Tallbird – Rabbit
There will probably come a time when kids stop listening to the music put out by record labels altogether. Heaven knows that time should come sooner or later. After all, generations after generations have been bombarded by enough disposable music that goes bad faster than a fast-food hamburger to make them lose their appetite for it.
Perhaps, the appeal of guitar-driven pop-music lies in how elastic and versatile it is. Anyone can have a crack at it. This is, I suspect, what makes punk and indie particularly appealing. It’s a world where themes and musical ideas can be jumbled up for infinity, with new results revealing themselves.
Tailbird’s Rabbit is like that. It sounds like the kind of record that a giant Smiths fan might find by accident and which would make them rejoice, silently, of course, for days. The music a gentle, dreamy reworking of 90s pop and 80s indie-rock stylings. The delivery is emotional and the ideas are clever. Truly guitar-pop can tell a million stories.
N8 – Whaling City Blues
Maybe it’s a consequence of functional illiteracy, but for the last 10 years, autobiographies, usually paper-thin in content, have become a hot commodity. Most often, they sell like hotcakes as some semi-celebrity spills the beans on the encounters they’ve had at the top.
One particularly interesting niche of this style of books is the autobiography written by rock musicians. Most of them are rubbish. Some of them could well have been reduced to an hour’s worth of podcast, some are written by former members of KISS, and some are genuinely brilliant. After all, if we have one great story to tell, it might be our own. Most of these books filled with stories of heartache, self-destruction, and a consistent move from town to town. It’s the tale of people seemingly avoiding some unavoidable disaster.
A good soundtrack to one of these books might be N8’s Whaling City Blues. With its clever words that seem to come out of the mouth of someone that has had to navigate life’s wildest corners, and a fair bit of wit and experience, this is the bohemian dream made flesh, for better or for worse.
