Album of the Month Ivor Cutler – A Flat Man. If you’ve never heard of Ivor Cutler then prepare for a discovery more strange and exciting than discovering that you’ve got a third nipple. His work inhabits the strange grey area where storytelling, poetry and song overlap. This is admittedly an extremely off-putting and pretentious way of putting it, but it’s true. His surreal songs and stories manage to be laugh-out-loud funny and touching at the same time. To mark the second anniversary of his death, Cutler’s family have re-released A Flat Man, his last album, on their own label. The chances of being able to buy it in Romania are about the same as Adrian Nastase going to prison for corruption, but then again, there’s always hope…
Morrissey – Greatest Hits. Given that Morrissey has already released six ‘Best Of’ albums, you’d have to be a pretty unhealthily obsessive Morrissey fan to believe that what the world really needs right now is another one. Fortunately, I am in fact a unhealthily obsessive Morrissey fan and believe that a new Morrissey Best Of should be released once every seven seconds, and played loudly through huge speakers in parks, offices and all places in which people congregate. Six Best Of albums is no way near enough – come on Morrissey! When’s the seventh coming out? Get it together!
One Republic - Dreaming Out Loud. As if the overly-sentimental and decidedly over-the-top songs weren’t enough, the lead singer of One Republic feels obliged show us just how emotionally pained he is by pulling a face like he’s passing a kidney stone every time he sings.
The Kooks, Konk – The Kooks are a shining example of why indie now deserves to die a quick death. As a supposed ‘alternative’ scene, there was always the supposition that part of indie was about being brave and experimental and mold-breaking. Instead, the legions of bands who spend more time buying improbably skinny jeans than they do writing songs have turned indie into the most conservative and straight-jacketed genre out there. The Kooks are essentially a boy-band trapped in the body of an indie-band, who make you realize just how much better it was during the days when boy bands wore matching white suits and sang ballads and performed on bar-stools.
Suie Paparude, A fost odata. Junkyard, Michi and Dobrica return with a brand new album that’s the musical equivalent of being kicked down a flight of stairs in a squat-party by a gang of twelve year old glue-sniffing electro-punks dressed as robots – and I mean that in a good way. Recommended.
Various Artists – Tuning Hitz. I really don’t get this compilation. It’s one thing to release compilations specially created for listening to you in your car (these kind of ‘driving’ compilations usually consist of 80s soft rock hits and are contractually obliged to include the track ‘Eye of the Tiger’ or Bachman-Turner Overdrive’s ‘Aint Seen Nothin’ Yet’). Sure, if you’ve got zero interest in music and want something to distract you from the monotony of your own existence while you crawl through Bucharest at about 0.1km/h, then these compilations are perfect. But music specially for ‘tuned’ cars? Do ‘tuned’ car owners gravitate towards certain kinds of music? Is this music unsuitable for un-tuned cars? And what about owners of really rubbish cars – surely there’s a market for them, too? I await the follow-up release of Trabant hitz 2008.