I don't like Radiohead. Their music brings to mind thin, pale, pretentious young men living in damp digs in a rain soaked back street somewhere in Galway that are too fond of the works of Samuel Beckett and woodbines. I am however a fan of Brad Meldhu, the brilliant American jazz musician who, it turns out, has a penchant for interpreting the songs of Radiohead on his albums in much the same way that one of his influences, the great Oscar Peterson frequently interpreted the songs of Cole Porter. Although there is no sign of a 'Brad Meldhu Plays the Radiohead Song Book' CD issuing anytime soon from his label Nonesuch Records, Sound Waves humbly suggests a tentative partial tracking listing for any such release and asks readers of Cluas to suggest any other songs by Radiohead that might suit Meldhu's interpretative gifts.

Track: "Exit Music (For a Film)"

Album: Art of the Trio: Vol. 3

Track: "Paranoid Android"

Album: Live In Tokyo

Track: "Everything In Its Right Place"

Album: Anything Goes

Brad Meldhu Official Website

[Read more...]

Around 30,000 French people have decided that their home country is just not wet or expensive enough. So they moved to Ireland, and now our French community is one of the largest non-national groups in the country.

[Read more...]

David Lyttle is, at 23, already a force to be reckoned with in New Irish Jazz. The list of musicians that this gifted pecussionist , composer and band leader has played with reads like a whos who of the music; Louis Stewart, Michael Buckley, Ronan Guilfoyle and Myles Drennan. Lyttle was accompanied for this live date by the wonderful bassist Michael Janisch and Soweto Kinch who is the recipient of two MOBOs, three BBC jazz awards and a Mercury nomination.

I remember once listening to an interview with the late Benny Green who was asked to define jazz in one word. His answer escapes me now but if I was to be asked the same question, my answer would be, 'feeling'. All of the jazz artists I love and admire, such as Charlie Mingus, Miles Davis, Ella Fitzgerald, John Coltrane, Louis Stewart, Brad Meldhu and Chet Baker play with a tremendous depth of feeling and, last Sunday, Lyttle and his group played with that same feeling, notably on Lyttle's composition in memory of his late father titled simply, 'Father'.

It is tempting to write about these three musicians separately but that would imply that they did not gel as a group when, in fact, they appeared at all times both as one and distinct, three in one and one in three, to paraphrase George Bernard Shaw. The setting also played a role in the evening. JJ Smyths is to Dublin what Ronnie Scotts is to London and the Village Vangard is to New York and, as noted by Soweto Kinch during the second set, it has a wonderful, warm acoustic that suited the fluid, masterly, mellow, hot, spiritual playing of Lyttle and his cohorts.

The group displayed a wry sense of humour, particularly when they did an freestyle on the name Dublin, asking the audience for words which began with the letters contained therein to which the audience responded; Drew (after the late Ronnie Drew), Urban, Bollocks, Lovely, Inspector (?) and Naughty, following it up with a lovely version of John Coltrane's 'Giant Steps', played with a magician's flourish before departing the stage.

I spent a Sunday evening in the company of David Lyttle and his group due to a spur of the moment decision and ended up lost in music.

Photo Credit: David Lyttle © John Soffe.

David Lyttle - Official Website

David Lyttle @ MySpace.com

[Read more...]

Remember how we told you about La Route du Rock, the French indie music festival that was in danger of financial meltdown?

The story so far: Last week’s three-day event at Saint Malo in Brittany needed to attract at least 14,000 paying punters to break even and guarantee the festival’s future. However, mere days before the kick-off, it was rumoured that only 8,000 tickets had been sold. The festival director told the media that La Route du Rock was in financial trouble. The festival’s website featured a begging letter asking fans for donations. Now read on…

The attendance was healthy enough to ensure the survival of the bi-annual trip to Brittany. “There will be winter and summer shows in 2009,” declared festival director François Floret, who only days before had been downbeat about the event's future.

Cynical readers will probably wonder if the festival organisers were overplaying their poor-mouth act just to generate extra publicity. However, painting your festival as a dead man walking is hardly going to attract floating voters. That said, 6,000 extra punters don’t just walk up to a geographically-isolated festival at the last minute, as we’re lead to believe here. 

Whatever the reasons, France’s much-loved indie festival seems set for a stable future. The sea air obviously works wonders.

[Read more...]

She has just released her debut album, ‘The Glove Thief’, and it’s lovely. Her thoughtful, playful way of juggling genres and mixing influences reminds us of the marvellous ‘Jet’ by Katell Keineg. Other times her hushed delivery and atmospheric arrangements recall Stina Nordenstam’s ‘And She Closed Her Eyes’.

[Read more...]

A review of the album 'At Mount Zoomer' by Wolf Parade

Review Snapshot: Wolf Parade's follow-up to their glorious debut, ‘Apologies To The Queen Mary’, is a brave comeback by the Canadian indie five-piece, but it falls short of its predecessor by some distance. Unfortunately the high points of the record are undermined and outnumbered by the low ones, making for a bit of a mixed bag. First-time listeners to this band may find the album an exhilarating experience, but those who have been exposed to the quality that Wolf Parade can produce might just be a little disappointed.

The Cluas Verdict? 6.5 out of 10

Full Review:
In 2005, Wolf Parade released ‘Apologies To The Queen Mary’, their first album after two previous EPs, to a generally positive critical response. It was an album that used electronic music as an accompaniment to indie rock as opposed to attempting to merge the two. The songwriting duties were split between the two founding members, Spencer Krug and Dan Boeckner.

The result was an album of contrasting styles interwoven into classic indie. It sold quite well, brought about a substantial fan base and even earned a nomination for the prestigious Polaris Music Prize, Canada's version of the Mercury.

Album number two was never going to be easy.

‘At Mount Zoomer’ begins in fine fashion with the blistering ‘Soldier's Grin’, which showcases Wolf Parade's characteristically jaunty guitar riffs and whimpering vocals to great effect. However, it then slouches into the disappointing ‘Call It A Ritual’, which is far too flat and disjointed when compared to Wolf Parade's previous body of work. The song drags, and not in any determined direction either.

The third track, ‘Language City’, is undoubtedly one of the highlights. It is anthemic and pulsating in equal measure and as good as anything these innovative Canadians have produced. Unfortunately there are just not enough quality tracks like this one to make the album memorable.

’California Dreamer’ is another track that will help fans of the band to keep the faith. It’s a suspiciously quiet song up to the point where it explodes into the chorus of “thought I might have heard ya on the radio/but the radio waves were like snow”. It is a sweeping track and reminiscent of ‘It’s A Curse’ off the band’s first album.

One of the worst features of ‘At Mount Zoomer’ is how poorly it flows. There are no good tracks together. Songs like ‘Call It A Ritual’ and ‘An Animal In Your Care’ act as little more then album filler. It’s not a particularly long album - only nine tracks - and yet there is an unacceptably high proportion of mediocre material on it.

At no stage does this second offering reach the chaotic majesty of its predecessor. There are no equivalents of ‘Dear Sons And Daughters Of Hungry Ghosts’ or ‘I'll Believe In Anything’. But it is still a decent album. ‘Apologies to the Queen Mary’ was a diamond in the rough. ‘At Mount Zoomer’ is more like quartz in a quarry. It’s kind of nice, but not all that remarkable.

Kevin Boyle

More ...

[Read more...]

In the last month or so a lot of stuff has been going on in the background at CLUAS. Below are just some of the developments that have taken place behind the scenes (just so you don't think we do be sleeping on the job, or something like that).

Biggest readership of a single CLUAS article. Ever.
CLUAS writer / blogger Steven O'Rourke got his paws on a 3 days Super-Deluxe-VIP-Access-All-Areas-and-thous-shalt-avoid-the-portaloo-queues pass to Oxegen and in return for such a lavish gift from the Gods he wrote up a review of all three days of Oxegen 2008. What's more, diligent man that he is, Steve published his three articles (one per day of the festival) within 12 hours of the end of each day. They were picked up immediately by Google (and Google News) and the consequence? Google sent over 1000 visitors to the reviews the day after the festival ended and, by the end of that week, the reviews had been checked out by 2647 visitors. This was a record for the site, no gig we've covered has ever attracted so much traffic, this even surpassed the number of visitors Michael' O'Hara's (now legendary) review of REM in the Olympia got (which when you consider that his review was linked to by REM's official site it is really saying something).

Three new writers
In the last fortnight a total of 3 new writers have joined the CLUAS crew having submitted their first reviews. Welcome on board to:

• Sig Doherty (who reviewed the Glasgowbury Festival)
• Andy Knightly (who reviewed the Sigur Ros album)
• Kevin Boyle (who reviewed the Fleet Foxes album)

Want to join their ranks? Well just submit a review!

New social booking marking tool at bottom of all blogs
The CLUAS blogging platform (which is developed by a team of chancers, myself included) was recently upgraded to the latest version, which brought in a number of enhancments to our blogging software. The first of these is that all blogs and reviews on CLUAS now have a social booking marking tool (at the end of the review or the blog entry). This will allow you to easily save the article or blog entry to the likes of Digg or Delicious.

New Avatar fucntionality for comments on blogs and reviews
Another improvement that came with the blog upgrade was the possiblity for those leaving comments on blogs or on CLUAS reviews to now have an Avatar (provided by the Gravatar service). If you don't have a Gravatar yet be sure to sign up for one.

Optimised addresses for search engines
The improvements of the blogging platofrm don't stop with Gravatars and social bookmarking.The URL (i.e. the web address) of CLUAS blog entries and reivews previously used to always end with the meaningless 'default.aspx'. Meaningless in the sense that it did not give a reader - or a search engine - any indication what the review or blog entry was about. That's changed, as the word 'default' is now replaced with the title of the review or blog entry. Have a look above in your browser's address bar to see what I mean.

Simplification of how bloggers can publish blog entries
Bloggers can for the first time publish their entries with the nifty Windows Live Writer tool (this means they can publish blog entries without even opening their browser - and more importantly they are no longer required to use the rather clunky CLUAS publication interface which our gold-plated readers can be thankful they have never been exposed to).

Calendars added to all CLUAS blogs
All CLUAS blogs now have a calendar so that readers can more easily navigate to old blog entries.

(Health warning: the new two adcances for the site are a bit "backroom nuts'n'bolts" in nature. My advice is that only most hardy among you read on because, if I am to be honest, they are not really that riveting...)

Improved 'title' tag for all discussion board entries
It is widely accepted in SEO circles (that is 'Search Engine Optimisation', BTW) that one of the things a search engine gives most weight to when assessing a web page is that the page has a 'title' tag and that this title tag is unique and contains words that reflect the content of the webpage). CLUAS does a good job of this, except on our discussion board. The discussion board may indeed have unique title tags, however all the board's title tags contain superflous words that send the wrong signal to search engines. And it just doesn' look pretty, here are a few exapmles:

• "Ash to stick to singles > CLUAS | Discussion Board | > CLUAS Irish Indie Music"
• "MCD vs Consumer Association > CLUAS | Discussion Board | > CLUAS Irish Indie Music"

See that comon part - "CLUAS | Discussion Board | > CLUAS Irish Indie Music"? Does it really serve any purpose? Is it really necessary? Of course not. Last week I therefore set up some rules so that when a disucssion board page is being pulled from the database the title is given a neater, more to the point 'title tag'. The two examples above now look like this:

• "Ash to stick to singles > CLUAS Music Forums"
• "MCD vs Consumer Association > CLUAS Music Forums"

This is something that many users would not notice (nor would they care) but it something the search engines will notice and I am betting that it will result in a better ranking in search engine result pages of CLUAS discussion board topics. 

Faster downloading of pages
Earlier this year CLUAS started compressing the size of all pages requested by visitors and then sending the visitor the compressed version of the page (the page would usually be compressed to 25% of its usual size resulting in a faster download time, and hence happier customers). What's more the compressed page would then be immediately 'cached' on the CLUAS server so that when the next vistitor requests that very page the CLUAS web server does not have to go and rebuild it and then compress it. The server just plucks up the copy of the already compressed file and then sends it to the visitor. It's a brilliantly effective system that ensures the CLUAS server and database are not overloaded due to the traffic levels we get. Anyways, last week I tripled the size of the CLUAS cache as the previous amount of space we had available for the cache was getting filled too quickly. This meant that many compressed pages would not get saved to the cache and each time they were requested by another user the server would have to get to work again, unneccesarily. Bottom line? Downloading should now be quicker for even more pages on CLUAS.

I have another 10 or so other improvements lined up to be rolled out throughtout September. Watch this space for the details.

[Read more...]

It's pretty embarassing if the sponsors of the Beijing Olympics have their goods knocked off, copied and sold in the host city's markets. Well that's what happens here: Olympic squads are loading up on fake Nike, Speedo gear in markets like Yaxiu, around the corner from my office. Sports brands which have spent loads of money on backing and clothing national Olympic squads suffer the indignity of being ripped off, under the noses of the Chinese police.

Welcome to China. Music companies know all about Chiense pirates. And they'll be stung again by the Olympics. Athletes like their tunes as much as everyone else and many are flying home with cheap, counterfeit versions of the CDs they'd otherwise buy for a lot more money in Oklahoma, Brighton or Dublin. CD/DVD shops in Beijing have tried to mask the business - they've been ordered to pull counterfeits from the shelves. But the larger, down-town stores are going to elaborate lengths to sell bootlegs. A Diana Krall CD for RMB65, and a Suede best-off for RMB38 seemed pricey for Beijing. Similarly, where a few weeks before the shelves heaved with new Hollywood releases, the only DVDs on offer yesterday were older classics like John Wayne's Rio Grande and the film versions of Ernest Hemingway classics like A Farewell to Arms. When I asked where the newer, cheaper stuff was I was led down a rabbit warren of corridors to a small window-less room where a dozen people were flicking through albums of CD and DVD jackets. So no law broken. But point to the DVD jacket that catches your eye and one of the two staff heads back out the door, to return after several minutes with the requested discs.

[Read more...]

Pivot, an experimental post-rock instrumental 3-piece, have been selected by Sigur Ros to support their latest tour (see the CLUAS review of Sigur Ros' latest album here).

[Read more...]

Surfer Phil Edwards once famously termed all those who did not surf as, "the legions of the unjazzed". More recently Alex Wade, in his book 'Surf Nation', spent a chapter contemplating the possible links between the jazz music and surfing, specifically long boarding. They are views that Sound Waves empathises with, having been a lifelong, if not especially committed or knowledgeable, fan of jazz.

Notwithstanding that, advances in music playback technology have resulted in yours truly not having a stereo at home for something in the order of 5 years. I resisted the lure of i-Pod. I clung dearly to my CD buying habits, using my laptop to create mix CDs from my collection to play in the car. The car therefore became my listening room but set its own boundaries. Fast driving rock and roll by the likes of Teddy Thompson found favour but the complex patterns of Steve Reich proved overpowering and claustrophobic. My first MP3 player was a free gift thanks to a judiciously placed order for office products, it held about 40 songs, but due to my dislike of listening to music on headphones, and the constant roar of ambient noise of modern urban life it was rarely played. Moreover, the acts that were being promoted seemed little more than expensively produced tribute bands. Their music sounded familiar, like a movie actor you swear you have seen in a previous film but just cannot place. In a nutshell, I had become utterly sick of listening to music. In all this time, my modest collection of jazz albums by a shortlist of greats such as Ella Fitzgerald, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Brad Meldhu, Cannonball Adderly and Charlie Mingus lay in a box under the bed, still much loved but absolutely unplayed.

About six months ago, after much soul searching, I finally plumped down the cash to buy an 80G i-Pod classic. I wish I could say that I had some damascene conversion but I didn’t. To be honest, it’s just a well designed, if overpriced gadget and it has mostly spent its time sitting unused on my desk at home.

So what has changed? Well, earlier this week I headed into TX Maxx to buy some socks and there on offer was a set of speakers for MP3 players that contain lights that change in time to the music they are playing. The tag said € 25.00 and considering that any shop that sells I-pod compatible speakers tends to stock equipment with prices north of € 200.00, I figured I couldn’t lose. What I didn’t expect when I got them home was the high sound quality that could emit from a pair of speakers that, basically, double as Christmas lights. And so, I spent my first night with these speakers, first downloading my jazz collection onto my i-Pod via my laptop and then listening to the magical sounds of an elite group of artists drifting gently through the air of my living room, as my speakers pulsed in time with a soft blue light. Kind of blue? Not anymore.

[Read more...]