patrick wolf?

Florence (of & The Machine fame) and Alec Empire.

i can't get enough of this homo.

Do they sell this t-shirt at his shows yet?

;)

"but he's not gay!"

huh

His boyfriend's gay.

lol

Florence was there? WTF. In what capacity? That's...sort of amazing. And v. unexpected - I would have figured Bishi or something like that.

She dueted with him on the title track of his new album; it's Eliza Carthy on the record.

Bishi was unhappily at home with some kind of horrible lurgey.

Will definitely try and catch him next time around, hopefully whenever The Bachelor 2 comes out.

Hmm. That's interesting - Carthy's voice is much more textured and um...interesting...than Florence's. I quite like Lungs and caught Florence live a few weeks back, but she really only has two setting, doesn't she? Normal and FULL BLARE. Curious how that would have worked.

I would have preferred Carthy, definitely, but Flo did a good job; she's got some timbre there, and exercised some control.

Alec Empire's little solo interval was pointless knob-twiddling, but when he went mental in the context of some actual songs it was great fun.

Test reply.

Have loved both recent singles. Can't fathom why he's not massive. Tried.

http://sickmouthy.com/2011/03/23/why-does-everybody-hate-patrick-wolf/

That made an interesting read. I do like a lot of his music but I was going through my collection recently looking for some CD's to get rid of (this is an on going thing I do) I put on the Bachelor and started listening through, I was really surprised how little I enjoyed it, I always thought it was his weakest by a long way but it's actually just a really poor album. The first album and Magic Position are the two I enjoy the most plus the singles from Wind In The Wires but I really don't have any interest in the new album. I just heard the new single the other day and it left me completely cold.

It's interesting what you say about people really not liking him. I saw him live around The Magic Position album and he seemed in a really bad mood on stage and admitted he was hungover, it was pretty obvious he wasn't into it. It didn't stop me liking him but me and my friends were really unimpressed. I had a similar experience with Conor Oberst when I saw him at Glastonbury but he was such a shit on stage it made me throw out all his albums when I got back, Patrick wasn't that bad. Since then I have read things that have not done him any favours, didn't he attack one of his band members on stage? Also when The Bachelor failed to get nominated for the Mercury music prize he had a bit of a strop saying "what do I have to do to get nominated, in times like this I ask myself what would Klaus Nomi do" well Klaus Nomi probably wouldn't have cried about it or even given a shit about some meaningless award.

I'm probably being too hard on him and I'm sure I like music by plenty of people that are complete twats (hello Mark E Smith) but there is something about him that is quite off putting and people seem to pick up on that. I like interesting pop stars but he tries way too hard and beyond the outfits and changing his hair colour for each album, is he actually that interesting? He seems much closer to Lady Gaga than Kate Bush who is obviously who he's aiming for.

seriously i liked him more when he was a corny Byronic goth as opposed to shiny popstar - wind in the wires remains my favourite album by him.

he's not massive because

a) he's a twat
b) he's a difficult sell from album to album. there's nothing wrong with having a malleable image but he tries too hard to be everything to everyone (popstar, provocateur, moody singer-songwriter, arty hipster) and ends up not pleasing anyone at all.
c) although most of his songs are well-crafted and polished, he doesn't bring anything interesting or unique to the genres he borrows from. usually it's just unconvincing. the problem i have with his later material is that a lot of it feels kinda phony - he wants to do early 90s pop so he writes "the city", he wants to be Cole Porter so he writes "enchanted". it sounds like he's doing karaoke on his own songs. he's got talent spilling out of him but it isn't directed towards a clear vision of what he wants to be as a performer, which is a waste.

imo he's never topped the first record

So great live.

Was just getting round to trying to get rid of my ticket for his gig this friday, 29 april, since I'm going to a wedding. In the course of my researches I discover the gig was last month, 29 march. *punches self in face*

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPliwL71pj0

Next single from Lupercalia. I'm kind of digging the tone of this album. It's as ebulliently joyful as The Magic Position was while somehow managing to be slightly less camp.

They play him on radio 2 now.

^^^^^^^^^^with the sound of that single he has just turned into...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_qZ5B-yioU

(Patrick looks better in a dress, mind you)

Just saw PW on the N-Dubz reality show

What? That must be something else. N-Dubz is a magnificently confusing musical thing that I have never quite understood. I kind of like the idea of them having a reality show. Does Dappy wear many silly hats?

Gosh. This is very pop. Really unashamedly so. Like, makes The Magic Position look ashamed.

one of the tracks (featured sax solo i think ?) got a lot of radio2 airplay a few weeks back.

doh. as mentioned upthread.

Oh, so it's a happy pop album, then?

Oh dear. I don't like the albums he makes when he's happy and in luuuuuurrrrrrve and all shiny so much as the ones he makes when he's miserable and hating humanity.

That said, this would be absolutely typical if I didn't like this album. It's the kind of thing that happens when there's an artist that I dislike on first exposure, then slowly come around on until one day it flips, and I love that artist as much as I formerly was repulsed by them. And when it finally clicks, and I get it, that's when they turn around and abandon whatever it was that had suddenly made them click for me. Like I start to doubt mine own reversal and mistrust my judgement.

Suppose I should wait and reserve judgement, but I'm feeling such trepidation about love so hesitantly given.

N1ck, have you heard the whole thing? I just have the four tracks released so far?

And yeah, from the production on the singles it was clear that this was going to be a mite bit poppier than The Bachelor, but Armistice sounded promising. I wish I could hear the original recordings of this stuff. The snippet of the earlier version of "Time of My Life" that was on the Battle Megamix released before The Bachelor came out sounded all lo-fi and aggressive and bitter and it was A++ good.

I'm a miserable wolf fan too. I was really looking forward to the Bachelor part 2, whatever happened to that? Has some of it been repurposed for this?

I think the first two and the last one are the territory you should stick to for now; this one is definitely a happy pop album. I'm really enjoying it, but I'm at a point with him where I love his craft so much I can just take whatever emotional direction he goes in. I think WitW will always be my favourite though, saying that.

Alex: I have literally just finished hearing the whole thing for the first time as I typed this.

This is still the Bachelor Part 2, because he always said that the first part was about being cursed and afraid you're going to die alone, and the second part is falling in love and feeling redeemed.

Don't like the first one so much, it still just sounds like a bad Capitol K record to me.

::ducks cabbage and tomatoes thrown from all sides::

Hoping that the mysterious second will be the more rough and nasty demo material? Like rifling through his hard drives (fnar) isn't that what it's supposed to be?

To be honest I'm not that fussed about the debut; I liked it but I don't think his songwriting was up to scratch.

What do you mean by 'mysterious second' though? His discography goes:

Lycanthropy (priapic shouting and beats and violins)
Wind In The Wires (more reserved folk with electronic touches, songcraft)
The Magic Position (glam pop with baggage)
The Bachelor (grand dark folk)
Lupercalia (pop)

Mysterious second disc that's supposed to come with the deluxe edition? Sorry, I think there was more to that post that got deleted when I changed a word.

Aha right, I get you. I gather that's what it's meant to be, aye. Not got that, just the album proper.

It was on some link *you* posted on twitter, so I assumed you'd know more about it than me!

Yeah. The Bachelor Part II has been repurposed for this, more or less. It was supposed to be called The Conqueror (as in William, as in his fiance) and was thus the happy in love complement to the moroseness of the The Bachelor. He seemed to have abandoned the tracks he did in Los Angeles with "dance producers" in favour of his own stuff, and glossed up the old tunes a bit, at least from the press discussion of it over the past year or two.

Did he end up keeping the Tilda Swinton bits on this album, or did those get tossed out with "The Conqueror"?

No Tilda that I noticed on first listen.

And yeah. Lycanthropy was my favourite when I first got into Patrick - something about it appealed to young/angry/ambivalent-about-being-queer me - but these days Wind in the Wires usually tops the list. It's a perfect balance of the first album's glitchy electronica anger, his talent for composition/arrangement, and TUNES (without being too perky). Plus, it's when his voice started evolving into a properly confident baritone.

The Bachelor was a step back in that direction, just with bigger production. That said, The Magic Position has a lot of moroseness buried under the surface. The title track and Get Lost can obscure stuff like Bluebells and Augustine and The Stars (and even Accident & Emergency, which has a bit of A Boy Like Me in it).

xp

No Tilda! Shame. There was something lovely about over the top narration in the middle of tracks. Ah, well.

The way you can tell that WitW is the keeper is the fact that it's the album with all of the stellar B-sides.

Godrevy Point alone is easily better than most of his catalogue.

^ Ah, that's interesting. I compiled all his b-sides from that era on to a single collection and it got more play than the album proper.

Also, there was a lot of knee-jerk "The Bachelor is shit" stuff, which surprised me, it's miles away my favourite.

There's a couple of B-sides from TMP that I really love: Adder, and The Marriage. The Tinderbox from the last album was good too. I doubt one will be able to judge albums these days from the quality of accompanying b-sides. :(

Opening three tracks on The Bachelor are AMAZING. After that it's still very good but perhaps drags a tiny little bit. It could do with being 5 minutes shorter.

It was those WitW B-sides that flipped me from "I'm really not sure about this..." to "OMG I absolutely love this."

It could also have been situational. I was in the midst of a happy week yomping about on the moors above St Ives being teenage and moody, when Sick & his missus picked me up in their car and whisked me out to Sennen. In the car back, they played those for me, and it was the combination of spectacularly bleak, beautiful Cornish coast which I love so much, and then hearing those bleak, beautiful songs about that coast while driving along it. (Also that and the combination of risk of sudden DEATH being bounced around the back of the car while Sick raced along those incredibly narrow twisty, turny lanes, might have helped)

And now I can't hear those songs without thinking of that coast, and the way I see it, and every time I hear it, it's like "Yes, THIS"

There's this perfect balance between being all teenage and stroppy and actually hitting on something transcendently true and eternal about human longing, on that album.

I know there are bits of The Magic Position which are mazing in the same way - I mean, there's that duet with Marianne Faithfull to start with - but both it and the Batchelor have skippable bits in the way that there isn't a note of WITW that I would miss.

No Tilda = BOOOOOOOO tho

(Nick if you really wanted to be a hero, you could make me a B-sides compilation of all that stuff. I'll swap it for a print of that pic I'm working on that I know yr missus likes) ;-)

I do really like the Batchelor a lot, its high points are very very high (god damn, Damaris!) but there are just a couple of tracks I tend to skip.

I mean, Damaris is almost so close but not quite over the line to self parody that it ends up being incredible. It's a real guilty pleasure. The only way it could be better would be if it was a sin.