Saturday, July 12, 2008
Thursday, July 10, 2008
Celebrity Muxtape #3: Sky Larkin
Next up to provide a selection of personal collection treats are a Leeds trio we featured in detail nearly a year and a half ago, since when they've brought out a second excellent single and recently returned from Seattle, where they've been recording their debut album with John Goodmanson (Sleater-Kinney, Bikini Kill, Death Cab For Cutie). They are and remain Sky Larkin, and these are their twelve. No notes to accompany this one, save to say that Nestor picked the first four, Katie takes up the middle and Doug does the last four:
Nestor:
Death From Above 1979 - Turn It Out
The Knife - Hannah's Conscious
Metric - Hustle Rose
Burial - Distant Lights
Katie:
Kate Bush - Rubberband Girl
The Blow - True Affection
Garnet Mimms - As Long As I Have You
Napoleon IIIrd - Hit Schmooze For Me
Doug:
Why? - Crushed Bones
At The Drive-In - Picket Fence Cartel
Dinosaur Jr - Freak Scene
Joni Mitchell - Carey
Sky Larkin's Muxtape
Nestor:
Death From Above 1979 - Turn It Out
The Knife - Hannah's Conscious
Metric - Hustle Rose
Burial - Distant Lights
Katie:
Kate Bush - Rubberband Girl
The Blow - True Affection
Garnet Mimms - As Long As I Have You
Napoleon IIIrd - Hit Schmooze For Me
Doug:
Why? - Crushed Bones
At The Drive-In - Picket Fence Cartel
Dinosaur Jr - Freak Scene
Joni Mitchell - Carey
Sky Larkin's Muxtape
Wednesday, July 09, 2008
Have Your Say
While we work on various other non-blog things for this week, and bearing in mind we're supposedly being visited 200 times a day, throw us down a gauntlet. Give us a thematic challenge for a Covermount. What would you like to see covered in a Primer? Knowing us as we hope you do, who is it about time we inducted into the Illustrated Guide pantheon? You comment, we'll listen, and rest assured that once our time is sufficently there'll be the usual amount of proper stuff - Things with mp3s attached! Muxtape Challenges (quite a few requests going out for those)! Festivals! - in the weeks and months ahead.
Monday, July 07, 2008
The Primer #2: reggae like it used to be
The full scale ridiculousness of a pasty bloke from Jesus Christ Superstar issuing a clarion call for old style reggae is that this was released in 1976, slap bang in the middle of what is now commonly known as 'the golden age of reggae'. What actually spurred us on to this, thogugh, was seeing a TV advert for something called Massive Reggae, posited as all the irie you need for your summer. And who have they picked off its tracklisting as its selling points? Shaggy, Shabba Ranks, Ini Kamoze, longtime Moyles punchline Chaka Demus & Pliers... basically Jamaicans influenced by hip hop to form a crossover version of dancehall, which was invented at the end of the 1970s and has a arm's length relationship with roots reggae. While roots is great summer music and none of the above really "reggae Beethoven" - thank you, Paul - it's misleading to throw them in as keepers of the Bob Marley flame. Indeed, there's far too many flames burning from the 'golden age' that aren't treated with such reverence, and it's time we had a look at them.
Quick timeline to start, because reggae certainly didn't intend to become the world's dominant Caribbean musical force. So first there was calypso, which originated at the start of the 20th century in colonial Trinidad, then there was Mento, which fused it with Jamaica's indigenous folk in the 1950s. When American rhythm and blues started ekeing in later that decade the sound system was invented, and when jazz came over the fusion invented ska. In truth ska is more our area of expertise, and we will come back to it one day. (Note to Universal: please commission a compilation entitled Maximum Ska which the TV advert for features No Doubt, Less Than Jake, the Holloways and Bad Manners so we have an excuse. Ta.) In the early 60s ska rhythms evolved to give space to vocalists, making stars of the likes of Desmond Dekker and Toots Hibbert, and that's where an Englishman called Chris Blackwell first made an impact. Blackwell was based in Jamaica as aide de camp to the island's governor and developed an interest in its indigenous music, so much so that he formed a label called Island Records in 1959 to record the emergent ska sounds. When he moved back to Britain in 1962 he continued selling his recordings, and two years later brought over eighteen year old bluebeat singer Millie Small and her version of R&B song My Boy Lollipop, a UK and US number two.
Even as Island later began signing white British acts the Jamaican spirit was still foremost in the label's priorities through the rise of the DJ and selector. The DJ in Jamaica is what we would know as an MC, and it was prominent DJs who invented toasting, which got taken back by the likes of Kool Herc to Bronx street parties where it developed into rap. The influence of Rastafarian culture led to the slower tempo and bassier version of ska that was given the name rocksteady, derived from an Alton Ellis song but not a universally popular term.
Where the term reggae comes from depends on who you talk to. Influential singer and producer Clancy Eccles claims to have coined it as an answer to the slang term streggae ("loose woman"), although Toots Hibbert clams he came up with it; hugely popular early 60s ska star Derrick Morgan says producer Bunny Lee used it as a term of onomatopoeia for the sound of the downstroke of the rhythm guitar in the form's development; others say it evolved from terms in Latin or Spanish. Whatever. Reggae in its early form was essentially rocksteady with more of a US soul influence and at an even slower pace - exotic smokes may have been partly responsible, we couldn't possibly say - with a greater emphasis on the organ and rhythm guitar ahead of the bass. Bunny Lee was the first producer to set this sound in stone, and among the first to make the crossover were a vocal trio who'd made their names in ska and continued through rocksteady, formed in 1962 by three friends who'd met through the vocal scene, Winston 'Peter Tosh' Macintosh, Neville 'Bunny Wailer' Livingstone and Robert 'Bob Marley' Marley.
The Wailers - Concrete Jungle
When the Wailers split in 1974 after British breakthroughs Catch A Fire and Burnin', put out by Island through the band's own Tuff Gong, Bob Marley formed Bob Marley and the Wailers with the Wailers Band, a backing outfit formed by brothers Aston and Carlton Barrett and featuring Bob's wife Rita as one of backing singers the I Threes, and became stratospheric with that year's Natty Dread, the accompanying tour and celebrated London Lyceum gig in 1975, plus chiefly 1977's Exodus and 1978's Kaya. The story is far too famous and elongated to go into in this format, but it was made possible by Blackwell's label and personal management, making the sound slightly more westernised through judicious overdubs to attract the overseas audience and frankly taking a chance on what was seen as, if not a novelty, then very much an underground thing at the time, a form of the earlier Jamaican imports beloved of skinheads and mods in the mid-60s where the only hits were novelties such as Max Romeo's Wet Dream.
Leaving aside international campaigns, Marley's other mentor on the road to reggae Damascus was an altogether more complex character. The Wailers Band mostly comprised members of the Upsetters, who had been the studio band of Lee 'Scratch' Perry. Perry started as an associate of Coxsone Dodd's sound system and later his Studio One ska label and studio, described as "the Motown of Jamaica". After they fell out Perry formed the Upsetter label in 1968, his first single, People Funny Boy, seen as a key milestone in reggae's development. In these years he worked with many of the island's big names, developing innovative production techniques involving layering, sound effects and mike techniques as well as a singular character. In 1973 he built Black Ark Studios to produce the Wailers among others and creating a sound all of his own, also exhibited on a series of his own dub-heavy records. Eventually stress and outside influences took their toll and he supposedly burned the place to the ground in 1979, moving abroad to make a series of erratic records before a critical resurgence working alongside Adrian Sherwood and Mad Professor. He now lives in Switzerland, accuses Chris Blackwell of being a vampire and is soon to release an album produced by Andrew WK.
Lee Scratch Perry & The Upsetters - Dread Lion
It's not in chronological order, but let's go into a sidebar on dub now we've brought it up. Coming out of the practice of making instrumental B-sides, the dub sound was essentially the forerunner of the remix, manipulating the master tapes of recordings usually by removing or altering the vocals to emphasise the bass and drum 'riddim', usually using echo and reverb, using the mixing desk as an instrument. Perry, whose 1973 Blackboard Jungle Dub is widely recognised as the first proper dub-only album, vies for invention of the form with King Tubby, born Osbourne Ruddock, a former sound system engineer and radio repairer who made his name as the go-to guy when weather (or jealous rivals) affected the electrics. Becoming a leading producer, he stumbled across dub's building blocks when playing with the desk attempting to make instrumental versions for toasters and went on to use his electronical background make a living out of building studio equipment for the means to alter the recordings. Although it fell out of favour in Jamaica at the end of the 70s dub carried on largely in Britain and as well as the art of the remix has been cited as a major influence on post-punk, house, techno, drum and bass, trip hop, UK garage and latterly dubstep.
Harry Mudie & King Tubby - Dub For The Dread
So clearly there's a dual speed going on in reggae, with Perry and Tubby reshaping its sound while a group of singers infiltrate the mainstream. Jimmy Cliff was a Perry client who broke through as a ska singer in the mid-60s and signed to Island. 1970's Wonderful World, Beautiful People was huge internationally, clearing a path for the film in which he starred as well as curating the soundtrack, 1972's The Harder They Come, in which he portrayed a singer forced into lawlessness in his quest for stardom, giving him a westernised 'outsider' image, and which became a cult hit and is credited with launching reggae in America when released there a year later. Last year the title track was adopted as a personal anthem by David Cameron. It had previously been politically connected with Nicaragua's Sandinistas, who Thatcher was virulently against. You work it out.
Jimmy Cliff - The Harder They Come
In the mid-70s a new breed of toasters/deejays appeared, influenced by pioneer U-Roy. Alongside Dillinger and I-Roy was Big Youth, who teamed up in 1972 with Gussie Clarke, a teenaged producer who was seen as more in tune with Kingston at street level than most. This led to a string of domestic hits before 1973 album Screaming Target, utilising the then common practice of borrowing someone else's backing track, here the likes of Gregory Isaacs and Leroy Smart and on the title track No No No, KC White's cover of Dawn Penn's original which Penn would take top ten internationally in 1992. He continued having big hits and extending his range in both vocal and producer until his style was overtaken, but he's still going. Watch how this develops from a critique of a famous Clint Eastwood character to a plea for literacy.
Big Youth - Screaming Target
Eric Clapton's 1974 cover of Marley's I Shot the Sheriff is cited as reggae's first breakthrough into whitey's rockist world, but John Peel was already playing all forms of roots reggae on his own show. A particular Peel favourite was Burning Spear. Winston Rodney originally called his band after the nickname of the first independent Prime Minister and President of Kenya, but eventually it stuck to him alone. Working with Studio One's Coxsone Dodd - who, it should be noted, discovered the Wailers and was pretty much the leading figure in ska and rocksteady - he developed a style based on Rastafarianism, black history and social concerns based on the oratory of Marcus Garvey. Burning Spear is still recording and has been nominated for eleven Best Reggae Album Grammys between 1986 and this year, but it's his mid-70s work that stands up the best,
Burning Spear - Marcus Garvey
More roots stuff and another album high watermark, 1976's The Heart Of The Congos. The Congos were a vocal trio who hooked up with Lee Perry in Black Ark, reggae historian Steve Barrow referring to the result as "the most consistently brilliant album of Scratch's entire career". They never recaptured its spirit and Perry's dispute with European label Virgin affected its overseas chances - indeed it wasn't properly issued in the UK until 1980, and that only when The Beat decided to make it the first release on their own Go Feet imprint - but it charms most who hear it.
The Congos - Fisherman
If Chris Blackwell, and later Richard Branson at Virgin, were getting the records out in Britain, Don Letts was alongside Peel finding them an audience. A first-generation black Briton of Jamaican descent, Letts ran a clothes store in the Kings Road where the mixture of Vivienne Westwood-inspired gear and Letts' roots and dub playlist attracted the punk in-crowd, as well as Marley whenever he was over (the environment inspired his Punky Reggae Party). The shop's accountant opened The Roxy nightclub in Covent Garden, which attracted much live punk trade, and invited Letts to become resident DJ, and with little or no punk records to play he transposed his reggae records to the new setting. The bass-heavy sounds, social soundbite lyrics and rebel image struck a chord. It was in fact in the UK that the last few roots reggae-inspired shifts would take place - lovers rock was a variant of rockers reggae coined in South London as an apolitical, soulful version, taken up by Aswad and Janet Kay. Ska lay dormat throughout this era as a mod memory until lapsed punks such as Jerry Dammers picked up on its fast rhythms and developed 2 Tone.
A Letts favourite was Culture, a vocal trio chiefly centring on Joseph Hill's vocals who worked with the Mighty Two, producer Joe Gibbs and engineer Errol Thompson. Their first and best album Two Sevens Clash based its title and title track on a Garvey prediction that when the sevens met on 7/7/7 there would be apocalyptic chaos, a premonition that caught on so much that many Jamaican businesses and schools closed for the day. Culture were an embodiment of 'rockers reggae', a subgenre named after the sound system of melodica-toting dub legend Augustus Pablo and originated by the rhythm section of Lowell Dunbar and Robert Shakespeare, better known as Sly & Robbie. (See also: Gregory Isacs, Horace Andy, Junior Murvin, Dennis Brown)
Culture - Two Sevens Clash
Also often grouped as rockers reggae spearheads are Black Uhuru, who formulated a more harmonic, Rastaised form and domestically took over where Marley left off when he went off to conquer the world. Like the Wailers they were a tight vocal outfit backing a strong lead voice but were more directly attuned to Jamaican politics and the endemic street violence as well as Garvey and religion. Their key work was released at the start of the Eighties, when they also toured with the Clash and the Police.
Black Uhuru - Happiness
By the time Black Uhuru were striking big original reggae was on the downturn. Marley's sound had arguably been watered down for wider acceptance and aside from him the sound never really made the international breakthrough many had put their money on, instead leading to many cult hits and the odd one-off (Althea & Donna, anyone?), and when Marley died in 1981 labels downgraded their interest in Jamaican reggae. A lot of established producers left for the US and UK largely due to the rising tide of violence, and as Rastafarianism declined in influence the young people either looked to America for inspiration or got into 'slackness', a more directly crude lyrical form. Slackness thrived in dancehall, a style that developed largely through Barrington Levy's work, a faster, digitalised form which was taken overground briefly in the early 90s, shifted into a more upfront, sometimes violent form by the likes of Buju Banton, Bounty Killer and Beenie Man and had a mini-revival a few years ago with Sean Paul and Elephant Man. Meanwhile ragga was invented in the mid-80s and was an instant hit, more toasting-centric than the singing of dancehall but otherwise much the same. Shabba Ranks is ragga, Shaggy is dancehall. Write that down. Latin America turned dancehall/ragga into reggaeton with the addition of hip hop and its own indigenous dance cultures - Daddy Yankee's Gasolina, number five in Britain in 2004, was its only real international crossover, although it retains a fervent fanbase in areas of America. Meanwhile within Jamaica Luciano's conscious roots and Bob's youngest offspring, double Grammy-winning toaster Damien Marley (2005's Welcome To Jamrock an increasingly rare European radio crossover) are attempting to reinvent what came before. In whatever format, the original reggae remains timeless and of itself to this day.
Paul Nicholas is currently appearing in The Royal Today and has launched a community arts centre in Blackpool.
BUYER'S GUIDE: Two reissue back catalogues to devour voraciously are those of Trojan Records and Blood & Fire records. Trojan was there at the time, issuing the Upsetters, Desmond Dekker and Dave & Ansell Collins among many others. The imprint was bought out in the mid-80s independently, then this decade was bought by Sanctuary and in turn Universal, and brings out a good fifty tracks at a time every so often. Blood And Fire was started in 1985 by five roots enthusiasts, including leading reggae historian Steve Barrow with the aid of leading not-reggae singer Mick Hucknall and until stalling last year issued a lot of hard to find albums and cheapo compilations. For those we write about: Bob Marley compilations are ten a penny, and just occasionally they're even printed without Marley's name atop plain Wailers material - Gold is the best mix of family favourites and judicious cuts from the period in question. Our choice of track is taken from Catch A Fire. Super Ape by Lee 'Scratch' Perry will never go out of print, probably, although a good place to start with the madness is the three disc Arkology. As an introduction to the headspinning world of King Tubby dub Father Of Dub does the business; Harry Mudie & King Tubby In Dub Conference Volume One isn't on Amazon at the moment. The Harder They Come soundtrack includes just three Jimmy Cliff songs alongside the likes of Toots & The Maytals, the Slickers and Desmond Dekker. Some artist albums: Big Youth's Screaming Target, Burning Spear's Marcus Garvey packaged alongside follow-up Garvey's Ghost, The Heart Of The Congos, Culture's Two Sevens Clash in a title-defying thirtieth anniversary reissue (for further vocal/roots work of the time, try Firehouse Rock by Wailing Souls) and Black Uhuru's Sinsemilla. (Thanks to Bill for some touch-up advice)
Sunday, July 06, 2008
Weekender : yoghurt eating grandpa is sex king of the Balkans
WHAT CD?
- Suspicions are raised right from the off when looking at the track details of Wire's Object 47, their 47th release and 11th proper studio album but first without co-founding guitarist Bruce Gilbert. The shortest track is just under three minutes, the longest approaching five and a half. Where's the cutting short when all has been said or undulating cosmiche workouts of recent EPs and first post-reformation album Send? In fact, in the way it trades in a more melodic metre albeit bent towards their experimental purposes it most recalls 1988's proper verse-chorus mobilising and highly regarded A Bell Is A Cup Until It Is Struck, coupled with the dread atmosphere of a Chairs Missing. It's certainly another fine entry into what wasn't too shabby a back catalogue to start with, and its insinuating insectoid ways make it a repeated listen grower.
- Independents Day is an event held Friday just gone designed to celebrate the history and increase awareness of the vitality of properly independent music. To that end it's put together a two CD charity compilation, the first comprising covers - the Prodigy finally getting a go at Ghost Town, the Futureheads giving With Every Heartbeat the rework Jo Whiley has so far denied them, Maximo Park massaging the Go-Betweens' Was There Anything I Could Do, British Sea Power ruffling Galaxie 500, Devendra Banhart messing with Don’t Look Back In Anger, who on earth told Feeder to cover Public Image? - and the second of new bands recommended by the bands who are responsible for CD1. Among these the Futuremen keep up their good work with a word for Thomas Tantrum, XL big up Laura Groves, British Sea Power reach hands across the Brighton scene with a nod to The Tenderfoot and Shrag's selection once again proves the Cribs' record collections are far better than their music.
- Seemingly without telling anyone, another album has eked out from the minimal faux-naive wonderment of Jonathan Richman, responsible for almost as many studio albums as the Fall but with less of a musical palette. Indeed Because Her Beauty Is Raw And Wild sticks largely to themes - acoustic guitar and drums, songs of simple affinity, a song about an artist (No One Was Like Vermeer). This time there's also a Leonard Cohen cover, another go at a Modern Lovers song and a closer about his late mother. There's even suggestions about graceful ageing and maturity, and when that happens to Jonathan Richman lyrics it's time to worry. Whatever, it's bound to be less produced than Black Kids' Partie Traumatic, and here that's all for the better.
- Strong week for single releases this week, with more choral Americans, the return of some old new friends and some genuinely new favourites. In order: when we saw them at End Of The Road last year we tagged Port O'Brien as West Coast rockers in a Bright Eyes sense - little did we realise how accurate that would prove to be. I Woke Up Today is an exuberant harmonic shoutalong just made for yelling along to in big fields. Perfect for summer in another sense are Those Dancing Days, now all out of school and free to spread the gospel of summer Northern Soul organ/organic indiepop with a lyrical kick, which Run Run does down to a T. The new names to Weekender are Mumford and Sons, yet another of those rootsy folky melancholy-suffused banjo-friendly bluegrass-aware co-operatives London is doing so well at the moment - not only have they played with Johnny Flynn and Noah And The Whale, but singer Marcus Mumford leads a double life taking a regular drumstool seat offering prime views of Laura Marling's back. Just because you can kind of tell from all that what the Lend Me Your Eyes EP will sound like doesn't mean it's not highly accomplished for a first release just eight months after forming.
COMING SOON: After all the cool quotient work he'd put in it took one album for Beck's star to implode, The Information disappearing straight down the concensus plughole. A linkup with Danger Mouse and a move back to 60s exotica influences, more the British psychedelia of the Zombies and Syd Barrett than the tropicalia of the underrated Mutations, colours Modern Guilt, released tomorrow and previewed by this trailer and this live version of the title track.
MYSPACE INVADERS: Male singer-songwriters may be probably the most maligned of artistic arrangements nowadays - after all, even with a guitar band there's still plenty of scope - but we like to think that we've nurtured a good record of late in seperating the wheat from the Nutini. So let's properly bring into the open Matthew Saunders, an acoustic wielder originally from Cardiff with broad accent to match and whom we were first introduced to via April's Welcome To Our TV Show!. He's also supported Dirty Pretty Things at Shepherd's Bush Empire, which raised our critical defences a little, but his way with matching a folk strum to a direct, sentimental lyric with a kick in the post-Syd Barrett mould overcomes all associated doubts.
VISUAL AID: Is Louie Louie the most covered live rock'n'roll song ever? Gloria might have a case, but the tale of a Jamaican sailor returning to his love's insistent riff and groove has proved irresistable for everyone from the Beach Boys to Motorhead. Most famously the Kingsmen brought it into the garage age and through the slurring of the lyrics made the song the Outhere Brothers' Don't Stop of the 60s, except in the 60s that meant a year long FBI investigation. It was actually written and first recorded in 1957 by Richard Berry, who sold the copyright cheaply - well, of course he did - and by 1989 was inviting anyone to have a go. Among those who did have a go in their own time were Iggy Pop and the Sonics. Toots And The Maytals skanked it up, Black Flag took it direct to the hardcore kids and the film 24 Hour Party People recreated one of John The Postman's all star performances. That's a barely recognisable Dave Gorman in the role of the aforementioned cult soused stage invading sorting office employee. The Pretenders named a seperate song after it, Hot Chocolate were inspired to write their only US number one as a follow-on, including the riff in a minor key transposition, and British Sea Power referenced it, Iggy and Charles Lindbergh at the same time. Even men in chicken costumes can pull it off.
LINKS EFFECT
* Lifts and taxis are all very well, but someone filming guerilla performances needed to take it back to live music's heritage. Hence Bandstand Busking, in which a crew and performer find a largely abandoned bandstand in London and film/perform in it. School of Language, Wet Paint, Stars Of Sunday League and currently Wild Beasts have had a go, with Johnny Flynn, Laura Groves and Frightened Rabbit coming shortly.
* While you may be of the belief that the last thing this summer needs is another music festival, you can't help but prick your ears up at news that British Sea Power are organising a long weekend's shindiggery. Sing Ye From The Hillsides! is being held on 29th-31st August at Tan Hill Inn, the highest inn in England at 1,732 feet above sea level, located on the Pennine Way in North Yorkshire. BSP are playing all three days with support plus sideshows including husky racing, duck herding, a pub quiz and an attempt to record the loudest ever human voice. The band will also be launching their own brand of nut brown ale at the festival. Of course they're having their own nut brown ale brewed! Tickets £50 a pop, available through Ticketline.
* Coming to our attention right at the death before posting: Boxing Duck hoys up the final Neutral Milk Hotel gig, although really it's just Jeff with Laura Carter (Elf Power's multi-instrumentalist, not the one out of Blood Red Shoes) And from that page, a link onto endless live, demo, rare, radio and connected Mangumosity.
- Suspicions are raised right from the off when looking at the track details of Wire's Object 47, their 47th release and 11th proper studio album but first without co-founding guitarist Bruce Gilbert. The shortest track is just under three minutes, the longest approaching five and a half. Where's the cutting short when all has been said or undulating cosmiche workouts of recent EPs and first post-reformation album Send? In fact, in the way it trades in a more melodic metre albeit bent towards their experimental purposes it most recalls 1988's proper verse-chorus mobilising and highly regarded A Bell Is A Cup Until It Is Struck, coupled with the dread atmosphere of a Chairs Missing. It's certainly another fine entry into what wasn't too shabby a back catalogue to start with, and its insinuating insectoid ways make it a repeated listen grower.
- Independents Day is an event held Friday just gone designed to celebrate the history and increase awareness of the vitality of properly independent music. To that end it's put together a two CD charity compilation, the first comprising covers - the Prodigy finally getting a go at Ghost Town, the Futureheads giving With Every Heartbeat the rework Jo Whiley has so far denied them, Maximo Park massaging the Go-Betweens' Was There Anything I Could Do, British Sea Power ruffling Galaxie 500, Devendra Banhart messing with Don’t Look Back In Anger, who on earth told Feeder to cover Public Image? - and the second of new bands recommended by the bands who are responsible for CD1. Among these the Futuremen keep up their good work with a word for Thomas Tantrum, XL big up Laura Groves, British Sea Power reach hands across the Brighton scene with a nod to The Tenderfoot and Shrag's selection once again proves the Cribs' record collections are far better than their music.
- Seemingly without telling anyone, another album has eked out from the minimal faux-naive wonderment of Jonathan Richman, responsible for almost as many studio albums as the Fall but with less of a musical palette. Indeed Because Her Beauty Is Raw And Wild sticks largely to themes - acoustic guitar and drums, songs of simple affinity, a song about an artist (No One Was Like Vermeer). This time there's also a Leonard Cohen cover, another go at a Modern Lovers song and a closer about his late mother. There's even suggestions about graceful ageing and maturity, and when that happens to Jonathan Richman lyrics it's time to worry. Whatever, it's bound to be less produced than Black Kids' Partie Traumatic, and here that's all for the better.
- Strong week for single releases this week, with more choral Americans, the return of some old new friends and some genuinely new favourites. In order: when we saw them at End Of The Road last year we tagged Port O'Brien as West Coast rockers in a Bright Eyes sense - little did we realise how accurate that would prove to be. I Woke Up Today is an exuberant harmonic shoutalong just made for yelling along to in big fields. Perfect for summer in another sense are Those Dancing Days, now all out of school and free to spread the gospel of summer Northern Soul organ/organic indiepop with a lyrical kick, which Run Run does down to a T. The new names to Weekender are Mumford and Sons, yet another of those rootsy folky melancholy-suffused banjo-friendly bluegrass-aware co-operatives London is doing so well at the moment - not only have they played with Johnny Flynn and Noah And The Whale, but singer Marcus Mumford leads a double life taking a regular drumstool seat offering prime views of Laura Marling's back. Just because you can kind of tell from all that what the Lend Me Your Eyes EP will sound like doesn't mean it's not highly accomplished for a first release just eight months after forming.
COMING SOON: After all the cool quotient work he'd put in it took one album for Beck's star to implode, The Information disappearing straight down the concensus plughole. A linkup with Danger Mouse and a move back to 60s exotica influences, more the British psychedelia of the Zombies and Syd Barrett than the tropicalia of the underrated Mutations, colours Modern Guilt, released tomorrow and previewed by this trailer and this live version of the title track.
MYSPACE INVADERS: Male singer-songwriters may be probably the most maligned of artistic arrangements nowadays - after all, even with a guitar band there's still plenty of scope - but we like to think that we've nurtured a good record of late in seperating the wheat from the Nutini. So let's properly bring into the open Matthew Saunders, an acoustic wielder originally from Cardiff with broad accent to match and whom we were first introduced to via April's Welcome To Our TV Show!. He's also supported Dirty Pretty Things at Shepherd's Bush Empire, which raised our critical defences a little, but his way with matching a folk strum to a direct, sentimental lyric with a kick in the post-Syd Barrett mould overcomes all associated doubts.
VISUAL AID: Is Louie Louie the most covered live rock'n'roll song ever? Gloria might have a case, but the tale of a Jamaican sailor returning to his love's insistent riff and groove has proved irresistable for everyone from the Beach Boys to Motorhead. Most famously the Kingsmen brought it into the garage age and through the slurring of the lyrics made the song the Outhere Brothers' Don't Stop of the 60s, except in the 60s that meant a year long FBI investigation. It was actually written and first recorded in 1957 by Richard Berry, who sold the copyright cheaply - well, of course he did - and by 1989 was inviting anyone to have a go. Among those who did have a go in their own time were Iggy Pop and the Sonics. Toots And The Maytals skanked it up, Black Flag took it direct to the hardcore kids and the film 24 Hour Party People recreated one of John The Postman's all star performances. That's a barely recognisable Dave Gorman in the role of the aforementioned cult soused stage invading sorting office employee. The Pretenders named a seperate song after it, Hot Chocolate were inspired to write their only US number one as a follow-on, including the riff in a minor key transposition, and British Sea Power referenced it, Iggy and Charles Lindbergh at the same time. Even men in chicken costumes can pull it off.
LINKS EFFECT
* Lifts and taxis are all very well, but someone filming guerilla performances needed to take it back to live music's heritage. Hence Bandstand Busking, in which a crew and performer find a largely abandoned bandstand in London and film/perform in it. School of Language, Wet Paint, Stars Of Sunday League and currently Wild Beasts have had a go, with Johnny Flynn, Laura Groves and Frightened Rabbit coming shortly.
* While you may be of the belief that the last thing this summer needs is another music festival, you can't help but prick your ears up at news that British Sea Power are organising a long weekend's shindiggery. Sing Ye From The Hillsides! is being held on 29th-31st August at Tan Hill Inn, the highest inn in England at 1,732 feet above sea level, located on the Pennine Way in North Yorkshire. BSP are playing all three days with support plus sideshows including husky racing, duck herding, a pub quiz and an attempt to record the loudest ever human voice. The band will also be launching their own brand of nut brown ale at the festival. Of course they're having their own nut brown ale brewed! Tickets £50 a pop, available through Ticketline.
* Coming to our attention right at the death before posting: Boxing Duck hoys up the final Neutral Milk Hotel gig, although really it's just Jeff with Laura Carter (Elf Power's multi-instrumentalist, not the one out of Blood Red Shoes) And from that page, a link onto endless live, demo, rare, radio and connected Mangumosity.
Saturday, July 05, 2008
The Weekly Sweep
Thursday, July 03, 2008
Celebrity Muxtape #2: A Classic Education
The second STN favourite to take part in our playlist of the stars feature is the Bologna-based band whose carefully constructed huge sweeping anthemry came to our attention at the turn of the year, and we instantly made space for them on our year in preview Covermount and have followed their progress carefully since. They've actually worked with the aforeMuxtaped Jeremy Warmsley and have just released a fine debut EP, available through their website and Myspace. With all that in mind we asked Jonathan, Paul and Luca to tell us some of their favourite songs:
A Classic Education's Muxtape
Gastr Del Sol - The Seasons Reverse
Jonathan: It just opened up a new way of feeling music for me. I was really a kid and coudn't understand what was going on in the song. It is such a great pop song, the lyrics are perfect for it. And when the fireworks go off at the end and you hear the children talking... well, lets just say i've imagined that scene so many times.
Smog - I Feel Like The Mother Of The World
Paul: It could continue for hours... this song and Bill Callahan's voice never tire me. That piano starts getting stuck in your head and never leaves.
Glasvegas – It's My Own Cheating Heart That Makes Me Cry
Luca: I need to listen to this song at least once a day! I just heard it even a second ago.
Mike Watt - Tuff Gnarl
Paul: It was written by Sonic Youth but here it is played by the best bass player in the world...in the history of rock and roll Watt's sound and his thumb work is what should be remembered, and not all those glam rock guitar solos! Plus you have Carla Bozulich on vocals here!
Elbow - Red
Luca: For the drums coming back in around 2:50... it's the beauty of despair.
Echo & The Bunnymen - Nocturnal Me
Jonathan: Sometimes when you hear this now you can't help but thinking, geez, it was maybe a little overblown and can easily sound funny with those grandiose lyrics. Other days though it's just what you need to get you back on track and feel invincible. Nature over everything!
Johnny Cash - Hurt
Luca: Because just like Trent Reznor said while he was listening to it, "I didn't think I had written such a beautiful song".
The Modern Lovers - I'm Straight
Jonathan: Wow, the arrogance that comes out of the words. I can feel the voice just right beside me, sweat dripping down. It's just the pure rock and roll song. "I'm straight and i want to take his place!"
Scott Walker - It's Raining Today
Jonathan: This song opens Scott 3 and it just spooks me out. Already the cover of the record is something that just gives me nightmares, but this song... The violins on the right channel just float in the air for the whole song and give it this phantom like atmosphere. The voice..what a voice. You're melted in a second.
Brian Eno - By This River
Paul: It's so simple and touching that you have to hear it once every 5/6 years so that you can rediscover it each time. It helps reminding us that you can be minimal and "leave it to the basics" when you are writing a song.
A Classic Education's Muxtape
Gastr Del Sol - The Seasons Reverse
Jonathan: It just opened up a new way of feeling music for me. I was really a kid and coudn't understand what was going on in the song. It is such a great pop song, the lyrics are perfect for it. And when the fireworks go off at the end and you hear the children talking... well, lets just say i've imagined that scene so many times.
Smog - I Feel Like The Mother Of The World
Paul: It could continue for hours... this song and Bill Callahan's voice never tire me. That piano starts getting stuck in your head and never leaves.
Glasvegas – It's My Own Cheating Heart That Makes Me Cry
Luca: I need to listen to this song at least once a day! I just heard it even a second ago.
Mike Watt - Tuff Gnarl
Paul: It was written by Sonic Youth but here it is played by the best bass player in the world...in the history of rock and roll Watt's sound and his thumb work is what should be remembered, and not all those glam rock guitar solos! Plus you have Carla Bozulich on vocals here!
Elbow - Red
Luca: For the drums coming back in around 2:50... it's the beauty of despair.
Echo & The Bunnymen - Nocturnal Me
Jonathan: Sometimes when you hear this now you can't help but thinking, geez, it was maybe a little overblown and can easily sound funny with those grandiose lyrics. Other days though it's just what you need to get you back on track and feel invincible. Nature over everything!
Johnny Cash - Hurt
Luca: Because just like Trent Reznor said while he was listening to it, "I didn't think I had written such a beautiful song".
The Modern Lovers - I'm Straight
Jonathan: Wow, the arrogance that comes out of the words. I can feel the voice just right beside me, sweat dripping down. It's just the pure rock and roll song. "I'm straight and i want to take his place!"
Scott Walker - It's Raining Today
Jonathan: This song opens Scott 3 and it just spooks me out. Already the cover of the record is something that just gives me nightmares, but this song... The violins on the right channel just float in the air for the whole song and give it this phantom like atmosphere. The voice..what a voice. You're melted in a second.
Brian Eno - By This River
Paul: It's so simple and touching that you have to hear it once every 5/6 years so that you can rediscover it each time. It helps reminding us that you can be minimal and "leave it to the basics" when you are writing a song.
Wednesday, July 02, 2008
Not holding his light under Garry Bushell
So we usually pass comment on Glastonbury's TV coverage - the above is from just this weekend - and this year was most notable for a very curious Friday night show which involved Mark Radcliffe not entirely playing ball with the spirit of, well, anything, apart perhaps from spirits, and Lauren Laverne. Now, we'll always love Laverne for fairly obvious reasons if you know us, but, you see, she used to go on television to do sort of thing. Now, while she's still capable of the odd flight of fancy, she seems to spend most of her working life in an advanced state of excitement as if possessed by the spirit (third use of that work in different contexts) of Zoe Ball, even when it sends her judgement awry. Declaring Amy Winehouse's famously scatted and/or slurred and slugging performance "a tour de force" and her musical highlight of the whole three days is one thing. Talking about Kate Nash opening the Friday Pyramid stage as an example of how an artist can have a sudden rise to prominence which belies their place on the bill is another - was Nash really booked before last August, then? And we know plenty of people still picking their dentures up from the floor after her introducing The National as an American Editors.
Still, at least Jamie Theakston was run out of Pilton town years ago.
Tuesday, July 01, 2008
Advance notice
To be perfectly honest, we'd by and large be happy with the way our chart of the year currently looks come the big write-ups in December, but that's not how the music industry works. Indeed, eleven of our top 20 of 2007 came out after this day last year. With that in mind, what's likeliest from what we currently know about to barge its way in?
The old favourites
A section for new records expected from those we've particularly cheered on to date. In an interview last year Okkervil River's Will Sheff revealed last year's STN Best Album Of The Year The Stage Names was envisioned as a double album. The other half, The Stand-Ins, has been set free by itself in lieu of another Appendix EP, released 9th September in America and October 13th here. It's seen as a continuation of the earlier album, with a follow-up song to Savannah Smiles, while Jonathan Meiburg, then a bandmate but now merely of Shearwater, gets a duet on one track. More excitingly, it's an album that follows on from a record that dealt with celebrity and the nature of fandom and there's a track called Blue Tulip. It couldn't be, could it?
Outside our own parameters Jeremy Warmsley merely skirted the boundaries of press interest with the superb 2006 debut The Art Of Fiction. This time, in the wake of the slow burn success of Welcome To Our TV Show and dates with the Mystery Jets and Transgressive's travelling show, you feel he's going for it. How We Became, released in September, sees him link production wise with Markus Dravs, who's just co-produced Viva La Vida And That and previously engineered/mixed three Bjork albums and Neon Bible. What we've heard him do live and in sessions suggests variously more directness and a Rufus-approaching grandiosity. How that will all turn out on record will be intriguing.
It was one of our great regrets that Michigan multidirectionalists Anathallo's sumptuous 2006 album Floating World never got a full British release - indeed, a track from it was released as a single only this February. No such fate awaits Canopy Glow, as Big Scary Monsters have a hand on it. According to Matt Joynt in a May interview "we're hoping for this fall. We're working out label stuff right now." Also, the songs are "more like traditional songs. There's still not like something anyone would hear on the radio", which is fair enough. Owen Pallett first announced a Final Fantasy album called Heartland in November 2006, but last July he said it wouldn't come out before halfway through this year. Reports around the release of Jukebox claimed Cat Power was working on a follow-up of original songs called The Sun, but that trail's gone quiet since. Grizzly Bear are doing a lot of touring in the first half of August, some with Radiohead, and they've already performed excellent new song While You Wait For The Others on Conan O'Brien's show. Late summer 2006 cause celebres The Victorian English Gentlemens Club are reportedly recording album two as you read this, a stage early 2006 cause celebres The Boy Least Likely To went through at the end of 2007 - their album, back to being self-financed, should be out very soon.
Debutants
Since her debut 7" two years ago Emmy The Great has been content to do things her own way while lesser talents hop on the major label bandwagon, and if that means being called the new Kate Nash as Q did even though Emmy's first single came out while Nash was still playing open mic nights, so be it. The album, presumably still on her own Close Harbour, is called First Love and is set for September. Ms Moss was once backing singer with Noah And The Whale, although it's probably unwise to enquire any further about when and how Laura Marling took up that mantle instead. Their own debut bears the cryptic title Peaceful, The World Lays Me Down and is out on 11th August. The tracklisting we have here lists an opener called 2 Atoms In A Molecule, which is a lyric from 2 Bodies 1 Heart, which is absent. What's gone on there?
Another former STN inquisition subject going longform are Sky Larkin, who were in Seattle over May and June with John Goodmanson (Sleater-Kinney, Bikini Kill, Death Cab For Cutie, Blonde Redhead). Quoth the studio boss in its blog "my goodness, I am TRULY excited about Sky Larkin. They are a band to watch, for double sure. They've certainly got my attention, and I think we'll be hearing a lot from them in the coming months." Those Dancing Days are a band we've been hearing no small amount about in the recent past, and now that Linnea has finished school they can get on with the important business of an album, scheduled for September/October. The Field Music diaspora has already produced one fine spinoff in School Of Language, and now Peter Brewis gets a go with The Week That Was, whose self-titled LP is released on 18th August.
We haven't talked about Mary Hampton on here, have we? Mary Hampton. Sparse, gothic English folk in the Denny/Briggs tradition from a Brightonian affiliated with lovely Drift Records (who among many other things are preparing a new Thirty Pounds Of Bone album), although My Mother's Children ("an album I know I am going to love for life" - Eliza Carthy) is released through another label on 4th August. Sheffield's wooden chair-utilising harmonising duo Slow Club got their studio stuff done early this year so their LP might just sneak out before the end of the summer. Haven't heard much from Eugene McGuinness since the flurry of interest around his mini-album The Early Learnings Of..., but a forthcoming flurry of business suggests something is afoot. East London absurdists XX Teens have been racing through rhythm section members of late and have still found time to complete Welcome To Goon Island, dropping 21st July. At long, long last Transgressive's long serving but lately very quiet synth-poppers with the accent on pop Burningpilot have an album ready - Cold Caller, released in October.
We've waited long enough
So now Chinese Democracy looks like coming to pass before the next ice age, the next band to have the dead hand of expectation placed upon them must be The Avalanches. Coming up to eight years since the first album's Australian release, Modular Records claimed they'd got it ready in 2006, the band said they were making final decisions in January 2007, but still radio silence prevails. As DJ Shadow will ruefully confirm follow-ups to critically acclaimed sampledelica debuts are always difficult work, but we can only find out for ourselves. It would have been My Bloody Valentine but then they went and played these comeback gigs. Last year Kevin Shields promised a collection of songs completed between 1993 and 1997 plus some up to date stuff was on the way, and last week he said he'd begun penning new material again.
So who else is overdue a return? Massive Attack revealed their fifth album would be called Weather Underground and six tracks had been completed for it in January 2006. That's even longer than Mezzanine took, and that ended with a member leaving in disgust - not unreasonably, they now say they're in no rush to actually release the thing. Described as "gothic soul", rumoured contributors include Tom Waits (christ, can you imagine?), Tunde Adebimpe and David Sitek, Guy Garvey, Hope Sandoval, Damon Albarn, Horace Andy, Mike Patton, Liz Fraser and Mos Def. Stereolab's Chemical Chords (18th August) is, if not a back to basics, a set of "purposefully short, dense, fast pop songs", more brassic exotica for a first studio set in four years. Doves' Some Cities is three and a half years old and a release date for the follow-up of late 2007 was completely missed, but Andy Williams promised in a blog two weeks ago "we aim to have this record finished by the end of summer, songs are already starting to be mixed." Madness' The Liberty Of Norton Folgate is a concept record about London of old, but then so was their best album The Rise And Fall. They've just previewed the whole thing with three nights at the Hackney Empire but a release date remains known only to them - September says one rumour. ballboy earned themselves a cult underground following, but with Gordon McIntyre having a couple of side projects some thought they'd gone permanently quiet. Not so, as I Worked On The Ships emerges on 11th August.
After a year of being talked about the Hot Puppies' second album Blue Hands has a release date, 22nd September, just a month or so before Becky Newman produces her first born and well after the New Pop revival it could have presaged. Gah. In fact it's has been in the works for so long that Bec and Beth have had time to form a side project called, erm, Bec And Beth, who release an EP a month before. After the underwhelming last Cardigans album Nina Persson has returned to A Camp business, citing influence from Bowie, girl groups, "80s punk" and Adam & The Ants. Two years on from Grandaddy's dissolvement Jason Lytle, who pretty much made the last two albums solo anyway, has promised solo business this year. After five years Bis' Manda Rin has meanwhile come up with My DNA, out on 8th September, a return to disco-punk yore claiming, worryingly, major influence from Late Of The Pier. Mercury Rev have 'only' been off for three and a half years but have made up with two full sets - Snowflake Midnight will be available from September 29th under proper methods, with companion album Strange Attractor given away free from the same date. According to the press release the former features "the forces of symmetry and chaos at play, shimmering, vibrating close-ups and vistas of Life driving itself onward, bursting with patterns and mandala-like forms pushed to the brink of incredible pressures then lost in an instant... blown apart by their own majestic desire to share themselves, spirals of new momentum inter-twingling with the vastness of limitless new creation." No pressure.
Pot pourri (that's a mixed bag, a random mixture, we don't really know what we're going to get)
Absentee: after working on all their side projects, Victory Shorts arrives in August.
Antony & The Johnsons: autumn sees the hotly anticipated The Crying Light. Hegarty sa: "On my last record, everything was sort of sad and redemptive. And this one, it's more extreme in both directions. Some of the songs are much more joyful, and some of the songs are much less redemptive. And then some of the songs are more thoughtful - more philosophical."
Archie Bronson Outfit: recording over May; new album tentatively talked about for the autumn.
Beck: Modern Guilt is out next Monday, and apparently it sounds like this.
Broken Social Scene Presents Brendan Canning: August's UK release of Something For All Of Us squares the 'Presents' circle after Kevin Drew's Spirit If.
Calexico: "Carried To Dust is the next step in Calexico's ongoing quest of moving forward while never turning its back on the past". Er, yeah. 8th September, in any case, and Sam 'Iron & Wine' Beam's on it.
Charlotte Hatherley: after time playing with Bryan Ferry and Clinic, was recording with Luke Smith (ex-Clor) last month.
CSS: Their London album, Donkey, is out on 21st July.
Drever McCusker Woomble: Kris, John and Roddy have done good solo Caledonian folky things on their own, and Phil Selway and Norman Blake guest on their collaboration Before The Ruin (15th September).
Klaxons: they're not really going prog, are they? They've promised an autumn release for ages, whatever.
MF Doom: heavy rumour has it that a concept album under the name DOOM is imminent.
Morrissey: can Years Of Refusal (15th September) really be as "punk, garage, DIY" as one member is on record as saying it is?
Pagan Wanderer Lu: our favourite Welsh satirical lo-fi electro warrior - a hotly contested mantle - has an album ready called Fight My Battles For Me for release... soon?
PJ Harvey & John Parish: autumn looks likely for the pair's second wide-ranging collaboration.
The Spinto Band: the recording sessions seem to have started a year ago, and while we don't yet have a date we have a title, Moonwink.
The Walkmen: You And Me is out August 18th, and will surely be better than A Hundred Miles Off.
Touch and go for 2008, more likely go
Bat For Lashes: now touring Fur And Gold has finally finished, Natasha has tentatively promised a return to the studio.
Camera Obscura: have been 'in' with previous album associate Jari Haapalainen through May and June but intelligence says nothing until the new year. Until then there's dates in the second half of this month and a few festivals.
Franz Ferdinand: Currently working with Dan Carey, but Alex says there's a lot of mixing still to do and January seems likely.
Lucky Soul: hard at work writing and demoing. Why not see them at London Luminaire next Wednesday?
Mew: just started tracking at Rich Costey's New York studio right about as you read this - Costey produced Frengers, which bodes well.
The Pipettes: the Exciting News Inside!-style line-up have already played live (supporting REO Speedwagon!) and are now searching out a studio to make themselves roomy in.
And then there's all the surprises we don't know about yet...
The old favourites
A section for new records expected from those we've particularly cheered on to date. In an interview last year Okkervil River's Will Sheff revealed last year's STN Best Album Of The Year The Stage Names was envisioned as a double album. The other half, The Stand-Ins, has been set free by itself in lieu of another Appendix EP, released 9th September in America and October 13th here. It's seen as a continuation of the earlier album, with a follow-up song to Savannah Smiles, while Jonathan Meiburg, then a bandmate but now merely of Shearwater, gets a duet on one track. More excitingly, it's an album that follows on from a record that dealt with celebrity and the nature of fandom and there's a track called Blue Tulip. It couldn't be, could it?
Outside our own parameters Jeremy Warmsley merely skirted the boundaries of press interest with the superb 2006 debut The Art Of Fiction. This time, in the wake of the slow burn success of Welcome To Our TV Show and dates with the Mystery Jets and Transgressive's travelling show, you feel he's going for it. How We Became, released in September, sees him link production wise with Markus Dravs, who's just co-produced Viva La Vida And That and previously engineered/mixed three Bjork albums and Neon Bible. What we've heard him do live and in sessions suggests variously more directness and a Rufus-approaching grandiosity. How that will all turn out on record will be intriguing.
It was one of our great regrets that Michigan multidirectionalists Anathallo's sumptuous 2006 album Floating World never got a full British release - indeed, a track from it was released as a single only this February. No such fate awaits Canopy Glow, as Big Scary Monsters have a hand on it. According to Matt Joynt in a May interview "we're hoping for this fall. We're working out label stuff right now." Also, the songs are "more like traditional songs. There's still not like something anyone would hear on the radio", which is fair enough. Owen Pallett first announced a Final Fantasy album called Heartland in November 2006, but last July he said it wouldn't come out before halfway through this year. Reports around the release of Jukebox claimed Cat Power was working on a follow-up of original songs called The Sun, but that trail's gone quiet since. Grizzly Bear are doing a lot of touring in the first half of August, some with Radiohead, and they've already performed excellent new song While You Wait For The Others on Conan O'Brien's show. Late summer 2006 cause celebres The Victorian English Gentlemens Club are reportedly recording album two as you read this, a stage early 2006 cause celebres The Boy Least Likely To went through at the end of 2007 - their album, back to being self-financed, should be out very soon.
Debutants
Since her debut 7" two years ago Emmy The Great has been content to do things her own way while lesser talents hop on the major label bandwagon, and if that means being called the new Kate Nash as Q did even though Emmy's first single came out while Nash was still playing open mic nights, so be it. The album, presumably still on her own Close Harbour, is called First Love and is set for September. Ms Moss was once backing singer with Noah And The Whale, although it's probably unwise to enquire any further about when and how Laura Marling took up that mantle instead. Their own debut bears the cryptic title Peaceful, The World Lays Me Down and is out on 11th August. The tracklisting we have here lists an opener called 2 Atoms In A Molecule, which is a lyric from 2 Bodies 1 Heart, which is absent. What's gone on there?
Another former STN inquisition subject going longform are Sky Larkin, who were in Seattle over May and June with John Goodmanson (Sleater-Kinney, Bikini Kill, Death Cab For Cutie, Blonde Redhead). Quoth the studio boss in its blog "my goodness, I am TRULY excited about Sky Larkin. They are a band to watch, for double sure. They've certainly got my attention, and I think we'll be hearing a lot from them in the coming months." Those Dancing Days are a band we've been hearing no small amount about in the recent past, and now that Linnea has finished school they can get on with the important business of an album, scheduled for September/October. The Field Music diaspora has already produced one fine spinoff in School Of Language, and now Peter Brewis gets a go with The Week That Was, whose self-titled LP is released on 18th August.
We haven't talked about Mary Hampton on here, have we? Mary Hampton. Sparse, gothic English folk in the Denny/Briggs tradition from a Brightonian affiliated with lovely Drift Records (who among many other things are preparing a new Thirty Pounds Of Bone album), although My Mother's Children ("an album I know I am going to love for life" - Eliza Carthy) is released through another label on 4th August. Sheffield's wooden chair-utilising harmonising duo Slow Club got their studio stuff done early this year so their LP might just sneak out before the end of the summer. Haven't heard much from Eugene McGuinness since the flurry of interest around his mini-album The Early Learnings Of..., but a forthcoming flurry of business suggests something is afoot. East London absurdists XX Teens have been racing through rhythm section members of late and have still found time to complete Welcome To Goon Island, dropping 21st July. At long, long last Transgressive's long serving but lately very quiet synth-poppers with the accent on pop Burningpilot have an album ready - Cold Caller, released in October.
We've waited long enough
So now Chinese Democracy looks like coming to pass before the next ice age, the next band to have the dead hand of expectation placed upon them must be The Avalanches. Coming up to eight years since the first album's Australian release, Modular Records claimed they'd got it ready in 2006, the band said they were making final decisions in January 2007, but still radio silence prevails. As DJ Shadow will ruefully confirm follow-ups to critically acclaimed sampledelica debuts are always difficult work, but we can only find out for ourselves. It would have been My Bloody Valentine but then they went and played these comeback gigs. Last year Kevin Shields promised a collection of songs completed between 1993 and 1997 plus some up to date stuff was on the way, and last week he said he'd begun penning new material again.
So who else is overdue a return? Massive Attack revealed their fifth album would be called Weather Underground and six tracks had been completed for it in January 2006. That's even longer than Mezzanine took, and that ended with a member leaving in disgust - not unreasonably, they now say they're in no rush to actually release the thing. Described as "gothic soul", rumoured contributors include Tom Waits (christ, can you imagine?), Tunde Adebimpe and David Sitek, Guy Garvey, Hope Sandoval, Damon Albarn, Horace Andy, Mike Patton, Liz Fraser and Mos Def. Stereolab's Chemical Chords (18th August) is, if not a back to basics, a set of "purposefully short, dense, fast pop songs", more brassic exotica for a first studio set in four years. Doves' Some Cities is three and a half years old and a release date for the follow-up of late 2007 was completely missed, but Andy Williams promised in a blog two weeks ago "we aim to have this record finished by the end of summer, songs are already starting to be mixed." Madness' The Liberty Of Norton Folgate is a concept record about London of old, but then so was their best album The Rise And Fall. They've just previewed the whole thing with three nights at the Hackney Empire but a release date remains known only to them - September says one rumour. ballboy earned themselves a cult underground following, but with Gordon McIntyre having a couple of side projects some thought they'd gone permanently quiet. Not so, as I Worked On The Ships emerges on 11th August.
After a year of being talked about the Hot Puppies' second album Blue Hands has a release date, 22nd September, just a month or so before Becky Newman produces her first born and well after the New Pop revival it could have presaged. Gah. In fact it's has been in the works for so long that Bec and Beth have had time to form a side project called, erm, Bec And Beth, who release an EP a month before. After the underwhelming last Cardigans album Nina Persson has returned to A Camp business, citing influence from Bowie, girl groups, "80s punk" and Adam & The Ants. Two years on from Grandaddy's dissolvement Jason Lytle, who pretty much made the last two albums solo anyway, has promised solo business this year. After five years Bis' Manda Rin has meanwhile come up with My DNA, out on 8th September, a return to disco-punk yore claiming, worryingly, major influence from Late Of The Pier. Mercury Rev have 'only' been off for three and a half years but have made up with two full sets - Snowflake Midnight will be available from September 29th under proper methods, with companion album Strange Attractor given away free from the same date. According to the press release the former features "the forces of symmetry and chaos at play, shimmering, vibrating close-ups and vistas of Life driving itself onward, bursting with patterns and mandala-like forms pushed to the brink of incredible pressures then lost in an instant... blown apart by their own majestic desire to share themselves, spirals of new momentum inter-twingling with the vastness of limitless new creation." No pressure.
Pot pourri (that's a mixed bag, a random mixture, we don't really know what we're going to get)
Absentee: after working on all their side projects, Victory Shorts arrives in August.
Antony & The Johnsons: autumn sees the hotly anticipated The Crying Light. Hegarty sa: "On my last record, everything was sort of sad and redemptive. And this one, it's more extreme in both directions. Some of the songs are much more joyful, and some of the songs are much less redemptive. And then some of the songs are more thoughtful - more philosophical."
Archie Bronson Outfit: recording over May; new album tentatively talked about for the autumn.
Beck: Modern Guilt is out next Monday, and apparently it sounds like this.
Broken Social Scene Presents Brendan Canning: August's UK release of Something For All Of Us squares the 'Presents' circle after Kevin Drew's Spirit If.
Calexico: "Carried To Dust is the next step in Calexico's ongoing quest of moving forward while never turning its back on the past". Er, yeah. 8th September, in any case, and Sam 'Iron & Wine' Beam's on it.
Charlotte Hatherley: after time playing with Bryan Ferry and Clinic, was recording with Luke Smith (ex-Clor) last month.
CSS: Their London album, Donkey, is out on 21st July.
Drever McCusker Woomble: Kris, John and Roddy have done good solo Caledonian folky things on their own, and Phil Selway and Norman Blake guest on their collaboration Before The Ruin (15th September).
Klaxons: they're not really going prog, are they? They've promised an autumn release for ages, whatever.
MF Doom: heavy rumour has it that a concept album under the name DOOM is imminent.
Morrissey: can Years Of Refusal (15th September) really be as "punk, garage, DIY" as one member is on record as saying it is?
Pagan Wanderer Lu: our favourite Welsh satirical lo-fi electro warrior - a hotly contested mantle - has an album ready called Fight My Battles For Me for release... soon?
PJ Harvey & John Parish: autumn looks likely for the pair's second wide-ranging collaboration.
The Spinto Band: the recording sessions seem to have started a year ago, and while we don't yet have a date we have a title, Moonwink.
The Walkmen: You And Me is out August 18th, and will surely be better than A Hundred Miles Off.
Touch and go for 2008, more likely go
Bat For Lashes: now touring Fur And Gold has finally finished, Natasha has tentatively promised a return to the studio.
Camera Obscura: have been 'in' with previous album associate Jari Haapalainen through May and June but intelligence says nothing until the new year. Until then there's dates in the second half of this month and a few festivals.
Franz Ferdinand: Currently working with Dan Carey, but Alex says there's a lot of mixing still to do and January seems likely.
Lucky Soul: hard at work writing and demoing. Why not see them at London Luminaire next Wednesday?
Mew: just started tracking at Rich Costey's New York studio right about as you read this - Costey produced Frengers, which bodes well.
The Pipettes: the Exciting News Inside!-style line-up have already played live (supporting REO Speedwagon!) and are now searching out a studio to make themselves roomy in.
And then there's all the surprises we don't know about yet...
Monday, June 30, 2008
26 down, 26 to go
There's been a lot of debate in recent weeks on whether 2008 has been a disappointing year for genuinely enthralling new music or one already being suffocated by excellence. Middle ground? Pschaw. As for us, well, let's just say that when narrowing the list down to produce our traditional top ten of the first half of the year, the longlist contained 27 albums. And to think we usually only do a top 30 of the whole year in December. This time around the ten, in nothing but alphabetical order, is suffixed with The Moment - that one part of a genuinely great song that elevates it into magnificence.
British Sea Power – Do You Like Rock Music?
THE MOMENT: 4:30 into Atom. The "cold war Pixies" dissemble into cymbals, divebombing Stukas and somewhere in the mix a piano literally being pushed downstairs.
Elbow – The Seldom Seen Kid
THE MOMENT: 0:00 into An Audience With The Pope. "If she says she needs me, everybody's gonna have to wait" sings Guy, heavy of heart.
The Fall - Imperial Wax Solvent
THE MOMENT: 4:02 into 50 Year Old Man. Having already informed us that not only is he the age of the title and furthermore likes it but also that he routinely pisses onto hotel towels, has a three foot long hard-on and that Steve Albini is in collusion with Virgin Trains against him, Mark E Smith finally takes a break to be replaced by a duel between a MIDI-enabled polyphonic ringtone creating keyboard and a banjo.
Johnny Foreigner - Waited Up 'Til It Was Light
THE MOMENT: 2:03 into Salt, Pepa & Spinderella. "Bring out the real fun, turn on the real drums" Alexei suggests. Junior obliges. Things summarily go thermonuclear.
Los Campesinos! - Hold On Now, Youngster...
THE MOMENT: 1:46 into We Are All Accelerated Readers. Gareth: "If this sentimental movie marathon has taught us one thing, it’s that the opposite of true love is as follows..." Choral response: "REALITY!"
Mystery Jets – Twenty One
THE MOMENT: 0:04 into MJ. Aztec Camera expansive pop (the reissued version featuring Somewhere In My Heart) is somewhat of a giveaway) decorated with backing "wohhhh! wohhhh!"s set it entirely in place.
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Dig Lazarus Dig!!!
THE MOMENT: 2:35 into We Call Upon The Author. "Who is this great burdensome slavering dog-thing that mediocres my every thought?"
Vampire Weekend – Vampire Weekend
THE MOMENT: 0:17 into Oxford Comma. No, Ezra, who indeed? It then becomes apparent that actually the bringing up of the titular grammatical conjunction precedent is actually going somewhere.
The Wave Pictures - Instant Coffee Baby
THE MOMENT: 2:30 into Instant Coffee Baby. David Tattersall's vocal has sounded throughout like it's been building towards a revelation, a moment of clarity about life. And here it comes, and... "you got cystitis, didn't you?"
Wild Beasts - Limbo, Panto
THE MOMENT: 0:45 into Woeboegone Wanderers. The tune passes from Orange Juice railway track post-punk-funk into waltz time seamlessly, Hayden Thorpe going with it without breaking note.
If you must know, the chief near misses are by Bon Iver, the Indelicates, Johnny Flynn, Lightspeed Champion, the Long Blondes, Portishead, Why? and Young Knives. We think. Sweeping The Nation reserves the right to change its mind by December. Tomorrow, we speculate what might make that task even more impossible between now and then.
British Sea Power – Do You Like Rock Music?
THE MOMENT: 4:30 into Atom. The "cold war Pixies" dissemble into cymbals, divebombing Stukas and somewhere in the mix a piano literally being pushed downstairs.
Elbow – The Seldom Seen Kid
THE MOMENT: 0:00 into An Audience With The Pope. "If she says she needs me, everybody's gonna have to wait" sings Guy, heavy of heart.
The Fall - Imperial Wax Solvent
THE MOMENT: 4:02 into 50 Year Old Man. Having already informed us that not only is he the age of the title and furthermore likes it but also that he routinely pisses onto hotel towels, has a three foot long hard-on and that Steve Albini is in collusion with Virgin Trains against him, Mark E Smith finally takes a break to be replaced by a duel between a MIDI-enabled polyphonic ringtone creating keyboard and a banjo.
Johnny Foreigner - Waited Up 'Til It Was Light
THE MOMENT: 2:03 into Salt, Pepa & Spinderella. "Bring out the real fun, turn on the real drums" Alexei suggests. Junior obliges. Things summarily go thermonuclear.
Los Campesinos! - Hold On Now, Youngster...
THE MOMENT: 1:46 into We Are All Accelerated Readers. Gareth: "If this sentimental movie marathon has taught us one thing, it’s that the opposite of true love is as follows..." Choral response: "REALITY!"
Mystery Jets – Twenty One
THE MOMENT: 0:04 into MJ. Aztec Camera expansive pop (the reissued version featuring Somewhere In My Heart) is somewhat of a giveaway) decorated with backing "wohhhh! wohhhh!"s set it entirely in place.
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Dig Lazarus Dig!!!
THE MOMENT: 2:35 into We Call Upon The Author. "Who is this great burdensome slavering dog-thing that mediocres my every thought?"
Vampire Weekend – Vampire Weekend
THE MOMENT: 0:17 into Oxford Comma. No, Ezra, who indeed? It then becomes apparent that actually the bringing up of the titular grammatical conjunction precedent is actually going somewhere.
The Wave Pictures - Instant Coffee Baby
THE MOMENT: 2:30 into Instant Coffee Baby. David Tattersall's vocal has sounded throughout like it's been building towards a revelation, a moment of clarity about life. And here it comes, and... "you got cystitis, didn't you?"
Wild Beasts - Limbo, Panto
THE MOMENT: 0:45 into Woeboegone Wanderers. The tune passes from Orange Juice railway track post-punk-funk into waltz time seamlessly, Hayden Thorpe going with it without breaking note.
If you must know, the chief near misses are by Bon Iver, the Indelicates, Johnny Flynn, Lightspeed Champion, the Long Blondes, Portishead, Why? and Young Knives. We think. Sweeping The Nation reserves the right to change its mind by December. Tomorrow, we speculate what might make that task even more impossible between now and then.
Sunday, June 29, 2008
On the other hand...
In today's Sunday Times, reviewing My Bloody Valentine in a slightly bizarrely written way that suggests you don't need earplugs as there's no new songs, Matthew Davis refers to "sometimes credulity-stretching tales about their front man, Kevin Shields. (It’s a long story, but google “MBV chinchillas” to get a flavour.)"
Result number one! (at time of writing)
(5pm edit: gah, down to page two. Not sure how, apart from the story none of those above it have been posted today, but there you go)
Result number one! (at time of writing)
(5pm edit: gah, down to page two. Not sure how, apart from the story none of those above it have been posted today, but there you go)
Is this the most useless music newspaper article ever published?
The Observer's "bluffer's guide to indie tribes"
So we know really what's happened here - the Observer have had a press release through about the Independents Day initiative and, not arsed enough to actually cover the event and discuss the history of the genre and where proper independently distributed music stands here in 2008, have had the section editor message across the floor "James? Write a bit about indie to fill a column, would you?" Hence the staggering revelation that Snow Patrol are a bit like Coldplay and daytime radio plays a lot of Kaiser Chiefs, which is purposely misleading the topic at hand, not least as it mostly namechecks major label bands. Really, what's the point?
"Indie tribes". Fuck off.
So we know really what's happened here - the Observer have had a press release through about the Independents Day initiative and, not arsed enough to actually cover the event and discuss the history of the genre and where proper independently distributed music stands here in 2008, have had the section editor message across the floor "James? Write a bit about indie to fill a column, would you?" Hence the staggering revelation that Snow Patrol are a bit like Coldplay and daytime radio plays a lot of Kaiser Chiefs, which is purposely misleading the topic at hand, not least as it mostly namechecks major label bands. Really, what's the point?
"Indie tribes". Fuck off.
Weekender : always thought chips and cheese was an invention of its Midlands university SU until Wild Beasts namechecked it
WHAT CD?
- We wrote last week that it was a slow one, but at least then there were a couple of real futher interest. This week it's as if the entire industry has decided on a long weekend post-Glastonbury, which is entirely plausible. The best we could find is an initiative from long serving semi-indie One Little Indian. Ahem: "we are reissuing 38 classic OLI albums using the newest technology in vinyl manufacturing - Half Speed Direct Metal Mastering. The groove is cut directly in copper metal. Transient response is greatly improved. Stampers are plated directly from the DMM Copper Master, eliminating two of the three plating steps required for lacquers. In short, DMM yields better detail resolution and a lower noise ratio. This is especially good for long play albums, or audiophile material. All albums are remastered direct from the original master tapes and pressed on 45rpm heavy weight 200g virgin vinyl audiophile discs. Each release is strictly limited, housed in a plastic wallet and individually numbered. A chance to pick up classic One Little Indian albums in the most lavish vinyl format available." Mmm. What this means is you can buy all the Sugarcubes and Bjork albums among others (Rocket From The Crypt, to name one) on vinyl again if you so wish, and the Sugarcubes' singles have also been box setted up. Nobody ever went bankrupt this way, you know. There's some decent singles available, most notably Wild Beasts' The Devil’s Crayon and a reissue of Operator Please's Just A Song About Ping Pong, but you might as well save up this week.
- Or should you? Indietracks festival is four weeks away, and we'll be there along with the cream of the semi-underground indiepop community. To celebrate a re-emergence of a scene that for all its resurgence gladly remans some distance away from the Guardian going "Juno! Twee's back!", Make Do And Mend Records are putting out a 44 track compilation of bands playing the Midland Railway Centre. Headliners the Wedding Present and Los Campesinos! aren't represented, but there is a song called And We Might Even Meet Dave Gedge alongside cuts by Darren Hayman & The Secondary Modern, Ballboy, A Classic Education, The Rosie Taylor Project, the Manhattan Love Suicides, The Bobby McGees, Milky Wimpshake, the Voluntary Butler Scheme, Slow Down Tallahassee, The Deirdres, Pocketbooks, The Mai 68s, KateGoes, The Kabeedies and plenty of others.
- In this week of people droning on about the punk spirit and pretending to be shocked by Johnny Rotten again - ooh, he said some nasty things about Coldplay! Yeah, it's actually now physically impossible to find someone willing to stand up for Coldplay in the national press - it's refreshing to find a contemporary take, The Punk Rock Movie, coming to DVD as a salutory lesson about how it was once a living, breathing organism as opposed to a cash cow that remains a pointless cash cow no matter how many layers of pretend irony you add to it. In 1977 Roxy Club DJ Don Letts was given an 8mm Super-8 video camera and thought he'd better document this youth culture upturning that was occurring around him and the club. What he filmed was DIY live footage of the Pistols, Clash, Slits, Subway Sect, Siouxsie & the Banshees, X Ray Spex, Generation X, Slaughter & the Dogs, the Heartbreakers... and their audience, just as importantly. Further supporting evidence? The not easy to please even then Tony Parsons wrote at the time "Letts’ home movie is the genuine article: raw, ragged, exhilarating home-grown action created by the young, the dumb and the glad. Iconoclastic imagery rich in the kind of savage warmth that could only be found in the heart of one of the troops...He can suss out the people who were in for the lifestyle, and those who were in it for mere leisure activity ego-gratification."
COMING SOON: takes a break this week ahead of one of STN's great traditions, the forthcoming rundown of what to expect in the rest of 2008. Oh, go on then, a quick one - July 28th finally sees rockabilly rebel teen siblings Kitty Daisy & Lewis release a self-titled album, and they're releasing a single, Going Up The Country.
MYSPACE INVADERS: If you're seeing Camera Obscura at Kings College London on 17th July we'd suggest getting there early for Sweden's Mockingbird, Wish Me Luck. An octet based around brothers Daniel and Nikas Wennergren, their being Swedish means you pretty much know what air they're working in already, and it's very much the sound of Jens Lekman embarking on a peaceful - well, obviously peaceful - coup to unseat Stuart Murdoch. Perfect for these long summer evenings.
VISUAL AID: At Christmas 1965, the year that saw Help!, Shea Stadium, Rubber Soul and Yesterday, the big ITV spectacular was The Music Of Lennon & McCartney, an attempt to equate their escalating fame with big fuck off Light Entertainment and musical cabaret. The whole thing is archived online in seven parts - this is the first, follow the Related Videos from here, although that's not always easy - featuring among others the George Martin Orchestra, Henry Mancini, Marianne Faithfull, Peter Sellers doing his Richard III She Loves You, Lulu, Cilla Black very much playing to later type, Esther Phillips, Peter & Gordon (Peter being Paul's then beau Jane Asher's brother), Billy J Kramer and the Dakotas, jazz organist Alan Haven, Fritz Spiegl (the Austrian composer and renaissance man who wrote the Z-Cars theme and Radio 4's UK Theme) and pretty much all the dancers in the country. John and Paul aren't the world's most charismatic hosts but became famous through their personalities expressed in interviews such as this 1964 press conference in Sydney, chiefly otherwise notable for Jimmy Nicol, who replaced Ringo for a couple of weeks when he was hospitalised with tonsillitis.
LINKS EFFECT
* News of another all-dayer of interest, and this one promises to be somewhat unique. There's Nothing Wrong With Covers is an all-dayer taking place at the Brixton Windmill on August 3rd in which some of Britain's best new bands pay tribute to some of America's most influential alternative bands, having to cover at least two of their forebears' songs during their set. An as yet unnamed special guest and friends will headline with a set of Jonathan Richman songs on a bill that also features Stuffy And The Fuses as Pixies, 4 Or 5 Magicians as Guided By Voices, Giant Robot and the City Of Tokyo as Archers Of Loaf, Pale Man Made as Sonic Youth, Favours For Sailors as Weezer, Dutch Husband as Sebadoh and Hour Hands as Built To Spill. Free BBQ as well. Tickets through the usual outlets.
* A couple of free samplers - Labrador Records, curators of much of Sweden's most pleasingly melodious output, have unveiled the Labrador 2008 summer sampler, starring Suburban Kids With Biblical Names, The Radio Dept, Sambassadeur, Club 8, The Mary Onettes and Acid House Kings. Meanwhile Eardrums Music has pulled together two huge sets of new music including new and rare songs by The School, The Voluntary Butler Scheme, Hello Saferide, Elle s’appelle, Club 8 again and lots of new names on us, many of which are great but not all of which are good in terms of nominature ("so we're all settled on Spaghetti Anywhere, then?")
- We wrote last week that it was a slow one, but at least then there were a couple of real futher interest. This week it's as if the entire industry has decided on a long weekend post-Glastonbury, which is entirely plausible. The best we could find is an initiative from long serving semi-indie One Little Indian. Ahem: "we are reissuing 38 classic OLI albums using the newest technology in vinyl manufacturing - Half Speed Direct Metal Mastering. The groove is cut directly in copper metal. Transient response is greatly improved. Stampers are plated directly from the DMM Copper Master, eliminating two of the three plating steps required for lacquers. In short, DMM yields better detail resolution and a lower noise ratio. This is especially good for long play albums, or audiophile material. All albums are remastered direct from the original master tapes and pressed on 45rpm heavy weight 200g virgin vinyl audiophile discs. Each release is strictly limited, housed in a plastic wallet and individually numbered. A chance to pick up classic One Little Indian albums in the most lavish vinyl format available." Mmm. What this means is you can buy all the Sugarcubes and Bjork albums among others (Rocket From The Crypt, to name one) on vinyl again if you so wish, and the Sugarcubes' singles have also been box setted up. Nobody ever went bankrupt this way, you know. There's some decent singles available, most notably Wild Beasts' The Devil’s Crayon and a reissue of Operator Please's Just A Song About Ping Pong, but you might as well save up this week.
- Or should you? Indietracks festival is four weeks away, and we'll be there along with the cream of the semi-underground indiepop community. To celebrate a re-emergence of a scene that for all its resurgence gladly remans some distance away from the Guardian going "Juno! Twee's back!", Make Do And Mend Records are putting out a 44 track compilation of bands playing the Midland Railway Centre. Headliners the Wedding Present and Los Campesinos! aren't represented, but there is a song called And We Might Even Meet Dave Gedge alongside cuts by Darren Hayman & The Secondary Modern, Ballboy, A Classic Education, The Rosie Taylor Project, the Manhattan Love Suicides, The Bobby McGees, Milky Wimpshake, the Voluntary Butler Scheme, Slow Down Tallahassee, The Deirdres, Pocketbooks, The Mai 68s, KateGoes, The Kabeedies and plenty of others.
- In this week of people droning on about the punk spirit and pretending to be shocked by Johnny Rotten again - ooh, he said some nasty things about Coldplay! Yeah, it's actually now physically impossible to find someone willing to stand up for Coldplay in the national press - it's refreshing to find a contemporary take, The Punk Rock Movie, coming to DVD as a salutory lesson about how it was once a living, breathing organism as opposed to a cash cow that remains a pointless cash cow no matter how many layers of pretend irony you add to it. In 1977 Roxy Club DJ Don Letts was given an 8mm Super-8 video camera and thought he'd better document this youth culture upturning that was occurring around him and the club. What he filmed was DIY live footage of the Pistols, Clash, Slits, Subway Sect, Siouxsie & the Banshees, X Ray Spex, Generation X, Slaughter & the Dogs, the Heartbreakers... and their audience, just as importantly. Further supporting evidence? The not easy to please even then Tony Parsons wrote at the time "Letts’ home movie is the genuine article: raw, ragged, exhilarating home-grown action created by the young, the dumb and the glad. Iconoclastic imagery rich in the kind of savage warmth that could only be found in the heart of one of the troops...He can suss out the people who were in for the lifestyle, and those who were in it for mere leisure activity ego-gratification."
COMING SOON: takes a break this week ahead of one of STN's great traditions, the forthcoming rundown of what to expect in the rest of 2008. Oh, go on then, a quick one - July 28th finally sees rockabilly rebel teen siblings Kitty Daisy & Lewis release a self-titled album, and they're releasing a single, Going Up The Country.
MYSPACE INVADERS: If you're seeing Camera Obscura at Kings College London on 17th July we'd suggest getting there early for Sweden's Mockingbird, Wish Me Luck. An octet based around brothers Daniel and Nikas Wennergren, their being Swedish means you pretty much know what air they're working in already, and it's very much the sound of Jens Lekman embarking on a peaceful - well, obviously peaceful - coup to unseat Stuart Murdoch. Perfect for these long summer evenings.
VISUAL AID: At Christmas 1965, the year that saw Help!, Shea Stadium, Rubber Soul and Yesterday, the big ITV spectacular was The Music Of Lennon & McCartney, an attempt to equate their escalating fame with big fuck off Light Entertainment and musical cabaret. The whole thing is archived online in seven parts - this is the first, follow the Related Videos from here, although that's not always easy - featuring among others the George Martin Orchestra, Henry Mancini, Marianne Faithfull, Peter Sellers doing his Richard III She Loves You, Lulu, Cilla Black very much playing to later type, Esther Phillips, Peter & Gordon (Peter being Paul's then beau Jane Asher's brother), Billy J Kramer and the Dakotas, jazz organist Alan Haven, Fritz Spiegl (the Austrian composer and renaissance man who wrote the Z-Cars theme and Radio 4's UK Theme) and pretty much all the dancers in the country. John and Paul aren't the world's most charismatic hosts but became famous through their personalities expressed in interviews such as this 1964 press conference in Sydney, chiefly otherwise notable for Jimmy Nicol, who replaced Ringo for a couple of weeks when he was hospitalised with tonsillitis.
LINKS EFFECT
* News of another all-dayer of interest, and this one promises to be somewhat unique. There's Nothing Wrong With Covers is an all-dayer taking place at the Brixton Windmill on August 3rd in which some of Britain's best new bands pay tribute to some of America's most influential alternative bands, having to cover at least two of their forebears' songs during their set. An as yet unnamed special guest and friends will headline with a set of Jonathan Richman songs on a bill that also features Stuffy And The Fuses as Pixies, 4 Or 5 Magicians as Guided By Voices, Giant Robot and the City Of Tokyo as Archers Of Loaf, Pale Man Made as Sonic Youth, Favours For Sailors as Weezer, Dutch Husband as Sebadoh and Hour Hands as Built To Spill. Free BBQ as well. Tickets through the usual outlets.
* A couple of free samplers - Labrador Records, curators of much of Sweden's most pleasingly melodious output, have unveiled the Labrador 2008 summer sampler, starring Suburban Kids With Biblical Names, The Radio Dept, Sambassadeur, Club 8, The Mary Onettes and Acid House Kings. Meanwhile Eardrums Music has pulled together two huge sets of new music including new and rare songs by The School, The Voluntary Butler Scheme, Hello Saferide, Elle s’appelle, Club 8 again and lots of new names on us, many of which are great but not all of which are good in terms of nominature ("so we're all settled on Spaghetti Anywhere, then?")
Saturday, June 28, 2008
The Weekly Sweep
Thursday, June 26, 2008
Production credit
Not only does it surely break all records for reissue speed, but the new version of the Mystery Jets' Twenty One now features a cover of Aztec Camera's Somewhere In My Heart. We don't dare post an mp3, so here's a live version (sorry about the beginning, can't be helped):
Because they're An Eighties-Type Band post-Two Doors Down, on the recording there's ostentatious synths, overcompressed snare, vocal echo, reverb...Erol Alkan's The band have really worked in the detail soundwise. And yet, it could never compete for the effect. Here's the original:
Roddy Frame is a man who has great courage in his convictions and great confidence in his own abilities, yet if he ever hears this sort of thing he must, if not break down in tears, then snuffle a bit to hear what producers Tommy LiPuma and Russ Titelman - not, one guesses, from Stoke Poges - did to his song. The drum sound somewhere between electronic kit and cast iron and that overly tricksy guitar solo for no reason other than a note reading 'SOLO HERE' is the key here. This is very much an eighties production, and in this current realm of making records that are Just Like The Eighties - a special hello to Ladyhawke, who's got that Big Love-era Fleetwood Mac channelling 1983 Bananarama effect down pat and made everyone believe it's a hip new sound - even Two Doors Down's superfluous sax can't fully reassemble what major label records, even those helmed by men like Frame, were supposed to sound like. It's not a criticism you can really lever at any other period of pop music as a whole - if you think about glam, which was supposed to be ostentatious rock'n'roll, those T-Rex and Slade hits still have space to breathe.
Except, does anyone think this period now might not be the best ageing? As any number of those pieces about bad mastering will tell you, this is the age of loudness for the radio, of wanting to fill every last ProTools display nook and cranny and destroying the nuances along the way, from Xenomania to John Cornfield. Even now records are starting to pull back from the brink, less, we suspect, because of hi-fi distortion and red levels in the studio and more because of what it looks like in the WMP display. In ten years' time we might be wondering just when it was unilaterally decided that Be Here Now would have been alright had it just been a bit more punchy throughout.
And in twenty years' time every record will sound like it again, natch.
Because they're An Eighties-Type Band post-Two Doors Down, on the recording there's ostentatious synths, overcompressed snare, vocal echo, reverb...
Roddy Frame is a man who has great courage in his convictions and great confidence in his own abilities, yet if he ever hears this sort of thing he must, if not break down in tears, then snuffle a bit to hear what producers Tommy LiPuma and Russ Titelman - not, one guesses, from Stoke Poges - did to his song. The drum sound somewhere between electronic kit and cast iron and that overly tricksy guitar solo for no reason other than a note reading 'SOLO HERE' is the key here. This is very much an eighties production, and in this current realm of making records that are Just Like The Eighties - a special hello to Ladyhawke, who's got that Big Love-era Fleetwood Mac channelling 1983 Bananarama effect down pat and made everyone believe it's a hip new sound - even Two Doors Down's superfluous sax can't fully reassemble what major label records, even those helmed by men like Frame, were supposed to sound like. It's not a criticism you can really lever at any other period of pop music as a whole - if you think about glam, which was supposed to be ostentatious rock'n'roll, those T-Rex and Slade hits still have space to breathe.
Except, does anyone think this period now might not be the best ageing? As any number of those pieces about bad mastering will tell you, this is the age of loudness for the radio, of wanting to fill every last ProTools display nook and cranny and destroying the nuances along the way, from Xenomania to John Cornfield. Even now records are starting to pull back from the brink, less, we suspect, because of hi-fi distortion and red levels in the studio and more because of what it looks like in the WMP display. In ten years' time we might be wondering just when it was unilaterally decided that Be Here Now would have been alright had it just been a bit more punchy throughout.
And in twenty years' time every record will sound like it again, natch.
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
The robots rebel
Embedding disabled, so we've got to go the long way round, but the point stands - what happens to Ralf Hutter at 1:24?
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
It was twenty years ago today, Ken taught the band to play
All hail the best new website we've seen in a while, Chart Stats. It may be nothing more than a breakdown of every singles chart ever and an increasing archive of the album lists too, but... well, there it all is. Privately we suspect the reason the likes of EveryHit have compromised archives is fearing contact from The Official Charts Company, but if that happens we can just parry that with "well, when are you using the archive to put out another Guinness Book Of Top 40 Charts, then?"
As an example of the wonders on offer, this was the top 40 of this week in 1988. We know when we've done this in the past we've passed comment on every entry, but ultimately life's too short.
40 INXS - Never Tear Us Apart
39 Natalie Cole - Everlasting
38 LA Mix - Check This Out
Nothing says 1988 more than a megamix. Not even those four numbers in order.
37 Scritti Politti - Oh Patti (Don't Feel Sorry For Loverboy)
However much Green enjoyed colliding plastic soul and upturned lyrical content, by this point this was not a career high point. That said, the Shabba Ranks duet was still to come.
36 Glenn Medeiros - Nothing's Gonna Change My Love For You
Vic Reeves wielding a large painting was just around the corner.
35 Elton John - I Don't Wanna Go On With You Like That
34 Joy Division - Atmosphere
To promote Substance, and here joined to its Anton Corbijn oversized Puritan video.
33 Glen Goldsmith - What You See Is What You Get
No memory of Glen Goldsmith at all. Wikipedia - of course Wikipedia - says he had a few soul hits, was on Band Aid II and later wrote Peter Andre's Mysterious Girl, "the only song released three times by the same artist in the history of popular music" according to one blissfully ignorant source.
32 Hazell Dean - Maybe (We Should Call It A Day)
31 T'Pau - I Will Be With You
30 Fairground Attraction - Perfect
29 Sade - Paradise
"Have you heard this new music called jazz?"
28 Aswad - Give A Little Love
27 The Communards - There's More To Love
Their last single, and as everyone in a pub knows Richard Coles gave up a radio job as the unthinking man's pre-cancer John Diamond and has fairly recently been ordained.
26 Tracy Chapman - Fast Car
25 A-ha - The Blood That Moves The Body
The attempts at an Abba-style critical rehabilitation seem to have foundered once people realised that "Chris Martin likes them" isn't really in the Suicide class of critical influence. The single after this was Touchy, which might explain why it was doomed to failure.
24 Salt-n-Pepa - Push It/Tramp
Like everybody else who was famous at some point in America in the 1980s, they've been the subject of a revivalist VH1 docusoap, just the sort of thing to set female rap back another few years.
23 Belinda Carlisle - Circle In The Sand
22 The Sisters Of Mercy - Lucretia My Reflection
21 Bruce Springsteen - Tougher Than The Rest
20 Rose Royce - Car Wash/Is It Love You're After
Now there's a song that's outlived the film it was recorded for. No idea why it was reissued. General nostalgia?
19 Mica Paris - My One Temptation
18 Eurythmics - You Have Placed A Chill In My Heart
17 Matt Bianco - Don't Blame It On That Girl/Wap-Bam-Boogie
What an odd concept Matt Bianco were. Obviously there was deemed a gap in the New Pop market for a swing jazz influence. And they've reformed!
16 Voice Of The Beehive - Don't Call Me Baby
Not as great as you remember, sadly.
15 Tiffany - I Saw Him Standing There
14 Aztec Camera - Somewhere In My Heart
There's a definite other post, possibly later this week, about this song; in the meantime, consider the distance covered from The Sound Of Young Scotland to working with Mark Knopfler.
13 Morrissey - Every Day Is Like Sunday
12 Kylie Minogue - Got To Be Certain
First recorded for SAW by Mandy Smith. Where is she now?
11 Erasure - Chains Of Love
10 Wet Wet Wet/Billy Bragg With Cara Tivey - With A Little Help From My Friends/She's Leaving Home
Guess which side got the airplay. This was the charity release for Childline ("oh eight hundred double one...DOUBLE ONE"), and Bragg did get a week on TOTP. He'd forgotten the lyrics and had them taped to the floor by his feet, only to see them covered in dry ice. Later distracted by an audible crash he autopiloted his way to the end assuming there'd be a retake. There wasn't.
9 UB40 With Chrissie Hynde - Breakfast In Bed
8 Phil Collins - In The Air Tonight
You have to wonder how he really feels about having his bitter divorce song hijacked by a bloke in a gorilla suit. Wonderbra did a failed viral version - go on, guess how that went - only really notable for starring Jentina. Jentina! The alleged British gypsy Kelis of 2003 whose career was ended by Lady Sovereign! Reduced to online shilling for bras!
7 Desireless - Voyage Voyage
One of the great barely remembered one hit wonders of the decade, largely due to being all in another language which 'we' supposedly won't go for.
6 The Pasadenas - Tribute (Right On)
Essentially someone's idea of a British Temptations. Possibly whoever was buying Big Fun records, we can't say.
5 Maxi Priest - Wild World
4 The Fat Boys With Chubby Checker - The Twist (Yo, Twist)
Ah, Buffy The Human Beat Box. Early hitmaking rap was largely playful but after a while it perhaps became too facetious, especially when this sort of thing is becoming a hit. Roll on the black CNN.
3 Sabrina - Boys (Summertime Love)
One word, Ms Salerno (now a recording studio and management agency owner): straps.
2 The Timelords - Doctorin' The Tardis
We're all across who this was and what was published on the back of it, right? Good. Apart from the fact that not one of the artists that has openly cited The Manual as a major influence has had a number one single, the sometime Time Boy and Lord Rock admit in it that it is "a book that will be completely redundant within twelve months" due to the vagaries of popular culture.
1 Bros - I Owe You Nothing
A title that was never used smirkingly when Matt and Luke later filed for bankruptcy, oh no. Whatever happened to Tom Watkins?
As an example of the wonders on offer, this was the top 40 of this week in 1988. We know when we've done this in the past we've passed comment on every entry, but ultimately life's too short.
40 INXS - Never Tear Us Apart
39 Natalie Cole - Everlasting
38 LA Mix - Check This Out
Nothing says 1988 more than a megamix. Not even those four numbers in order.
37 Scritti Politti - Oh Patti (Don't Feel Sorry For Loverboy)
However much Green enjoyed colliding plastic soul and upturned lyrical content, by this point this was not a career high point. That said, the Shabba Ranks duet was still to come.
36 Glenn Medeiros - Nothing's Gonna Change My Love For You
Vic Reeves wielding a large painting was just around the corner.
35 Elton John - I Don't Wanna Go On With You Like That
34 Joy Division - Atmosphere
To promote Substance, and here joined to its Anton Corbijn oversized Puritan video.
33 Glen Goldsmith - What You See Is What You Get
No memory of Glen Goldsmith at all. Wikipedia - of course Wikipedia - says he had a few soul hits, was on Band Aid II and later wrote Peter Andre's Mysterious Girl, "the only song released three times by the same artist in the history of popular music" according to one blissfully ignorant source.
32 Hazell Dean - Maybe (We Should Call It A Day)
31 T'Pau - I Will Be With You
30 Fairground Attraction - Perfect
29 Sade - Paradise
"Have you heard this new music called jazz?"
28 Aswad - Give A Little Love
27 The Communards - There's More To Love
Their last single, and as everyone in a pub knows Richard Coles gave up a radio job as the unthinking man's pre-cancer John Diamond and has fairly recently been ordained.
26 Tracy Chapman - Fast Car
25 A-ha - The Blood That Moves The Body
The attempts at an Abba-style critical rehabilitation seem to have foundered once people realised that "Chris Martin likes them" isn't really in the Suicide class of critical influence. The single after this was Touchy, which might explain why it was doomed to failure.
24 Salt-n-Pepa - Push It/Tramp
Like everybody else who was famous at some point in America in the 1980s, they've been the subject of a revivalist VH1 docusoap, just the sort of thing to set female rap back another few years.
23 Belinda Carlisle - Circle In The Sand
22 The Sisters Of Mercy - Lucretia My Reflection
21 Bruce Springsteen - Tougher Than The Rest
20 Rose Royce - Car Wash/Is It Love You're After
Now there's a song that's outlived the film it was recorded for. No idea why it was reissued. General nostalgia?
19 Mica Paris - My One Temptation
18 Eurythmics - You Have Placed A Chill In My Heart
17 Matt Bianco - Don't Blame It On That Girl/Wap-Bam-Boogie
What an odd concept Matt Bianco were. Obviously there was deemed a gap in the New Pop market for a swing jazz influence. And they've reformed!
16 Voice Of The Beehive - Don't Call Me Baby
Not as great as you remember, sadly.
15 Tiffany - I Saw Him Standing There
14 Aztec Camera - Somewhere In My Heart
There's a definite other post, possibly later this week, about this song; in the meantime, consider the distance covered from The Sound Of Young Scotland to working with Mark Knopfler.
13 Morrissey - Every Day Is Like Sunday
12 Kylie Minogue - Got To Be Certain
First recorded for SAW by Mandy Smith. Where is she now?
11 Erasure - Chains Of Love
10 Wet Wet Wet/Billy Bragg With Cara Tivey - With A Little Help From My Friends/She's Leaving Home
Guess which side got the airplay. This was the charity release for Childline ("oh eight hundred double one...DOUBLE ONE"), and Bragg did get a week on TOTP. He'd forgotten the lyrics and had them taped to the floor by his feet, only to see them covered in dry ice. Later distracted by an audible crash he autopiloted his way to the end assuming there'd be a retake. There wasn't.
9 UB40 With Chrissie Hynde - Breakfast In Bed
8 Phil Collins - In The Air Tonight
You have to wonder how he really feels about having his bitter divorce song hijacked by a bloke in a gorilla suit. Wonderbra did a failed viral version - go on, guess how that went - only really notable for starring Jentina. Jentina! The alleged British gypsy Kelis of 2003 whose career was ended by Lady Sovereign! Reduced to online shilling for bras!
7 Desireless - Voyage Voyage
One of the great barely remembered one hit wonders of the decade, largely due to being all in another language which 'we' supposedly won't go for.
6 The Pasadenas - Tribute (Right On)
Essentially someone's idea of a British Temptations. Possibly whoever was buying Big Fun records, we can't say.
5 Maxi Priest - Wild World
4 The Fat Boys With Chubby Checker - The Twist (Yo, Twist)
Ah, Buffy The Human Beat Box. Early hitmaking rap was largely playful but after a while it perhaps became too facetious, especially when this sort of thing is becoming a hit. Roll on the black CNN.
3 Sabrina - Boys (Summertime Love)
One word, Ms Salerno (now a recording studio and management agency owner): straps.
2 The Timelords - Doctorin' The Tardis
We're all across who this was and what was published on the back of it, right? Good. Apart from the fact that not one of the artists that has openly cited The Manual as a major influence has had a number one single, the sometime Time Boy and Lord Rock admit in it that it is "a book that will be completely redundant within twelve months" due to the vagaries of popular culture.
1 Bros - I Owe You Nothing
A title that was never used smirkingly when Matt and Luke later filed for bankruptcy, oh no. Whatever happened to Tom Watkins?
Sunday, June 22, 2008
Weekender : so many messages unreplied to
WHAT CD?
- Having seen Brakes five times, Electric Soft Parade twice and his solo set once live in the time frame, as well as having found ourselves standing next to him at two seperate festivals last year, it occurs to us we've seen Thomas White more often than members of our own family in the last two years, and to think we've never even introduced ourselves. Not surprising, mind, as factor in his drumming for Restlesslist and his sideline/stand-in work with a phalanx of other bands and he seems to be in possession of some sort of magic quality music elixir, one that's capable of stretching out genre boundaries while never losing sight of the qualities of a good tune. That's as much the case with his debut solo album, I Dream Of Black, another high quality product from the fast becoming completely reliable Drift label. Recorded by himself on a four-track it plays better than many a patchwork release produced in far less reduced circumstances, delving further into the psychedelic elements ESP often hint at - his Myspace suggests Broadcast as a major influence, which we can very much see - levered with the kind of Tim Buckleyesque songwriting he's exhibited playing acoustically. Chalk another one up in his credit column.
- The above's release seems to have been moved forward from mid-July at short notice, which is good as the patchy Með Suð à Eyrum Við Spilum Endalaust apart there's very little to write about this week after the My Bloody Valentine reissues were moved back because Kevin Shields has been taking too long - stop us if you're surprised at any stage - writing the liner notes. Here's a curio, though. Between 1957 and 1964 the BBC broadcast the Radio Ballads series, an entirely new form of wireless recording documenting everyday British life mixing together field recorded voices of the subjects with specially written songs, instrumental pieces and sound effects created by the great political folk singer (and father of Kirsty) Ewan MacColl, his similarly feted as a writer-performer wife Peggy Seeger and BBC producer Charles Parker. Someone called Broadcaster has extensively sampled them for Primary Transmission, adding a techno beat undertow (MacColl and Seeger's son Calum MacColl, who has worked with everyone from Boyzone to Christy Moore, co-produces) to great and generally non-Moby effect.
COMING SOON: Alex Kapranos is OK with new songs from Franz Ferdinand's recent tryout gigs being posted on YouTube because apparently they'll be much different when their third album is released in January. Right then. 38 seconds of What She Came For doesn't deviate too much from Franz norm although it cuts off just as it enters into what sounds like a hell of a chorus, while Send Him Away's 62 seconds is lover's post-punk. A New Thrill sounds quite glammy refracted through the Glasgow School; more promising is Ulysses' understated aggressive stomp - this makes sense in our head, honest. Katherine Kiss Me is for our money the best of the new bunch, a spidery guitar and funky rhythm. Wry disco inferno Turn It On has also been played, but that's been in the set so long it was briefly mooted early on as the first single from You Could Have It So Much Better...
MYSPACE INVADERS: There have been a few attempts recently to bring rockabilly into 00s indie frames - don't say a word, Penate - but Norwich's Bambi Get Over It are going to make 00s indie come towards them with their two and a half minute jive frenzies. Sim Eldem makes for a strident female vocalist reminiscent of Neko Case when on New Pornographers duty, they're not shy on hiding a folk influence - they have mandolin and accordion players after all - and play with an energy which suggests they would almost certainly be a live riot in a small venue.
VISUAL AID: Dennis Wilson's Pacific Ocean Blue has finally re-emerged and his brother Brian turned 66 on Friday. Who knows what he was doing on Friday, but we know what he was up to 32 years ago, eating cake with the McCartneys before performing Good vibrations. Early Beach Boys television performances from the striped shirt era are always great for seeing the formations directors thought they'd work in, such as miming I Get Around gathered around the back of an SUV or being boogied on down to by an orange jumpered Andy Williams. Ready Steady Go! was presented in a rather more straight laced fashion, even with the audience that close in. They even ended up playing backup to actress Annette Funicello on the theme to 1965 Disney film The Monkey's Uncle and got their own crew for the quasi-Monkees dirigible pratting about video - yes, video, in 1966, fuck you Bo Rap - for Sloop John B. What Dennis there is there is actually among the most fascnating of the band's clippage, not least this extraordinary home video candid footage of he and Al Jardine shopping in London in 1966. There's Dennis' showstopping solo rendition of You Are So Beautiful in Melbourne in 1978, joining Brian, who at this point had been reclusive and/or incapacitated for some time, to present an unknown award in 1976 - good turnout of winners there, evidently - and drumming like his career depended on it on California Girls at Knebworth in 1980, the last time the original line-up played in Britain.
LINKS EFFECT
* Welcome To Our TV Show number 5 is go and it's a tribute to the ever wonderful Moshi Moshi Records featuring the Wave Pictures, Hot Club de Paris and Slow Club, plus an all-star Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air, the relative merits of Easy Lover and Imagine and ignorance about the Ulster Fry. We know someone who wrote a song about the good breakfast fry-up itself and got it played on Virgin radio. Anyway, go here and then here.
* Free album! Black Plaque by NHG is described as "stupid, digitally-treated, sloppy metal music played by dumb nerds" and features a song called And The Wolf Was Geri Halliwell's Intestine (Parts 1 & 2). We know who's behind it but if we told you we'd have to kill you, only to say it's a band we've featured here recently who've just signed to the same label as another band we've featured even more recently.
* Paid for album! Adam & Joe's Song Wars are but one element of one of the very best things on radio at the moment, and on Monday the first 22 songs it's produced during their 6 Music stay are available on iTunes, with that excellent cover. The IKEA meatballs cooking instructions songs have made it!
* Who wants a music festival friendly satnav device, then? Garmin are giving away a free festival POI download, complete with further information as well as, y'know, getting you there.
* A blog after our own heart - NME & Melody Maker scans from between 1987 and 1996. Look how serious the Maker 1988 staff look. And Suicide and Napalm Death live reviews flanking Tanita Tikaram and Rick Astley!
- Having seen Brakes five times, Electric Soft Parade twice and his solo set once live in the time frame, as well as having found ourselves standing next to him at two seperate festivals last year, it occurs to us we've seen Thomas White more often than members of our own family in the last two years, and to think we've never even introduced ourselves. Not surprising, mind, as factor in his drumming for Restlesslist and his sideline/stand-in work with a phalanx of other bands and he seems to be in possession of some sort of magic quality music elixir, one that's capable of stretching out genre boundaries while never losing sight of the qualities of a good tune. That's as much the case with his debut solo album, I Dream Of Black, another high quality product from the fast becoming completely reliable Drift label. Recorded by himself on a four-track it plays better than many a patchwork release produced in far less reduced circumstances, delving further into the psychedelic elements ESP often hint at - his Myspace suggests Broadcast as a major influence, which we can very much see - levered with the kind of Tim Buckleyesque songwriting he's exhibited playing acoustically. Chalk another one up in his credit column.
- The above's release seems to have been moved forward from mid-July at short notice, which is good as the patchy Með Suð à Eyrum Við Spilum Endalaust apart there's very little to write about this week after the My Bloody Valentine reissues were moved back because Kevin Shields has been taking too long - stop us if you're surprised at any stage - writing the liner notes. Here's a curio, though. Between 1957 and 1964 the BBC broadcast the Radio Ballads series, an entirely new form of wireless recording documenting everyday British life mixing together field recorded voices of the subjects with specially written songs, instrumental pieces and sound effects created by the great political folk singer (and father of Kirsty) Ewan MacColl, his similarly feted as a writer-performer wife Peggy Seeger and BBC producer Charles Parker. Someone called Broadcaster has extensively sampled them for Primary Transmission, adding a techno beat undertow (MacColl and Seeger's son Calum MacColl, who has worked with everyone from Boyzone to Christy Moore, co-produces) to great and generally non-Moby effect.
COMING SOON: Alex Kapranos is OK with new songs from Franz Ferdinand's recent tryout gigs being posted on YouTube because apparently they'll be much different when their third album is released in January. Right then. 38 seconds of What She Came For doesn't deviate too much from Franz norm although it cuts off just as it enters into what sounds like a hell of a chorus, while Send Him Away's 62 seconds is lover's post-punk. A New Thrill sounds quite glammy refracted through the Glasgow School; more promising is Ulysses' understated aggressive stomp - this makes sense in our head, honest. Katherine Kiss Me is for our money the best of the new bunch, a spidery guitar and funky rhythm. Wry disco inferno Turn It On has also been played, but that's been in the set so long it was briefly mooted early on as the first single from You Could Have It So Much Better...
MYSPACE INVADERS: There have been a few attempts recently to bring rockabilly into 00s indie frames - don't say a word, Penate - but Norwich's Bambi Get Over It are going to make 00s indie come towards them with their two and a half minute jive frenzies. Sim Eldem makes for a strident female vocalist reminiscent of Neko Case when on New Pornographers duty, they're not shy on hiding a folk influence - they have mandolin and accordion players after all - and play with an energy which suggests they would almost certainly be a live riot in a small venue.
VISUAL AID: Dennis Wilson's Pacific Ocean Blue has finally re-emerged and his brother Brian turned 66 on Friday. Who knows what he was doing on Friday, but we know what he was up to 32 years ago, eating cake with the McCartneys before performing Good vibrations. Early Beach Boys television performances from the striped shirt era are always great for seeing the formations directors thought they'd work in, such as miming I Get Around gathered around the back of an SUV or being boogied on down to by an orange jumpered Andy Williams. Ready Steady Go! was presented in a rather more straight laced fashion, even with the audience that close in. They even ended up playing backup to actress Annette Funicello on the theme to 1965 Disney film The Monkey's Uncle and got their own crew for the quasi-Monkees dirigible pratting about video - yes, video, in 1966, fuck you Bo Rap - for Sloop John B. What Dennis there is there is actually among the most fascnating of the band's clippage, not least this extraordinary home video candid footage of he and Al Jardine shopping in London in 1966. There's Dennis' showstopping solo rendition of You Are So Beautiful in Melbourne in 1978, joining Brian, who at this point had been reclusive and/or incapacitated for some time, to present an unknown award in 1976 - good turnout of winners there, evidently - and drumming like his career depended on it on California Girls at Knebworth in 1980, the last time the original line-up played in Britain.
LINKS EFFECT
* Welcome To Our TV Show number 5 is go and it's a tribute to the ever wonderful Moshi Moshi Records featuring the Wave Pictures, Hot Club de Paris and Slow Club, plus an all-star Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air, the relative merits of Easy Lover and Imagine and ignorance about the Ulster Fry. We know someone who wrote a song about the good breakfast fry-up itself and got it played on Virgin radio. Anyway, go here and then here.
* Free album! Black Plaque by NHG is described as "stupid, digitally-treated, sloppy metal music played by dumb nerds" and features a song called And The Wolf Was Geri Halliwell's Intestine (Parts 1 & 2). We know who's behind it but if we told you we'd have to kill you, only to say it's a band we've featured here recently who've just signed to the same label as another band we've featured even more recently.
* Paid for album! Adam & Joe's Song Wars are but one element of one of the very best things on radio at the moment, and on Monday the first 22 songs it's produced during their 6 Music stay are available on iTunes, with that excellent cover. The IKEA meatballs cooking instructions songs have made it!
* Who wants a music festival friendly satnav device, then? Garmin are giving away a free festival POI download, complete with further information as well as, y'know, getting you there.
* A blog after our own heart - NME & Melody Maker scans from between 1987 and 1996. Look how serious the Maker 1988 staff look. And Suicide and Napalm Death live reviews flanking Tanita Tikaram and Rick Astley!
Saturday, June 21, 2008
The Weekly Sweep
Friday, June 20, 2008
An Illustrated Guide To... My Bloody Valentine
Let's start with a round of hipster word association with that name. Two albums of boundary-pushing bliss; nearly bankrupting Creation; fastidious attention to detail; shoegazing; haven't done anything for years. Well, there's varying amounts of truth to all of that, but the bigger picture is far less complicit with easy pigeonholing. As the band limber up for the first of five long sold out nights at the Roundhouse following last week's two ICA 'rehearsals' that seem to have been nothing of the sort, plus remastered versions of those two albums in July - how long did that process take, do you think? - this is how a goth inspired jangly band from Dublin ended up creating a genre out of next to nothing and then, some prevarication later, blasting it apart.
Kevin Shields was actually born in Queens, New York on 21st May 1963, moving with his family to Ireland when he was ten. The youngest of five, he had a Catholic upbringing but had his head turned by glam and punk, and at fifteen joined The Complex, an Oi!-style punk band which also featured drummer Colm O'Ciosoig. Having toyed with becoming a Butthole Surfers-esque noise band, in 1983 the pair formed a band with singer Dave Conway and his keyboard playing girlfriend Tina, naming the band after Paramount Pictures' flop attempt to cash in on the post-Friday The 13th slasher film boom two years earlier (which, in a case of art imitating, um, art, is currently being remade.) With limited opportunities at home the band moved to Holland and then Berlin, where they recorded the mini-album This Is Your Bloody Valentine, released in January 1985, an unfocused Cramps/Birthday Party inspired thrash featuring only the odd distortion pedal to suggest later developments. The band moved to London a few months later and Tina left, the remaining trio bringing in a permanent bass player for the first time, friend of a friend Debbie Googe, formerly of Somerset anarcho-punks Bikini Mutants.
December saw the Geek! EP, which apparently fetches up to $200 on the open market, followed by The New Record By My Bloody Valentine EP the following September. It was with this record, released on former Creation associate Joe Foster's Kaleidoscope Records, that the band moved into waters somewhere between C86's dark jangle and Jesus & Mary Chain's feedback frenzies. The Primitives' label Lazy Records put out the Sunny Sundae Smile EP in February 1987, a further coalescing of the wall of noise melodies that would go a little way towards the MBV trademark sound.
Sunny Sundae Smile
Shortly after its release Conway decided to leave due to ill health and what he saw as a failure to reach personal potential. After music press adverts for a new singer failed to work Shields became co-vocalist alongside Bilinda Butcher, a fan and another friend of a friend who Shields also taught to play guitar. While getting themselves together, the newly reconfigured band held off demands for an album with two late 1987 releases, August three-track EP Strawberry Wine and November four-tracker Ecstacy (later combined as Ecstacy And Wine). While still buzzsaw bubblegum, an ethereality started to creep in, aided by Butcher's vocals, that began to mark them out seperately.
Maybe it was this that impressed Alan McGee in January 1988 when MBV played with his own band Biff Bang Pow!; McGee has been quoted as saying he felt he'd found the British Husker Du. Approaching them about an initial single deal for Creation Records, agreement was met about an EP, released in August 1988 officially without a title but usually referred to after its storming opener You Made Me Realise, which buried a pop melody under layer after layer of distorted and feeding back guitar, including a section of pure white noise where a bridge would normally be. This was track two.
Slow
It went down so well that another four-track EP, led by the oddly off-key, tender yet brutal Feed Me With Your Kiss, followed immediately before the eventual debut album, November 1988's Isn't Anything. Shields had learnt how to work the studio and the band pushed themselves, deliberately existing on two hours sleep a night, creating a sound rarely heard even in the post-J&MC age - some of the Chain, some Cocteaus, some Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr, Spacemen 3, sure, but never together like this. Rushed along by O'Ciosoig's athletic drumming, the hazy, cut-throat guitar lurches and rushes combined with boy-girl vocals that sounded almost too casual, made for what had been known in previous years as 'dream-pop' only more explicit, while the inscrutable lyrics dealt with alienation, disorientation and suicide but most of all contributing to what Simon Reynolds identified three years later as 'vampiric'. "And, of course, the way the vampire myth works is as sexual allegory - the rush of blood away from the head, the idea that excess brings on pallor and neurastenia, that sex makes you ill."
Sueisfine
Right, technicals. As well as varied open tunings, analogue phasing onto tape and reverse reverb effects - he claims there were very few actual overdubs on either album - Shields had developed a form of guitar playing involving adjusting and taping up the tremelo arm of his Fender Jaguar so its pitch could be constantly bent while playing almost normally, a manoevure he dubbed 'glide guitar', where "the sounds just seem to be there, floating around". Shields told Guitar World magazine in 1992 "about ten years ago, I virtually gave up playing guitar because I thought I could never do anything as truly different as most of the guitarists I liked... I decided just to follow my whims, play for a laugh, go out and jam on garage rock. That's how this band started." Inevitably, plenty of guitarists were inspired to try and work out how he did it, usually by buying a shitload of pedals. In fact the term 'shoegazing' was coined in 1990 by Sounds magazine to describe the way Russell Yates of fuzzy janglers Moose would have his lyrics taped to the floor, but the NME picked it up to refer to pedal studiers such as Ride and Slowdive, as well as anyone else from the Thames Valley region who liked distortion such as Swervedriver and Kitchens Of Distinction. The Melody Maker preferred the soubriquet The Scene That Celebrates Itself, a clique-antipathating statement that got well reused when Blur appeared.
It was from the land of the shoegazers that the band went into the studio in February 1989 without any new songs written, pretty much to see what happened with the idea that the album would be more studio based anyway. What happened has gone down in legend and myth. Seventeen engineers, including co-producers Shields and O'Ciosoig, are listed, although Shields has said that they were included even if all they did was make the tea; the bulk of the actual work has been ascribed to Alan Moulder (later U2, Smashing Pumpkins, Nine Inch Nails, Moby) and when he was later called away to other work Anjali Dutt (Oasis, Boo Radleys). The work took place in an estimated nineteen studios, often spending a single day inside before deeming it unsuitable. In the meantime two EPs emerged, both merely crediting Moulder as engineer. The first, Glider, appeared in April 1990 and was notable for lead track Soon, even by the standards previously set out a groundbreaking statement melding hip-hop drum loops (Shields had previously sampled Public Enemy beats for a rare B-side), Philip Glass keyboards, enigmatic vocals and power drill guitars. Brian Eno said it "set a new standard for pop. It's the vaguest music ever to have been a hit". That was followed in February 1991 by the further adventures in narcotic squall of the Tremelo EP.
Swallow
Vocals - engineered by Guy Fixsen (Breeders, Stereolab, Sundays, Pixies BBC sessions), lyrics written overnight before early morning recording - were only recorded in May 1991, 27 months after work began, and constituted Bilinda Butcher's first contributions bar a few lyrics. Shields had also taken over studio bass duties, as he often had over the previous three years (while an admirer of Googe's live bass playing, he thought it not quite what he wanted on the records), while O'Ciosoig spent large parts of the sessions out of action ill and contributed direct recordings to only two tracks, otherwise supplying drum patterns which Shields sampled and cut into shape, a technique he wasn't averse to applying all over the album.
If this was difficult for the band it was impossible for Creation, who were still independent and had Primal Scream emerging but had been fighting off debts already for several years. Co-founder Dick Green suffered a nervous breakdown he partly ascribes to the wait and McGee reputedly had to dip into his father's life savings to pay off studio creditors. Even the mastering took nearly two weeks after the editing computer threw the entire album out of phase - and this an album recorded in mono to emphasise the guitar sound, something he'd briefly tried to inflate acoustically in the studio with limited success by building a huge tent to play in. The estimated total bill is still a matter for much debate - Green says £270,000, Shields claims to have calculated £140,000, insiders told the Melody Maker a figure around £250,000. Shields also estimated that the total recording time added up to four months. McGee understandably never quite forgave Shields for making an album that never stood a chance of recouping (it peaked at number 24), refusing to nominate the album for the first Mercury Music Prize, letting their contract quietly elapse once promotion was completed and as recently as last year dismissing them in the Guardian as "my joke band" (not to be confused with the "genius artist" epithet he gave Shields three years earlier in the same publication).
Oh yeah, the record. Released in November 1991, Loveless was far from a joke. The Isn't Anything sonic blueprint was pushed almost to snapping point, ethereal melodies vying with densely whacked-out effects and sonic envelopes, guitars coiling around each other, lyrical meaning buried in the mix, almost like ambient dreampop encased in a centrifuge. It really is an album that defies logical explanation. That's why all reviews of it read like this.
When You Sleep
Creation did finance a short tour to promote the album before washing their hands of MBV, and it's one which has gone down in legend, Mojo later rating it the second loudest in history. Described by NME eyewitness Danny Kelly as "more like torture than entertainment", it chiefly went down in legend for You Made Me Realise, more specifically the 'holocaust' section where that mid-section white noise breakdown was extended... and extended... and extended, reputedly for up to half an hour but more often for around a still excruciating ten minutes. Basically, however long it took Shields to ascertain that everyone present and unprepared had been sent into a sensory deprivation form of delerium, hypnosis and general altered state of consciousness by the sheer volume of the sustained attack.
You Made Me Realise
Now you know what it's supposed to sound like here's what we mean. Not the greatest sound recording, and actually recorded on the Glider tour in May 1990 when the holocaust is in a work in progress three minute form (starting at 2:58), but watch for the bloke about thirty seconds into it who unwisely decides this is just the time to enact a stage dive.
Fairly certain Shields never tried this arrangement, though.
So what then? My Bloody Valentine signed to Island Records in October 1992 for what Shields reckons was £500,000, which funded a purpose build studio in Streatham. However problems with its mixing desk led to a falling out with the label and eventually among the personnel, and the label payroll was eventually made one band lighter in 2001. Two covers did appear, Louis Armstrong's We Have All The Time In The World for a charity compilation and Wire's Map Ref. 41°N 93°W for a tribute album. Rumours spread - at least three albums' worth of new songs shelved or delivered to the label with no outcome, experiments in jungle and D'n'B inspired by pirate radio, houses in advanced disrepair and/or covered in barbed wire, Shields keeping up to twenty chinchillas around the place (actually, Shields and Butcher have confirmed that one). Essentially, when it came down to it, Shields could never find a way to gainfully follow an album that pushed back the boundaries of his chosen sphere. He kept himself busy, though - he contributed the usual clanging guitar noise on record and live to Primal Scream's XTRMNTR and Evil Heat albums, recorded with the Manic Street Preachers, contributed four solo tracks to the Lost In Translation soundtrack which was nominated for a Bafta, added live backing to Patti Smith's readings from her book The Coral Sea - a live recording is imminent - has remixed Mogwai, Yo La Tengo, the Go! Team and Placebo among others and has worked with a Canadian dance company and French Mazzy Staralike Le Volume Courbe. Speaking of Mazzy Star, O'Ciosoig was the other half of Hope Sandoval & the Warm Inventions, Butcher added vocals for Dinosaur Jr and Collapsed Lung and Googe released three albums as the main member of Snowpony alongside ex-members of Curve and Stereolab. Meanwhile the experimental Athens, Georgia band Japancakes became the most explicit of the many bands who hold MBV in thrall when they covered Loveless in its entireity for an album released last November, vocals replaced by pedal steel guitar and cello.
However, in the official year of the comeback, 2007, and in the midst of 'nu-gazing', Shields told Magnet magazine in January "we are 100 per cent going to make another My Bloody Valentine record unless we die or something", and in November revealed to Ian Svenonius out of Nation Of Ulysses, The Make-Up and Weird War on his vbs.tv music talk show Soft Focus that he was tinkering with an album comprising a three quarter finished record started in 1996 with Butcher plus "a compilation of stuff we did before that in 1993–94 and a little bit of new stuff." Although nobody has since been any more forthcoming on the latter, live dates were shortly afterwards announced for this year, including Bestival, Electric Picnic, Benicassim, Roskilde, Fuji Rock and the US ATP, as well as these Roundhouse dates and a short North American tour. At the ICA warm-up, You Made Me Realise lasted twenty minutes. From here, who knows where.
Kevin Shields was actually born in Queens, New York on 21st May 1963, moving with his family to Ireland when he was ten. The youngest of five, he had a Catholic upbringing but had his head turned by glam and punk, and at fifteen joined The Complex, an Oi!-style punk band which also featured drummer Colm O'Ciosoig. Having toyed with becoming a Butthole Surfers-esque noise band, in 1983 the pair formed a band with singer Dave Conway and his keyboard playing girlfriend Tina, naming the band after Paramount Pictures' flop attempt to cash in on the post-Friday The 13th slasher film boom two years earlier (which, in a case of art imitating, um, art, is currently being remade.) With limited opportunities at home the band moved to Holland and then Berlin, where they recorded the mini-album This Is Your Bloody Valentine, released in January 1985, an unfocused Cramps/Birthday Party inspired thrash featuring only the odd distortion pedal to suggest later developments. The band moved to London a few months later and Tina left, the remaining trio bringing in a permanent bass player for the first time, friend of a friend Debbie Googe, formerly of Somerset anarcho-punks Bikini Mutants.
December saw the Geek! EP, which apparently fetches up to $200 on the open market, followed by The New Record By My Bloody Valentine EP the following September. It was with this record, released on former Creation associate Joe Foster's Kaleidoscope Records, that the band moved into waters somewhere between C86's dark jangle and Jesus & Mary Chain's feedback frenzies. The Primitives' label Lazy Records put out the Sunny Sundae Smile EP in February 1987, a further coalescing of the wall of noise melodies that would go a little way towards the MBV trademark sound.
Shortly after its release Conway decided to leave due to ill health and what he saw as a failure to reach personal potential. After music press adverts for a new singer failed to work Shields became co-vocalist alongside Bilinda Butcher, a fan and another friend of a friend who Shields also taught to play guitar. While getting themselves together, the newly reconfigured band held off demands for an album with two late 1987 releases, August three-track EP Strawberry Wine and November four-tracker Ecstacy (later combined as Ecstacy And Wine). While still buzzsaw bubblegum, an ethereality started to creep in, aided by Butcher's vocals, that began to mark them out seperately.
Maybe it was this that impressed Alan McGee in January 1988 when MBV played with his own band Biff Bang Pow!; McGee has been quoted as saying he felt he'd found the British Husker Du. Approaching them about an initial single deal for Creation Records, agreement was met about an EP, released in August 1988 officially without a title but usually referred to after its storming opener You Made Me Realise, which buried a pop melody under layer after layer of distorted and feeding back guitar, including a section of pure white noise where a bridge would normally be. This was track two.
It went down so well that another four-track EP, led by the oddly off-key, tender yet brutal Feed Me With Your Kiss, followed immediately before the eventual debut album, November 1988's Isn't Anything. Shields had learnt how to work the studio and the band pushed themselves, deliberately existing on two hours sleep a night, creating a sound rarely heard even in the post-J&MC age - some of the Chain, some Cocteaus, some Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr, Spacemen 3, sure, but never together like this. Rushed along by O'Ciosoig's athletic drumming, the hazy, cut-throat guitar lurches and rushes combined with boy-girl vocals that sounded almost too casual, made for what had been known in previous years as 'dream-pop' only more explicit, while the inscrutable lyrics dealt with alienation, disorientation and suicide but most of all contributing to what Simon Reynolds identified three years later as 'vampiric'. "And, of course, the way the vampire myth works is as sexual allegory - the rush of blood away from the head, the idea that excess brings on pallor and neurastenia, that sex makes you ill."
Right, technicals. As well as varied open tunings, analogue phasing onto tape and reverse reverb effects - he claims there were very few actual overdubs on either album - Shields had developed a form of guitar playing involving adjusting and taping up the tremelo arm of his Fender Jaguar so its pitch could be constantly bent while playing almost normally, a manoevure he dubbed 'glide guitar', where "the sounds just seem to be there, floating around". Shields told Guitar World magazine in 1992 "about ten years ago, I virtually gave up playing guitar because I thought I could never do anything as truly different as most of the guitarists I liked... I decided just to follow my whims, play for a laugh, go out and jam on garage rock. That's how this band started." Inevitably, plenty of guitarists were inspired to try and work out how he did it, usually by buying a shitload of pedals. In fact the term 'shoegazing' was coined in 1990 by Sounds magazine to describe the way Russell Yates of fuzzy janglers Moose would have his lyrics taped to the floor, but the NME picked it up to refer to pedal studiers such as Ride and Slowdive, as well as anyone else from the Thames Valley region who liked distortion such as Swervedriver and Kitchens Of Distinction. The Melody Maker preferred the soubriquet The Scene That Celebrates Itself, a clique-antipathating statement that got well reused when Blur appeared.
It was from the land of the shoegazers that the band went into the studio in February 1989 without any new songs written, pretty much to see what happened with the idea that the album would be more studio based anyway. What happened has gone down in legend and myth. Seventeen engineers, including co-producers Shields and O'Ciosoig, are listed, although Shields has said that they were included even if all they did was make the tea; the bulk of the actual work has been ascribed to Alan Moulder (later U2, Smashing Pumpkins, Nine Inch Nails, Moby) and when he was later called away to other work Anjali Dutt (Oasis, Boo Radleys). The work took place in an estimated nineteen studios, often spending a single day inside before deeming it unsuitable. In the meantime two EPs emerged, both merely crediting Moulder as engineer. The first, Glider, appeared in April 1990 and was notable for lead track Soon, even by the standards previously set out a groundbreaking statement melding hip-hop drum loops (Shields had previously sampled Public Enemy beats for a rare B-side), Philip Glass keyboards, enigmatic vocals and power drill guitars. Brian Eno said it "set a new standard for pop. It's the vaguest music ever to have been a hit". That was followed in February 1991 by the further adventures in narcotic squall of the Tremelo EP.
Vocals - engineered by Guy Fixsen (Breeders, Stereolab, Sundays, Pixies BBC sessions), lyrics written overnight before early morning recording - were only recorded in May 1991, 27 months after work began, and constituted Bilinda Butcher's first contributions bar a few lyrics. Shields had also taken over studio bass duties, as he often had over the previous three years (while an admirer of Googe's live bass playing, he thought it not quite what he wanted on the records), while O'Ciosoig spent large parts of the sessions out of action ill and contributed direct recordings to only two tracks, otherwise supplying drum patterns which Shields sampled and cut into shape, a technique he wasn't averse to applying all over the album.
If this was difficult for the band it was impossible for Creation, who were still independent and had Primal Scream emerging but had been fighting off debts already for several years. Co-founder Dick Green suffered a nervous breakdown he partly ascribes to the wait and McGee reputedly had to dip into his father's life savings to pay off studio creditors. Even the mastering took nearly two weeks after the editing computer threw the entire album out of phase - and this an album recorded in mono to emphasise the guitar sound, something he'd briefly tried to inflate acoustically in the studio with limited success by building a huge tent to play in. The estimated total bill is still a matter for much debate - Green says £270,000, Shields claims to have calculated £140,000, insiders told the Melody Maker a figure around £250,000. Shields also estimated that the total recording time added up to four months. McGee understandably never quite forgave Shields for making an album that never stood a chance of recouping (it peaked at number 24), refusing to nominate the album for the first Mercury Music Prize, letting their contract quietly elapse once promotion was completed and as recently as last year dismissing them in the Guardian as "my joke band" (not to be confused with the "genius artist" epithet he gave Shields three years earlier in the same publication).
Oh yeah, the record. Released in November 1991, Loveless was far from a joke. The Isn't Anything sonic blueprint was pushed almost to snapping point, ethereal melodies vying with densely whacked-out effects and sonic envelopes, guitars coiling around each other, lyrical meaning buried in the mix, almost like ambient dreampop encased in a centrifuge. It really is an album that defies logical explanation. That's why all reviews of it read like this.
Creation did finance a short tour to promote the album before washing their hands of MBV, and it's one which has gone down in legend, Mojo later rating it the second loudest in history. Described by NME eyewitness Danny Kelly as "more like torture than entertainment", it chiefly went down in legend for You Made Me Realise, more specifically the 'holocaust' section where that mid-section white noise breakdown was extended... and extended... and extended, reputedly for up to half an hour but more often for around a still excruciating ten minutes. Basically, however long it took Shields to ascertain that everyone present and unprepared had been sent into a sensory deprivation form of delerium, hypnosis and general altered state of consciousness by the sheer volume of the sustained attack.
Now you know what it's supposed to sound like here's what we mean. Not the greatest sound recording, and actually recorded on the Glider tour in May 1990 when the holocaust is in a work in progress three minute form (starting at 2:58), but watch for the bloke about thirty seconds into it who unwisely decides this is just the time to enact a stage dive.
Fairly certain Shields never tried this arrangement, though.
So what then? My Bloody Valentine signed to Island Records in October 1992 for what Shields reckons was £500,000, which funded a purpose build studio in Streatham. However problems with its mixing desk led to a falling out with the label and eventually among the personnel, and the label payroll was eventually made one band lighter in 2001. Two covers did appear, Louis Armstrong's We Have All The Time In The World for a charity compilation and Wire's Map Ref. 41°N 93°W for a tribute album. Rumours spread - at least three albums' worth of new songs shelved or delivered to the label with no outcome, experiments in jungle and D'n'B inspired by pirate radio, houses in advanced disrepair and/or covered in barbed wire, Shields keeping up to twenty chinchillas around the place (actually, Shields and Butcher have confirmed that one). Essentially, when it came down to it, Shields could never find a way to gainfully follow an album that pushed back the boundaries of his chosen sphere. He kept himself busy, though - he contributed the usual clanging guitar noise on record and live to Primal Scream's XTRMNTR and Evil Heat albums, recorded with the Manic Street Preachers, contributed four solo tracks to the Lost In Translation soundtrack which was nominated for a Bafta, added live backing to Patti Smith's readings from her book The Coral Sea - a live recording is imminent - has remixed Mogwai, Yo La Tengo, the Go! Team and Placebo among others and has worked with a Canadian dance company and French Mazzy Staralike Le Volume Courbe. Speaking of Mazzy Star, O'Ciosoig was the other half of Hope Sandoval & the Warm Inventions, Butcher added vocals for Dinosaur Jr and Collapsed Lung and Googe released three albums as the main member of Snowpony alongside ex-members of Curve and Stereolab. Meanwhile the experimental Athens, Georgia band Japancakes became the most explicit of the many bands who hold MBV in thrall when they covered Loveless in its entireity for an album released last November, vocals replaced by pedal steel guitar and cello.
However, in the official year of the comeback, 2007, and in the midst of 'nu-gazing', Shields told Magnet magazine in January "we are 100 per cent going to make another My Bloody Valentine record unless we die or something", and in November revealed to Ian Svenonius out of Nation Of Ulysses, The Make-Up and Weird War on his vbs.tv music talk show Soft Focus that he was tinkering with an album comprising a three quarter finished record started in 1996 with Butcher plus "a compilation of stuff we did before that in 1993–94 and a little bit of new stuff." Although nobody has since been any more forthcoming on the latter, live dates were shortly afterwards announced for this year, including Bestival, Electric Picnic, Benicassim, Roskilde, Fuji Rock and the US ATP, as well as these Roundhouse dates and a short North American tour. At the ICA warm-up, You Made Me Realise lasted twenty minutes. From here, who knows where.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)