Restorative Beer

Sometimes I get in ruts with listening to music. One summer, to my dismay, I lost the ability to listen to all music for a good two months and all I did was wallow around Dustin Hoffman style circa The Graduate in the not-so-warm New Zealand sun. A front stoop, chipped concrete, Boards of Canada; even Music Has The Right couldn't snap me out of it. I was concerned as one probably ought to be after seemingly losing interest in yr favourite thing. I feel like you have to do this sometimes, slip out of yr pattern for a while, be dissillusioned, embrace existential cliche, read Camus, listen to 'Fox in the Snow', don't go to work, get awe-struck by Less Than Zero play yr Smiths records really loud and clean yr room and sing along to every word in a theraputic process of cleaning out and delving in, an ever-interesting introspection.



I've been in a rut since (or during) Splendour In The Grass, a two day festival during which I don't know if I particularly enjoyed a single band; granted, I had a whole heap of fun, mainly fueled by MDMA and beer and marijuana, even that couldn't keep me interested further than 4 songs into The Arctic Monkey's set. I made a new friend there and she was worried about being a 'hater' for not digging this band like everyone else but I said 'no, you are not a hater, you are merely a sensible person who has her own tastes in music'. I couldn't help but feel like a bore too though, but I fe . A transcendental flicker 1:32 of the way through New Order's X, some much needed melodrama. Back at much needed home I have been trying to make a mix CD (due to lack of tape player, format snobbery and all that) but am underwhelmed by this too, maybe because I'm torn between skuzzy ugly aesthetics and polished Spoon-style rock and then hip-hop also, I guess I'm searching everywhere in my iTunes for more meaning than the dissillusioning Bloc Party set where I wondered how I used to like them so much. You'd think I'd understand that a rock and roll band doesn't mean a blessed thing.

Arthur & Yu - Come To View (Song for Neil Young)

Anyway, I think all that this rut has taken to shake is one full listen of If Yr Feeling Sinister but we'll see. And now this, Arthur & Yu, similarly warming but differently sounding. I wish Summer were hear now, But I'm also devastated that Queensland does not 'do' daylight savings, one of my favourite things.