NICK EDDY RELENTS

Coco wept

On the back of the new VF there is a Chanel ad that fairly blew my mind:

I understand the innate edginess of a neck tattoo on a glorious, rich ModelLady, I really do. But the Powers That Be need to think about others. While a neck tat that says Float is indeed daring and maybe dreamy to the Reals, it is a pander which exploits the citizenry of a place like D_____, where such flesh adornments are not only the style, they are Mandatory.

Where were YOU while Popsicle invented Ash, Supergrass, et al?

Or where was I, for that matter?

Look, I really don't know Thing One about these Swedes and the causation of their 1992 album Lacquer. Can't even remember where I read about it, and it all happened fairly recently. But it is a stellar little rock LP where the blueprint for good Ash songs is fairly delineated and the singer (there may be more than one) sounds like Gaz Coombes a lot of the time. So, yeah, go find. Their wiki page is in Swedish or some other Norse lingo, so I have no info.

Doesn't matter!

Mashitty!

The concise Marina and the Diamonds

Marina and the Diamonds, who should be bigger than this Lady Gaga person, actually write nice pop songs that will never make it here because they are good songs (see also: Noisettes). Oh, well!

What's nice, though, is that all the thirteen songs (bar one) on their album are between 3:00 - 4:00 in length! Very odd to see on a playlist. No 1:02 breathy "atmosphere" track, no six-minute power ballad in the manner of Bonnie Tyler only fresher for today...just three minute pop songs! With her classy-yet-chick-from-the-Motels diction all over. Good!

This puts me in mind of something that had made me nuts for sixteen years: the way the British press was complicit in putting forth a myth that Oasis wrote "perfect three minute songs." I must have read this, what?, at least five times in the nineties. Well, no, even from the very beginning Oasis were given to bloat and letting all their songs roll on far too long. This Orwellian "give them a big enough lie and they will swallow it" posturing by the UK press is something for which we all must pay and which will continue to make us all suffer.