Update on music...
Thought I'd do a quick update on what I now think of those albums I bought a couple of weeks on ...
Athlete - Tourist
Still utterly great, every track has something which marks it out and makes an album that's a lot better than pretty much everything else I've heard recently. Only down point I find is 'Modern Mafia' which does go down as definite 'filler' in my book, although to leave it out might have unbalanced the track running order...
KT Tunstall - Eye to the telescope
Again, almost every track is fresh and original. Her voice has got great depth and colour on it and listening back on it a couple of times more on decent headphones realises some additional production tweaks which generally impress. Great happy 'chill out' acoustic folk rock stuff.
Led Zeppelin - Physical Grafitti
OK, so a couple of tracks are just plain
weird, and it doesn't really seem to quite work as well as a whole album as a traditional 'prog-rock', but anyway it does have some real gems - including that 'Kashmir' track, which Matt Damon quoted in Oceans 12!
Soulwax - Much against everyone's advice
As mentioned before, at least a couple of wonderful tracks, but some of the quieter ones have now grown on me too. Unfortunately though it doesn't come close to really being the sum of it's parts.
The Who - The Ultimate Collection
Doesn't really impress that much, it might be the "Ultimate Collection" because all of the songs, but it's not an album and I just feel at bit disappointed - expecting all loud crashing guitars, but it instead generally sounds a lot more 'weedy' in most songs. To be fair, I probably need to listen to the entire thing a few more times, but the problem ends up being that we have almost 30-40 songs and finding the gold in the gravel isn't as easy as it perhaps should be.
Thirteen Senses - The Invitation
It's grown a bit more on me, but still it has nothing which really pulls it out of the current "pretty average soft-rock" group of bands and it just doesn't stand there shouting anything but "I'm an average album!!!"
Impromptu Excursions
Phew! What a day. Started out fairly late actually, after yesterday's excitements - we just about made it over to our local Benjy's as mentioned before by about 1pm. Then wandered over to church to find that actually I was very much in demand to perform miracles with a six-person drama group who all wanted to be heard and who kept swapping microphones! (admittedly, I did tell them to do it half of the time).
Anyway, the mixing went satisfactorily - it was initially a bit hard to fill a mix with just one keyboard, a bass and some drums - especially when the keyboard player does love his 'hammond organ' sound! But then the Electric Guitarist turned up (the amazing Bob) and that made everything sound nice. Packup went OK afterwards as well, although there seemed to be more people sitting around chatting and waiting for us than actually helping clear up, sheesh....what did they think it was, Church?!! ;-)
We got packed up and then someone said "Nandos, anyone?" so we did the run with the van to take everything back to our storerooms (the church doesn't own it's own venue, so
everything has to be set up and packed away every week) and then over to Nandos.
One medium 1/2 chicken and chips later, someone said "Cinema, anyone?" so we all piled off to see 'Oceans 12' - which isn't anywhere near the same league as Oceans 11, and has a plot through which you could drive a fleet of buses - but still a reasonably entertaining yarn, and all in
the best possible taste.
Anyway, hence why I'm so late home - bath and bed calls. cya.
Student Sunday!
Had a fun time yesterday round at Wessy's making invites for his wedding (in May, must remember to keep the date free!) and getting my hair cut with my
new clippers, hmmm... a little bit shorter than normal perhaps, but that generally means I just need to keep my chin a bit smoother for a while - to avoid looking 'upside down'!
Only got back fairly late last night so now I'm just waking up on a Sunday err... afternoon, working out what's real and what's one of those annoying dreams where you dream you've just got up and got dressed then realise 'no, I'm still in bed...'. Eventually a good cup of tea tends to be the deciding factor in actually forcing myself out of bed and getting dressed and on with the day.
So here we are, off to
Benjys for an all day breakfast then straight over to
church to prepare for the 5pm service - which, as I'm generally providing most of the technical support, mixing, plugging things in, and trying to keep the band and everyone else happy from a Sound/Video point of view I need to be over there a good couple of hours early... Especially as it's a 'student service' which generally means that
anything can and probably will happen.
Working with the stars.
Strange place Hammersmith, and Barnes for that matter too. Where else in London could you regularly find yourself in a mildly delapidated looking Argos store in a mile long queue next to none other than authentic celebraties such as newsreader extrordinaiire
Moira Stewart (as I did earlier today)?
Or where can you wander out of Hammersmith tube only to almost bump into GLA member and former Lib-Dem candidate for 'Mayor of London'
Susan Kramer, or even wait to pay for your lunch at Tescos with Chelsea's
Eider Gudjohnson or even
Tim Henman?
More to the point, should I really wonder so much whether Moira got herself a pack of video tapes or a desk-lamp? Is it just another form of the same 'connection' with the random people that we see on TV and websites that sells several thousand 'celebrity gossip' magazines every week - do these 'minor celebs' get used to it after a while, or what
is the acceptable protocol?!
Or even just to expand the question to our Christian brothers and sisters in the media, when you spot a member of
Delirious, or the pastor of your 'mega-church' or some other 'celebrity' in the Christian world is there an unwritten code of conduct?! Or should I just keep sticking to the '
subtle nod of recognition and general good wishes' that I've been practicing?
Holiday Music
Went shopping just before the skiing trip and spent almost £50 on CDs! Well, at least I had some music for the trip but I probably would have been thanked more by my wallet for buying online (I like
amazon,
play and
cd-wow - with no real faithfulness to any one of them) ... but - anyway, I listened to a few of them - and my verdicts follow:
Athlete - Tourist
Actually, I didn't get this in the shop as it wasn't out until the monday following - but I've now got it on order from cd-wow. However for the holiday, I picked up a 32kbs playback of the whole album from
XFM's listening post which was enough to push me over the edge into the 'saturation listening' to any album like this one - which grows on you quickly and then starts to reward you with noticing the extra little blippy bits they like to put in.
Every track has something about it, either a sing-along-chorus or a wide string soundscape, deservedly a number one album already - Just get it, it's good!!
KT Tunstall - Eye to the telescope
First heard her on the repeat of
'Jools', after Sam (my little brother) was raving after seeing her on the initial run - and mostly because she was playing with an
Akai Headrush tape-loop pedal! Then had a listen to the tracks of
her website and finally got the CD.
Mostly semi-acoustic 'girl-with-guitar' country/blues/rock stuff (imagine Norah Jones fronting for Gomez and then getting a bit of attitude to go with it), but with some added fantastic little production twists and musical surprises. Definitely Top-10 worthy, and as there arn't really any filler tracks - it's good stuff.
Led Zeppelin - Physical Grafitti
Actually, Joy (my sister) gave me this for Christmas. And thought I'd better take it with me. As you'd expect, it's prety classic mid-70s stuff... definitely
prog-rock - which I
think I like!
Soulwax - Much against everyone's advice
Actually an album I've wanted to hear for a while - it's got at least three killer tracks, in the title track, 'Overweight Karate Kid' and 'Too Many DJs' (one of my all-time personal favourite tracks). But apart from that, it's a collection well produced tracks, but without any real cohesion and one two many fillers and balladesque bits of whining. Probably worth getting if it's ever on 'special'.
The Who - The Ultimate Collection
Nuff said, you need a bit of 'Who' in your CD collection and this looks like it has all the hits
Thirteen Senses - The Invitation
Bought this on impulse after hearing 'Thru the glass' on the radio, but it didn't really grow on me. Jury is out on this one - it's either weak wannabie Embrace/Keane/Coldplay or it's actually quite good and I just havn't given it a chance - so I'll reserve judgement on this one. But yes - apart from the mentioned track, I didn't hear anything yet to convince me it's any good...
Das Photo du Ski
OK, the photos are now all up on
my photo site - but here's one to wet your appetite:
That particular shot was taken from the top of the 'Glacier De La Chiaupe' in the
La Plagne ski area, which we skiied over to on Friday. Most of the week before that had been spent in the areas of
Les Arcs and
Peisey Vallandry making up an area of skiing which was really pretty impressive in it's magnitude. The only annoying thing being that as lifts generally started closing at about half-four in the afternoon there was a certain limit on how far you could get in a day.
Our
chalet was in La Villaret, which was a little village which seemed pretty dominated by skiers - at least I didn't notice that many people who looked like locals! On the other hand, we only really saw the chalet in the mornings and the evenings, pretty much all of the rest of the time was spent up the mountain skiing or eating out. The guys running the chalet were great, especially when you consider the constant production line of cakes and 3-course haute-cuisine meals in the evening. They also were generally quite willing to offer guests a lift down to the 'lobster pots' (the antiquated, but functional cage-lift up from La Villaret/Peisey into Plan-Peisey where the ski lifts started...)
Actually, that was the biggest thing I noticed, having only been once before (to
Bettmeralp) I wasn't really used to not being able to stumble out of my door at pretty much any hour of the day and have a chair-lift ready and waiting to take me up to the pristine slopes. On the other hand, the range and quality of runs at Les Arcs seriously dwarfed it's swiss cousin - albeit with the occasional point where someone had just forgotten to put any piste markers in!
It was also brilliant to get to know a new group of guys from church, and having Brad and Emtia around to help me interpret the complicated piste markings was invaluable. All in all, I think everyone enjoyed themselves - although it was fairly clear that you really needed to be able to ski well in order to get the most out of the region: public-transport and runs sometimes not quite linking up - so that the non-skiiers and those who could do
only snowplough in our group ended up very limited in the runs they could gain access to.
On my part, it was also really useful to have some ski lessons to try and actually get proficient at skiing - to the point at which I wasn't too scared when the piste got a bit icy later in the week, and was able to take on a few red-runs! (which - to be fair - in P-V were often easier than the blues!). A couple of lessons from the
English ski school out there made all the difference...
Anyway, I could go on and on - about how I somehow contrived to lose at Trivial Pursuit and Pictionary - and about the Pictionary rematch that we stole at the death with some inspired visual guesswork, or about the amount of alcohol consumed was possibly a little bit too much for us not to have a
"not an official Every Nation Church activity" on the flyers next time - but I think I'd probably either bore you, or never get to go home today - or (more likely) just get no work done at all today. So I'll leave it there...
I came, I skiied, I conked out
I'm back, it was fantabulous, we had one day with a little snow and then bright blue skies the rest of the time. More tommorrow (with pictures) once I've woken up!
