Track of the Week: The Legendary Pink Dots: A Crack In Melancholy Time (1994)

For approaching thirty years, The Legendary Pink Dots have ploughed their own individual musical furrow, seemingly oblivious to the fashions and trends that shape popular music. And why should they? Ceaselessly following their muse through an ever-increasing number of albums, the Dots have developed almost in a vacuum to become the formidable power they are today - forever on the fringes, yet with a devoted cult following; musically individual and confident yet with a hunger to develop and experiment more. If the musical world at large doesn't give a damn, then that's the world's loss. LPD's career, if you can call it that, is a strange one. From their formation in London in 1980 in the early days, they combined a strong British psychedelic sound, reminiscent of past eccentrics like Gong and Julian Cope, with a Do-It-Yourself philosophy and a love of tape loops, found sound and industrial noise. Not to mention a fascination with the occult and apocalypse. Over the years, the band gained confidence until, with 1991's 'The Maria Dimension' album, they became one of the most striking and innovative, if largely unknown, bands around. By 1994's '9 Lives To Wonder', they had pretty much become a law unto themselves as far as the experimental underworld was concerned. Philip Knight's keyboards, samples and warped tape effects provides the perfect, dark unsettling backdrop for Edward Ka-Spel's dark lyrics, which he delivers sounding like Syd Barrett's ghost lost in deep space, made all the more affecting by his inability to pronounce the letter 'r'. 'A Crack In Melancholy Time' is one of the album's best songs. The deep, throbbing bass and gentle drums give the song a dubby feel, whilst the electronics crackle and whirr and a cold cosmic wind blows through the song's delicate bones. Meanwhile Ka-Spel mumbles something low in the mix about having blood on his hands, only coming through clearly in the chorus to chant 'Count me out! Count me out!'. His naturally frail voice suits the dark atmosphere of the song, as he rises from twitchy nervousness in the verses to a state of number panic for the chorus. About four minutes in, the instruments fade away, leaving the cosmic winds to howl malevolently to themselves for the remainder of the song. 'A Crack In Melancholy Time' is a showcase in dark tension, with the violence hovering just below the song's nervous surface. Its soft groove and catchy tune make it instantly memorable, but its genuine psychedelic derangement turns it into something more interesting. The Legendary Pink Dots will never be a popular band, as their manifold eccentricities put off some (probably most) listeners straight from the start. But they have been strangely influential in their own quiet way. They are certainly original and, if you can get into them, startlingly fresh and compelling. Perhaps, in twenty or so years time, they will be remembered as one of the great undiscovered cult bands of the 90s and beyond, or perhaps the world at large will never know. Either way, it seems that the Dots are perfectly happy to continue on their bizarre personal musical voyage. Long may they continue.

Track of the Week: 10cc: The Wall Street Shuffle (1974)

10cc came out of Manchester in the 1970s, made up of the songwriting team of Graham Gouldman, Eric Stewart, Kevin Godley and Lol Creme. The four had worked variously as hit writers for hire before forming a band together, and each member was a multi-instrumentalist who could also perform as vocalist as required. This lead to a talented, versatile and initially remarkably ego-less group. Since the Great Punk Culling, and thanks to the over-playing of 'I'm Not In Love', 10cc are viewed as bloated soft-rock AOR merchants. Which is a bit unfair, as this ignores the band's sarcastic wit and knack for writing complex and arty pop songs. 'The Wall Street Shuffle' is a good example of this. The song opens with a crunching, catchy guitar riff as the band take the piss out of money driven American businessmen. Musically, the song then proceeds to go through a number of musical twists and turns, barely repeating itself over the course of four minutes. Yet somehow, the song holds together beautifully and was catchy enough to become a top ten hit in the UK. The punchy guitars give way to twinkling keyboards, as the band name-check American financial firm Dow Jones and the Great Depression anthem 'Brother Can You Spare A Dime' in almost the same breath. With glossy production and sumptuous layers of overdubs, the listener might at first be reminded of contemporary chart toppers Queen. But 10cc have a light poppiness in place of Queen's hard rock bombast, and, unlike Freddie and co., were capable of sharp lyrical wit. 10cc's sharp, sarcastic sense of humour is never far away, especially in the sparkling keyboard-led bridge, in which they sneer 'Oh, Howard Hughes / Did your money make you better?'. Not to mention the couplet in the second verse 'Bet you'd sell your mother / You can buy another'. The sense of fun is present in the music, too, with nice little touches like the cheesy low voice singing 'You gotta be cool on Wall Street / When your index is low', but never to the detriment of the music itself. Perhaps the best bit of the song is the coda, in which a pretty overdubbed keyboard line is undercut by harsh bursts of guitar to create a tongue-in-cheek sinister effect. 10cc were intent on creating intelligent pop music that didn't take itself too seriously. When this worked, they wound up creating some of the most enjoyable pop music of the era, and although they would throw it all away later, they certainly don't deserve to be lumped in with the usual suspects on the Soft Rock Scrapheap. Remember them this way.

The Organ Split Up! Noooooooo!

http://www.theorgan.ca/news.php

Tragically, it looks like everyone's favourite all-female indie group form Vancouver are over. The Organ have split up, after releasing just one album, 'Grab That Gun', which surely counts as one of 2006's finest. They will be sorely missed. *sniff*

Vote for Your Top 10 Scottish Singles of All Time!

http://www.jocknroll.co.uk/index_files/HowToVote.htm

Go on, you know you want to. Here are my entries (only one appearance by Orange Juice because you're only allowed one single by each artist).

1. Orange Juice - Simply Thrilled Honey
The most perfect pop song ever. Really, this could be any one of their songs. I discovered Orange Juice at a pivotal time in my life, and have been one of my favourite bands ever since. Just magical.

2. Josef K - Sorry For Laughing
Pretty much invented Franz Ferdinand, only Paul Haig's crew were always loads better. Witty, dapper, wracked with existential angst but fun and sexy too. Men of faultless integrity too - made sure they split up before they sold out.

3. The Fire Engines - Get Up And Use Me
Still one of the best live gigs I ever saw was the Fire Engines. Their music doesn't make sense but, when it's this exciting, it really doesn't need to. 4. The Associates - White Car In Germany This still sounds like it comes from another planet. What an amazing voice Billy Mckenzie had, and what a tragedy his early death was. God bless.

5. The Pastels - I'm Alright With You
The Pastels might just have made their finest music before they really figured out how to play their instruments. This is perfect pop, and I love the B-sides also.

6. Belle and Sebastian - Dog On Wheels
The Belles represent an indie ideal long since forgotten by pretty much everyone else. Orange Juice's natural successors - and that's not something I say lightly.

7. The Skids - Into The Valley
I remember my dad playing this song when I was a kid and dancing around the room. Still makes me dance like a 10 year old.

8. Aztec Camera - Just Like Gold
The first blosoming of Roddy Frame's talent, raw and untouched by the dodgy production that would ruin some of his later albums. And the B-side is the ultimate version of 'We Could Send Letters'.

9. The Cocteau Twins - Pearly Dew Drops
More alien music - how could Liz Fraser possibly be human? She sounds like an angel in the raptures of ecstasy. And sooooo sexy.

10. The Jesus and Mary Chain - Upside Down
They really peaked early, didn't they? Still, what a fantastic piece of dead-eyed, drugged up arrogance.

Track of the Week: bIG fLAME: New Way (Quick Wash And Brush Up With Liberation Theology) (1986)

'We did change the world, full stop.' bIG fLAME

The story of bIG fLAME is a strange one. It is a tale of arrogance, betrayal, integrity, bloody-mindedness, unwieldy song titles, silly haircuts and daft punctuation. And that's before we even get onto the music. Alan Brown (bass and vocals) and Dil Green (drums) were allegedly in the original line-up of Wham! with George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley, but were kicked out due to general aesthetics - apparently the record company moguls just didn't think our heroes were good looking enough to be part of a successful pop group. Allegedly. So Brown and Green, muttering that they weren't going to sell their souls and their integrity in order to become successful anyway, retreated back to Manchester, recruited Greg Keeffe on guitar and set about making proper music. Pop stardom could go to hell. Using a number of bizarre gimmicks guaranteed to put off the normal record buying public, such as releasing 7-inch singles only - well, honestly, who buys albums these days anyway - bIG fLAME embarked on their short, fiery career. Perhaps the height of their fame came when, oddly enough, their song 'New Way (Quick Wash And Brush Up With Liberation Theology)' got included on the NME's C86 compilation. Eschewing the jangly Byrds-derived pop of their contempories, bIG fLAME sounded like The Fire Engines and The Minutemen going to the pub, snorting a truckload of speed and then arguing violently about politics before passing out, on average, two and a half minutes later. This pretty much holds true for all of their songs. 'New Way' starts, with an almost jazzy rhythm before Keefe's guitar, atonal, distorted, trebly and mixed incredibly loud, disrupts the song and leads into a must faster, crazed rhythm. The band ably navigate their way through a number of tempo changes, and Brown and Green's energetic rhythm section recalls The Minutemen but, unlike The Minutemen's ultra-tight playing, chaos never feels far away. Lyrically, I assume the song does pretty much what it says on the tin - Brown's voice is always low in the mix, and, although they certainly have political ideals, the band also possess a wry sense of humour, evident in song titles such as 'All The Irish Must Go To Heaven' and 'Why Popstars Can't Dance'. bIG fLAME's brand of organised chaos was never going to crack the mainstream, and the band made sure that they split up before they became in danger of splitting up, leaving just a handful of singles and Peel sessions. Since these are (criminally) out of print, and reasonably hard to find without bankrupting yourself over eBAY (unless you know where to look), the curious can check out their myspace site at http://www.myspace.com/bigflamemcr, and a video of them performing !Cuba! exists on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSDgGqFc17g.