Enjoyed listening to Astrud Gilberto‘s ‘I haven’t got anything to do’ album this morning. It’s from 1970, and is on a Japanese CD which I extravagantly bought at Tower earlier in the year. Actually, Tower has decent prices on some Japanese titles, particularly when they have a $3 off everything sale.
Anyway, I stopped by Academy at lunchtime and picked up three things:
– The World Shopping with Space Ponch. I bought this because it was very cheap and I had a feeling it was recommended on the exotica mailing list a while back. Anyway, it’s ok – synth-laden electro pop with a lot of vocoder and some Jean-Jacques Perrey-style electronic samples (much like the ones Stereolab used on their ‘Transient Random Noisebursts…’ LP.
– Kirsty MacColl – Tropical Brainstorm. It might seem as if I’m being morbid, but I really wanted to hear this. She died last year (was run over by a boat or something), and I was pretty sad about it. One of my first records was Kirsty’s rendition of Billy Bragg‘s ‘A new England’. After that I found that she was a very handy popstar to be into – I was eleven years old, and was able to afford her records because they were normally reduced to 20 or 30p in WH Smith… I remember being very young and listening to ‘He’s on the beach’ and ‘Terry’. They were cool records. Anyway, ‘tropical brainstorm’ sounds nice enough. It’s very smoothly produced with a kind of radio-friendly electronic-cuban pop hybrid thing going on. Kirsty still maintains her sardonic, detached vocals, but a lot has changed since the singles of the mid 80s. There is a lot of humor on the album – one song is about cybersex with an anonymous Dutchman. All in all, a weird purchase – I wouldn’t have bought this if she hadn’t died; I probably won’t listen to it much; yet I’m enjoying listening to it… hmm….
– I also bought a used copy of Neutral Milk Hotel‘s ‘in the aeroplane over the sea’. I haven’t listened to this yet, and it was bought entirely on a (very strong) recommendation from Tim, who works for my company. He is so mentally into this band that I figured I’d better check it out. I haven’t listened to it yet, but I’ll write about it here when I do…