Music

The Time Out music team are often accused of being, not to put too fine a point on it, miserable bastards. Sometimes even when we’re being complimentary. ‘Amy Winehouse is great,’ people say without reading the article. ‘How dare you suggest she might let her fans down.’ Because we’re cold-hearted automatons, that’s why. ‘Nitin Sawhney has never accepted public money,’ you protest. ‘Apart from those grants he took from the Arts Council’. Oopsie – sorry about that. ‘OMG y r u so nassty to Gary Barlow hes so fit!!!’ you scrawl, as we shuffle nervously and stare at our shoes.

So we thought, with it being the New Year, that we’d make an extra-special-with-sugar-on-top effort to be nice for once. Thus we made a collective new year’s resolution to find something good to say about one of our pet peeves. You can read the results of this soul-searching below.

PS: Of course, no one sticks to their resolutions for more than a week, so don’t expect us to follow through with these opinions next week.
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Does It Offend You, Yeah?
Does It Offend You, Yeah? It does actually. That made-to-get-under-your-skin name and their so-nu-rave-they-glow T-shirts… Grrrr. But it is a brand-new year. Maybe that end of 2007 cynicism got the better of us and they’re deserving of another chance. After all, what’s wrong with being provoked? They’re not called anything so outrageous as Selfish Cunt but they’ve still managed to irritate 93 per cent of London’s over-18s with a name alone. The most common thought that springs to mind upon hearing Does It Offend You, Yeah? goes something like this: ‘Bloody upper-middle class, nu-rave oiks being ghetto with Peaches Geldof.’ Aha! But could it be that they’re putting one over on both Daily Express-reading numb-nuts and liberal lefties who think that kids all speak this way, that texting has rotted their brains, or that talking this way is actually a criminal offence?

And if it’s less complex than that, how about the fact that just hearing their name gets a rise out of people? Now that being offensive is old hat, annoying people is the next best thing. The other issue to contend with, if we’re going to like Does It Offend You, Yeah?, is that they stand for something odious and rotten to the core in music. Cheap, cotton-deep, soulless music made with no care in the craft. It’s done for one reason alone: to pose in front of fellow hipsters. But just how many of your favourite bands are guilty of the same thing? It’s not like they’re Hadouken!
That band is so laughably shocking that they sound cuddly and silly. Does It Offend You, Yeah? are certainly more in-yer-face and parent-baiting with their messing-with-your-melon, Justice-styled electro-punk. And if their music annoys you, well, isn’t that the point? For that alone we’re offering some grudging respect. That is until they sign a T-shirt deal with Top Shop and employ Peaches Geldof to produce them. Chris Parkin

James Blunt
In these post-post-modern days of ‘Guilty Pleasures’ and ‘Indie Pan Pipes’ compilations, it seems you’re allowed to like pretty much everything at a distance. Irony is the plastic sheet we put over the sofa of our souls, so it doesn’t get all dirty from the cultural arses which perch upon it.

Of course, these days it’s socially acceptable to say that you ‘ironically’ appreciate Abba, or bukkake. But tell those self-same dinner party guests that you find, say, James Blunt’s lyrics about oral sex amusing and you’ll find yourself saving a lot of money on Christmas cards. It is often said, especially by us, that despite the fact that Blunt sells millions of records, no one has ever met anyone who has admitted buying one. Perhaps all these albums were purchased by the grateful citizens of far-off countries, whom Blunt liberated from the Nazis or whoever back when he was a war hero.

Who knows? Not us. So let’s examine Blunt’s perceived lesser qualities. Sure, Blunt’s weedy, reedy half-croak is one of the least effective implements, but Neil Young sounds like he’s got the lung capacity of a goldfish and he gets significantly more critical props than, say, Paul Potts. Marry this with Blunt’s sparse (some might say untutored) guitar stylings and surely he must actually be the male Cat Power. The indie-blues comparison becomes clearer when you study his lyrical preoccupations – namely love, drugs and sex. ‘I've taken a shitload of drugs,’ he warbles on ‘Give Me Some Love’, explicitly stating what even Pete Doherty will only allude to (and be photographed doing, every day).

It seems the saccharine nothingness of ‘You're Beautiful’ has overshadowed Blunt’s true lyrical gift, which is an unashamed casual misogyny more befitting Sir Mixalot. ‘You said you’d be a celebrity several years ago,’ he sings to the titular protagonist of ‘Annie’. ‘Did it all come tumbling down? Will you go down on me?’ What a gentleman. ‘There, there, love’, he is saying to the fading starlet, ‘perhaps your dreams are swirling down the toilet. But I suppose I could allow you to suck me off – that'll solve everything.’ Twisted genius. Eddy Lawrence

Mountain Goats © Mark Vans

The Mountain Goats
The Mountain Goats are a band I should hold dear. Cultish and critically acclaimed, they’re praised for their literacy and humour, count Eddie Argos and Jeffrey Lewis among their pals, and have songs on their forthcoming album about slasher movies, lake monsters and Prince Far I. ‘John Darnielle’s frank and frequently devastating lyrics will help you embrace the fragile frost and loneliness of the city streets’, said the programme for the Pineapple Folk Yuletide Gathering at the Union Chapel last month. Sounds good, I thought, give me lots of that.

In fact it felt like arriving late to a party at which everyone else was already drunk. Sandwiched between fantastically raw sets from Alasdair Roberts and Micah P Hinson – inexplicably played to half-empty pews – the Californian duo got standing ovations for a set of smug, self-absorbed, comically overwritten whiner-rock that sounded like Weezer on a rate of a dollar per simile or They Might Be Giants spending too much time with the cat. What was I not getting? What part of me was missing? For a band who trade on their outsider status, it was a strangely alienating experience.

So I’ve isolated the triggers (including Darnielle’s honking whine of a voice, phony geek-chic haircut and general resemblance to PG Wodehouse’s gawkish newt-fancier Gussie Fink-Nottle) and concluded that it all boils down to his habit of emphasising every pretentious couplet with a little jab of his hand – as if to drive home the piercing truth of lines like, ‘The most remarkable thing about you standing in the doorway is that it’s you and that you’re standing in the doorway’. Without that unmistakably self-important gesture, it could all be a great joke, a send-up of the sort of glib, bombastic navel-gazing that kept ‘Dawson’s Creek’ in business.

The answer, I reckon, lies in the video for ‘This Year’, in which Darnielle is kidnapped and forced to perform under duress. Perhaps, with the singer’s hands bound behind his back, I would stand some sort of a chance of enjoying The Mountain Goats. Then again, perhaps we could just stop at the kidnap. Bella Todd

Enthusiasm
It’s a perpetual source of personal puzzlement as to why musical appreciation is so often equated with reverence. Respect I understand –
it would be an odd fan indeed who felt the object of their affection wasn’t worthy of that – but glassy-eyed worship is something else. Something odiously obsequious and shamefully undiscriminating – and is thus hugely disrespectful of an artist’s talent.

After all, if you can’t tell bad from good or indifferent – or are at least unwilling to voice your doubts – what the hell does your approval mean?
It’s this overweening need to lavish every creative act with praise, irrespective of its quality that does my head in and this is especially true where the pantheon of ‘classic rock’ is concerned. Why must fans of Bruce Springsteen pretend that the grisly ‘Pink Cadillac’ is a great song, just because ‘Darkness On The Edge Of Town’ and ‘Nebraska’ are awesome? Why did the crawly-crawly-bum-lick crowd that greeted Brian Wilson with a standing ovation at the Royal Festival Hall in his (first) London reprise of ‘Pet Sounds’ fail to acknowledge the fact that this wasn’t The Beach Boys, but rather one frail pensioner whose genius has sadly long since expired propped at a keyboard, backed by a tribute band? More recently, what was the capacity crowd at the O2 Arena the night I saw Prince hearing? I heard too few hits sung in their entirety, too much filler in medley form and far too much general ‘fonky’ faffing about, but everyone else in the place was grinning and squealing like it was the ‘Lovesexy’ show at Madison Square Garden. If only.

Still, it’s possible that these seemingly over-charitable chumps are all well aware of the existential crisis into which their heroes could at any time pitch them and have made a conscious choice to behave as if they love everything – all the time – in order to prevent it. Maybe they believe that to call yourself a fan you must necessarily pledge allegiance and that doesn’t involve standing to one side, weighing up the pros and cons, but rather leaping right in, hand on heart. Perhaps what I assume to be acts of unthinking, bovine compliance are just practical means developed to minimise misery. I resolve to see if it works. See you down the front in 2008 – I’ll be the one wearing the dumb grin, whooping and waving my hands in the air. Sharon O’Connell