Anyone for Rickets?

Finally got this at the weekend. Recognisably Ladytron and yet varied and satisfying. Their first album (LP/CD/Whatever) was the sound of eighties synths and drum machines squeezed into a bathroom by the ghost of Joe Meek. Later LPs have gradually expanded the reverb to the size of an elephant, making Ladytron into the techno Cocteaus. There is very little straying from the musical path set by the first few bars of each track but that may just be the manifestation of the desire to get away from the techno/dub tricks that made early synth bands so varied (See

Love and Dancing). It needs to be played loud. Any band that gets reviews in both Wire and Word is fine by me. In fact maybe I will live for a year using that as the criterion for buying records. Or maybe not.

Interesting article here echoing my own rants about the nostalgic desire for the return of the old days. I suppose this is really the wish to return to youth where the carefree life was nothing to do with the fact that we had less things to worry about but more because our parents did all the worrying for us. Now I am a parent, I do the worrying for my children. And just last night I was moaning about having to go into work while the kids got to lie in and then play for at least a-further four weeks. Having said that, I suppose that there has been a real increase in the complexity of life but I put that down to corporate obfuscation, the desire to attach a financial aspect to almost everything that in years gone by would have been almost a human right and just plain incompetence and blindness to the simplicity of things. I was watching a short programme about the Tube Map yesterday. This icon is an pure example of where ignoring a huge amount of complexity produces something both beautiful and practical. There was also mention of the two sides of good design being technical ability and intuition. Conspiracy nuts would like us to think that the complexity is a planned thing - designed to obscure the real way of the truth and the light. For a long time I have thought that complexity is mostly due to plain lack of talent. Further discussion is outside the scope of this entry - partly because I am not clever enough to carry on any analysis and partly because I am bored.

I like well-defined areas of doubt and uncertainty just as I like well-defined complexity - what I can't stand is chaos - unless of course it is defined by an equation. It may be for this reason that early mornings seem to depress me at the moment. I am trying (and succeeding) to keep my work and home lives separate at the moment which means not thinking about work when out of hours. This seems to leave me not sure of what I am actually going to do until I have reached my desk and got hold of the directories/programs/emails which define all office life these days. I pick up quickly though, leaving me happy on the way home. The rain CD helps as well. I often find myself looking up with a hope that it really is raining. It was this morning but just drizzle.