To use basic pop culture analogies, Darwin Deez’s Radar Detector is essentially many fun things crossed with Napoleon Dynamite. This man’s hair terrifies me a little bit, but luckily no clip is longer than 3 seconds so my eyes don’t have a chance to fidget, so it all works – even him. Perhaps it’s easy to win people over with upside-down umbrellas too. Any home made gadget in a music video and I’m sold basically.

I’ve just bought tickets to the album launch party next month. It sounds like silly, fun and ridiculous music.

via Matthew

New from OK GO – move over Honda. Bright colours and simple things for my eyes seem to be a keen trend in music videos. “No doubt an intern that did the dominoes” was my first thought, although I can’t imagine any dominoes I’d be happier stacking. I love the glasses that make up a musical part of it, although wonder if that was done separately. Ideally in a magical word each glass would contain a small microphone and sound would be directly recorded from the video filming. Perhaps not.

“Filmed in a two story warehouse, in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, CA. The “machine” was designed and built by the band, along with members of Synn Labs over the course of several months.

“This is the Rube Goldberg machine version. In other words, a video depicting complex devices that perform simple tasks in indirect, convoluted ways.” – hellokinsella

Beth Jeans Houghton played at Komedia on Wednesday. I wouldn’t have found this gig without Jonathan writing an entry for Bored of Brighton which is good because she was fantastic. She’s like Gaga’s outfit, but wonderful and singing excellent music. I can’t think of a better description than his really:

“Her songs – and Beth herself, if you take her interviews as evidence – inhabits a creative world which is winningly magical. It isn’t the wistful, wide-eyed universe of a Bat For Lashes, but rather an arch, colourful terrain which seems to owe more to Cindy Sherman or Tony Hancock than it does Kate Bush.

Her musical palette – she is a young, female, folk singer – may seem familiar at first glance, but she has practically nothing in common with the likes of Laura Marling, Emmy The Great, Florence Welsh et al. First, her voice is more interesting – an effortless, husky hum which recalls 70s icon Bobbie Gentry, and her music is informed by deeper, darker, more esoteric strains of folk, country and progressive rock; by the likes of Tunng, Pentangle and Melanie.”

Here’s my hand-held video from the gig (new E-P1 cam does far better recordings than my point and shoot, unsurprisingly, though I wasn’t expecting sound to pick it up as much as it did). Stornaway, the main band, were less exciting but Beth J Houghton & The Hooves of Destiny (her band) were fantastic.

I’ve finally got round to sorting my videos. My Mac has become sluggish because I need to restart it. It’s a terrible habit, along with my ability to accumulate 20 tabs and corresponding open notepads for each.

There’s an independent record store in Brighton called Resident. It seems very pleased with its status, very into new bands, folk and good things, and is good at sending out newsletters/blog posts with their record of the week and such, all in a lovely enthusiastic tone. They also have in-store gigs which are free and tend to be promoting real gigs taking place later in the evening at more serious venues. I’d never been to until last week (actually last Friday – this is horribly late) when I went to see Jesca Hoop in an acoustic set.

“Her music is like going swimming in a lake at night” – says Tom Waits.

It was lovely – not a ‘one man and his guitar’ acoustic sort of way, but Hoop and a guitar, two very harmonious backing singers, and er.. yes, a bloke with a guitar nipped in for a bit. It’s a small store and twenty or thirty people stood very politely. Really intimate, really nice.

And a video, of course. Taken on zoom, and I got heavy arms whilst doing an impression of an army drill with the camera, but it’s a taste:

In appealing to my love of vile cheesy music, I love this mix up. But I’m also pleased that I don’t know half of the songs. DJ Earworm (yes), the author, recommends ‘Ableton Live‘ music software, which I might trial but I’m abundantly terrible with music and suspect there’s not enough software in the world that’ll help this.

It wasn’t all bad in 2009 though. I suddenly leapt on the Cat Stevens band wagon and got stuck into the Harold and Maude soundtrack (a film I love) for a long time. I heard some fantastic live sessions via BBC 2 I need to hunt down. Brilliant recordings, and he’s such a damn hippy.