Waffle

Speaking of banging on about my favourite performers, I've still got several albums in the review pool. Sometimes, a bit of a delay in reviewing a record is a good thing: when I first heard Richard Thompson's Front Parlour Ballads, I didn't like it that much, at least compared to other Richard Thompson albums. I initially felt that the changes on the surface – Thompson's continuing stripping down of his sound since 1996's You? Me? Us? were beginning to mask a lack of real development in Thompson's songwriting. There's a lot on Front Parlour Ballads that I'd already heard on previous records. Also, unlike his last studio album, The Old Kit Bag, which highlighted the growth in Thompson's vocal abilities, the new one, with its rough and ready production approach, revealed his limitations.

Since then, though, I'm glad to say that the album has grown on me a lot. The faults are still there, but the songwriting and the guitar playing, on repeated listening, are great as always. In fact, the album reminds me a lot of Thompson's very first solo album Henry the Human Fly, one of my favourite Thompson albums, reissued last year. Ballads has the same kind of lyrical storytelling, the same kind of character vignettes painted in broad strokes. Ballads is more sophisticated and less alcohol-fueled than Henry and has a greater musical range despite being recorded with little in the way of acccompaniment apart from Thompson's guitar.

"Miss Patsy" with its jaunty 3/4 rhythm, could easily have been a track from Henry, as could the youth gang fun of "Mutton Street" and the wonderfully sinister closing song "When We Were Boys At School" – about a boy who was bullied and ridiculed at school and is now a sinister, unseen presence in the corridors of power. I didn't know Thompson went to school with Tom Riddle!

Since Henry, Thompson has developed a much greater insight into human relationships, and that reveals itself in "Should I Betray" in which the viewpoint character agonises over breaking his female friend's already very brittle illusions concerning her husband. Another favorite of mine is the opening track, "Let it Blow", a gleeful tale of a cad (and possibly also a bounder) who has made one last catch. That one has some percussion and some lovely melodic electric guitar overdubbed on the basic track, making it almost a band performance. A few more tracks like that and the record would have been more balanced and accessible. As it is, it's really very good; it just takes a few listens to get into.

I mentioned before that I was unimpressed with the Dutch iTunes store. However, they had the new Kate Bush single available, so this was clearly the time to give them another chance.
They're still rubbish! They've got people coming in to download a long-anticipated Kate Bush album, but they couldn't be bothered to make some other rarities available for those same people to download. No "Experiment IV", no 1986 version of "Wuthering Heights", two tracks that are only available on the compilation The Whole Story. No "December Will Be Magic Again". I was ripe to buy all three tracks.
There are a couple of artists and bands that I bang on about endlessly on this blog. Richard Thompson, Deep Purple, Fairport Convention, Jethro Tull. They have a handful of albums by the former three, and nothing at all by the latter. These aren't obscure acts! And yes, there is material out there by all three that I don't have and would like to buy on an individual track basis. Makes you wonder if they want my money at all. Mind you, they do have Thompson's Grizzly Man soundtrack. Tempting...
But compared to the American store? Not good enough. Not nearly.

This weekend, I'll try to upgrade the blog software to Movable Type 3.2, un-b0rk the comments section and maybe even switch to a higher account level so I can invite more co-bloggers. I may fail (and break stuff in the process), but I will take some time to try. Comments are very much in demand, to the point where people have removed links to Waffle on their own sites out of frustration with the lack of comment functionality.

I may also switch to dynamic templates for the blog, which would be a big, big change indeed.
I hear that the new default templates for Movable Type 3.2 are very different (again) from the existing ones, and more complicated (again!). Because so much about the existing installation is broken, I am leaning towards backing up everything I got and doing a full install. Will it be worth the bother to work with the new templates or will I be better off using the old ones?

There are a few people with Movable Type blogs reading Waffle, if you could advise me, please email me. I promise that if my plans succeed, it will be the last time you'll have to email me for comments and advice; there will be shiny new comments!

By the way, there are even more overhauls planned in all the locations where I publish Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan. I can guarantee that these overhauls will be disruptive over a period of several days. Please bear with me - I promise I will report as best I can, with B-movie title clichés.

I never thought I'd live to see this day: New Kate Bush single online (short, Flash-based excerpt only, not enough to gauge the quality by; sounds kind of Peter Gabriel-esque). Concrete release dates and a title for the album:

Aerial
UK release: November 7.
US release: November 8.
Tracklisting at Screaming CD/DVD reveals it's a double.

I am shaking like a leaf. Via, Via. More.

Bleargh. The Comicgenesis update system is kaput again; go to The mirror site or Modern Tales for your Monday fix.

And somebody send me some new B-Movie clichés to title these "Technical Difficulties" posts with, because I've run out.

This review of The Meaning of Tingo by Adam Jacot de Boinod mentions one Dutch word listed in the book:

QUEESTING Dutch

Allowing a lover access to one's bed, under the covers, for a chit-chat.

I for one have never heard this word in my life. Will check a dictionary when I go home. The German words in the review sound dodgy to me as well.

Update: Looks like the word existed in Dutch but the custom it referred to is now disused. See Item no.33 on this page.

(Also: Oooh! Emblems! I did a course on emblems once, as an aspiring cartoonist with an interest in historical subjects should. Emblems, with their specific set of rules for combining text and images, were a related art form to the modern comic. Interestingly, Jean-Marc van Tol, who I also mentioned a few days ago, studied medieval literature. The most striking feature, apart from the birdies with penises, of Fokke & Sukke is the consistent use of a motto above each cartoon, which has to be taken in with the graphic and the dialogue. Coincidence, or a surreptitious influence of emblematic literature?)

The last complete The Lives of X!Gloop story has started on the website. This one was drawn in 1992, and set in the year 2004. Strange how 2004 seemed a distant enough future at the time.
Of course, the future as I envisaged it, a world in which New York City had car-free Sundays, a female mud-wrestler turned President of the US and the Olympics cleaned up by genetically manipulated Belgians, is wildly inaccurate even if President Bush has now been making noises to Americans about not using their cars unecessarily. That's not a problem; the problem is that compared to the future we actually got, it's pretty tame. Not nearly absurd enough. Next time I do a near-future story, I will have to make it more over-the-top.