Tellison - Good Luck It’s Christmas
Tellison are great, but as much as I loved this years “The Wages of Fear” I couldn’t help but wish the band had recorded an entire album of gorgeous ballads like “Freud Links The Teeth And The Heart”. Sure, I know they’re first and foremost a rock band, and a mightily good one as well, but personally I find it’s in these more tender moments (see also: “Fire”, “My Wife’s Grave Is In Paris”) that the band are at their peak.
Good news then, to find that Tellison have released one of their most beautiful songs yet as a Christmas single. “Good Luck It’s Christmas” is a devastatingly sad look at the festive season, with Stephen mournfully intoning that “bad luck and Christmas are the same, cos every year they’re back again”. But it’s all underpinned by the idea that together, we can get through this, and the band sound sincere in wishing us good luck for what is often a difficult time of year. Indeed, the band invite you to pay what you want for the track and all proceeds will be going to CALM (Campaign Against Living Miserably), a campaign set up to reduce the high suicide rate amongst men under 35. So be sure to head over to Bandcamp and download it. Not only will the money go to a great cause, but you’ll get a brilliant Christmas song out of the deal, so head over there and get into the spirit of the season of giving!
Jed. x
“The Future Of Music” - AGCS Vs Spotify
Remember a few years ago, when Spotify first started to creep into the public consciousness, and you downloaded it and your first thought was “wow, this is pretty cool”. Sure, the adverts were annoying, and there were huge gaps in the collection, and you really couldn’t see how it was going to be financially viable for the company itself, let alone for the bands whose music you were streaming. But, you reasoned, this was an idea in it’s infancy and within a few years time all these problems would be ironed out.
Christmas TV 2011 - An AGCS Guide
“And I’d like it if you made it to mine by Christmas Eve, So you can hold me, and we’ll watch Christmas TV”
So sang Slow Club on their festive hit “Christmas TV”, and while the sentiment is all well and good, the harsh reality is that Christmas TV is almost exclusively shit. I mean, just look at the BBC’s big, expensive promo for the festive season and as Shane Richie mugs his way into your (recurring) nightmares you’ll quickly find yourself losing the (good)will to live. It’s enough to make any reasonable person vomit.
But don’t worry! AGCS are here to help, with some recommendations of good telly from Christmases Past (we DID look at this years listings, and lets just say this: be sure to put LOTS of DVDs on your list). These are the few instances of Christmas TV gone right, where great shows have somehow, against all the odds, managed to make great festive episodes.
Emmy The Great & Tim Wheeler - This Is Christmas
Saccharine (adj.)
- Excessively sweet or sentimental
- Relating to or containing sugar; sugary
To save me constantly referencing a thesaurus, looking for ten different ways to say the exact same thing, I’ve put that definition at the top of this review. I can call the songs cloying, sickly, overly sentimental but it all comes back to that one word: saccharine. If you were expecting this to sound like Ash, or Emmy’s own output, or a brilliant mixture of the two, you will be sorely disappointed. “This Is Christmas” does what it says on the tin. This is, very much, a traditional Christmas album.
“Every Holiday Is A Disaster” with Bordeauxxx
Bordeauxxx are ace! If you checked out our awesome compilation of this year’s best unsigned music (if you missed it here’s a link), you’ll already be familiar with the gang-chants-and-glockenspiel glory of Every Holiday Is A Disaster, but if not, here it is again in video form:
Great, right? You can get this track and the similarly excellent “Mother’s Ruin” EP over at Bandcamp, but before you go running off to do that, let’s get on with what this is all building up to: today’s door of the advent calendar with Bordeauxxx! And since the band happen to have a song called Every Holiday Is A Disaster and Christmas is called “The Holidays” by some (American) people, I unimaginatively asked the band’s members to write about their most disastrous “Holidays” (Christmases). The resulting tales of wintry woe are after the jump.
“The Pain From An Old Wound” - AGCS Vs Nostalgia
The first of a series of essays on the state of music in 2011.
“May You Live In Interesting Times” goes the old Chinese curse, and it’s fair to say this year has been an interesting one. The front pages of newspapers have been adorned with scandal, disaster, and revolution at a seemingly unprecedented scale. But what if, in a hundred years time, an historian was looking not at the newspapers but at the music press of 2011, trying to ascertain the culture of these times, the soundtrack to those great events? Was our greatest cultural achievement really the 20th Anniversary Deluxe Edition of “Nevermind”? Was there nothing new of any value? Was 2011 really so void of artistic merit that music journalists genuinely started to believe “Screamadelica” was a good album? And proceeded to write article after ARTICLE after INTERMINABLE HYPERBOLIC ARTICLE about Bobby Gillespie’s towering genius? Or will this endless celebration of mankind’s two greatest achievements (Nevermind. Screamadelia.) just serve to further validate the historian’s 120th Anniversary Reissues of both those albums? Remixed in hyperphonic-hoversound? (Because it is the future and THAT IS WHAT THEY HAVE!)
A Christmas Gift For You From TeamABC
TeamABC are great. I think I may have mentioned this before, and indeed just yesterday I was extolling the virtues of their new Complaints EP. So I was very excited when the band’s creative powerhouse Stef Purenins agreed to write a Christmas song (his first one) for our calendar. The resulting track is called “Winter Nights” and in keeping with the rest of the TeamABC catalogue it’s bloody brilliant. Even better, Stef’s created an awesome timelapse video showcasing the recording process. And even better still, you can get the track for free here. So while you’re over there, why not buy the handcrafted CD of Complaints EP for all your friends and relatives?
Jed. x
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