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.

Living with the JesusPhone

Hurrah and Huzzah. I am home at last... well, I have been home for about a week but I have neglected my blog in place of many important tasks such as seeing missed friends, searching for a job (my most hated of activities) and of course getting a hold of the iPhone 3G.

As you may have read back in July, my trusty K800i gave up after around 22 months of loyal service. Upon arriving home I quickly went about trying to acquire another phone. I was given two phones but each one was locked to a different carrier and, as I am new to Balham, I have no idea where I would go to get these things unlocked. This of course proved to me that an iPhone was meant to be and after much confusion and O2 generally being arses I managed to procure an 8GB GodPhone.

It arrived on Monday so I have had a while to play with it and come up with a few first impressions.

Firstly, it's beautiful. But everyone knows that and everyone knows how fun the multi touch interface is. I haven't had any of the problems that seem to be popping up on Mac and iPhone forums. My battery life is as expected - if I use Wi-Fi or 3G to surf the web  and download apps from the app store or use the GPS to find my way I get about 13 hours of battery life. If I leave it in standby and only use the net every no and then, it'll last for days. As I bought it because I liked the idea of always having internet access, I am happy to charge it every night.

My 3G signal is fine. Inside the house I get two bars which is still enough to comfortably surf websites. Outside I get full signal. In fact yesterday I had to go to Ealing Broadway and on the final part of the journey where the tube goes over ground I managed to read my e-mails to get an address and then use Google maps to search that address. All from a train carriage.

As you can see I have never had mobile internet so this is all rather exciting. It's a long way from spending 5 minutes checking your e-mails and paying about £2 for the privilege.