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06
Oct
10

Album Review: Linkin Park – A Thousand Suns

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Categories: Album Reviews
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When they came out of nowhere, guns blazin’ back in 2000 with their killer debut album Hybrid Theory, Linkin Park broke so much new ground in the rap/nu metal genre that even the most hardened music critics couldn’t help but admit the boys from Cali were packing the musical equivalent of a hand full of aces.

Hybrid Theory was stacked full of powerful, catchy riffs and hooks, which were perfectly accentuated by the irrepressible anger of front man Chester Bennington’s shredded vocals and Mike Shinoda’s excellently written rhymes.

 

 

Now, nearly a decade later Linkin Park have released their fourth offering, A Thousand Suns, and sadly it’s even less appealing than 2007’s Minutes To Midnight, which pretty much makes it the band’s worst album to date. When a band opens an album with not one, but two tracks that are largely just a collection of different noises overlaid with a spattering of vocals and a 50-second sound bite, you know right then and there that they’re running out of ideas.

Read the whole enchilada here…

-ST

29
Sep
10

Album Review: Philip Selway – Familial

By SlickTiger 1 Comment
Categories: Album Reviews
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There’s no two ways about it, drummers are a special bunch. Quiet and stoic, they have a gentle way about them not unlike idiot savants or people with severe autism.

This is, of course, a gross over-generalisation. There are at least three drummers that come to mind who are exceptionally gifted with both intelligence and musical ability, and one of those three is Philip Selway.

 

 

Selway was well on his way to becoming a full-time academic back in the early 90s, studying English and History in Liverpool, before he joined arguably the best alternative / indie / experimental rock band of all time, Radiohead.

There are only a few drummers in the world that boast the chops and muscle that Selway does behind a kit and can still pull off the shuffling, syncopated twists and turns that gave Radiohead classics like “Idioteque” and “There There” the bones to stand tall and strong.

Question is, is Selway worth a damn as a solo musician, or does his material sound like watered-down Radiohead B-sides?

Huh. Not an easy question.

Click here for the whole enchilada…

-ST

01
Sep
10

Album Review: Wavves – King Of The Beach

By SlickTiger 1 Comment
Categories: Album Reviews
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Picture a random house party when everyone’s sitting around at 3 in the morning and the guy who’s spent the last hour drinking tequila straight out of the bottle picks up a guitar and starts trying to jam.

Now put that guy on stage in front of hundreds of ticked off fans and you’ve got a situation much like the one that happened last year when Wavves played their most notorious gig to date,  the Barcelona Primavera Sound Festival.

 

 

Nathan Williams (frontman, singer and guitarist for the low-fi stoner rock band Wavves) ingested a cocktail of Ecstasy, Valium and Xanax before taking to the stage at Primavera last year and behaved like a giant asshole kid which, at the tender age of 23, is exactly what he was.

Well, good news is Williams is 24 now and has put such childish things as his highly publicised and cringe-worthy meltdown behind him to surge forward with Wavves third album, King Of The Beach.

Read the whole enchilada here…

-ST

25
Aug
10

Where The Music At Yo?

By SlickTiger 3 Comments
Categories: Album Reviews
Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

If you love this site as much as I do (not humanly possible) you might have noticed there haven’t been any music reviews as of late.

Reason being I’m now officially writing album review for a radass site called www.pulpmag.co.za.

So the deal is I publish a little taste of my reviews on this site, just the first couple of sentences, then if you wanna check out the full review, you click a HYPERLINK* included at the BOTTOM of the post that says “Read the whole enchilada here…” and ka-pow! It’s a done deal

So to kick things off, here are all the reviews I’ve written to date, enjoy!

Album Review: Arcade Fire – The Suburbs

If Holden Caulfield, the anti-hero protagonist of The Catcher In The Rye, had to grow up and start an indie rock band, that band would be Arcade Fire.

 

 

This phenomenal Canadian group, which consists of no less than seven members, has a powerful grasp on nostalgic indie anthems that deal with themes of innocence lost and disillusionment with adulthood that would have made Holden proud.

Their debut 2004 album Funeral instantly became a firm favourite among music critics and aficionados the world over as did their 2007 follow-up, Neon Bible, which earned the band numerous awards and accolades and proved there was much more to this band than just their debut album.

And so Arcade Fire approached their third album which, many would argue, is the most difficult album to record. Repeat the material of your previous two albums and your audience will yawn in your face and move on. Stray too far from your roots and your fans will balk like skittish ponies, bitching and moaning all the while about how you either sold out or took WAY too many drugs this time around.

Read the whole enchilada here…

Edward Sharpe And The Magnetic Zeros

Before I start writing this, a confession. This is not a new album. It’s been out for just over a year now, BUT iTunes released the deluxe version of the album three weeks ago which, coupled with the fact that pretty much no one knows this band, is justification enough to review this gem of an album.

 

 

Not a whole lot is known about Edward Sharpe And The Magnetic Zeros and the few interviews I found with the band on YouTube are difficult to watch because frontman and lead vocalist Alex Ebert has taken a lot of drugs in the 32 odd years he’s been alive and has this way of staring off into the distance in interviews and making absolutely no sense.

That said, the band itself is nothing short of seriously awesome. Like Arcade Fire, Edward Sharpe is made up of enough people to start a slow pitch softball team. Everyone in the band sings, though Alex Ebert and Jade Castrinos handle the majority of the vocals.

Read the whole enchilada here…

Also look out for the “Tiger Bites” section on the site. That’s where I wrap up the week’s news in the music world.

We live in interestin’ times I tell ya. Interesting times indeed…

-ST

*WARNING: NEVER click more than 5 hyperlinks a day, it’s like feeding gremlins after midnight…

21
Jul
10

Album Review: Stone Temple Pilots

By SlickTiger 2 Comments
Categories: Album Reviews
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I used to like this band. Back in the 90s they had some pretty killer songs and their debut album Core (1992) was definitely one of the better albums to come out of the grunge era.

 

 

Their second and third albums were also ok, but by the time albums four and five rolled around it was pretty obvious to their rapidly diminishing fan base that whatever magic these grunge / alternative / arena rockers had back in the early 90s was pretty much dead and bloated.*

So why, I ask you, why in God’s name would you want to come back, nine years later and record another album?

There’s only one excuse to go there, and that’s if you’ve been working long and hard over those nine years to write material that really gets people sitting up and listening, material that lives up to the hype a nine year hiatus is likely to create, but did Stone Temple Pilots do that? Did they release that album?

No. They did not release that album. They released a turd instead. Another almighty stinker to remind the world that while the grunge era might have been badass while it was happening but it’s fucking over now and should be buried in the same landfill our flannel shirts ended up in.

 

 

From the opening track “Between the Lines” this album aims low and misses. How about these for brilliantly written, awe-inspiring lyrics, “Penguins don’t fly / Crocodile Sunday smile / Really love to fish / But don’t like super-fishy people”.

Even worse is the way “Between the Lines” shamelessly rips off the Nirvana classic “Stay Away” like nobody’s business. Hit play and see for yourself.

 

 

Do those two vocal lines sound a little similar to you? Yeah, that’s because at best all this album amounts to is a half-assed attempt at rehashing what other bands did much, much better back in the 90s.

One minute they sound like a bad Soundgarden cover band (“Take a Load Off”) and the next they’re banging out Blind Melon-type choruses with reckless abandon (“Fast As I Can”), but that’s not even the worst of it.

The worst of it is the track “Cinnamon” which sounds like it was written and performed by Hanson. And then to prove they can still shake things up, they end the album with the track “Samba Nova” which, as the name suggests, sounds like a samba song someone wrote after pushing two Es up his arse.

 

 

When they’re not ripping off everyone from Blind Melon to Spacehog to David Bowie (I swear the chorus line in “Dare If You Dare” is taken verbatim from the Bowie classic “All The Young Dudes”)  they’re trawling their previous albums for riffs they can regurgitate to try and make sound fresh.

The closest this album comes to producing a half-decent track is the bizarrely titled “Hickory Dichotomy” which has a certain nursery rhyme catchiness to it if you don’t mind listening to frontman Scott Weiland’s meandering pseudo-intellectual lyrics.

Like I said, I used to like this band, I really did, but I just feel that the new self-titled album is about as interesting as listening to an hour long sound effects record of traffic noise.

Final Verdict: 3/10

*10 points for anyone who sees what I did there. TEN!

14
Jul
10

Album Review: The Black Keys – Brothers

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I can’t tell you how badly I’ve been itching over the past two months to write this review. Usually if an album’s older than a month I won’t touch it because this is the internet goddamnit! If you miss something by even a week, it’s dead and buried.

I’m making an exception in this case though for one simple reason: this is an album that will go down as one of rock music’s finest and as such, it doesn’t matter if I post this review now or two years from now, this album is timeless and will sound just as good then as it does now.

 

 

There’s a universal formula that you can apply to most bands almost without fail. The first album comes out rough and ready, gets a few people talking, has one or two singles but otherwise doesn’t make much of a splash. A decent producer gets a hold of the band and turns the second album multi-platinum and suddenly they’re everyone’s favourite overnight.

By album number three, the pressure’s on. The band changes its sound, loses half its fans and spirals into a dark period of drug-fuelled loathing and embarrassing moments at awards ceremonies.

Then a few years later they bang out a couple more albums that deal largely with how they kicked the drugs, how much they love their long-suffering wives and what being a dad is like, by which stage no one really gives a rat’s ass anymore.

The Black Keys are not that band. Since their debut The Big Come Up back in 2002, they have steadily gotten better and better with each successive album, continually exploring and pushing the boundaries of the blues rock genre, picking up from where legends like Robert Johnson, Junior Kimbrough, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and Hendrix himself left off, fine-tuning that sound and making it their own.

 

 

Right from the first few seconds of the opening track “Everlasting Love”, the foot-tappingly infectious grooves that define this album strut confidently to the fore and make it known that what you’re listening to is fucking cool, plain and simple.

The tone throughout the album is so mind-blowingly warm and authentic, it almost sounds like you’re listening to vinyl. Not only is it blues rock the way it was meant to be played but, more importantly, it’s blues rock the way it was meant to be heard.

“Next Girl” comes on big and bold, strapping its fists like a prizefighter going into a bare-knuckle brawl which, considering the song’s written about an ex-girlfriend, speaks volumes about how expertly the duo understand and handle their material.

If you’re going through a nasty break-up, there’s a good chance “Next Girl” will instantly become the best song you’ve ever heard in your life. Auerbach’s riffs tear through the rhythm section with the kind of subtle menace every man’s felt at some stage in his life when contemplating what a bitch his ex was.

 

 

It’s poetic in its simplicity “My next girl / Will be nothing like my ex girl / I made mistakes back then / I’ll never do it again.”

It’s an album that shifts gears fluidly between upbeat, big drum, fuzzy guitar riff-laden monsters like “Howlin’ For You” to slower, more sincere blues-driven tracks like “Unknown Brother” and the awesome cover of Jerry Butler’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” (not to be confused with the Rick Astley song of the same name that’s only cool because it’s crap) and somehow manages to stay solid as a rock throughout all 15 tracks.

I usually take great joy in slating the songs that piss me off on an album, even the albums that I really love, but the honest truth here is that on Brothers there are none. Auerbach and Carney keep Brothers lean and mean, which makes for a refreshing change from albums that have three great tracks and nine shit ones thrown in as pure filler.

My expectations were set high right from the start with Brothers, and it still managed to surpass them which basically never happens.

 

Brothers is a sure-fire winner in my books and definitely gets my vote as the best album I’ve heard this year so far. I’m leaving you with “Next Girl” for you to decide for yourself whether this album is everything I’ve hyped it up to be.

Enjoy 😉

 

 

Final Verdict: 9/10

-ST

07
Jul
10

Album Review: Morcheeba – Blood Like Lemonade

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There’s a man out there, name of Brett Schewitz, one of the many I’ve met through Twitter who’s proven himself to be a stand-up guy, the kind of dude who says what me means and does what he says, which makes him pretty rare in a world of people who are full of talk and not much else.

Anyway, he hooked me up with the new Morcheeba album, Blood Like Lemonade, about a week before it launched but instead of jumping in there and reviewing it right away, I dicked around for about two months and missed the scoop on this album completely.

So Brett, this review’s for you and the good folks at Sheer Sound, sorry it’s taken so long to bash out, I blame the whisky.

 

 

So, Morcheeba. There’s a name you probably haven’t thought of since the late 90s. They KILLED it with their album Big Calm back in 1998, which quickly became the soundtrack to many a late-night  toking-session with pseudo-intellectual varsity students the world over smoking ridiculous-looking glass bongs and zoning-out to trip hop masterpieces like “The Sea” and “Part Of The Process”.

Since then it’s been a little patchy for the formidable threesome of DJ Paul Godfrey, multi-instrumentalist Ross Godfrey and singer Skye Edwards, who comprised the band’s original line-up. Remember the nursery-rhyme vacuity of “Rome Wasn’t Built In A Day”? Yeah, it was pop-inspired tracks like that gem that lost Morcheeba almost all it’s street cred.

I mean seriously, “One fine day / We’ll fly away / Don’t you know that Rome wasn’t built in a day / Hey hey hey”. Yeah, and then we’ll make hay, down by the bay, we just may, make hay all day. Dr Seuss could have done a better job.

 

 

Around 2003 the band axed Skye Edwards and pumped out another few albums which I’m sure some die hard fan is going to come out of the woodwork and attack me for saying that nobody really gave a crap about.

Queue 2010 and I’m sitting with my headphones on on a sunny Friday at work spinning Blood Like Lemonade and I’m thinking “Holy fuck, this shit’s good.”

The band’s come full circle, both musically and in terms of their line-up, which (thank God) now includes Edwards again and believe me, that fact in itself is reason enough to go out and buy this album right now.

 

 

The woman can sing. It’s like listening to Billy Holiday’s older sister. Every note Edwards sings is clear as a bell and warm as a logfire on a winter’s night.

And don’t even get me started on the lyrics, because I honestly won’t stop. The opening track “Crimson”, which is also my favourite on the album starts with some of the most powerful and evocative lines I’ve heard in a long time.

“I can smell the Goodyears burning / And it won’t fade away / Windscreen broken, you’re bleeding / Rolling action replay / Hellbound hopeless for you / Nothing left to hold on to…”

There’s a subtle darkness to “Crimson” that is so goddamn seductive it’s impossible to ignore. It almost sounds like a Massive Attack track, something off Mezzanine, except infinitely more chilled. It’s trip-hop without the pretence, beautiful in its simplicity.

Then cut straight to a track like “I Am The Spring” and you’ll start to understand what makes this album really stand out. “I Am The Spring” is as sparse as it gets, the entire track is just Edwards being accompanied by an acoustic guitar which, in my humble (read: overinflated) opinion is the ultimate litmus test for any musician. Strip all the production and fancy studio effects out of a song and what have you got left?

In this case, you’ve got a powerful and haunting song about love that tells it like it is, ending with the line “I am the spring / Love is blossoming / But I’ll take the fall for you” which, much like love itself, is perfect in its tragedy.

 

 

Throw in a track that tells the story of a person who gets addicted to the thrill of murder (“Recipe For Disaster”), one where Edwards takes an honest and introspective look at the band itself (“Even Though”), and the excellently written and produced title track (“Blood Like Lemonade”) which smacks of Big Calm and you’ve got an album that is really hard not to like.

Just watch out for the instrumentals “Mandala” and “Cut To The Bass”, they’re fun the first few times, but the novelty wears off fast after which point they become repetitive and downright boring to listen to, but hey, no album is perfect right?

All in all, I found Blood Like Lemonade to be a great album and it’s sure to go down like a whore on payday the next time you whip that old, ridiculous glass bong out the closet and invite your mates around for an old-school smoke up.

Final Verdict: 7.5/10

02
Jun
10

Album Review: The Dead Weather – Sea Of Cowards

By SlickTiger 4 Comments
Categories: Album Reviews
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If Marla Singer from the movie Fight Club started a band, it would sound like The Dead Weather. They’re dark, edgy and angry and with their second album they’ve perfected their particular brand of radio-unfriendly blues / tripped-out reggae / 70s rock and infused it with enough wailing feedback, weird synth effects and creepy organs to bring the last acid trip you had flashing back hard and fast.

 

 

Their previous effort, 2009’s Horehound did very little to impress. Musically, it sounded like everyone on the album was pulling in different directions, a common short-coming suffered by supergroups. The songs were loose and rushed and whatever inroads they made with regard to originality and style were overshadowed completely by singer Alison Mosshart’s toneless wailing and the disjointed, hookless attempts at songwriting that defined a lot of tracks on the album.

The biggest draw-card that Horehound had was the fact that Jack White (of The White Stripes and The Raconteurs) was in the band, but even that didn’t impress too much. ‘Oh, another Jack White side-project? Meh’ seemed to be the general consensus.

Fast forward to ten months later and The Dead Weather’s second album is already on shelves and who knows what the hell happened in those ten months but the band has come back tighter, meaner and better than ever.

Interestingly, in a recent interview, Jack White explained that the title Sea Of Cowards is a direct reference to the hordes of anonymous trolls on the internet that ‘spit venom and attack people in a cowardly way using fake names.’ Dorky? Yeah, a little, but trust me, the album is anything but.

 

 

This time around, Mosshart has found a happy medium between the aforementioned ‘toneless wailing’ and the throaty whispering that she’s prone to and I was pleasantly surprised to find that on Sea Of Cowards I didn’t feel like my ear drums were being scraped with industrial-grade sandpaper every time she belted a chorous out.

Although to be fair, Jack White does sing a lot more on Sea Of Cowards than he did on Horehound, which is definitely what the latter album was sorely lacking. The man has also upped his game considerably in terms of loading the tracks on Sea Of Cowards full of sick, bluesy, distorted guitar riffs and hooks that bite hard and don’t let go.

The first single, “Die By The Drop” is definitely not the finest example of what this album has to offer, the chorous is a mess, but the vocal dynamic between Mosshart and White during the verse works well and the lyrics “Let’s dig a hole in the sand brother / A little grave we can fill together… Some people die just a little / Sometimes you die by the drop / Some people die in the middle / I live just fine at the top” are catchy as TB and guaranteed to get your inner air drummer jamming.

The best track on the album is the instantly likeable “The Difference Between Us”. If you’re thinking of buying this album, listen to this track and if it doesn’t grab you, steer clear of Sea Of Cowards and go check out the new Michael Buble album, I hear it’s a huge hit with mindless drones the world over.

 

 

“The Difference Between Us” rises like a dark phoenix from a distorted guitar / synth melody that is perfectly accentuated by either White or Jack Lawrence, both of whom are credited as drummers on the album.

Fucking superbands. Swapping instruments like wives at a swinger’s party. You gotta love that shit.

“No Horse” moves with the sexy confidence of a gunslinger in a fist fight and has a bassline that will make you grin from ear to ear it’s so badass, not to mention the grungey, wailing guitar riffs that White bends and grinds out like a maniac.

The last track on the album, “Old Mary” will confirm any suspicions that this band is seriously twisted. The quiet, church-organ chords that haunt this track make a fitting backdrop to White’s lyrics, which are a twisted bastardisation of the Hail Mary: “Old Mary full of grease / Your heart stops within you / Scary are the fruits of your tomb / And harsh are the terms of your sentence…”

 

 

It’s an album that feels like it died in the Old West (thanks to the awesome melodies ex-Queens Of The Stone Age guitarist, organist, pianist and bassist Dean Fertita brings to the mix) and was revived sometime in the 70s in a drug-fuelled séance. It’s sexy, it’s deadly and it’s hell-bent on breaking all the rules.

The Dead Weather have done a fine job of carving out a sound that is unlike any band you’ve ever heard, and with Sea Of Cowards they’ve fine-tuned that sound into a far more listenable and coherent whole and proved without a doubt that they aren’t here to fuck around.

Try this album on for size, see where it takes you and who knows, when you get there, you might just thank me 😉

Final Verdict: 8/10

-ST

26
May
10

Album Review: The National – High Violet

By SlickTiger 2 Comments
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Call me old school, but I have a profound respect for hard-working bands. I’m talking about the kind that take a decade or more to fine-tune their sound and get a little better with every album they release.

The National released their first album in 2001 and have since released another four studio albums, the last of which, 2007’s Boxer, received widespread critical acclaim, so much so that their song ‘Fake Empire” was used by the Obama campaign at many high-profile events during the last election.

 

 

And so the pressure was on for the band to deliver the goods for their new album, High Violet, and they sure as hell didn’t disappoint.

As with their previous albums, singer Matt Berninger’s vocals are a major attraction on High Violet. He keeps his distinctive baritone calm and steady throughout, choosing to steer clear of the wilder vocal territory of tracks like “Mr November” and “Murder Me Rachel” off previous albums, and it works like a charm.

 

 

Imagine Nick Cave’s vocals stripped of all their hatred and fury and you’d have something close to Berninger who chooses subtle irony and pathos and his weapons of choice and wields them with great effect.

“All our lonely kicks are getting harder to find” Berninger sings on “Little Faith”, “We’ll play nuns versus priests until somebody cries / All our lonely kicks that make us saintly and thin / We’ll play nuns versus priests until somebody wins.”

The somber musical landscape of High Violet depicts a kind of sleeping pill society that hangs permanently in the space between waking and sleeping in a hazy reality where in a track like the Interpol-ish “Conversation 16” Berninger swings from confessing to feelings of inadequacy and regret to quietly and calmly singing the verse “I was afraid I’d eat your brains / Cause I’m evil”.

 

 

The track “Anyone’s Ghost” stands out as one of the best on High Violet and picks up from where Boxer left off in terms of the band’s experiments in blending orchestral swells into their music. Drummer Brian Devendorf does an excellent job of giving songs like “Anyone’s Ghost” a clean and punchy beat which his brother Scott follows like a bloodhound on his bass guitar.

“Afraid Of Everyone” is another killer track that Devendorf’s percussion stands out on. He’s the kind of drummer that knows exactly what to do when, and focuses on doing exactly that to the best of his ability rather than stacking songs full of complicated fills and showy drum rolls. There’s a sparsity in the way he plays on High Violet that suits the album perfectly.

The National has a second pair of siblings in the brothers Aaron and Bryce Dessner who match each other riff for riff on rhythm and lead guitar with Aaron sometimes handling the bass and piano sections of their songs. For the most part their instruments take a backseat to Berninger’s vocals on High Violet except in tracks like “Runaway” where Bryce’s acoustic picking takes centre stage and “England”, which would be nothing without Aaron’s lilting piano melodies.

 

 

Of course, High Violet won’t suit everyone’s tastes. It’s a lot more somber than previous albums, and the individual tracks are difficult to tell apart from one another on the first few listens, but their idiosyncrasies do start shining through if you give them the time they deserve.

The best way to describe High Violet would be to imagine taking a track like Bruce Springsteen’s “Streets Of Philadelphia” and turning it into an entire album. For this reason, sadly, it can’t top their 2007 masterpiece when it comes to the complexity and range they showed themselves capable of, but it comes pretty damn close.

Still though, High Violet is an album that will satisfy fans and possibly even turn first time listeners on to The National and so I would recommend buying this album and giving it a spin or two, because if nothing else, it should make for some welcome company on a rainy day.

Final Verdict: 7/10

-ST

03
May
10

Top Secret Weekend

By SlickTiger 6 Comments
Categories: Album Reviews
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Fuck, did we get up to some crazy shit this weekend, man-o-man. I fucking wish I could tell you guys about it, but I can’t, aaaarrrrrrgggggghhhhhhh!

How lame is that? It’s like starting a joke and then right at the end of it saying, ‘Umm, actually wait… that’s not how it goes… umm…’

[SFX: Crickets]

But yeah, I guess there’s no harm in sharing a few details.

Here is the weekend summed up in completely nonsensical bullet points:

  • I drove up and down the same kilometer of dirt road for nearly two hours
  • J-Rab mastered the art of being dead
  • We walked into a restaurant, ordered a plate of dry Nachos with melted cheese and a plate of bread, with me dressed like Euro-trash kiddie fiddler
  • A dream about a threesome with two other girls was dreamed
  • A fake drive-in was built in our garage
  • My dreams of winning the Xbox dwindled
  • I did grocery shopping
  • Yatse!

 

 

It bugged me at first living out here in the total solitude of weekend days when J-Rab had to work, but over time I’ve actually come to really enjoy it.

Cape Town is easing its way into winter. It’s the beginning of May and people are still walking around more often than not in shorts and T-shirts and generally the days still feel long and sunny.

Up here in the loft of ‘The Shed’ (as we now affectionately call our house) I can look out over a wine vineyard as I bash away at this keyboard, acres of neat rows of vines that are slowly turning a brownish red as winter approaches.

The lawn we planted a few weekends back is growing like crazy, it’s small but I still get a real kick out of taking my shoes off and walking around in circles over its surface. It’s especially fun at night, when you can look up at all the stars.

Life is getting better and better down here. Things might have been a bit rough in the beginning, and there were a lot of highs and lows in rapid succession, but overall, the highs are winning and I’m glad we live here in the sticks.

 

 

Even if all manner of animals (Anatolian shepherds, owls, geese and rats to name a few) keep us awake at night and The Shed is so badly constructed you can see outside through some of the gaps in the wood, it’s our little corner of the world, and nothing can touch us out here.

That and the fact that there’s just a good feeling I have going about this year right now, are pushing me to finally get off my ass and do what I’ve wanted to do my whole life.

Aaaaarrrrrrrgggggghhhhhhh! Wish I could tell you, fuck!

What I can say though is that it’s all building up to the 200th Post Celebration that’s going to be happening here on TFW, which lands on the 17th May.

So not long now Party People.

Not long at all 😉

-ST

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