Telling tales
Some fans of The White Stripes, myself among them, have been wary of the polish and professionalism of The Raconteurs. Part of the appeal of The White Stripes has been their rawness and brute energy. They've updated the blues for a wider, but still discerning, audience and they have bags of attitude. The White Stripes have always been eclectic, but I was slightly put off by what seemed, on first listen, to be The Raconteurs' knowing musicianship. I've now been converted. On this week's show they give a blistering performance of Carolina Drama, a track from their latest album Consolers of the Lonely. We'll have the song up on the website as soon as possible, but you can watch it now on iPlayer. The Raconteurs also have a great web 1.0 site - it's worth checking out.
© MMIX~RS~q~RS~~RS~z~RS~56~RS~)
Comments
Its not a competition. They are both great bands. This is rare enough in itself. A single person driving 2 excellent and quite different bands. There is a genuine sense of credibility about the Raconteurs. Even the name is simple and meaningful. This band deliver great stories with honesty and passion. To be musically hot is not a crime. It just makes repeated listening more enjoyable and therefore increases the life of the listening experience.
guitarmafia
Complain about this comment
I’ve always been intrigued by the origins of things. From whence did they originate? How did they come about? What gave rise to it being done so, rather than not? Now, one can read about the origins of almost anything; man, earth, the side parting. You can do so by using THE great modern invention of our time – the web. Or the old fashioned way, by reading a book. Here you will find a myriad of different theories, put forward by an equally dazzling list of authors claiming to have THE definitive solution. Equally, and perhaps more satisfying, there are events that have occurred that cannot be fundamentally explained, or if they can, certainly not in a way that allows my mind to picture the event. Take, for example, the Moai statues of Easter Island. Now various theories place the creation of these statues at differing periods separated by centuries. What they all agree on is, they were created using stone not indigenous to the island. And certainly not a stone that was transportable by any known means. Which begs the question, “How did they get there?” My mind can’t even fathom such an event occuring…well, actually I can, but to realise it, one would require a Dreamworks production budget and most would then just argue that it was far fetched. Similarly, my mind and imagination hit a vacuum like wall when challenged to imagine what time must have been like prior to what many like to call The Big Bang. This is my favourite description of The Big Bang, “a cosmological model of the universe that is best supported by all lines of scientific evidence and observation. The essential idea is that the universe has expanded from a primordial hot and dense initial condition at some finite time in the past and continues to expand to this day.” Come again? I don’t get it. First I don’t get how something is growing at an infinite level. What exists on the other side of infinity? It’s growing, right? Well, what’s it growing into? A big space? A big empty space that drops as deep as it ascends high? An ocean of nothingness that drops into an abyss of nada…? Exactly. I just can’t do it. Then, there is the issue of what existed before tick tick boom? Again, we’re told that, “the universe was filled homogeneously and isotropically with an incredibly high energy density, huge temperatures and pressures, and was very rapidly expanding and cooling. Approximately 10-35 seconds into the expansion, a phase transition caused a cosmic inflation, during which the universe grew exponentially. After inflation stopped, the universe consisted of a quark-gluon plasma, as well as all other elementary particles. Temperatures were so high that the random motions of particles were at relativistic speeds, and particle-antiparticle pairs of all kinds were being continuously created and destroyed in collisions. At some point an unknown reaction called baryogenesis violated the conservation of baryon number, leading to a very small excess of quarks and leptons over antiquarks and anti-leptons—of the order of 1 part in 30 million. This resulted in the predominance of matter over antimatter in the present universe.” Yes but antiquarks, antischmarks…what did the gaff look like? I mean just try and fathom it. Bearing in mind that nothing existed in this ‘infinite density’ you can’t start imagining swirls of clouds, or “C-beams shimmering in the dark at the Tannhouser Gate.” And that for me is the fundamental intrigue, letting the imagination run to a point so far removed from the shackles of time and space that no book or theory can actually paint the picture. It instead requires an experience of the event. The joy of unchartered territory is that no one can tell you you’re wrong…
www.oneloveformusic.com
Complain about this comment
View these comments in RSS