Art Brut, Top of the Pops! RIP Sleater-Kinney

http://www.petitiononline.com/abtotp/petition.html

A petition to get Art Brut on Top Of The Pops before it's too late!

In other, sadder news, Sleater-Kinney, one of America's finest bands, are on an indefinite hiatus

http://www.sleater-kinney.com/

They will be sorely missed.

Track of the Week: XTC: Towers of London (1980)

From Swindon they came, and with their catchy tunes and spiky guitars they conquered the world... Or so it should have been anyway. XTC produced some of the best, well written and loveable pop tunes of any era, but through sheer bad luck managed not to make it huge. 'Towers of London' is just one of many, many fabulous XTC songs, and really I could have just have easily made many other XTC songs Track of the Week. But I have chosen 'Towers of London'. 'Black Sea', its parent album, should have been huge. It's loaded with great pop songs, and the production - drums miked up loud, no overdubs that couldn't be played live - ensures that it hasn't aged a day. Just ask Blur, who rewrote album opener 'Respectable Street' as 'Tracy Jacks' for 'Parklife' in the 90's.
'Towers of London' is typical XTC fare, opening with a vaguely Byrds-y, Beatles-y guitar line from song writer Andy Partridge before the drums kick in. Lyrically, the song's subject matter - London, naturally - is a tribute to XTC's pop heroes - The Beatles and The Kinks, despite Partridge knowing next to nothing about the subject. It is pulled off beautifully though. Colin Moulding's cyclical, melodic bass playing is very reminiscent of Paul McCartney's playing style, and Partridge and Moulding's vocal harmonies ensure the song had a memorable tune, but XTC's angular, post-punk guitars make the song very much their own, despite the obvious influences. All accompanied by a bell - towers of London, you see. But there are two things that lift the song from merely brilliant into the realms of pop genius. Firstly the bridge - a sudden key change reflects the change from the song's reflective tone to a more urgent one, and a tune to die for. The line 'Clear as children's chalk lines on the pavement' is so visual, and relates back to the chorus' nostalgic remembrance of the 'men who fell' over the decades, watched over by the magnificent towers. It's just magical. And it's followed by a rather nice guitar solo by new recruit Dave Gregory. The second, absolutely magical bit is the coda - after another verse and chorus, everything gets much quieter, and Moulding and Partridge sing 'Towers of Londonnnnnnnnnnnnn' wonderfully plaintively, before the whole band stops, apart from the regular tolling of the bell. Then the intro guitar line comes in again, and over one chord, the band sing 'La la Londinium' over lots of 'Ooooooh' backing vocals as the song fades away - again, magic.
'Towers of London', like most of XTC's songs, focuses on the lives of normal people and trapped eccentrics with equal amounts of humour and pathos, much like Ray Davies from The Kinks. On the tour promoting this album, Andy Partridge had a nervous breakdown on stage due to stage fright, and the band have never played live since, severely scuppering the commercial success they so obviously deserve. But never mind, they have left behind a back catalogue packed with brilliant songs that have inspired everyone from Blur to Franz Ferdinand, and whose appeal will continue undimmed after the many who have copied their sound but little of their charm have fallen by the wayside.

Slaughtering Sacred Cows: The Jesus and Mary Chain

This is a new column, so a few words of explanation. I have only been writing about music that I love, that has inspired me in some way. The purpose of this column is to add some variety by talking about bands, albums or songs that I personally think have received an unfair amount of commercial or critical praise. It is just an opinion and not meant to cause offence to fans of these groups - sometimes I may even like much of the group in question's work and be playing the devil's advocate in order to make a point. It is detrimental to be in a situation where you receive nothing but praise; even if you are right, arguments are necessary if only to make sure you remember the reasons WHY you are right.
The Jesus and Mary Chain released 'Psychocandy' in 1985, and ever since it has been held up as a classic. It is undeniably a landmark album. JAMC's sound took three-chord poppy songs, influenced by sixties girl groups, and played untamed white noise over the top. Basically they pioneered 'Record Collection Rock'. Part of the enjoyment is recognising the homages the music makes to its influences. This led to more and more bands recycling the past rather than innovating. Which is not to say that the genre has produce no good music - I am a great fan of Stereolab and Primal Scream (at least when they're not pretending to be the Rolling Stones or MC5, but that's another story). But the Mary Chain and this general ideal marked an ideological shift in indie music - using influences more as citations then artistic fuel - which led to Oasis and Blur ripping off The Beatles and The Kinks during Britpop, right through to the modern day post-punk revival's pillaging of the Wire and Gang of Four song book. Not in itself a bad thing, except what happens when bands have finished with history - we've redone the sixties, seventies and eighties, when they historically catch up with themselves, where should new groups look for musical inspiration? It ultimately seems a short-sighted aesthetic approach.
But it would be unfair to blame all of this squarely on The Jesus and Mary Chain. Beyond all of this, my main gripe with them is the music itself. Even fans of the band have to admit that they were a one-trick pony - again not necessarily a bad thing, but your appreciation of their records depend on how much you're blown away by this trick. Considering that combining feedback with melody is nothing new in pop music - The Velvet Underground were doing it in the late sixties, as were Sonic Youth in the eighties and My Bloody Valentine in the nineties. All of these bands used feedback as a compositional device and very strikingly integrated it into their songs, whereas the whole point of the Mary Chain is that the feedback isn't integrated - the pop music and the noise are going on at the same time regardless of each other. Which is admittedly pretty striking the first time you hear it, but once you've gotten over that, it gets old pretty quickly and you can't really take it anywhere much compositionally as the whole point is that they are disassociated. And later in their career, when JAMC removed the feedback, the other problem with this record becomes clear - the band aren't much cop at writing songs. Being only based around three chords needn't be a song writing disadvantage - look at The Ramones and The Velvets again - but almost all of The Jesus and Mary Chain's songs are built around major chord I-IV-V sequences. The Mary Chain wanted to bring 'darkness' back into music, but as their music is based around the same three major chords and simple major key melodies, it lacks the darkness inherent in the Velvet Underground's music, and, without the energy of The Ramones, their songs are just dull to listen to. Combine that with the band's limited lyrical repertoire of girls, drugs and boredom, and it becomes very difficult to tell the difference between most of their songs - in fact, I reckon if you placed the needle randomly on the record, a seasoned fan might have difficulty naming the song. And, as more and more bands reference the Mary Chain sound themselves, the original sounds less and less striking – the whole feedback/melody thing has become so common-place that it seems almost funny that they once managed to incite crowds to riot. I don't think the Jesus and Mary Chain are awful, I just think that they're boring, and so the critical acclaim they are held in utterly baffles me.

Track of the Week: Roxy Music: For Your Pleasure (1973)

Roxy Music sounded like no one before them. They ransacked and pillaged popular culture, mixing the avant-garde with the kitsch, chewing up and spitting out musical and lyrical cliches into a new, warped and twisted yet riotously fun concoction, pioneering what would become glam-rock. All this was driven by the tensions between Brian Ferry, ice-cool sci-fi would-be 50's crooner, and Brian Eno, synthesiser innovator with a career of wild sonic experimentation ahead of him. Such conflict ensured that this line-up of the band would not last long, with Eno soon growing bored with the limitations of the Roxy format and Ferry wanting to take the music in a more conventional direction, and, sure enough, after the band's second album Eno departed for his solo career. On reflection, perhaps this was for the best, as the early experimental Roxy utterly nailed their style on these two albums. 'For Your Pleasure' is the closing and title track on the second album, and, some 30 years later, despite the myriad of glam-rock and post-punk bands taking their musical cues from Roxy, it still sounds utterly weird and alien.
The song opens with an austere, tribal tom-tom rhythm, before the band enters, with Ferry singing one of his more cryptic lyrics. After each quite short verse, the band pauses, and we are left with an ominous silence, before the tom-toms lead us back into the next line. This happens four times, once without even any lyrics, before the band adopts a different tune for the next three verses, interspersed with the same pauses. The instruments are all treated by Eno, changing the length and decay of the sounds more and more as the song continues, creating uneasy wobbles and strange echoes. Ferry's lyrics are the usual string of garbled cliches, with dark horses hiding and night stars shining brightly, seemingly meaningless. Sung in an emotionally wracked, quivering voice, the way the lyric's very meaninglessness contrasts with the over-riding dark intensity of the music becomes sinister - just what is he on about? As the music becomes more and more warped by Eno's tape effects, Ferry's wish 'I hope thing's will turn out right' seems more and more futile. Then everything stops, and Ferry sings in a very low voice right near the bottom of his register, slow and deliberately, almost unaccompanied apart from the occasional stray piano note from Eno, 'Old man / Through every step I change / You watch me walk away / Tara....' A chorus of multi-tracked vocals take up the refrain, endlessly repeating 'Tara' over and over again, with absolutely no hint of emotion in their voices. The rest of the band enters, replete with dramatic rolling tom-toms as guitarist Phil Manzanera quietly playing a sinister solo in the background. Eno's tape effects mutate and distort the sound, transforming the music into a violent whirlpool of noise that eventually swallows everything. As the song finishes we are left the swirling tape effects, sounding like a fleet of helicopters, whilst the amassed vocals stop saying words and are transformed into a heavenly choir. An old woman's voice comes out of nowhere and whispers, 'Don't ask why.' And the song fades out. It sounds like the end of the world, both terrifying and strangely uplifting. But is this a suggestion of life beyond the grave or just a hymn to the end of everything? The music firmly refuses to give any answers.
The song is very much a starting point for Eno's later ambient and sound manipulation experiments that he would pursue in his later years, and, in its sinister atmosphere, perhaps a direct precedent for the more sinister and far-our Associates songs. It was certainly important in incorporating the use of tape effects into popular music, and as such it provided a starting point for future experiments in electronic music, from Cabaret Voltaire to This Heat and onwards. This song terrified me when I first heard it as an impressionable 11 year old, and it still does till this day. I would dearly like to know what the song is about, but I guess that would kind of be missing the point - the song's apocalyptic power and haunting beauty is an end in itself. As the disembodied voice at the end says, 'Don't ask why.'

Album of the Month: The Organ: Grab That Gun (2006)

'As I was saying / I know that I'm one of the few who got / Away from you'

The Smiths are one of those bands that, as far as indie rock is concerned, it is impossible not to be influenced by. Not only are they pretty much required listening for any self-respecting angsty mis-fit teen, their sound and world view has, for better or for worse, become as much a fixed component of the musical and lyrical vocabulary of every independent band to follow in their wake. Most bands simply do not endeavour to escape from the shadow of Morrissey and co., especially in these days when influences are worn cheerfully on sleeves. But not The Organ. The Organ have obviously listened to The Smiths alot - lead singer Katie Sketch's vocal moans bear an uncanny resemblance to Mozza's unconventional vocal style, and guitarist Deborah Cohen is clearly influenced by Johnny Marr's jangly chords. Yet on the second song on their debut album, 'Steven Smith', Sketch sings about the numerous people unable to escape the band's shadow ('One look at you / And they're suddenly covered in shrapnel too') before attempting to violently take control of her own muse from Morrissey. Has she succeeded? Although they sound sonically similar in many respects, The Organ are taking tentative steps into their own sonic territory. and, of course, their antagonistic relationship with their influences makes for more interesting listening then the standard sincerest-form-of-flattery approach that most bands these days use - one of the things that made The Smiths exciting was their determination to mess with the standard formula, and so it is with The Organ.
The Organ are an all-girl band from Canada, painstakingly assembled by Sketch, who taught the band how to play their instruments. And this album is very much a labour of love, rerecorded as the original version did not meet Sketch's expectations. And, though the album may seem slight at barely 30 minutes worth of music, it was undeniably worth all that hard work.
The Smiths are not the only standard indie-rock reference point that The Organ draw from - there are also traces of The Cure, Joy Division, Pixies and Throwing Muses. But whereas most bands are happy merely to copy these bands' sounds, The Organ seem intent on suffering the same emotional pain as their heroes also. So 'A Sudden Death' and 'No One Has Ever Looked So Dead' are filled with loneliness, sexual confusion and alienation as Morrissey-esque as their titles, whilst 'There Is Nothing I Can Do', whilst not reaching the same level of intensely disturbing catharsis as the Throwing Muses' 'Delicate Cutters', deals with self-harm far more honestly and believably - and less melodramatically - than a thousand screaming emo kids. Thus The Organ have an emotional impact denied many of their peers, though this probably means that they will be too miserable by half for your average thrill-seeking Editors fan.
The band's timbre is noticeable too - the titular Organ - the keyboard, thankyou, played by Jenny Smyth, is a driving force behind many of the songs, and one of the things that gives the band their individual sound. And 'Grab That Gun' is beautifully mixed - one of the many faults of the postpunk revival, a movement that The Organ are NOT a part of, has been to ignore the vital role of the rhythm section, but here the drums and bass are mixed high up, bringing out the music's strong, driving quality.
But, at the end of the day, more then anything else, this album is a collection of strong, catchy, well-written, moving songs. The Organ are one of the few bands of the past ten years whose music I feel I could live in - the songs are songs that will soundtrack the highs and lows, the triumphs will be celebrated by the reservedly upbeat 'Memorize The City', and 'Sinking Hearts' and 'Love Love Love' will provide solace in moments of despair. And the soaring climax of 'Brother' is simply one of the most exciting moments in modern pop, full stop. This album has already done this for me in the month that I have been listening to it, and, as other recent CDs sink to the bottom of the pile, 'Grab That Gun' will remain near the top for a long time to come. Like their heroes/rivals The Smiths, The Organ will reach out and touch people with their music for years to come.

Track of the Week: Neil Young: Cortez The Killer (1975)

Compared to his previous two albums, the bleakly confessional 'On The Beach' and 'Tonight's The Night', 'Zuma' is a walk in the park. It's still an intense dark album full of images of betrayal and death, but this time the emphasis is on country tinged murder ballads rather then bleak, personal existential angst. The album's centre piece is undoubtedly the seven-and-a-half minute epic, 'Cortez the Killer'. The song is remarkably simple, one of Young's traits that unites the range of musical styles he plays in, consisting of the same three chords repeated throughout, overlaid mostly with Neil Young and Frank Sampedro 's malevolent soloing. Never a conventionally skilled player, Young's soloing has always been worth listening to for the staggering amount of emotion he packs into it, driving already intense songs almost to breaking point. Here, his soloing has become even more ragged and discordant then on early classics such as 'Down By The River'. Sampedro's playing works in a similar manner and nicely complements Young’s. Together, they drag the song out to its epic length, through numerous sinister build ups and fiery releases. Anyone who dismisses all guitar solos as meaningless indulgent drivel should give this record a listen - the soloing is part of what gives the song its tangible feel of bad karma - 'Cortez' just sounds plain nasty. You can see why grunge pioneers like Dinosaur Jr and Pixies cite Young as a major influence. Lyrically, the song starts off as a lament for the death of the Aztecs, described romantically by Young - 'The women all were beautiful, and the men stood straight and strong / They offered life in sacrifice so that others could go on'. But in the last verse, he turns the song back in on itself, relating the loss of the Aztecs to a failed relationship - 'I still don't remember when or how I lost my way...' So how does the relationship end? It's left vague in the lyrics, but the sinister atmosphere of the song, and the violent intensity of the playing, suggests that something nasty happened to this initially ideal relationship. Especially as the song is placed at the end of an album loaded with images of death, and early songs deal with protagonists with a definite sinister side to them. On side one of the album, 'Looking For A Love' deals with a person whose relationships are jeopardised by his 'darker side'. And this is Neil Young, who sang, 'Down by the river / I shot my baby' on an earlier album. The title of the song focuses on Cortez, the Spanish conquistador responsible for the colonisation of South America by the Spanish and hence the death of the Aztec race, rather then the Aztecs themselves. The protagonist sees himself as Cortez in this situation, somehow responsible for the death of his relationship with this girl, but did he actually kill her? The suggestion is made all the more sinister by its very vagueness. In many ways the song is similar to 'Down By The River', the Young song quoted earlier, in that most of the actual violence happens inside the music and outside the relatively calm lyrics. Young's protagonists keep a straight face for society, but however well they hide it, they cannot stop the inner torment that plagues them as a consequence of their actions. As the song draws to a close, both guitarists emotionally worn out by the sheer intensity of the experience, an all but spent Young repeats the first line of the song, 'He came dancing across the water /Cortez, Cortez', then says numbly, 'What a killer.' He sounds genuinely tortured by the ordeal, whether it is in fact just the end of the Aztecs or the jealous murder of a loved one. And it is Neil Young's emotional intensity and honesty that makes him such a compelling artist.

Track of the Week: The Go-Betweens: The Wrong Road (1986)

Dedicated to Grant McLennan, lead guitar, vocals, (12.02.58 - 06.05.06) RIP

Australia's greatest pop group, The Go-Betweens moved to Scotland in the early 80s, where they put out a single on Postcard Records before the label collapsed. With their crisp, clean guitar pop, influenced by Talking Heads and Television, they fitted right in with lthe label's ethos and sound, standing proudly next to Josef K and Orange Juice (I don't give higher compliments). After Postcard's demise, The Go-Betweens released six albums worth of pop brilliance on various labels. Song-writers Robert Forster and Grant McLennan enjoyed a Lennon/McCartney relationship, and both writers had a penchant for witty litterate lyrics of failed romance and longing and a wonderful way with chord sequences. None of which, oddly enough, ever really translated into massive record sales, but it did inspire a large cult of devoted followers. A recent reunion tour and new album had been greated with rapture by fans and critics alike, but this May Grant McLennan died in his sleep, bringing a premature end to this fantastic band.
'The Wrong Road' is McLennan's song of regret at having made the wrong decision at various cross-roads of life. The song is built on acoustic guitar and a genlte 6/8 drum pattern, filled out with a tasteful string arrangement, whilst McLennan muses on how he 'Started out Oliver, ended up Fagin.' The music is sweetly moving but never overly sentimental, and McLennan's poetic lyrics, whether describing his current abode where 'The ghosts in the next room hear you cough' or comparing the rain to 'The sound of a finished kiss / Like when a lip lifts from a lip', are strongly evocative. But his self-depricating humour and good-natured charm stop the song from sinking into the self-absorbed navel-gazing that characterizes alot of indie pop from this era. The character in the song is struggling to accept his fate with grace rather then be bitter about it ('What was that phrase? Grace under pressure') and indeed the soaring chorus suggests acceptance and sadness rather then spiteful bitterness. The other nine songs on 'Liberty Belle and The Black Diamond Express', the song's parent album, are just as strong, and despite this fans cannot agree on which Go-Betweens album is the best. That should give you some idea of the wonderful consistancy of the Forster and McLennan songwriting team, and what a loss to the music world Mclennan's untimely passing was.