Rose Elinor Dougall needs less introducing than you'd imagine, given she used to be Rosay Pipette. That was cast off a year ago and she's now developing into a psych-electro-folk-pop singer-songwriter of great promise, an album vouched for come summer. And this is her:
First single bought: Sheryl Crow - All I Wanna Do (jesus...)
First album bought: Blur - The Great Escape, but before that I had been given 100% Dance by my cousin which included hits such as 2 Unlimited etc... wish I still had that...
First gig voluntarily attended: Divine Comedy at the Brixton Academy. Still one of the best gigs I've ever been to, he had an orchestra and it was amazing. Fin de Siecle had just come out.
The record that most made you want to get into music: I'm not sure because I don't remember the moment I decided that. I guess all of the records I was exposed to when I was small by my parents, like Joni Mitchell and John Martyn, amongst a whole load of other stuff, and watching people like Pulp on Top of the Pops.
A song not enough people know about but everyone should hear: Who Knows Where the Time Goes by Sandy Denny, but it has to be the version off Unhalfbricking.
A song you'd play to get people dancing: Black Cat by Broadcast. Or maybe Spread by Outkast... Or maybe 2 Unlimited..
The last great thing you heard: Well, John Martyn died today (as in the day she did this) which is just the saddest news, and I was listening to the radio and they played One Day Without You from some BBC session he did in the seventies, and it was just bloody great... and then it was followed by the Pigeon Detectives or some shit which rather ruined the vibe.
Your key non-musical influences: I was working in this bar until recently and one of the best things about it was that you got to observe all of these different people interacting with each other or dancing or crying or whatever, and especially when alcohol is involved, it just heightens the extremities of human behaviour. I get a lot of ideas from watching... hell is other people, I think Sartre said. Otherwise paintings and stories. I'm particularly enjoying Richard Yates at the moment, he seems to really understand how to portray human frailty in a very unsentimental but perceptive way.
Your favourite new artist: I'm quite looking forward to getting my hands on the Telepathe record.
As well as a few gigs in London and one in Cardiff in February, Dougall is supporting British Sea Power on their two date tour.
Thursday, February 05, 2009
Wednesday, February 04, 2009
The Music That Made... KateGoes
KateGoes' current press release refers to them as "cuddle-core". Fair enough. Brummie compatriots and mates of Misty's Big Adventure - Grandmaster Gareth produced their new single, of which more shortly - they're the type of band to treat every gig as an opportunity to make their own themed costumes and the type of primary coloured POPPOPPOP!!! confection that makes them damnably near the best fun this side of Stephen Fry stuck on the 26th floor (note: topicality) That new single, then. It's 76 seconds of wonder called All We Wanna Do Is OH!, it's the theme to BBC3's Two Pints Juniors sitcom Coming Of Age and SL Records are allowing you to download it for free. This is probably the most straight laced interview Kate Thompson has ever given. Sorry, Kate.
First single bought: I was bought my first two singles as presents - The Orinoco Kid by The Wombles and The Frog Chorus by Paul McCartney (We All Stand Together, we know - Ed.)
First album bought: Blur - Parklife
First gig voluntarily attended: Super Furry Animals at the Academy in Birmingham. I can’t remember what year. They’d just released Rings Around The World. (2001)
The record that most made you want to get into music: At the time it was Bjork.
The three headliners at a festival you were curating: Jerry Dammers and the Specials, Misty’s Big Adventure, Broadcast
A song not enough people know about but everyone should hear: Misty’s Big Adventure - Fashion Parade
A song you'd play to get people dancing: Shirley Ellis - The Clapping Song
The last great thing you heard: Joe Meek - I Hear A New World
Your key non-musical influences: Robert Lepage, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Orson Welles
Your favourite new artist: Misty’s Big Adventure
This is what they do - Heartbeat live:
First single bought: I was bought my first two singles as presents - The Orinoco Kid by The Wombles and The Frog Chorus by Paul McCartney (We All Stand Together, we know - Ed.)
First album bought: Blur - Parklife
First gig voluntarily attended: Super Furry Animals at the Academy in Birmingham. I can’t remember what year. They’d just released Rings Around The World. (2001)
The record that most made you want to get into music: At the time it was Bjork.
The three headliners at a festival you were curating: Jerry Dammers and the Specials, Misty’s Big Adventure, Broadcast
A song not enough people know about but everyone should hear: Misty’s Big Adventure - Fashion Parade
A song you'd play to get people dancing: Shirley Ellis - The Clapping Song
The last great thing you heard: Joe Meek - I Hear A New World
Your key non-musical influences: Robert Lepage, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Orson Welles
Your favourite new artist: Misty’s Big Adventure
This is what they do - Heartbeat live:
Tuesday, February 03, 2009
The Music That Made... The Phantom Band
See, we mean what we promised yesterday. Speaking up for the band, singer Rick Anthony.
First single bought: The Source featuring Candi Staton - You Got The Love
First album bought: Starship - No Protection
First gig voluntarily attended: Sepultura at the Glasgow Barrowlands sometime in 1996.
The record that most made you want to get into music: Faith No More - Angel Dust if we're going back, though there have been many others as well.
The three headliners at a festival you were curating: If I can choose anyone ever, The Stooges, Black Sabbath, Tom Waits. If you're binding me to the laws of reality then today I would probably choose Angels of Light, Slayer, Tom Waits.
A song not enough people know about but everyone should hear: Huun Huur Tu - Eshten Charlyyry Berge
A song you'd play to get people dancing: See question one. Alternatively, either RL Burnside - Goin' Down South or The Cure - Close To Me.
The last great thing you heard: Bill Callahan covering a Kath Bloom song, The Breeze/My Baby Cries - that was great. Purple Rain came on my mp3 player this morning walking into town and thats always pretty great.
Your key non-musical influences: Coffee, Batman, Alasdair Gray's Lanark, hmmmm too many, too difficult, I can't... it won't...
Your favourite new artist: The Glasgow band Sparrow and the Workshop and the London band Django Django are both really good.
The Phantom Band tour from 16th February.
First single bought: The Source featuring Candi Staton - You Got The Love
First album bought: Starship - No Protection
First gig voluntarily attended: Sepultura at the Glasgow Barrowlands sometime in 1996.
The record that most made you want to get into music: Faith No More - Angel Dust if we're going back, though there have been many others as well.
The three headliners at a festival you were curating: If I can choose anyone ever, The Stooges, Black Sabbath, Tom Waits. If you're binding me to the laws of reality then today I would probably choose Angels of Light, Slayer, Tom Waits.
A song not enough people know about but everyone should hear: Huun Huur Tu - Eshten Charlyyry Berge
A song you'd play to get people dancing: See question one. Alternatively, either RL Burnside - Goin' Down South or The Cure - Close To Me.
The last great thing you heard: Bill Callahan covering a Kath Bloom song, The Breeze/My Baby Cries - that was great. Purple Rain came on my mp3 player this morning walking into town and thats always pretty great.
Your key non-musical influences: Coffee, Batman, Alasdair Gray's Lanark, hmmmm too many, too difficult, I can't... it won't...
Your favourite new artist: The Glasgow band Sparrow and the Workshop and the London band Django Django are both really good.
The Phantom Band tour from 16th February.
Monday, February 02, 2009
Phantom power
Maybe it's just the non-musician in us, but as far as STN is concerned if you can produce an album that doesn't fit neatly into any descriptive pigeonhole, that jumps from style to style while still sounding of a whole as a band and a concept... then you'll be a man/men, my son(s).
Which brings us to The Phantom Band, a Glaswegian sextet who have described themselves as "proto-robofolk", used to disguise their identities in photos and on stage and are, for the extraneous win, on Chemikal Underground. They've just brought out a debut album, Checkmate Savage (perhaps not uncoincidentally produced by ex-Delgado Paul Savage), which, stuck with what else to do with a wide range of influences from dark rock overlordage to prog churn to heavy beats, decide just to throw them all into the same melting pot just to see what happens, giving them so much room to breathe that a nine track album totals nearly 55 minutes. So The Howling opens the album with Neu!/Stereolab kraut-synth pulses and grumbles with vocals from the Gary Lightbody/Frightened Rabbit's Scott Hutchison school of slightly insecure power, introduces an undertow of Midlake on the chorus, throws in the odd ghostly backing vocal, then five minutes in drops to baritone vox intoning the likes of "carry my body on the reckoning wind, what was flesh is dust again" before giving in to expansive wordless choruses, crashing wave percussion, whistling synths and delayed guitars.
And that comfortableness with versatility is pretty much as good a kickoff point as you want. It's a very dark album - witness those titles, The Howling, Burial Sounds, Throwing Bones - but also one throbbing with excitement and experimentation in the same way prime Super Furries or Beta Band does. Like Meursault, who at heart approach all this in a not entirely dissimilar way - there's similar folk and techno influences in here, definitely - it's almost an alternate Scottishness, one that sees Josef K for their nameless Kafka dread rather than their choppy riffs, more likely to hang around with Mogwai than Franz. Folksong Oblivion pitches into a level of rock somewhere between garage and swamp, with its lumbering guitars, wheezing organ and insistent organ, with carefully covered pop nous in there, just carrying the weariness of the world on its shoulders as it does so, closing with an ominous, desperate chant of "I can't see for the mountain silhouette", and that's the single, the one for the radio that's meant to draw you into a world where it seems obvious to follow it with Crocodile, a nigh on eight minute instrumental that gradually, swirlingly builds like nothing this side of Dusseldorf into a welter of droning, distorted guitars over insistent motorik rhythms and woozy keyboard patterns. Then there's Left Hand Wave, which sounds like early Simple Minds or someone similarly spacey and post-post-punky being played over a John Carpenter soundtrack. And then there's Island, in which Rick Anthony channels Will Oldham at his most tender with a sea shanty element before, live band version Bon Iver like, being joined by sparse guitars and massed backing vocals. It's not far off nine minutes but you simply don't notice. Then it's onto Throwing Bones, Snow Patrol when they were good gone swamp rock with slide guitar decoration and more "Apache beat" drumming (Klaus Dinger called it that, we just wanted a third euphemism for Krautrock rhythm), and it sounds just as much putty in their hand. Even the out of nowhere doo-wop bridge does, especially whoever's taking the bass part with an elan Den Hegarty would be proud of. (There's one for the teenagers.)
Being psychedelically inclined Scots it's a fairly obvious touchstone, but there's quite a bit here reminding us of the permanently on-or-off hiatus Dawn Of The Replicants, the way they carjack already Beefheartian angular fuzzpop exercises and accelerate them into a wall just in case something interesting comes out of it. The breadth of their ambition and scope is laudable, but that would mean nothing without a level of discipline under its own terms, and that's what Checkmate Savage has - they know what they're doing, now they want you to join them on their long, strange and wild trip.
Tomorrow, more Phantom Bandness.
God, this is shaping up to be a fantastic musical year already, isn't it?
Which brings us to The Phantom Band, a Glaswegian sextet who have described themselves as "proto-robofolk", used to disguise their identities in photos and on stage and are, for the extraneous win, on Chemikal Underground. They've just brought out a debut album, Checkmate Savage (perhaps not uncoincidentally produced by ex-Delgado Paul Savage), which, stuck with what else to do with a wide range of influences from dark rock overlordage to prog churn to heavy beats, decide just to throw them all into the same melting pot just to see what happens, giving them so much room to breathe that a nine track album totals nearly 55 minutes. So The Howling opens the album with Neu!/Stereolab kraut-synth pulses and grumbles with vocals from the Gary Lightbody/Frightened Rabbit's Scott Hutchison school of slightly insecure power, introduces an undertow of Midlake on the chorus, throws in the odd ghostly backing vocal, then five minutes in drops to baritone vox intoning the likes of "carry my body on the reckoning wind, what was flesh is dust again" before giving in to expansive wordless choruses, crashing wave percussion, whistling synths and delayed guitars.
And that comfortableness with versatility is pretty much as good a kickoff point as you want. It's a very dark album - witness those titles, The Howling, Burial Sounds, Throwing Bones - but also one throbbing with excitement and experimentation in the same way prime Super Furries or Beta Band does. Like Meursault, who at heart approach all this in a not entirely dissimilar way - there's similar folk and techno influences in here, definitely - it's almost an alternate Scottishness, one that sees Josef K for their nameless Kafka dread rather than their choppy riffs, more likely to hang around with Mogwai than Franz. Folksong Oblivion pitches into a level of rock somewhere between garage and swamp, with its lumbering guitars, wheezing organ and insistent organ, with carefully covered pop nous in there, just carrying the weariness of the world on its shoulders as it does so, closing with an ominous, desperate chant of "I can't see for the mountain silhouette", and that's the single, the one for the radio that's meant to draw you into a world where it seems obvious to follow it with Crocodile, a nigh on eight minute instrumental that gradually, swirlingly builds like nothing this side of Dusseldorf into a welter of droning, distorted guitars over insistent motorik rhythms and woozy keyboard patterns. Then there's Left Hand Wave, which sounds like early Simple Minds or someone similarly spacey and post-post-punky being played over a John Carpenter soundtrack. And then there's Island, in which Rick Anthony channels Will Oldham at his most tender with a sea shanty element before, live band version Bon Iver like, being joined by sparse guitars and massed backing vocals. It's not far off nine minutes but you simply don't notice. Then it's onto Throwing Bones, Snow Patrol when they were good gone swamp rock with slide guitar decoration and more "Apache beat" drumming (Klaus Dinger called it that, we just wanted a third euphemism for Krautrock rhythm), and it sounds just as much putty in their hand. Even the out of nowhere doo-wop bridge does, especially whoever's taking the bass part with an elan Den Hegarty would be proud of. (There's one for the teenagers.)
Being psychedelically inclined Scots it's a fairly obvious touchstone, but there's quite a bit here reminding us of the permanently on-or-off hiatus Dawn Of The Replicants, the way they carjack already Beefheartian angular fuzzpop exercises and accelerate them into a wall just in case something interesting comes out of it. The breadth of their ambition and scope is laudable, but that would mean nothing without a level of discipline under its own terms, and that's what Checkmate Savage has - they know what they're doing, now they want you to join them on their long, strange and wild trip.
Tomorrow, more Phantom Bandness.
God, this is shaping up to be a fantastic musical year already, isn't it?
Sunday, February 01, 2009
The Music That Made... Joe Gideon And The Shark
Beginning a week of nearly nothing but these is another of those bands we adore but haven't gone on about half enough. Siblings Gideon (vocals, guitar, former pan-American beauty contest judge) and Viva (vocals, keyboard, drums, former Olympic rhythmic gymnast) are Joe Gideon And The Shark, a darkly brooding duo of semi-spoken grimly poetic imagery, majestically discordant intensity and wild-eyed fuzzy blues riffage. After touring with the similarly cut Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds last year their tremendous debut single proper DOL came out in December, with an album on its way harbouring no end of promise. This is what made them so:
First single bought: The Human League - Being Boiled
First album bought: Best of Ike And Tina Turner
First gig voluntarily attended: Lou Reed at Brixton academy
The record that most made you want to get into music: 13th Floor Elevators
The three headliners at a festival you were curating: Patti Smith, Kim Gordon, PJ Harvey
A song not enough people know about but everyone should hear: David Byrne - Dura Europus
A song you'd play to get people dancing: Smog - Cold Blooded Old Times
The last great thing you heard: Angels Of Light - We Are Him
Your key non-musical influences: Kurt Vonnegut. The Road Of Death and other roads.
JG&TS, having literally just come off tour with Seasick Steve, support Wire in February and tour themselves in March. DOL sounds like this:
First single bought: The Human League - Being Boiled
First album bought: Best of Ike And Tina Turner
First gig voluntarily attended: Lou Reed at Brixton academy
The record that most made you want to get into music: 13th Floor Elevators
The three headliners at a festival you were curating: Patti Smith, Kim Gordon, PJ Harvey
A song not enough people know about but everyone should hear: David Byrne - Dura Europus
A song you'd play to get people dancing: Smog - Cold Blooded Old Times
The last great thing you heard: Angels Of Light - We Are Him
Your key non-musical influences: Kurt Vonnegut. The Road Of Death and other roads.
JG&TS, having literally just come off tour with Seasick Steve, support Wire in February and tour themselves in March. DOL sounds like this:
Saturday, January 31, 2009
The Weekly Sweep
Incidentally, what do you think of our new The Music That Made... series? We've had no comments about it yet, which suggests a certain coolness. To which we say stuff you, because this week apart from one day it's nothing but The Music That Made...s. Find out the hotly tipped new band whose singer kicks back with some Tuvan folk, the singer-songwriter who yearns for 2 Unlimited and the maker of one of our favourite debut albums of the STN era's Dire Straits upbringing.
Recommended reading for the week is Pagan Wanderer Lu's new blog, including: what to talk about at the hairdressers, the vitaminic properties of sunshine and officially choreographed Animal Collective dance moves. His new album Fight My Battles For Me is out in March and is currently available to preorder from his special shop. When we gather together the money and ensure Brainlove aren't going to email us it all an hour after we put in the pre-order, we'll be in the mailout queue.
Friday, January 30, 2009
Discourse 2000 #2
NOMINATED BY: TJ Worthington, auteur of Out On Blue Six, part of the Talk About The Passion collective, regular TV Cream contributor and hundreds of other outlets besides
While it may also have given rise to hordes of mental Wicker Man fans jumping over a charred bit of wood singing "we will fix it, we will me-end it", the slow but steadily-building interest in 'acid folk' of recent years - helped in no small part by genre champion Mark Radcliffe's sideways move to Radio 2 - has brought many musical benefits. Not just in the modern day artists it's helped to bring to a wider audience, but also the rediscovery of overlooked gems from the past - often to the surprise of the artists themselves - including the works of Vashti Bunyan, Shelagh McDonald, Simon Finn, and the long-forgotten characters found on this decidedly offbeat compilation.
Fuzzy Felt Folk was a joint venture between Jonny Trunk, the mastermind behind cult reissue label Trunk Records, and Martin Green, the influential DJ whose deleriously obscure archive discoveries have been making up superb compilations since the influential The Sound Gallery back in 1995. Described as music with a "childish, sweet sound but at the same time an old-fashioned, spooky edge", the typically eclectic tracklisting sits genuine hardcore folkies like Orriel Smith alongside session musicians chopping out sprightly ditties for use in schoolroom 'Music And Movement' sessions, and a couple of obscure soundtrack rarities. Some of it, like Barbara Moore's frantically jazzy 'The Elf' and 'Merry Ocarina', the aptly named and much-sought after music from Vision On's surreal interludes with a girl and her tortoise, is upbeat and infectious, but most of it is subdued and haunting, most disconcertingly the three inexplicably chilling readings of traditional songs by a tambourine-backed Christopher Casson.
In his liner notes, Jonny Trunk mused from bitter experience that the album would probably only sell enough "for a round of toast or a bus ride to the seaside"; but for once, the contents of a wilfully uncommercial compilation managed to get through to its intended audience and beyond, selling so well that it eventually ended up on the display racks of several high street music stores. "Fuzzy Felt Folk" can sit as comfortably next to Eliza Carthy and Emmy The Great as it can to those Tudor Lodge and Mellow Candle reissues, and is proof positive that old music can still be 'new' in the right context.
While it may also have given rise to hordes of mental Wicker Man fans jumping over a charred bit of wood singing "we will fix it, we will me-end it", the slow but steadily-building interest in 'acid folk' of recent years - helped in no small part by genre champion Mark Radcliffe's sideways move to Radio 2 - has brought many musical benefits. Not just in the modern day artists it's helped to bring to a wider audience, but also the rediscovery of overlooked gems from the past - often to the surprise of the artists themselves - including the works of Vashti Bunyan, Shelagh McDonald, Simon Finn, and the long-forgotten characters found on this decidedly offbeat compilation.
Fuzzy Felt Folk was a joint venture between Jonny Trunk, the mastermind behind cult reissue label Trunk Records, and Martin Green, the influential DJ whose deleriously obscure archive discoveries have been making up superb compilations since the influential The Sound Gallery back in 1995. Described as music with a "childish, sweet sound but at the same time an old-fashioned, spooky edge", the typically eclectic tracklisting sits genuine hardcore folkies like Orriel Smith alongside session musicians chopping out sprightly ditties for use in schoolroom 'Music And Movement' sessions, and a couple of obscure soundtrack rarities. Some of it, like Barbara Moore's frantically jazzy 'The Elf' and 'Merry Ocarina', the aptly named and much-sought after music from Vision On's surreal interludes with a girl and her tortoise, is upbeat and infectious, but most of it is subdued and haunting, most disconcertingly the three inexplicably chilling readings of traditional songs by a tambourine-backed Christopher Casson.
In his liner notes, Jonny Trunk mused from bitter experience that the album would probably only sell enough "for a round of toast or a bus ride to the seaside"; but for once, the contents of a wilfully uncommercial compilation managed to get through to its intended audience and beyond, selling so well that it eventually ended up on the display racks of several high street music stores. "Fuzzy Felt Folk" can sit as comfortably next to Eliza Carthy and Emmy The Great as it can to those Tudor Lodge and Mellow Candle reissues, and is proof positive that old music can still be 'new' in the right context.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
STN ahead of the curve shock
A quick note of reminder now it's all popular and celebrities use it: if you're not already keenly attracted to our Twitter feed, for god's sake follow us why don't you for exclusive links, blog news and loose leaf ponderings. Where else would you find out about Neil Hannon's cricket concept side project?
Apart from in this link.
Apart from in this link.
Discourse 2000 #1
A reminder, or introduction: this is the feature in which we're attempting to put together an alternate library of this decade's lower level album triumphs according to a range of guest bloggers. Feel free to offer your services nominating and writing about a record as this feature will be running nearly all year - all the contributory details are here. Oh, and thanks to Thomas for suggesting the name. You should see some of those we came up with ourselves.
NOMINATED BY: Joe Skrebels of Music From A Green Window
In an age where hip-hop stars are regularly lambasted for inciting violence, misogyny and homophobia, and where a lot of the time this is true, it could be all too easy to slip into a jaded view of the whole genre. But by dismissing it out of hand, a whole world of musical pioneering could be missed - for every Ludacris there's a Mos Def, for every G-Unit there's a De La Soul. Hip-Hop can have something to say, and it can be as meaningful as any lyric sung by some misanthropic indie singer.
From a British perspective, the album that has best done this in recent memory is Angles by Dan Le Sac vs. Scroobius Pip. A producer and a poet from Essex weren't the most likely candidates to become the saviours of intelligent hip-hop, but with Scroobius Pip's wit and biting social commentary backed up by Dan le Sac's 8-bit bleeps and beats, it's hard to disagree. Angles lives up to its name by not approaching the album's subjects in a one-dimensional way, every song is looking at its subject from a new perspective. The eponymous song is the most obvious, looking at a tragic situation from the views of several different people, A Letter From God To Man is a an inverse prayer, whilst Look For The Woman looks at unrequited love from the other side.
It could be easy to look at this album from a purely lyrical standpoint, but Le Sac's understated backings are just as important, often creating an almost stark atmosphere, amplifying the lyrical content, or by sampling Dizzee Rascal in a satire of current hip-hop trends, or Radiohead just because it sounds amazing.
"Angles" proves that hip-hop can be funny or heart-rendingly sad, it proves that it can tell us something about society, whether its the effects of self-harm or the importance of Danny Glover in the Lethal Weapon movies, and most of all, it proves that hip-hop itself is important. I'll leave you with Scroobius' own words, as they sum it up far better than I can.
"I'm just trying to be a positive role model for ya
Cause in my town I'm blessed with many role models
So many that sometimes the mind just boggles
See KRS is my teacher
Slick Rick's my ruler
Chuck D's my preach'
I'm just a preschooler
I've still got growing to do though
I ain't trying to fool ya
But compared to all the other kids in my class
I'm much taller"
Le Sac vs Pip Myspace
A Letter From God To Man
NOMINATED BY: Joe Skrebels of Music From A Green Window
In an age where hip-hop stars are regularly lambasted for inciting violence, misogyny and homophobia, and where a lot of the time this is true, it could be all too easy to slip into a jaded view of the whole genre. But by dismissing it out of hand, a whole world of musical pioneering could be missed - for every Ludacris there's a Mos Def, for every G-Unit there's a De La Soul. Hip-Hop can have something to say, and it can be as meaningful as any lyric sung by some misanthropic indie singer.
From a British perspective, the album that has best done this in recent memory is Angles by Dan Le Sac vs. Scroobius Pip. A producer and a poet from Essex weren't the most likely candidates to become the saviours of intelligent hip-hop, but with Scroobius Pip's wit and biting social commentary backed up by Dan le Sac's 8-bit bleeps and beats, it's hard to disagree. Angles lives up to its name by not approaching the album's subjects in a one-dimensional way, every song is looking at its subject from a new perspective. The eponymous song is the most obvious, looking at a tragic situation from the views of several different people, A Letter From God To Man is a an inverse prayer, whilst Look For The Woman looks at unrequited love from the other side.
It could be easy to look at this album from a purely lyrical standpoint, but Le Sac's understated backings are just as important, often creating an almost stark atmosphere, amplifying the lyrical content, or by sampling Dizzee Rascal in a satire of current hip-hop trends, or Radiohead just because it sounds amazing.
"Angles" proves that hip-hop can be funny or heart-rendingly sad, it proves that it can tell us something about society, whether its the effects of self-harm or the importance of Danny Glover in the Lethal Weapon movies, and most of all, it proves that hip-hop itself is important. I'll leave you with Scroobius' own words, as they sum it up far better than I can.
"I'm just trying to be a positive role model for ya
Cause in my town I'm blessed with many role models
So many that sometimes the mind just boggles
See KRS is my teacher
Slick Rick's my ruler
Chuck D's my preach'
I'm just a preschooler
I've still got growing to do though
I ain't trying to fool ya
But compared to all the other kids in my class
I'm much taller"
Le Sac vs Pip Myspace
A Letter From God To Man
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Do you want to?
Franz Ferdinand occupy a curious position in music at the moment, namely that they're blamed for the raft of copycats and watering down wastrels that have followed in their sharp pressed, clean guitar attack footsteps. Nobody blames the Beatles for Freddie and the Dreamers; the Stone Roses were not chased out of town by folk waving placards of Northside, yet Tonight has been greeted with something of a resigned air. Maybe it's just bad timing what with the overriding press line currently being "landfill indie is dead, indie guitars are out, bring on a phalanx of girls with synths who've heard When Doves Cry/Slow/Only You", but given it was Franz who gave this stuff, along with a truckload of aphorisms and a whole new attitude that unlike many of their disciples successfully married the worlds of outsider acceptance and commercial potential, to the world. OK, reintroduced it technically. All the same, the air of Tonight shies away from the sound of You Could Have It So Much Better, which in retrospect while certainly not a bad album - more prone to filler and neutral gear than the still fine if much thinner than you remember it being debut but with its share of likeable barnstormers, Do You Want To not included - was broadly the same as said debut but toughened up not so much for the clubs as for the ampthitheatres. It's how far away it shies that's the issue.
Famously, Alex Kapranos wanted to make girls dance. That he still tries to do. He's always given the impression that Franz Ferdinand wouldn't specifically be anchored to this jerky punk-funk/post-punk thing, though, and while we're not going to go through the attempted production and style permutations as every piece you read about this album spends most of its length dredging back through it all you'd expect the band to subtly shift their dynamic into new shapes and areas. We're not sure the opener and single quite manages that, Ulysses essentially just a not too far from Kaiser Chiefs big stomping radio chorus attached to this:
And another thing - while we're eschewing what the album nearly was, it's worth reminding ourselves that Ulysses was the title of the song visitors to a London art gallery in late 2007 were invited to add their own interpretation of the drum track to. So much for the artsiness of artifact.
As for the rest of it... well, after Ulysses comes Turn It On, mooted as far back as the gigs introducing songs that ended up on You Could Have It So Much Better as the big synth track but, well, a big glam production, a hint of whirring synth, an attempt to eke out a Stooges riff at the end. Then No You Girls boasts a cocksure strut, a stalking bassline and a coy lyric before a huge repetitive chorus. Common to both, the gnawing feeling we've done all this in this band's company. Send Him Away tries at raga-like bouncing rhythm and then forgets to do anything with it so chooses to lapse back into what we're now calling That Chorus Style. Already there's no impression they've constantly tried to challenge themselves beyond getting some more analogue keyboards in just when we wanted them to redefine what Franz Ferdinand at heart are, like a self-appointed art school dandy band is supposed to. The art-pop for dancing girls thing done, this third album coming at a time when they need to prove themselves in the face of dwindling critical and commercial potential. Instead, more off-beats, more major key choruses, more lyrics about lust and nightclubs, more filler, more moments that should impress more than they do. It's like they didn't get the message about how pop isn't a dirty phrase any more. Why does Bite Hard sound so much like it's going to really take off and take the floor with it when it's clear it's going to lapse back into rote arch four to the floor, and sure enough it does?
There are better moments. What She Came From has the four-four beat and That Chorus but is slinkier, smarter in its lyrics because Kapranos isn't trying to rise above everyone else and just goes for the growling jugular, before even the band get bored after three minutes and embark on just racing each other to collapse at the finish. Live Alone is literally something from the first album we can't immediately place sped up and given a glitterball to hold above themselves. Finally, three tracks from the end, the band break out of their self-imposed box. The first is the least likely. Lucid Dreams sub-B-side quality in its initial version released quietly to radio last year, has had a radical makeover, much darker, backed by synth squelches and shorn of any desire to be sung along to with fists aloft by beery blokes at Reading. Then, two verses in, it turns into its own remix, full of dark bass plunges amid fragments of vocals and shards of guitar solo, then does away with everything that came before and heads deep into industrial house hell. Dream Again's pretty spacewalk burbles and tinkles are Brian Eno-like, either ambient-wise or in the slower moments of his indispensible first four solo albums, in its balladic construction, before Katherine Kiss Me is a pretty, personalised ballad reminiscent of nobody so much as James Yorkston.
And that just shows the rest up - even if it doesn't all have to be so outre, by this stage you feel that given where they came from they should be more comprehensively altering perceptions through textures and indoctrinating styles with further ideas. Until the last quarter, Tonight is an album that doesn't have the courage of its convictions so retreats back to where it feel safest, to what FM rock radio now constitutes in Britain. Franz Ferdinand, we thought you were far better than this.
Famously, Alex Kapranos wanted to make girls dance. That he still tries to do. He's always given the impression that Franz Ferdinand wouldn't specifically be anchored to this jerky punk-funk/post-punk thing, though, and while we're not going to go through the attempted production and style permutations as every piece you read about this album spends most of its length dredging back through it all you'd expect the band to subtly shift their dynamic into new shapes and areas. We're not sure the opener and single quite manages that, Ulysses essentially just a not too far from Kaiser Chiefs big stomping radio chorus attached to this:
And another thing - while we're eschewing what the album nearly was, it's worth reminding ourselves that Ulysses was the title of the song visitors to a London art gallery in late 2007 were invited to add their own interpretation of the drum track to. So much for the artsiness of artifact.
As for the rest of it... well, after Ulysses comes Turn It On, mooted as far back as the gigs introducing songs that ended up on You Could Have It So Much Better as the big synth track but, well, a big glam production, a hint of whirring synth, an attempt to eke out a Stooges riff at the end. Then No You Girls boasts a cocksure strut, a stalking bassline and a coy lyric before a huge repetitive chorus. Common to both, the gnawing feeling we've done all this in this band's company. Send Him Away tries at raga-like bouncing rhythm and then forgets to do anything with it so chooses to lapse back into what we're now calling That Chorus Style. Already there's no impression they've constantly tried to challenge themselves beyond getting some more analogue keyboards in just when we wanted them to redefine what Franz Ferdinand at heart are, like a self-appointed art school dandy band is supposed to. The art-pop for dancing girls thing done, this third album coming at a time when they need to prove themselves in the face of dwindling critical and commercial potential. Instead, more off-beats, more major key choruses, more lyrics about lust and nightclubs, more filler, more moments that should impress more than they do. It's like they didn't get the message about how pop isn't a dirty phrase any more. Why does Bite Hard sound so much like it's going to really take off and take the floor with it when it's clear it's going to lapse back into rote arch four to the floor, and sure enough it does?
There are better moments. What She Came From has the four-four beat and That Chorus but is slinkier, smarter in its lyrics because Kapranos isn't trying to rise above everyone else and just goes for the growling jugular, before even the band get bored after three minutes and embark on just racing each other to collapse at the finish. Live Alone is literally something from the first album we can't immediately place sped up and given a glitterball to hold above themselves. Finally, three tracks from the end, the band break out of their self-imposed box. The first is the least likely. Lucid Dreams sub-B-side quality in its initial version released quietly to radio last year, has had a radical makeover, much darker, backed by synth squelches and shorn of any desire to be sung along to with fists aloft by beery blokes at Reading. Then, two verses in, it turns into its own remix, full of dark bass plunges amid fragments of vocals and shards of guitar solo, then does away with everything that came before and heads deep into industrial house hell. Dream Again's pretty spacewalk burbles and tinkles are Brian Eno-like, either ambient-wise or in the slower moments of his indispensible first four solo albums, in its balladic construction, before Katherine Kiss Me is a pretty, personalised ballad reminiscent of nobody so much as James Yorkston.
And that just shows the rest up - even if it doesn't all have to be so outre, by this stage you feel that given where they came from they should be more comprehensively altering perceptions through textures and indoctrinating styles with further ideas. Until the last quarter, Tonight is an album that doesn't have the courage of its convictions so retreats back to where it feel safest, to what FM rock radio now constitutes in Britain. Franz Ferdinand, we thought you were far better than this.
Monday, January 26, 2009
You could serve it so much better
The day of release of a new Franz Ferdinand album, even now their stock has been brought low by imitators, is something worth getting excited about in advance. Should we? Dunno, haven't heard Tonight yet - we'll tell you what we think in a couple of days - but we tell you what we can offer as an assuagation.
In September 2005, while on a world tour promoting their last album, Alex Kapranos was invited by the Guardian to write a column about what he ate while on the road. It's better than it sounds, "a travel diary as excuse to write about food" and purposefully not the day to day stuff, documenting the changes in culture and what it's felt fair to serve the traveller, with a light scene setting touch. The columns were eventually collected into one volume, Sound Bites: Eating On Tour With Franz Ferdinand, which was Radio 4 Book Of The Week in December 2006 and repeated last year on BBC7, Kapranos reading edited extracts from his own work. What a shame those readings are now confined to the archives, never to be properly heard aga...oh, wait.
Warning: You'd better like the first thirty seconds of Eleanor Put Your Boots On.
Part one: a languid essaying of the word 'booze', a documentation of a cross-gendered cowboy outside an Austin Tex-Mex, Paul Thompson's issues with oysters, crab death.
Part two: the guilt of eating cake at T In The Park, the art of staring on the Pigalle, pigeon death, Italian food discovery, Christmas in a Bavarian market.
Part three: the desire from afar for British curry, food left in the home fridge for two and a half years, the joy of South Shields saveloy dip and Christmas home bombing.
Part four: baked bread in Australia, curious vegetables and serving rites in Japan, annoying a hotel manager in Singapore.
Part five: Alex recalls the icing on his fifth birthday cake, reveals his bandmates' curious restaurant foibles, the fast food/Biblical quotation crossover and has a moment of realisation about tourism and a moment of explanation about playing live.
In September 2005, while on a world tour promoting their last album, Alex Kapranos was invited by the Guardian to write a column about what he ate while on the road. It's better than it sounds, "a travel diary as excuse to write about food" and purposefully not the day to day stuff, documenting the changes in culture and what it's felt fair to serve the traveller, with a light scene setting touch. The columns were eventually collected into one volume, Sound Bites: Eating On Tour With Franz Ferdinand, which was Radio 4 Book Of The Week in December 2006 and repeated last year on BBC7, Kapranos reading edited extracts from his own work. What a shame those readings are now confined to the archives, never to be properly heard aga...oh, wait.
Warning: You'd better like the first thirty seconds of Eleanor Put Your Boots On.
Part one: a languid essaying of the word 'booze', a documentation of a cross-gendered cowboy outside an Austin Tex-Mex, Paul Thompson's issues with oysters, crab death.
Part two: the guilt of eating cake at T In The Park, the art of staring on the Pigalle, pigeon death, Italian food discovery, Christmas in a Bavarian market.
Part three: the desire from afar for British curry, food left in the home fridge for two and a half years, the joy of South Shields saveloy dip and Christmas home bombing.
Part four: baked bread in Australia, curious vegetables and serving rites in Japan, annoying a hotel manager in Singapore.
Part five: Alex recalls the icing on his fifth birthday cake, reveals his bandmates' curious restaurant foibles, the fast food/Biblical quotation crossover and has a moment of realisation about tourism and a moment of explanation about playing live.
Sunday, January 25, 2009
Fly off the wall
Here's an untapped resource for us, The Fly In The Courtyard, where the website of the titular noted free publication gets its favourite new bands to pop round with some instruments and little or no amplification - including on vocals, which can be a little trying at times, but you'll live - and then puts them on its site for all to wonder at. So obviously here's some favourites of ours in reduced audio circumstances. Who did you think we'd start with?
New song too. And you'd be surprised how well Salt, Pepper & Spinderella works acoustically, especially if you get David Roy from Dananananaykroyd to add to the guitar attack.
His day job we'll come back to in a second, as first we've got the band JoFo are supporting on a European tour next month, Sky Larkin. Eventually they get started with album high spot (of many, obviously) Matador, Katie atop an old BMW. That live music/vintage cars crossover draws nearer.
And a brand new song not on the album or as far as we know any B-sides, Fire Fighter. Rock that accordion, Doug.
So you'd wonder how the all-action live style of Dananananaykroyd would translate to a more parkour-friendly area, and you'd be right to be intrigued and not a little scared. Calum and John do their best screaming work on next single Black Wax against two acoustic guitars while Laura and Paul are reduced to tambourine and clapping duties, the multi-level approach on the fire escape a fine use of the space available given the number of participants. Uniquely for the situation, they also introduce an element of pyrotechnics.
Now, the rest aren't on the Fly's YouTube channel and the embedding facility for these videos is fucked to buggery, and you can quote us on that. Instead, linkage alone for similar videos of some of the other people we've been championing over the last couple of months, so you can deal with their fiddly player yourselves:
Rose Elinor Dougall stays well away from health and safety equipment up the self same fire escape for some sophisti-pop in the round aided by her band the Distractions (not the Factory Records pop-post-punk outfit or comedian Mitch Benn's backing duo), all nearly outshone by the bobble on the drummer's hat.
Everything Everything: perfectly good name, if one largely unGooglable without quotation marks, perfectly awkward sound. Why they're in an ice cream van... well, maybe you can come up with some bizarre and imaginative reason.
Eugene McGuinness - see, with one person it's easy enough, stick him in the garage, give him a chair and let him work his slanted singer-songwriterly magic.
The Voluntary Butler Scheme. When we saw Rob Jones he was doing everything from drums to guitar to keys to kazoo himself with the aid of judicious loop pedallage, but such witchcraft wouldn't do so he's brought in Damo Waters, whose own one man band Muddy Suzuki we posted about a week and a half ago, and Jon Palmer who also trades as Awesome Wells, who here he's carefully attempted to hide.
New song too. And you'd be surprised how well Salt, Pepper & Spinderella works acoustically, especially if you get David Roy from Dananananaykroyd to add to the guitar attack.
His day job we'll come back to in a second, as first we've got the band JoFo are supporting on a European tour next month, Sky Larkin. Eventually they get started with album high spot (of many, obviously) Matador, Katie atop an old BMW. That live music/vintage cars crossover draws nearer.
And a brand new song not on the album or as far as we know any B-sides, Fire Fighter. Rock that accordion, Doug.
So you'd wonder how the all-action live style of Dananananaykroyd would translate to a more parkour-friendly area, and you'd be right to be intrigued and not a little scared. Calum and John do their best screaming work on next single Black Wax against two acoustic guitars while Laura and Paul are reduced to tambourine and clapping duties, the multi-level approach on the fire escape a fine use of the space available given the number of participants. Uniquely for the situation, they also introduce an element of pyrotechnics.
Now, the rest aren't on the Fly's YouTube channel and the embedding facility for these videos is fucked to buggery, and you can quote us on that. Instead, linkage alone for similar videos of some of the other people we've been championing over the last couple of months, so you can deal with their fiddly player yourselves:
Rose Elinor Dougall stays well away from health and safety equipment up the self same fire escape for some sophisti-pop in the round aided by her band the Distractions (not the Factory Records pop-post-punk outfit or comedian Mitch Benn's backing duo), all nearly outshone by the bobble on the drummer's hat.
Everything Everything: perfectly good name, if one largely unGooglable without quotation marks, perfectly awkward sound. Why they're in an ice cream van... well, maybe you can come up with some bizarre and imaginative reason.
Eugene McGuinness - see, with one person it's easy enough, stick him in the garage, give him a chair and let him work his slanted singer-songwriterly magic.
The Voluntary Butler Scheme. When we saw Rob Jones he was doing everything from drums to guitar to keys to kazoo himself with the aid of judicious loop pedallage, but such witchcraft wouldn't do so he's brought in Damo Waters, whose own one man band Muddy Suzuki we posted about a week and a half ago, and Jon Palmer who also trades as Awesome Wells, who here he's carefully attempted to hide.
Saturday, January 24, 2009
The Weekly Sweep
Friday, January 23, 2009
The Music That Made... Brakes
One of our favourite and most consistently great bands through the nearly four year existence of STN, Brighton country-punk supergroup of sorts Brakes are currently warming up for their third album, Touchdown, released on 20th April through new label FatCat (Frightened Rabbit, Twilight Sad, Múm). Ahead of its first single singer/guitarist Eamon Hamilton shared his thoughts:
First single bought: The Ghostbusters theme tune by Ray Parker Junior
First album bought: Never Mind The Bollocks by Sex Pistols
First gig voluntarily attended: Pixies at Gloucester Leisure Centre, on their Doolittle tour
The record that most made you want to get into music: Its a flip between Psychocandy by Jesus and Mary Chain and 20 Classic Cuts by Little Richard (ACE Records)
The three headliners at a festival you were curating: Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster, Louis CK, Creedence Clearwater Revival
A song not enough people know about but everyone should hear: Seeds Of The Pine by Martha Scanlan
A song you'd play to get people dancing: Mickey's Monkey by The Miracles
The last great thing you heard: Underwater Moonlight by The Soft Boys
Your key non-musical influences: Stroud, Brighton, Brooklyn. As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning by Laurie Lee. My wife Koren Zailckas. Old Town Bar in New York, the Hand In Hand pub in Brighton and the Red Lion pub in Chalford, near Stroud. Backgammon. digg.com, drudgereport.com, huffingtonpost.com. GTA 1-4.
Your favourite new artist: Taylor Swift
The band begin a tour on Wednesday calling at London, Guildford, Manchester, Cardiff, Exeter, Sheffield and Cambridge. See their website for further details and wonder if they still see fit to do Cheney. New single Hey Hey is released 16th February; it sounds like this.
First single bought: The Ghostbusters theme tune by Ray Parker Junior
First album bought: Never Mind The Bollocks by Sex Pistols
First gig voluntarily attended: Pixies at Gloucester Leisure Centre, on their Doolittle tour
The record that most made you want to get into music: Its a flip between Psychocandy by Jesus and Mary Chain and 20 Classic Cuts by Little Richard (ACE Records)
The three headliners at a festival you were curating: Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster, Louis CK, Creedence Clearwater Revival
A song not enough people know about but everyone should hear: Seeds Of The Pine by Martha Scanlan
A song you'd play to get people dancing: Mickey's Monkey by The Miracles
The last great thing you heard: Underwater Moonlight by The Soft Boys
Your key non-musical influences: Stroud, Brighton, Brooklyn. As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning by Laurie Lee. My wife Koren Zailckas. Old Town Bar in New York, the Hand In Hand pub in Brighton and the Red Lion pub in Chalford, near Stroud. Backgammon. digg.com, drudgereport.com, huffingtonpost.com. GTA 1-4.
Your favourite new artist: Taylor Swift
The band begin a tour on Wednesday calling at London, Guildford, Manchester, Cardiff, Exeter, Sheffield and Cambridge. See their website for further details and wonder if they still see fit to do Cheney. New single Hey Hey is released 16th February; it sounds like this.
Thursday, January 22, 2009
We're wondering now
Question: why, on iTunes, last.fm and Spotify to name three, if you search for Gangsters by the Specials does it come up with a completely different version which is longer and features someone who isn't Terry Hall on vocals, and where on earth does that version originate? (NB. We know a lot of sources have the proper version on under the then proper band name Special AKA, we're just curious)
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
The Music That Made... Swanton Bombs
Great new artists don't just appear fully formed in time for the January editions of the monthlies, sometimes they whack you round the back of the head with greatness in their own time. Although we mentioned them back in October, the East London/Essex duo Swanton Bombs really came into fruition with the newly released Mammoth Skull EP (buy from Norman Records if you're quick, there's only 500, but they've got a CD of older songs free), four tracks of subtle wonder spanning from fractured angular post-post-punk to charging, twisted piano pop, sometimes at the same time. It's a long time since a debut four-tracker has come out of the blue with such promise attached, so we decided to get in ahead of the curve and ask Dominic McGuinness and Brendan Heaney what's floated their boats. Which one these answers covers... well, that's for you to guess, because they didn't say. And going on the first answer, that's just as well.
First single bought: Eiffel 65 - I'm Blue
First album bought: The Very Best Of Chuck Berry
First gig voluntarily attended: Toploader at the Brixton Academy
The record that most made you want to get into music: The Strokes - Is This It
A song you'd play to get people dancing: Big Boi - Ghetto Musick
The last great thing you heard: I'd rather have a full frontal labotomy than a full bottle in front of me
Your favourite new artist: Video Nasties
Swanton Bombs are on tour with Threatmantics and the aforementioned Video Nasties across the land for the rest of this month - check their Myspace (link up there) for details.
First single bought: Eiffel 65 - I'm Blue
First album bought: The Very Best Of Chuck Berry
First gig voluntarily attended: Toploader at the Brixton Academy
The record that most made you want to get into music: The Strokes - Is This It
A song you'd play to get people dancing: Big Boi - Ghetto Musick
The last great thing you heard: I'd rather have a full frontal labotomy than a full bottle in front of me
Your favourite new artist: Video Nasties
Swanton Bombs are on tour with Threatmantics and the aforementioned Video Nasties across the land for the rest of this month - check their Myspace (link up there) for details.
Now then
To conclude our extended qualifications on the ability of the Now! series to capture a moment no matter what its quality, we had a look at the compilations from as near as possible to its fifth, tenth and fifteenth anniversaries. Not the twentieth, as even by our 00s-cauterising standards 2003 is too recent to properly make something out of in retro nostalgia terms and even then the attraction of Joe Budden and D-Side palls.
Fifth anniversary
The last Now! number one before compilations were harvested off to their own chart and there's a curious duality going on. On the one hand, in those Levi's/inception of Q times there's a rush of elder statesmen and stateswomen with Womack & Womack, UB40 and Chrissie Hynde, Robert Palmer, Phil Collins, Art of Noise featuring Tom Jones, Bryan Ferry and the summarily advert-aided Hollies on Disc 1 alone, plus 38 year old Bobby McFerrin standing out like a sore thumb before Trevor, Anne and JJ met Tom. And then disc two kicks off with Chubby Checker! And there's the other part, as all this new music from American youths and British DJs starts flocking into the mainstream too, as the track here is the Fat Boys' The Twist reworking, and if that's understandably not what you were strictly after the whole thing opens with the Coldcut-produced The Only Way Is Up and showcases Bomb The Bass, Wee Papa Girl Rappers, Salt n Pepa and, er, Milli Vanilli, plus a none more Vicks-friendly segue of Yello, Inner City, D-Mob and Beatmasters. Changes are afoot which not even a slew of AOR - the Christians' version of Harvest For The World, Hue & Cry, Breathe's ever dreary Hands To Heaven, Level 42, T'Pau - can stop. The compilers even get clever towards the end, following Transvision Vamp's snottiness by committee I Want Your Love with the now slimmed down Duran Duran's explosion in a Fairlight factory I Don't Want Your Love followed by the Human League's not particularly dignified Love Is All That Matters, which didn't even make the top 40. And it all closes with Martha's Harbour, to throw a bone to just about everyone. Verdict: there's a revolution happening, but we'll just idle away over here with our CDs and basic rediscoveries while you work it all out.
Tenth anniversary
Actually, things evidently didn't get better that quickly, as five years on Now is starting with UB40's version of (I Can't Help) Falling In Love With You, followed by the Pet Shop Boys' version of Go West, followed by Frankie Goes To Hollywood's actual Relax (a best of was out, see). And from then it's into... well, when we covered the 1992 Christmas chart last month we noted the preponderance of novelties and covers, as if there was a recession on or something, and 1993 was clearly the year of Eurobeat. Stakka Bo is a shot across the bows, but when Disc 2 opens with Cappella, Haddaway, 2 Unlimited, Culture Beat and last vestige of rave The Goodmen, with Urban Cookie Collective, Captain Hollywood Project and 80s jazz vocalist chancing her arm Juliet Roberts following soon behind, you realise this isn't really a period in post-rave dance music's evolution, Open Up or no Open Up, that many would be proud of, although you know as well as we do that come the mid to late 2010s scores of self-consciously 'wacky' 21 year olds will be telling the BBC entertainment section that "I discovered all that early 90s music in my parents' attic, I really think it was inventive, happy music and it's not given the credit it deserves..." (Mind you, the 80s revival hasn't bothered with Sade/Matt Bianco/Working week jazz-pop, so there's hope yet) The presence of SWV and Eternal suggests the R&B girls are about to arrive, and there's some Brits with guitars attempting to make the leap in the form of the Levellers, James and, good lord, Radiohead's Creep - shame this isn't number 25, we'd have had to consider Kingmaker - but in a period when pop hadn't yet seen the potential in proper boy bands and guitars weren't being let back in the club yet it seems full of passing fads like Chaka Demus & Pliers (ah, the summer of reggae, if that's what you really must call it), the Spin Doctors (the 90s' least fondly remembered hitmakers?) and the Shola Ama of 1993, Lena Fiagbe. Plus, the whole month of release saw I'd Do Anything For Love (But I Won't Do That) at number one, and if that's not indicative of confused times we don't know what is.
Fifteenth anniversary
So somewhere along the way marketing arrived, and with CD:UK having just started the dancers and stage school kids are appearing, Billie and 911 opening disc two. Yet extraordinary how potent cheap music is, and by 1998 dance music was pretty cheap. And successful, which is why we have a whole host of chancers, from T-Spoon's easy column inches Sex On The Beach to Deetah to Touch And Go (Would You...?, a favourite of the people who put music behind home improvement shows to this day), plus Sash! - 39th in the 2008 album sales list, his best of, nearly selling 300,000 copies - and The Tamperer's non-chimney related hit If You Buy This Record Your Life Will Be Better. Here Gangster Trippin' and Music Sounds Better With You seem like the 1812 Overture. Plenty of R&B influenced stuff too, UB40 are back, and a good period for the sort of light radio pop of the type that flits by the listener without their hardly noticing. Jennifer Paige was never going to be more than a one hit wonder, the Meredith Brooks of that year, and Alisha's Attic always seem to be coming and going but it's alarming how little Lutricia McNeal made an impact despite three top ten singles, rising without trace and disappearing quietly. Space probably don't even remember covering We Gotta Get Out Of This Place, but here it is. The overwhelming thought is it all seems very sandpapered off and acceptable, not necessarily a bad thing in itself but it was all settling for "will this do, Robbie our liege?" a little.
And Mel B and Missy Elliott's I Want You Back is, B's shot at gossamer soul singing aside, much better than you remember it.
Fifth anniversary
The last Now! number one before compilations were harvested off to their own chart and there's a curious duality going on. On the one hand, in those Levi's/inception of Q times there's a rush of elder statesmen and stateswomen with Womack & Womack, UB40 and Chrissie Hynde, Robert Palmer, Phil Collins, Art of Noise featuring Tom Jones, Bryan Ferry and the summarily advert-aided Hollies on Disc 1 alone, plus 38 year old Bobby McFerrin standing out like a sore thumb before Trevor, Anne and JJ met Tom. And then disc two kicks off with Chubby Checker! And there's the other part, as all this new music from American youths and British DJs starts flocking into the mainstream too, as the track here is the Fat Boys' The Twist reworking, and if that's understandably not what you were strictly after the whole thing opens with the Coldcut-produced The Only Way Is Up and showcases Bomb The Bass, Wee Papa Girl Rappers, Salt n Pepa and, er, Milli Vanilli, plus a none more Vicks-friendly segue of Yello, Inner City, D-Mob and Beatmasters. Changes are afoot which not even a slew of AOR - the Christians' version of Harvest For The World, Hue & Cry, Breathe's ever dreary Hands To Heaven, Level 42, T'Pau - can stop. The compilers even get clever towards the end, following Transvision Vamp's snottiness by committee I Want Your Love with the now slimmed down Duran Duran's explosion in a Fairlight factory I Don't Want Your Love followed by the Human League's not particularly dignified Love Is All That Matters, which didn't even make the top 40. And it all closes with Martha's Harbour, to throw a bone to just about everyone. Verdict: there's a revolution happening, but we'll just idle away over here with our CDs and basic rediscoveries while you work it all out.
Tenth anniversary
Actually, things evidently didn't get better that quickly, as five years on Now is starting with UB40's version of (I Can't Help) Falling In Love With You, followed by the Pet Shop Boys' version of Go West, followed by Frankie Goes To Hollywood's actual Relax (a best of was out, see). And from then it's into... well, when we covered the 1992 Christmas chart last month we noted the preponderance of novelties and covers, as if there was a recession on or something, and 1993 was clearly the year of Eurobeat. Stakka Bo is a shot across the bows, but when Disc 2 opens with Cappella, Haddaway, 2 Unlimited, Culture Beat and last vestige of rave The Goodmen, with Urban Cookie Collective, Captain Hollywood Project and 80s jazz vocalist chancing her arm Juliet Roberts following soon behind, you realise this isn't really a period in post-rave dance music's evolution, Open Up or no Open Up, that many would be proud of, although you know as well as we do that come the mid to late 2010s scores of self-consciously 'wacky' 21 year olds will be telling the BBC entertainment section that "I discovered all that early 90s music in my parents' attic, I really think it was inventive, happy music and it's not given the credit it deserves..." (Mind you, the 80s revival hasn't bothered with Sade/Matt Bianco/Working week jazz-pop, so there's hope yet) The presence of SWV and Eternal suggests the R&B girls are about to arrive, and there's some Brits with guitars attempting to make the leap in the form of the Levellers, James and, good lord, Radiohead's Creep - shame this isn't number 25, we'd have had to consider Kingmaker - but in a period when pop hadn't yet seen the potential in proper boy bands and guitars weren't being let back in the club yet it seems full of passing fads like Chaka Demus & Pliers (ah, the summer of reggae, if that's what you really must call it), the Spin Doctors (the 90s' least fondly remembered hitmakers?) and the Shola Ama of 1993, Lena Fiagbe. Plus, the whole month of release saw I'd Do Anything For Love (But I Won't Do That) at number one, and if that's not indicative of confused times we don't know what is.
Fifteenth anniversary
So somewhere along the way marketing arrived, and with CD:UK having just started the dancers and stage school kids are appearing, Billie and 911 opening disc two. Yet extraordinary how potent cheap music is, and by 1998 dance music was pretty cheap. And successful, which is why we have a whole host of chancers, from T-Spoon's easy column inches Sex On The Beach to Deetah to Touch And Go (Would You...?, a favourite of the people who put music behind home improvement shows to this day), plus Sash! - 39th in the 2008 album sales list, his best of, nearly selling 300,000 copies - and The Tamperer's non-chimney related hit If You Buy This Record Your Life Will Be Better. Here Gangster Trippin' and Music Sounds Better With You seem like the 1812 Overture. Plenty of R&B influenced stuff too, UB40 are back, and a good period for the sort of light radio pop of the type that flits by the listener without their hardly noticing. Jennifer Paige was never going to be more than a one hit wonder, the Meredith Brooks of that year, and Alisha's Attic always seem to be coming and going but it's alarming how little Lutricia McNeal made an impact despite three top ten singles, rising without trace and disappearing quietly. Space probably don't even remember covering We Gotta Get Out Of This Place, but here it is. The overwhelming thought is it all seems very sandpapered off and acceptable, not necessarily a bad thing in itself but it was all settling for "will this do, Robbie our liege?" a little.
And Mel B and Missy Elliott's I Want You Back is, B's shot at gossamer soul singing aside, much better than you remember it.
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Brand new Second Hand
See, this is why we keep blathering on and doing this thing to death - because we know lurking somewhere out there is the next great, or at least potentially great, new band.
Presenting, then, The Second Hand Marching Band.
You're intrigued already, we can tell. Based in Glasgow and formed in December 2007 to "play songs with many instruments that could be danced to" they number between 16 and 22, but don't go thinking this is mere Polyphonic Spree gimmickry. Including members of many other bands, including Dananananaykroyd (drummer Paul Carlin), Eagleowl, Q Without U, The Just Joans and The Occasional Flickers (and, it suggests here, soon ex-Teenage Fanclub/Mogwai drummer Brendan O'Hare), their number includes mandolinists, ukeleleists, glockenspiel (two!), accordion, flute, clarinet, melodica and a three piece internal brass section, we're dealing with sprawling folk of the Sufjan/Beirut end at heart, but with a cheerfully ramshackle chorality pitched somewhere between revivalist joy and huddling together for warmth and safety and an admitted post-rock influence in the way the layers of instruments slowly build and crescendo. You'd imagine they're something special live, although they're only playing across Scotland at the moment. Fair enough, as despite the whole Balkan/Americana reference points it is ultimately a very Scottish sounding thing. They released a limited edition EP, A Dance To Half Death, last week, available from their Myspace and through Chaffinch Records. Watch them, because if we're any judge - pause for readers to make faces and odd noises behind hands - they're building up to something very interesting. Lostmusic has an mp3 up. So do we.
The Second Hand Marching Band - We Walk In The Room (via Sendspace while our server plays silly buggers)
Presenting, then, The Second Hand Marching Band.
You're intrigued already, we can tell. Based in Glasgow and formed in December 2007 to "play songs with many instruments that could be danced to" they number between 16 and 22, but don't go thinking this is mere Polyphonic Spree gimmickry. Including members of many other bands, including Dananananaykroyd (drummer Paul Carlin), Eagleowl, Q Without U, The Just Joans and The Occasional Flickers (and, it suggests here, soon ex-Teenage Fanclub/Mogwai drummer Brendan O'Hare), their number includes mandolinists, ukeleleists, glockenspiel (two!), accordion, flute, clarinet, melodica and a three piece internal brass section, we're dealing with sprawling folk of the Sufjan/Beirut end at heart, but with a cheerfully ramshackle chorality pitched somewhere between revivalist joy and huddling together for warmth and safety and an admitted post-rock influence in the way the layers of instruments slowly build and crescendo. You'd imagine they're something special live, although they're only playing across Scotland at the moment. Fair enough, as despite the whole Balkan/Americana reference points it is ultimately a very Scottish sounding thing. They released a limited edition EP, A Dance To Half Death, last week, available from their Myspace and through Chaffinch Records. Watch them, because if we're any judge - pause for readers to make faces and odd noises behind hands - they're building up to something very interesting. Lostmusic has an mp3 up. So do we.
The Second Hand Marching Band - We Walk In The Room (via Sendspace while our server plays silly buggers)
Monday, January 19, 2009
The Music That Made... Superman Revenge Squad
Superman Revenge Squad is Ben Parker of Croydon, who with only an acoustic guitar to hand and a sharp enquiring mind and fast tongue in his head made one of our favourite albums of 2008, This Is My Own Personal Way Of Dealing With It All, which we impetuously left out of our end of year countdown as you can only buy it from him at gigs or from his Myspace, which evidently you should. (Although we did nominate and write about it for The Line Of Best Fit's Under The Radar list) With his litany of pop cultural lyrical touchstones and our love of his work we figured he'd be good value for our questions, and so it proved. "I fear they might make people question my musical history, and that I might have waffled on a bit" he forewarned us.
First single bought: Hmmm. Well, it was probably something by Iron Maiden, on cassette single in the bargain bin in Woolworths I think – possibly a song called Holy Smoke. The cardboard box it came in was quite battered if I remember rightly. I wasn’t into music at all really up until about the age of thirteen, and then suddenly I was stupidly obsessed with it. And I went into a big heavy metal phase and spent all of my time reading heavy metal magazines, playing the guitar and not doing any homework. I still have a soft spot for Iron Maiden – they get a few mentions on the songs I’ve written, along with other people I’ve really liked in the past, like Morrissey and the Smashing Pumpkins. If it sounds like I’m taking the piss I am doing it fondly. Although not, perhaps, in the case of Smashing Pumpkins, but that's a whole other story.
First album bought: I got Thriller by Michael Jackson when I was at the primary school. Maybe because I liked the video for Thriller. Certainly not because of the duet he does with Paul McCartney on it!
First gig voluntarily attended: Maybe a little embarrassingly, it was the Little Angels. I quite liked them. It was, honestly, the loudest gig I’ve ever been to – my ears were ringing for days – although I suppose they weren’t as used to that kind of noise in those days.
The record that most made you want to get into music: As soon as I started listening to music I wanted to get a guitar, and I started writing songs - I've got books and books of lyrics (really bad lyrics!). I remember liking Loco Live, a live album by the Ramones, quite a lot because I could play it fairly easily – it didn’t have fiddly guitar bits in - and it was quite exciting at the time. Other notable things I got were 1991 The Year Punk Broke – the video with Sonic Youth and a load of other good people on it and reading the Morrissey and Marr book (The Severed Alliance), because it made me realise that you could sing music and be a bit awkward!
The three headliners at a festival you were curating: If I had to pick today it would possibly Will Oldham and Alasdair Roberts and Herman Dune (with Andre back in the band!). I love all of them. But if I could (slightly geekily) populate it with people and bands from the past if would be Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band, Bob Marley and the Wailers (from about 1972) and Black Sabbath (from about 1974 or so).
A song not enough people know about but everyone should hear: There’s a song called This Time Around by a band called S.O.U.L that I love. It’s on some Northern Soul compilation I’ve got and it has the best intro to a song ever. According to Last. fm I’m the only person that has ever loved the song, of the 42 listeners that it has had. So I’m gonna pick that.
A song you'd play to get people dancing: I don’t really do dancing generally, but I remember when a friend of mine was Djing a night of mainly Aphex Twin type stuff and he slipped Jackie Wilson’s (Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher And Higher on and it was great. I’d do that maybe, amongst a load of truly miserable songs that no-one could dance to.
The last great thing you heard: I played with Paul Hawkins last week, and he’s got a new song called something like I’ll Take Good Care Of You and it’s brilliant.
Your key non-musical influences: Dunno really – Film makers I like are the obvious ones: Mike Leigh and David Lynch and the Coen Brothers. Books I love are: Brighton Rock by Graham Greene, Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton, Jack Maggs by Peter Carey. I read quite a bit, different things, but those are faves.
Your favourite new artist: Jack Mountain. Definitely. He recorded three albums last year and gave them out at gigs for free and they are great. For good examples check out Saturday Fuck Off from Escape From The Planet Of Rockers or My Heart's An Anchor from Battle For The Planet Of Rockers – they are free to download I think.
Superman Revenge Squad is playing assorted dates around the country; if you're in or near Cardiff, Clwb Ifor Bach on 27th February with Gindrinker and the aforementioned Paul Hawkins & Thee Awkward Silences looks like a three line whip for attendance to us. This is what he sounds like - Idiot Food...
...and Kevin Rowland.
First single bought: Hmmm. Well, it was probably something by Iron Maiden, on cassette single in the bargain bin in Woolworths I think – possibly a song called Holy Smoke. The cardboard box it came in was quite battered if I remember rightly. I wasn’t into music at all really up until about the age of thirteen, and then suddenly I was stupidly obsessed with it. And I went into a big heavy metal phase and spent all of my time reading heavy metal magazines, playing the guitar and not doing any homework. I still have a soft spot for Iron Maiden – they get a few mentions on the songs I’ve written, along with other people I’ve really liked in the past, like Morrissey and the Smashing Pumpkins. If it sounds like I’m taking the piss I am doing it fondly. Although not, perhaps, in the case of Smashing Pumpkins, but that's a whole other story.
First album bought: I got Thriller by Michael Jackson when I was at the primary school. Maybe because I liked the video for Thriller. Certainly not because of the duet he does with Paul McCartney on it!
First gig voluntarily attended: Maybe a little embarrassingly, it was the Little Angels. I quite liked them. It was, honestly, the loudest gig I’ve ever been to – my ears were ringing for days – although I suppose they weren’t as used to that kind of noise in those days.
The record that most made you want to get into music: As soon as I started listening to music I wanted to get a guitar, and I started writing songs - I've got books and books of lyrics (really bad lyrics!). I remember liking Loco Live, a live album by the Ramones, quite a lot because I could play it fairly easily – it didn’t have fiddly guitar bits in - and it was quite exciting at the time. Other notable things I got were 1991 The Year Punk Broke – the video with Sonic Youth and a load of other good people on it and reading the Morrissey and Marr book (The Severed Alliance), because it made me realise that you could sing music and be a bit awkward!
The three headliners at a festival you were curating: If I had to pick today it would possibly Will Oldham and Alasdair Roberts and Herman Dune (with Andre back in the band!). I love all of them. But if I could (slightly geekily) populate it with people and bands from the past if would be Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band, Bob Marley and the Wailers (from about 1972) and Black Sabbath (from about 1974 or so).
A song not enough people know about but everyone should hear: There’s a song called This Time Around by a band called S.O.U.L that I love. It’s on some Northern Soul compilation I’ve got and it has the best intro to a song ever. According to Last. fm I’m the only person that has ever loved the song, of the 42 listeners that it has had. So I’m gonna pick that.
A song you'd play to get people dancing: I don’t really do dancing generally, but I remember when a friend of mine was Djing a night of mainly Aphex Twin type stuff and he slipped Jackie Wilson’s (Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher And Higher on and it was great. I’d do that maybe, amongst a load of truly miserable songs that no-one could dance to.
The last great thing you heard: I played with Paul Hawkins last week, and he’s got a new song called something like I’ll Take Good Care Of You and it’s brilliant.
Your key non-musical influences: Dunno really – Film makers I like are the obvious ones: Mike Leigh and David Lynch and the Coen Brothers. Books I love are: Brighton Rock by Graham Greene, Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton, Jack Maggs by Peter Carey. I read quite a bit, different things, but those are faves.
Your favourite new artist: Jack Mountain. Definitely. He recorded three albums last year and gave them out at gigs for free and they are great. For good examples check out Saturday Fuck Off from Escape From The Planet Of Rockers or My Heart's An Anchor from Battle For The Planet Of Rockers – they are free to download I think.
Superman Revenge Squad is playing assorted dates around the country; if you're in or near Cardiff, Clwb Ifor Bach on 27th February with Gindrinker and the aforementioned Paul Hawkins & Thee Awkward Silences looks like a three line whip for attendance to us. This is what he sounds like - Idiot Food...
...and Kevin Rowland.
Sunday, January 18, 2009
Bird watching
Merriweather Post Pavilion. Well, it's just as good as everyone says, really. What they've worked out, possibly with the aid of Panda Bear's Person Pitch album, is how not just to be rhythmic campire folkies or glitchy psychedelics or Beach Boys indebted heavenly harmonic shamen or post-house acoustic beatmakers but to find a happy medium between them all while allowing the songs to shine. Gorgeous melodies come more to the fore than ever before and the temptation they've previously succumbed to to bury any hint of pop aesthetics in electronic trickery or pull it apart methodically is buried. It's got groove, it's got meaning. More than anything, it's got a soul, and with this level of careful layering, thumping club bass versus freak folk and odd talismanic momentum moments that's a special thing to pull off.
But you know all that, because especially now you don't need to read another bedroom bound blogger drone on about how special it all sounds. So let's talk about another album, one that won't grab the limelight in every review; Noble Beast by Andrew Bird, released 2nd February.
At this distance it's looking like it's M Ward's turn in 2009 to get an attempted big push out of the alt-Americana rounds and into the mainstream's line of fire, following the She & Him sleeper hit with an album in Hold Time that seems set to take his sound to colossal extremes. Ward being big is of course no bad thing, even if hindsight suggests Post-War wasn't really the top ten album of the year we acclaimed it as at the time, but it does mean some fellow travellers in timeline and genre terms have to wait their turn once again. Andrew Bird is foremost among these, a prolific violin-wielding/sawing/plucking whistle-friendly (23 seconds it takes that to kick in here) singer-songwriter and one time conservatory training rebel who often comes across as a more linear Final Fantasy. Perhaps for that reason we'd never quite warmed to him before now, but Noble Beast sees him take his arrangements and strip them back to something more light and direct, almost approachable for mainstream use. Almost, of course, because his lilting voice expresses resonantly worded tales layered in detail and cryptic reference points while remaining on nodding terms with the pastoral oddness of freak folk that once took him as their own envoy to the wider world. It's a warm sounding album, layered in bells and handclaps around his delicately complex violin backing, self-created percussive loops and stabs at being the alt-Roger Whittaker, soothing if slightly reserved, laced with alt-country, Balkan folk, Spanish guitars and Shins-esque adult pop. It's a style that fits him well through careful amendments and one that seems purely his, easy to approach but never too comfortable and giving up new details and high points on further listens even for something so on face value sparsely produced. It's very smart stuff to make something so precise sound so soft and worth investigating.
But you know all that, because especially now you don't need to read another bedroom bound blogger drone on about how special it all sounds. So let's talk about another album, one that won't grab the limelight in every review; Noble Beast by Andrew Bird, released 2nd February.
At this distance it's looking like it's M Ward's turn in 2009 to get an attempted big push out of the alt-Americana rounds and into the mainstream's line of fire, following the She & Him sleeper hit with an album in Hold Time that seems set to take his sound to colossal extremes. Ward being big is of course no bad thing, even if hindsight suggests Post-War wasn't really the top ten album of the year we acclaimed it as at the time, but it does mean some fellow travellers in timeline and genre terms have to wait their turn once again. Andrew Bird is foremost among these, a prolific violin-wielding/sawing/plucking whistle-friendly (23 seconds it takes that to kick in here) singer-songwriter and one time conservatory training rebel who often comes across as a more linear Final Fantasy. Perhaps for that reason we'd never quite warmed to him before now, but Noble Beast sees him take his arrangements and strip them back to something more light and direct, almost approachable for mainstream use. Almost, of course, because his lilting voice expresses resonantly worded tales layered in detail and cryptic reference points while remaining on nodding terms with the pastoral oddness of freak folk that once took him as their own envoy to the wider world. It's a warm sounding album, layered in bells and handclaps around his delicately complex violin backing, self-created percussive loops and stabs at being the alt-Roger Whittaker, soothing if slightly reserved, laced with alt-country, Balkan folk, Spanish guitars and Shins-esque adult pop. It's a style that fits him well through careful amendments and one that seems purely his, easy to approach but never too comfortable and giving up new details and high points on further listens even for something so on face value sparsely produced. It's very smart stuff to make something so precise sound so soft and worth investigating.
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