Aka Wednesday 26th September
Today, as it was New Comic Book Day, I went into London Town
and brought these joyous comics:
...and picked up this flyer for 'Dead Rabbit', which looks like it'll be a great series:
…I also brought the new Pop Will Eat Itself boxset, ‘PWEI: Def Comms 86 – 18, Pop Will Eat Itself /// Communications 1986 / 2018’:
…which looks beautiful, with 75 tracks of Poppies goodness,
complied by Graham Crabb, one of the founders of PWEI, most of which I’ve already got, but there were four
previously unreleased tracks and new sleeve notes. I did spend twenty minutes
walking round London arguing with myself if it was worth the £22 just for four
“new” tracks, but I couldn’t resistant getting it.
The Poppies sound went from jingle jangly C86 indie to sampedelic
cut ‘n’ pasters to dance to industrial, as the cost of samplers, drum machines,
computers, etc. dropped and the availability increased. Of the new tracks:
- Cape Connection (exclusive version) – more striped back than the released album version, almost like a demo version, it sounds a tad more mellow and not as punchy.
- Fatman (session version) – sounds pretty similar to how I remember the album version, although musically the session version sounds a bit more up.
- Oldskool Cool (ravey mix) – sounds nice, ravey and a little jump-up jungle, a bit like Orbital crossed with Urban Takeover
- Eyes Wide Open (demo) – my first thought is Sisters of Mercy meets Nine Inch Nails, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard any Sisters of Mercy! It sounds ok, but you can tell it’s a demo as the vocals feels a little separate from the music, like it needs a little fine tuning, but it does grow on you
…so, overall, I’d give it 10/10 as an introduction to Pop
Will Eat Itself, but if you’re already a fan, I’ll give the boxset a 5/10 - you’ve
probably already got the vast majority of these songs and the four exclusive
songs, for me, don’t justify getting the boxset, but the sleeve notes are great,
if a little short, details about the recording of the albums and their design, thanks
to The Designers Republic each release was beautifully designed with great art
and icons, which has been carried over with this boxset (as you can see above),
although it would have been nice to have had more 😊.
…listened to episode three ('The Music Of The Chromosomes') of
'Rob Newman’s Total Eclipse Of Descartes', which discusses genetics and
internationalism, going from his ancestry to Coleridge & Wordsworth to
public schools/the upper classes & state school education to imprinting. If
I were to try to condense this episode to a single line or phrase, it would be
that the upper classes game the system, impose a philosophy that suits
themselves and disadvantage everyone else.
…watched 'Agent Carter' Season Two, eps 8 – 10. The main storyline
of ‘zero matter’ and how it affects individuals and how Agent Carter and the SSR
respond gives plenty of room to explore societal issues, such as racism and misogyny,
as well as the personal relationships between the characters.
The crew Agent Carter (writers, directors, actors, set
designers, costumiers, etc.) have made a great world and the characters have
grown and changed since they were introduced in the very first episode and it’s
a shame that we won’t see this continue (except in very short cameo’s in the
MCU films, e.g. the ‘80’s section in Ant-man) and that we won’t see how they
react to the huge societal changes that were just round the corner, the civil
rights fights, hippies, the sexual revolution, the counter-culture, the energy
crisis, etc., c’est la vie!
…I did the G2 crossword…
…which went about as well as Tuesday’s, with needing to
cheat on six of the 21 clues, although I think that ‘dissolved in water’ is a
little misleading as a clue for ‘aqueous’, but I did learn that ‘Belize’ was
formerly called British Honduras and that ‘Ayrshire’ is a ‘hardy breed of
Scottish dairy cattle’.
…and all in all, I walked about 7.24km and burnt 846
calories (apparently).
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