Today I returned to the internet after a day away, only to find more sad news.
First of all, in light of the Brussells attacks, I must say that I am (as always in these cases) deeply saddened by this tragedy, and my thoughts and prayers go out to each and every one of the victims and their families, friends and colleagues.
I feel the need to say this because otherwise you are always going to feel like you're trivialising such events when it appears that you're not being vocal about them and talking about other things. But in reality, it goes without saying, and nobody should make you feel bad about whether you put up a flag on social media or not.
Plus Daesh don't deserve to see our pain, only our solidarity when they attempt such moronic ill-thought out ways of trying to get the West to listen.
Anyway, that's a whole other blog entry I may or may not decide to write at some point and not what I want to get in to right now.
Alas, in amongst the sadness of current event my sadness today was further deepened by the news that a member of one of my all-time favourite hip-hop groups, A Tribe Called Quest, has passed away.
This group have been a big part of my musical life, one of the first I ever heard and one that shaped the music (and particularly the hip-hop) I listened to as I have travelled through life.
So that means that Phife Dawg was part of my life. A big part of it that I never really acknowledged with quite so much certainty until today.
I could write an entire post about what ATCQ have done as hip-hop pioneers, and indeed, Phife's role within that, but all I feel I need to do today is say firstly that 2016 is racking up some major talent up there in the big blue yonder, and secondly, listen to A Tribe Called Quest.
Thanks Phife, thanks for the music, thanks for being influential. May you rest in peace.
Well... this is how it ended up looking. It got a bit messy.
But what is a beer festival without shenanigans?
So yesterday was the 26th Sussex Annual Beer and Cider festival in Brighton, and I've been going to this event with my friends for about five or six years now. It's always a fun day, and there's always some good beer discoveries, and despite always going on the the final day, and a lot of good beers being sold out, there were still some winners on the racks.
I vaguely recall posting most of the ones I liked on my Untapped profile, but the one beer that stood out for me this year was Treasure IPA by Great Heck Brewery, from Yorkshire.
I'd love to go in to more detail about how the beers tasted, but right now I'm still a bit hungover, and in all honesty, I can't remember - as you can see from the photo, it all got a bit messy and from about 7pm onwards I really can't remember a thing!
Unfortunately this year we were four people down from our usual crew, and they were missed, but I think the troopers that were in attendance did them proud!
All in all, the day was fun, great beers, great friends, and all just a stones throw away from my flat.
I'm restricting myself to attending three beer festivals only this year (last year it seemed as if there was a beer festival nearly every week!) and this one is always the one to kick off the year - next will be the Great British Beer Festival in London in August, followed by the Eastbourne Beer Festival to bring the year to a close.
Today I don't think I could possibly face a pint of beer, but right now I'm feeling like I want to brew another batch with my friend Scuff.
It's the first day of Spring today and so I raise an invisible toast to friends, and more good times this year!
About a week ago I wrote a review about the new Nerf Herder album 'Rockingham'.
Although I gave it a respectable 5 out of 7, I am ashamed and deserve a slap for doing so.
Having not been able to remove ANY of the songs from my head this week, and playing the album about three times through each day, I can now honestly say that it deserves a full 7 out of 7.
I originally said something that I need to clarify... I said in my original review:
"It's not their best album" which sounds a bit negative, and suggests it's not brilliant, but what I meant by this is that it's not my favourite Nerf Herder album, which is still true. However... I think I now love it just as much as my favourite Nerf Herder album 'Nerf Herder IV'.
In fact, having listened to Rockingham so much now, there's actually a lot of similarity between the two albums and if you squidged both together to make a mega album, it would indeed be MEGA!
That being said, Rockingham as a standalone album is now officially a classic Nerf album in my eyes (ears!).
There's only one song I'm not keen on on Rockingham and that's the track 'Jackie Got Married', but I only don't like it because I don't get it, and have no idea who Jackie is or what the song is about - I'm sure it's funny to Americans though (?!).
The opening track 'Portland' (about Portland, Oregon, funnily enough) is one of my favourites because I've been there and it seems accurate!
Each time I listen to the album, I end up with a new favourite song from it.
The thing I love about Nerf Herder is their signature sound, which although is pop-punk in it's essence, is laced with so many other styles or what I call Nerf-isms, such as the rock and sci-fi elements that are also thrown into a big blender with a generous helping of nerdy geeky fun. There's really no other band on the planet that can do what Nerf Herder does or sound how they sound, not without falling flat on their ass.
Lead singer and songwriter Parry Gripp is actually a living genius, and if you've never heard any Nerf Herder, I guarantee you've heard something he's written, like this for example (which I dare not press play on because it's an ear worm that will literally eat your brain for the rest of your life once you've heard it...)
By the way, if you dared to press play and listen... I'm sorry. But only a little bit.
You (if you're lucky enough to still be alive) or your children, or your children's children are at a local music venue that has been around for a long long time.
It has history. It's been refurbed a thousand times, but essentially it's still the place you threw yourself on and off the stage during concerts when you were in your teens, twenties, and possibly thirties.
The venue is packed and the crowd are warmed up.
A four piece band take to the stage and start playing classic G-funk era hip-hop songs, such as 'Let Me Ride', 'Ain't Nuthin' but a G Thang' and 'What's My Name' and then suddenly a 79-year-old Dr Dre comes out and starts chatting shit over the top of the tracks.
Possibly wearing a 17 high stack of Raiders baseball caps, and 50 pairs of headphones (Beats of course) around his fat but flabby aged neck.
The crowd love it. They go as mental as the guy standing in front of them, who kind of sounds like he's reciting actual lyrics, but mostly sounds like he's making it up as he goes along, but it somehow works and everybody gets in to it and dances/bops/sways along.
Well, basically, that's pretty much what seeing Lee 'Scratch' Perry is like. The only other comparison I can think of would be a Public Enemy live band with only Flava Flav as the front man.
LSP is a living legend, the man who pioneered dub reggae and produced some of the most memorable and important reggae songs, albums and artists of all time. Not much of a singer, or artist in a traditional sense. I mean, not in the same way Bob Marley was an artist.
But LSP created so many reggae superstars and gave them his trademark sound, and so has every right to stand on a stage with a band recreating those classic tracks that he crafted over the years, and basically do and say whatever he wants over them.
Literally.
He's that much of a legend, the guy could read from the back of a packet of peanuts and make it engaging, amazing and brand new.
An eccentric character, unique, one of a kind, and somebody that will never be replaced when his time finally comes to head up to Jah on a big cloud of ganja smoke. True legends are thin on the ground these days, no thanks to 2016's hunger for stealing greatness away from us mere mortals, and I'm so glad I got to see LSP in a more intimate venue before, god forbid, anything happened to him...
I've been waiting for a new Nerf Herder album for what feels like forever.
But it's only actually been eight years. ONLY.
If you're not familiar with the work of the 90s nerd-core pop-punk band, or perhaps only know them from their theme song for Buffy the Vampire, then first of all slap yourself, and then go and listen to all of their albums in order - immediately.
Nerf Herder are one of my favourite bands of all time, and one of the first live bands I ever saw. I was lucky enough to chat with some of them after they supported No Use For A Name (another of my all-time favourite bands) in Portsmouth way back in 1999/2000 and I still have a ticket for that show with various band members squiggles on.
Anyway, yesterday saw the release of their fifth full length album, Rockingham.
This album was crowdfunded, and seems to have been a long time in the making. Alas, I was not one of the people to donate towards the album because I'm way too skint to do such things, and am a struggling artist myself, however, they'll get enough online plays and plugs from me to cover the cost of any donation I'd have given if I was able to.
So was it worth the wait?
Well... yes. I have to say straight off the bat that it's not their best album, but having only listened to it twice before writing this review, and blasting it as I write, I have to say it's a grower and one thing that is a good sign is that when I woke up this morning I had at least two hooks from the album running through my head. Having said that, it's not their worst album either, because... well... in my opinion they don't have a bad album, which is a big achievement in my book as most bands end up squirging out some shit at some point in their careers. Luckily, or perhaps cleverly in this case, Nerf Herder haven't done that yet. I'd say this album is as good as 2002s 'American Cheese' which admittedly took me a while to get used to as it seemed quite different to the the albums prior to this release, but was actually a nice development of their pop-punk sound, adding synths and keyboards, which then really came into their own on the Nerf Herder IV album.
I really like all of their previous work, and my favourite, and in my opinion their strongest album is the aforementioned Nerf Herder IV released in 2008. The songs on Rockingham are laced with Nerf Herder's typical catchy chorus lines and funny lyrics, but I feel that the subject matter of the new album falls slightly short of the mark in terms of the silliness and down right bizarreness of their previous stuff.
It almost shows a more grown up Nerf Herder, with slightly more rocky, slower numbers, like a middle-age man reminiscing about the old days. The band are all in their mid 40s now after all.
That being said, they still know how to make some great songs, with 'We Opened for Weezer' being one of my favourites from the album
and this was one of the songs stuck in my brain this morning! There's plenty of geeky goodness which fans have come to expect from Nerf Herder on the Rockingham album, covering all the usual Sci-Fi bases, with Star Wars and Doctor Who references, and a song about blaming Bill Murray for a proper Ghostbusters 3 film never happening. Speaking of Ghostbusters, I'll write a seperate post about the new film and my views on it soon.
Anyway, Rockingham is over way too quickly, and maybe it's just because it's been so long a wait for new songs from Nerf Herder that I'm left wanting more and at the same time not feeling completely full up by what Rockingham has to offer (in a good way because I want more, MORE DAMMIT!) and I can only hope that this is the start of a pick up in momentum for the band and that this release is proactive and means that there is more to come and not something that was only done because the fans made them do it (if that makes sense?!).
A year or two ago I honestly thought I'd never get to see Nerf Herder at a show ever again, and I hope this fear can now be removed from my worried mind and that they'll finally come back to the UK before either I die, or one of them does. 2016 is being unrelenting in it's taking away of awesome people, so I hope both they and myself can dodge it's evil claws long enough to be able to be in the same venue as each other one more time!
Anyway, to sum up, Nerf Herder have so far done no wrong with their output, and although the new album is not an immediate classic, I know it's going to reveal more to my ears as I give it more listens, and if I can't shake the choruses from my brain for the next few days then I know it's earned it's place in my 'What My Ears Liked in 2016' playlist.
I'm giving Rockingham 5 out of 7. I don't care what anybody else thinks.
Listen to Rockingham by Nerf Herder on Spotify here:
I've wanted to set up a personal blog for a while, and recently I found an old one I had. Having been through all the posts and removing the most cringeworthy - or ones that may possibly get me in to trouble - I've left the ones that are still ok for public consumption.
To be honest, unless you know me, they probably won't be of much interest anyway, and even then they still probably won't be!
Anyway, I just thought I'd start writing some stuff again.
This blog is just what's going on inside my head, and will feature things about illustration, music, food, beer, and anything else that I decide I want to waffle on about.
Please bear with the awful blog template, I'm still re-learning the Blogger platform and will be tweaking it as I go!
