Thursday 8 December 2005

Hit and Miss Thursday (Synthetic Seventies Super Special)

Velvet Goldmine is an underrated film. So sez me anyway, everyone else tends to think it’s complete bollocks. David Stratton probably hammered it as nothing more than a cheap excuse to see Ewan McGregor’s balls and Toni Collette’s muff. Possibly true, but it’s also got a pre-Bateman Christian Bale (who is, let’s be frank, hot in both movies) and the always entertaining Eddie Izzard. Anyway, this is Hit and Miss Thursday and not the Movie Show so piss the film off and let’s discuss the soundtrack instead. Most of it is either classics of the era (Satellite Of Love, Virginia Plain etc..) and covers of same. Notable is the thinly veiled Radiohead as the “Venus In Furs”. Their glam rock covers are so much better than that shoegazing prog-rock shit they pump out now. It might not be right to say it but fuck it I’m going there - glam beats prog hands down. I’m not for glitter and giant shoes but give me the choice between that an a cape and I’m yours.

The most impressive contributions come from the band Shudder To Think. Two new songs that are easily to comparable to anything from the era the movie is set in. The songs are in the film but are wobbly at best, when the band takes over on the soundtrack they’re off the charts. According to AllMusic (the people who, lest we forget, we give almost any album four stars) Shudder To Think had a “hardcore punk background” but you’d never pick it. Not that I’d know - I’ve heard precisely one other song of theirs and even that was sung by somebody else. Who cares? They couldn’t live up to these.

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Download: Shudder To Think - Ballad Of Maxwell Demon (2.2mb)

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Download: Shudder To Think - Hot One (1.4mb - shithouse bitrate alert)

They’re extremely Bowie. Like SERIOUSLY Bowie. These songs ranked 360th and 60th respectively in the TSP 1000. Hot One especially. Gah, that song has sex written all over it. From the opening piano right through. *sigh* Almost makes me wish I was interested. It’s a crime, A CRIME I TELL YOU, that these songs aren’t better known. I insist that some shitty “Wham! Bam! Thank You Glam!” CD (and yes, I own something with that exact title) is rewritten to eliminate anything ever perpetrated by Gary Glitter and includes these instead.

P.S - I’ve got hundreds of fuckers that I want to post so get used to cheap posts tacked on to top music. The only way you can stop it is to narc me into the feds for posting MP3’s and you don’t want to do that. Because we all know what happens to laggers don’t we?

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