The sort of sustained sunny warmth that will lead more than one frontman to remark "so the summer's arrived at last", a kneejerk reaction to a bit of sunlight that ignores how probably half the festival season weekends have been warm, deserves as appropriate an main stage opener as Sunny Day Sets Fire. In name, obviously, but also in deed as the multinational, instrument-swapping outfit find the unwieldly middle ground between the Polyphonic Spree's middle-aged symphonies to mammon and the Arcade Fire's choral marches towards valhalla. Partly due to the weather and partly as a result of the advertised Big Top surprise guest proving to be so much of a surprise nobody turns up to perform there they get a very decent audience for midday on the second day of a festival and promise much for future recordings.
The Local has taken the lead on the impressive initiative of holding weekend morning open mic sessions in The Local. Most of those we catch are fairly uninspiring, but we were taken by a band who, inevitably, we didn't catch the name of (they were a female-male Brighton duo apparently called Das something - do get in touch if you're reading) but impressed with some modern indie-folk storytelling not too far removed from STN favourite Emmy The Great. Who, by the way, we spot on two seperate occasions later on despite not being on the bill, but that's another matter.
Is live Loney, Dear usually this much louder and harder than on record? The harmonies remain intact but Emil Svanängen's bedroom yearnings lose something in translation with a full band, eroding their winningly wistful sheen with what seems like trying too hard to make up for playing to a field. It's in the Bimble Inn that we find a more successful translation of joy-filled wistful whimsy in the scrappy acoustic pop of Slow Club - Charles on guitar, Rebecca standing up behind an occasionally employed drumkit, both singing and harmonising on their off-kilter stories and city shanties. Nobody dances despite Charles' invitation, although it's fairly hard not to be moved when they're at full pelt, but it's just what the occasion and the ambience required.
Speaking of pop fun factories, here come I'm From Barcelona. And here comes Emanuel Lundgren, bounding on in mafia chic black and white to an electro version of Treehouse which he sings most of before producing an inflatable lilo to literally crowdsurf on as the rest of the band, down to a manageable thirteen for this trip, emerge. Having played all over the site last year you can tell Lundgren means it when he commends the festival as their favourite, and however much it resembles a microbudget Flaming Lips show the people love it back, joyfully partaking in a never ending supply of confetti and balloons, increasing throughout to Prisoner beach scene size, a couple of which get stuck in surrounding trees. Most aren't going to let a little thing like little new material dissuade them, although we do get a new song taking up possibly ironic cudgels for Britney Spears alongside the singalong favourites. They're a band made for the moment such as this and repay in kind, culminating in Lundgren's flying leap off the front of the stage from which you fear he might never return. It's alright, he does eventually.
A lot of people enthused about My Brightest Diamond's Big Top set afterwards but despite having made a mental note we went and missed it, following up with 9 Bach in the Bimble Inn, frontwoman Lisa Jen (Gruff Rhys' solo album sidekick) flanked by two different glockenspiels as if this could be no more twee. In fact it's sumptuous Welsh language folk-pop, like Rhys' own work unhindered by the language barrier in taking on mystical qualities while not forgetting the pleasing tunes.
Like the mass-handed Swedes, Darren Hayman is already an End Of The Road favourite, back for a second year with a new album on the way. In fact it's the same set, give or take a few for timeslot purposes, as we saw him play at Indietracks, right down to the fiddle/ukelele faceoff with Hayman suggesting we shouldn't just go on musical ability ("also take into account effort and comic timing") and the early Hefner Hello Kitten/Pull Yourself Together closing run played out to similar joy among the knowing throng. Any Hayman is great Hayman, of course, the lovelorn poet laureate, wise, warm (almost despite his common subject matter) and self-deprecating, showing the Arctic Monkeys and their acolytes what realistic songwriting really is.
Joan As Police Woman, alone at piano and guitar, seems in as fine form, The Ride coming to life, and brokenly daffy banter form as ever. We've already seen her solo show in full this year so don't stop for the whole thing but her vocal force of nature belies the space issues of the Garden Stage. Over in the Local former Dream City Film Club leader Michael J Sheehy raked through the old Costello traits of guilt, particularly of the Catholic kind, and revenge with a garnish of death blues and the voice of someone you wouldn't mess with in a darkened bar. Comparisons might well be odious but just after Joan Wasser's been on Swede Frida Hyvonen can't help but come across as an own brand version, her own all too personal stories, grandiosely skyscraping piano balladry and oddball between song banter decent enough in its own right but lacking that extra something that sets JAPW apart.
The RG Morrison, who stops halfway through his first song through worry about the smoke machine being placed directly behind his amp, shares a label with Thirty Pounds Of Bone and deals in a less seafaring but otherwise not dissimilar acoustic ballpark, elements of Nick Drake and Daniel Johnston secreted within his stories and finding an original way to escape the morass of such singer-songwriters, both bruised and strong. Over in the Big Top the programme says David Vandervelde but circumstances say Port O'Brien, over from California and providing a diverting Americana take on the West Coast rock tradition, like a blissed out early Bright Eyes.
Over in the garden, as somewhat telegraphed by the frontman earlier, Hayman, Watkins, Trout & Lee have gathered to play at the piano for a very decent turnout of loyalists. Darren Hayman's bluegrass project, also featuring two of his The Secondary Modern band and The Wave Pictures' Dave Tattersall, is as much messy fun as you'd expect, with only mildly embarrassed requests for audience participation and covers of Jonathan Richman, Wreckless Eric and the gospel standard Nobody Knows, as once covered in a Hefner Peel session. It's certainly more entertaining than the highly disappointing Devastations, whose new album promises much but here their sequenced sheen is replaced by fumbling channelling of Galaxie 500 to little effect.
On the other hand, Fireworks Night's subtle intimacy in The Local has an aura all of its own, their slow-burning string-aided minimal folk noir acting as a siren towards tales of hope and loss. Highly charming stuff. Also, almost completely lost when Brakes are raging away a hundred yards away or so. As long time readers will know we keep seeing Brakes at festivals but they remain a live joy, still working their set of minimalist wild-eyed country-punk plus Camper Van Beethoven covers into crowd-pleasing intensity, even if they only do Cheney twice, and mess one of those up. On the plus side, during a gorgeous No Return in the autumnal night air Eamon's head starts steaming like Dion Dublin's used to do.
Monkey Swallows The Universe also have problems with noises off, but this time it's not of the bill's doing but of festival circumstance, firstly through the sort of in-tent crush rarely experienced by us outside The Great Camera Obscura Logjam Of Summer Sundae 2006 and then by idiots talking loudly next to the bar which make a Nat Johnson solo acoustic song virtually inaudible. Once they're out of the way our bad mood is alleviated by some dulcet music. The smartly playful nature of the British nu-folk scene, as some arse will eventually christen it so it might as well be us, has fine Sheffield representatives here, taking slivers of the confident charm also found in Pulp and the Long Blondes in various ways and using it to construct gorgeously melodic songs with heart and soul, and the odd nod to antifolk's origins and Sarah Records. They're not too precious about it either, throwing a snatch of Take On Me into a version of Jimmy Down The Well that's already getting handclaps and singalongs from the faithful and closing with the day's second Richman cover, Ice Cream Man with French bits included and a few multilingual chorus repetitions to fill out the time. They've had a fair bit of attention, and on this evidence deserve it.
Realising we have no chance of taking in Benjamin Wetherill's romantic hushed folkiness when The Bees are doing their increasingly wearisome retro thing nearby, we're in the process of wandering back through the forest when we remember Architecture In Helsinki are on. Instantly the Big Top is transported into the weekend's only real dance party as the Australian sextet belie the cool reception for current album Places Like These the only way you imagine they know how - with truckloads of energy, a desire to use everything in sight as percussion and a keenness to see the crowd having as good a time as they are on stage. Like once and future kings of the party atmosphere !!!, they jig about constantly, swap instruments and keep momentum levels high, seemingly intent solely on making everyone dance at their command, coming across as natural rather than trying too hard. More percussive and angular then on record, it makes sense of their variable recorded material insomuch as to show that it can hardly convey the controlled mayhem of what they're making this music for, even during a nearly straight cover of Mental As Anything's Live It Up. Points off, though, for being the only band we saw over the three days to lapse into a stab at Boyz II Men's End Of The Road. Far too cheap.
With time to kill we venture back forestwards and, in an area so dark we can't so much as pick anything up on the camera, we chance across Frida Hyvonen on the forest piano pretty much picking up where she left off on stage to a small group including Emanuel Lundgren and a man who turns out to be Everett True, before returning to The Local for Congregation. It would probably be churlish to mention that there's already been a band called Congregation (early/mid-90s, led by Billy Reeves, later of Theaudience and now BBC London radio reporter, Friends Of The Bride manager and general man about town). It'd certainly be churlish to mention that their sound has been done before as well, but we'll let them off as such rough-house female-fronted blues is rarely as effective, raw slide guitar backing occasional Television Personalities sidewoman Victoria Yeulet sounding like Karen O as a Stars In Their Eyes Anglicised version of Lisa Kekaula of the Bellrays.
The big clash of the weekend came with the two Saturday headliners, Super Furry Animals on the Garden Stage, British Sea Power in the Big Top. With start times of 10.30 and 10.45 respectively we thought we'd at least know where to start; in the end both came on at about 11. Even despite the wait, Super Furry Animals seem somewhat distracted. Opening with the not immediately obvious Slow Life, they cherrypick from all eight albums but don't really achieve a level of consistency, especially not when they're persisting with the new straight-up rockout version of Northern Lites, when surely the last thing anyone wants of the Super Furries there is the dumbing down into standard indie of any of their songs. It sounds great enough, and Bunf gets presented with a cake for his birthday ("it's got Clangers on it!"), but it's not happening tonight, and it seems as time passes that they're aware of it. Meanwhile...
"How fucking wasted?" is Noble's succinct verdict (and the most we've ever heard a member of the band say in one sentence onstage, for what it's worth) as Yan falls to the floor again after, ironically, Please Stand Up. It's not like you could ever confuse the live British Sea Power visual experience for anyone else, but tonight, as well as the towering branches, enormous flagpoles and between song tapes of atmosphere, birdsong and, erm, military aircraft, there's a sense of urgency and intensity around them. Not that we've ever doubted their greatness, but at the moment BSP stand on the precipice dividing them from cementing their place as post-post-punk national treasures and merely being that funny band from 2002 with the foliage. Tonight it's as if they've taken that disparity to heart and power through their set, Yan theatrically crowdsurfing during The Spirit Of St Louis, while the new songs taking up more where The Decline Of... left off than continuing Open Season's streamlining in that refried washing machine-mangled Pixies sense. We didn't make it through to Rock In A. Suffice to say we were surprised the Big Top tent was still standing the following morning.
Thursday, September 27, 2007
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Howe good: End Of The Road Festival Friday review
This was the second End Of The Road festival, set in a well manicured public gardens a few miles from Blandford down some not at all scary after dark single lane country roads. Despite the odd 'too many festivals'-driven sneer from outsiders - how come nobody says Bestival, a week earlier, is too late in the year? - the first event beat the far more press lauded Latitude to the Best New Festival gong at last year's public voted UK Festival Awards, and it doesn't take long on site to see why, or to determine that this site has its own special aura. You could put it down to the way it combines the best visible elements of many a much loved second tier festival : the spectacular setting folk with many twists booking policy of Green Man (the festival the organisers openly admit was their inspiration), the bottom-up build and all-in attendee as music-appreciating gang mentality of Truck, the family friendliness of Summer Sundae and the below-radar flightpath of any event that doesn't have the dead commercial hand of Mean Fiddler acting as a surrogate Banquo's ghost. That it's not yet one for the Q set is ultimately its most pleasing aspect, that Simon and Sofia have gone through with their big idea and chanced across something special in itself.
But even then there's something different, something other about this one. There's not the scale of human traffic evident in a lot of the competition even though it was within 500 tickets of selling out its 5,000 capacity; everything's more laid back, people seem in less of a rush to get from stage to stage, more content to explore. And there's plenty to discover, from the Somerset Cider Bus that had massive queues outside all weekend to the forest area. Clearly a lot of lateral thinking work went into this area, from the fairy lights and toys draped on and around the trees to the clearing it led to with a piano in one corner. And that's before you've got to the Tree Of Knowledge (a bookcase full of reference books wrapped around a tree), the healing fields, the art installations, the roped off sculpted scenery or the tame peacocks that wandered around the fields.
By the time we arrive we've missed Strange Idols for the second time this summer among others, and our plans to see ex-Grandaddy Jim Fairchild's new project All Smiles are stymied by the simple fact that he seems not to have turned up. Instead, in the midst of one of the light but annoying persistent showers that will litter the day, we start with cult folk-roots outfit the Willard Grant Conspiracy, an Americana cousin to Nick Cave in his most pessimistic moods. There's clearly a sharpness to their melancholy but the intensity of emotion doesn't quite translate to a big open air stage despite their quasi-orchestral mob-handed setup. In fairness we couldn't stop for much of their set as over in The Local, the new bands tent new to the festival this year, was Napoleon IIIrd, someone we've wanted to see since the excellent In Debt To album (finally released on CD on October 22nd, we understand) landed with us. James Mabbett may well be joined by a drummer and organist but this is no attempt at organically attempting to recreate all the intricacies, loops and multitracking of the album, much of the backing being dealt with by a large analogue reel-to-reel tape player he keeps having to bang to stop it buzzing. It barely matters, as the frustration and passion inherent in Mabbett's voice comes through as much as the hook-laden but complex and oddly structured backing gives the songs their individual twist. It's the kind of thing some would dismiss as 'too clever for its own good', whatever the hell that means. All we'll let on is it's a standout set by a genuine individual talent.
Suitably ennobled we promptly wander into the wrong tent and end up catching the end of Washington's Jesse Sykes & The Sweet Hereafter's set of dark alt-country, which doesn't grab as you feel it should but our decision turns into something of a boon when Howe Gelb, curator of most of the stages today, Big Top MC and resplendent in a large white cowboy hat, joins in on improvised piano for their last song. Back in the Local tent are Actress Hands, scion of the Brighton Scene - all of Brakes are watching on, including Alex White even though he's supposed to be in the band - but today bedevilled by problems with tunings, the mix, the mikes, the monitors and just about everything else. At least Matt Eaton can make light of it all, and their Big Star-indebted sound is more convincing live, when it works properly, then they've managed on record as yet.
We missed Stephanie Dosen at Summer Sundae, and while again her ethereal style might suit a tent better than this big Garden Stage, backed by an all-girl quartet, two on strings, there's something in the soft-spun fragility of her writing that seems to work in this setting. Her banter and occasional subject matter suggests elements of being away with the fairies as often as spilling her innermost thoughts and secrets, but it's kept in check by a delivery that's reminiscent of Martha Wainwright at her sweetest. You can see what Bella Union main men Robin Guthrie and Simon Raymonde saw in her, as while it's very much in the alt-country milieu there's a ghostliness and subtlety that suggests the Cocteau Twins' own world.
Actress Hands' Johny Lamb and Matt Eaton are back on The Local stage for the former's own band Thirty Pounds Of Bone, and while some of the summery power-pop influences are there live at its core this is a different beast, more trad-English folky and sea shanty-inspired while still veering off on warped alternative tangents, like Michael Head teaming up with Sparklehorse to create a darkness on the edge of a coastal town. A confident, poised set proves there's gold in this strand, not really folky in the modern sense of the term, instead founded on home-brewed ambition and a singular cause, and we end up buying their CD on site from a stall run by Rough Trade, who seemingly keep having to fend off enquiries about the seperate entity label, and have to resort to a wind-up torch after their lights go. There's an allegory about the state of independent record shops here somewhere. John Doe, once of LA punk trailblazers X, now a fairly standard bluesy acoustic singer-songwriter with a dark storytelling bent and a song about ex-punk colleagues now deceased, passes time even before Gelb and band join him towards the end, while Woven Hand's gothic backwoods folk approximated Will Oldham mid-cathartic therapy.
This is Scout Niblett's first festival in seven years, she tells us. Maybe this is the type of under the radar activity that means while the Nottingham-raised Steve Albini favourite holds a small but forceful cult following we'd never managed to get into her. Until now. Starting off alone with electric guitar, later joined by a flailing drummer, it's immediately striking how much passion and empathy she puts into her performance, writing the most delicate, intimate allegories and personalised stories and coating them in a sheer rush of melodically tensed dynamics and grunge-influenced dirty great guitar sounds cut to the bitter quick. Comparisons to Rid Of Me-era PJ Harvey and long dark night of the soul Cat Power are undoubtedly there but Niblett's songs seem to come from somewhere else entirely. Her forthcoming fourth album, featuring four duets with Will Oldham, will on this evidence be something special.
Sons Of Noel And Adrian's baroque orchestral folk (featuring, it transpires, ex-Hope Of The States violinist Mike Siddall) has promise but doesn't really go anywhere, so for the first time we head off to the bijou Bimble Inn tent, scene, it's said, of the very heart of the festival's all-in atmosphere. Which we can see, but the downside was having to watch Marie Frank behind a group of children playing Jenga. It's no great loss in all honesty, her Sundays-recalling acoustic-led songs are fairly devoid of individual character.
We never really fell for Midlake's appropriation of 70s soft rock for their own ends on The Trials Of Van Occupanther, and while they're playing solidly enough on their only UK festival appearance of the year - indeed, they've broken off midway through a US tour to come to Britain for this one gig - there's nothing there to make us change our minds, and they're not going to play Balloon Maker, so we decamp to The Local and join a half-full tent in sitting down to listen intently (the sound, by the way, was excellent throughout at all stages) to Mary Hampton. Yet another Brightonian, she's very much in the English folk revival tradition of Briggs and Denny, a storyteller possessing a voice of great clarity and an ability to pull the listener transfixed into her worldview.
As if Robyn Hitchcock - pop polymath, inventor of psych-indie before cheap categorisations were par for the course and a close second to Nick Lowe in the All-England Gracefully Ageing Singer Championships - wasn't draw enough, accompaniment on huge acoustic bass, slide guitar and mandolin is provided by John Paul Jones, next to be seen for £125 in the O2 Arena in November. Despite such a huge and varied back catalogue that we hardly recognise anything in the set it's all of a piece without being one-paced, typically whimsical but highly intelligent and emotional, psychedelically aired but melodic and modernistic. Being Hitchcock, these come with between song patter that drifts into odd diversions and alleyways yet always find their way back into introducing the next song. Joined towards the end by a saw player and that man Gelb on piano, this was a superior delve into the psyche of one of our foremost off-kilter songwriters, not to mention his accomplished mate.
And so to wipe clean thoughts of both the cold and any ideas that today was getting far too folky with headliners Yo La Tengo. Ira Kaplan's guitar manages to break down before he's even started, which leads him to fling it to the ground and storm off ostensibly in search of a replacement only for that one to start working again when he returns. Understandably he rages through the opener Sugarcube as if it has a personal vendetta against him. From then on, although accomodation problems meant we couldn't stop for the whole set, it was proof that here are three people who both know exactly what they're doing and haven't pre-planned anything but are more than capable of following each other when Kaplan's off on a ten minute noise solo. Only the experience of actually seeing them at full throttle can probably get across what YLT live are like, from the abrupt changes in style and unsettlement to the musical dexterity while everything fires off around them. No peace in the Dorset night, then, but nobody's complaining when a headliner delivers a set this stratospheric.
But even then there's something different, something other about this one. There's not the scale of human traffic evident in a lot of the competition even though it was within 500 tickets of selling out its 5,000 capacity; everything's more laid back, people seem in less of a rush to get from stage to stage, more content to explore. And there's plenty to discover, from the Somerset Cider Bus that had massive queues outside all weekend to the forest area. Clearly a lot of lateral thinking work went into this area, from the fairy lights and toys draped on and around the trees to the clearing it led to with a piano in one corner. And that's before you've got to the Tree Of Knowledge (a bookcase full of reference books wrapped around a tree), the healing fields, the art installations, the roped off sculpted scenery or the tame peacocks that wandered around the fields.
By the time we arrive we've missed Strange Idols for the second time this summer among others, and our plans to see ex-Grandaddy Jim Fairchild's new project All Smiles are stymied by the simple fact that he seems not to have turned up. Instead, in the midst of one of the light but annoying persistent showers that will litter the day, we start with cult folk-roots outfit the Willard Grant Conspiracy, an Americana cousin to Nick Cave in his most pessimistic moods. There's clearly a sharpness to their melancholy but the intensity of emotion doesn't quite translate to a big open air stage despite their quasi-orchestral mob-handed setup. In fairness we couldn't stop for much of their set as over in The Local, the new bands tent new to the festival this year, was Napoleon IIIrd, someone we've wanted to see since the excellent In Debt To album (finally released on CD on October 22nd, we understand) landed with us. James Mabbett may well be joined by a drummer and organist but this is no attempt at organically attempting to recreate all the intricacies, loops and multitracking of the album, much of the backing being dealt with by a large analogue reel-to-reel tape player he keeps having to bang to stop it buzzing. It barely matters, as the frustration and passion inherent in Mabbett's voice comes through as much as the hook-laden but complex and oddly structured backing gives the songs their individual twist. It's the kind of thing some would dismiss as 'too clever for its own good', whatever the hell that means. All we'll let on is it's a standout set by a genuine individual talent.
Suitably ennobled we promptly wander into the wrong tent and end up catching the end of Washington's Jesse Sykes & The Sweet Hereafter's set of dark alt-country, which doesn't grab as you feel it should but our decision turns into something of a boon when Howe Gelb, curator of most of the stages today, Big Top MC and resplendent in a large white cowboy hat, joins in on improvised piano for their last song. Back in the Local tent are Actress Hands, scion of the Brighton Scene - all of Brakes are watching on, including Alex White even though he's supposed to be in the band - but today bedevilled by problems with tunings, the mix, the mikes, the monitors and just about everything else. At least Matt Eaton can make light of it all, and their Big Star-indebted sound is more convincing live, when it works properly, then they've managed on record as yet.
We missed Stephanie Dosen at Summer Sundae, and while again her ethereal style might suit a tent better than this big Garden Stage, backed by an all-girl quartet, two on strings, there's something in the soft-spun fragility of her writing that seems to work in this setting. Her banter and occasional subject matter suggests elements of being away with the fairies as often as spilling her innermost thoughts and secrets, but it's kept in check by a delivery that's reminiscent of Martha Wainwright at her sweetest. You can see what Bella Union main men Robin Guthrie and Simon Raymonde saw in her, as while it's very much in the alt-country milieu there's a ghostliness and subtlety that suggests the Cocteau Twins' own world.
Actress Hands' Johny Lamb and Matt Eaton are back on The Local stage for the former's own band Thirty Pounds Of Bone, and while some of the summery power-pop influences are there live at its core this is a different beast, more trad-English folky and sea shanty-inspired while still veering off on warped alternative tangents, like Michael Head teaming up with Sparklehorse to create a darkness on the edge of a coastal town. A confident, poised set proves there's gold in this strand, not really folky in the modern sense of the term, instead founded on home-brewed ambition and a singular cause, and we end up buying their CD on site from a stall run by Rough Trade, who seemingly keep having to fend off enquiries about the seperate entity label, and have to resort to a wind-up torch after their lights go. There's an allegory about the state of independent record shops here somewhere. John Doe, once of LA punk trailblazers X, now a fairly standard bluesy acoustic singer-songwriter with a dark storytelling bent and a song about ex-punk colleagues now deceased, passes time even before Gelb and band join him towards the end, while Woven Hand's gothic backwoods folk approximated Will Oldham mid-cathartic therapy.
This is Scout Niblett's first festival in seven years, she tells us. Maybe this is the type of under the radar activity that means while the Nottingham-raised Steve Albini favourite holds a small but forceful cult following we'd never managed to get into her. Until now. Starting off alone with electric guitar, later joined by a flailing drummer, it's immediately striking how much passion and empathy she puts into her performance, writing the most delicate, intimate allegories and personalised stories and coating them in a sheer rush of melodically tensed dynamics and grunge-influenced dirty great guitar sounds cut to the bitter quick. Comparisons to Rid Of Me-era PJ Harvey and long dark night of the soul Cat Power are undoubtedly there but Niblett's songs seem to come from somewhere else entirely. Her forthcoming fourth album, featuring four duets with Will Oldham, will on this evidence be something special.
Sons Of Noel And Adrian's baroque orchestral folk (featuring, it transpires, ex-Hope Of The States violinist Mike Siddall) has promise but doesn't really go anywhere, so for the first time we head off to the bijou Bimble Inn tent, scene, it's said, of the very heart of the festival's all-in atmosphere. Which we can see, but the downside was having to watch Marie Frank behind a group of children playing Jenga. It's no great loss in all honesty, her Sundays-recalling acoustic-led songs are fairly devoid of individual character.
We never really fell for Midlake's appropriation of 70s soft rock for their own ends on The Trials Of Van Occupanther, and while they're playing solidly enough on their only UK festival appearance of the year - indeed, they've broken off midway through a US tour to come to Britain for this one gig - there's nothing there to make us change our minds, and they're not going to play Balloon Maker, so we decamp to The Local and join a half-full tent in sitting down to listen intently (the sound, by the way, was excellent throughout at all stages) to Mary Hampton. Yet another Brightonian, she's very much in the English folk revival tradition of Briggs and Denny, a storyteller possessing a voice of great clarity and an ability to pull the listener transfixed into her worldview.
As if Robyn Hitchcock - pop polymath, inventor of psych-indie before cheap categorisations were par for the course and a close second to Nick Lowe in the All-England Gracefully Ageing Singer Championships - wasn't draw enough, accompaniment on huge acoustic bass, slide guitar and mandolin is provided by John Paul Jones, next to be seen for £125 in the O2 Arena in November. Despite such a huge and varied back catalogue that we hardly recognise anything in the set it's all of a piece without being one-paced, typically whimsical but highly intelligent and emotional, psychedelically aired but melodic and modernistic. Being Hitchcock, these come with between song patter that drifts into odd diversions and alleyways yet always find their way back into introducing the next song. Joined towards the end by a saw player and that man Gelb on piano, this was a superior delve into the psyche of one of our foremost off-kilter songwriters, not to mention his accomplished mate.
And so to wipe clean thoughts of both the cold and any ideas that today was getting far too folky with headliners Yo La Tengo. Ira Kaplan's guitar manages to break down before he's even started, which leads him to fling it to the ground and storm off ostensibly in search of a replacement only for that one to start working again when he returns. Understandably he rages through the opener Sugarcube as if it has a personal vendetta against him. From then on, although accomodation problems meant we couldn't stop for the whole set, it was proof that here are three people who both know exactly what they're doing and haven't pre-planned anything but are more than capable of following each other when Kaplan's off on a ten minute noise solo. Only the experience of actually seeing them at full throttle can probably get across what YLT live are like, from the abrupt changes in style and unsettlement to the musical dexterity while everything fires off around them. No peace in the Dorset night, then, but nobody's complaining when a headliner delivers a set this stratospheric.
Monday, September 24, 2007
Back
With sore calves, aching legs, a mysterious stomach strain, the beginnings of a frontal lobe headache, a spinning head (not literally), mild tinnitus, an awkward feeling throat, a number of A4 paper cutouts and notepad pages in assorted states of creasing covered in barely legible scribbling, a handful of CDs, a useless Rough Trade sticker, a good number of Sky Larkin badges (thanks to a Ms K Harkin of Leeds for passing those on) and several hundredweight of great memories of End Of The Road and Truck. Reviews to come this week.
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
Sweeping The Nation Covermount 9: C97
As we leave you for a couple of weeks, we've organised a little retrospective toy for you to play with, and while we thought about it we've reuploaded some of our favourite Covermounts of yore, namely:
Be My Babies - songs that start with that drumbeat
Reasons To Be Cheerful - a list of list songs
Borrowed Nostalgia For The Unremembered Eighties - top 20 hits that'd never get near it today
You Probably Think This Song Is About You - songs for, about or using other artists' names
This Won't Last Long - nothing more than 120 seconds long
All of these, including this one, are on Rapidshare, so remember to click on 'Free' at the bottom of the first page, then enter the four digit release code and get downloading those mothers.
If you've been reading this blog carefully over the years, and may god preserve you if you have, you'll know we have a special personal affinity with the year 1997 in schmindie. Apart from anything else, it seemed so much more exciting, with bands getting on the Radio 1 daytime playlists while actually taking a chance and forging their own peculiar paths (anachronistic comparative sidenote: we can't help noticing Ryan 'war on corporate indie' Jarman is presently carousing with Kate Nash). As such, here's 74 minutes of memory jogging. Obviously it was something of a bind working out what to leave out, from Arab Strap to Midget to Number One Cup to Silver Sun to Lizard Music (sorry? Theme From We Are The Egrets? No?) You'll also notice that because we're predictable but don't like to be that predictable we've left Kenickie out of this one, although rest assured that coming soon are Covermounts on musicians who went on to become TV stars, bands from the north-east, groups who formed while at convent school, artists with strawberry blonde drummers who also played guitar and any other excuse we can think up. (Actually, musicians who went on to become TV stars would be quite good, wouldn't it? Madness, Altered Images, the Skids, the Higsons, Heavenly for Cathy Rogers... we'll put that one on the list.)
This was the state of independence ten years ago, and you're welcome to it.
C97
Bennet - Mum's Gone To Iceland
Number 34 with a bullet, Bennet were essentially Blur Club Juniors but not without their own charm, something not often seen at the time on their label Roadrunner Records (Machine Head, Sepultura, Type O Negative, later Slipknot and Nickelback)
David Devant And His Spirit Wife - Miscellaneous
The best live band in the country for about ten minutes that spring, for their magic trick-filled, low cost effect laden show, props and antics supplied by the Spectral Roadies. The Vessel and co are apparently still going but never topped debut album Work, Lovelife, Miscellaneous
Gorky's Zygotic Mynci - Young Girls And Happy Endings
The first band to bring Cymraeg to the masses, the Kevin Ayers/Robert Wyatt admirers had their pop phase in '97. This formed part of their great chart footnote, one of five top 50 singles and eight top 75 hits, the most by a band who never cracked the top 40.
Belle & Sebastian - Le Pastie de la Bourgeoisie
From the 3...6...9 Seconds Of Light EP (led by the great forgotten early B&S single A Century Of Fakers), a track namechecking plenty of literary touchstones in a Smiths style named after a piece of misspelt graffiti Stuart Murdoch says he once saw. It's been claimed it was put there by...
The Yummy Fur - Stereo Girls
...John McKeown of the Yummy Fur, who years before claiming to be called Jackie and going boogie with the 1990s was busy being streamlined post-punk pop well before it was fashionable. Paul Thompson's on this, Alex Kapranos (when he was Huntley) joining a year later.
Angelica - Teenage Girl Crush
In the immediate aftermath of At The Club many went searching for new vicarious girl-pop thrills and hit strychnine-laced marzipan paydirt with these four Lancastrians who actually didn't make a sustained impact for another couple of years. Holly Ross, where are you now?
Helen Love - Does Your Heart Go Boom
The great thing about the mid-90s Evening Session was every so often there'd be a new single from Helen Love, or Mika Bomb, or Girlfrendo, and Lamacq would ignore fashion and play the arse off it. The Ramones-obsessed DIY keyboard-touting Welsh girl and friends knew what they liked.
Velocette - Get Yourself Together
The modish sweep of Spectorish girl pop, nearly a decade before it was worthy of extended magazine pieces. Disappointingly, all we could locate is the album version and not the superior single mix with excellent backing vocals, but you'll live.
Comet Gain - Strength
Before that most of Velocette had been in these longstanding Northern Soul/Dexys-inspired smart poppers, this their final single before a parting of the ways (and a reformation with other people a year later).
Idlewild - Queen Of The Troubled Teens
Score one up for the flight of stairs falling down the flight of stairs where now lies pianos and strings and folk. Nowadays half of MSN would take this as a screen name; then, it was some Dinosaur Jr-indebted brash Scottish blokes with a singer who couldn't stand still for a second.
Bis - Skinny Tie Sensurround
Ah, Bis. You loved or hated their E-number technopop and Manda Rin's bouncing, and a surprising number still love them going on the fact they've just announced another reformation mini-tour. This was the moody, sarky one off The New Transistor Heroes.
Scarfo - ELO
While everyone aware of Jamie Hince pisses themselves over the coverage of his supposed dalliance with Kate Moss (the Mail referred to "Kate lookalike Alison Mosshart", which is true insomuch as she has ovaries), we go past the Kills to the underachieving abrasive angularities of Hince's first notable band.
Ultrasound - Same Band
Remember New Prog? Spiritualized, mostly, but there was a large as a tank parking space for this band that never looked like a band, this being the original version of their debut single before dissolving into double album with 30 minute title track Hades.
The Bitter Springs - It's Business
Simon Rivers will one day receive his due for his eclectic nature and socially wry lyrics, but until then he'll have to continue playing east London pubs and putting out albums on Spanish labels to little attention. There's a best of planned for the end of the year. Don't let us down.
Linoleum - Marquis
Behind the Sleeper/Echobelly type they may have been, and Caroline Finch always vocally reminds us of Davina McCall somehow, but they're the closest mid-90s UK fem-indie got to a Throwing Muses, pulling the listener in with three clever chords and then knifing them in the back.
Tiger - Race
They attempted to repopularise the mullet, and musically they decided there wasn't enough Stereolab/Fall influence in the indie of the day. Guitarist Julie Sims occasionally had three strings tuned to the same note, and they split two weeks before their second album came out.
Seafood - Scorch Comfort
Another debut well ahead of the curve of further attention. Despite a lot of positive press around 2001 it never quite happened, largely because When Do We Start Fighting came out in the midst of Strokesmania and they sounded too much like the wrong American bands (Sonic Youth, Pixies, Sebadoh)
Jonathan Fire*Eater - The Search For Cherry Red
Now only really noted as a) a primary influence on the Strokes and b) three of them going off to form the Walkmen, they sounded like a 60s R&B Nuggets outfit pumped full of adrenaline and taken round town after dark by Nick Cave. And we know this came out in 1996 in America.
Clinic - Porno
IPC Sub-Editors Dictate Our Youth's already been on a Covermount, so here's the spooked-out B-side of the still extraordinary sounding first flourishings of Liverpool's answer to Crime. Last spotted wearing big hats and beefeater-inspired brown outfits as well as the face masks.
Dawn Of The Replicants - Lisa Box
Still extant Galashiels oddballs treading the post-Pixies path less Zappa'd and about every other musical sticking point this side of Weller, they exploded onto the Peel/Radcliffe scene at the end of 1996 and got signed to EastWest for two very un-major label-like albums.
Urusei Yatsura - Superfi
One of the glitter and leopardskinned kids' favourites, they attempted to be the lo-fi sci-fi Glaswegian glam-Sonic Youth. Slain By Urusei Yatsura was like being dangled over a crocodile pit by a feather boa. Ant & Dec were reputedly fans.
Earl Brutus - The SAS And The Glam That Goes With It
You have to end with some Earl Brutus, because there's not far you can progress from a group of mid-30s men, one of whom wrote Boxerbeat, doing electronic glam-rock lagered up Suicide with onstage garage forecourt revolving signs and a man whose only job was drinking cans of beer.
Be My Babies - songs that start with that drumbeat
Reasons To Be Cheerful - a list of list songs
Borrowed Nostalgia For The Unremembered Eighties - top 20 hits that'd never get near it today
You Probably Think This Song Is About You - songs for, about or using other artists' names
This Won't Last Long - nothing more than 120 seconds long
All of these, including this one, are on Rapidshare, so remember to click on 'Free' at the bottom of the first page, then enter the four digit release code and get downloading those mothers.
If you've been reading this blog carefully over the years, and may god preserve you if you have, you'll know we have a special personal affinity with the year 1997 in schmindie. Apart from anything else, it seemed so much more exciting, with bands getting on the Radio 1 daytime playlists while actually taking a chance and forging their own peculiar paths (anachronistic comparative sidenote: we can't help noticing Ryan 'war on corporate indie' Jarman is presently carousing with Kate Nash). As such, here's 74 minutes of memory jogging. Obviously it was something of a bind working out what to leave out, from Arab Strap to Midget to Number One Cup to Silver Sun to Lizard Music (sorry? Theme From We Are The Egrets? No?) You'll also notice that because we're predictable but don't like to be that predictable we've left Kenickie out of this one, although rest assured that coming soon are Covermounts on musicians who went on to become TV stars, bands from the north-east, groups who formed while at convent school, artists with strawberry blonde drummers who also played guitar and any other excuse we can think up. (Actually, musicians who went on to become TV stars would be quite good, wouldn't it? Madness, Altered Images, the Skids, the Higsons, Heavenly for Cathy Rogers... we'll put that one on the list.)
This was the state of independence ten years ago, and you're welcome to it.
C97
Bennet - Mum's Gone To Iceland
Number 34 with a bullet, Bennet were essentially Blur Club Juniors but not without their own charm, something not often seen at the time on their label Roadrunner Records (Machine Head, Sepultura, Type O Negative, later Slipknot and Nickelback)
David Devant And His Spirit Wife - Miscellaneous
The best live band in the country for about ten minutes that spring, for their magic trick-filled, low cost effect laden show, props and antics supplied by the Spectral Roadies. The Vessel and co are apparently still going but never topped debut album Work, Lovelife, Miscellaneous
Gorky's Zygotic Mynci - Young Girls And Happy Endings
The first band to bring Cymraeg to the masses, the Kevin Ayers/Robert Wyatt admirers had their pop phase in '97. This formed part of their great chart footnote, one of five top 50 singles and eight top 75 hits, the most by a band who never cracked the top 40.
Belle & Sebastian - Le Pastie de la Bourgeoisie
From the 3...6...9 Seconds Of Light EP (led by the great forgotten early B&S single A Century Of Fakers), a track namechecking plenty of literary touchstones in a Smiths style named after a piece of misspelt graffiti Stuart Murdoch says he once saw. It's been claimed it was put there by...
The Yummy Fur - Stereo Girls
...John McKeown of the Yummy Fur, who years before claiming to be called Jackie and going boogie with the 1990s was busy being streamlined post-punk pop well before it was fashionable. Paul Thompson's on this, Alex Kapranos (when he was Huntley) joining a year later.
Angelica - Teenage Girl Crush
In the immediate aftermath of At The Club many went searching for new vicarious girl-pop thrills and hit strychnine-laced marzipan paydirt with these four Lancastrians who actually didn't make a sustained impact for another couple of years. Holly Ross, where are you now?
Helen Love - Does Your Heart Go Boom
The great thing about the mid-90s Evening Session was every so often there'd be a new single from Helen Love, or Mika Bomb, or Girlfrendo, and Lamacq would ignore fashion and play the arse off it. The Ramones-obsessed DIY keyboard-touting Welsh girl and friends knew what they liked.
Velocette - Get Yourself Together
The modish sweep of Spectorish girl pop, nearly a decade before it was worthy of extended magazine pieces. Disappointingly, all we could locate is the album version and not the superior single mix with excellent backing vocals, but you'll live.
Comet Gain - Strength
Before that most of Velocette had been in these longstanding Northern Soul/Dexys-inspired smart poppers, this their final single before a parting of the ways (and a reformation with other people a year later).
Idlewild - Queen Of The Troubled Teens
Score one up for the flight of stairs falling down the flight of stairs where now lies pianos and strings and folk. Nowadays half of MSN would take this as a screen name; then, it was some Dinosaur Jr-indebted brash Scottish blokes with a singer who couldn't stand still for a second.
Bis - Skinny Tie Sensurround
Ah, Bis. You loved or hated their E-number technopop and Manda Rin's bouncing, and a surprising number still love them going on the fact they've just announced another reformation mini-tour. This was the moody, sarky one off The New Transistor Heroes.
Scarfo - ELO
While everyone aware of Jamie Hince pisses themselves over the coverage of his supposed dalliance with Kate Moss (the Mail referred to "Kate lookalike Alison Mosshart", which is true insomuch as she has ovaries), we go past the Kills to the underachieving abrasive angularities of Hince's first notable band.
Ultrasound - Same Band
Remember New Prog? Spiritualized, mostly, but there was a large as a tank parking space for this band that never looked like a band, this being the original version of their debut single before dissolving into double album with 30 minute title track Hades.
The Bitter Springs - It's Business
Simon Rivers will one day receive his due for his eclectic nature and socially wry lyrics, but until then he'll have to continue playing east London pubs and putting out albums on Spanish labels to little attention. There's a best of planned for the end of the year. Don't let us down.
Linoleum - Marquis
Behind the Sleeper/Echobelly type they may have been, and Caroline Finch always vocally reminds us of Davina McCall somehow, but they're the closest mid-90s UK fem-indie got to a Throwing Muses, pulling the listener in with three clever chords and then knifing them in the back.
Tiger - Race
They attempted to repopularise the mullet, and musically they decided there wasn't enough Stereolab/Fall influence in the indie of the day. Guitarist Julie Sims occasionally had three strings tuned to the same note, and they split two weeks before their second album came out.
Seafood - Scorch Comfort
Another debut well ahead of the curve of further attention. Despite a lot of positive press around 2001 it never quite happened, largely because When Do We Start Fighting came out in the midst of Strokesmania and they sounded too much like the wrong American bands (Sonic Youth, Pixies, Sebadoh)
Jonathan Fire*Eater - The Search For Cherry Red
Now only really noted as a) a primary influence on the Strokes and b) three of them going off to form the Walkmen, they sounded like a 60s R&B Nuggets outfit pumped full of adrenaline and taken round town after dark by Nick Cave. And we know this came out in 1996 in America.
Clinic - Porno
IPC Sub-Editors Dictate Our Youth's already been on a Covermount, so here's the spooked-out B-side of the still extraordinary sounding first flourishings of Liverpool's answer to Crime. Last spotted wearing big hats and beefeater-inspired brown outfits as well as the face masks.
Dawn Of The Replicants - Lisa Box
Still extant Galashiels oddballs treading the post-Pixies path less Zappa'd and about every other musical sticking point this side of Weller, they exploded onto the Peel/Radcliffe scene at the end of 1996 and got signed to EastWest for two very un-major label-like albums.
Urusei Yatsura - Superfi
One of the glitter and leopardskinned kids' favourites, they attempted to be the lo-fi sci-fi Glaswegian glam-Sonic Youth. Slain By Urusei Yatsura was like being dangled over a crocodile pit by a feather boa. Ant & Dec were reputedly fans.
Earl Brutus - The SAS And The Glam That Goes With It
You have to end with some Earl Brutus, because there's not far you can progress from a group of mid-30s men, one of whom wrote Boxerbeat, doing electronic glam-rock lagered up Suicide with onstage garage forecourt revolving signs and a man whose only job was drinking cans of beer.
In shops soon
As we were saying, we're going off for a little break from Friday. A busman's holiday, actually, taking in End Of The Road Festival and Truck Ten with a period of offline recuperation in the middle, so our first posts back will be our reviews of those two events.
Inevitably, those two Mondays affected are also two of the busiest and best weeks for quite a while for approvable new releases, so here's our checklist to what we suggest you put on your imaginary Wishlist:
17th September
Officially it's Broken Social Scene Presents Kevin Drew, but Spirit If... doesn't really resemble a BSS record aside from how it somehow all manages to fit together against most odds, understandably less of a mess then the band's self-titled record of last year but still stylistically all over the place, held together by Drew's superior sense of what sticks when modern American indie throws everything at the wall, veering from the gorgeously self-assured to kaleidoscopic rowdy rhythms that peak at Dinosaur Jr levels (J Mascis guests on one track). Emma Pollock's Watch The Fireworks picks up where the Delgados left off, a little more piano-centric wistfully but still a close cousin to those moments where her former band found a happy medium between melody and dissonance. Australia's Devastations pick up the sinister baton from the likes of the Dirty Three on Yes, U, betraying the post-rock influence but adding their own stately dynamics. There's little surface sinister about the Rumble Strips' Girls And Weather, which seems to have been on the release schedule for years - downbeat, maybe, but never sinister when there's those horns and that early 80s/late 50s-cribbing energy to be had. (Cliffs Note: when we say they sound like Dexys, we mean as much in Charlie Waller's apeing of Kevin Rowland's untutored punk-origin soul righteous vocalising, itself openly indebted to 'General' Norman Johnson of Chairmen Of The Board, as in the horn section) Sonic Youth projects that aren't proper band albums do increasingly need to be approached with caution, but you're in safeish hands with Thurston Moore solo; Trees Outside The Academy is largely acoustic, reminiscent of the avant-folk Moore's Ecstatic Peace label major on, with psychedelics making their way around the edges. Steve Shelley and good old J Mascis pop by. All three Joy Division albums - Closer, Unknown Pleasures and Still - get remastered and added to with Control's release around the corner (5th October, in fact). A shorter than we were led to believe Gorky's Zygotic Mynci reissue campaign comprises debut Patio and 1995's breakthrough Bwyd Time. The selling point is its compilation by the Dead 60s, but Riot Radio Broadcast is as good a basic reggae and dub primer as you'll get. Wait until it's half price. The Simpsons: Testify is the third compilation of original material from the series, featuring David Byrne, the B-52s, Jackson Browne, Shawn Colvin, Kelsey Grammer and guaranteed no Spider-fucking-Pig. Single of the week is Young Folks, inevitably, already in the top 40 and with only number 30 to beat, closely followed by PJ Harvey's low-key 7" return When Under Ether. Outsider status goes to The Young Republic, who are actually on End Of The Road Recordings and hence play about a million times (four, actually) at the festival, promoting the Shins-folk-Belle & Sebastian of Modern Plays. It's not on Amazon, but Frank Turner's DVD All About The Destination is released, featuring live footage, a documentary, videos and fan contributions. This ties in with Turner being on tour. Well, of course he's on tour.
24th September
This might just be the best album release week of 2007, so how to choose a highlight? We have a failsafe method known as the Band With Andy Falkous In Solution. Future Of The Left's Curses could easily have been the fourth McLusky album. Well, of course it could - it's two of McLusky plus Kelson from Jarcrew. But you know what we mean - it develops their sound enough, but it's still capable, as the very best of McLusky was, of bringing down walls through sheer force of the combined kinetic power of discordant riffs, fuzzed up bass, earthshaking drums and shouting of angular phrases that amount to choruses. Falco's lyrics are still as sharp and bleakly funny as ever (he recently said he always thought McLusky were treated as a comedy band because everyone went on about the humour in the lyrics, but foolish is the listener who sees this as some sort of Electric 6 knockoff), and if there's more Meat Puppets sludge about some of the songs it's only to heighten how disquieting the whole enterprise is. Rock album of the year? Quite possibly. In a very different, very post-literate American way, Okkervil River could seethe and snarl with the best of them at times, but The Stage Names is a more considered beast, Will Sheff alighting this time on the theme of showbusiness itself and the difference between the publically presented persona and private self. It's not a concept album on which to hang itself, though, but a means of catharsis for Sheff's poetically drawn characters trying to understand the means by which they entertain, both others and themselves. Unfortunately, yes, Okkervil River albums do tend to draw this kind of complex prognosis from people like ourselves. Let's just say it's an emotional rollercoaster of poetic alt-Americana and move on. PJ Harvey albums used to be greeted in a similar fashion, but maybe Uh Huh Her was a post-Mercury step too far as White Chalk seems to have faded into the background. This is her hauntedly fragile piano album, haunted and best parlayed in the imagery surrounding its press of Harvey looking mordant in antique white dresses. Given time this could emerge as her great overlooked work. What to make of Devendra Banhart at any time is even more confusing: Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon was recorded in Topanga Canyon, hub of the early 70s LA CSNY/Eagles/Taylor/Mitchell/Ronstadt/Browne clusterfuck (literally, in some cases) scene, and is also more piano based, but the usual organic mess of psych-folk prevails. Meet Me In St Louis are a mess of something else entirely, Variations On Swing launching the new UK post-hardcore clubhouse leaders as purveyors of awkwardly twisted multi-layered and multi-part quasi-spazzcore, a kind of Cedric Bixler-Zavala and Omar Rodriguez-Lopez with fewer prog intentions and much less wilfulness. If more bands who claim a debt to the Libertines sounded like SixNationState we wouldn't be in such a bad way, the Jeepster Records-reviving fivesome taking that shabby jerkiness and injecting it with proper melodies, ska/dub influences and post-punk energy on their self-titled debut. Iron & Wine's Sam Beam has branched out from his previously hushed, intimate tones on The Shepherd's Dog for a walk in more musically grown-out areas, lyrically no less introspective but more confused and cynical. It also comes with a nightmare-inducing painting of a dog on the cover. We need a paragraph break at this point. Imagine if we'd had to write that lot up properly.
The Flaming Lips were always due a live DVD, and UFOs At The Zoo, which comes in a curious audio DVD package, is a document of their Oklahoma City homecoming extravaganza from a year ago next weekend, incorporating a massive UFO the band appear from, strobes, smoke machines, confetti, Wayne Coyne's balloon and people in alien and Santa outfits. Then the first song starts. You know the Prisoner balloons/mic camera/nun puppet/fake blood/mechanical bird/smoke machines/megaphone drill from there. The more earthly, in all senses of the term, Violent Femmes issue a Live At The Hacienda DVD. The Big Stiff Box Set is five CDs of much of what the legendary label put out, starting with Nick Lowe and ending with an excerpt from the celebrated The Wit And Wisdom Of Ronald Reagan. In the middle, Elvis Costello, Ian Dury, Madness, Devo, the Damned, the Pogues, Kirsty Maccoll, Motorhead, the Go-Gos, the Adverts, Wreckless Eric, Lene Lovich, Yello, Department S, Tenpole Tudor, the Belle Stars, Furniture, Tracy Ullman, The Inspirational Choir Of The Pentecostal First-Born Church Of The Living God and, even more hilariously, The Enemy. The House Of Love's first two albums were both eponymous; the one being reissued is their 1988 Creation Records debut with Christine on. Shack's progression from kitchen sink dreamers to ill-starred lost heroes to Noelrock contenders to Love-inspired outsiders once again is charted on Time Machine. Singles? Gravenhurst issue the howling Hollow Men on 7" two weeks after its parent album, the Decemberists package their singular slot at Talking Headsisms The Perfect Crime along with, of all things, remixes, and Les Savy Fav (the only punk band left in America, you may be aware) glue two of the three best tracks from their forthcoming album, What Would Wolves Do? and The Year Before The Year 2000, together on a double A-side.
Inevitably, those two Mondays affected are also two of the busiest and best weeks for quite a while for approvable new releases, so here's our checklist to what we suggest you put on your imaginary Wishlist:
17th September
Officially it's Broken Social Scene Presents Kevin Drew, but Spirit If... doesn't really resemble a BSS record aside from how it somehow all manages to fit together against most odds, understandably less of a mess then the band's self-titled record of last year but still stylistically all over the place, held together by Drew's superior sense of what sticks when modern American indie throws everything at the wall, veering from the gorgeously self-assured to kaleidoscopic rowdy rhythms that peak at Dinosaur Jr levels (J Mascis guests on one track). Emma Pollock's Watch The Fireworks picks up where the Delgados left off, a little more piano-centric wistfully but still a close cousin to those moments where her former band found a happy medium between melody and dissonance. Australia's Devastations pick up the sinister baton from the likes of the Dirty Three on Yes, U, betraying the post-rock influence but adding their own stately dynamics. There's little surface sinister about the Rumble Strips' Girls And Weather, which seems to have been on the release schedule for years - downbeat, maybe, but never sinister when there's those horns and that early 80s/late 50s-cribbing energy to be had. (Cliffs Note: when we say they sound like Dexys, we mean as much in Charlie Waller's apeing of Kevin Rowland's untutored punk-origin soul righteous vocalising, itself openly indebted to 'General' Norman Johnson of Chairmen Of The Board, as in the horn section) Sonic Youth projects that aren't proper band albums do increasingly need to be approached with caution, but you're in safeish hands with Thurston Moore solo; Trees Outside The Academy is largely acoustic, reminiscent of the avant-folk Moore's Ecstatic Peace label major on, with psychedelics making their way around the edges. Steve Shelley and good old J Mascis pop by. All three Joy Division albums - Closer, Unknown Pleasures and Still - get remastered and added to with Control's release around the corner (5th October, in fact). A shorter than we were led to believe Gorky's Zygotic Mynci reissue campaign comprises debut Patio and 1995's breakthrough Bwyd Time. The selling point is its compilation by the Dead 60s, but Riot Radio Broadcast is as good a basic reggae and dub primer as you'll get. Wait until it's half price. The Simpsons: Testify is the third compilation of original material from the series, featuring David Byrne, the B-52s, Jackson Browne, Shawn Colvin, Kelsey Grammer and guaranteed no Spider-fucking-Pig. Single of the week is Young Folks, inevitably, already in the top 40 and with only number 30 to beat, closely followed by PJ Harvey's low-key 7" return When Under Ether. Outsider status goes to The Young Republic, who are actually on End Of The Road Recordings and hence play about a million times (four, actually) at the festival, promoting the Shins-folk-Belle & Sebastian of Modern Plays. It's not on Amazon, but Frank Turner's DVD All About The Destination is released, featuring live footage, a documentary, videos and fan contributions. This ties in with Turner being on tour. Well, of course he's on tour.
24th September
This might just be the best album release week of 2007, so how to choose a highlight? We have a failsafe method known as the Band With Andy Falkous In Solution. Future Of The Left's Curses could easily have been the fourth McLusky album. Well, of course it could - it's two of McLusky plus Kelson from Jarcrew. But you know what we mean - it develops their sound enough, but it's still capable, as the very best of McLusky was, of bringing down walls through sheer force of the combined kinetic power of discordant riffs, fuzzed up bass, earthshaking drums and shouting of angular phrases that amount to choruses. Falco's lyrics are still as sharp and bleakly funny as ever (he recently said he always thought McLusky were treated as a comedy band because everyone went on about the humour in the lyrics, but foolish is the listener who sees this as some sort of Electric 6 knockoff), and if there's more Meat Puppets sludge about some of the songs it's only to heighten how disquieting the whole enterprise is. Rock album of the year? Quite possibly. In a very different, very post-literate American way, Okkervil River could seethe and snarl with the best of them at times, but The Stage Names is a more considered beast, Will Sheff alighting this time on the theme of showbusiness itself and the difference between the publically presented persona and private self. It's not a concept album on which to hang itself, though, but a means of catharsis for Sheff's poetically drawn characters trying to understand the means by which they entertain, both others and themselves. Unfortunately, yes, Okkervil River albums do tend to draw this kind of complex prognosis from people like ourselves. Let's just say it's an emotional rollercoaster of poetic alt-Americana and move on. PJ Harvey albums used to be greeted in a similar fashion, but maybe Uh Huh Her was a post-Mercury step too far as White Chalk seems to have faded into the background. This is her hauntedly fragile piano album, haunted and best parlayed in the imagery surrounding its press of Harvey looking mordant in antique white dresses. Given time this could emerge as her great overlooked work. What to make of Devendra Banhart at any time is even more confusing: Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon was recorded in Topanga Canyon, hub of the early 70s LA CSNY/Eagles/Taylor/Mitchell/Ronstadt/Browne clusterfuck (literally, in some cases) scene, and is also more piano based, but the usual organic mess of psych-folk prevails. Meet Me In St Louis are a mess of something else entirely, Variations On Swing launching the new UK post-hardcore clubhouse leaders as purveyors of awkwardly twisted multi-layered and multi-part quasi-spazzcore, a kind of Cedric Bixler-Zavala and Omar Rodriguez-Lopez with fewer prog intentions and much less wilfulness. If more bands who claim a debt to the Libertines sounded like SixNationState we wouldn't be in such a bad way, the Jeepster Records-reviving fivesome taking that shabby jerkiness and injecting it with proper melodies, ska/dub influences and post-punk energy on their self-titled debut. Iron & Wine's Sam Beam has branched out from his previously hushed, intimate tones on The Shepherd's Dog for a walk in more musically grown-out areas, lyrically no less introspective but more confused and cynical. It also comes with a nightmare-inducing painting of a dog on the cover. We need a paragraph break at this point. Imagine if we'd had to write that lot up properly.
The Flaming Lips were always due a live DVD, and UFOs At The Zoo, which comes in a curious audio DVD package, is a document of their Oklahoma City homecoming extravaganza from a year ago next weekend, incorporating a massive UFO the band appear from, strobes, smoke machines, confetti, Wayne Coyne's balloon and people in alien and Santa outfits. Then the first song starts. You know the Prisoner balloons/mic camera/nun puppet/fake blood/mechanical bird/smoke machines/megaphone drill from there. The more earthly, in all senses of the term, Violent Femmes issue a Live At The Hacienda DVD. The Big Stiff Box Set is five CDs of much of what the legendary label put out, starting with Nick Lowe and ending with an excerpt from the celebrated The Wit And Wisdom Of Ronald Reagan. In the middle, Elvis Costello, Ian Dury, Madness, Devo, the Damned, the Pogues, Kirsty Maccoll, Motorhead, the Go-Gos, the Adverts, Wreckless Eric, Lene Lovich, Yello, Department S, Tenpole Tudor, the Belle Stars, Furniture, Tracy Ullman, The Inspirational Choir Of The Pentecostal First-Born Church Of The Living God and, even more hilariously, The Enemy. The House Of Love's first two albums were both eponymous; the one being reissued is their 1988 Creation Records debut with Christine on. Shack's progression from kitchen sink dreamers to ill-starred lost heroes to Noelrock contenders to Love-inspired outsiders once again is charted on Time Machine. Singles? Gravenhurst issue the howling Hollow Men on 7" two weeks after its parent album, the Decemberists package their singular slot at Talking Headsisms The Perfect Crime along with, of all things, remixes, and Les Savy Fav (the only punk band left in America, you may be aware) glue two of the three best tracks from their forthcoming album, What Would Wolves Do? and The Year Before The Year 2000, together on a double A-side.
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
This is music
Three more new releases below the mass critical radar to highlight and post mp3s from? That's how we swing it.
For maximum enjoyment it's probably best to overlook the anchoring idea behind Dirty Projectors' Rise Above (8th October in the UK through Rough Trade), it being a "reimagining" of two thirds of Black's Flag hardcore landmark 1981 album Damaged, an album David Longstreth claims not to have heard since middle school. Grizzly Bear's Chris Taylor produced and it reflects some of that band's ambitious scope - like Yellow House, it's a multi-layered album that rewards extra listens - with room for a mildly more linear form of Animal Collective's avant-artpop and the stereo-spanning brainstorms of Todd Rundgren if bred on psych-soul. Purists will (and do) hate it, everyone else will struggle to hang on but be glad they did so.
Dirty Projectors - Thirsty And Miserable
While we're on far too clever for their own good one man bands, we like to think we've had a long and fruitful association with the now Cardiff-based Pagan Wanderer Lu, in that he contributed to Songs To Learn And Sing last November. His 2005 album Build Library Here (Or Else!) was reissued last week on Brainlove Records, demonstrating his growing prowess (there's an earlier version of The Memorial Hall, standout from last year's The Independent Scrutineer EP) at welding together smart DIY electro, scratchy lo-fi folk and deft lyricism. One big push and a proper cult following is his for the taking.
Pagan Wanderer Lu - At The Hairdressers...
We've lost the press release that came with the new self-titled album (their second, and their first was eponymous too) by Toronto's Holy Fuck so can't tell you when it's out in the UK - October 23rd, America - but we do know they specialise in making electronically inclined instrumental dance-punk that actually features no programmed elements at all, developing songs live without rehearsal and recording them immediately after coming off tour. That they're touring Europe soon with !!! gives a good indication of where they're coming from.
Holy Fuck - Milk Shake
For maximum enjoyment it's probably best to overlook the anchoring idea behind Dirty Projectors' Rise Above (8th October in the UK through Rough Trade), it being a "reimagining" of two thirds of Black's Flag hardcore landmark 1981 album Damaged, an album David Longstreth claims not to have heard since middle school. Grizzly Bear's Chris Taylor produced and it reflects some of that band's ambitious scope - like Yellow House, it's a multi-layered album that rewards extra listens - with room for a mildly more linear form of Animal Collective's avant-artpop and the stereo-spanning brainstorms of Todd Rundgren if bred on psych-soul. Purists will (and do) hate it, everyone else will struggle to hang on but be glad they did so.
Dirty Projectors - Thirsty And Miserable
While we're on far too clever for their own good one man bands, we like to think we've had a long and fruitful association with the now Cardiff-based Pagan Wanderer Lu, in that he contributed to Songs To Learn And Sing last November. His 2005 album Build Library Here (Or Else!) was reissued last week on Brainlove Records, demonstrating his growing prowess (there's an earlier version of The Memorial Hall, standout from last year's The Independent Scrutineer EP) at welding together smart DIY electro, scratchy lo-fi folk and deft lyricism. One big push and a proper cult following is his for the taking.
Pagan Wanderer Lu - At The Hairdressers...
We've lost the press release that came with the new self-titled album (their second, and their first was eponymous too) by Toronto's Holy Fuck so can't tell you when it's out in the UK - October 23rd, America - but we do know they specialise in making electronically inclined instrumental dance-punk that actually features no programmed elements at all, developing songs live without rehearsal and recording them immediately after coming off tour. That they're touring Europe soon with !!! gives a good indication of where they're coming from.
Holy Fuck - Milk Shake
Monday, September 10, 2007
Weekender : raging in the plague age
FREE MUSIC: This, as we'll explain in the next couple of days, is the last Weekender of September, so let's make it precious. Like starting with free iLiKETRAiNS: new single out this week, previous single Terra Nova (the one about Captain Scott) available on SXSW's still active downloads.
HEY YOU GET OFFA MYSPACE: There's something naggingly mid-90s about Cambridge's The Sleep Wells. We don't necessarily mean Britpop and its attendant ills, more the sophisticated female-fronted power indiepop of a Salad or Mambo Taxi (dare we add Sleeper? They were much loved when they first emerged), and latterly the Land Of Talk type. The band themselves describe their sound as "somewhere between Radiohead and Jeff Buckley", but then bands have a tendency of hearing something different to everyone else. What it is is something which lulls the listener in broodingly and has much raw potential.
VISUAL REPRESENTATION: The only link this week is live clips we've had on our master list for some time and not previously featured. Which means Bjork and Polly Harvey covering Satisfaction at the 1994 Brit awards, Elliott Smith's Waltz #2 on Later With Jools in 1997, Television's Foxhole from 1978, Jonathan Richman's I Was Dancing At The Lesbian Bar with cooing backing vocalists, The Queen Is Dead at Salford University in June 1986 and, as a rejoiner both to this age of televised talent contests and Sly Stone's own abortive recent British shows, an absolutely astonishing clip of Sly and the Family Stone performing My Lady and I Wanna Take You Higher at the Ohio State Fair in 1968, filmed for NBC's Showcase.
VIRAL MARKETING: James Blunt on Sesame Street. That's James Blunt on Sesame Street. Course, it's nothing Stevie Wonder, REM, Johnny Cash or James Taylor haven't already done, but... James Blunt! On Sesame Street!
FALLING OFF A BLOG: One of the new breed of mp3 bloggers Keep Hope Inside is currently highlighting, A Space For Music Liberation is another of those unpretentious mp3 blogs that gets enthusiastic about a wide range of stuff, from Lethal Bizzle to Billy Talent to Calvin Harris.
EVERYBODY GET RANDOM: We've always meant to do a mini-series of blogs run by members of notable bands - members of the Mystery Jets, Gravenhurst and Voxtrot all maintain good ones we know of, and particularly meaty and readable whatever angle it approaches from is The Clerkenwell Kid, the work of Stephen Coates, conceptualist behind the "antique beat" dark poetry of The Real Tuesday Weld, last heard of soundtracking a Lucozade advert and releasing a new album (featuring on one track the Puppini Sisters!) next month in the US and next year in the UK, however that's been allowed to happen. Podcasts, stories and downloads are all included.
IN OTHER NEWS: We mentioned the Facebook group, right?
HEY YOU GET OFFA MYSPACE: There's something naggingly mid-90s about Cambridge's The Sleep Wells. We don't necessarily mean Britpop and its attendant ills, more the sophisticated female-fronted power indiepop of a Salad or Mambo Taxi (dare we add Sleeper? They were much loved when they first emerged), and latterly the Land Of Talk type. The band themselves describe their sound as "somewhere between Radiohead and Jeff Buckley", but then bands have a tendency of hearing something different to everyone else. What it is is something which lulls the listener in broodingly and has much raw potential.
VISUAL REPRESENTATION: The only link this week is live clips we've had on our master list for some time and not previously featured. Which means Bjork and Polly Harvey covering Satisfaction at the 1994 Brit awards, Elliott Smith's Waltz #2 on Later With Jools in 1997, Television's Foxhole from 1978, Jonathan Richman's I Was Dancing At The Lesbian Bar with cooing backing vocalists, The Queen Is Dead at Salford University in June 1986 and, as a rejoiner both to this age of televised talent contests and Sly Stone's own abortive recent British shows, an absolutely astonishing clip of Sly and the Family Stone performing My Lady and I Wanna Take You Higher at the Ohio State Fair in 1968, filmed for NBC's Showcase.
VIRAL MARKETING: James Blunt on Sesame Street. That's James Blunt on Sesame Street. Course, it's nothing Stevie Wonder, REM, Johnny Cash or James Taylor haven't already done, but... James Blunt! On Sesame Street!
FALLING OFF A BLOG: One of the new breed of mp3 bloggers Keep Hope Inside is currently highlighting, A Space For Music Liberation is another of those unpretentious mp3 blogs that gets enthusiastic about a wide range of stuff, from Lethal Bizzle to Billy Talent to Calvin Harris.
EVERYBODY GET RANDOM: We've always meant to do a mini-series of blogs run by members of notable bands - members of the Mystery Jets, Gravenhurst and Voxtrot all maintain good ones we know of, and particularly meaty and readable whatever angle it approaches from is The Clerkenwell Kid, the work of Stephen Coates, conceptualist behind the "antique beat" dark poetry of The Real Tuesday Weld, last heard of soundtracking a Lucozade advert and releasing a new album (featuring on one track the Puppini Sisters!) next month in the US and next year in the UK, however that's been allowed to happen. Podcasts, stories and downloads are all included.
IN OTHER NEWS: We mentioned the Facebook group, right?
Sunday, September 09, 2007
In shops tomorrow: 10/9
Singles
While the Hot Puppies single that would have firmly placed them up among the top of the UK female-fronted pack, the Blondie-does-Scary Monsters-esque King Of England, seems to have been cancelled (at least in over the counter terms, you can mail order it from their website) there's still plenty of interest, not least from Welsh compatriots Future Of The Left. We should warn you that we're going to come over all unnecessary about their album Curses, released on the 24th, but 7" Small Bones Small Bodies does far more than a good enough job at ferociously evil sludge-hardcore. They'll never cross over, but if we were to take over they'd be one of the most beloved band in Britain. In fact, Falco should be on the next series of Never Mind The Buzzcocks. He'd piss it. iLiKETRAiNS are about as likely as FotL to make the Album Chart Show, but The Deception does suggest a very slight flattening out of their post-rock dynamics. This is all relative, of course, it's still a chimingly doomed elegy from the point of view of Donald Crowhurst, the sort of subject they were bound to get round to covering eventually. Like their own compatriots CSS, you begin to wonder on news of the advertising-aided reissue of baile pop gem Solta O Frango whether Bonde Do Rolê have that much confidence in the rest of their material. SixNationState, thus far and for most of their forthcoming debut album exultant in party indie-dub thrills, explore their Coral side better than the Coral have for some time on We Could Be Happy. Remember when White Stripes singles, at whatever stage, were events? Like the song itself, You Don't Know What Love Is (You Just Do As You're Told) just drifts by now.
Albums
A big week for the big shots, with the overplayed Kanye/Fiddy duel (who really believes 50 will retire?) taking top honours with KT Tunstall bringing up a shapely commercial rear. Over on the independent benches, having reneged on their Columbia tie-up to go back into Memphis Industries' friendly embrace (and Sub Pop in America), we find the block party fuzz pedal cheerleaders of your dreams, the Go! Team. If Proof Of Youth doesn't move that far away from the cut and paste signifiers of Thunder Lightning Strike it's because this world is so definitively their own, or rather Ian Parton's own, as while it may sound more like a band effort now he has five other people to call on during recording it still sounds like it's been mixed for large parts from a transistor radio signal. So for the most part - clever move putting My World, a pastoral folk youth education TV theme tune of yore fed through a laptop, third after the two singles - it's a mess of samples, guitars and raps, the disprite sample library beefed up both by Ninja and guests (Chuck D, Marina from Bonde Do Role, Solex, the none more Go! world-sounding Double Dutch Divas), and it sounds like the toughed up summer jam ellipsis to the first album's playful darkness. Gravenhurst have never been predictable, starting as Nick Talbot's psych-folk project before turning on last album Fires In Distant Buildings into a thing of controlled menace. The Western Lands sees he become they and things take another turn, inspired by the end of nu-gaze that values its Krautrock beats as much as its drones and effects pedals, although the ghost of Shields looms large. As a reminder of Gravenhurst things past, so does the perhaps more literal ghost of Sandy Denny, both in tribute, in core melody and in Fairport Convention cover. It might take its time to click, but the rewards are worthwhile. Animal Collective may be the type of band that fools reckon are just pop bands in waiting, but they have melodies and harmonies on Strawberry Jam. The sort that get hurled at a wall at disorientating speed of thought alongside every kaleidoscopic broken beat and odd sound they can think of, but the roots are there even if the garnish is gleefully poisonable. Chalk it up as 'not quite experimental crossover yet, like it matters". Whereas Animal Collective get lauded by the avant-garde artpop gentry, it's left to sites about jobs in regional journalism to laud Bearsuit, who pack Oh:Io with no less in the way of noise and frenzied instrumentation but prefer post-C86 proper indie to noisemaking. No such messthetics with Actress Hands, so much auxiliaries to the Brighton Scene that they even include a White brother, who join the list of Big Star-inspired luminaries on Boys Need Jazz. Siouxsie has divested herself of half of her stage name on, after all these years, solo debut Mantaray, coming across as a Weimar cabaret PJ Harvey. With the Sopranos steady income cut off Alabama 3 return to the acid-country grindstone on MOR. Finally, who feels ripped off that The Fall Box Set 1976-2007 features only 5 CDs? What it does contain is cherrypicked singles, B-sides, album tracks, live rarities (Hey! Marc Riley is one of twenty previously unreleased recordings) and all sorts of gubbins found down the back of Mark E's sofa.
Books
And to complement that windfall comes The Complete Guide To The Music Of The Fall, written by Mick Middles, previously behind the only officially endorsed Fall book and now attempting a track by track analysis. Wouldn't a H P Lovecraft and Philip Dick anthology be quicker?
While the Hot Puppies single that would have firmly placed them up among the top of the UK female-fronted pack, the Blondie-does-Scary Monsters-esque King Of England, seems to have been cancelled (at least in over the counter terms, you can mail order it from their website) there's still plenty of interest, not least from Welsh compatriots Future Of The Left. We should warn you that we're going to come over all unnecessary about their album Curses, released on the 24th, but 7" Small Bones Small Bodies does far more than a good enough job at ferociously evil sludge-hardcore. They'll never cross over, but if we were to take over they'd be one of the most beloved band in Britain. In fact, Falco should be on the next series of Never Mind The Buzzcocks. He'd piss it. iLiKETRAiNS are about as likely as FotL to make the Album Chart Show, but The Deception does suggest a very slight flattening out of their post-rock dynamics. This is all relative, of course, it's still a chimingly doomed elegy from the point of view of Donald Crowhurst, the sort of subject they were bound to get round to covering eventually. Like their own compatriots CSS, you begin to wonder on news of the advertising-aided reissue of baile pop gem Solta O Frango whether Bonde Do Rolê have that much confidence in the rest of their material. SixNationState, thus far and for most of their forthcoming debut album exultant in party indie-dub thrills, explore their Coral side better than the Coral have for some time on We Could Be Happy. Remember when White Stripes singles, at whatever stage, were events? Like the song itself, You Don't Know What Love Is (You Just Do As You're Told) just drifts by now.
Albums
A big week for the big shots, with the overplayed Kanye/Fiddy duel (who really believes 50 will retire?) taking top honours with KT Tunstall bringing up a shapely commercial rear. Over on the independent benches, having reneged on their Columbia tie-up to go back into Memphis Industries' friendly embrace (and Sub Pop in America), we find the block party fuzz pedal cheerleaders of your dreams, the Go! Team. If Proof Of Youth doesn't move that far away from the cut and paste signifiers of Thunder Lightning Strike it's because this world is so definitively their own, or rather Ian Parton's own, as while it may sound more like a band effort now he has five other people to call on during recording it still sounds like it's been mixed for large parts from a transistor radio signal. So for the most part - clever move putting My World, a pastoral folk youth education TV theme tune of yore fed through a laptop, third after the two singles - it's a mess of samples, guitars and raps, the disprite sample library beefed up both by Ninja and guests (Chuck D, Marina from Bonde Do Role, Solex, the none more Go! world-sounding Double Dutch Divas), and it sounds like the toughed up summer jam ellipsis to the first album's playful darkness. Gravenhurst have never been predictable, starting as Nick Talbot's psych-folk project before turning on last album Fires In Distant Buildings into a thing of controlled menace. The Western Lands sees he become they and things take another turn, inspired by the end of nu-gaze that values its Krautrock beats as much as its drones and effects pedals, although the ghost of Shields looms large. As a reminder of Gravenhurst things past, so does the perhaps more literal ghost of Sandy Denny, both in tribute, in core melody and in Fairport Convention cover. It might take its time to click, but the rewards are worthwhile. Animal Collective may be the type of band that fools reckon are just pop bands in waiting, but they have melodies and harmonies on Strawberry Jam. The sort that get hurled at a wall at disorientating speed of thought alongside every kaleidoscopic broken beat and odd sound they can think of, but the roots are there even if the garnish is gleefully poisonable. Chalk it up as 'not quite experimental crossover yet, like it matters". Whereas Animal Collective get lauded by the avant-garde artpop gentry, it's left to sites about jobs in regional journalism to laud Bearsuit, who pack Oh:Io with no less in the way of noise and frenzied instrumentation but prefer post-C86 proper indie to noisemaking. No such messthetics with Actress Hands, so much auxiliaries to the Brighton Scene that they even include a White brother, who join the list of Big Star-inspired luminaries on Boys Need Jazz. Siouxsie has divested herself of half of her stage name on, after all these years, solo debut Mantaray, coming across as a Weimar cabaret PJ Harvey. With the Sopranos steady income cut off Alabama 3 return to the acid-country grindstone on MOR. Finally, who feels ripped off that The Fall Box Set 1976-2007 features only 5 CDs? What it does contain is cherrypicked singles, B-sides, album tracks, live rarities (Hey! Marc Riley is one of twenty previously unreleased recordings) and all sorts of gubbins found down the back of Mark E's sofa.
Books
And to complement that windfall comes The Complete Guide To The Music Of The Fall, written by Mick Middles, previously behind the only officially endorsed Fall book and now attempting a track by track analysis. Wouldn't a H P Lovecraft and Philip Dick anthology be quicker?
The Weekly Sweep
Saturday, September 08, 2007
Radio 1: as it is: epilogue
So actually there's not much point in listing the Zane Lowe, In New Music We Trust and Colin Murray playlists here, as they're all archived on Radio 1's website. Anyway, we've done twelve hours of playlisted daytime, we think we can gain an idea of our point from that.
Which is, there does seem to be a lot less music played on the station than you might expect. Four records were played three times over the daytime schedule and of the four presenters three are clearly personality led and the other, Whiley, has a lot of interruptions for the main part of her show for listener interaction and the like. Interestingly, while we've been on this this week Radio 1 has unveiled a new schedule that among other things drops the Thursday regional Zane Lowe opt-out to midnight on Wednesdays, curtailing Huw Stephens' unsigned show, the spiritual successor to Peel. Murray has the late evening slot now and has made it nothing like the Peel approach in any way, and while there's an argument that as nobody could replace his dedication to finding new music there's a far more persuasive one that, if you're running with that new tag, having a show that plays very new music at an accessible time with no easy Listen Again clause. (Also, what the hell is that Sunday evening Annie Mac show "covering all things teen-related" supposed to be? That'll change focus in three months.)
The problem is, we're railing against the methods of something on an upwards curve in terms of listeners and core audience approval. It's the old independent radio argument - you can give the listeners what you think they want, but at the end of the day they want to listen onto to what they already want.
Which is, there does seem to be a lot less music played on the station than you might expect. Four records were played three times over the daytime schedule and of the four presenters three are clearly personality led and the other, Whiley, has a lot of interruptions for the main part of her show for listener interaction and the like. Interestingly, while we've been on this this week Radio 1 has unveiled a new schedule that among other things drops the Thursday regional Zane Lowe opt-out to midnight on Wednesdays, curtailing Huw Stephens' unsigned show, the spiritual successor to Peel. Murray has the late evening slot now and has made it nothing like the Peel approach in any way, and while there's an argument that as nobody could replace his dedication to finding new music there's a far more persuasive one that, if you're running with that new tag, having a show that plays very new music at an accessible time with no easy Listen Again clause. (Also, what the hell is that Sunday evening Annie Mac show "covering all things teen-related" supposed to be? That'll change focus in three months.)
The problem is, we're railing against the methods of something on an upwards curve in terms of listeners and core audience approval. It's the old independent radio argument - you can give the listeners what you think they want, but at the end of the day they want to listen onto to what they already want.
Friday, September 07, 2007
Radio 1: as it is IV
Scott Mills, 4pm-7pm
Judging by the 'wake up with Moyles, go home with Mills' trailers, Radio 1 are grooming Scott Mills as the next breakfast show host, being Moyles' holiday cover and like him having started at the station on early mornings and taken over Kevin Greening's role as the regular supply DJ. This is interesting, as among the four daytime DJs he's probably the one with the least profile among non-listeners, so much so that you might be able to get away with putting any late 20/early 30 year old with slicked back hair on telly and claiming it's him, although he's cameod on Casualty playing a reporter and done the midweek lottery show. It's also telling that Radio 1 now see drivetime as a personality-led format after years and years of the music first approach. This does, however, mean wind-up phone calls.
Hard-Fi - Suburban Knights
Amy Winehouse - Tears Dry On Their Own
The Enemy - You're Not Alone
Alright, to be honest, Scott's on holiday this week, although Mark Chapman, occasional stand-in DJ and erstwhile sports presenter currently stinking up the place along with the rest of Five's Italian football coverage, is hosting Scott Mills Gold in his stead. Pause to consider that prospect, and move on. It turns out Chapman's gag of announcing that Mills is in fact dead has somehow backfired and newspapers and magazines have been receiving enquiries to that end, and indeed it's been reported in the French broadcast press. Again, we can learn far more from this than any focus group about the makeup of the modern daytime Radio 1 listener. Chapman ends up lapsing into a Michelle of the Resistance impression.
Mason vs Princess Superstar - Perfect (Exceeder)
Chapman points out Mills is hosting the Lottery that night, which given it's all fairly clearly recorded apart from the balls isn't much help. Then he starts playing stupid and/or inaudible noises, but not what he only describes as the "brown noise" as apparently it "sets things off in another building". Blimey.
Timbaland feat. Keri Hilson & DOE - The Way I Are
Milburn - What Will You Do
A clip of Mills playing the "shopping trolley noise", which appears to work on the same level as some of Danny Baker's visual-based phone-ins without the accompaniment of a middle aged man trying to work in a Wodehouse reference between surprised gasps. Say someone had emigrated twenty years ago, has just returned to the homeland and decided to test the temperature of UK pop culture nowadays by listening to Radio 1 at this very point...
Kelly Clarkson - Since U Been Gone (which still doesn't sound like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs or Interpol, rockists)
News
The Twang - Two Lovers
Booty Luv - Don't Mess With My Man
Chapman tells a story involving builders and face masks which doesn't seem to have affected anyone or anything
Bedouin Soundclash - When The Night Feels My Song
Mills Gold, featuring some sort of testing of the limits of sick humour, or at least as much of them that can be broached during the school run. Those parameters have surely already been stretched like a cheap metal spring by Moyles, of course. Most of the studio somewhat ruins it by going at the placename 'Bangkok'.
Fall Out Boy - This Ain't A Scene, It's An Arms Race
KT Tunstall - Hold On (Live Lounge)
News
Maroon 5 - Wake Up Call
Just Jack - Starz In Their Eyes
Chapman points out that this has been used as backing on the X-Factor. In case we don't get the irony, he then explains what the song is about just to hammer the point home.
Interpol - Mammoth
A 'celebrity call' with Zippy from Rainbow 'ringing' a publishers. Basically it's a load of clips and someone apparently gullible enough to think this waste of two minutes of their life is worth persevering with. At least when Noel Edmonds was doing it there was something more to it.
Sean Kingston - Beautiful Girls
Keane - Is It Any Wonder
Rihanna - Shut Up And Drive (were the lyrics written by Max Power staffers?)
Marcus from Big Brother impressions! Marcus from Big Brother impressions!
Rooney - When Did Your Heart Go Missing
"Steven Gerrard says 'eat sweets, be good at football'!" Mills Gold with Scott's ten year old World Cup expert. Hilarity almost ensues, if not when Mills affects not to be able to pronounce Oswestry.
Gym Class Heroes - Clothes Off (god, not again. Lil Chris has just covered this too, curiously, and Clea released a cover not too long ago, which is three more people than you ever thought cared about it to begin with)
Newsbeat
Kaiser Chiefs - The Angry Mob
Chemical Brothers - Galvanise ("haven't heard that for a while" Chappers says, which was very much not the case when it was out)
Girls Aloud - Sexy! No No No
Sam in his combine harvester texts in. Progression throughout the day, see. Meanwhile from the archive Bruce Forsyth 'calls' someone
Justin Timberlake - My Love
Stereophonics - It Means Nothing (it's alright, they've not progressed)
Akon - I Wanna Love You
David Guetta feat. Chris Willis - Love Is Gone
Entertainment news, which is even less consequential than the earlier one
Deep Dish - Flashdance
Editors - An End Has A Start
Mills Gold? Some sort of sexually related truth game also involving, inevitably, Colin Murray ends up with everyone else in the studio telling about Spoony's penis. No wonder he left the station. Murray inadvertedly rescues the morass with a reference to Greta Garbo, although fails to follow up with the required Peter Cook impression.
Plain White T's - Hey There Delilah
Freaks - The Creeps (how evidently have the 'attitudional' vocals been shoehorned over the top of the instrumental? Yer Mam! have posted about the original)
Maximo Park - Girls Who Play Guitars
Well, what was that? Mills' style seems stuck between Drivetime Crew Heart FM (his previous employer) and post-Moylesisms, the fate awaiting any man now who comes to Radio 1 boasting a personality. Perhaps this dual stool-falling is why Mills has yet to make much of a cultural impact outside the station - what is he, then? What does he specialise in? New music's five hour stand tomorrow.
Judging by the 'wake up with Moyles, go home with Mills' trailers, Radio 1 are grooming Scott Mills as the next breakfast show host, being Moyles' holiday cover and like him having started at the station on early mornings and taken over Kevin Greening's role as the regular supply DJ. This is interesting, as among the four daytime DJs he's probably the one with the least profile among non-listeners, so much so that you might be able to get away with putting any late 20/early 30 year old with slicked back hair on telly and claiming it's him, although he's cameod on Casualty playing a reporter and done the midweek lottery show. It's also telling that Radio 1 now see drivetime as a personality-led format after years and years of the music first approach. This does, however, mean wind-up phone calls.
Hard-Fi - Suburban Knights
Amy Winehouse - Tears Dry On Their Own
The Enemy - You're Not Alone
Alright, to be honest, Scott's on holiday this week, although Mark Chapman, occasional stand-in DJ and erstwhile sports presenter currently stinking up the place along with the rest of Five's Italian football coverage, is hosting Scott Mills Gold in his stead. Pause to consider that prospect, and move on. It turns out Chapman's gag of announcing that Mills is in fact dead has somehow backfired and newspapers and magazines have been receiving enquiries to that end, and indeed it's been reported in the French broadcast press. Again, we can learn far more from this than any focus group about the makeup of the modern daytime Radio 1 listener. Chapman ends up lapsing into a Michelle of the Resistance impression.
Mason vs Princess Superstar - Perfect (Exceeder)
Chapman points out Mills is hosting the Lottery that night, which given it's all fairly clearly recorded apart from the balls isn't much help. Then he starts playing stupid and/or inaudible noises, but not what he only describes as the "brown noise" as apparently it "sets things off in another building". Blimey.
Timbaland feat. Keri Hilson & DOE - The Way I Are
Milburn - What Will You Do
A clip of Mills playing the "shopping trolley noise", which appears to work on the same level as some of Danny Baker's visual-based phone-ins without the accompaniment of a middle aged man trying to work in a Wodehouse reference between surprised gasps. Say someone had emigrated twenty years ago, has just returned to the homeland and decided to test the temperature of UK pop culture nowadays by listening to Radio 1 at this very point...
Kelly Clarkson - Since U Been Gone (which still doesn't sound like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs or Interpol, rockists)
News
The Twang - Two Lovers
Booty Luv - Don't Mess With My Man
Chapman tells a story involving builders and face masks which doesn't seem to have affected anyone or anything
Bedouin Soundclash - When The Night Feels My Song
Mills Gold, featuring some sort of testing of the limits of sick humour, or at least as much of them that can be broached during the school run. Those parameters have surely already been stretched like a cheap metal spring by Moyles, of course. Most of the studio somewhat ruins it by going at the placename 'Bangkok'.
Fall Out Boy - This Ain't A Scene, It's An Arms Race
KT Tunstall - Hold On (Live Lounge)
News
Maroon 5 - Wake Up Call
Just Jack - Starz In Their Eyes
Chapman points out that this has been used as backing on the X-Factor. In case we don't get the irony, he then explains what the song is about just to hammer the point home.
Interpol - Mammoth
A 'celebrity call' with Zippy from Rainbow 'ringing' a publishers. Basically it's a load of clips and someone apparently gullible enough to think this waste of two minutes of their life is worth persevering with. At least when Noel Edmonds was doing it there was something more to it.
Sean Kingston - Beautiful Girls
Keane - Is It Any Wonder
Rihanna - Shut Up And Drive (were the lyrics written by Max Power staffers?)
Marcus from Big Brother impressions! Marcus from Big Brother impressions!
Rooney - When Did Your Heart Go Missing
"Steven Gerrard says 'eat sweets, be good at football'!" Mills Gold with Scott's ten year old World Cup expert. Hilarity almost ensues, if not when Mills affects not to be able to pronounce Oswestry.
Gym Class Heroes - Clothes Off (god, not again. Lil Chris has just covered this too, curiously, and Clea released a cover not too long ago, which is three more people than you ever thought cared about it to begin with)
Newsbeat
Kaiser Chiefs - The Angry Mob
Chemical Brothers - Galvanise ("haven't heard that for a while" Chappers says, which was very much not the case when it was out)
Girls Aloud - Sexy! No No No
Sam in his combine harvester texts in. Progression throughout the day, see. Meanwhile from the archive Bruce Forsyth 'calls' someone
Justin Timberlake - My Love
Stereophonics - It Means Nothing (it's alright, they've not progressed)
Akon - I Wanna Love You
David Guetta feat. Chris Willis - Love Is Gone
Entertainment news, which is even less consequential than the earlier one
Deep Dish - Flashdance
Editors - An End Has A Start
Mills Gold? Some sort of sexually related truth game also involving, inevitably, Colin Murray ends up with everyone else in the studio telling about Spoony's penis. No wonder he left the station. Murray inadvertedly rescues the morass with a reference to Greta Garbo, although fails to follow up with the required Peter Cook impression.
Plain White T's - Hey There Delilah
Freaks - The Creeps (how evidently have the 'attitudional' vocals been shoehorned over the top of the instrumental? Yer Mam! have posted about the original)
Maximo Park - Girls Who Play Guitars
Well, what was that? Mills' style seems stuck between Drivetime Crew Heart FM (his previous employer) and post-Moylesisms, the fate awaiting any man now who comes to Radio 1 boasting a personality. Perhaps this dual stool-falling is why Mills has yet to make much of a cultural impact outside the station - what is he, then? What does he specialise in? New music's five hour stand tomorrow.
Thursday, September 06, 2007
Radio 1: as it is III
Edith Bowman, 1pm-4pm
For years Edith Bowman was MTV UK's bronze girl as opposed to its golden one, the only member of their ever evolving presenting team who never made it onto proper telly. Six years she spent gainfully doing just about every home grown show on the network while everyone from Air (Donna) to Zane Lowe graduated to the big leagues. Then in 2003 Colin Murray invited her to join him on a new Radio 1 show on Saturday mornings, so lightweight and stupid it was hard to believe it didn't have sponsorship from a company that made helium canisters but which led to them taking over from Mark and Lard (Murray said at the time that those complaining were "closer to their pensions than to their 18th birthday". That went down well.) Murray went back to night-times last year, and we'll get round to him, leaving Bowman with as much time to refer to everything as "genius!" as she wants. Has she settled in at all? Let's find out.
David Guetta feat. Chris Willis - Love Is Gone
The Twang - Two Lovers (bizarrely, Bowman recently stated Phil Etheridge's vocals were comparable to Jonsi Birgisson's for Sigur Ros)
At least she keeps the intro short.
Justin Timberlake - Sexyback
The Lunchtime Linkup gives over the first half to a kind of Workmates Request deal like you used to get on ILR, except this week it's a group of mates evidently making very slow progress towards the Reading Festival. Today it's "Steve Palmer AKA Roachy", with his brother, apparently nicknamed 'Weiner'. We think we're ahead of the implication. They're in a pub. The first use of 'quality' as a descriptive term happens here. Pete, the aforementioned brother who wants to see The Used and Brand New, has picked...
Funeral For A Friend - Streetcar
Joey Negro - Make A Move On Me
"How can you not like it?" Steve says of FFAF. We think we can try. Somehow it gets round to impulse buying and inviting both stories of and a song that suggests such from listeners. The latter will have to be very inspecific.
Remi Nicole - Go Mr Sunshine ("Download it now!" says Edith. They never used to suggest we bought CDs and vinyls now)
Pigeon Detectives - Take Her Back
News
Amy Winehouse - You Know I'm No Good
Editors - An End Has A Start (is this allowed under BBC guidelines?)
Ida Corr vs Fedde Le Grand - Let Me Think About It
Lily Allen - Smile
Plenty of stories coming in and some very mark-stretching song suggestions, most worthy of Bowman's noting Money For Nothing, Celine Dion's Think Twice and something Edith only refers to as "the eBay song".
Plain White Ts - Hey There Delilah
2 Unlimited - No Limit
Yeah, this is what they came up with. We've just stared at the monitor for a good minute trying to work out the criteria under which this came out top.
Beyonce - Green Light
Red Hot Chilli Peppers - By The Way
"We haven't had a reaction like that to a track for quite some time" says Edith of No Limit. Ironic nostalgia has to stop. Bizarrely, she then receives a text from someone who added 'Manson' to her son's middle names by deed poll. Edith clearly thinks very little of the idea, although she does mention that Colin gave himself a middle name by deed poll of 'J', after Homer J Simpson. Someone could build a fascinating psychological profile of that man.
Beatfreakz - Somebody's Watching Me
Now people are suggesting a new middle name for Edith. The madness never stops. "I know a bloke who changed his name to Creamy Goodness" says one text. Not. Enough. Murders.
KT Tunstall - The Prayer (as performed about two hours earlier)
Gym Class Heroes - Clothes Off
Brakes - Beatific Visions (Edith's record of the week, not that it's helped their profile much)
Someone suggests Bowman change her middle name to 'dot' after her email address, which is actually quite good for as long as Edith doesn't then explain and expand it. First 'genius' of the day.
Axwell - I Found U
News
Kaiser Chiefs - The Angry Mob
Lemar - If There's Any Justice
Previously Edith has been in hysterics at the idea that James King might have been in Ibiza, which seems to be an injoke too close to the edge of listener reason. Movie expert in residence King is taking trivia questions, although given the first question requires King to explain to Bowman that Brian Conley and Bradley Walsh are not the same person it's not entirely clear how readily this is being taken up.
Out Of Office - Hands Up
Robyn - With Every Heartbeat
So they've decided that nobody wants to spend time in film critic screenings with anyone but Mark Kermode - not a majority view, we're guessing - but frankly James gives the game away when talking about Coronation Street actors in major films following an enquiry about whether Fred Elliott is in Hudson Hawk (answer: no, he's fictional, although John Savident is) Isn't the tag that he's supposed to be receiving these blind?
Reverend & The Makers - He Said He Loved Me
Gnarls Barkley - Smiley Faces
Linkin Park - Bleed It Out
Basement Jaxx - Oh My Gosh
Peter Bjorn & John - Young Folks
Muse - Supermassive Black Hole
Edith is saying stuff during much of this, it's just not very interesting business regarding Knocked Up and Dawkins-baiting clairvoyancy therapy, and after all this is as much about listing the records played as critiquing the DJs. Right?
Kano feat. Craig David - This Is The Girl
Freaks - The Creeps
News
Fratellis - Whistle For The Choir
Royksopp - Eple (perhaps as a giveaway as to how this got in, Edith starts talking over it a minute and a half in)
The Logical Song, excellently, appears to be the title of a guess the song competition which appears to have the add-on of listeners providing an overelaborate pretend description of what they're doing at the time. It could be more literate, in all honesty.
Foo Fighters - The Pretender
Kanye West - Stronger
Blur - Tender
That was as the answer to the competition. The clues we couldn't be arsed to transcribe, but it is notable that she plays all eight minutes of the album version. Thinking about this whole afternoon shift, when Mark & Lard had their two hours it was well known in the industry that it was getting a phenomenal amount of listeners at that time and indeed the independent sector would use it as a clarion call for more individual ideas among its local stations, yet the audience has only grown since this kind of two text-ins, basically breezy Fifian banter (Bowman is from Anstruther, the same village the Fence Collective is based in) and more music per half-hour has come in. Which, we feel, says something hugely profound about what the pop radio listeners of 2007 really want.
For years Edith Bowman was MTV UK's bronze girl as opposed to its golden one, the only member of their ever evolving presenting team who never made it onto proper telly. Six years she spent gainfully doing just about every home grown show on the network while everyone from Air (Donna) to Zane Lowe graduated to the big leagues. Then in 2003 Colin Murray invited her to join him on a new Radio 1 show on Saturday mornings, so lightweight and stupid it was hard to believe it didn't have sponsorship from a company that made helium canisters but which led to them taking over from Mark and Lard (Murray said at the time that those complaining were "closer to their pensions than to their 18th birthday". That went down well.) Murray went back to night-times last year, and we'll get round to him, leaving Bowman with as much time to refer to everything as "genius!" as she wants. Has she settled in at all? Let's find out.
David Guetta feat. Chris Willis - Love Is Gone
The Twang - Two Lovers (bizarrely, Bowman recently stated Phil Etheridge's vocals were comparable to Jonsi Birgisson's for Sigur Ros)
At least she keeps the intro short.
Justin Timberlake - Sexyback
The Lunchtime Linkup gives over the first half to a kind of Workmates Request deal like you used to get on ILR, except this week it's a group of mates evidently making very slow progress towards the Reading Festival. Today it's "Steve Palmer AKA Roachy", with his brother, apparently nicknamed 'Weiner'. We think we're ahead of the implication. They're in a pub. The first use of 'quality' as a descriptive term happens here. Pete, the aforementioned brother who wants to see The Used and Brand New, has picked...
Funeral For A Friend - Streetcar
Joey Negro - Make A Move On Me
"How can you not like it?" Steve says of FFAF. We think we can try. Somehow it gets round to impulse buying and inviting both stories of and a song that suggests such from listeners. The latter will have to be very inspecific.
Remi Nicole - Go Mr Sunshine ("Download it now!" says Edith. They never used to suggest we bought CDs and vinyls now)
Pigeon Detectives - Take Her Back
News
Amy Winehouse - You Know I'm No Good
Editors - An End Has A Start (is this allowed under BBC guidelines?)
Ida Corr vs Fedde Le Grand - Let Me Think About It
Lily Allen - Smile
Plenty of stories coming in and some very mark-stretching song suggestions, most worthy of Bowman's noting Money For Nothing, Celine Dion's Think Twice and something Edith only refers to as "the eBay song".
Plain White Ts - Hey There Delilah
2 Unlimited - No Limit
Yeah, this is what they came up with. We've just stared at the monitor for a good minute trying to work out the criteria under which this came out top.
Beyonce - Green Light
Red Hot Chilli Peppers - By The Way
"We haven't had a reaction like that to a track for quite some time" says Edith of No Limit. Ironic nostalgia has to stop. Bizarrely, she then receives a text from someone who added 'Manson' to her son's middle names by deed poll. Edith clearly thinks very little of the idea, although she does mention that Colin gave himself a middle name by deed poll of 'J', after Homer J Simpson. Someone could build a fascinating psychological profile of that man.
Beatfreakz - Somebody's Watching Me
Now people are suggesting a new middle name for Edith. The madness never stops. "I know a bloke who changed his name to Creamy Goodness" says one text. Not. Enough. Murders.
KT Tunstall - The Prayer (as performed about two hours earlier)
Gym Class Heroes - Clothes Off
Brakes - Beatific Visions (Edith's record of the week, not that it's helped their profile much)
Someone suggests Bowman change her middle name to 'dot' after her email address, which is actually quite good for as long as Edith doesn't then explain and expand it. First 'genius' of the day.
Axwell - I Found U
News
Kaiser Chiefs - The Angry Mob
Lemar - If There's Any Justice
Previously Edith has been in hysterics at the idea that James King might have been in Ibiza, which seems to be an injoke too close to the edge of listener reason. Movie expert in residence King is taking trivia questions, although given the first question requires King to explain to Bowman that Brian Conley and Bradley Walsh are not the same person it's not entirely clear how readily this is being taken up.
Out Of Office - Hands Up
Robyn - With Every Heartbeat
So they've decided that nobody wants to spend time in film critic screenings with anyone but Mark Kermode - not a majority view, we're guessing - but frankly James gives the game away when talking about Coronation Street actors in major films following an enquiry about whether Fred Elliott is in Hudson Hawk (answer: no, he's fictional, although John Savident is) Isn't the tag that he's supposed to be receiving these blind?
Reverend & The Makers - He Said He Loved Me
Gnarls Barkley - Smiley Faces
Linkin Park - Bleed It Out
Basement Jaxx - Oh My Gosh
Peter Bjorn & John - Young Folks
Muse - Supermassive Black Hole
Edith is saying stuff during much of this, it's just not very interesting business regarding Knocked Up and Dawkins-baiting clairvoyancy therapy, and after all this is as much about listing the records played as critiquing the DJs. Right?
Kano feat. Craig David - This Is The Girl
Freaks - The Creeps
News
Fratellis - Whistle For The Choir
Royksopp - Eple (perhaps as a giveaway as to how this got in, Edith starts talking over it a minute and a half in)
The Logical Song, excellently, appears to be the title of a guess the song competition which appears to have the add-on of listeners providing an overelaborate pretend description of what they're doing at the time. It could be more literate, in all honesty.
Foo Fighters - The Pretender
Kanye West - Stronger
Blur - Tender
That was as the answer to the competition. The clues we couldn't be arsed to transcribe, but it is notable that she plays all eight minutes of the album version. Thinking about this whole afternoon shift, when Mark & Lard had their two hours it was well known in the industry that it was getting a phenomenal amount of listeners at that time and indeed the independent sector would use it as a clarion call for more individual ideas among its local stations, yet the audience has only grown since this kind of two text-ins, basically breezy Fifian banter (Bowman is from Anstruther, the same village the Fence Collective is based in) and more music per half-hour has come in. Which, we feel, says something hugely profound about what the pop radio listeners of 2007 really want.
Wednesday, September 05, 2007
Radio 1: as it is II
Jo Whiley, 10am-12.45pm
The oldest (42) and longest serving (14 years this month, six and a half in this slot) of the weekday team, Whiley may perhaps be the person upon whom your opinion of the station stands or falls. She gets the new music to daytime job and can make a band, but the ones she makes, while starting out with the best intentions (Roy Vedas, anyone?) have of late been of the rockist same as before but lesser methodology. Changing Tracks appears to have become a Noughties Our Tune, while the simpering over this month's Grazia-approved celebrities and TV imports could well put the listener off them entirely. And why does she have so many people getting in touch who a) start their texts 'Hey, Jo' and b) are on tractors?
Kaiser Chiefs - The Angry Mob
Mark Ronson - Ooh Wee ("fantabulous", apparently)
"What is your status today?" Do you see? Jo Whiley is down with the Facebook kids! Jo, being all new and that, gets three or four free plays a show but completely ruins the surprise by playing clips of them at this point. She does this a lot in varying ways, possibly to ensure the producer is earning their crust
Editors - An End Has A Start
"What cover do you think she (KT Tunstall, remember) will do?" This is the other thing that gets on people's wick about Whiley, the way she's taken the ironic live cover and run with it, the ultimate result being Squalid Schmindie Band Do A Pop Song But, Like, Meaningfully And Acoustically. When Arcade Fire did the Live Lounge they covered Maps and Whiley didn't so much as put it out on the air, leaving it for the online team. Again, just to completely ruin any sense that there may be an unlikely payoff, Jo states it'll be one of Take That's Shine, the Holloways' Generator (no chance), Plain White T's Hey There Delilah and Bloc Party's The Prayer. CAN YOU WAIT?
Rihanna - Shut Up And Drive
Lostprophets - Rooftops
M.I.A. - Jimmy
Maximo Park - Girls Who Play Guitars
News
Gym Class Heroes - Clothes Off
Jack Johnson - Upside Down
Seven Song Shuffle. It's not as good as Bits And Pieces, largely because we got one out of the seven chopped and diced clips. One. "Maybe it's easier than it has been" says Jo. Cheers.
Charlean Dance - Mr DJ (they still make records like this? And get them on the Radio 1 playlist?)
Clearly we're spending too long listening to this no-ambition indie schlock to recognise half the Radio 1 A-list (and Pearl Jam's Alive). Although Scouting For Girls actually sound much, much better at half speed.
Athlete - Hurricane
Kate Nash - Foundations (not actually playlisted until the week of release)
The Hives - Tick Tick Boom
Audio Bullys - Shoot You Down
Jack Penate - Torn On The Platform
Scissor Sisters - She's My Man
Changing Tracks. It's different, see, because it's over some sort of anodyne beats backing. Jo uses just as many light pregnant pauses as Simon Bates, that's what it is. Today it's a bloke called Calvin who tried to keep a girl and a boy going at the same time while at university, failing and wanting the girl, who split with him, back. This song's been picked as it showed him "I didn't have to conform to what people expected of me".
Embrace - Ashes
Hundreds and hundreds of texters tell Calvin to "be yourself". That's what gets so many people into trouble, of course.
Taio Cruz - Moving On
Lee Cabrera - Shake It (Move A Little Closer)
The Go! Team - Doing It Right
Jo seems to value "energy" above everything else in her live music. We suggest she never goes to see Spiritualized Acoustic Mainlines. "Quite a few people getting in touch because they watched Skins". See, these people walk among us. One texter is indeed on his tractor.
Razorlight - In The Morning
"Richard on his tractor" now. "Some good news - Joe Dempsey, who played Chris, is on this show on Friday". Then she talks about hating slugs for some reason.
P Diddy feat. Christina Aguilera - Tell Me
"I do hate them, on a par with egg whites" Jo continues as perhaps the unlikeliest intro news have ever had
Linkin Park - Bleed It Out
Freaks - The Creeps (do all dance records have to sound like Yeh Yeh by Bodyrox now?)
More slugs. Whatever floats the mid-morning nation's boats. Someone claims they couldn't see the cat's bowl for them the other night. Is that possible?
Jamie Scott and the Town - When Will I See Your Face Again?
Hard-Fi - Suburban Knights
Now we're onto leeches.
Eminem - Lose Yourself
Showbiz news. Athlete and Adam Brody say little of ultimate interest. Sienna Miller talks about global warming as patron of some charity or other. How this fifteen seconds, as opposed to the full minute about her love life, is meant to increase their standing lord knows. "Genuinely normal" is Natalie Jameson's verdict, presumably on the basis that she wasn't made out of newsprint.
Libertines - Don't Look Back Into The Sun (At the time this sounded ridiculously scrappy and half-formed. Now it sounds exactly the same as half the guitar records released in any given week.)
Timbaland feat. Keri Hilson and someone else - The Way I Are
The Hoosiers - Worried About Ray (Why were we not warned about the revival of soft rock production?)
KT arrives. Jo immediately butters her up so much she may consequently be unable to stand up. Tellingly, when Jo asks her who the most impressive person she's met is and suggests Justin Timberlake, Kanye West and Mary J Blige, Tunstall replies with Bonnie Raitt.
KT Tunstall - Hold On (Live Lounge)
Meck feat. Leo Sayer - Thunder In My Heart
Apparently KT's backing singers don't have names. She reveals she's recorded a Christmas mini-album, including Fairytale Of New York with Ed Harcourt and Sleigh Ride apparently in the style of the Beastie Boys. Sweet lord. So, did you guess right?
KT Tunstall - The Prayer (Live Lounge) (Done just about straight, which somewhat defeats the object of, well, KT Tunstall covering Bloc Party)
Sean Kingston - Beautiful Girls (What a bizarre record this is, by the way. Why does that backing seem to be a WH Smith PA-style budget cover of Christina Aguilera's What A Girl Wants in an 80s soft pop style?)
The Zutons - Valerie
Sonny J - Can't Stop Moving ("you'll recognise this song", apparently. Does anyone else think St Etienne's Nothing Can Stop Us gone blaxploitation?)
"Check 'em out on Myspace" Jo somewhat inevitably advises
Kanye West - Stronger
There's something oddly unsatisfying about Whiley these days for someone painted as daytime Radio 1's emissary to the very soul of music fandom. She seems overkeen as a result to hitch herself to any potential youth cult going - indeed she's also going a bundle on Heroes - and at times seems to want to spoonfeed her audience rather than distract them. See you the other side of Newsbeat.
The oldest (42) and longest serving (14 years this month, six and a half in this slot) of the weekday team, Whiley may perhaps be the person upon whom your opinion of the station stands or falls. She gets the new music to daytime job and can make a band, but the ones she makes, while starting out with the best intentions (Roy Vedas, anyone?) have of late been of the rockist same as before but lesser methodology. Changing Tracks appears to have become a Noughties Our Tune, while the simpering over this month's Grazia-approved celebrities and TV imports could well put the listener off them entirely. And why does she have so many people getting in touch who a) start their texts 'Hey, Jo' and b) are on tractors?
Kaiser Chiefs - The Angry Mob
Mark Ronson - Ooh Wee ("fantabulous", apparently)
"What is your status today?" Do you see? Jo Whiley is down with the Facebook kids! Jo, being all new and that, gets three or four free plays a show but completely ruins the surprise by playing clips of them at this point. She does this a lot in varying ways, possibly to ensure the producer is earning their crust
Editors - An End Has A Start
"What cover do you think she (KT Tunstall, remember) will do?" This is the other thing that gets on people's wick about Whiley, the way she's taken the ironic live cover and run with it, the ultimate result being Squalid Schmindie Band Do A Pop Song But, Like, Meaningfully And Acoustically. When Arcade Fire did the Live Lounge they covered Maps and Whiley didn't so much as put it out on the air, leaving it for the online team. Again, just to completely ruin any sense that there may be an unlikely payoff, Jo states it'll be one of Take That's Shine, the Holloways' Generator (no chance), Plain White T's Hey There Delilah and Bloc Party's The Prayer. CAN YOU WAIT?
Rihanna - Shut Up And Drive
Lostprophets - Rooftops
M.I.A. - Jimmy
Maximo Park - Girls Who Play Guitars
News
Gym Class Heroes - Clothes Off
Jack Johnson - Upside Down
Seven Song Shuffle. It's not as good as Bits And Pieces, largely because we got one out of the seven chopped and diced clips. One. "Maybe it's easier than it has been" says Jo. Cheers.
Charlean Dance - Mr DJ (they still make records like this? And get them on the Radio 1 playlist?)
Clearly we're spending too long listening to this no-ambition indie schlock to recognise half the Radio 1 A-list (and Pearl Jam's Alive). Although Scouting For Girls actually sound much, much better at half speed.
Athlete - Hurricane
Kate Nash - Foundations (not actually playlisted until the week of release)
The Hives - Tick Tick Boom
Audio Bullys - Shoot You Down
Jack Penate - Torn On The Platform
Scissor Sisters - She's My Man
Changing Tracks. It's different, see, because it's over some sort of anodyne beats backing. Jo uses just as many light pregnant pauses as Simon Bates, that's what it is. Today it's a bloke called Calvin who tried to keep a girl and a boy going at the same time while at university, failing and wanting the girl, who split with him, back. This song's been picked as it showed him "I didn't have to conform to what people expected of me".
Embrace - Ashes
Hundreds and hundreds of texters tell Calvin to "be yourself". That's what gets so many people into trouble, of course.
Taio Cruz - Moving On
Lee Cabrera - Shake It (Move A Little Closer)
The Go! Team - Doing It Right
Jo seems to value "energy" above everything else in her live music. We suggest she never goes to see Spiritualized Acoustic Mainlines. "Quite a few people getting in touch because they watched Skins". See, these people walk among us. One texter is indeed on his tractor.
Razorlight - In The Morning
"Richard on his tractor" now. "Some good news - Joe Dempsey, who played Chris, is on this show on Friday". Then she talks about hating slugs for some reason.
P Diddy feat. Christina Aguilera - Tell Me
"I do hate them, on a par with egg whites" Jo continues as perhaps the unlikeliest intro news have ever had
Linkin Park - Bleed It Out
Freaks - The Creeps (do all dance records have to sound like Yeh Yeh by Bodyrox now?)
More slugs. Whatever floats the mid-morning nation's boats. Someone claims they couldn't see the cat's bowl for them the other night. Is that possible?
Jamie Scott and the Town - When Will I See Your Face Again?
Hard-Fi - Suburban Knights
Now we're onto leeches.
Eminem - Lose Yourself
Showbiz news. Athlete and Adam Brody say little of ultimate interest. Sienna Miller talks about global warming as patron of some charity or other. How this fifteen seconds, as opposed to the full minute about her love life, is meant to increase their standing lord knows. "Genuinely normal" is Natalie Jameson's verdict, presumably on the basis that she wasn't made out of newsprint.
Libertines - Don't Look Back Into The Sun (At the time this sounded ridiculously scrappy and half-formed. Now it sounds exactly the same as half the guitar records released in any given week.)
Timbaland feat. Keri Hilson and someone else - The Way I Are
The Hoosiers - Worried About Ray (Why were we not warned about the revival of soft rock production?)
KT arrives. Jo immediately butters her up so much she may consequently be unable to stand up. Tellingly, when Jo asks her who the most impressive person she's met is and suggests Justin Timberlake, Kanye West and Mary J Blige, Tunstall replies with Bonnie Raitt.
KT Tunstall - Hold On (Live Lounge)
Meck feat. Leo Sayer - Thunder In My Heart
Apparently KT's backing singers don't have names. She reveals she's recorded a Christmas mini-album, including Fairytale Of New York with Ed Harcourt and Sleigh Ride apparently in the style of the Beastie Boys. Sweet lord. So, did you guess right?
KT Tunstall - The Prayer (Live Lounge) (Done just about straight, which somewhat defeats the object of, well, KT Tunstall covering Bloc Party)
Sean Kingston - Beautiful Girls (What a bizarre record this is, by the way. Why does that backing seem to be a WH Smith PA-style budget cover of Christina Aguilera's What A Girl Wants in an 80s soft pop style?)
The Zutons - Valerie
Sonny J - Can't Stop Moving ("you'll recognise this song", apparently. Does anyone else think St Etienne's Nothing Can Stop Us gone blaxploitation?)
"Check 'em out on Myspace" Jo somewhat inevitably advises
Kanye West - Stronger
There's something oddly unsatisfying about Whiley these days for someone painted as daytime Radio 1's emissary to the very soul of music fandom. She seems overkeen as a result to hitch herself to any potential youth cult going - indeed she's also going a bundle on Heroes - and at times seems to want to spoonfeed her audience rather than distract them. See you the other side of Newsbeat.
Tuesday, September 04, 2007
Could they by any chance be related?
30th August: Rhodri Marsden, writer, man about cybertown and formerly of The Free French, Scritti Politti's live band and Spearmint sidemanery, writes for the Independent about his YouTube hit project The Schema.
4th September: Rhodri Marsden (see biography passim) 'writes' for the Mail about his YouTube hit project The Schema.
4th September: Rhodri Marsden (see biography passim) 'writes' for the Mail about his YouTube hit project The Schema.
Radio 1: as it is
A while ago we found an old notebook, a good eleven or twelve years old, packed with ideas, doodles and flights of fancy. Among these was a plan we'd taken up on some summer's day to note down every record played on BBC Radio 1 from the end of the Golden Hour at 10am through to the moment Radcliffe became Sturgess/Lloyd at midnight. What purpose it served us at the time is unrecorded, but it seemed fascinating with the benefit of hindsight, records lost to the passage of time rubbing shoulders with future retro playlist classics.
As Radio 1 steps up to celebrate its fortieth anniversary at the end of September, it got us thinking. The station's listenership figures are going sharply up again after several years in the commercial and critical doldrums, yet the stick it receives from the cognescenti is unmatched since at least DLT and Bates were running things. Is it really that slow to reason and fast to trend or does it merely hold up a mirror to what the 16-24s and factory workers of today really want, in its position as Britain's only national pop station? Well, that question is for a conference of some sort, but it's about time we took notes once more.
What we're doing over the next five days, with the aid of some Listen Again ripping, is taking in a whole day's Radio 1 output, from 7am to midnight, noting down every record played and everything else we deem notable along the way. As a fairly normal day in the scheme of things we chose Wednesday 22nd August, two days before the big Reading & Leeds Carling Weekend festival but with nothing untoward otherwise, and notably a day when the regular schedule was technically unbroken. Moyles today, Whiley tomorrow, Bowman Thursday, Mills Friday, the specialist shows Saturday - time to embark on seventeen hours' checking on where the pop nation stands...
Chris Moyles, 7am-10am
Just past his own tenth year anniversary, Chris Moyles has earnt his role as emblem of the modern Radio 1. RAJAR after RAJAR his figures go up, yet for many he remains a totem of all that is wrong with modern youth broadcasting. Clearly he wouldn't be here without Evans' example, having made his radio name in the mid-90s, but his persona of high grade cajoling and drawing back only when threatened, like a gazelle might, has, perhaps because he's never had Evans' simultaneous TV exposure, crystallised what many feel is the modern Radio 1 attitude. Bloody hell, he's got a second autobiography out next month. We've not heard his show since before he started on breakfast at the start of 2004. Much of this, we suspect, will sail clean over our head. We also half suspect it'll be read out on the show before the end of the week.
Is the start always this prolonged? Do people not want records any more? Chris had a late night at a showbiz event (the Rolling Stones). Some things don't change. Chris talks about security at the O2, then something about jobsworthiness. He's still working the retro-styled jingles, which don't sound like old Radio 1 jingles at all any more. Twelve minutes in, a record!
Robyn feat. Kleerup - With Every Heartbeat (cut off before the really good bit)
The Bravery - An Honest Mistake
Some convoluted stuff about the ill sportsreader and Dave introducing some sort of football in-game
Sean Kingston - Beautiful Girls
News, then some sort of birthday feature. This must work on endless levels of irony.
The Rolling Stones - (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction (we suspect this wasn't on the computer system)
Hard-Fi - Suburban Knights
Justin Timberlake - Lovestoned
Joel off of JK & Joel gets auditioned for the sports news. It doesn't last long.
Ida Corr vs Fedde Le Grand Let Me Think About It ("which they should have done at playlist")
Dave has a new game and Chris chooses the intro music live. This is clearly going to take much longer than the game.
Pink - Get The Party Started
Maroon 5 - Wake Up Call
Think Of A Number, it's called. It's some sort of draw-based football prediction game. Eight minutes later it makes no more sense then when it started.
Scouting For Girls - She's So Lovely (Chris likes it. Of course he does)
When did periods of silence become a successful part of a radio persona?
News. Followed by Who Knows Dom?, some sort of Six Degrees-esque feature that makes precious little sense, and an anecdote about making gravy that's as exciting as it sounds.
Kanye West - Stronger
Freaks - The Creeps
We've just realised that we're two hours in and have barely written anything for such a length. It's Dave's Tedious Link, which today comes up with, wow...
Prefab Sprout - The King Of Rock'n'Roll
Moyles ends up doing an impression of Paddy McAloon, and McAloon's vocal style on Steve McQueen at that. Then he plays a lot of non-obvious TV themes, which he's also always been good at. This dissolves into Chris talking about who he fancies, as per, which somehow leads onto long forgotten girl band Girls At Play.
Pigeon Detectives - Take Her Back
An advert for the show's podcast sees Chris do What Darth Vader Would Have Sounded Like Had Dave Prowse Not Been Redubbed. He would have had a strong Bristolian accent, apparently.
Kano feat. Craig David - This Is The Girl
Chris does a series of impressions of Leigh Francis' version of Craig David, for all the use that is. Then, news, followed by Chris' poor take-offs on the entire BBC live England football studio team. This doesn't seem a lot of content for two and a half hours.
David Guetta feat. Chris Willis - Love Is Gone
Gossip - Standing In The Way Of Control
Some sort of gubbins about Fantasy Football, the sort of thing you come up with 2 hours 50 into a breakfast show that's not had a narrative to hang on to this morning. It gets onto fit women, of course.
Armand Van Helden - I Want Your Soul
Jo Whiley's got KT Tunstall in, so the team are swapping Jimmy Krankie approximations. "Rubbish show today, wasn't it?" is a fair way to leave it, being a show that sometimes hints at structure but is more content to follow its nose and its obsessions for three hours. Given those with any awareness of Moyles' style and preoccupations already know what these obsessions are more than likely to be, especially within this hermetically sealed world of catchphrases and internally led features, it's a show that stands or falls on whether they actually have anything to discuss at length. This makes it actually quite brave in the music-led breakfast radio world, especially with little requested listener interaction, but if it doesn't come off it jars horribly.
As Radio 1 steps up to celebrate its fortieth anniversary at the end of September, it got us thinking. The station's listenership figures are going sharply up again after several years in the commercial and critical doldrums, yet the stick it receives from the cognescenti is unmatched since at least DLT and Bates were running things. Is it really that slow to reason and fast to trend or does it merely hold up a mirror to what the 16-24s and factory workers of today really want, in its position as Britain's only national pop station? Well, that question is for a conference of some sort, but it's about time we took notes once more.
What we're doing over the next five days, with the aid of some Listen Again ripping, is taking in a whole day's Radio 1 output, from 7am to midnight, noting down every record played and everything else we deem notable along the way. As a fairly normal day in the scheme of things we chose Wednesday 22nd August, two days before the big Reading & Leeds Carling Weekend festival but with nothing untoward otherwise, and notably a day when the regular schedule was technically unbroken. Moyles today, Whiley tomorrow, Bowman Thursday, Mills Friday, the specialist shows Saturday - time to embark on seventeen hours' checking on where the pop nation stands...
Chris Moyles, 7am-10am
Just past his own tenth year anniversary, Chris Moyles has earnt his role as emblem of the modern Radio 1. RAJAR after RAJAR his figures go up, yet for many he remains a totem of all that is wrong with modern youth broadcasting. Clearly he wouldn't be here without Evans' example, having made his radio name in the mid-90s, but his persona of high grade cajoling and drawing back only when threatened, like a gazelle might, has, perhaps because he's never had Evans' simultaneous TV exposure, crystallised what many feel is the modern Radio 1 attitude. Bloody hell, he's got a second autobiography out next month. We've not heard his show since before he started on breakfast at the start of 2004. Much of this, we suspect, will sail clean over our head. We also half suspect it'll be read out on the show before the end of the week.
Is the start always this prolonged? Do people not want records any more? Chris had a late night at a showbiz event (the Rolling Stones). Some things don't change. Chris talks about security at the O2, then something about jobsworthiness. He's still working the retro-styled jingles, which don't sound like old Radio 1 jingles at all any more. Twelve minutes in, a record!
Robyn feat. Kleerup - With Every Heartbeat (cut off before the really good bit)
The Bravery - An Honest Mistake
Some convoluted stuff about the ill sportsreader and Dave introducing some sort of football in-game
Sean Kingston - Beautiful Girls
News, then some sort of birthday feature. This must work on endless levels of irony.
The Rolling Stones - (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction (we suspect this wasn't on the computer system)
Hard-Fi - Suburban Knights
Justin Timberlake - Lovestoned
Joel off of JK & Joel gets auditioned for the sports news. It doesn't last long.
Ida Corr vs Fedde Le Grand Let Me Think About It ("which they should have done at playlist")
Dave has a new game and Chris chooses the intro music live. This is clearly going to take much longer than the game.
Pink - Get The Party Started
Maroon 5 - Wake Up Call
Think Of A Number, it's called. It's some sort of draw-based football prediction game. Eight minutes later it makes no more sense then when it started.
Scouting For Girls - She's So Lovely (Chris likes it. Of course he does)
When did periods of silence become a successful part of a radio persona?
News. Followed by Who Knows Dom?, some sort of Six Degrees-esque feature that makes precious little sense, and an anecdote about making gravy that's as exciting as it sounds.
Kanye West - Stronger
Freaks - The Creeps
We've just realised that we're two hours in and have barely written anything for such a length. It's Dave's Tedious Link, which today comes up with, wow...
Prefab Sprout - The King Of Rock'n'Roll
Moyles ends up doing an impression of Paddy McAloon, and McAloon's vocal style on Steve McQueen at that. Then he plays a lot of non-obvious TV themes, which he's also always been good at. This dissolves into Chris talking about who he fancies, as per, which somehow leads onto long forgotten girl band Girls At Play.
Pigeon Detectives - Take Her Back
An advert for the show's podcast sees Chris do What Darth Vader Would Have Sounded Like Had Dave Prowse Not Been Redubbed. He would have had a strong Bristolian accent, apparently.
Kano feat. Craig David - This Is The Girl
Chris does a series of impressions of Leigh Francis' version of Craig David, for all the use that is. Then, news, followed by Chris' poor take-offs on the entire BBC live England football studio team. This doesn't seem a lot of content for two and a half hours.
David Guetta feat. Chris Willis - Love Is Gone
Gossip - Standing In The Way Of Control
Some sort of gubbins about Fantasy Football, the sort of thing you come up with 2 hours 50 into a breakfast show that's not had a narrative to hang on to this morning. It gets onto fit women, of course.
Armand Van Helden - I Want Your Soul
Jo Whiley's got KT Tunstall in, so the team are swapping Jimmy Krankie approximations. "Rubbish show today, wasn't it?" is a fair way to leave it, being a show that sometimes hints at structure but is more content to follow its nose and its obsessions for three hours. Given those with any awareness of Moyles' style and preoccupations already know what these obsessions are more than likely to be, especially within this hermetically sealed world of catchphrases and internally led features, it's a show that stands or falls on whether they actually have anything to discuss at length. This makes it actually quite brave in the music-led breakfast radio world, especially with little requested listener interaction, but if it doesn't come off it jars horribly.
Monday, September 03, 2007
Weekender : the international board of wishing
FREE MUSIC: Like your hushed, intelligent acoustica? Then you'll like Washington's The Caribbean, who namecheck the Go-Betweens in The Go From Tactical, from forthcoming album Populations, and sound reminiscent of their striped sunlight sound at its most stripped back, along with the Shins and the folky end of Americana in general. There's something very clever and subtle going on here.
HEY YOU GET OFFA MYSPACE: Maybe it's unfair to call Napoleon the new I'm From Barcelona just because they're both mob-handed Swedes, but there's the same full but organised atmosphere around their music. Mixed by Peter Bjorn & John associate Linus Larsson, there's that same tinge of melodic DIY indiepop that everyone in Sweden now seems to have as their birthright, but at the same time they're not wrong in proclaiming themselves a soul act. They've played London supporting Lucky Soul and are set for a UK release of their debut album out this week in Sweden, possibly through Ruffa Lane itself. Essentially, beat the rush.
VISUAL REPRESENTATION: This is the ironic age, where the closest we come on television to worlds colliding is the sort of inverted commas hanging heavy in the air around the already for Comic Relief as it was Jeremy Clarkson vs Lethal Bizzle (note to commenters: actually, the Bizzle probably knows exactly what's going on) How different are the days of TV-AM, when if it wasn't Toyah taking a blunt object to Echo Beach it'd be Anne Diamond or whoever facing up and talking down to Phil Oakey, Sparks (who the hell are those presenters?) or, good lord, Timmy Mallett and the Style Council, while Mad Lizzie would attempt to empathise with the London Boys or Bucks Fizz and occasionally Steve Strange would conduct a makeover. Andrew Castle knows precisely who Ben Folds is nowadays and it's no fun.
VIRAL MARKETING: Although it seems to have been around for some time due to leaking at about the time Tim Berners-Lee legged it down the patent office, Animal Collective's Strawberry Jam is still a week away from issue and Domino are reputedly pulling something of a campaign around it. That'll go down well with the Paramore kids. They've even commissioned a video for Peacebone which is about as easy to comprehend as the song is.
FALLING OFF A BLOG: Obscure videos and tracks from our shared pasts are what make up The Sound Of Indie, described as "one person's music collection laid forth for the world to hear". It's a well indexed one, certainly.
EVERYBODY GET RANDOM: Something for 50 Quid Man to lose an afternoon too, and while we usually shy away from major organisation-sponsored virals this one's too good to miss - replace the messages on the signs in the Subterranean Homesick Blues video with your own.
IN OTHER NEWS: Dedicated to the man who according to well placed sources apparently really has had his coffin given the catalogue number FAC 501, NineteenEightySeven, compiled by the Filthy Little Angels label that put out the Grease tribute last year and three years ago introduced the Long Blondes to the nation's record shops, is a selection of specially recorded covers of songs of that year. Wojtek Godzisz, formerly of Symposium, is as close as it gets to anyone you'll have heard of, but the rest of it strikes a balance well between the cool (the Replacements, the Vaselines, two Smiths songs) and the knowingly naff (Balor Knights' go at A-Ha's The Living Daylights is a highlight).
HEY YOU GET OFFA MYSPACE: Maybe it's unfair to call Napoleon the new I'm From Barcelona just because they're both mob-handed Swedes, but there's the same full but organised atmosphere around their music. Mixed by Peter Bjorn & John associate Linus Larsson, there's that same tinge of melodic DIY indiepop that everyone in Sweden now seems to have as their birthright, but at the same time they're not wrong in proclaiming themselves a soul act. They've played London supporting Lucky Soul and are set for a UK release of their debut album out this week in Sweden, possibly through Ruffa Lane itself. Essentially, beat the rush.
VISUAL REPRESENTATION: This is the ironic age, where the closest we come on television to worlds colliding is the sort of inverted commas hanging heavy in the air around the already for Comic Relief as it was Jeremy Clarkson vs Lethal Bizzle (note to commenters: actually, the Bizzle probably knows exactly what's going on) How different are the days of TV-AM, when if it wasn't Toyah taking a blunt object to Echo Beach it'd be Anne Diamond or whoever facing up and talking down to Phil Oakey, Sparks (who the hell are those presenters?) or, good lord, Timmy Mallett and the Style Council, while Mad Lizzie would attempt to empathise with the London Boys or Bucks Fizz and occasionally Steve Strange would conduct a makeover. Andrew Castle knows precisely who Ben Folds is nowadays and it's no fun.
VIRAL MARKETING: Although it seems to have been around for some time due to leaking at about the time Tim Berners-Lee legged it down the patent office, Animal Collective's Strawberry Jam is still a week away from issue and Domino are reputedly pulling something of a campaign around it. That'll go down well with the Paramore kids. They've even commissioned a video for Peacebone which is about as easy to comprehend as the song is.
FALLING OFF A BLOG: Obscure videos and tracks from our shared pasts are what make up The Sound Of Indie, described as "one person's music collection laid forth for the world to hear". It's a well indexed one, certainly.
EVERYBODY GET RANDOM: Something for 50 Quid Man to lose an afternoon too, and while we usually shy away from major organisation-sponsored virals this one's too good to miss - replace the messages on the signs in the Subterranean Homesick Blues video with your own.
IN OTHER NEWS: Dedicated to the man who according to well placed sources apparently really has had his coffin given the catalogue number FAC 501, NineteenEightySeven, compiled by the Filthy Little Angels label that put out the Grease tribute last year and three years ago introduced the Long Blondes to the nation's record shops, is a selection of specially recorded covers of songs of that year. Wojtek Godzisz, formerly of Symposium, is as close as it gets to anyone you'll have heard of, but the rest of it strikes a balance well between the cool (the Replacements, the Vaselines, two Smiths songs) and the knowingly naff (Balor Knights' go at A-Ha's The Living Daylights is a highlight).
Sunday, September 02, 2007
In shops tomorrow: 3/9
Singles
Loads this week, which is good. So, in our usual lack of defendable order: when the Go! Team toured last spring of the new songs debuted Doing It Right's Northern soul/girl group/nursery rhyme melody sung in Japanese/usual Go! Team sound was the standout. It's lost the "G! O! Exclamation mark!" bit from the start, but it's no less effervescent for that. Possibly easier to listen to, in fact. Lucky Soul are supporting the Wedding Present on two dates on the latter's George Best anniversary tour in November, which must have its own rhyme or reason somewhere. One Kiss Don't Make a Summer is more of the usual soaring sixties summer sound. The reason why the Rumble Strips album has been delayed and delayed finally becomes clearer as the new wave summer smash of Girls And Boys In Love has turned up soundtracking the trailer to Simon Pegg's film Run Fatboy Run and apparently features heavily therein too. It sounds a bit like Dexys, but you knew that. That Emma Pollock reminds of the Delgados (Peloton mixed with Universal Audio, if we're being exact) on Acid Test is more inevitable and no less good for the soul. Those who desire a British Iron & Wine will not find many better candidates than Leeds' The Rosie Taylor Project, who on their Myspace biography refer to allegations from others that they are "just a rip off British version of Ryan Adams, when in fact we don't sound a lot like him no matter how hard we try". Fair enough. Bits of Nick Drake and Ben Gibbard also work their way into Black And White Films, their debut 7" on the fast rising Bad Sneakers records. Interpol's Mammoth sounds like Interpol, Editors' An End Has A Start sounds like Editors, and Kubichek!'s Method Acting sounds like a band who should ideally be spoken of in the same terms as both. Have I Was A Cub Scout or Voxtrot really paid back the faith we had in them at the start of the year? Decide for yourselves using Our Smallest Adventures and Firecracker respectively. Finally not even the cold, dead hand of Ronson can quell unlikely forthcoming Kevin Ayers collaborator Candie Payne's retro-futurist Dustyist One More Chance.
Albums
Pausing only to note with glee that a band have called themselves Ted Maul (and then see that glee dissipate on learning they're a death metal drum'n'bass outfit), we don't find a lot about this week. Annie Clark has long been more sidewoman than star in waiting, being guitarist for Sufjan Stevens and the Polyphonic Spree, but as St Vincent Marry Me is an admirably diverse collection that races between chamber pop, folk, soul, cabaret pop and just about everything else apart from zydeco. Kate Bush meets Feist, let's go with. There's no real reason why Charles Thompson has gone back to using Black Francis, especially now the Pixies reunion seems to have declared on four DVDs and two years of festivals (wasn't there supposed to be an Albini-helmed Breeders album this year?), but while Bluefinger is no Doolittle it recaptures something of the barely contained maverick essence of his earliest superior solo work. That's your lot for new releases, so into the remastered bins we delve with Dexys Midnight Runners, who perhaps tellingly have left the expansion of Too-Rye-Ay until last, even after the compilation of songs by a version of the band that never recorded an album (The Projected Passion Revue). This of course is the Emerald Express/dungarees/one hit wonder/actually it was meant to be Jocky Wilson all along as Rowland's idea of a joke version of the band. B-sides, live versions and 'that' pad it out to a second full disc. Coincidentally Kevin Rowland also gets a go as the compiler of the latest in the Motown Made To Measure archive celebrity choice series. Pink Floyd's The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn also gets a good going-over including a reproduction of a Syd Barrett notebook, stereo and mono versions and a third disc of bonus tracks including everything from the celebrated singles of the time (Arnold Layne, See Emily Play) and, oh joy, alternate takes. Apparently the fans are up in arms that EMI aren't bothering with many an unreleased track only available on bootlegs but we don't care what other baggage it carries around these days in the prog/psychedelia/Cult Of Syd sense, too much of it invented much that we hold dear today to dismiss. Bestival next weekend, so Rob da Bank gets to reuse Sunday Best's A-Z idea on A-Z Of Bestival 2007, actually Bonde Do Role to Zion Train, but nobody's counting. And while the market seems sluggish if not non-existent, that never stopped Stiff Records before, so now you can buy a cut and shut of Tenpole Tudor's decidedly odd Eddie, Old Bob, Dick And Gary/Let the Four Winds Blow: The Stiff Anthology and Jona Lewie's Kitchen At Parties containing On The Other Hand There's A Fist.
Loads this week, which is good. So, in our usual lack of defendable order: when the Go! Team toured last spring of the new songs debuted Doing It Right's Northern soul/girl group/nursery rhyme melody sung in Japanese/usual Go! Team sound was the standout. It's lost the "G! O! Exclamation mark!" bit from the start, but it's no less effervescent for that. Possibly easier to listen to, in fact. Lucky Soul are supporting the Wedding Present on two dates on the latter's George Best anniversary tour in November, which must have its own rhyme or reason somewhere. One Kiss Don't Make a Summer is more of the usual soaring sixties summer sound. The reason why the Rumble Strips album has been delayed and delayed finally becomes clearer as the new wave summer smash of Girls And Boys In Love has turned up soundtracking the trailer to Simon Pegg's film Run Fatboy Run and apparently features heavily therein too. It sounds a bit like Dexys, but you knew that. That Emma Pollock reminds of the Delgados (Peloton mixed with Universal Audio, if we're being exact) on Acid Test is more inevitable and no less good for the soul. Those who desire a British Iron & Wine will not find many better candidates than Leeds' The Rosie Taylor Project, who on their Myspace biography refer to allegations from others that they are "just a rip off British version of Ryan Adams, when in fact we don't sound a lot like him no matter how hard we try". Fair enough. Bits of Nick Drake and Ben Gibbard also work their way into Black And White Films, their debut 7" on the fast rising Bad Sneakers records. Interpol's Mammoth sounds like Interpol, Editors' An End Has A Start sounds like Editors, and Kubichek!'s Method Acting sounds like a band who should ideally be spoken of in the same terms as both. Have I Was A Cub Scout or Voxtrot really paid back the faith we had in them at the start of the year? Decide for yourselves using Our Smallest Adventures and Firecracker respectively. Finally not even the cold, dead hand of Ronson can quell unlikely forthcoming Kevin Ayers collaborator Candie Payne's retro-futurist Dustyist One More Chance.
Albums
Pausing only to note with glee that a band have called themselves Ted Maul (and then see that glee dissipate on learning they're a death metal drum'n'bass outfit), we don't find a lot about this week. Annie Clark has long been more sidewoman than star in waiting, being guitarist for Sufjan Stevens and the Polyphonic Spree, but as St Vincent Marry Me is an admirably diverse collection that races between chamber pop, folk, soul, cabaret pop and just about everything else apart from zydeco. Kate Bush meets Feist, let's go with. There's no real reason why Charles Thompson has gone back to using Black Francis, especially now the Pixies reunion seems to have declared on four DVDs and two years of festivals (wasn't there supposed to be an Albini-helmed Breeders album this year?), but while Bluefinger is no Doolittle it recaptures something of the barely contained maverick essence of his earliest superior solo work. That's your lot for new releases, so into the remastered bins we delve with Dexys Midnight Runners, who perhaps tellingly have left the expansion of Too-Rye-Ay until last, even after the compilation of songs by a version of the band that never recorded an album (The Projected Passion Revue). This of course is the Emerald Express/dungarees/one hit wonder/actually it was meant to be Jocky Wilson all along as Rowland's idea of a joke version of the band. B-sides, live versions and 'that' pad it out to a second full disc. Coincidentally Kevin Rowland also gets a go as the compiler of the latest in the Motown Made To Measure archive celebrity choice series. Pink Floyd's The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn also gets a good going-over including a reproduction of a Syd Barrett notebook, stereo and mono versions and a third disc of bonus tracks including everything from the celebrated singles of the time (Arnold Layne, See Emily Play) and, oh joy, alternate takes. Apparently the fans are up in arms that EMI aren't bothering with many an unreleased track only available on bootlegs but we don't care what other baggage it carries around these days in the prog/psychedelia/Cult Of Syd sense, too much of it invented much that we hold dear today to dismiss. Bestival next weekend, so Rob da Bank gets to reuse Sunday Best's A-Z idea on A-Z Of Bestival 2007, actually Bonde Do Role to Zion Train, but nobody's counting. And while the market seems sluggish if not non-existent, that never stopped Stiff Records before, so now you can buy a cut and shut of Tenpole Tudor's decidedly odd Eddie, Old Bob, Dick And Gary/Let the Four Winds Blow: The Stiff Anthology and Jona Lewie's Kitchen At Parties containing On The Other Hand There's A Fist.
The Weekly Sweep
And, as a yang to all this pop positivism ying, here's five things that upset the axis of our world this week - not necessarily bad things, as as well you should know by now to us that's taking the Luger to the wooden piscine cylinder, just things that disappointed us more than anything:
Saturday, September 01, 2007
Jacked on Pollock
The Delgados are one of those bands who you just return to every so often to remind yourself how great they were over the course of five proper albums. Watch The Fireworks, released on September 17th on 4AD, is singer/guitarist Emma Pollock's solo debut, carrying on some of that band's intelligently structured sound but in a more intimate, less fuzzy or orchestral vein. Much of it is piano led, and in Delgados terms it pitches somewhere between the breezier pop of Universal Audio and Peloton's darker urges. Here's a couple of tasters:
Emma Pollock - If Silence Means That Much To You
Emma Pollock - Here Comes The Heartbreak
And from the old band:
The Delgados - The Arcane Model
From Peloton
The Delgados - I Fought The Angels
From The Complete BBC Sessions
Emma Pollock - If Silence Means That Much To You
Emma Pollock - Here Comes The Heartbreak
And from the old band:
The Delgados - The Arcane Model
From Peloton
The Delgados - I Fought The Angels
From The Complete BBC Sessions
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