Matthew Sheret.com

Most of the last week has seen me holed up in WAW+P towers, picking away at some of the threads hanging on next weekend’s takeover of Notting Hill Arts Club. If I were a Weeknotes kind of person I’m sure I’d go into detail about the lessons we’ve learned, but actually the micro-view of that process doesn’t quite feel right, either for myself or WAW+P. What I’m trapped in at the moment is something closer to The Long Angst wherein all sense of perspective and judgement is lost amid a clutching emptiness somewhere just underneath my ribcage. My back is so tight you could use it as a string instrument. If you’re not me though it’s going to be a great day.

In the meantime, my review of Los Campesinos! new album Romance Is Boring went live up at Global Comment. I felt a strange frustration listening to the record, wondering why the lyrical ennui was so present in the face of the escapism and excitement both the music and their lives as musicians can instill.

“I know people whose lives are lived in a state of momentum – both internationally and within London – that I need to think twice about phoning in case I get an international dial tone or just slow them down. They are far from rock stars. This when every day I find myself surrounded by a ‘no future’ rhetoric of financial stagnation that chokes the half formed dreams of school-age Brits. At the same I’ve spent all day listening to an album by people who have barely graduated that’s all about interstates and momentum rather than England’s pylons and crumbling piers, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Except that, also, everything is wrong with that, because if you acknowledge the escapism it takes to get there then you can change lives.”

More after the link (and two compliments that’ll charm me for weeks).

Of course there’s a lesson for me too in that excerpt too; organising WAW+P can be frustrating and difficult, but I’m really proud I’m able to do that kind of thing, and honored to be doing it with the people I am.