2007 In Review: All Along The Ancient Wastes The Thin Reflections Spin...

The end of the year, in music as well as life, is habitually accompanied by a lot of looking back. Unlike life, in music there is a time-honoured method by which the highs and the lows, the pleasant surprises and the disappointments, the changes and the progressions of the past 365 days can be measured – the sacred End Of Year List. Whether all-encompassing, dizzyingly eclectic 100 Best Albums or the personal highlights of the Top 10, it allows us to put the course of the past year into sharp relief, which, coupled with the perspective of hindsight, brings this chapter in the history of music to a nice neat closure. Which, when you compare it to how we look back on the passing of this past year of our life, seems somewhat artificial and contrived.
The rub: I am not doing a Top 10 Albums of 2007. Last year I approached the task with relish, drawing up a list of Top 10 Reissues to go with it. As I skim through the huge number of lists in magazines, on the internet or wherever, I can’t help but feel that 2007 has been a pretty rotten year for music. This is odd, as it certainly can’t have been any worse then 2006, a fairly average year in regards to post-millennial pop music. It’s been a long time since anyone came up with music that was radically original, but it would be nice to be blown out of the water by an undisputedly brilliant piece of pop music. Almost universally critically lauded releases such as The Klaxons’ album leave me completely and utterly cold, whereas others, such as LCD Soundsystem’s inarguably excellent second album, I have enjoyed immensely but for some reason still feel they lack that special extra spark necessary to make me rave about them. This is not to say that there hasn’t been some fantastic music released this year. I could probably do a top 10 if push came to shove, but, if truth be told, you guys could probably make it up for yourselves. New Fall, new Electrelane, new Burial, Von Sudenfed, no alarms and no surprises. Similarly, a lot of records I truly love have been reissued again, made available after years of being out of print. Again you can do the list for yourselves: Fire Engines, Nico, The Pop Group, Young Marble Giants, House Of Love, The Slits…. I currently see no advantage in actually writing out either list.
So, a lean year, but not that lean. Old boss, same as the new boss. One of my hopes for next year is that, after years of being inundated with bland indie guitar bands and formulaic R’n’B, someone will come along armed with the talent and the musical vision to throw off the shackles of the Age of the Anthem and make music that is prepared to take some risks, music that is no longer content to play it safe with one eye always on the prize. With record shops closing at an increasing rate and record companies increasingly using the internet to sell music, it is important to remember how much music means to us, which, re: Radiohead’s album release stunt, is an entirely different question to how much cash people will part with to hear your new record. Recently, I find myself borne ceaselessly back into the past even as I go forward. I have listened to some fantastic records which, though they may not have come out this year, I had not heard before. Also, I have become reacquainted with my prog rock past. I have recently listened to albums that I have not listened to since I was 15, and quite possibly for good reasons, and have been overjoyed to find that they hold up today quite nicely without the warm rosy glow of nostalgia. Perhaps it is simply the fact that musically we live in an incredibly retrogressive time, but the pioneering spirit of a lot of these records means that they sound unnervingly fresh today, despite having dated somewhat around the edges. So, here are 10 records I am listening to now, which I think are absolutely fantastic, in, for the most part, utterly arbitrary order. Some I have heard recently, some are old favourites, none of them came out this year.

10. Gentle Giant – Octopus (1973)

In at the prog deep end. Even in the heady days of the early 70s, Gentle Giant were just too weird to break out of cult fandom and into the mainstream, but they did come alarmingly close. Often overlooked back in the day, the band’s utterly bonkers mix of medieval folk, modern classical and complex prog rock was never truly absorbed or followed up, so as a result it still sounds striking today. Discordant riffs in impossibly time signatures weave around each other like a madrigal, the voices do the same, and then the whole mix dissolves into heavy riffing or alien occult funk. And that’s just the first song. The band’s sheer weirdness, coupled with a warm sense of humour, means that they managed to avoid a lot of the pomp and noodling that afflicted some of their peers. Octopus is the band at the peak of their power due to the sheer satanic frenzy that they kick up. ‘The Advent Of Panurge’ probably gives King Crimson nightmares, especially the funk bit with the weird chanting. Yet elsewhere, ‘Think Of Me With Kindness’ is genuinely touching, and features a soaring French horn solo to boot. Something of a lost classic.

9. The Comsat Angels – Waiting For A Miracle (1980)

Just so you know I’ve not completely blown my post-punk cool. Sheffield’s most underrated sons were a far cry from some of the unimaginative dross emerging from the city these days. The Commies, as I’m sure they would have objected to being called, saw your Pere Ubu and your Joy Division and raised you this: a collection of stone cold post-punk classics. Elliptical bass and drums anchor Steve Fellows’ soaring, searing guitar to create a dub-like sense of encroaching doom and smothering dread. On ‘Monkey Pilot’, Fellows sings ‘Sometimes I feel / Out of control…’ as he swims in paranoia up to his eyes, whilst ‘On The Beach’ imagines imminent nuclear apocalypse, and is one hell of a catchy tune. ‘Total War’, with its inverted drums and sub-bass explosions, is, naturally, about relationships. The Comsat Angels perfectly encapsulated the dread and paranoia of their time, yet to this day are criminally over-looked. They would follow this stunningly-well realized debut with the dark, doomy masterpiece Sleep No More, but that is another story.

8. Van Der Graaf Generator – Pawn Hearts (1971)

Both John Lydon and Mark E. Smith have expressed their admiration for this group, and it’s not hard to see why. In the tortured vocals of Peter Hammill, once described as a ‘male Nico’, you can hear a little of both Johnny Rotten and MES. And, for a prog band, these guys sure made an unholy racket. Austere, intellectual and malevolent, Van Der Graaf Generator had seriously bad juju. There are those who still swear that the band were cursed and that the music they made was actually evil. Pawn Hearts is the group’s dismal and gloomy peak. Hammill venomously spits out existential doubt, a man trying to hold together in the violent fury of the storm kicked up by his band members. Robert Fripp guests on guitar, but you can hardly hear him through the highly-organised din of Hugh Banton’s warped keyboards and David Jackson’s sax, all driven on by Guy Evans’ drums. The album’s harsh elemental imagery is complemented by the wild and tempestuous playing. This was the last album the band made before going collectively nuts and having to take a number of years out. Bloodied but unbowed, they returned as intense and malevolent as before, but this record remains their peak.

7. Genesis – The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway (1975)

Gabriel era Genesis reaches its peak, only to fall apart. Initially baffling, the more I return to this album the more I appreciate it. The highly crafted, melodic yet unpredictable music has aged fantastically well, and the obscure concept allows you to make what you will of it. I loved this album when I first heard it as a 12 year old, but I love it even more now. I think ultimately it’s about the corruption of innocent soul by a brutal and unconcerned society. The middle class Peter Gabriel’s transformation into Rael, a New York Porto Rican punk, is unnerving in its sheer believability, especially in his awe-inspiring performance on ‘Back In NYC’. He knows he ain’t perfect, but Rael sees right through the façade of the life offered to him as a young person and sees a humdrum existence in the rat race, selling your soul for cold hard cash and working for people who’ll stab you in the back at the first opportunity they get, none of which sounds too great to him. ‘Your progressive hypocrites hand out their trash / Well it was mine in the first place, so I’ll burn it to ash….’

6. Electrelane – The Power Out (2004)

Electrelane may have come no closer to achieving originality then any of their peers, but what makes them great is the way that they draw on accepted indie tropes – the one-chord-wonder of Neu! And Stereolab, the lo-fi clatter of The Pastels and The Raincoats – and use it to serve their own muse. I remember distinctly avoiding them when this album came out, as I thought it was simply going to be Stereolab-lite. More fool me. Electrelane were never technically great musicians, but they always displayed an intuitive inventiveness and a canny feel for what works. They are a band of contradictions – Emma Gaze’s drumming and Rachel Dalley’s bass playing sound endearingly uncertain yet are always there in the right place at the right time, Verity Susman’s untutored vocals are rough around the edges but enable her to achieve greater emotional impact, Mia Clarke’s guitar work is unshowy and restrained yet highly inventive. Their well-established influences coalesce into something familiar yet with the band’s own personality indelibly stamped on it. Their music is emotionally engaging yet free of melodrama. Their songs are melodic and simple yet unpredictable and full of strange joys – the ‘Ave Maria’ climax of ‘Gone Under Sea’, the choir drafted in for ‘The Valleys’, ‘Oh Sombra!’ and its breathless peak as it races to the finish. Some of my friends don’t understand what I see in Electrelane; I can’t understand why they can’t see it themselves.

5. Emerson, Lake & Palmer – Brain Salad Surgery (1973)

Synonymous with prog-rock wankery of the worst degree, ELP may be the least cool band on the planet. Sure there was a lot wrong with them, but at their best they were stunningly inventive. Brain Salad Surgery is their finest hour, the album for which they pulled out all the stops and did exactly the hell as they wanted. And what they wanted was to produce a forward thinking, exhilaratingly experimental rock LP. The surprising thing about BSS is how well it achieves this. It opens with their audacious desecration of ‘Jerusalem’, which was released as a single and banned by the BBC. As political statements go, that isn’t bad, and the band’s inventive arrangement, whilst heavily bombastic, is actually a lot of fun. Their adaption of Ginastera’s ‘Toccata’, by virtue of being by a modern composer, actually works a lot better then their adaptations of older classical works, with some nice synthesizer work from Emerson. ‘Still… You Turn Me On’ quite possibly would have been a hit single if its single release hadn’t been scuppered by Emerson and Palmer’s reluctance to allow Lake into the spotlight. ‘Karn Evil 9’, the prog epic to end all prog epics, was so long that on vinyl it had to be split into two parts to get it to fit on the actual record. It still impresses today, with stunning musicianship from E, L and P, utterly incomprehensible sci-fi gibberish lyrics and a bewildering range of ideas, ranging all the way across the board from classical to jazz to cheesy easy listening and honky tonk. And the cover was done by the dude who designed Alien. Go on, loose yourself. (‘Benny The Bouncer’ is still shit thought.)

4. Amon Duul II – Wolf City (1974)

The Duul’s last great album only really sounds subdued next to the psyche-prog-mania of Yeti and Dance Of The Lemmings, and sees them mastering nicely the slightly-less-derranged, more concise prog of Carnival In Babylon whilst bringing back some of the fire that that album lacked. ‘And you walk in with your decrees / And you walk out with shaking knees,’ howls Renate in ‘Surrounded By The Stars’, sounding like a cross between Dark Willow and Nico, as the band race through crunching guitar riffs and searing folk-rock viola to melt into an orgasmic haze of Mellotron. This happens a number of times on the album, especially nicely on the closer ‘Sleepwalker’s Timeless Bridge’, it is some of my favourite Mellotron playing of all time. It rises up out of nowhere and engulfs everything in its path, dissolving into a formless Kosmiche goo. The title track is a bitter attack on Nazi Germany, whilst ‘Jail-House Frog’ and ‘Green Bubble Raincoated Man’ are surreal acid-rock nuggets that twist and turn through monster rock and delicate folk-rock without warning. Krautrock lunacy at its best.

3. Flower Travellin’ Band – Sartori (1971)

If I had to choose a book of the year, it would be much easier. Julian Cope’s ‘Japrocksampler’ is excellent, and has caused me a lot of time, money and effort trying to track down obscure Japanese prog albums when I should have been doing more productive things. People still laugh at Japanese pop music, but have you heard this? Flower Travellin’ Band hit their peak with this fantastic slice of heavy prog. The guitarist sounded like a Japanese space invader playing Black Sabbath with Eastern scales and the vocalist is a lunatic howling at the moon. None of this will quite prepare you for their music, which sounds fantastically fresh to these jaded western ears. Intense, original and a law onto themselves, their western influences were clear but distorted through their personal prism, it became something weird and different in their own hands. There’s a whole chapter dedicated to them in the book, and also one for Les Rallizes Denudes, whose bass player hijacked a plane for the Japanese Red Army. One listen to their records will convince you that this is one of the least remarkable things about them.

2. Gong – Flying Teapot (1973)

With their instant associations with hippies, daft sense of humour and far too many drugs, Gong probably drive many people away at the gates, which is a shame because their music has aged exceptionally well. Flying Teapot is the first in the Radio Gnome Invisible series (don’t ask, really), which, concept aside, consists of three albums of psychedelic liquid space-funk jazz prog in exelcis. ‘Radio Gnome Invisible’ sounds like an Igor of a song, cobbled together from unrelated spare bits, from dopey bass intro to eastern sax to singalong chorus and then round the whole lot again just cause it was such fun. ‘Flying Teapot’ takes up the rest of side one, opening with delicate pulsing ambient synths before a funky bass line leads into a glorious spaced-out mess. ‘The Pot-Head Pixies’ is Daevid Allen’s attempt to write a pop song, replete with ‘I am/ You are / We are CRAZY’ playground chant along. ‘The Octave Doctors And The Crystal Machine’ is just Tim Blake’s synthesizers whirring melodically to themselves and spouting dry ice, some years before Eno was doing it. ‘Zero The Hero And The Wicth’s Spell’ is side two’s epic, racing through crashing guitars and flute reminiscent of Traffic through jazz-influenced saxophone solo before crashing out into the Witch’s Spell part. With a repetitive bass-line taking the lead, weird synthesizers and Gilli Smith’s space-whisper vocals, this sounds bizarrely akin to Joy Division and Pere Ubu. Until the saxophone comes in, that is. Weird, hilarious, frightening and entertaining in equal measure, this was only the beginning – Angel’s Egg and You, parts two and three of the trilogy, are even better. Daevid Allen spent his missing years as a cab driver in Australia. Great guy, but I can think of fewer people I’d trust less behind the steering wheel.

1. Roy Harper – Stormcock (1971)

Every now and then you hear an album that reaffirms your love of music. It reminds you why music means so much to you in the first place and lets you know that the spark of excitement hasn’t gone out of your relationship with music, you can still feel that intensely about a record. You listen to it non-stop, you obsess over it, the lyrics start to take on specific resonance in relation to your own life. After listening to the record for the first time, you know instinctively that something inside of you has changed. Stormcock is one of these records. The album with which Roy Harper fully realized his potential and the benchmark for the rest of his career, Stormcock is staggering in its scope and ambition. There are only four songs across the whole record, but there is no sense of sprawl or noodling, no time is wasted. Most of the record is just Roy Harper on acoustic guitar and vocals, though some berk from some 70s group who have reformed for a one-off concert recently plays some pretty cool lead guitar on one of the tracks, and there is an adventurous and sumptuous orchestral arrangement on ‘Me And My Woman’. Harper’s guitar playing is extraordinary throughout, achieving a remarkable range of textures and expression, and his voice is fantastic. His lyrics are intelligent and poetic, politically engaged without resorting to soapbox sloganeering – you can see why Mark E. Smith cites him as an influence. Lyrically the album is bitter and violent in places – ‘The Same Old Rock’ scathingly lambastes organized religion, whilst in ‘Hors d’Oevres’ Harper neatly satirizes his critics whilst protesting against the death penalty – yet the music is stunningly beautiful throughout. Folk rock had never before been taken so far – shifting, lyrical and elegant, swirling through a range of moods and textures yet never indulgent. Stormcock is at once unlike anything you’ve ever heard, yet instantly entrancing and engaging. It is truly one of those records that take you to a magical place, existing in its own glorious sonic world. This is by far the best thing I’ve heard all year.