The Remix:

There are a bunch more on YouTube…

Arctic Monkeys – Whatever people say I am that’s what I’m not This album is absolutely cracking, and note it’s the original album and not the newer “Favourite Worst Nightmare” that I’m recommending. I only really started listening to this band earlier this year and I far prefer the older album. I can honestly say I don’t think there’s a bad track on this album.
Amy Winehouse – Back to Black This is a great soul album, Amy has an amazing voice that you just would not believe from the look of her or from hearing her talk. Favourite tracks include the obvious “Rehab” along with the title track “Back to Black”.
Fratellis – Costello Music Here come the good times, it’s the Fratellis’ storming album “Costello Music”. I first listened to this while driving down the cost near Santa Cruz in California. What a blast, this album has a great pace and excitement to it and always gives me a feel-good boost when I listen to it.
Ash – Twilight of the Innocents Ash were the first band I ever went to see live, an experience I’ll never forget. This is their latest album, also rumored to be their last, and it’s great! It has a bit of an american rock feel to it, but still the distinctive Ash sound, seemingly no worse for the loss of Charlotte to her solo career.

Also Rans: Maximo Park – Our Earthly Pleasures, Arctic Monkeys – Favourite Worst Nightmare, Wolfmother – Wolfmother.

Note: Links are to amazon.co.uk.

Looks like it’s also available on Napster and through Rhapsody or MusicNet services.

iTunes: Glory Lasts Forever

Napster: Treehouse Burning

If the technical details in his write-up are all a bit much, I’ll summarise: When Mark played the Sony CD in his Windows computer, it quietly installed some software onto his computer that used special techniques to make it appear as if no such software was there (the files were hidden from most Windows programs including explorer). Not only this, but the software provided no way to remove it (should you discover its presence) and manual attempts to remove it by one of the more talented Windows hackers in the industry were fraught with problems.

It seems that not only are music lovers treated as criminals by the music industry, but that the music industry themselves are resorting to criminal methods to try and prevent fair use! Let us be very clear here – the people that this will affect are not those that are ripping enormous quantities of music and making them available online (who disabled autorun on their cd-rom drives many years ago), it affects the average home legal music user in an underhanded, undocumented and unwarranted way.

In case you hadn’t noticed, this stuff makes me mad!

Update 1: The software phones home too!
Update 2: Mark receives a response from First 4 Internet, creators of this rootkit. Mark then trashes said response.

Ever since the third release of PN 2 (2.0.3) PN releases have been named after my favorite jazz musicians. It started with coltrane (one of the candidates for the next wordpress release) for, obviously, the legend John Coltrane.

Next up was 0.4 with “miles” for Miles Davis, one of the best known and perhaps most accessible jazz artists. WordPress has already been here! 0.5 ushered in the era of “mingus” – another wordpress release name. Ryan’s write-up of mingus is fantastic, every new bit of mingus I listen to provides something new – what an immense talent but less accessible than Davis.

Half way through the numerous 0.5 releases saw PN move from mingus to “herbie”. Herbie Hancock is one of my favorite jazz artists – a hugely influential modern jazz pianist. Head Hunters was a landmark album and both Chameleon and Watermelon man are pure jazz genius. Herbie Hancock was the artist that re-lit my interest in jazz and has had me looking back for old favorites and rediscovering the whole scene.

This brings us nicely to 0.6 and “ella”. I discussed Ella Fitzgerald in the release post for 0.6 and note that she has also been suggested as the name for the next wordpress release.

Coming up on the PN 2 roadmap are Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie and Duke Ellington. More to come about them with the releases!

As for WordPress, go for Thelonius Monk. I just bought a couple of Monk CDs to experiment and they are fantastic – 0.6 “Monk”.

Occasionally, I find that I get into a track that I really shouldn’t like. Surprise is usually followed by a guilty purchase of the track which I’ll listen to for a few months until it starts to slip off the radar again. One such track was Freestyler by the Bomfunk MCs. I have no business liking tracks like this, but something about the track just wouldn’t leave me alone and I kept finding myself humming it and drumming along.

The latest such track is Gold Digger from the Late Registration album by Kanye West. Generally I could completely give hip-hop a miss. However, the Ray Charles sample in this track is so infectious and the vocals amusing that I ended up buying it on iTunes eventually and am still enjoying listening to it.

What are your occasional tastes?

• Moved from my flat into my mate’s place (including putting all of our stuff into storage) while we waited for our next flat to become free.
• Seen Ben Folds live at Southampton Guildhall
• Enjoyed a very muddy Glastonbury Festival (my 7th!):

  

  

• Moved from my mate’s place into our new flat, then moving all of our stuff back out of storage, fixing the non-draining shower and unpacking lots of stuff
• Realised that moving from a furnished flat into an unfurnished flat is going to be problematic
• Discovered that good beds and mattresses are hideously expensive
• Developed a taste for eating dinner from the top of a packing box (luckily, as I’ll be doing that for a while – turns out all furniture is expensive!)
• Seen U2 live at the Cardiff Millenium Stadium, supported by the Killers and Starsailor – the second time for the Killers in a week!
• Played my first gig with my new band, Marlon
• Fixed a whole bunch of PN bugs and added lots of new code that isn’t quite ready yet!
• Not had enough sleep!

You can see the listing and download the song on the Unsigned show page.

Congratulations to the guys!

Highlights of the gig for me were our “signature tune” Jailhouse Rock (Jerry Leiber/Mike Stoler), and Power of Love (Huey Lewis and the News). We also played Easy by Faith No More which went down a storm, this was particularly impressive given that we had played it only twice previously!

By special request we also played a song from my last band (the oddly named Mt. Ararat) called “Get Back On”. The new band includes all the members of the old one and so we did know how to play it, but it was the first time we’d done so in about 4 or 5 years. It went surprisingly well and we got a big kick out of playing it – I’m glad it was requested!

We wore highly embarassing convict costumes that we hadn’t seen before the night – we were laughing so hard we were a good 10 minutes late going on. When I get some pictures back I’ll post them for all to laugh at.