Monday, August 16, 2010

Sébastien Tellier

Discovered a bit of YouTube gold through a friend and had to share.
I'd never heard of Sébastien Tellier, but upon research I found he's a French singer-songwriter who did Eurovision in 2008 (a brave mistake perhaps as France only came 19th) and once collaborated with Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo (the half of Daft Punk with the, er, interesting name). Guy-Manuel produced his third album, 'Sexuality'. Tellier went in a new direction and called it "intellectual R&B".

Sébastien is clearly an arse man (like many male frogs) which is reflected in the video for 'Look'. I like the audio but I like the visuals much more. One could say it simply consists of a woman shitting diamonds, but I promise it's much more tasteful than that.

Saturday, August 14, 2010

Klaxons

WARNING: There may be some ranting in the following post.

When I read that Klaxons were releasing a second album I thought "hmm I must check that out" because I rather liked their debut (although I don't know if I'd still like it now, I was 13 at the time of its release, everyone was listening to it and I wasn't very mature in my music taste).
Well don't bother. They've released a video of their new single 'Echoes' and if that's anything to go by, 'Surfing The Void' is going to be shit. Apparently Polydor told them to re-record bits because it was "too experimental for release". It's not experimental in the slightest, so either they recorded the whole thing again or their label do not have a clue what they're talking about. Or both. It's dull dull dull.
The video is stupid for a start. To begin with I thought "Alright they're doing that half-whispering, half-talking thing again. That's okay". Then I started to get bored and the whole I'm-such-a-liberal-free-thinker-I'm-wearing-clothes-that-don't-really-match thing was grating on me. I was wondering if they were going to claim they're on their gap yahs and that they'd been on the lash the night before and had made vomcanoes. With little chunklets. (It's set in Egypt).
Anyway it's basically a load of guys all standing triumphantly as if they were God-given gifts, wind blowing through their hair, occasionally shouting "eeeechoes [something about otherworlds]".
Then there's the song. Stupendously banal, vapid, uninspiring to the max. And that's all I have to say.

Rant over.

Anyway now you can see/hear for yourself. If you must.

'Echoes'