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Ah, holiday time, the time when you finally have some time on your hand. Time to hang around at beaches ... and to read some nice books. This time, I had four books with me, but found just enough time to finish two of them -- there was also swimming and sun bathing to do, mind you.

The first one, "The bed room secrets of the master chefs" by Irvine Welsh is a novel constructed around one interesting idea: what if you could transfer all your personal disasters over to the one person you're hating the most? Although it would be equally valid to say that the novel is constructed around the question what damages permanent alcohol abuse can do to your body, but something along this line is probably the connecting issue of Welsh's books anyway. What I particular liked about this book is the way in which Welsh describes the figures to encounter in British (or make that Scottish) pubs: judging from the few times I've been to a pub in the UK it's easy to take the picture Welsh is painting for real. A note of warning: if you don't like "explicit content" this is not a book to your likening and if you don't happen to be a native speaker (I'm German) this is not the easiest book to pick up. Funny and very recommended if you like pub novels.

The second book I've read is "Gangleader for a day" by Sudhir Venkatesh, subtitle "A rogue sociologist crosses the line". It's an autobiography and a fascinating one. Sudhir Venkatesh wanted to find out more about urban poverty in Chigaco and got to take a very close look into the ghettos of modern America. He befriends a gang leader in Chigaco and learns about how the people in the poor projects manage their lives. Although his writing is a little dry, the characters and stories are fascinating. It's of course a very particular look at american society, one which teaches you respect for the poor, but still one which doesn't increase my respect for the american society and its politicians as a whole. Well worth a read.

While the doors at plattentests.de are still open for voting on the best music of 2007, I'm going to be away for the rest of the year, so I'm going to post my favourites now.

Best records of 2007:

Just as with their first albums, "Towards the bright light" and "The back room", it's hard to ignore the impulse to compare Interpols new record "Our love to admire" to the new album "An end has a start" by The Editors. While I did reviews of the first two albums for plattentests.de (here and here), I haven't reviewed the new ones there, so I'm gonna take a step at an informed comparison here, generalizing a little and also taking into account the slew of other bands that people tend to ignore.

Auch dieses Jahr findet bei plattentests.de der Jahrespoll der besten Alben, Songs, etc. statt.
Und wie jedes Jahr gibt es auch wieder fette Pakete mit CDs zu gewinnen. Alles weitere findet ihr dann dort.

Last week I went to see "Broken Social Scene present Kevin Drew's 'Spirit If ...'" playing in Heidelberg. I hadn't written about it earlier because the concert wasn't very exciting. The reason I do so now is that, like most concert I visit, it made me listen more closely to the records of the band. I also bought "Spirit If ..." at the concert, right before the start. Afterwards, I was afraid to have made a classic mistake: generalize from previously nice records to a new one and buy it without a first try, and possibly wasting time, money and emotions.

Where was I? Ah, yes, the reason why I'm writing this entry now: the concert of last week was the first in a very long time in which the concert wasn't up to match the records at all. In particular, I thought that the reduced amount of band members playing and especially Kevin Drews ambitions might be responsible for the uninspired concert, as I left with the impression that Kevin was a little to self-loving and maybe even a little jealous when Branden Canning played and sung two songs that got a lot of applause. But after having listened to "Spirit If ..." now several times, I must conclude that it probably was mainly due to the reduced possibilities of only playing with six instead of the usual ump-teen players. And btw: adding volume doesn't really help -- too often I had to put on my ear plugs which only results in even more reduced distinguished tunes.

The Tender Bar is a memoir written by JR Moehringer -- and one of the books I've read during my holidays. It's really outstanding, both in the many funny anecdotes it tells, all of which are centered around the bar which was basically the authors' replacement for his dad, as well as for the really joyful writing style. I only wish most blog authors, myself included, could achieve a similar ability to write so inspiring and refreshing simply by going to our favorite bar, too.

Well, I'm sure Isaac Brock wasn't too happy about his injury. Yesterday I heard that because of his injury the Modest Mouse concert in Frankfurt in June had to be cancelled, which would have taken place during my holiday. Instead, the concert now took place yesterday at the Batschkapp, and I was even able to get a card via eBay. Yes! The concert went quite well, although the Batschkapp was completely sold out. The warm-up band was pretty bad, but Modest Mouse hit the roof, although they were aiming for ... you know. What I learned during the show was that I like the songs from "Good news ..." more than the ones from "We were dead ...". This is of course an over-generalization, e.g. "Dashboard" is certainly among the best songs of MM, but overall the songs from "Good news ..." have more variation and also more life in them. But, hey, I felt almost like the protagnoist from How soon is never?, seeing Johnny Marr. Now I only have to find out from which LP that song is that they played after "Float on". Update: Some good soul from the forum on plattentests.de said it was "Tiny cities made of ashes" from "The Moon& Antarctica" and indeed, I recognized it was. However, played live, it sounded quite differently, much more powerful. And something else I forgot to mention: after the Trail of Dead in 2005, this was the second concert which featured two drummers and just as with ToD, this had a terrific effect on the sound.

Well, this post was due since quite some time now, so I'll stop babbling and go for the latest additions to my CD archive (yes, I'm an old fashioned user of those tiny discs).

First of all, I did a review of The Mission "God is a bullet", currently to be found at plattentests.de. It's nice in it's old fashioned guitar-oriented wave, but also not to convincing. Perhaps I've just become too bored with this old stuff. (5)

The Queers new album "Munki brain" also landed on my shelf for a review, but at the time there were to many better other records. We're also not exactly a punk store, so that explains the omission. The record is what you would expect from a number umpteeemth album, and I'm sure every surf punk is going to have a great time with it. Me, I'm not a surf punk, and these days only rarely a listener to punk. (5)

The nicest addition as of late is from Modest Mouse with "We were dead before the ship even sank". It provides so much niceness and comfort that you'll feel as floating around, only to trash you to the ground a mere split second later. Any fan of indie rock will probably know that legendary Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr has become a member of the band, which hasn't exactly hurt the sound. The compactness of the songs is sometimes just stunning and mostly brillantly instrumented. I do have some complaints about the drums though, but nethertheless a fantastic record. (9)

I have my share of problems with The Arcade Fire and "Neon bile" is no exception. There are a lot of good tunes on the album, but sometimes it's just too pathetic. (6)

I'm more and more bored by indie dance pop, like e.g. made by Maximo Park, whose new album I've only dipped into but refrained from buying. But I couldn't resist to buy "Ten new messages" by The Rakes for no particular good reason. Indie dance pop, all the same, though sometimes a little bit rougher, i.e. more like The Dogs. (6)

Finally, there is "Myth takes" by !!!: Just like their last record, this is dance music made for the indie discos or maybe just the other way round. Again, there are some fantastic songs on it (Heart of hearts, for instance) but then again, I may be just too old to learn to dance to this disco sound. (7)

In the category "Yesterday", I finally have "13 Songs" by Fugazi, so I can now assign a name to those songs I knew it would know. Brilliant punk rock and a must buy for anybody. (9)

No, I didn't stop listening to music, I just forgot blogging about it. But, hey, I remembered today.

The readers's poll on plattentests.de is over. "Good evening, Germany. And here are the results of the German (readers) jury." "Sorry, could you repeat that?" "Yes, here are the results of the German (editorial staff) jury." "Thank you, Germany!"

Here's what I voted:

Looking for a present, I recently stumbled upon the book "How soon is never?" by Marc Spitz. In case you liked the band The Smiths some twenty years ago ... No. Let me try to put it otherwise. Around 1986 there was no one listening to the Smiths, you would have been hating or loving them. So, if you happened to love the Smiths, "How soon is never?" is interesting as it tells the story of some ex-Smiths-fan-become-rock-journalist's life. If you like to check out what your life might have been like in case it had not provided to get over the Smiths, that is. Or perhaps you know that already.

Anyway. Naturally reading the book led me to dig out my old CDs (I own only "Louder than bombs" on vinyl. It was the first Smiths album I bought - in 1987, I think - , although that doesn't really explain it, as I think that I already owned my CD player, which btw. is still the same today). It's true what Marc writes, also in 2007 that music is still worth listening to. Similarly for my favourite other band of that time, the The Woodentops -- their live album from 1987, "Live Hypnobeat Live" is still unbelievable wrt. its intensity -- and speed, of course. I did some web searching and discovered that they seem to have played some concerts again, last year, surprisingly. If they were to play in Germany again (I saw them in 1987 in Oberhausen), I would probably travel quite some distance. There is even a new website (Woodentops portal) on which one can download MP3s of old material, including raw live material.

Yesterday, I voted for Tool as the best live band, although I hadn't seen them yet, as the concert was tonight. Well, they didn't let me down, they easily did win the price as the best live band this year [1]. The concert hall, Mannheim's Maimarkthalle, was a particular disappointment. Or in fact it wasn't, it was just the horrible surrounding I've expected it to be.

The warm-up band, Mastodon, was also a nightmare. Usually, I don't care about bad warm-up bands, but this time the sound was so loud you couldn't ignore them. The loudness was really a problem. Sometimes I felt it was just too loud although I brought and used a pack of ear protectors. Apart from that, Tool were great, especially the light show was the best what I've seen so far.

[1] It was only the fourth concert for me this year. Tomte has been great, Til Brönner (my first Jazz concert ever) was very nice, too, and The Horror The Horror, this years' best newcomer in my opinion, played a nice concert, too (although they had to fight a rather tiny location, Freiburg's Jos Fritz cafe and its ridiculous time table). But Tool was way more exciting.

Jahrespoll auf plattentests.de. Lauft los und versucht Euch ein Paket CDs zu sichern.

After about sechs years of XMMS usage, I think I'm finally done with it. Playlist handling is a major pain. And I usually just shuffle my way through my collection. But don't even try to find a song in that long, long way down south ... sorry, down the playlist.

I've tried Rhythmbox, but as it is to closely bound to Gnome (and gstreamer, in particular) it doesn't work for me (I'm using WindowMaker without Gnome on my workstation at home). And no, I don't have any KDE libraries installed and yes, I like it that way -- although I've heard quite a lot good things about amarok.

Dear Lazyweb, please what kind of audio player might fit my needs? I just need a little more functionality than XMMS. Selection by album, artist and/or genre would be nice.

Wow, it's been quite some time since my last records review. Not too bad, there's not that much new stuff on my desk. I'll give a quick tour.