Review: Fink, Gomez, O2 Academy, Bristol 26.04.09

Musicians like Newton Faulkner are bad enough for any number of reasons (let’s cite his cover of the Spongebob Squarepants theme tune as primary evidence), but when they succeed over far more talented artists from the same genre, all hatred borne toward them can be fully justified. Case in point: the lovely Fink (aka Cornish-born Fin Greenall), who bears the same luscious, woodsy guitar style and soulful voice (at a deeper timbre), but executes the two with a dark vocal intensity that contrasts beautifully with his relaxing instrumentation (which on this balmy Sunday evening is just two guitars; no band). A distracted frown crosses his brow on ‘Blueberry Pancakes’, as he sings, “everyone else is secondary, everyone else is temporary”, ostensibly about a departed lover, and proves that acoustic guitar-toting folkies needn’t just sing about the surf and good times with the bluesy ‘Sorry I’m Late’, his voice blistering at “she fucks me while the sun goes down”. “I’m nervous because the guy who inspired me to play guitar is stood over there,” he worries, but he needn’t. Especially considering the arrival of Gomez. 

Despite looking astoundingly youthful for a band in their thirteenth year, every other aspect of their set sounds so dated in its embarrassing pub rock predictability that it’s a chore to watch. ‘Whipping Piccadilly’ rattles its de facto groove, but their new material is atrociously boring, and not at all helped by singer and keyboardist Tom Gray goading the crowd into eliciting praise, though the audience seems to think differently – there’s many a couple smooching to the slowies, and reminiscing back to the halcyon days of 1998 when ‘Bring It On’ came out, and they’d never heard Newton Faulkner butchering ‘Teardrop’. Probably.

Review: Hanne Hukkelberg – Blood from a Stone

Originally published at TLOBF

To say that ‘Blood From a Stone’ conjures soundscapes where Bat For Lashes’ moody beats meets Grouper’s ethereal swathe coated in the glow of Beach House’s sexy haze makes it sound like a much more exciting proposition than it really is. All these similarities are hugely palpable in Norwegian Hukkelberg’s third album, but the problem is that they’re executed with such minimal panache and effort that it’s a chore to make yourself listen all the way through.

The majority of songs have exactly the same structure – verses based around a facile programmed drumbeat, cheeping synths that sounds as though they were made on Brian Eno’s iPhone application, Bloom, some incoherent mewing and inconsequential choruses so dull that even her backing singers sound like they’re falling asleep (case in point – ‘No Mascara Tears’). It’s a baffling concept, but ‘Seventeen’ sounds exactly like Kelly Rowland’s ‘Stole’ (remember, the one about teenage suicide?) put through Tegan and Sara’s synthesizers. Don’t believe me? Try Rowland’s lyrics for size – “the brightest kid in school / He’s not a fool / Reading books about science and smart stuff” – and then Hukkelberg’s – “He didn’t fit in at school / The stupid rules / Made him a fool”, later singing about taking “the easy way out”. It’s unwittingly funny, and a perversely welcome lift halfway through a largely dull record.

The frustrating thing is that there are a few good songs on here, and condensed thus it’d make a promising EP. Opener ‘Midnight Sun Dreams’ does TLOBF the very kind job of reviewing itself in its title – it’s every bit as sensual as you’d imagine, with her voice flaring gently amidst an ebb and flow of the disquieted sleep patterns a Norwegian summer must bring. The way she sings, “I’m no temptress” makes for a reaction of lust at odds with aching beauty that makes you realize what The National were on about when they sang of a “feathery woman” on the incredible ‘Mistaken for Strangers’, so it’s a shame she can’t maintain the allure throughout. ‘Bandy Riddles’ builds to a climax where Grizzly Bear’s rhythm section meets the cathartic yells of Camille, and in the celestial closing number, ‘Bygd Til By’, the only song here in her mother tongue, she lets the mysterious (to us at least) lyrics roll deliciously from her lips. Less than a month after the release of Bat For Lashes’ ‘Two Suns’, however, you probably don’t need this in your record collection.

4/10

Review: Earth @ The Croft, Bristol, 23.04.09

Originally published at TLOBF

“This is about how you get a medical condition where you can’t look at flashing lights, so lift your glass to your favourite method of self-destruction,” jokes Dylan Carlson before Steve ‘Stebmo’ Moore plays the fateful opening salvo of ‘Engine of Ruin’. Judging by the submissive head bowing and enraptured half-shut eyes of the audience, it’d seem that the preferred road to aural wreckage of everyone present is letting Earth attack their ears with their dismal grace and perturbing volume; like the slow erosion of Chinese water torture. This is one of those gigs that’s so close and impending that it’s left down to booming exhalations from the amplifiers to act as air conditioning for the night; despite Moore’s Wurlitzer blooming a lazy song beneath Carlson’s judgment gavel of a guitar, each note is so elongated and weighty that even contemplation begins to feel like physical exertion, so the occasional blasts of oxygen are gratefully received.

Their six-year hiatus not included, this year and tour mark the 20^th anniversary of Earth, and they’re on fine form. To call them forceful, dark and hypnotic would be a crass understatement of their intensity - as they burn slowly through the embers of ‘The Bees Made Honey in the Lion’s Skull’ the emotional autonomy of the audience is lost to what feels like an ancient brainwashing ritual, Carlson excavates the protracted depths of ‘Miami Morning Coming Down II’ like he’s after Howard Carter’s prestige, and the Croft’s ceiling tiles give up their hold and tumble to the floor. Neither drummer Adrienne Davies nor Carlson bats an eyelid. ‘Bees…’ vinyl bonus track ‘Junkyard Priest’ raises the set’s brontide to a more aggressive level, with Stebmo taking on trombone duties to flesh out the night’s sleepy dynamic, and to recover a little soul just when it starts to feel like you’re watching a band in slow motion. The same pounding rant appears in an as-yet untitled new song in E flat minor (simultaneously frustrating and gratifying for fans, it’s the only non-‘Bees…’ track they play tonight). Playing with the resounding motifs from what will become its predecessor, it takes a more passive-aggressive turn of events, refusing to satisfy neat crescendos or cyclical melodies with a petulance so ear-ravishing that all you can do is raise your glass as high as you can, and weather the storm.

Review: Soap&Skin - Lovetune for Vacuum

Originally published on The Line of Best Fit

Don’t let the soft, scented domesticity of Anja Plaschg’s stage moniker or album title fool you; ‘Lovetune for Vacuum” is a mournful Frankenstein of a record – a young woman attempting to come to terms with the often twisted depths of her own feelings by imprisoning them within a fortress of ticking shutter sounds and mandrake violins. With a beguiling voice pitched somewhere between Anthony and Karin Dreijer Andersson (Fever Ray/The Knife), 18 year old Plaschg (who grew up on a rural pig farm in her native Austria) cuts an emotionally bruised, shadowy figure on her extraordinarily precocious debut.

At the heart of the record is a shy, elegantly mechanical android, that ticks and whirrs with the sounds of typewriters, camera clicks and children’s toys, gradually expanding and dominating with each song. On the childlike ‘Cry Wolf’, it cowers reticently behind a background of Múm style vocals and a naïve flute, but gathers strength by ‘Turbine Womb’ (the lyrics can be a little sci-fi Sylvia Plath, but impressive for a second language) to sound like Optimus Prime doing the ballet; indeed, Plaschg’s strengths reach far beyond the stereotype of the quirky musical ingénue to join Peter Broderick, Hauschka and Max Richter as part of the exciting European scene of young classical protégés, such is her impressive piano work. Come the penultimate track, ‘DDMMYYYY’, the machine is fully-fledged, as industrial and aggressive as Leila or any of Richard D James’ Warp brethren as it drowns out a woman’s crazed histrionics – it’s no surprise that both Fenessz and DJ Koze have remixed her.

In parts, this is a terrifying record, and you can only imagine what it’s like to be her parents – an unpredictable raven haired pearl looming from the shadows of farmhouses in her press photos, even crouched naked amongst the pigs; with tortured scientific lyrics about the Greek daemon of death (‘Thanatos’, not dissimilar to the rousing layered vocals of Electrelane’s ‘The Valleys’) through to the slightly sixth form poetry words of ‘Extinguish Me’ (“I search in snow, in vain / For your footsteps’ trail / I have to kiss them / With my scalding tears”) and childhood pain (‘Spiracle’). It’s not always a pleasure to listen to, particularly as the tangle of piano and icy church intonations of ‘Fall Foliage’ rumble into that familiar elegant clunk of clockwork and whirrs, but it’s to her credit that she rides the motif through to the end of the record, and proves its worth – her bleak electronic dystopia could easily soundtrack Watchmen or similar. If this is how she sings ‘Lovetunes…’, heaven help us when she turns her pen to less starry-eyed subject matter.

7/10

Review: Alessi's Ark - Notes from the Treehouse

Originally featured at The Line of Best Fit

Despite the wandering loveliness of 18 year old Alessi Laurent-Marke’s debut album, there’s a part of me that doesn’t want other people to hear it. And not for reasons of selfishness or wanting to be cooler than thou – rather the desire to protect her, to tuck her and the swooping warmth of her voice away from a press that’ll to turn her into the next poster girl for an untapped genre; to save her from the potential ignominious fate of a major label getting her to make the same album over and over until the cash cow’s bled dry and all inspiration stifled; to keep her away from the naysayers who’ll nitpick at her for being an arcane young Londoner with tangible influences that unabashedly bob their pretty heads above the surface of ‘Notes From the Tree House’.

Fortunately or unfortunately, whichever way you look at it, with an album this strong there’s absolutely no chance of it staying under the radar – especially when you consider that she walked straight out of senior school with her GCSE Music compositions and into the arms of EMI, and Saddle Creek rabble rouser Mike Mogis. It’s a worry from the first song, ‘Magic Weather’, that the soaring weight of ornate instrumentation befitting of Van Dyke Parks might overwhelm Alessi – the strings pop up in nooks and crannies, and reveal themselves sparkle by sparkle to be a vast Narnia of wonderment - but she coolly holds her own amongst the perhaps over-lavish production, smoothing out inconsistent vocal ticks to eventually swoon like Alela Diane or Nina Nastasia.

This could come across as patronizing, but considering that most of the recent soup of young singers are possessed with a gift for lyrics that makes Twitter look profound, Alessi’s Ark deal an impressive hand in succinct, measured wistfulness that can’t help but raise a smile – on ‘Over the Hill’ she sings, ”I know we’ll get there eventually / but I’m English, so bear with me” with dreamy sagacity, and rolls through the hazy lullaby of ‘Constellations’, turning “she loves you, yes she does” into “Hell I’m in love with you, yes it’s true”, conjuring the beautiful, all-engulfing moment of being magnetized by the face of a hoped-for lover.

‘Notes From the Tree House’ isn’t a perfect album, but what use would that be? The most pertinent comparison in terms of early ability would be to Cat Power – but whereas Chan Marshall developed her often difficult angst into lustrous showmanship, it’d be lovely to see Alessi go the other way, and steer this polished sunrise into even more experimental territory. Little pockets of eerie sonogram echoes and dissonant film dialogue hide below the record’s surface like buried treasure, proving that Alessi is more than capable of keeping her own secrets.

7/10

Review: PJ Harvey & John Parish, Bristol Anson Rooms, 18.04.09

Originally featured on The Line of Best Fit and Epigram

There’s a terrifying stillness about PJ Harvey. At the end of each song, it’s as if a dark shadow has imprisoned her in celluloid, before the shutter release of John Parish’s tremendous guitar again liberates her diabolical wide-eyed rapture, gesticulating and wild in eldritch white. The three straitjacket-esque straps around her chiffon-swathed legs cannot contain her, as black heels occluding alabaster ankles dance in tongues around the defenceless boards of the Anson Rooms.

If this all sounds a little overblown, it’s because there aren’t words nuanced or physical enough to express the intense bliss evoked this evening. Yeah, we could steal some of Polly and John’s own, like the sumptuous, “you move me, like music” from ‘Rope Bridge Crossing’ off ‘Dance Hall at Louse Point’, but they wouldn’t be nearly as devastating as when emitted from red lips to lie on the nail bed of Parish’s awkward flinching guitar, and Künstlicher's no cuckoo.

Playing in support of their second album together in 13 years, PJ, John and their regular band of collaborators might look foreboding in their respective ghostly moll and gangster ensembles, but, just as on record, tonight’s performance is the sight of two old friends having fun, dismissing the common perception of them as serious artistes drowning in the gravitas of their craft. Single ‘Black Hearted Love’ is all visceral guitar and silky, butter-wouldn’t-melt rhetoric that’s the perfect contrast to wonderful surprise support act Howe Gelb’s (of Giant Sand) gravelly acoustic drawl, and snaps into ‘Sixteen, Fifteen, Fourteen’, whereby Harvey’s meticulously controlled voice hops from craggy wails to staccato counting, a cliff top siren call and girlish hiccoughing. The five of them lead an exquisitely balanced set, dipping into ‘The Soldier’, whose words hang like a tangled marionette over Parish’s childlike yet demented ukulele.

Despite unabashed dancing, inquisitive birdlike looks to John on her left, and a neat red grin a million miles from the Joker-ish make-up of her ‘To Bring You My Love’ era, at this stage it’s still hard to believe that this almost translucent woman has either the dint or desire to let forth the raw whoops of their oeuvre’s more scabrous works. However, with ‘Taut’, Harvey inflicts mirth and mild apprehension upon the audience as she spits “Even the son of God had to die my darlin’” like Pazuzu by way of Dorset, but curtails the outburst before embodying madness that’d see Mr Rochester hunting out the ladder to the attic hatch.

The only downside to letting PJ Harvey mesmerize you into forgetting that you’re stood in the dingy Anson Rooms (which have all the charm of a rotting grammar school gymnasium) is that it’s sometimes hard to remember to snap out of it to appreciate the astounding work of her dapper bandmates. In matching trilbies and suits (and pianist, bassist and guitarist Eric Drew Feldman’s shiny red brogues deserve a mention too), they look as though they’ve just stepped out of the Coen Brothers’ ‘Miller’s Crossing’, and sound just as ominous.

“I have another story to tell you,” says Harvey, polite as a school mistress, before wreaking prurient havoc on the crowd with ‘A Woman A Man Walked By’ – every time she roars “I want his fucking ass!”, she jerks her own derriere, howling like a castrated werewolf, and dancing through John and Giovanni’s exorcism of a guitar solo with vigour that belies her maraca-induced shoulder injury.

The night seems fleeting, and the final song comes all too soon. After a thirteen year break between albums, it’ll most likely be at least as long again, if ever, before the next one; a thought as disquieting as the shadowy stillness that engulfs the rocking chair creak of ‘April’.

Jeffrey Lewis & The Junkyard - 'Em Are I

Originally featured in NME 15/04/09

What with New York’s most idiosyncratic neurotic upping sticks to Europe for his past few films, Manhattan musician and illustrator Jeffrey Lewis has stepped in to chronicle the detritus of the human condition for his amicable fifth full length album. To fans, the majority of this lovingly crumpled bundle of nerves will be happily familiar from Lewis’ self-flagellating live schedule, as wearily explored on ‘Roll Bus Roll’, an unapologetically downbeat ditty about Greyhound buses, cheered on by a frayed backseat choral line and a picaresque ukulele that reignites the joyful spontaneity of touring. Lewis peeps through warmly looping guitar layers at anxious existentialism on ‘If Life Exists?’, and self-deprecates with ‘Broken Broken Broken Heart’, all handclap-propelled rollicking ‘60s pop which belies its bitter sentiment, and ‘To Be Objectified’ (“going bald is the most manly thing I’m ever going to do”). Meanwhile, ‘Whistle Past the Graveyard’ resurrects the madcap hyperactivity of ‘Systematic Death’ (off the album ’12 Crass Songs’) to quack and cluck with banjo-led insanity through the realms of the zombiefied absurd. His comic book sensibilities burst from the record with technicolour verve, particularly as the titular erudite swine of ‘Good Old Pig, Gone to Avalon’ wiggles with Muppet-like bounciness to the Arthurian city. But no comic book hero is complete without his trusty sidekick – Jeff’s brother Jack plays bass throughout, and wrote ‘The Upside-down Cross’, a torrid, eight minute song about marriage and ecology where Calexico race Do Make Say Think up a mountain only to find that Sonic Youth have beaten them to the top. With the Brothers Lewis’ dry delivery, worry of impending baldness and mounting collection of romantic woes, it seems that Woody Allen needn’t bother going home.

7/10

Papercuts – You Can Have What You Want

Originally featured in NME

Bunkering down with a box set of ‘The Twilight Zone’ might not seem the most obvious way to craft an album of hazy summer dreams, but Papercuts’ (aka Jason Quever) third record hugs the emotionally mysterious in a swathe of somnambulant romance embracing bumbling lo-fi guitar trills. All crackling shimmer and Mercury Rev syrupiness, it’s as much summer as the smell of Hawaiian Tropic, and therein lies the problem; ‘You Can Have…’ is, on occasion, a beautiful, densely crafted album in respectful debt to the ‘60s (aided by the guys from Beach House) - at times Van Dyke Parks meets Grizzly Bear (‘Once We Walked in the Sunlight’), at others, so nonchalantly français you half expect Serge Gainsbourg to appear – but the slow, dusky familiarity and sobering lack of dynamics (disappointing when Quever shows what he is capable of on ‘Future Primitive’) make for more of a groundhog day than transcendence into any fifth dimension.

5/10

Review: Bat For Lashes - Two Suns

Originally featured in Epigram

“It seems to come from the world of Grimm’s fairytales,” said Thom Yorke of Natasha Khan’s enchanting music when he chose Bat For Lashes to support Radiohead, and on ‘Two Suns’, the fantastical elements that danced through her debut remain, but with a poetic maturity and strength that rather more resemble the complex stories of Angela Carter’s ‘The Bloody Chamber’ than childlike naivety - bewitching the listener with her haunting, almost lonely exploration the duality of self, gender, and psychogeography. 

Lead single ‘Daniel’ arrives on a cinematic sunrise fanfare, building tentatively with Khan’s sultry English diction and the dark glamour of a 1980s music matriarch. Moments of macabre formality surface on ‘Sleep Alone’ as a looping sitar courts a proud bass note, and again on final track, ‘The Big Sleep’, an eerie coda where Scott Walker moans the ghostly lament of a drag queen’s last hurrah. Yeasayer appear on beat duties throughout, firing booming tribal canons across the sparkling dual landscapes that Khan so vividly conjures – she celebrates the “thousand crystal towers” of her former home, New York, on the piercing ‘Glass’, and orchestrates a dusty spiritual ‘60s ritual on ‘Peace of Mind’, guitars rattling with ramshackle familiarity. There’s a newfound strength in her vocals too, which glower lupine and sensual through the forests of ‘Moon and Moon’, accompanied by a chorus of haunting sylphs. 

“I got fed up of everyone thinking I was this mystical creature that drinks unicorns’ tears for breakfast!” she said of her debut, and as she smoulders, “I’m evil” at the end of the arresting ‘Siren Song’, it’s clear that on ‘Two Suns’, Natasha Khan is the wolf in grandmother’s clothing not to be underestimated.

4.5/5

Is music consumption as we know it imploding?

As The Pirate Bay founders await a court verdict and YouTube removes premium music videos from UK viewers, is Spotify the life raft the music industry’s been waiting for?

Originally featured in Epigram

When asked whether each MP3 file shared online represents a lost sale for the record industry, John Kennedy of the International Federation of Phonographic Industries answered, “yes”, much to the amusement of the founders of Sweden-based The Pirate Bay. The two sides are currently awaiting the verdict (due on April 17^th) of a much-publicized trial that has seen the Swedish authorities file charges against the torrent sharing website for “promoting other people’s infringements of copyright laws”. 

While Kennedy’s position on the download to sales ratio is laughably ill thought out, given the amount of reasonable file sharers who download for sampling purposes prior to committing to a purchase, the case itself has reached a cliffhanger which will resonate with profound consequences across the world whatever its outcome. The Pirate Bay representatives were in the dock for over two weeks, proving that the line between legal and illegal downloading is not as defined as the authorities might like to think. If the prosecution wins, it’s a step towards realizing the dreams of the ‘Big Four’ record labels (Sony BMG, Warner Music, EMI, Universal) and international governments, where illegal P2P networks are forced to compensate those whose copyrights have been breached. However, if The Pirate Bay’s arguments about being merely a search engine rather than the source of copyrighted material hold up, then the authorities face further obstacles in their fight to reduce illegal downloading, an activity that the UK government aims to cut by 80% come 2011.

On 29^th January 2009, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport published an interim report entitled ‘Digital Britain’, detailing government proposals to mirror France’s three step plan for tackling repeat downloading offenders. By teaming up with major Internet Service Providers (ISPs), offenders would first receive an ‘educational letter’ informing them of the illegality of their actions; followed by suspension of services until you sign a contract agreeing to cease such activity, and the potential to lose your internet connection for a year if you persist. It is estimated that as many as 7million people in the UK share files illegally, and in December 2008, the Entertainment Retailers Association found that piracy of music and film accounts for up to £1.5bn in lost revenue each year. The government has pledged £8million to cut intellectual property theft, and hopes to implement public awareness campaigns and education in schools about the value of intellectual property.

Most people would be surprised at the little amount of money that most musicians earn from selling records. SClub7 famously worked for a comparative pittance, based on a blanket wage agreement they signed with their label at the start of their career. New York experimentalists Gang Gang Dance were recently forced to cancel a tour they couldn’t afford to continue when all their equipment was lost in a fire in Amsterdam, and guitar goddess Marnie Stern resorted to a kisses for cash scheme to pay off a parking fine that threatened to cripple her recent tour. This surprising and kinda saddening news makes it all the more laudable that governments across the world are taking pains to educate young people about intellectual property (despite the capitalist structures at play behind the scenes), but the moot point is, what other methods (apart from traditional purchasing) will be put in place to sate the musical needs of culturally voracious downloaders?

When MySpace launched its assault on the web five years ago, the New York Times called it “a marvelously efficient, remarkably cheap and not terribly invasive means of spreading buzz.” Shortly after, in November 2005, YouTube exploded into homes across the world, and together, these sites seemed to pave the golden path for on-demand music consumption; to provide an exciting remedy for an ailing record industry. However, the musical content of both sites is now under threat in the UK from YouTube’s dispute with the Performing Rights Society (PRS) (which could extend to Myspace), a non-profit collection agency which distributes royalties to its members. The existing license between YouTube and the PRS is up for renewal, and the PRS wants more money for its members than YouTube’s parent company Google claims it is able to give. This has led to YouTube removing a number of ‘premium videos’ from UK access. YouTube profits from the adverts that appear by videos, the monetary gain of which they are not obliged (thus do not) share with the artists. Although Patrick Walker, YouTube’s director of video partnerships, told the Guardian that, “if the next Arctic Monkeys is going to surface, we need to get this [relationship] to work”, his shtick about nurturing talent is pretty transparent, and as this mercenary debate continues and online music licensing becomes more complicated and expensive, fans searching for music to enjoy legally are being driven elsewhere.

It would then seem that we should be thanking the heavens for the advent of Spotify, free software with an instant streaming library of music so exponentially vast that one blogger nicknamed it “God’s iTunes”. Just like The Pirate Bay, Spotify was launched by a group of Swedes (one of whom ironically created uTorrent, a client for downloading largely illegal torrents), in October 2008, and so far has been almost whole-heartedly supported by all corners of the record industry. The UK government loves it so much that their Central Office of Information is one of the main clients of its advertising service, whereby every 15 minutes or so, a short ad interjects your stream of choice. Its low demand on bandwith also marries tidily with a proposal from the ‘Digital Britain’ report, whereby the government wants to ensure a minimum 2mb broadband connection to every home across Britain by 2012.

It’s supported by the ‘Big Four’, and Merlin, an umbrella company established to give independent labels the representative force of their conglomerate rivals, thus Spotify claim that up to 10,000 new tracks are added to their library each day. The back catalogues of labels Domino, Fat Cat, Warp, the Leaf Label amongst others appear almost in full, as does Radiohead’s oeuvre, and U2, Morrissey and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs gave Spotify users exclusive dibs on their album prior to release. With its clean interface, purely genuine content, reassuring images of handsome Swedes reclining on concept Ikea furnishings, and promise that they “respect creativity and believe in fairly compensating artists for their work,” it’s not hard to see why over a million users have signed up since October; surprising even, given that it was invite only until February. It even accounts for the community aspect of downloading – you can share your personalized playlists with your friends, and it’s still only in Beta (trial) form.

The biggest downside to Spotify is that you can’t download music from it. At present, songs can only be streamed from your computer; you can’t add them to your iPod or similar. However, they’re currently hiring a developer to enable the application for iPhones, and contemplating a portable future. From a romantic perspective, it might neatly do away with the idea of owning a record collection. Heck, it’s so damned cutting edge that it pretty much renders owning MP3s obsolete – why fill up your hard drive when you can stream from an endless library to your heart’s delight?

However, it still doesn’t quite have the answer for making up those lost sales that John Kennedy’s so worried about. Although Spotify defeats the point of illegal downloading with its extensive back catalogue and sparkly pre-release exclusives, why bother buying a record when you can access it for free? What Spotify doesn’t do is address the issue of getting something for nothing, summed up eloquently by a pro-downloading musician (who wished to remain anonymous):

“There are hardly any bands confident enough to just put their album on the shelves without giving it a preview somewhere. Seeing as most bands have something out there for free, to an extent I think that we do have a right to free music, but it depends on the intention the listener has – whether they’re going to invest in the band in the future somehow. There are a lot of people who don’t spend a dime on music, and that’s completely immoral.”

Whether The Pirate Bay’s actions are judged thus remains to be seen, but the future of music consumption is indubitably on the cusp of profound change.