Elephant Amongst The Pigeons

It never ceases to amaze me the propensity of the American fan to head straight for the insult button when challenged about the veracity of any aspect of their culture. Weirdly I received two comments from "Anonymous", the second squealing in a piggy-like fashion about my ignorance of the Delta. In my travels around the USA I have always been surprised by the ignorance so may residents of that fine country show of their own heritage and lands. I once had the pleasure of a young lady in Corpus Christi who made herself available to me purely because I had seen the world outside of Texas. She was great, and I love Texans for their openness and warmth (well not all of them obviously).

My criticism of CTE is more a criticism of the herd mentality of the music industry. I have absolutely nothing against "kick ass rock n' roll", or "a great live show", but I do struggle with a music media and industry that is so desperate to discover some new messiah that they grasp at any weak straw or crumb of comfort. This has no benefit for the acts or the industry; when a band is pursued so relentlessly, with inducements and large cheques, the pressure on them to succeed from the off is intense and invariably leads to disappointment and career meltdown. I'm sure CTE are fine live but they are purely revisiting somewhere that has already been mapped out and rediscovered in a far more ground shaking way by the likes of The White Stripes or Black Keys.

And as for English fog, anonymous 2, maybe your stereotypical tornadoes has blown a huge new hole in your ass.

Cage The Elephant???

So I was round at Promonews.tv HQ end of last week and the main guy, Dave Knight, was in the process of putting up the new video by Cage The Elephant. Naturally I was interested as there's been words on the wire about this band with various people banging on about their hotness and general fabulousness. So I was pretty disappointed when I discovered that they were basically the new Gomez.

What I mainly got from them was a band who, as usual, wanted to be The Stones but were coming at it via Black Crowes or a band like that. So in effect they are copying a copy-cat band, in that sort of phoney rock 'n roll fashion.

I know, I know. Lots of people liked Gomez and they won the Mercury Prize blah blah blah but come on. They were one of those bands that people like my brother in law, who let punk pass him by as he was on the road with Mike Oldfield, would deem "real music". Oh come on. A bunch of white college boys trying to be all delta does not make it real. If I come across a bit like Steve Buscemi in Ghost World well so be it. I'm sure they're a great night out but it's all a bit too contrived for me. Mind you I like the Ami Barwell pics on their myspace.

Anyway file under whatever.