Once I have enough money I'm leaving this hellhole for good and I can't wait.
Someone's crying Lord: Kum Ba Yah. Someone's aurally famished Lord: Kum Ba Yah. Someone's going completely insane as a result Lord: Kum Ba Yah. Someone's being a jerk Lord: Kum Ba Yah. But above all someone's singing Lord: Kum Ba Yah. Kum ba Yah do not bow to corporations or war-lords. Blair, Bush, Kim Jong-Il, they want to destroy us because they know the secret power we have in store. More powerful and up to date and exciting than any nuclear weapon those dullards can create: Music. Give President Bush a guitar and laugh him off the world stage. Give Blair a piece noise-generating musical equipment and watch his mind curve to melting snow. Strap a bass on Kim Jong-il and watch his secret police incarcerate him in accordance with his own insane legislation. Give Gordon Brown an acoustic and ask him to knock out a tune- he will not be able to. Now put these things into the hands of the virtuous and see the dual fronteirs of youth and energy surge across the unknown and spray out onto the floor. Tony Blair's favourite group is R.E.M. (only the later stuff mind, and then only the worst tracks like 'Leaving New York') I'm sure he probably likes U2 as well.....David Cameron reckons that his favourite band is The Smiths. I can't see it myself, because in one of their most celebrated tracks Morrissey sings about the Queen being dead. I'm sure if you really grilled him on it he'd admit to liking The Charlatans or even Kula Shaker much more than he likes The Smiths, who he probably hasn't even heard..... What's more, the new leader of the Liberal Democrats, Nick Clegg, claims to really like David Bowie, but probably only the Tin Machine Stuff one would imagine, that being the absolute nadir of Bowie's career. Next you'll be telling me Michael Portillo likes Megadeth. If he did, he'd say his favourite track was their cover of 'Anarchy in the UK' because it's fucking shit. He'd think he was being funny but he'd be wrong because anyone who has ever been even remotely involved with the Conservative party forgoes the right to be funny ever again- that is unless they are being laughed at for their views on the NHS. Are you involved in politics? What's your favourite band? Do you like NWA?
CRIG 0001 'Snakes' single by Stranger Son of WB. it is available on strictly limited edition black vinyl 7" and is available directly from this site (message us), the band or in Piccadilly Records, Manchester. If your bag is brain-drain frazz then this is your bag. If not then you need a new bag. Said single was recently played by Marc Riley on his 6music radio programme. He keeps playing it over and over again, with little to suggest he will ever get enough. Perhaps this phenomenon can be attributed to the irrefutible genius of SSOWB's music. If you would like to hear it in this context then it is available on the internet thus rendering time travel obsolete and unnecessary. However, it is much more important to own your own copy which will cost £3 +p&p.
‘It all means nothing to me’ press release
Julian Donkey Boy are a 3 piece indie-pop band from North Manchester. The ep ‘It all means nothing to me’, released on the painfully independent Kum Ba Yah Records imprint is the band’s first release on a commercially recognised format, following on from a string of low-key CDr albums and eps which most people will sadly never hear until they are reissued as part of an unfeasibly expensive career-spanning box set many years in the future. The tape hiss of earlier bedroom-core releases may be absent this time around but the ‘vibe before perfection’ ethos that made previous works so compelling is notably present. With the title, a track locally felt surface-level nihilism and inconsequence is transformed into an articulate outpouring of affirmative cosmic joy by way of a pleasing melody and a satisfyingly raw vocal performance. Consistent in quality, the rest of the ep features the dynamic sadness ‘Afterthought’ and the quasi-anthemic ‘Fixing to mend’ with both tracks being firmly established favourites of the band’s pathologically devoted fanbase of hair-banded girls and earnest young men.
Look out for ‘It all means nothing to me’ in all good record shops and HMV. Black Sabbath are, without doubt, one of the best bands of all time. If it weren't for Black Sabbath the heaviest thing around would have been Led Zeppelin and heavy metal as we know it would not be. The thing is, although Led Zeppelin are great, sometimes they're just not heavy enough and the innuendo-heavy lyrics can sometimes be annoying. It is because Black Sabbath sonically and lyrically channel the central confusions of humanity that makes them ultimately the more satisfying band. From the opening seconds of their eponymous debut it was clear that Black Sabbath intended to establish themselves as one of the most 'evil' sounding bands of all time. Employing the 'tri-tone' sequence, (banned by the church earlier in the millennium) Black Sabbath crafted one of the most evil riffs of all time, surpassing even the outro of the Beatles’ 'She's so Heavy' which up to then had been the most evil riff. The lyrics seemed to court evil, with Osbourne screams and cries for mercy as if attempting self-exorcism, the likes of which had never been previously heard in music. Certainly bands had screamed before, Little Richard having introduced the practice at the dawn of the rock and roll era, but never before had the devil seemed so manifest to reasonable people. For some, this demonic quality to Sabbath's early work would prove too much, with many listeners becoming very upset. It would, however, not be until their third LP, 1971’s 'Master of Reality', that Sabbath would create the sound that would come to define the musical term 'heavy' in the sense we now know it. Always a band keen to arrest the listener's attention the very second the needle hit the groove, listeners were introduced to the third album with a primitive sample of Ozzy during a post-bong coughing fit. The song, 'Sweet Leaf', would quickly become wholly representative of an era of flux, with the countercultural conceit of the pro-cannabis lyrics being subtly undermined by the crushing new reality that the hard-edged down-tuned riff evinced. With the heady idealism of the Sixties a hazy memory, many younger music fans had taken to hitting bongs as a way of overcoming disillusionment at the failure of their hippy antecedents to engineer any lasting social change and to get high. The release from the reality that hard-core cannabis use provided was naturally accompanied by an interest in the occult and otherworldly, which also found voice in Osbourne’s lyrics. But it was the riffs that really set Sabbath apart from the other rock bands of the era. Tony Iommi, with his propensity for down-tuned and slow riffs created a new sound that directly mimicked (in a sonic sense) the feeling of being high. The best example of this might be found in the opening riff of 'Into the Void'. To unstoned ears, the down-tuned riff would sound as if the record was playing too slow; but to those who had ingested the appropriate amount of cannabis, it made perfect sense. It was as if the band had created a secret pocket of reality that would be hopelessly confusing to anyone but those under the influence of cannabis. Whilst the riff invoked the neuroses of a darkening post-hippie culture, the lyrics once again find Osbourne grappling otherworldly themes in his consideration of the potential utopian future for the seemingly doomed culture in space travel and trans-planetary imperialism. With all hope seemingly lost, Ozzy implores the contemporary generation (who he would name in 'Children of the Grave') to "Leave the earth to Satan and his slaves Leave them to their future in the grave. Make a home where love is there to stay". With the earth on the point of ecological crisis, and the seemingly endless Vietnam War still in full nihilistic swing, it is perhaps easy to see why Osbourne might have seen fit deploy such apocalyptic imagery. Furthermore, his simultaneous addiction to both heroin and cocaine and insatiable appetite for LSD and barbiturates can't have helped. Having firmly established the Sabbath sound with 'Master', the next album presented the band with the challenge of developing a sound that had no precedent other than that they themselves had created. They were, as Osbourne had prophesised, a band truly going ‘Into the Void’. ‘Volume 4’ certainly reflects this. What we find on Volume 4 is a band attempting to brace this void by expanding its musical vision to incorporate a greater diversity of sound. Rather than the relentless rock of previous records ‘Volume 4’ shows a more sensitive side to the band, with the epic pop introspection of ‘Changes’ being a notable example. Although for some the song might now exist irredeemably beneath layers of sentimental goop after Kelly Osbourne’s dire rehash, that its lush pop arrangement represents a significant milestone in the band’s development is irrefutable. Although in Kelly’s version, the line “I’m going through changes†refers to little more than her own egocentric concerns regarding her new found fame following the ‘reality’ TV hit ‘The Osbournes’, the same line in the mouth of her father takes on an entirely different significance. The ‘changes’ in Ozzy’s original are not merely those taking place in his own life but those of the human universe thus lending the line an altogether more satisfying freight of meaning than Kelly’s egoistic whinging whilst raising important considerations as to the time-sensitive nature of poetry. One must be careful not to overstate the importance of ‘Changes’ as the fact remains that it was susceptible to the damage caused by Kelly Osbourne. Had she chosen a different a song with which to trade on her father’s legacy such as ‘Into the Void’ then I believe the legacy of the original would be untainted. That said, ‘Changes’ did play an important role in introducing a melodic dynamic that would be most agreeably incorporated on their next album ‘Sabbath Bloody Sabbath’(SBS). The record sleeve of SBS may be viewed as a helpful analogy of how the sound achieved on this most accessible and complex Black Sabbath record braces the dialectic of the sacred and profane to masterful effect. The sleeve depicts a supine man who we may fairly assume has been engaged in the sacred act of love making surrounded biblical symbols of the profane in the snake and the rat thus visually portraying the dialectic tension from which the album draws its inspiration and power. We find that the faith (Christian or otherwise) to which Ozzy appealed in the opening of ‘Black Sabbath’ (‘Oh please God help me’) has given way to a sense of profound metaphysical doubt. The cultural backdrop of a televised Vietnam war and mounting ecological and cold war fears may go some way to explaining why this might be with such horrors serving to challenge the existence of a benevolent force of universal moral good. Such is the mood of metaphysical enquiry that presides over the album. However, to see the album simply as an expression of doubt is grossly reductive. The album isn’t simply contest that the horrors of reality evidence the Nietzschean pronouncement that ‘God is Dead’ but much rather a quest towards affirmation. Although the Profane may be well represented on the album and may be its starting point, the Sacred is its ultimate destination and is very much present in the implicit ecstasies of the band’s new found way with a pop melody. It is in the spirited melodies of songs such as ‘Looking for Today’ and ‘Spiral Architect’ that ideas of the Sacred are kept alive and the dialectic tensions effectively braced and channelled as musical power. ‘Looking for Today’ might be seen as the key example of this. The lyrics, as the title suggests, find the poet in search of a meaningful reality in the present. There seems to him nothing but history and plans for the future. His quest echoes the Zen impetus towards ‘living in the moment’, but rather than this quest be a bohemian accoutrement as it was for many of his hippie predecessors Osbourne’s layman mysticism seems born of real desperation and casts the profane nature of early-Seventies reality into a fittingly negative relief. Although such a line may immediately express doubt, it is a doubt that is simultaneously answered by the affirmative melody of the music and thus the power of the sacred/profane dialectic tension is unleashed upon the ears. After that, they went off the boil a bit, releasing the patchy Sabotage with the artwork, depicting a tired looking Ozzy, prefiguring his exit from the group. After that Black Sabbath, for the most part, fell in line with the rest of the early 80’s metal pack. But without the punk energy of Motorhead and the subtle ironies of Judas Priest’s cod posturing, their relevance soon faded. It has long been a commonplace of Sabbath criticism to dismiss Ronnie James Dio as an inferior singer to Osbourne. And although the overall quality of Sabbath’s material took a dive after Ozzy’s departure, it must be said that he had quite a good voice and made the best of a bad situation even if he knew deep down that all his musical output sucked without exception. It would be nigh on 20 years before Ozzy would rejoin the rest of the band for a string of reunion gigs in the late 1990’s. Having witnessed one of these gigs at when I was 16 I can tell you that although they put on a good show and played everything a Sabbath fan could want to hear, I couldn’t suppress the feeling that they weren’t channelling the dialectic tensions of the sacred and the profane in quite the same way as they did back in 1973.
It's Kristmas everyone! And if there's one thing we like here at Kum Ba Yah Records it's Kristmas...and Krosswords! That's why we've devised this kunning Kommemorative Kristmas Kryptic Krossword Kwiz! And there certainly won't be a cross word said about this Krossword because the first person to solve it will win the 150 copies of the recently reissued Julian Donkey Boy ep 'It all means nothing to me'....So join in and give it your very festive best, because Christmas is a time when people of all colours, creeds and religions come together to celebrate the birth of God's son, Jesus. Good luck Krossword fans and a very merry Kum Ba Yah Kristmas to you all! Merry Christmas every one!!! And a Happy New Year! Have a cracking Christmas everyone! And to every one of you Merry Christmas and a happy New Year. Merry Christmas!!!
KLUES!!
Down
1. "I must say, I like your hamster"
"That's a piece of bread"
"fanfare please!!" (7)
3. Going once...going twice...who wants to be killed? (6)
4. Home to the London Eye (6)
5. Mass destruction? Sounds agreeable! (4)
Across
2. "I'm thirsty nurse, do we have any ink?" "Certainly my learned coleague."(5)
5. I'll-be-your-man, Earl, after eating your bready inventions. (we hear) (3,10)
7. A famous actor's surname (2,4)