The Beasthouse is reborn

One of the sites that I've been meaning to link to is Lawrence Miles' Beasthouse.

Miles is one of those rare people that I have to call a "pop culture genius." unfortunately, as is frequently the situation with genius, he tends to have his output in fits of non-regularity. I've been waiting for him to post to his site since April of 2005.

Have a (comparatively) small taste:

"The Hounds of Love", The Futureheads

Some would say that doing a karaoke-rock version of "The Hounds of Love", stripping away everything that made the Kate Bush version worthwhile and replacing it with a bunch of generic guitar noises calculated to get it classified as "alternative", is in itself a major offence (q.v. No Doubt's version of "It's My Life", which I know I keep mentioning but it's still winding me up). I'd argue that it's not as offensive as the idea that after doing this, the people responsible can still comfortably go by the name of "The Futureheads" without anyone punching their stupid faces in. To be honest, I still blame Nirvana for a lot of this guitars-equal-alternative nonsense: the modern generation, i.e. those who were too small to angst in 1991, have been brought up to believe that Nirvana were world-shaping revolutionaries and that (as one particularly poor music journalist put it) 'everyone can remember where they were the first time they heard "Smells Like Teen Spirit"'. For the sake of any readers under the age of twenty, I feel I should point out that this is almost on a "no-cock revolution" level of wrongness. We liked "Smells Like Teen Spirit" because it was a fantastic noisy pop record, not because we'd never heard anybody hitting their guitars really, really hard before. As "alternative" music goes, it was hardly dangerous or radical; final and damning proof of this only turned up last month, when my 74-year-old mother asked me 'what's the name of that song that goes "hello, hello, hello, hello"?', and thereafter bought Nirvana's From the Muddy Banks of the Wishkah in a sale at HMV. Bear this in mind the next time someone tries to tell you that Kurt Cobain expressed the anxiety and self-destructive urges of his generation. Someone who draws a pension and watches every edition of Changing Rooms probably isn't likely to blow her own head off in response to the emptiness of modern life.

He's recently restarted the Beasthouse here, and is posting edited highlights of his brilliant "Top 40 Countdown" in a semi-separate blog.

Clear some time off your calendar and dive in.