So, the announcement most of us have been waiting for… with unexpectedly not-entirely-satisfying information.

The National have announced some Australasian tour dates, but all that’s on offer right now are the following dates:

• 15 JAN 2008: AUCKLAND, New Zealand – Studio
• 17 JAN 2008: BRISBANE, Australia – The Zoo
• 18 JAN 2008: MELBOURNE, Australia – The Corner

Not exactly comprehensive! I can only hope they’re looking to add some more dates. I know Sydneysiders are considered to be the overpriveleged citizens as far as giggage goes, but this isn’t the sort of thing I want to be left out of!

So, Rage Against The Machine have not only reformed but now they’re doing some shows in Sydney. I don’t think I’ll be rushing out to buy tickets – while their self-titled debut enjoys the odd spin in my CD player, I tend to enjoy going to a concert to enjoy music, not put my life at risk of being trampled.

What really got me though was the maximum ticket price:

Ouch!

A band that I’ve been aware of for some time but never got around to exploring until now is The Chameleons, a post-punk group from the 80s that at the time would have been orbiting in the same territory as the usual bevy of acts from that period that get typically name-checked: The Smiths, Echo & The Bunnymen, Joy Division and U2

I’m not sure what has made me take notice of them as references to the group seem to be few and far between, but in the last couple of weeks I finally decided to get amongst their stuff and started listening to their debut album Script of the Bridge (1983), which so far has been excellent listening.

For me what sets these guys apart is a significantly more expansive sound than many of their contemporaries – at times even rivaling some of Johnny Marr’s sonic orchestrations thanks to guitarists Reg Smithies and Dave Fielding making use of their guitars to provide a combined assault of textures. This combined with Mark Burgess’ rather passionate and occasionally frenetic vocals makes for a sound of its own, despite the many similarities they might have shared with groups of their time.

Enough rambling, here are a couple of tracks off their aforementioned Script of the Bridge album. See what you think.

• Don’t Fall
  Track 1 from the album. Opens with a vocal sample which interestingly got re-sampled by Way Out West on a track from their Don’t Look Now LP. I can only assume they took it from this track as no-one seems to know where it originally came from.
• Up The Down Escalator
  I think this might have been my first exposure to the group thanks to Steven Drozd’s compilation for LateNightTales (which is a pretty good mixtape by the way)

These days, anything about Radiohead is news, as the silence surrounding the band and their still-untitled 7th LP has been enough to rival that of My Bloody Valentine’s (if Kevin Shields is to be believed, they’re still coming back for another album yet)

But fear not, as that should change very soon. After over two months of neglect, their site’s front page has been updated with the rather obscure statement: “emergent life form”

What’s next? Tracklist? Artwork? Release date? Who knows?

Keep your eyes trained, earthlings. News should be coming very soon.

Update: This appeared on Hodiau Direkton:

Which must be a code of some sort. I’m wondering if it’s a symbol-based typeface Thom or someone downloaded off the internet?

Update 2: thanks to grapplinghook28‘s efforts, the characters have been decoded to say:

YES
WEARE
STILL
ALIVE

Nowhere near as exciting as I would have hoped!

It’s Daft Punk madness time. Their Australian tour has just been announced (December 22 for Sydneysiders living under a rock), and everybody‘s going crazy (myself included), and for good reason too: I only needed to see their storming set from Coachella in May last year to realize that these boys do know a thing or two about working a vibe.

Now, working a vibe is all very well and good, and a talent in its own right, but I was a little surprised to find a page documenting the samples used in various Daft Punk songs, and discovering that many of them are very… well, unaltered.

Sampling is one of those issues that has divided the musical world for decades now, and although I’m entirely all for sampling, I’m not quite sure where I stand on the issue of what is ostensibly more hook burglary rather than obtaining sounds and riffs and working them into an entirely new musical context (which I am a huge proponent of). This post will probably draw a lot of comment representing both sides of the debate.

So, let’s check out a couple of samples shall we: (and again, full credit must go to Palms Out Sounds for their locating all of these sounds – I’ve just excerpted them to save effort for you, dear reader. check out the site for full length tracks)

Digital Love (as found on Discovery)

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From “I Love You More” by George Duke

I guess I found this one relatively innocuous – mostly because Daft Punk build a good song on top of it and it features one of the best solos to do an air synth solo to, but still – it proves why the song is so repetitive: almost all of the significant sounds come from the sample itself, which was not something I was expecting.

Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger (also from Discovery)

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From “Cola Bottle Baby” by Edwin Birdsong

Pretty much everything that I thought was dope about this loop is pretty much present in the original: that kickin’ ride bell, the interplay between those classic synths, and that guitar slide (which I had thought was an extra sample dropped in).

Robot Rock (on Human After All)

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From “Release the Beast” by Breakwater

On Human After All, Daft Punk proved that although their ability to get a great sound was more or less flawless, their execution of this was not always as compelling. In my original review (sorry, old blog), given while listening an early leak which I assumed had to be a fake made by the duo to confound illegal trading (I was wrong), I waxed lyrical about the “hot” sound (“…tight drum sounds, big guitars…”).

Now what do I make of that when this sample suggests that the drums sounds are… well… just part of the sample. And the keyboard riff. And the big guitars.

I think this track probably makes the biggest move from “art” into the territory of “robbery”. I mean, c’mon: adding a vocoder does not a track make.

In Conclusion

I’m not sure what to make of this: I don’t want to be so closed minded as to write it off as a talentless reuse of some great sounds (it’s not, not entirely anyway). At the same time, it’s certainly not in the same league of many of the sample-borrowing artists that I’m particularly a fan of.

Your thoughts? I have a hunch that I’ll probably have a few people reminding me that it’s music for the dancefloor, not the mind.