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On Monday I kick off my three-week summer holiday.
I have nothing planned except living an affable life, watching Arctic Monkeys live, attending the Accelerator music festival, celebrating a couple of birthdays (at least) and oh yeah, a friend is getting married. Oh, and I have to find a new place to live. Apart from that, though, I'm home free!
I love having a clean slate when I'm not working. Tabula rasa. Sure, appointments are good, but I hate scattering my vacations with intermittent where-to-bes, or worse yet, scheduling my weeks off so that every single day is supposed to be fun-packed. I'm glad my parents didn't plan much when I was little and we went abroad on holiday, or my current state of mind would be even more traumatised.
When I was little my family and I mostly visited former Yugoslavia during the summer holiday. That's where my dad's relatives live. I haven't been there for more than 15 years, but I keep in touch with a couple of cousins. It'd be nice to visit, which I've planned to do for years; see, I hate planning! Procrastinating, though...
While writing on time off from work, I've just started listening to Manic Street Preachers' album "The Holy Bible", that I've apparently grossly underestimated for the past years that I've owned a copy. Don't let this happen to you: pick up a copy and listen to it now!
The lyrics are thoroughly engulfing, enraging, feministic and questioning, touching on a variety of subjects, producing the most vivid account of anorexia I have ever heard, and on several accounts delving into desire/anti-desire. The band at this stage reminds me of The Smiths, by combining very melodic, catchy music with brilliant lyrics that confront the listener, demanding attention in their own right. They're the only band who has made hair-metal guitar-solos accessible to me, by the way. By the way, the track "Archives Of Pain" opens with a quote from the mother of one of the victims of the Yorkshire Ripper.
I'm going to get the 10th Anniversary Edition of the album in question, as it contains a DVD but foremost a CD with the original mix of the album plus a bonus-CD of the same album, the difference being it is mixed for the US market; the band prefer a lot of the mixes on the American disc. From Wikipedia:
The 10th Anniversary Edition of The Holy Bible contained the mix of each album track intended for release in the US. In the band interview on the accompanying DVD, the US mix of "Yes" was one of the songs particularly cited as a significant improvement over the original.
From another page off Wikipedia:
Nicky said of the remix that "it does beef it up quite a bit actually, gives it a bit of American savvy". Sure enough, the US mix sounds more like a rock album than the less commercial post-punk sound of the British mix. James also commented on the enclosed bonus DVD interview that the overall sound of the US mix is reminiscent of how the tracks sound live. However, not all of the tracks were considered superior by the band - Nicky stated in the DVD interview that although he considered around eight of the US tracks better than their UK counterparts, "Faster" was a better song in the original mix. James mirrored this opinion, expanding the list to not only "Faster", but "Archives of Pain" and "The Intense Humming of Evil", suggesting that in the original mix they were "closer to their roots".
In short, I really like this album and it's like finding a gold-mine that needs to be excavated. Mmm! Here's a clip of "Faster" from their gig at Glastonbury in 1994.