The News Review:
- Sean O’Hagan: My journey to the Proms | Music | The Observer
- 311 ‘” and friends ‘” bring their unique takes on reggae to Tweeter
- Daft Punk leaves ‘em delirious
Sean O’Hagan: My journey to the Proms | Music | The Observer
The Observer – Jul 22, 2007
Around this time I started buying NME and fell under the spell of Nick Kent and Charles Shaar Murray two music writers whose prose and general demeanour suggested to me that they were just as important – and glamorously wayward – as most of the people they wrote about. Not being able to sing a note and never having shown the slightest musical inclination I began to harbour a vague dream of becoming a music writer. I had relocated to London and was still drifting when punk shook up the moribund music scene of the 1970s. It was quite a time to be a music fan one of those moments when life seemed to suddenly accelerate: speed spliff lager; noise chaos energy. I saw the Clash the Ramones the Jam but alas not the Sex Pistols. I spent all my spare cash on singles punk singles but mainly reggae singles – Burning Spear Culture Augustus Pablo Dennis Brown Tappa Zukie. It was a brave new world of music and I immersed myself in it to the exclusion of almost everything else.
311 ‘” and friends ‘” bring their unique takes on reggae to Tweeter
Providence Journal – Jul 22, 2007
UNITY IS ONE OF REGGAE’S core themes and for decades the genre has been a remarkable base for umpteen stylistic hybrids with rock jazz and punk inspiring Madness the English Beat UB40 No Doubt and of course 311. “I found out about reggae in junior high school. [Rastafarian punk band] Bad Brains was one of my favorite bands and it wasn’t until I started to get into them that I thought reggae was really cool” Mahoney says. “They were these black guys playing hard-core punk. ”“The philosophy behind the reggae was that the artists were about good energy and dealt with heavy issues mostly about positivity getting past some barriers and the power of positive thinking” Mahoney says. They have a cliff you can jump off into the water” he says… ” The crowd at the club were mostly vacationing Americans but “the local stage hands were tripping out. They had never really seen rock music and got a kick out of it” Mahoney says. “It was pretty laid-back show. It was cool hanging out with the Jamaicans. I can’t wait to go back. ” The Jamaican stage crew who seemed to know what they liked no matter what it was called are evidence of Mahoney’s belief that music is at the end just music and that “influences come from everywhere” which has enriched 311’s music.
Daft Punk leaves ‘em delirious
OCRegister – Jul 22, 2007
The strangest but often coolest one: Daft Punk. For more than a decade now the Parisian duo which packed a teeming sea of sweat-soaked fans into the Los Angeles Sports Arena for a rare glimpse Saturday night has maintained an enigmatic cachet in the dance music scene that now can conjure Kraftwerkian worship on the part of admirers. Indeed in some ways Daft Punk can be viewed as Kraftwerk inverted. Both European acts have long-presented robotoid visages to their audiences whether on stage in video or on record. But where the pioneering German electro maestros have always hid from media attention while still allowing their faces to be seen the men of Daft Punk Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Emmanuel de Homem-Christo are less press-shy yet infinitely stricter about keeping their identities shielded by personae. Very few pictures of the pair’s faces exist and when they perform live they do so as they have appeared in videos their heads tucked inside windowless helmets that suggest they are aliens or robots or both. As with the even more reclusive Residents (the guys who wear giant bloodshot eyeballs and top hats) such obscuring automatically raises the question of whether your $50 bought you 90 minutes with the real thing or whether you just watched skilled underlings trained in Daft Punk entertainment like so many touring Blue Man Groups before it… For the first 50 minutes of Saturday’s set I was enveloped in that feeling alongside everyone else stuffed on the floor cascades of sweat pouring off my face and neck. (You thought Madonna at the Forum was hot? This was like taking a sauna on the sun. ) After a brisk opening turn from Ratatat and surprisingly engaging between-sets spinning from Sebastian & Kavinsky that initial stretch from Daft Punk left me mesmerized by man-machine music treated to supreme pacing. First came the inviting tones from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” to say hello followed straight away by the mission statement “Robot Rock. ” Then it was on into the ominous (and very Kraftwerkian) “Television Rules the Nation” the command-crazy “Technologic” (”buy it use it break it fix it trash it change it now upgrade it” just the first few of about 50 more orders) then some dynamic shifts in tempo and volume while the vast ever-changing visuals shifted from E-tripping color blurs to retro-futuristic grids lifted from “Tron” and “2001″ and finally four of the biggest celebrations from 2001’s “Discovery” including the soul-gilded hooks of “Face to Face” and “Too Long” and the ebullience that comes from “Superheroes” and most of all “One More Time” an anthem so beloved by both technophiles and casual dabblers that Daft Punk felt obliged to replay it to close the encore. Once midnight drew nigh however and my unenhanced energy gave out just as tracks like “Rock ‘n Roll” and “Music Sounds Better With You” started to heat up the duo’s show seemed to become more routine steaming on with fewer and fewer fresh twists. This is an entirely personal perspective mind you: Had I kept on dancing my endorphins might have pushed me to an even more wide-eyed plateau.