Are there many fretless guitarists around now?

What did you make of SPECTRE? 

And how would you rank Craig's Bond outings now?

On the surface, The Great Escape is just Blur on autopilot. But when you dig deeper and listen to those lyrics, you'll notice that it's a very lonely album centered around social isolation and alienation.

Think about it. It's most evident in the ballads like Best Days and The Universal, but even the upbeat pop songs have it. Stereotypes is a cynical denunciation of hedonism and exhibitionism, Country House is a about a man who feels so isolated in the city that moves to the country, hoping to find solace, It Could Be You is a depressing hope in an external saviour in the form of winning the lottery, Globe Alone is about social isolation, etc. It almost feels like a predecessor to OK Computer, except more human and intelligible, instead of being cold and robotic.

Been listening to The Byrds the last couple days...anyone else like them? Clearly a big influence on the Stone Roses. I knew the bigger hits (Turn Turn Turn, Eight Miles High) but listening to the albums, I've discovered some great psychedlic pieces with the classic jangly chiming guitar sound like Draft Morning or Tribal Gathering. Had no idea they went through so many line up changes either.

I like them too. I think The Coral are the band which are most influenced by The Byrds.

We should have a Bond thread

Anyway... SPECTRE. I enjoyed it but it still has some major flaws. The biggest one is probably related to the villains: Blofeld's character is so clichè that not even a great actor like Christoph Waltz could save it. And what about the henchman? Can't remember his name, but he was piss poor and even more clichè than his boss.

I'll admit that I fell in love with Lea Seydoux. Her character was, again, little more than a bunch of clichès (that'w what happens with most Bond girls, actually) but she managed to make it both delicate and aggressive. And unbelievably sexy

Visually the movie was stunning though: Hoyte van Hoytema did a great work with cinematography. And Thomas Newman's soundtrack was good too.

In the end I thought that it was a bit of a "Bond on autopilot". Not bad but not that great either... probably my second least favorite among the Craig movies:

1. Casino Royale
2. Skyfall
3. Spectre
4. Quantum of Solace

I think that just about sums it up for me as well: Bond on autopilot.

And that was always gonna be the danger with having Mendes come back for another one, I think. He was obviously a big fan of the old Bond movies that came out when he was growing up (he was one of the one's who were really against Craig getting the role in the mid-00s), and I think, like us all when thinking back to things from our own childhoods, he possibly looks back on those movies now with rose-tinted glasses. It was never really on that women just threw themselves at a Roger Moore well into his fifties, but we could ignore it then because "it was a different time" and it was all done (certainly by Roger's time) with a wry eye and a smirk anyway. 

And I don't buy it here, that twenty-odd year old Lea Seydoux, in all her loveliness, would fall for some bloke in his late-forties just...because. Alright, Daniel Craig may not be just any other bloke, but he has still obviously aged quite a lot since he first got the role, and I can't suspend belief enough to imagine he could seduce a woman like that anymore. And I shouldn't have to suspend belief - again, it's not the 70s anymore! I didn't mind it so much that he seduced Monica Belucci earlier on in the film, because it was age appropriate then, and that was kind of a callback to the old films anyway. But with Seydoux, I really wanted to see her character to interact with Bond as Eva Green's character did in Casino.

I enjoyed how Bond had to really put the work in charming Eva Green's character in Casino, because, obviously she's a monstrously attractive woman and after a troubled life, she's going to be guarded against throwing herself in the arms of men she hardly knows. Take this scene, for example:

Brilliant exchange. And Craig really excels at this kind of thing. Damn shame they didn't give Seydoux some material like this, because her character had reason to be just as wary of Bond as Green's was here. It looked for periods of the film like they were going down that route, and then, they just didn't. Imagine that's because they needed more time on the script. I think the film was in that way similar to Quantum, in that it needed a good rewrite.


Anyway, I hope Craig does another Bond film of the calibre of Casino and Skyfall, one last one to go out on a real high.

Great stuff! Must admit I hadn't heard of Kaitlyn's music before, so many thanks for sharing the link. Reminded me a little of Suzanne Ciani, who's also known for her work on the Buchla. Now listening to some of her other tracks on YouTube.

Add Charmless Man to that list as well. Especially interesting as a counterpart to the more cheerful parts of Parklife (think Girls & Boys, Parklife, Tracy Jacks, Bank Holiday...). It really is a lyrically tight album with a very well done theme - just a shame they were running a little dry musically. It definitely didn't need to have 15 tracks either, like most Blur albums you could vastly improve it by cutting two or three.

The same thing happened to me. I had Keep The Dream Alive mislabeled as Alive.

So people want to cash in on poor Lemmy's death with new Motorhead?