The Null Device
2003/6/16
365 Days gives you a different piece of audio bulldada each day, in convenient MP3 format. This includes gems like "Religion for Retarded", a 1970s-vintage guide to picking up girls in clothes shops, a found piece of dada titled Leper in a Tumbledryer, Louis Farrakhan singing a calypso song about a sex change operation and Elvis Casio (if there ever are two words that, when combined, promise endless ironic kitsch, they would be "Elvis" and "Casio"), as well as numerous thrift-store finds, religious recordings, vintage ads and miscellaneous bits of weird audio. Not to mention some quite doovy incidental artwork.
Tonight, I followed BeTh's advice and went to see The Brunettes, a New Zealand indie-pop band who were playing at the Rob Roy. They were pretty good, playing a sort of '60s-retro bubble-gum pop, and doing it very well. Lots of jangly guitars and bongos and xylophones and doo-wop/shoobie-doobie-doo vocals and handclaps and harmony vocals and vintage keyboards (they had a Nord Electro on stage), and playing very tightly. They sounded somewhere between Spearmint and Birdie, and with a definite Phil Spector influence too.
The Smallgoods were also good, in a power-pop sort of vein. I didn't hang around to see Architecture In Helsinki, though, having other things to do.