Monthly Archives: January 2008

Williamsburg Will Oldham Horror – Jeffrey Lewis

I’m a big fan of Will Oldham, a singer-songwriter who has worked under various monikers including Palace, Palace Music and the most recent: Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy. I’m going to post a few YouTube videos over the next few days which will highlight his genius and beard.

This is a song by Jeffrey Lewis, another singer-songwriter who is described as being ‘anti-folk’, whatever the hell that might mean. It’s something of a classic, being a tribute to Will Oldham and featuring a Will Oldham look-alike.

[youtube]ZwGhPnsCjDg[/youtube]

These New Puritans – Not The Fall

It takes a lot of balls to name your band with a reference to The Fall. These New Puritans (apparently abbreviated to TNPS, though I prefer the simpler ‘Turnips’) have done just that and after they were featured in the Guardian the other day, I thought I’d check them out. You know, see whether they live up to their name.

The answer is: no, they don’t. They’re basically a mixture of Franz Ferdinand and The Klaxons – and not the best bits of either band, for that matter. I’ve been intrigued by several newspapers and websites referring to them as actually sounding like The Fall. I figure this was more lazy journalism than impossible fantasy: These New Puritans have nothing of Mark E. Smith’s vitriolic wit or poetry, let alone a proper-sounding jangly guitar. In Numbers, the lyrics go “What’s your favourite number? / What does it mean? / Number 1: the individual / Number 2: duality / Number 3: …numerology is all shit”. Talking about the song, lead singer Jack Barnett says, “It’s our attempt to recreate numerology in a song. It’s a pop song with a dubby beat. But I say “numerology is all shit”, so it’s all deconstructed immediately”. Hmmm.

Anyway, here’s Elvis, another of their songs.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzHwRcOsDNw[/youtube]