Forget the World Cup - the competition of the Summer starts NOW...
Summer’s always a disappointment. Remember when you were a kid, and the school holidays went on forever…World Cups were great because you weren’t saturated with 24/7 football from every league on the planet on TV, so seeing players like Hagi or Maradona or Stoichkov or Platini or Gullit was a genuine thrill, watching these exotic masters of a football run rings round the opposition…fuck it, maybe I’m just old…
And being old, the disappointment’s more pointed. Watching Holland spend 120 minutes trying to kick the beautiful game back into the Stone Age sucked. So did T in The Park, with the worst bill in living memory (Kasabian as headliners?! Honestly, stay in the house, dig out some old Primal Scream b-sides and charge yourself a fiver for a can of beer that you put in the airing cupboard rather than the fridge for the same experience…at least you won’t get rained on…) Ditto Glastonbury where U2 cancelled and they missed an opportunity to do anything other than have a Damon All-Bran vanity project replace them….poor Bono and his dicky back…he should remember to lift from the knees when carrying all the world’s problems on His shoulders…cock….and bands don’t put out anything interesting because they’re all at festivals doing greatest hits sets so that a glut of witless goons – Yates, Cotton etc – on BBC3 can tell them that they ripped up the crowd (consisting of 80,000 people completely out of their trees). This situation is changing…keep your eyes on the reviews sections over the next wee while, as there’s some good stuff about to hit…
It is in this spirit that we’ve decided to give the summer the kick up the arse that it needs, and launch the event that’s going to DEFINE the summer. Nay, the year. Nay, this fucking generation. Ladies and gentlemen, Shout4Music.com is proud to launch the inaugural Shout4Music.com In My Pants World Cup.
If you don’t know the ‘In My Pants’ game, it basically runs that any song title can be improved by bolting the phrase ‘In My Pants’ onto the end of it. We want you to look at your record collections and send in the best to either twitter.com/shout4music, or visit the Facebook page, and send us a message containing your favourites to stick up on the newsfeed. By the time you read this, we should have stuck some up to give some inspiration; my personal favourites just now are Repeat Failure (In My Pants), by The Delgados, Jeffrey Lewis’ Bugs And Flowers In My Pants, or Mogwai’s all time classic Glasgow Mega-Snake In My Pants.
Please send to the Twitter site as either Direct Messages, or as a reply (start the tweet with @shout4music) so we can keep an eye on them. Trend them as #inmypants, and we’ll stick all of it up, with anything that makes us laugh like a drain or physically sick (so death metal fans are in with a big shout) perhaps eligible to win some LPs or singles, or whatever we’ve got knocking round the office. Usual rules apply with employees, girlfriends/boyfriends or family of staff not allowed to enter / attempt to bribe judges / tell us not to be so juvenile.
Good luck, and remember kids, we’re all winners in our own special way!
The anti-folkin’ supergroup of Jeff & Jack Lewis and Kimya Dawson drop their first album a Stone Roses-like 8 years after 5 of the tracks here first featured on ‘Antifolk Collaborations Vol 1′. To a large extent, these are more Kimya’s songs than Jeff’s – ‘A Common Chorus’ and ‘Pirates Declare War’ could easily fit on the Moldy Peaches LP; ‘Ishalicious’, a skiffley rattle of a track is the best of the old stuff here, and perhaps the most benefiting of being recorded with a full band, although a quick listen to Lewis’ 1st LP ‘The Last Time I Did Acid…’ verifies he was writing better music solo at the time. Indeed, there’s nothing here that stands up to the best of Lewis’ solo output, and like so many ‘supergroups’, The Bundles are less than the sum of their parts. Not to say this is a bad album, far from it: ‘Desert Bundles’ multi-vocal parts are ace, and ‘Metal Mouth’ is typical Jeff; a humourous tale of two lovers with braces entwined, and perhaps his most rock track since ‘Anxiety Attack’. Confirmed fans will buy this, and be slightly disappointed; the casual observer would be better investing in Lewis’ solo LPs.
