"I want a colonic."

Tonight we’re playing a show in Cardiff, a Charity show. Doesn’t that just make us look very mature and conscientious? I’ll start wearing large framed dark sunglasses and sprouting shamrocks out about Irish national pride and the song Vertigo, perhaps. It’s a better idea to carry on with our EP release ‘The Saltway’  which is coming out in the next few weeks. It will be on Spotify, which means, you can be that person at a party who adds an unknown band on to the playlist, skips to them and acts as if people should know exactly what it is (if they do ask who it is, I give you permission to gasp and tusk about how much more you know about modern music than them). 

     Hearing complaints and grievances hollered about this time of year is regular, not for Ron. How do I avoid them? I use projects that involve Jason Schwartzman. 2010 is my second Autumn/Fall using this method. 

     Bored to Death is a HBO series written by acclaimed author ‘Jonathan Ames’ which debuted in September 2009, it has just come back. Having recently read Ames’ his first novel ‘I Pass Like Night’, you expect his series to be similarly uncomfortable yet humorous, it’s more the other way around. Schwartzman plays a struggling New-York-Writer who is moonlighting as an amateur private detective, it is his way of escaping from the reality of going through a tough break-up and his success as a writer gradually waning (it’s a semi-autobiographical take on Ames’ own life). The script has a similar stylised nature as his novels do and with the acting being faultless, it translates effectively. Their overly inquisitive, emotional and nervous natures are derivative from their discontent with their own lives, they’ve become children again and it makes for incredibly intriguing interactions with the world and one another. In Particular, there is an atmosphere between Schwartzman, Danson and Galifianakis which makes the most obscene and more regular bits of dialogue hilarious. Series Two is currently being aired in America, download all of series one and then you can just torrent it week by week as it comes out, like we all do.

Coconut Records.

    The next thing that helps me through the early nights and winter solstice is Schwartzman’s solo music project, Coconut Records. Davy (2^nd Album) is in essence a really good record, but I’m going to talk about Nighttiming (1^st Album); as it just feels like so much more of a concise idea. The album itself is accessible and fairly conventional, but it’s all so heartbreaking. The simplistic vocal melodies are coy and tied together with the piano; these two instruments are very much the driving force behind Coconut Records. There is plenty of extra instrumentation yet generally it’s decoration as oppose to poignant features, of course there are exceptions but it boasts more so when this is the case. Nighttiming pushes you into the state of mind similar to that of when a relationship is spiralling into decline and you know you’ve had your last kiss. You become a bathetic person. When the lyric ‘Am I Making Sense?’ is repeated at the end of the ‘Ask her to Dance’, it conjures a feeling that a wry smile is the answer to the album, perhaps it was a passing thought.

   The other alternatives for these months are that you go into hibernation or release your own sophomore EP. I’m doing all of the above, right now.