Let’s do this!

DNKL - Battles (Seekae Remix)

As I was saying to my good friend SMN the other day: post SBTRKT and MNEK, hasn’t the trend for dropping vowels from your name got a bit old? “Yes, MRTN,” he replied. “By the way, it’s time to take a break from those 20-odd pages of gig listings you’re desperately trying to cram into to four pages, it’s #ReviewAnything time.” BLLCKS. Without getting too technical, if you’re going to drop vowels from your name, it’s got to make sense in the first place, giving people a chance to reasonably pronounce it. So who/what is DNKL? I can only presume it’s an acronym for Do Not Know, Like. What was that, their music? Well, the skittering D&B of the first track’s Seekae remix couldn’t quite crowd out a lovely vocal and some sweet mid-80s Fleetwood Mac keyboard washes, and when they’re being themselves, as on Hunt, DNKL are like a warm Radox bath of analogue synth-soul loveliness. “Isn’t that, like, chillwave you’re describing?” you might reasonably ask. Do not know, like. But it’s good. MH

Paul Edis - Bring Me Sunshine

At first, I thought this was akin to a performance from a “special” child at the Pride of Britain Awards - a youthful fellow stuttering into a version of a much-loved classic. Ah, didn’t he do well! Luckily, this jazzy reworking of Morecambe and Wise’s greatest hit broadens into something more worthwhile. The awkward pauses in the first minute are just a tease, as Edis sidles into a stride-piano variation of the kind Jools Holland essays when backing some octogenarian soul ledge on Later… Then it gets complicated in a way Jools would never countenance, more like a Jarrett or Petrucciani encore. It’s still easy-on-the-ear easy-listening, sure, but done with skill and confidence. Let’s hear something original next time. SW

A clubbing blog

Any blog post that starts with “Oilroight, lads? How we doin’, cocka?” immediately makes me uneasy. But this was great. A slightly nostalgic but, at times, caustic look back at the world of Birmingham clubbing, it features the criminally underloved Rapture TV that came to Miss Moneypennys one night in 1998 and let its two presenters get more messed up than the punters they’re supposed to be interviewing (sample line, while talking to a half-naked man in a cowboy hat: “Do you work out? Is it your LIFFFFEEEEE?”). Some of it is beyond the pale – I really didn’t need to know about where, how and with whom you performed a sex act in Ministry Of Sound – but lines such as this more than make up for it: “I once stood upright and proud on the Bakers dancefloor, waving my twiggy arms around behind my sister’s head and gurning as June Sarpong hopped on a podium and screamed, “SEE YOU AFTER THE BREAK” to the MTV Dancefloor Chart camera crew.” It’s a great account of a time when EDM didn’t exist, a film like Human Traffic could get funding, and Russell Brand was busy breezing through clubland taking the piss out of people on pills rather than trying to stick it to the man. LB

Some Eastern Bloc wallpaper

Everyone loves a bit of ephemera, be it old football programmes, air sickness bags, or that picture of your great, great, great grandfather looking a bit bored in 1892. Ephemera is important because allows us to laugh at the past. “Weren’t they stuffy old weirdos”, we sneer, failing to recognise that someday someone will scoff similarly at our listicles and unnecessarily matey packaging. It’s for this reason that I got quite excited by @elena_ccia’s tweet. “Oh, wow, the Soviets,” I thought. “They’re bound to have made some really daft wallpaper.” Grandiose prints of Lenin fighting a bear while dressed as a cosmonaut was what I was hoping for. What I got was picture after picture of artfully decaying floral prints, the sort you’d find in your gran’s dining room or on the cover of a Death Cab For Cutie album. Come on guys, you put a dog into space, couldn’t you have made a bit more of an effort? GM

A John Lewis parody video

How did the John Lewis Christmas advert become an annual cultural event? How did we, as a species, let this happen? A faceless department store employs an ad agency called SnogVisInc or Mcferry-Pliskett-Roux or ‘π’, whose premises are stuffed with pompously vast Macs and breakout areas with ergonomic furniture that costs a billion pounds an armrest that’s perched upon by privately educated people called Trix or Tim that you’d happily slap until you died. Every person, event and product involved in this chain of capitalist horror is so awful there are no words – and those at the end of the chain that coo “ISN’T IT LOVELY I CRIED” are the very worst link of all. Those people on Facebook who haven’t got the cognitive wherewithal to realise that Facebook, like John Lewis ads, is aimed at the intellectually bereft. So let’s rebel, like HappyToast has done. This, where that sexually rampant penguin from this year’s campaign receives his dues and is joyously eaten, is the anarchy symbol scrawled on the bank wall. The call to arms. We should all eat the penguin. Smash the windows. Fight the power. Fight the system in any way, no matter how small, and hold up our hands and say “NO MORE”. And you know what would be a good start? Realising John Lewis is laughing at you because it thinks you’re stupid and never shopping there ever again. LH