Review: 1 Minute Wonders - Albums Division

PALOMA FAITH – DO YOU WANT THE TRUTH OR SOMETHING BEAUTIFUL?
Whilst I am not necessarily against Paloma Faith and her work, I also think it is difficult to find something especially notable about her. Her work certainly has some lyrical credibility and depth, but whilst she is certainly trying very hard to be interesting, I’m afraid for me she falls short of genuine intrigue, both musically and personally. It feels like she has selected aspects from different artists; her vocals have a bit too much of the Winehouse about them, she samples lashings from Roisin Murphy’s wardrobe, and something indistinct I can’t quite place, but am pretty certain is not organic to Miss Faith. She is certainly listenable, indeed there is a gentle, unassuming quality about her that is quite endearing, and additionally her album/single artwork is often very curious and attractive. However, I feel Paloma and her music are missing something that makes her ultimately a bit lack lustre. “New York” is alright though. 4/10


BOWLING FOR SOUP – SORRY FOR PARTYIN’
Most famous in the UK for their righteous single “Girl all the Bad Guys Want” back in 2003, Bowling for Soup return with their eighth full-length album this month, which has entered the hot 100 this week off the back off their UK mini-tour. The new album continues with the group’s pop punk trend, consisting of constricted, whiny American vocals, naughty school boy lyrics, contemplative middle eights, and guitar riff heavy segways. A good 18 tracks long, you get a lot of pop punk for you money. “My Wena” in particular is a notable highlight, not just for obvious innuendo relate aspects, but because of the enjoyable, competent instrumentation. As albums go, Sorry for Partin’ certainly isn’t gonna break any boundaries, but it does deliver what pop punk intends to do; cute, fun, accessible guitar music that harbours a fantastically charismatic adolescent quality. Why not, I say, why not! 7/10

Article: Ready? Then let synchronise voices – now!

One of my major pet peeves at the moment is bad sound in adverts. As you may or may not know, I do have a bit if a problem with the general shit-ness of most adverts anyway, but this newly developed dislike is quite specific, and to describe it as aptly as possible, I’m afraid I have had to raid the old student text vaults and reference an old friend, Monsieur Michel Chion. To explain precisely my annoyance, I must borrow a word Chion specifically developed in Audio Vision, that of synchresis, meaning  ‘the spontaneous and irresistible weld produced between a particular auditory phenomenon and visual phenomenon when they occur at the same time’ . Audio synchresis occurs literally all the time - it is essentially the way that audio overdubs, sound effects and the like are synchronised to match our expectations in relation to the visual information on screen. When it works, we don’t notice it; it is a subtle but exact creative process that we tend to only detect when it is done inaccurately. We are perhaps most familiar with a lack of audio synchresis through the cliché of badly dubbed kung-fu movies, but recently it has been creeping in in a covert way to general advertising for main-stream UK companies. There are a few adverts in particular whose audio synchresis is so shoddy it is actually embarrassing that they think such cheap, naive methods will “work” on us.


To demonstrate, there have been two major synchresis perps in the advertising world in recent weeks; PC world and Kingsmill. Let start with Kingsmill. Cast your minds back to the most recent lot of Kingsmill adverts, bizarrely titled “Kingsmill Confessions”. There is one particular advert where a dad and his son return home from football and eat the mum’s sandwich, presumably because they just couldn’t resist shitty old Kingsmill and not ‘cause they were hungry from physical exercise. Over the top of the visuals is an overdubbed narrative-style voice-over of the dad confessing his Kingsmill sins. My major problem with this advert is that the overdubbed voice is that of Timothy Spall. Timothy Spall isn’t actually in the adverts visually, just some specky bald bloke playing the dad. Watching this advert therefore really jarrs any possible naturality and audio-visual synchronisation for me because the bloke on screen is evidently not Timothy Spall, who has a very distinguishable and memorable voice. The lack of synchresis is astounding to me as it is such a simple problem to fix - you just have to make the image match the sound. I don’t give two shits if you have got Timothy bloody Spall as the voice-over and that he is really very bloody good, using his voice doesn’t fucking work within your concept. You need to pick one or the other, otherwise you might as well have a picture of a cat meowing with a dog barking over the top of it. The two entities do not cohere, they do not make sense, and it does not work as a combined effort.


I was further aggravated recently by PC World. Initially, their new series of “My World…” adverts were badly synchronised in a rather subtle form: they had a clip of a curly haired blonde guy talking about his world/pc world which wasn’t quite dubbed properly and was so closed miked that it was as if he was speaking right into your ear. Quite simply, it sounded like it was recorded in a vacuum – unnatural with none of the general sonic ambience necessary for the illusion of audio normality. Whilst this was a bit shit, you could just about excuse it as a post-production error that they couldn’t be arsed to put right. Indeed, they probably realised it didn’t work because their new adverts don’t have any actual people in them at all, usually just pictures of their products. The new adverts don’t really work either though. Like Kingsmill they typically use well know voices, often with serious syncresis problems. Another particular advert from a few weeks ago springs to mind; one of a crazy student with desperately typically messy hair printing a photo of himself after a night at the SU Bar. And the famous voice-over? Why it was only Will from the fucking Inbetweeners! And he has very tidy, sensible hair, thank-you very much. The notion of a typical wanker student returning from a “messy” night at the SU does not fuse with the potent character of Will that so readily jumps to mind when one hear his (again) quite distinctive voice.


For me these errors are really inexcusable. Audio syncresis in some form will have been taught to the people in charge of the sound production on these adverts, so either they are simple charlatans who really aren’t good at their jobs, or the senior copywriter for whatever advert in question just doesn’t give two shits about any kind of vital audio-visual cohesion. I find this very odd (since advertising is a multi-billion pound/dollar industry), why this very noticeable, yet very easy to fix problem is still so prevalent. It happens all the time in adverts, yet it simply wouldn’t be tolerated in films. Fair enough, films are more specifically creative works where such things as syncresis are vital for general plot continuity and audience absorption. But as we are subject to adverts dozens of time everyday, must we have to continually tolerate some complacent, poor quality article masquerading as something worthy of our attention? Sigh. I know there are more important things in the world than this that need sorting, but if people are going to forge a living out of enabling people to flog their stuff, one should at least get the simple stuff right and therefore generally do it properly. Otherwise it’s the creative/audio equivalent of the guy who always fills the same form out wrong or constantly leaves the photocopier jammed. And no one wants to be that guy.

Review: 1 Minute Wonders - Albums Division

This is essentially a collection of very brief album reviews that will be 1 to 6 sentences in length, and will typically take about a minute to read. They will rather sweepingly review their subject matter (current chart albums), condensing the reviewing process into a tiny little easy to swallow pill of information. They should not be supplemented for a varied diet of proper music reviews, however they do have a certain value in this uber-fast 24-hour life style we are all presumed to lead. Furthermore, they are typical in non-music based journalistic mediums (e.g. newspapers, fashion mags etc.) that feel they should add a splash of music for colour and variety. Therefore, my involvement in this new style of reviewing should also be considered to exemplify my diversity and ability to write about mainstream music for a mainstream audience. So I can cover whatever floats your boat, ya-know.


KINGS OF LEON - ONLY BY THE NIGHT
I am just a little bit staggered that this album is still in the charts. Released over a year ago, it is still only number fucking seven, which is a little bit insane for any album. The sad thing is this really isn’t Kings of Leon’s best work. Its ok as an album, and has some good tracks; “Use Somebody” in particular has a quiet beauty about it that is rather appealing, but ultimately this album has less of the charisma, humour, energy, pent-up angst, instrumental diversity and drive of the masterpieces that were albums 2 and 3. Which is a bit of a shame. Fingers crossed number 5 recaptures more of the old magic. 6/10


LADY GAGA - THE FAME
I would like to make a prediction that in the future whole books will be written about Lady Gaga, simply due to her proximity musically, stylistically and controversially to Madonna. Gaga certainly has interest in all these areas, especially her ridiculously fantastic stylistic narcissism, but her musical backing, whilst layered to buggery is still essentially quite simple dance-pop beats and synth shit, (much like the great Madge her self’s music often is). But therein lies the magic. Gaga’s music is simply repetitive, simply catchy, simply brilliant dancey poppy pop, and there aint nothing wrong with that. 8/10


BEATLES - ABBEY ROAD
Due to the ridiculous influx of Beatles’ albums into the charts at present, I felt it was right to go to the source of all this boring commotion and review the album that started it – Abbey fucking Road. Contrary to popular belief, The Beatles’ work is not beyond a 6 sentence review, so open your eyes baby; here it comes. This is one of the best Beatles’ albums instrumentally, with deep, grinding bass (certainly uncharacteristic for McCartney), interesting arrangements and indulgent but often beautiful and almost always accomplished guitar parts. The best work is that which has as little vocals as possible, namely “I Want You (She’s so Heavy)”, “Oh Darling” and “The End”, the worst being an inglorious return to an awful Beatles staple; the nursery rhyme song, ala “Octopuses Garden”, “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” and “Mean Mr. Mustard”. Whist this album is essentially quite heavy (a quality that I feel gives it more longevity than other Beatles’ albums), there are some beautifully delicate interludes, such as “Here Comes the Sun” and “Golden Slumbers”. Probably their best, but not the best.
N/B – I had to do this review from memory as I do not currently have Abbey Road on my computer and could not find any audio of it online but at all. ‘Cause you know, old Macca and Star are a bit paranoid they may not get every penny of their £500 million fortune. Understandably, of course. 8/10