Posted by Budgie at October 4, 2004 06:50 PM

10 Deep Fried Mars Bars?

Winning the Lottery but you can't find your ticket?

Clicking on the latest issue of The Pipe and not finding any bootlegs?

Riding Vanessa Feltz?

This issue of The Pipe focuses on the rather nifty site called eSpew.

The site was brought to my notice by Jeebus over on the Chutney board as an alternative for looking for MP3's instead of a peer to peer program.

The site works as a huge search engine for music files that are currently residing on the web. Type in the name of the artist or the title of the song and the site will throw up (no pun intended) tracks that are available.

Unfortunately the only draw back is that the site is so popular that it's server is forever being overloaded and searches can fail with time out errors, so bear with it as it can be temperamental. But when it works it's well worth the occassional hassle.

So seeing as there hasn't been that many noticable bootlegs that I have stumbled across this past fortnight, then I thought I would knock up, in fine Chutney tradition, a "Back To Mine" style 10 track compilation using stuff found on eSpew.

1. The Go! Team - "Junior Kickstart"

First up, the marvellous Go! Team. I have mentioned their album "Thunder, Lightning, Strike" over on the forum a couple of times and it is one of the best albums I have heard all year. A loud, brash, tinny blend of beats, guitars and old hip hop samples. This tune, "Junior Kickstart", sounds like some band trying to rehearse in someones living room whilst trying to watch some old 70's cop show on the TV very loudly.

2. British Sea Power - "The Lonely"

British Sea Power are one of my favourite bands and they are one of my all time favourite live bands, I mean who could not fail to be entertained by some lads pretending to be some sort of 50's army that are besotted with nature and into creating noisy, hook laden songs? "The Lonely" is them in a more reflective mood and this song, one of the highlights from their debut album, is them creating a song David Bowie would kill for. And top marks for the line "Just like Liberace / I will return to haunt you with peculiar piano riffs".

3. Calexico - "The Ballad Of Cable Hogue"

Calexico are a band that I can never quite put my finger on and now I just expect the unexpected from them. At first I thought that they were part of the Alt.Country thing but the more I listened to them the more they seemed to veer away from that sound, and though they did have their roots in it, they now seem intent to create their own mixture of that sound but with things like Spaghetti Western soundtracks and Ambient music involved, not to mention them pushing things further by having their work remixed by leftfield people like The Cinematic Orchestra, The Gotan Project and Jazzanova. "The Ballad Of Cable Hogue" is just a straight forward song, a duet with singer Marianne Dussard, and sounds like something I would imagine Nick Cave would probably come up with if he lived on the Tex-Mex border.

4. Talking Heads - "This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody)"

My favourite Talking Heads song changes incredibly frequently, some days it's "Stay Hungry" with its Eno-esque keyboards kicking in at the end, some days its the tightness of "Born Under Punches" that I favour. "This Must Be The Place" is the one I have been playing the most recently. A lovely, simple song that always makes me smile, especially on the last line where David Byrne sings, "Hit me on the head / I go, Oooooooooooooooo".

5. Stereolab - "Ping Pong"

This takes me back to the nights I used to go to my local Indie Disco and if you were lucky inbetween the Blur and Cypress Hill tracks you sometimes got to hear bouncy pop gems like this. I think that this was the single that really kind of got them some sort of chart recognition in this country but then after that it was back to their lab to knock up more experimental and retro / futuristic pop goodness, but they never dented the charts again. Shame as some of their later stuff is very good indeed.

6. Slowdive - "Some Velvet Morning"

It wouldn't be a Budgie's "Back To Mine" without the inclusion of a Slowdive track. I adored this band, and even though they are no more, I still do. They were always the butt of jokes during the "Shoegazing" scene in the early 90's but its only now that people are really starting to realise just how good a band they were, especially in recent years with the Morr Music label doing a tribute album to them. They only made 3 albums and the transition from shimmering and feedback laden guitars through dub and then to ambient was seemless. "Some Velvet Morning" is a cover of the Lee Hazelwood & Nancy Sinatra classic.

7. Ulrich Schnauss - "Nobody's Home"

Berlin's Ulrich Schnuass was one of the artists who contributed to the Slowdive compilation "Blue Skied N' Clear" that was mentioned above. He covered "Crazy For You" from their final album and the song was picked up and used by Lucozade in the advert that had the woman that was made of liquid running through water. Schnauss has released 2 albums and he has managed to create an incredibly layered and ambient music that sounds like bands like Slowdive and The Cocteau Twins jamming with people like the Boards Of Canada. "Nobody's Home" is taken from Ulrich's first album "Far Away Trains Passing By". I can't recommend it, and it's follow up "A Strangely Isolated Place" enough.

8. Kraftwerk - "Das Model"

Everyone knows this and here is the German vocal version still sounding great some 26 years on.

9. Curve - "Chinese Burn"

Curve are another of my all time favourite bands and I always go into broken record mode when talking about them and mentioning the fact that Garbage ripped them off big time, polished the sound and became more successful. But hey, listen to "Chinese Burn" and you'll see Curve were and are still the better band and that Curve's Toni Halliday is miles better looking than Shirley Manson. You may recognise this tune as it was used years ago in one of Sony's MiniDisc adverts.

10. New Order - "Confusion (Pump Panel Mix)"

Always end on a high... And you don't get bigger and louder than this. New Order remixed out of oblivion by the Pump Panel and "Confusion" turned into an epic 10 minute 303 noisefest. The 2 minute break down from the 6 minute mark is unbelievable... Oh, and it featured in the original "Blade" film too. What more could you ask for? And here was me going to include the Felix Da Housecat remix of their "Here To Stay" track instead...

As mentioned above, eSpew can be very busy at times, but stick with it and you should be able to get those tracks, no problem.

Hope you enjoy the tracks, feel free to discuss them in the Forum, or even suggest your own eSpew finds.

Budgie

[ please note that there are no files held on The Pipe or House Of Cuss, all MP3's are linked to other sites. If you do not want me to link to your files then please let me know, via the forum, and I shall remove the link. ]