Tag Archives: Prince

Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy – Can’t take That Away From Me

Another cover from Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy here. In case you didn’t recognise it, this is a Mariah Carey song. I actually think that his R. Kelly cover is better. Speaking of which – has anyone seen Trapped In the Closet? I’ve seen a bit of it. I can’t work out if Kelly is a tortured genius or a complete lunatic.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OT3jTbMckQ[/youtube]

We spent the weekend in Rome and have the Primavera Sound festival fast approaching.

Albums and their covers

In celebration of the exhibition coming to the MACBA this month, here’s a selection of album covers which I find to be, in turn, thrilling, sickening and indie-cool-self-affirming.

That is to say, here are the covers of some albums I like and love. Not all of the covers are great works of art, but many are. Royal Trux, being my favourite pop-group, dominate the field somewhat. I’ve always enjoyed their album art, given that it combines a variety of rock clichés, fan-art, corporate-style logos and blocked toilets.

Elliott Smith’s epnoymous album has an evocative image of bodies ‘falling’ or ‘floating’ between buildings in an American city. The design represents a haunting pre-shadowing of the ‘falling man’ photograph taken on September 11th 2001 in New York City.

The Flaming Lips’ ‘The Soft Bulletin’ album features an awesome photograph taken outside an ‘Acid Test’ party in San Francisco in the late sixties. I love the way it captures a young man’s intoxicaton, no doubt due to some of the acid he’d been testing.

Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy’s ‘Master and Everyone’ has a simple cover photo which needs little explanation: his face, with its idiosyncratic beard fills the sleeve… his eye seems abnormally deep and reflective, as if it’s been ‘photoshopped’.

After these, the Rolling Stones’ explicitly erectile cover for ‘Sticky Fingers’, Basement Jaxx’s homage to Copito de Nieve, the albino gorilla late of Barcelona’s city zoo, Super Furry Animals’ collage of a famous drug dealer’s various passports’ photos and Primal Scream’s stunningly primal ‘Screamadelica’ cover are all firm favourites.

Album art is a special form which combines the necessities of commercial success and hip styling with an interesting glimpse of how the pop-group (or their record label) view the music contained within the packaging. A good album cover should give a clear idea of the feeling and agenda (I wanted to write ‘philosophy’, but that seems too much) that the album espouses. Either that, or it should have nothing to do with anything. An album cover is, therefore, both an advertisement for the product, and a part of the product itself. As to the design included on CDs or vinyl records themselves – and the other design elements in on an album’s packaging, that’s a different matter. But Royal Trux’s highly suggestive hypodermic skyscrapers which feature in one of their EPs, (though I can’t remember which one), represent to me a pinnacle in album art by virtue of their combination of drug imagery and the New York City skyline.


In a brief note which didn’t deserve a whole post: here’s a great article about the most important website in the world. GYAC: it’s Popbitch.

New iPod launched!

So, this’ll probably be the next model I get. My current iPod is stuttering occasionally, and will probably have to be replaced before too long.

From engadget.com, the latest news:

New iPod announced! The new iPod, as speculated, features video capabilities and the wider display, but it’s still a music-first device.

The device will feature a 2.5-inch display, QVGA resolution (320 x 240), and will MPEG-4 h.264 (natch), and presumably Quicktime.

The new iPod will be 30% thinner than the current 20GB iPod (making it 0.44-inches thick—say wha?), and will feature a 60GB version (which should be thinner than the current 0.63-inch thick 20GB iPod), and editions of both in black.

The 20GB should go for $299, and the 60GB for $399. They’ll be shipping next week.

What’s the device named, you ask? The iPod. That’s it, just The iPod. Well spare you the Prince jokes. The iPod will have TV out.

Stevie has iTunes 6.0 up there—only about a month after introducing iTunes 5.0.

iTunes 6.0 will also feature video and the iTunes Music Store will feature video downloads (big surprise, right?)—at launch over 2,000 music videos will be made available at a cost of $1.99 apiece.

Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy live in Barcelona

Last night we went to see Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy and Matt Sweeney play the Sala Apolo on Paral·lel.

The show was fantastic, but marred very slightly by the crowd. As usual. Thing is, in Barcelona, people go to concerts to chat with their mates. But I go to hear the music and see the performers. I find it incredibly rude when during a quiet bit (and with artists like BPB, the quiet bits are some of the most sublime), crowds of people around you start laughing and chatting. It’s one of those irritating things which if you complain about them, you sound like a loser… but the reason I wanted to go to that concert was to get away from the shittiness of living in a time when it’s practically a crime to take anything seriously.

Ah well, never mind.

Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy mostly played tracks from the current album Superwolf, recorded with his cohort Matt Sweeney. Perhaps in a reflection of the many references to the sea in his songs, BPB’s live show seems to rise and fall like the ocean swell. Listening to the music, I was at times reminded of Nick Cave, Arab Strap and even some post-rock bands like Mogwai. His lyrics are bizarre and fascinating, often concerning animals and on this album, death in the sea.

He also played a firm favourite with the audience, Ease Down the Road, which I hadn’t heard before but will remember. Not even the dickhead with his big hair who couldn’t stand still and kept swaying and twitching around in front of me, obscuring my view until I moved, when he would twitch again to re-block my view… not even he could ruin my enjoyment of this concert. Mainly cos we moved to the other side of the room from him.
Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy and Matt Sweeney at the Sala Apolo – 1 out of 1