the long blondes

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simon silverdollar

Guest
just heard these. what total shit. just goes to show how far having pretty and well dressed boys and girls in yr band can get you...
sounds like a 16 year old high school band circa 1996. if this is the future of uk guitar music then it's in deep, deep, trouble.
the journalists hyping them should be ashamed of themselves.

(second rant from me in the space of a few hours!- i'm flu'd up at the moment, so i'm in a well bad mood...)
 

dominic

Beast of Burden
i disagree

or rather, at least i can see their appeal

definitely the most appealing of the sheffield "retro" bands

and "pretty and well-dressed boys and girls" should be a baseline expectation for any band!!!

HOWEVER, i think that's a lot better stuff out there than the long blondes, even w/in the "retro" format
 
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simon silverdollar

Guest
i was just astonished by how half-arsed they sound. it all sounds so...limp. and the song writing i think is pretty dire: real 'punky-pop for beginners' stuff to these ears. go to any night that focusses on bands that are just starting out and there's loads of bands that sound just like them.

and the bits where they try to go a bit ska are dismal. (and, again, very like what a group of sixth formers would have come out with in the mid to late 90s).

i'm amazed that comparisons to Pulp are so often brought up in the press. if i was jarvis cocker i'd be quite insulted.
 

Raw Patrick

Well-known member
I like the Nathan Fake album, but not as much as I love the Long Blondes--and if people are talking retro, and they are, then the Nathan Fake LP is just as retro.

I saw the Long Blondes second (or maybe third) show totally by accident as me and a friend were drinking in the pub where they were playing. Before they played I was ready to sneer as they were fully poseured up and stand-offish--I fully expected them to be another English band who were all shapes but unable to rock. When they played though they had great songs, were funny, made intelligent use of their (sometimes) musical shortcomings and were full of character. It was obvious from the way that they played that they deserved to go somewhere.

I went up to them afterwards and told them that I'd fully expected them to be shit and they were funny, dirty, nice people with a good wide ranging taste in music, books, films etc.

(Dominic--who do you prefer? I'm fishing for tips for things to listen to.)
 

owen

Well-known member
simon silverdollar said:
goes to show how far having pretty and well dressed boys and girls in yr band can get you...

christ, if only it were so!

in fact the unifying factor in almost all the recent wave of over-hyped schmindie acts has been the utter unrelenting sartorial drabness. look at the arctic monkeys, or the libertines (shopping in camden market does not style make), or the kaiser fucking chiefs and you note this mistaken belief that putting on a blazer and having scruffy hair equals making an effort. also they tend to be pretty minging- pete docherty has to be the ugliest pop poster boy in history, looking akin to a chubby chimney sweep. so hooray for the long blondes for being genuinely very good looking and well turned out.

but yeess, musically not very exciting. i don't like nondescript pub rockers being likened to pulp either...what happened to sheffield, eh? did all the futurism get sucked out of it because of gatecrasher or something...?
 
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simon silverdollar

Guest
owen said:
christ, if only it were so!

in fact the unifying factor in almost all the recent wave of over-hyped schmindie acts has been the utter unrelenting sartorial drabness. look at the arctic monkeys, or the libertines (shopping in camden market does not style make), or the kaiser fucking chiefs


there was a good recent quote i read from someone in Mogwai, where he was saying that one advantage his band had over their contemporaries was that they didn't 'look like the bashstreet kids'. !

i think what really annoys me about the long blondes is the reaction to them in the press, which is evidence (yet again) of shockingly low standards and expectations. Reading about them, you'd think the Long Blondes would sound fantastic. I certainly did. The comparisons to girl groups like the Ronettes, or the comparisons to Pulp for example. But then you come to hear them, and -coupled with the anger at being so misled- there's just this sense of disbelief, indignation, that people could ever feel that these comparisons might be valid ones to make. Have the journalists who make such claims ever actually heard the artists in question? How could you ever listen to the Ronnie Spector's voice, and then listen the Long Blondes, and think that they're on an even remotely similar level, in any way? Likewise with the comparisons between their lyrics and jarvis cocker's lyrics.

I'd love it if print journalists started to criticise bands for not sounding as good as the Ronettes, for not writing lyrics that are as good as Jarvis Cocker's, but that day seems a long way off. Instead, we get this is banal wank of, 'ooo, they have quite honest and heart felt lyrics about relationships and they're from sheffield, so I guess they're Pulp's natural heirs. Woo Hoo, three cheers for them, buy the album everyone, become part of the scene...'

any way. rant over.
 

alo

Well-known member
No one read this on another thread so i'm gonna put it here because i'm lazy and hurt...!

Just reading The Last Party by John Harris, (might put up a thread about it next week) and quite an obvious point is made about the general state of rock journalism toward its climax. In that, as Britpop morphed the anti-mainstream, rarefied climate of indie into a pop explosion, there became less and less reason to talk about it in critical terms. Especially as the tunes were leap frogging the weeklies straight into the daytime radio laps of Moyles/ Evans et al. In the celebration of the Britpop moment, the NME began to be merely more than cheerleaders, and have never really recovered since. To some extent, this unquestioning style has seeped into music journalism in general. Witness the witless rise of music coverage in the Sunday Supplements. The reason why Vice is such a hit is because it actually dares to be rude and objectionable about people/music acts. (Although its snidey obnoxiousness for obnoxiousness' sake is a different reason not to read it.)
.......

I Generally agree about the state of music journalism as a whole. Its perhaps because there is so much of it about, so much media to fill, that the need to invent excitement is just becoming absolutely desperate. Most of it amounts to little more than (false) advertising.
 

owen

Well-known member
simon silverdollar said:
I'd love it if print journalists started to criticise bands for not sounding as good as the Ronettes, for not writing lyrics that are as good as Jarvis Cocker's, but that day seems a long way off. Instead, we get this is banal wank of, 'ooo, they have quite honest and heart felt lyrics about relationships and they're from sheffield, so I guess they're Pulp's natural heirs. Woo Hoo, three cheers for them, buy the album everyone, become part of the scene...'

any way. rant over.

no, rant more! i totally agree with this. one of the things that especially gets to me is the imperative nature of all this- people act as if by pointing out the fatuousness of these comparisons, by not tolerating mediocrity, that you're being miserablist and contrarian. the pulp thing is particularly acutely irritating as they were such an odd, unique band, and tend to be lumped in with the wall-to-wall mediocrity of britpop (and its recent redux)
 

Raw Patrick

Well-known member
Russell Senior of Pulp appears on a Long Blondes single.

(Not that Senior's post-Pulp career has been much cop--Venini were weak.)
 

owen

Well-known member
Raw Patrick said:
Russell Senior of Pulp appears on a Long Blondes single.

(Not that Senior's post-Pulp career has been much cop--Venini were weak.)


oh yes, they were rubbish. though i my favourite period of pulp (roughly 1990-4) is dominated by his slavic violin and evident perversity. also the other day a friend said my NEW HAIRCUT made me look like a blond russell senior- hopefully without the terrifying stare
 

fldsfslmn

excremental futurism
Y'know ... I think I'm coming to a new understanding of all this. I haven't heard the Long Blondes but I have heard the Arctic Monkeys and the analysis will probably carry over ...

Something in the original post about the LBs sounding like a "16 year old high school band circa 1996" rather than a new musical movement or an authentic inheritor of the genres and poses they're misappropriating—genres and poses which we often remember firsthand—makes a lot of sense to me.

These young people weren't 16 in the 1990s, but they might have been the age that people often pretend to have been when Joy Division or MBV or whoever hit (ie., old enough to go to shows, old enough to hear with the rancor of teenage ears, old enough to be encountering true themes like sex and employment). Adding years to one's age, in a musical context, isn't necessarily an attempt to mislead, to spoof, or to sound authoritative, but it is proof that music always does hit—subliminally, or physically—age groups younger the recommended age stated on the packaging.

There is genuine nostalgia in what they kids are doing, but it's nostalgia for the 1990s, not—as we often see it—a sort of nostalgia for a never-experienced 1980s, or a series of genre conventions filtered through long-in-the-tooth hipsters like Franz Ferdinand.

In that way we can conclusively say that there is a newness to groups like the LBs or Arctic Monkeys because they're remembering a state of music that was already debased by endless repetitions of psychedelia and then mod and then whatever ... If they can remember it, something has changed and things are different. They're saying, "hey, let's put a ska part here" because the 1990s—their Golden Age—was rife with that sort of tasteless genre-hopping. Hard to explain what I mean here ... It isn't just repetition.

Of course the music itself is crap, so the question remains why these kids aren't finding more interesting ways of expressing themselves? I guess everyone's a filmmaker now anyway.
 
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simon silverdollar

Guest
fldsfslmn said:
If they can remember it, something has changed and things are different. They're saying, "hey, let's put a ska part here" because the 1990s—their Golden Age—was rife with that sort of tasteless genre-hopping. Hard to explain what I mean here ... It isn't just repetition.

.

i agree the long blondes do seem to trade in a different sort of nostalgia than one might expect: reading about them, and seeing pictures of them, i imagined they'd sound nostalgic, but for a time that they never experienced (the '60s, in this case). i guess this is the kind of nostalgia that i've come to expect, having got into music at the time when bands romantiscing the 60's (stereolab), the early 70s, (broadcast), and the late 70s (the whole 3rd wave of american punk) were everywhere.

But yeah, the long blondes do seem to be harking back to a much more recent time- the sound of the mid to late 90s for teenagers who weren't into jungle and weren't into Oasis (i was one of these teenagers, incidentally).

I guess that's why I feel so baffled by the whole thing- for people of my generation, everyone and their mates sounded like this a few years back, and now it's getting touted as The Future!

But i don't have a problem with nostalgia in music, really. The problem I have with the Long Blondes is more that, however nostalgic they are, they simply don't write very good songs, and no one in the press seems to be saying this.
 
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simon silverdollar

Guest
alo said:
as Britpop morphed the anti-mainstream, rarefied climate of indie into a pop explosion, there became less and less reason to talk about it in critical terms. Especially as the tunes were leap frogging the weeklies straight into the daytime radio laps of Moyles/ Evans et al. In the celebration of the Britpop moment, the NME began to be merely more than cheerleaders, and have never really recovered since. To some extent, this unquestioning style has seeped into music journalism in general. Witness the witless rise of music coverage in the Sunday Supplements. The reason why Vice is such a hit is because it actually dares to be rude and objectionable about people/music acts.
I Generally agree about the state of music journalism as a whole. Its perhaps because there is so much of it about, so much media to fill, that the need to invent excitement is just becoming absolutely desperate. Most of it amounts to little more than (false) advertising.


yeah i think things are going to go even more this way of journalists as cheerleaders, with the recent explosion of Myspace: very few paid journalists are going to stick their neck out and risk saying, of a band that there's a huge Myspace buzz about, "actually, they're just a bit shit".

More widely, I guess sites like Myspace could mark the end of music journalists being 'discoverers' of talented musicians.
 

UFO over easy

online mahjong
simon silverdollar said:
(and, again, very like what a group of sixth formers would have come out with in the mid to late 90s

This is what I don't understand. There's this huge hero-worship culture in indie, but most of the kids into it could, and probably do, exactly the same thing, except on acoustic guitars in student pubs.
 

mms

sometimes
UFO over easy said:
This is what I don't understand. There's this huge hero-worship culture in indie, but most of the kids into it could, and probably do, exactly the same thing, except on acoustic guitars in student pubs.

i think it's a kind of hive mentality - creating a scene or buzz small enough to feel naturally part of but big enough to create a feeling of cultural power / friendly friction against other bands etc but one that doesn't work in any 'actual' way and is only falsely impowering - a kind of do it together rather than diy, not really everyone can do what the 'stars ' do (restrictions of work, and time, ambition ) but everyone can invest in going to gigs and buy mp3's etc , (less restrictive, no work /practice involved) . The arctic monkeys are the most ordinary men chosen to e lauded in this sense.
 

dominic

Beast of Burden
simon silverdollar said:
More widely, I guess sites like Myspace could mark the end of music journalists being 'discoverers' of talented musicians.

this is a good thing

empowering the people in the best sense

yes, there'll be the hazard of "group think" -- but that's always a hazard

(personally, i enjoy finding new bands and musicians through myspace -- have been turned on to more new music this way than i ever have before)

HOWEVER, there'll still be a need for journalists to make sense of music, to assess music -- i.e., precisely what you're asking journalists to do
 
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simon silverdollar

Guest
dominic said:
this is a good thing

empowering the people in the best sense

yes, there'll be the hazard of "group think" -- but that's always a hazard

(personally, i enjoy finding new bands and musicians through myspace -- have been turned on to more new music this way than i ever have before)

HOWEVER, there'll still be a need for journalists to make sense of music, to assess music -- i.e., precisely what you're asking journalists to do

oh yeah, i wasn't saying it was a bad thing at all. personally, what i love about (good) music writing is reading about people's personal responses to music, and how music figures in their lives: the problem is that, short of the Wire's 'Epiphanies' column and stuff written by the usual suspects (most of whom post here) this sort of music writing is pretty hard to come by in the music press.

I get the impression that the NME, certainly, isn't interested is this sort of stuff: it stills sees itself as an old-fashioned 'discoverer' of talent, but that's obviously pretty misguided in at least two ways: not only does it not really discover stuff, what it does cover generally doesn't have talent.
 

Raw Patrick

Well-known member
The NME is now classed as a 'mens lifestyle' mag rather'n a music one in any business planning by it's publishers which is a pretty clear idea what is going on with it.

"But yeah, the long blondes do seem to be harking back to a much more recent time- the sound of the mid to late 90s for teenagers who weren't into jungle and weren't into Oasis (i was one of these teenagers, incidentally)."--I don't get this from their music at all, sure it involves a recombination of the past but so does the Nathan Fake mentioned above and no-one is on his case (I don't think.) I can hear pretty clear gestures towards to girl groups/Pulp/scratchy post-punk and 60s garage (and certainly that stuff is waht they DJed when I saw 'em do so.) I wish I wasn't their only defender.

I think that William Swygart writes nicely about them here (right down the bottom): http://www.stylusmagazine.com/feature.php?ID=2089 (warning--mentions my name.)

"yes, there'll be the hazard of "group think" -- but that's always a hazard"--Wot? Like message boards where people say, "I haven't heard the Long Blondes but I have heard the Arctic Monkeys and the analysis will probably carry over ..."
 

Raw Patrick

Well-known member
Ok, here's what I wrote in 2003:

As soon as I saw the The Long Blondes standing in the corner of the venue, discreetly crying out for attention, I knew that they they had ‘it’, that je ne sai quoi, that special something that marks people out. As assholes. Plainly they were preeners and poseurs, more neo-mod dullards attempting to pass themselves off, in the prevailing cultural climate, as rockers. And no Anglo clotheshangers have ever really rocked, Bowie maybe being the closest anybody has got and that’s hardly that close. But, and you know from the way that this is being written that there is going to be a but, I was very wrong, not about The Long Blondes being poseurs – they plainly are – but they can rock also.

They amble stageward, plainly unconcerned about (lack of) tuning and sound balance and strike up. Dorian’s gtr playing is rudimentary but expressive - skewed Brit blues boom riffs sounding like a chewed up TDK cassette that’s been flattened back out and slid back into the ghetto blaster. The lack of polish lending a certain balance and precision to what is being communicated. In contrast the rhythm section plays it like a disco record, or sort’ve. The drummer doesn’t use his hi-hat and so there is none of the tsstsstsst push-pull sibilance of disco but instead, in combination with the bass, a strange Cramps meets ESG loopback that plays off neatly against the simple garage structures of their songs. There’s also a keys player but I can only tell she’s plugged in when she hits horrendously wrong notes. No matter, cuz contextually they sound right, like early Eno as Geordie faux-cowgirl. The singer, all ripped stockings and you’d-love-to-fuck-me-but-you-wouldn’t-dare-try sneer, yelps and barks tales of urban alienation and sexual paranoia. At the end of the set they even twist Del Shannon’s Runaway to fit their agenda, revealing the simple emotional power of a song obscured by it’s usage as nostalgic place setter in Heartbeat backing music and suchlike. And all of this takes place quick; quick enough that the competing pieces of the sound(s) and attitude are only put together later, semi-drunk on the last train home. Whilst watching it’s hard to apprehend everything happening and that’s what makes it exciting and surprising. That’s what makes The Long Blondes the best British band-as-band that I’ve seen this year.

Cold Hans, Stand Up and Be Counted! Issue 2
 
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