablo Echarri (Katurian) went from acting in soap operas to acting in the theatre and how he had cut his hair to suit the character best-, and even though there was one actor (Carlos Belloso) who my father adores and who is indeed a very talented performer, I have never particularly liked Echarri and didn't have a set opinion on the other two important members of the cast. I was pleasantly surprised, I must say, because not only was the play's plot immensely intriguing and interesting, combining a bit of a metalinguistic theme concerning stories and their possible emotional effect on readers and writers alike, with what might be said to be a psychological thriller with all four of the main characters very well represented in the script and even studied each -some more than others- in its own depth; but also all four of the leading actors gave very good performances. Indeed, Pablo Echarri surprised me greately and pleasantly, showing he can actually act, and pretty much keep the whole play going, since he's barely ever off stage, and the rest of the cast was also remarkable, especially Belloso's portrayal of Michal, with an amazing control of his body language at all times and never ceasing to add trails to his character's personality resulting in a most convincing and even endearing performance.
The play also had a very interesting set up, consisting of one room which changed props for only one scene, and making a very well thought of use of illumination effects to change the moods and introduce segments of stories in a separate settings by means of elevated stage fragments and video projections.

To sum up, the theatre is great, there's a lot of possibilities I'd love to see further exploited (which have been, only I haven't seen them because I don't go to the theatre as much as I'd like to, and as much as I should) and definitely, The Pillowman is an excellent play, and I've been lucky enough to see it put to action by remarkable actors.
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In my probably short concert-related-life, I'm confident to say I've seen very different acts. Only as far as this year comes, I've seen a lovely and intimate show given by José González, a very powerful performance by My Chemical Romance on a semi-full football field, an amazingly crowded stadium jump, shout and sweat to the (gothic?) metal of Sonata Arctica, many drunk but still quite tame New Yorkers move their heads to Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds and barely react to the magic of St Vincent, a sold-out theatre exhilarated by the impeccable performance of Muse, and a considerable amount of mostly thirty-something couples be enthranced by Joss Stone's voice. Still, mostly in talking to other music fans and comparing experiences, I've come to realise that beyond the genre of music the band plays, there's a very important part of the act of giving a performance, which I'm not sure how to call so I'm going to refer to simply as attitude.
Last night, I was lucky enough to catch a show by probably the band with the most of this attitude out there these days: The Hives. I must admit, I've never been a very big fan of theirs; I've always known their popular songs and did download their albums and listened to them sporadically, but I wouldn't file myself under the definition of a fan. However, the idea of catching their live show attracted me, so I headed to the Obras Stadium on the evening of September 13th, 2008, expecting simply to have a good time. Little did I know that The Hives had much more to offer than just a nice evening; I had read about their cockiness on stage, but it had never occurred to me that it would turn out to be such a magnificent act of verbal masturbation that kept the whole audience the way it's supposed to be when facing themselves with a true rock band: gasping for more of that irresistible orgasm that is the culmination of rock music at its full extent.
Accompanying their precise and powerful playing -even despite quite a few technical problems(*)-, the band was, as strange a choice of words as this might be, charming. Not only did they all (yes, all of them) manage an astonishing freeze in the middle of a song, worthy of a Polaroid of misleading living statues; drummer Christian “Chris Dangerous” Grahn threw about a dozen drum sticks to the crowd, guitarist Nicholaus “Arson” Almqvist incited the audience with his widely open eyes and intense glare, and they all ended up, at the end of the evening, drowned in their own sweat, proving one of the very giving audiences of South America that tonight they had also been receivers.
In a very well spoken Spanish, lead singer "Howlin" Pelle Almqvist constantly encouraged the crowd to rise to their highest, to keep on jumping, to clap their hands, to shout out loud; to decide if indeed, The Hives were the best rock band in the world. The answer, unequivocally, was yes.


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(*) This is something that upset me a bit. One of the opening bands was one of former Soda Stereo drummer Charly Alberti, and even if I didn't like their music, I was very aware that the sound quality was very good (stomped over the previous openers' -Banda de Turistas- volume). Still for the main act, the lead singer's microphone went off in the middle of a song. Huh. Nice set of priorities there. Hopefully I'm wrong and it was a simple and honest mistake, and not the carelessness of someone who as more aware of things while the other band was playing.

Number one, yes. There's probably going to be many of these, seen as I tend to doodle things I end up liking when I get bored at University and I've got a couple of very boring classes I can't miss this semester, so I'll have the chance to draw a lot.

( Scans under cut )

On another note, I'm feeling quite crappy because of this annoying weather and it's not fun. I skipped a class today to come home because of how sick I felt; I'm better now but I'm still not friends with this low-pressure. Rain already!