the world is alive now.

in and outside our home. ("ragged wood" - fleet foxes)

 taken from their wonderful debut album "fleet foxes"

this week consisted of book reports, senseless bibliographies, countless hours in the library, even more hours reading boring books, answering dull essay questions and trying to figure out the phonetic transcription of your own name (which honestly isn´t the easiest thing to do for us germans when the brits pronounce our names differently).

but of course it wasn´t all bad. james joyce certainly is my new best friend (next to oscar wilde), the first set of guitar strings (and my guitar!) is still intact, online banking finally works (hopefully) and thanks to my wonderful friends i´m gonna go to switzerland for a weekend in december to see the antlers and dry the river. and while we´re on the subject of dry the river, a ticket is booked to see them in bath in november (two bristol trips in one week = exhausting).

so one more or less uneventful week has past since i saw bombay bicycle club live. in order to hopefully recreate some of the fun we had, i´m gonna start this post with - of course - bombay bicycle club. here´s an acoustic performance of "rinse me down" for watchlistentell.

support act number one was dog is dead. i´ve had a closer look at their music and it´s definitely not bad. although i gotta say i prefer the acoutsic and live versions a lot more than the studio versions. so thank god for live gigs and youtube. here´s an acoustic version of "young" recorded for burberry acoustic.

apparently people have been reading (or at least found) this blog by typing "dry the river scott bassist" and "robert steadman stornoway" into google. this actually shows that my impression of these bands was probably right. if you attend a stornoway gig, there are at least a handful of girls screaming "rob, i love you!"; same thing with scott from dry the river (dtr). well, perhaps not exactly the same but quite a lot of people certainly prefer scott over the rest of the band (this does not include me [anymore] by the way, although i love listening to his voice in interviews - too strange maybe?).

anyway, stornoway are in every single playlist on my ipod and dry the river are certainly starting to get there as well. i was watching some videos of dtr at the haldern pop festival the other day and there was one thing that caught my attention. here is a video of "new ceremony" by dry the river (live performance from the haldern pop festival) and one of "watching birds" by stornoway (live performance from somerset house, london). pay attention to scott (dtr) and oli (stornoway), both on bass - notice anything?

moving right along to ruarri joseph who (of course) already did a shed session (for some reason jon from sfts is always one step ahead of me). he was recommended to me by a friend who recently went to london for a week and saw ruarri live. so here´s his shed session, well, one part of it - "as always".

a rather strange but nevertheless great recommendation from another friend was certainly nigel wright. the boy is only 18 years old but his voice sounds so "grown-up". great guitar sound, amazing voice. can´t wait for the album. here´s "solid muse".

so, kindergarden flashback. well, not quite kindergarden. i was (almost) 6 years old when alanis morisette released one of her most famous and certainly one of her best singles in february 1996 - "ironic". "jagged little pill" was her debut album and in my opinion, honestly her best too. it wasn´t necessarily the most successful album (compared to her other records) but it was certainly the most impressive one. the last two albums (from 2004 & 2008) involved too much pop for my taste. so let´s reminisce, shall we? here´s "ironic".

last one today is ben howard - as you probably expected. he´s coming to manchester next thursday and since he´s been quite good in haldern, i´m gonna see him here again. what ben does with his guitar in this video of "empty corridors" is definitely not the way i´d ever play my guitar but he certainly makes it work. 

  

ben howard on thursday, ahab on friday and ash on sunday. it´s gonna be one busy week. makes the week after that almost look lame with only one gig. but november is gonna be packed again, so there are tons of gig reviews coming up.

i got a hot date with jane austen and frances burney now (yes, at almost 1 am on a friday night). although the "hot" certainly only refers to the 10 cups of tea i´ll have to drink in order to stay awake. see ya soon. x