The good thing with the mp3-player on shuffle is that you might find yourself thinking ‘hey! nice song!’ to realise that it’s from an album you were meant to write something about. In this case, the song was Chinatown from Watoo Watoo’s latest album La Fuite. The album contains good music to listen to during summer evenings, while reading a book for example. (Or while writing a review on the laptop and wondering why you’re not just reading a book.) Actually, Chinatown is the only song with English lyrics, all the other ones are sung in French. It’s only the girl singing, too. I thought Michael used to sing on previous albums, but they’re all in a box, far away from home, and even further away from the tiny room I am typing this from… Anyway. It’s a really good album and I am entitled to say that, because I’ve been listening to it a lot. It sounds like Stereolab playing Gainsbourg songs on a Sunday afternoon. But I’m only saying that because this is supposed to be a review a I think it needs a sounds like-quote.

Oh, and the label is called Letterbox, who are from Northern England and who happen to have released the debut album by California Snow Story as well. Human Resources-wise, the band is the missing link between Camera Obscura and The Hermit Crabs, but music-wise they’re a bit more quiet, singer songwriter-ish than both bands. But it’s not like their sound is miles away from those bands either. I really liked their debut EP, released on Shelflife back in 2002, and I had fallen in love with their mp3-single Suddenly Everything Happens too, that has been available on the label’s website for a long time. It’s still my favourite song of the album, which is called Close To The Ocean, but that might be just because I tend to stick to what I know already. After all, many other songs have charming boy-girl vocals too and it’s still one of my favourite album of the past six months. And they’re definitely the best band known as CSS.

Interview with Watoo Watoo here. Filles Sourires approval here. California Snow Story interview here. The Rain Fell Down approval here.

It’s been almost five years since I first went on an Interrail trip to Sweden and Finland and attended the Mitt Bästa Liv festival. Now that might have been a good moment to get melancholic and think of all the good times that belong to the past forever; it was definitely a good moment to obtain a new passport as the old one, that I had bought for the occasion, is about to expire.

So I spent most of this morning in a grey and depressing waiting room at the Dutch Embassy in London, with a stomach that felt emptier by the minute. Talking to fellow Dutchmen turned English was quite nice though. Two things we all agreed on: people in this country –especially those driving cars– just don’t get the concept of people riding bicycles. And the British trains are worse than their often bemoaned Dutch equivalents. Much worse.

And then, after more than two-and-a-half hours of waiting, I finally could hand in my application form, together with my photos… only to realise that the new and very strict rules that apply to British passports aren’t the same as the new and very strict rules that apply to Dutch passports. My head was too big. Now Dimitra has told me several times that my head is rather big, but I wouldn’t have thought it even shows on passport photos.

I had new photos taken at a local photoshop that did know the Dutch rules (and understood Dutch entrepeneurship quite well, too). I’ll get my new passport sent to me in a week or two, while in the meantime they have taken my old passport. I think. I can’t find it anymore. It had a stamp from when I had visited Poland back in the pre-EU days, which I always thought was kind of cool, so it would be sad if it’d be lost forever. And therefore perhaps a bit fair that I, accidentally, took the embassy’s pen.

We know Slumberland has always had a weak spot for Leeds-based bands, but that doesn’t mean they did a bad thing making The Lodger’s Grown-Ups to be their first full length release in four years. In fact, the three mp3s they’ve posted on their website, made me glad I gave the band a second chance, after I had written them off as a one indie-hit wonder, following their debut single Many Thanks For Your Honest Opinion. The new songs remind me a bit of Voxtrot, but that’s probably just one of these silly associations that don’t make sense out of my head. Actually, I think these new songs are about a thousand times better than the new Voxtrot. But then, you probably won’t hear The Lodger in a shoe shop on Exeter High street.

Fact that couldn’t be squeezed inside the post: it’s out in the UK on Angular.

Years ago, I occasionally got a song in my head of which I remembered only one line, which in that same head, had transformed into ‘Is that just great? Is that just great?’ – sung by, probably, two girls together. It took me about a year to finally find out which song it was: Shymaster by Rizzo, who were indeed two girls. They were a bit Softies-go-indiepunk. It turned out I actually owned it on 7″, but well, I’ve never had a talent for recognising my favourite tunes.

Nancy, who has a tendency to dig up songs that have meant a lot to me in the past, posted the song a couple of weeks ago. Actuallt, it was she who released it in the first place. I’ve been playing it a lot this week, partly because I realised that I still really like the song, partly because my new phone, which has an mp3-player built in, currently only takes 128MB of music.

Oh, and those lyrics? Well, i wasn’t even close: ‘In the fifth grade, in the fifth grade’. It is about sexual education and, more generally, growing up. Perhaps I just didn’t want to know…

(Removed silly quote from the indiepop list, as it is not very polite to quote people without their consent. Let’s just say that the indiepop lists wasn’t having its best weeks.)

For those who happen to have a less restriced, grumpy and let’s-theorise-about-music-as-that’s-what-we’re-on-this-planet-for view of music, Exeter will go Pop! again and play your favourite indiepop tunes. It’s on Friday the 15th of June, at the Exeter Phoenix as usual, and the doors will open at 8pm. Actually, that’s a lie, the doors will be open all day, so you can have a nice meal and a nice drink and enjoy a pre-summer evening, waiting for us to start playing records. Which will happen around 8pm. See you then, hopefully.

Song of the day: Professor Pez – Indiepopkids

It’s kind of weird to have Indiepopkids in my head all day, to sing that ‘we’re indiepop kinds growing up in a rainy town’ and that we ‘spend the money we don’t have on records, every time we go out‘, while the other day, I was having a meeting with a pensions advisor. It seems that I’ll be turning 65 and I need to make sure I’ll still have money to buy bread by then. Okay, it’s not going to happen until 2043, but grown-up people plan long in advance. I am grown-up, it seems.

But still, the fact Professor Pez are going to have a new record out later this your can make me a bit excited.

Song of the day: The Mountain Goats – Lab Rat Blues

Yesterday, while, of course, looking for something else, I stumbled upon the lyrics of The Mountain Goats’ Lab Rat Blues and found myself humming them, silently. I used to have a huge crush on the band and while that crush has long gone, I still have a weak spot for the very lo-fi early stuff. Lab Rat Blues used to be my favourite song and it brings back memories of listening to the song over and over again while studying for my school exams. The song is from The Hound Chronicles, the tape that made me fall in love with the band back in, I think, 1995 and, to my best of knowledge, it hasn’t been released in any other format since.

And then last night, by sheer coincidence, Nancy posted an mp3 of that very song, as well as two other songs from the same tape.