Two weeks. Ouch. Boy am I shite at updating my loyal fans (and capitalising on new ones). The more astute among you have probably already realised why this is. Two words: Comedy Festival.
Aside from a busy and dare I say successful season - actually yeah, it was successful and here's the proof - there was all those other brilliant shows to see and experience.
Aside from the scads of brilliantly funny shows from the likes of Sam Simmons, Tom Ballard, Steve Sheehan, Maria Bamford and Bo Burnham, here are some other MICF highlights - in no particular order or detail.
*Scatalogical humour with Paul Foot at a Hungry Jack's at 4am
*Secret Santoni Cabaretoni at The Tuxedo Cat
*Good friend/medical practitioner/living partner Dr. Professor Neal Portenza getting a special mention in the Golden Gibbo nominations.
*Dr. Brown's Clown Classes: tough, revealing and rewarding.
*Reggie Watts murdering the HiFi bar
*single-handedly starting a crowd singalong of Come On Eileen on the final night of Festival Club prior to Dave Callan's DJ set.
There's probably many more besides, but most importantly are all the wonderful people who came out and supported Al's Music Rant. If you were there, I thank you, I had brilliant audiences every night - no matter the size - and without a good audience, there is no point. Your laughter, support (and ticket revenue) are what keeps it all ticking along. So here's to the next show...
Now it's time to bring some life back to the pages that inspired the show to begin with.
The A/V Room
Remember that little collection of music video posts a while back?
No? ...really? it was quite memorable, got a lot of feedback about that one. I have a real love/hate relationship with music videos, as detailed by the lil' sorta-manifesto accompanying the original post. But collating the best videos scattered across the internet for my own nefarious purposes was a lot of fun. Plus in the intervening weeks there's been some more that have actually tickled my fancy, of course there's a million more that I hated, but let's stick to the good stuff shall we?
Kimbra - Cameo Lover (Dir: Guy Franklin)
Kicking us off is the most excellent Kimbra, an AMR perennial. The next single from her IMPOSSIBLY anticipated debut Vows (trust me, as soon as I get my hands on that sucker, you'll know about it). The colourful, exuberant, punchy, Motown-lish sing-a-long gets a colourful, exuberant, puncy video to match. My only criticism is that Ms. J would never go for such a cookie-cutter hunk, pink three-piece suit or no.
World Order - Machine Civilisation (Dir: Genki Sudo)
I can't claim this one at all, I'd never heard of Genki Sudo let alone World Order before, discovering it all via Stereogum; but absolute gems like this are too good not to share. If you have even the slightest interest in choreography, or human movement, you owe it to yourself to watch this. Nice little tune too, like a Japanese Postal Service to my ears.
Ghoul - The Slip (Dir: John-Paul McElwee)
Another steal, this time from Dom Alessio's brilliant blog, over at his triple j Home & Hosed page, where he premiered the clip from one of my (and his) favourite new acts, Ghoul (featured briefly before here). The simple narrative conceit, a depressive bender... in reverse, is so brilliantly realised. I love how it kind of forces you to piece together the story as you're watching as well, with no clear answers by the end. Man, just makes me want to go all Tyler Durden and hit rock-bottom.
Jack Ladder & The Dreamlanders - Cold Feet (Dir: Steve Rogers)
The Ex-Expatriate bassist (now there's a confusing lil' sentence) Tim Rogers, not to be confused with You Am I's Tim Rogers (this is getting messy) has released a new clip directed by Steve Rogers, but not the Steve Rogers who is Captain America (god this is like Inception). This moody little piece is the taster for his third album, Hurtsville and the first with full backing band The Dreamlanders which features the talents of Laurenz Pike of PVT, ex-Mercy Arms guitarist Kirin J Callinan. Now let us never venture into such complicated six- degrees-of descriptions again!
Wiley - Action In Numbers (Dir: Us)
We've sort of seen many of the elements that make up this video before - the multiple artists, the colour minimalism, the rewinding - but it's hard to fault it when it comes together so well. Wiley is either having a ton of fun performing his bucket list of music video 'things' and hiding it very well, or he's just a really focussed rapper-artist, or something. The best bit is him hopping over his own arm - middle left about two min in.
Fleet Foxes - Grown Ocean
The soundtrack to this assemblage of faux-super 8 footage is the closing track from the group's epicly good sophomore album, Helplessness Blues. If watching this doesn't make you want to grow some extravagant facial hair and become a folk troubadour, you either lack the spirit of adventure or you're female. It's not even the beardiest, folkiest cut from the album - that honour probably goes to the Simon & Garfunkl-meets-prog-rock of Sim Sala Bim or The Shrine/An Argument. All this talk of the album, and not the above video, has probably given the game away, this is really just a chance to flag what is probably gonna be one of the albums of the year.
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