A few days ago I watched again The Beach, the movie by Danny Boyle from 2000 with Leonardo DiCaprio as a main actor. It is far away from my favorite movie but I still like the landscape because I traveled through Thailand several times during these days and I remember Phi Phi island as a peaceful and great place. In all his movies Boyle had a fantastic taste for the soundtracks. Most of them showing new bands and they got a greater audience. So it was no wonder that Underworld appeared on the soundtrack with 8 Ball that wasn't released on any of their albums before. A trippy beat, reduced guitars and the voices made this song outstanding and worth to be featured in this series.
Update notice: Fucking DMCA prohibits me from providing the songs as a download. That's why I have made available the songs about Youtube, so that everybody can make to itself a picture of my image.
What year with so many heights and depths. I have come back better and better in my occupation. And the better I have managed this, the worse it goes for my wife in her occupation. Not only that she a lot of problems has to do to herself in her position, but there are colleagues whom have worked against her. I do not know how many evenings we have maintained us and looked for solutions. At last the best solution might be that she gives up her job and searches for herself something else. This was also the time in which we have gone away on from ourselves and did not have any more the same aims which we want to pursue. Nevertheless, we have done everything to give ourselves a new perspective and to gain control of our life again. Then something happened what I would not have held for possible. My father got cancer and has passed away after a short time of the suffering peacefully. I would never have thought, how much I would lack him, because he was there fifty years for me and my brothers always. This is why all other things that happened to me made no difference. Anyway - life goes on. More next week, people.
Seems like I turned more and more into electronic music:
LCD Soundsystem - This Is Happening: If only for Dance Yrself Clean
Caribou - Swim: Fantastic record
Four Tet - There Is Love In You: Good like everytime
Warpaint - The Fool: What a great band and what a great record
The Gaslight Anthem - American Slang: Influences of Springsteen, Waits and The Clash made a great record
Arcade Fire - The Suburbs: Another alternative rock that sounds good
Panta Du Prince - Black Noise: Electronic music that I played often since then
And here like the weeks before, some songs from the start of the topical decade:
And again: some movies from this year:
The Kings Speech: Excellent historical drama
The Social Network: A true story how to get a billionaire
Black Swan: Wonderful pictures and a great drama
Shutter Island: Very good novel and a very good movie
Inception: Di Caprio again - what a great story
Soul Kitchen: Fantastic story about how to run a German restaurant
Some headlines again from the rest of the world:
Heavy earthquake in Haiti devastating the capitol Port-au-Prince; more than 300.000 people died // Airplane crash in Smolensk kills the President of Poland Lech Kaczynski // European finance crises starts with the support of Greece // Ethnic riots in Kyrgyzstan // 2010 FIFA World Cup is held in South Africa and was won by Spain against the Netherlands
He has it still - this rat-catcher's voice; though she sounds different, more fragile, taken, but also a little age-wise and more conciliatorily, but not less reproachfully, only less deploring. 16 years after Spirits that reports back of drugs, alcohol and the destiny sieved Heron, finally, again with a new collection from poems and songs, and knows how as to fascinate as at times from winter in America.
The special in this record is above all that he has found a sympathetic musical partner, or in Richard Russell also again better: this has found Heron and has reactivated directly from the prison. Differently than Brian Jackson in the 70s, however, Russell offers a wide spectrum of styles with those he Heron's texts puts under which have all one common denominators: the bandaging of traditional instrumentations with highly topical modern genres like hip-hop and electronics. The fact that here stretching frictional surfaces should prove is clear that this succeeds, however is, also to be ascribed to the aerial and partly fragile arrangements which Russell sketched here thus capably and absolutely freely of currying favour. How he made from Robert Johnson 's classic Me And The Devil an artistic hip-hop, is as astonishing as the quite clear power station loans in Your soul And mine. Blues is celebrated on I'll take Care Of You and Heron's own (and fantastic) New York Is Killing Me and above all to this piece a rhythmically like orchestrated gruff Extravaganza sticks which one has never heard thus. Soonest comparably this is still with blues an explosion, only never overload so and crudely. Heron's gospel song-like song does his remaining around these songs to let get under skin.
And if he proclaims guitar accompanied his lyrics with the title track only from accumulator tables, one also thinks without fail of first (and possibly best) American Recordings album of Johnny Cash. If one of the big old men should walk on such a way for his late work, then Heron. A short, but big and extremely exciting album which connects Old and newly brilliantly. Heron has never taken up bad albums, but I'm New Here counts definitively to his best.
A few days ago my player shuffled on my way to work a song from Jim Carroll about friends of him who died long before their time. Later that day I grabbed out his debut album 'Catholic Boy' from 1980. Long years ago I read his autobiographical book 'The Basketball Diaries' concerning his life as a teenager in New York City's hard drug culture. I was astonished to read what he made trough in his younger years. In his diaries he writes about his life between the ages of twelve and sixteen, detailing his sexual experiences, high school basketball career, and his addiction to heroin, which began when he was 13. There must be a movie about this starring Leonardo Di aprio but I haven't seen it yet. Later he became a member of the factory working with Andy Warhol. Jim Carroll died exactly four years ago on a heart attack. RIP
