Cuando tengo tiempo libre...

Who would have thought that it was temporally possible for a "Thirty Days of Music" feature to span an exceedingly barren five months? About as possible as it is for there to be 500 Days of Summer and for an be-cardiganed indie boy to think he has found his soulmate just because she knows all the words to "There Is A Light That Never Goes Out"

Dear, sweet, crooked-smiled, double-barreled Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Though beautiful you may be, the trite dialogue bestowed unto you was toe-curling, and the Smiths are more cliche than kismet.

Anyway, I give up. I quit these thirty days just like I quit my ballet, jazz, tap, art, clarinet, piano and guitar lessons. I lack perseverance and motivation. More importantly, in total justification of my extended absence from "Brain Tumours for Breakfast" and on a note that absolves me from being slothful and devoid of motivation, I fell out of love with music. Completely and utterly enveloped by inertia and apathy. My voracious appetite for discovering music, be it old or new was replaced by an aural routine that consisted of listening to Too Fast For Love by Mötley Crüe for three months solid. And although I will always have to suppress the urge to air guitar solo to “Livewire” in polite company, there is only so much of Vince Neil’s pitching I can endure for concentrated periods of time. So I had to break my Crüe habit lest there be a repetition of Prefab Sprout Syndrome* and I could never listen to them again.

Thankfully, taking on the position of Music Editor of TN2, with Karl McDonald of Those Geese Were Stupefied as my sensei has been the primary motivating factor in rekindling the love affair. I also finally got around to listening to Adebisi Shank’s second album and it made all the serotonin in my body rush to my head. And then there was a prolonged bedroom dancing moment featuring Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire”

This weekend, in between working as a waitress in a bar (and believe me, nobody wants me baby, judging on the piss poor tips I made) I’ve spent every available moment rediscovering albums that made my teenage insides surge with excitement** and unearthing new, shiny, delicious, precious gems.

Like THIS one







OK. So Warpaint may not be particularly new; they’ve been around since 2004 and released an EP last year. But their début album The Fool isn’t out ‘til the end of the month. Gossamer-floaty psychedelic folk melodies and whimsical wraithlike vocal harmonies. Throw in a Motown lyric sample and the kin of Shannyn Sossamon*** and I’m indubitably hooked. Plus they’re adorable. TN2’s deputy music editor Gheorghe Rusu interviewed drummer and keyboardist Stella Mozgawa last week, so I’ll post a link on the blog when it’s available for consumption.


I don’t know whether I’m very good at blogging. I’m unreliable, and erratic with my posts and my finger tends to slip off the musical pulse from time to time, but I use footnotes, so that has to count for something.


If you’d like, you can also follow me on Twitter here . Because I do that sometimes. When I remember to. I downloaded a “Tweetdeck” and everything. It translates tweets into foreign languages so I can pretend to be fluent in Spanish.














* Once, I worked for an entire summer in Marks and Spencer. They played but one CD in the store all day every day for said entire summer. I had to listen to “The King of Rock N Roll” six times during the average shift. A perfect piece of ‘80s synth pop with the most bizarre music video of all times featuring a human hotdog dancing beside a swimming pool ruined forever.


** Best Fwends, Alphabetically Arranged, Moshi Moshi 2007 anyone?


*** Who I still maintain is the most breathtaking beautiful human being I have ever seen in my entire life. She is perfection to such an extent that I can only blame her ever so slightly for the fact she named her child Audio Science.

Thirty Days of Music- Part XVI

I've only ever had one job before*. When I had just turned sixteen years old my mommy, in a vain attempt to teach me the value of money, stipulated I would have to seek employment if I wanted any semblance of a social life. Living in Conlig, a small village affectionately referred to by some as the arsehole of Bangor and Newtownards, is potentially highly detrimental to culturing friendships, particularly if the majority of those friends live in Belfast aka the "Big Smoke"**, aka civilisation. So with immense fear and trepidation I filled in an application form and secured an interview with Marks and Spencer.

It's important to note that when I was sixteen, I was a husk of the well-rounded individual I am today***; if I was out shopping I'd have to give money to whoever I was with at the time so they could purchase my items for me so I didn't have to interact with the shop assistant. If my house phone rang, and nobody else was there to answer it I would let it ring out rather than having to talk to somebody I potentially didn't know. And, of course, ordering food in restaurants was simply not an option.

Remembering that job interview makes my internal organs clench with mortifcation. I was so terrified I had to try to force words out in between my fits of hyperventilation. My first day on the job I was shaking so much when I gave my first customer their change I dropped it all over the counter.

Fuck knows how I got that job, but having to talk to a stream of veritable unknowns for eight hours a day every day caused my confidence to burgeon. Yet apart from the fact it enabled me to become a fully-functioning member of society and I got to make up games involving trying to scan items through the till as quickly as possible, I hated working there so much. I hated the employees, supercilious old women who acted as if they were my superior even though we were earning the same wage and took delight in telling me how dry my bleached hair looked in between asking if I was a goth. I hated how hardly anybody frequented my department and hours seemed like aeons. I hated how little pay I got and how they expected me to work forty-eight hour weeks the whole summer. I hated the fact that they fired my sister because she took three days off work with swine flu. And I hated the music they piped into the shop.

Shop music is infinitely worse than elevator music, I know this to be a fact. Generally speaking, you only have to stay in an elevator for approximately one-two minutes, so whatever watery, repetitive song that's being streamed into what soon becomes the irritatingly confined space is easily and quickly escapable. Marks and Spencer played the same CD every day for four months. I know this, because I was there for nearly every day of those four months. It was a curious blend of Christian Rock, Sarah Bareilles, the Boomtown Rats and a song that I used to absolutely adore that has, as a direct consequence of management's inability to burn another fucking CD, been completely ruined for me.

Day sixteen is a song you used to love but now hate.

Prefab Sprout - The King of Rock n Roll by peesmith

It really upsets me that I hate this song. Prefab Sprout are clearly one of Newcastle's greatest musical exports, second only to Cheryl Cole.

Boasting synths that try to emulate the sounds of a bull frog, a compellingly nonsensical chorus and a musical video featuring a frog waiter and humans dressed as hot dogs, all they wanted to do was change the world with music

* though if anybody asks, my curriculum vitae tells a different story.

** if you're from Derry

*** he he