Curly Carl proudly presents...
Dec. 12th, 2006 01:13 pmCurly Carl writes: I'm delighted to announce that my ward, whipping boy and protegé, Momus, will appear live in concert in Madrid, Spain this coming Saturday. (That's me in the poster, drinking Bud while doubling as a security guard.) Apart from the show at Neu Club (dot .es, not dot .com as it says on the flyer, sorry, muy bad) there are also a couple of London shows coming up, one at The Spitz (January 4th), one at Tate Britain (January 5th). Details on Last FM's Momus events page.

The last time Momus quoted some press about his current album Ocky Milk, some concerned passerby got defeatist on our asses. "Momus, are you seriously happy with the attention Ocky Milk has been getting?" wrote Mr Concerned. "I mean, a forum thread or two, a blog here, a Pitchfork-wannabe there... it's not exactly blanket coverage, is it? My kid brother's myspace electronica does as well. Not in any of the music mags (that I can find), not in Wire, not even in Pitchfork, let alone national newspapers or anything like that. While at the same time someone like Green Gartside gets a Mercury nomination. It's not a bad album, I guess you deserve better."
Well, Mr Concerned, just so you don't have to keep scouring the music mags, here's a little round-up of the latest UK reviews. As you can see, we've now got at least one national newspaper on board with the bard; The Independent on Sunday, who give the record three stars. "All told, a challenging but compelling collection," says Record Collector. "His eccentricity is bubbling into a fine, but still twisted, maturity... like listening to the music an alien observer has produced on an undercover anthropological mission to Earth," says Plan B magazine. "Vaudeville with vocoders? Well, it's different... perversely cultish and relentlessly spasmodic," muses Rock Sound magazine. "A wholly unexpected, glorious return," chatters Teletext -- "finally he's relevant again."
Opinions on Momus himself vary -- for Expatica he's "the most intelligent man in pop", whereas for Stylus he's "an unscrupulous, emotionally vacant pervert with a good sense of humor". Still, the Stylus scribes have stuck "Nervous Heartbeat" at 44 in their Stylus Top 50 singles of 2006 list. Who's complaining? Certainly not our unscrupulous, emotionally-vacant pervert friend. He knows full well that he didn't even release a single in 2006. But his -- our -- lips are sealed.

The last time Momus quoted some press about his current album Ocky Milk, some concerned passerby got defeatist on our asses. "Momus, are you seriously happy with the attention Ocky Milk has been getting?" wrote Mr Concerned. "I mean, a forum thread or two, a blog here, a Pitchfork-wannabe there... it's not exactly blanket coverage, is it? My kid brother's myspace electronica does as well. Not in any of the music mags (that I can find), not in Wire, not even in Pitchfork, let alone national newspapers or anything like that. While at the same time someone like Green Gartside gets a Mercury nomination. It's not a bad album, I guess you deserve better."
Well, Mr Concerned, just so you don't have to keep scouring the music mags, here's a little round-up of the latest UK reviews. As you can see, we've now got at least one national newspaper on board with the bard; The Independent on Sunday, who give the record three stars. "All told, a challenging but compelling collection," says Record Collector. "His eccentricity is bubbling into a fine, but still twisted, maturity... like listening to the music an alien observer has produced on an undercover anthropological mission to Earth," says Plan B magazine. "Vaudeville with vocoders? Well, it's different... perversely cultish and relentlessly spasmodic," muses Rock Sound magazine. "A wholly unexpected, glorious return," chatters Teletext -- "finally he's relevant again."
Opinions on Momus himself vary -- for Expatica he's "the most intelligent man in pop", whereas for Stylus he's "an unscrupulous, emotionally vacant pervert with a good sense of humor". Still, the Stylus scribes have stuck "Nervous Heartbeat" at 44 in their Stylus Top 50 singles of 2006 list. Who's complaining? Certainly not our unscrupulous, emotionally-vacant pervert friend. He knows full well that he didn't even release a single in 2006. But his -- our -- lips are sealed.
you've seen him drinking, now see him dancing
Date: 2006-12-12 12:29 pm (UTC)and here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZdVEeGfD4U
Enjoy Mister Momus!
Alexandre Piedade
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Date: 2006-12-12 12:45 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2006-12-12 01:45 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-12 02:47 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-12 02:21 pm (UTC)Is there some board somewhere that decides what's relevant and what isn't?
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Date: 2006-12-12 02:53 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-12 03:22 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-12 08:18 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-12 11:51 pm (UTC)A lot of people aren't aware, but budweiser is made with corn syrup,/i>. Ick.
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Date: 2006-12-14 01:25 am (UTC)Never acquired a taste for beer. Started filching mother's whiskey sours during cookouts in the 70's. Oh, to be twelve, tipsy and riding my chopper bike on a warm summer evening again...
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Date: 2006-12-14 06:42 pm (UTC)Beer is fine, but I admit to being a bit picky with what beer I'll drink - though, apparently, I'm not as picky as Nick.
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Date: 2006-12-12 02:41 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-12 02:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-13 01:34 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-12 04:21 pm (UTC)Hahaha, are they mad?
Tate Britain, by the way, is teh suxx0rz. They take perfectly good non-British painters like Fuseli and Peter Lely and Rubens and call them British and when you ask them where the other FOREIGN painters are, they go: "OH but we only have BRITISH ones here!". It was also the place where they had the little curtains over the SEX PAINTINGS OMG! Land of insanity!
(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-12 04:39 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-12 04:58 pm (UTC)If only you could put porn in it, but play behind a little curtain, it would be the funniest thing ever.
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Date: 2006-12-12 05:01 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2006-12-12 05:37 pm (UTC)It's slightly odd that a record designed to be friendly, exotic and romantic, to stress the ethics of kindness "makes you wanna meet a beautiful girl, trick her into falling in love with you, then break her heart". But artists really don't control how their work is received. I mean, they do their best, but...
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Date: 2006-12-12 06:08 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-12 07:09 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-12 09:07 pm (UTC)This is something I got from older Momus records; if I was feeling bitter or something I could find peace in the musings of a calculating world-weary bastard of a character. Here I get more of a stranded-in-a-mystical-jungle feeling , or at least a looking-out-the-window-of-the-Galaxy-Express-999 feeling than anything. It's very otherworldly.
I like the vocal style, it reminds me of the kind of physical disconnect that charges conversations between sober people and people on acid. There is some pondering, some delicate imagery, and bits of mis-heard remarks that trail into weird and wonderful sentences that make perfect sense on some other astral plane.
As long as you keep making records like this, for as long as they let you, I think reviews should be only a casual earthly distraction. Incomplete tiny postcards from a cloudy world.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-16 08:37 pm (UTC)I hope you're being sarcastic. It's really a most insipid, pointless and trite quote. I mean, what if these other people like decapitating dogs, or slicing and slashing faggots, or -- heaven forbid! -- Westlife? Are you happy for them?
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Date: 2006-12-19 07:55 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-12 05:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-12 05:49 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-12 09:31 pm (UTC)But I suppose I'll never understand the tastes of the refined. "Nervous Heartbeat" a better single than "Hang Low"? Really? I'm just an unreconstructed pop fan, I guess -- "Bubblegum or experimental music and nothing in between", as Stephen Merritt said before he went all acoustic on us.
(I don't mean to disrespet Ocky Milk in saying this. It is marvelously weird. I just can't get the aesthetic that informs "Pleasantness", "Permagasm" and the rest of the honey-dipped formlessness in the middle section. I was happy to see the return of "Dialtone", though. And "Hang Low" is a wonderful song.)
....finally relevant again?
Date: 2006-12-12 09:50 pm (UTC)I remember reading a particularly vicious review of Hippopotamomus in NME magazine at the time of it's release and being thrilled that someone whose music I liked so much could incite such a morally outraged reaction.
Some of the above reviews you quote from are if anything worse because the reviewers in question are exhibiting no real reaction, instead falling back on stock music journo cliche and what they perhaps assume are clever turns of phrase..what the fuck does "relentlessly spasmodic" mean exactly?
You have produced consistently entertaining, uniquely intelligent (by extension singurlary up-lifting) and contrary to what many critics claim remarkably diverse pop records over the past two decades.
You have resultingly secured a fan base of -one would imagine- reasonably enlightened, reflective individuals who actually like your records for precisely what they are.
Trumps the shallow compliments of musicquik magazines I think.
Regards.
Thomas Scott.
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Date: 2006-12-12 10:02 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-12 10:11 pm (UTC)'Nuff said, cat-daddy. (I never thought I would use that expression. Yet I'm loathe to erase it, so I think I'll go hide in a closet now.) Ta-ta! XD
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Date: 2006-12-12 10:17 pm (UTC)TTFN
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Date: 2006-12-12 10:32 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-14 02:47 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-13 03:40 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-14 01:32 am (UTC)That comment on relevance I found very grating. Made one's middle finger itch.