Stereo Sanctity

2012-01-19T19:04:00.007Z

THE FORTY-TWO BEST RECORDS OF 2011:
Part # 9

Fucking hell, FINALLY!

5. Bong – Beyond Ancient Space (Ritual Productions)

Yeah, I know – not much of a name is it? “Hey man, what shall we call our stoner doom band?” “How about… Bong!” Much like those indie bands who call themselves things like ‘Amplifier’ and ‘The Drums’, it doesn’t exactly fill one with hope regarding the imaginative breadth of the music within. I might have passed over this one, or else never noticed it at all, had some kind soul not recommended it to me one day. I’m very glad they did recommend it, and I would like to sincerely thanks them for the steer, because ‘Beyond Ancient Space’ is simply some of the best psychedelic music I’ve heard in years.

First track is a bit slow to get going, building up from silence with some ominous, Sunn 0)))-esque ritual incantation. Ho hum. Soon as the first roar of sub-bass hits and the drummer splutters into life though – whoa. All bets are off. Draw the curtains, lights off. Any fucker who dares phone or ring the doorbell in the next hour is gonna have to wait. This is gonna be epic.

Ostensibly still a doom metal album, ‘Beyond Ancient Space’ exists in similar proximity to its parent genre as Alice Coltrane’s ‘Journey In Satchidananda’ does to jazz – using its skeleton merely as a basecamp from which to take off into uncharted realms of pure, blissful, bottomless psychedelia.

You know that bit in ‘Phantasm’, where Mike gets pulled through the Tall Man’s dimensional gateway and sees that column of mindless, hooded dwarves trudging across an endless expanse of red-lit desert by the light of a hazy, dying sun? You don’t? Well let’s pretend you do, and let’s imagine if, instead of a horrifying vision of a life of emotionally-stunted, death-ruled interplanetary drudgery, that had actually been really cool and he’d decided to go with it and join their ranks. That’s kind of what listening to the 25 minutes of ‘Onward To Perdonaris’ is like – a churning maelstrom of distortion, like some eternal death march across burning sands, whilst a forboding Eastern-tuned sitar/tamboura type riff shimmers overhead, heavily-phased open strings chiming like the bell of some phantasmagorical galleon.

Bypassing the assaultive/headache-inducing compression favoured by groups like Electric Wizard, Bong instead concentrate on summoning the more dynamic, analogue-ish widescreen dronescape beloved of Earth and Sleep – potentially muffled at low volumes, but completely overwhelming when cranked at a half-decent system, a form of diffuse obliteration that works particularly well when middle track ‘Across The Timestream’ hoves into view on the desert horizon.

By this stage, the undertow of bass feedback – hard to tell from whose cabinets it originated – has grown so monolithic that it proceeds to swallow the guitarist and bassist altogether, solidifying into a sound that’s less like a three piece rock band, more like a duet between the drummer and the endless roar of herculean thrusters powering some derelict, unmanned freighter through the depths of deep space.

I should say a few words about the drummer actually. Often, the demands of doom metal –especially in as extreme a form as this – can impose substantial limitations and challenges upon humble keepers of the beat, driving them either toward lumpen repetition or distracting experimentalism. Not this guy though – he’s swinging like John Bonham played back at quarter speed, and it’s beautiful. Listen to those cymbals crash!

Believe it or not, I’m pretty picky when it comes to my space-rock transcendence, but Bong win the gold medal. If this don’t send you, you probably didn’t want to go in the first place.

Looking on Youtube, I learn that, hilariously, these songs have ‘radio edits’. This isn’t one of them;

4. The Bats – Free All The Monsters (Flying Nun)

A band who have spent the best part of three decades whittling away at their particular brand of timeless indie-rock to without feeling any particular need to expand their horizons, different eras in The Bats’ back catalogue can best be differentiated by slight tweaking of the overall production aesthetic, from the FX-laden shoegaze of ‘Coachmaster’ to the more rustic, folksy timbres of ‘Daddy’s Highway’, with assorted stops at scenic viewpoints in-between.

‘Free All The Monsters’ then sees them returning to their spiritual home on the rejuvenated Flying Nun label with an album that initially veers somewhat toward the thin, reverb-drenched sound of ‘classic’ ‘80s British indie, sometimes even approaching a fabricated jangle akin to The Smiths or something. Thankfully, this problem can be easily rectified through the immoderate application of volume and EQ, which, as with many albums from the actual ‘80s, allows the true grandeur of the music to take flight.

Pushed to an appropriately ear-hurty level, the tangled sustain of Robert Scott and Kaye Woodward’s guitars assume their proper majesty, as their voices (teamed up more frequently, and more persuasively, than on previous records) wrap themselves elegantly around the slow, wise-owl phrasing of the strongest set of songs the band has written in recent memory or… hell, let’s just take the leap and say, ever.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, I thought ‘The Guilty Office’ and ‘At The National Grid’ were plenty good, but almost every number here is a potential ‘greatest hits’ contender. Scott’s writing has retained a singularly high level of quality over the years, but he’s really upped the ante here, investing many of these songs with the kind of fiery, uncertain passion that usually tends to vanish from the work of settled/experienced rock bands as they glide through middle age. Correspondingly, the band seem to have been retooled to match their leader’s renewed vigour, letting rip with a kind of yearning, overdriven sprawl that pushes things a few steps further into the wilderness than was allowed within the contemplative, grown up homesteads of their last few records.

Even the more upbeat songs here – the lightweight jangle of ‘Simpletons’ and the disarmingly jaunty title cut - seem to be pushing back toward a comfort zone of grand, wistful despondence, an atmosphere in which a choice chord or cadence can transform lyrics that fall flat on paper - “And you know, I’ll take you with me / cos tomorrow’s a long, long time..” - into statements that move beyond the mere words into definitive, irreducible reflections on the nature of… something or other. And when the band really go with this mood and let rip on doleful epics like ‘Fingers of Dawn’ and ‘See Right Through Me’ (with it’s nod to Dylan’s implacable ‘I Shall Be Released’), the effect is stunning. You know those moments in songs like this, where they reach a big, Byronic climax at the end of a verse, and you’re like, ‘cue guitar solo!’, and the lead line crashes in just right and you’re like, yes? Well there’s a lot of that going on on the second half of this album.

Perhaps my favourite song is ‘On The Bank’, which blows things out to an almost Crazy Horse-like level of slow-burning grandeur, as Scott relates what appears to be the tale of a hazardous night-time sortie from some sort of seafaring vessel under hostile circumstances. Doubtless it’s all a big woolly emotional metaphor, but as is my want, I prefer to take these things literally. “treading water takes you down / and it’s good to have companions on the ground / though they may be more useful on the bank / to lend a hand.” Sound advice for any nautical disembarkation. Anyway, it’s a total epic, and I bloody love it.

Surely it can’t be just me who thinks that The Bats are better at making this kind of music than just about anyone else on earth? Can it really just be geographical distance and soft-spoken humbleness that’s denied them the chance to compete with the R.E.M.s and Teenage Fanclubs of this world? If you’re unfamiliar with their catalogue and am at all swayed by all my above nonsense, maybe 2012 might be a good year to investigation these propositions.

3. Peaking Lights – 936 (Not Not Fun / Domino)

Peaking Lights ‘Imaginary Falcons’ from 2010 was something real special – the primary achievement up to that point of the selected few (also see Blues Control and, uh… ) who were busy channelling the detritus of the past decade’s psyche/drone/noise hoo-hah into happy, harmonic, human realms. Now everybody with a pulse is doin’ that, and ‘936’ ably delivers on the next step of this music’s evolution so perfectly as to create its own self-sufficient universe, entirely ignorant of such pan-generic crit blather.

In an attempt to latch some space-filling blah onto this self-evidently wonderful music, writers have made much of Peaking Lights debt to dub, and indeed, whilst I’m not much of an expert on such things, stuff like Lee Perry’s sublime production work on ‘Heart of the Congos’ would seem to be as valid a reference point as any to work from here. Like Perry at his best, Idra Dunis and Aaron Coyes seem keen to apply experimental technique and DIY happenstance to the creation of music that is just, well…. irresistibly nice and comforting. As befits its rough production values and avant ancestry, each track here begins in slightly jarring fashion, pricking up our ears with a few seconds of rather harsh sounds and unheimlich rhythmic tics. Every time though, it takes only a few bars for us to fully internalise the song’s logic, for us to relax as we realise just how instinctively pleasing to human ears these sounds are. Peaking Lights is music to hang with. Music to be enveloped by. Music to render you happy and content in any situation. Homemade 21st century, post-everything lullabies.

Late last year, I wrote to a friend that ‘936’ is “..kind of electronic, kind of psychedelic, but with really good songs and beautiful melodies and cool bass lines too – like music cool parents would play to their babies to put them to sleep. I just play it all the time.”

And hopefully that’s about all you need to know really. It’s all I can think of to write, so it’d better be.

2. Milk Music – Beyond Living 12” (Perennial Death)

I shared some of my thoughts on Milk Music here, in August 2011.

I listened to mp3s of their 12” hundreds of times before that, and, now that I’ve finally got a physical copy, I’m gonna listen to it hundreds more.

Drawn on the subject of what my current favourite bands are, I recently found myself saying something of Milk Music along the lines of “they’re kind of a combination of everything that was great about rock music in the late ‘80s / early ‘90s”. I then almost immediately realised that this was a really fucking stupid and misleading thing to say, on any number of levels.

Because seriously, any of those acts that exists to pay professional homage to the Our Band Can Be Your Life ‘glory days’ of heritage indie-rock, playing to the same crowds who go to those abysmal ATP ‘play the album all the way through’ nights, can fuck right off. I mean, I know I’m usually pretty retrogressive in my music taste, but I’d like to think I’ve developed at least some sense of good taste along with it. Go! Leave me! Take me off your PR’s mailing list! You’re about as cool as someone playing aesthetically correct Grateful Dead-style hippie rock in 1982, and you know it. Get outta my face.

Milk Music are not like that. They are not cool because they sound like Dinosaur and The Wipers and Black Flag. They are cool because they are as good as them, at a time when pretty much nobody else is. End of.

“Political angst will never flow / in the dark where the real feelings grow” – like, what the hell does that even mean? I don’t know man, but he sounds like he means it! Remember when angry guys with loud guitars could pull that sorta thing and get away with it? DUCK, Milk Music coming through!

The sticker on the front of this 12” in Rough Trade said something like “as tipped by NME, Pitchfork etc…”, so I guess the moment has passed and they’ll be making concept albums about lightbulb factories by this time next year. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.

Rock music in 2011, thy name was Milk Music.

1. Comet Gain – Howl of the Lonely Crowd (Fortuna Pop)

Well it was foregone conclusion really, wasn’t it. Having spent months earlier this year banging away about Comet Gain in preparation for their latest magnum opus, I could scarcely have made anything else No # 1 could I?

With all those unwise words already up in digital print, I guess I probably don’t need to restate the fact that every LP Comet Gain have released since 2000’s ‘Tigertown Pictures’ has had a huge amount to me, each one becoming a veritable cornerstone of my musical being. Over five years in the making (so to speak – I mean, I’m sure many of those years weren’t exactly spent ‘in the making’), and on first impression ‘Howl..’ certainly doesn’t disappoint. If anything, it’s perhaps the most ballsy and immediate record the band has ever made – a loud, lengthy and unapologetic restatement of all the thematic and musical concerns that CG and their fans have held dear through the intervening years.

Opener ‘Clang of the Concrete Swans’ certainly leaves little room for uncertainty, a stream of consciousness, state-of-the-nation-address of a song that thunders along like a 21st century update of one of those epic mid ‘60s Dylan tracks. Only, y’know, better, and more relevant, and with cool sounding guitars, and a beat and stuff. Recklessly veering between the teeth-grinding frustrations of poverty-stricken urban drudgery and curdled cries of adolescent rebellion, it’s an astonishing-bordering-on-ridiculous statement of intent; “oh, be young, be someone / be someone rebel, vicious, dumb”.

This is by far the most professionally produced album CG have ever done (not that it matters), as is exemplified on the track 2 & 3 double-header of potential singles ‘Weekend Dreams’ and ‘An Arcade From The Rain’, wrecking ball pop songs that cement the record’s default palette of monster guitar tone, monster bass tone and domineering New Order style keys.

(Initially ‘Weekend Dreams’ had me a bit non-plussed, because I was used to listening to the earlier version released on a split single with Hello Cuca (reviewed here). Basically, for the album cut they’ve taken a bit that turned up as a coda in the final choruses of the first draft (the whole “I’ve got a cheap desire to be..” thing) and turned almost the entire song into it, losing a lot of good material in the process. Still though, that’s their prerogative, and once I got used to it I love the spirited performance of the new one too.)

And incidentally, if you’re not already a Comet Gain fan but still took an active interest in that bracketed paragraph, chances are you’re the kind of person who probably should be a Comet Gain fan, as David Feck’s bottomless obsession with pop cult ephemera proves as rich a source of material here as it ever has done, his ever-growing gallery of until-recently unsung loser-heroes swelled with new recruits, from proto-beatnik junkie-thief Herbert Huncke to former Fall keyboard player Una Baines, ‘This Sporting Life’ protagonist Frankie Machine, Dixon Steele from Nicholas Ray’s ‘In a Lonely Place’ and the proprietors of Berlin industrial label SPK. Thee ecstatic library indeed.

In what I think might be its third recorded outing, ‘Herbert Huncke’ is finally nailed here, assuming the rattling VU pastiche New York subway sound type proportions it’s always been aiming for, muscular production, spirited ‘woo woos’ and a great noise guitar solo finally overcoming the incongruity of a mild-mannered English guy delivering lines like “you motherfucker / where is my bread”. The SPK track, ‘Working Circle Explosive’, is great too – a flaming clarion call of Baader Meinhof punker discontent, fuelled by sloganeering non-sequitur lyrics and some even more ferocious multi-layered fuzz.

At the heart of the record though, ‘The Ballad of Frankie Machine’ is simply an incredible track, encapsulating everything about this band that has meant so much to me. On this song, this one here, you can see… what exactly? Beyond all the back story and the shambolic live shows and cult following and all other nonsense, simply a band who can achieve something like this, who can play these tangled guitars and make them sound like a shadow falling back across the whole 20th century’s history of betrayals and heartbreaks, who can fuse the personal and the political into a sharp, bloody lump, who after many, many, many listens can still make my stomach twists in knots as Rachel sings “my best suit on, out with the boys tonight / don’t wake me up I might be dead..”.

The disparity between such intensity and the sloppy, melancholy acoustic numbers that have been a big part of CG’s repertoire at least since ‘City Fallen Leaves’ may irk some, but for those of us prepared to go the whole distance, there is beauty to be found even in these rambling, drunk-at-3am half-songs that scarcely any other band in history could get away with, as ‘After Midnight..’ and ‘Some Of Us Don’t Want To Be Saved’ are pulled back across the line by the sheer force of Feck’s need to communicate with us the totality of his whole whatever, the band’s epic, chiming swing driving the compositions forward as they take on the mantle of lovelorn grandeur of David’s beloved Go-Betweens; “It’s the small things that keep us alive / the coded souvenirs, left of the dial”. Stirs the blood, I tell ya. What’s that, wordcount? Another thousand words down the can? Worth every comma.

It’s hard to say how ‘Howl of the Lonely Crowd’ will fit into the pantheon quite yet. It’s taken a long time – years upon years of obsessive listening – for the previous LPs to reveal their true worth as they collide with life experience and coagulate into shiny, strange, twisted, inoperable lumps in my psyche. Maybe I’ll completely forget about this album by February. Maybe I’ll play it at least once a week until the day I die. Either way, for the moment it certainly sounds like a really fucking good album, and that’s a good start on the road to immortality.

2012-01-09T23:36:00.016Z

THE FORTY-TWO BEST RECORDS OF 2011:
Part # 8

Almost there, folks.

10. The Beets – Stay Home (Captured Tracks)

“One day I was just a yellow yolk / then I grew up bigger and I broke..”

I wouldn’t have put good odds on one of my most played songs of 2011 being an acoustic ballad written from the point of view of an unfertilised egg yolk, but here we all are, and The Beets ‘Hens & Roosters’ seems to have taken on a mantra-like quality for me over the past twelve months. Not that I particularly relate to its woolly childhood/adulthood metaphors or anything, but… it’s just a really nice song, y’know? Moving without being moving, catchy without being catchy, it’s a perfect example of what makes The Beets such a special and inexplicably refreshing proposition in the current musical landscape. Just a nice little song. Simple and humble, it just works, y’know?

What could it possibly be, that can draw us back month after month to the ostensibly unappealing sound of a couple of shrill, whiny guys strumming chords on acoustic guitars whilst another shrill, whiny guy bashes a snare drum, as they sing rudimentary 90 second songs about “laying on the ground, yeah yeah” and “watching television, watching television”? How, in the second decade of the 21st century, when anyone with half a clue is sick to fucking death of indie-lifer earnestness and contrived, self-conscious geekery, can this possibly be a good idea for a band?

Don’t ask me man, but it seems to work. There is a kind of Vonnegut-like universality about what The Beets do: an understanding of the centrality of communication, and of the power of the obvious, well-stated. It will take them far. You could hear it distantly in the lolling, toe-tapping comfort of their earlier “Spit In The Face of Those Who Don’t Want To Be Cool”, and, now that they’ve at least figured out how to put the microphones in the same room as the performers when recording music, the essential strength of their songwriting shines through.

How often these days do you hear a band made up of culturally-informed white people, in which notions of influence and intent are both unknowable and largely irrelevant? Listening to The Beets, I have no idea what kind of records these guys like listening to, or what kind of music they are trying to make. Their music sounds like it simply is - instinctual and obvious and pre-existent. Clutching at straws, to could maybe tie them in aesthetically to the original ‘80s/‘90s strains of American ‘lo-fi’, in sound at least. Far removed from the tormented, egomaniacal face-pulling of all that Sebadoh or early Mountain Goats stuff though, The Beets have a lapsidaisical ‘so it goes’ take on life that seems far healthier, far more appealing somehow. Far more fun too.

Because yes, just to beat up on their enigma further, The Beets are out to entertain, rather than to wallow. Try as you might, you will be unable to deny the beat group swing of ‘Cold Lips’, or the horny hollers of – uh, I swear this song gets away with not being creepy somehow – ‘Young Girls’. I hate to tell you this, but with their beat up acoustics and their nerdy whining, The Beets are making you dance. What the hell?

Going a long way with very little, The Beets already have another LP out at the time of writing. I’ve not heard it yet, but I bet it’s amazing. I guess by this stage we can add them to the likes of chocolate-covered liquorice, Woody Allen and The Rolling Stones on the list of ‘things that shouldn’t work, but really do’.

9. Let’s Wrestle – Nursing Home (Merge / Full Time Hobby)

I like Let’s Wrestle. I listen to them a lot. I feel a deep kinship with their sense of humour, and their continuation of a particular lineage of self-deprecating British shambolism that can’t help but still align them to some extent with Swell Maps, TVPs and Half Man Half Biscuit, even as their musical prowess and career decisions take them across the pond to engage in more direct and efficient emulation of yr actual Dinosaur/Huskers type indie royalty.

It’s nice in a way to be reminded that groups who seek to honestly reflect the grim and strange peculiarities of the way we live in this country – and the stranger and grimmer things we choose to laugh at - do not necessarily need to do so whilst sounding like a lesser line-up of The Fall playing hungover krautrock in a condemned bingo hall. It is oddly spiriting to hear Wesley Patrick Gonzalez singing about inconclusive arm wrestling bouts, computer games, walking his mum’s dogs and “two Greek men fighting in a pharmacy” over compositions which – bar new bassist Sam Pilay’s sing-song bass lines and the lack of stubbley ‘90s earnestness – could have fitted in nicely on a Jawbreaker or Nirvana album.

Given how much I enjoy listening to about 60% of it, I would have rated this album even higher, but after a great first half I'm afraid it hits a severe slump in the middle, as Gonzalez’ write-what-you-know songwriting leads him deep into a trough of listless solipsism, incorporating some rather anaemic slow songs and reaching its nadir on ‘I’m So Lazy’ and ‘I Forgot’, respectively concerning the fact that he is lazy, and the time his girlfriend told him off for forgetting to pick her up from the station and do the shopping. And rightly so, the useless git. Don’t write a song about it, just get it right next time, as Bratmobile or somebody might have said were they consulted. Honesty and self-awareness in song-writing is one thing, but I fear that simply stating your faults over some dreary verse chords fails to achieve much on any level.

Let's not accentuate the negative though – after all, such bellyaching clearly comes from the same well as the self-deprecating observational funsterism of Let’s Wrestle’s better songs, and they do succeed in pulling things together nicely for the final stretch of ‘Nursing Home’, with a couple more delightfully ribald punkers and – a first for the band – a really successful quiet song. Written more in character than from first hand experience (presumably), ‘I Am Useful’s tale of an abandoned husband taking stock of his earthly achievements chronicles the inadequacies of modern, middle-class manhood in far more convincing fashion, like one of those real keepers Darren Hayman knocks out every couple of years. A very good song.

Perhaps more imagination and less reportage points the way forward for Let’s Wrestle’s continued maturation, but it pains me to think of such things. As long as they’re still spending at least some of their time bawling out tales of unlikely drunken escapades and supermarket encounters over messy pop punk tunes, I’ll be a willing audience.

Oh, and hey: that Steve Albini guy really knows how to record a great-sounding rock album, doesn’t he? Who knows, if he keeps it up he might be able to make a career out of it.

8. The Feelies – Here Before (Bar/None)

Seems like this record was pretty much slept on this year. Or at least, I didn’t hear much about it. Not sure why this was the case – I mean, everyone love The Feelies, right? I guess they must have just been hit with some of diminished interest/expectation fatigue that tends to greet new material from reformed heritage indie-rock bands. A shame, because I think for my money this is probably the best record they’ve ever made.

Admittedly, twenty years is a pretty big gap by anyone’s standards, but this is after all a band who took five years off between their first and second records, and almost as long again before making their third. This one, by my count, is their fifth, and the band’s unhurried method of operation is perhaps worth bearing in mind, given that ‘Here Before’ sounds less like a desperate grab at past glories and more like a natural progression and refinement of the band’s sound. The work of group of like-minded individuals who have always seemed to operate on the principal of coming together once in a blue moon when the time is right to make some music, and doing so; the kind of album one can presumably step up to make after two decades of selective song-writing and careful contemplation of the subtle mysteries of the indie-rock form.

Like The Bats, The Feelies have become enlightened masters of that form – secret chiefs of the fast-strummed guitar, the elegant chord progression, the casually melodic bass-line. Through the band’s early years in existence, founders Glenn Mercer and Bill Million seemed like rather nervous, retiring presences on their own records, putting The Feelies in the odd position of being a band led by two singer/guitarists but completely dominated by the rhythm section, a circumstance that helped define the unique sound of their ‘Crazy Rhythms’ material. Subsequent albums have investigated other means of fusing meaningful songcraft and guitar blather to the band’s more confident rhythmic muscle, and on ‘Here Before’, they’ve finally hit a perfect balance, leading to some of the most exquisitely exemplary post-VU guitar-pop ever realised.

As is ever the case with these things, there’s nothing particularly special to point out here, no big ‘HEY LOOK’ moments. Like a room full of modest masterpieces by some lesser known impressionist painter, it’s the beauty of the craftsmanship that stands out; everything in its proper place, with minor variations on established themes taking on major significance. On songs like ‘Change Your Mind’, Mercer sounds (and writes) like the kind of warm, fleetingly profound Lou Reed that we’ve always wished Lou Reed would bother to be more often, vague yet perfectly turned couplets intoned with laidback reassurance: “you believe what you believe / that’s alright, it’s fine by me”. Guitars – primarily clean-toned – clang and chime just the way you’d want them to as the chord-borne melodies ebb and flow, delicious fuzz busting out for some soaring killer solos, exactly at the point at which you need one. Factor in one of the most concise and muscular rhythm sections in the indie-realm keeping things sprightly even on the slower songs, and there are few ways in which these kinda songs could possibly get any better. Affecting, ego-free, finely wrought music of a classic vintage is to be found right here – the kind of thing that makes you feel like berating younger musicians for not immediately taking time out from what they’re doing to listen, reflect, and take heed of the myriad lessons to be learned herein.

7. The Dirtbombs – Party Store (In The Red)

From May 2011:

“The idea of recreating techno on rock band instruments is always a notion I’ve kinda liked. I mean if the point of your band is energy and repetition, you might as well go the whole hog, right? Groups who have tried this sort of thing before, such as Oneida, have often done just that, steering straight toward an extreme noise-trance whiteout, so it’s cool to hear The Dirtbombs pulling back from that precipice and remembering to aim for the dancefloor instead, to mix a few metaphors. The album’s title is self-explanatory – far from a crazy experiment or punker in-joke, this is an honest attempt to fuse the rhythmic drive and atmospheric cool of early American electronic dance music with the sound and fury of rock n’ roll, and by and large, a successful one, I’d venture to suggest.

More than just banging through the skeletons of Derrick May and Juan Atkins compositions in garage-punk style, Collins and co have worked hard to meet their source material halfway here, incorporating percussion loops, hissing distorted synths, extreme echos and a relentless motorik pulse into their arsenal, and splitting the difference between punk rock brevity and club-friendly 12” track lengths by sticking largely to a 4-6 minute middleground.

[…]

Let’s just say that ‘Cosmic Cars’ and ‘Alleys of Your Mind’ are your new favourite late night driving tunes, ‘Tear The Club Up’ will make perfect entrance music for your forthcoming wrestling career, and ‘Strings of Life’ and ‘Jaguar’ both sound like beautiful sunrise-insomnia trance-outs that could have been pulled straight off some newly unearthed Arthur Russell/Sleeping Bag session.

As just about every review of this album has noted, the beatless 22-minute fuckaround of ‘Bugs in the Bass Bin’ does stand as something of a stumbling block to overall enjoyment, but if you’ve got the patience to let it play through once or twice then even that starts to make a twisted kinda sense. Exactly WHAT kind of sense, who the hell knows, but I was certainly liking it a lot better by the end than I was at the start.

But basically, if the idea behind this album is one that appeals to you, rest assured The Dirtbombs do it about as well as it can be done, and you can go to the record shop with my blessing for the triple-LP set, just as I will hopefully do when I have a lot of money and have already bought enough Detroit techno records to assuage my aforementioned ignorance. Just like 'Ultraglide in Black' and 'Life, Love & Leaving' served to point me in the direction of a ton of soul compilations ten years ago, funnily enough... hmm, go figure."

6. Charalambides – Exile (Kranky)

Until I saw this up for pre-order at a couple of my favourite record shops, I had no idea there was a new Charalambides album out.

In the five years since their last official album for Kranky, I’ve touched base a few times with Christina Carter’s prolific stream of solo releases, which have veered from the sublime (‘Texas Working Blues’) to the practically unlistenable (‘Masque Femine’), but have largely lost sight of the no doubt many and varied projects Tom Carter has occupied himself with in recent years. Since the band cancelled a bunch of tour dates and more or less faded from view in ’07 (I think?), I’ve had no idea whether or not the two were even still making music together, and, pushed out by new sounds, new concerns, Charalambides’ music had largely faded from my mind.

So to be sitting here looking at these mammoth slabs of vinyl – eight songs, seventy five minutes - is something of a cause for celebration here in my little world. Or at least, I think it is. It occurs to me that I’m a very different person now to the one who has heavily into Charalambides midway through the last decade. Might the more humourless, stentorian folk-recital aspect of their work now just kinda really bug me? Will I really be able to get myself in the appropriate mood for this kind of angst-wracked, spectral blues very often? Might it all be a bit, y’know, demanding for my slovenly, pop/punk loving verge-of-30 self?

Midway through play # 1 of side # 1, as blinding waves of crystalline lead guitar thread their way into ‘Desecrated’s cloudbank of multi-layered string sustain, I get my answer. I’m staring at the speakers, anything else I was planning on doing this evening wiped from my mind entirely. The spell is cast again; I’m in their thrall. This music is f-ing incredible.

It is demanding at times, no doubt about that. ‘Wanted To Talk’ on side four could probably ruin a party five doors down the street – eleven and a half minutes of Christina delivering plain song lyrical lines delineating what seems to be a breakdown of marital communication over a continuously repeating pattern of six guitar notes. Even at their most ‘difficult’ though, Charalambides songs have a kind of mighty, invisible heartbeat behind them, a steady rhythm that continues even when almost no sound at all is in evidence, drawing the listener into the wordless, subconscious intimacy of their self-contained world. And even the pitch darkness you sometimes find there doesn’t seem like too bad a place to be. It’s always calm there, even in the midst of misery and collapse. Real ‘eye of the storm’ stuff.

Then when they do finally tear down the blinds and let the sunshine in – the triumphant guitar pyrotechnics of ‘Into The Earth’, the vast, desertscape string drone of ‘Before You Go’, the tangled bliss of ‘Words Inside’ - the effect is almost indescribable.

In fact, ‘Exile’ for the most part strikes me the most immediate and powerful music Charalambides have ever made – a monumental testament to everything they’ve ever set out to achieve. Perhaps their masterpiece, if there’s anyone out there still listening.

Or that’s what I think at the moment, anyway. I only got this record last month, and I’ve not really had the time to process it properly, to immerse myself in it as much as I would like to.

Y’know what I should do more often? Lie on the floor and listen to music. I mean just lie there, no cushions or anything, not doing anything else, and just listen. I used to do that quite a lot, now I barely ever do. This would be an extremely good album for that kind of immersion I think.

After all these years, the heaven-scraping splendour that this duo can pull out of two guitars and one voice is still a staggering and terrifying thing. It would be an unfathomable cliché to say that it makes my hair stand on end, except that it really does.

This is an album that deserves to have many more words written about it, only listening to it makes words seem so stupid.

2012-01-04T22:55:00.011Z

THE FORTY-TWO BEST RECORDS OF 2011:
Part # 7

So, that idea that I should start early so that I’d have time to wrap this up before the New Year…? That went well, right…?

15. Night Birds – The Other Side of Darkness (Grave Mistake)

One of those descriptors, rather like ‘erotic thriller’ or ‘acid jazz’, that inevitably fails to deliver on either of its promised components, dropping ‘surf punk’ in the opening sentence of a review is a good way to wave bye-bye to whatever tenuous engagement w/ a readership one has left. Nonetheless though, it proves unavoidable here, as New Jersey’s Night Birds are, unmistakably, a punk (PUNK) band, incorporating the conventions of the surf (SURF, or perhaps ‘INSTRO’) genre into their music, and doing so with a fearsome competence that sees the results lurking comfortably in the shadow of prime-era Dead Kennedys and (especially) Agent Orange.

At least some of the personnel here – sadly I know not how many or which ones – cross over with the phenomenal Psyched To Die (whose ‘Sterile Walls’ 7” I still like to find time to play at least once a week), and indeed, much here – the shrill, bug-eyed rage of the vocal delivery, the twitchy velocity and incongruously ‘hot licks’ of the music – has evidently come along with them. Whilst lyrical themes remain pleasantly bleak though (demonstrative song titles: ‘Failed Species’ , ‘Can’t Get Clean’), the surf element can’t help but foster a certain irascible goofiness within PTD’s straight-faced nihilism – a goofiness which some listeners may find trying, as cuts like ‘Day After Trinity’ veer about as close to Man..or Astroman? territory as you’re likely to get this side of a Man..or Astroman? tribute album, an effect bolstered by the inclusion of some choice sci-fi movie dialogue. Personally though, I’ve been listening to Man.. or Astroman? a lot this year, and sampling tons of bullshit from movies, so I think all this is just swell. (In particular, the guy toasting the end of the world with a can of beer on ‘Oblivious’ is just plain beautiful.)

As is necessary when monkeying around with surf stuff, the musicianship and recording on this record is frighteningly ‘professional’ for a punk band. Thankfully though, Night Birds (veterans of probably about a thousand other groups between them, I’m sure) are experienced enough to use such – ahem - ‘ability’ to enhance rather than diminish their overall attack, and those uneasy with the goof factor can still enjoy exemplary h/c rippers like ‘Sex Tape’ and ‘Neon Gray’ without having to crack a grin that’s anything less than evil.

Great punk music, great surf music, ‘Other Side of Darkness’ is simply a kick-ass record in every respect, the kind of welcome shock to the senses that has me flailing around for ill-judged metaphors involving whirlwinds and red hot pokers and stuff, so I should probably shut up now before I embarrass myself further.

14. Circuit Des Yeux – Portrait (De Stijl)

Third time out the gate for Haley Fohr under the Circuit Des Yeux name, and in a move that very few would be ballsy enough to attempt, she opens proceedings with a crackly recording of some old time bluesman (I think it might be Son House, but could be completely wrong), discussing ‘the meaning of the blues’ and so forth. A potentially preposterous statement of intent for a young indie-ish type artist, but with the weight she hits us with on ‘Portrait’, it makes good sense.

If her previous records were essentially anonymous – opaque documents of some kind of non-specific pain and unease – then ‘Portrait’ represents an astonishing opening up on Fohr’s part – a big reveal of the voice, emotions and back story behind the music that’s almost unprecedented amongst artists of an avant/noise-type persuasion.

Taking one’s music in a more personal, song-based direction is not necessarily something to be celebrated of course, and neither is striking out at new styles on each record just for the heck of it. But to move straight from abstract basement creep-outs to fully-formed Cat Power / Neil Young guitar balladry in the space of one album is, I think, a fairly astounding progression for anyone, all the more so given that Fohr not only maintains the dread atmospherics of her earlier recordings here, but actually intensifies them, her new-found yen for song-writing simply adding form and narrative to what was previously a big, dark unknown.

I wasn’t sure what to make of the centre-piece track ‘3311’ at first – I mean, christ… it’s not like it’s confessional or sensationalist or anything, but it’s.. pretty straight-up, y’know? The kind of song whose intent you can’t question, whose details you don’t need spelt out.

Troubled times are equally evident on ‘101 Ways to Kill a Man’, where plain-spoken reportage of drug abuse, poverty and parental abandonment can’t help but cast a new light on the cathartic terrors and suburban dread of Fohr’s previous records. Some of the lyrical phrases and musical decisions in these songs might seem a bit rough, a bit overwrought, but as stated above, there is an honesty of feeling to them that bypasses criticism – the bluesman’s opening remarks taken to heart and acted upon.

There are also some holdovers from the old stuff of course – cuts like ‘Crying Chair’ and ‘Falling Out’ ooze a familiarly murky, experimental menace. But, sonically speaking at least, nothing as perverse and terrifying as the strange vistas of ‘Sirenium’ is in evidence here, and it’s clear where Fohr’s new focus lies. Suffocating depression odes like ‘Weighted Down’ and the heavily goth-damaged ‘Twenty and Dry’ could be taken straight from some long lost Nico recording, and ‘Portrait’ closes with a live deconstruction of Springsteen’s ‘I’m On Fire’, causing me yet again to wonder what it is that draws female singers to this most macho of love songs (seriously, I have, like, four covers of it in my music collection, all sung by women). For all of ‘Portrait’s unexpected embrace of the tools of classic rock though, the intent this time round is characteristically unsettling, the ritual demolition of The Boss’s mojo in a hail of formless distortion marking a fitting conclusion to a very dark and brave record.

13. Motion Sickness of Time Travel – Seeping Through the Veil of the Unconscious / Luminaries & Synastry (Digitalis)

I’ve really been dreading trying to find something pertinent to say about Rachel Evans’ (not the one from Comet Gain, obvs) recordings under the Motion Sickness of Time Travel name. Prolific to a fault, there have been at least a few splits, tapes etc this year in addition to these two mammoth LPs (‘Seeping Through..’ is from late 2010 I think, but I got it in 2011 so I’ll count it). Hours and hours of deep haunty-glazey synth-bliss that I have listened to for many, many more hours and hours. Always late at night, after watching some movies or getting back from a gig or just pissing about on a quiet week night, Motion Sickness of Time Travel is almost always on, everyday cares forgotten. The world fades out into sepia. Sleepytime!

On the surface, I suppose there’s nothing much I can quite grab on to (other than a cool name) to help distinguish Motion Sickness.. (straw poll: should I call them MSoTT? No, thought not) from any number of solo analogue-ambient cosmic drifters clogging up my iTunes (I’m always happy to have them). But we tired kosmonauts care not for the surface, right? And there’s something about Evans’ approach to this form really strikes a chord with me, rendering her an immediate big-hitter in the ever-expanding legion of twenty-first century avant-psyche ladies, slotting in nicely somewhere between Grouper and the LA Vampires/Maria Minerva Not Not Fun axis.

And beyond that… well there’s little I can say to really justify the extent to which I like this music, beyond the fact that I think it uses its palette of analogue-generated drones, spectral synth-lines and heavily-effected worldless vocalisations very well indeed, and that it allows me easy access to a wide range of thoughts, feelings and internal spaces that I very much like spending time in.

I suppose that of the two records, ‘Seeping..’ is by far the most nocturnal and potentially sinister, actually even touching on the lofty domain of Leyland Kirby/The Caretaker at some points as Evans builds a thick blanket of decaying textures, the kosmische dream slowly collapsing back into a murky past – tones wavering as the batteries run low, drifts of static as phantom blackbirds peck at the cables, cooing space-voices lurking forever on the edge of hearing, a mulch of dead leaves across the studio floor… or something like that. ‘Luminaries’ by contrast sheds a more optimistic light on the signifiers of nostalgia, the blanked out couple embracing against blinding Pacific glare on the cover providing a perfect illustration of the wistful, memory-tripping games within – faded seaside photos, kaleidoscopic patterns of light on the water, sunstroke visions… same fingers on the same machines, but I think now there’s sand on the floor of the studio. Sometimes the motion sickness is worth it, I’m thinking.

12. The Spits – The Spits V (In The Red)

Hey, a new album by the Spits! Fuck yeah, I love The Spits! They’re the greatest! This is a new album by them, and it kinda sounds like they always sound, more or less.

Well, I mean, it’s not got as many instantly catchy hits on it as IV (the one w/ the kids school photos on the front), but it still rules. It’s got a heavier guitar sound and louder drums, and more of that kinda malfunctioning retro-futurist punk-sci-fi kinda thing they like so much going on, like the sound of some perpetually drunken KBD punk band rampaging around the wastelands in some second hand Damnation Alley wagon held together with duct tape. Pretty damn cool, huh..?!? Yeah!

People say The Spits records pale in comparison to seeing them live. I dunno, I’ve never had the pleasure, but in the meantime I like their records just fine.

Song-wise, we got ‘All I want’, which is a rule-ass pop song, and ‘My Mess’ and ‘Fed Up’ which are about making a mess and being fed up. They’re great! Quite a few of the songs – ‘Tomorrow’s Children’, ‘Electric Brain’, ‘Fallout Beach’, ‘Acid Rain’ are all creeped out sci fi / post-apocalyptic doom kinda things. Alright! ‘Last Man On Earth’ might be inspired by the Vincent Price movie, or it might not, but it definitely steals the melody from some classic rock song I can’t quite put my finger on. Awesome!

And, uh, yeah, that’s it. This rules!

Whatcha looking at? Expecting me to write more or something? Show’s over! Go listen to The Spits.

11. Peter Stampfel & Jeffrey Lewis – Come On In (self-released)

When I went to see Peter Stampfel and Jeffrey Lewis play a concert in Brixton just under a year ago, I suppose I was expecting a fairly laidback affair – a folky, acoustic instruments only sorta show, Jeff maybe breaking out some of his mellower numbers in between paying homage to the septuagenarian Holy Modal rounders founder, a few hippy laff-fests, a gentle stroll through the Alan Lomax songbook and off we go. Y’know the sorta thing.

Boy, how wrong can you get! Turns out it was actually one of the most raucous shows I attended all year, both performers having the time of their lives, bashing out riotous, rough-as-a-bear’s-arse folk-punk as Stampfel pulled hit after hit out of his murky solo back catalogue – a seemingly endless barrage of hilarious, weirdo rock n’ roll songs undreamt of in the halls of man. ‘Black Leather Swamp Nazi’! ‘Duke of the Beatniks’! ‘Stick Your Ass in The Air’! That great song they did about going to bars and causing trouble! This is some mad, bad, wonderful shit going on right here; my kinda music, my kinda people.

The dynamic between these two guys was really beautiful, each seemingly realising that they’re a different generation’s version of the same person, goofing around on stage swapping endless anecdotes of comic-book shopping orgies, Victorian drug-taking practices and forgotten New York boho antics, infusing each other’s songs with new sparks of inspired oddness.

Somewhat more mannered in presentation, this self-released tour CD perhaps doesn’t quite reflect the leery enthusiasm of that live show, but it’s nonetheless a fine collection of the fruits of this particular meeting of minds. The first half showcases a handful of great new Lewis numbers, the wonderfully self-explanatory ‘Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea’ and ‘I Spent The Night In The Wax Museum’, whilst Stampfel toasts his collection of vintage bottlecaps on ‘Bottlecaps Are Cool’ (“..if you don’t believe me you’re a fool”), and summons the aforementioned spirit of raucous abandon perfectly on his frenzied drunk-driving anthem ‘Busted’. Things mellow considerably on the second half, Stampfel’s age and experience showing through as his voice cracks on a beautifully spare rendition of ‘God, What Am I Doing Here’, a strange, simple and deeply moving song written by his long-lost wife and writing partner Antonia. The incredible early work of Stampfel’s old comrade Michael Hurley also gets a look in on a renamed version of his signature ‘No I Won’t Come Down’ and the unvanquished hippy ghosts take on full substance on the gentle stoner testimonials of ‘Little Sister in the Sky’ and the psyche-folk epic ‘On We Went’.

If Lewis and Stampfel’s respective careers prove anything though, it’s that hippy and punk when properly expressed are one and the same notion, and through listening to their collaboration and hearing their rambling dialogues, I’ve come to realise just what a goshdarned inspiration Stampfel in particular is – living proof of how far following your weird dreams and obsessions can get you, still overflowing with enthusiasm for comic books and cultural detritus, still presumably penniless, still making new friends and cranking witty, weird-ass punk songs, still a thousand miles off anyone’s radar, yelling off-key like a foghorn and whacking his violin like he just picked it up for the first time yesterday, still laughing in the face of any notion of respectability. What a hero. Here’s hoping he keeps at it for a good while longer.

This song isn’t even on the CD, but it’ll kinda set the tone nicely I think:

2011-12-26T17:34:00.006Z

THE FORTY-TWO BEST RECORDS OF 2011:
Part # 6

20. Zola Jesus – Conatus (Sacred Bones)

It’s difficult to fathom why this one isn’t in my top ten. Hopefully it’ll be in a lot of people’s top tens. It’s pretty good. I guess it’s naturally gonna be Zola Jesus’s big ‘coming out party’ record, sitting on the verge of mainstream(ish) success, and it is SOLID, building on the template established by her ‘Stridulum’ material and hitting all the buttons you’d expect it to hit.

Only trouble is for those of us who’ve been following ZJ’s career, we’ve heard it before. Up to now, every record she’s made, from ‘New Amsterdam’ through ‘The Spoils’ to ‘Stridulum’, has been a quantum leap forward from the one that has preceded it. Having apparently hit peak performance with total KO songs like ‘The Night’ and ‘Can’t Stand’ though, ‘Conatus’ sees her settling back into cruising speed, rolling out a fresh, LP length reiteration of her established style, hopefully picking up a lot of new fans & supporters in the process, but fostering an unavoidable sense of diminishing returns for those of us who’ve been rocking the aforementioned for 18-plus months.

It doesn’t make the music any less good, but it makes it less exciting if ya know what I mean. Don’t ask me why. I could listen to, say, The Queers or ‘70s Black Sabbath making the same album a thousand times over and be perfectly happy, so I don’t know why my expectations of young operatically trained electro-pop ladies from Wisconsin should be any different. Who knows. This subjective/personal music crit is a mug’s game sometimes.

Eleven new cuts of earth-shaking neon-industrial bombast is still nothing to be sniffed at though, and needless to say, when I feel a Zola Jesus itch in the near future, I’ll be reaching for this one to get the job done with less of a sense of over-familiarity. That sounds a bit cold, but hey the world is cold – with fame and fashion and the inevitable dilution of identity knocking on her door, the fact this record stays on-message is an achievement worth celebrating in itself. That Nika Danilova has managed to find a route into mainstream consciousness without compromising the essential ?!?!? of her work is pretty fucking awesome.

Much here is veering hazardously toward the smooth, of course, but all is premeditated, nothing is chronic. Tracks like ‘Vessel’, ‘Hikikomori’ and ‘Seekir’ all have a certain steely calm to them that was missing before, a steadier pulse alongside their menace, to soothe the spirit on those long walks through underground stations and departure lounges, rather than abandoned hospitals and municipals wastelands. Indomitable human spirit amid the burnished chrome, and all that sort of thing. In short, much of ‘Conatus’ seems to be tapping into the same zeitgeist as the ‘Drive’ soundtrack – a sort of brooding electronic dream that can keep on brooding forever so far as I’m concerned. A well-guarded headphone wall to undermine the coldness without.

But all of this is build up. When the hiss of digital noise reemerges ever so slightly, when the weight of melodramatic angst starts to build and break on the astounding ‘Lick the Palm of the Burning Handshake’, we’re back where we’ve always been with ZJ, back in the 2019 wasteland, standing atop the burning building, helicopter shot as the credits roll.

19. Veronica Falls – s/t (Slumberland / Bella Union)

Funny thing – I’ve been going to see Veronica Falls play for so long, I’ve played their singles (the re-recorded A sides of which constitute the immediate highlights here) so much, that their ‘long-awaited’ debut album almost seems like an anticlimax in spite of its abundant quality.

In a weird sorta way it’s almost too good; superbly recorded, with a careful balance between live energy and studio clarity, it sees the group inhabiting their chosen persona – that of a jangly indie-pop band who’ve died and returned as lovelorn gothic ghosts – with such calculated completeness, it almost makes me uneasy.

All of which is neither here nor there in the greater scheme of things, so rest assured if you neither know nor care what I’m going on about, this is a great record. If the one sentence sales pitch in the preceding paragraph at all appeals to you, you should totally check it out.

As has consistently been the case since the band stepped fully-formed into my consciousness on the night Michael Jackson died, Roxanne Clifford and James Hoare’s twin guitars provide a curtain of flawless Velvets strum, working in agreeable union with Patrick Doyle’s frantic stand-up drumming, creating an appropriately tempestuous backdrop for these raised eyebrow tales of doomed love and graveside angst, the trio’s crystal-cut voices (bassist Marian Herbain doesn’t join in the singing, to my knowledge) giving the songs a bit of a chilly, melodramatic English folk feel - the perfect musical accompaniment to a march ‘round Highgate cemetery on a freezing autumnal Saturday morning, winter sun glinted through the trees.

Which, conveniently, is exactly the situation portrayed in their video to ‘Found Love.., or their similarly wintry, forest-set clip for ‘Bad Feeling’. See what I mean? Always doing exactly what they should do, this lot. Too perfect.

18. Chain & The Gang – Music’s Not For Everyone (K)

So I could hold forth here about how Ian Svenonious will likely never manage an LP that matches up to his riotous, inspirational live shows, and about how he presumably doesn’t even intend to, at least not via the indulgent idiosyncrasy of the “me plus whoever else shows up” Chain & The Gang set-up. I could talk about how inflated expectation aside though, this is a real fun listen. I could reflect on how much I enjoy Ian’s sly digs at the current lethargic/depressive mindset fostered by constant warnings of impending economic collapse and the slowly degrading quality of life in America, on tunes like ‘Why Not?’, ‘Not Good Enough’ and ‘It’s a Hard Job (Keeping Everybody High)’.

But that’s the kind of bland, reasonable analysis I’ve been churning out for every one of these records, and it’s starting to get to be a drag, man. As a well-needed break, let us reflect instead on Chain & The Gang’s message to their people, as elucidated on this record’s back cover, and reiterated in spoken word form at the start of side two for benefit of the short-sighted or illiterate;

Everyone might switch on the radio
But they don’t get it
No matter how they try, they can’t or won’t
Don’t tell them about it
I know you wanna share
The thing you love so much…
But don’t!

Everyone in this country might own a personal listening device
Everyone might have a state of the art hi-fi
Everyone might have a home library of record albums
Or compact discs
Or even a compiled stack of concert set lists
But music’s not for everyone

[…]

Music’s not for them
It’s for you and me

Does a moth know a flame just because it’s drawn to it?
Does a body know a bullet just because it’s hit?

Does a lemming know the void that waits for it …
At the bottom of a cliff?

Does the worm know the mud
Does the salt know the sea
Does the universe understand infinity?

A clock spends its life marking time
Does it understand mortality?

Do people who listen to music even like it?
Do people deserve it even if they buy it?
Music is not for everyone

Music is for the few, for the brave
Don’t try to explain it to them though
It doesn’t matter what you say
They can’t understand

They’ll never understand
Just sneak away to that hole
Where the music makes its stand

Ludwig Van Beethoven is not for everyone

Shirley Ellis is not for everyone

Helen Shapiro is not for everyone

Bo Diddley is not for everyone

Bobby Fuller is not for everyone

(et cetera)

17. Tieranniesaur – Tieranniesaur! (Popical Island)

An album that I’ve been trying to get a chance to write about for months if I’m honest, Tieranniesaur is very much the kind of thing that I enjoy and approve of without having much to say about it beyond a basic thumbs up RECOMMEND. A full-scale joycore sensation of some kind masterminded by Annie Tierney of Chicks and Yeh Deadlies, this is a galumphing great ten tracks-worth of funk/rock/electro/dub/80s hiphop post-generic pop amalgamation, guaranteed to demolish indie discos worldwide with it’s enthusiastically ramshackle takes on Le Tigre / Go Team / LCD / Funkadelic / ESG type tropes… if only they got a chance to hear it.

Built around a realiable foundation of programmed drums, monster bass and agreeably zany trash-talk rhymes, cuts like ‘Rockblocker’, ‘Sketch!’ and ‘I Don’t Stop’ are total winners on any potential internet-era Jukebox Jury, appearing out of nowhere brazen as you like and marching ‘round like they own the place, demanding remixes, chart positions, hit youtube videos, all the rest of it… and, uh, I guess I’m not very good at finding things to say about upbeat, dancey type music, but GREAT times to be found here, in case you were short on them this year.

Frankly, being hit with a platter like this when you were expecting maybe a nice little folk album or something is weird enough, but midway through, things get weirder, as Tieranniesaur start conquering styles like gleeful mountaineers dishing out flagpoles. Euphoric disco on ‘Pretty Girl String Quartet’, Graceland-esque faux-African pop on ‘Candy’ and ‘Azure Island’, and a sublime bit of straight-laced cinematic funk on the superb ‘Here Be Monsters’.

An astoundingly FUN pile o’ music, full of great lines, great rhythms, awesome tunes, raucous energy and random guest appearances by people I’ve never heard of, ‘Tieranniesaur’ kinda sounds like an audio record of one of the best parties ever, and as such is an experience I can wholeheartedly recommend.

16. The Real Numbers – 12” (Three Dimensional Records)

I caught Minneapolis’ Real numbers almost by accident earlier this year, at the same show I saw Crawling Age, and through the fog of a few beers, they were a revelation - breakneck pace nerd-bounce! Fast, snappy, funny, catchy songs! Loads of energy, small, raucous crowd, amazing fun.

Bought their 12”, and verily, it is a blast. Eight genius weirdo pop-punk songs, over before you’ve really registered them. Occasionally sounding like a Television Personalities record played at the wrong speed, this is the kind of music I will never not love. As their label puts it, there’s “nary a duff cut” to be found here – about fifteen minutes of flat-out joy, nix on the fat – sides A and B both open with total pogo classics ‘Might I See You Tonight’ and Undertones-ish ‘All About You’, both of which I’ll be DJing the fuck out of opportunity allowing, whilst ‘Boats & Cars’ showcases a slightly more nuanced side of the group, sounding not unlike the TVPs played at the correct speed.

Not much else to say really, especially since I’m away from home at the moment and can’t play the vinyl in search of further wordly inspiration. Closest thing I’ve heard recently to the particular kind of greatness found on Nodzzz first LP, this is one of the absolute best of the year from America’s garage/punk/whatever underground. Total winner!

2011-12-22T17:38:00.007Z

THE FORTY-TWO BEST RECORDS OF 2011:
Part # 5

25. Vivian Girls – Share The Joy (In The Red)

Poor Vivian Girls – they were in a real ‘damned if you do..’ situation with this one. Momentary hype bubble irreparably broken, I suspect a lot of people had the knives out regardless – to curse ‘em out as no ideas/no talent timewasters if they delivered more of the same, to mock their pretensions if they tried something a bit different, or hey, why not a bit or both? The fact that ‘Share The Joy’ is a pretty good record got lost in the shuffle as the band were being shown the door.

It’s not perfect, it’s got a few duds, but in terms of sound and songwriting I think album # 3 is a real progression for the group, with a handful of tracks that are flat-out brilliant. A significant departure from the Shangri-Las-via-Husker Du hardcore of ‘Everything Goes Wrong’, ‘Share The Joy’ has more of a mid-fi denim desert rock kinda feel to it – less of the distortion and compression, more of the beautifully straight-up, band-in-a-room kinda chiming slow-burn, verging at times into the shallow end of grizzled Crazy Horse sprawl. It works pretty well. The Neil comparison is particularly pertinent on ‘The Other Girls’, an ambitious six and a half minutes of opening track, expanding the band’s default mope to persuasively epic scope, carrying forward the kind of dead-eyed melancholy that’s been at the heart of all their music thus far into a few minutes of instinctive, emotionally resonant soloing – honest, rough-edged, heart-string tugging rock music. Nothing wrong w/ that. Much like the Girls At Dawn album last year, there’s not much to say to try to sell this to some hypothetical tastemaker, but it’s the kind of thing that always works for me, and I think it’s a killer track.

‘Other Girls’ establishes the pattern of downbeat melodicism and cool, clean-toned guitarwork that flows through all of ‘Share the Joy’s best moments – ‘Heard You Say’, ‘Trying To Pretend’ and re-recorded singles cut ‘Lake House’ - all securing the band a comfortable new foothold in the realm of a kinda (god, it’s killing me having to type this) punk-informed Americana, culminating in my personal favourite track here, the full-on wronged woman vengeance ode of ‘Sixteen Ways’. By contrast, the self-conscious girl group pastiches of ‘Take It As It Comes’ and ‘Dance (If You Wanna)’ fall pretty flat, seeming like unhelpful anachronisms within the band’s new musical narrative, but say whatcha like: Vivian Girls have made three records in four years, each of them emotionally and sonically distinct, all of them poignant, exciting and broadly successful. Chances are that’s more than you’ve done.

Sixteen Ways

24. Blood Patrol – Demo Tape (self released)

From last month:

“Listening to these demos – rejoicing in the muffled gut-thump of the practice room > portastudio > cassette > mp3 translation process – makes me want to learn to drive, get my licence, and buy a car. This is solely so that I could drive around aimlessly and give people lifts. And as they sit in the passenger seat, I’ll jam this tape in the stereo. I’ll start drinking fizzy drinks again, so that I can slurp from a big drive-thru cup as I say “yeah man, this is Blood Patrol” and start bashing out blast-beats on the steering wheel.

Hopefully it’ll be a long drive, so that I can cherish their expression of cautious relief in the moment of silence when the tape comes to an end… before I instinctively reach over and put it on again. I reckon I could spin it at least six times during an average slog across London.

Looking around me, I see indie records, psychedelic records, garage-punk records, whatever else. I listen to the sound of Blood Patrol from my computer speakers, and I think, fuck man, I’ve been wasting my life. I could have been listening to stuff that sounds like Blood Patrol. Why would anyone want to listen to music that doesn’t sound like this?

A metal review demands sub-genres, so what ‘THIS’ is is…. well I guess it’s kind of a hardcore/thrash crossover thing, with land speed record H/C drumming (not actually blast-beats, despite what I said earlier), low end Entombed/Bolt Thrower guitar chug, deranged ‘Reign in Blood’ whammy bar carnage and grave-soil gargling BM vocals. Perfection, in other words.

Completely devoid of the pretension and dry technicality that dooms much contemporary metal to the ‘not right now thanks’ pile, this tape is about as far as you can get from the pristine, multi-tracked headache factory of a studio death metal album. But at the same time, it doesn’t retreat back to the mysterioso trashcan-holocaust guff of yr average kvlt BM release either. Basically this just sounds like we always wanted metal so sound, before things got all silly – a functional low fidelity recording of some guys in a room, rocking it out with energy of a teenage punk band and the chops of stadium beserkers. It’s just plain fucking FUN. They’re singing about blood and thunder and destruction and zombie bloodbaths and rampaging through the dark night on galloping stallions and tearing monsters’ throats out, and they’re having the time of their lives. It’s exhilarating! It’s rock music! It’s METAL! It’s BLOOD PATROL. It… well, it rules.”

Unhallowed & Old

23. Kitchen’s Floor – Look Forward To Nothing (Siltbreeze)

“I AM IN A ROOOM!!!”, the main guy in Australia’s Kitchen’s Floor repeatedly screamed at the conclusion of his band’s primitive and unsettling first LP, and if the room in question was the one pictured on the cover of this second effort, I feel his pain. That curtain alone is the stuff of nightmares. Actually, that first record really grew on me between my placing it at, like, #40 or something in a previous year-end list and the emergence of ‘Look Forward To Nothing’ a couple of months back, and I’m pleased to report that it essentially delivers more of the same, chronic rage only exacerbated by the more conventional rock structures and a thicker, louder recording found herein.

Shamelessly sullen and antisocial, Kitchen’s Floor songs are like spiteful teenage tantrums in sonic form, compelling like picking scabs. Stripping garage-born adolescent rock back to its ugliest, most simplistic form, a typical composition sees the band picking out a single chord or a rudimentary riff, hammering it into the ground for seventy or eighty seconds alongside an infuriated, monotone complaint (“I HAVE TO DIE!!!”, “I’M ON MY OWN!!”), and calling it a day. Brilliant. I mean, what more y’dou need? Gets the fucking point across.

Whilst broadly accurate, I fear that such a summation fails to really reflect the fearsome level of craft and catharsis at work in Kitchen’s Floor. As innumerable one-shot garage-trash bands have proved over the years, recording a load of shitty sounding minute long rant songs isn’t difficult. Keeping people coming back to them though, keeping them feeling something whilst you rage and gurn, takes… a certain something extra. Skill and effort for two easy box ticks, sheer FORCE of discontent for another, topped off by… something else, too intangible for me to try to catch it in a word.

In this respect, Kitchen’s Floor bring an attack that reminds me of the earliest Dead C material (back when they still did songs), or the kind of balance that was in play when Nirvana recorded ‘Bleach’. Particularly startling is the way that some of the longer (relatively speaking) songs, through sheer weight of noise and repetition alongside some cannily-picked chord progressions, seem to acquire a more euphoric, positive character that raises them above the mire into clear, blue skies. Great when that happens, isn’t it?

After a decade in which 98% of studio time has been monopolised by boring indie bands with too much equipment aiming for that same ‘shoegaze’ sweetspot and failing, you’ve gotta ask yourself how these depressive backwoods fuck-ups manage to hit the bullseye just in passing and shrug it off so that they can yell some more about kidney infections and bedbugs. By being fucking good, that’s how.

Insects

22. Las Kellies – Kellies (Fire)

Hard to approach a record by a band who are ripping into another band’s trademark style – in this case, that of ESG – quite as relentlessly as Argentina’s Las Kellies are doing here, without one’s comments seeming like criticism. Hopefully though, long-term readers will realise where I stand on this one. Originality is overrated, and furthermore, I find it difficult to conceive of a world in which there are too many bands that sound like ESG. In fact, if there’s ever been a band whose style deserves to become a genre in its own right, ESG is the one. (And if for some reason you’re reading this and are unfamiliar with the works of ESG, well, best get on that right now. One of the best bands EVER, you guys.)

Acknowledging their chief inspiration with a faithful cover of ‘Erase You’ (“flowers from the garbage chute” becomes “flowers from the cornershop”, rather charmingly), Las Kellies have the whole thing down really – the monster bass, sharp-as-fuck drumming, the lack of any distraction from the central presence of the groove. All is present and correct. Perhaps they’re not quite as sparse as their precursors - more prominent guitar, faster tempos here and there maybe – but basically it’s a solid tribute, enlivened with some killer original material and a welcome touch of punk rock abandon.

An unlikely but welcome release by British indie label Fire, this album is the first I’ve heard from Las Kellies, but checking their bandcamp, it seems they’ve been tearing it up in their native land for a few years, and that their full scale ESGification is a relatively recent phenomenon. Their previous full length, 2009’s ‘Kalimera’ boasts a more guitar-heavy post-punk sound - still rhythm-led and still really awesome, it’s perhaps more reminiscent of their ‘70s Brazilian sisters in As Mercenárias. It is this experience and punk-grounding I think that thus gives them the tools they need to strip down the engine and remerge as the best damn ersatz ESG party band going, absolutely kicking ass on instant < 2 minute hits like ‘Hit It Off’ and ‘Bling Bling’, before getting more “moody”, throwing the expected dub elements and creepy noises into the mix on ‘Adwentre’ and the frantic, ‘Chistelle’-like ‘Bife Dos’. Oh, and on a more personal note, hard to beat ‘Scotch Whisky’ as a party tune. One of my favourite musical styles enthusiastically employed in celebration of one of my favourite things.

How much fun is this album? Well, as I write this I’m sitting here alone with a runny dose and hacking cough in an unheated room in the middle of the Welsh countryside, and I’m still dancing. Righteous through and through, I would LOVE to see this band live. I would love to book them to play some all-night party, where they could play as long as they liked. Much oomph on the bass. Much Scotch Whisky. YEAH.

Prince in Blue

21. Grouper – AIA: Alien Observer / Dream Loss (Yellowelectric)

I was a bit late in gaining an appreciation of Liz Harris’s work as Grouper. That whole “Mazzy Star through a fogbank” thing on her ‘breakthrough’ record ‘Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill’ was ok, but it wasn’t really doing a lot for me. Retrospectively discovering her earlier album ‘Way They Crept’ though, I was pretty blown away. Dark, inscrutable, frightening and beautiful, I think it stands out as some kinda masterpiece amid the whole of the past decade’s worth of psyche/drone/ambient product.

Thus I was pleased to find that these two more-or-less self-released albums see Harris dodging the inevitable pull toward song-based forms that afflicts recording artists like her when they attain a certain degree of popularity, instead picking up the more prominent vocals and clearer fidelity from the ‘Dragging..’ era and transporting them to a far more abstract realm, earthy guitar tones entirely excised in favour of eighty minutes-worth of austere, celestial womb-drone – a vast, distant music that seems designed to evoke the idea of an incorporeal spirit dispatching lullabies across the currents of deep space, catching the ear of some doomed astronaut as he floats in limbo, the 2001 star-child looming over the non-existent horizon…

So pretty great, in other words.

Alien observer is the more accessible of the two discs here, its exquisite title track the closest thing AIA has to offer to a ‘hit’, tremolo-damaged keyboard sound deliberately evoking the signifiers of a long-lost space-age, like something that might have transpired had San Francisco’s famed Space Lady developed a knack for fully-realised original compositions and hit the studio with them. Elsewhere, the cosmic drone prevails, often tempered with a disarmingly classicist approach to melody that nags at our memory receptors, particularly on the incredible centrepiece track ‘Vapor Trails’, which opens with a slow series of phrases reminiscent some half-remembered Christmas hymn… you can almost feel the dust between the organist’s fingers in some lonely Midnight Mass, the warmth of the pillow yr heading back to afterwards, even as the song’s unearthly atmospherics pull you straight into deep space. Drawing us down again and again into an isolation tank of deep, retro-futurist comfort, lulling us into submission whilst pulling at the threads of memory that keep our minds together, ‘Alien Observer’ is a sublimely beautiful record, perhaps a perfect exemplar of Eno’s original conception of ambient music.

And if so, that’s a sentiment that could apply doubly so to ‘Dream Loss’, which plunges even further into the abstract, sounding like music trying to retreat as far into the distance as it possibly can without disappearing completely, like intergalactic signals at the very edge of radio contact range. In spite of such intriguingly earth-bound song titles as ‘Dragging the Streets’ and ‘I Saw a Ray’, this is music doing everything in its power to hide itself from view, to sink into the subconscious, to prevent our ears from despoiling its secrets with our half-assed notions of structure and meaning, even at times falling back in desperation on that most obvious sonic veil – the curtain of deteriorating guitar distortion. As ever with work that convincingly trades on the unknowable, Harris is surely aware that only an ever-increasing fascination can result, drawing us back regularly into the deeps of this sound, in search of alien relics, luminous gases and moonrocks, rewards perhaps even more tempting than the sun-bleached bones and tarnished jewels of ‘Way They Crept’.

Alien Observer [from ‘Alien Observer’]

Soul Eraser [from ‘Dream Loss’]

2011-12-15T22:09:00.015Z

THE FORTY-TWO BEST RECORDS OF 2011:
Part # 4

30. The Mountain Goats – All Eternals Deck (4AD)

That this is my least favourite Mountain Goats album since John Darnielle signed to 4AD all those years ago should be self-evident from its placement this low on the list. Deprived of a central concept to work around, it seems to find his songwriting flailing around in a number of odd and unsatisfying directions, as the band’s sound falls back on a competent but uninspiring strain of MOR acoustic indie-rock that’s getting pretty damn old, its few self-conscious attempts at experimentation (in particular, the Disney-ish dude choir on ‘High Hawk Season’) emerging as unwelcome embarrassments – the kind of thing that reinforce all the worst clichés about this band and its fans.

Nevertheless, there are many good and worthwhile songs here. ‘Estate Sale Sign’ is an immediate favourite - a breakneck sprint through ritual sacrifice, decrepit shopping malls, fading movie stills and birds of prey circling on high, it sticks around just long enough to throw up hints of a cruel and bizarre story beneath whilst remaining thrilling and elusive – a perfect Mountain Goats song really, recalling the fractured narratives of “We Shall All Be Healed”. ‘Beautiful Gas Mask’ is a similarly killer tune, threading lyrical non-sequiturs into a great bit of “no idea what it’s about, but it sure gets the blood pounding” goodness. The self-explanatory ‘For Charles Bronson’ is almost an absolute stormer, it’s momentum sapped somewhat by over-polite production and an unnecessary middle section, a fate shared by the half-great ‘Prowl Great Cain’. Perhaps tellingly, two of the best cuts here recall the more brooding, relatively low-key approach of 2009’s ‘The Life of the World to Come’ – piano-led opener ‘Damn Those Vampires’ (which fleetingly conjures the dusty desert-horror fables of movies like ‘Near Dark’) and, probably the overall highlight of this record, the richly evocative ‘Age of Kings’, which perhaps breaks interesting new ground for Darnielle, building it’s atmosphere not through any blood-curdling lyrical invention, but simply through its elegant, burnished gold string textures and stately melody.

A lot of the other songs here I don’t really ‘get’, but that’s ok, really, I mean, that’s fine – after all, a lot of the old boombox era records only mange maybe a 50% hit rate in all honesty. Darnielle has had an absolutely spectacular run since ‘Tallahassee’, and it would be churlish to expect it to last forever. What’s more worrying is that the crazy passion and fury that’s fuelled The Mountain Goats for twenty odd years seems to be dissipating here. Like many successful songwriters before him, Darnielle is starting to feel the effect of his being a guy who sits in an office all day with a piano writing songs for a living, rather than some desperate ne’erdowell trawling the highways trying to make a buck, or whatever. Basing one’s career almost entirely on compositional chops is always going to be a uneasy balance between “that’s an interesting subject, I should probably write a song about it” and “here’s something terrifying that happened when I picked up the guitar this evening, I don’t know where the fuck it came from”, and if you insist on being prolific, that balance is always gonna get a bit off-whack sometimes.

Then again though, a lot of people seemed to like this record just fine. The reviews were good. Is it weird that for some reason I think the songs on last year’s throwaway Extra Lens side-project way overshadowed even the best ones on this album? On what side of the band/listener divide is the energy really draining away here? Are The Mountain Goats changing, or just me? Something to ponder in the dark hours of the night. Whatever - # 30 dudes.

Beautiful Gas Mask

29. Maria Minerva – Tallinn at Dawn tape / Cabaret Cixous LP (Not Not Fun)

Two whole albums of laptop transcendence from the prolific Ms Minerva, rising above blog-hype and cool-label-anticipation-disorder and “TRIVIA FACT: interned at The Wire” to really make her mark on the world of…. whatever the hell you call this kind of thing.

‘Tallinn..’ is ostensibly the weaker of the two sets of recordings, but there’s a stark naivety and sketchy pop minimalism to the songs herein that I really love. It’s just awesome, untutored homemade songs really, assembled out of little more than random samples, midi synth lines, Maplins-mic vocals and cheap effects, but within this evidently limited framework, Minerva reveals a great knack for sound-assembly and an uncanny ear for a really haunting melody. All of the record’s strengths are fully in evidence on the tremendous ‘Sad Serenade (Bedroom Rock n’ Roll)’, one of my favourite tracks of the year, which fuses chunks of some long lost youtube rock star interview to bass and drum patterns that sound weirdly organic despite never claiming to have known life outside a harddrive, spinning swathes of psychedelic burble like week old memories of some euphoric nightclub moment, topped with a shivering vocal like something out of one of Marianne Faithful’s weed-inspired greenhouse dreams. Or something. I dunno. Point is, it’s great. Twenty seven iTunes plays and counting.

‘Cabaret..’ is a far more elaborate affair, often a bit too amorphous to really get an angle on, on first listen seeming like an endless blissout of disconnected, muffled-through-the-walls club music and pan-cultural East End art blather that’s engrossing without ever manifesting anything really distinct. On repeated spins though, attention is drawn once again to the strength of Minerva’s tricky vocal melodies, and their central role in organising the dubbed out clouds of this sound into something not just tangible but pretty damn magical, as heard on the superb ‘Honey Honey’ - not so much blissful as a second-hand descriptor but more, y’know… actually blissful, heavily phased vocals fading into a haze of reconstructed Indian street-singing as the track progresses. Again, it never really sticks around long enough to sign off on its beauty, but fleetingly there’s something pretty special there. Similar feels can be felt in ‘Soo High’, submerging mixing skeletal r’n’b structure under heavily processed ice-cream van chimes and reverb layers to sublime effect, and ‘Pirate’s Tale’, a fully-formed masterpiece of this nameless whatever, taking us from Spitalfields out to sea, knocking on the doors of all the adjectives I’ve thrown around in this review in the process.

Ineffable, irreducible DIY hypnogogical cosmopolitan collage-pop of the highest order, Maria Minerva’s records will inevitably sound dated as shit to our stupid ears five years down the line. All the more reason to enjoy them now then, I’d suggest.

Sad Serenade (Bedroom Rock n’ Roll) [from ‘Tallin at Dawn’]

Pirate’s Tale [from ‘Cabaret Cixous’]

28. Yeh Deadlies – The First Book of Lessons (Popical Island)

From May:

“Come on in and relax, these songs seem to say (without getting too happy-clappy about it), everybody’s welcome. Maybe life’s not perfect – in fact we are going to tell you in lyrical form about all manner of awkward situations and personal upsets - but the sun’s shining and it’s a quiet afternoon and we’re all on the same page here, so grab a pint and we’ll weave our merry tunes for ya.

And fucking merry they are too, full of great, interesting melodies and attention-grabbing little musical bits and pieces, and they tell us about a bunch of stuff that’s maybe taken from their lives or maybe just made up, and for once you actually care. As Yeh Deadlies have moved away from the more overtly folky approach of their earlier recordings and assumed the mantle of a full electric pop band, joint singers/writers Padraig and Annie have correspondingly developed a real knack for cramming odd and personal details into the songs whilst never letting them meander too far from their core function as strong, emotionally resonant pop songs. Most song lengths remain on the right side of three minutes, tempos remain upbeat, and collapses into diary entry banality are strenuously avoided, but each number still succeeds in communicating the essence of a situation, an idea, a feeling, whatever. So, uh, I’m no expert or anything, but I think that probably adds up to official Real Good Song-Writing. Well done everybody!

Although Dublin is a big city, this really sounds like a rural album to me. Or it really hit the spot when I put it on whilst barrelling through the countryside last month, at least. Maybe I’m just projecting, but the songs seem to pull together to create an agreeable picture of life in a small-ish provincial music scene, from the reflections of a DJ at a small town club night surveying the 3am carnage in “Disc Jockey Blues” to the tale of a kid growing up and joining a band in, er, “The Kid’s in the Band”, and so on.

If ‘The First Book of Lessons’ was a movie, I think it would probably be one of those ‘90s British indie movies where young people in brightly coloured clothes live amid drab, dilapidated surroundings, and they go to transport cafes, and go surfing, and sit together on the cliffs and stuff like that. Hopefully it wouldn’t be shite (because most of those kind of movies were shite), but y’know what I mean.

In a field submerged ‘neath a flood of bilious careerists and terminal hat-wearers, Yeh Deadlies sound like good people playing good music, and that’s really something to be thankful for.”

No Rock n’ Roll Dreams (in Empty Beds)

27. Jeffrey Lewis – A Turn in a Dream Songs (Rough Trade)

Jeffrey Lewis’s previous LP ‘Em Are I’ was my favourite record of.. when did it come out again? Year before last? Ok, yeah – 2009. In particular, admired the way that Jeffrey managed to take the fallout from what was obviously a pretty devastating break-up and turn it into a set of songs that was enjoyable, profound, funny, musically ambitious and generally optimistic, transcending the moansville routinely occupied by about 98% of spurned singer-songwriter types.

Kind of sad then to hear him returning this year with a record as thoroughly down-in-the-dumps as this one, nixing the raucous punk and rock n’ roll outbursts the gave colour to his previous albums in favour of what is largely a one man acoustic trawl through different flavours of listless self-pity.

Anxiety and morbid self-examination have always been at the heart of Lewis’s songwriting of course, but in the past he’s always managed to put a good spin on it, using humour and weird, homespun wisdom to engage with a more universal sentiment – a talent that often seems to elude him here as he offers a number of dreary strumathons bemoaning the fact that girls don’t like him and he’s forced to go to restaurants on his own and aimlessly wonder the streets and stuff and DUDE, for christ’s sake, it’s sad that you feel so bummed out, but carrying on like this in public isn’t going to help matters! Pull yourself together, go play some great shows and draw some awesome comic books, you’re great at it and you’ve got loads of wonderful friends, and everybody loves you! Jeez, some people.

Thankfully though, this is still a Jeffrey Lewis album, and Jeffrey Lewis is awesome, so there’s plenty here to enjoy. For one, ‘Cult Boyfriend’, a perfect example of the kind of instant classic yeah-you-got-my-number-buddy pop culture referencin’ hits that got us loving him in the first place. For two and three, there’s ‘Krongu Green Slime’ and ‘So What If I Couldn’t Take It’ , intricate, image-packed rambles that seem like weirder tangents from some ‘60s underground comic in audio form, telling tales of primordial retail economics, cosmic entropy, hallucinogenic suicide rampages and flunked mafia executions. ‘Time Trades’ is a good one too, vaguely recalling Richard Hell’s similarly named song and stretching a dark-hours-of-the-night philosophical tangent into a convincing trail of reassuring wisdom, bypassing our cynicism in a way that only Lewis can really get away with. Opener ‘To Go And Return’ is real nice as well, a gentle, shimmery folk-psyche fingerpicker enlivened by droning, discordant brass.

In fact, who am I kidding – at least 50% of ‘A Turn In The Dream Songs’ is really great, and it’s at least 100% better than it would have been if some other bearded jerk had made it. It would be easy to pull apart the threads of depression and narcissism that underpin even the best of these songs, but why bother, they’ve always been there, they’re part of what makes Jeff Lewis the writer/performer he is, and here’s hoping he can take some inspiration from the noble sentiment of songs like ‘Time Trades’ and work up a more positive frame of mind for the next time he hits the studio.

Cult Boyfriend

26. Y Niwl – Album (Aderyn Papur)

Behold – the best Welsh language surf album of the year!

But seriously folks, even if there were dozens of Welsh language surf albums to choose from (and I sincerely wish there were), I’d like to think Y Niwl would still be riding high on the hog with this lovely effort.

I should admit that I’ve actually been listening to a lot of surf music this year. I really like it, in fact I think it’s one of the greatest musical forms around.

It’s a genre that works best I feel when completely disconnected from all the mouldering aesthetic bumpf that goes along with it. I remember once hearing an old interview with The Pixies, where they were talking about their fondness for surf music, and how when they listened to it, they weren’t thinking of hotrods and beaches and Californian dudes surfing and all that stuff, but instead of “crazy little people, running around, doing stuff!” That just about sums it up I think. It’s evocative, exciting music that deserves a wider framework of imagery to work with. Thus I really appreciate the fact that Y Niwl play great surf music without making any effort to try to harness the ‘surf’ aesthetic. No stripey shirts or tiki lounge kitsch for these guys – in the one press shot I could find of them, they’re standing in somebody’s back garden in the rain, next to a conservatory, having a cup of tea. Stubble and bobblehats and rain macs – classic SFA/Gorkys Welsh stoner guys really. Much respect to them for taking this fine music wholly on it’s own merit, and playing it so well, devoid of period goofery.

On the scale of surfitude, I suppose you might say Y Niwl are more on the relatively laidback side of things - the kind of surf band one imagines might enjoy a quick joint or two before practice. Not for them the rip-roaring fretboard theatrics of Bambi Molesters or Los Straitjackets. Largely, Y Niwl prefer to explore a woozier, more psychedelic take on surf conventions, their sound crisply recorded as the genre demands, but swathed in a heavily atmospheric undertow of beautifully cavernous reverb and echo, rolling in across the tunes like Aberystwyth sea mist, genre-defying electric organ riffs chiming in too to add a whole other layer to a beautiful sonic, uh… layered thing? By which I mean, a brilliantly recorded, imaginatively rendered, good-natured, instantly enjoyable pile of vaguely trippy instrumental rock. Nice work!

Undegpedwar

2011-12-10T13:48:00.010Z

THE FORTY-TWO BEST RECORDS OF 2011:
Part # 3.

35. Crawling Age – CDR (self-released)

From October:

“I think Crawling Age are one of those ‘get together for one day a year / write and record a bunch of stuff in an afternoon’ kind of deals, and indeed, they seem concerned with little beyond having a laugh, swapping instruments so that everybody gets to have a go at everything, and making a lively bunch of oven-ready less than 2 minute songs, putting seven of the best of ‘em on this CD-R, and giving a free copy to anyone who’s interested. A fine approach! A happy racket!

Live, they lengthened their set to the requisite twenty minutes with much mucking about and a great version of Jowe Head’s immortal ‘Cake Shop’, and the spirit of Swell Maps indeed hangs heavy over these recordings. Hard to put your finger on exactly *where* it hangs amid the murky din of Crawling Age, but when the certain nameless, inexplicable something that Swell Maps forever defined is present, you can never mistake it. It’s there, creeping through the cracks, coagulating amid the background shouts and between song chuckles. Introduce it to the blaring, belligerent murk these men call home in their main bands, and a good thing is born, somewhat not dissimilar to that great Human Race CD I wrote up last year.

[…]

In conclusion: I really like this CD. It’s stupidly fun, fulla random, crazy noise, inspired, off-the-cuff song ideas and goofy four-track tangents, and it asks nothing in return. I wish I was in a band like this – sounds like a blast.”

Soundcloud > (You Crossed Over To) The Other Side

34. Amen Dunes – Through Donkey Jaw (Sacred Bones)

Didn’t know what to make of this one when I first picked it up as a blind buy. First listen put me off to the extent that it was almost heading for a one-way trip to Music & Video Exchange, but repeat spins have crept up on me nicely. Damon McMahon’s bedroom psyche opuses (which make up the entirety of this hour long audio doorstop) have an irritatingly distant, unknowable air about them, his reedy vocals whining away throughout, sounding mildly tormented but forever failing to actually wrap themselves around anything that might be recognised as a human phrase or emotion, whilst the instrumentation mostly takes the form of a homogenous swathe of drifting strong textures, man-size reverb and ‘ritual’ percussion, remaining gentle and roughly harmonic, rarely feeling to the need to up the stakes with the kind of experimental gestures and big noises that usually serve to push this kinda music into the foreground. In its most fully-formed moments, it starts to revert back into more palpable indie-rock shapes, verging onto something kinda like Greg Ashley if he got really whacked on something heavy, or some fucked up ghost of Tim Buckley or something… dunno whether that sounds much like a recommendation..?

Give it some time though, and this is a real grower. The somnambulant logic of McMahon’s songs slowly starts to become clear, revealing a kind of shy, shadowy drift that can spill over into moments of burning atmospheric splendour, exulting in a kind of lysergic alienation that (for no particular reason) pulls my cultural compass straight back to the more benighted realms of late ‘60s & ‘70s Japan - to the warped un-folk desperation of The Jacks, Onna and Takashi Mizutani’s solo recordings. Either that, or some of the eerie post-Skip Spence private press type shit that I’d imagine McMahon so covets. More unhinged moments like ‘Jill’ and ‘For All’ speak more of a kinda Mutant Sounds Shadow Ring/Jim Shephard deconstructive agenda, whilst one of the best tracks here, ‘Swim Up Behind Me’, even recalls one of Arthur Russell’s perfect pop miniatures, as filtered through heavy ashram/sitar/velvet curtains type vibes.

If ‘Through Donkey Jaw’ had emerged from one of those times and places, I’d doubtless be hailing it as some kind of haunted, troubling masterpiece, and as such it seems unfair to wallop McMahon with the accusations of pretension and tedium that hang heavy over a record like this, just because he happens to be contemporary, American, and presumably self-conscious in his exploration of these kinda outsider-ish cultural backwaters. And, frustratingly vague as they might initially seem, the pieces here can really get under your skin after a while, filling your room with the kind of rich, smoky fug only found in the very best psychedelia. So light a black candle, smoke something pungent, observe the last glimmers of golden winter light creeping through the blinds, generally GET THE MOOD, and you will find much wordless melancholia, dusty floorboard scrape and translucent Evil Beatles blather here to enjoy.

Soundcloud > Swim Up Behind Me

33. Fungi Girls – Some Easy Magic (HoZac)

Veterans of several singles that I very much enjoyed, Texas teenagers Fungi Girls turn in their first long player, and I’ve very much enjoyed it also. They’re still a weirdly low-key band, their appeal undeniable but at the same time kinda elusive. They still specialise in hiding brilliantly inventive gtr/bass/drums playing and mischievous energy behind somewhat hesitant, disinterested vocal delivery and a particularly morose strain of melodicism. And they still sound like boys who have listened to a lot of good records very, very closely – to the extent that they’ve managed to internalise the essence of what makes them good, rather than simply taking on an urge to copy them.

This subtle but important distinction makes it very difficult to really pin any obvious reference points to Fungi Girls for more than a bar or two before you have to grudgingly admit that actually they’re not really that much like whatever the name that just jumped out at you was - looking back on previous posts, seems I’ve ventured REM, The Feelies, The Clean, 13th Floor Elevators, Strange Boys and The Byrds at one point or another. Of that lot, the only comparison that really holds water is perhaps The Clean, particularly in regard to their early stuff – not because Fungi Girls sound like The Clean on anything like a consistent basis (they’re far more technically proficient and neatly recorded for one thing), but simply because they seem to be coming from a similar place, heading in a similar direction. Both seem wise beyond their years – like the cool, learned kids fading into the background in every photo, with the confidence to know that the path to great rock n’ roll lies not in wearing ridiculous outifts or making a fuss or putting something rude on the front of your record, and to realise that when you’ve got it cookin’ and the instruments are working together free of ego, it doesn’t take much more than a four track and some reverb machines to get you there.

Or maybe they’re not like that at all. I don’t bloody know. I’m just talking through my hat here, trying to fill space writing about some guitar-pop band who have great surfy drumming and neat guitar-playing and sound like they’d be perfectly happy if everybody went away and locked the door to their practice room and left them to it.

There’s a lot of neat stuff on this record. A lot of cool little bits of musical hoo-hah that I really appreciate. Occasionally something will venture above the parapets and knock your block off – the rollicking ‘Safe As Milk’ groove of ‘Doldrums’, the wild fuzz guitar break on ‘Velvet Days’ – but mostly it’s happy just keep it’s head down and enjoy being what it is. Which is: fun, smart, shy and good.

Soundcloud > Doldrums

32. Zombie Zombie – plays John Carpenter (Versatile Records)

Well this was always gonna be a hard one to summon up much of a word count for.

We’re in ‘does exactly what it says on the tin’ territory here really: discerning French analogue synth / drums duo explore the back catalogue of The Awesomest Guy in the World (or ‘John Carpenter’, as you might call him in your house), with instant hole in one results.

In fairness to ZZ, they do work hard here to take things in a direction we might not quite have expected whilst still delivering the synth-rocking goods. Whereas they could have just busted through a straight set of Carpenter’s most recognisable themes to the guaranteed adulation of everyone who’d conceivably buy a record like this, instead they open up with a scorching take on “Escape From New York” deep cut ‘The Bank Robbery’, before ploughing through the under-heard theme from the widely derided “Escape From LA”. Next comes the obligatory “Assault on Precinct 13”, and Zombie Zombie will no doubt have irked many purists by really doing a number on the ultra-minimalism of Carpenter’s classic, keeping the unfuckable-with central riff intact, but contaminating the brew with a syncopated live drum track, a euphoric house piano line that rises midway through and – heaven help us – a conga break. Against all the odds, it works pretty well. Next, “Halloween (main theme)” gets a bit of a disco makeover, retaining its essential menace whilst drawing a bead between Carpenter and Detroit techno, and proceedings close with a lengthy take on the Carpenter/Morricone showdown of “The Thing”s main theme, evolving here into a widescreen trance-out of glacial analogue splendour, and (I could be wrong but it sure sounds like) stately sustained tone brass drones.

Bon travail, Zombie Zombie!

Sadly no Coupe de Villes numbers, but aside from that I couldn’t be happier.

Soundcloud > The Bank Robbery (from ‘Escape From New York’)

31. Dignan Porch – Deluded 12” (Captured Tracks)

I’ve really grown to like Dignan Porch. I mean, I liked them from the start, when I heard their superb ‘Tendrils’ LP and assumed they were some mysterioso one/two piece American band from the middle of nowhere. But now that I’ve seen them live a few times, got used to the idea that they are a five person ensemble operating out of Tooting of all places, I like them even better.

This eight song 12” is, I’m assuming, a nice holdover before their proper second LP, and represents what I guess is the first evidence of the group recording as a full band, with drums and keyboard and bass and things backing up main guy Joe Walsh (no, not that Joe Walsh)’s simple, short, revelatory songs and his brother Sam’s politely tangled psychey guitar-work.

It’s a transition that works well.

And, uh, there ya go really. ‘Tendrils’ highlight ‘Like It Was’ is reworked here as ‘Like It Was Again’, clearer lyrics and rhythm section serving to enhance the weirdly anthemic power of the original draft without sacrificing its eerie earworm fascination. ‘Stream’ and ‘Yards’ are great full band originals, nailing yet more otherworldly melodies to generous bursts of the kind of mid-fi fuzz rock exegesis that Dignan can pull off as a live band when they’re on form. ‘I’m A Saint’ meanwhile takes the plunge into full-on psyche, sounding not unlike some faux-folky oddity you might find tucked away on side 2 of a H.P. Lovecraft or Country Joe & The Fish album. ‘I Threw Myself Off Tower Bridge’ heads off in the opposite direction, a straight-up, clean-vocaled tune that would probably have given the game away back when I imagined Dignan Porch came from Indianapolis or somewhere, with a recognisable strain of self-deprecating British indie shining through.

Possessed of one of best gifts for melody currently abroad in indieish-music-world, a welcome taste for thrift and conciseness and a beautiful, home-made bedroom world of psychedelic sound, Dignan Porch are really something. They do a form of music that I really like, and they do it really well. Almost every song on the 12” is flat out brilliant, not a second is wasted, and I am greatly anticipating anything/everything they do in 2012.

Soundcloud > Yards

2011-12-02T18:19:00.005Z

THE FORTY-TWO BEST RECORDS OF 2011:
Part # 2.

40. No Problem – And Now This (Deranged)

Every year’s best-of list needs an obligatory Canadian punk record, and the appropriately named No Problem dutifully provide, with a no-nonsense burst of heavily ‘Flag-influenced mid-fi hardcore, hitting all the bases you might expect with applaudable vigour.

The band have a sloppy, forward-charging momentum reminiscent of Keith Morris era ‘Flag or early Adolescents (NO SOLOS), but for better or worse their vocalist leans heavy on the Rollins impersonation – altogether too heavily at times, and to be honest I nearly deep-sixed this one straight after he threw in a ‘that’s right!’, an ‘UGH!’, a staged coughing fit and an ‘I…can’t…BREATH’, all in the space of the 1:50 opening track.

Thankfully, subsequent numbers reveal No Problem to be a somewhat more interesting proposition than such po-faced silliness might suggest, adding a welcome dose of self-reflexive humour that makes me suspect that such macho exhortations are at least partly intended as self-parody (cf: the album title), especially once songs like ‘Ghost Car’ and the terrific ‘Spoiled Little Brat’ veer off message into the realms of full-on KBD zaniness. The band’s sound also becomes more opne-minded here and there, incorporating some unexpected touches like the odd four-note lead guitar line thing that glides over the top of ‘Most Days’, that vary the hue of their musclebound attack slightly, giving some tracks a feel akin to Fucked Up circa ‘Hidden World’, an invigorating mixture of raw violence, good ideas and relentless enthusiasm. Not that there’s anything wrong with just plain sounding like Black Flag of course – an ambition they continue to court with at least a certain level of success. After all, anybody coming to a party like this in search of open-minded self-expression is setting themselves up for a letdown.

It’s punk. It’s good. It’ll do. UGH!

Soundcloud > Spoiled Little Brat

39. The Advisory Circle – As The Crow Flies (Ghost Box)

By this point, the ‘hauntology’ aesthetic that Ghostbox helped define should really have jumped the shark - named and defined and discussed and picked over in Cultural Studies journals, we should be sick of this shit – fed up with the easy nostalgic cues, recycled webs of imagery and hints of pagan otherness lurking ‘neath the covers of second hand Penguins.

By rights, the label’s artists should be moving on before things get silly – expanding their operations into less thoroughly explored realms, or else pulling apart the threads of electronic/occult coziness that underlie their work in search of deeper mystery beneath. Or at the very least, dropping the aura of lounge/library politeness and writing some fucking good tunes.

Ironic then that ‘As The Crow Flies’ should find Jon Brooks aka The Advisory Circle digging his heels in, sticking stubbornly to the familiar, and emerging with one of the most enjoyable records on the label to date. From the nod to ‘The Owl Service’ opening titles on the cover art to the well-worn patterns within, this is Ghostbox by numbers really, but served up on this occasion with a solid musical heft and major key melodic inventiveness that makes it hard to resist sinking once again into the familiar idyll of a ‘70s that never was.

Opening – how else? – with BBC news pips and a faux-Orwellian public service announcement, ‘The End of the Beginning’ kicks things off with a convincingly stately fantasia of ‘motivational’ synth lines and hypnotic percussion, reminiscent of Neu!’s ‘Isi’, before the faux-radiophonic nature docu music of ‘Here! In The Wychwoods’ shimmers with a kaleidoscopic grandeur last seen on the best of Boards of Canada’s ‘Geogaddi’. Stranger idylls follow, such as the rolling pastoral love theme of ‘Innocence Elsewhere’, the mildly menacing action movie electro of ‘Modern Through Movement’ (which evolves into something like John Carpenter scoring a new theme for ‘Rainbow’), and the beguiling school hall dance therapy banishing ritual of ‘We Cleanse This Space’.

So far, so ‘YEAH, THAT’S KIND OF EXACTLY WHAT I EXPECTED’, but by this point you’re already hooked on another journey down the Ghostbox rabbithole, and let the zeitgeist shift as it may – the strength of this record makes a good case for this being a consistently rewarding place to be. There are a few missteps along the way – an overreliance of cutesy synth-bliss here and there (a touch more creep in the mix please!), and a misguided step toward vocodered indie-dance-pop falls rather flat on the closing ‘Lonely Signalman’, but by and large ‘As The Crow Flies’ is less the redundant retread we might have feared, instead playing out as a painstakingly realised perfection of this particular form.

Soundcloud> Learning Owl Reappears

38. Fergus & Geronimo – Unlearn (Hardly Art)

Not so much a ‘disappointment’ as a sudden, unexpected left turn, Fergus & Geronimo’s debut LP singularly fails to deliver on the kind of exultant, high energy soul-pop that their superb run of singles had promised, instead shanghaiing us for a trip to altogether choppier, more conceptual musical waters. Fusing disconnected genre pastiche to a series of cynical lyrical diatribes, invigorated by an occasional outburst of salty passion, ‘Unlearn’ is a curious record indeed – weird and offputting to the extent that when the duo do fall back on their talent for Awesome Pop suss, its use seems more assaultive than earnest – killer hooks and heart-on-sleeve vocal delivery used to rub salt into the wound, like hints of the fun we won’t be getting whilst these guys are still pissed off about something.

All of which can be taken as a compliment… kinda. Regardless of what it might not be, ‘Unlearn’ is certainly a pretty intriguing prospect, assembled with a kind of skewed, malign intellect reminiscent of Sparks or John Cale. Branching out in all directions from a straight-forward garage-psych base-camp, ‘Girls With English Accents’ plays as an eerily dead-eyed recreation of ‘Aftermath’-era ‘Stones, whilst vicious anti-music critic rant ‘Wanna Know What I Would Do?’ is one the most evilly catchy tunes you’ll have heard this year, it’s sing-song flute-led melody aimed at staying lodged in your head for weeks, even as the uncompromising venom of the song’s message lunges audaciously toward career suicide. Anti-boomer screed ‘Baby Boomer / Could You Deliver’ and slightly more obtuse anti-yuppie screed ‘Where the Walls are Made of Grass’ both benefit from elaborate baroque-psyche breakdowns that seem to exemplify ‘Unlearn’s focus on detourning traditionally upbeat musical gestures with negative lyrical snark – a tactic that’s in danger of turning terminally sour by the time ‘Forced Aloha’s indie-rock-album-closer sunset drift takes time out to announce that “your life is nothing / but an ugly beach-house fuck”.

This overriding tone of scatter-gun discontent is hammered home to such an extent that reprises of rousing singles cuts ‘Powerful Lovin’’ and ‘Baby Don’t You Cry’ start to sound lost amid the bile – like hugs from someone you suspect is about to switchblade you. Everything comes together nicely though on ‘The World Never Stops’ – an infectious, darkly funny love song, the protagonist reflecting on the inevitable cycle of life & death as he ogles girls – just about the best Sparks hit that Sparks never wrote.

That Fergus & Geronimo have the potential to knock out any number of smart, soulful garage-pop smash hits is clear. That they seem so sick of the contemporary world that they just want to fuck us up instead is kinda understandable. Outsider status firmly established and fair-weather fans dismissed, it’ll be interesting to hear where they head next.

Soundcloud > Wanna Know What I Would Do?

37. Swamp Witch – Gnosis tape (Gay Scientist Recordings)

Oof! Crashing in with the most suffocatingly heavy doom metal tone I’ve heard this year, Swamp Witch are a band whose name say it all really – a blackened, humid haze of grave soil and stagnant bong water, turned pungent and nasty in the Southern heat, like choking to death on Spanish moss. Fun times! Densely atmospheric whilst never losing their foundations as vicious, recognisable heavy rock songs, the three tracks on the A side here pull in all the best bits of extreme doom stalwarts like Moss and Burning Witch, pressing them down into a relatively economical twenty minutes of trudging terror - a thick, psychedelic mix allows for screeds of feedback, distant, mysterious screams and the vocalist’s coruscating black metal roar, but, crucially, the band never let it slide fully into stoned abstraction, keeping the riffs coming, keeping the heads banging in greasy slo-mo. Praise be. Vinnum Sabbathi!

And as if that wasn’t enough clinically depressed heaviosity for you, side B actually calls in one of those ‘Chopped & Skrewed’ stoner hip-hop DJ guys in to rework the same material, further slowing the pace to a sickening, medicated crawl, cranking the bass and swathing the whole deal in digital echo – basically exaggerating all the excesses of this genre to a level of skull-crushing fuckedness - the sound of being hit on the back of the head with a shovel and buried alive in the Everglades. So if you’re the kind of person who needs that in their life right now, you know where to look. YOU WILL NEVER WASH YOUR HAIR AGAIN.

Great sample from Al Adamson’s ‘Satan’s Sadists’ utilised on both sides too. Never gets old.

Soundcloud > Novem

36. Expo 70 – Death Voyage (Dead Pilot)

I’ve checked in from time to time with Justin Wright’s work as Expo 70 over the years, and whilst I’ve always found the music therein to be a pretty enjoyable tribute to the ‘70s heyday of Kosmische/experimental rock, it’s never really managed to make much of an impression on me beyond the level of a well-executed period dress-up. A nice surprise then to cop a listen to ‘Death Voyage’ and discover that Expo 70 has been forging on ahead into some darker, murkier and altogether more compelling territory of late, here presenting a series of lengthy, drone-based tracks (I know, who’da thought it?) that immediately put me in mind of a soundtrack to some non-existent cosmic horror movie about an experimental submarine expedition, voyaging to uncharted depths in a pitch-black oceanic trough, uncovering vast chthonic ruins of unknown origin and… who knows what else, lurking out in the darkness?

But maybe that’s just me.

I wouldn’t count on it though, as ‘Death Voyage’ is certainly a carefully sequenced record, swinging about as close to establishing a ‘narrative arc’ as an instrumental drone-rock album conceivably can, creating a dense, atmospherically consistent cycle of tracks that builds in intensity throughout.

Second track ‘Silent Watcher’ is particularly good, with rampantly phased synths sounding out like malfunctioning sonars, working an uneasy stand-off with sketchy, post-rock style guitar aggrepios to establish a mood of oppressive, monolithic dread that sets the tone for everything that follows. ‘Metensomatosis’ and ‘Travelling Circular Labyrinths’ up the ante, working with layers of tape-mangled Frippertronic doom guitar, gradually building to an eviscerating celestial din the recalls the work of Birchville Cat Motel’s Campbell Kneale (no small boast). By this point all bets for survival are off, allowing the record to boil over into the epic brownout of ‘Summoning Recapitulation Upon The Pyramid Temple’, as the lights goes out, water floods the hold and human life seems a very long way away indeed.

A brilliantly effective, reassuringly crushing take on the ‘one man drone-rock odyssey’ formula, ‘Death Voyage’ completely flips my take on Wright’s work. Awesome in the sense that it instigates awe, it sees him confidently stepping into the gnarly shoes of his inspirations rather than just paying gentle homage from afar.

Soundcloud > Silent Watcher

2011-11-27T21:53:00.006Z

THE FORTY-TWO BEST RECORDS OF 2011:
Part # 1.

Yeah, I decided to make it forty-two. And your point is..?

Here’s the two bonuses, before we move on to the usual five-per-post run down.

42. Dum Dum Girls – Only In Dreams (Sub-Pop)

Sneakily checking this out prior to release a couple of months back, I scribbled some stuff here that still sums up my feelings quite nicely really.

‘Only In Dreams’ is such a leap from DDGs previous material, it’s like listening to a different band. Amazing to think that as recently as the end of last year, she/they were still knocking out tracks in the same lo-fi vein as her earliest material (cf: the ‘He Gets Me High’ EP, ‘Stiff Little Fingers’ 7”, the Misfits cover on the b-side of the ‘Bhang Bhang..’ single). ‘Only In Dreams’ though is full steam ahead toward bombastic, mainstream-focused guitar-pop that really sounds like The Pretenders.

Inevitably, this takes them a lot further away from the elements that initially drew me to the band, but as far as second album progressions go it’s a logical and well-executed move I s’pose. The chief failing here isn’t so much the sound as the fact that – for me at least - the songwriting doesn’t match up to the high standards set by the first LP, favouring generic love songs and empty platitudes over the weirder/darker details and character studies that stood out on ‘I Will Be’. But the drumming’s still great, the guitars still have a reassuring coating of fuzz n’ phase all over them, and when it all works, it’s pretty brilliant - you’d certainly be hard-pressed to find better gigantic, transcendent, radio-ready pop/rock songs than ‘Bedroom Eyes’ and ‘Just a Creep’ in the racks circa 2011.

Far from a total bust then, but basically listening to ‘Only In Dreams’ feels a bit like seeing a much-loved pupil graduating from art college and getting a job in the city or something. Bye bye Dum Dum Girls, hope you have fun out in the big wide world! I’ll stay here playing that f-ed up tape with ‘Long Hair’ and ‘Hey Sis’ on it.

Youtube > Bedroom Eyes

41. Hype Williams – One Nation (Hippos in Tanks)

Writing previously about impeccably mysterioso London duo Hype Williams, after catching them live last year and subsequently reviewing their first 12”, I ended up comparing them to Boards of Canada. A fairly random shot at a passing insight, but one that now makes me feel kinda vindicated, as ‘One Nation’ sees them jettisoning the final traces of the cut n’ paste murk and sketchy bedroom improvisations that characterised their earliest material (check out the ‘High Beams’ EP if you can find it, it’s great), and defaulting to a fully synth-based approach that… well, that basically sounds *so much* like Boards of Canada that the similarity becomes unavoidable. Or at least, I think it does. I suppose it could just be some weird fixation I’ve developed?

Anyway, Hype Williams’ main departure point from the BoC blueprint – aside from generally working with a slightly more threatening, lo-fi aesthetic – is the removal of any head-noddy 4/4 ‘beatz’ (always the element that narked me on BoC’s otherwise very fine records), and their replacement with the kind of menacingly fragmented dub-step type drum programming that I won’t embarrass myself by trying to define, as I’m basically pretty unfamiliar with the styles from which it originates. Further contemporary signifiers can easily be heard in another significant addition – that of direct vocal samples - heavily echoed sighs and exultations, warped reflections of contemporary club music and radio pop.

In keeping with their previous releases, ‘One Nation’ takes the form of an entirely unmarked white label 12”, anonymous but for the fact that Boomkat put it in the post to me when I ordered the Hype Williams record. I had to dig up an illegal download to find any track titles (where did they come from? Did some random uploader make them up?), and just had to google again to find out what label it’s on. Feeding into this aesthetic of overall eeriness, HW, like BoC before them, succeed in creating an atmosphere of Utter Creep by means of dragging ostensibly ‘positive’ sounds – crackly poetry recitals and pitch-shifted self-help dialogues, echoing watch alarms and distant ice cream van chimes (no laughing/crying children this time round, but I think I caught a few on the last record) – out of their original contexts, letting them float anxiously in the void, twisted out of shape alongside the duo’s soothing, distantly familiar melodies, made strange via deteriorating washes of electronic sound. Y’know, just like…. uh, so look, I don’t wanna sound like I’m hitting HW w/ plagiarism allegations here – it’s really good to hear this stuff revisited, retooled - made more visceral and unpredictable for a new era, and, as ever, ‘One Nation’ is an engaging and rewarding listen that takes on a life beyond its obvious antecedents.

Soundcloud > Warlord

2011-11-23T17:39:00.004Z

THE FORTY BEST RECORDS OF 2011:
Introduction.

I know, who the hell starts doing their ‘best of year’ round-ups in November? Some kind of freak, clearly. DECEMBER 1st is the start date. Everybody knows that.

Over the past few years though, it’s become increasingly clear that – sadly - I probably do more actual music writing in December than I do in total over the preceding 11 months, usually tripping over myself trying to get it all done in time, and bringing the whole thing into harbour* in garbled, first draft form around January 15th when nobody cares anymore, cos it’s next year already.

So to spread things out, ease my (ha) workload, hopefully encourage some better, more sensibly spaced content, I’m gonna start a bit early. I’d planned to start even earlier, but I got distracted. Inevitably I’ll hear some great stuff during the next few weeks that I’ll wish I’d been able to include, but… maybe I’ll do another post about those later, or something.

Some general notes before we get started:

If one thing has refined my new release record listening during 2011, it’s been the curse of the Disappointing Second Album. Seems that throughout this year, my flat has been echoing with the dread sound some of the brightest stars of the‘08/’09 Awesome Glut crashing against the rocks.** We all know that sinking feeling I’m sure – getting to side # 2 of a much-anticipated record, thinking “y’know, I don’t think I really even like this”.

I’ll name no names, but you get what I mean – if you notice any bands that I’ve championed over the past few years who are notable by their absence from the forthcoming list, well, there ya go. I’m sure you’d agree it would be dishonest of me to keep on delivering forced praise out of some misguided sense of loyalty when the music is just isn’t doing it for me, so I won’t.

It’s ok of course, it’s not a final judgement – second album can happen to anyone. Some bands turning in a lacklustre ‘ten-songs-we-had-to-write-quick’ effort, others just developing their music into a more elaborate, fully-realised style that I just don’t like as much as their scruffier early stuff because.. y’know, I’m fickle like that. In the case of the former, hopefully they can have a good think and really pull things together for the third go ‘round – we’ll still be listening. As to the latter, well, no hard feelings – it’s been good to know ya. I’ll still cherish your early stuff, and hope you have fun out there in the big wide world being Suede or Simple Minds or whatever.

Subsequent to that, you’ll probably notice that some of the reviews within my forthcoming top # 40 kinda read like bad reviews. This is a little odd, I’ll grant you, but the sad fact is that some of my favourite artists have brought out records this year which, whilst not without their qualities and points of interest, are somewhat underwhelming or confounding within said artist’s overall canon. So I still like ‘em enough for them to make the list, but a slip from, say, consistently being in my top # 5 to being placed about 30-something is something we need to examine, if ya see what I mean.

That sounds a bit cold, doesn’t it? It’s not a competition after all. “MUST TRY HARDER, Indie-Rock Band # 348234!” Maybe I’m getting too carried away with this numbered listing business? The numbers don’t really mean anything, after all – I only started it as a convenient framework within which to convey my relative enthusiasm for stuff, because listing things in alphabetical order seemed kinda lame.

Just because I’m not feelin’ something or other quite as much as I did two years ago, or don’t like the production on so-and-so’s record, that shouldn’t be taken as any objective critical judgement, lest you need reminding.

Anyway, negativity aside, the good news is that there’s been no shortage of records I’ve really liked this year – unexpected hits, new groups, old favourites making good – all the usual fab gear. Starting… soon? Next few days, honest.

*Gotta watch those seafaring metaphors, I just can’t let them be.
**SEE WHAT I MEAN?

2011-11-15T20:53:00.002Z

Hey, Future of the Left have some new stuff out.

I don’t usually go in for ‘plug’ type posts, but hey – better than no posts. Just thought that fans of obtuse, hateful diatribes detailing the failures of the modern world set to the accompaniment of tormented prog-punk might benefit from knowing that Future of the Left – who made one of the most extraordinary albums of recent years with ‘Travels With Myself and Another’ – have got a new six track EP type thing out this week.

Precisely the kind of mid-level, semi-pro band-with-a-certain-following who are left in a sticky spot by the recent collapse of the music industry, and lumbered with artwork and title choices that are hardly likely to generate much enthusiasm beyond their existing fan-base (I mean look at this damn thing for chrissake, looks like some sixth form grunge band’s demo CD), I guess I just feel that Future of the Left should be pushed in people’s direction a bit more forcefully. £3.99 at Amazon, you bastards. There, that was pretty forceful.

On first listen, ‘Polymers are Forever’ sounds like it might comprise various outings considered a bit too odd to fit in on past and future LPs – heavy on both the elaborate multi-part song dynamics and semi-spoken word storytelling, which pleases me no end. About four or five callous chuckles achieved during a half-attentive first spin. If you liked ‘Arming Eritrea’ and ‘Lapsed Catholics’ off the album, you’ll appreciate this lot. Or if you’ve got no idea what I’m going on about, why not just take me on trust. I mean, don’t you want to listen to angry Welshmen performing experimental rock songs entitled ‘My Wife is Unhappy’ and ‘Dry Hate’? No? Well I suppose I wouldn’t either if you put it like that, but you should want to.

I mean, check out this perplexing little epic - isn’t it great? Does it not bespeak some dark intelligence that might help you in your life, as you reluctantly navigate the world outside? Fine, fine whatever.

2011-11-02T20:09:00.003Z

Blood Patrol – demo tape

Don’t push me too hard on the hows and whys, but recently I have been spending a lot of time listening to a demo by a band called Blood Patrol, operating out of somewhere in Germany.

I’ll be honest with you – I’ve not really made much of an effort to keep up with recent developments in the world of metal. In fact I am pretty much ignorant of everything that has transpired in the genre since I gave up reading ‘Terrorizer’ four or five years ago. I pick up new records by bands I already know I like, and one or two other things people have recommended to me, but aside from that…

I’m sure that there are dozens, probably hundreds, of incredible, innovative, awe-inspiring metal bands around whose work I’ve entirely missed out on. I daresay you could throw a brick on Camden high street and hit a more innovative, awe-inspiring metal band than Blood Patrol. Hell, most of the members of Blood Patrol are probably in a more innovative, awe-inspiring band than Blood Patrol.

But those other bands are not Blood Patrol.

I should probably say that in capitals. BLOOD PATROL!

What’s special about Blood Patrol?

Nothing.

So why, of all the metal bands in all the world, am I listening to Blood Patrol?

Because, dude – Blood Patrol RULES.

Metal logic. Best logic.

Listening to these demos – rejoicing in the muffled gut-thump of the practice room > portastudio > cassette > mp3 translation process – makes me want to learn to drive, get my licence, and buy a car. This is solely so that I could drive around aimlessly and give people lifts. And as they sit in the passenger seat, I’ll jam this tape in the stereo. I’ll start drinking fizzy drinks again, so that I can slurp from a big drive-thru cup as I say “yeah man, this is Blood Patrol” and start bashing out blast-beats on the steering wheel.

Hopefully it’ll be a long drive, so that I can cherish their expression of cautious relief in the moment of silence when the tape comes to an end… before I instinctively reach over and put it on again. I reckon I could spin it at least six times during an average slog across London.

Looking around me, I see indie records, psychedelic records, garage-punk records, whatever else. I listen to the sound of Blood Patrol from my computer speakers, and I think, fuck man, I’ve been wasting my life. I could have been listening to stuff that sounds like Blood Patrol. Why would anyone want to listen to music that doesn’t sound like this?

A metal review demands sub-genres, so what ‘THIS’ is is…. well I guess it’s kind of a hardcore/thrash crossover thing, with land speed record H/C drumming (not actually blast-beats, despite what I said earlier), low end Entombed/Bolt Thrower guitar chug, deranged ‘Reign in Blood’ whammy bar carnage and grave-soil gargling BM vocals. Perfection, in other words.

Completely devoid of the pretension and dry technicality that dooms much contemporary metal to the ‘not right now thanks’ pile, this tape is about as far as you can get from the pristine, multi-tracked headache factory of a studio death metal album. But at the same time, it doesn’t retreat back to the mysterioso trashcan-holocaust guff of yr average kvlt BM release either. Basically this just sounds like we always wanted metal so sound, before things got all silly – a functional low fidelity recording of some guys in a room, rocking it out with energy of a teenage punk band and the chops of stadium beserkers. It’s just plain fucking FUN. They’re singing about blood and thunder and destruction and zombie bloodbaths and rampaging through the dark night on galloping stallions and tearing monsters’ throats out, and they’re having the time of their lives. It’s exhilarating! It’s rock music! It’s METAL! It’s BLOOD PATROL. It… well, it rules.

Here they are doing ‘Unhallowed & Old’ and their self-titled song:

We ride at dawn for Blood Patrol’s myspace page!

2011-10-29T14:09:00.005+01:00

SKULL TIME:
Thee Fourth Annual Stereo Sanctity / Breakfast in the Ruins
Halloween Mix Tape.

(Cross-posted with the other place.)

Well I could hardly yet this much loved (by me at least) blogging tradition slip, could I? No further explanation needed, I hope.

Accidental themes that emerged whilst compiling this year’s Samhain offering: (i) a general preoccupation with zombies, voodoo and the like; (ii) a slight shift away from fun pop tunes toward more genuinely creepy atmospherics and hair-raising metal nastiness (although there’s still some great examples of the former too); (iii) the first volume in this series with no Ramones.

So without further ado…

SKULL TIME!

1.“welcome to the castle”
2.The Misfits - Skulls
3.Cheater Slicks – Night of the Sadist
4.The Recedents – Zombie Bloodbath on the Isle of Dogs
5.Drunks With Guns - Zombie
6.Destroy All Monsters – You’re Gonna Die
7.Claudio Simonetti – Demons
8.German Measles – Olivia’s Eyes
9.Nile – The Nameless City of the Accursed
10.Jeffrey Lewis & Peter Stampfel – I Spent the Night in the Wax Museum
11.The Ventures – The Bat
12.Curse – Killer Bees
13.Bruno Nicolai – Funeral Striptease
14.“exorcising a curse”
15.Swamp Witch – Emerald Serpent
16.Anaal Nathrakh – Carnage
17.The Girls At Dawn – Evil One
18.Mater Suspiria Vision – The Ring
19.“god at the crossroads”
20.LA Vampires & Zola Jesus – No No No
21.The Wee Four – Weird
22.Black Time – I’m Gonna Haunt You When You’re Gone
23.Exuma – Dambala
24.“home for tea”
25.Roky Erickson & The Explosives – I Walked With a Zombie

(N.B. – In case anyone wants to turn this into an actual, physical CD, I’ve enclosed some printable artwork in the .zip file – just send the enclosed .jpg to print as a landscape A4, and bob’s yr uncle.)

2011-10-22T14:30:00.003+01:00

Crawling Age – CD-R

Crawling Age were first on the bill at this great gig I went to last month, headlined by The Real Numbers from America (whom I liked a lot). Crawling Age is kind of a UK garage-punk supergroup of sorts, featuring one bloke from Black Time, one bloke from The Hipshakes and one bloke from… well to be honest I forget which band the other guy is from, but I’m sure they’re pretty good (he was filling in on drums w/ Real Numbers at this particular show).

I think Crawling Age are one of those ‘get together for one day a year / write and record a bunch of stuff in an afternoon’ kind of deals, and indeed, they seem concerned with little beyond having a laugh, swapping instruments so that everybody gets to have a go at everything, and making a lively bunch of oven-ready <2 minute songs, putting seven of the best of ‘em on this CD-R, and giving a free copy to anyone who’s interested. A fine approach! A happy racket!

Live, they lengthened their set to the requisite twenty minutes with much mucking about and a great version of Jowe Head’s immortal ‘Cake Shop’, and the spirit of Swell Maps indeed hangs heavy over these recordings. Hard to put your finger on exactly *where* it hangs amid the murky din of Crawling Age, but when the certain nameless, inexplicable something that Swell Maps forever defined is present, you can never mistake it. It’s there, creeping through the cracks, coagulating amid the background shouts and between song chuckles. Introduce it to the blaring, belligerent murk these men call home in their main bands, and a good thing is born, somewhat not dissimilar to that great Human Race CD I wrote up last year.

Opening song ‘(You Crossed Over To) The Other Side’ is my favourite here, in that it sounds exactly like you’d want a punk song called “(You Crossed Over To) The Other Side” to sound. Eg, it’s 77 seconds long and goes, “YOU CROSSED OVER TO THE OTHER SIDE! / YOU CROSSED OVER TO THE OTHER SIDE! / YOU CROSSED OVER TO THE OTHER SIDE! / YOU CROSSED OVER TO THE OTHER SIDE!”.

‘Don’t Talk’ is my second favourite – great swing, toe-tapping Kinks-via-Teengenerate tune, and an insane guitar solo.

‘Telescopic Love’ is probably my third favourite – longest cut here by a margin of about a minute, rattling along with twisted (TWISTED, no less) metallic sound and weird slap echo like one of those early Neon Boys recordings, or something that might soundtrack a cyberpunk episode of The Sweeney.

‘Venezuela’ is my fourth favourite - a more relaxed number, with immaculately whacked Back From The Grave twang, paying perceptive musical tribute to the titular locale.

In conclusion: I really like this CD. It’s stupidly fun, fulla random, crazy noise, inspired, off-the-cuff song ideas and goofy four-track tangents, and it asks nothing in return. I wish I was in a band like this – sounds like a blast.

No web presence, so you’ll have to find your own merry way to this one (I’d suggest making contact via the protagonists’ other groups), but here’s a few soundcloud uploads.

2011-10-19T19:58:00.009+01:00

Stacey Adams -
Soft Grunge EP

Apparently a random, late night Bandcamp download, I have no idea what drew me to this EP by the enigmatic Stacey Adams, or how it ended up on my iTunes. But I do like it quite a lot, so, uh... good. Clearly the processes that bring me music are in good working order, even when I’m not consciously aware of them.

That said, I know in advance that this music is going to sound absolutely TERRIBLE when try to describe it. But describe it I must, so let’s gird our loins and just get on with it.First thing’s first: Stacey Adams is not, as you might expect, a woman. At a guess, I’d say Stacey Adams probably two men, or maybe just one man, multi-tracking himself. He is (or they are) almost certainly recording at home, in an environment in which not upsetting housemates or neighbours is an active concern.

With requisite equipment in place but need to rock necessarily muted, Stacey Adams make sleepy-headed, weirdly gentle-sounding songs of crumbling mumble-whine and vague dorm-room sadness, utilising a palette of brushed drums and effect-heavy/low volume practice amp fuzz guitar. There’s some bass in there too actually (“don’t mind me”, it seems to be saying), so they could be a three piece? Actually, there are three guys pictured on the banner of their Bandcamp page, and three guys credited in the credits, so duh.

So yes, this is indeed SOFT GRUNGE. In fact it basically has me thinking of the kind of thing Evan Dando might be doing right now, if he was twenty one years old and had spent the past few years digging on all those momentarily trendy ‘chillwave’ groups, thinking “hey, I could do that”. And also if he sang not in a rich, doleful croon, but instead in a kind of strained, reedy chronically ill nerd voice, like a hungover Jad Fair or something.

Additionally, all but one of the songs are named after people – the titular Ms Adams, along with ‘Steve French’ and ‘Sally Salmonella’ – which, given the all-pervasive yearning slob/nerd sensitive boy stench emanating from this thing, we can only assume pay tribute to unrequited crushes, or perhaps lost friends or rivals, or whatever.

Assuming you haven’t already stabbed yourself in the face trying to imagine what all this might add up to, let me reassure you that, contrary to all expectation, this EP is actually quite good, and I like listening to it a lot.

The thing about Evan Dando y’see is that whatever else he might have done, he wrote GREAT TUNES. So much so that he could have recorded them on a penny whistle and bongos in-between kicking homeless children and declaring his support for extreme right wing organisations, and they’d still have been great tunes. Stacey Adams’ tunes are not of the same order of greatness, and indeed they don’t really sound like Evan Dando songs even in the slightest. But they do at least have a certain easy-going, hard-to-hate charm that invites the comparison. So there’s that.

Also, the key I think to making successful homemade rock/pop is to seem both welcoming and effortless. There is nothing more off-putting on the CD-R scrapheap than encountering recordings that seem to yell “I spent 128 hours mixing this track, it nearly killed me, and you’re just sitting there IGNORING it – I want you to work like I did, damn it! Work to appreciate my wonky unnecessary time-changes and multi-layered vocal harmonies! I don’t want to see your attention waver even SLIGHTLY for the next four minutes twelve seconds, for the sweat from my brow has coated each one of them in GOLD!” Total downer, man. However serious/morose your music may be, you’ve gotta meet people with a smile, you’ve gotta make it sound natural. Stacey Adams are extremely good at this. The songs on this EP are not exactly in a happy place, but their sound still seems to say, hey man, come on in, would you like a drink? We were just playing some songs, wanna listen?

Thanks Mr Stacey Adams, sure I’d like a drink, and yeah, I’d be happy to listen. Hey, you guys are soundin’ pretty good.

So yeah: this is a nice EP – have a listen.

2011-10-05T20:47:00.007+01:00

Deathblog:
Bert Jansch
(1943 - 2011)

It goes without saying that I was very sad today to hear of the death of Bert Jansch. It was cancer what done it, but I never even knew he was ill, to coin a phrase.

I went through a period of listening to Jansch a LOT a few years back, and whilst there’s not been much folky stuff on my plate of recent, I’ve no doubt those records will be staying with me in irregular rotation for the rest of my life. Just great, great music, made to last the years, etc.

Thinkin’ about it, it’s difficult to really get an angle on how influential Jansch was in his chosen field – hitting the ball that had been thrown out there by Davey Graham a year or two earlier and knocking it outta the court, taking a musical form that had previously stuck stubbornly to tradition and perceived ‘authenticity’, and quietly opening it up into a dense, rolling musical language taking in psychedelia, improvisation, moments of clanging modernist dissonance and Eastern drone.

Whilst still sounding as naturalistic and rootsy as [insert yr own rustic, folkie cliché here], his guitar style, his songs and his deeply peculiar singing voice all have an incredibly strange cadence to them that seems to come from somewhere entirely off the map, something that’s proved impossible to really replicate, however much his successors might try. It would probably sound quite startling if it wasn’t also so welcoming and familiar – music built up out of earth and wood, mushrooms and garlic cookin’ up in a black pan on some portable gas hob, faded floral curtains, twigs and moss and rolling tobacco, that sorta thing.

And I’ve not even got round to Pentangle yet… what an incredible band, like the sound of a bunch of guys in hand-woven hemp robes suddenly launching a mission into deep space… absolutely love ‘em. ‘Cruel Sister’ is just, like, the best damn record ever. [Disclaimer: ok, it’s probably not actually the best record ever, but… y’know, it’s pretty good. Or at least I think it is.]

Needless to say, I’m now cursing the fact I never bothered to make it to any of those Pentangle reunion shows, but I was at least lucky enough to see Jansch at an All tomorrows Parties some time last decade. He was a grumpy sod, but endearingly so, and his playing was absolutely extraordinary – seems like his sound just kept getting more knotty and determined as the years went on.

Really sad to see him go anyway. A sound that no one else can make has gone, to be made no more.

So, a few favourite moments, courtesy of Youtube. There’s a lot more awesome Pentangle footage out there than there is awesome solo Bert footage, so the selection probably reflects that. And seriously, the live Pentangle stuff is SO GOOD. Kinda weird how they always made Jacqui Mcshee sit on that uncomfortable looking high chair, but whatever - these five people so clearly WIN at music, it's almost frightening.

I've been listening to this stuff all through this evening and really enjoying it, so if you're unfamiliar with this whole malarky, do yourself a favour and dig in.

2011-09-22T23:04:00.002+01:00

7.
Cheap Girls - Stop Now

A year or two ago, my friend Pete and I went to see this group, headlining a bill with a buncha random punk bands or something. We drank a lot of beer, and we jumped around at the front and declared that this band was frrrkin’ awesome, and I bought their CD.

Played it a few days later, but it didn’t grab me at all. It kinda feel down the back of the hi-fi, and I didn’t find it until this evening when I was tidying up prior to moving house.

Guess what: it’s pretty good! I’m still not sure what kind of thought process would lead three men to decide that ‘cheap girls’ is the perfect name for their band (maybe it’s a sorta oblique tribute to Cheap Trick’s ‘Southern Girls’?), but that aside it’s a marginally more punkoid throwback to that quintessentially ’90s sorta Gigolo Aunts/Posies/late period Dinosaur Jr power-pop sound with big, boomin’ production, and some nights that’s plenty good enough for me. This track in particular is a pretty definitive example of the form. The hazy intro/verse/pre-chorus bit is ON. I wish I had some more beer.

2011-09-22T00:08:00.002+01:00

6.
Solid Space – Tenth Planet.

“Ever wondered what The Chills might have sounded like if they'd grown up locked in a windowless bedroom in a London suburb with only fuzzy videos of Gerry Anderson shows and old Dr. Who episodes to keep them company?

Me neither, but I'm delighted to have an answer all the same.”

- That's a reductive and deeply unsatisfactory summation I recently made of ‘Space Museum’ by Solid Space – an extraordinarily good album, apparently self-released on cassette in the year I was born and subsequently lost to history, until it started turning up on some of the more interesting music-sharing blogs recently.

Seriously, the more I listen to this, the better it gets. I’m at a loss trying to say anything about that wouldn’t just sound stupid.

Startlingly good song-writing and a sparse, incredibly evocative sound; mystic communion with the flickering mythos of low budget British sci-fi; hazy legacies of gentle suburban bedroom psychedelia and post-punk experimentation hanging heavy, all set off with a real emotive/narrative kick. An instant favourite – one of the most gloriously affecting things I’ve heard in ages.

Not gonna link directly, but I’m sure you know where to look.

2011-09-21T00:00:00.001+01:00

5.
Eddy Current Suppression Ring –
Get Up Morning

A consistently great band and no mistake.

There’s something really.. PRACTICAL.. about ‘em that I really appreciate. Like, they convey the idea that they know how to do things properly. Purely based on listening to their records, I get the feeling that if you were friends with Eddy Current Suppression Ring and invited them round to your house, they’d fix your TV, and train your dog, and show you how to rewire your hi-fi so that it sounded *just so*, and cook up an amazing curry out of whatever you’ve got lying around in the fridge, and then be great company whilst relaxing w/ a couple of beers - but only a couple mind, they’ve got to cycle 20 miles to a six hour practice, or something.

Also, on a more basic level - the guitarist. Every song, he’s just got something really simple and unexpected and awesome on the go, just quietly getting on with it. PRACTICAL.

I’ve said all that before on here, haven’t I? Well it merits saying again.

2011-09-19T20:55:00.001+01:00

4.
Dum Dum Girls – Bedroom Eyes

On 08/09/11 I said:

“Currently having a listen to the new Dum Dum Girls record.

Compleeeetely different sound & recording technique from anything she/they’ve done in the past… even her voice sounds really different. Very ’90s BIG SOUND going on, but not necessarily in a bad way.

It sounds like a more pop-orientated Throwing Muses in places, maybe even a touch of Fleetwood Mac-gone-punk or something…? Those can’t possibly be bad things, right..!?

Second albums have proved disastrous for a lot of new-ish bands this year, so here’s hoping this one stays the course.”

grant observed that this tune sounded like he’d always hoped The Pretenders would sound, and I thought OF COURSE, *that’s* where I’ve heard that particular tone of voice that DeeDee is doing throughout this album before!

On further listens, the record’s a curate’s egg deal really: some bits (like this tune) are thrilling, big budget guitar pop that manages to hit you just right and fool you into feelin’ something. Other times, textures and song lengths get totally out of control, but without an ounce of the kind of writing or emotional chops needed to wrangle such bombast (“the Oasis effect”, as we in the trade like to call it), making the second side in particular into a vapid, pummelling sprawl. That I don’t like it as much as the early one-woman stuff is a no-brainer, but still, what can ya say – people gotta move on, and it’s a more valid progression than many manage.

2011-09-18T23:43:00.003+01:00

3.
Life Partners - Music is Hard

One day, when a combination of laziness, cynicism and endless PR emails from try-hard indie bands causes me to give up doing a music blog, I think I might take everything down and just leave a blank page with a link to this song in the middle of it. It’s pretty cathartic.

(Hopefully that won’t happen soon though.)

(And hopefully you’ll conveniently forget I posted this when I get ‘round to plugging my own stuff again.)

(Oh, and, you can download all this band’s stuff for free here if you like.)

Added later, elsewhere:

The genius thing about this song is it cuts both ways – there are people in whose faces I’d dearly love to yell it, but at the same time I know there are probably legions who'd want to yell it right back at every musical thing I've ever played in, liked or been associated with. Kind of a universal cycle of cleansing music-sceney anger.

Ironic that I think the great thing about pop music is that it's really easy, but... I get what he means I s'pose. Not urging bands to “improve” in a technical sense (I hope), but just to please, please try to be, y'know... better?

2011-09-17T14:53:00.002+01:00

2.
Sonny Sharrock - Many Mansions.

Amen, Irving (b. 1918)
In My Father's House There Are Many Mansions
color woodcut, 407 x 533 mm.

Heresy in some circles I realise, but in truth I never really ‘got’ all Sharrock’s high-end skronky stuff on ‘Black woman’ etc. Randomly found myself listening to this one a few weeks back though, and the hypnotic doom-style riff that he and the drummer (Elvin Jones, guys!) are laying down under the sax player (Pharoah Sanders no less!) through the first half just completely bad-ass… (the riff has a modal ‘Kind of Blue’ kinda quality to it too, like ‘60s Miles goes metal or something).

I particularly love it when Jones eventually goes off on some shit for a while, but the guitar just keeps hammering away those same few notes… then when Sharrock veers off into soloing too towards the end, the groove’s been so well established that it just sorta *continues*, even though no one’s really playing it anymore.

I’m not really much for writing about jazz, but yeah, this is great. From * 1991 * too if ya can believe that. Last album Sharrock recorded before his death, and a right fucking piece of work it is too – incredible stuff.

2011-09-16T18:18:00.003+01:00

1.
The Nashville Ramblers – The Trains.

“I can hear the trains underground
When I’m alone
I can feel the sun going down
How can I explain all the reasons
She frightens me so?”

What an incredible tune.

I suppose that, living as I do in London, I frequently DO hear the trains underground – hell, I travel on them on a regular basis. But still, for some reason the idea of underground trains always really excites me when it pops up in songs, or books, or whatever. When thrown out of context, it just seems such a mysterious, fantastical idea. I’ve always loved that weird conspiracy theorist notion (marginal and old fashioned, even within the realm of conspiracy theories) that there is a network of secret, underground railroads crossing the USA, transporting, well… who knows what? Nuclear waste? Alien carcasses? Moleman infantry? Shining balls of pure energy? Strange, caged god-monsters of an unimaginable nature?

I even love the idea just as a metaphor – like Elvis’s ‘Mystery Train’, taking him down into the dark; like a giant pre-internet highway transferring information and resources and personnel between the world’s extended networks of weirdos, dissidents, rock n’ rollers.

Whatever your interpretation, I imagine you would have to find your way to an eerie, special place to hear these ‘trains underground’.

So when I heard that amazing bit in this song for the first time, I didn’t think of a guy in London or New York or some other big city hearing ACTUAL trains underground. Instead I pictured this forlorn dude, in a huge open field with the big sky above him, listening to the mysterious, distant rumbling and clanking beneath his feet, reflecting on how this strange woman in his life “frightens him so”…

Thrown seemingly casually into this otherwise standard-issue yearning, insecure love song, these few lyrical oddities open the whole thing up into a kind of sprawling psychedelic grandeur…. and the fact it’s an absolutely barnstorming imitation Del Shannon-via-The Byrds ‘60s jangle-wonder of the highest order certainly helps. Wowza.

2011-09-15T22:04:00.001+01:00

7 Songs / 7 Days.

So, this blog’s been getting a tad stagnant in the past few weeks. Business as usual for the summer time perhaps, but September is a month I’d earmarked as a good time to get a load of writing done, goddamnit. Work hassles, moving house, recording some new songs etc have seen to that, needless to say.

Plenty of music stuff I could write about, but I just haven’t had the time or enthusiasm to crack my knuckles and get on with it. Still, you can’t stop the rock, so I thought it might be a good idea to compile and expand a bunch of bits of rock-write I’ve accidentally splurged out in other places recently (tumblr mostly), and present them here, with accompanying tune links.

Seven songs / seven days – pretty self explanatory. Beginning tomorrow.

This isn’t one of them, but any old excuse;

Boom bip-bip, boom bip-bip, YEAH!

2011-09-11T17:38:00.004+01:00

Mystery Train#ing# - Part the Sixth

Yet another addition to my ongoing set of widest-possible-definition psychedelia compendiums, and again, there’s no fixed theme here, although I detect a strain of warped memories, distorted time and eerie futuristic travel running through this one… kind of a sense of ‘Solaris’-like haunted serenity maybe, if that’s not way too much of a pretentious claim to make with regard to yr own damn mixtape?

As usual, no additional info about these tracks enclosed (gotta maintain the whole MYSTERY conceit), but if you wanna find out where any of these came from, google away and exciting discoveries may or may not await.

Oh, and appropriately enough perhaps, I don’t know where the artwork for this one originated. I just found the image knocking about on my hard drive the other day and thought “damn, that would make a great album cover”. Possibly someone else already thought that and it already IS an album cover – if that’s the case, please let me know and I’ll replace it with something else before I embarrass myself further.

Anyway, enjoy.

1. Katie Paterson – Ice Record
2. Grouper – Alien Observer
3. Maquiladora – So Far Away
4. Maria Minerva – Sad Serenade (Bedroom Rock n’ Roll)
5. The Litter – Codine
6. Motion Sickness of Time Travel – Mental Projection
7. Solid Space – Tenth Planet
8. Schizo – Telstar
9. Bruno Nicolai – Funeral Striptease
10. Pocahaunted – The Weight
11. Bobbi Humphrey – Chicago, Damn
12. Metal Boys – Tokio Airport
13. Hexenjagd – Twin Peaks theme
14. Michael Yonkers – Don’t Wait Until Tomorrow
15. Music de Wolfe – Forgotten Memories
16. Rameses III – No Water, No Moon
17. Morita Doji - 今日は奇蹟の朝です (Today is the Miracle Morning)
18. Joel Mathis – Time Machine

Download.

Previous editions:

Volume # 1 (originally written up here)
Volume # 2 (originally written up here)
Volume # 3 (originally written up here)
Volume # 4 (originally written up here)
Volume # 5 (originally written up here)

2011-09-06T18:17:00.002+01:00

Support Finder Keepers.

I’ve been a bit slow in getting ‘round to posting about this, but better late than never.

In brief, it seems that Finders Keepers, one of my favourite record labels, got well and truly clobbered by the recent PIAS warehouse fire. To try to raise some cash to keep themselves afloat, they’ve invited the great and the good from the groovier end of the British music world to compile a bunch of CD/mp3 compilations from the label’s back catalogue, available for just a few quid each from the label’s website.

You know that the label does lots and lots of fantastic stuff, and if you don’t, well this is a good opportunity to find out.

Don’t necessarily want to go all-out into treating record labels like charities, but let’s just say that if they were charities, Finders Keepers would certainly be in my monthly direct debits – just have a quick scan through their recent releases for an insight into why. And if all these setbacks delay their programme of Jean Rollin soundtrack releases even slightly, I’m gonna hold the whole world responsible.

2011-09-04T20:30:00.002+01:00

Dancing Days Are Over.

What a bummer – one of the absolute best, rockingest pop groups of the past few years, killed by Disappointing Second Album syndrome and going-for-the-big-push tour burn-out.

Still, their goodbye message is so characteristically upbeat, it’s hard to feel too down about it;

“We have decided that we will be putting Those Dancing Days to bed for a while. We have been together as a band for almost six years now and have had such an amazing time - we have grown up together, created together, seen the world together. We have been so incredibly lucky and feel so honoured that so many have appreciated our music. As a young band we have had the pleasure of being role models for other young musicians - something we have found incredibly fulfilling and important - and especially to young female musicians like ourselves. Go girls - never doubt yourselves and never stop dreaming! After we played the Popaganda festival this last weekend we felt it was the perfect ending to the summer and a good time for us to say good bye for a while. We want to explore things on our own for a change; some of us will go back to school, some of us will be taking jobs - and without a doubt all of us will explore new musical settings. To all our fans - thank you for being wonderful! We hope to see you again in the future and until we do - live and love!

xxxx

TDD”

Let’s remember the good times, etc:

For a special treat, if you go here, you can see a music-industry-type podcast thingy with them being interviewed and playing some tunes at my place of work. It was a fantastic gig.

Here's wishing them all the best with those new musical settings.

2011-08-26T18:56:00.002+01:00

Milk Music.

(Photo by Matt Koroulis on Flickr)

The best new band I’ve discovered this year is Milk Music, from Olympia, WA.

You’ll notice I said “the best”, rather than “my favourite”. Partly just to aid tidy sentence construction, but partly because my belief that this is true extends beyond the usual veil of subjectivity.

Credit where it’s due dept, I picked up on them toward the start of the year following a superlative write-up on Doug Mosurock’s Still Single blog. Since then – via some questionably obtained mp3s - they’ve soundtracked more morning/evening journeys than anything else on record. They just hit that perfect headspace for preparing for another fucking day at work, I suppose. Like much good rock music, their sound speaks of facing up to the crap and ploughing through it. Then having a smoke as all lies in ruins before you. Not that I either smoke or reduce things to ruins on a daily basis, but y’know what I mean.

The essence of what Milk Music does can be dissembled into its constituent parts without much effort;

Propulsive drive and dead-eyed-stare quality comes straight from The Wipers.

Emotionally engaged, riff-heavy song-writing is pure early Dinosaur / late Huskers.

Monster guitar tone via Zeke/Black Flag.

Nothing new under the sun of course, but currently the particular way in which this group slam this stuff together feels like a revelation. Or a sobering punch in the tummy, at least. Milk Music are pretty young guys too (I think?), and ply their wares with the kind of gut level brutality that young guys traditionally should. That’s pretty crucial, I feel.

Ask the man on the street and he’d probably tell you it sounds like grunge. But as Sid Vicious famously put it in a rare moment of insight, “I’ve met the man on the street and he’s a cunt”. We all know where the good shit was at before the media came up with that label, and so do Milk Music. Hey guess what, it’s still there. Rock Music, I believe it’s called.

In fact, all you 80s/90s Proper Rock veterans, moaning about how the kids today just aren’t making music as uncompromisingly bad-ass as they did before you got old and the internet turned up and spoiled everything: get a clue and leap the generation gap – you have a new favourite band at last, and they probably hate websites just as much as you do.

Their six song 12” ‘Beyond Life’ is beyond good, and you can get in touch with the Perennial Death label to see whether they’ve still got a hard copy left to ship to where you live.

I enjoyed capitalising the phrase Rock Music earlier in this post, so let’s nail our flag to the mast and say that this is the Best American Rock Record in recent memory. The recording isn’t flashy, but it’s not murky either. It’s just right. The guitar is mixed at *the right level*, and long-term readers will know what that means. One day maybe I’ll speak to the bass player, and ask him how it feels having his tone entirely swallowed by his buddy’s low end. And assuming he doesn’t think I’m attempting a crude euphemism and punch me, we can hopefully at least come to an agreement that he’s always there in the background, doing good work.

Here’s a soundcloud of the 12”s title track;

And whilst you’re waiting for that to arrive in the post, you can enjoy the rougher but even louder session that they did for Brian Turner’s WFMU show, with a couple of tunes off the record and a whole bunch of other ones. ‘Thrashing in the Unknown’ in particular is a burnin’ monster, to utilise the same terminology employed by the band in the interview segment in reference to David Crosby’s ‘Almost Cut My Hair’.

Here it is, all free to stream/dl:

What else to say? I dunno. Milk Music have a shitty name, but they’re one hell of a band. As I get older, I’ve noticed my body is becoming less tolerant of the rigours of regularly attending what you Americans call ‘punk shows’, so you can take it as quite the compliment when I say that being stuck in an unventilated basement with a bunch of random maniacs, Milk Music, a cheap vocal PA and a set of full stacks is about the closest thing to paradise I can imagine right now. Oof.

2011-08-19T17:32:00.010+01:00

The Big Comet Gain Post:
FINAL INSTALLMENT.

Thank christ.

VI.

“David and Jon failed the auditions… their guitars sounded wrong.. they’re singing as morons, because nobody sings as a naive ‘hello’..”
- ‘Mainlining the Mystery’

When I moved to London in 2006, Comet Gain were AWOL.

By saying that, I don’t mean to imply that I was in any way ‘down’ with some kind of scene in which I expected to find them – far from it in fact. Still under the spell of ‘Realistes’, I naturally assumed them to be the hippest motherfuckers on the face of the earth, stepping out in immaculate mod finery, drinking cheap spirits and talking neo-Marxist theory with Ian Svenonious as EPI lightshows flicker across the walls in clubs so fucking cool I’d never even heard about them.

Admittedly, I didn’t even have a very good idea of what any of ‘em looked like beyond the blurred faces on the record sleeves, but try as I might I never clocked any CG sightings or activity through late ’06 through the entirety of ’07 up to the first quarter of ’08.

I knew that Jon Slade had his ‘Born Bad’ club night in Brighton, but I never went to Brighton. I knew some friends of friends who were friendly with the whole Fortuna Pop kinda crowd, and rumours trickled down second (/third/fourth) hand that Feck/Christian was a ‘difficult character’. Dark speculations were exchanged that he was ‘big into drugs’, that he’d fled the country, or given up on music, or god knows what.

The ‘leaving the country’ bit was at least vaguely true I think – I gather he’d moved to France for a while to live with his girlfriend. The drugs bit seems more like the kind of kneejerk auto-rumour that circulates around the shadow of any absent rock music savant guy, I suppose. Maybe, maybe not, I dunno. He just doesn’t seem the type to me. Much like the woman who once told me she didn’t like The Mountain Goats because John Darnielle had done ‘many bad things’, I suspect whoever I gleaned that rumour from had just taken ‘City Fallen Leaves’ centrepiece ‘The Punk Got Fucked’ rather too much at face value.

So for a while there, it seemed like I’d missed the party and Comet Gain were no more. No sightings, no news – even the label that put out ‘City..’ had disappeared.

Then: early 2008. I was hanging around with a new friend and we were both really into The Wave Pictures.

[..and god, whatever happened to THEM, whilst we’re on the subject? That one album they did is genuinely amazing, and the live shows were great, but recently they’ve just gone way off the boil, last record sounded like songs existing to fulfil a contract, crawling round looking for a place to die..].

So, uh, anyway – my friend was trying to convince me I should come to the first of a series of shows they were doing at the room upstairs at the Enterprise by Chalk Farm tube, and I was like, yeah, that sounds cool, who’s supporting, and she was like, oh it’s some band called Comet Gain. And I was like HOLY FUCKING SHIT?!?! Comet Gain?? By this stage, you might as well have told me that Serge Gainsbourg had come back from the grave and would be popping in to do a few numbers with Scott Walker on piano.

Needless to say, I was there. As it transpired, the band on this occasion, playing to maybe about thirty people crammed into living room-sized space above the Enterprise, consisted initially of David Feck and Jon Slade, their imitation guitars plugged into tiny Fender practice amps, practically daring each other to try to remember the chords to whatever potential back catalogue favourites they’d scribbled down. As at every subsequent Comet Gain gig, Kay Ishikawa turned up, played her bass parts perfectly, looked disdainfully at everyone, and left again. She is a great bass player.

Lacking a regular drummer, the bloke from mainstream indie band The Cribs had been dispatched to fill-in. That those guys are big CG fans has been well-documented, but apparently their enthusiasm hadn’t yet filtered down to the drummer, who seemed entirely unfamiliar with the songs, winging it on foolproof instructions of the “this one’s fast, then it goes slow for a bit” variety.

Rachel E. was notable by her absence.

Feck certainly LOOKED like a man who’d spent the past three years in France taking drugs. Far from an impeccable mod avenger, he had a look more akin to a red faced sea captain, just washed into port after a tempestuous ocean crossing – bedraggled winter fleece-thing, three weeks stubble, boat shoes and strange, unheimlich motions. Jon Slade looked like he was reaching the end of a 24 hour drinking binge, wishing he could go home for a shower and change of clothes. Actually though, it seems like he always looks like that. Just the way he rolls, I guess.

Of the songs aired, I remember ‘Realistes’, ‘Why I try to Look So Bad’, and golden oldie ‘Raspberries’ (dating back to the heretofore unmentioned ‘90s line-up of the group), abandoned halfway through after several attempts to remember the tune. I recall there being much leery swearing, lager-swilling, and gratuitous use of the word ‘cunt’.

So in retrospect, perfection, but at the time it wasn’t quite what I was expecting. Probably a bit of a fiery initiation into the strange rites of the Comet Gain live experience.

Later that evening, I approached David F. with what was no doubt a load of excruciating fanboy blather. Apropos of nothing, he started telling me that he had spent his time off conducting an in-depth study into the magickal properties of ‘60s garage rock, concluding that ‘Louie Louie’ was the perfect rock n’ roll sigil, a basic three chord vehicle for world-altering unconscious intent.

I have subsequently not ventured to speak to him again, simply because as far as awkward rock star / fan conversations go, that one was pretty unbeatable.

VII.

Press shot circa 2009.

“Young, free and single, like the crack in the 45, that makes the guitar snap all night, and in the morning it starts all over again… we aren’t cartoon characters, the pain is true, beware our bitten mouths and finger nails… we have torn ideals… Comet Gain has torn ideals..”
- ‘Jack Nance Hair’

The next time Comet Gain made an appearance must have been a few months later, cos I remember it was a really hot, late Spring evening. In what I can only assume must have been a favour to the people who run/ran it, they were appearing at a sorta informal ‘folk night’ in a room above the Apple Tree pub in Farringdon. For some reason I arrived foolishly early and forgot to bring a book, with the inevitable result that I was quite trashed by the time the band eventually stepped up to play. Blame excitement or beer as you will, but oh man, this was a magnificent gig – probably still the best time I’ve ever seen them.

If the space above the Enterprise was ‘living room sized’, this place actually WAS (and presumably still is) a living room, complete with mantelpiece, arm chairs, little trestle tables and stuff. Although not widely advertised, word of mouth for this one had obviously gone out to the faithful, and place was rammed, the lady charged with collecting £3 from everyone on the door pretty much giving up as people crammed their way onto the staircase trying to gain access.

Some friends of the band who do a ‘60s style light show had still found space to set up their wallpapering table and projector though, bathing the room in ink-blob melting ersatz UFO club glory. There was a (different?) stand-in drummer this time, but Rachel was back, her central presence cheerleading the others into a transcendently ramshackle performance. For some inexplicable reason, Jon Slade was wearing cricket whites and an umpire’s hat. I recall that I was worried about not being able to force my way out to get more beer, but somebody bought one for me, and I was happy! Not bad going considering I went to the gig alone. This truly was the big COMET GAIN ARE BACK moment, and thankfully I don’t have to carry on about it at any greater length, cos Youtube provides.

Such self-deprecating banter as would stir the hearts of the gods. Never exactly one to hide his current obsessions, I remember this one saw Feck wearing a big 13th Floor Elevators pyramid badge, and closing proceedings after they turned the PA off with a solo stumble through Roky’s ‘Splash # 1’. Much as we may fall back on properly promoted gigs at more reliable/comfortable venues, isn’t it a magnificent thing when an ill-advised happenstance like this really comes together? A great night.

Subsequently, I went to see Comet Gain a whole bunch of times as they re-constituted themselves into a viable pop group, gradually accruing members as official drummer Woody Taylor returned, Anne-Laure Guillain joined on keyboard, and now they’ve even recruited a wholly gratuitous third guitarist, making the band circa 2011 a seven piece on occasions when everyone turns up.

Before that though, I remember attending, uh, let’s see now… at least a couple of shows at the Buffalo Bar, probably a few more here and there, and a hilarious turn at the Old Blue Last where they didn’t seem to have a working guitar lead between them, prompting stunned expressions from super-slick support act The Pains of Being Pure at Heart.

Safe to say CG’s reputation for unreliability and general shamblism reached its apex in (I think?) the summer of ’08, when they were awarded a much-coveted (in some circles) slot headlining the Indietracks festival. By far their biggest engagement since getting back together, and at the very least a well paid summer festival booking announced months in advance. In a nigh-on supernatural feat of disorganisation though, it seems that most of the band *failed to even show up*, citing the fact that nobody told them they were playing, or they’d forgotten, or were busy, or something. I don’t know how many readers are familiar with the organisational faff of being in a band, but if so, CAN YOU EVEN IMAGINE the heights of miscommunication that would lead to such a situation? It’s positively heroic.

Reports as to what actually transpired vary, but the consensus of opinion seems to suggest that Jon Slade took the stage with a bunch of girls he’d rounded up and tried to instigate some sort of ill-fated requests set / mass singalong / general noise-making session. Predictably, reactions to this astounding debacle vary widely: one friend I spoke to described being wholly enthused by the “ten minutes of chaos” that followed a days worth of mediocre twee-pop, but long-standing fans of the band from outside of the London/Brighton axis were understandably less than thrilled at seeing their first and perhaps only chance to see such a revered group contemptuously pissed away. Brilliant lark though it may seem to those of us lucky enough to be able to see them play regularly, I’d imagine the whole episode must have created a lot of ill-will toward the band (not least on the part of the influential festival organisers, I’m sure).

Similarly, one of my favourite Comet Gain shows was another indie-pop hoedown headlining appearance, at London Popfest in early 2009(?), a fantastic mixture of beauty and chaos that seemed to go on for hours. Things started conventionally ‘well’, with a magnificent cover of Felt’s ‘Ballad of the Band’, as captured here;

..but soon Feck was riffing on Hitchcock’s ‘Frenzy’, suggesting that “strangling people with neckties in Soho” seemed a better career move than “doing this”, as the whole thing collapsed into some drunken mess of noise and semi-coherent beat poetry. Goddamn I love this band, I remember thinking, as disgusted tweesters pushed past me toward the exit, leaving the place half empty by the time they finally ground to a halt.

Indeed, the disjuncture between the perfectionism and fiery idealism of Comet Gain’s records and the self-sabotaging car crash of their live incarnation has proven a stumbling block for many potential fans. After years of worshipful listening to the LPs, I too was pretty taken aback by it initially, only gradually coming to appreciate, nay love, the chaotic grace of the band’s unpredictable stage presence. As well as appealing to me as a lifelong proponent of musical mess and amateurism, I can’t help but find a strange triumph in the way they hide noble sentiments and sky-scraping talent behind a veil of bloody-minded alcoholic piss-taking – a classic diversion tactic that draws comparison with a whole lineage of British outsider culture, from Wyndham Lewis and Dylan Thomas through to the Television Personalities, Swell Maps and (them again) the Mekons.

The brilliant thing is of course, they never do it on purpose. I mean, that would just be stupid. They try their best to be a brilliant live group playing brilliant songs, and frequently succeed… but sometimes things go wrong, the atmosphere gets weird, and instead of getting all precious about it, they just have a laugh and go with it, ending up wherever the feeling takes them. It’s an inspiring thing to see.

I guess they’ve probably gotten a bit more (ugh) professional though as they’ve picked up steam and acquired new members, leading up gradually to the release of their new album earlier this year. Performances rarely degenerate into total disorder anymore, and by all accounts the handful of shows they did in America the other year left everyone pretty impressed. But still, pop along to a Comet Gain recital and you can still fully expect to expect random members failing to turn up or ducking off stage never to return (hey, it doesn’t matter so much when there are seven of ‘em), unexpected cover versions standing in for songs they can’t remember, and sight of David Feck on his knees, trying to tune a guitar string whilst twisting the wrong tuning peg. For about three minutes. Beautiful stuff.

We’re finally reaching the end of this bloody thing now, reaching the present at last. What more do you need to know? Well… they’ve done a bunch of one-off singles for different labels, all of which are strange and great in equal measure. The singles/odds n’ sods collection ‘Broken Record Prayers’ came out in in ’09 and is bloody fantastic, and now in 2011 we’ve finally had the new LP, ‘Howl of the Lonely Crowd’ (and who else on god’s earth could get away with calling their record that). Needless to say, it’s a monster, the rockers rocking in jagged furious fashion, the epic opening cut pissing in the face of anyone who purports to care whether Bob Dylan is still alive, and even the now-inevitable sloppy acoustic songs taking on a rich, Go-Betweensy grandeur after a few listens. In between, Feck found time to record an LP as Cinema Red & Blue with members of Crystal Stilts, Hamish Kilgour from The Clean and others, and it’s perhaps even better. You should get it, if you haven’t already. Attendees at Comet Gain’s recent two-night residency at London’s Lexington were gifted with a copy of ‘Thee Optical Sewer’, what promises (I’ll believe it when I see ‘em) to be the first of potentially many band-produced fanzines, and, jinx though it may be to say it, it looks as if they’re going from strength to strength, adapting well to a new standing as a kind of cult indie institution with little left to prove.

As an infuriating happy ending (cos nobody wants a happy ending from a rock biography), here they are playing to what I’m sure must have been by far their biggest audience to date, at the Primavera festival in Barcelona earlier this year.

VIII.

TEDIOUS ROCK-CRIT AFTERWORD.

Sitting on a long train journey recently, meditating (as you do) on my choices for The Best Rock n’ Roll Groups of All Time, I came to the conclusion that there are essentially two models for a truly brilliant band. First, there’s what you might call the Unified Band: the band who look the same, are on exactly the same page, fighting a kind of war in the name of a singular musical vision. If you look behind the scenes, there will almost certainly be some deeply eccentric and conflicting personalities behind this band, but when they’re clocked in they are a unified force, creating music of such basic, uncompromising power that it changes the shape of the world forever: The Ramones, Stooges, Black Sabbath, Les Rallizes Denudes, The Shop Assistants, Dead Moon, Black Flag, The Misfits, The Sonics, Bikini Kill – take your pick.

Comet Gain are not one of those bands. But at the other end of the playground, where things get weird and messy, you’ve got an entirely different kind of band, a kind of band that reaches further, aims higher, hits some point of singularity and falls back into a beautiful mess. A band which, though it may have a central guiding presence, is essentially composed of a bunch of random misfits, and has little fixed idea of exactly what it’s doing or where it’s going, making it liable to fly off in any number of directions, throwing together themes and references and big mixed up emotional signifiers as it sees fit, celebrating it’s own contradictions and blurring the boundaries between genius and nonsense, transforming the internal world it shares with it’s listeners just a thoroughly as the Unified Band might shake the walls of the wider world. I’m sure you can find your own examples of this kind of band, but I won’t throw out any obvious names right now, because as far as I’m concerned at the time of writing, Comet Gain are the best one.

2011-08-02T12:07:00.002+01:00

A Very Short Review of Indietracks 2011.

Well if it turns out there’s another weekend during the remainder of 2011 that is even half as full of love and camaraderie, sunshine and shenanigans and, well… beer, as the one just past, I’ll eat my hat.

A more friendly and positive place to spend time would be hard to imagine; even through the hungover journey home yesterday, I was grinning and giggling like a happy fool. Basically I wish I could just scoop up all the people I spent time with during the weekend and go on a big adventure with them. Or just live on a campsite as a strange cult of high functioning alcoholics, whatever’s easiest.

But enough about my private life. Musically there’s not really much more that needs to be said: I went to see all the groups on the bill who I think are great, and they were all great. No big new discoveries or bitter disappointments, but that’s fine. About half the bands I was there to see are friends too, so any pretence of objectivity would get a bit silly. I’ve written about most of ‘em before I’m sure, so you can have a look at my scanned schedule above and do the math. Sock Puppets, Wendy Darlings, Fireworks, Horowitz, Mat from the Specific Heats: youse guys are the best.

Oh, and Zipper and Dignan Porch were really good too, although I don’t know ‘em personally so probably shouldn’t refer to them as “youse guys” or anything.

Of the bigger headlining-type acts on the bill, I’m pleased to report that Jeff Lewis played a blinder, and sad yet unsurprised to note that Herman Dune didn’t - but we can talk about their dispiriting descent into mediocrity another day. I really enjoyed Edwyn Collins’ set despite my unfamiliarity with his back catalogue – from songwriting through sound through backing band selection, he struck me as a guy who knows where it’s at, so overdue investigations will be made. Yes, he played the hit, and yes, it was great.

I felt kinda bad for spending the whole weekend having to tell Crystal Stilts fans how much I dislike Crystal Stilts, but felt at least slightly vindicated when some friends left their set halfway through, citing similar problems to the ones I’ve always experienced with them. I seem to be doomed to miss Milky Wimpshake whenever they play (an extremely minor curse placed on my head by a slightly miffed indie sorcerer perhaps?), so sorry to say it happened again. It would have been nice to see Frances McKee from The Vaselines too, but sadly I didn’t get a spot in the still-very-small church in time.

So that’s that really. Huge thanks to all the people who help make Indietracks happen – still the best example of what a music festival can/should be that I’ve ever been to. To be honest, given the company, the atmosphere, the location, it would have been the best weekend of the year even if they’d just booked local polka bands, so all the great music was a nice bonus. I hope I didn’t do too much minor social blundering when my mouth occasionally overtook my brain, and I’m sorry if I accidentally overlooked anyone amid the huge number of nice people I wanted to chat to, but basically: look forward to seeing everybody same time, same place next year.

2011-07-25T17:42:00.008+01:00

The Big Comet Gain Post: Part # 4.

FINALLY. You’ll forgive me my inadvertent summer holiday. More hiatus to come I’m afraid, but let’s throw this out there before it gets silly.
Be advised: following post contains drunkenness.

V.

“This ain’t a band, it’s a heartache,
This ain’t a song, it’s a fuck-up”
- Cinema Red & Blue, ‘Jesse Lee Kincaid’

Comet Gain’s follow-up to ‘Realistes’, ‘City Fallen Leaves’, came out in late ‘05/early ’06 I think, and I’d already listened to it to the point of oblivion before I moved to London in late 2006. But inevitably perhaps, it’s a record I most strongly associate with my first year or two in the capital, so let’s skip over initial impressions and all that (thank christ) and pick things up there.

On one level, ‘City..’ is an album full of immediate hit songs, with far brighter, louder production than any previous CG release. Look: they even went to Brighton and made a VIDEO for opening track ‘Fists in my Pocket’, and whilst they’re down a member down and looking a bit hungover, it’s a surprisingly straightforward ‘look, we’re an indie band, this is our video for our song’ kinda proposition.

Pretty good song, huh? Another one of those aforementioned ‘Amazing Hit Songs’. Fuck me, just listen to the way David and Rachel spit the consonants on “..pocket”.

At the same time though, ‘City Fallen Leaves’ also functions as a big, spiked bundle of failure and disappointment, and desperate attempts to deal with such, framed within the soul-grinding context of life in London after the hope one initially invests in the city’s thin promise of bohemian riches has long since curled up in the corner and died.

It’s also a record being bled dry by nostalgia – full of songs aching for friends and scenes long departed, replaced by… what? Crying over old mixtapes and all that shit.

A few years after the forward-marching statement of intent that was ‘Realistes’, it seems the battle hasn’t gone too well.

Although it could be easily misconstrued as some kind of ‘tribute’ to London, ‘..Fallen Leaves’ sounds frankly like the work of a man who’s fucking sick to death of it. As a newcomer to the big, ugly, unwelcoming city myself, wondering why I’d go to such trouble just to call an insufferable place like this ‘home’, I fell back endlessly on the double-header of ‘Daydream Scars’ and ‘Bored Roar’. Simple and loud – perfect punk rock songs - full of futility and utter fury; cursed frustrations of banging your head against this deadening banality between every bus stop, drawing an arc between park bench haunting maniacs and dead eyed clowns in leather jackets, paying £4.50 a pint to stand in the rain cos there’s no space inside, reassuring each other that this is where it’s all going down.

“So bored, with static you will never change/
Bored with how are you and let’s do this again”

Through dozens of dark, pissed off journeys back through early morning South London, these tunes were where it was all going down - still would be probably, if I still bothered hauling myself off every weekend, in search of something I couldn’t quite name but inevitably fail to find. Where was I coming back from? I don’t even remember. Wherever it was, it can’t have been much fun. At least now, unlike the narrator of some of the ‘City Fallen Leaves’ songs, I’ve come to an understanding with the city – experienced enough in how to live here that I know the people, the places, the memories, the journeys that I’m comfortable with, and I can usually stick with them without yearning for something more; secure in the knowledge that every time I go central I’ll wonder why I fucking bothered; aware that I’d probably be happier drifting down the Thames in a barrel than scamming ‘round Soho after midnight trying to get a bus. So it was and so it ever shall be – hating stuff and avoiding places in what this city’s all about, as befits the capital of a nation as belligerent and neurotic as our own.

Then again though, I’m an optimist. So before I lose the thread and get all Peter Ackroyd on your ass, let me admit that I found myself in exactly the situation described in the preceding paragraph this very evening. And this time ‘round, it was fine. ‘City Fallen Leaves’ all the way back was sounding good. It’s an album I can very rarely listen to sober in the daytime these days, just because it’s all a bit too… y’know. If you don’t get what I’m going on about with this band though, here’s a tip: head out to Soho, drink about six hours worth of whatever slop’s going, scour the streets for more, catch the 436 to Deptford Bridge at 2am and put them on yr headphones. (Mr . Feck is very much is very much a North London partisan I realise, but some difference, y’know.)

It was this aspect of Comet Gain’s appeal that first inspired me to draw a comparison with that other great band who only ever truly make sense on drunken forced marches and Night Buses – The Mekons. Not the most obvious reference point perhaps, but compare & contrast in terms of ideals, attitude, musical execution, personalities, membership policy, rabid cult fanbase and general public ignorance etc, and I think you’ll find it’s all there. Felt like a fairly odd line to draw when I first threw it out there in a review a couple of years back, but I’ve seen it popping up in a couple of other places subsequently, which is nice - hopefully proves I’m not entirely off the mark. Plus: Comet Gain don’t wear stupid hats or utilise accordions (not yet anyway), thus making their music far more palatable whilst in mixed company, but retaining the same disgraceful power and wild abandon. Result.

But look: I really can’t do the full bit on ‘City Fallen Leaves’ right now. I’ve get too much silly shit tied up with it, it’s all too… y’know. I’d rather talk about surf music, or metal, or something. Can we have that conversation instead? Do you know ‘Thunder Reef’ by the Bobby Fuller four? What a tune. Have you heard that mp3 that was doing the rounds of all the between song banter from a Venom concert edited together? Hilarious. Let’s go from there.

I mean, what the fuck am I supposed to say about ‘Ballad of a Mixtape’ by this stage, for fuck’s sake…? I couldn’t even begin. It’s ridiculous. It must be like being some wounded veteran of the American War of Independence, hearing the ‘Star Spangled Banner’ for the first time. I mean, gimme a break.

“Unwilling to bend our knees, but willing to burst into flame
In Washington State, or in New Cross Gate”

(Gotta love the local reference though.)

Anyone who is in any way involved with the kind of stuff I write about on this blog, just listen, and we’ll all salute at funerals in the rain together, alright?

Here’s the accompanying panel from the CD booklet, that I scanned (at work when nobody was looking) and posted back in May 2006. Click to enlarge and let it tell the story cos I’m not going to.

Back with our next thrilling instalment before you know it.

2011-07-11T22:00:00.004+01:00

Another Intermission:
Mystery Training, Chapter # 5

Before I get back to the Comet Gaining (it’s coming), it occurred to that I haven’t posted a volume of my ongoing psychedelic mix CD project thing for quite a while, so here we go.

No particular theme to this one, but it’s a track-list that I’ve been kicking around for a while and I really like it.

So schedule an eighty minute walk in the woods, hit this up on the headphones, and I believe you’ll have a fine time.

Tracklist:

1. Louise Huebner – Introduction
2. Witch – Introduction
3. J.D. Blackfoot – Prophesy
4. The Aquarian Age – 10,000 Words in a Cardboard Box
5. Bruno Nicolai – Una Vergine Tra I Morti Viventi: Sequence # 1
6. The Twinkeyz – Aliens in Our Midst
7. Hype Williams – Dolo
8. Linda Perhacs – Cimacum Rain
9. The Jacks – Marriane
10. Jeffrey Lewis & Peter Stampfel – I Spent the Night in the Wax Museum
11. The Ventures – The Bat
12. Inca Ore – Shine On from the Heaven Above
13. Nudge Squidfish – Part Cherokee
14. People of the North – The Vastest Island
15. Meiko Kaji – Hitori Kaze
16. The Top Drawers – Song of a Sinner
17. Pärson Sound – Blåslåten
18. Parson-Smith – The Letter

DOWNLOAD.

Oh, and whilst I’m at it, here some new links I put up recently to the previous volumes;

Volume # 1 (originally written up here)
Volume # 2 (originally written up here)
Volume # 3 (originally written up here)
Volume # 4 (originally written up here)

2011-06-29T12:14:00.002+01:00

Interlude: Five-Oh-Oh.

I’m sure we all need a break from this Comet Gain stuff by now. I’ve been spending a few days listening to – wow, get this - other music before I launch into the next bit.

And conveniently enough, we have an anniversary to mark in the meantime. Blogger Dashboard tells me that this thing what you are currently reading is the 500th post on Stereo Sanctity.

I guess 500 posts in seven and a bit years is nothing to shout about in blog terms, but if my calculations are correct (they’re probably not) I reckon it averages out at about one post per six days since May 2004 – a far better breakdown than I was expecting, given my frequent failure to get a post done at least once a week and irregular lapses into unexpected hiatus over the years.

By way of celebration, I’ve tidied up the dead wood in the links list a bit – never let it be said I don’t know how to party. So what does the future hold for what history will record as the distinctly-turn-of-the-century medium of the Music Blog? Fuck all, if the number of decent ones still standing is any indication, but a desert can be a cool place to be, so I’ll keeping plugging away.

For no reason whatsoever, I will dedicate the rest of this post to revisiting a video I’ve already posted once before, from Kuwait’s The Bendaly Family, just because it never fails to fill my heart with joy.

So much to love going on here, but I would in particular draw your attention to;

1. The way this video seems to suggest a fully formed Wes Anderson-style movie, all about the way that starry-eyed Mr Bendaly has coerced his wife and daughters (and nieces? sisters? who knows..) into becoming his backing band as he pursues his goal of international pop stardom. Participation, you feel, is compulsory in this family – anyone who lacks rudimentary musical talent, well they’ll just have to clap their hands, or do some dancing!

2. Also playing into this imagined motion picture is the way in which The Bendaly Family manage to totally rock the idea of vintage/indie dress codes and contemporary wimp/girl/amateur-friendly pop performance aesthetics… in Kuwait in 1978.

3. Above all though, I just really love the way that this song is actually three completely separate songs with wholly conflicting moods, crudely crowbarred together with no attempt at all to disguise the joins – first the forlorn, political angst-ridden “those guys who cause all the trouble” section, then the sexy “do you love me?” belly-dancing bit, then the big, wholesome “la la la” pop chorus. Mr Bendaly’s jaunty ‘I’m goin’ for a walk’ arm swinging move as he introduces the latter section, singing “when I go… etc”, is just the greatest thing.

Actually, checking back, those are pretty much exactly the same observations that I made when I first posted the video in August ’09… but hopefully they bear repeating.

I guess it is the fact that just about every country on earth has a wealth of stuff this awesome buried in its culture – so much so that after decades of obsessive immersion I’m nowhere near even hitting bottom on my own particular corners of closer-to-home Anglo-American pop music – that keeps me doing this crap five hundred ‘publish now’ clicks later.

2011-06-25T19:43:00.007+01:00

The Big Comet Gain Post: Part # 3.

IV.

“If you worship an idea long enough it becomes real / a rainbow burst in suburban gloom / the Weekend Gods will dream a better you”

- sleevenotes, ‘Howl of the Lonely Crowd’

‘Realistes’ is a difficult record to write about. It speaks for itself too well. If you’ve not heard it, I recommend getting hold of a copy before reading this. Seriously – I mean c’mon, it’s not bloody hard, and if you’re with me thus far on this thing, it’s not going to be an acquisition you’ll regret. Shockingly, I think it’s actually out of print, and Amazon.co.uk says a new copy will set you back £18.50. But thankfully, this is 2011, so there are other ways. You can probably get a legal download for a more reasonable sum from your preferred vendor and still hoof some cash back toward the band and the label. Or you could magic it up on yr Spotify or whatever, or… well, y’know, there are ways. Just get it. And put it on. You’ll see what I mean.

I guess you’ll miss out on the artwork, and the credits and such, but such is life. Again, they’re made with vinyl in mind, which made poring over the little words and pictures on the CD trying to pull out the detail a bit of a challenge. I remember being surprised that Comet Gain – who struck me as a bit of an out-of-nowhere loner kinda outfit on ‘Tigertown..’ – had managed to pull in some super-cool friends on this one. Some familiar faces returned on the blurry black & white shots and type-written cut-ups on the back cover – there’s Kay again, still on bass, Rachel’s still doing ‘vox’, both looking very demure in their blurred snapshots. But now none other than Jon Slade – THE Jon Slade, from Huggy Bear! – is in the band too, on ‘gtr/keys’. ‘d.christian’ still hogs the song-writing credits, but otherwise he seems to have been replaced with some character called David Feck, pictured here as a dishevelled gent resplendent in pointy shoes, trenchcoat and shades, clutching an ancient stripy suitcase (full of mixtapes?), looking as if the photographer had caught him making a 5am getaway from his flat before the bailiffs turned up.

Drums on this album are provided, believe it or not, by Chris Appelgren, boss of Lookout! Records and singer in The Peechees and The Pattern. What band but Comet Gain could get a hipster-millionaire record label mogul from San Francisco to come to Croydon to play drums on their record, then not really bother to even tell anyone? (Chris wrote an informative bit about the process of making the album, which you can still read on the Kill Rock Stars website here.) Then to top it all off, one song has a guest vocal from KATHLEEN HANNA. Whoa, how’d they pull that one off? Believe me, these are all the kind of names that would have me handing over my cash before hearing note back in 2002-ish. Whatever else they might be, these Comet Gains were clearly some hip motherfuckers.

Thankfully though, I wasn’t cruising on the fumes of secondhand indie cred for long after I hit play. If ‘Tigertown Pictures’ played out like some tangled mess of noise and sentiment and anger, ‘Realistes’ sounds like the same elements, streamlined and fully-realised - music as a manifesto, the sound of a band who know exactly what they’re about, where they’re heading and how they’re going to get there, determined to drag you along with them and to push you into being the best person you can possibly be in the process, just so that you can dare stand alongside the example this record sets.

If you’ve followed my advice above and are listening to it, you’ll already know what an incredible opener ‘The Kids At The Club’ is – a perfect example of CG’s endearing habit of occasionally wrongfooting those who’d write them off an a bunch of esoteric fuck-ups by casually tossing off the most perfectly obvious, massively anthemic, universally applicable, 100% proof POP HIT you heard in your life. They’ve got a whole brace of songs like this from various points in their career – tunes so stupidly gigantic that it’s almost embarrassing for them to play them live, or for somebody else to DJ them or do a cover version – it’d be like trying to curry favour by ‘doing the hit’, even it’s a ‘hit’ that only a couple of thousand people have ever heard.

It would be all too easy to read ‘Kids at the Club’ as some myopic hymn to London-centric indie nightlife, but this is an interpretation that should be strenuously avoided. It is a song about passing on the flame of the transformative power of pop music, from the memories of your own youth to the realities of the next generation, and the one after that – the one that’s happening right outside your window, right now, and continuing forever more. When I listen to it today, I’m far from a kid, I’m very rarely ‘at the club’ and when I am it’s usually a let-down, but that’s got nothing to do with it. It’s a song about having faith in the fact that The Kids (the same ones who are alright) are out there somewhere, maybe at a ‘club’ I’ve never heard of and wouldn’t understand in the slightest, but they’re there, that’s the main thing, and that’s what lets us breath a sigh of relief and believe.

It is from this almost religious faith in pop music and it’s associated culture that ‘Realistes’ gets it’s power – it’s a strong record, but its self-assurance comes solely from that moment of transcendence when the perfect song peaks at the perfect moment, and from a violent opposition to the banality that reasserts itself when the beat fades away again. I’ve always thought that any successful rock n’ roll band needs to be kicking against something; maybe the reason I like Comet Gain so much is that at their best moments they’re kicking against EVERYTHING – their music is that of pure idealism. “Defiance” is a word I’ve always found impossible to avoid when writing about them – it’s a kind of short-hand for the essential component behind all of their words and music, and sure enough, here they are in the middle of their ‘manifesto record’, conveniently summarising their position for all time on track #4, “My Defiance”:

“The look on
A young girl’s face
When she turns on
Her first record player

I need that
I want that
I’ll grab that
Sensation by the throat

It brings back the feeling of the love in your eyes
Dancing in your bedroom in North-West Five
So get up, and use me
Don’t sell me, here comes the chorus now”

In 2002 or 2011, there is nothing I can possibly say to that. Speaking as someone who’s writing this crap, to someone who’s reading it: shall we take a few seconds to stand and salute?

There is so much more I could say about ‘Realistes’. I could do you a full track-by-track, but we’d be here all night. Let’s stay general. Let’s talk a bit about the SOUND of this album, which, obviously, I love.

A lot of people will tell you that Comet Gain are an ‘indie-pop’ band. Some will see this strange appellation as the sole reason to pay attention to them, others as a warning to avoid them at all costs. When I bought ‘Realistes’ I had no fucking idea what ‘indie-pop’ was. If Comet Gain ticks the boxes then maybe I still don’t. The music on ‘Realistes’ has never sounded like some fey, self-deprecating thing to me; on the contrary, it’s about as far from those clichés as it’s possible to get. This is soul, this is punk, this is noise – this is every kind of music that’s strong and direct and uncompromising, but filtered through the fingers of men and women with far too many 7” singles, far too many pin badges and Oxfam paperbacks and guilty middle-class backgrounds… so where does that leave us exactly?

Looking at it another way, it could well be argued that any band who take the time to cover ‘She Never Understood’ by Alan McGee’s band Biff!Bang!Pow! should be laughed out of court the second they try to claim allegiance to anything but darkest, dismallest INDIE. But, oh – nobody ever thought of making it sound quite like this. The jangle on the guitars is there, the fainting fit chord progressions are still there, but no way man, this is not some fussily recorded peon to The Byrds and rose-tinted loneliness rendered by soft-spoken fellas in corduroy jackets. This is the sound of a one-take roar in a basement, guitarists pushing the treble ‘til it hurts, fighting a spluttering PA system as the motorik rhythm pulses like a heartbeat, pure beautiful tangle within a hairs-breadth of collapse. SHE NEVER UNDERSTOOD. Christ, just that title. The sheer exultant self-pity of it – imagine it yelled over this soaring, bleeding racket by these stiff-legged drop-outs. Is that ‘indie-pop’? I don’t fucking know.

Like most great albums, ‘Realistes’ is recorded cheaply, quickly, with no time for bullshit. Everything bleeds into everything else, ‘White Light/White Heat’ style. The guitars clang and howl and bawl, weird overcompressed keyboards chime in like Casio angel choirs, and Appelgren’s utilitarian pulse never lets up, even on the slow numbers. It’s clear and loud and brilliant-sounding, but also kinda inexplicably tinny, like the whole thing was mixed on cassette tape or something. It’s recorded like they were in a HURRY – to fight for the workers, to free the kids from a life of drudgery, to light a fire or flee the country or get to the pub – but somehow the stars were aligned, and everything just went *right*.

I’ve been listening to ‘Realistes’ regularly for just about ten years now, and I’m not sick of it yet.

In retrospect, I can see that the album’s pure aesthetic vision is a bit of a put-on, or rather a wish – a sort of dress-up of what Feck and his gang desperately wanted their lives to be, and a prayer to make it happen, summoning visions of steely faces from Godard and Truffaut movies, and of daring young intellectuals hustling in cinemas and record shops (“three Polanskis tonight / you bring the speed and I’ll bring the popcorn”); of first generation mods whooping it up on Tower Bridge Road, and of Otis Redding down on his knees at the Apollo; of the legends of Billy Liar and Frankie Machine and Mick Travis; of rioters in Brixton and the Rough Trade bands scratching out their strange new language; of George Orwell in Spain, loading his rifle in the name of human dignity.

In the world created by ‘Realistes’, pop culture and politics aren’t just some awkward alliance: they’re one and the same: reflecting your beliefs in the clothes you wear, the songs you listen to, the book you read isn’t just a surface gesture: it’s the first step toward remaking the world in your own image – the image handed down to us from the twentieth century’s endless army of noble, doomed rebels. Rebelling against what? Anything, everything; what have you got? When everything in the modern world seems like an obstacle, that’s when you’ve got the power to head down to the basement and make a great fucking record.

Blimey, I’m getting all worked up here. Just like I was on January 19th 2006, when I wrote a bit about the penultimate song on ‘Realistes’, “Don’t Fall in Love if you Want to Die in Peace”, which I recall listening to about ten times a day at the time;

“The very definition of an underrated band, Comet Gain have pretty much provided the almost embarrassingly accurate soundtrack to my personal universe and belief system over the past year or so. They’ve got a new album out at the moment which I haven’t picked up yet, so for now I’ll stick to this song from their previous one, ‘Realistes’, which blew my mind and stomped my heart anew on my walk into work this morning. It’s a fairly atypical Comet Gain track, but still encompasses all the reasons I love this band. A clumsily picked out guitar melody, a girl singing with a guy on backing vox, some kinda really dodgy sounding synthesised strings, a song of bold, well-trodden sentiments that in the hands of other musicians would have us cringing...... how oh my lord do these simple things combine into such spell-binding genius?

Comet Gain sing and play here with a mix of guts and beauty and grit and dirt and despair and hope that reminds me of my cherished bootleg of Nico and Lou Reed demoing ‘Chelsea Girls’ in a hotel room, the voices nervous and untrained and just on the verge of shouting, the music tender and brittle and staying just the right side of collapse. […] when Rachel sings “.. look at your sky through Bob Dylan’s eyes..”, my soul just about spills out on the pavement and runs off to find a drink.

So let’s forget the simpering idiots who’ve made “indie” an insult – Comet Gain know what their perfect world sounds like, what’s important to them is what’s important to you and me, and they’re chasing it for all it’s worth. Unlike so many, they fucking mean what they say, and the result is some of the best and most underappreciated music you’ll hear this decade.”

I was being a right sad-sack when I wrote that. If I’d only let the CD play on a few more times, rather than skipping back to that one all the time, maybe I’d have sorted my shit out a lot sooner. Digital alarm clock chimes begin the album’s title track, excising the heartbreak with a roar of sloganeering reassurance, a reiteration of all the hope and energy that’s been poured into the preceding ten tracks, as the band almost literally kneel in worship before the healing power of rock n’ roll, disappearing over the horizon on a Hawkwind drum beat and a guitar sound like someone trying to record a jet engine on a Tascam 4-track – “this is my prayer, this is my prayer, this is my…”

2011-06-21T20:27:00.006+01:00

The Big Comet Gain Post: Part # 2.

Apologies for the delay. I had some kinda busy-times space-filling posts prepared, but didn’t want to break the flow of the Comet Gain thing. I mean, ideally, I’d sit down and plough through the whole thing in one sitting, but life gets in the way. So kick back for a moment, light yr pipe, think back to earlier this month when you read my preceding post, and let’s see where we left off…

III.

The nearest thing to a Comet Gain press shot, circa 1999.

“This low-fi punk-pop band offers some nice moments on this disc, particularly on the ersatz Motown of "Dificient Love" and the straight-ahead punch of "Skinny Wolves," but the lack of finesse in guitarist David Christian's style gets a bit wearing after a while.”

– entire text of Allmusic.com review of ‘Tigertown Pictures’

“The only reason you play bad guitar is to get bad reactions – all this clone collective band shit, through boredom, contempt and NO IDEAS… our only ambition is just to die”

- Comet Gain - ‘Record Player’

My appreciation for the rest of ‘Tigertown Pictures’ grew more slowly. Even listening to it the other day, wandering around the streets whilst thinking about writing this article, I was noticing new connections in it, new patterns and details that were previously lost in the haze of the recording. It’s more than an earnest young lad such as my eighteen year old self could manage to take in in one go really - esoteric cultural reference points, blurry attempts at incompatible musical styles, big choruses and sentimental strumming crashing jagged fragments of noise and desperate, indecipherable poetry. What was all this stuff trying to convey? I dunno, but it definitely seemed to have something on its mind.

‘Jack Nance Hair’! Well, the special people can’t say no to a song with a name like that. This version you’ll note is very different to the one that turned up at the start of ‘Broken Record Prayers’ – murkier, more incoherent, with some words that may actually seek to reflect the sad fate of Mr. Nance, alongside other words that almost certainly do not. “I’m afraid she doesn’t know it, I’d like just once for her to show it” mutters David as the drum beat and guitar riff kick the song up to a faster tempo – a quietly heart-stopping moment, the first of many. Then there were the Rachel-voiced songs (‘Skinny Wolves’, ‘Hate Soul’) that seemed to draw on girl group and Motown tropes in an attempt to create a more upbeat pop atmosphere, resonant of breathless underground nightlife, random drunken passion and the like. I didn’t think those songs worked very well on this album, and I still don’t really. They seem a bit forced.

More befitting of the sprawling, cracked vibe of the whole affair is stuff like the lengthy ‘Transmission Lost’, verses full of mysterious references to “German documentary making” and “the rising of the poor after the war” opening up into an incessant chorus repeat (“running, running, running”) mixed over a barely decipherable spoken word monologue, culminating in breathless calls to “fight BACK” and “keep the Socialist dream alive”, expressed with an earnestness that can almost bring tears to my eyes as it pops up on my mp3 player midway down another street rotten with estate agents and betting shops.

(Soundcloud isn’t letting me upload songs from this album as friendly non-d/l streams today, so I guess I’ll just have to awkwardly give them to you to download instead – them’s the breaks.)

Transmission Lost.

Then there’s ‘Jaspar Johns’, a jagged post-punk temper tantrum that seems more intent on celebrating the artist’s drug habit than his work, morphing inexplicably into an extended quote from Johnny Cash’s ‘I Walk the Line’, and ‘When You Come Back I’ll Feel Like Jesus Coming Off The Cross’, the absurdly overwrought sentiment of the title overcome by a slow, stately melody that belies the frantic belligerence of much of the rest of the record, and a line about somebody leaving home “with a suitcase full of mixtapes” - something I would literally be liable to do at around the time I acquired this album. A ‘gabba gabba we accept you’ lyric, like a not-so-covert nod to the similarly obsessed. Again, the first of many. I picked it up and put it in my pocket.

One song that particularly stood out for me (I know this before archival research indicates I put it on a bunch of my own mixtapes around this time) was ‘The Ballad of the Arms of Cable Hogue’. Like the photocopied lobbycard cinematic moments plastered across Comet Gain’s records, there’s something inexplicably immortal about this song, something about the way the rather vague verses open up into a chorus vast enough to fill a Western skyline – “man on the telly, with a bullet in his belly”. That line immediately made me choke up, and still does – instant transportation to some darkened basement flat on a seafront somewhere, where the flickering image of the writhing, doomed cowboy on the screen mirrors the broader pain and confusion and terrible dramas going on all around it in the ‘real’ lives of the people who have brought us these strange, desperate songs. “Those that lose their lives / for the sake of the midnight hour”.

The Ballad of the Arms of Cable Hogue.

I’ve still not seen Sam Peckinpah’s ‘The Arms of Cable Hogue’. I’d like to. If you were to collar me in the pub one night, I’d probably bullshit and pretend I know all about it. Try it some time if you know me in real life – I’ll probably have forgotten I wrote this paragraph.

Anyway, now seems a good juncture at which to talk about what a great singer Rachel Evans is. Usually, there are few roles in a rock group less distinguished than that of the lead singer who only sings on about a third of the songs and otherwise doesn’t do much, but anyone who’s listened to a Comet Gain record, or seen them on stage, will know what an inadequate summation of her contribution the band that is.

Basically, I think she’s one of the best female punk singers ever. She has this brilliant way of shouting whilst remaining perfectly in tune. Her voice is like a thousand yard stare, daring you to call her out as she imbues even the fruitiest Feck/Christian lyrics with a deathly commitment that can… what? Chill the blood, shiver the spine, break the glass. I dunno – insert your own cliché. It’s fucking brilliant anyway. We’ve all got a muso-ish tendency buried in us somewhere to kinda resent people in bands who don’t play an instrument or write songs, but we can tell that tendency to fuck off whenever Rachel sings. His songs plus her voice = a combination that can practically stop my heart beating for two or three minutes. So I just thought I’d mention that before we move on.

I don’t think Comet Gain were anywhere near my favourite band after ‘Tigertown Pictures’, but they certainly seemed crazed and mysterious enough to keep me interested. I know I liked them enough that when I saw their NEXT album in some corporate clearout sale, I picked that up too.

For ages, my copy had a big ugly sticker that said £4.99 on the front. I don’t remember where from. Maybe Virgin? Maybe Leicester? An insalubrious locale for such a weighty acquisition.

The album is called ‘Realistes’. I probably went around for years calling it ‘Realist-ees’, but obviously it’s pronounced ‘Realists’. Long-time readers may recall that I declared it my favourite album released between 2000 and 2009. I’m honestly dreading trying to face up to writing something about it, but I’ve committed myself now so I’ll have to bite the bullet. Watch this space.

2011-06-06T21:11:00.008+01:00

The Big Comet Gain Post: Part # 1.

As I write, a copy of Comet Gain’s first album in seven years is awaiting collection from the post office. (That's not a picture of it above, obvs.) By this stage, the cycle of anticipation has doubled back on itself and I’m scarcely anticipating it at all. After so many years, so much obsession and projection and heartache and weird, creepy sound-ownership poured into their previous LPs, the existence of a new one to sit alongside those tablets of the lore just seems ridiculous. Whatever is on it, it will disappoint, initially at least. It will take time for it to work its way into the pantheon. It will take beer and stubbed toes and hungover journeys to work. It will get there eventually.

As ‘The Howl of the Lonely Crowd’ sits in the sorting office then, the time seems nigh for me to step up and launch into my Big Comet Gain Post. Think of it as an attempt to examine the way this sporadically active British rock band – whose name you could probably yell in a busy record shop anywhere in the world without eliciting a glimmer of recognition – have infiltrated my life and thought to such a degree over the past decade that… well, I don’t even know how to end that sentence. A lot of drunken walks home, a lot of nights crammed into insalubrious music venues, a lot of personal upsets and snap decisions, a lot of rambling letters and purchases of records and books and movie tickets, would all have been very different without the music of Comet Gain. And, in general, they’d have been a lot less fucking good too, I’d wager.

I’m afraid you’re going to have to bear with me quite a bit on this one. It’s gonna be split into several sections, and I’m going to try to present information and thoughts and visuals in a way that’s roughly in line with when I acquired them. This band were very mysterious to me for a long time, before I eventually had the good fortune to find myself living in a city where they were playing semi-regular gigs, and for a lot of their fans I’d imagine they are mysterious still. More than is usually considered sensible these days, they seem like a band still dedicated to forcing their way to immortality via blurry photos, random pronouncements, distant rumours and general uncertainty, and that’s something I’d like to try to reflect.

So hey, let’s take this in numbered sections, with quotes, like a H.P. Lovecraft story or something, shall we? Yeah, that sounds like fun.

“We started as a joke and idea, we played broken songs on broken amps and cardboard drums and it never got much more professional. We believed in obsolete things and passionate hearts and still do and made these records from our hearts to yours for whatever it was and still is and could be. Never die, up the workers and all that. DCF”

- sleeve note, ‘Broken Record Prayers’ compilation, 2009

Nobody told me to listen to Comet Gain. I never heard them on the radio, or read about them in the press. Even ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’, whose shambolically utopian post-riot grrl aesthetic agenda and nexus of editorial/band member allegiances would you’d think have provided the perfect vehicle for plentiful Comet Gain coverage, somehow forgot to tell me about them. Instead, my discovery of the band was wholly accidental, mediated through my pre-download era trawling of chain store clearout bins, in search of something, anything that might be worth listening to.

Somewhere between the age of about eighteen and twenty, whilst indulging in this unsavoury, vulture-like activity, I found myself in the middle of an unexpectedly fucking brilliant clearance sale in the Brighton branch of Borders. Subsequently, I have learned that none other than CTCL editor Everett True spent some time working in a managerial capacity at Borders (this branch, presumably), following his departure from the mainstream music press and prior to his founding of the aforementioned publication. Thus it’s my theory that what I was actually experiencing here was the shop’s attempt to rid itself of all the unsellable stock he’d ordered in. But regardless – the fact is that for a poor kid without access to even dial-up internet, the chance to actually pick up discs by the mysterioso likes of Flying Saucer Attack, The Make Up and The 13th Floor Elevators for £1 a pop was extremely exciting.

And amongst their number… COMET GAIN. What the hell is that? Never heard of ‘em. WHAT a great name a band though, and the cover (some sort of endlessly photocopied still from a Jean Luc Godard movie chopped up inside big yellow and orange boxes or something) looked cool as shit, so I went for it.

I guess with a name like that I naturally assumed they’d be a psychedelic band of some kind. Maybe some Stereolab kinda deal. Y’know, like they were probably jamming in the studio and were all like ‘uh, so chaps, I think we need a name’, and they got it from one of their pedals, or a knob on a weird Japanese reverb unit or something. In hindsight, I suspect this name origin story is about as far from the truth as it’s possible to get. In fact, I’d venture to suggest that the sort of muso gear-nerd fetishism that an assumption like that might imply is exactly the kind of thing Comet Gain stand against. Something they exist to spit in the face of, even! I doubt David Feck even knows the name of the single rusty stomp-box he plugs his Japanese Rickenbacker copy into on-stage. And that’s something to be proud of, damn it! I mean, d’you think Swell Maps or The Clean or The Raincoats had time to caress their fucking mass-produced electronic gizmos and build fucking pedalboards whilst they were busy wringing out the raw energy of youth that was running through their bones, capturing it in the form of random, frantic eternal racket before it soured, dedicating every second to feeling autonomous and alive…? (That’s a rhetorical question - don't answer it.)

But I’m getting ahead of myself. So yeah: I still don’t know why they’re called Comet Gain. But it’s still a great name. And on the back of this CD, which was called ‘Tigertown Pictures’, on a label called ‘Where It’s At Is Where You Are’ Records, there’s a tiny little square of faces – too small to really make out much detail -introducing the members of the band. Being the sad bastard I am, I probably scrutinised this in detail before I even put the CD on. ‘Kay’ – identifiable from her picture as female and Asian – played bass. ‘Rachel’ did ‘vox’. Some bloke I can’t remember the name of played the drums. Everything else was the remit of one ‘d. christian’ (male, no caps), who also took all the songwriting credits. I was sorta annoyed that this was a band with girls in, and yet the bloke had written all the songs and basically done everything. I was like that back then.

I can’t clearly remember what my first impressions were when I put ‘Tigertown Pictures’ on. I know it wasn’t an instant hit – I remember finding its sound thin and headachey and generally off-putting. But back in those days, you paid your money and took yr choice, y’know, so I kept putting the CD on regardless, and eventually it must have clicked. I remember thinking ‘oh, right, they’re an indie band’ – ‘indie’ in the sense that The Yummy Fur or Boyracer were ‘indie’ that is – scratchy and murky, with fluffed lyrics that you can’t quite hear properly, but with a certain undeniable passion about what they’re doing that keeps you listening regardless. And a certain fury too. Yeah, that was the hook for me maybe.

II.

The first Comet Gain song that really made an impression on me was ‘Record Collection’, the opener on ‘Tigertown Pictures’. Bloody hell, I thought, they may be an indie band, but they’re the most furious indie band I’ve heard in my life. The metallic clang of that guitars, the ranting, unguarded vocal delivery… the only thing in my limited musical vocabulary I could really compare this sort of fury to was Shellac’s ‘Prayer to God’. Even though it’s not very much like it at all, nothing else within my reach really seemed an apt reference point.

In essence, the song is a simple-bordering-on-dumb idea that just about any other band in the world would probably have played out as a tongue-in-cheek mess-around – a chorus declaring “I don’t wanna hear your record collection in my brain anymore”, contrasted with verses in which the singer lists songs and artists he can’t face anymore, presumably because they remind him of time spent with his ex. Y’know, you can imagine it can’t you – a singsong-y girl group beat and a bunch of eyebrow raising cultural reference points. Fair enough. The situation is clearly no fucking joke for d.christian however, his ripped-to-fuck guitar constantly lunging ahead of the beat and having to double back on itself as he launches into a semi-improvised tirade of startling venom, declaring that “all musicians are a disgrace, disfigured, misinformed and rotten!” and “rock n’ roll’s a cancer in my lungs!”, in-between spitting out his rejection of “spiked guitars and Eno produced shit!”.

As you might expect, the song’s a bit of a mess, a kind of tantrum-like outburst that feels like it’s been pieced together haphazardly from several takes. The band rarely revisit it live, and you probably won’t listen to my Soundcloud upload and be blown away or anything. But for a first-time listener unaccustomed to the ways of this band, something about it was fairly extraordinary. Something about the way this ‘d.christian’ throws caution to the wind in his vocal delivery, rejecting the slurs and sneers and mumbles expected of an ‘indie’ vocalist, as he instead tries to hurl his cracked, white-boy voice in the direction of the kind of catharsis an American soul singer might pull out of the this material, straining to hit notes his lungs can’t even conceive of, as if he’d stormed down to the studio (assuming this sonic disaster of an album ever saw the inside of a studio) straight after hurling said record collection at his lover’s tearful head.

There is something about ‘Record Collection’ that maybe gets to heart of why I started to relate to Comet Gain so strongly – mainly I think, the idea of a band that refused to write this stuff off as a joke, of a singer who wasn’t ashamed to admit that the idea of not being able to listen to The Beach Boys or Dexy’s Midnight Runners anymore wasn’t just a wistful ‘moving on’ experience, it was a fucking holocaust. It seemed a brave thing to admit, something we can all connect to to some extent, but would never be able to scream in song, putting our obsessions and weaknesses on display like that. Even ten years ago, I could see what an excessive, lunatic thing the song essentially is, but can any of us music fans truly say we don’t get some kind of vicarious thrill of recognition from the uncertain voice after the fury has died down that repeats, “will you still love me tomorrow / when I show you the track of my tears?”, as the impotent, amp-scraping feedback fades away behind him? At that point I think, the connection was made.

2011-05-30T20:23:00.005+01:00

Albums Catch-Up:
The Dirtbombs – Party Store
(In The Red)

If there was one major stumbling-block for the groups that emerged from the late ‘90s/early ‘00s garage boom, it was probably song-writing. Not to say that there weren’t a ton of great songs and great songwriters to be found within that scene of course, but whereas internet era fuzz-punks can preserve their mystique by spreading themselves across limited edition 7”s, random junk tapes, one-off mp3 downloads, fucked up live recordings and the like, the era that gave birth to bands like The Dirtbombs was a little more prescriptive.

If you were a band that was ‘going places’ in 1998, the only place it was in your power to go to was the fucking studio, to lay down the requisite twelve or fourteen original compositions required by your label, to be pressed onto a little CD that would be your calling card to the world. And there’s nothing that kills the unhinged immediacy of great garage-rock quite like having to do that, as two chord tunes that no doubt rocked the shack when playing to a well-lubricated crowd at a basement gig reveal their plodding insufficiency in the face of multiple takes, boring production details, tedious mixing decisions.

For some reason, it was the Detroit bands who often seemed to suffer worst from this affliction. KO & The Knockouts, The Hentchmen, Bantam Rooster – sure, they must’ve been great live, they had their moments on record, but can you imagine regularly slugging your way through a whole album of 3 minute+ songs by them? Can you imagine listening to their second album, their fourth? That’s not a criticism of those bands – it’s just the nature of the kind of music they play. Not everyone has the strength of character to be a Billy Childish or a Fred Cole.

It’s a truism that all garage bands essentially want to be covers bands, and all too often this leads them to a mean damned-if-you-do situation: if a band’s got a couple of great originals, you’ll be pissed when they string out their record with eight redundant covers (see The Lyres, Flamin’ Groovies etc.). And if they don’t (see the clearout bin at your local used CD shop), you’ll have found something better to do long before they’ve finished grinding through their arse-aching forty minutes of we-wrote-this-in-the-studio-cos-we-needed-a-song chord-welding.

Hearing a great live rock band pushed into the latter situation can be absolutely soul-crushing, and it’s maybe no surprise that by far the best band from this scene (or, uh, my favourite at least) – The Detroit Cobras – was the one that took being a covers band really fucking seriously, whilst The Dirtbombs were at the top of their game when they did the same on 2001’s epic soul/funk tribute ‘Ultraglide in Black’. That their all-originals follow-up album ‘Dangerous Magical Noise’ fell straight into the trap outlined above – absolutely exhilarating for a few minutes but mind-numbing in its entirety – was probably inevitable, even if seeing the band touring it was one of the most astounding live shows I’ve ever witnessed.

Since then, it is to Mick Collins’ credit that he has done his best to steer his band in some rather more eccentric directions than was really necessary to maintain a base-level touring income, and if 2007’s ‘We Have You Surrounded’ was an insane mess of a record, mixing frenzied apocalyptic noise with Sparks covers, lyrics cribbed from Alan Moore and weird anti-consumerist rapping, it certainly wasn’t anything anyone saw coming, and that’s gotta count for something. Anyway, to finally get to the matter at hand, I’d happy to report that this year’s ‘Party Store’ finds The Dirtbombs back on track in a big way – on the one hand retreating to the safety of another covers album paying tribute to Detroit’s musical heritage, but at the same time also realising a concept that takes them far further outside their comfort zone than any previous release – namely, reconfiguring a selection of classic Detroit Techno cuts for a live rock band.

I’d love to be able to act smart here, but the sad truth is that I actually know very little about Detroit Techno. I’ve probably picked up a vague idea how it sounds just by osmosis, and finding out more about it has always been on my long-list of ‘things to do’, but Soul-Jazz have never obliged me with a white-boy friendly ‘beginners guide to..’ comp and nobody’s ever sent me a link to a .zip of their best-ever-Detroit-Techno-mix to check out or anything, so, uh… sorry guys, I’m afraid I’m coming to this one blind.

Maybe that’s for the best though in some ways. I feel like knowledge of the originals might blunt my enjoyment of ‘Party Store’ somewhat, exposing these instant-killer riffs and thunderous rhythms as merely the work of misguided rock-goons aping the sleeker, more perfect sounds of producers and musicians who dedicated their lives, rather than just a few months, to living inside this music. But for the moment I’ve gotta go with what I hear, and what I hear on ‘Party Store’ is bad-ass. Trying to second-guess what the originals might sound like whilst listening to The Dirtbombs hammer them out on kit drums and fuzz guitar is actually a very enjoyable process, and one that I’m glad I’m of the right level of ignorance to experience, whilst the music, in and of itself, is just a plain blast.

The idea of recreating techno on rock band instruments is always a notion I’ve kinda liked. I mean if the point of your band is energy and repetition, you might as well go the whole hog, right? Groups who have tried this sort of thing before, such as Oneida, have often done just that, steering straight toward an extreme noise-trance whiteout, so it’s cool to hear The Dirtbombs pulling back from that precipice and remembering to aim for the dancefloor instead, to mix a few metaphors. The album’s title is self-explanatory – far from a crazy experiment or punker in-joke, this is an honest attempt to fuse the rhythmic drive and atmospheric cool of early American electronic dance music with the sound and fury of rock n’ roll, and by and large, a successful one, I’d venture to suggest.

More than just banging through the skeletons of Derrick May and Juan Atkins compositions in garage-punk style, Collins and co have worked hard to meet their source material halfway here, incorporating percussion loops, hissing distorted synths, extreme echos and a relentless motorik pulse into their arsenal, and splitting the difference between punk rock brevity and club-friendly 12” track lengths by sticking largely to a 4-6 minute middleground.

Maybe I’m just saying this cos it’s so rare to hear a black voice on a rock record, but Mick Collins really does have one of the sweetest classic soul voices currently operating in any genre (I’d love to hear him to a ballads record or something), and hearing him stretch himself around the disco-chrome glossolia lyrics of sample-based songs that were never meant to be ‘sung’ as such, turning them into weird, irresistible call & response charts is a joy (“no more rainy day / the sun will chase the clouds away / good life, good life, good life”). Even his sly faux-Germanic monotone on ‘Sherevari’ is a hoot; “Smoking on his cigarette / listening to his car cassette / cruising with his hot playmate / in his Porche from 9 til 8” – I mean, basically you could port this shit into any supercharged, no-brainer garage-punk without much difficulty, right?

Having already ploughed through nearly a thousand words on the subject already, to actually launch into an in-depth description of the music herein at this point seems almost surplus to requirements. Let’s just say that ‘Cosmic Cars’ and ‘Alleys of Your Mind’ are your new favourite late night driving tunes, ‘Tear The Club Up’ will make perfect entrance music for your forthcoming wrestling career, and ‘Strings of Life’ and ‘Jaguar’ both sound like beautiful sunrise-insomnia trance-outs that could have been pulled straight off some newly unearthed Arthur Russell/Sleeping Bag session.

As just about every review of this album has noted, the beatless 22-minute fuckaround of ‘Bugs in the Bass Bin’ does stand as something of a stumbling block to overall enjoyment, but if you’ve got the patience to let it play through once or twice then even that starts to make a twisted kinda sense. Exactly WHAT kind of sense, who the hell knows, but I was certainly liking it a lot better by the end than I was at the start.

But basically, if the idea behind this album is one that appeals to you, rest assured The Dirtbombs do it about as well as it can be done, and you can go to the record shop with my blessing for the triple-LP set, just as I will hopefully do when I have a lot of money and have already bought enough Detroit techno records to assuage my aforementioned ignorance. Just like 'Ultraglide in Black' and 'Life, Love & Leaving' served to point me in the direction of a ton of soul compilations ten years ago, funnily enough... hmm, go figure. It'd be nice to think Mick Collins might be cooking up some new tribute album concept that will push me down some unexplored alley of American music in time for 2021, wouldn't it?

http://www.thedirtbombs.net/
http://www.intheredrecords.com/

2011-05-27T00:51:00.002+01:00

Soup Studio / The Duke of Uke.

I heard some bad news yesterday concerning the uncertain future of what is almost certainly the best place in record music in London, Soup Studio.

In a textbook example of that horrible process whereby useful and creative ventures raise an area’s ‘appeal’ to the extent that those very ventures find themselves kicked out on their arse to make space for the same identikit commercial crap that people initially went there to avoid, the studio and it’s upstairs neighbour The Duke of Uke are being evicted from their E1 address by the landlord, who seemingly reckons he can now use the space to harvest more cash than mere rent can provide; exactly the same fate that befell The Spitz venue & restaurant down the road a few years back, and what apparently used to be a far more worthwhile incarnation of Spitalfields Market a few years before that.

Anyway, as mentioned, Soup is a brilliant place with a great, no-nonsense set up, and Simon Trought is both a skilled engineer and a lovely chap. To have a space in the middle of London where bands at any level of ability and notoriety can go to get quality recordings of their tunes done efficiently on a variety of nice equipment for reasonable rates, in a welcoming, relaxed environment in which no one is ever sneered at or made to feel dumb, is an absolute godsend.

The fact that I, an avowed hater of ukuleles, should essentially be campaigning to save a ukulele shop hopefully tells you something about the overall goodness of this place (and in fairness, it must be said that the staff and customers of the ukulele shop have always proved very friendly too, helping to dispel the unholy terror and rage that inevitably overwhelms me at the thought of having to traverse a room containing about five hundred ukuleles).

So yeah – I’m not quite sure what the likely future of Soup is at the moment, or how entwined it is liable to be with the future of the Duke of Uke, but… let’s just say that if in recent years you’ve enjoyed recordings by the likes of Comet Gain, Herman Dune, The Loves, The Wave Pictures, Darren Hayman, Veronica Falls or Let’s Wrestle, you could do worse than expressing your appreciation by donating some cash to help The Duke secure a new home. That is all.

2011-05-21T16:16:00.001+01:00

Albums Catch-Up:
Yeh Deadlies –
The First Book of Lessons
(Popical Island)

Creators of one of my favourite singles of 2010, Dublin’s Yeh Deadlies have come to occupy a pretty unique space in my current listening habits. Just as I was completely excising from my life the possibility of enjoying earnest, painstakingly well-produced folksy indie featuring lots of harmony vocals, xylophones, proper middle eights, literate big-hearted lyrics and so on, along comes a band proffering earnest, painstakingly well-produced folksy indie featuring lots of harmony vocals, xylophones, proper middle eights, literate big-hearted lyrics and so on (EPSWPFIFLHVXPM8LBHLetc, if you will), that I really, really like.

And, I mean, I usually have a kneejerk hatred of this stuff these days, so it stands to reason that all you guys out there who still have a lot of time for EPSWPFIFLHVXPM8LBHLetc should REALLY dig Yeh Deadlies, and make them at least sorta-famous so that they can get booked by Ear Your Own Ears and come to London to do “ ‘ proper’ ” shows in big venues with security guards on the door and an awful, murky sound mix.

It may already be a totally played out comparison that I probably used the last time I wrote about Yeh Deadlies, but they give me a feeling similar to early Herman Dune, back when they were still real special. Not that there’s much similarity musically of course – “The First Book of Lessons” is full of keyboards and gentle fuzz guitar and lively chord changes and ‘80s pop influences and all sorts of other things far removed from the erstwhile ‘Dune playbook – but they share the same… I dunno - intent? atmosphere? whatever. Come on in and relax, these songs seem to say (without getting too happy-clappy about it), everybody’s welcome. Maybe life’s not perfect – in fact we are going to tell you in lyrical form about all manner of awkward situations and personal upsets - but the sun’s shining and it’s a quiet afternoon and we’re all on the same page here, so grab a pint and we’ll weave our merry tunes for ya.

And fucking merry they are too, full of great, interesting melodies and attention-grabbing little musical bits and pieces, and they tell us about a bunch of stuff that’s maybe taken from their lives or maybe just made up, and for once you actually care. As Yeh Deadlies have moved away from the more overtly folky approach of their earlier recordings and assumed the mantle of a full electric pop band, joint singers/writers Padraig and Annie have correspondingly developed a real knack for cramming odd and personal details into the songs whilst never letting them meander too far from their core function as strong, emotionally resonant pop songs. Most song lengths remain on the right side of three minutes, tempos remain upbeat, and collapses into diary entry banality are strenuously avoided, but each number still succeeds in communicating the essence of a situation, an idea, a feeling, whatever. So, uh, I’m no expert or anything, but I think that probably adds up to official Real Good Song-Writing. Well done everybody!

Although Dublin is a big city, this really sounds like a rural album to me. Or it really hit the spot when I put it on whilst barrelling through the countryside last month, at least. Maybe I’m just projecting, but the songs seem to pull together to create an agreeable picture of life in a small-ish provincial music scene, from the reflections of a DJ at a small town club night surveying the 3am carnage in “Disc Jockey Blues” to the tale of a kid growing up and joining a band in, er, “The Kid’s in the Band”, and so on.

If “The First Book of Lessons” was a movie, I think it would probably be one of those ‘90s British indie movies where young people in brightly coloured clothes live amid drab, dilapidated surroundings, and they go to transport cafes, and go surfing, and sit together on the cliffs and stuff like that. Hopefully it wouldn’t be shite (because most of those kind of movies were shite), but y’know what I mean.

In a field submerged ‘neath a flood of bilious careerists and terminal hat-wearers, Yeh Deadlies sound like good people playing good music, and that’s really something to be thankful for.

“No Rock n Roll Dreams (in Empty Beds)” and “The Present Perfect” are some of my favourite songs on the album, so here are Soundclouds of them;

The whole album can be streamed or purchased from http://yehdeadlies.bandcamp.com/, and you can learn all about Popical Island at http://popicalisland.tumblr.com/About.

2011-05-16T20:48:00.005+01:00

Happy 60th Birthday Jonathan Richman!

Aw, shucks.

Is it wrong that I probably care about this dude more than most people who I've actually met?

By perfect coincidence, here's a video I've never seen before of him doing perhaps my favourite song by him.

Hope he's having a good one, anyway.

2011-05-13T21:34:00.002+01:00

Apologies/Updates/Blah…

Agh, wouldn’t you know it. Just when I finally got some time to work out some new blogposts, blogger went down for 24 hours. Anyway, that’s no excuse, I haven’t posted for bloody weeks.

Needless to say: life since Easter has been pretty manic. Some of that has been good (hanging out with The Sock Puppets at Trev’s Oddbox weekender, seeing great sets from One Fathom Down and The Wendy Darlings and Horowtiz and discovering The Choo Choo Trains, who are a lot better than their name suggests, and playing records and dancing ‘til the venue politely asked us to get going – that was all brilliant), and some less good (job is bugging me, accommodation situation after next few months is still pretty uncertain), but, uh, yeah – net result is no action here. I had some posts queued up for my other blog, but no such luck with the music stuff I’m afraid.

This is particularly annoying, because one of my priorities over Easter was to try to find time to write about some of the many, many fine albums I’ve heard this year that deserve to be written about, some of which their makers were even nice enough to send me copies of after I expressed an interest. No time; didn’t happen. Urgh.

So anyway, that leads us to a couple of announcements:

1. The flyer above should be pretty self-explanatory. COME ONE, COME ALL. It’s the aforementioned Trev, and Carys from The Give It Ups and myself, and we’ll all be playing some fucking brilliant shit, if I do say so myself. No requests, unless a)I like it anyway and b)it’s good for dancing. (Pet peeve: you wouldn’t believe the number of tunes people usually play at indie-discos that have NO BEAT, just so that fans of the band in question can cheer cos they recognise it and then sorta shuffle round dolefully for four minutes trying to find the rhythm section – none of that in my set thanks, although maybe the others will be more flexible…). Er.. well anyway, half-finished website with a probably incomplete round-up of what he played last Sunday can be found here. The venue has a high ceiling, so pogoing is mandatory. As much Ramones and derivations thereof as is necessary will be deployed in aid of this.

2. ALBUM CATCH-UP: As mentioned above, I’m really gonna blitz it this weekend to try to pay tribute in words to some of the LP-length things that have been pleasing me of recent. Watch this space.

2011-05-02T22:30:00.001+01:00

Great Garage-Rock Ranting Song of the Week # 5

I’ve been pretty slack on keeping the series cooking over the past two weeks, so let’s get to it!

The Lyrics – They Can’t Hurt Me

"Don’t cry to me babe, about yourself,
For all I care, you can go somewhere else!
Go hang yourself up on a mouldy shelf – I DON’T CARE!"

The first of two bone-fide rant classics from San Diego wildmen The Lyrics – their other one is even better, so stay tuned.

Available on:

Back From The Grave, Vol # 1
Highs in the Mid-Sixties: Teenage Rebellion (L.A. ‘65)

2011-04-26T19:17:00.002+01:00

Deathblog:
Poly Styrene
(1957 – 2011)

It would remiss of me not to mark the passing of Poly Styrene. Surely a definitive influence on all the subsequent generations of female screamers I’ve celebrated here over the years.

She was pretty cool.

Her voice was amazing.

Some of her lyrics were killer.

‘Germ-Free Adolescents’ is a great spin.

There’s something kinda… rigid?... about X Ray Spex sound that always put me off a bit even though I liked the vocals and the songs. Now though, I think I really like that aspect of it. I should listen to that LP more.

Etc. : (

Great round-up of obits from XRRF here.

2011-04-25T16:49:00.001+01:00

Two Tears – Eat People 7”
(Kind Turkey)

Not something I had anticipated finding on my metaphorical desk, but that I’m glad to have received nonetheless, here’s three tracks from Kerry Davis, ex of Red Aunts, working in a primarily solo/homemade capacity.

Red Aunts were always one of the more garage-trash-punk affiliated riot grrl bands (or one of the more riot grrl-affiliated garage-trash-punk bands, if you prefer), and the more low-key Two Tears material initially seems to follow suit, Davis growling through “Eat People”, with all the Mr. Airplaneman-ish raunch you’d expect.

“Heisse Hex” and “Senso Unico” though are both persuasively mechanical, distantly Fall-like songs, the foreign language titles barked and twisted as if they were private language glossolia or magical incantations between whispered threats and complaints. The former in particular is great, chugging away like nobody’s business, a brilliantly sinister coda/end section and call-and-response chorus ringing like some cross between Mark E. Smith and Petra Černocká’s spell-casting in Saxana.

This is distinctive, quietly bad-ass music that raises the spectre of Mo Tucker’s ultra-primitive “Playin’ Possum”, filtered through the PJ’s 4 track demos, and probably every other contrived example I can pull from my itunes of a cool rock lady bludgeoning us with menacing self-sufficiency. Recommended!

http://www.myspace.com/thetwotears
http://www.kindturkeyrecords.com

2011-04-18T22:45:00.004+01:00

The Other Girls by Vivian Girls.

It bugs me how the dumb Pitchfork reviewer was really nasty about the guitar playing on this track - I think it sounds really nice. Maybe the VGs should call up Neil Young and they can go egg the guy's house or something. Damn muso.

Anyway, don't believe the un-hype; even I was all prepared to be totally unexcited by this new Vivian Girls record, but y'know what? It's a really, really good listen - a far more interesting and enjoyable buncha songs than a lot of people might have anticipated. Give it a chance, before you go writing 'em off as the year-before-last's rudderless hype casualties or whatever.

2011-04-15T21:06:00.007+01:00

Here Today, Gone Tomorrow.

Shamefully, I nearly missed the fact in the midst of the assorted crap that constitutes ‘life’, but today marks ten years since Joey Ramone passed away.

Ten years! Ten years since I spent a week stomping round a midlands university campus, wearing black jeans black shoes and my black Ramones t-shirt. I’ve still got it; I was planning on wearing it tomorrow, oddly enough.

To mark the occasion, here are five brilliant Joey-penned songs that often get overlooked.

1. I Remember You

I’ve been kinda obsessing over this song recently – it’s never quite hit me in the past for whatever reason, but I think it’s one of the absolute highlights of ‘..Leave Home’. It’s got that kind of beautiful, doomed midtempo feeling, like you hear in the tougher live versions of ‘Here Tomorrow, Gone Tomorrow’ from this period, or of course on ‘I Just Wanna Have Something To Do’ a few years later – moments when Joey’s heartbreak and Johnny’s metallic riffage seem to be working in complete unison to take pop to sad, dark places. Joey’s vocal delivery on this track is absolutely stunning.

2. Babysitter

Another recent obsession. WHAT A SONG! I want to start a band that just plays this one song, over and over again until they’re forced to leave the stage. It’s perfect. Imagine a band so good that they deem this an outtake. Live versions are even better, but I can’t find any on youtube.

3. 7/11

I was gonna say ‘everybody knows I love this song’, but obviously they don’t – I’m talking to fucking strangers on the internet, why would they? I’ve played this my myself on the guiter for years and have tried to record it two or three times but never quite done one I’m happy with. A bit of an overcooked example of a crushing teenage heartbreak song some might say, but it makes me cry frequently enough.

4. She Talks To Rainbows

It has long been my belief that if you compiled all of the sporadic really good tracks The Ramones recorded in their lacklustre post-‘Too Tough To Die’ years, you’d have one of the best rock n’ roll records of all time. This would be on it, of course. Written by Joey for Ronnie Spector, I believe.

5. I Want You Around

What can I possibly say that this clip doesn’t?

When we listen to the Ramones, we are all Riff Randell.

Let's raise a glass tonight to the coolest guy who ever lived.

2011-04-12T23:21:00.005+01:00

The Zygoteens –
Sleeping With the Stereo On EP
(Timme Heie Humme)

Four cuts of absolutely perfect pocket-rocket pop-punk/power-pop blastage from these fresh young fellas outta… I dunno.. some place in Germany? Nope, Milwaukee apparently.

Equal parts Look-Out Recs (fizz and easy melody), Exploding Hearts (heart-on-sleeve confessional oomph, Heartbreakers boogie) and Supersuckers/Teengenerate/early Hives etc etc(velocity / plain-fuckin’-GOINGFORIT-ness), it sounds like maybe they recorded this cheaply and turned in a master with all the levels pushed up too high, prompting some snotty functionary at some stage in the production process to cut all the tops and bottoms off, leaving things sounding all muffled and flubby where they should be comin’ on all “Guitar Romantic”/”Jet Generation”.

But you can’t stop the rock so the light shines through! “WE WERE CHEWING BUBBBLEGUM / AND ACTIN’ REALLY DUMB,” Zygoteens yell through the murk on “Sleeping With The Stereo On”, and you’ll be hard pressed not to answer with a fist-raised “YEAH!”. Funny how as a concept/substance, actual bubblegum is about the foulest thing I can imagine, but when used as a signifier of a certain set of aesthetic values in pop records, it never fails. Plus I just read the lyrics sheet and the last line of that song (as in, repeat ‘til close) is “Living in a world of pizza tonight”. Word.

I hope the time never comes when I don’t love stuff like this. However many records that sound like this I might own, it will never be enough. I will always want to listen to another one straight away. Great full colour cartoon artwork here too, nice thick vinyl, limited to 400 if yr into that sort of thing.

Damned if I can think of what else to say here, except that it is difficult to sit still in front of the computer whilst this music is playing… instead it is calling upon me to leap up and see how long you can touch the ceiling for, to pound on the walls, try to do a backflip for the first time in fifteen years and see how that ends up (ouch). This music does not allow for inaction, damn it! Get up! Review ends here.

http://www.myspace.com/thezygoteens
http://www.myspace.com/timmeheiehummerrecords

2011-04-10T17:03:00.001+01:00

Great Garage-Rock Ranting Song of the Week # 4

The Angels – Get Away From Me

“Oh what’s the matter Jim, can’t you take a little hint
Can’t you see you’re buggin’ me?
Well my lovin’ got a price
Get outta my life
Get away from me… baby!”

A super-rare example of female garage-ranting. Fantastic wise-ass gang-girl vocal delivery!

Available on:

Girls With Guitars (Ace Records).

2011-04-09T14:44:00.004+01:00

The Last Days of The Last Days of Man on Earth.

I mean, where else on the internet are we gonna go to find pictures of Pittsburgh band
Real Enemy drinking beer outside a grocery store in 1983…?

Bit late posting about this, but I was sad to discover this week that one of my favourite music weblogs, Joe Stumble’s Last Days of Man on Earth, has decided to call it a day.

To rehash what I said in the comments on his goodbye post, ‘Last Days’ has pointed me in the direction of a vast amount of good stuff over the past few years, be it punk, hardcore, new wave, early hip-hop or miscellaneous art-rock weirdness, and I’ll really miss it.

As well as the music, I’ll particularly miss Joe S’s sharp commentary, assorted historical delving and scene-setting etc. It seems like my favourite music blogs are dropping like flies and the moment, and with so many others around that just throw up a mediafire link, say “yea, cool shit, check it out” and call it a day or else just recycle press releases, decent writing, opinions and compiling of info on marginal music like this is always, always, always appreciated.

So if anyone knows any sites I might be missing out on that broadly cover the various kinds of music I like mouthing off about here (or not) and feature actual content rather than just functioning as glorified press services for careerist indie PR crap… well now’s the time to point me in the right direction.

Sorry, that got a bit ranty, didn't it? Apologies.

Anyway, if you like music and cool stuff from the punk/new wave era, I recommend hitting the archives of ‘Last Days..’ and filling your cup whilst the site is still functioning.

2011-04-06T21:01:00.002+01:00

Black Sunday –
Can’t Keep My Hands Off You b/w Lights
(Red Lounge/Disordered)

Y’know who are a really under-rated band from the past decade or so? Black Sunday, a Memphis band led by singer/synth player Alicja Trout. Admittedly, their 2005 magnum opus “Tronic Blanc” has a few things going against it: drab cover art that makes it look like some out-dated post-hardcore/emo effort, a slightly testing 45 minute run time and an opening cut of bilious shoegaze fartery. But stick with it and one of the more varied, atmospheric and inventive artefacts to have crawled from the indie/punk-ish undergrowth in recent years will surely be revealed.

Alicja was in Lost Sounds with Jay Reatard back in the day, a circumstance which seems to have gained her a foothold in the garage-punk milieu, despite Black Sunday working from a different blueprint entirely (although the continuity with Lost Sounds’ violent synth-rock/garage-trash crossover thing is certainly maintained). Let’s see now… we’re looking at something like cold wave/minimal synth kinda stuff, stripped of the accompanying aesthetic attitude and mixed up in variable quantities with bits of basement scuzz excavation and ol’ fashioned, upbeat KRS/K indie, perhaps..? I dunno. Her/their sound hits a lot of bases, but there’s little that ends up in quite the same place.

I don’t know what Black Sunday’s set-up is/was, or indeed whether this is really a Black Sunday single or an Alicja Trout solo joint, or quite what the difference between the two propositions might be, but I can at least assert that both sides here find her/them in good spirits, stretching the 3/4 minuters that comprised “Tronic Blanc” out a bit, letting each song luxuriate across a whole seven inches of of 33 playing vinyl. This single also cleans up the album’s grue to a significant extent, pushing guitars and distortion into strictly cameo roles, instead favouring cleaner, more repetitive synth-lines and simple drum loops, shifting toward a recognisable electro-pop kinda sound.

B side “Lights” would have been a real stand-out on the album, a convincingly catchy wavo power-pop number enlivened by some unexpectedly great lead guitar playing, but “I Can’t Keep My Hands off You” is longer, sweeter and even better; ascending synth patterns and a lovely melody over propulsive drum machine… I could almost imagine the twee-pop mob going for this, although the six note chorus refrain has a gloriously sinister edge to it, repeating through a lengthy closing segment that almost veers into Broadcast/United States of America territory. Quite a long track, as mentioned, but really, it could have been three times as long and still not lost my interest for a second. A real keeper.

I like the earlier/scrappier stuff fine, but I like this better. Listening to this single sorta makes it feel like the album, interesting/enjoyable though it is, was merely the middle ground between the bombastic sturm-und-drang of Lost Sounds and the more refined, more fully realised sound that’s finally making it’s way into the light here. To hear a full LP of this would be a fine thing indeed.

http://www.myspace.com/blacksundaymemphis
http://redloungerecords.com/

2011-04-04T19:32:00.004+01:00

Fungi Girls –
Owlsey Knows b/w Glare # 2
(Group Tightener)

The second single I’ve acquired from this canny Texas group, who seem to have found a happy place anchoring themselves to the notion of not doing anything new exactly, but studying the old stuff harder than anyone else, thus emerging fresh by default. If ya see what I mean.

Moving away from the Flying Nun echoes of their Hozac single, this disc finds them closer to home geographically if not temporally, engaged in a thorough excavation of the International Artists back catalogue. Harnessing the reassuringly ‘off’ sound of ’66-’68 Texan psychedelia, Fungi Girls undertake their borderline historical re-enactment with a bright-eyed panache so distant from the drug-mashed stumble of this music’s original practitioners that it sounds kinda refreshing, and inviting. Like, bands making this kind of music aren’t supposed to play together exactly on the beat, maintain a jaunty, upbeat pace throughout and put in the studio hours necessary to get a really lovely mix of complementary instrumental tones, y’know… but wouldn’t it be nice if they did?

Clearly, a preppy, cleaned up take on first album 13th Floor Elevators sounds like a hideously redundant notion whichever way you squint at it, but, well, what can I say? A band who christen their A-side in tribute to the recently departed Mr. Owsley obviously feel no shame in their retrogressive agenda, and nor should they - like that first Strange Boys record, Fungi Girls do the still-sounds-good-to-me thing with enough grace and vibrancy to really send ya, so to speak, zeroing in on that strange moment where a crisp, surf-rock rhythm section meets post-Byrds electric guitar, early whiffs of drug-fiend hipster consciousness creeping in via stinging bolts of weird tremolo and mumblin’, brain-blown lyricism… summer’s coming on and it still sounds good to me.

http://www.myspace.com/fungigirls
http://grouptightener.tumblr.com/

2011-04-02T13:22:00.001+01:00

Great Garage-Rock Ranting Song of the Week # 3

The Standells – Sometimes Good Guys Don’t Wear White

“You think those guys in white collars are better than I am, baby? Then FLAKE OFF!
You don’t dig this long hair? Get yourself a crew-cut darlin’!
Yeah… I mean what I say!”

Utter classic.

Available on:

Nuggets box set
Dirty Water LP
Probably a bunch of other records

2011-03-29T12:19:00.003+01:00

Y’know What? I Don’t Think I Will Mess with Texas.

Josh T. Pearson is an amazing guy – a real legend in his own lunchtime, for whom I feel a huge fondness.

At the same time though, I’m almost frightened to listen to his first recorded statement in twelve years, for precisely the reasons set out by Doug Mosurock in this excellent review. I just don’t wanna have to take what it seems like he’s laying down here, y’know? Hopefully he’d get what I mean.

Anyway, a few weeks ago I heard the weirdest thing, as Radio 4’s daily arts programme ‘Front Row’ suddenly played a burst of Pearson’s album, using it as the hook for an almost unbelievably simple-minded item about long songs. I mean, if they wanted to do some promo for the record, you’d think Pearson himself would provide ample material for a good story, but no…

“That was an extract from the new album by Texan singer-songwriter Josh T. Pearson, which features a number of songs that last nearly TEN MINUTES. Hello, Mr. Writer-from-The-Guardian, could you tell us whether any people have written long pop songs in the past?”

“Why yes, ‘Hey Jude’ and ‘Macarthur Park’ were quite long, and since then people have often recorded long songs. In the ‘80s, bands like New Order put long songs on 12” singles.”

“Ha ha, yes, I remember those. I suppose you could put them on a CD now and make them as long as you like. Have there ever been any long rap songs, I wonder?”

“Why yes, since you ask, rap music has always had long songs. Here’s a bit from ‘White Lines’ by Grandmaster Flash – that’s pretty long..”

“Well, thanks for that Mr. Writer from The Guardian. Josh T. Pearson’s album is out now..”

And people wonder why we prefer to read about music on the internet these days.

2011-03-27T21:51:00.004+01:00

New Favourite Band.

Morgan & The Organ Donors.

From Olympia WA, presumably.

Thrown my way by afogofideas tumblr.

No more info at present, but hopefully won't stay that way for long.

Look! Here they are doing a quiet number:

2011-03-27T16:13:00.004+01:00

Poster Art.

I didn’t take a camera with me on yesterday’s jaunt around town (I don’t own a working camera at the time of writing), but I can at least report on my favourite placards;

1. STOP THESE CUNTS
(a universally applicable slogan, hopefully stored under the bed and dusted off every couple of years)

2. CLEGG IS A CUNT
(the last word here was overwritten in biro on a professionally printed placard reading “Clegg is a Chopper”, a message the carrier obviously found a bit too subtle)

3. (via www.thisisnotagoodsign.com)

4. Every Child Counts? NOT IN HULL!
(This was a simple, printed one in black on white Times New Roman – it’s the underlining that does it I think. Makes me wants to reply to every rhetorical question henceforth with “NOT IN HULL!”)

5. FUCK OFF TORY CUNTS
(If it ain’t broke..)

6. Fuck the Tories! Fuck the Tories! Fuck the Tories! Fuck the Tories! Fuck the Tories!
(Increasingly desperate biro scrawl on box cardboard, natch.)

I guess I just like my expressions of proletariat fury simple, obnoxious and preferably rendered in red poster paint, biro or permanent marker. ‘Clever’ slogans are inevitably a smug waste of time. Contrived contemporary pop culture references can fuck off too. So crushingly unfunny. Swearing is fun. Insanely incoherent ones are good, but I didn’t see many of those, sadly. Go for the visceral, always.

2011-03-26T20:09:00.001Z

Great Garage-Rock Ranting Song of the Week # 2

The Knaves – Leave Me Alone

“I put down my fork and I said… LEAVE ME ALONE.”

This record is the Citizen Kane of garage rock ranting songs. In fact it’s such a tour de force of pure, unadulterated rantage, I think it dooms this series from the outset by putting all other contenders in the shade.

Available on:

What A Way To Die: 15 Forgotten Losers From the Mid 60's

2011-03-23T13:10:00.001Z

R.I.P. Arthur Magazine

Sad to hear this week that Jay Babcock has called time on the online incarnation of what once was the print-based Arthur Magazine.

I guess Arthur pushed the neo-hippy self-parody buttons a bit hard at times, but whilst I’ve rarely felt the urge to sit in a teepee drinking organic hemp-wine listening to Bright Back Morning Light or whatever*, it was a mag that always walked the walk re: excellent writing and compelling, well-researched, *long* articles on a wide range of topics, along with a consistent commitment to DIY culture and humanist ideals that is applaudable indeed.

The post-print industry apocalypse online edition of the mag was, in effect, a real good weblog/nerve-centre for the kinda stuff the paper version championed, and I’ll be sad to see it go.

Admittedly, I don’t really see why a dedicated stream of cash-moneys is necessary to post some links to cool shit on a weblog once every couple of days, but Babcock sounds pretty bummed on the whole deal re: not being able to do a print edition really, so I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt if he wants to cut his losses and move on.

I guess we can take solace in the fact that decent/principled periodicals are rarely afforded much of a shelf-life at the best of times. It’s not like there was ever much of a window in which you could pop down the newsagents and pick up Zap! Comix or International Times or Who Put The Bomp? or Punk or Roller Derby or Careless Talk Costs Lives or whatever right, and the kind of obstacles they faced count doubly for the situation in the past few years, triply so when yr trying to put the damn thing out for free.

Still though, the fact that Arthur has hit such a shoulder-shrug of a dead-end while Vice is still roaring on as a record label, TV station, venue proprietor etc speaks of a massive FAIL in regard to this generation’s culture war. Not our fault I guess, just further depressing proof that if you want a media venture to have legs these days, you’ve gotta get some cash behind it. And we all know who’s got the $$$ and what you’ve got to do to get it.

*Actually, screw that, I think I’d probably love some organic hemp-wine, if anyone’s got any..?

2011-03-18T18:51:00.002Z

Great Garage-Rock Ranting Song of the Week # 1

The La-De-Das – How Is The Air Up There?

“Your father is a VIP, thinks he’s always right
Your mother watches her TV, won’t talk to you all night
Couldn’t help sitting up so high, you got a bloody nose
You never seen a flower or a tree or anything that small”

Available on:

Wild Things: Wyld Kiwi Garage ’66-‘69
Nuggets II box set

2011-03-15T23:14:00.004Z

Lisa Bouvier & Allt Ar Musik – Indian Ar Dod CS
Horowitz – The Knitwear Generation CS
(Fika Tapes)

Two items here from a new London-based / Scandicentric micro-label, both of them zipping effortlessly past my twee-defences and making me smile and get all ‘yay-for-handcrafted-objects-and-DIY-culture’ and so on, however much of a filthy anachronism starting a tape label in 2011 may be.

To address the Lisa Bouvier / Allt Ar Musik one first, if someone described the music herein to me before I heard it, my cynical grown-up self would hiss like a wounded snake and go hide in the airing cupboard until it was over. So it’s a good job that I saw Lisa B. play a real nice solo set prior to purchase, giving me the courage to press play and roll with whatever transpired. And what transpired is TOTALLY AWESOME, whisking me back to the innocent days before I had really clocked the existence of any “indie-pop scene”, when I would still meet any manifestation of polite, well-dressed kids ‘doing it for themselves’ with a hearty thumbs up and when I would still welcome the presence in my life of records on which white people play poorly recorded trumpets.

So let’s put the question right out there: how does the idea of mannered, bedroom-fi Swedish language covers of Mary Lou Lord’s “His Indie World” and Sebadoh’s “Gimme Indie Rock” grab you? Not so good? Well take a second look, because only an inveterate grouch would deny that these particular ones are a ton o’ fun. There’s a really great feeling of after-school four-track fun about these recordings that bypasses any/all reservations, and indeed sleevenotes from Lisa B. reveal how these are quite old recordings, dating from when she and the dude who is ‘Allt Ar Musik’ teamed up at college and just started goofing around with some music, expressing their joy at the joint discovery of the kind of up-with-people DIY/indie culture that us British or American kids are drenched in from an early age and basically sick of by the time we crawl into our mid/late ‘20s.

Cover art depicting the two of them sitting happily on some bedroom floor surrounded by cheap equipment is emblematic of the whole affair. Oh, to be a youngster again, to sit on that floor; drink tea, giggle, make songs. Good times.

Horowitz are a band who I’d imagine would be apt to share these wistful sentiments of badges-n’-Converse nostalgia, and whilst I’ve probably run out of original things to say about them by this point, their bleary-eyed fuzz-pop remains a thing of grandeur on this here Fika tape. In fact, it sounds better than ever busting out of a tape. Well, not really ‘better’ as such because my tape player turns everything into underwater sludge, but… aesthetically correct? Yes, definitely. I could describe Horowitz’s three songs here and tell you what they sound like, how they fit into the band’s oeuvre and such, but really all I want to say is goddamnit, there’s something about everything Horowitz record that just hits me right here y’know? Their home-taped drum machines and bubblegum Boyracer fuzz, their drifty, elegiac melodies and the big bearhug of lonely/star-gazing indie-boy emotion that goes into each one of their songs… it just makes me want to salute and wipe a tear from my eye, y’know? “This is why we fight”, all that kinda stuff (god help us if there’s a war).

Much as I shake my fist at the retro-tape craze (largely on the practical grounds that the tapedeck on my mini hi-fi grinds away so painfully I might as well have dropped it in a fishtank on the night John Peel died and left it there ‘til last summer), there’s no denying that these Fika tapes are real lovely pieces of work – brightly-coloured cassettes in hand-folded cardboard packets, each stuffed to bursting with a download card, a ramblin’ photocopied insert, a fruit teabag and a recipe for cake. The whole lovin’ package! Horowitz give us a recipe for beer-cake, and all is right with the world.

Each tape limited to 100, so if any of this sounds like the kind of culture you might feel a connection to, check ‘em out.

http://fikarecordings.com/
http://www.myspace.com/horowitzband
http://lisabouvier.se/

2011-03-10T22:53:00.001Z

Sweet People et les Oieseaux Chantaient
(Polydor Records, 1978)

So I’ve got a huge stack of new singles to review, swiftly becoming old, plus a few really great records that people have been nice enough to send me recently… and yet here we go with a write-up of this nifty little number my friend Pete bought in Greenwich /music & Video Exchange for 10p, cross-posted with Pete’s bird-watching blog;

I’m no expert on vintage easy listening music, but in purely practical terms this gem of a charity shop disc gets my vote as the ‘best easy listening record ever’. I wish I had a USB turntable so that we could share it with you.

Both sides sound exactly like the music that would play in a sun-dazed, California set ‘70s movie, during a scene in which a dude hangs out with his girl on the beach as the sun sets, and they have a special time together that he will think back on fondly when he’s stuck in a foxhole in Vietnam, or is busted smuggling cocaine across the Mexican border, or shot in the back by Warren Oates, or whatever.

One side is accompanied by birdsong, whilst the other is built around the sound of waves crashing against the shore. Each track consists of a few simple, pleasing musical phrases, which are established at the outset and repeated continuously with only slight developments and changes in instrumentation along the way. The ‘Ocean side’ features some marvellously subtle, miraculously un-irritating harmonica playing, a strummy guitar sound and a distantly evocative melody, all faintly reminiscent of something off Neil Young’s ‘Harvest’, perhaps? The ‘Bird side’ is a touch more jazzy, in a hazy sort of way, gentle electric organ tones perhaps seeking communication with our avian friends.

Both sides boast a rich, deep, relaxing mixture of tones, tailor-made by experts to make human ears happy. An archetypal senile old grandmother could nod her head along with this, and remark how nice and relaxing it is. And no archetypal sneering punk-ass record nerds would dare to tell her otherwise, because SHE IS RIGHT. It is very nice and relaxing, and that’s all there is to it.

Remarkably, the instrument tones and other sounds on this record sound equally natural whether played at 33 or 45 rpm, and the overall pace and feeling of the compositions doesn’t seem to change much either way. Given the choice, I’d probably play it at 33 so that it’s a bit longer and more tripped out, but granny may prefer to stick to 45, as the label recommends.

It is no exaggeration to say that 10p has never been better spent.