Ian Sherman, the Lester Bangs of Chinese rock. So was he described in an invitation to a memorial do for Ian Sherman, music critic for the (English) Beijing edition of Time Out magazine. I was away on June 5 but there was reporedly a big turn out at a Dos Kollegas gig organised by Tag Team Records, for which Sherman wrote pithy press releases and band bios. There aren’t many following China’s rock/indie music scene who can write as well as Sherman could. One was an acquaintence and Sherman contemporary at Time Out, now a financial journalist at the China Economic Quarterly. There's also the writing musician-impressario, Jon Campbell, and wit/columnist Kaiser Kuo, a veteran of the local rock scene of even greater vintage (he played guitar in breakthrough 1980s/90s metal band Tang Dynasty). Other than that rock writers in Beijing tend to be students who become enamoured by local bands during a passing-through time here.

Sherman wrote with verve and passion and knowledge and without putting the boot in when a CD was rubbish, as many are among the avalanche of records which started to come out of local studios in the early 2000s. I’m currently trying to read the local back issues of InMusic and Rolling Stone – it’s slow work, given frequent recourse to my Chinese-English dictionary.

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The joys of Youtube have been denied lately in China - government didn't want any huamn rights themed videos showing  up in the a year of anniversaries like June 4: 20 years since the 1989 Tiananmen bloodbath.

This may not be such a problem: China afterall has copied youtube: most slavishly in youku.com and Tudou.com is a less blatantly copied local video sharing site. But neither is a great alternative to the original, I discovered with an experiment seeking video content for Bruce Springsteen. It's harder to navigate when your Chinese is scrappy -as is mine - but such is the similarity to youtube that it's only a matter of clicking where you'd normally click on youtube pages. Like youku, you get a lot of music videos, and the odd TV and film clip. I also found a string of videos uploaded by a real Chinese Springsteen fan - unlike Dylan or the Stones the Boss isn't a big name in China. But what the Chinese copycats lack is the sheer variety of music served up on Youtube. There's none of the videos from mobile phones and cameras at one-off concerts. But that's foreign (Western) music. Type in Carsick Cars, the name of China's best indie act of the last five years into the youku/tudou search engines and you get a trove of rare footage, concert clips and fan-edited videos. So they're not the place to go for western rock and pop, but youku and tudou are good outlets for local rock music - and for improving one's Chinese language skills.

Given that October will bring the big party for the Party - 60 years since the founding of the People's Republic of China - I expect to see a lot more blockages of Youtube. I'll keep an eye on the local clones.

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There was one thing I was conscious of when I opened the polling booths for the CLUAS writers to vote for their top Irish albums of the last decade - the possibility that the final results could be biased towards releases from more recent years, considering more recently albums could well be to the fore of a writer's mind when casting their votes.

The first chart below however testifies that the CLUAS writers are not such a fickle bunch. It shows the breakdown - by year of release - of the CLUAS writers' top 50 Irish albums of the last 10 years and it is encouraging to see their choices are nicely spread across the full decade (although memories apparently don't stretch too well back to 1999, with only one fin de siécle album making the top 50...).

One thing that is striking in the above chart is 2003, which saw the release of more albums in the top 50 than any other year. Before rushing to the conclusion that 2003 was, therefore, a vintage year for Irish music I thought it'd be instructive to check the average ranking in the top 50 of albums released in a given year (see chart below).

First up, it shows that 2004 does not appear to have set the writers on fire in terms of memorable releases - the five 2004 releases had a low average ranking of 38 in the top 50. The other end of the scale reveals that, while 2003 may have produced the highest number of albums in the top 50, the average ranking of the 2003 albums (8 albums with an average ranking of 25.3) was lower than the releases of 2001 (3 albums with an average ranking of 16.7) and 2002 (5 albums with an average ranking of 18.2).

Conclusion? It is clear that, without any shadow of even a micro-doubt, the real vintage period for Irish music in the last decade was 2001-2002. So that's one discussion laid to rest then (until someone asks a different 35 people for their fave Irish releases of the last 10 years and get a completely different answer...)

Annex 1: The albums in the top 50 released in 2001 and 2002, i.e. the "vintage period":

Annex 2: The albums in the top 50 released in 2004, i.e. the poorest performing year in terms of rankings:

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As an appetizer for the main event, Let’s French is putting on a pre-festival show: Naïve New Beaters (right) will appear at Twisted Pepper in Dublin on Saturday 6 June.

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It’s the first time I ever bought a guitar in the same workshop it was made in. Well today I bought a US$30 from craftsman Mr Lay Lwin. In his 60s and dressed in the traditional wrap-around biyin 'skirt' that most Burmese men wear, Lay Lwin is chairman of Sein Shwe Lwin Guitar Garden, on Anawrahta road in the bustling Kyauktada township in downtown Yangon/Rangoon. The shop was a welcome detour in the downpour that blanketed the city for most of the day – this is rainy season. What got me was Lay’s smiling demeanour and loving attention with which he showed me each guitar. The US$30 price tag was also a clincher: prices fluctuate according to whether he’s using plastic or steel tuning gears, or if the strings and frets are steel or a cheaper alloy mix.

The top of the soundbox is pine, the sides plywood. It’s not surprising most of the country is still covered in forestry, that Burma would make guitars. Problem is much of that wood is being slashed by or for Chinese timber companies, who often pay off local officials to turn a blind eye as they drive their loot over the border into China’s Yunnan province. Still, the New Light of Myanmar newspaper earlier this week editorialized on the need to grow trees so the air can be clean and the country green, as if hardwood trees they’ve allowed to be chopped can be replaced overnight.

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Beijing Beat is in Burma this week, just as the country’s most famous citizen, Aung San Suu Kyi is on trial. There’s lots of well-armed police and military out on patrol, but this is no dour nation. The music shops, and there are plenty, sell guitar chord books and stacks of CDs and DVDs of local artists. Chinese pop is big in Burma. Staff sung along to Mandopop megahits while I was getting my hair cut at the East Boys hair salon on Seik Kan Tha Street A five minute walk away, three helpful attendants at the Man Thiri music shop – they produce and distribute CDs, VCDs and tapes as well as DVDs –  when I asked them for their best local folk and Burmese rock CDs plucked me out a work by harpist Haing Win Maung, and this by local hip hop/rocker Alex: Live at Inya Lake.

The local official press is farcically out of touch – the regime’s greetings to Azerbaijani leaders for that country’s national day made the page one lead yesterday – but there are plenty of chances to get alternative views in Rangoon/Yangon. There’s the paper boy selling Thailand’s The Nation on the street near my hotel, and then, in the hotel lobby, the staff watching satellite TV coverage of Aung San Suu Kyi’s trial, piped in by the country’s opposition in exile in Norway. That seems to be Burma: a very, friendly, nuanced kind of place. Badly run, unnecessarily impoverished, but also full of surprises. Number one for me was how it makes a good first impression: the new international airport in Rangoon is smart, glass and chrome and attentive, friendly staff. Nothing at all as chaotic as my recent experience flying into Dhaka, in neighbouring Bangladesh. But then nowhere do you hear chaotic Bangladesh’s multiplicity of voices, and debate. I’m looking forward to checking out the live music scene, particularly the Lazy Club, where apparently aforementioned rocker Alex regularly plays.

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The summer of 2006 must have been an exciting time to be young and French. Springtime student protests had caused the Chirac/de Villepin government to retreat on controversial employment reforms. Les bleus were heading for the World Cup Final and Amélie Mauresmo was winning Wimbledon. Former Dublin au pair Ségolène Royal was shaking up the presidential election race. And a guitar band from Versailles looked dead certs to become global rock megastars.

As it turned out, those protests gained little in the long term. The French football team lost the final so controversially that Mauresmo’s victory the previous day has been virtually forgotten. Royal lost the 2007 election to conservative Nicolas Sarkozy and (like Sarkozy, in his own way) is now more a celebrity than a politician. And that Versailles band, Phoenix (right), are still only big fish in a small indie pond.

But their 2006 album ‘It’s Never Been Like That’ was a cracker and it at least gained them a larger cult following in North America. They are still the only French rock band with a worldwide audience and credibility anywhere near electro acts like Air, Daft Punk and Justice. And their style of music has become a reference point: if any band mixes too-cool-for-school indieness with lovelorn melodic retro-pop, then they sound like Phoenix.
 
So, in this uncharted territory for a French band, Phoenix have just released their new album. Three years on, will it see them finally close the deal and break through to mainstream success?

It will not. ‘Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix’ has at least two excellent singles and rarely puts a foot wrong, but on the whole it leaves you with a sense of disappointment. How come?

Well, a great deal of the problem with the new Phoenix album is that it sounds so much like Phoenix. Most of the tracks on this record wouldn’t sound out of place on their previous album. Thomas Mars’ idiosyncratic vocal style, singing melodies so undulating and jerky that they’re almost out of sync with the rest of the song, sounds familiar by now. Was that all we saw in them?

And now other bands are picking up their sound – we recently mentioned French rivals Pony Pony Run Run, whose single ‘Hey You’ does the Phoenix thing better than Phoenix.

Those two fine songs we mentioned above, ‘Lisztomania’ and ‘1901’, are the opening tracks here and give the album a deceptively strong start. A failing of Phoenix, one reason why they aren’t filling Enormodomes or headlining summer festivals outside France, is that they’ve never written a killer radio-friendly chorus – but ‘Lisztomania’ has a memorable hook (though not as catchy as PPRR’s ‘Hey You’). By sheer force of concentrated Phoenix-ness is ‘1901’ so good. Third track ‘Fences’ is a pleasant bit of disco-indie, but The Virgins sewed up this genre last year with their brilliant single ‘Rich Girls’.

And that’s it for highlights. To mention this album’s fleeting nod to relative innovation, we note that ‘Twenty One One Zero’, the bit of loop-heavy stadium electronica that the band put on the web last year, briefly reappears here during an instrumental called ‘Love Like A Sunset Part I’. It gives way to ‘Love Like A Sunset Part II’, a very brief track which features three heavy acoustic guitar strums repeated. Then next song ‘Lasso’ resumes the classic Phoenix style.

It’d be disingenuous to present this as Phoenix maintaining their standards or refining their distinctive sound – quite simply, this album feels like a risk-free consolidation and the songs aren’t dazzling enough to blind you to this.

Of course, there’s the possibility that several million people who’ve never come across Phoenix before will hear this album and fall for it, or perhaps some well-chosen advertising placement will pierce the mainstream subconsciousness. But neither of these scenarios would make ‘Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix’ any better an album. This is still a fine band, oozing charm and talent, but they need to do something new with their music.
 

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Key Notes realises he's been a little quiet of late.  There are lots of exciting goings on at Key Note Towers, more of which you'll read about in the coming weeks.  However, to make up for the recent radio silence this blog has a double pass to give away to Holly Golightly & The Brokeoffs this Thursday, May 28.

Flirting with music for the first time in 1991 as a founder member of all girl garage band Thee Headcoatees, Holly Golightly's career really took off with the release of her debut record The Good Things in 1995.  Blending blues and folk rock, Golightly has released 13 solo albums over a wide variety of formats and labels, one of the most successful of which was Truly She Is None Other, which was written in partnership with Billy Childish.  Described as 'a scruffed up British version of Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood, the albums lead track Tell Me Now So I Know was chosen to soundtrack the Jim Jarmusch movie Broken Flowers.

In 2006, following 11 years of tourning and recording with the support of a full band, Holly Golightly teamed up with one man drums/guitar/double bass ensemble Lawyer Dave to form Holly Golightly & The Brokeoffs.  Their second album as a duo, Dirt Don't Hurt, was released in October 2008 to critical acclaim.

On Thursday night, May 28, Holly Golightly & The Brokeoffs bring their blend of folksy blues to Andrew's Lane Theatre.  Tickets are available for €15 from the WAV ticket office, Road Records, City Discs, Sound Cellar or the usual outlets.  However, thanks to Forever Presents, Key Notes has a double pass to give away.  To win, just email keynotes[@]cluas[.]com with 'Breakfast At Tiffany's' in the subject line before noon on Wednesday.  A winner will be chosen at random and, as usual, Key Notes' decision is final.

Holly Golightly & The Brokeoffs:  Jesus Don't Love Me

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Okay, so we might not have fancied their most recent album. But in the spirit of ‘G’wan Oirland’ and all that, we’re pleased to report that Bell X1 are playing a high-profile Paris show tonight (14 May), one that’s bound to win them great exposure and interest among French music fans.

For the last concert on their current continental tour, the Kildare band are headlining the latest edition of Les Inrocks Indie Club, the regular band night hosted by Les Inrockuptibles, France’s best selling and most respected music and culture magazine.  The show takes place at La Maroquinerie, one of the best-known rock venues in Paris, and the line-up is completed by The Phantom Band, The Soft Pack (that fine Californian band formerly known as The Muslims) and local hopefuls Toy Fight.

You being fairly sharp, you’ll have noticed that the nationalities of the acts are given on the poster (right). G’wan Oirland!

One of the added benefits of headlining a show organized by a top-selling music magazine is that said top-selling music magazine invariably gives you plenty of glowing publicity and blurb and what have you. Thus Les Inrockuptibles have called ‘Blue Lights On The Runway’ “glacial et lancinant” – icy and piercing. (‘Lancinant’ is also the word in French to describe a sudden, shooting pain such as your correspondent’s recent running injuries.) We don’t see what they mean (unless they mean ‘painful’), but that’s the sort of language you find in French music reviews.

The band supported Nada Surf in France last year, but it seems their second-fiddle days are behind them now. With tonight’s high-profile Paris show and a Benicassim appearance to come, Bell X1 are really making a go of things here on the continent and perhaps they might return to Eire all inspired and creatively reinvigorated. Good luck to them.

Honestly, we really like ‘Neither Am I’ – especially ‘Man On Mir’ and this one, 'Pinball Machine':

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Making a music video is generally an expensive undertaking and, even if bands go for the cheap and cheerful option, having the skill and imagination to make it look professional can prove just as difficult getting finance. 

Over the past 6 years, however, acts such as The Frames, Duke Special, Fight Like Apes, C O D E S, The Mighty Stef and Future Kings of Spain have all had the opportunity to work with student filmmakers thanks to a special collaboration between the Tisch School of Arts at NYU and Hot Press.

This year saw the program celebrate its 100th video and, as you can see from the above photograph, Key Notes attended a special screening to mark the event on Wednesday May 6.  On the night the Tisch filmmakers premiered videos (in various states of completion) from The Laundry Shop, The Dirty 9's, One Day International and Moth Complex.  [Declaration of interest: Steve O'Rourke, author of Key Notes, is friends with Aoife O'Leary of Moth Complex and earlier this year was involved in helping and promoting the band.]

Unfortunately, none of this years crop of videos are available yet but this blog's favourite on the night was One Day International's video for Little Death which had an Eighties kids TV program feel to it, very camp but it worked very well.  Of the other videos, The Laundry Shop's The Daily Special and Learned my Lesson by Moth Complex were still very much works in progress.  The video for Lucy Opus (The Dirty 9's) was perhaps the most 'classical' video of the evening, following, as it did, the sure fire format of movie scene, band scene, movie scene, band scene, movie scene, fade; cracking song though.

Key Notes' favourite video of the Tisch/Hot Press venture remains Syndicate by the Future Kings of Spain and this blog doesn't need much of an excuse to play it again:

Key Notes will, of course, post another blog when this year's batch of Tisch/Hot Press videos go live.

Photo Credit: Hot Press

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