4 posts from 2006

What albums are in heavy rotation for you right now?

Albums? Albums... oh yes, I remember them.

It's very rare that I play albums more than a few times these days. I rarely play them enough to get to that point where I know lots of the words and then eventually get sick of it. A few plays and it disappears into the general iTunes morass of randomised playing.

The only album I've played over and over in the past few months has been 'The Last Brontosarus' by Jacob Borshard, which is downloadable for free from his site. Really recommended if you like Belle and Sebastian, Camera Obscura and other "twee" tunes.

I don't often visit the Vox site, so I only become aware of the Questions of the Day when someone in my "neighbourhood" answers it. So I missed the QotD about what magazines you subscribe to, only noticing it a day or two later when reading Chris' post. I can't find a way to see old QotDs and click a simple 'Answer' button for them, but still...

I susbcribe to Sight & Sound and the London Review of Books. I swap the latter with my dad, who subscribes to the New York Review of Books, which means I spend most of my reading time reading lengthy reviews of books rather than the books themselves.

I also have a lifetime subscription to McSweeney's, although I'm woefully behind on my quirky American short-story reading and should either catch up or tell them that they should stop wasting their money on me.

I subscribed to The Believer for 12 months until March this year but it had gone drastically downhill since I read a few issues early on and it became a chore to get through it each month (other than Nick Hornby's accounts of what books he'd read or bought each month which was always a joy and which are collected together in a volume released next month and which I can recommend as a way to excite you about reading if you're feeling a bit jaded).

What's your morning beverage of choice?  Coffee, tea, juice?  Homemade or store-bought?

Orange juice, occasionally grapefruit juice. Shop-bought, organic, not from concentrate.

What is your favorite cover song?
Question submitted by Ray.

Oh well, I suppose I should try posting something to this thing, although I'm not sure why I'd need another place to write stuff. If it takes Questions of the Day to get people to write then maybe they shouldn't be writing...

Anyway... I've got 342 songs in my iTunes "Covers" playlist. Picking from the ones I've rated 5/5...

My favourite covers tend to change the atmosphere of a record, and if I was going to pick a single favourite on that basis it'd probably come from this lot:

• Cat Power - Most things from her Covers Record, particularly Wonderwall, Satisfaction and Wild is the Wind.
  
• Cibo Matto - About a Girl
• Dweezil and Ahmet Zappa - Baby One More Time
• Dynamite Hack - Boyz N The Hood
• Macha and Bedhead - Believe
• Nina Gordon - Straight Out of Compton

But then there are also covers that pick up the original, slap racing stripes on the side and make it GO GO GO:

• Snuff - Theme from Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads
• The Vandals - Don't Stop Me Now

There, is the world a better place for me posting that?