A couple of days ago, I did something which I hadn’t done since I was a 17 year old teenager — I went out and bought a new Guns N’ Roses album. Chinese Democracy went through 14 studios, burnt millions of dollars in production and was made over a total of 13 years.

Axl Rose’s voice is as piercing as ever and he sounds in stunning form throughout the album. The album sounds pretty polished and the production quality is just great.

But the album is a complete let-down. The album art is stunningly bland, despite the fact that Axl Rose had more than a decade to figure out how the cover could look like. The music sounds badly, badly dated: hair metal is dead, grunge has come and gone, nu metal/rap rock pushed some boundaries but Guns N’ Roses were probably in some kind of deep frozen stasis mode to even notice.

And for a hard rock album, the tempo is just horrid. There are just no fast-paced tracks to be found; just ballads and other pieces of cheesy, passable music that have minimal melody and are completely hook-free. After listening to the album almost 10 times, I still can’t remember enough to hum a damn tune from this album that was made by the band which brought us classics like Paradise City.

No, wait… the ‘band’ is now just Axl Rose and a bunch of contract musicians. This band should really have been called Hired Guns N’ Axl Rose. And they should have put this album out in 1996, not 2008.

This might sound totally weird, but Microsoft just released an exciting line of graphic t-shirts. The designs are a little on the pretentiously hip and retro side, but I have to say some of the t-shirts look pretty sweet. This is gear from Microsoft I would readily buy. Heck, I’m already looking forward to upgrades.

Match Day Football Programmes is a collection of match day programmes from the golden era of British football (before all the commercialism, professionalism and all that) published by Fuel Design. It features English league (and a few non-league) clubs from 1945 to 1991. At £18 a piece, this pocket sized book is an excellent window into the simpler (albeit amateur) days of the beautiful game.

MTV just launched MTV Music where they have a free database of over 16,000 music videos available free for everyone to watch. They even have an API to perhaps entice geeks to ditch YouTube and MySpace as their source for music videos.

The first thing that went through my mind was “What took them so long?!?”. The second thing that went popped into my head was “They’re calling it MTV Music? How redundant!”.

The third thing I did was to watch Dire Straits‘ Money For Nothing video which was one of the first few things I remember watching on MTV back in the days when they used to show nothing but music videos.

Warning: Video quality is quite crap for the older stuff

One of the more technically advanced gadgets in its day almost 70 years ago, the Jaeger LeCoultre Compass looks as like a very, very polished piece of workmanship. It cost about £40 pounds in 1937 but today, this timeless beauty can fetch about US$2,000.

[Via oobject]

With all the money they made, I suppose the Arctic Monkeys‘ Alex Turner could do whatever the hell he felt like doing. And so maybe he decided to gang up with his friend Miles Kane, start a side project called The Last Shadow Puppets and release a ballsy and ambitious album titled Age of the Understatement that would pay homage and draw inspiration from retro ‘orchestral’ pop music.

Despite the arrangements sounding somewhat familiar (maybe nostalgic is the right word here), the sweeping strings, fulsome percussions and great energy make this a very, very good album. Already I am thinking this should be one of the best albums of the year.

That’s the official video to the new single, Spiralling, from Keane’s upcoming studio album, Perfect Symmetry. I seriously don’t know what the hell is up with the retro (and honestly quite fugly) 80s Max Headroom-esque graphics. The ‘Ohh’ background vocals sounds like it was sampled from EMF’s Unbelievable and they are even some Zoo TV style video walls somewhere in there. A terrifyingly ugly and obnoxiously derivative video that looks like it was done by my neighbour’s 12 year old who could only afford 3D software from two decades ago.

Fail.

I love seeing retro ads but I didn’t know there is an entire cottage industry that sells vintage magazine advertisements. I guess real riches are truly in the niches…

This is just too damn funny — Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie have to be the two most funniest guys on TV for me right now.

We haven’t struck gold in space and my car radio isn’t solar powered at all, at least we have the home computers that was predicted in the 1979 book, The Usborne Book of the Future: A Trip in Time to the Year 2000 and Beyond.

Super retro presentation slides from 1975 — you should check out some of the awesome 70s graphic work in there. Actually, these slides look better than some Powerpoint slides I have seen.

If I had an inclination towards oversized, retro watches, I’d be very keen on the Nixon Rotolog series. They also come in a bunch of other colour combinations but the blue/yellow colour combination is really testing my aversion to oversized watches.

Update: Seems the blue/yellow one is out of stock, so that may have saved me an impulse buy.

I think I still have the classic Iron Maiden album Piece of Mind lying around somewhere on cassette. This shoe is presumably dedicated to that album and is presumably aimed at people like me who bought the album as a teenager.

Or not.

Quantum mechanics is a fascinating subject, but this was exactly the kind of drab, boring videos that were shown in class that would put you to sleep in an atomic instant. This video is highly recommended viewing if you have trouble sleeping.

I sure hope the Firebox.com site accepts international credit cards (update: oh baby, yes they do!) because I am so going to order the remote control K.I.T.T. car as soon as I can. It talks and has that snazzy, retro, swooshing red sensor light in front!

Speaking of Knight Rider, I wonder if they’ll show the NBC Knight Rider TV movie here in Singapore…

[Via Cool Hunting]