it gets much much better than this

Birds of Britain continued (Modern Division)



's bit like she's crossed Radiohead circa "Creep" with Radiohead circa Kid A and then sluiced it through post-Dido AOR

i like the chorus, which is un-choruslike, just this curl of melody, an origami-like fold ("still-a-weird-ooooo")

talking of post-Dido AOR, you can't not have a soft spot for this



here is a great old piece by K-punk on Dido's life for rent
(with equally great debate in the comments)(hard not to feel a bit "those were the days" eh?)

that post made me go buy the ceedee (well i found it going cheap at Kieran's school's rummage sale but still...) ... it didn't quite click with me though



going back to KT Tee, i would never have heard "Still A Weirdo" at all I don't think if I hadn't gone on the first of my two "grief vacations" to England this year, the first one involving a trip to Dorset for a couple of days (on Dancing Ledge we said goodbye), which meant long car journeys which meant listening to UK radio... and one thing I found, contrasting markedly with what radio is like in Los Angeles, is that:

A/ on the british radioscape there's hardly any old music at all (it was entirely current or recent, at least during daylight hours, with hardly any "oldies" played, let alone whole segments of nostalgia pop)

and

B/ you could hardly hear anything resembling rock. In about six hours total of in-car radio listening, I think I heard maybe one or two guitar riffs. I don't remember hearing much guitar at all and if it was present in records it was that mushy, pro-Tooled indistinct guitar-as-Polyfilla-in-the-wall-of-sound type, c.f. the kind of "rock" bands that you get on a VH1 Top 20 videos of the week count-down.

It's completely the opposite in America, or where we live at any rate: old music (classic rock, 80s-oriented segments, etc) outweighs current stuff by a considerable margin. And you get can rocked and riffed to your heart's content*. (Even when it comes to current pop there's quite a bit more of pseudo-rock guitar-texture-mush to be heard).

Britain seems to be post rock, in lots of ways.

* that--listening to radio in the car--is the principal reason I've been "it doesn't get much better than this"-ing actually--just keep hearing great old tunes I'd forgotten or in quite a few cases never even heard before.