Michael Knight's Blog
-
Michael Knight in Kim
Interestingly, this non-entity is the second result for "Kim" in Google. On Thursday you can witness more ontologically sound entertainment, however:
Michael Knight
Kim, Brunnenstrasse 10
Donnerstag, 19 März, 21 Uhr
Eintritt: FREI
DJ Martin Petersdorf
There'll be a gig in Madame Claude on the 3rd April too; more details to follow.
-
Gig 16th October
Hi all,
I shall eschew the usual entertaining framing devices this time, which is actually what I did in the last Michael Knight mailout, if any of you were subjected to that, and state simply that there's a singer/songwriter evening tomorrow night (16th) in Bang Bang Club beside Hackescher Markt, at which I shall play 2/3 songs. It is, I believe 7/8 euro at the door. It should be fun of some sort, and an appropriate aperetif for the next full band gig on the 9th of November. Full details:
16. Oktober 21h Bang Bang Club
amSTARt - Singer/Songer Nacht IV.
AKG + HG von G.a.t.B.
gitarre-stimme. myspace.com/..grimmandthebrothers
Aron Habits
Prenztroit. Oh Yeah. myspace.com/aronhabits
D. Cooper
gitarre-stimme. kruidenrecords myspace.com/dcooperthepigbirds
Getting Up Every Morning
gitarre-stimme-glockenspiel gettingupeverymorning.com
John Edward Donald
gitarre-tape. dog eared, scribble kite myspace.com/humanelephant
Martha Rose
gitarre-stimme. England myspace.com/martharosemusic
Marzipan Marzipan
soft noiselo-fi discodance and countryswing larsdideriksen.com/..marzipanmarzipan
neu geben
gitarre-stimme-tape. showtunes myspace.com/neugeben
Race Car
harmonium-stimme. Berlin. myspace.com/justinebeatty
Richard Murphy
keyboard-stimme. M.Knight. Irland yesboyicecream.com
SchneiderFM
gitarre-stimme www.mirrorworldmusic.com
Secret Hiding Place
gitarre-stimme. Schweiz
Skirt
gitarre-stimme. ex - RaketeJR myspace.com/skirtmusik
-
Pen sharpening
"Lush, complex classical arrangements adorn this cross between operetta, sitcom and Smiths song. Irishman Richard Murphy's lyrics, written in Berlin after a break-up, sound grimly autobiographical. A story of failure in the music business is here counterpointed by tales of the narrator's boastful infidelity, which culminate in stalking a one-night stand to her workplace. The title track paints a final, stable relationship as socially acceptable defeat. The music feels over-egged, the lyrics needlessly jokey, masking real ambition, emotion or irony." Uncut
"I'm not entirely clear why Richie Murphy isn't already a huge star in his own country. Why did his band, Michael Knight, have to leave Dublin for Berlin to seek their fortune? Do people just not get their sense of humour here? Or is it just that their elaborate, meticulously arranged pop and highly literate lyricism are just too clever-clever for mainstream tastes here?
Whatever, this state of affairs will surely be put right with their flamboyant second album, explanatorily subtitled 'A Somewhat Disjointed Narrative in 11 Tableux'. A loosely connected series of sharp, witty and acutely observed musings on the high and lows of love and life, it's set to a musical score that is, by turns, quaintly ramshackle and astonishingly accomplished. A fine ensemble cast of singers and musicians flow in and out of Murphy's intricate missive, each song a joyful nugget in its own peculiar right.
From the post-modern sleaze of 'Coronation Street' to the ironic triumph of the title track, Murphy's theatrical wit and daring sense of melody puts him on a footing with the likes of Stephen Merritt, Neil Hannon and even Noel Coward. A truly victorious album." State Magazine
"So much that is original and unusual about away-from-the-mainstream music-making informs this second album from Richard Murphy and his collective: a sleeve like a tattered, secondhand book; lyrics presented in play-script form; a sprawling opening track of Swingle-Singers-on-the-lash vocal ravings; the threat that beneath the formal, chamber-pop structures, chaos lurks and dissonance hums; the primacy of the artistic vision, with nothing sweetening or diluting its purpose. Deluded misanthropists, defeated idealists, becalmed lovers, materialistic arrivistes and vengeful exes people the "11 Tableaux", with Murphy's laconic singing and Bacharachian progressions just about joining the dots. Pretty odd, but rather fine." The Sunday Times
"Sometimes, certain bands of immaculate quality manage to slip through the net, while the ones with the financial backing, PR company and big-budget press campaign are shamelessly snagged and thrown to the masses for public consumption and undeserved success. Michael Knight's 2005 debut 'Youth Is Wasted On the Young' was one of that year's best Irish albums, but was sinfully overlooked by all but a discerning few.
That scandalous oversight is about to be rectified, however, by the now Berlin-based protagonist of Michael Knight, Richie Murphy. If 'Youth..' was a collection of gloriously sun-saturated, piano-permeated pop that wryly embraced the halcyon days of adolescence, its follow-up is an older, more worldly-wise and perhaps cynical cousin, who's determined to tell it like it is.
Attention to detail unmistakably reigns supreme in Murphy's house: from the artwork to the album concept (a 'somewhat disjointed narrative in 11 tableaux', in its own words), to the guest appearances (Nina Hynes and Miriam Ingram both feature),I'm Not Entirely Clear How I Ended Up Like This is infused with both a dark humour and a self-deprecating melancholy that's evident in both lyrics and music - see Coronation Street, Reading Old Diary Entries and You People Are Idiots for illustrative glum chuckles.
Put it like this: a musician who can create a song from three minutes of nothing but "Ahh ahh aahs" (Dumbshow) and still make it a joy to listen to has to be doing something right. A wonderful album, from a supreme songwriting talent." www.entertainment.ie
"Subtitled 'A Sometime Disjointed Narrative in 11 Tableaux', the Dublin band led by Richard Murphy attempt to combine classical music and pop to tell everyday stories about dysfunctional relationships. In their Myspace influences, Bacharach follows Beethoven and Nabokov sits alongside Mussorgsky but you could add Stephin Merritt and Neil Hannon to the list to sum up the combination of classic pop notions and scabrous wit presented here. The concept is interesting enough and the presentation is superb - sleeve like a battered paperback, lyric booklet looking half like an opera libretto and half a soap-opera script - but it only works about half the time. 'Coronation Street' has a memorably scything guitar riff and 'And The Party Was My Idea' has some lovely arrangements but after a while the lyrics become more interesting than the music (a feeling reinforced if you listen to the bonus CD of instrumental versions).
There's plenty of humour in the words; 'Reading Old Diary Entries' starts "November 8: failed to sell those tapes/ nobody likes Menswear anymore' while 'Scenes After A Hard Day's Work' is the tale of a stalker told in waltz time. Even so, the chronology of the mundane eventually dulls and the way that language is sometimes forced into lyrical structures become strained. It's literate and sophisticated music that overreaches itself but, then, that's what ambition does." www.soundsxp.com
"In a world where the best thing you can say about some bands is anthemic or heartfelt I'm happy to report that this Dublin-based indie band are neither. Neither are they at the end of the reading queue. Michael Knight are apparently named after an 'Irish writer chiefly remembered for a series of transparently self serving polemics thinly disguised as fiction.' So not as you may have thought an eighties TV character with a killer car. They are the brainchild of Ritchie Murphy a purveyor of deadpan pop with breezy harmonies and bittersweet lyrics. They now release their album 'I'm Not Entirely Sure How I Ended Up Like This,' which is named after George Bernard Shaw's best line and the follow up to 2005's 'Youth Is Wasted On The Young.'
They describe it as 'a somewhat disjointed narrative in 11 tableaux,' which is exactly what it is. The prologue 'Dumbshow,' is a flourishy instrumental with ah ah vocalising which leads into act one 'Coronation Street.' It's a pleasant sonnet where the star crossed lovers duet over what sounds like the theme to a seventies cop show. And so the play unravels with random conversation set to a soundtrack of cello, double bass, trumpet, mandolin and accordion. The dramatis personae enter and exit stage left after contributing to the vocal melange.
The quirky scattered themes lead to some great turns of phrase. 'You People Are Idiots,' proffers the line 'What's the point of reading Baudelaire if that fact I'm unable to share.' 'Reading Old Diary Entries,' is what it says on the tin. The line 'Failed to sell those tapes. Nobody likes Menswear anymore,' is accompanied by piano and strings. 'When Will You Collect Your Boxes,' finds Nina Hynes declaring 'how can you stand such hideous curtains?' The title track ends 'ooh a week in Las Palmas would be a nice break or we could save up for a conservatory. Victory is mine.'
This experimental tunage is jammed with unusual chord changes and odd song structures. The Piano-based indie-pop sounds like The Divine comedy in a parallel universe or Belle and Sebastian scoring a Samuel Beckett play. MK say their album is a comically failed attempt to repackage humiliating personal episodes with the joke on someone else. While it has charming little melodies and refreshing insights this album is like their own private in joke. I'm sure their mates will love it."
www.subba-cultcha.com
"Michael Knight are a band, not a person. This deceptively awkward misnomer had me writing out half of this review with erroneous grammar, before I bothered to read their press release. It also makes it hard to slip the band's name into IN REAL LIFE conversation:
"Have you heard Michael Knight's new album?"
"Who's he?"
"Oh no, it's a band… they're called Michael Knight."
Not that I've had such a conversation – Michael Knight's album isn't worth bringing up in an IN REAL LIFE conversation. Nor has anyone outside of Ireland heard of them either, so this made-up discourse falls at the first hurdle. I'm Not Entirely Sure How I Ended Up Like This – the second album from Berlin-based/Irish-born protagonist Richie Murphy and his associated musicians – leaves me with ambivalent feelings, so much so that I was going to make the pun 'I'm Not Entirely Sure If I Like This'. Ooops.
I admire this record's sound – it purveys a charming blend of eerie, cinematic indie-rock and piano-driven swoons. There's just something lacking in the songs though – oh yeah, actual songs. Eleven tracks and 25 minutes in, its confused attire makes me crave for something substantial, something that will give me some kind of opinion on it either way. It's a likeable, but empty record. As it is, the instrumentation is foreboding and overbearingly grandiose, while the band's poetry is given little space for praise with Murphy's timid voice at the helm. The final mix sounds so decidedly average.
Those lyrics, somewhat understated throughout, are at their blackly melancholic best on 'Coronation Street'. It's actually the most interesting track instrumentally, too, with lush Spaghetti-western whistling and girly vocal coos. In stark comparison, 'And The Party Was My Idea' segues into a bland melange of overwrought orchestration and lazy vocals, which even Brian O'Shaughnessy (a man who as put his name to production skills to My Bloody Valentine and Primal Scream records) can't save from mediocrity.
Some parts of I'm Not Entirely Sure How I Ended Up Like This remind me of a modern-day Lee Hazlewood. But with that kind of comparison comes great expectation, and Michael Knight just make me yearn to put on Requiem For A Lost Lady* instead. If anyone wants to explain to me the value in this record, then by all means, please do. It took me a while to 'get' The Velvet Underground too.
*an album that everyone should own, especially those with delusions of owning a good music collection." www.drownedinsound.com
"Michael Knight, not a person but a band named after a fictional character, surround their second album I'm Not Entirely Clear How I Ended Up Like This with a lot of rigmarole designed to amplify the album's stature as art, or at least to self-consciously poke fun at the notion of doing the same. So the album package looks like a well-worn book; the lyrics are set up like the text of a play; there is a faux author bio; and the entire affair comes with the subtitle "A Somewhat Disjointed Narrative in 11 Tableaux". If those aren't enough devices for you, the album comes on two discs: one the album of pop songs, the other an instrumental version of the same. Alas, the hoopla around the album package sets up a framework of expectation the music itself can't live up to. The band throws strings, Morricone and musical-theater reference points, and lyrics likely to be called "literary" around songs in the Andrew Bird/Rufus Wainwright terrain that are at base, average. The instrumental version highlights some of the prettier trappings of the songs, while inevitably pointing out their less interesting structures." www.popmatters.com
"At some point in the past 12 months Richie Murphy decamped from Ireland and set up shop in Berlin. It seems a good fit considering Germany's endless un-ironic ardour for all things Hasselhoffian and that the fact that Murphy is the star around which everything Michael Knight (the band, rather than the TV character) related orbits. He's hardly the first musician to do make a similar move. Bowie, Lou Reed and U2 are all notable names that have produced some of their most acclaimed work in the German capital and the city is the current home of Liars, who since moving there a few years ago have made the two best albums of their career.
I'm not entirely clear how I ended up like this, Michael Knight's second album was mostly recorded in Ireland so any suggestion that the quality of this album has anything to do with some mystical musical talent that all visitors to the Brandenburg Gate are somehow blessed with rather than with Murphy's natural gifts as a songwriter can bugger right off. At his best Murphy trades in the sort of lushly arranged sophisticated yet slightly archaic pop that brings to mind an entirely devoid of smugness Neil Hannon or a not utterly in love with himself Rufus Wainwright. That's assuming that either such thing actually exists in nature, based on recent reports those particular anthropological quests continue unabated.
It would be easy to say that there's a timeless quality to this record but I don't think that that would be entirely accurate. For me it conjures up very evocative images of a specific time and place. England between the wars, there's women wearing those silly sparkly hats and they're all discussing this spiffing new dance from America called the Charleston. Hugh Laurie hasn't yet gone to med school and picked up a bad approximation of an American accent. Nor has Stephen Fry become an international treasure thanks to his mocking of a not as dumb as he pretends to be Aston Villa supporter. In the corner sits Murphy at a piano, accompanied by a string section he sings his wryly cynical songs to a crowd unaware of how much he's scoffing at them. As to why he's got an electric guitar and a delay pedal, which drags my daydream into the present, with him? Everyone should be allowed the odd anachronistic goof in their flights of fancy."
Thrill Pier
"Buying/receiving albums in bulk; it can often be weeks/months/years before I get around to actually removing them from their packaging, never mind listening to them. Sometimes though, an albums artwork is such that it moves swiftly to the top of the playlist. Such was the case with I'm Not Entirely Clear How I Ended Up Like This, the second album from Michael Knight, not a person, but a collective of musicians under the stewardship of Dublin Born/Berlin Based Richie Murphy. Designed to look like a well read book, it has the subtitle: 'A Somewhat Disjointed Narrative in 11 Tableaux' and the lyrics are printed in the style of a play. If that's not enough for you, the listener has a choice of two disks, one with the songs as they were recorded and a second disk of instrumental versions.
Unfortunately, that's as good as it gets with I'm Not Entirely Clear... as what follows is 35 minutes of acoustic doodling that too often confuses self-deprecation with self-consciousness and song structure with overwrought orchestral arrangements. Combined with Murphy's weak vocals it all adds up to something akin vanilla cheesecake; somebody may have put a great deal of effort into making it and it may contain lots of fine ingredients but the final product is just too bland for my tastes. Besides, Neil Hannon and Stephen Merritt already carry this faux-vaudeville act with much more panache.
That being said, there are moments of pleasure on I'm Not Entirely Clear... The deliciously dark Coronation Street sees Murphy and Nina Hynes (her vocals being by far and a way the brightest star in an otherwise dull sky) duet over the albums most interestingly arranged track. Lyrically there is a great deal of humour in the words but as with most of the tracks on the album it often feels like you're being excluded from one big in joke. The instrumental disk is also worth a listen once, just to hear some of the more interesting structures and chord changes but begins to sound like the soundtrack to an art installation towards the end.
Michael Knight state that this album is 'a comically failed attempt to repackage humiliating personal episodes with the joke on someone else.' Perhaps the joke's on me and that's why I'm not laughing." Cluas.ie
-
Album Launch Sugar Club May 3rd
Current mood:
You'll be grateful to know that I initially attempted to make this message more entertaining by writing it as a dialogue in the style of one of those annoying radio ads, except it was going to be clever and self-referential and go off in all sorts of fanciful directions, while still conveying the information it was meant to convey - but found that it was in fact just boring and pretentious. So, suitably chastened, I present the required details, and no unnecessary literary stylings:
blustery
Michael Knight launch their new album "I'm Not Entirely Clear How I Ended Up Like This" on May 3rd in the Sugar Club, 8 Lower Leeson Street, Dublin. Support on the night from Patrick Freyne and Mackerel the Cat. Doors 8pm. 10 euro on the door.
This gig's unique selling points include a full band of indeterminate number, clumsy attempts to couch on-stage nervousness as ironic banter, and at least one interminable between-song pause culminating in the plugging-in of a hitherto inexplicably malfunctioning keyboard. Although, considering previous shows, these aren't particularly unique. There'll be some sort of "disco", I think they're called, afterwards, and if the label will finally stump up for it, you can have your mind blown by dancing on these tiles. The record hits the stores very soon, or it can be bought NOW from various online locations, such as this one.
For those further afield, or unable to make the 3rd, we'll also be playing the following shows in support of iLiKETRAiNS:
May 8 Roisin Dubh, Galway
May 9 Cyprus Avenue, Cork
May 10 Crawdaddy, Dublin
Some nice words about the record (you can listen to songs here) from the press people:
"So much that is original and unusual about away-from-the-mainstream music-making informs this second album from Richard Murphy and his collective: a sleeve like a tattered, secondhand book; lyrics presented in play-script form; a sprawling opening track of Swingle-Singers-on-the-lash vocal ravings; the threat that beneath the formal, chamber-pop structures, chaos lurks and dissonance hums; the primacy of the artistic vision, with nothing sweetening or diluting its purpose. Deluded misanthropists, defeated idealists, becalmed lovers, materialistic arrivistes and vengeful exes people the "11 Tableaux", with Murphy's laconic singing and Bacharachian progressions just about joining the dots. Pretty odd, but rather fine." The Sunday Times
"I'm not entirely clear why Richie Murphy isn't already a huge star in his own country. Why did his band, Michael Knight, have to leave Dublin for Berlin to seek their fortune? Do people just not get their sense of humour here? Or is it just that their elaborate, meticulously arranged pop and highly literate lyricism are just too clever-clever for mainstream tastes here?
Whatever, this state of affairs will surely be put right with their flamboyant second album, explanatorily subtitled 'A Somewhat Disjointed Narrative in 11 Tableux'. A loosely connected series of sharp, witty and acutely observed musings on the high and lows of love and life, it's set to a musical score that is, by turns, quaintly ramshackle and astonishingly accomplished. A fine ensemble cast of singers and musicians flow in and out of Murphy's intricate missive, each song a joyful nugget in its own peculiar right.
From the post-modern sleaze of 'Coronation Street' to the ironic triumph of the title track, Murphy's theatrical wit and daring sense of melody puts him on a footing with the likes of Stephen Merritt, Neil Hannon and even Noel Coward. A truly victorious album." State Magazine