KJBishop.net » Music

Distracted by Paul Stanley’s falsetto

kjbishop — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 03:09:12 +0000

I’m supposed to be working. And what am I doing? Headbanging to I Was Made For Loving You. That song is like the golden perfect child of rock and disco. Although there are plenty of clips out there with better sound, I bond with this one, which takes me back to living rooms of temps perdu. I mean, I don’t think I ever heard Kiss through decent speakers. There’s a deplorable lack of Kiss tribute bands over here. Come on, Bangkok! Your traffic’s like Sydney Road on a Saturday night times twenty, all day, every day; you also have a lot of men in makeup. What’s stopping you from going all the way?

Maybe I should just forget about writing today and go ice skating instead. Because the long-awaited big rink is open!

The Caravan Song etc.

kjbishop — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 12:27:16 +0000

Did I ever mention that I found The Caravan Song from Mike Batt’s soundtrack to the movie Caravans, sung by Barbara Dickson, on YouTube? I love the whirly fairground ride in the desert. This was always Raule’s song.

I had trouble settling down to work this morning and spent a couple of hours on YouTube. I found this groovy camel-plodding music, and the lush, nocturnal Mystic Caravan from DJ Mosavo’s album Serpent’s Garden, and finally Aziza Mustafah Zadeh, a composer, pianist and singer with a gorgeous voice. She is really something. A few of her clips: The Nightingale & the Rose ; Last Day of Chopin ; Man Vagifim Giziyam ; Ladies of Azerbaijan ; Oriental Fantasy (I love watching her play this one) ; also, she can sing the Queen of the Night aria and play it at the same time…

And <3 Ghostfire’s The Last Steampunk Waltz.

ETA: ON the subject of sound and <3, the neighbours have got a new, much quieter water pump!

The Bible-black grave

kjbishop — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 08:57:25 +0000

I’ve had a bit of a thing for dark and spooky country music ever since I was a kid listening to Johnny Cash at my grandparents’ place and I heard Ghost Riders in the Sky. Of course, let it not be forgotten that Australia’s favourite folk song is a yarn, frequently set to sweet and swollen strings with the national flag flying in the background, about a bloke who drowns himself rather than be caught for stealing a sheep (and whose ghost lingers on, pining eternally for the sheep, a magnificent ram with balls like this. Anyway…)

Christian Read turned me on to Ghoultown, from which I waltzed to some other bands in the gothic country vein, or whatever you call it. Here’s 13 variously melancholy, vengeful and batshit songs that I recently found and liked:

Sons of Perdition:
Blood in the Valley (I can’t stop listening to this)
All He Wants Is My Blood
Anhelo
Burial at Sea

Those Poor Bastards:
Sick and Alone
Swallowed By Sin (my new favourite song for in the shower)
Glory Amen (Hallelujaaargh!)
At the Crossroads

Ghoultown:
Walkin Through the Desert (with a crow)
Drink with the Living Dead
These guys get harder and more metall-y, but I like their country-horror stuff.

Lonesome Wyatt and Rachel Brooke:
Someday I’ll Fall
Crippled Farms

Redwest (spaghetti western metal!):
Fistful of Dollars

And I might have to post another 13 soon.

Band/artist websites
Ghoultown
Sons of Perdition (one man band, Zebulon Whatley)
Those Poor Bastards (two man band, Lonesome Wyatt and The Minister)
Lonesome Wyatt
Rachel Brooke
Redwest

Spaghetti Western Sunday

kjbishop — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 11:26:03 +0000

Last night I watched The Good, The Bad, The Weird, a (the?) 2008 South Korean spaghetti western by Kim Ji-woon (Korean title Joheunnom Nabbeunnom Isanghannom … aka “Nom Nom Nom”). Set in 1930s Japanese-occupied Manchuria, it’s a tale of gangsters, killers, bandits, and a treasure map. Inspired by Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, GBW takes the same trio of a bad guy, a kooky bad guy, and a “good” bad guy, adds a cast of other assorted colourful bad guys, plus the Japanese army, and sets them all at each other (with weapons ranging from a morning star to a machine gun — one of the things I enjoyed about the film was its milieu of cultural and technological worlds in collision). I have to agree with the reviewer who called it “a cartoon of a cartoon” — and some of the cartoon lines are faint, notably in the characterisation department. And as you might expect in a cartoon of a spaghetti western, there are no female characters to speak of, except for a few decorative girls and a granny, who was cool in an old silent granny way but didn’t have much screen time. But I still thought it was a lot of fun. (Not to mention that Byung-hun Lee as “the Bad” Park Chang-yi is my kinda man in black.) Here’s the trailer.

My other recent discovery in the spag-western field is the Spaghetti Western Orchestra. An Aussie group, formerly the Ennio Morricone Experience, they do what their name suggests: play spaghetti western theme music, with great playing, amusing theatrics, and fine scream-yodelling. This is their version of The Good, The Bad and the Ugly.