New albums!

Hurrah! There is nothing quite like listening to a new album by one of your favourite bands and it not being a huge disappointment. Having been fairly hard up for cash over the last few months I have held off from buying Sigur Ros' new album Með Suð Í Eyrum Við Spilum Endalaust. I had watched the excellent video for Gobbledigook a few times and decided to at least download that one track. Upon searching iTunes I found that the album was going for £5.99 (iTunes Plus, hence no DRM), an offer I couldn't pass up. 

My tube journey to work takes around an hour so I decided that it was the perfect opportunity to give it a good listen from beginning to end. I cant be bothered to go into a track by track review or anything but I have to say that overall, the album is definitely a candidate for my favourite album... that's right... even better than Takk... and ( ).

If you are one of those people that only download single songs (I couldn't do it. I'm too anal about my iTunes library - single tracks piss me off) I would highly recommend Goggledigook - even if you had previously written off Sigur Ros as pretentious bollocks. There are several more 'catchy' songs, i.e. not 10 minutes long, throughout the album but they do not in any way sound dumbed down or unlike Sigur Ros. There are a couple of epics on there too so lets not get too scared that we'll see Jonsi playing his guitar with a violin bow on T4 just yet... although they like to be all edgy and underground nowadays so we just might...

Now the reason for the plural in the title of this post is because I also wanted to quickly write about The Cure's new album 4:13 Dream. I've deliberately waited a while to voice my opinions because they have a habit of changing over a short period of time as was the case with 2004's The Cure. At the time I listened to it non stop but now I only ever really listen to Lost, Going Nowhere and, if we are talking about the vinyl, This Morning. A similar thing happened with 4:13 Dream. I listened to it once through and made up an opinion which after several more plays had completely reversed. 

I hated it.

Well... maybe hate is too strong. I couldn't really hate an album that included Underneath the Stars and The Perfect Boy but the rest seemed a bit of a disappointment. At least The Cure (the album) flipped between upbeat songs and more dreary ones. 4:13 Dream is practically musical Prozac in comparison. I know Robert has promised that we'll see the darker songs on another album released next year but rarely can we trust our mate Bob. After listening through a good few times (as of this time, the play count is at around 20) I've realised that it doesn't really matter that there are no Disintegrations, Bloodflowers or Colds. It is still a great collection of more energetic, punchier Cure songs that will be remembered alongside Just Like Heaven and Inbetween Days rather that the aforementioned epics. 

You can decide for yourselves over at the album's Last.fm page where every track is available in full. I'll just sit and wait in hope that we do actually see this dark album next year and I finally get to hear a non live version of the almost legendary song 'A Boy I Never Knew' - a song recorded for the 2004 album but scraped because it was so sad the recording had Robert crying for the last minute. It was lost for about four years until they played it on this year's 4Tour. Now that's The Cure that everyone really wants. Not all this happy lark.

My early Christmas present

Yet again, I apologise for the complete radio silence on this blog over the last month.  I'm not sure why I haven't posted as there have been several important events that have occurred over the last month which I have been quite interested in such as the new Cure album, The Cure playing the O2, the U.S. presidential election and the wonderful Dead Set.

One other thing to happen to me this month is my (almost) free acquisition of an XBox 360. I have a friend who earns a fair amount of money. He is also quite impatient. His second XBox 360 started showing the infamous red ring of death and was therefore useless. I assured him that he could get it repaired and that I would even sort it all out for him and send it off myself. He didn't want to wait that long and the next weekend he went out and bought himself a brand new premium model. He then donated the broken console to me to send off to be repaired.

I bought some packing paper and bubble wrap (this is the almost part of the previous paragraph - cost = £6.00) and sent it off to the Microsoft repair centre in Frankfurt. It has only been a week and I have already been told via Microsoft's support site that they have sent out my new XBox. I should have it arrive some time next week.

Now the last time I wrote a post about video games was back in April. I was annoyed at not being able to play Grand Theft Auto IV and I mentioned I was very much a PlayStation fan. It's not due to any mindless fanboyism, it's just because I have had Playstations since 1998 and most of my favourite franchises are Sony exclusives (WipeOut, Gran Turismo, Metal Gear Solid). I do not, however, have a spare £299 + games to spare on buying a PlayStation 3 so a free XBox will make a pretty good stand in since other than the franchises I have mentioned, most games are cross platform or indeed Microsoft exclusives. 

I am still faced with the problem of disliking the controller and of course having to quickly translate A, B, X and Y into X, Triangle, Circle and Square. I'm sure after playing GTA for a few hours I will have worked it out but I still doubt I will ever love a controller more than the Dual Shock.

Another problem I am facing is the fact that I'm not a huge fan of first person shooters. OK, this may sound strange coming from someone that often cites Half Life 2 as one of his favourite games but that's different... that's Half Life 2. I am looking forward to Bioshock and maybe one of the new Call of Dutys but I couldn't care less about Halo 3 or 90% of the other FPSs that clutter up the XBox game catalogue. I am also not fussed about XBox live. I don't particularly want to pay £30 a year to be called a 'gay' or a 'pussy' by a fifteen year old American kid because I don't play the game 19 hours a day. Online gaming is really something that has passed me by.

So there we are. I am a PlayStation fan forced to go over to the dark side. When I bought my iMac back in April 2007 I thought I was rid of Microsoft but they have a funny way of getting themselves back into your life. Lets just hope that they've sorted out their god awful quality control and my shiny new box won't die a horrible death lit by three red lights in a few months time.

I shall report back once I've had a few days of play with it and I can say for sure whether I feel cheap and dirty from cheating on Lady Playstation with her most bitter of rivals or whether I will be starting divorce proceedings.