Gomez’s We haven’t turned around

The Style Council rock Japan, 1985

I put together a few mix CDs for a friend’s party the other week and had to include this track from the Modfather himself, Paul Weller, during his Style Council period, which marked the second distinct phase of his ever-changing career. Weller may have disavowed much of his back catalogue, but for the rest of us, there’s still much pleasure to be had living vicariously through soulful, introspective moments like these.

Zombie Zombie video tribute to John Carpenter

This non-official video for Parisian electronics and drums duo Zombie Zombie is a remake of John Carpenter’s The Thing. Directors Simon Gisrel and Xavier Ehretsmann manage to retain the creepiness of the original using only stop-motion animated GI Joe figures. Pretty rad.

Micah P Hinson’s Yard of Blonde Girls

It can often be the case that a music video detracts from the music itself. You listen to a song or album and you set your own landscape to it, you imagine the expression of the performer and you conjure the scenery that catalyses such great songwriting. Then you watch the video and all is not how you wanted it to be. She/he isn’t as intimate as you’d dreamed and the choreography is staged and inorganic. It’s like a film version of a great book: why force the imagination along a different route? But this video is one of the rare ones that hijacks the listener and carries them along in tandem with the song. It fits the music perfectly with the rusty recording and transient mood of the piece.

Milk and Honey necklace by Stephanie Simek

Milk and honey, an indubitable pair. In this necklace by Stephanie Simek, a golden honeycomb beeswax pendant is encased in plastic and hangs from an oxidized sterling silver chain. The links are interwoven with a milk protein-based fiber. We have it for sale in our online store.

Malcolm Middleton’s Secret Playlist

Malcolm Middleton (ex-Arab Strap) has just released his fifth solo album, Waxing Gibbous, composed from years worth of scribbles in notebooks, which were ‘chiseled and connived into being songs’. We checked in with him to get his words n the music that inspired the new recrding. He started with The Auteurs song, Lenny Valentino [listen below]: ‘I must have missed this band the first time around, but since reading Luke Haines’ autobiography, I am hooked. Anyone who can write about their own life and come across so badly gets the thumbs up from me!’ Read the rest of Malcolm Middleton’s Secret Playlist.

A Pig by any other name is Zebra

Don’t be fooled by the cunning disguise. This, my friends, is a pig, a swine, in the truest sense of the word. It’s been painted to look like a zebra, partly because of the bad press pigs have gotten lately, and partly for a Halloween parade in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene Park. Apparently it lives in the area and is walked in the long shadows of the night, as whispered about and mythologized as the Yeti, Bigfoot and Paris Hilton’s brain. [photo via Fort Green PUPS photostream]