How much do I love artsy German indie electro-popsters Wir Sind Helden? A LOT, that's how much. I've been seeing references to them in German magazines and feminist blogs for years, but only heard them for the first time recently. And oh my God, how did it take me so long? They are so fantastic and last night Ju Ju and I had a bit of a German dance party as we grooved around the kitchen to the sounds of Die Reklamation.

Not only do I absolutely love this song (I can't embed the video), but back in 1995 I created (and never finished) a graphic novel about an indie band who sell their souls to the devil for fame, and a few pages of it, and I am seriously not exaggerating, looked exactly, PANEL FOR PANEL, like a bit of this video. My heroine even looked like, and was dressed identically to, Wir Sind Helden's lead singer/guitarist Judith Holofernes.

I love this song, and its supercute Tintin-esque video:


And this video (and song) just makes me happy:


Because I am a sheep, give me a few "five things" list suggestions!

It has not been a fun week. So let's listen to Zooey Deschanel singing to cheer ourselves up. I love this song.

I'm off to London in a couple of hours! And I will see some of you there. I am currently debating whether to risk bringing my knitting on the plane - bamboo double-pointed needles, so they won't set anything off, and really they're no more pointy than a pencil, but who knows whether this is enough? I'll ask when I'm checking my bags in, I couldn't bear them to throw away my nice new bamboos.

Anyway, I suppose I'd better go and, like, pack, and have a shower and get Ju Ju ready for her trip to the cattery at the vet. But before I go, I'll leave you with this: Stevie Wonder doing 'Superstition' (one of the greatest songs ever) on Sesame Street circa 1972. Note that (a) Stevie and his band perform the whole song, which lasts for 6 minutes - you wouldn't get that on kids' TV now (b) Stevie is surprisingly hot and also totally into performing on Sesame Street, which is awesome and (c) best of all, there is what one commenter on Jezebel (whence this link came) described as "the rad little kid on the fire escape just ROCKING the fuck out." Pure unadulterated joy. Enjoy.

Apparently I am too frazzled with work at the moment to do a proper post, but not too frazzled to partake in a nostalgic music meme, as stolen from jinxremoving! Note that I never really throw music away, so although the meme includes both "own" and "used to own", I don't listen to some of these albums very often these days, although I don't look back and cringe at any of them with the possible exception of Siamese Dream. Also, in the majority of cases the words "because I taped it off someone" should come after "own".

( Nostalgia ahoy! or, Were the '90s really good for music or am I just nostalgic because I was in my youthful prime back then? )

Following from my Ronson/Allen post the other day, here's my favourite track from that album, the cover of Radiohead's 'Just'(the original, as it happens, is one of my favourite ever songs with one of the most exhilarating chord progressions in the world. I used to put it on a lot of the mixtapes I made for chums when I was in college. The video was freaking amazing as well). I forgot this cover had been released as a single ages ago so there's actually a video for it.

The sound quality on Youtube isn't great, but you may still be able to see why I think this is is just one of the best covers I've ever heard. If it doesn't make you want to dance, you're probably dead.

I love, love love Mark Ronson and Lily Allen's cover of the Kaiser Chiefs' 'Oh My God'. Share my delight here, if you are one of the few people in this part of the world who hasn't heard it already:

1. The ongoing Buffy comic. Oh, so good. The last two panels made me grin from ear to ear (of course, I guessed who the off-panel speaker in the second last panel was, but I still beamed when I turned the page and was proved right). Speaking of Buffy comics, I also finally got my hands on the collected Tales of the Vampires - I got a few of the comics when they were coming out, but they kept selling out too quickly from Dublin's indie comic shop. Anyway, despite the fact that the art in the serial story about the mini-watchers is shockingly bad (seriously, could they have at least got someone who knew how to draw kids? The children looked like mutant dwarves), and I kept wishing they'd got Mike Mignola to illustrate that as well as the cover, the story itself was great, as were almost all of the single short ones. I love the way they all explore stuff that was hinted at in the programme about the vampires retaining elements not only of their personalities but of their feelings for other people - the story about the man whose father is turned into a vampire was particularly fantastic. So yeah, strongly recommended if you can find it (I suggest looking online).

2. The Laura Viers and Saltbreakers album. Excellent and not over-hyped, as I had feared. Speaking of slightly fey North American indie girls, I love this Feist video (and the song too):


3. I am listening to a lot of Pentangle recently for the first time since, well, since I was a kid and my dad used to play them all the time. But they really are great. I am very pleased at this twee folk revival thing that's been happening lately, although as ever I can't help feeling smug, in a hideously teenage "but of course I've been listening to Steeleye Span again for years!" way. I have also rediscovered the Boo Radleys' Giant Steps album. 'Lazarus' is one of my favourite songs ever, but I haven't listened to the entire album in years, and I'd forgotten how good it is. I think the shoegazing/post-shoegazing revival is already underway...

4. I've been trying to brush up on the auld Deutsch by actually looking up words I don't know in a dictionary when reading something complex, as opposed to what I have been doing for the last few years, which is to get frustrated when I can't understand something and then just giving up on the book. I've been reading Cornelia Funke's Tintenherz (published in English as Inkheart), which is a pretty good kidlit/YA fantasy. Admittedly I don't really have to look anything up in that, apart from the odd obscure word which turns out to mean "a fire-eater's flaming torch" and stuff like that, and indeed can easily read it in bed while feeling sleepy, which is a sign of how demanding it is. However, I have also been attempting to read Robert Ide's Geteilte Träume: Meine Eltern, die Wende und Ich, which is a book by a Ossi journalist born (like me) in 1975, about how the wall coming down created a generation gap between his generation, who were in their teens at the time, and their parents. It's totally fascinating, but I'm finding it quite slow going because (a) he uses very long sentences with ten zillion subclauses, which is confusing enough in English let alone in a language with German's word order and (b) there are a lot of references to specific East German brand-names, which, thanks partly to the German way of starting all nouns with capital letters, I keep thinking are ordinary nouns that I don't recognise. It's frustrating because the book is incredibly interesting and well-done. I just wish it didn't take me ten minutes to get through a page.

5. I am going to see CSS on Saturday, and watch the final five episodes of Battlestar Galactica on Sunday. Huzzah!

Und du? What cultural delights are you enjoying right now?

This is totally freaking awesome.

Jem and the Holograms! Le Tigre! Together at last! God, how I loved Jem when I was a kid. Alas my mother wouldn't let us get ANY Barbie-esque dolls after the two raggedy old Sindys given to leedy at some time in the late '70s (with whom we played Jungle Sindys, which involved the Sindys living in the crabapple tree in the back garden), so I never had a Jem of my own, despite the fact that rockin' Jem was clearly much cooler and more feminist than horrible old Barbie or indeed Jungle Sindy.

Oh joy! This morning I discovered that Kristin Hersh had a new solo album coming out next month, just in time for me to write about. Just a few hours later, it was sitting on my desk. And oh, it's good. I was a bit disappointed by the 50 Foot Wave album, but this is absolutely wonderful - lots of spiky electric guitar, lots of strings, fabulous, weird tunes. Huzzah!

Alas, I can't find any MP3s online. In the meantime, have a listen to a slightly ropey live version of one of my favourite songs ever, courtesy of Hersh's official website.

Earlier this year young Patsington went to the Rotterdam Film Festival, where his short film was being shown. While there, he saw a Japanese film called Linda Linda Linda, and returned singing its praises. It's about a group of girls in a Japanese high school who form a band, but need a new singer. So they choose the first girl who walks past, who happens to be a rather shy Korean exchange student who doesn't really know much Japanese yet. I thought it sounded great, and Patsington kept saying how much i would love it, but it's not available on DVD anywhere and I couldn't find a torrent of it – until last week. It took, seriously, about five days to download, because there were only about five people in the world either seeding or downloading it, but it finally finished yesterday and we watched it last night. And as Patsington predicted, I absolutely and utterly adored it – it's so funny and charming and the girls in it are really cool and cute. I wish I'd seen it when I was a teen. So if you can get your paws on it, I strongly recommend it - after all, how can you resist a film of which this is the climactic scene?



It rules!


As did the gig I went to on Wednesday, which featured both Patsington and my own sister leedy, whose top pop combo the Jimmy Cake (whose dazzling roster of celebrity fans includes Cillian Murphy and, um, that's it. But come on, that's pretty good!) played their first gig in about a year. Now, I don't lavish too much praise on my relatives, but ver Cake were absolutely freaking amazing - I was awestruck. I was not awestruck by a band that played earlier in the evening, although I was amused. It appears that the shoegazing revival is well and truly upon us, a fact which makes me feel about a million years old as I realised that when I was actually listening to Ride, this band hadn't even started primary school. Or, possibly, been born.

Nevermind, I can listen to the Long Blondes to cheer myself up, as at least they sing about remembering what it was like to be 19 but being glad that those days are behind them. That Blondes album really is very good, isn't it? And I do like the lyrics although I could do with a bit less of the I-don't-trust-other-women which keeps cropping up throughout the album. But the glorious spiky tunes cancel out my irritation.

And finally, HAPPY BIRTHDAY, biascut! See you later!

Random Music Alert! If you have not heard my celebrity lookalike* Charlotte Gainsbourg's 5.55 album, get your hands on it now, because it's absolutely and utterly amazing, and 'The Songs That We Sing' is currently my favourite song in the world (you can hear it on her site).

Also, I have a feeling only kylegirl will appreciate this, but oh my God, Mary Worth is freaking hilarious at the moment. First drug-pusher Tommy makes a cameo reappearance (sadly without his "very own meth lab!"), and now Mary, the sanctimonious meddler, is being outmeddled by a new neighbour. To understand how I became besotted with a preposterous comic-strip soap opera, just head over to the Comics Curmudgeon and read the Mary Worth category.

*Well, she's the only celebrity that more than one person has ever told me I look like, if that counts. Although actually, in the photo on her site's homepage she looks more like another girl I know.

You know when you discover a new band that ticks all of your boxes - that makes music which is just so you you might as well have commisioned it? Well, that's happened with the spiky, twinkly and very poppy Persephone's Bees album. This is partly because they sound almost exactly like Komeda, whom I also love, but who cares?

I need to be woken up by the music's jauntiness, as this morning Patsington plunged us into technological chaos. He had set the alarm for seven o'clock, but when it went off he decided (as he often does, to my great rage) that, having woken me an hour before I had to get up, he didn't want to get up now after all. He possesses the ability to fall asleep again easily after waking up. I, once I've had enough sleep to actually function, do not. Even if I am very tired and really want a full eight hours sleep, if you wake me up after six and a half I won't be able to fall asleep again and end up lying there wide awake while Patsington slumbers on. I keep telling Patsington to just set the bloody alarm for eight because he won't get up till then anyway, but he continually insists that he will get up at seven.

Anyway! This morning, as usual, the alarm went off at seven and Patsington didn't want to get up, so he reset it to eight. And, mirabile dictu, I actually managed to get to sleep again until the alarm went off. I felt oddly like I'd only been asleep for a few minutes, but staggered out of bed anyway. Then I looked at my watch and discovered that I had been asleep for a few minutes, because the foolish Patsington had changed the clock time as well as the alarm! So I lay back on the pillows and tried to doze for a few minutes until the alarm went again, because Patsington had hit snooze instead of changing the alarm time. At that stage I was beyond sleep so I just got up. And now I'm in work, desperately trying to find famous people who will answer questions about what books they want for Christmas. It's a hard life.

I spent much of the summer of 1996 moping over my then-recently-ex boyfriend - who really was not worth it, to a ridiculous degree, but with whom I was still in a band at the time which did make it all a lot worse. This moping was accompanied by mournful cigarettes on the back door step when my parents had gone to bed, writing long and rambling letters to my friends who were away for the summer (which was most of my friends apart from the Mozzer and, actually, Patsington, with whom I went to see Radiohead), and listening to miserable music. This music was usually either Palace or Mazzy Star. I listened to Mazzy Star so much that summer that I still can't listen to them now.

Ten years later, I am not moping over a stupid boy who decided he prefered a psychotic little law student to me, and am in fact rather happy, in general, but I do still like miserable, slightly hazy music. And I've found some good stuff: Howling Bells. It's the best slightly poppy, hazy music I've heard in a long time. And like much of the good music I've discovered recently, I first heard them on Russell Brand's BBC 6music show. It's the third album I've bought by a band I first heard on the show, and they're nearly all bands championed by Trevor Lock. He really does have excellent taste for someone regularly described as dressing like a cross between Alan Bennett and a Jack Russell.

So you tell someone that you're talking about starting a new band called the Owl Service, and suddenly you're listed as such for a gig tomorrow. Heavens! Anyway, Patsington and I (and not the potential third member of the Owl Service, who is leedy) are playing at tomorrow's Hoot Night in the Sugar Club, which should be fabulous as always, so do come along. We're doing 'Debaser' with an acoustic guitar (played by Patsington) and a toy glockenspiel (played by me wearing my new pink dirndl), which should be...interesting.

I am in love with this album by The Eighteenth Day of May, which leedy got our dad for his birthday. I heard it for the first time in the family folk fest yesterday, and loved it so much I got it on iTunes when I came home last night. I've been practically listening to it all day on a crazed acid-folk loop and I can't get enough of it.

Recently, in real life not on teh interbets, I have been ranting about the lack of good places to go out dancing. But lo, a new club is starting whose playlist looks rather like my record collection! In fact, its remit is almost exactly the same as Bon Bon, the short-lived club run by my friend C and I about five or six years ago. Funnily enough, we were just talking about Bon Bon on Friday night and I was announcing my intention to start a new club run by laydeez (all suggestions welcome, Dublin birds). But perhaps this new one will do to be going on with.

Of course, the people who run it appear to be about ten (well, early 20s) so we would probably be the equivalents of the sad old people who used to turn up at McGonagles when I was 16 and in retrospect weren't particularly sad or indeed particularly old - probably about 22, in fact. Oh, the ravages of time....

Some records I love, in handy collage form...

Create your own Music List @ HotFreeLayouts!

Link courtesy of alicetiara

If you only do one pointlessly amusing thing today, go here, scroll down and watch the Pete Burns interview. Seriously, go and do it now. Even if you've never heard of Pete Burns, it's absolutely fucking hilarious. Especially the cowboy.

You know when things mysteriously disappear in your house, like books and CDs, and you can't figure it out where they've gone, and you look and look for them because you know they've got to be around somewhere despite all evidence to the contrary, and it drives you insane? Well, a couple of years ago my copy of this album disappeared. Ultra Chicks: Filles in the Garage is a collection of '60s French ye-ye singles, and it was difficult to find when I bought it six years ago (I got it through Other Music's website, but it seems impossible to buy a copy now). So as well as being frustrated when it disappeared into the ether, I was sad, because I loved it, and I'd never be able to get another copy. I had several of the other compilations in the Ultra Chicks ye-ye series, but this had been my favourite one.

This evening the DVD remote fell down the back of our couch. Our couch folds out into a sofa bed, so there's lots of space in its innards for things to get lost in. And the remote seemed to have fallen right down the back, so I had to take off the cushions and pull up the bar of the mattress - and I caught a glimpse of a CD, down beneath the mattress layers. Just guess what it was....

Yes! It was the vanished Ultra Chicks! So now I'm listening to lots of crazy French rocky girly pop, and I am very happy. There might have been some celebratory dancing. In fact, there was.

I'd been looking forward to the new Nellie McKay album for ages, because her first one was my favourite album of 2004, so I was thrilled when I heard it was coming out at the beginning of January. And then lo, a few weeks ago it disappeared from my wishlist on Amazon because "this item is no longer available". And then I found out that the release had been cancelled because Ms McKay had got into some huge row with her label. Which sucked. But then! It dawned on me, rather belatedly, that the album might be floating around on the internet somewhere. Which it was. And I have it! And it's fantastic! So weirdly poppy and show-tuney and spiky. I love Nellie McKay. She makes the sort of music I'd love to make. I would kill to see her do Polly in the new Broadway Dreigroschenoper (that's Threepenny Opera to non-Deutschers).

Also, yesterday I heard part of Peter and the Wolf on the radio and it reminded me of how utterly fantastic the music is. Yes, I know it's always seen as a fluffy kids' piece, but seriously, just listen to it. I absolutely adored the music when I was a kid, and it still stands up. Go and listen to the hunters' theme - it's just so cool. I need more Prokofiev - the only other stuff I have is Romeo and Juliet...