(let's see what needles do)

The number of 'friends' on the userinfo is now 'people who have befriended you + communities you are a member of', which makes me look popular since I don't tend to have prolific communities on my friendslist. Hah.

Hot Hot Heat single taken off Radio 1 B-list due to reference to 'bandages'! You couldn't make it up. Apparently, Radio 1 "want[s] to be the radio version of what The Sun newspaper would do" (quoted in this week's NME), so why they aren't playing "Rock the Casbah" incessantly (Mick Jones must be so pissed off) and ranting in every available moment about the glory of going to war is quite beyond me. I mean, isn't that what The Sun does? Except for the Rock the Casbah part, because the Clash are quite clearly too cool for the Currant Bun.

In other "banned from music media" news, Hope of the States' latest video - featuring sad cartoon figures sheltering with their guitars behind bombed and smoking trains - is not to be shown on MTV channels. According to the singer (whose facial resemblance to him out of the marvellous mechanical carl'n'pete show is Not Helped by the foxy black army jackets the entire band wear), this is because "George Bush is scared of a fucking cartoon". He also compared the Barfly audience to battery chickens, which is sort of cute, but then most things are cute when said by a boy who manages to make me feel old. At the end of the gig - in the Barfly it's impossible for the band to get out except through the audience, and I'd scooted over to try and find a setlist, fangirl brat that I am - I ran into him and told him they were fantastic (in that wonderful non-sequitur way that is the heart of all post-gig band-audience conversation), and he really does look completely twelve. In that actually-in-his-early-twenties way. Not the greatest singer known to mankind, but, well, forgiveness.

They've been compared to Godspeed You Black Emperor!, which I think has something to do with the fact that they make a very loud noise with a violin on top, have films of Doom Despair and Lyrics running throughout their set and also "Black Amnesias" could in fact be the loud bit from a GYBE! song. Mind you, they played after that "George Washington", which is actually bouncy jaunting indie with a charming keyboard line (almost Coldplayesque! but in a credible way) and a violin on top, and the GYBE! coefficient restricted to the guitars, so. There's the über-post-rock bits where you can shut your eyes and go very still and bathe in extremely loud shining noise, and then there's the parts with vocals or where you're staring intently at the violinist trying to hear him playing in the mix or where the rhythm isn't that of tectonic plates stroke celestial spheres stroke paranoid waterfalls stroke sonic fucking cathedrals (someone compared them to Slowdive! "My beloved Slowdive", in fact. The shoegazing revolution is now! You cannot resist! Ahem).

In short: hah! There are good new bands in the UK! And they are not only Too Cute For Words, but they have a violin and play the keyboards with proper curved fingers and the guitar often with something possibly metal that produces the most wonderful sound and they make noise. And they're fantastic.