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Gruff Rhys recommended Vintage Violence by John Cale in Music (curated)

 
Vintage Violence by John Cale
Vintage Violence by John Cale
(0 Ratings)
Album Favorite

"It's got the charm of a debut album and he is someone who has inspired me a great deal. I suppose he was taking time off the avant-garde of New York in this album but I like the idea that he was 27 or something and he had already been in the Velvet Underground, which was unlikely for anyone from Garnant in any case - he was making a pop album for a major label in LA and driving around in sports cars and things! Overall, it's not his most experimental or brutal record but the songs are charming and it's still really influential. You can hear 'Sound & Vision' by Bowie is a complete lift from 'Cleo' on this album, it's obviously a record that seeped into people's collections so a music fan like Bowie would have been aware of this album. It's a really interesting pop record and I think as a musician still working, he offers quite an inspirational path as to how you can still experiment. The Super Furries collaborated with him for the film Beautiful Mistake - we got to be his backing band. It was so interesting, it was like an out of body experience for us. I think it was interesting for him as he hadn't had band practice in the Welsh language since the early-1960s or something!"

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    Combo Organ Model V

    Combo Organ Model V

    Music

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    Combo Organ Model V is a musical keyboard app for iPad/iPhone/iPod touch that simulates the electric...

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David McK (3425 KP) rated Fatherland in Books

Dec 20, 2022  
Fatherland
Fatherland
Robert Harris | 2012 | Fiction & Poetry
5
7.7 (3 Ratings)
Book Rating
Robert Harris's best-selling alt-history novel, basically asking what the world would be like if the Nazis had won WW2, and following the investigation by a police officer in the 1960s when a naked body is found floating in a lake on the outskirts of Berlin just ahead of Hitler's 75th birthday, leading to the uncovering of a vast conspiracy...

A conspiracy covering up events, in the 'real' world, anyone with even the slightest knowledge of WW2 history would know about. And rightfully so.

That, I felt, was my biggest problem with the novel - there was just no sense of mystery or intrigue, no real 'what-will-happen-to-the-characters-next?' that made me really want to read on - indeed, there were times that I had to force myself to continue rather than starting another book.

From a personal POV, I think I would have preferred more emphasis on the the alt-history portions of the story (how did Germany win the war? What happened in the UK? To name but two ...) than on the central mystery: to me, at least, the balance is out of whack, favouring the mystery over the little nuggets of such information carefully doled out throughout the course of the novel.

I'm also not that much a fan of cliff-hanger endings, personally ...