(Weekender will appear here on Monday. It's just the way things are.)
Saturday, September 27, 2008
The Weekly Sweep
(Weekender will appear here on Monday. It's just the way things are.)
Friday, September 26, 2008
What are you doing this weekend?
Well, you're wrong. If you're near London, we'd hope you'd be at Kings College London for This Ain't No Picnic, a two day, 34 band "urban festival" curated by the great and wonderful people of Smalltown America, the natural successor to their former Alldayers. Headliners are Future Of The Left on Saturday and, playing their only British gig for the moment, Polysics on Sunday, while the bill includes many a STN favourite - 4 Or 5 Magicians, Gossamer Albatross, Gindrinker, Bearsuit, Superman Revenge Squad, Popular Workshop, The Strange Death Of Liberal England, Cats In Paris, The Young Playthings, Chris T-T, Fighting With Wire, The Deirdres... the list goes on. Why, it's a bill we know so much about, they asked us to edit the programme, and we hope to see you all diligently taking it in, even the bits STA staffers penned. There will also be a seperate bar with a film programme of punk rock and DIY music films, plus there's entry to the venue’s regular clubnight to 4am on Saturday. All proceeds to Cancer Research UK and The Connection At St Martins. Tickets are about £25/£15 on the door.
(We asked Andrew Ferris of Smalltown America and Jetplane Landing to do a Celebrity Playlist for us as a tie-in but he got snowed under by all the stuff the label is involved with this week, that's what the holdup of the last few days was about. We'll try and get some off him in the future. There's a reason to stay reading.)
(We asked Andrew Ferris of Smalltown America and Jetplane Landing to do a Celebrity Playlist for us as a tie-in but he got snowed under by all the stuff the label is involved with this week, that's what the holdup of the last few days was about. We'll try and get some off him in the future. There's a reason to stay reading.)
Planes speaking
What on earth is going on with the new radio edit of MIA's Paper Planes? Alright, so children's chorus/gunshots is a bit of a sore point these days in Britain, but the gunshots have been replaced with something that sounds like heavy artillery, the till effect has been changed, and bafflingly the word 'records' (in the line "I've got more records than the KGB") has been cut in half, presumably deemed far more offensive than the line that follows it but one, "some I some I some I murder", which has got away untouched. Was it being edited at random?
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Monday, September 22, 2008
Listening party
Hidey-ho, mp3 time again, and a good selection since the start of the month of labels and artists forwarding their stuff on. Not least Bailiwick Recording Company - based in Guernsey! Ace! - who wrote to inform us that they're putting out a Gossamer Albatross 7" on October 20th, sent us the tracks from it and said "go on, post one". Alright then:
Gossamer Albatross - Elizabeth, Queen Of The Sea
We haven't been as constantly vocal about them as we have with others, but wiry, spry London trio Popular Workshop are a band we've had a lot of time for over the last year - featured in Weekender as a Myspace discovery over two years ago, in the Class Of '08 covermount right at the start of the year and quite a few different tracks in the Weekly Sweep. Now they've got an album ready, We're Alive And We're Not Alone, out on October 6th and recorded at Electrical Audio, Chicago with all that entails. Sounds like it was, too.
Popular Workshop - Her Birthday
Laura Wolf was in the Sweep a few weeks ago. Heartbeeps filled the H requirement in the A-Z of Myspaces from a couple of months back. And when they met, it was Internet Forever, fuzzy guitar plus lo-fi keyboard alternapop. RIYL Times New Viking, UltCult, a Los Campesinos! affected by the credit crunch.
Internet Forever - Break Bones
Gossamer Albatross - Elizabeth, Queen Of The Sea
We haven't been as constantly vocal about them as we have with others, but wiry, spry London trio Popular Workshop are a band we've had a lot of time for over the last year - featured in Weekender as a Myspace discovery over two years ago, in the Class Of '08 covermount right at the start of the year and quite a few different tracks in the Weekly Sweep. Now they've got an album ready, We're Alive And We're Not Alone, out on October 6th and recorded at Electrical Audio, Chicago with all that entails. Sounds like it was, too.
Popular Workshop - Her Birthday
Laura Wolf was in the Sweep a few weeks ago. Heartbeeps filled the H requirement in the A-Z of Myspaces from a couple of months back. And when they met, it was Internet Forever, fuzzy guitar plus lo-fi keyboard alternapop. RIYL Times New Viking, UltCult, a Los Campesinos! affected by the credit crunch.
Internet Forever - Break Bones
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Weekender : Tony Cascarino circa 1995
WHAT CD?
- This is the week when the autumnal burst of massive releases kicks off, but never mind your Kings Of Leons and your Katy Perrys, because there's an album that we have a real sense of excitement and foreboding about. TV On The Radio, see, have made two proper albums and they've both been our album of their respective years (Desperate Youth Bloodthirsty Babes predating STN, obviously, but we have notebooks). Now comes Dear Science, universally described as "their most accessible record to date/fulfilling their potential" as if those first two works were noise projects. Although they often weren't very comfortable listening, we'll grant you. The whole thing's currently streaming on their Myspace, which is handy as like the puffs we are we haven't actually brought ourselves round to listening to it yet. You know, "just in case". Lot of fucking help we are, we know. Look, it's TVOTR with a Princely pop edge, what more do you need? See you at the end of year list.
- They never come up in conversations about favourite British independent labels - come on, you all have them - but the self contained Memphis Industries' roster has always been a byword for interest beyond the "will this do?", and it's telling that their two big hitters, the Go! Team and the Pipettes, have both returned after dalliances with major labels, as did the Brewis brothers for their projects after the last days of Field Music contained what seemed to us to be some none too subtle hints in interviews about the label's leading role in their putting the band on ice. Absentee, despite being lured away into more glamorous pastures by a place on the recent Transgressive tour through that label controlling their publishing, are a typical MI band, getting on with the job at hand irrespective of which way the pop world is leaning. With Dan Michaelson's Cohen baritone to lean on they're only ever going to sound one way, and on second album Victory Shorts they repeat the trick of matching buoyant dark pop to Michaelson's Smog-recalling doom and damnation. Also out this week a couple of slightly disappointing sophomore albums, Cold War Kids' Loyalty To Loyalty and the Spinto Band's Moonwink.
- And in singles.... you know the theory that every artist has one good song in them? Crystal Castles' isn't even theirs, it's HEALTH's, but still the 8-bit mutant disco of Crimewave has to come from somewhere. Guillemots' spectacularly underwhelming Red at least gives up its best track Kriss Kross, while east London power (tools) trio Popular Workshop's claustrophobic anxiety of Reptilians previews next month's debut album.
MYSPACE INVADERS: Fancy something all gothic and dark folkie? Euchrid Eucrow is, well, the mysterious Euchrid, plus Caroline Weeks from Bat For Lashes' band and Abi Fry of same plus British Sea Power. That he/they are named after the lead character from Nick Cave's novel And The Ass Saw The Angel is some indication of just how desolate it is, but in there are echoes of the accordion-led Balkan music appropriated by A Hawk And A Hacksaw and, if even just in Eucrow's keening voice, of some place you wouldn't dare go on a misty night, or at any time.
VISUAL AID: "Hop around, lose all your junk!" Reginald Bosanquet was main ITN anchor between 1974 and 1976, famous for his slurred delivery and alleged drinking habit. His Wikipedia entry contains the line "He also reached the headlines for breaking into his ex-wife's flat, an offence which got him thrown off the judging panel for Dustman of the Year 1975." In 1980, he made this... would 'song' be too kind? It's called Dance With Me, it was voted 'top' of Kenny Everett's Bottom 30 after its 1980 release and it makes you wonder if the Disco Demolition people at Comiskey Park had a point. It's not even ironic in the illfated way of the Jim Bowen Rap, more in the lineage of Larry Grayson's Shut That Door or John Inman's similarly catchphrase heavy and similarly enlightened effort, and especially Rising Damp, wherein over similar wine bar disco funk Leonard Rossiter freestyles a set of Rigsby one-liners. Even Frank Carson was guided studiowards in the 1970s, slipping into a transatlantic accent on the chorus. And then there's Tiswas' Four Bucketeers...
LINKS EFFECT
* Inevitably, while we've been away essentially everything has changed, not least that we're now contributing long form reviews for The Line Of Best Fit. Do have a look.
* After a hiatus Welcome To Our TV Show! is back. No Warmsley in this one, being on tour and that, but Fay takes up the slack with Ontario-originating nut Mayor McCA, the burlesque Etta James of Paloma Faith and three songs in five minutes from Jay Reatard. Full band, too. The next TV Show, in what is unlikely to be an unconnected development, has been recorded elsewhere.
* So Los Campesinos! are going on this frankly ridiculous tour with No Age and Times New Viking, and fair to say they're well prepared for an online run on it. That it has its own site is a good start. That it has a Twitter - well, it's the modern age. Brilliantly, it's also having a YouTube account dedicated to it, at the moment harbouring merely an introduction from... well... it's a Los Campesinos! event. Take a wild guess. (Note the expertly placed At The Club poster) We'd be happier if they were playing somewhere we could easily get to and back from on a weekend, but you can't always get what you want.
* Remember the run of band specific blogs from a while back? One such, the REM-centric Pop Songs 07-08, finished a little while ago... until Michael Stipe came across it and expressed an interest, so much so that he's now taking questions about the lyrics and related issues.
* Label news, and Wichita want your email address. In return, they'll allow you access to a fifteen track compilation including Los Campesinos!, Sky Larkin, Les Savy Fav, Those Dancing Days, Conor Oberst, Peter Bjorn & John, Euros Childs, the Dodos, Her Space Holiday and Simian Mobile Disco. Meanwhile Smalltown America, a label you'll be hearing more about on here later in the week, have gone into podcasting, the first three 'casts featuring songs variously by such young shavers as 4 Or 5 Magicians, Superman Revenge Squad, the Chiara L's, Ice Sea Dead People, Applicants, Tubelord, This Town Needs Guns, Calories, The Kabeedies, Alan MX, Brontosaurus Chorus, The Retro Spankees, The Light Sleepers and Lovvers.
* And some updates on bands previously covered on STN: the ace one-man band Superman Revenge Squad has an eleven track CD which can be ordered for £3 through his Myspace; and The Wonderland Project write after our coverage of their CD dissemination plan to say that records have already made their way to Nova Scotia and Bridlington (which is namechecked in one of the songs), and you can keep track of their progress on this map. Meanwhile the first issue of Phonogram: The Singles Club, as mentioned a couple of weeks back, has a landing date of December 10th and therefore can now be pre-ordered from your local comic stockist. "Penny B wrestles with the big questions: Will she get the boy? Will the DJ play her record? Why was her gin and tonic so expensive? In a world where music is magic, she’ll discover just how deep shallow actually gets." Apparently.
* Who wants to go see some television being filmed in Manchester? No, scrub that: who wants to see Johnny Foreigner for free in Manchester this Wednesday? They're recording a live session for Channel M at 2pm, and if you email guestlist@channelm.co.uk they'll let you know if there's any spaces left. If you prefer Fujiya & Miyagi you're mad, but if you want to see them a day later under the same circumstances go through the same procedure.
* Finally, a note to bring to wider attention the fact that the B-side to Cliff Richard's new single is called Mobile Alabama School Leaving Hullabaloo. Mobile Alabama School Leaving Hullabaloo!
- This is the week when the autumnal burst of massive releases kicks off, but never mind your Kings Of Leons and your Katy Perrys, because there's an album that we have a real sense of excitement and foreboding about. TV On The Radio, see, have made two proper albums and they've both been our album of their respective years (Desperate Youth Bloodthirsty Babes predating STN, obviously, but we have notebooks). Now comes Dear Science, universally described as "their most accessible record to date/fulfilling their potential" as if those first two works were noise projects. Although they often weren't very comfortable listening, we'll grant you. The whole thing's currently streaming on their Myspace, which is handy as like the puffs we are we haven't actually brought ourselves round to listening to it yet. You know, "just in case". Lot of fucking help we are, we know. Look, it's TVOTR with a Princely pop edge, what more do you need? See you at the end of year list.
- They never come up in conversations about favourite British independent labels - come on, you all have them - but the self contained Memphis Industries' roster has always been a byword for interest beyond the "will this do?", and it's telling that their two big hitters, the Go! Team and the Pipettes, have both returned after dalliances with major labels, as did the Brewis brothers for their projects after the last days of Field Music contained what seemed to us to be some none too subtle hints in interviews about the label's leading role in their putting the band on ice. Absentee, despite being lured away into more glamorous pastures by a place on the recent Transgressive tour through that label controlling their publishing, are a typical MI band, getting on with the job at hand irrespective of which way the pop world is leaning. With Dan Michaelson's Cohen baritone to lean on they're only ever going to sound one way, and on second album Victory Shorts they repeat the trick of matching buoyant dark pop to Michaelson's Smog-recalling doom and damnation. Also out this week a couple of slightly disappointing sophomore albums, Cold War Kids' Loyalty To Loyalty and the Spinto Band's Moonwink.
- And in singles.... you know the theory that every artist has one good song in them? Crystal Castles' isn't even theirs, it's HEALTH's, but still the 8-bit mutant disco of Crimewave has to come from somewhere. Guillemots' spectacularly underwhelming Red at least gives up its best track Kriss Kross, while east London power (tools) trio Popular Workshop's claustrophobic anxiety of Reptilians previews next month's debut album.
MYSPACE INVADERS: Fancy something all gothic and dark folkie? Euchrid Eucrow is, well, the mysterious Euchrid, plus Caroline Weeks from Bat For Lashes' band and Abi Fry of same plus British Sea Power. That he/they are named after the lead character from Nick Cave's novel And The Ass Saw The Angel is some indication of just how desolate it is, but in there are echoes of the accordion-led Balkan music appropriated by A Hawk And A Hacksaw and, if even just in Eucrow's keening voice, of some place you wouldn't dare go on a misty night, or at any time.
VISUAL AID: "Hop around, lose all your junk!" Reginald Bosanquet was main ITN anchor between 1974 and 1976, famous for his slurred delivery and alleged drinking habit. His Wikipedia entry contains the line "He also reached the headlines for breaking into his ex-wife's flat, an offence which got him thrown off the judging panel for Dustman of the Year 1975." In 1980, he made this... would 'song' be too kind? It's called Dance With Me, it was voted 'top' of Kenny Everett's Bottom 30 after its 1980 release and it makes you wonder if the Disco Demolition people at Comiskey Park had a point. It's not even ironic in the illfated way of the Jim Bowen Rap, more in the lineage of Larry Grayson's Shut That Door or John Inman's similarly catchphrase heavy and similarly enlightened effort, and especially Rising Damp, wherein over similar wine bar disco funk Leonard Rossiter freestyles a set of Rigsby one-liners. Even Frank Carson was guided studiowards in the 1970s, slipping into a transatlantic accent on the chorus. And then there's Tiswas' Four Bucketeers...
LINKS EFFECT
* Inevitably, while we've been away essentially everything has changed, not least that we're now contributing long form reviews for The Line Of Best Fit. Do have a look.
* After a hiatus Welcome To Our TV Show! is back. No Warmsley in this one, being on tour and that, but Fay takes up the slack with Ontario-originating nut Mayor McCA, the burlesque Etta James of Paloma Faith and three songs in five minutes from Jay Reatard. Full band, too. The next TV Show, in what is unlikely to be an unconnected development, has been recorded elsewhere.
* So Los Campesinos! are going on this frankly ridiculous tour with No Age and Times New Viking, and fair to say they're well prepared for an online run on it. That it has its own site is a good start. That it has a Twitter - well, it's the modern age. Brilliantly, it's also having a YouTube account dedicated to it, at the moment harbouring merely an introduction from... well... it's a Los Campesinos! event. Take a wild guess. (Note the expertly placed At The Club poster) We'd be happier if they were playing somewhere we could easily get to and back from on a weekend, but you can't always get what you want.
* Remember the run of band specific blogs from a while back? One such, the REM-centric Pop Songs 07-08, finished a little while ago... until Michael Stipe came across it and expressed an interest, so much so that he's now taking questions about the lyrics and related issues.
* Label news, and Wichita want your email address. In return, they'll allow you access to a fifteen track compilation including Los Campesinos!, Sky Larkin, Les Savy Fav, Those Dancing Days, Conor Oberst, Peter Bjorn & John, Euros Childs, the Dodos, Her Space Holiday and Simian Mobile Disco. Meanwhile Smalltown America, a label you'll be hearing more about on here later in the week, have gone into podcasting, the first three 'casts featuring songs variously by such young shavers as 4 Or 5 Magicians, Superman Revenge Squad, the Chiara L's, Ice Sea Dead People, Applicants, Tubelord, This Town Needs Guns, Calories, The Kabeedies, Alan MX, Brontosaurus Chorus, The Retro Spankees, The Light Sleepers and Lovvers.
* And some updates on bands previously covered on STN: the ace one-man band Superman Revenge Squad has an eleven track CD which can be ordered for £3 through his Myspace; and The Wonderland Project write after our coverage of their CD dissemination plan to say that records have already made their way to Nova Scotia and Bridlington (which is namechecked in one of the songs), and you can keep track of their progress on this map. Meanwhile the first issue of Phonogram: The Singles Club, as mentioned a couple of weeks back, has a landing date of December 10th and therefore can now be pre-ordered from your local comic stockist. "Penny B wrestles with the big questions: Will she get the boy? Will the DJ play her record? Why was her gin and tonic so expensive? In a world where music is magic, she’ll discover just how deep shallow actually gets." Apparently.
* Who wants to go see some television being filmed in Manchester? No, scrub that: who wants to see Johnny Foreigner for free in Manchester this Wednesday? They're recording a live session for Channel M at 2pm, and if you email guestlist@channelm.co.uk they'll let you know if there's any spaces left. If you prefer Fujiya & Miyagi you're mad, but if you want to see them a day later under the same circumstances go through the same procedure.
* Finally, a note to bring to wider attention the fact that the B-side to Cliff Richard's new single is called Mobile Alabama School Leaving Hullabaloo. Mobile Alabama School Leaving Hullabaloo!
Saturday, September 20, 2008
The Weekly Sweep
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Come, come to the Larmer Tree: End Of The Road Festival Sunday review
Can we share our own plans? So we were planning in the few days before EOTR to do something with whichever artists we could back into a corner to tie in with this here blog, without actually thinking what that one thing would be. Having seen someone touting a signed blow-up banana around Summer Sundae we considered getting as many performers as possible to sign something and then give it away on here, but the only things we had to hand that we could carry in our bag for the duration were a 50p notebook and the back of an eight pack of Duracell (AA size, for the record). Then there was the thought of getting personalised video or audio messages, but our camera's video option doesn't record sound and our phone sound recorder didn't come with a USB cable. Eventually a lightbulb appeared - there's plenty of people we like around, why not collect some Celebrity Playlists? Unfortunately we came up with that one halfway through Sunday, so it was a bit late, and as up to that point we'd seen out with the plebs such luminaries in our world as Jeffrey Lewis, Martin Noble, Tom White (although we think he hates us - long story), Marc Beatty, Dave Tattersall, Darren Hayman, Robin Ince, Josie Long (those three in conversation, which seemed right and proper), the aforementioned Richard Hawley and, in a surprise cameo, Aleks Campesinos, while the only person of note we saw with the hoi polloi after that point was the bass player from Absentee, who was ahead of us in the organic burger queue late on Sunday, it all seemed more than slightly forlorn. Next year. We'll get our name around. Make up a T-shirt if we have to.
Music.
Sons Of Noel & Adrian, a ten-strong baroque chamber folk collective drawn from that Willkommen Collective we discussed yesterday, open up the Garden Stage with their expansive, brittle and doomed sea shanties, shifting from wistful picking-led melodies to washes of controlled noise and choral vocals with subtlety and grace. Not, as demonstrated by Bon Iver yesterday, that they're all bad, but it's interesting how the populace will fall for any American folkie outfit with a hint of foreboding while this sort of thing remains unbidden, taken up only by those willing to make the effort to dig it out. It feels at once universally sourced and yet a solely British take on what modern folk should mean. Maybe it's because some British bands are too much in thrall to the American traditions to think outside that box - case in point Congregation in the Big Top. Victoria Yeulet has a fine set of hollering blues pipes, working against Benjamin Prosser's 12-bar slide guitar and simultaneous bass drum kick playing, but there's little variation and nothing there to suggest it's going to come soon.
Last year The Wave Pictures packed out the Local tent with fans well before most people had come across them, so obviously they had to get the promotion to the Garden Stage this year. That they don't look overawed by the experience, in fact quite the opposite, is testament to the trio's abilities to wring peculiar gold from the Richman/Hayman template and, live at least, whack in a dollop of compacted Neil Young soloing. They're getting a very odd reaction at the moment, with reviewers comparing them variously to The Enemy, Ocean Colour Scene and assorted other landfill indie acts, but you know Steve Jones would run a mile if confronted with this level of ability and lyrical dexterity (yes, of course the sculpture/marmalade line gets a crowd singalong), not to mention this level of self-deprecation, especially when Dave Tattersall lays into his own mother's meterological reading skills before bashfully realising exactly who he's talking about. It's pretty much a straight up hits set including one new song and a vocal turn for drummer Jonny Helm on Now You Are Pregnant, and it strikes a fine chord.
Given the roots of New York anti-folk were in simplicity and musical regression and the Moldy Peaches specialised in a child-like wonder at adult themes, it's not entirely surprising Kimya Dawson's new album is for kids, and given the family nature of EOTR it's not surprising she plays bits of it in her set. Her grown-up songs are, well, more of the same, except about relationships rather than scatalogical, but Dawson has a charm that means these ideas come across all the better. Moving from US anti-folk to British blues-folk might have seemed retrograde were it not for the abilities of Liz Green, the reticent young Mancunian whose acoustic jazz influenced take sounds like she's inherited the direct spirit of those captured by Alan Lomax's sound archive, aided by John Fairhurst's nimble fingerpicking. Not at all overwhelmed by the space of the huge Big Top, Green has enough projection in her to go far. Also having a go on his own, his Magnolia Electric Co on hiatus, is Jason Molina on the big stage, in good voice and impeccable suit but with a set that washes straight over us. Maybe it's the fact that we didn't know a lot of these songs, or maybe it's because after two and a half days of general aimless trudging we're for the time being out on our feet.
"Welcome to our festival!" What could revive us? Well, some ragged three-chord garage punk led by a man in military uniform and handlebar moustache, for a start. Billy Childish, possibly the only man in rock who would call a heckler "you silly sausage", and his Musicians of the British Empire are doing what he's been doing for three decades now - raw, scorching beat group/power trio pre-punk with Nuggets/Who/Sonics/Kinks riffs, a Thames Estuary accent and a healthy disregard for everyone else. It's not professional as such - like some self-parody he stops one song because he claims he's forgotten its fourth chord and later spends some time retuning before realising he didn't need to for the next song, while bassist Nurse Julie seems to spend the majority of the 45 minutes giggling even when not forgetting the words to one of her two vocal leads - but it all adds to the gaiety of this bracing racket, and he becomes the first artist we've ever seen fully fill the Big Top. Long live Billy Childish, still doing his own cussedly raucous thing in the face of fashion.
Speaking of anti-fashion... "All weekend people have been coming up to me wanting me to do some of my new stuff" deadpans Darren Hayman at the outset. This is in fact Darren & Jack Play Hefner Songs, the occasional (although the suggestion is this is the last time) roundelay in which Hayman and Hefner multi-instrumentalist Jack Hayter...well...play Hefner songs, here aided by Franic (who gives Amelia Fletcher's vocals on Don't Go a shot, Hayman's first choice Emmy The Great being unavailable) and Jonny of the Wave Pictures. Quietly Hefner's direct riffs and unstinting lovelorn lyrics have become an influential band on a great swathe of the modern indiepop scene, not to mention bred a coterie of slowly ageing fanboys that enable Hayman to step away during the very first song A Hymn For The Postal Service and everyone to shout back the '2, 3, 4..." from the middle of The Hymn For The Cigarettes, which Hayman promptly forgets the words to. Heavier on the early songs, you get the feeling Darren and Jack could have continued all night if they wanted; how they actually finish is a rousing The Day That Thatcher Dies closing with Hayman, Hayter and Dave Tattersall exchanging solos three times over "like on Let It Be".
Jeffrey Lewis also takes the wide angle on his career, but such are his storytelling skills that we even trust him when he leaves one song to Jack. No comic book displays, but there's a new song about how much better Herman Dune were when both brothers were in the band - a very Jeffrey Lewis subject - another elongated version of The Last Time I Did Acid..., that man Tattersall pops by on ukelele for a couple of songs and there's the now obligatory closing with two Crass covers, the last of which, Do They Owe Us A Living, seeing John Darnielle run on to contribute backing vocals. The Garden Stage overrunning means we did what we feared we might not get to do and see the last two songs of Tindersticks' set. They're in particularly velvety form tonight on this short evidence, if by all accounts mostly the new material from The Hungry Saw, a string section aiding these smoky song noirs of experience go over.
Anticipation, aided by a number of namechecks by everyone from Hayman to Charlie Fink, is at fever pitch for The Mountain Goats in the Big Top, and when Darnielle takes the stage properly he gladly acknowledges the reception, prepares himself... and breaks a string with the very first strum. There then follows a five minute hold-up for a replacement, Darnielle attempting to sing Regina Spektor's Samson over the top of drummer John Wurster (ex-Superchunk) keeping the rhythm of that first song, Palmcorder Yajna, going until being called away for running repairs. Just the fact they did Palmcorder Yajna was in keeping with the set, with a few from Heretic Pride mixed with some cherrypicking from the previous few albums, including a new arrangement of Dance Music and a particularly fine Have To Explode. Having played Sept 15 1983 to near silence Darnielle notes our being taken in by the performance - for which, it has to be said, the vocals weren't always audible, and in a Mountain Goats show that's really quite important - and promised "another song about child abuse", which turns out to be This Year, and on that song's rapturous reception he encourages us to sing along to closer No Children, an offer gladly taken up by many. Eventually, then, a triumph and another high water mark in a weekend already full to the brim with them.
Only one thing for us to do now - watch Brakes. It's tradition. So there's all the old favourites, the usual slew of Brakes newcomers bemused and amused by the things everyone else is singing back to Eamon and the lengths of some of the songs - Cheney gets three plays - a couple of promising new songs, a new Tom White haircut (a kind of off-centre Travis Bickle with fringe) and the personal surprise of Isabel and You'll Always Have A Place To Stay, which by our reckoning means that in the seven times we've now seen Brakes or solo Hamilton they've played everything from both albums except Sometimes Always, and they only do that in Brighton for obvious guest reasons. The only guest this time is Hamilton's new wife - we'd thought she'd been introduced as Carla Bozulich, as in the ex-Geraldine Fibbers frontwoman, but checking facts, dates and likelihood we're not sure - who in marrying him has earned herself a lifetime pass of Jackson duets and, frankly, the pair of them making out like teenagers in front of all these people.
And so, for another year, ends this most glorious of festivals, the right setting with the right people at, if not the right time - would you camp in a field in mid-September for anything less? - certainly the right atmosphere, this year enlivened by many properly memorable performances. We've already got our early bird ticket for 2009.
Music.
Sons Of Noel & Adrian, a ten-strong baroque chamber folk collective drawn from that Willkommen Collective we discussed yesterday, open up the Garden Stage with their expansive, brittle and doomed sea shanties, shifting from wistful picking-led melodies to washes of controlled noise and choral vocals with subtlety and grace. Not, as demonstrated by Bon Iver yesterday, that they're all bad, but it's interesting how the populace will fall for any American folkie outfit with a hint of foreboding while this sort of thing remains unbidden, taken up only by those willing to make the effort to dig it out. It feels at once universally sourced and yet a solely British take on what modern folk should mean. Maybe it's because some British bands are too much in thrall to the American traditions to think outside that box - case in point Congregation in the Big Top. Victoria Yeulet has a fine set of hollering blues pipes, working against Benjamin Prosser's 12-bar slide guitar and simultaneous bass drum kick playing, but there's little variation and nothing there to suggest it's going to come soon.
Last year The Wave Pictures packed out the Local tent with fans well before most people had come across them, so obviously they had to get the promotion to the Garden Stage this year. That they don't look overawed by the experience, in fact quite the opposite, is testament to the trio's abilities to wring peculiar gold from the Richman/Hayman template and, live at least, whack in a dollop of compacted Neil Young soloing. They're getting a very odd reaction at the moment, with reviewers comparing them variously to The Enemy, Ocean Colour Scene and assorted other landfill indie acts, but you know Steve Jones would run a mile if confronted with this level of ability and lyrical dexterity (yes, of course the sculpture/marmalade line gets a crowd singalong), not to mention this level of self-deprecation, especially when Dave Tattersall lays into his own mother's meterological reading skills before bashfully realising exactly who he's talking about. It's pretty much a straight up hits set including one new song and a vocal turn for drummer Jonny Helm on Now You Are Pregnant, and it strikes a fine chord.
Given the roots of New York anti-folk were in simplicity and musical regression and the Moldy Peaches specialised in a child-like wonder at adult themes, it's not entirely surprising Kimya Dawson's new album is for kids, and given the family nature of EOTR it's not surprising she plays bits of it in her set. Her grown-up songs are, well, more of the same, except about relationships rather than scatalogical, but Dawson has a charm that means these ideas come across all the better. Moving from US anti-folk to British blues-folk might have seemed retrograde were it not for the abilities of Liz Green, the reticent young Mancunian whose acoustic jazz influenced take sounds like she's inherited the direct spirit of those captured by Alan Lomax's sound archive, aided by John Fairhurst's nimble fingerpicking. Not at all overwhelmed by the space of the huge Big Top, Green has enough projection in her to go far. Also having a go on his own, his Magnolia Electric Co on hiatus, is Jason Molina on the big stage, in good voice and impeccable suit but with a set that washes straight over us. Maybe it's the fact that we didn't know a lot of these songs, or maybe it's because after two and a half days of general aimless trudging we're for the time being out on our feet.
"Welcome to our festival!" What could revive us? Well, some ragged three-chord garage punk led by a man in military uniform and handlebar moustache, for a start. Billy Childish, possibly the only man in rock who would call a heckler "you silly sausage", and his Musicians of the British Empire are doing what he's been doing for three decades now - raw, scorching beat group/power trio pre-punk with Nuggets/Who/Sonics/Kinks riffs, a Thames Estuary accent and a healthy disregard for everyone else. It's not professional as such - like some self-parody he stops one song because he claims he's forgotten its fourth chord and later spends some time retuning before realising he didn't need to for the next song, while bassist Nurse Julie seems to spend the majority of the 45 minutes giggling even when not forgetting the words to one of her two vocal leads - but it all adds to the gaiety of this bracing racket, and he becomes the first artist we've ever seen fully fill the Big Top. Long live Billy Childish, still doing his own cussedly raucous thing in the face of fashion.
Speaking of anti-fashion... "All weekend people have been coming up to me wanting me to do some of my new stuff" deadpans Darren Hayman at the outset. This is in fact Darren & Jack Play Hefner Songs, the occasional (although the suggestion is this is the last time) roundelay in which Hayman and Hefner multi-instrumentalist Jack Hayter...well...play Hefner songs, here aided by Franic (who gives Amelia Fletcher's vocals on Don't Go a shot, Hayman's first choice Emmy The Great being unavailable) and Jonny of the Wave Pictures. Quietly Hefner's direct riffs and unstinting lovelorn lyrics have become an influential band on a great swathe of the modern indiepop scene, not to mention bred a coterie of slowly ageing fanboys that enable Hayman to step away during the very first song A Hymn For The Postal Service and everyone to shout back the '2, 3, 4..." from the middle of The Hymn For The Cigarettes, which Hayman promptly forgets the words to. Heavier on the early songs, you get the feeling Darren and Jack could have continued all night if they wanted; how they actually finish is a rousing The Day That Thatcher Dies closing with Hayman, Hayter and Dave Tattersall exchanging solos three times over "like on Let It Be".
Jeffrey Lewis also takes the wide angle on his career, but such are his storytelling skills that we even trust him when he leaves one song to Jack. No comic book displays, but there's a new song about how much better Herman Dune were when both brothers were in the band - a very Jeffrey Lewis subject - another elongated version of The Last Time I Did Acid..., that man Tattersall pops by on ukelele for a couple of songs and there's the now obligatory closing with two Crass covers, the last of which, Do They Owe Us A Living, seeing John Darnielle run on to contribute backing vocals. The Garden Stage overrunning means we did what we feared we might not get to do and see the last two songs of Tindersticks' set. They're in particularly velvety form tonight on this short evidence, if by all accounts mostly the new material from The Hungry Saw, a string section aiding these smoky song noirs of experience go over.
Anticipation, aided by a number of namechecks by everyone from Hayman to Charlie Fink, is at fever pitch for The Mountain Goats in the Big Top, and when Darnielle takes the stage properly he gladly acknowledges the reception, prepares himself... and breaks a string with the very first strum. There then follows a five minute hold-up for a replacement, Darnielle attempting to sing Regina Spektor's Samson over the top of drummer John Wurster (ex-Superchunk) keeping the rhythm of that first song, Palmcorder Yajna, going until being called away for running repairs. Just the fact they did Palmcorder Yajna was in keeping with the set, with a few from Heretic Pride mixed with some cherrypicking from the previous few albums, including a new arrangement of Dance Music and a particularly fine Have To Explode. Having played Sept 15 1983 to near silence Darnielle notes our being taken in by the performance - for which, it has to be said, the vocals weren't always audible, and in a Mountain Goats show that's really quite important - and promised "another song about child abuse", which turns out to be This Year, and on that song's rapturous reception he encourages us to sing along to closer No Children, an offer gladly taken up by many. Eventually, then, a triumph and another high water mark in a weekend already full to the brim with them.
Only one thing for us to do now - watch Brakes. It's tradition. So there's all the old favourites, the usual slew of Brakes newcomers bemused and amused by the things everyone else is singing back to Eamon and the lengths of some of the songs - Cheney gets three plays - a couple of promising new songs, a new Tom White haircut (a kind of off-centre Travis Bickle with fringe) and the personal surprise of Isabel and You'll Always Have A Place To Stay, which by our reckoning means that in the seven times we've now seen Brakes or solo Hamilton they've played everything from both albums except Sometimes Always, and they only do that in Brighton for obvious guest reasons. The only guest this time is Hamilton's new wife - we'd thought she'd been introduced as Carla Bozulich, as in the ex-Geraldine Fibbers frontwoman, but checking facts, dates and likelihood we're not sure - who in marrying him has earned herself a lifetime pass of Jackson duets and, frankly, the pair of them making out like teenagers in front of all these people.
And so, for another year, ends this most glorious of festivals, the right setting with the right people at, if not the right time - would you camp in a field in mid-September for anything less? - certainly the right atmosphere, this year enlivened by many properly memorable performances. We've already got our early bird ticket for 2009.
Do you like folk music?: End Of The Road Festival Saturday review
Photos
After the rains, the mud, an amorphous sticky gloop that keeps one of our shoes for itself twice and nearly makes a small part of the route between the two major stages and an area near the Bimble Inn impassable. Luckily not a single drop lands for the rest of the weekend, albeit six thousand people walking over it all over the following two days keeps it nice and rugged. Enough weather moaning, then, there's music to be watched.
Absentee open the Garden Stage doing their alt-country-but-more-alt thing, about half and half split between first and forthcoming second albums and with Dan Michaelson's Cohen drawl - hurrah! - actually audible for the most part. There's a lot to be said for them, not least that they do get underrated a good deal, but they're mostly falling on deaf ears this early on and there's not that spark to win them over. Unlike, over in the Big Top, The Accidental. A kind of folktronica supergroup involving one each of Tunng, the Memory Band, the Bicycle Thieves and someone even less famous than the Bicycle Thieves, they exude the right amount of bonhomie and charm, laying aside any electronic leanings in favour of fingerpicked guitars, warm but dark undertones and four-part harmonies, a compelling experience that'd be joyful were it not full of songs about ghosts and bad pubs.
Time to brave the Bimble Inn. Did we mention last year that we never liked the Bimble Inn? It's a teepee shaped tent with cushions and soft flooring down one side and a bar extending about two thirds of the way down, which means you're either stuck at the back unable to see (especially so this year with the wet floor precluding last year's bouts of sitting down) or, due to the talking at the bar, hear anything or you're right under the performer's nose. We're at the back for Threatmantics, so what might well be very loose folk is audibly trampled all over. Doubtless had we properly heard much more they'd have been better suited than Screaming Tea Party, here because their label Stolen Recordings, home to wasters Pete & The Pirates, have chosen this as the perfect spot for a label showcase and they'll bring their part-Japanese screaming noise-poppers featuring a thrashing guitarist in a gas mask and two others wearing golf visors if they have to. Keep the noise down, there's delicate acoustic guitars over there.
And over there on the Garden Stage there's violins, glockenspiels and that bloke off that song off the radio with the odd Bristolian vowels despite being a Londoner. Noah And The Whale, bumped up - but not too far up - the bill in the wake of their top ten album success, aren't as gleefully overawed by the attention as they were at Summer Sundae in the week they broke big, and probably aren't as joyful as the best of their songs suggest they should be played as a result, but they're certainly going for it, and when Five Years Time finally arrives last there's children on shoulders doing the actions, as there should be. Stolen's Let's Wrestle will never get children singing along, or so you'd hope, but their ramshackle indie like mamma used to make has its charms, if not aided by Wesley Patrick Gonzalez being too low in the mix. Followers of their In Loving Memory Of... EP will be interested to know that the band had hired the self same Joe Reddington as their roadie, by which they mean appearing on stage mid-song to deliver a bottle of beer for the bassist.
Because the one thing Brighton's music landscape could do with another of is a micro-scene, the Willkommen Collective is the name of a group of bands who share a folk outlook and personnel, and they've set up camp for an hour by the piano in the woods for each of the bands to have a go, although pretty much all of them are in the band that starts, Shoreline, in any case. Theirs is an expansive, swaying sound lifted by strings (Mike Siddell, who used to be in Hope Of The States and recently seen schlepping around in Lightspeed Champion's footsteps, is in them), banjo and harmonies, and here given further levity by the small boy in full Superman outfit who wanders into the area and stands puzzled in front of the collective for some time. By the time we return after a second, even more wayward set by The Young Republic which this time has the good grace to end on Modern Plays, Sons Of Noel & Adrian are bringing it to a close
It is at this point that we wander down to the other end of the enchanted forest to the lit up dancefloor installed, like the table tennis table a bit further back, for no reason other than because they can. Three children are sitting on the branches of a low hanging tree. One decides to shake the adjacent branch. It near enough takes our head off at the nape of the neck. Their father has spotted this and warns them off trying that again. We turn round. It's Richard Hawley. It's that kind of festival. (Hawley, who we'd seen earlier in the organic pizza tent, dresses off-duty much as you'd expect him to)
Justin Vernon, AKA Bon Iver, seems genuinely taken aback by the size of the crowd that's come to hear how he intends to rework the intimacies of his album to a setting fit for the open air. An hour later, everyone watching is taken aback by what he's done. It's a basic band set-up behind him, but the fleshing out of the songs in no way compromises the gorgeousness and personal touch of those songs famously worked up in a secluded log cabin, if anything enhancing their peaks and Vernon's swooping voice. Gradually Vernon came to know he had everyone at his beck and call, encouraging them to sing along to the end of The Wolves and then howl at the sky, and you don't hear an approving roar when an artist asks if we want to hear a new song much. That song, Blood Bank, has an understandably fuller side but is as raw, keening and loquacious as anything on the album, which bodes well. The other surprise, a cover of Talk Talk's I Believe in You, simultaneously sounded like an original and a faithful reading of the actual original, which takes some doing. The applause is long and heartfelt, and Vernon seems genuinely touched. No wonder. Bringing Bowerbirds on at the end for a heartaching harmony-driven reading of Nashville singer-songwriter Sarah Siskind's Lovin's For Fools put the tin lid on it and screwed it on with industrial force - an absolute, EOTR-winning triumph.
Ah, the Third Battalion are here with their branches and their flags and their, um, Yoda on a stick. That must mean British Sea Power are around to maintain their 100% EOTR appearance run. Playing to what seems to mostly be their crowd BSP choose the cussed route usually only seen in radio sessions, opening with the not immediately obvious A Wooden Horse and later dropping in Like A Honeycomb, an often overlooked track from the often overlooked itself Open Season, and A Lovely Day Tomorrow, one of our favourite BSP songs and given a fine workout here if truth be told but, and there's no getting around this, a seven year old B-side. Otherwise it's the usual spiralling ambition set to socio-historical themes, and they're all the better for it. Overrunning means Lately/Rock In A has to be abandoned from the end of the set, but Martin Noble gives it a go anyway when his guitar packs in halfway through No Lucifer, instead choosing to go over the barrier and have several fateful goes at crowdsurfing, eventually returning with the owner of a meticulous banner heralding 'THE RISE OF IRISH SEA POWER', designed in the same way as their own first album cover. What had gone before demonstrated why people go to such lengths for this band.
After a failed attempt to make anything out of what Birdengine was singing and plucking and a visit to a piano set by Timothy Victor's Folk Orchestra, essentially a very British version of the Coal Porters school of bluegrass hoedown, Low came onto the Garden Stage to darken the mood in more ways than one. Time was when they were as quiet as they were slow, but Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker and whoever's their bassist this week have been upping the amplification for a while now and blazed through the likes of Sunflower, Dinosaur Act and Canada with malice - quiet, stark and careful malice, but still malicious nonetheless - aforethought, with little of the warmth some of their later work has projected.
Now, a confession. We left early to catch the second Acorn set, which meant we missed the talking point of not just the set but the entire festival. Witnesses state that right at the end a string broke on Alan Sparhawk's guitar. Having already confessed to having a bad day, Sparhawk spectacularly lost it, making an attempt to break the thing before grabbing the strap, whirling it round hammer thrower style and launching it full throttle right into the crowd, to a complete stunned silence. Luckily it caused no injury, and the recipient seems quite pleased with his new slight seconds guitar, but you can imagine the pall that caused to fall.
The Acorn, meanwhile, might have been even better in their enclosed space than before, their percussionist taking the advantages by using the Bimble Inn support beams as something else to hammer on as all around ratcheted up the tension and release in the music and there was barely room to breathe for the dancing and general enthusiasm, especially so when Rolf Klausener mentioned almost in passing a couple of minutes after a rapturous finish that they had some free promos of Glory Hope Mountain at the front. There'd have been less of a crush had he said he had free £50 notes to give away. It's not often that Jeremy Warmsley gets overshadowed in our view, but there he was, and he pretty much admitted so. Not that he was bad by any stretch, despite the best efforts of instruments that kept very briefly cutting out, reworking songs from The Art Of Fiction - I Knew Her Face Was A Lie, inspired by seeing a YouTube cover, solo on the piano a highlight, and previewing some of How We Became in its stripped down three-piece live version. The cover of New Order's Temptation makes for a rumbustuous closer, even more so than the still skyscraping Craneflies. Winningly, when he said at the end he had two CDs to sell afterwards, unlike The Acorn he actually meant he had two copies of The Art Of Fiction with him. (And he still had time to educate us in the finer points of high five etiquette)
So out of kilter, despite the drummer's superb beard, with many of those around them they might as well have played Download they may be, but The Chap know how to bring the party. A very specific type of party, though, one that takes the stripped back punk-funk of a Talking Heads from any era you want, injects healthy electro beats and oddness and then slathers it in so much knowing, pop culture referencing archness it makes Franz Ferdinand resemble One Night Only. With judicious use of samples and the odd piece of choreographed shape throwing there's clearly something very wrong about The Chap, a band who could only be fronted by a man called Johannes von Weizsäcker who closes the set by attempting to destroy a cello only by the strength of manaical bow sawing (the horsehair gives in first), but at the same time something very right about their mutant art disco-rock, post-modernism coming right round the back and giving itself a kick up the arse. While dancing.
It's very difficult to dance to Two Gallants, but it's also very difficult to ignore them when within earshot. The passion and righteousness in Adam Stephens' pained holler, while their death blues marches are pumped full of steroids, Tyson Vogel's imaginative drumming against Stephens' less than delicate fingerpicking emerging somewhere near acoustic Led Zeppelin. In the dark of a near midnight, and only just over half full Big Top, these redemption songs are almost terrifying, especially when Las Cruces Jail virtually raises the roof. Given we aren't going to get into the packed Local tent to see Shearwater and with the Modern Ovens (Hamilton and Noble BSP's Jonathan Richman covers band with Matt Eaton and Darren Moon of the Tenderfoot) still an hour and a half away, we consider that a good place to leave it for the second night.
After the rains, the mud, an amorphous sticky gloop that keeps one of our shoes for itself twice and nearly makes a small part of the route between the two major stages and an area near the Bimble Inn impassable. Luckily not a single drop lands for the rest of the weekend, albeit six thousand people walking over it all over the following two days keeps it nice and rugged. Enough weather moaning, then, there's music to be watched.
Absentee open the Garden Stage doing their alt-country-but-more-alt thing, about half and half split between first and forthcoming second albums and with Dan Michaelson's Cohen drawl - hurrah! - actually audible for the most part. There's a lot to be said for them, not least that they do get underrated a good deal, but they're mostly falling on deaf ears this early on and there's not that spark to win them over. Unlike, over in the Big Top, The Accidental. A kind of folktronica supergroup involving one each of Tunng, the Memory Band, the Bicycle Thieves and someone even less famous than the Bicycle Thieves, they exude the right amount of bonhomie and charm, laying aside any electronic leanings in favour of fingerpicked guitars, warm but dark undertones and four-part harmonies, a compelling experience that'd be joyful were it not full of songs about ghosts and bad pubs.
Time to brave the Bimble Inn. Did we mention last year that we never liked the Bimble Inn? It's a teepee shaped tent with cushions and soft flooring down one side and a bar extending about two thirds of the way down, which means you're either stuck at the back unable to see (especially so this year with the wet floor precluding last year's bouts of sitting down) or, due to the talking at the bar, hear anything or you're right under the performer's nose. We're at the back for Threatmantics, so what might well be very loose folk is audibly trampled all over. Doubtless had we properly heard much more they'd have been better suited than Screaming Tea Party, here because their label Stolen Recordings, home to wasters Pete & The Pirates, have chosen this as the perfect spot for a label showcase and they'll bring their part-Japanese screaming noise-poppers featuring a thrashing guitarist in a gas mask and two others wearing golf visors if they have to. Keep the noise down, there's delicate acoustic guitars over there.
And over there on the Garden Stage there's violins, glockenspiels and that bloke off that song off the radio with the odd Bristolian vowels despite being a Londoner. Noah And The Whale, bumped up - but not too far up - the bill in the wake of their top ten album success, aren't as gleefully overawed by the attention as they were at Summer Sundae in the week they broke big, and probably aren't as joyful as the best of their songs suggest they should be played as a result, but they're certainly going for it, and when Five Years Time finally arrives last there's children on shoulders doing the actions, as there should be. Stolen's Let's Wrestle will never get children singing along, or so you'd hope, but their ramshackle indie like mamma used to make has its charms, if not aided by Wesley Patrick Gonzalez being too low in the mix. Followers of their In Loving Memory Of... EP will be interested to know that the band had hired the self same Joe Reddington as their roadie, by which they mean appearing on stage mid-song to deliver a bottle of beer for the bassist.
Because the one thing Brighton's music landscape could do with another of is a micro-scene, the Willkommen Collective is the name of a group of bands who share a folk outlook and personnel, and they've set up camp for an hour by the piano in the woods for each of the bands to have a go, although pretty much all of them are in the band that starts, Shoreline, in any case. Theirs is an expansive, swaying sound lifted by strings (Mike Siddell, who used to be in Hope Of The States and recently seen schlepping around in Lightspeed Champion's footsteps, is in them), banjo and harmonies, and here given further levity by the small boy in full Superman outfit who wanders into the area and stands puzzled in front of the collective for some time. By the time we return after a second, even more wayward set by The Young Republic which this time has the good grace to end on Modern Plays, Sons Of Noel & Adrian are bringing it to a close
It is at this point that we wander down to the other end of the enchanted forest to the lit up dancefloor installed, like the table tennis table a bit further back, for no reason other than because they can. Three children are sitting on the branches of a low hanging tree. One decides to shake the adjacent branch. It near enough takes our head off at the nape of the neck. Their father has spotted this and warns them off trying that again. We turn round. It's Richard Hawley. It's that kind of festival. (Hawley, who we'd seen earlier in the organic pizza tent, dresses off-duty much as you'd expect him to)
Justin Vernon, AKA Bon Iver, seems genuinely taken aback by the size of the crowd that's come to hear how he intends to rework the intimacies of his album to a setting fit for the open air. An hour later, everyone watching is taken aback by what he's done. It's a basic band set-up behind him, but the fleshing out of the songs in no way compromises the gorgeousness and personal touch of those songs famously worked up in a secluded log cabin, if anything enhancing their peaks and Vernon's swooping voice. Gradually Vernon came to know he had everyone at his beck and call, encouraging them to sing along to the end of The Wolves and then howl at the sky, and you don't hear an approving roar when an artist asks if we want to hear a new song much. That song, Blood Bank, has an understandably fuller side but is as raw, keening and loquacious as anything on the album, which bodes well. The other surprise, a cover of Talk Talk's I Believe in You, simultaneously sounded like an original and a faithful reading of the actual original, which takes some doing. The applause is long and heartfelt, and Vernon seems genuinely touched. No wonder. Bringing Bowerbirds on at the end for a heartaching harmony-driven reading of Nashville singer-songwriter Sarah Siskind's Lovin's For Fools put the tin lid on it and screwed it on with industrial force - an absolute, EOTR-winning triumph.
Ah, the Third Battalion are here with their branches and their flags and their, um, Yoda on a stick. That must mean British Sea Power are around to maintain their 100% EOTR appearance run. Playing to what seems to mostly be their crowd BSP choose the cussed route usually only seen in radio sessions, opening with the not immediately obvious A Wooden Horse and later dropping in Like A Honeycomb, an often overlooked track from the often overlooked itself Open Season, and A Lovely Day Tomorrow, one of our favourite BSP songs and given a fine workout here if truth be told but, and there's no getting around this, a seven year old B-side. Otherwise it's the usual spiralling ambition set to socio-historical themes, and they're all the better for it. Overrunning means Lately/Rock In A has to be abandoned from the end of the set, but Martin Noble gives it a go anyway when his guitar packs in halfway through No Lucifer, instead choosing to go over the barrier and have several fateful goes at crowdsurfing, eventually returning with the owner of a meticulous banner heralding 'THE RISE OF IRISH SEA POWER', designed in the same way as their own first album cover. What had gone before demonstrated why people go to such lengths for this band.
After a failed attempt to make anything out of what Birdengine was singing and plucking and a visit to a piano set by Timothy Victor's Folk Orchestra, essentially a very British version of the Coal Porters school of bluegrass hoedown, Low came onto the Garden Stage to darken the mood in more ways than one. Time was when they were as quiet as they were slow, but Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker and whoever's their bassist this week have been upping the amplification for a while now and blazed through the likes of Sunflower, Dinosaur Act and Canada with malice - quiet, stark and careful malice, but still malicious nonetheless - aforethought, with little of the warmth some of their later work has projected.
Now, a confession. We left early to catch the second Acorn set, which meant we missed the talking point of not just the set but the entire festival. Witnesses state that right at the end a string broke on Alan Sparhawk's guitar. Having already confessed to having a bad day, Sparhawk spectacularly lost it, making an attempt to break the thing before grabbing the strap, whirling it round hammer thrower style and launching it full throttle right into the crowd, to a complete stunned silence. Luckily it caused no injury, and the recipient seems quite pleased with his new slight seconds guitar, but you can imagine the pall that caused to fall.
The Acorn, meanwhile, might have been even better in their enclosed space than before, their percussionist taking the advantages by using the Bimble Inn support beams as something else to hammer on as all around ratcheted up the tension and release in the music and there was barely room to breathe for the dancing and general enthusiasm, especially so when Rolf Klausener mentioned almost in passing a couple of minutes after a rapturous finish that they had some free promos of Glory Hope Mountain at the front. There'd have been less of a crush had he said he had free £50 notes to give away. It's not often that Jeremy Warmsley gets overshadowed in our view, but there he was, and he pretty much admitted so. Not that he was bad by any stretch, despite the best efforts of instruments that kept very briefly cutting out, reworking songs from The Art Of Fiction - I Knew Her Face Was A Lie, inspired by seeing a YouTube cover, solo on the piano a highlight, and previewing some of How We Became in its stripped down three-piece live version. The cover of New Order's Temptation makes for a rumbustuous closer, even more so than the still skyscraping Craneflies. Winningly, when he said at the end he had two CDs to sell afterwards, unlike The Acorn he actually meant he had two copies of The Art Of Fiction with him. (And he still had time to educate us in the finer points of high five etiquette)
So out of kilter, despite the drummer's superb beard, with many of those around them they might as well have played Download they may be, but The Chap know how to bring the party. A very specific type of party, though, one that takes the stripped back punk-funk of a Talking Heads from any era you want, injects healthy electro beats and oddness and then slathers it in so much knowing, pop culture referencing archness it makes Franz Ferdinand resemble One Night Only. With judicious use of samples and the odd piece of choreographed shape throwing there's clearly something very wrong about The Chap, a band who could only be fronted by a man called Johannes von Weizsäcker who closes the set by attempting to destroy a cello only by the strength of manaical bow sawing (the horsehair gives in first), but at the same time something very right about their mutant art disco-rock, post-modernism coming right round the back and giving itself a kick up the arse. While dancing.
It's very difficult to dance to Two Gallants, but it's also very difficult to ignore them when within earshot. The passion and righteousness in Adam Stephens' pained holler, while their death blues marches are pumped full of steroids, Tyson Vogel's imaginative drumming against Stephens' less than delicate fingerpicking emerging somewhere near acoustic Led Zeppelin. In the dark of a near midnight, and only just over half full Big Top, these redemption songs are almost terrifying, especially when Las Cruces Jail virtually raises the roof. Given we aren't going to get into the packed Local tent to see Shearwater and with the Modern Ovens (Hamilton and Noble BSP's Jonathan Richman covers band with Matt Eaton and Darren Moon of the Tenderfoot) still an hour and a half away, we consider that a good place to leave it for the second night.
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Wiltshire music club: End Of The Road Festival Friday review
Photos
Coming away from our first End Of The Road Festival this time last year (follow the tag link) we genuinely thought about not going back for the plain reason that they'd never top that bill and any further investment might dull the memory of what a wonderful thing had going on here at Larmer Tree Gardens. Then we decided we were being silly, as it'd be far better regarded among bands, bookers and potential ticket buyers after proving they could do it for a second year, and bought an early bird ticket. Eventually announcements started being made, and we felt smugger with each one. Then it sold out, and notwithstanding worries over space we were pleased. This, if we're honest, was the festival we were most looking forward to this year, and things looked even more up, overcast skies aside, when we clocked how many more stalls and food outlets they'd managed to fit into a relatively small space.
In truth, those leaden clouds above would play a large part in the Friday proceedings, meaning that when Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin open the Garden Stage with their preppy, peppy 60s hooks in thrall to the Shins and first album Weezer, the combination of the conditions and the small, unenthusiastic crowd mean they pass by without making an impact. It's when we retreat to the Big Top that we realise that in those terms it's not going to be all plain sailing - the heavy rain that did for parts of Bestival in this area of Britain the previous weekend have left the entrance to the marquee muddy already, not to mention that sound problems mean a steward is still blocking the entrance more than twenty minutes after the first band are meant to have started.
But when they're sorted, there are much worse ways of kicking off a stage for the long weekend than Gossamer Albatross. Showcasing a set of songs not even on the demo EP circulated at the end of last year, there's a confidence about their ability and Lewis Gordon's vocal and melancholic storytelling beyond their years, recalling not just the regular touchstones of Beirut (if Zach next chose next to investigate the folk music of Britain) and Final Fantasy but through to the lofty perch of Neutral Milk Hotel and the 'Big Music' of the Waterboys. Some of the intricacies, as well as Gordon's vocal in the mix, as lost when they introduce a rhythm section and rock out, as much as they do, but the towering ambition is intact and that they're about to work with Jeremy Warmsley makes sense given the similar construction of these apparently very new full band songs. You really feel that this is a band perched on the edge of having a great deal of national attention come their way and who are gaining the confidence to take it head on.
Trying to work out who Cats In Paris take after isn't so easy. Not that there aren't touchstones, it's just they spread them out over a wide area and then attempt to cram them into the same four minutes, where analogue synths crash into pop hooks hiding in heavily compressed prog structures and emerge into the freak-folk undergrowth amid surrealist imagery. Comparisons to Deerhoof can be drawn, or perhaps Animal Collective if they'd first heard Bearsuit, but there's little so wilfully self-indulgent or atonal, except perhaps for the screaming bits, just the mere ADD musical schizophrenia as Michael Watson darts between synth, violin and mike as he carefully lays down his jigsaw piece of experimental cut and paste pop with harmonies that remembers it's still worth dancing to. It should be a mess, but as it is it almost demands you go away and think through what you just heard to see how it all makes sense.
That this was all going off inside the Big Top was lucky, as outside it had started pelting down and will do for much of the evening, causing not nice conditions underfoot, puddles to form and everyone who had the foresight to bring wellies to don them (don't look at us like that). Many, however, still brave the rain for The Acorn, and it becomes apparent during the weekend's first, but not last, properly magical set that this is a band worth braving anything up to and including plagues of locusts to see live. Their album, Glory Hope Mountain (out in the UK in roughly a month's time), is an inventive work but one that needs time and effort; translated to the stage, though, it bursts into spectral life, a dynamic reworking of the album's pastoral themes that brings them into glorious rhythmic, energetic technicolour. Starting with its best song Crooked Legs helps, but throughout the Canadians' wealth of instrumentation and the sheer grace and power Rolf Klausener invests in these lushly arranged, meticulous songs of experience and hope alongside his six bandmates' invention, making these wide open Gardens spaces seem all the more intimate. It's a triumph, and if there isn't a wave of hype by the album's release there's something very wrong.
The Big Top still just about running late means we have time to catch the end of The Young Republic's set. Last year their careering multi-handed Americana was a joy, but despite the eight on stage clearly having a whale of a time there's little actual spark coming off them, despite a spirited run through Girl From The Northern States. Similarly, as the rain hits its worst, A Hawk And A Hacksaw's Baltic hoedowns struggle manfully to make an audience connection and carry lugubriously on for a trifle too long. Faring better inside the Big Top is Peter and the Wolf, against what it has to be said are some odds as despite the name it's one bloke, Red Hunter, mostly with just a ukelele and his plaintive vocals performing a couple of songs he claims to have written the other day in a quietly mesmeric set.
Laura Marling, sporting a new fringe bowl cut as well as a suit jacket, seems to be in a Boris Johnson fashion phase. Despite not quite looking like she's got over the nerves stage of playing live to large audiences and barely saying a word from stage entrance to last song, she's far more composed than that, though, doing that whole effortlessly drawing the listener into her fragile world thing, aided by a fine band, not least in the all-round abilities of Marcus Mumford, possibly pop's only accordion-playing drummer. A new song confirms her advancing abilities with finding the key to the heart. The real deal? She's done more than enough to make such notions hackneyed. The rain chooses this moment to cease after a good twenty minutes of concurrent sunshine, leading to two rainbows. It seems to fit.
What a thing of wonder is Warren Ellis - the man, the stare, the beard. Dirty Three's music may be instrumental, usually a signifier for members to concentrate on their instruments as if in open heart surgery, but while Mick Turner seems immoveable and Jim white looks imperturbable while playing complex drum patterns Ellis and violin are off all round the place, high kicking and swooping in on his bandmates' instruments. And while live instrumental music is often fated to dull longeurs, the pitch and yaw of Dirty Three's sound, Ellis and amp whipping bow across strings with virtuoso ease while making one violin sound like a roomful while Turner's guitar alternates between carefully picked out wonder and shoegazing noisescaping, is inescapably exciting. And then the song ends and Ellis sets off freestyling for a couple of minutes about what the next song may or may not be about, once announcing it to be Everything's Fucked with clear relish at the end of a spiel during which he detailed exactly how he'd caused the previous day's Channel Tunnel fire. Completely captivating, intense and unique, it's a rare object lesson in how music without words can be even more of a spectacle than with. The bit of Robyn Hitchcock we catch mid-set can't really compete. Almost completely alone this year - he invites his sisters on for some close harmony and later has another guitarist join him - and still able to construct a setlist half of which you won't know, such is his back catalogue (although closing with a fine version of the Soft Boys' Queen Of Eyes) and banter that makes Ellis' look monosyllabic and obvious, but it's not as engaging as last year with John Paul Jones.
Somewhere among the talking in the expanded and moved away from the main stage from last year Local stage we catch the end of One Little Plane's set, Kathryn Bint delivering charming and slightly offbeat singer-songwriter fare in the Emiliana Torrini mode but with space still ahead of her to develop. Someone well developed in the art of standing out from the crowd is Mark Eitzel, and while we've never really got round to investigating American Music Club properly that's clearly very remiss of us on this form. The behatted Eitzel comes on like a preacher, passionately spitting out tales of betrayal and black humour in a crooning wild-eyed style which Nick Cave seems to have taken extensive notes from, the very apotheosis of this damaged emotional bar-room alt-rock. Following them into the Big Top come Akron/Family, the trio in their hooded, headbanded, robed finery and starting with some campfire ohm-ing that lasted for some time. And then some time further. And some more on top of that, so much so that we decided they were having one of those improv self-indulgence nights and left. It seems to have turned shortly afterwards into a feedback frenzy involving The Acorn and sundry audience members. Well, it had to happen.
Coming away from our first End Of The Road Festival this time last year (follow the tag link) we genuinely thought about not going back for the plain reason that they'd never top that bill and any further investment might dull the memory of what a wonderful thing had going on here at Larmer Tree Gardens. Then we decided we were being silly, as it'd be far better regarded among bands, bookers and potential ticket buyers after proving they could do it for a second year, and bought an early bird ticket. Eventually announcements started being made, and we felt smugger with each one. Then it sold out, and notwithstanding worries over space we were pleased. This, if we're honest, was the festival we were most looking forward to this year, and things looked even more up, overcast skies aside, when we clocked how many more stalls and food outlets they'd managed to fit into a relatively small space.
In truth, those leaden clouds above would play a large part in the Friday proceedings, meaning that when Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin open the Garden Stage with their preppy, peppy 60s hooks in thrall to the Shins and first album Weezer, the combination of the conditions and the small, unenthusiastic crowd mean they pass by without making an impact. It's when we retreat to the Big Top that we realise that in those terms it's not going to be all plain sailing - the heavy rain that did for parts of Bestival in this area of Britain the previous weekend have left the entrance to the marquee muddy already, not to mention that sound problems mean a steward is still blocking the entrance more than twenty minutes after the first band are meant to have started.
But when they're sorted, there are much worse ways of kicking off a stage for the long weekend than Gossamer Albatross. Showcasing a set of songs not even on the demo EP circulated at the end of last year, there's a confidence about their ability and Lewis Gordon's vocal and melancholic storytelling beyond their years, recalling not just the regular touchstones of Beirut (if Zach next chose next to investigate the folk music of Britain) and Final Fantasy but through to the lofty perch of Neutral Milk Hotel and the 'Big Music' of the Waterboys. Some of the intricacies, as well as Gordon's vocal in the mix, as lost when they introduce a rhythm section and rock out, as much as they do, but the towering ambition is intact and that they're about to work with Jeremy Warmsley makes sense given the similar construction of these apparently very new full band songs. You really feel that this is a band perched on the edge of having a great deal of national attention come their way and who are gaining the confidence to take it head on.
Trying to work out who Cats In Paris take after isn't so easy. Not that there aren't touchstones, it's just they spread them out over a wide area and then attempt to cram them into the same four minutes, where analogue synths crash into pop hooks hiding in heavily compressed prog structures and emerge into the freak-folk undergrowth amid surrealist imagery. Comparisons to Deerhoof can be drawn, or perhaps Animal Collective if they'd first heard Bearsuit, but there's little so wilfully self-indulgent or atonal, except perhaps for the screaming bits, just the mere ADD musical schizophrenia as Michael Watson darts between synth, violin and mike as he carefully lays down his jigsaw piece of experimental cut and paste pop with harmonies that remembers it's still worth dancing to. It should be a mess, but as it is it almost demands you go away and think through what you just heard to see how it all makes sense.
That this was all going off inside the Big Top was lucky, as outside it had started pelting down and will do for much of the evening, causing not nice conditions underfoot, puddles to form and everyone who had the foresight to bring wellies to don them (don't look at us like that). Many, however, still brave the rain for The Acorn, and it becomes apparent during the weekend's first, but not last, properly magical set that this is a band worth braving anything up to and including plagues of locusts to see live. Their album, Glory Hope Mountain (out in the UK in roughly a month's time), is an inventive work but one that needs time and effort; translated to the stage, though, it bursts into spectral life, a dynamic reworking of the album's pastoral themes that brings them into glorious rhythmic, energetic technicolour. Starting with its best song Crooked Legs helps, but throughout the Canadians' wealth of instrumentation and the sheer grace and power Rolf Klausener invests in these lushly arranged, meticulous songs of experience and hope alongside his six bandmates' invention, making these wide open Gardens spaces seem all the more intimate. It's a triumph, and if there isn't a wave of hype by the album's release there's something very wrong.
The Big Top still just about running late means we have time to catch the end of The Young Republic's set. Last year their careering multi-handed Americana was a joy, but despite the eight on stage clearly having a whale of a time there's little actual spark coming off them, despite a spirited run through Girl From The Northern States. Similarly, as the rain hits its worst, A Hawk And A Hacksaw's Baltic hoedowns struggle manfully to make an audience connection and carry lugubriously on for a trifle too long. Faring better inside the Big Top is Peter and the Wolf, against what it has to be said are some odds as despite the name it's one bloke, Red Hunter, mostly with just a ukelele and his plaintive vocals performing a couple of songs he claims to have written the other day in a quietly mesmeric set.
Laura Marling, sporting a new fringe bowl cut as well as a suit jacket, seems to be in a Boris Johnson fashion phase. Despite not quite looking like she's got over the nerves stage of playing live to large audiences and barely saying a word from stage entrance to last song, she's far more composed than that, though, doing that whole effortlessly drawing the listener into her fragile world thing, aided by a fine band, not least in the all-round abilities of Marcus Mumford, possibly pop's only accordion-playing drummer. A new song confirms her advancing abilities with finding the key to the heart. The real deal? She's done more than enough to make such notions hackneyed. The rain chooses this moment to cease after a good twenty minutes of concurrent sunshine, leading to two rainbows. It seems to fit.
What a thing of wonder is Warren Ellis - the man, the stare, the beard. Dirty Three's music may be instrumental, usually a signifier for members to concentrate on their instruments as if in open heart surgery, but while Mick Turner seems immoveable and Jim white looks imperturbable while playing complex drum patterns Ellis and violin are off all round the place, high kicking and swooping in on his bandmates' instruments. And while live instrumental music is often fated to dull longeurs, the pitch and yaw of Dirty Three's sound, Ellis and amp whipping bow across strings with virtuoso ease while making one violin sound like a roomful while Turner's guitar alternates between carefully picked out wonder and shoegazing noisescaping, is inescapably exciting. And then the song ends and Ellis sets off freestyling for a couple of minutes about what the next song may or may not be about, once announcing it to be Everything's Fucked with clear relish at the end of a spiel during which he detailed exactly how he'd caused the previous day's Channel Tunnel fire. Completely captivating, intense and unique, it's a rare object lesson in how music without words can be even more of a spectacle than with. The bit of Robyn Hitchcock we catch mid-set can't really compete. Almost completely alone this year - he invites his sisters on for some close harmony and later has another guitarist join him - and still able to construct a setlist half of which you won't know, such is his back catalogue (although closing with a fine version of the Soft Boys' Queen Of Eyes) and banter that makes Ellis' look monosyllabic and obvious, but it's not as engaging as last year with John Paul Jones.
Somewhere among the talking in the expanded and moved away from the main stage from last year Local stage we catch the end of One Little Plane's set, Kathryn Bint delivering charming and slightly offbeat singer-songwriter fare in the Emiliana Torrini mode but with space still ahead of her to develop. Someone well developed in the art of standing out from the crowd is Mark Eitzel, and while we've never really got round to investigating American Music Club properly that's clearly very remiss of us on this form. The behatted Eitzel comes on like a preacher, passionately spitting out tales of betrayal and black humour in a crooning wild-eyed style which Nick Cave seems to have taken extensive notes from, the very apotheosis of this damaged emotional bar-room alt-rock. Following them into the Big Top come Akron/Family, the trio in their hooded, headbanded, robed finery and starting with some campfire ohm-ing that lasted for some time. And then some time further. And some more on top of that, so much so that we decided they were having one of those improv self-indulgence nights and left. It seems to have turned shortly afterwards into a feedback frenzy involving The Acorn and sundry audience members. Well, it had to happen.
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
Thoughts
Which is more disturbing - Zane Lowe's apparent belief that his whole listenership is hanging on his every word desperately hoping for news of the new Razorlight single, or that he might be right?
Colin Murray would be a really decent radio host is he could just stop being "Colin Murray". In the space of his first link on Wednesday he stated an apparently genuine belief that the Mercury Music Prize was named in honour of Freddie Mercury and pretty much libelled Alison Krauss in the cause of dismissing her life's work in favour of labelling her a MILF supreme.
Nobody believed us when we said in advance of the nominations that Elbow would win, when come the evening it was obvious - Radiohead wouldn't win with this when they didn't win with OK Computer, the panel would be subconsciously wary of garlanding another debut album with Myths Of The Near Future already ageing, while Untrue (odds on favourite!) is technically superb and reflects exactly where forward thinking British urban music should be, but it's not the sort of thing you'd put on for forty minutes' pleasure.
We've worked it out. Oasis' The Shock Of The Lightning resembles a mashup in which Bring It On Down has been artlessly pasted on top of the intro to Stereolab's Wow And Flutter.
Alright, Noah And The Whale reissuing Shape Of My Heart we can see the financial logic in, even if it is the next nearest they've had to a hit (and Rocks And Daggers seems to go down just as well live, although that could be because they played it straight after 5 Years Time and in that situation launching into the theme from Ovide would have gone down well). But Vampire Weekend supporting an October tour by re-releasing A-Punk? Fuck off with ya!
Did anyone else hear the half-time 5 Live coverage of the Croatia-England game? Specifically, the bit where they replayed Alan Green's commentary of Walcott's goal preceded by a sizeable section of the intro to The Walkmen's The Rat. We genuinely thought for a moment we'd put 6 Music on accidentally.
Given all most people knew in advance of the Large Hadron Collider was that there was a chance it'd end the world, we'd suggest CERN's scientific advance is somewhat tempered by their poor abilities at PR. (Yes, it does count, that D:Ream bloke, remember)
Come on, Ovide? Some sort of cartoon duck? Went out early on in the Children's BBC slot and before Going Live? "More top tales of Ovide Video/The gang's all here, let's get on with the show, yeah let's go"?
Being a rotten cash-in approximation of the Killers is one thing; being a rotten cash-in approximation of the Hold Steady another. To be both, and still end up sounding like American Hi-Fi, means the Gaslight Anthem are surely worthy of some sort of anti-commendation award.
Even this far on, is September 11th really the best day to be playing Eels' Souljacker? We have a very distinct memory of E in full beard mode being interviewed about this on the Big Breakfast bed on that very morning.
There is little more satisfying in life than watching the scrolling song display on a DAB radio slowly spell out 'Dananananaykroyd'.
End Of The Road? Come back tomorrow to Friday inclusive.
Colin Murray would be a really decent radio host is he could just stop being "Colin Murray". In the space of his first link on Wednesday he stated an apparently genuine belief that the Mercury Music Prize was named in honour of Freddie Mercury and pretty much libelled Alison Krauss in the cause of dismissing her life's work in favour of labelling her a MILF supreme.
Nobody believed us when we said in advance of the nominations that Elbow would win, when come the evening it was obvious - Radiohead wouldn't win with this when they didn't win with OK Computer, the panel would be subconsciously wary of garlanding another debut album with Myths Of The Near Future already ageing, while Untrue (odds on favourite!) is technically superb and reflects exactly where forward thinking British urban music should be, but it's not the sort of thing you'd put on for forty minutes' pleasure.
We've worked it out. Oasis' The Shock Of The Lightning resembles a mashup in which Bring It On Down has been artlessly pasted on top of the intro to Stereolab's Wow And Flutter.
Alright, Noah And The Whale reissuing Shape Of My Heart we can see the financial logic in, even if it is the next nearest they've had to a hit (and Rocks And Daggers seems to go down just as well live, although that could be because they played it straight after 5 Years Time and in that situation launching into the theme from Ovide would have gone down well). But Vampire Weekend supporting an October tour by re-releasing A-Punk? Fuck off with ya!
Did anyone else hear the half-time 5 Live coverage of the Croatia-England game? Specifically, the bit where they replayed Alan Green's commentary of Walcott's goal preceded by a sizeable section of the intro to The Walkmen's The Rat. We genuinely thought for a moment we'd put 6 Music on accidentally.
Given all most people knew in advance of the Large Hadron Collider was that there was a chance it'd end the world, we'd suggest CERN's scientific advance is somewhat tempered by their poor abilities at PR. (Yes, it does count, that D:Ream bloke, remember)
Come on, Ovide? Some sort of cartoon duck? Went out early on in the Children's BBC slot and before Going Live? "More top tales of Ovide Video/The gang's all here, let's get on with the show, yeah let's go"?
Being a rotten cash-in approximation of the Killers is one thing; being a rotten cash-in approximation of the Hold Steady another. To be both, and still end up sounding like American Hi-Fi, means the Gaslight Anthem are surely worthy of some sort of anti-commendation award.
Even this far on, is September 11th really the best day to be playing Eels' Souljacker? We have a very distinct memory of E in full beard mode being interviewed about this on the Big Breakfast bed on that very morning.
There is little more satisfying in life than watching the scrolling song display on a DAB radio slowly spell out 'Dananananaykroyd'.
End Of The Road? Come back tomorrow to Friday inclusive.
Sunday, September 07, 2008
Weekender : a double dose from far away
WHAT CD?
- So actually out this week is the Thomas Tantrum album, for details of which see last week, as well as underwhelming albums from bands with good pasts (Emiliana Torrini, Calexico) and frankly uninteresting albums from bands with no pasts (trust us, you'll wonder what on earth came over you regarding Glasvegas in eighteen months). Top of our list, then, is The Holy Pictures, the latest departure in the never less than fascinating career arc of David Holmes, from atmospheric techno to field recorded imaginary noir soundtrack to distorted funk beats to the Free Association outing to everyone's choice of actual film soundtrack composer, is now dipping into krautrock and distortion territory with a debut shot at singing, the better to express some properly heart on sleeve lyrics. Also out this week is the second in the Broken Social Scene Presents... offshoot series, and while, like Kevin Drew's Spirit If from last year, now Brendan Canning's Something For All Of Us really make you wonder how these songs might well have been better with the other as a sounding board, this is still a fine set of low-key wonderments in the lower budget BSS sense, plus the odd funk, folk and dance curveball.
- Disturbing detail of the week: Johnny Foreigner, who we understand we ought to hate now, and Dananananaykroyd are prominently featured in the current issue of low grade not-quite-showing-breasts magazine Front. As far as extending the brand goes, extending it to the kind of bedroom onanist whose traditional serving between sessions of buffing the happy lamp is sub-Gub Smith attempts to catch the zeigeist of 1995 while blindfolded is a risky one. Berrow, Southern & Laidley, noisesmiths by appointment to the gentry, reach single number three from the no-seriously-why-don't-you-own-it? Waited Up Til It Was Light, the percussion (both natural and electronic) favouring Salt, Peppa & Spinderella, which comes on 10" with remixes from Bloc Party (Gordon, apparently), Dolby Anol feat. Acrnym (two variant pseudonyms for a mysterious moonlighting collective who might have already been mentioned in this bit) and Nibiru (some bloke who's engineered Sasha & Digweed, apparently). British Sea Power have a single out too, but it's just Waving Flags on download again and nobody's playlisted it this time either.
- In 'other stuff': David and Stephen Dewaele have plenty of buttons to push, whether as Soulwax or 2manydjs, and Part Of The Weekend Never Dies, by Klaxons, Hot Chip and Janet Jackson video director Saam Farahmand, is by extension more than a live document of their club-friendly shows supporting their Nite Versions album, recorded over 120 shows with a range of off-duty footage and testimonies. While one 80s eccentric, archdrude Julian Cope, sees his solo and Teardrop Explodes video compilation Copeulation make it to DVD, another has his personality, opinions, lyrics and cultural reference points examined by Len Brown, the former journalist who has met the subject more often than anyone else in a professional writing capacity, in Meetings With Morrissey.
- As for next week: Edinburgh raised singer-songwriter Kat Flint got fans to pay for the recording of Dirty Birds and she's repayed them with an album that's too slippery for that folky acoustic-toting female singer-songwriterly mode, dark, intelligent, captivating writing fitting off-melodic songs that unveil their full loveliness in their own time, aided with a warm, affecting voice and a knack for using unusual instrumentation in an unshowy way so you don't realise until much later that that's, say, scissors and a roll of sellotape being used there. Cold War Kids' pounding career high to date Something Is Not Right With Me leads the singles field that also features Bon Iver (For Emma), The Spinto Band (Summer Grof) and The Week That Was (The Airport Line), but the thing we'd most like to highlight from w/b 15th September is a book. Last year the Guardian's Dave Simpson set out to write an article about the Fall's celebrated turnover of members, in light of Mark E Smith's own autobiography plans. Simpson ended up spending two years attempting to track and interview all 55, with fascinating results documented in The Fallen: Searching For The Missing Members Of The Fall. It really is a wonderful and frightening world in there.
MYSPACE INVADERS: Haven't had a Cardiff band for a while, so let's have one now. Joy Of Sex are a multi-gendered trio who sound like a wired, boggle-eyed take on the fuzzily taut Pixies/Wire dynamic with criss-crossing vocals, wrecked song structures and seeming stream of conscious while still meaningful lyrics, and if all that sounds familiar to long time STN readers then it should be clarified that they do indeed share a kinship with The Victorian English Gentlemens Club. And frankly, two bands mining this seam (not that they're a straight ripoff by any means, we hasten to add) is far better than none.
VISUAL AID: So, what's this End Of The Road festival all about? Ooh, all sorts, and as we disappear ready for next weekend - come on, three day band of high pressure, just for us - these is the sort of places where you'll find us. There's the bands who seem to be making it a second home, like British Sea Power and the outfit whose frontman will inevitably join them at some stage during Rock In A, Brakes. Will this really be the sixth time in just over two years we've seen them? How many times will we nearly bodily run into Tom White this year? Place bet now! The Wave Pictures are back too and they'll doubtless be gadding about with friends Jeffrey Lewis and Darren Hayman, possibly even a revival of the latter's semi-secret Hayman Watkins Trout & Lee set from last year. Beyond those returning to the scene of past glories there's plenty of artists we'll be seeing for the first time - Mercury Rev are the most appetising of the headliners, but we'll be making sure we're present for the likes of The Mountain Goats, Tindersticks and Bon Iver, not to mention a host of new bands we've championed recently such as The Chap, The Acorn and Gossamer Albatross, plus, in a tent that won't be half big enough, Shearwater. Bon voyage!
LINKS EFFECT
* A few quick things: Jeffrey Lewis' music store is selling City And Eastern Tapes, a new companion to his City And Eastern Songs album in that it's that album in early lo-fi form plus a few unreleased songs. Rhodri Marsden writes lucidly on 'The Futility Of Flogging Music', while in less intelligent spheres Weebl & Bob do Ladytron. Weebl as Mira Aroyo is just worrying. Right, we're out. Back on the 16th.
- So actually out this week is the Thomas Tantrum album, for details of which see last week, as well as underwhelming albums from bands with good pasts (Emiliana Torrini, Calexico) and frankly uninteresting albums from bands with no pasts (trust us, you'll wonder what on earth came over you regarding Glasvegas in eighteen months). Top of our list, then, is The Holy Pictures, the latest departure in the never less than fascinating career arc of David Holmes, from atmospheric techno to field recorded imaginary noir soundtrack to distorted funk beats to the Free Association outing to everyone's choice of actual film soundtrack composer, is now dipping into krautrock and distortion territory with a debut shot at singing, the better to express some properly heart on sleeve lyrics. Also out this week is the second in the Broken Social Scene Presents... offshoot series, and while, like Kevin Drew's Spirit If from last year, now Brendan Canning's Something For All Of Us really make you wonder how these songs might well have been better with the other as a sounding board, this is still a fine set of low-key wonderments in the lower budget BSS sense, plus the odd funk, folk and dance curveball.
- Disturbing detail of the week: Johnny Foreigner, who we understand we ought to hate now, and Dananananaykroyd are prominently featured in the current issue of low grade not-quite-showing-breasts magazine Front. As far as extending the brand goes, extending it to the kind of bedroom onanist whose traditional serving between sessions of buffing the happy lamp is sub-Gub Smith attempts to catch the zeigeist of 1995 while blindfolded is a risky one. Berrow, Southern & Laidley, noisesmiths by appointment to the gentry, reach single number three from the no-seriously-why-don't-you-own-it? Waited Up Til It Was Light, the percussion (both natural and electronic) favouring Salt, Peppa & Spinderella, which comes on 10" with remixes from Bloc Party (Gordon, apparently), Dolby Anol feat. Acrnym (two variant pseudonyms for a mysterious moonlighting collective who might have already been mentioned in this bit) and Nibiru (some bloke who's engineered Sasha & Digweed, apparently). British Sea Power have a single out too, but it's just Waving Flags on download again and nobody's playlisted it this time either.
- In 'other stuff': David and Stephen Dewaele have plenty of buttons to push, whether as Soulwax or 2manydjs, and Part Of The Weekend Never Dies, by Klaxons, Hot Chip and Janet Jackson video director Saam Farahmand, is by extension more than a live document of their club-friendly shows supporting their Nite Versions album, recorded over 120 shows with a range of off-duty footage and testimonies. While one 80s eccentric, archdrude Julian Cope, sees his solo and Teardrop Explodes video compilation Copeulation make it to DVD, another has his personality, opinions, lyrics and cultural reference points examined by Len Brown, the former journalist who has met the subject more often than anyone else in a professional writing capacity, in Meetings With Morrissey.
- As for next week: Edinburgh raised singer-songwriter Kat Flint got fans to pay for the recording of Dirty Birds and she's repayed them with an album that's too slippery for that folky acoustic-toting female singer-songwriterly mode, dark, intelligent, captivating writing fitting off-melodic songs that unveil their full loveliness in their own time, aided with a warm, affecting voice and a knack for using unusual instrumentation in an unshowy way so you don't realise until much later that that's, say, scissors and a roll of sellotape being used there. Cold War Kids' pounding career high to date Something Is Not Right With Me leads the singles field that also features Bon Iver (For Emma), The Spinto Band (Summer Grof) and The Week That Was (The Airport Line), but the thing we'd most like to highlight from w/b 15th September is a book. Last year the Guardian's Dave Simpson set out to write an article about the Fall's celebrated turnover of members, in light of Mark E Smith's own autobiography plans. Simpson ended up spending two years attempting to track and interview all 55, with fascinating results documented in The Fallen: Searching For The Missing Members Of The Fall. It really is a wonderful and frightening world in there.
MYSPACE INVADERS: Haven't had a Cardiff band for a while, so let's have one now. Joy Of Sex are a multi-gendered trio who sound like a wired, boggle-eyed take on the fuzzily taut Pixies/Wire dynamic with criss-crossing vocals, wrecked song structures and seeming stream of conscious while still meaningful lyrics, and if all that sounds familiar to long time STN readers then it should be clarified that they do indeed share a kinship with The Victorian English Gentlemens Club. And frankly, two bands mining this seam (not that they're a straight ripoff by any means, we hasten to add) is far better than none.
VISUAL AID: So, what's this End Of The Road festival all about? Ooh, all sorts, and as we disappear ready for next weekend - come on, three day band of high pressure, just for us - these is the sort of places where you'll find us. There's the bands who seem to be making it a second home, like British Sea Power and the outfit whose frontman will inevitably join them at some stage during Rock In A, Brakes. Will this really be the sixth time in just over two years we've seen them? How many times will we nearly bodily run into Tom White this year? Place bet now! The Wave Pictures are back too and they'll doubtless be gadding about with friends Jeffrey Lewis and Darren Hayman, possibly even a revival of the latter's semi-secret Hayman Watkins Trout & Lee set from last year. Beyond those returning to the scene of past glories there's plenty of artists we'll be seeing for the first time - Mercury Rev are the most appetising of the headliners, but we'll be making sure we're present for the likes of The Mountain Goats, Tindersticks and Bon Iver, not to mention a host of new bands we've championed recently such as The Chap, The Acorn and Gossamer Albatross, plus, in a tent that won't be half big enough, Shearwater. Bon voyage!
LINKS EFFECT
* A few quick things: Jeffrey Lewis' music store is selling City And Eastern Tapes, a new companion to his City And Eastern Songs album in that it's that album in early lo-fi form plus a few unreleased songs. Rhodri Marsden writes lucidly on 'The Futility Of Flogging Music', while in less intelligent spheres Weebl & Bob do Ladytron. Weebl as Mira Aroyo is just worrying. Right, we're out. Back on the 16th.
Saturday, September 06, 2008
The Weekly Sweep
Friday, September 05, 2008
Interlude
So, having failed to think of any worthwhile pre-scheduled posts to fill the next week efficiently enough with (or the last week, come to that) STN now takes some time away from our spam-filled inbox and our autosaves. There'll be the usual weekend stuff over the next two days and then we'll be back on, ooh, let's say Tuesday 16th with the start of our observations on End Of The Road Festival.
So if you're going to EOTR, do say hello. If you don't know what we look like, guess. It might confuse people. If you're not, we'll again be texting our Twitter like billy-o from on site from this time next week. In the meantime, why not download the Covermounts and study everything in the Appendix.
So if you're going to EOTR, do say hello. If you don't know what we look like, guess. It might confuse people. If you're not, we'll again be texting our Twitter like billy-o from on site from this time next week. In the meantime, why not download the Covermounts and study everything in the Appendix.
Monday, September 01, 2008
Celebrity Playlist - the bloodening
So since we liked Celebrity Muxtape as it took most of the work off us but Muxtape is pretty much killed off by The Man now, we've been forced into a change of plan.
So please welcome Celebrity Playlist - the same format, twelve songs picked by people we like of the music that made them, as before, except just the words. We probably won't get a new one in before next week's pre-End Of The Road holiday - or ever, if our run of response walls of silence to this continue - so here's examples of what we've had so far:
Jeremy Warmsley
A Classic Education
Sky Larkin
MJ Hibbett
So please welcome Celebrity Playlist - the same format, twelve songs picked by people we like of the music that made them, as before, except just the words. We probably won't get a new one in before next week's pre-End Of The Road holiday - or ever, if our run of response walls of silence to this continue - so here's examples of what we've had so far:
Jeremy Warmsley
A Classic Education
Sky Larkin
MJ Hibbett
Sunday, August 31, 2008
Weekender : still waking in cold sweats
WHAT CD?
- It's when you're watching one of the schmindie music channels on Sky Digital and wincing at what we're presented as the hippest new things you all need to know that you realise how much people like us need to act as a proactive buffer for new music consumption. As White Lies' Editors B-sides follow Iglu & Hartley's MGMT-meets-Hard-Fi-played-by-men-without-tops follow Ida Maria's artless shouting follow that new Santogold single that sounds like Jane Wiedlin, it's refreshing to find a band that don't try too hard. Admittedly that actually is an accusation that's been directed towards Thomas Tantrum, and in particular singer Megan Thomas, whose singing voice, which she assures is much like her speaking voice, plots a path between Clare Grogan and Life Without Buildings' Sue Tompkins, more than one track even borrowing Tompkins' rhythmic word association for what passes for a chorus. Their self-titled debut album, released on their own Sindy Stroker label, produced by Richard McNamara off of, of all bands, Embrace and currently Myspace streamable in full, is the sort of record you can imagine having come out around the turn of the century and being feted by a select and cultured few to this day, exhibiting trace elements of post-punk but very much awkward, hook laden and of the indie pop milieu. It's the sort of adventure through youthful self-investigation of personal parameters joyfulness you only get in bands who haven't had the time to work out what they do yet, and it remains cherishable.
- If Fujiya & Miyagi are one trick ponies, it's a mightily impressive trick: motorik grooves, now driven by a real-life rhythm section, taken through a roundabout route that takes in not just Talking Heads but solo David Byrne, the Tom Tom Club and Jerry Harrison's keyboards for the Modern Lovers, while David Best breathily recites streams of consciousness. The Lightbulbs press release namechecks James Brown, the Human League, Serge Gainsbourg and Wire, but that's what press releases are for. It does its job, at least. Also believing in the Neu! is David Holmes, who returns from soundtrack curation and makes a well reverbed vocal debut on single I Heard Wonders. Also in the single racks are Slow Club, Charles and Rebecca inviting their friends round for the choral joyousness of Let's Fall Back In Love. Album any time soon? Attempting to make Johnny Flynn into a crossover star was always going to be a loss leader but the singles are still affecting things, Brown Trout Blues the latest.
MYSPACE INVADERS: There's not a lot of biographical detail we can tell you about Hajen. She's from Gothenburg, her Myspace has been up for about two months and has garnered 86 friends and 1617 views as of Thursday night, she's actually called Amanda, and she claims as influences Bob Dylan, Cat Power, Neil Young, Radiohead, 16 Horsepower and The Mars Volta. Ah, copy and paste. In fact Chan Marshall's last three albums would be a very good comparison to her spare, piano-based despair and soaring, heartfelt vocals, as would Stina Nordenstam and Regina Spektor. Only one other blog, and that Swedish music specific, has covered her as far as we can tell, but we certainly won't be the last.
VISUAL AID: He celebrated his fiftieth birthday on Friday with his status as an icon and a trailblazer for black people in his particular area of entertainment secure, even if he hasn't lived up to his 1980s heights in recent years. Here's his seminal video for Thriller.
LINKS EFFECT
* The Pipettes - you remember, they're like the 60s - are coming back with free gigs at The Fly in London over each of the next three days - try Tuesday, Restlesslist are supporting then - and a small scale tour in October. They'll be selling a remix CD at the latter dates, and as is now the way with such things they're inviting any passing herbert to put together their own mix for it, and as such are giving away the vocal parts to The Shoe That Fits as Myspace downloads. Yeah, that's an invitation to remix a song nobody outside the band has properly heard, and presumably thanks to the passage of time and members there won't be a lot of tracks from the first album being reworked for it either. Either common sense has taken its leave or there's some evil masterplan to all this. Anyway, best of British. In other news, our favourite music-as-magic comic Phonogram is heading towards its second series, The Singles Club. Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie have set this series in more contemporary times than the Britpop-centric Rue Britannia, which we discussed with Gillen two years ago, which means fewer Kenickie references but more like issue 1's club flyer inspired cover art on a Pip-theme. We're assured it will remain of a similarly high quality, current ETA being December. Would it be improper to round this bit off by linking to a new and interesting interview with the de-polka'd Rose Elinor Dougall? Yes, it probably would.
* It's three girl rhumbas all the way this week in this section, we tell you. ITV are currently running a series of online mini-documentaries entitled Web Lives, "a series of short documentaries following people whose lives are shaped by the Internet". The current subject in the Cyber Celebs section is some podcasters, and before them a comedian. And before him, the Duloks. Now, Mina, Mira and Mar are many things, but "web 2.0 superstars" isn't one of the first that springs to mind. Yet here they are advertised as an "unsigned trio (who) are slowly building up a Myspace fan base where they control everything without middle men getting in the way" - like most unsigned bands, then - and generally doing what they do in the gear they do it in and with the peculiar elan they exhibit while doing it. The editing must have been a nightmare.
* Nothing gladdens the heart and confounds the synapses like an indie queen on a kids' TV show. So, from Canada, Stars and Broken Social Scene's Amy Millan, plus country-jazz singer Christine Bougie and an excitable chef puppet.
* And a round-up of what else has caught our eye this week: the Wave Pictures' productivity rate has been covered on here before, but their turn on Bandstand Busking features an obscurity (2004's David's Evening On Wheels) and two brand new songs; our occasional series of blogs started by sometime major online music magazine players continues with Mike Diver, who we met three weeks ago and who left Drowned In Sound last week - are these events connected? We think we should be told - and who's for the time being marshalling From Sinking; meanwhile Marcello Carlin, who's been all round the place but (inevitably) mostly Stylus, goes for the album version of Tom Ewing's Popular number ones project (that one's in the sidebar) on Then Play Long, while Music Sounds Better With Two takes on the number two peaking singles from the chart's history. And here's Those Dancing Days covering Toxic.
- It's when you're watching one of the schmindie music channels on Sky Digital and wincing at what we're presented as the hippest new things you all need to know that you realise how much people like us need to act as a proactive buffer for new music consumption. As White Lies' Editors B-sides follow Iglu & Hartley's MGMT-meets-Hard-Fi-played-by-men-without-tops follow Ida Maria's artless shouting follow that new Santogold single that sounds like Jane Wiedlin, it's refreshing to find a band that don't try too hard. Admittedly that actually is an accusation that's been directed towards Thomas Tantrum, and in particular singer Megan Thomas, whose singing voice, which she assures is much like her speaking voice, plots a path between Clare Grogan and Life Without Buildings' Sue Tompkins, more than one track even borrowing Tompkins' rhythmic word association for what passes for a chorus. Their self-titled debut album, released on their own Sindy Stroker label, produced by Richard McNamara off of, of all bands, Embrace and currently Myspace streamable in full, is the sort of record you can imagine having come out around the turn of the century and being feted by a select and cultured few to this day, exhibiting trace elements of post-punk but very much awkward, hook laden and of the indie pop milieu. It's the sort of adventure through youthful self-investigation of personal parameters joyfulness you only get in bands who haven't had the time to work out what they do yet, and it remains cherishable.
- If Fujiya & Miyagi are one trick ponies, it's a mightily impressive trick: motorik grooves, now driven by a real-life rhythm section, taken through a roundabout route that takes in not just Talking Heads but solo David Byrne, the Tom Tom Club and Jerry Harrison's keyboards for the Modern Lovers, while David Best breathily recites streams of consciousness. The Lightbulbs press release namechecks James Brown, the Human League, Serge Gainsbourg and Wire, but that's what press releases are for. It does its job, at least. Also believing in the Neu! is David Holmes, who returns from soundtrack curation and makes a well reverbed vocal debut on single I Heard Wonders. Also in the single racks are Slow Club, Charles and Rebecca inviting their friends round for the choral joyousness of Let's Fall Back In Love. Album any time soon? Attempting to make Johnny Flynn into a crossover star was always going to be a loss leader but the singles are still affecting things, Brown Trout Blues the latest.
MYSPACE INVADERS: There's not a lot of biographical detail we can tell you about Hajen. She's from Gothenburg, her Myspace has been up for about two months and has garnered 86 friends and 1617 views as of Thursday night, she's actually called Amanda, and she claims as influences Bob Dylan, Cat Power, Neil Young, Radiohead, 16 Horsepower and The Mars Volta. Ah, copy and paste. In fact Chan Marshall's last three albums would be a very good comparison to her spare, piano-based despair and soaring, heartfelt vocals, as would Stina Nordenstam and Regina Spektor. Only one other blog, and that Swedish music specific, has covered her as far as we can tell, but we certainly won't be the last.
VISUAL AID: He celebrated his fiftieth birthday on Friday with his status as an icon and a trailblazer for black people in his particular area of entertainment secure, even if he hasn't lived up to his 1980s heights in recent years. Here's his seminal video for Thriller.
LINKS EFFECT
* The Pipettes - you remember, they're like the 60s - are coming back with free gigs at The Fly in London over each of the next three days - try Tuesday, Restlesslist are supporting then - and a small scale tour in October. They'll be selling a remix CD at the latter dates, and as is now the way with such things they're inviting any passing herbert to put together their own mix for it, and as such are giving away the vocal parts to The Shoe That Fits as Myspace downloads. Yeah, that's an invitation to remix a song nobody outside the band has properly heard, and presumably thanks to the passage of time and members there won't be a lot of tracks from the first album being reworked for it either. Either common sense has taken its leave or there's some evil masterplan to all this. Anyway, best of British. In other news, our favourite music-as-magic comic Phonogram is heading towards its second series, The Singles Club. Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie have set this series in more contemporary times than the Britpop-centric Rue Britannia, which we discussed with Gillen two years ago, which means fewer Kenickie references but more like issue 1's club flyer inspired cover art on a Pip-theme. We're assured it will remain of a similarly high quality, current ETA being December. Would it be improper to round this bit off by linking to a new and interesting interview with the de-polka'd Rose Elinor Dougall? Yes, it probably would.
* It's three girl rhumbas all the way this week in this section, we tell you. ITV are currently running a series of online mini-documentaries entitled Web Lives, "a series of short documentaries following people whose lives are shaped by the Internet". The current subject in the Cyber Celebs section is some podcasters, and before them a comedian. And before him, the Duloks. Now, Mina, Mira and Mar are many things, but "web 2.0 superstars" isn't one of the first that springs to mind. Yet here they are advertised as an "unsigned trio (who) are slowly building up a Myspace fan base where they control everything without middle men getting in the way" - like most unsigned bands, then - and generally doing what they do in the gear they do it in and with the peculiar elan they exhibit while doing it. The editing must have been a nightmare.
* Nothing gladdens the heart and confounds the synapses like an indie queen on a kids' TV show. So, from Canada, Stars and Broken Social Scene's Amy Millan, plus country-jazz singer Christine Bougie and an excitable chef puppet.
* And a round-up of what else has caught our eye this week: the Wave Pictures' productivity rate has been covered on here before, but their turn on Bandstand Busking features an obscurity (2004's David's Evening On Wheels) and two brand new songs; our occasional series of blogs started by sometime major online music magazine players continues with Mike Diver, who we met three weeks ago and who left Drowned In Sound last week - are these events connected? We think we should be told - and who's for the time being marshalling From Sinking; meanwhile Marcello Carlin, who's been all round the place but (inevitably) mostly Stylus, goes for the album version of Tom Ewing's Popular number ones project (that one's in the sidebar) on Then Play Long, while Music Sounds Better With Two takes on the number two peaking singles from the chart's history. And here's Those Dancing Days covering Toxic.
Saturday, August 30, 2008
The Weekly Sweep
Friday, August 29, 2008
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Sweeping The Nation Covermount 14: It's A London Thing
So, that's the Beijing Olympics done. The world records and gold medallists are in the books, the imagery committed to video library, and the flags and the honours have been passed on for London 2012 after a closing ceremony demonstration of the country's legacy in pop (Jimmy Page, Leona Lewis), sport (David Beckham), nostalgic culture (a double decker bus) and comedy (Bori...come on, you could see that punchline coming, couldn't you? The Now Show, you know where to find us)
When better time - apart from in 2012, but we've got this together now - to pay tribute to the history of London as the muse for a whole host of songwriters - its areas, its riches, its deprivation, its Tube system, its party culture, its stay at home attitude. London has a place in popular music we reckon not even New York or Paris can match. It becomes part of band's stories but it makes its own mythologies. It creates genres and sounds that only really exist or thrive within its boundaries. There are songs here by lovers and haters, storytellers and detractors. A creative, financial and often psychological hub, the musical capital gains are endless, and here's 74 minutes or so of them.
It's A London Thing
Ian Dury - The Bus Driver's Prayer
Right, we'll try and get through these twenty without leaving in confusing syntax or horrible factual errors, unlike the last Covermount (we're not sure we'll ever let ourselves forget confusing Cath Carroll for Cathal Coughlan - they're not even the same gender!) It's not actually a Dury original - the writer is unknown but it's been around since the early 70s - but you can see how Dury, who slightly changed the words, would be attracted to a song that namechecks various stops in Greater London. Here he is doing it on So It Goes.
Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine - The Only Living Boy In New Cross
The clips on YouTube of Carter USM's 'final' (as in they're playing two more in November) gig last year made it seem more like Sodom & Gomorrah than a last hurrah for a band that slipped through the critical net and turned up on every other T-shirt in the early 90s. Rock-fisted as they were, we wouldn't mind an issues band like them now, this being equally about HIV paranoia and celebrating South London lowlifes.
From 1992 - The Love Album
Girls Aloud - Swinging London Town
This isn't issues led at all. In fact, it's a fairly open pisstake of ligging debutante partygoers who are always pictured pissed in expensive dresses in the celebrity magazines. You might like to stop for a moment here and consider the irony of Xenomania writing a song on that subject for the members of Girls Aloud to sing.
From Chemistry
Good Shoes - Morden
A band that got swept along on the south London straightforwardly rattling indie-rock 'thing' that got the Maccabees noticed, although before then they'd played at the Mystery Jets' Eel Pie Island hullaballoos. All the members are from the Borough of Merton locale, although title aside it could be about any average urban small town.
From Think Before You Speak
Blur - London Loves
Parklife, however, was as chirpy Cockerney as they come. Well, so cliche had it, the album's character sketches in retrospect being as paranoid and alienated from the party life as celebratory. This, as an example, is generally about empty lifestyles and the subject's ignorance of "the way people just fall apart".
From Parklife
Squeeze - Piccadilly
Difford and Tilbrook wrote a lot about London life and urbanity - certainly you can't imagine a lot of other places packing in those locales in 1982.
From East Side Story
Pulp - Mile End
Jarvis was living in London during Britpop and partaking well in the self-celebratory nature of the scene, as he would document in his comedown album This Is Hardcore. This came a couple of years before that, on the Trainspotting soundtrack, documenting the seedy underbelly of the area Cocker first moved to when coming down from Sheffield.
From Different Class Deluxe Edition
David Devant And His Spirit Wife - Pimlico
And then there's the vaudeville angle. We've discussed DDAHSW back on C97, since when The Vessel, who now appears to be referring to himself as David Devant in contravention of naming convention before (actually no he's not - see the comments), has formed Glam Chops with fan/kindred spirit Eddie Argos.
Elvis Costello - London's Brilliant Parade
Although occasionally referred to as a Liverpudlian Declan grew up in Twickenham and spent very little time in Birkenhead when the family moved there before going back south, working at the Elizabeth Arden factory and writing a song about the former Hoover factory in Perivale. Fair to say he wasn't impressed by its postcard image.
From Brutal Youth
Madness - Primrose Hill
Madness borrowed as much from music hall and Ray Davies as ska, and 1982's The Rise And Fall was their version of a concept album based on their childhoods. Being on the side of Regent's Park and next to Hampstead and Camden Town Primrose Hill's place in the band's psychogeography was assured.
From The Rise And Fall
Lord Kitchener - London Is The Place For Me
In 1948 the Empire Windrush arrived at Tilbury, Essex carrying nearly 5000 Jamaicans starting a new life abroad, marking the start of the modern era of multicultural relations. Among them were calypso musicians Lord Beginner and Lord Kitchener, born Aldwyn Roberts, who between them helped spread their indigenous music to Europe. This song gave its title to a series of Honest Jon's Records compilations of 1940s and 1950s calypso.
From London Is The Place For Me
Smiley Culture - Cockney Translation
The second generation of the Jamaican immigrants were exemplified by David Emmanuel, who would go on to break the top 20 with Police Officer but had earlier had a minor hit and Peel attention with this comparisons and confusions of East End and West Indian slang, one of Michael Rosen's Desert Island Discs and a song Simon Reynolds has argued facilitated the leaking of black terms into general East London slang.
Saint Etienne - London Belongs To Me
Regular Covermount contributors, Bob and Pete (and probably Sarah too, to be fair) have had a long affinity with the sociology and landscape of London, producing the films Finisterre and What Have You Done Today, Mervyn Day? This takes a different tack, documenting love in Camden Town while namechecking World Of Twist.
From Foxbase Alpha
Richard Thompson - Sights And Sounds Of London Town
Tales of prostitution, homelessness, drug dealing, Soho wheeler-dealing - the cheery stuff - from Thompson's 1999 early folk revival-themed album.
From Mock Tudor
Tori Amos - London Girls
Being the iconoclast, North Carolina born Amos has covered two Chas & Dave songs, on the B-side of her Caught A Lite Sneeze single. One was That's What I Like Mick, and is absurd. This is at least more universal in lyrical tone, despite references to a geezer and getting a round in.
Robyn Hitchcock - Trams Of Old London
Onto the Tube now, with the eccentric English songwriter's eccentric English songwriter imagining the journey of the ghost of a derelict tram.
From I Often Dream Of Trains
Elliott Smith - Waterloo Sunset (live)
Calexico - The Guns Of Brixton
Two of the most quintessentially London bands of them all, two of their most capital specific songs that every one of you will know, both subject to stripped back covers by Americans.
Hefner - The Greater London Radio
Obviously it's about love dashed on the rocks, but despite being from Essex and Kent Hefner were always metropolitan at heart. This is the next album due on Darren Hayman's extension and reissue series.
From We Love The City
Catatonia - Londinium
And eventually those who move to the city hoping the streets are paved with gold get fed up, or filled up, and decide to leave. Cerys Matthews' party lifestyle and attendant issues are well documented, but this was written by guitarist and Cerys' former paramour Mark Roberts and it was rumoured Cerys wasn't overly keen. Christ, she's not still dating Marc Bannerman, is she?
From Equally Cursed And Blessed
When better time - apart from in 2012, but we've got this together now - to pay tribute to the history of London as the muse for a whole host of songwriters - its areas, its riches, its deprivation, its Tube system, its party culture, its stay at home attitude. London has a place in popular music we reckon not even New York or Paris can match. It becomes part of band's stories but it makes its own mythologies. It creates genres and sounds that only really exist or thrive within its boundaries. There are songs here by lovers and haters, storytellers and detractors. A creative, financial and often psychological hub, the musical capital gains are endless, and here's 74 minutes or so of them.
It's A London Thing
Ian Dury - The Bus Driver's Prayer
Right, we'll try and get through these twenty without leaving in confusing syntax or horrible factual errors, unlike the last Covermount (we're not sure we'll ever let ourselves forget confusing Cath Carroll for Cathal Coughlan - they're not even the same gender!) It's not actually a Dury original - the writer is unknown but it's been around since the early 70s - but you can see how Dury, who slightly changed the words, would be attracted to a song that namechecks various stops in Greater London. Here he is doing it on So It Goes.
Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine - The Only Living Boy In New Cross
The clips on YouTube of Carter USM's 'final' (as in they're playing two more in November) gig last year made it seem more like Sodom & Gomorrah than a last hurrah for a band that slipped through the critical net and turned up on every other T-shirt in the early 90s. Rock-fisted as they were, we wouldn't mind an issues band like them now, this being equally about HIV paranoia and celebrating South London lowlifes.
From 1992 - The Love Album
Girls Aloud - Swinging London Town
This isn't issues led at all. In fact, it's a fairly open pisstake of ligging debutante partygoers who are always pictured pissed in expensive dresses in the celebrity magazines. You might like to stop for a moment here and consider the irony of Xenomania writing a song on that subject for the members of Girls Aloud to sing.
From Chemistry
Good Shoes - Morden
A band that got swept along on the south London straightforwardly rattling indie-rock 'thing' that got the Maccabees noticed, although before then they'd played at the Mystery Jets' Eel Pie Island hullaballoos. All the members are from the Borough of Merton locale, although title aside it could be about any average urban small town.
From Think Before You Speak
Blur - London Loves
Parklife, however, was as chirpy Cockerney as they come. Well, so cliche had it, the album's character sketches in retrospect being as paranoid and alienated from the party life as celebratory. This, as an example, is generally about empty lifestyles and the subject's ignorance of "the way people just fall apart".
From Parklife
Squeeze - Piccadilly
Difford and Tilbrook wrote a lot about London life and urbanity - certainly you can't imagine a lot of other places packing in those locales in 1982.
From East Side Story
Pulp - Mile End
Jarvis was living in London during Britpop and partaking well in the self-celebratory nature of the scene, as he would document in his comedown album This Is Hardcore. This came a couple of years before that, on the Trainspotting soundtrack, documenting the seedy underbelly of the area Cocker first moved to when coming down from Sheffield.
From Different Class Deluxe Edition
David Devant And His Spirit Wife - Pimlico
And then there's the vaudeville angle. We've discussed DDAHSW back on C97, since when The Vessel, who now appears to be referring to himself as David Devant in contravention of naming convention before (actually no he's not - see the comments), has formed Glam Chops with fan/kindred spirit Eddie Argos.
Elvis Costello - London's Brilliant Parade
Although occasionally referred to as a Liverpudlian Declan grew up in Twickenham and spent very little time in Birkenhead when the family moved there before going back south, working at the Elizabeth Arden factory and writing a song about the former Hoover factory in Perivale. Fair to say he wasn't impressed by its postcard image.
From Brutal Youth
Madness - Primrose Hill
Madness borrowed as much from music hall and Ray Davies as ska, and 1982's The Rise And Fall was their version of a concept album based on their childhoods. Being on the side of Regent's Park and next to Hampstead and Camden Town Primrose Hill's place in the band's psychogeography was assured.
From The Rise And Fall
Lord Kitchener - London Is The Place For Me
In 1948 the Empire Windrush arrived at Tilbury, Essex carrying nearly 5000 Jamaicans starting a new life abroad, marking the start of the modern era of multicultural relations. Among them were calypso musicians Lord Beginner and Lord Kitchener, born Aldwyn Roberts, who between them helped spread their indigenous music to Europe. This song gave its title to a series of Honest Jon's Records compilations of 1940s and 1950s calypso.
From London Is The Place For Me
Smiley Culture - Cockney Translation
The second generation of the Jamaican immigrants were exemplified by David Emmanuel, who would go on to break the top 20 with Police Officer but had earlier had a minor hit and Peel attention with this comparisons and confusions of East End and West Indian slang, one of Michael Rosen's Desert Island Discs and a song Simon Reynolds has argued facilitated the leaking of black terms into general East London slang.
Saint Etienne - London Belongs To Me
Regular Covermount contributors, Bob and Pete (and probably Sarah too, to be fair) have had a long affinity with the sociology and landscape of London, producing the films Finisterre and What Have You Done Today, Mervyn Day? This takes a different tack, documenting love in Camden Town while namechecking World Of Twist.
From Foxbase Alpha
Richard Thompson - Sights And Sounds Of London Town
Tales of prostitution, homelessness, drug dealing, Soho wheeler-dealing - the cheery stuff - from Thompson's 1999 early folk revival-themed album.
From Mock Tudor
Tori Amos - London Girls
Being the iconoclast, North Carolina born Amos has covered two Chas & Dave songs, on the B-side of her Caught A Lite Sneeze single. One was That's What I Like Mick, and is absurd. This is at least more universal in lyrical tone, despite references to a geezer and getting a round in.
Robyn Hitchcock - Trams Of Old London
Onto the Tube now, with the eccentric English songwriter's eccentric English songwriter imagining the journey of the ghost of a derelict tram.
From I Often Dream Of Trains
Elliott Smith - Waterloo Sunset (live)
Calexico - The Guns Of Brixton
Two of the most quintessentially London bands of them all, two of their most capital specific songs that every one of you will know, both subject to stripped back covers by Americans.
Hefner - The Greater London Radio
Obviously it's about love dashed on the rocks, but despite being from Essex and Kent Hefner were always metropolitan at heart. This is the next album due on Darren Hayman's extension and reissue series.
From We Love The City
Catatonia - Londinium
And eventually those who move to the city hoping the streets are paved with gold get fed up, or filled up, and decide to leave. Cerys Matthews' party lifestyle and attendant issues are well documented, but this was written by guitarist and Cerys' former paramour Mark Roberts and it was rumoured Cerys wasn't overly keen. Christ, she's not still dating Marc Bannerman, is she?
From Equally Cursed And Blessed
Monday, August 25, 2008
A journey of discovery
As record companies lose money and bands look for new ways of getting their music to the people quicker blah blah drone zzzzzzzz. Someone has to put the fun back into the way music is presented, so it might as well be The Wonderland Project. A duo originally from Brighton and Oxford, they match wistful life vignettes to offbeat keyboards and beats, somewhere between the Postal Service and Pagan Wanderer Lu. Their new album The History Of Science & How To Mend A Broken Heart is out today and is available from Amazon and iTunes, but they're hoping that's not the way you pick up on it. Instead from today they're distributing a number of limited edition, numbered CDs in random places around the country, the hope being that whoever picks them up listens, rips them if they want and then leaves the CD in another place where it can be passed on. Those who pick them up will also be asked to tell the band via their website where the CD was dropped, so the individual journeys can be plotted on the roving album map and they can see how far the records have got. We're not sure how much of a response it'll really get, but it's definitely worth a shot.
The Wonderland Project - A Sense Of Community
While we're about it, let's delve back into the promo pile for something we've had lying around for about four months now and never got round to posting from until now, for which we apologise. Stars And Sons is Mike Lord, who also plays in the live incarnation of our old friends 4 Or 5 Magicians and on his own produces infectious keyboard-led melodies with an ambitious sweep that recalls Ed Harcourt and an air that is positively Canadian (which Lord's not, he's from Brighton via Colchester, but there's echoes of Owen Pallett and Spencer Krug at large) The Goat Show EP is available on an honesty payment system from Myspace; if that's too much effort, 14.28571% of it is below.
Stars And Sons - Fights Already Fought
Finally we continue our recent co-option of Project Notion, a band who when first brought to your attention we commented upon the top line of their Myspace friends and now find ourselves on that same top line. If you're coming fresh to these five teenagers-and-thereabouts from Melton Mowbray, and if you aren't thanks to what we've written about them before you might recognise a lot of this paragraph, they trade in a complexity that defies most attempts at pinning them down. The guitars are math-rock tappy, the rhythms from the better end of jazz-rock, Tori Maries sounds like she's come hotfoot from a trip-hop recording session, and there's an undertow of folky acoustics and percussion. They're mesmerising live, where the intricate Tim and Mike Kinsella-esque guitars (although we do actually doubt they'd claim Cap'n Jazz and their ilk as influences the way they use them) really take off, and while they've claimed influence from Anathallo and Califone and longtime local scene trustee Kevin Hewick reckons "The Sundays crossed with Durutti Column and Discipline era King Crimson", really there's nothing immediately coming to mind that accurately nails their style. This is from The Ethereal Apparatus, a six track EP they're currently giving away to anyone who sends their snailmail address to the email address in their Myspace blog.
Project Notion - Castles In The Air
The Wonderland Project - A Sense Of Community
While we're about it, let's delve back into the promo pile for something we've had lying around for about four months now and never got round to posting from until now, for which we apologise. Stars And Sons is Mike Lord, who also plays in the live incarnation of our old friends 4 Or 5 Magicians and on his own produces infectious keyboard-led melodies with an ambitious sweep that recalls Ed Harcourt and an air that is positively Canadian (which Lord's not, he's from Brighton via Colchester, but there's echoes of Owen Pallett and Spencer Krug at large) The Goat Show EP is available on an honesty payment system from Myspace; if that's too much effort, 14.28571% of it is below.
Stars And Sons - Fights Already Fought
Finally we continue our recent co-option of Project Notion, a band who when first brought to your attention we commented upon the top line of their Myspace friends and now find ourselves on that same top line. If you're coming fresh to these five teenagers-and-thereabouts from Melton Mowbray, and if you aren't thanks to what we've written about them before you might recognise a lot of this paragraph, they trade in a complexity that defies most attempts at pinning them down. The guitars are math-rock tappy, the rhythms from the better end of jazz-rock, Tori Maries sounds like she's come hotfoot from a trip-hop recording session, and there's an undertow of folky acoustics and percussion. They're mesmerising live, where the intricate Tim and Mike Kinsella-esque guitars (although we do actually doubt they'd claim Cap'n Jazz and their ilk as influences the way they use them) really take off, and while they've claimed influence from Anathallo and Califone and longtime local scene trustee Kevin Hewick reckons "The Sundays crossed with Durutti Column and Discipline era King Crimson", really there's nothing immediately coming to mind that accurately nails their style. This is from The Ethereal Apparatus, a six track EP they're currently giving away to anyone who sends their snailmail address to the email address in their Myspace blog.
Project Notion - Castles In The Air
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