Los Campesinos. All photographs courtesy of Valerio Berdini and taken at the London leg of the tour.

I think me and my friends are getting boring. I should be at the peak of my young-and-aliveness, but now the golden days of spring are past and I’m just tired and contented, this once-exuberant music nerd, captured at least for now the perfect beautiful, dorky girl everything about my hobbies had been basically aimed at, and I’m left just… enjoying it? Since when is mere enjoyment something to fucking feel?

If this accelerated process of spiritual ageing is actually mostly in my head as a sort of dumbass way of processing genuine happiness (ohh god look at me, I’m such a contented cunt) but anyway, if this is anything to go by, I’ll be looking back nostalgically at ‘You! Me! Dancing!’ somewhen about next month. I don’t care whether you can maybe state a case for its ubiquity or not, it’s a really special song that basically sums up perfectly everything about the indie clubnight experience. But hey, haha, when Los Campesinos play it tonight I’m not one of the kids at the front bouncing about so alive, I’m slightly detached, jerking about, appreciating it myself in my own little bubble of “yes, this is personally significant”-ince. Continue Reading

Wordless at the Whitney, a series of concerts curated by Wordless Music for the Whitney Museum of American Art noisily ended last Friday with a set by lo-fi favorites Times New Viking and Jefferson Friedman’s third string quartet as performed by members of the American Chamber Music Ensemble.  Times New Viking’s latest album, Rip It Off, out on Matador records, has received a lot of recent critical praise for its affecting combination of noise and pop.  Jefferson Friedman, a former member of the punk band Shutter to Think, has become a highlight in contemporary classical music.  The two were well matched, and not just in the context of Wordless Music’s brief to bring the classical and indie music worlds together.  Both halves of the program had a highly developed sense of how to balance two extremes: dense textures and sweet melodies. Continue Reading