Kate Nash / Supercute! at Bottom of the Hill, San Francico, 8-May-2010

Oh dear. Kate Nash is a clever songwriter, vaguely in the Lily Allen genre. She doesn't have a strong voice so what she needs is a sympathetic backing. Unfortunately she seems to have fallen in with the complaint rock crowd. She has a stodgy backing band who can play (they keep switching instruments and roles) but don't know how to not play. Kate Nash herself gets to strap on a guitar and play loud but the whole effect is like having George Best on your team and putting him in goal. The best part is when she is joined by support band Supercute! who are surely destined for world domination.

Recovering a usb hard drive

I have a load of mp3s on an external usb hard drive. Before our office move I backed these up to another usb hard drive. At the new office the original disk was giving that distinctive clicking sound that indicates death. I started copying the other disc but then it too stopped working. I took out the disk from its enclosure and attached another usb interface adapter, but that didn't work either. Next I opened up my four year old desktop computer, hoping that it would have a sata interface. The discs weren't sata but I was able to pull out a dvd driver cable and attach that to the disk (see picture above). Now Windows saw the disk and chkdsk ran. Finally I have been able to spend the last two days copying files off the disk using rsync.

UK Election day newspapers

Florence and the Machine / Holy Hail @ Mezzanine, San Francisco, 17 April 2010

Poor Holy Hail had some good ideas and lots of enthusiasm, but terrible sound. I hadn't been to the Mezzanine before. It is a big location for Indie rock (shudder) and they do get a lot of British bands. For a time they didn't offer advance tickets which was a deal breaker for me. Inside is a nice club layout with a few hidden away places where you could sit around. The stage is weirdly in a corner of the dance floor. I was worried that this was the source of the poor sound but it must have been just traditional cruelty to support acts.

Florence and the Machine are a band but are really one person, the eponymous singer. The hired help consists of players of drums/bass/guitar/keyboards and (super trendy) harp, all dressed in black so as to fade into the background. Florence was dressed in a traditional combination of wedding dress style leotard over metallic shorts, along with a flowing shawl which was worn in several different ways. She has two tones when singing, a plaintive throaty voice, and a full blooded roar form the gut. When she lets loose it is an awesome sound which sweeps everyone along with it. Some of the songs on the album are pretty decent so altogether it is an impressive package. Why then did my attention wander a bit? Well I was tired. But I would have sacrificed a bit of power in the singing for more detail, and I'd like to have heard a bit more character from the band. Overall though this was memorable.

UK General Election quiz

Internet quizzes seem to favour the sensible party, which in this case is the Liberal Democrats.

Take the Who Should You Vote For? UK General Election quiz

Labour				30
Liberal Democrat				29
Green				14
Conservative	-18
UK Independence	-37

You expected: LAB
Your recommendation: Labour
Click here for more details about these results

New NME logo on 10 "special" covers

The Mall of Cthulhu

OK I am writing this review partly to test the blogger/Amazon asociates integration (summary: does not work in Firefox). I recently read this book: The Mall of Cthulhu by Seamus Cooper. This book has the best title in history. It is another modern day Cthulhu book, a bit like Charles Stross's Laundry series. It is wryly written, the jokes are not flagged and you have to keep paying attention. I enjoyed it as light reading.

Dalek with British Flag (from Victory of the Daleks)

Lady Gaga and Beyonce by Yamino