Track of the Week: The Fall: Disney's Dream Debased (1984)

"Nobody liked us. We always got good reviews, but that doesn't put food on your plate, does it? I was thinking of packing it in. I was going to sell pool tables." - Mark E Smith

Such was the disillusionment of Mark E Smith, lead singer of The Fall, the world's greatest pop group, by 1983. Six albums of brilliant mutant shambling krautrock-rockabilly down the line, not enough people were paying attention. But, fortunately for us, the group didn't quit. On an American tour, Smith picked up new band member and wife Brix Smith, supplier of big American guitars and poppy hooks. None of which really surfaced on the next Fall album, the excellent 'Perverted By Language'. But, thanks to Brix's input, by 1984's 'The Wonderful and Frightening World Of The Fall' and its attendant singles, Britain's strangest group was planning something of a full-scale assault on the mainstream. Running through pagan chants, paranoid occult hysteria ('The Fantastic is in league against me!'), murder and the like, lyrically Mark is on top form, but the rough, discordant, epic repetition of, say, 'Hex Enduction Hour' (not a criticism) is replaced with strongly defined, if eccentric, song structure. Producer John Leckie (he of Pink Floyd and later Stone Roses fame and with a degree in handling 'difficult' musicians and frontmen) cleans up the sound, replacing the murk of former releases with a clean, crisp sound and bringing Smith's vocals to the fore.
'Disney's Dream Debased' closes the album. It's subject matter is typical Fall fare - something goes horribly wrong at Disneyworld - 'Blood on the ground /Blood on the sand, blood all around.' Although left ambiguous in the song, it was inspired by Mark and Brix Smith's real-life visit to Disneyworld in California, where a woman was accidently decapitated by a ride. But rather then focus on the inherent horror of the event, as we might expect him to do, Mark E Smith turns it into a meditation on the inevitable loss of innocence - 'The dream, an innocent meets her fate'. Disney's child-like dreams are no match for the grim violence of the modern world, in the same way that everyone's childish innocence simply cannot survive the reality of adult life. The music is equally unexpected from The Fall - all sunny, jangly guitars - more or less in tune for the first time in their career - offset by the vaguely discordant droning of the lead guitar, giving the song a sinister edge. The song is driven, as always, by Steve Hanley's dynamic bass playing, which gives the song a powerful momentum, despite being interupted half way though the second verse, leaving the guitar by itself to pick out a mournful twisted fairground tune before launching back into the verse again. Brix sings 'Diiisneeey' in harmony plaintively in the background, whilst Mark's usual violent ranting is exchanged for a more reflective tone. Pop music, but entirely on the band's own terms. The overall effect is moving, yet haunting, with Smith claiming the song was birthed 'In fallen dreams / Anthem to /Creator of all that had stopped'. The song certainly has a weird, elegiac feel - haunted by the ghosts it is dedicated to. Which is typical of Mark E Smith's gritty social surrealism - ordinary events are twisted into bizzare grotesque caricatures of reality to highlight the ills of modern society. The Fall - Wonderful, Frightening, and so much more.

Gig Review: Yeah Yeah Yeahs: 19.05.06 Glasgow Barrowlands

The Yeah Yeah Yeahs earned a reputation for chaotic live shows, and the excitement in the air is tangible as the crowd waits for the band to take the stage. The band are touring to support relatively mellow new album 'Show Your Bones', and question tonight is, have the band traded in the visceral excitement of their legendary live shows for their new-found melodicism?
Any doubts are immediately crushed as the band appear onstage amist dry ice and coloured lighting and open with rousing single 'Gold Lion'. Straight away, you are entranced by the band's energy and presence: Karen O is commanding and utterly captivating from the start, entering veiled by a scarf which she violently rips off as the song starts to take off. Nick Zinner is equally visually compelling, looking like a young Nick Cave and violently thrashing his guitar. The band are augmented by an extra guyitarist/keyboardist, who keeps in the background and helps to flesh out their sound, but the need for a bassist is simply not felt. Live it becomes apparent how much Brian Chase's superlative drumming anchors the sound, with Zinner often providing rhythmic and textural contrast. But Karen O is the centre of attention here, the focus of the band's charisma, wild and unpredictable, jumping and dancing across the stage.
Old favourites such as 'Pin' and 'Art Star' are greated with much enthusiasm from the crowd, but new classics such as 'Turn Into' and 'Fancy' get just as rapturous a reception. Very few modern day bands have such commanding charisma - it is hard to take your eyes of the stage, and especially Karen, even for a moment. The slower songs allow the band and the audience brief moments of respite, and Karen O reveals an utterly convincing vulnerability during love songs such as 'Cheated Hearts' and 'Maps' that stands in stark contrast to her usual manic stage persona. She giggles at the end of 'Turn Into', caught up in the sheer joy of the performance, and dedicates 'Maps' to the fans - the sincerity of such actions I only question much later.
The gig lasts for the usual 90 minutes, but somehow seems to have gone much faster. By the time the band close the encore with a triumphant 'Maps' and 'Date With The Night' (with Karen O changed into a different costume, naturally), I am simultaneously utterly exhilarated and completely worn out. Three days later and my pulse has only just returned to normal. No other band of their generation can pack as much excitement, intensity and fun into their shows. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs may have broadened their sound, but they have assuredly not lost it.

Track of the Week: The Smiths: Suffer Little Children (1984)

Morrissey's fascination with ambiguity has run throughout his career, so it's appropriate that The Smiths' first album is riddled with it: both the sexual ambiguity the man would become famous for and a weird moral ambiguity, nowhere more apparent then on the unsavoury lullaby 'The Hand That Rocks The Cradle' and on 'Suffer Little Children', about the moors murders. The band understandably got a lot of flak for dealing with these subjects, with people accusing our heroes of encouraging child molesting and murdering. Which of course they weren't - Morrissey was simply using unusual perspectives to write songs from, and there is no reason that art should not be able to tackle morally difficult subjects, but in doing so the artist runs the risk of being villified and misunderstood - just ask Nabokov.
'Suffer Little Children' is Morrissey's tribute to the victims of the moors murders, something he says had a large affect on him when he was growing up, and it ballances his sympathy with his morbid fascination. The whole of The Smiths' self-titled debut is concerned with the themes of death and loss of innocence, so it is appropriate that the final song on the album deals directly with both. With lines like 'Dig a shallow grave / And I'll lay me down', he puts himself in the position of the murdered, vowing to haunt Hindley and Brady night and day - 'You might sleep BUT YOU WILL NEVER DREAM'. The seemingly innocent 'fresh lilaced moorland fields' are contrasted with the brutal murders and the 'stolid stench of death' that now fills them. But what makes the song special is the way that the lyrics' mourning for lost innocence and dark morbidity are echoed by Johnny Marr's guitar playing. The song is made up musically of two sections which are played after each other and repeated for the whole song. The first consists of major seventh chords, which are played gently like a lullaby and almost lull you into a false sense of security, but not quite - the added seventh means the chords don't sound as simple and happy as normal major chords. In the second section, the first two bars are made out of rising major chords, which sound hopeful and uplifting, but in the next two bars, major chords are followed by some nasty, chromaric minor sevenths that don't sound like they belong in the same key at all, brutally finishing the phrase. In this way, the structure of the song mimics the ambiguity of the lyrics. This is what made the Morrissey/Marr songwriting team so special - Marr's ability to write music that was suited perfectly to what was going on in Morrissey's lyrics. And Morrissey's strength as a vocalist is strongly in presence here - he twists the tune around his irregular lyrics instead of singing the same tune every time the verse comes up, forcing you to pay more attention to what he's saying whilst simultaneously freeing up the possibilities of his voice as an instrument. The overall effect is haunting and sinister, yet somehow still beautifully elegiatic, and ultimately the song is a moving tribute. I think that this is perhaps the main reason that Morrissey irritates me so much these days: far more galling then the man's overbearing arrogance is the fact that, without the alchemy Morrissey and Marr had together, his recent output is simply incabale of reaching such heights of brilliance and sheer magic as his work with The Smiths.

Track of the Week: The Chameleons: Don't Fall (1983)

'In his autumn before the Winter comes man's last mad surge of youth.' 'What on earth are you talking about?'

We shall perhaps never know, as that enigmatic sample which opens The Chameleons' 'Don't Fall' and, as it is the first track, their debut album 'Script of the Bridge', was taken from the band randomly recording voices off television. It makes quite a striking start for the song though, especially when followed by a viscious ascending guitar riff and Mark Burgess bellowing 'Don't faaaaaall!', buried deep in the mix. The Chameleons were combining Joy Division-style doom-mongering with Echo and The Bunnymen's widescreen melodicism years before Interpol cottoned onto the idea. But guitarists Reg Smithies' and Dave Fielding's unorthodox guitar tunings and layered atmospheric playing gave the band a sound that was all their own. And that sound is certainly in full force on this song - the guitars take centre stage, creating an ominous fog in which it's hard to hear Burgess' Curtis-meets-Cope croon, but you get the impression from the way he spits out the words that he's quite upset. The words that manage to make themselves heard above all this do litttle to disperse this impression - 'How did I come to be drowning in this mess, this fucking mess!'. In the context of the song, it makes sense to have the vocals burried under the oppressively gloomy guitars - Burgess sounds like he is literally being swallowed up by the noise, his desperation clear. The chorus has him succumbing to paranoia or worse - 'Seeing faces where there shouldn't be faces'. Up the end of the second chorus, the song is simply indie-mopiness par excellance - impressive but a little overwhelming. Then, as the second chorus finishes, Burgess sings 'Don't fall,' and everything drops away, leaving just the guitar playing quietly, subtley, shorn of its shroud of doom. Which allows us to hear Mark clearly as he sings 'I know your back's against the wall / But this roaring silence / Will not devour us all'. And so the song has been changed from a morbid celebration of doom to a rallying cry for hard times. The drums, bass and guitars re-enter, but now you notice the major chords, and a soaring, melodic guitar line leads us out, as looped vocals repeat the chorus and the coda in a round, creating a feel of almost nursery rhyme calm. Until they too disappear, and we are left with just that crystalline guitar part. And you realise things might end up alright.
It's very easy these days to cast The Chameleons as the missing link between Joy Division and Interpol, whom they sound uncannily like. This song in particular reminds me very much of Interpol's 'Obstacle 1'; both songs have a very similar shift in tone half way through. Though that of course does both bands an injustice - Interpol's strong Television influence - prominent on 'Obstacle 1' - and their compositional skill lift them out of the realms of pastiche (in other words: I like them). The Chameleons, in many ways, chose their timing horribly badly. As they appeared on the scene, post-punk was dying and New Romanticism was about to spectacularly wear itself out. Their next release, the woefully titled 'What Does Anything Mean? Basically', was perhaps a textbook example of 'Difficult Second Album Syndrome', and after that, it was too late - as rap's star rose, rock music entered one of it's most infertile slumps (Smiths and Felt excluded) until the Madchester scene arose in 1989, and The Chameleons pretty much just gave up. A pity, as had they appeared on the scene earlier they might just have been Echo and The Bunnymen. As it is, they remain one of the era's most under-rated bands.

Album of the Month: The Knife: Silent Shout (2006)

'I wanted to see right through to the other side...'

Like many modern bands, The Knife rose to prominence when a cover of their single 'Heartbeats' was used in a Sony commercial. Unlike most bands, however, they have decided to follow up their brush with commercial favour by releasing 'Silent Shout', the darkest, most sinister and downright evil electropop album since Coil's 'Love's Secret Domain'. Just check out the lead-off single and title track, streaming with its appropriately nasty video here. http://www.mtv.co.uk/mtvdance/music/article.jhtml;jsessionid=3LWWVHXHAFFSJQFIAIHSFE4AVABBAIV0?articleId=45132606 From the ominous pulsating bassline and the constantly mutating synth part, it's immediately clear that this song won't be being used to sell electronic products anytime soon. And then the vocals enter, processed beyond recognition of gender or source and strategically doubled at sinister fourths, whispering dark secrets in your ear, sinister, inhuman yet somehow not mechanical. The first time I heard this, the hairs rose on the back of my neck. And the sheer depth of the sound - full of darkness and texture, it almost sounds three-dimensional, like you could reach out and touch it, or indeed get physically sucked into it. The video itself is almost unnecessary - the end result is so synaesthetic, you can already see the pulsating lights, the warped figures disappearing into the forest, that grotesque face.
The Knife are Olof Dreijer and Karin Dreijer Andersson, a Swedish brother and sister duo who create music in their own studio and release it on their own label. Olof is responsible for the beats, whilst Karin takes care of the vocals and lyrics. Karin has an impressive tone and vocal range, which is often manipulated beyond recognition by pitch shifters, octave doublers and the like to help create the characters of the various personae that she inhabits in these songs. These range from the mythical sirens in 'The Captain' to the thuggish misogynist in 'One Hit', who, with the help of extreme vocal processing, sounds convincingly masculine and brutish. Olof's musical palette is no less varied, supporting the songs with the appropriate amount of menace and veiled aggression. Thus the album travels from the eerie synth string intro to 'The Captain' to the sickly dancefloor mania of 'We Share Our Mother's Health' to the fading light of album closer 'Still Light' the soliloquy of a dying hospital patient.
The over-riding mood of the album is one of fear and paranoia. Characters often feel angry or afraid, hurt or trapped by forces outside their control, but are unable to fully express their emotions. The desperate housewife in 'From Off To On' dreams of a happy, normal life, but is denied any release outside that provided nightly by TV oblivion. The ill-fated hermaphrodite in the title track is haunted by visions of his/her own death. This is accentuated by the album's music - the songs are so nearly normal electropop songs, yet there is something indefinably yet tangibly wrong with them. Like A Certain Ratio's classic 'Knife Slits Water', all the ingredients for a dancefloor smash are there, but the normal cycle of tension and release is broken, creating a distinct sense of unease. Like the face in the music video, the most sinister thing about it is how in the corrupted features we can see traces of what was naturally meant to be. I can't imagine this music being played in your average hedonistic nightclub.
This album is a thrilling journey into the heart of darkness. By adopting these warped and damaged personas, Karin is able to express a picture of the world seen from the diseased, the dying, and the dispossessed which throws the listener's world view into sharp relief. It is this embrace of darkness that truly sets The Knife apart from most modern groups, who are afraid to so challenge themselves and their audience, and in any case have their eyes firmly fixed on the glittering prize of commercial success. For their courage alone The Knife deserve praise and admiration, but with it they have made one of the most compelling modern albums I have heard for a long, long time. And it's been worth the wait.

Track of the Week: Funkadelic: One Nation Under A Groove (1978)

The Platonic ideal of a pop group, if such a thing existed, would probably bear more then a passing resemblance to George Clinton's Funkadelic/Parliament: after all, they made incredibly popular dance music whilst absorbing and mutating avant guarde ideas, they were open to influences from every range of popular music both black and white, they were stunningly original, they had social and political concerns but their wacky sense of humour prevented them ever taking themselves too seriously, they sucked up and spat out every staple of pop culture from conspiracy theories to religion to aliens, and they understood the importance of daft stage props and dressing up in outrageous costumes. Of course the reality was often a bit messier: having two bands with a collective pool of 35-odd musicians to draw from brings obvious problems without chucking in truckloads of drugs and a tendancy for over-ambitiousness into the equation. But both Funkadelic and Parliament had a remarkably high hit-rate, all things considered, and this song is certainly a hit.
As soon as the song starts, you're forced right into the action: without any introduction, Bootsy Collins is playing one of the most propulsive bass lines you're ever likely to hear, accompanied by solid, funky drumming, rhythmic guitar playing, keyboards, George Clinton's vocals and a host of backing vocalists and, to top it off, an utterly manic cowbell part. Despite the sheer amount of stuff going on, nothing feels extraneous - every part is serving the groove. The end result is one of the funkiest, most compuslively dance-able tracks ever recorded. The song is certainly rooted in funk, but there are traces of everything from psychedelia in the fuzzed-out guitars to jazz in the unusual chords. The next thing that strikes you is how freely structured the whole thing is: a fair amount of extemporisation appears to be going on. Although most parts stick more or less to playing variations on a theme, not even the bass-line or the cowbells play the same part all the way through the song. The chorus pops up at irregular intervals, and Clinton's sporadically repeated exhortations feel even less structured. Yet the whole thing never even comes close to falling apart.
Lyrically, the song works as a manifesto: the 'nation' in question is simply Clinton's followers, united under the power of funk in his crusade for freedom, fun, sex and equality and against boredom, conformism, repression and government control. Clinton sees music as a unifying power for good in the world, and as a result the music is utimately its own end, rather then a means for preaching. Which is part of the reason this song works so well: though it has political undertones, at the end of the day, it never loses sight of its role as fun music for dancing to.
And of course, the reverberations of both Funkadelic and Parliament's work is still being felt in music today: Prince's fusion of sex and politics owes an obvious debt, and samples from both bands regularly crop up in hip-hop and dance records to this day, not to mention the influence these records had on the emerging post-punk scene at the time. But very few, if any, of their followers have proved capable of producing such a bold musical mix as the original.

Album Review: Battles: EP C / B EP (2006)

I certainly never expected a Pheonix to arise from the ashes of post-rock and math-rock, genres that had started out promising a new alternative to rock music's tired formula, but wound up just as formulaic themselves. And I certainly never expected anything this good from this motley crew of wandering minstrels: guitarist/keyboardist Ian Williams of the pleasant-but-prosaic post-rockers Don Caballero, drummer John Stanier from post-hardcore band Helmet, guitarist David Konopka of the somewhat obscure Lynx, and avant soloist Tyondai Braxton. But this release, not an album but a compilation of their early EPs to prepare the world for their debut album expected sometime in September this year, shows a focus and sense of purpose far beyond their original projects. The influence of their previous work is evident from the offset - all the songs are made up of complex inter-weaving parts, often in various tricky time-signatures. But the focus of Battles' music is on melodic and compositional strength, something too frequently lost in post-and-math-rock's aimless noodling and descent into quiet-loud-quiet-VERY LOUD-quiet formula. And post-rock's vaguely apocalyptic bombast is replaced by a quite driving intensity and a menacing tension. Much of this is down to Stanier's excellent drumming - minimal, heavy and precise, he firmly roots the sound in ROCK music, whatever the time signature, even alowing elements of funk and dubb to shine through, something sacrificed to complexity in math-rock and sorely missed in most post-rock's life-less rhythmic thump. But this is very much a GROUP, and the melodic interplay between the various parts sucks the listener in and keeps them listening. Even more striking is their use of digital cut-ups and real-played sharp changes of tempo and time-signature, blurring the line between the digital cut-and-paste backing used in hip-hop and the complex multi-part prog rock suites of old - no mean feat! Thus, with its cycling themes and lurching changes of pace SZ2 comes on like 80s King Crimson filtered through This Heat's 'Horrizontal Hold', whilst BTTLS could almost be Nurse With Wound in the way that it uses a musical language of decontextualised noises of amplifier buzz and guitar strings snapping to sculpt a piece of Eno-like ambience. Hi/Lo cruises along on digital blips, whilst listening to the meticulously constructed TRAS2 deconstruct down to its component drum-kit sounds, right down to the hi-hat line, is utterly compelling.
Battles are constantly fighting to prove that you can be melodic yet complex, brutally intense yet cerebral, avant-garde yet engaging. I look forward to hearing how they fare across a full album. For now Battles have one, let's hope they are as successful in the war.

Gig Review: A Certain Ratio: 29.04.06 Edinburgh Bongo Club

A Certain Ratio are one of the most under-rated bands on the planet. Factory Records' other signing, and not even the Durutti Column, they are curse to forever walk in the shadow of Joy Division. Which is a shame, because their blend of Ian Curtis-inspired indie-mopieness and Funkadelic-style dancefloor grooves not only predated both the Madchester movement and modern indie rock's love affair with the dancefloor, but also was responsible for some excellent music. Tonight, ACR are on top form. Opening with an instrumental medley that segues elegantly into the wonderful 'Do The Du', from the onset they sound muscular and energetic. As on the studio recordings, Jeremy Kerr's propulsive funk bass and Donald Johnson's superlative drumming are the backbone to their sound. Live, listening to the way these two talented musicians bounce ideas off each other is a revelation. Martin Moscop's minimal guitar, and the use of various keyboards, samplers and trumpets fill out their sound without overcrowding it and loosing its cavernous, dubby feel. They appear possessed with an energy lacking from some of their studio recordings tonight, especially on 'Rialto', which, with the help of a guest vocalist, is transformed from the spectral beauty of the studio version to an alien funk rave-up. They preview some songs from their unreleased new album, most of which are excellent - ACR sound invigorated by the rediscovery - both by themselves and by a host of post-punk revivalists who owe an obvious debt - of their roots. A fan who saw them back in 1980 tells me that tonight's show was as good as their performances back in their heyday. Looking around me, the old, dour Mancunians - both on stage and off - are transformed. Everyone is dancing joyously - despite ACR's reputation as gloom-mongers, this is no voyage into darkness - like New Order, ACR know too well the pain and suffering of this world, but find redemption on the dancefloor. And they were doing this before New Order, or pretty much anyone else, latched onto the idea!

Gig Review: Fire Engines: 28.04.06 Edinburgh Liquid Rooms

The Sun Ra Arkestra are headlining tonight, and their live set is excellent. But, despite all I have heard about this legendary group, I am not here to see them. I am here to see the Fire Engines. Between 1979 and 1981, the Fire Engines burst on the Edinburgh music scene, released a clutch of fantastic singles and one mini album, played incendiary 15 minute gigs, and split up. Now they are back, however briefly, and I would seriously urge everyone to jump at a chance to see them live while you can, because they may not be together for much longer. Because the 20 minute set they play tonight is possibly the most thrilling, visceral and intense live music experience I have ever had. Traditional band staples such as 'Get Up And Use Me', 'Discord' and 'New Things In Cartons' are totally wired - invested with all the passion and energy the band can muster, the band sound right at the edge between chaos and control. But the band are very much in control. None of the band members are conventionally technically briliant, but tonight, the interplay between Graham Main's funk-influenced bass, Russell Burn's primitive and unconventional drumming, and especially the warped guitar herioics of Davy Henderson and Murray Slade achieves a twisted kind of virtuosity. The guitarists eschew traditional chords in favour of spiky, dissonant riffs and atonal No-Wave soloing. The end result is experimental music that is kinetic, fun and utterly exhilarating. The short sets are intentionally designed to cram twice as much excitement into half the time - something they easily achieve. In fact, 'quality over quantity' seems to be a recurring theme with the Fire Engines: from their recorded output (which in total amounts to about an hour's worth of material) to their shows, they do not so much burn brightly as explode. 'We want to give you more,' Davy Henderson comments half way through the set. In so many ways, they have.