Fleet Foxes

I picked up Fleet Foxes' self-titled debut during one of my frequent trips to the HMV "two for ten" section. They had been recommended to me by last.fm after listening to bands like Mostly Autumn and Bon Iver, and I can see why. I will readily admit that when I bought the CD I had absolutely no idea what to expect, and what I heard was very much a pleasant surprise.

The music is a gentle blend of alt-rock guitar, folk melody and soothing 5-part harmonies with the reverb knob turned up to full. The result is a dreamy sound that captures the imagination and makes you take notice, all the while being lulled into a day-dream state. The lyrics are definitely folk-inspired, ambiguously poetic and evoking romanticised imagery of more innocent times.

The cover art is a particular point of interest for me. The outer cover is detail from a painting called Netherlandish Proverbs, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder in 1559. The picture contains many small scenes enacting literal representations of Flemish proverbs of the day. It is one of those wonderfully deep pictures that, at first glance, appears to be little more than a picture of 16th century village life, but on close inspection contains some wonderfully intricate detail.

The album cover itself shuns the jewel case, and is instead a card sleeve with the painting around it. Tucked into the front is a slip of paper containing the liner notes, but is actually more a letter to the listener by lead singer Robin Pecknold. It describes the band's desire to create music that transports the listener to a particular time or place.

The letter details the singer's feeling as he discovered, upon seeing photos of his own childhood, that his own most treasured memories were fabrications of his imagination after seeing these photographs at an earlier, unremembered time and integrating them into his own self image. I always enjoy looking at the little book included with many albums, but despite their simplicity, these are now my favourite to date. Like the music and the lyrics, these simple notes have a melancholic romance about them that appeals to me and gives me the impression that these musicians care deeply about how their listeners respond to the work they have created.

From humble beginnings to one of 2008's "must hear" bands, Fleet Foxes have come a long way in a very short time. Before they ever released a track, they got over quarter of a million listens on their MySpace page from word-of-mouth recommendation alone. Their debut album is an absolute pleasure to listen to, and it's very difficult to pinpoint favourites within its humble 39 minute play time.

White Winter Hymnal is one of my personal high points of the album, with an upbeat tempo and folk harmonies that are easy to listen to and have a definite feel good element. Another is Your Protector, an altogether more sombre song with a distinctly military feel. The song's meaning is not clear from the lyrics, but it conjours up the image of the girl left behind, from the perspective of the soldier at war, not expecting to return.

Every track has some aspect that arouses some emotion. By the end of the final track, the almost a capella tragedy of Oliver James, it's easy to feel that the band don't want the album to end, almost as much as the listener. An amazing album.

Fleet Foxes at MySpace
Fleet Foxes at Wikipedia

Lacuna Coil - Shallow Life

Having tried (and failed) to filter out the metal from Doozr's music collection, I decided to admit defeat and when he purchased the new Lacuna Coil album I thought I should embrace my inner metal chick and give it a listen.

Lacuna Coil have had five studio albums to date and Shallow Life marks the band moving their sound from gothic metal to more straight-forward alternative hard rock. I have very limited knowledge of their previous offerings and have just started listening to their 2006 release Karmacode.

On my first listen to Shallow Life, I was surprised how much I liked the overall sound to the album. It has a distinct mainstream metal feel and I can't help but compare tracks such as 'I'm Not Afraid' with artists such as Linkin Park. Throughout the album there are a number of really strong choruses and catchy guitar riffs that epitomise producer Don Gilmore's style (Avril Lavigne, Linkin Park, Pearl Jam) and I can understand why long standing Lacuna Coil fans might find the change too far removed from their previous gothic sound.

Cristina Scabbia states: "Shallow Life is a natural metamorphosis from within the band; we explored different musical territories while maintaining our own style. A mix of old and new, fast and slow and light and dark. The album production is incredibly powerful and has a beautiful purity to it. Shallow Life has forced us to challenge ourselves. It represents the way we see ourselves in the days we live in through truth, love and lies."

I have come to adore this album. All of the tracks have something about them that sends a shiver down my spine and as the album progresses, the volume gets louder and louder. However, standout tracks for me are Survive, I Like It and Wide Awake.

I don't know yet if their previous releases will appeal to me in the same way as Shallow Life has and I am not sure how existing Lacuna Coil fans will feel about the direction they have taken their music. However, Shallow Life as a stand alone album is without a doubt the most excited I have been about new music for a long time.

Lacuna Coil home page

Shallow Life on Wikipedia

Mac OS X 10.6 - Snow Leopard

On August 28th 2009, Apple released the new version of Mac OS X, 10.6 "Snow Leopard". This is an interesting release, because it doesn't actually do very much over and above its predecessor, 10.5 "Leopard". Indeed, the subtely different name indicates that it's just a more refined version of the same thing.

The main question with this refinement, really, is whether it is worth it. Having used it for a couple of weeks now, I can give a resounding "yes". It's smoother, more polished, and generally a wonderful improvement on an already excellent operating system.

Installation

To celebrate this new release, 23inertia and I had a little "install party" to update our respective Macbooks to the latest and greatest incarnation of the Mac OS. My 32-bit Macbook was being upgraded from 10.4 Tiger, so I have the Mac Box Set. This includes iLife '09 and iWork '09, which I shall review later. 23inertia's 64-bit 2nd generation Macbook was being upgraded from 10.5 Leopard, so used the generously priced £25 upgrade version of the installer.

The installation itself was about as simple as you can get, and involved inserting the disk, double-clicking the installer, and clicking "continue" a few times. A little while later, the machine reboots itself and you're sat at the Snow Leopard login screen.

A small glitch in the installer did manifest itself, though. On 23inertia's machine, it rebooted into the installer proper, or at least, tried to. Maybe the disk didn't spin up in the drive fast enough, or maybe a setting got lost, but the result was that it didn't actually boot the installer, but went back into Leopard. Oops! Fortunately, restarting the installer worked perfectly the second time. Strange little bug, and I've not seen mention of it elsewhere.

Under The Hood

Many of the new features do not manifest at the UI level. Rather, they sit in the guts of the OS and allow it to take advantage of computer technology in a much more effective way. It's 64-bit throughout now, and thanks to Apple magic, also works perfectly on 32-bit machines. That's particularly handy because my ageing Macbook has a 32-bit CoreDuo processor.

Some new functionality that assists well on the processing front are Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCL. GCD is a thread pooling technology that lets applications hand over concurrency issues to the OS to handle, allowing better utilisation of multiple cores on suitable machines. That includes all generation 1 Macbooks or higher, so pretty much the entire Mac lineup. I think only one edition of the Mac Mini was released without at least 2 cores.

OpenCL is a clever bit of trickery that, on a suitably equipped machine (read: not mine) will use the processor and memory of the graphics card to handle some of the actual heavy lifting involved with rendering the shiny user interface of OS X. This will take the load away from the main processor, freeing it up to do more useful things via the magic of Grand Central Dispatch.

On The Desktop

Once you log in, the desktop is noticeably more lovely as soon as you start using it. Part of this is due to Apple's decision to raise the default gamma level to 2.2 from 1.8. The brings it in line with PCs and normal televisions. The advantage of this is that the colours are much more vivid. This comes at the expense of contrast range, however, so some detail may be lost. Most people will just appreciate the improved display, but others might want to revert to 1.8. This is easily achieved through the Displays page in System Preferences, by created a custom calibrated colour profile.

The Finder is more responsive thanks to being completely rewritten to be exactly the same, and the dock responds even more fluidly to mouse events. This makes managing the desktop even less effort than it already was. Handling logging in to remote machines is much improved, allowing user credentials to be saved for quick access to services published over Bonjour. I did have to do a bit of hacking with Avahi and Netatalk to get my Debian box to show up, though.

As well as the Finder and Dock having performance improvements, other more functional improvements have been added to Exposé. Gone is the rather random, haphazard arrangment of windows when invoking Exposé. Instead, the windows are arranged into a grid, with a highlight border indicating your current selection and window titles annotating the scaled window previews.

Parts of Exposé are also built into the Dock. Clicking and holding on an open program icon doesn't just bring up the Dock item menu, as in previous versions. Instead, the single program version of Exposé activates, bringing all active windows for that app together so you can easily switch between them. A secondary little menu allows you to set Dock item properties, so no functionality is lost.

The interface to Spaces has been generally improved. I never used Spaces in Leopard so I'm not entirely sure what is new and what is not, but it is lovely and easy to use now. Pressing ctrl and a number jumps straight to a numbered desktop, ctrl and an arrow to move in the requested direction to the next desktop, and F8 to bring up an overview of all spaces. The overview mode is very nice, allowing you to drag windows or entire applications (by holding shift while dragging any window) to different spaces.

Finally, Dock folders have had a much needed overhaul. New features this time include the ability to scroll the Grid view, and navigate the folder structure within the same fly-out window. This saves opening and navigating a full blown finder if all you want to do is open a document or program.

Application Enhancements

As well as all these lovely improvements that make the system nicer to use, there are a bundle of nice little additions to built-in apps and the system in general. One of these is a faster "wake up" process which, compared to waking Tiger from sleep, is like lightning. I open the lid, and as soon as the screen appears, so does the login dialog. No more waiting a few seconds to get round to it. I unlock the screen, and I'm already connected to the WiFi network and everything is immediately back up to speed.

Other improvements include the acquisition and viewing of image files. The Image Capture application has had a thorough overhaul, giving it an interface rather more consistent with the rest of the OS. There are still some clunky bits, like the default button downloading ALL photos on a particular camera even if you have selected only a few (there is a second button to only download the selection), but on the whole the app is vastly improved.

Preview is similarly improved, with little additions such as a preview sheet for quickly scanning and jumping to different pages based on thumbnails, and nicer annotation and editing tools for quickly rotating, cropping and drawing on images. The magical selection tool from PDFs that tries to follow the columns of text in a document (rather than selecting across the full width of the page) also works incredibly well.

The user interface to Quicktime has completely changes for this release. Gone are the ugly grey window borders and iTunes-esque play button at the bottom. Instead, the window is borderless and the controls float above the video when required. This takes a bit of getting used to, though, and at the moment I keep wondering if I can have my old interface back. That being said, Quicktime can now better save movies, and can record directly from the camera or by taking a video of the screen, screencast style. This is further enhanced by a "trim" tool that lets you crop rubbish bits off the beginning and end of a video.

Some other little odds and sods that you might not notice include:

•    Disk eject now tells you what process is preventing a disk from ejecting
•    You can tell Spaces to always open a particular app on a particular space
•    Files can be restored to their original location from the Trash
•    Terminal can now split panes
•    A few new fonts to play with
•    The Airport menubar item animates while searching for a network

Summary

This has been a somewhat lightning tour of Snow Leopard, just highlighting some of the improvements that I've seen while using it. I'm sure there are more little improvements all over the place that I shall keep uncovering, but on the whole I am very pleased with this upgrade. It has made even my 3 year old machine snappier and more responsive, and look better to boot. 23inertia is similarly impressed, although she says it's just because it's shinier. So, if you want to put your aging Tiger out to pasture, or make your existing Leopard even shinier, get Snow Leopard. You know you want to!

Kasabian - West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum

Alternative rockers Kasabian have returned to the studio to produce their 3rd album, and their second #1 after Empire. The tongue-twistingly named West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum, referencing a mental institution near Wakefield, is very much a Kasabian album, with the same rough sound and heavy beats present in their earlier work.  

The album art is a strange piece. It shows the band dressed up for a "party in the asylum", wearing all manner of strange costumes. It took me a moment to realise what I was supposed to be looking at in the shop. From a distance it just looked like a splodge of colour with human faces. Of course, that might just be my eyes. 

The album itself is a fairly standard rock offering. The songs all do have distinctive sounds, but they are all recognisably Kasabian. A few tracks stand out, including Fast Fuse, Vlad The Impaler and Ladies And Gentlemen (Roll The Dice). Another one that stands out is West Ryder Silver Bullet, which starts with a very peculiar narrative about a maniac (presumably in the titular asylum) who draws electronic graffiti. When his language speaks to you, in that moment, poetry will be made by everyone, and there will be emus in the zone. So now you know. 

Perhaps after a few more listens it will strike more of a chord with me, but at the moment my summary would have to be good, but ultimately forgettable. It is certainly a good listen, so I'll keep it in the collection for the future, and won't complain if it comes up on shuffle.


Addendum: After listening to this album around 15 times, it's actually starting to grow on me. I've taken a liking to Where Did All The Love Go and Fast Fuse, and find myself humming them to myself. So I'm changing my verdict: good, but you have to let it grow on you. Don't give up on it too soon!

Kasabian home page 

West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum on Wikipedia

Placebo - Battle For The Sun

Sometimes it's possible to get into a band completely at random, even if they've been around longer than you've been a music listener. This happened recently for me, when I happened across Placebo's cover of "Running Up That Hill" in the trailer for the movie Daybreakers. After finding the full track and enjoying it, I sought out more from this mystery band that I'd somehow missed, despite them being around since I was just 14 years old. 
 
Battle For The Sun is the band's 6th studio album, and the first with the new drummer Steve Forrest. The album sees the band take another step forward, away from the sparse musical style of their first albums. Here, they experiment with new instruments, and tie the album together with a coherent theme running through all the tracks. According to lead singer Brian Molko, the album is more positive in its outlook than previous offerings. In an interview with NME, he said:

"We've made a record about choosing life, and choosing to live, about stepping out of the darkness and into the light. Not necessarily turning your back on the darkness because it's there, it's essential; it's a part of who you are, but more about the choice of standing in the sunlight instead." - Brian Molko

I got the special edition of the album from Amazon, which comes in a very nice book-style package. In the front cover is the CD itself, and a documentary DVD is tucked into the back. The pages contain the liner notes, all lyrics and some photographs and artwork of the band. It's a very nicely presented package and I took great pleasure in looking through it while listening to the music. 


The music itself is a good mix of hard rock riffs, heavy basslines and lyrics that are easy to sing along to. By and large, every track delivers although there are a couple of relatively uninteresting bits. The opening track, Kitty Litter, while being a good solid rock song, doesn't quite hook into the brain the way some of the others do.


Other tracks have unusual parts that leave some reviewers cold, and others enthused. The hard repetition in the title track is strange to listen to at first, but soon grows on you and is actually a very good track. The bizarre inclusion of a toy piano's built-in melody right in the middle of For What It's Worth is another moment that is a bit of a surprise. 


It's hard to pick out a few favourites, but the ones I find myself playing to myself in my head are, in no particular order:

• Ashtray Heart After the band's original name, this is a straight up catchy rock song.
• Battle for the Sun Strange on first listen, but actually very good
• For What It's Worth Solid rock song with a strange toy piano bit in the middle.
• Devil In The Details Good song that captures the ethos of the album.

There has been a lot of nay-saying about this album. Some say it deviates too far from Placebo's roots. Some say it's just not good enough to qualify in the current market. Some say that only hardcore fans will like it. I would say that perhaps they're looking for too much meaning behing their choice in music. It's a good rock album that bears repeat listening, and will have you humming the tunes to yourself after the first couple of listens.


Placebo website 
Battle for the Sun on Wikipedia