Coffee Table LPs Never Breathe

Heldon - A Dream Without Consequence?

2010-04-04T00:38:00.001Z

Ask any music fan to name you five good bands from France and I guarantee you they will struggle. France has made many great and notable contributions to culture and the arts, but it is a popularly held belief that this does not extend to rock and roll. Perhaps the national stereotype of the French is just too sophisticated and cultured to really rock out with abandon; when French recording artists do become famous, they tend to be in the sleazy, suave balladeer mode a la Serge Gainsberg or arch yet tasteful electronic artists such as Air or Daft Punk. Scratch the surface, however, and there is a wealth of exciting and original French rock music, from Gong’s mystic space-funk to Magma’s apocalyptic alien operas to Ame Son’s acid fried freak outs. It’s tempting to conclude that, much like the Germans and the Japanese, the French rock groups’ very inability to convincingly reproduce American and British rock sounds allowed them to develop their own refreshingly idiosyncratic take on the form.
So it’s probably not without knowing irony that Heldon titled their third album It’s Always Rock And Roll. Here was music as thrillingly far out as anything produced at the same time in Germany or Japan, but handicapped as a French product, it was pretty much doomed to be ignored from the offset. If they had been British, Heldon’s musical invention, embracing of electronics and aversion to bombast would likely have landed them in with the select prog groups whose reputations survived the punk culling, such as King Crimson and Van Der Graaf Generator. Had they been German, they would be spoken of in the same breath as other krautrock hipster touchstones. As it stands, they remain to this day a glorious undiscovered secret.
Heldon were formed by guitarist Richard Pinhas, France’s own guitar hero. Pinhas was a suave left-wing intellectual who had experienced the political unrest of the 1968 student riots. Looking for some form of self-expression, he moved into rock and roll. Taking their name from a Norman Spinrad sci fi novel, the band fused Pinhas’ Fripp-like guitar playing with spacey synthesisers. It’s entirely appropriate that Pinhas should take his band’s name from Spinrad’s alternate universe masterwork The Iron Dream, partly because of that novel’s sound kicking of right wing ideology would have appealed to Pinhas’ politics, but also because the group themselves sound like they don’t quite belong in our universe. Although Pinhas’ heavy Crimso influence and the band’s penchant for sidelong epics places them firmly in the prog camp, their pioneering use of droning electronics is more aligned with Cluster or Tangerine Dream’s experiments than Wakeman or Emerson. Indeed, at times Heldon achieved a nasty, spikey minimalism that predates Suicide or Throbbing Gristle, and their use of clangy metallic percussion echoes Kraftwerk and anticipates Einsturzende Neubauten. Their integration of synthesisers is particularly remarkable in how successful it is – synths played their part in the downfall of many great prog acts, simply because the rigid technology of the time was hard to square with the dynamic time signature and tempo shifts that gave the music so much of its colour. At times, Heldon’s mastery of the tension between man and machine recalls The Who’s defining work on ‘Baba O’Reilly’ and ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’, and their ability to work with the mechanical groove is reminiscent of Manuel Gottsching’s seminal E2-E4 and of course the Gottsching-indebted LCD Soundsystem.
Heldon released seven studio albums in their lifetime, each one worth owning, and the best ones being very special indeed. As information about them is relatively scarce on the internet, here follows a rundown of their studio output, in chronological order and with mock Pitchfork ratings out of 10.0, in the hope that people will be moved to investigate these wonderful albums. Personnel info adapted with apologies from allmusic.com, apologies to the band and musicians if any of it is incorrect.

Electronic Guerilla (1974)

Gilles Deleuze – Vocals
Patrick Gauthier – Synthesiser, keyboards
Georges Grunblatt – Synthesiser, keyboards
Ariel Kalma – Keyboards
Richard Pinhas – Guitar, keyboards
Alain Renaud – Guitar
Coco Roussel – Percussion
Pierrot Roussel – Bass

Interestingly enough, the first album from France’s guitar hero Pinhas doesn’t feature any guitar until the second track. Electronic Guerilla opens with ‘Zind’, two minutes of throbbing electronics that wouldn’t be out of place on a Cluster LP. Electronics are woven into the whole album, their ominous buzzing providing a counterpoint for Pinhas’ wild guitar soloing. While Robert Fripp is obviously the main influence on his playing, Pinhas is definitely his own man. The sonic debt is clear in both the fuzzed out, searing soloing and the delicate acoustic passages, especially on ‘Ballade Pour Puig Antich, Révolutionnaire Assassiné en Espagne’, where it is doubled with soft mellotron. However, Pinhas’ style is less disciplined than Fripp, favouring a raw and unhinged edge that gives his playing its own identity.
The title of the album betrays the bands politics, as does ‘Ouais Marchais, Mieux Qu'en 68’, which features a spoken word piece about the student riots in France in 1968, and Pinhas’ anger is audibly simmering on this track some six years later. However the album is not at all as violent as this might suggest – indeed the tone is lyrical and sedate, with disconcerting eddies of anger and violence felt underneath, almost subliminally.
Electronic Guerilla is an impressive debut, and Heldon’s potential is on ample display. However, it’s audibly a formative work. Pinhas’ guitar playing is yet to reach the peaks it would on later albums, and there are odd moments where the synthesiser backings and the guitar playing feel somewhat clumsily wielded together, almost as if they belong to separate songs. This is especially noticeable on ‘Ballad…’, whose pastoral, early Crimson tone is constantly offset by an intrusive synthesiser buzz. Having said that, all the tracks have something to offer, and even at this early stage it’s clear that Heldon were going to develop into a very exciting band indeed.

Rating: 7.6

Heldon II: Allez Teia (1975)

Allain Blanche – Guitars
Georges Grunblatt – Synthesiser, guitar, keyboards, mellotron, ARP
Richard Pinhas – Guitar, synthesiser, keyboards, mellotron, tapes, ARP
Alain Renaud - Guitar

And the terrorist chic continues with the cover for Heldon’s second LP, with its cover showing a grainy black and white picture of an activist running from an armed policeman. Ill-advised, but admittedly miles away from Roger Dean. One wonders if the cover is the reason why Pinhas himself reportedly thinks little of this LP, as it’s another solid effort in the same vein as the debut. The album start off with the band’s strongest ever shout out to their musical heroes, ‘In The Wake Of King Fripp’, a lyrical piece of mellotron, acoustic guitar and acid-drenched soloing that indeed would not have sounded too out of place on the first two Crimso LPs. Not that Heldon have sacrificed their individuality – the rest of the album sees them refining and developing their own sound, growing ever more confident with their mix of kosmiche electronics and proggy guitar heroics. Pinhas’ brilliance is often in the way the band’s two distinct voices – guitar and synthesiser – work in distinct harmony with each other, as in conversation. Instead of man fighting the machine, as on The Who’s ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’, Heldon sound like a fully integrated cyborg, the organic and mechanical effortlessly interwoven. In this way the sound and feel of Heldon II reminds me of Manuel Gottsching’s E2-E4, at this point still nine years in the future, especially on tracks like ‘Moebius’. Like E2-E4, Heldon’s songs are already beginning to organically evolve, slowly and lyrically mutating over the course of their length. ‘Fluence’ is a prime example of this, Heldon’s first track over ten minutes long and the best thing on the album. Its serene deep space synthesisers wouldn’t be out of place on any classic German space rock album, and though there is a gap between it and the next song, they could just have easily flowed together. It illustrates the band’s increased confidence and gives a hint to their future direction. ‘Alphansis’ and closer ‘Michel Ettori’ feature no synthesisers, just Pinhas’ acoustic guitar weaving elegant melodic patterns.
Heldon II is perhaps a little less impressive than the band’s debut, suffering as it does from feeling largely like more of the same and lacking the shock of the new factor. Perhaps like their heroes King Crimson, their second album simply follows the pattern of their first a little too closely. It also feels a little less focused, drifting in some places. However, it drifts very nicely indeed, and with their next album, Heldon would begin to realize their massive potential.

Rating: 7.4

Third: It’s Always Rock And Roll (1975)

Gilber Artman – Drums
Aurore – Vocals
Didier Batard – Bass
Patrick Gauthier – Synthesiser, keyboards
Georges Grunblatt – Synthesiser, keyboards
Jean Mytruong – Drums
Richard Pinhas – Guitar
Alain Renaud – Guitar

Richard Pinhas’ work ethic is nothing if not impressive – Heldon’s second album of 1975 was a double LP, and one that saw his band really start to kick into gear. Like The Beatles’ Rubber Soul, The Fall’s Grotesque or XTC’s Drums And Wires, It’s Always Rock And Roll (or Third – Heldon were already starting to get confused with their numbering) marks the point where a formerly good band with potential made the leap into greatness. One of the reasons for this new-found rock raw power is the addition of Didier Batard on bass, who would later become part of the core Heldon power trio on later albums. Here his brutal, precise bass playing, with its shades of Jannick Topp and John Wetton, gives the music that extra kick that was missing on the earlier LPs. A good double LP is often seen as the hallmark of a good prog band, as it gives a group a real chance to stretch out and express their ideas to the fullest. Heldon’s spaced out sprawl suits the format brilliantly, and the band waste no time in freaking out with a vengeance over four sides of vinyl.
The album opens yet again with a guitar free track, ‘ICS Machinique’. The shimmering synth arpeggios are reminiscent of Tim Blake’s excellent work for Gong. Also notable, though, is the interaction between the synthesisers and the nervous drums, almost tripping over itself to keep up with the synthesiser’s mechanical whirring. From here on in, drums would play an increasingly important part in the human side of the Heldon cyborg, providing a muscular anchor and counterpoint to the spacey explorations of the synthesisers and guitar. ‘Côtes de Cachalot à la Psylocybine’ features sinister Blade Runner synths and some truly twisted soloing from Pinhas. If the first two Crimso albums were the original Heldon reference point, here he sounds like ‘Prince Rupert’s Lament’ off of Lizard, or ‘Requiem’ from 1982’s Beat – tortured guitars howling their pain in the distance while the ship goes down. ‘Méchammment Rock’, with its clomping, rhythmic guitar and thrillingly unhinged percussion could almost be Lark’s Tongues-era Crim, or Magma on the warpath.
The band’s gnomic sense of humour comes through in the song titles, whilst at the same time restating the endless possibilities of rock music that had by this time fallen into dull cliché – see the Stones album referenced by the title. ‘Cocaine Blues’ has little to do with the blues and more to do with oscillating, cosmic synths. ‘Virgin Swedish Blues’ is a bit closer to the blues in that it features more prominent guitar, albeit heavily phased and joined at the hip to pulsing electronics and more Fripp-tastic guitar solos. ‘Ocean Boogi’ is more of the same. ‘Zind Destruction’ cleverly references Spinrad again and the group’s own debut album. Angry buzzing synths and menacing guitar create an appropriately apocalyptic track.
Of course, it wouldn’t be an epic prog rock double LP without sidelong tracks, another worthy measure of a prog band’s quality. On their first side-swallowing epics, Heldon don’t disappoint. ‘Aurore’ takes up all of side 2, and is a dark slab of timeless deep space, all atonal kosmiche synthesiser drones, cut from the same cloth as Tangerine Dream’s Zeit. Closing the whole affair on side 4 is the Philip K Dick-referencing ‘Doctor Bloodmoney’, which is even better. Heldon create a suitable soundtrack for PKD’s post-apocalypse world that develops throughout its whole length from kosmiche gloop through periods of hysteria and oceans of calm to a stunning drum-led climax that could really be nobody else. This is a perfect example of just how good they were with synthesisers – witness how the drummer effortlessly keeps up with the shifting and mutating synth patterns through a deft command of jazz technique and rock dynamics.
It’s Always Rock And Roll is a triumph. Truly cosmic, it is lightyears away from most people’s standard definition of rock music, yet in its endless invention and sheer attitude, it’s about as rock and roll as you can get. The only reason that I haven’t awarded it the full 10.0 out of 10.0 is that stunningly, Heldon would keep on developing and progressing, soon surpassing even this wonderful record.

Rating: 9.2

Heldon IV: Agneta Nillson (1976)

Alain Bellaiche – Bass, guitar
Michel Ettori – Guitar
Patrick Gauthier – Synthesiser, keyboards, Mini Moog
Richard Pinhas – Guitar, keyboards, electronic sounds, mellotron, electronics
Gerard Prevost – Bass
Philibert Rossi – Synthesiser, mellotron
Coco Roussel – Drums

And we’re back to Roman numerals with Heldon IV, not to mention dodgy cover art, this time featuring a baby in an intensive care unit. The music sees the band following on from the innovations of the previous release, and gearing up for what would be the most successful phase of their career. Heldon are beginning to devote entire sides of vinyl to concept pieces that allow their music to stretch out for 20 minutes at a time. The suite on side one is a bit weaker then side two, but it’s still pretty impressive. ‘Perspective’ parts I to III shift across Tangerine Dream synthesisers into arpegiator land coupled with some droning industrial-esque guitar work, reminiscent of Throbbing Gristle, who wouldn’t release their first album for a year yet. The atmosphere is perhaps overly oppressive, the metallic clangs and harsh distortion grinding away through all of part III (excellently subtitled ‘Baader-Meinhof Blues’). The side concludes with a solo bass piece, which rivals in its melodic invention Chris Squire’s ‘The Fish’, if not possessed of quite the same rhythmic dexterity. Although Batard, Pinhas’ natural second in command, decided to sit this one out, the twin ex-Magma team of Alain Bellaiche and Gerard Prevost fill his shoes amply. However, if side one occasionally lacks focused, this is more than made up for in side two. The epic ‘Perspective IV’ anticipates the devastating sonic potential of the full Heldon power trio, which would be unleashed later that same year. The rhythm slowly builds out of the synthesiser drone, becoming a bubbling and heaving juggernaut over which Pinhas lays down some aweinspiring noise-funk madness, sounding at times like the ‘Sweet Thing’ coda from Diamond Dogs played by a particularly frenetic Can. The whole thing fades away and the synthesisers come back again, to lead us through another stellar drum and synth work out like the one on ‘Doctor Bloodmoney’. Again the way the drummer navigates the ebb and flow of the arpegiator is simply astounding in its dexterity and inventiveness, this display really ought to put the drummer up there with the other prog greats. Just as it seems he’s about to nail the whole thing down to a solid hard jazz groove, the whole thing comes to a sudden stop. Unsurprisingly, this track would provide the template for much of the rest of Heldon’s career.
Heldon IV is a great album, but it’s really the sound of a band gearing up for the big ones, and side one is a tad less compelling than the sheer sonic mastery displayed on side two. Over the next three albums, Heldon would refine their approach even further, achieving even greater heights of cosmic glory.

Rating: 8.7

Un Reve Sans Consequence Speciale (1976)

Francios Auger – Drums
Didier Batard – Bass
Patrick Gauthier – Synthesiser, keyboards
Richard Pinhas – Guitar, keyboards
Jannick Top – Bass

Once again Pinhas’ insane work ethic gave us two classic Heldon albums in one year. Losing the numbers entirely this time (on my copy at least, allmusic refers to it as Heldon V), Un Reve Sans Consequence Speciale is even better than its predecessor, and as an added bonus, features a guest spot on bass from Magma’s legendary second in command Jannick Top on side two. The end result isn’t quite the unholy Magma/Heldon mashup you’d imagine, but it’s still pretty awesome. In fact, Reve… is a step up from all of Heldon’s previous releases, largely thanks to the fact that Pinhas had finally found a bassist and drummer who could keep up with him in terms of passion and intensity. Didier Batard, previously heard anchoring the sonic maelstrom on chaos, returns to the fray for some more, and this time is accompanied by the excellent Francois Auger on drums. Auger’s dextrous command of jazz technique and rock power, not to mention his sheer off-the-wall inventiveness, make him the perfect choice to complete Heldon’s monstrous rhythm section. Finally with the pieces all in place, Heldon from this point onwards were an unstoppable sonic behemoth, purveyors of cosmic doom and redemption in about equal measure.
‘Marie Virginie C’ is a stunning assertion of all of Heldon’s strengths, a long form workout with screeching synths, wild distorted guitar and powerful drumming. Once again the mechanical theme here is strong, with the percussionist’s use of sheet metal violence making the group sound like some giant factory. Pinhas’ work here is acid-damaged and extreme, similar to Manuel Gottsching’s cosmic freak outs. This is followed by the percussion only ‘Elephanta’, which really gives Auger a chance to shine all by himself. Over eight minutes, the piece is never dull, as he channels both the mechanical and the tribal, using an astonishing range of instruments and sounds. Playing with the apregiators clearly paid off here, as the way he sets up the overlapping and shifting rhythms is not dissimilar to the melodic mutating patterns of the synthesiser. The end result sounds like robots playing gamelan at a party. Side two continues with ‘Marie Viriginie C’, this time building up from a mechanical groove and Top’s monstrous bass, opening up dub-like caverns of sound over which harsh synthesisers buzz and metal clashes. ‘Mvc II’ is an excellent example of the kind of weirdness that prog can throw up that you’d be unlikely to come across in any other genre. The rest of side two is taken up by ‘Towards The Red Line’, a mesh of whirring synths that approaches This Heat in its sonic density and detail. Rolling drums and Fripp-like guitar heroics burst through the chaos at key moments, humanity adding its voice to the joyful mechanical chaos. Eventually the group achieve an anchoring groove, somehow bringing the whole glorious mess into sharp focus.
Un Reve… shows Heldon confidently straddling the gap between prog and krautrock, whilst anticipating the sound of industrial and post punk’s most out there groups. Truly now they were in a league of their own, something that their final two releases would bear out.

Rating: 9.5

Heldon 6: Interface (1977)

Francois Auger – Synthesiser, percussion, drums
Didier Batard – Bass
Patrick Gauthier – Moog bass, synthesiser, keyboards
Richard Pinhas – Synthesiser, guitar, keyboards, electronic sounds, moog synthesiser

The punk and post-punk years would not see any change in the public image of French rock, although Paris’ execrable Metal Urbain have the distinction of their debut 7” being Rough Trade 001. It’s entirely appropriate to Heldon’s perverse attitude that they would achieve perfection when the gates had closed for prog. Had Interface (or Heldon 6 – their only LP to be graced with Arabic numerals) been released a couple of years earlier, perhaps its sheer brilliance would have allowed it to transcend the silly Frenchies can’t rock stereotype and set the world alight. Released in punk’s year zero, it didn’t stand a chance. Listened to today, Heldon’s (first!) masterpiece is a timeless piece of kosmiche prog-funk, guaranteed to blast you straight to seventh heaven.
Side one is linked conceptually by the ‘Volantes’ segments, bubbling synthesisers aided and abetted by funky bass and drums, which features some truly epic guitar mangling from Pinhas on the final segment. In between we get the glorious cosmic doom of ‘Jet Girl’, all synthesiser drones and mourning guitars, and ‘Bal-A-Fou’, which morphs from its all synth beginning to a sunny, sparkling whirl of interlocking guitar and melodic bass, anticipating the rock gamelan approach of 80s Krim whilst harking back to Neu! at their shimmering motorik peak. Batard really shines on this track, his melodic and rhythmic range is quite stunning. More of this is on display on side two, which is swallowed by all three parts of the title track. A slow beginning evolves into a confident, limber and funky groove, with the bassist locked into the pulses of the synthesiser and more fine displays by Auger, leaving Pinhas to solo at his acid-drenched, unhinged best over the top. The drummer engages in some truly impressive rolls and fills, pushing aside and playing with the beat. The third part builds up again from phased drums, the bass subtly entering and then the synths, creating a kosmiche drone-out worthy of Klaus Schulze. This builds up into a weird, electro dub, more in line with Kraftwerk or Suicide than anything else, or like Sister Ray reimagined as a techno nightmare. Then the whole mix is topped off with Pinhas’ malevolent guitar soloing, and the band really kick off. Again, the mix of spacey guitars and synthesisers puts the listener in mind of E2-E4, only much more sinister, with undercurrents of violence making themselves felt underneath the bubbling surface. Pinhas’ guitar playing is still audibly influenced by Fripp, but his work here shows you just how far the guy’s come. There is a thrillingly dangerous edge to his playing, an off-the-cuff wildness as he loops clusters of sound, generates blistering bursts of noise and lets the ends of phrases disintegrate into harsh feedback. This approach prefigures Keith Leviene’s revolutionary work with Public Image Limited a couple of years later; indeed with Leviene being a Yes fan and PiL being Can and Magma-heads, could Leviene himself be a fan of this album? Brilliantly, this slice of mutant space electronics ends on a joke, the groove fading away leaving us briefly with a distorted guitar cheekily playing a fuzzed-up Chuck Berry riff before the tape cuts. It’s Always Rock And Roll, indeed.
Interface is utterly glorious, the raw, monstrous Heldon power trio at its utter, cosmic peak. As well as cementing Pinhas’ reputation as a guitar whiz, if Auger and Batard weren’t the best rhythm section in rock by now, I’d like to know who was. Heldon now found themselves facing the age old dilemma for great bands – how can you possibly follow up perfection? The correct answer is, of course, you release another stone-cold, all-time classic.

Rating: 10.0

Stand By (1979)

Francois Auger – Percussion, piano, drums
Didier Badex – Synthesiser
Didier Batard – Bass
Klaus Blasquiz – Vocals
Patrick Gauthier – Piano, keyboard, polymoog, mini moog
Richard Pinhas – Guitar, keyboards, moog synthesiser, vocoder, electronics, polymoog

Appropriately enough, Heldon’s seventh and final album receives no numbers in its title. It took the band two years to complete the follow up to Interface, the longest time they’d ever taken between releasing albums. Yet even a cursory listen to Stand By reveals that the band clearly had lost none of the fire and intensity that made Inferface so essential. Heldon’s second masterpiece would also be their last, though this album shows no signs of an ailing creative force. They split at the peak of their powers. Stand By is possibly Heldon’s most complete album. Before you notice the tautology, let’s move on to the music.
Stand By opens with the title track, possibly Heldon’s single finest composition. An awesome piece of prog rock, it shifts organically through a number of changes of pace and mood. The influence of both King Crimson and Magma is strong here, especially on the monolithic and very Top-like bass playing from Batard. Its knotty structure of interlocking riffs and its cerebral development through them puts the listener in mind of great Crimso instrumentals like ‘Red’. The band switch from brutalist hard rock to menacing funk and back again on a dime, and everyone gets a chance to show off their instrumental prowess. ‘Une Drole de Journee’ is another example of sequencers and drummer operating in perfect harmony, Auger totally locked into the shifts in tone and tempo. It also features a wonderful guest spot from Magma’s Klaus Blasquiz, spraying his trademark bizarre wordless vocals over the top, quite possibly in Kobaian, the constructed language Christian Vander invented for Magma. Or maybe it’s just gibberish, perhaps a slightly tongue-in-cheek tribute. Certainly, the rich harmonies are closer to Gentle Giant’s playfulness than Magma’s choral malevolence. Side two is given over entirely to ‘Bolero’, which is split on the CD into 8 parts with creative subtitles, but really it’s one big piece. In stark contrast to the sheer malevolence of ‘Interface’, ‘Bolero’ is lyrical and melodic. Indeed, this is as close as Heldon would get to E2-E4, and it shares many of that piece’s traits, anticipating Gottsching’s masterwork by some years. In the motorik pulse running through the track and its melodic expansiveness recall Kraftwerk’s driving epic ‘Autobahn’. It’s sheer joy and almost pastoral tone is markedly different from the industrial themes that run through their later albums, and there’s a nice sense of circularity that their final album should end with a piece that recalls in spirit the gentler tone of their early albums while at the same time displaying just how far the band had progressed from those days. Again, Auger’s locked groove in tandem with the synths proves just how much a master he was of his craft.
Really, it’s down to personal preference which of Heldon’s two masterpieces you prefer. I personally don’t think there’s much in it, so I’ve awarded them both perfect tens. Stand By doesn’t give any indication of a band drifting apart musically, and it suggests that even more great music could have followed. However, kudos to Heldon for splitting at the peak of their powers, rather than dragging on long past their sell-by date. This way we remember them at their best, untainted by years of rot and decay. The 80s were not an easy time for prog, and it’s understandable that Pinhas would want to continue as a solo artist, free from the musical and financial constraints of a prog group. If you’re going to go out, this is some way to do it.

Rating: 10.0

Conclusion

So, in their brief six years of existence, Heldon released seven albums of top notch prog, which anticipated some of the most original and groundbreaking music released in the next decade. Heldon were musical pioneers certainly, but is it reasonable to cast them as this great lost influence? Probably not. Much as I would love to find out that everyone from Manuel Gottsching to Keith Leviene to Fripp himself is secretly a Heldon fan, I think it’s unlikely at best. Heldon are probably one of those groups who made fantastic music ahead of its time that sadly you could erase from the timeline without causing significant damage. This is unquestionably a travesty. Hopefully I’ve inspired my hypothetical audience to investigate these albums, because they are all worthy of your time and attention, and just because nobody paid attention at the time doesn’t mean that Heldon didn’t produce a wealth of awe-inspiring and exciting music. Richard Pinhas should be regarded as a guitar hero, and Interface and Stand By are prog classics of the first order, and hopefully one day they will be rightly seen as such. And Didier Batard and Francois Auger really deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as their British and German peers for their musical prowess and invention. The power trio version of Heldon, in all its punked up, progged out glory, is truly a thing of wonder to hear in full flow. Musicians looking for new artistic directions in these retrogressive times could do worse than take inspiration from Heldon’s heady mix of prog, krautrock and electronica.

Radiohead: Do They Suck The Young Blood?

2010-03-15T00:05:00.001Z

The end of decade lists recently published betray a lack of critical consensus about the greatest music of the past ten years. A result of the increasingly fractured and subdivided musical genres, a function of the way the internet has changed the way we listen to and think about music? Perhaps, but that’s not what this article is about. One of the things that the lists generally agree on is Kid A. This puts Radiohead in the curious position of having two albums widely considered to be among the best of the decade they were released in – indeed Pitchfork would have you believe that both Kid A and OK Computer are the single best albums released in their respective decades. OK Computer regularly tops lists of Best Ever Albums, by both expert panels of critics and the public. Yet, for all this adoration, universal acceptance still eludes Radiohead. A small yet significant and very vocal minority cries out against the canonization of their albums, painting Yorke and co. as whiny bores overintellectualising rock, or simply getting credit for poorly recycling other people’s ideas. In terms of influence, fan worship and controversy, it’s all too easy to compare Radiohead to The Smiths. Certainly they inspire equal amounts of worship and vitriol in their supporters and detractors respectively.
Where do I stand? Good question. I consider myself a lapsed Radiohead fan. I heard Pablo Honey and The Bends at an impressionable age, and they were one of the few modern bands that made a mark on my prog-addled teenage brain. I remember hearing OK Computer, Kid A and Amnesiac later, after all three had come out, and being impressed that the post-grunge band from the first two albums had changed so much, but finding the latter two distinctly unmemorable. To stop this from morphing into a life story, I eventually became a much bigger fan, only to find my affection cooling off later. I’m pretty sure some of this is a reaction to the hype – so much intensive information and discussion about music only serves to dull its magic in your mind. However, I’m not sure that’s entirely it. I don’t argue with Radiohead haters in music arguments because, to a certain extent, I see their point and even kind of agree with it.
I don’t think Radiohead overintellectualise rock, I think that’s a load of nonsense. No artist should be bound by other people’s preconceptions of what they should or should not be doing. Also, in this world we are cursed by Radiohead’s vastly VASTLY inferior mirror universe copies Muse and Coldplay, who actually both emphasise Radiohead’s own strengths quite nicely. Muse’s stodgy and sonically ugly schmindie rock and Coldplay’s horrifically bland U2-isms not only vindicate Radiohead’s choice to follow a more interesting path after the success of The Bends and OK Computer but also show how damn good Radiohead were at schmindie rock and bland U2-isms before they got bored with them.
However, none of Radiohead’s albums are consistently brilliant, even the admittedly excellent OK Computer. And, for all their vaunted pushing of the envelope, there’s nothing radically new in OK Computer, Kid A or Amnesiac. The surprising thing is that they came from a fairly competent rock band and the latter two sold impressively for what they are. Which is a user-friendly rehash of experimental rock down the years. Many of these ideas were pretty old by the time Radiohead got to them – Pink Floyd and krautrock leave their fingerprints over both records – and many of them aren’t even from particularly obscure sources. Sure, there’s the odd shout out to Faust, but Floyd were and are hugely popular. Radiohead were beaten to the punch in exhuming Pink Floyd and Genesis by Marillion, whose excellent Brave is surely an influence on OK Computer, with its spooky ambience derived from a haunted castle and its premillenial dread pre-empting Radiohead’s effort by a number of years, and the end result is much more generous spirited as well. Other more modern influences, from Sigur Ros to the entire 90s output of Warp Records, may have been a bit closer to the cutting edge, but still were hardly old news and actually sold reasonable amounts. While Kid A was intended to be alienating on first lesson, it’s not as if Radiohead dropped their listeners entirely in the deep end.
But, perhaps more importantly, there is something very worthy and po-faced about Radiohead’s music, which maybe stems from their angst-fuelled early days in the aftermath of grunge. They make serious art, dammit. Look at many of their (more adventurous) sonic sources though, and you will see bands with much more of a sense of humour. From Faust to Aphex Twin, the best experimental music is able to be fun and engaging whilst pushing the boundaries. And for all their moping, Radiohead are unable to summon the bleak, frightening austerity that makes records like The Marble Index and Closer so bracing. At the end of the day, for all their risk-taking, there is still something incredibly white bread about Radiohead.
Enough on the rhetoric. How do I actually feel about Radiohead’s actual music? I don’t know. It’s been ages since I’ve been able to listen to them. The thought occurred to me that being here in Costa Rica is as far away as I’m likely to get from Radiohead, so this is an excellent time to revisit their albums away from all the noise, and try to assess them fairly and objectively. And then give each one a crass Pitchfork rating out of 10.0. I am genuinely curious to find out what I make of the music now. I have decided that I will listen to all their studio albums, including frakking Pablo Honey, as well as the officially released live album I Might Be Wrong. I’m not going to delve into Thom Yorke and Johnny Greenwood’s solo albums here, as they don’t have quite the cultural cachet that their day job has, so my opinion of them is less likely to be influenced by all the hype if I ever get round to hearing them. I have also decided not to listen to all of Radiohead’s B-sides or any compilations thereof. However, I will be talking about the odd B-side in between albums when appropriate, largely because two of my favourite ever Radiohead tracks are B-sides and I have nowhere else to cram them in. In my review of In Rainbows, I will ignore the way the record was released, and judge it entirely on the merit of the music itself, which is what all the idiots who reviewed it at the time should have done. But while I’m here, I may as well point out that I thought the whole thing was a cynical attempt to get attention and ultimately get the fans who care about the band the most to pay twice for the same thing. Bands as diverse as Marillion, Coil, Einsturzende Neubauten and Ghost Box records have been using the internet for most of this decade in increasingly innovative ways without making such a bloody fuss. You can still download Marillion’s excellent Happiness Is The Road from their website free of charge, long after Radiohead took down In Rainbows and replaced it with the traditional paying version. Lastly, I’m magnanimously going to spare Radiohead the utter embarrassment of dredging up the execrable ‘Pop Is Dead’, because I’m such a nice guy.
Onward to the reviews! But first: ahahahahahahaha, ‘Pop Is Dead’ is so shit! OK done now.

Pablo Honey (1993)

And so the Radiohead story starts not with a bang, but with a whimper. Pablo Honey is infamously not very good, and perhaps the only surprise here is just how poor the debut of one of the most widely respected bands in the world now is. But then again, perhaps part of Radiohead’s appeal stems from the fact that instead of arriving fully formed, they started off rough and ready and drastically improved.
Amongst the daft things frequently written about this band is the epithet ‘last’ – Radiohead are the last great guitar band, the last band to really matter and so on. Palpably rubbish, but in one way it makes sense, at least for now – any band around today who released an album this uninspiring would be lucky to be allowed the time and funding to develop into something better. Radiohead’s get out of the scrapyard free card was, of course, minor indie hit ‘Creep’. Listening to it today, you’re reminded why it became a hit in the first place and why you never want to hear the damn song ever again. As a whole, the album is firmly rooted in its time. In 1993, Simon Reynolds used the term ‘post rock’ to describe a movement in music that Radiohead would later be associated with, but there’s no sign whatsoever of that on this recod. Instead we get grungey alternative rock. It’s a genre that has yet to really have a hipster revival, and really that’s for the best, because by and large it just wasn’t really any good.
While in retrospect it’s kind of interesting to hear the defining features of Radiohead’s sound – Johnny Greenwood’s guitar and Thom Yorke’s voice – in their nascent form, both sound decidedly unformed and unsure of their own strengths. The music is a mix of fairly standard alt-rock influences – the most prominent being stadium-era REM and U2, and of course Nirvana – but it rarely coalesces into anything individual or interesting. The exceptions are ‘You’, a hard rocker that builds up from delicate guitar picking and hints at where the band would go next, and ‘Anyone Can Play Guitar’, a compelling mess of Sonic Youth-esque guitar nailed to a snarky lyric.
The rest of the album drones by in a haze of angsty awkwardness. Radiohead have three guitarists, which always seems on paper somewhat redundant, and though later on they would figure out a sensible way to orchestrate them, here they just obfusticate and cloud up the already muddy and confused songs. ‘Thinking About You’ is vaguely memorable for being the first showing of the band’s gentler, acoustic side, though lyrics equating masturbation with self-loathing can’t quite raise the song into genuinely good territory. ‘Stop Whispering’ betrays the band’s Pixies influence, though the band’s lackluster musicianship and uninspiring writing make the comparison a decidedly unfavourable one. ‘Prove Yourself’ is kind of cute and kind of pathetic. The rest of the LP is deplorable, to the extent that you feel embarrassed for the band listening to it, (‘How Do You’ is actually hilariously awful). In particular, the adolescent, angsty lyrics must make Thom Yorke cringe these days. Pablo Honey has never been reassessed by anyone, and, frankly, it’s unlikely to be because it doesn’t deserve it. Listened to today, it’s remarkable how un-Radiohead-like much of the music on Pablo Honey is. Don’t worry, they got better.

Rating: 3.8

The Bends (1995)

The Bends is a remarkable improvement on Radiohead’s debut. It’s far more assured and confident, the music stronger and more coherent. It’s actually a pretty good album. That being said, it’s not quite the unadulterated masterpiece many would have you believe. Exactly half of The Bends is utterly fantastic. Sadly, the other half is less convincing, and sees the band still stumbling over some of the problems that plagued their debut.
The good songs first. The album starts off strong, with ‘Planet Telex’ arriving in a cloud of spacey whooshes and dry ice, with echoplexed guitars and much improved vocals, followed by the title track. The songwriting is much more complex and well realized right off the bat, as are the arrangements, which find time to incorporate weirder, quieter moments amidst the clarified rock punch. ‘The Bends’ takes a well-aimed swipe at Britpop nostalgia, firmly setting the band against all that self-important, retro nationalistic tripe, the fear and self-loathing of the lyrics almost undercut completely by the song’s glorious, anthemic chorus. ‘Fake Plastic Trees’ is still just beautiful, undulled by years of familiarity. A nuanced study of the hollowness of modern life, it swells up from an acoustic beginning to a grand climax, and shows just how inventive Radiohead were becoming with their arrangements – the texture of the song morphs subtly through spacey keyboards to full on guitar rock. ‘Black Star’ is a far better rewrite of ‘More Than A Feeling’ then ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ ever was, replete with twinkling guitar fade in and mellow harmonies contrasted against a brutal crunching guitar riff. ‘Just’ sees self-loathing from the other side with a snarling guitar line derived from Magazine’s ‘Shot By Both Sides’, and has some very nifty guitar work. Nocturnal closer ‘Street Spirit (Fade Out)’ is a thing of limpid wonder, with its cyclical guitar riff perfectly complementing the blurred, dreamlike shifts between nightmare and dream in the lyrics.
These songs alone make The Bends more then worth your while, but unfortunately, that’s only half the story. The rest of the songs are not so strong. While there’s little here that’s outright embarrassing, (though ‘Nice Dream’ comes close), there’s also very little that’s up to much. Radiohead’s songwriting was still letting them down. ‘My Iron Lung’ is a compelling song with a cool guitar riff, until the band completely lose the plot with an almost comically bad heavy section. ‘Sulk’ is utterly forgettable and ‘Bones’ is a clumsy mess. Another problem is the horrible guitar sound that the band seem to favour on their first two albums: not noisy enough to be truly bracing and lacking enough low end to give the sound definition, the end result is an indeterminate, heavy yet curiously limp sounding mess. The real surprise here is how poor Radiohead’s gentler, less rocky songs are. ‘High and Dry’, ‘Nice Dream’ and ‘Bullet Proof… I Wish I Was’ are all horrifically bland and approach U2-esque levels of crassness and painful sincerity. They really don’t suggest at all how well Radiohead would manage once they ditched their alt-rock tendencies.
Another thing I feel I must mention at this juncture is Radiohead’s lyrics. Thom Yorke trades in vagueness and inscrutability. When this works, it works very well, creating an underlying sense of paranoia or dread that’s never specifically pinned down, allowing the listener’s imagination to fill in the blanks, and Yorke would eventually wind up very good at this indeed. However, at this stage, there are many cases where it simply doesn’t work – Yorke sounds like he really is singing about nothing, or else nails together a phrase so gutwrenchingly clumsy it wrecks the entire mood of the song. ‘Now I can’t climb the stairs/ Pieces missing everywhere….’ Sometimes it sounds like he isn’t even trying. Or trying too hard and failing. There are many such examples on the album, ‘Nice Dream’ is particularly bad.
So, while The Bends is a definite step up from Pablo Honey and marks Radiohead’s first step on the trail towards greatness, the band still encounter teething troubles on the way. Its good songs are often great, but its poor songs are often very poor indeed, and The Bends doesn’t quite manage to stand up by itself as a truly great LP. However, there is magic to be found in its grooves for sure, and they were getting there.

Rating: 6.7

‘Bishop’s Robes’/‘Talk Show Host’ (1996)

They were getting there very fast indeed. These two B-sides from the ‘Street Spirit’ single show that by the next year, Radiohead were leaving The Bends behind full speed and gearing up to make their masterpiece. Both of these songs could have sat on The Bends, and while they would have wrecked the flow of the album completely, they would have sat happily with the album’s best songs. ‘Bishop’s Robes’ is a glorious, string-laden ballad of the type Coldplay wish they could write. ‘I am not going back,’ sings Yorke wistfully at the chorus as he gives Oxford a quietly brutal kiss-off. If ‘Bishop’s Robes’ anticipates OK Computer’s melodic grandeur, then ‘Talk Show Host’ marks out Radiohead’s path afterwards. Twinkling keyboards and Yorke’s paranoid yelping are repeatedly undercut by a monstrous bassline and breakbeats copped straight form The Happy Mondays copping Can. Truly a thing of twisted beauty, and one of my favourite Radiohead songs.

NOTE: From this point onwards, all of Radiohead’s studio albums suffer from lousy mastering. I don’t want to talk about this at great length here, but if you master and album entirely in the red it removes all the dynamics, makes the instruments not sound like real instruments and makes the whole thing unpleasant to listen to. Radiohead’s albums certainly aren’t the worst mastered out there, but it is noticeable, and it does effect my enjoyment of this on the whole very good music. All these albums deserve better then that.

OK Computer (1997)

Apres ca, le deluge. After this album, in the eyes of the world Radiohead could do no wrong. And as much as the wind up merchant in me hates this, it’s hard to deny the quality of this fantastic record. Certainly it remains Radiohead’s greatest achievement, the perfect blend of mature songwriting and sonic experimentation. Calling it the greatest album of all time is ridiculous, but it doesn’t stop OK Computer from being a really good LP.
The album storms in on a guitar riff copped from the middle section of ‘Red’ by King Crimson, all thundering break beats and shimmering guitar, as it races to rip through Magazine’s ‘Recoil’ in the coda. This is where the prog comparisons started in earnest, and it actually is a little deserved. ‘Paranoid Android’ adroitly navigates through three seemingly unrelated musical sections to create a coherent whole, ‘Exit Music (For A Film)’ features mellotron, and the whole album flows together so well the band would forever be fighting off accusations that it’s a concept album. The comparison most frequently made is to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon, which shares the album’s vague theme of the way the evils of society slowly drive you insane, but the album has an even more recent precedence in Marillion’s excellent Brave, and the two albums share a similar sound and musical ambition. Both albums also go to the brink of despair to find redemption and a new love of life at the end. OK Computer is positively dripping with alienation – to the extent that the extraterrestrials seem like a friendly alternative on ‘Subterranean Homesick Alien’ – but the album opens and closes with the image of a person walking out of a potentially fatal accident simply happy to still be alive. You can practically see Thom Yorke’s grin as he sings, ‘In an interstellar burst I am back to save the universe’ on ‘Airbag’, perfectly capturing the change of perspective forced on you by a brush with death. ‘Lucky’, at the other end of the album, is less outspoken about its joy but more profoundly moving for it. Possibly Radiohead’s single greatest track, ‘Lucky’ is quietly content to rise above all the bullshit in the world and serenely wait for the waters to subside, knowing that the important things will still be there. ‘The head of state has called for me by name / But I don’t have time for him…’ The song rises from delicate guitar effects and ghostly keyboards, through a fantastic Johnny Greenwood guitar breakdown all to leave the listener hanging on an interrupted cadence.
There is a deep vein of melancholy running through many of these tracks, particularly on the brutal, wounded ‘Exit Music (For A Film)’, which ends with Yorke murmuring brokenly, ‘We hope that you choke’, all aggression spent, all hope gone. ‘Subterranean Homesick Alien’ and ‘No Surprises’ both yearn for any sort of escape, however unlikely or horrific, from the crushingly mundane. However the album is not without humour, particularly on the justly iconic ‘Karma Police’. In the age of Oasis, Radiohead show you how to rip off a Beatles song (in this case ‘Sexy Sadie’) and come out looking intelligent on the other side. The lyrics call out for the Karma Police to come and arrest various unpleasant characters in an increasingly hysterical tone – it’s chorus of ‘This is what you’ll get / If you mess with us’ makes me think of Pink’s vile rant towards the end of The Wall – before the glorious coda reveals the whole set up to be a joke. Radiohead’s rhythm section, sometimes wondrous, sometimes a liability, shine particularly brightly here. Indeed their parts for the coda could almost be from a jazz standard, with the gentle, rolling drum fills and walking bass line. ‘Climbing Up The Walls’ almost resurrects Bauhaus for some tongue in cheek gothic horror, and ‘Electioneering’ is a coruscating, sneering attack against slimy politicians, and the first real sign of Radiohead’s political awareness on record.
Sadly the record just falls short of perfection. Much noise has been made about ‘Fitter Happier’, which, while it’s pretentious, is so short that it’s not really any sort of a problem. More damaging are ‘Let Down’, the dying echoes of Radiohead’s U2 influence coupled to some truly cringe-worthy lyrics, and ‘The Tourist’, the uneventful Johnny Greenwood song faced with the unenviable task of following ‘Lucky’ and closing the LP. However these are minor gripes on what is a very good record indeed. If Radiohead are unlikely to release anything ever as good again, neither are that many other bands. Greatest album of all time? Not by a long shot. Greatest album of the decade? Not even close. Bloody marvelous? You bet.

Rating: 9.2

Kid A (2000)

Inevitably this album was subject to ridiculous amounts of analysis on its original release, but I don’t really want to talk about that here. Hindsight allows us to look at Kid A as a transitional album rather then an end in itself, and as Radiohead advance on and on, this viewpoint makes more and more sense. It’s not that Kid A is a bad album – like The Bends, half of it is very good indeed. The album sounds like a band desperately trying to distance themselves from their previous album, and only partially succeeding.
Kid A makes a big song and dance about how different it is from OK Computer, but at the end of the day it’s not as if Radiohead went and released Metal Machine Music. Kid A is still identifiably a Radiohead album. Hell, many of the songs still have guitar and Thom Yorke’s unprocessed voice. In retrospect it’s a little surprising that it caused quite so much fan outrage. ‘How To Disappear Completely’ is a limpid aching ballad that could have easily fit on OK Computer, though it succeeds in being more depressing then anything on that album.
If OK Computer gets labeled prog, Kid A gets labeled post-rock. In some ways you can see what people are talking about, as the band was taking its experiments integrating rock with electronics to further, more leftfield extremes. ‘Everything In Its Right Place’, still one of Radiohead’s greatest songs, opens the album on an incredibly strong note. Like Sigur Ros if they were any good, the song is a hallucinatory swirl of keyboards and Yorke’s echoing, cut up vocals, turning his oblique lyrics into a kind of mantra. ‘The National Anthem’ is another top moment for the Radiohead rhythm section, all pounding drums and idiot bassline as all chaos breaks out over the top. The 5/4 time signature throws the whole band, but ‘Morning Bell’ is still an incredible song, with its melodic bass line and soaring melody hiding some truly disturbing lyrics, until the song breaks down halfway through and Yorke is left muttering to himself like a psychopath. ‘Idioteque’ truly is a thing of wonder, all glitching beats and wobbling keyboards while Thom Yorke’s paranoid rant about communication technology and government surveillance seems more and more chilling with each passing day. If you’re stuck in Britain, hahaha.
Unfortunately, not all of Kid A is an unqualified success. ‘Kid A’ is a poor Aphex Twin retread, and ‘Treefingers’ is nothing that Eno or Cluster didn’t do loads better in the early 70s. These tracks have all the hip post-rock influences of krautrock and electronica but unlike ‘Idioteque’ or ‘National Anthem’, they fail to do anything interesting with them, and the end result is self conscious and uninspiring. Not all of Kid A fails because Radiohead’s ambition overshoots itself either. ‘Optimistic’ is a dull, droning guitar lead song that is simply lacks the necessary guitar distortion to fit on side two of Pablo Honey. ‘Motion Picture Soundtrack’ opens off threatening to be an awesome Nico rip off, but simply peters out into nothingness, to pointlessly return in a cloud of confusing before slouching off again. I actually spent ages with the guitar tab of ‘In Limbo’ trying to find out if anything was actually happening in the song, because its very elusiveness fascinated me. Turns out it’s just a really boring song.
In a strange way, Kid A resembles The Bends more then any other Radiohead album. Once again, Radiohead felt the need to distance themselves from their past. Both albums see the band struggling against the boundaries of their previous work whilst containing hints of the rewards this struggle would eventually reap. As a result, Kid A is a far from coherent album, but it does contain some top drawer material, and its experiments allowed Radiohead to advance to the next stage in their musical journey.

Rating: 6.9

Amnesiac (2001)

Although a collection of offcuts from the Kid A sessions, Amnesiac is easily the superior LP. I think at this early stage, Radiohead wanted their transformation to appear more radical then it was, and so wound up second guessing themselves and putting out weaker material first in an effort to be weirder. With the benefit of hindsight, the connection between OK Computer’s sonic experiments – basically rebooting prog with electronica and post punk influences – runs through to Kid A and Amnesiac’s most interesting moments, and the more self consciously ‘experimental’ moments come off as more conservative because of how closely they ape their source material. In retrospect, the 12 track album they should have released in 2000 goes something like this:

Radiohead – Amnesiac Kid Is Wrong

Packt Like Sardines In A Crushed Tin Box
Pyramid Song
National Anthem (I Might Be Wrong Live version)
You And Whose Army
I Might Be Wrong
Knives Out
Morning Bell (I Might Be Wrong Live version)
How To Disappear Completely
Idioteque (I Might Be Wrong Live version)
Like Spinning Plates (I Might Be Wrong Live version)
Everything In Its Right Place
Life In A Glass House

See? Most of it’s Amnesiac, cause it’s a better, and better sequenced, album. Your welcome Nigel Godrich.
Anyway. The album starts off with another great Radiohead opener, ‘Packt Like Sardines…’, in which Yorke and the beat stutter across each other, the song’s protagonist driven to paranoid breakdown. ‘Pyramid Song’ is a gloriously daft choice for a single, an Egyptian death mantra set against an oblique piano line whose alien geometry would have HPL running for cover. ‘You And Whose Army’ lyrically mirrors the bunker mentality of ‘Talk Show Host’, switching from a bluesy croon to a full band march of defiance. ‘Knives Out’ could have happily sat on OK Computer, with its mesh of guitar lines and straightforward chorus. ‘Dollars And Cents’ is a dark, warped mess of krautrock and electronica which is genuinely compelling, as Thom Yorke turns himself into the information running through networks. I feel genuinely bad about leaving it off the above tracklist, but I suppose it could have been an awesome B-side.
Above all, Amnesiac proves that Radiohead’s strength comes from their openness to all sonic possibilities. Whereas Kid A sounds hermetically sealed in from the rest of the world, Amnesiac’s best moments steal from everything from krautrock and electronica through to blues and wonky jazz. Indeed, this is seen clearly in some of the album’s best tracks. ‘I Might Be Wrong’ is a bluesy, almost Stones-like grove overlayered with interlocking riffs and thudding electronic percussion, which all drains away for a glorious acoustic guitar break. ‘Life In A Glass House’, Radiohead’s most satisfying album closer since ‘Street Spirit’, is even more bizarre, a collaboration with jazz trumpeter Humphrey Lyttelton, which successfully nails Yorke’s paranoia to a woozy, almost drunk horn section. It shows just how far out Radiohead’s music can get without loosing any of its signature qualities.
This time round, the only songs that don’t work are the pointless ‘Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors’, actually a more interesting experiment in punctuation then in music, the slight ‘Hunting Bears’ and ‘Like Spinning Plates’, whose mix of backwards vocals, churning chords and electronics never quite coalesces into anything coherent. Also, ‘Morning Bell’ is reprised, inexplicably turned into a rather dull 4/4 ballad. But for the most part, Amnesiac is a powerful and fully realized album, the sound of a band confidently exploring new waters and becoming accustomed to its natural voice.

Rating: 8.3

‘Trans-Atlantic Drawl’ (2001)

This little gem wound up being relegated to B-side status, which is a bit of a shame as it really is fantastic. Rocking harder then anything from the Kid A sessions, ‘Trans-Atlantic Drawl’ hits the ground running. Pounding drums, fuzzed out guitar flying off at every angle and a demented playground lyrics of something about magazines, it comes across as Faust playing ‘Kandy Pop’ by Bis, especially as it reaches the chorus, where the fuzz reaches anthemically daft levels. Then, instead of verse two, someone cuts the tape and glues it half way through an exploration of frigid ambient drones. Brilliant.

I Might Be Wrong (2001)

Rather then take my sequencing advice, Radiohead may as well have waited for another year and just put out these live recordings instead, in which every version trumps the studio recording, apart from the muddy rendition of the title track. Forced to just play the songs instead of agonise over arrangements, the songs are stripped of the ever so slightly fussy studio versions’ ponderousness and take on a much more spontaneous and fun feel. Here Radiohead sound mischievous, drugged up, spaced out and muscular.
The album opens stunningly with the all-time classic version of ‘National Anthem’ riding in on a wave of static. The great thing about the original is that it’s basically just that riff, you can do what you like with it, and the band proceed to do just that. Overlaid with radio static, wooshy keyboards and spacey guitars, the song takes on a cosmic element only hinted at by the somewhat clinical studio version. The rhythm section is tight, brutal and focused, and Yorke’s vocals, as opposed to being processed to hell, are breathless and excited. ‘I Might Be Wrong’ is poorly recorded and not as exciting as it should be, lacking the subtle shade and build up of the original, but it still retains a murky charm. ‘Morning Bell’ is stunning, the playing here simultaneously more passionate and more focused then the original, with Yorke working himself into a frenzy during the coda. The band’s command of dynamics here is fantastic, as the guitars rise to a storm only for everything to suddenly cut back to menacing quiet. ‘Idioteque’ similarly benefits from a more immediate arrangement, the contrast of the band’s impassioned playing and the brutally mechanical electronics creating a tension entirely appropriate to the song’s lyrics. The result is a piece of electronic-tinged krautrock dance mash-up that anticipates LCD Soundsystem. ‘Everything In Its Right Place’ gets expanded into a sea of languid atmospherics, taking on an almost lullaby-like purity. It even starts off with Yorke singing, ‘Here comes the flood’, a shout out to Peter Gabriel surely. ‘Dollars And Cents’ becomes the dark cyberpunk nightmare it was always meant to be, with some particularly adroit drumming, and the delicate acoustic song ‘True Love Waits’ shows the band can still write conventional songs when they feel like it. But special mention must go to Amnesiac filler ‘Like Spinning Plates’, which, shorn of its messy backwards tape arrangement, becomes a glorious, proggy epic building effortlessly to an emotional peak.
Far more then simply a market filler in between studio works, I Might Be Wrong actually works out as Radiohead’s most satisfying post-OK Computer album. It’s to the point, deadly focused and shows off the sheer range and potential of the band’s new musical direction. At the end of the day, when forced to stand on their own two feet, this era of Radiohead prove that they’re an experimental force to be reckoned with, and a kick-ass rock band to boot.

Rating: 8.5

Hail To The Thief (2003)

If such a thing as an underrated Radiohead album is possible, then Hail To The Thief is it. Following on from the fawning admiration heaped on Kid A and its companion releases, perhaps the album simply lacks the shock value of those releases. Certainly, there are few surprises here in terms of content – the songs that integrate experimental textures into Radiohead’s standard bag of tricks work, the glitch experiments don’t. It doesn’t help that much of the fan base had patiently put up with Kid A and Amnesiac and was hoping for a return to standard alt-rock, which needless to say it didn’t get. It also doesn’t help that Hail To The Thief looks like someone taking the piss out of a Radiohead album, with its cover of a twisted alien landscape made up of bricks containing scary buzz words, the clunky political reference of the title, and each song’s portentous/pretentious subtitle, a trick not seen in a mainstream rock record since Yes’ Tales From Topographic Oceans. (‘Softly Open Our Mouths In The Cold’ and ‘Brush The Cobwebs Out Of The Sky’ are pretentious and vague enough to be Mew track names. Urgh.)
Which is actually a shame, as Hail To The Thief is bloody brilliant really, and at times equals and even surpasses its immediate predecessors. The two opening songs in particular are absolute Radiohead classics. The sort-of title track ‘2 + 2 = 5’ manages not to sink into anvilicious preaching despite its self-conscious Orwell reference, and instead its comparison of Bush and Blair to Chicken Little is a surprisingly effective way of calling them out over their handling of the truth during the Iraq war. Musically it opens with delicate guitar arpeggios before switching unexpectedly into an intense rocker, Yorke spitting ‘You have not been paying attention!’. The band sound more fired up then they have in the studio since OK Computer, but without loosing any of their experimental tendencies, as the next track so effortlessly proves. ‘Sit Down. Stand Up’ (punctuation trouble again) again manages to switch between wildly contrasting moods and timbres without missing a beat. This time, eerie strings and mournful vocals give way to an electric storm and massed, idiot chanting of ‘The raindrops/The raindrops/The raindrops…’ over and over again. If the whole album kept up this pace, it would be a stone cold classic.
Perhaps inevitably the pace drops. ‘Sail To The Moon’ is pleasant but forgettable, the setting that a lot of Radiohead’s ballads seem automatically set for these days. Then we have the inevitable electronica experiment, ‘Backdrifts’, which works about as well as you’d expect. To Radiohead’s credit, they seem to have realized that straight up ripping off Aphex Twin doesn’t work for them, so this time round Yorke’s voice is unprocessed, and pools of acoustic guitar are added to the mix. As a result it sounds less derivative and more like a Radiohead song, but sadly still not a very good Radiohead song. They repeat the whole exercise again a few songs later with ‘The Gloaming’, to equally inconsequential results. ‘Go To Sleep’ is another winner though, all sweeping guitar lines and a bleepy malfunctioning robot solo at the end. ‘Where I End And You Begin’ sees the band exhuming their U2 influence, but oddly enough in a kind of appealing way. This is in no small part due to the excellent, firely display by the rhythm section here, as they utterly outdo Larry Mullen Jr and the other twat with a rolling, funky groove that gives the song a genuine undertow of passion and darkness, making Yorke’s ‘I will eat you alive’ at the end darkly seductive as opposed to just silly. ‘We Suck The Young Blood’ is Radiohead attempting a kind of goth cabaret, appealing on paper but more odd then good in practice. The same goes for the intermittently engaging Motown influences cropping up in ‘A Punch Up At A Wedding’. Our heroes liked ‘Optimistic’ so much they rewrote it here as ‘There There’, the album’s somewhat lackluster lead off single. It’s an improvement on the original, but then that’s not really saying much.
After a bit of a lull in the middle, the album gets interesting again towards the end of side 2. ‘Myxomatosis’ is a snarling rocker, with the band all foaming at the mouth and disintegrating before your ears. It’s the most gloriously unhinged thing on the album. ‘Scatterbrain’ is a sweet, delicate song brimming with dark humour – it’s title is literal. ‘Wolf At The Door’ sees Thom Yorke sing-speaking over an elliptical riff in a song that doesn’t really sound like Radiohead at all. It’s a brilliantly off-key way to end the album.
Hail To The Thief is at times brilliant and at times frustrating, sometimes in the same song. For all its warped sonic experiments, the songs don’t ever really offer up a new coherent direction for Radiohead to move in. At the end of the day, this isn’t really a problem – Radiohead’s sonic palette is now wide enough to encompass all these different songs and still sound sonically consistent. If it never feels as radical a departure from the past as Kid A, it’s because its stylistic detours are handled with the grace and subtlety of a band that has well and truly found its feet. Because of this we can easily forgive the odd misstep.

Rating: 8.1

In Rainbows (2007)

In Rainbows is the only Radiohead record I hadn’t listened to previously before writing this article. As such it’s the record I’ve had the least time to live with. However I feel it might be my favourite record they’ve done in the last decade. It’s certainly the most consistent album they’ve released since OK Computer, and it sees them finally nailing the balance between warped, everything but the kitchen sink experimentation and their natural way with a melody.
The very presence of ‘Nude’ should feel like something of an ass pull, seeing as the song’s been hanging around as a live favourite since the OK Computer days, but when the end result is as shimmering and gorgeous as this, it’s hard to complain too much. It really is a fantastic track, all swooning strings and Thom Yorke’s delicate falsetto crooning, matched to some nifty 50s sci fi keyboard effects. ‘Weird Fishes/Arpeggi’ is a wonderful piece of modern prog, interlocking sections of cyclical guitar and keyboard. They even get away with some almost U2-esque vocals at the climax, until it switches into a spaced out krautrock groove for the finale. I assume that’s the ‘Arpeggi’ bit though I really don’t know why. ‘All I Need’ is a sensual slow burner, with vibraphone and wonky droning keyboards, (and ‘I’m an animal / Trapped in your hot car’ is a pleasingly surreal come-on), and ‘Faust Arp’ has an almost poppy melody wrapped in its complex arrangement. ‘House Of Cards’ wryly paraphrases a crappy old pop song in its opening lines and gets away with it thanks to its gentle arrangement and lush melody. ‘Reckoner’ is another slowburning epic, and ‘Jigsaw Falling Into Place’ is driven by kinetic drum and bass lines under a writhing, bluesy acoustic guitar part. ‘Videotape’ is a lovely, blurred closing track. Elegiac and sinister, it builds up from just Yorke’s voice and piano to a gloriously oblique finale, drums rolling like distant thunder underneath dreamlike clouds.
Again the album is not quite perfect. Opener ’15 Step’ (where are they getting these titles?) is engagingly odd, but not much besides that. It does suggest that eventually, if they keep plugging away at the electronica tracks they might wind up somewhere interesting, but it’s still not clear if it will be worth all the time and awkwardness. ‘Bodysnatchers’ charted higher then any Radiohead single since ‘Creep’, though listening to the song the thought occurs that it probably managed that through luck more then quality or pop appeal. The song aims for exciting and messy but just hits messy. The bonus disc continues in much the same vein as the album proper, and the two actually blend into each other rather nicely, even if the songs on the second disc don’t give the impression of going anywhere.
In Rainbows really is remarkably assured. It contains many of Radiohead’s most successful experiments and most gorgeous songs. While the material shows just how far out Radiohead can go, it also demonstrates just how canny they are with a good tune. At this stage I feel we ought to know what to expect from Radiohead, but on the strength of this album I’m not so sure. Hopefully they can keep up this balance of the boldly experimental and the effortlessly melodic for some time to come.

Rating: 8.7

Conclusion

Like my similar article on The Smiths, I originally started this piece wanting to give Radiohead much more of a kicking, but at the end of the day I found the music ultimately means too much for me to do that. I have to confess that I really enjoyed returning to all of these albums. Even the thoroughly crappy Pablo Honey retains some nostalgic charm for me, and I’d forgotten just how good a lot of Radiohead’s best material is. In particular I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of Hail To The Thief, and it was nice to finally get around to hearing In Rainbows, which I’m glad I was able to do away from all the hype. In my introduction, I take Radiohead to task for their negative influence on modern indie rock. While it’s unfair to praise or shoot the parents for the sins of the children, it’s something that inevitably happens quite a bit in the world of music criticism. And if we have Radiohead to blame for Muse and Coldplay, it also strikes me that we have them to thank at least partially for Animal Collective and Dirty Projectors. It’s possible to hear the influence of Radiohead’s latter work on many of the more interesting and daringly experimental bands, in their post-everything, all channels open approach and also in their refreshing lack of concern about apparent coolness. Even in the cases where they didn’t act as direct influences, Radiohead almost certainly opened up the headspace of 2000s indie rock, making the audience more ready to listen to and accept other people’s innovations.
Returning to their music, it really is remarkable how much they’ve matured over the years. In a market that specializes in churning out the same thing over and over again, Radiohead have never been content to rest on their laurels, and each new release sees them expanding not only their sound but also their outlook on life. Hail To The Thief and In Rainbows in particular are refreshingly free of the misery and angst that they are so well known for. Even back in the days of The Bends, they were tempering their navel-gazing tendencies with a wry sense of humour and self awareness, and their music is all the better for it.
As to the question of Radiohead’s originality, they have their influences sure, and sometimes they wind up sinking under the historical weight of them. But Radiohead have proven that they can stand on their own to feet, and these days their best material sounds like no one but themselves, as they coherently mould all their disparate musical sources into a compelling whole. They will never beat the krautrockers or Warp Records at their own game, but it’s enough that they play their own game very well.
Comparing Radiohead to the two other bands put in similar position reveals a lot to their credit. Rather then being sickeningly populist and earnest like U2 and REM, or loosing what made people interested in their music in the first place, like REM, Radiohead have simply continued to follow their muse down whatever path it leads them. There are certainly worse bands we could have at the top. And I for one am glad that we have them.

Top 10 Prog Albums of the 80s

2010-01-31T03:14:00.002Z

"Dawn of light lying between a silence and sold sources,
Chased amid fusions of wonder
In moments hardly seen forgotten
Coloured in pastures of chance..."

The opening lyrics from Tales From Topographic Oceans (1974). Average number of songs per side of vinyl: 1

"I never meant to be so bad to you
One thing I said that I would never do
A look from you and I would fall from grace
And that would wipe the smile right from my face"

The opening lyrics from Asia´s self titled debut (1982). Average number of songs per side of vinyl: 4.5

If the early 70s represents the peak of prog (and, by extension, pretty much all culture), then by the 80s, things were looking decidedly grim. Punk didn’t immediately sound the death knoll for prog, much as it would like you to believe, but whilst1977 still delivered a reasonable harvest of prog classics, by the early 80s a combination of critical ridicule and commercial indifference put progressive rock in a decidedly tenuous position. Part of the problem seems to be that the ridiculous creative splurge of prog’s golden age – you can pretty much set the goal posts from the release of In The Court Of The Crimson King in 1969 to the disintegration of 70s Crim in 1974 – left many of the bands artistically exhausted or burned out. However, the core of the decay stems from the sad fact that, faced with New Wave and FM radio’s demand for shorter songs and greater approachability, many of prog’s leading lights ditched cosmic lyrics and expansive song structures in favour of toothless, airbrushed AOR. At the end of the day, these people who were at home stretching crazy cosmic jazz across entire sides of vinyl simply had no idea how to write a three minute pop song, and it shows. Just look at the difference between the lyrics above. However you feel about Tales (I love it, but that’s a different story for another day), its cosmic mysticism is surely infinitely preferable to Asia’s trite, adult relationship clichés.
Asia are an unbelievably easy target, but in this case they are an entirely deserving one. It’s hard to imagine any prog fan looking at that line-up and not salivating – John Wetton, Carl Palmer, Steve Howe (and Geoffry Downes, but there’s a black sheep in every family)… you can almost imagine the monstrous hybrid of Larks’ Tongues Crim, ELP and Yes, all thundering, malevolent precussion coupled with soaring, complex guitar lines – don’t tell me you’re not all hot and bothered now. But put on the disc and what do you get? Slick, soulless stadium rock, with some of the most distinctive musicians of their generation phoning in unbelievably anonymous performances. Interestingly, pretty much all of Asia have admitted that the problem was they chased the money rather then following their muse. Sadly, this album is prog in the 80s in microcosm, as once great acts shed what made them so brilliant, innovative and interesting in the first place to make a living pedaling listless MOR. Like the clichéd dragon Roger Dean cover of Asia’s debut compared to the mythic crystal caverns he painted for Yes’ Relayer, the music was familiar yet wrong, the complexity, soul and idealism missing, creating an ersatz prog-not-prog that pleased no one (the millions who buy this nonsense excepted, I guess). Tellingly, the inscription on modern prog legend’s Astra’s myspace reads “Not named after the Asia album.” Britain’s short lived prog revival would give us Marillion, IQ and Pendragon, who went some way to rectifying the ills of the decade, but unfortunately, most of the prog revivalists who followed in their wake were more And Then There Were Three then The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, many being little more then overplayed stadium fodder.
However, it wasn’t all doom and gloom in the prog world. Though the decade saw Magma largely out of action, their influence spread to a new generation of European zeuhl bands, ready to pick up where Vander and co. left off, and often take the music into radically different and unexpected directions. The influence of prog, especially zeuhl and RIO, was still prevalent in the Japanese underground, where to this day it never really went away. Marillion and IQ would produce consistently good records up into the new millennium, and runts of the litter Pendragon would ultimately grow into themselves, astoundingly so with last year’s Pure. And some of the prog greats adapted to the times with all the sensitivity, intelligence and imagination we came to expect of them.
So, here are 10 great prog albums from the 80s, which deserve to sit side by side with the classics of the genre. These people kept the prog flame burning when all about them were losing their heads, and made some unbelievably imaginative and innovative music, some of them considerably after post-punk’s glorious period of creativity had drawn to an end. They are heroes, every one a wizard and a true star.

10. IQ – The Wake (1985)

IQ’s best album – at least until Subterranea – was released the same year that Marillion stormed the charts with their masterpiece Misplaced Childhood (more of which later, naturally), so it inevitably finds itself in that album’s shadow. This is a shame, because in its own right, The Wake is an absolute prog rock classic. A concept album, of course, about life, death and the afterlife, the album features Peter Nicholls at his most subtle and Peter Gabriel-like, and he sings with a delicacy and restraint missing from later albums. However, the real stars of the album are guitarist Mike Holmes and keyboardist Martin Orford, who, despite the inevitable comparisons to Steve Rothery and Mark Kelly, manage to hold their own quite comfortably, displaying robust and lyrical musicianship throughout. Orford’s gothic keyboards give ‘Outer Limits’ and ‘Magic Roundabout’ a real sense of drama and grandeur. The guitar solo on ‘The Thousand Days’ is particularly glorious, and ‘Widow’s Peak’ allows Holmes to work his whole bag of tricks, from periods of acoustic delicacy to stomping Crimsonesque malevolence. And in fact, it’s worth seeking out the reissue for the bonus track ‘Dans Le Parc Du Chateau Noir’, which sees him rip it up

9. After Dinner – Paradise Of Replicas (1989)

After Dinner were a Japanese band influenced by RIO, particularly Henry Cow and Art Bears, which is pretty much the only thing that gives them any context whatsoever. Their music is a similarly hard to pin down mix of modern classical, jazz and rock influences, creating something wonderfully individual in the process that doesn’t really fit in anywhere. They only ever released two albums, but both deserve to be remembered as classics of the first water. Haco is something of a Japanese Dagmar Krause. She has an incredible voice, capable of stunning power and ridiculous leaps, but retaining a sense of playfulness not seen in Krause since her Slapp Happy days. Indeed, After Dinner, despite their esoteric influences, are a more open and playful proposition then the Art Bears. As a result, their albums switch effortlessly between cabaret songs and tape loops of metal on metal. Exotic percussion and eastern modes mix with classical formalism and jazz experimentation to create something unique.

8. Shub Niggurath – Les Mortes Vont Vite (1986)

I actually think this may be a contender for the oddest record I own, and I own a shedload of really really strange music. Shub Niggurath were a Belgium band who answered the question none of us had the wit to answer – ‘wouldn’t it be awesome if Magma had brutal No Wave tendancies?’ The answer, surprisingly enough, is yes, yes it would. Songs like ‘Incipit Tragaedia’ and ‘Yog Sothoth’ start of as claustrophobically dark and tense zeuhl, Kontarkosz filtered through a black hole, then mutate into crunching, bass-led chasms of white noise. The feedback solo in ‘Yog Sothoth’ is particularly merciless, screaming at the heavens whilst the rhythm section gallops along in multiple time signatures. The nightmarish intensity is kept up throughout the whole album, with barely a moment of light to break the darkness – Shub Niggurath only use quiet passages to build up interminable dread for the coming destruction. Shub Niggurath would release one more album that almost reaches the same levels of demonic intensity before disappearing forever into the shadows.

7. Eskaton – Ardeur (1980)

Magma’s influence is a strange thing. They have few fans, but the fans they have treat them with a rare devotion. One of the side effects of this has been the appearance of many zeuhl bands throughout Europe, extending as far as Japan. These bands often seem to be extensions of Christian Vander’s work themselves, as if the sheer power of his influence alone is enough to put these people in his thrall, to turn them into vessels designed to carry out the man’s work. Eskaton were a zeuhl band from France, who basically dealt in MDK-era Magma, the Kobaian replaced with politically influenced French, spiced up liberally with a bit of Gentle Giant and driving funk. A simple trick, but pulled off exceptionally well. Ardeur was their second and final album, before they split up due to the world’s mass indifference to such eccentric product. A shame, because Ardeur is a corker. Despite their obvious influences, Eskaton possess a robust and subtly funky rhythmic drive which makes their sound their own. Additionally, in keeping with the dictates of the time, and in contrast with their first LP, on Ardeur Eskaton keep their prog-outs relatively short, managing to get in, do the damage and get out in a fraction of the time it would take Magma to work through MDK’s first movement. However, when they do stretch out, the results are stellar. ‘Dagon’ is 10 minutes of Lovecraft-inspired prog horror, all rhythmic bass detonations, female choral massed wordless ululations and sudden snaps of driving terror.

6. Art Zoyd – Phase IV (1982)

Art Zoyd were the original Magma spin-off band, but ultimately developed a life of their own. Phase IV is still their finest achievement, a sprawling, malevolent double album of zeuhl wonder. Like a more orchestrally inclined version of Magma, it’s easy to see why they eventually wound up scoring ballets and soundtracks – their music has a very natural sense of drama and movement. ‘Etat D’Urgence’ sets the scene for the whole LP – large acoustic passages for violin and guitar give way to rumbling bass and goblin chanting. If Art Zoyd rarely achieve Univers Zero’s nerve-shredding intensity, they are more willing to let light and shade into their music, creating a richer and less foreboding album that’s still able to create enough moments of chilling terror to keep you on the edge of your seat.

5. Univers Zero – Ceux Du Dehors (1981)

Ceux Du Dehors is a sunny picnic of an album by Univers Zero standards, but a twisted monster by most people’s standards. Daniel Dennis was Magma’s second drummer in a line up that went sadly unrecorded, so we can only imagine its unearthly intensity and dread. He left over creative differences to form Univers Zero, who mixed zeuhl with RIO and modern classical influences to fulfill Dennis’ own dark, HPL-fixated vision. This is further evidence for the theory that all Magma-heads also have a Lovecraft fixation. Ceux Du Dehors is less intense then the primarily acoustic efforts the band put out at the end of the 70s, but then again, most things are less intense then the utterly terrifying Heresie. More prominent use of electric instruments and keyboards makes Ceux Du Dehors sound more aligned with classic prog, but it’s still a bumpy ride, as the worst nightmares of Larks’ Tongues Crimso and Henry Cow go up against sections that are pure Stravinsky. The album also features the direct Lovecraft homage ‘La Musique d’Erich Zann’, whose scaping viola and wheezing horror conjure up suitable music to split open dimensions with.

4. Art Bears – The World As It Is Today (1981)

Henry Cow were equally infamous for their radical left wing politics as their radical fusion of free jazz, modern classical music and rock. Their vision was already bleak and angry in the early 70s, but, unsurprisingly following Britain’s political development in the late 70s and early 80s, they only got bleaker and angrier. The Cow, composed as it was of diverse and outspoken individuals, fell apart due to musical and political differences, but the core of guitarist Fred Frith, vocalist Dagmar Krause and drummer Chris Cutler continued making music together as Art Bears. Chris Cutler’s lyrics reached their peak of political expression with The World As It Is Today, a brutal attack on capitalism which would have warmed the cockles of Gang Of Four’s hearts, whilst their more minimal take on prog, integrating Cutler’s use of tape effects into their already singular mixture, further aligned them with the post punk vanguard. Indeed, This Heat were in many ways Henry Cow and Art Bear’s post punk reflection. The World As It Is Today is a modern song cycle, with Cutler’s pared down percussion, and enlivened by Frith’s virtuoso yet brutally noisy guitar, particularly prominently on ‘Democracy’.

3. Marillion – Misplaced Childhood (1985)

Arguably still Marillion’s greatest achievement, and certainly the most iconic album of the prog rock revival, Misplaced Childhood still sounds simply wonderful today. Inspired by an acid trip Fish went on after receiving a tab from an ex-girlfriend in the post, the album takes us on a journey through the singer’s failed relationship, which results in Fish coming to the realization that there are worse troubles in the world then his, giving him the strength and resolve to move on. The album was conceived as a single, coherent work, and whilst ‘Kayleigh’, ‘Lavender’ and ‘Heart Of Lothian’ work well enough on their own to have stormed the charts when released as singles, the album really is a song cycle, best enjoyed in one sitting. Fish’s lyrics are at their poetic best, and he gives a rousing, passionate performance throughout. While his characteristic bitterness and cynicism is still present, there are moments of pure, simple and open emotion, like the aforementioned singles, and the uplifting ending gives the whole thing a generosity of spirit. However, as was later shown, the band was far from simply Fish’s backing act. Steve Rothery’s glorious guitar playing is fantastic throughout, echoing David Gilmour and Steve Hackett at their most lyrical. Mark Kelly’s keyboards are dramatic and sweeping, switching effortlessly from moody to ecstatic. And Marrillion’s often underrated rhythm section is in full force here, just listen to the way Pete Trewavas and Ian Mosely punctuate each line of ‘Kayleigh’, so together they could almost be a single organism, the way they effortlessly navigate the time and tempo changes throughout, and their unexpected integration of African and calypso rhythms on ‘Waterhole’. Truly a case of a band operating at their absolute peak. It should be noted that Marillion also put out four other absolute classic studio albums during the 80s, any of which could have made this list.

2. Rush – Moving Pictures (1981)

By Moving Pictures, Rush must have seemed unstoppable. Whilst many of their peers disintegrated or degraded during the latter half of the 70s, Rush kept going from strength to strength. And just kept going. They opened the 80s with the all time classic Permanent Waves (stop what you are doing right now and listen to ‘Natural Science’. No, really. You can thank me later), and followed it with the just as all time classic Moving Pictures. The album opens with the brilliant ‘Tom Sawyer’, the portrait of a modern-day rebel replete with snotty lyrics from Neil Peart, buzzing synthesizers, a snarling guitar solo in 7/8, and a series of thoroughly epic Peart drum rolls. The album just keeps on going from there – every track is a solid gold classic. ‘Red Barchetta’ enters on a haze of guitar harmonics before erupting into a full speed car chase, ‘YYZ’ comes across like 70s Crim on holiday, and the gorgeous melody of ‘Limelight’ is contrasted by the ominous bass rumbles and Alex Lifeson’s haunting guitar moans of the instrumental section. Despite being as proggy as you can possibly get, the songs here are all relatively concise – only ‘The Camera Eye’ lasts over 10 minutes, and many of the others finish before the five minute mark. Indeed, here Rush show how many of the prog bands could have adapted their material to make it shorter and more approachable – Moving Pictures is just such fun! – without losing any of their classic prog idiosyncrasies. Rush were willing to adapt to the new technology as well, making the most out of modern synthesizers, and even adopting a dub/reggae influence successfully on closer ‘Vital Signs’, in which Geddy Lee plays perhaps the greatest bass solo in rock music history. The band’s strong songwriting and ability to adapt to new musical ideas without losing their core identity would see them produce more great albums in the 80s, particularly Signals and Grace Under Pressure, and indeed in the 90s as well.

1. King Crimson – Discipline (1981)

This album inevitably tops the list. In 1974, King Crimson disbanded ‘for good’, with Fripp saying that it was all over for ‘dinosaur’ bands. He spent the rest of the decade hanging out with Brian Eno and David Bowie, absorbing new musical influences and observing the changing musical tides. After playing on various other people’s albums and releasing an underwhelming solo LP, Fripp decided it was time to get a band together again. The band was originally going to be called Discipline, and featured former Crimso drummer Bill Bruford, but also Adrian Belew, an ex-Zappa acolyte who contributed searing noise guitar to Talking Heads’ Remain In Light LP, and Tony Levin, who played bass on Peter Gabriel’s solo LPs. This new group was far removed from Fripp’s previous band, with influences extending from New Wave to krautrock to Afrobeat and gamelan. As rehearsals continued, Fripp decided to resurrect the King Crimson moniker, and Discipline became the name of the album instead. It’s an apt title – prog rock’s epic sprawl was replaced with an interlocking mesh of guitar lines and cyclical percussion; lyrics about Crimson Kings and Prince Rupert’s tears gave way to Belew’s gnomic word play. Only two songs go past the five minute mark. And yet, it’s hard to imagine an album more true to the ethos of progressive rock – here was a genuine, original music taking the influence of modern classical tropes such as minimalism, the rhythms and structures of traditional African and Asian music, and contemporary pop, and fusing them all into a coherent whole with stunning musicianship. Adrian Belew’s development as a guitarist is simply astounding, though the music is diverse enough to allow him to indulge in his old, untutored squall when it suits the song. Bill Bruford’s drumming is a revelation, as he all but abandons the bombast of his earlier sound to subtly and playfully support and subvert the simple rhythmic patterns of the music, whilst integrating electronic percussion for the first time. The music itself is complex yet approachable, with Crimso showing real pop leanings without compromising their vision an iota. The album is immediately in line with Japan and Talking Heads’ idealistically similar explorations of the same era, whilst paving the way for many of the better post-rock bands of the 90s. Whilst Yes and Genesis were looking more and more like fish out of water, Crimso were sounding effortlessly contemporary and full of energy and new ideas.

… And Five From Classic Prog Acts To Avoid

1. Yes – Big Generator (1987)

90125 was a worrying development for Yes fans, but was at least partially redeemed by the cheesy party classic ‘Owner Of A Lonely Heart’. Big Generator has no such redeeming features. John Anderson’s lyrics have degenerated to new age doggerel, and the music is as lame and as unimaginative as his lazy hippy dippy clichés. Nobody on this album sounds like they are even trying, and the end result is one of the most boring records ever created by man. Although Yes had been in decline since Relayer, their last great album, this was arguably the point of no return. A thoroughly pointless LP.

2. Genesis – Invisible Touch (1986)

Following the departure of Gabriel and Hackett, the extent to which Rutherford, Banks and Collins went to embarrass themselves is nothing short of legendary, but for all the wrong reasons. There is much to dislike about all their albums of this period, all of which have dragged Genesis’ once good name through the dirt in all kinds of nasty ways, but Invisible Touch is arguably the nadir. Largely indistinguishable from Phil Collins’ anodyne solo work at this stage, Invisible Touch is half-assed, emotionless AOR at its absolute worse. Gone was any trace of prog, replaced with bland synthesizer arrangements, clunky electronic percussion and trite lyrics. Though, on the upside, it doesn’t have ‘Illegal Alien’ on it.

3. Magma – Merci (1984)

It gives me no great pleasure to talk about Magma’s only sub-par album. Unable to cover the costs of recording, Magma had been cutting wood on the road for years, and for the first and probably only time in his life, Christian Vander considered that compromise might be a reasonable option. His idea wasn’t actually a bad one – to record an album that mixed all the usual zeuhl trademarks with modern funk and R and B. On their previous album, the excellent and underrated Attahk, Magma had proved that they could do funky with ‘The Last Seven Minutes’. Unfortunately, Merci is a disaster. One of the all time greatest drummers replaces himself with a drum machine, the band get stuck repeating ‘ooh baby’ on top of overly slick and soulless arrangements, and all the Magma idiosyncrasies are ironed out in favour of radio-friendly blandness. Unsurprisingly, none of this helped the band gain any more radio play or fans, and when Magma returned, it was to return to their strengths with the all time classic Kohntarkosz Anteria, and we could all pretend Merci never happened. Oddly enough, if you make it through three quarters of Merci, you are rewarded with the obscure Magma classics ‘Eliphas Levi’ and ‘The Night We Died’, gorgeous pieces arranged for choral vocals and solo piano, which lay out much of the ground for Vander’s spin-off group Offering, and suggests that, had Vander simply stuck to his guns like he usually does, Merci could have been brilliant.

4. Pink Floyd – A Momentary Lapse Of Reason (1987)

More like A Momentary Lapse Of Quality Control, amiright? (Sadly, that suggests that the Floyd ever got it back). I hate this album. David Gilmour and Roger Waters had a symbiotic relationship – Waters needed Gilmour’s musicianship to support his bleakly misanthropic vision, but equally Gilmour needed Waters’ distinctive lyrical vision to bring out his best music. This is immediately shown by this incredibly lackluster LP. The feeling of confusion and disorientation expressed by the man awakening on a beach of beds on the cover reflects the fan’s reaction upon hearing Floyd’s first Watersless release. Without Waters’ lyrical output, Floyd are utterly toothless, and without his strong aesthetic vision, Gilmour and Mason and a bunch of session musicians bumble about in AOR Purgatory, composing limp power ballads and tuneless rockers. Fun fact – Antony Moore from Slapp Happy penned some of the album’s insipid and preachy lyrics, allowing the record to embarrass two prog rock legends for the price of one.

5. Marillion – Holidays In Eden (1991)

This album wasn’t actually released in the 80s, but as it falls prey to many of the same faults, and really it only just misses out, I thought I’d include it here, in the company it deserves. Marillion’s only crap album was a result of the record company simply not knowing what to do with the band. With Fish gone and the times changing, the hits were drying up, and the execs wanted to make sure the band behind such mega hits as ‘Kayleigh’ and ‘Lavender’ still delivered the goods. Want to hear the incredible, innovative solution? Ever thought Marillion would sound absolutely awesome if they sounded more like U2? Neither has anyone else in the history of the world, but that’s the album that EMI thought Marillion needed to make to keep shifting units. Holidays In Eden is a horrible record, the songs drowned in generic stadium rock production, all bland keyboards and Edge-inspired guitar parts. The whole process so disgusted Marillion that they withdrew to a European haunted castle, boarded themselves up for three years and returned with the awe-inspiring but thoroughly unsellable concept album Brave, beginning the end of their relationship with major labels and their switch to internet autonomy. Frustratingly, the bonus disc on the remastered reissue of Eden is all but essential, featuring raw live and stripped down acoustic takes of songs from the album. In this context, the songs are revealed to be brilliant, suggesting that, without executive meddling, Holidays In Eden could have been another classic.

The World Spins Out Of Tune - Top 50 Albums of the 2000s

2009-10-04T14:15:00.001Z

It’s not quite the end of the decade yet, but it’s near enough for Pitchfork and Uncut to release horrifically mediocre Top Albums of the Decade lists, so I thought I may as well get in on the act now as well. It’s unlikely that anything released in the next couple of months will drastically change the order of the list, but if it does and you’re reading this now, well gosh now I feel silly. The thing about the 2000s is that there has been no underlying trend, as far as I can see there are no hands-down classics like Pet Sounds in the 60s or Loveless in the 90s that you’d just have to have on the list. But on the upside there has been loads of fantastic music that will only ever be a niche interest. The state of music certainly isn’t as grim as a cursory scan of Pitchfork or Uncut will have you believe. When I started my list, I thought I would find no trend in my results either, but as the list went on, I found myself more and more describing the music as having the ability to transport you to some Other Place, the ability to create a self-contained musical world. This probably says more about my taste then any general trend in music itself, but as far as trends go, I’m happy with that one. I don’t think music should not engage at all with reality, I just like the ability to completely lose yourself in a good record.
So this list is simply the 50 albums that came out in the last 10 years that I’ve enjoyed the most. I have limited each artist to one album for the sake of musical diversity; suffice to say there are many artists on this list for whom I could have easily picked two or more albums from. The Fall, Erase Errata, Electrelane and all the Ghost Box artists spring to mind immediately. The order is absolutely final and was calculated using SCIENCE that you mere mortals would simply not understand, but trust me when I say that my methods are mathematically sound and totally wasn’t the result of me typing up the first 50 albums I could think of and randomly rearranging the order so it looked nice. But first: honourable and dishonourable mentions:

Not on the list because they’re crap: Up The Bracket, Is This It, Vampire Weekend, anything by Sigur Ros, Kid A.

Bubbling under because they’re good but in danger of becoming horrifically over-rated: Turn On The Bright Lights, Funeral (second best album of the decade? Piss off.), Fever To Tell, Dear Catastrophe Waitress (The Life Pursuit’s crap). Probably Yoshimi falls into this category as well.

Artists who have surprisingly been shit for 10 years now but still soldier on: the Manics, Radiohead. Congratulations Mr Cave, No More Shall We Part means you just miss out.

Embarrassingly not on the list because I’ve forgotten or haven’t got round to listening to it yet: fill this bit in yourself. The Transactional Dharma of Roj (Ghost Box 012) probably belongs on here somewhere, but I only got it through the post yesterday so I’ve only heard it the once.

Right. On to the main attraction:

50. King Crimson – The ConstruKction of Light (2000)

If modern day Crimso are a disappointment, it’s only in comparison to the giddy heights they scaled earlier in their career. Taken on their own considerable merits, their 00s albums are great. Whilst 2003’s The Power To Believe is the stronger album, ConstruKction arguably reaches higher peaks. Modern updates of ‘Larks Tongues’ and ‘Fracture’ may be unnecessary, but it’s still great to hear the band in full flight muscling its way through such strong material. The rest of the material saw King Crimson’s eccentric sense of humour to the fore, (mostly) without harming the power and majesty of the music. And the title track is an all-time Crimso great, with its spiralling elliptical guitar lines and one of Adrian Belew’s most engaging and cryptic lyrics. “And if Warhol is a genius…”

49. The Long Blondes – Someone To Drive You Home (2006)

Stolen moves, sure, but when they’re executed this well, who cares? The Long Blondes were fun, smart and sassy, brimming with infectious energy and armed with a real knack for a tune. The album highlights ‘Once And Never Again’, ‘Giddy Stratospheres’ and ‘Weekend Without Makeup’ transcend their Blondie-meets-Pulp origins to make great pop with heart and brains.

48. The Mars Volta – De-Loused In The Comatorium (2003)

The prog rock revival has been secretly gaining ground for some time, but even today to announce on your debut album that you’ve written an allegorical concept album about your dead friend’s afterlife or whatever the devil De-Loused is meant to be about is to set yourself up as a target for untold ridicule. The Mars Volta, then as now, were never ones to let ridicule stand in the way of their preposterous ambition. Against all the odds, the ex-hardcore punks came up trumps with a fantastically overblown yet stunningly ambitious piece of music that flew in the face of indie rock orthodoxy. The band have never looked back. Their other albums are fantastic, but the debut remains my favourite, if only for its sheer audacity.

47. Liars – They Threw Us All In A Trench And Stuck A Monument On The Top (2001)

You know, it’s funny that I can’t be bothered with Liars any more, because I loved this album when it came out. The whole dance-punk, post-punk revival thing wound up being a massive disappointment, but actually, I still reckon this album delivers. Helped in no small part by a great rhythm section (which they subsequently lost, and boy do the records suffer for it), They Threw Us All… may be a gauche recycling of past post-punk tropes, but it undeniably possesses a dark energy and enthusiasm. While they never matched the invention and intensity of the Gang of Four or ESG records they were imitating, the likes of ‘Grown Men Don’t Fall In A River Just Like That’ and ‘Mr. Your On Fire Mr.’ thunder along with convulsive purpose. And the occult horrors of ‘This Dust Makes That Mud’ ends on a 20 minute lock groove designed to test the listener’s patience. Stupid but cool.

46. LCD Soundsystem – Sound of Silver (2007)

I don’t really want to add too much to the noise already surrounding this album, but, you know, it’s pretty good. James Murphy gets to rip off everyone from La Dusseldorf to David Bowie and doesn’t wind up looking stupid doing so. He even manages to invest the record with real emotional punch – ‘Someone Great’ and ‘All My Friends’ wind up being more then fancy games of Spot The Hipster Reference Point via Murphy’s sincere and actually kinda profound look at ageing.

45. Welcome – Sirs (2006)

An oddity in this day and age, in that there’s pretty much no context for this. Arguably just a thirty-minute mess with no discernable hooks, patience reveals Welcome to be a bizarre half-breed descended from early Pere Ubu and Syd Barrett-era Floyd. Trebly scratchy guitars pan wildly from one speaker to the other, drums clatter, the whole thing collapses in on itself then reassembles inside out. And eventually, structures reveal themselves – charming, tuneful vocals rise out of the chaos, only to be swallowed again as all hell breaks loose. Then the song ends, and it’s only been two and a half minutes. This continues for the whole record. I have no idea who these guys are, but in its own way and entirely on its own terms, I think this album is something of a modern classic.

44. Deerhoof – Milk Man (2004)

Now this is definitely a modern classic. Deerhoof play an attention deficit mash of post-punk, psychedelia, prog and sheer noise, often all at the same time, topped off by a cute Japanese singer who sings disturbingly twisted and gauche lyrics like sugar wouldn’t melt in her mouth. Milk Man is the band at the peak of their powers, cramming as many hooks, ideas and just general bat shit craziness into each song as possible. It’s a concept album of some sort about the eponymous Milk Man, who kidnaps children and takes them to his magical kingdom. Or something. The band have too much fun to get bogged down in the details, which is how it should be. And with tunes as infectious as the title track, who’s complaining?

43. Blood Ceremony – Blood Ceremony (2008)

In this irony-clad age, thank the gods for Blood Ceremony. Copping all their moves from Black Sabbath and Jethro Tull circa 72 and writing songs about witchcraft and black magic entirely devoid of self-awareness or irony, Blood Ceremony are a surprisingly refreshing proposition. It doesn’t hurt that their guitarist sure knows how to Tony Iommi-it up, or that their female lead vocalist has an incredible voice. But it’s the strength of the material that lifts this above retro-pastiche and gives the band a voice of their own, despite their prominent influences.

42. Subtonix – Tarantism (2002)

And whilst we’re on the subject of black magic… Here come the Subtonix, like an undead X-Ray Spex, all set to feed on the flesh of the living and banish all the mediocre post-punk revivalists to the pit from whence they came. Considering how bland most of the post-punk revival bands turned out, it’s something of a mystery why Subtonix, armed with real attitude, nurse uniforms and buckets of fake blood, failed to capture the public’s imagination. They certainly had the tunes – all spiky guitars, gloomy bass, shrieking sax riffs and Siouxsie vocals. Sadly it wasn’t to be, but we still have this, the band’s only album, which still brims with darkness, mystery and, well, damnit, fun.

41. Animal Collective – Sung Tongs (2004)

Again, this record’s been praised enough. But it’s got some top tunes on it. Despite having their influences, Animal Collective didn’t really sound like anyone else, and they remain unique. Sung Tongs saw them staking out their territory, and it’s remarkable in this reductive day and age just how broad it is – folky guitars and campfire singalongs to tape-loops, electronics and daemonic chanting. This openness has served AC very well over the years, and they ended the decade with the fantastic Meriwether Post Pavilion being justifiably praised to the skies and even scraping the top 20. Nice one.

40. Einsturzende Neubauten – Perpetuum Mobile (2004)

Much as I hate this phrase, Perpetuum Mobile really was a return to form. For the first time in their career, Ende Neu and Silence Is Sexy had seen Neubauten occasionally struggling to reconcile compositional subtlety with their penchant for all-out metal on metal noise. However, with Perpetuum Mobile, they really nailed it. From the motorik of the title track which echoes their Krautrock forefathers to the haiku-like elegance of ‘Ich Gehe Jetz’, the album’s sonic range is stunning. The boys from Berlin use every material that comes their way to its fullest sonic potential, yet always ensure that the arrangement serves the song. Blixa is on top form as a vocalist as form, showing that he can handle delicate emotion as well as that scream. They even get all sentimental on the genuinely moving ‘Dead Friends (Around The Corner)’ and carry it off with aplomb and dignity.

39. Xiu Xiu – Fabulous Muscles (2004)

Another Pitchfork choice. Good record though. Fabulous Muscles remains Xiu Xiu’s peak, the perfect mix of crazy sonic inventiveness and delicately poised (well, for these guys anyway) songwriting. Despite the often harrowing subject matter, it remains a thoroughly enjoyable record. No more is the disparity between luscious, New Order-influenced melody and the song’s innate horror shown then on ‘I Love The Valley OH!’, a passionately sung overdose tale set to gorgeous pop.

38. Comets On Fire – Blue Cathedral (2004)

This one actually pisses me off, because if it was better, then it would be unbelievably awesome. I think it’s let down by crappy production, the way it’s recorded makes it kind of hard to listen to. Anyway, what a great album. Ben Chasny does 70s space rock. He’s a fantastic guitarist, and he freaks out with a vengeance all over this record. See, if it were better then I could say it was like a modern Ash Ra Tempel, with Chasny as a Manuel Gottsching de nos jours, but sadly the record just misses. Irritating. Anyway, yeah, top stuff otherwise.

37. Kate Bush – Aerial (2005)

Kate Bush’s return after 12 years. It’s funny, in her absence she’s really become a touchstone for a kind of female pop singer. I like Tori Amos, but once you get on to people like Bat For Lashes, they’re kind of taking the piss. Anyway, Kate storms back into the fold with this glorious song suite and shows ‘em all how it’s done. Songs about washing machines, numbers, sunsets… it was like she’d never been away. Despite having nothing to prove at this stage of the game, she went ahead and did it anyway. And then… silence.

36. Six Organs Of Admittance – Dark Noontide (2002)

More Ben Chasny. Six Organs Of Admittance are a bit better then Blue Cathedral at fulfilling their potential. This album is a fantastic mix of Western and Eastern folk, psychedelic rock and electronic drone, almost Fairport Convention covering Coil in Hokkaido. People tried to nail them to the free folk thing, but Six Organs don’t really fit anywhere, they just continue ploughing their own furrow and sod the rest of the world. Good on ‘em. Album highlight – the almost Amon Duul II-like ‘A Thousand Birds’, the perfect synthesis of psychedelic folk and raga rock.

35. Litmus – Planetfall (2007)

‘DESTROY THE MOTHERSHIP!’ Litmus are blatant Hawkwind plagiarists, but when it’s done with such panache it’s impossible to be angry. And not even Hawkwind have ripped off Hawkwind this well for years. This is a highly proficient slab of space rock in good old fashioned Mountain Grill vintage. However, Litmus are smart enough to avoid Hawkwind’s missteps without jettisoning their sense of adventure. If these guys ever learn to stand on their own two feet, they could be dangerous. For now, they can settle with just great fun.

34. Legendary Pink Dots – The Whispering Wall (2004)

The Legendary Pink Dots have gotten to the stage of their career where they can pretty much do what they want. They’re never going to crack the mainstream, and they don’t care, they’re pretty much happy with their small but loyal solid fan base. The Whispering Wall comes on like its contending with the big boys though. All the usual ingredients are there in exelcis – swirling pulsating keyboards, dinky electronics, psychedelic guitar and Edward Ka-Spel’s lisping vocals. But now it was coupled to some of their strongest and just plain approachable material in ages. A younger band would have been gunning for a breakthrough, but typically the Pink Dots were unconcerned about the wider world.

33. Wolf Eyes – Human Animal (2006)

Why not Burned Mind? Great as that album was, it was fairly standard Whitehouse/Merzbow burn-your-face-off noise, albeit done with aplomb. Human Animal is a more developed, subtler album. It’s as nasty and unpleasant as it’s predecessor, but because it actually factors in quieter moments and different timbers, it manages to be even more extreme and nerve-wracking, and even expand the vocabulary of a genre far too content to play to its strengths at the expense of development.

32. Current 93 – Black Ships Ate The Sky (2006)

In which Current 93 almost accidentally break into the mainstream. Black Ships… isn’t a prissy sell-out record by any stretch of the imagination – it’s pretty much business as usual. Violent apocalyptic visions, tapeloops, guitar and piano led folk music. But, thanks to all the free folk nonsense flying around, C93 were in the odd position off almost fitting with the current musical context, and high-profile collaborators from Antony to Marc Almond raised the record’s profile even further. At the end of the day, though, it wasn’t to be, and all we are left with is another great Current 93 album. There are worse fates.

31. Porcupine Tree – Deadwing (2005)

It’s pretty much personal preference which P-Tree album of the 00s is your favourite. Whilst none of them matched the band’s career highs of Signify and The Sky Moves Sideways, they were all consistently good. I’m going for Deadwing today because it has the gorgeous ‘Lazarus’ and ‘Mellotron Scratch’ on it. And it’s a pretty good album. So there.

30. Nisennenmondai – Destination Tokyo (2008)

Nisennenmondai are an all-girl Japanese no-wave trio who call their songs ‘Pop Group’ and ‘This Heat’. The only way they could get any better would be if, on their full-length debut, they went on an epic krautprog freak out as well. Oh wait, that’s just what they did. Perfect. If you don’t think that sounds like the best thing since sliced bread, there’s something wrong with you.

29. Kode9 And The Spaceape – Memories Of The Near Future (2006)

A dubstep classic. Kode9’s sonic dystopia – all loping beats, sub-bass explosions, the hollowed-out zombie corpse of rave – is matched by Spaceape’s Philip K Dick-on-a-downer paranoid alien rantings, all delivered in his sonorous Jamaican patois. Cannibalising everything in its wake from rave culture to the Seven Samurai to Prince, Kode9 takes no prisoners. The sound of post-millennial dread at its chilling finest.

28. The Organ – Grab That Gun (2004)

At the end of the day, were The Organ just wasted potential? Grab That Gun comes on like the strongest indie debut of the decade. Katie Sketch’s hand-picked crew materialised out of nowhere with this gem of a record. Heavily influenced by The Cure and The Smiths, The Organ appropriated those bands’ male whining and used it as a template to express their female angst. But beyond the intriguing concept were ridiculously strong songs with intelligent and perceptive lyrics. ‘Steve Smith’ deals with the spectre of Morrissey by taking him out and shooting him, and ‘Brother’ has Sketch wryly acknowledging that she could be wrong over the song’s brutal coda. This half hour of top quality pop should have been the start of a brilliant career, but wound up being the end as the band disintegrated a mere two years later.

27. Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds – No More Shall We Part (2001)

Old Saint Nick’s last great album is arguably his best work outside the Birthday Party. Having abandoned his old fire and brimstone style for reflective ballads, the real triumph of No More… is that it reveals what a strong songwriter Cave had become. There’s nothing really new here in sonics or lyrics – Cave explores his usual themes of love, passion, death, loss and the morality and consequences which tie all of them together – it’s more the strength of the material is at an absolute peak. ‘Hallelujah’, ‘As I Sat Sadly By Her Side’ and ‘Love Letter’ show Nick at his most melodic and lyrical, whilst he still manages to summon up some of the fire of old (thanks in no small part to Blixa) on ‘The Sorrowful Wife’. Cave would follow this up with the meritless Noctoruama before getting bored with writing songs altogether, instead hamming up his mad preacher shtick over less and less memorable material. Remember him this way.

26. The Go-Betweens – Oceans Apart (2005)

This album wound up becoming the Go-Betweens’ unintentional swansong, as it was followed by the sudden tragic death of Grant McLennan. Still, what a way to go. The Go-Betweens sign off at the peak of their game, with Robert Forster at his scabrous best on ‘Here Comes A City’, and McLennan sounding suitably elegiac on the gorgeous ‘No Reason To Cry’. Elsewhere, the usual fine melodies and literate wordplay were present in abundance. The band sound on top form, and very much like they’re enjoying themselves immensely. It’s nice that they finished on such a strong, uplifting album.

25. Antony And The Johnsons – I Am A Bird Now (2005)

I Am A Bird Now shows Antony’s songwriting at its personal best. Delicate, imaginative arrangements, unusual subject matter treated in a sensitive and intelligent way, and that voice – this album was incredibly fresh when it appeared amidst a tired and clichéd indie scene and despite all the media attention that followed, it still sounds remarkably singular. What remains is the haunting simplicity of the songs, and the passion that Antony pours into the performance.

24. XTC – Wasp Star (Apple Venus Volume 2) (2000)

XTC’s final offering sees the band in fine health. Apple Venus Volume 1 saw XTC take their jerky, oblique pop to new orchestral heights. Wasp Star retains the general sound, but feels somehow more relaxed and at ease with itself. These songs may have been rumoured to be offtakes from Volume 1, but when the material’s this good it seems churlish to complain. Lyrical, poppy and gorgeously melodic, yet unassuming and eccentric, Wasp Star makes a very fitting coda to XTC’s recording career. God bless.

23. Gang Gang Dance – Saint Dymphna (2008)

The peak of the Brooklyn scene. Gang Gang dance are such a weird mash-up of influences – electro, afrobeat, hip hop, psychedelia, post punk, R & B, noise… their music should be a complete unlistenable mess. Yet somehow, on Saint Dymphna it all comes together to create a thoroughly modern hybrid. Chanting mixes in with brutal electric precussion as MBV soundscapes swirl into themselves. More so then even their most accomplished peers, Gang Gang Dance have fused their disparate source material into their own identifiable sound. It’s catchy too.

22. Life Without Buildings – Any Other City (2001)

“If I lose / If I lose / If I lose….” The most remarkable thing about Life Without Buildings’ sole LP is Sue Tompkins’ stream of consciousness vocals. Her weird, chirpy voice stutters and trips over phrases. Lyrics seem to chase each other’s tails throughout entire songs, cutting and pasting back in on themselves. Mundane pieces of chatter become magical by being removed from their context. What on earth is she on about? That’s not to say that she carries the album by herself. The rest of the band provide a shimmering dreampop backing which swirls and swells, like a blessed-out Television. The band mysteriously broke up one year later, and nothing more was heard from them, but this album remains a thing of wondrous, mysterious beauty.

21. Eric Zann – Ouroborindra (2005)

Ghost Box 004. An eccentric release on an eccentric album, Eric Zann was a mute viol player whose eldritch music had the ability to cause rifts in the space-time continuum, allowing all sorts of cosmic horrors access to our dimension. Jim Jupp couldn’t have chosen a more appropriate pseudonym for this release. Whereas the other Ghost Box artists focus more on the uncanny then the menacing, most of the music on Ouroborindra is outright malevolent. With its references to Lovecraft, C S Lewis and Arthur Machen, the album is full of warped tape effects, evil sounding drones and analogue synthesizers, all manipulated to sound as menacing as possible. Don’t listen to this in the dark.

20. The Dirty Projectors – Bitte Orca (2009)

Against the odds, this album actually comes close to some kind of Gentle Giant meets Scritti Politti hybrid. With their concept albums about Don Henley and lounge-music reworkings of Black Flag albums, Dirty Projectors should be complete charlatans. I’m still not convinced that Dave Longstreth isn’t a charlatan; he certainly sounds, behaves and acts like one. Therefore the Dirty Projectors should just be smug hipster douchebaggery, but this actually is far from the case. I have no idea what this band’s game are, I mean what the hell are they trying to achieve? I suspect a massive put on, but then maybe Longstreth has some kind of idiot savant thing going on. Whatever his bizarre intentions maybe, when he writes a tune, stuff like ‘Useful Chamber’ and ‘Stillness Is The Move’ happen. Which ultimately makes him alright by me, I guess.

19. Coil – Musick To Play In The Dark Volumes 1 and 2 (2000)

Yeah this is kind of cheating. So bite me. Coil reinvented themselves at the turn of the millennium by opening themselves up to the female and lunar influences they had been shutting out. The results were some of their finest music. Laced with digital clicks, designed as the computer-age equivalent to the crackle of the fire, these dark and sensual songs give Coil an extra dimension that was missing from their earlier, more aggressive work. Haunted and haunting, Balance is at his shamanistic best throughout, whether flirting with ghost boys on ‘Where Are You?’ or dealing with the death of his parents by sheltering in memories of their mundane advice in ‘Broccoli’. ‘The Dreamer Is Still Asleep’ is a dark psychedelic epic, whilst the elegiac ‘Batwings’ ends with Balance singing made-up gibberish like it was Gregorian chants. The end effect is surprisingly moving.

18. Scritti Politti – White Bread, Black Beer (2006)

Who could have predicted that Green Gartside would return from years of exile in 2006 with his best album yet? Yet that’s what happened. Green Gartside finally got over his existential neurosis and post-structuralism to deliver the pop album he was born to make. From the Beatles-esque ‘Dr. Abernathy’ to Snow In The Sun’, the record is crammed full of great pop, all the more affecting for being emotionally honest for a change. The album was even followed by rare, celebratory live dates, most out of character for the borderline-reclusive Gartside.

17. Magma – Kohntarkosz Anteria (2004)

KA is one of Magma’s crowning achievements. It is one of their perfect albums, up there with Mekanik Destructiw Kommandoh, Kohntarkosz, Wurdah Itah and Theuz Haamtahk. The only reason it’s as low as number 17 is because, whilst it was recorded in 2004, it was written in the mid 70s, so I kind of feel placing it any higher is cheating. KA is part of the Kohntarkosz trilogy, and, as with the Wurdah Itah trilogy, lack of funding and the rigours of touring meant that when the time to record came round, Christian Vander skipped straight to the climactic Kohntartkosz. KA remained unrecorded for years, like Theusz Haamtahk and Ementeht Ra, the latter which remains so. Fortunately for us, Vander got Magma back together to finally do justice to the work, and it stands up there with the rest of the band’s masterpieces. Harsh, rhythmic and malevolent like its sister piece, KA finds the new line up coping wonderfully well with the material, and comparing quite favourably indeed thank you to the iconic Topp and Blasquiz line up which recorded the latter.

16. Acid Mothers Temple And The Melting Paradise UFO – Absolutely Freak Out! (Zap Your Mind) (2001)

Let’s face it, all AMT albums are interchangeable up to a point, so you may as well pick whatever one you like. I’m going for Absolutely Freak Out. It’s a double album, so there’s plenty of krautrock-damaged space rock to go round, it’s got a good solid line up with Cotton Casino on vocals, and it has a nice cover. Epic stuff.

15. Marillion – Marbles (2004)

Hogarth-era Marillion work in a strange way. Masterpieces are interspersed with increasingly experimental gap albums, which the band use as stepping stones to achieve the next masterpiece. Marbles is the result of the band expanding their palette on This Strange Engine, Radiation and Marillion.com, which saw them add Cuban party music, Radiohead-derived indie rock and electronica and trip hop to their list of influences. Those albums were all fantastic and it was a lot of fun to hear the band try out all these new styles, but it was only with Marbles that you got to see where they were going with all this. Marbles is a solid gold classic; identifiably prog in its classic incarnation, but at the same time boldly and brashly modern. ‘The Invisible Man’ is Marillion’s ‘Supper’s Ready’, a moving and lyrical epic that shifts through a number of styles, but augmented by electronics, incredibly inventive keyboard work from Mark Kelly and some very innovative guitar work from Steve Rothery. Elsewhere Marillion out-REM REM on ‘Genie’ and give us two more prog epics in Ocean Cloud and Neverland. Mud in the eye for anyone who still thinks they’re one-dimensional Genesis rip-offs.

14. The Advisory Circle – Other Channels (2008)

Ghost Box 010. Other Channels is The Advisory Circle’s first full-length release. Building on from the excellent Mind How You Go EP, Other Channels is the gateway to an alternate universe, the world as seen by bored sedated housewives when the Mogadon starts to go wrong. Cold War paranoia crackles through public service announcements, cracks start to appear in the ice, the visiting salesman is warped into a being of cosmic horror. The record harks back to a time when electronic music sounded genuinely alien and uncanny, and acts as a prism, allowing us to see the ghosts haunting the school piano and trapped in the wires. Yet despite the overwhelming sense of the Other, this may well be Ghost Box’s most inviting, accessible release.

13. Ghost – Hypnotic Underworld (2004)

Japan’s Ghost realized that there was still plenty of mileage to be gotten out of psychedelia and prog, and that one need not be retro in the slightest to do so. Thus, Ghost channel the spirits of Syd Barrett, Dave Allen and Robert Fripp, as well as home-grown oddities like Brast Burn and Flower Travellin’ Band to make their entirely individual take on prog rock. Dreamy and lush, yet with a muscular menacing undercurrent, Hypnotic Underworld keeps up the pace brilliantly, through its epic, multi-part title suite through the Far East Family Band whimsy of The Piper and a very authoritative cover of Syd’s ‘Dominoes’. Anywhere else this kind of behaviour would get you laughed at, but because their Japanese they wind up being kind of cool. Righteous.

12. Rings – Black Habit (2008)

The most under-rated album of the decade? Rings released this singular masterpiece to general indifference last year, which is a great shame. It is, quite simply, the best Paw Tracks release by some distance. The problem with the post-punk revival is that instead of moving on from such unsurpassed sonic innovations as Metal Box, Hex Enduction Hour or Deceit, the groups were content to rehash other people’s ideas, so that Andy Gill’s guitar sound is merely another indie trope. Black Habit is the direct descendant of Cut and Odyshape, our girls here ready and willing to explore the sonic landscapes opened up by those albums. Haunting and spectral, the songs’ exploratory structure never loses site of their emotional core, whilst the sonic brew is broad enough to encompass folk and dub influences.

11. The Focus Group – We Are All Pan’s People (2007)

Ghost Box 008. This was the first Ghost Box release I heard, and in true GB style, it opened up an entirely new musical dimension to me, one I was unaware even existed. Drawing from the experiments of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, library music and dinky 70s electronica, The Focus Group epitomize the Ghost Box house style, using these elements to create a spectral alternate present, in which the futurist dreams of the 60s and 70s came to pass. But whereas Belbury Poly and The Advisory Circle use uncanny samples and arcane reference points to create a sense of temporal displacement in their essentially melodic compositions, The Focus Group achieve this via a jarring cut-and-paste aesthetic. We Are All Pan’s People flickers between hokey folk songs, found sound, electronics and disembodied voices like a radio switching randomly between stations. Upon hearing it I was immediately reminded of The Faust Tapes in the way the music creates its own internal logic through a mixing together of seemingly unrelated musical snippets. Pan’s People holds its own against such a monolithic and iconic work, and like Copey decribes in Krautrocksampler one can imagine kids in the playground doing skits of it, surely a sign of a record’s power to get under your skin.

10. Joanna Newsom – Ys (2006)

This record is quite simply astonishing. Precious little else released this decade can touch it for invention and musical ambition. Whilst the idea of a precocious female singer songwriter armed with a harp can arouse suspicion before you even see the medieval style painting on the cover art, Ys is a thoroughly well-realized song cycle. The record is, to all intents and purposes, a modern version of Roy Harper’s Stormcock. Like Harper, Newsom explores the mystical and the sensual with a rare warmth and good humor, whilst the music is dazzlingly complex. The 5 songs are packed full of melodic ideas, gorgeous chord changes and stunning melodies, adeptly supported by Van Dyke Park’s orchestral arrangement, which adds tonal colour but never gets in the way. In a world where music has increasingly become the background noise to aggressive commercials, and everyone is trying to undercut everyone else to appeal to the lowest common denominator, Ys’ delicate beauty stood out even more.

9. Burial – Burial (2006)

Burial’s self-titled debut conjures up a London of the not too distant future, submerged in water and populated by fleeting ghosts. The music is a spectral echo of rave, all empty spaces and pirate radio crackle. Burial is otherworldly and mysterious, something not even the revelation of his identity can shatter. Burial’s debut just edges it over the excellent follow up Untrue for one crucial reason – the voices are more disembodied and submerged, achieving a ghostly subliminal presence that gives the tracks more power. There is a real understanding of space and silence, creating an almost cavernous impression, like Joy Division playing in a mausoleum. The human presence in the music is numbed, lost, confused. As a result the music achieves a profound but never cloying sense of pathos. The album reflects perfectly post-millennial tension, the vague gnawing sense of dread triggered by too much information and too little sleep as the world spirals out of control around us.

8. Peter Gabriel – Up (2002)

Peter Gabriel has released music in 5 different decades, and is still going from strength to strength. Up shows just what a mature, confident and exciting musician the man is. Gabriel’s natural thirst for new sounds and sense of adventure has served him well. Here he creates a rich tapestry from cutting edge digital noise and traditional African and Asian instruments. Up sounds sonically gorgeous and ridiculously exciting. But at the heart of it all, Gabriel is still just an incredible songwriter, and the songs here sit comfortably with his best material, which considering the man’s track record is no mean feet. ‘More Than This’ and ‘I Grieve’ show him at his heartbreaking best, whilst ‘Signal To Noise’ uses a guest appearance by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan to achieve its apocalyptic climax. ‘No Way Out’ and ‘The Drop’ are haunting and frightening in equal measure, whilst ‘Darkness’ switches from pools of quiet beauty to chasms of roaring terror in the flick of a knife. Throughout it all, Gabriel’s voice is in fine form. Always sounding curiously aged, he has grown into it know, and it has lost none of its warmth or its passion in the process.

7. The Knife – Silent Shout (2006)

“I caught a glimpse, now it haunts me…” The Knife’s second LP saw them move on from their merely excellent debut to produce one of the All Time Classics. Whilst not exactly a concept album, the songs feel linked together to form a cohesive whole in a way that the tracks on Deep Cuts just don’t. Dark and brooding, the songs have a common thread of unhealthy relationships and shifting identity. This is conveyed brilliantly by Karin Dreijer Andersson’s already impressive vocals, which are subjected to all manner of sonic manipulations and tricksiness to create a host of disturbed and disturbing characters, from the sirens on ‘The Captain’ to the violent misogynistic gangster in ‘One Hit’. The music backs her every inch of the way, from the haunted pulsings of the title track to the apocalyptic sonic bombing of ‘We Share Our Mother’s Health’. The Knife really show up all these crappy synth pop bands that have sprung up recently, because they are able to use electronics to their full potential, creating a detailed and absorbing sonic world, whereas most of these muppets with synthesizers and female lead singers with dubious haircuts have difficulty convincingly ripping off Duran Duran.

6. The Fall – Country On The Click (2003)

Seeing as it’s no longer the real new Fall LP by any stretch of the imagination, I’ve decided that this album can now revert to its original intended title. The Fall seem pretty much indestructible at this point, having come back from the brink and gone from strength to strength over a series of incredibly strong LPs. This remains the high point of 2000s Fall. After the fiasco of Are You The Missing Winner, easily their worst record since the dreaded Cerebral Caustic, only the faithful could have been getting fired up about this release, but they were proved right and then some. As soon as ‘Green Eyed Loco Man’ bursts through the speakers, it’s clear they mean business in a way that hasn’t been apparent since the heady days of The Infotainment Scan. The football hooligan anthem ‘Theme From Sparta FC’ is one of those classic Fall shoulda-been-a-hit-single songs, brutal, nasty and catchy as all hell. Townie anthem ‘Contraflow’ sees MES laying into the countryside over a crushing riff, whilst ‘Johnny, Janet and James’ and ‘Mountain Energei’ see the band successfully engaging with their reflective side for the first time in years. ‘Mike’s Love Xexagon’ sees Mark E Smith take the side of the world’s most hated Beach Boy over whooshing electronics and spectral chanting, proof that however prominent the band’s pop side becomes, they never let their experimental side rest either. The Fall would go on to produce three more great albums this decade, but Country On The Click remains not only the high point of this period of their existence, but one of the All Time Fall Classics, up there with Hex, Infotainment and Saving Grace.

5. Erase Errata – Other Animals (2001)

The post-punk revival promised so much, a return to innovation and experimentation in guitar pop after years of retro posturing. And initially it looked like it might be able to deliver, especially if you listen to Erase Errata’s stunning debut album. No mere rehash of other people’s ideas, Erase Errata’s stroppy, choppy and angular music is influenced by Gang of Four, The Fall and The Minutemen, but also a healthy dose of Captain Beefheart. Rather then just use these as clever reference points, the band incorporate them into their own individual sound, using improvisation as a basis for coming up with ideas. The songs are short and wonderfully economic, the longest song clocking in at just under three minutes, because the band use the old Wire technique of the song stops when the text runs out. The lyrical subject matter proves the band to be eloquent and politically aware, and able to talk about such issues without resorting to soap-box sloganeering. Bands in Erase Errata’s wake would dilute the original post-punk sound in order to achieve mass commercial success, but our heroes continue to plug away, as vital and as singular as ever.

4. Astra – The Weirding (2009)

In which prog rock returns to conquer the world. Astra’s debut arrived fully formed, as if our heroes had just fallen through a time rift from 1973. A double vinyl concept album (about some vague apocalyptic rumblings, I think) with gorgeous cover art, which is how you do these things if you’re doing it properly, the title track alone manages to sonically reference ‘Cirkus’ and ‘Echoes’ and still winds up sounding like its own beast. The album is suffused with gorgeous mid-period Floyd vocal harmonies, cosmic guitar and thunderous mellotron not heard since the heady days of Lizard. The group’s instrumental prowess is really second to none, and on the side-long cosmic instrumental ‘Ouroboros’ they all get a chance to spread their wings to dazzling effect. The album’s true strength is the way that the group manage to transcend their influences by the sheer strength of their cosmic vision. Thus, while you can hear echoes of prog rock heroes both famous and obscure (is that some Far East Family Band I hear in there?), Astra achieve their own individual sound. The album closes, in proper prog rock fashion, with the gloriously epic ‘Beyond To Slight The Maze’, which just keeps rising in grandeur and intensity. One of my albums of the year for 2009, and a definite highlight of the decade.

3. Electrelane – The Power Out (2004)

The way Verity Susman sings ‘Ave Maria’ at the end of ‘Gone Under The Sea’, somehow both spiritual and wistful, is one of the most moving moments in music of the last 10 years. Electrelane were true greats, an inspired mix of Stereolab, Raincoats and Neu!, always delivered with passion and intensity and a knowledge that louder and faster doesn’t necessarily mean better. Despite having a well-defined sound, The Power Out shows just how versatile that sound was, and how far removed they were from the mere Stereolab copyists some of the press had them pegged as. The choir on ‘The Valleys’ is one of the most inventive uses of choir in pop music, utterly unexpected the first time you hear it and singularly powerful. ‘Oh Sombra!’ sees the band tear it up in style, and elsewhere the band never drop the ball, moving deftly from lyrical instrumentals to songs with lyrics taken from Nietzsche and Siegfried Sassoon. Moves that would be pretentious in lesser bands’ hands come off here with surprising ease, as the band engage with the emotional core of their highly sourced texts whilst avoiding any pomposity or smugness. It helps that any intellectual pretension in the lyrics is offset by the glorious heady rush of the music, full of fun, energy and vitality. The perfect mix of sonic experimentation and oblique pop songwriting, why Electrelane remain to this day hideously under-rated is something of a mystery.

2. Belbury Poly – The Willows (2004)

Ghost Box 003. In many ways the label’s defining release, Belbury Poly took their name from the evil institution striving to bring about apocalypse in C S Lewis’ That Hideous Strength and named their debut album after Algernon Blackwood’s greatest horror story, immediately setting out the Ghost Box aesthetic. Sonically the album covers all their musical bases as well, from library music to BBC Radiophonic Workshop via stilted 70s electronica. But more then that, the album, both in the music and with its distinctive house style art work, arcane quotes on the back and blurred photographs, solidified the Ghost Box world – strange goings on in the fictional town of Belbury, locked in an alternate reality populated by the specters of 60s futurism and the worst nightmares of Machen and Lovecraft. The album acts as a distorting portal, briefly superimposing their world onto ours, in much the same way as the eldritch forces in Blackwood’s story encroach into our reality. The title track summons those very forces by name, all sinister buzzing and analogue synthesizers, whilst ‘A Warning’ sends out distress signals across the vastness of space. The sense of menace never actually manifests, instead it is hinted at through the music’s hokey Otherness, summoning buried memories of 60s British science fiction and public information films fractured and incorrect, to create a sense that something is naggingly, intangibly wrong.

1. Diagonal – Diagonal (2008)

I saw Diagonal play live a couple of years ago supporting Acid Mothers Temple. I had never heard of them before and wasn’t really expecting all that much, but they came on and just completely progged out. Most neo-prog is simply over-produced AOR masquerading as a poor man’s Genesis, but this was something completely different. These guys clearly knew their Soft Machine and their King Crimson. Brutally complex, the musicianship was quite astounding, but what really struck me was how much fun these guys were having. Here was a bunch of musicians who really loved what they did, and that sheer joi de vivre crossed over to the audience as well. I remember thinking how great it was in this day and age where most bands just want to cynically chase the dollar that there were people making music like this. I then promptly forgot about them until my brother said to me one day, ‘You must hear this new prog band I’ve just discovered, they’re really something else.’ And the album he had found was Diagonal’s self-titled debut. Sure enough, the songs came bursting through the speakers with the same unbridled joy and invention. It’s just so refreshing to know that there are people who realize that Soft Machine and Crimso’s work is not finished, that there are still new and exciting things to do with it. Thus ‘Semi Permeable Menbrain’ comes on like a direct descendant of ‘Larks Tongues In Apic Part 1’, except with added Canterbury Sound keyboards and whooshy electronics. But this is no mere pastiche of prog rock past. Diagonal sound entirely individual. Nowhere is this more apparent then on album highlight and indeed one of the All Time Great Songs, the all-conquering epic ‘Deathwatch’. The song builds up from quiet vocal harmonies to a stunning instrumental climax with each melodic line interweaving and rising through a number of twists and turns to its glorious conclusion. Diagonal are a new band with immense promise, and we can only wonder at where their flights of imagination will take us next.

Déjà VROOOM, or How I Got Back My Power To Believe in 2000s-era Krim

2009-03-03T22:32:00.000Z

The ConstruKction of Light (2000), Heavy ConstruKction (2000) and The Power To Believe (2003)

Our favourite artists are more likely to cause feelings of intense betrayal when they release bad albums. However, because they’re favourites, we are more likely to keep working at some artists’ poorer LPs in the defiant belief that they could not possibly be as bad as all that simply because of who the artists are. There really is no logic to this. However many times I listen to Cerebral Caustic, it’s not going to stop sucking. Yet recently, after repeat listenings, two albums by one of my favourite bands which I had previously thought to be among the greatest disappointments in music history have proved to be not quite as merit-less as I thought.
Between 1969 and 1995, King Crimson released a wealth of great music. Guitarist Robert Fripp led the band through a series of line-ups, with each album building on the innovations of the one before. In the early 70s, the band mutated into the highly improvisational Wetton-Cross-Bruford (bass, violin and drums respectively) line-up which, over 3 LPs and various stunning live performances, produced music of unparalleled intensity, twisted cerebral malevolence and lyrical beauty. After a hiatus, the group returned in the 80s without Wetton and Cross but with Adrian Belew (guitars, vocals) and Tony Levin (bass), two experienced American musicians who helped forge a new, post-New Wave version of King Crimson. Their 3 80s albums represent one of the few sensible attempts of prog to respond to the shifting musical landscape post-1977. Their sound became a warped mix of gamelan, afrobeat, prog and proto-postrock, and King Crimson put many New Wave and post-punk groups to shame, let alone their one-time peers such as Genesis and Yes. Then, after another sabbatical, the group returned in the mid nineties, still with Fripp, Belew, Levin and Bruford but with the addition of Pat Mastelotto (drums) and Trey Gunn (bass). THRAK was released at the height of Britpop, and proved that, in a sea of retro mediocrity, Crimso were still a force to be reckoned with, as sharp, innovative and brutal as ever. Then followed a period of instability, with the band fracturing into various side-projects to search for new directions. In 2000, Crimson reformed, reduced to the quartet of Fripp, Belew, Mastelotto and Gunn, and released The ConstruKction of Light, which was followed in 2003 by The Power To Believe. Both records felt like a massive letdown. Floundering without the support of Bruford and Levin, the band appeared reduced to churning out increasingly uninspired retreads of former glories, heavy with self-reference and bluster but low on melody and innovation. The latter LP earned the less-then-affectionate nickname The ConstruKction of Shite in my household, whilst I heard The Power To Believe once and refused to part with my hard-earned cash for it. King Crimson and the once-invincible Robert Fripp appeared to have lost their way. Cue horrendous disillusion.
Except, about once every year, I would dig out The ConstruKction of Light and listen to it again in the hope that I had missed something the last time round and that, on this hearing, everything would shift into place and the record would reveal itself to be, if not a masterpiece, then at least not a complete embarrassment. This is ridiculous behaviour and a complete waste of time that could be spent listening to a record which doesn’t suck, and I wouldn’t recommend this practice to anybody. Except… except….
Except, finally, after nine years, it finally happened. The ConstruKction of Light remains King Crimson’s worst studio album, but the good news is, actually, it’s not a terrible LP. It’s not even a very bad LP, and in fact has some sublime moments on it. Throughout the album, Trey Gunn, whilst being a perfectly respectable musician, has a hard time moving out of Tony Levin’s shadow, and Pat Mastelotto’s drumming has you longing for Bruford’s return. His drumming lacks the dynamics, subtlety and rhythmic inventiveness that characterises Bruford’s playing, and, whilst the man is certainly a hard act to follow, Pat doesn’t help himself with his over-reliance on bizarre electronic drums and playing in a particularly heavy and stolid style. Having said that, the rhythm section is not entirely to blame for the album’s patchy hit rate. THRAK hinted at chinks in King Crimson’s armour with its occasional tendency to self-referencing: ‘VROOOM’ intentionally recalls ‘Red’ from 1974 in its structure and melody, and there were several ‘knowing’ nods to earlier Crimson LPs in Belew’s lyrics. This process is taken even further here, with large sections of the album being taken up with reworkings of classic Crimso material. ‘FraKctured’ and ‘Larks’ Tongues in Aspic, part IV’ are both unnecessary reworkings of pieces by the classic 70s Crimson, and simply serve to highlight the deficiencies of the new line-up when compared to the legendary Fripp-Wetton-Cross-Bruford line-up. Talking about giving your critics a stick to hit you with. Having said that, ‘FraKctured’, whilst never reaching the dizzying heights of the original, is nice enough, and does contain moments of sublime beauty and bone-crunching menace which make it worth a listen. ‘Larks’ Tongues’, however, fares less well. Split into three further parts for reasons best known to the band, this track is a mess of heavy dissonance which at times suggests that it might break into something less confused but sadly never does. Quite why they felt the need to do ‘Part IV’ is something of a mystery, as the 80s line-up already attempted to revisit ‘Larks Tongues In Aspic’ with the similarly unnecessary and unsuccessful ‘Part III’. However, Adrian Belew’s ‘Coda: I Have A Dream’, which is messily tacked onto the end, is prettily melodic and features some nice playing by both guitarists.
Perhaps as disturbing as Crimson’s reliance on their past is their sudden fondness for novelty songs. The album opens with the truly bizarre ‘ProzaKc Blues’, which is basically King Crimson’s idea of a piss-take of a blues song, replete with Belew pitch-shifted to sound like a gruff blues singer. Featuring joke lyrics, the song is funny but irritating on first listen and just plain irritating on subsequent hearings. ‘The World’s My Oyster Soup Kitchen Floor Wax Museum’ is basically Belew playing a weird word-association game over a knotty, dissonant backing, and sounds like it was more fun to write then it is to listen to, and is chock-full of ‘cute’ references to previous Crimson songs.
However, once King Crimson stop pissing about and actually get down to business, they prove that they do indeed still have the old magic flowing in them. The title track is a thing of wonder, and sounds like nothing in the Crimso catalogue before it. Fripp and Belew’s guitars intertwine like chiming bells, winding through a spiralling stop-start structure that slowly builds into a wonderfully lyrical and melodic song, with Belew’s chiming vocals and some fantastically bizarre lyrics (‘And if Warhol is a genius, then what am I? / A speck of lint on the penis of an alien’). ‘Into the Frying Pan’ sounds like a Beatles song being sung backwards, with some excellent soloing from Fripp. And the bonus track ‘Heaven and Earth’, which is numerous studio jams edited and pasted together, sees the band playing with a subtlety, intensity and lyrical quality missing throughout much of the album proper. All in all, although ConstruKction is a muddled and messy album, it is not without its charm and moments of true transcendence. A listen to Heavy ConstruKction, the triple live album recorded during the tour for ConstruKction, reveals more of this line-up’s strengths and weaknesses. Whilst the band muddle through bizarre cover versions and various old classics which suffer the loss of Bruford and Levin (Mastelotto seems incapable of handling the driving tom-tom beat of ‘Dinosaur’ by himself), much of the new material shines, especially smoother and less cluttered readings of ‘The ContruKction of Light’ and ‘Into the Frying Pan’. The third disc, however, is a real joy. Consisting entirely of improvisations recorded at various stages of the tour, it reveals that this Krim is capable of creating music of visceral intensity and alien beauty with its own individual voice.
Having finally come to terms with ConstruKction, I decided to track down a copy of The Power To Believe and see how it held up in the light of my recent revelation. Although The Power To Believe was generally better received then its predecessor. It didn’t do a thing for me at the time. Listening back to it now, this is squarely the fault of ‘Facts of Life’ and the abysmal ‘Happy With What You Have To Be Happy With’, Crimso’s worst ever track and inexplicably the lead single. Whilst ‘Facts of Life’ is simply poor prog-metal, albeit with some admittedly nice Fripp soloing at various points, ‘Happy…’, this LP’s joke song, this time with Nu Metal as its ‘satirical’ target, is just appalling. To save the band any further embarrassment, I shall say no more about it if they promise never to play the damn thing live ever again. Once you get rid of these tracks, it becomes clear that The Power To Believe is actually a fine album, with the band learning some lessons from ConstruKction’s relative failure. Mastelotto’s drumming is greatly improved, and his drumming is incorporated with electronic drums in a much less grating way. He even plays some almost Bruford-esque fills on ‘EleKtriK’. ‘Level Five’ continues the murky dissonant riffing that marred ‘Larks’ Tongues part IV’, but with more purpose, momentum and melody then before. ‘EleKtriK’ features chiming guitars reminiscent of ‘The ConstruKction of Light’, but in a much smoother and more linear context, building into a ferocious instrumental. ‘Eyes Wide Open’ is a glorious Belew ballad in the tradition of ‘One Time’ or ‘Matte Kudasai’, featuring some lovely guitar playing from both Belew and Fripp, and ‘Dangerous Curves’ is a motorik slow-burner in the style of ‘Talking Drum’, building to a shuddering climax and infused with real menace. The title track, split into four parts, is built around a recurring haiku sung by a voxcodered Belew, and reappears in various contexts, from delicate ambient Frippertronics to chiming gamelan percussion. Overall, The Power To Believe is a much more confident and less troubled recording then The ConstruKction of Light, although, like the previous album, it does suggest that Crimson are now uncomfortably dependent on their past.
I was glad to find that The ConstruKction of Light and The Power To Believe are much better albums then I thought they were, and it’s nice having new King Crimson material to listen to. Although neither album quite sees the band able to shake off the heavy weight of their impressive past and move on as they used to be able to, both are thoroughly respectable efforts, and hint that there may still be life left in the beast. The more out-there material on ContruKction of Light, Heavy ConstruKction and The Power To Believe suggests that, if they really want it, and providing they don’t get complacent, King Crimson still have the potential to strike out and progress to pastures new. And that’s certainly something worth believing in.

One Of Those Things: 2008 In Review

2009-01-13T23:48:00.000Z

So here we are at the end of another year. By most accounts, 2008 has been a lean year for music, with the disparity between the usual critical end-of-year lists showing a lack of consensus on direction. I’m almost tempted to mark the musical year by the losses – great individuals such as Klaus Dinger (Neu!), Rick Wright (Floyd) and Ron Ashton (Stooges), to great bands – my favourite modern band, Electrelane, are on ‘indefinite hiatus’, and The Long Blondes are no more. Nostalgia was as prominent as ever, with more and more bands responding to the call to reform and do just a few more gigs for the cash. Not that this didn’t provide one of the musical highlights of the year, with the opportunity to see My Bloody Valentine live in all their glory. Gig-wise, other highlights were Marillion, Rings, and, as ever, The Fall. Things have been pretty quiet on the blogging front, partly due to lack of time and partly because when I did have the time, I just didn’t feel inspired to preach to the void. However, time and energy permitting, I do have some fun posts planned ahead, from a review of Spirit’s excellent Spirit of ’76 double LP to the long-promised and highly controversial Why Marillion Are Loads Better Then Radiohead post. 2008 was also the year I lost faith in Nick Cave. I still love his early records, but after going cold on the bizarrely over-rated Abattoir Blues/Lyre Of Orpheus double and not warming to Grinderman at all, I found myself simply not caring about his new record, something that only a year ago would have seemed unthinkable. Hopefully I’ll recover from my Cave-related apathy and Old Saint Nick will recover from his recent tendency to do his hammed-up mad preacher act over every track and get back to singing again. Other irritants include Vampire Weekend and Hot Chip. Aside from Fleet Foxes and Bon Iver, which I have still not heard, Vampire Weekend really was the indie hit of the year, the album praised to the high heavens in Pitchfork and charting high in most end of year polls. I suppose they are this year’s Strokes/Franz Ferdinand/whatever, which in itself is mildly irritating, but that’s not really what gets my goat. So much noise has been made about Vampire Weekend’s Ivy League education and their Afrobeat influences that you could be forgiven for expecting the record to a) have intelligent and literate lyrics and b) actually have Afrobeat influences. I’d go for that; that sounds like quite an enjoyable record to me. The problem being that all the premature hype and backlash cycle (insanely completed before the band had even released their record!) served to obscure that the album is, in most respects, your typical late 2000s meat and veg indie record. The lyrics cheerfully reference Oxford commas and the like whilst still being as shallow, banal and crushingly unimaginative as the next band’s. And Afrobeat influences? Come on, these guys listened to Graceland once and quite liked it, that’s as far as it goes. If you’re going to bang on about Afrobeat influences it’s not unreasonable to expect at least a little rhythmic sophistication, an attempt to recreate or absorb the blistering, primal fusion of funk, jazz and African music found in Fela Kuti’s work. Vampire Weekend are as rhythmicly staid as the next bland, sexless stadium indie drivel. Hot Chip have been vaguely irritating me for a while by crassly re-imagining LCD Soundsystem’s ‘All Channels Open’ plundering of past electronic and organic dance music as a poor, stodgy Pet Shop Boys rip off with smug lyrics by stupid people who are under the delusion that they’re smarter then their fans. This is all ignorable enough if you put your mind to it, but it’s their recent work collaborating with Peter Gabriel (covering Vampire Weekend, no less!) and Robert Wyatt that is really irritating. I think it reflects quite nicely on Wyatt and Gabriel, who are clearly too nice and polite to tell Hot Chip to piss off, but really I wish they would find somebody musically more interesting and, well, not crap, to collaborate. How about Robert Wyatt doing guest keyboard work on the next Belbury Poly album?
2008 hasn’t been a complete write off for new music by any means. There has been some great music released. The new Fall LP is reliably excellent, as is the new Marillion album. Ghost Box have been releasing consistently excellent and fascinating stuff for a number of years now, and their 2008 release, Other Channels by The Advisory Circle, is possibly the best thing to come out on that label. The Rings album is possibly the best record to be released on Paw Tracks (and that includes all the Animal Collective LPs), and Diagonal’s debut LP, coming across like a halfway house between early Softs and 70s Crim, is an excellent resurrection of all the elements of prog that are so sorely missed in modern music without falling into the common pitfall of neo-prog. The problem is that the chances of these records reaching the audience they deserve seem farther away then ever. Although in some ways the internet might level the playing field in music by opening all the channels, most of the channels are still clogged up with lowest common denominator guff. And I think in this day and age, there is always someone willing to go lower, crasser, more obvious, and more commercial, less challenging then you, which essentially leaves interesting music high and dry as far as the market is concerned. So whilst I am sure that there will be plenty of great music released in 2009, I also am sure that I will have to look further then the pages of NME or Pitchfork to find it, and that its chances of breaking out and having an impact on mainstream music to make it less dull and homogenized and more exciting and innovative is slim. And, as ever, I feel the tug of the past more and more strongly as the reissues pile up and more and more lost treasures from the past are excavated. Ultimately though, I hope that I’m proved wrong.

Cultural Revolution vs. Intellectual Bankruptcy: Kill Your Idols (2004)

2008-07-29T23:48:00.000Z

“[It] tells me absolutely nothing, shows me nothing new, is not visionary, and is by its very nature and attitude redundant.” Lydia Lunch on the New York music scene, 2004

This year has seen the publication of three different books on No Wave. Using three different approaches, the books are well-informed and passionate about their subject, but the critical consensus is that none of them quite manages to get to grips with the violent inspiration behind the music or truly engage with the scene’s nihilistic world view. This suggests that there is still a healthy interest in No Wave music, but that it remains frequently misunderstood and misrepresented. Scott Crary’s 2004 documentary Kill Your Idols was made before all these books, and it also attempts to explain the music of No Wave whilst looking at its influence on musicians of the mid-noughties.
No Wave, for anyone lucky enough to avoid my drunken rantings, was a scene based in New York in the late 70s and early 80s. Driven by the nihilistic anger that inspired punk but contemptuous of a scene which they saw as musically conservative recycling of Chuck Berry riffs, a bunch of disparate artists and down-and-outs dispensed with such niceties as musical training, chords and conventional song structures to produce untamed and raw music which they felt did justice to their feelings of anger and alienation. Though chaotic and unmelodic, this music was highly inventive, original and bristling with invention and passion, often because the practitioners strove to make music that was unprecedented and also had to overcome the barrier of having literally no musical training whatsoever. Whilst The Clash and The Sex Pistols boasted about being unable to play despite clearly having respectable enough musical chops, the No Wave bands had often genuinely never picked up their instruments before deciding to make music. As a result, the music made by bands such as DNA, Mars, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks and James Chance and the Contortions among others sounds unlike any music produced by anyone before or since. Most of the bands lasted for only a short amount of time, preferring not so much to burn out as to explode in a violent blast of inspiration and energy rather then staying around to turn into everything that they opposed. However No Wave’s use of untutored guitar noise gave birth to bands such as Sonic Youth and Swans who redefined the way the guitar was used in rock music.
The first 30 minutes of Kill Your Idols is stunning, and is worth seeing for any No Wave fan for the archive footage of live performances. Martin Rev (Suicide), Lydia Lunch, Jim Sclavunos (both Teenage Jesus and the Jerks), Arto Lindsay (DNA) and Glenn Branca all talk about their lives and their music, with Lydia on her usual good form. However, then the film cuts to 2002 to compare No Wave to the (then) current New York music scene. In a series of acutely embarrassing and occasionally sickening interviews, the class of 2002 are shown up for the shallow poseurs they are. Particularly cringe-worthy is Karen O from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, who comes across as an utterly vacuous valley girl (replete with “Like, y’kneaow”s and all – for the edited highlights, plus some of LL’s putdowns thrown in for good measure, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhAK2flDdXA ), whilst the execrable A.R.E. Weapons are so shallow, stupid, sexist and unpleasant that it makes you profoundly glad that nobody’s heard of them since 2002. Seeing the documentary some four years after it came out only makes many of the modern bands sound more myopic and idiotic, considering what happened to their careers afterwards. The documentary is trying to show up the young pretenders for how vacuous, vain, idiotic and unimaginative they are compared to the No Wave musicians, but surely this is a moot point. As a result, time is spent on a number of modern bands who don’t deserve it, whilst No Wave pioneers such as Mars and James Chance and the Contortions are mentioned only in the passing. In the subsequent showdown between the No Wavers and the new groups, the old groups come off infinitely better. Lydia Lunch is particularly scathing, and looking at the evidence it’s impossible not to agree with her. The tone is not of old fogeys upset by being deposed but of innovative and driven artists thoroughly disappointed with the blatant careerism and the lack of imagination on display. Of the new bands, only Gogol Bordello (whose music I do not know) comes off well – he is clearly an intelligent guy with a deep and sincere passion for the music he makes, and is just as upset at the lack of imagination displayed by today’s guitar bands.
Despite burning out well over 20 years ago, No Wave still holds a large appeal for people such as me who weren’t around at the time. Watching the first part of this film brought me back to all the reasons why No Wave has this strange draw for me: the passion and intensity of the music, the raw, no-nonsense world view of the musicians, the sheer inventiveness and originality of approach, and above all the shocking alien-ness of the music itself. However, the times and the place that inspired this music – 1970s New York – are gone. The specific tensions that fuelled the scene have changed greatly as well, as has the musical landscape. Although Kill Your Idols does provoke thought about the disparity between No Wave and the current music scene in New York, other then geography it presents no sensible reason why we should compare the two in the first place. The division between the No Wavers and the modern bands is inevitable as they ultimately share so little common ground, both sonically and idealistically. I would have liked to see the film go into more detail about No Wave – the film would have benefited greatly from interviews with Mars and James Chance and the Contortions, as well as other members of DNA, and there were loads of No Wave bands untouched – and what made it so special. It would have been interesting to compare No Wave to the Mutant Disco movement that followed it, with 99 Records, Liquid Liquid, ESG and the like. Mutant Disco was musically very different from No Wave – particularly in its embrace of dance music and black culture – but was influenced by many of the same issues and ideas, and a comparison between the two would have made more sense then the comparison in the film. It would also be nice to hear from some more bands that were more obviously influenced by No Wave then the pale post-punk/garage rock revivalists who appeared in the film. Sonic Youth, Swans and Foetus – bands who came around shortly after No Wave and were influenced by its sound and approach – all appear in the documentary and are interesting and insightful on the original No Wave scene, so why not, say, UT, The Birthday Party, Einsturzende Neubauten or Fire Engines? Having said that, the first 30 minutes of Kill Your Idols are excellent, and Lydia Lunch and Arto Lindsay in particular are wonderful throughout. As a huge No Wave fan, though, it’s hard not to feel a little short-changed by the end product.
No Wave was more important then its flash-in-the-pan duration might suggest. The fact that to this day the music has lost none of its visceral punch is a testament to the strength and individuality of its creators’ visions, and it stands as a stellar example of triumph of imagination and passion over adversity. Perhaps one of the reasons that No Wave holds such fascination in today’s derivative, reissue-repackage culture is that its contradictory and divisive nature along with its uncompromising sonic extremism means that it can’t be easily pinned down, reprocessed and revived to be sold again to a new generation. The music of No Wave, the intriguing characters that made the music and the things that drove and shaped their particular artistic outlook are worthy of a fascinating book and/or documentary, but sadly this has not yet been made.

Pick An Album For Every Year You've Been Alive

2008-07-07T21:19:00.002Z

Because I actually have nothing better to do.

1985 – This Nation’s Saving Grace – The Fall
1986 – Liberty Belle and the Black Diamond Express – The Go-Betweens
1987 – Clutching At Straws – Marillion
1988 – The House Of Love – The House Of Love
1989 – Me & A Monkey On The Moon – Felt
1990 – Nowhere – Ride
1991 – Loveless – My Bloody Valentine
1992 – Slanted & Enchanted – Pavement
1993 – Transient Random Noise Bursts With Announcements – Stereolab
1994 – Dummy - Portishead
1995 – Mobile Safari – The Pastels
1996 – All The Pretty Little Horses – Current 93
1997 – Levitate – The Fall
1998 – Mezzanine - Massive Attack
1999 – Musick To Play In The Dark Volume 1 – Coil
2000 – Musick To Play In The Dark Volume 2 – Coil
2001 – Other Animals – Erase Errata
2002 – Up – Peter Gabriel
2003 – The Real New Fall LP – The Fall
2004 – The Power Out - Electrelane
2005 – Axes – Electrelane
2006 – Burial - Burial
2007 – We Are All Pan’s People – The Focus Group
2008 – Other Channels – The Advisory Circle

Much more competition for the earlier years I can tell you.

Top 10 Non-Punk Albums of 1977

2008-06-06T22:34:00.001Z

Ah, 1977. Year Zero. The Year Everything Changed. The year punk arrived in a hurricane of raw passion, blood and snot to save us from the bloated prog rock bores hogging the airwaves. The Clash! The Sex Pistols! The Damned! What a pity it all sucked. Certain corners of the music press would have you believe that punk was the be all and end all, and that the early 1970s were a cultural wasteland redeemed only by the odd David Bowie or Lou Reed album. This is, of course, complete nonsense. Last year there was a lot of fuss about the thirtieth anniversary of punk, so here is a list of my top 10 albums from 1977 that have nothing to do with punk, to prove there was plenty to listen to if you didn’t believe that a bunch of badly-dressed Stones wannabes were going to change the world. I have deliberately avoided David Bowie’s classic 77 albums, Low and “Heroes”, because of their huge impact on punk and post-punk music, and also classic early post-punk albums such as Wire’s Pink Flag and Suicide and Television’s debut albums on the ground of fairness.

10. Rush – A Farewell To Kings

Rush only really hit their stride with 1976’s 2112, a gloriously overblown concept album stuffed to breaking point with spaceships, evil priests and Ayn Rand inspired dystopias all played out to an immaculate hard riffing virtuoso prog rock. Remarkably they only got better from then on, with next year’s A Farewell To Kings proving that they had no trouble following up a classic LP. The title track is a brutal anti-monarchist rant set to crunchy guitar and blistering drumming that clearly gave the Manics a few ideas, and ‘Closer To The Heart’ slyly broke the band into FM radio. The swirling ‘Cygnus X-1’ is more preposterous space rock that paves the way for the band’s next album, Hemispheres, which would see them maturing and filling out their sound with gargantuan keyboards. However the unavoidable highlight of the album is ‘Xanadu’, an epic based on Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’ which shows the band at their breathtaking best (although dear old Samuel must turn in his grave every time he hears those lyrics). Alex Lifeson’s guitar mutates from hard riffing to acoustic arpeggios to the signature riff that sounds eerily like ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’ only good, whilst Neil Peart is let loose on a range of drums, bells and gongs to help drive the song to its thunderous conclusion.

9. Steely Dan – Aja

On Aja Steely Dan’s Walter Becker and Donald Fagen reached their peak sonically, demanding an increasingly accomplished array of session musicians to do take after take of the songs on this album until they got the sound in their heads on tape. As such it was the antithesis of punk’s rough and ready passion. Steely Dan were no slouches in the songwriting department either, their sophisticated jazzy chords and smooth melodies miles away from punk’s three chord limit. As a result of Becker and Fagen’s increasingly perfectionist work ethic, Aja is played immaculately. The music is sublime, from Wayne Shorter’s sax solo on the opening track to the silky funk underpinning ‘I Got The News’. However, just because this record is classy doesn’t mean that it’s all sweatness and light – far from it. Becker and Fagen are at their most snide and sarcastic throughout, as ‘Black Cow’ is the bizarre and sinister aftermath of a failed relationship and ‘Deacon Blue’ is the song of a drunk, jazz-loving hipster woefully out of place in a sports-obsessed America. Cryptic and sinister yet smooth enough to be played on the radio to unsuspecting civilians everywhere, Steely Dan were, in their own way, much more dangerous then punk.

8. Genesis – Wind And Wuthering

There is a press shot of Genesis from around the time The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway came out. Peter Gabriel sits in the centre, wearing only a pair of torn jeans, hair cropped short, glaring moodily out at the camera. The rest of Genesis are standing behind him, grinning sheepishly with unkempt shoulder length hair and dressed like your dad after a visit to the charity shop. In retrospect, Gabriel’s departure seems inevitable – he had already moved on from his band mates and into the future. However, the fact that he was already somewhat removed from proceedings meant that Genesis were able to continue business as usual without him for another two LPs as the core line up of Steve Hackett, Phil Collins, Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford. However, Wind And Wuthering was the final album they made before Steve Hackett quit, leaving Collins, Banks and Rutherford to descend into MOR oblivion. However, in spite of internal and external tension, Wind And Wuthering stands up respectably as Genesis’ last will and testament. The opening ‘Eleventh Earl Of Mar’ is a fantastic prog rock epic worthy of the Gabriel years, with Phil sounding very Gabriel-like, and Hackett unleashing his full bag of tricks, from sinister distorted leads to the delicate acoustic bridge. There is also some awesomely overblown keyboards and piano runs from Tony Banks. ‘One For The Vine’ is an extended piece about a reluctant messiah, showing that Gabriel didn’t take all of the band’s surreal humour with him when he left, and ‘Your Own Special Way’ proved that the group could get radio play without compromising their sound. The album ends, appropriately on an elegiac note, with ‘Unquiet Slumbers For The Sleepers’/‘In That Quiet Earth’/‘Afterglow’ providing the final Genesis epic, building up to the gorgeous apocalyptic finale in which Genesis as we know and love them say goodbye for the last time. If only they’d ended it there, Wind And Wuthering would have been the perfect conclusion to Genesis’ legacy.

7. Gong – Live Floating Anarchy 1977

The Clash may have wanted a riot of their own, but Gong, loathed hippies though they may have been, were formed in the France student revolution of 1968. As a result, radical politics had always run deep in their veins underneath their drugged-out hippy spiritualism, and when all the young groups were screaming ‘Anarchy!’ in 77, they were more then happy to join in and show them how it was really done. Having lost Steve Hillage to a solo career and Pierre Moerlen and Didier Malherbe to fusion blandness, head pothead pixie Daevid Allen and wife Gilly Smyth teamed up with a bunch of fellow malcontents and, abandoning their previous laid-back sound, unleashed deranged, techno-infused space-punk. Just as far out but more mean and gritty, and spitting radical student polemic, Gong were far more in tune with the time then many of their prog-rock peers, as shown by the fact that they played live alongside The Fall and Crass.

6. Parliament – Funketelechy vs The Placebo Syndrome

Funketelechy vs The Placebo Syndrome is arguably Parliament’s masterpiece, perhaps even more so then 1975’s sublime Mothership Connection. By now Clinton’s amalgamation of black American music had matured into something that was uniquely his own, and Funketelechy.... arguably sees him perfect that vision. The usual ridiculous concepts are there, this time George Clinton and his band of merry men are out to battle Sir Nose d’Voidoffunk and warn the listeners of the dangers of falling in thrall to The Placebo Syndrome, representing consumerism. The lyrics provide as much silly fun as ever, but the band is on absolute top form, battling it out over a number of solid funk grooves over which anything can and does happen. ‘Wizard of Finance’ is a ballad of sorts, well, musically anyway, whilst ‘Flash Light’ and ‘Bop Gun’, both featuring Bernie Worrell’s awesomely funky synthesised bass, must be two of the most irresistible dancefloor juggernauts ever unleashed upon the human race.

5. Pink Floyd – Animals

During 1977, Pink Floyd were pretty much Public Enemy Number 1 in the punk community. With their ‘pretentious’ music and their rich rock star lifestyles they symbolised everything that punk was meant to be kicking out at, quite literally in the case of Johnny Rotten’s ‘I Hate Pink Floyd’ t-shirt. However, if any of the punks had actually bothered to listen to the Floyd’s 77 release Animals, they may have been surprised with how much they had in common. Animals shows that Roger Waters could match Johnny Rotten for misanthropy any day, and then some. Musically the band are at their most sharp and brutal, with Dave Gilmour’s guitar raging and snarling throughout ‘Dogs’, and, although the songs are long, there is a clarity and focus at work which ensures that not an unnecessary note is played. The album’s brutal caricaturing of Thatcherite business men as dogs and pigs and its portrayal of the masses as sheep following their leaders blindly to slaughter puts The Clash’s unimaginative soapbox sloganeering to shame. The punks could complain all they want, but Pink Floyd continued to shift units and sell out stadiums, and the musical and lyrical qualities that shine through in Animals would ensure their survival as a valid creative force as far as 1979’s The Wall, outlasting most of their prog rock contempories.

4. Kraftwerk – Trans-Europe Express

By 1977, most of the krautrock groups that helped make the late 60s and early 70s such an exciting time for music had burned themselves out. Kraftwerk were just hitting their stride and were showing no signs of slowing down or stopping. Following on from the innovations of Autobahn and Radioactivity, Trans-Europe Express is possibly Kraftwerk’s finest achievement, the ultimate paean to the unity of man and technology. Whilst their earlier releases have dated somewhat, Trans-Europe Express still sounds amazing today. The shimmering city-scapes of ‘Europe Endless’ and the title track’s glorious dancefloor monotony capture the majesty of decaying grandeur beautifully, whilst ‘The Hall Of Mirrors’ is a genuinely disturbing exploration of narcissism and self-image which seems even more pertinent in this age of plastic surgery and botox. But the finest track on the album is possibly ‘Showroom Dummies’, which betrays the band’s wry sense of humour and sees them playing with their robot image for the first time over creepy yet irresistibly danceable electronica. This album would go on to have a huge influence on the post punk and electronic scene, as well as disco and hip-hop. Artists as diverse as Donna Summers, The Human League, Africa Bambata and David Bowie have cited this record’s influence. Kraftwerk themselves would spend their remaining career refining the work they did on this album.

3. Goblin – Suspiria

Goblin were an Italian prog rock band. Fans of King Crimson and Genesis, they wound up working on the soundtracks to the films of director Dario Argento and never looked back. Their work so well complemented his films that he got them to write the soundtrack to his impressionistic horror Suspiria before filming it, and worked the film around the music. Both the soundtrack and the film display how well placed his faith was. The soundtrack is the perfect accompaniment to Argento’s dark, nightmarish and brutal horror about witches who run a dance school, but is equally effective on its own. The band eschew normal film score clichés, instead creating a dark, murky and tribalistic sound based around droning improvisation, malevolent chanting and clattering percussion. The music lurches from creepy looped celesta and bells to all-out thunderous assault and back again, via moments of unbearable tension. Suspiria is justly regularly rated as one of the most terrifying movies ever, and one listen to this soundtrack reveals one of the reasons why – this music alone is enough to send you running for the light.

2. Univers Zero – 1313

Speaking of malevolent European prog... Univers Zero were a Belgium prog rock band lead by drummer Daniel Denis. Influenced equally by Magma’s malevolent warped space prog, H. P. Lovecraft’s cosmic horror stories and 20th century chamber music, Univers Zero were anything but easy listening. 1313, their debut album, is a portal into the depths of the crawling chaos. Bassoon, viola and harmonium are given as much space as guitar, bass and drums to create music that has very few links with anything else in rock music. Scrapes and drones build to vicious frenzies; instruments play in different keys and time signatures at the same time. Dark, ritualistic and intense, the music sounds almost like it wasn’t created for human ears. The record is almost entirely acoustic, yet it manages to achieve a pitch of terror that would send most black metal bands running for their lives. The only reference points I can think of that come close to doing Univers Zero justice are the scarier King Crimson stuff from the 73-74 period and Magma at their most demonic, like on Kohntarkosz. But really, these guys were out there on their own. Incredibly, 1979’s Heresie would reach even further heights of dark malevolence, and the group would continue making brutally twisted prog well into the 80s.

1. Fela Kuti – Zombie

Nigerian musician Fela Kuti discovered James Brown and invented Afro-beat, a fusion of jazz, funk and traditional African music. Zombie remains his most well known album, partially due to the context surrounding it. The song ‘Zombie’, which takes up all of Side 1, is a vitriolic attack on the brutality of the Nigerian military, with Fela accusing the soldiers of behaving like zombies – he sings ‘Zombie no go think unless you tell him to think’, and then barks orders like ‘Attention! Double up! Fall in! Fall out! Fall down! Get ready!’ like a deranged sergeant major whilst the backing vocalists chant ‘Zombie!’. The record became hugely popular, leading to people shouting ‘Zombie!’ at soldiers. Unfortunately the military responded to Fela’s criticism of their brutality... well... brutally, leading to a series of devastating attacks on Fela and his family, during which he was horrendously beaten and his aged mother was chucked out a bedroom window to her death. Even more incredible then the context is the music itself. Zombie is arguably Fela’s greatest album. All the Afro-beat elements are in place in excelsis – the scratchy, repetitious guitars, the rolling drums, Fela’s trumpet playing, the chanting – and it all ties together to create an utterly infectious groove over one chord, which is repeated until the end of the side of vinyl, building into an unstoppable frenzy. Side 2 is taken up by the equally long and equally good ‘Mister Follow Follow’, its subject, the perils of blindly following authority, suitably thematically related. This time, though, the band take a slightly more mellow approach, allowing the listener to recover somewhat from the righteous frenzy of Side 1. Unbelievably, with all that stuff going on, Fela would get round to releasing 5 other great albums in 1977 alone, a feat unmatched by any of the other artists in this list.

Gig Review: Rings 02.04.08 Nice N Sleazy

2008-04-20T22:05:00.000Z

Rings’ debut album Black Habit is an early contender for best record of 2008 and sees the band comfortably stepping in to fill the position of Greatest Current Pop Band recently vacated by Electrelane. I suspected as much on listening to the album, but they confirm my suspicions with aplomb tonight. A series of delays and the thoroughly average post-rock noodlings of support band Galchen don’t do anything to put anyone in a good mood, but once the band actually get on the stage and start playing, I am instantly blown away. Rings are Nina Mehta (vocals and usually guitar), Kate Rosko (vocals and usually keyboards) and Abbey Portner (vocals and usually drums). Sadly, Abbey Portner is too ill to play tonight, but the other two gamely play on without her. Fortunately the sparse tribal nature of the songs means that they can work around their missing drummer, playing the drums (consisting solely of a floor tom and a ride cymbal) in between their own parts or with the help of a primitive drum machine. Mehta and Rosko sit facing each other rather then the audience, their concentration fixed on each other and their instruments. As a member of the audience, you feel as if you are eavesdropping on something personal and intimate. Pretty much every review of the album has mentioned The Raincoats, largely because the post-punk legends’ second LP Odyshape is just about the only easily identifiable musical reference point for Rings. Like The Raincoats, Rings use their lack of conventional ability to their advantage, playing simply but with great inventiveness. Sparse, scratchy guitar lines and cycling clusters of gentle keyboard mix with sparse tribal drumbeats, with no particular part taking the lead, whilst voices sing overlapping and vaguely discordant harmonies, from lilting nursery-rhyme to pagan chanting. The end result could be a complete mess, but is informed by an understanding of space and a delicate melodicism, becoming a completely individual sound that is deeply moving. Any accusations of being excessively fey or twee are crushed by the band’s range of vivid expression, with their music moving seamlessly from melodic sweetness to darker dissonance and back again, often within the same song. Whilst I had to listen to the album a couple of times to become adjusted to the group’s sound, live the band plays with a warmth, delicacy and immediacy that is instantly enthralling. This is a band that sound like no one else on earth, yet still are able to pack an emotional punch. It’s not often you can say that, let alone in this day and age. For this reason alone, Rings deserve some of your time and attention.

RIP Klaus Dinger 1946-2008

2008-04-03T01:10:00.002Z

I guess that NEU! reunion is permanently off now. As I am currently too upset to eulogise one half of one of my favourite bands, I guess I'll leave it to Brian Eno:

"There were three great beats in the 70s. Fela Kuti's Afrobeat, James Brown's funk, and Klaus Dinger's Neu! beat."

God bless.

Todd Rundgren – Something/Anything? (1972), A Wizard/A True Star (1973)

2008-03-09T23:39:00.001Z

Perhaps the true acid test for a great pop hook is how long it remains lurking in your subconscious, its ability to come out of the depths of your psyche and haunt you apropos of nothing, the way it can make you feel as wide-eyed and excited as when you first heard it. But then again, part of why pop music affects us the way it does is its powerful emotional link to some of our crucial formative memories. Pop music soundtracks our early teenage life, and whilst many people wind up ashamed of the dodgy music that they listened to when they were 11 – 13 (there are some secrets you will never get out of me!), a lot of the stuff I listened to at this time I still have a really strong affection for. In many ways I guess I’m kind of lucky that much of what I was listening to then turned out to be pretty cool – The Beatles, Talking Heads, David Bowie… these, luckily enough, were the people who shaped what my idea of pop music was, and what it could be.
Until recently, I had not listened to Todd Rundgren for ages. But Something/Anything and A Wizard/A True Star were, along with Sgt. Pepper’s, Ziggy Stardust, Lamb and For Your Pleasure, among the first albums I listened to. In many ways, Todd Rundgren, like Bowie, Brian Ferry and Peter Gabriel, epitomized what I thought rock stars were all about: art-damaged yet poppy, master craftsmen yet daringly innovative, weird twisted beings bringing their profoundly alien yet insidiously catchy visions to corrupt the youth of planet Earth. Well, at least that’s how it felt at the time. Todd Rundgren, between his spaceman costumes, the portrait of him as damaged sorcerer on the cover of AW/ATS and the sheer alien-ness of the music contained within, was a warped space-rock hero like Bowie’s Ziggy. However, the thing that hit you as soon as you put the records on was Todd’s absolute KILLER way with a pop hook. Something/Anything opens with ‘I Saw The Light’, just under three minutes of gorgeous pop harmonies and stunning melodic hooks. It is the kind of song that you can hear once and have in your head for the rest of the week, yet it still manages to sound amazingly fresh the next time you hear it. And from then on, the album never lets up. Racing through the full gamut of pop styles, from soulful ballads to heavy rock to experimental oddness, and with almost every instrument played by Todd himself, the consistency holding the record together is the guy’s sheer knack for writing unbelievably good pop songs. The album is a double LP stretching across 86 minutes, but it never drags, the pace never slackens, you never feel bored. Ultimately, it’s a collection of amazing songs by a skilled writer at his peak.
‘I Saw The Light’, ‘Couldn’t I Just Tell You’ and ‘Hello, It’s Me’ were all deservedly hits of some note, and S/A could have been the springboard for a mainstream career. However, displaying a healthy dose of bloody-minded obscurity which would both enliven and dog his career, Our Hero holed himself up in the studio, took a shedload of psychedelics and recorded the wonderfully warped A Wizard/A True Star. In parts an attempt to recreate a psychedelic trip on record; in some ways AW/ATS could be seen as sides 5 and 6 of S/A: charting the psychedelic and proggy depths that the previous record had only hinted at, whilst still containing a healthy dose of soul and rock. In other ways, it’s much more obscure and self-indulgent then its predecessor. Experiments with synthesizers, mellotrons and found sound abound, especially on the first side, and Abbey Road-style medley bursting with surreal lyrics and bizarre sound effects. The shimmering, camp and outrageously sinister ‘Zen Archer’ is the highlight of side 1, but it is almost matched by the anthemic meta-pop opener ‘International Feel’, which, with it’s cheeky ‘I only want to see / If you’ll give up on me / But there’s always more’ opening lets you know you’re not in for an easy ride. However, beneath all the bizarre experimentation, Rundgren’s pop sensibilities still shine through in the sheer melodic grace of many of these songs. Side 2 brings us back to slightly more normal ground, opening with the awesome Philly soul of ‘Sometimes I Don’t Know What To Feel’ – astoundingly never released as a single. It also includes an excellent medley of soul covers, before closing with the psychedelic space-age utopian anthem ‘Just One Victory’. At 55 minutes, the record is long enough to qualify as another double (it was originally released as a single LP, the length resulting in poor sound quality on the original record), but its drugged-out sprawl, though in places impenetrable, is never less then compelling.
Listened to today, Something/Anything and A Wizard/A True Star sound excellent, their gorgeous melodies shining through and their sense of adventure all the more laudable in these retrogressive times. For some reason, Todd Rundgren seems to have been forgotten, and he is often overlooked in favour of his contempories. Perhaps this is because of his association with prog rock. After AW/ATS, Our Hero released the even more wayward and spralling Todd, before going on to form the prog rock band Utopia. His commercial career never quite regained the momentum of the Something/Anything years, and his prog stuff is often slagged off as an indulgent embarrassment, despite containing more then its fair share of excellent moments. However, The Artist Formerly Known As Prince, for one, has acknowledged the influence of this pioneer who, in recent years had been cruelly forgotten. Which is a shame, as Todd Rundgren was a truly talented songwriter and gifted innovator. A wizard and a true star, in fact.

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

2007-12-20T13:42:00.000Z

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.

Psychedelic Warlords: Why Hawkwind Are Awesome

2007-11-23T11:57:00.000Z

“They looked like a bunch of spacemen who had been on a ship for a thousand years and gone completely wacko.” Michael Moorcock on Hawkwind

I was astounded the other day when mentioning 70s space-rock titans Hawkwind in conversation with some of my more musically enlightened friends resulted in hoots of derision. Time and critical consensus have, sometimes unfairly, not been overly kind to much music produced in the early 1970s, and it seems that, in some quarters at least, Hawkwind have been unfairly lumped in with the droves of indulgent, Spinal Tap-esque dross that was so common in that era. So I thought I’d better clear up the confusion which appears to have built up around something that I thought would have been a given among the musical cognoscenti: that Hawkwind are unimpeachably awesome, and anyone who disagrees is wrong.
Born out of lead guitarist and lynchpin David Brock’s love of early Pink Floyd psychedelia, Michael Moorcock’s cult science fiction novels, a barrage of effects pedals and a truly heroic drug intake, Hawkwind were the original hippies who went too far. Eschewing the flashy musicianship of many of their contempories – for all I know, they may well have only known four chords – they played snotty cyberpunk, fuzzed-up spaced-out Kraut blues designed to blast you into the heart of the sun. Their classic albums, In Search Of Space, Doremi Fasol Latido, Space Ritual, Hall Of The Mountain Grill and Warrior On The Edge Of Time are classics of the first water.
In Search Of Space is Hawkwind’s second LP, but their first great one, coinciding with the arrival of Lemmy on bass. ‘You Shouldn’t Do That’ motors in from deep space on a cloud of whooshing ambient synthesizers to crash into a typical Hawkwind groove – think the Sex Pistols as a futuristic biker gang on their way to zap some hippies into oblivion, whilst sullen vocals mutter ‘Get nowhere’ over and over again. Malevolent, powerful and driving, it shows that the band had finally found the identity that their somewhat confused first album lacked. Listened to today, it’s hard to understand saxophonist Nik Turner’s assertion that Hawkwind were a ‘peace and love band’. ‘Master Of The Universe’ is another gem in the same mould, with the band raging full-on to the centre of drug-induced solipsism, but ‘You Know You’re Only Dreaming’ and ‘We Took The Wrong Step Years Ago’ are gorgeous slices of acoustic guitar-led pop to go cold to, laced in icy and glittering synthesizers twinkling like a field of lost stars. Meanwhile, the single ‘Silver Machine’, a sublimely daft piece of fuzzed-out space-rock with a backwards Chuck Berry riff, went to number 3 in the singles chart despite being recorder entirely on LSD. It never appeared on the album, naturally. Next up came Doremi Fasol Latido, which, despite being woefully titled, is an excellent record. ‘Brainstorm’ is eleven and a half minutes of Hawkwind at full throttle that, oddly enough, sounds a little bit like Joy Division’s ‘Interzone’, albeit infused with more Kraut-punk muscle, with the band’s echoey, spaced-out ambience eerily preempting Martin Hannett’s icy production. The effects pedal abuse on ‘Lord Of Light’ invents the swirling shoegaze of Ride’s Nowhere some 30 years too early, whilst ‘Time We Left This World Today’ starts off like the White Stripes in deep space before collapsing in on itself and turning inside out. This time, the great non-album single was ‘Urban Guerilla’, a snotty punk anthem celebrating terrorism which unfortunately coincided with IRA bombings in London, leading to the single being banned. With Lemmy now complimented on drums by Simon King, thus cementing the legendary Hawkwind rhythm section, the band then recorded their defining masterpiece, the all-time great Space Ritual, which is one of THE albums of the 70s and one of the few live records worth owning. Although capturing the true spectacle of these proto-punk monsters at their peak must have been a daunting task, with the shows becoming legendary as much due to the over the top laser shows and nude female dancers as to the music, Space Ritual delivers on all accounts. Originally a sprawling double LP, interspersed with fantastically daft sci-fi interludes spoken by resident poet Robert Calvert, recent reissues have expanded the original album with a shed-load of bonus material and a DVD, none of which feels extraneous. Basically, you need this record. Highlights abound, but personal favourites include a vicious ‘Masters Of The Universe’, the cosmic boogie of ‘Orgone Accumulator’ which sounds like Stereolab on steroids, and a bloodied, punked-up take of the originally delicate and shimmering ‘Down Through The Night’ from Doremi. Most bands would have seemed lost after such a peak, but Hawkwind bounced back with the fantastic Hall Of The Mountain Grill, a strong contender for their greatest ever studio album. Opener ‘The Psychedelic Warlords (Disappear In Smoke)’ wittily lambasts armchair revolutionary hippies who mistake drugged-out ranting for political action, replete with an almost dub-like middle section in which the guitars phase in and out of focus, leaving Lemmy’s bass to take the lead. ‘D-Rider’ is simply glorious, from the phasered guitars to the endless layers of synthesizers to some of the most enjoyably daft lyrics ever put to paper. The Lemmy-written ‘Lost Johnny’ is pure punk malevolence – drugged-out paranoia in hyperspace, whilst ‘Paradox’ and ‘You’d Better Believe It’, the latter recorded live, are classic Hawkwind – biker anthems for aliens on hallucinogens. However, their next album, the infuriatingly hard to find Warrior On The Edge Of Time, was to be the last Hawkwind classic. Unsurprisingly considering their drug intake, tensions began to run high in the band, and Lemmy was fired mid-tour in Toronto. The classic line-up was disintegrating, and though they would still have moments of greatness, they would never be this good again. The classic era had come to a close.
Hawkwind were ahead of their time, but have never really been given credit for it. Their concept of space-blues ties in nicely with Roxy Music’s retro-futurist kitsch, and was picked up by Stereolab in the 90s. Their delicate and shimmering acoustic ballads and brutal three-chord space drones paved the way for the likes of Spiritualized (Space Ritual is infinitely superior in my humble opinion to the somewhat bafflingly over-rated Ladies And Gentlemen, We Are Floating In Space, but that’s another story for another day), and their snarling bar-chord attack anticipated punk by almost half a decade. Their minimalist approach and love of repetition along with their chaotic improvisation and sense of barely controlled anarchy put them more in line with the Krautrock scene in Germany then any British prog group or lame heavy rock Purple Sabbath idiocy, and they were possessed of a subtle yet wry sense of humour. So snide indie snobbery and accepted notions of ‘cool’ can go and hang; Hawkwind were one of the all-time greats, and don’t let anyone try to tell you otherwise.

Electrelane on "indefinite hiatus"

2007-11-08T11:29:00.000Z

http://www.electrelane.com/site.html

The position for "Current Greatest Band" may soon be open again, as Electrelane have announced that they are on "indefinite hiatus", with their November gigs being tha last for the "forseeable future". This is clearly a disaster for modern music, and I shall get a fitting tribute to my favourite band of recent years written up at some point soon, when I have finished my present Sisyphean workload. Until then, all I can say is thanks, Electrelane, for all the amazing, beautiful music, for standing tall and making a difference in an age of mediocrity. All the best...

"Winter Bells in dark and silent dreams
Help me while these thoughts are troubling me
I slept through the falling of the leaves
I never thought that time could get so faraway from me..."

The Velvet Underground: White Light/White Heat (1968)

2007-10-09T12:12:00.000Z

Oz [looking through Giles' records]: Wow. Either I'm moving in with you, or you're letting me borrow your albums.

Giles: I think saving the world from immanent danger is more important than any record.

Oz: Even this one? [holds up Loaded]

Giles: [long pause] Well, a case could be made, I guess...
Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 4, ‘The Harsh Light Of Day’

These days, it seems the Velvets’ popularity has expanded to the stage where they can be casually referenced in cult TV shows. Everybody knows how, in 1967, the Velvet Underground released their first album, The Velvet Underground & Nico, and, despite being faced initially with public indifference and pitiful sales, the band went on to become hugely influential on generations of rock musicians. Today, their striking debut is (quite rightly) regularly recognized as not just one of pop music’s most audacious and influential debuts but one of the all-time great albums. The Velvets’ mix of streetwise suss and cool experimentation within a recognizably pop context has influenced everyone from David Bowie to Stereolab to Jonathan Richmond to Wire. Their self-titled third LP pretty much invented Galaxie 500, and Loaded, Lou Reed’s attempt at commercial appeal, for better or for worse pretty much invented the indie rock sound, from Postcard and C86 to Belle And Sebastian and onwards. All four of VU’s original studio albums are undeniably excellent, each having spawned a legion of followers, yet still having aged arguably better then any other act from the 60s you care to mention, but my favourite Velvet’s album is their dark, druggy and sinister sophomore effort, White Light/White Heat. Often cast as a ’difficult’ album and overlooked in favour of its more subdued and approachable sister albums, in truth WL/WH represents the pinnacle of the Velvet Underground, in all their drugged-up, subversive glory. It is also a much more thrilling and listenable record then some would have you believe.
Following their first album’s lack of success, the Velvets sans Nico holed up in their New York basement, wired on paranoia and amphe-phe-phe-phe-phetamines, and made some of the most intense, messy and noisy music ever committed to wax. Their drug habits didn’t do Lou Reed and John Cale’s increasingly antagonistic working relationship any favours, and the nervous tension evident on The VU and Nico is here raised to fever pitch. The first album may have become belatedly famous for Lou Reed’s song and lyric writing craft, but the Velvets were taking their cue from the raw and nasty feedback-drenched epics such as ‘European Son’ and ‘The Black Angel’s Death Song’. Having said that, White Light/White Heat hits the ground running with the title track which could almost have sat on the first LP alongside such VU classics as ‘I’m Waiting For My Man’. However, even from the start the tension is rife, from Reed’s wall-eyed vocals to the impossibly overdriven guitar and organ, swathing the song in harsh feedback 1,000 volts more intense then anything the Jesus and Mary Chain would ever achieve. You can feel that something is not quite right – the Velvets seemed to have surgically removed their tender side that came to the fore on the Nico-sung ballads of the first album. In its place is a weird and nasty ambience, totally in keeping with the chaos and tension in the music. The lyrics are typical Reed fare – a devil-may-care speedfreak anthem inciting you to murder your mother, before the song dissolves into a hail of harsh noise and feedback. And all in under 3 minutes. Perfect pop. Things get even weirder and nastier with ‘The Gift’. One speaker channel features what is essentially a wired jam on one chord, like ‘European Son’ slowed down to a grind, with shards and splinters of noise breaking out at odd intervals, whilst in the other speaker channel John Cale tells a shaggy dog story which is in equal parts hilarious and disturbing in his deadpan Welsh accent. What stops the piece from falling into sheer novelty is the band’s playing, which imbues the track with menace and threat, and the deadpan bizarreness of the story, performed to perfection by Cale. ‘Lady Godiva’s Operation’ is equally weird, disturbing and funny. It starts off almost like a folk ballad, albeit one drenched in guitar and viola feedback. as the lyrics get progressively odder and more unpleasant, so does the music, mutating into what sounds almost like Captain Beefheart drugged up to the eyeballs on heroin, with voices and whirring noises slipping in and out of the mix and from speaker to speaker as the gruesome operation goes more and more wrong. It almost sounds like the Velvets are performing open surgery on the listener with their scraping guitars and abrasive feedback. As Reed intones, somewhere between morbid fascination and drugged-out numbness, ‘The head won’t move’, the song falls apart, prognosis for the patient clearly not positive.
Then, amidst all this noise and nastiness, there is a moment of piece, as heartbreakingly delicate and beautiful as it is brief. It is often said amongst fans that the Velvets’ talents at writing love songs are sadly overlooked, and most site their third, self-titled album as evidence, housing as it does such moments of tender beauty as ‘Pale Blue Eyes’ and ‘Candy Says’. But ‘Here She Comes Now’ is perhaps the most overlooked of all their ballads. Sandwiched in between the sinister surrealism of ‘Lady Godiva’s Operation’ and the brutal ‘I Heard Her Call My Name’, ‘Here She Comes Now’ is all the more striking for being amidst such chaos. Opening with a melodic guitar figure that would later be echoed on Orange Juice’s gorgeous ‘Louise Louise’, if it weren’t for Lou Reed’s ambiguously sinister lyrics, the song would be a thing of pure limpid beauty. But after two verses in almost as many minutes, the song fades away, and the gentle silence left in its wake is shattered forever.
‘I Heard Her Call My Name’ is a juddering, nerve-shredding ride of a song, in which the deranged protagonist hears the voice of his dead girlfriend. But what makes the song is Lou Reed’s guitar playing. Trying to emulate Orlette Coleman’s free-jazz playing on his guitar, Reed unleashes chaotic runs of guitar lines laced with feedback that shoots out of the mix, barely playing in any recognizable key as each line melts into the next and stutters and sparks before exploding all over again. It’s all Sterling Morrison, John Cale and Moe Tucker can do to keep the steady thud-thud-thud two-chord Velvets riff going underneath him, and several times the sheer fuzzed-out intensity threatens to derail the song. Harsh, wild and deranged, this is what you wished James Williamson’s guitar lines on Raw Power sounded like instead of all that proto-shredding twaddle. The soloing is so rhythmically loose that it breaks completely free from the droning of the rhythm section, instead achieving something akin to The Magic Band’s more unhinged guitar moments, and anticipating the Fire Engines’ post-No Wave squall by some twenty years. ‘And then my mind split open’ indeed. It is one of the most exciting pieces of guitar playing in the history of pop music, and truly proves Lou Reed’s talent as a great guitarist who was able to make up in daring and inventiveness anything he lacked in conventional ability. It’s just a shame to think that in two years the man would be playing the pedestrian pentatonic My First Guitar Solo ™ on ‘Oh, Sweet Nothing’ from Loaded.
Then we come to the most famous track on the album, and the one perhaps most responsible for White Light/White Heat’s reputation as difficult. ‘Sister Ray’ always starts off faster then you think it will. And it’s always more intense, more messy, more noisy, more unspeakably thrilling then you think it will be as well. The Velvet’s legendary side long 17 and a half minute noisefest is still one of the most exciting pieces of music in pop history. The band start off playing three chords, but quickly grow bored with two of them. ‘Repetition in our music and we’re never gonna lose it’, sang Mark E. Smith twenty years later, and you can bet he learned it from the masters. Lou Reed delivers his legendary lyric about drugged up transsexual rape and murder at his sardonic best, his overdriven guitar feedback competing with John Cale’s equally overdriven organ for sheer noise and intensity. Cale and Reed sound like they are trying to drown each other out, stringing out the music tighter then a high tension line, whilst Sterling Morrison gives up on the other chords and Moe Tucker battles gamely to keep some semblance of control. Though it would be an influence on everyone from krautrock bands to early industrial groups, the sheer sonic intensity and gritty nastiness of this screaming bloody mess of a song would rarely if ever be equaled.
After this mess of misanthropy and white noise, John Cale left the band to be replaced by Doug Yule, making for a much less tense, much more relaxed Velvet Underground. If it’s easy to be disappointed by this mellowing out, it’s worth remembering that that kind of intensity is hard to sustain, and that afterwards being in the Velvet Underground must have been a more amenable proposition for the band members then before. White Light/White Heat still stands as a benchmark for the daringly experimental and for sheer bone-shaking noise, proof that something twisted, ugly and deranged can indeed be a thing of beauty, and as one of those records that truly stands above the crowd; music that really matters. Music critics and casual fans may always pay more attention to the Velvets’ more accessible albums, but it is perhaps fitting that White Light/White Heat remains in the shadows, sought out by the faithful alone and never to be given away free with this Sunday’s edition of the Observer. It is one of my favourite albums, and I love it dearly. This is, perhaps, enough.

Kosmische Slop – Ash Ra Tempel

2007-08-14T19:45:00.000Z

Whilst trawling the internet I recently stumbled upon this, http://www.headheritage.co.uk/unsung/feature/ash_ra_tempel an exemplary piece of Copey hype about krautrock band Ash Ra Tempel. It struck me as quite fantastic piece of rhetoric to draw a line between the nihilistic proto-punk squall of The Stooges and MC5 to Ash Ra Tempel’s cosmic hippie meanderings. What possible common ground could these bands share? “And those searching for the fulfilment of the Detroit promise need have looked no further than Ash Ra Tempel in 1971.” Well, quite. Having listened to Ash Ra’s first three albums some while ago, I’d dismissed them as formless spacey noodling and moved on. Now, I’m hardly one to get all nostalgic about the whole Detroit garage thing – I like The Stooges fine, but MC5 suck – the sheer bizarreness of the comparison made me dig up ART’s albums again, to see if I’d been missing anything. From Copey’s description, it was clear that one of us was talking bollocks. Seems that my original dismissal of the band went as far as getting rid of the CDRs involved, but, thanks to the internet, I soon found myself in possession of the first four ‘classic’ albums. And boy do I feel sheepish. Ash Ra Tempel are the best thing since sliced bread. You always thought the wanky bits of Pink Floyd was the interminable space jamming in the middle of the actual song bits, but Manuel Gottsching, Klaus Schultze and Hartmut Enke knew better. Whilst the Floyd and their prog-rock contempories pussy-footed around with quasi-classical suites, these boys cranked their amps up to 11, blew their minds on acid, dispensed with bothersome structures and set the controls for the heart of the sun with a vengeance. Thus they became pioneers of Krautrock, or, as Gottsching preferred to call it, kosmische music. Their self-titled first album, one of the all-time out-there classics, kicks of with ‘Amboss’. Gottsching’s guitar rises in a thunderous squall out of synthesizer dry ice, accompanied by Schultze’s manic, possessed drumming, crashing and collapsing in a raw, bleeding bloodied mess, all (barely) held together by Enke’s megalithic, throbbing bass. Gottsching is the great lost guitar hero, combining Hendrix’s space-jazz fluidity with a casual, devil-may-care sloppiness, descending mid-song into a mind-melting orgy of speaker-destroying unbridled feedback, only to rise phoenix like for the final climax. Needless to say, this glorious screaming mess consumes the whole of side one. Side two is taken up by the even longer, even more out-there Traummaschine. Our heroes’ space engine has burned out, and they’re left floating in deep space, with only shimmering synthesizers and swirling pools of guitar for company. I probably don’t have to tell you that it’s a proto-ambient masterpiece. This is more-or-less the format for all of Ash Ra Tempel’s classic albums – freeform freakout lunacy on side one, ambient chill-out on side two. Second album Schwingungen has a multi-parted song suite on side one, vaguely reminiscent of both Pink Floyd and Can, before erupting into bizarre screeching and phased guitar noise which takes it somewhere else entirely; Copey’s post-punk analogies begin to make sense. Side two is more ambient droning, with synthesizer and guitar echoplexed, twisted and distorted beyond recognition into something that starts off Eno before winding up Saucerful of Secrets-era Floyd. Whilst I still don’t care much for Seven Up, their somewhat restrained and confused third album recorded with acid-guru Timothy Leary, the fourth and final classic Ash Ra album, Join Inn, is another classic in the same mold, with ‘Freak ‘N’ Roll’ as intense and deranged as anything since ‘Amboss’ , and Gottsching’s girlfriend’s wordless vocal trills taking the ambient side to new levels of cosmic bliss. Sadly, it was the end. ART had always operated as a revolving collective, with whoever was available at the time joining in the chaos and fun, but the industrial quantities of acid everyone was doing meant that it was never going to last forever. At a 1973 gig, Enke finally did a Syd, freaking out onstage. Ash Ra’s following albums were Gottsching solo projects in all but name, still interesting but much less intense. Gottsching eventually pulled the plug on the band and went solo, becoming a pioneer of electronic music in the 80s with the legendary E2-E4 album. Though they remain largely unappreciated outside of specialist circles, Ash Ra Tempel’s early albums are the most cosmic of all Krautrock. To this day they represent a pinnacle of raw, spacey, freaked-out mess, formless and deranged space trash, cosmic slop of the highest order. I can’t recommend them highly enough.

Only Slightly Less Then I Used To, My Love: Top 10 Falls From Grace

2007-07-29T22:35:00.000Z

We all know this feeling. Most artists go through a purple patch, some are lucky enough to go through a couple, and the stuff they produce outside of this, whilst often still harbouring the ghostly flickers of genius, is somehow less essential, less earth-shatteringly brilliant, basically, less good. This isn’t what this article is about. This article is about those artists who have produced great music that you really love, but have managed to screw up so badly that you are hardly on speaking terms with them. However, for some bands, the failure becomes an integral part of the story. The old adage about the journey being as important as getting there is the key here, as many great artists come to the brink of fame and fortune, only to throw it all away in the most dramatically stupid yet incredibly endearing way possible. Rock and roll has always been about the rebel, the outsider, and things would be a lot less exciting were it not for hardened outsiders such as Kevin Rowland who simply refuse to relinquish their status as rebel. And there’s something cool about that, (providing you can forget about the dress). So, from the terrible betrayals so embarrassing you can’t look them in the eye any more to the charmingly reckless wholesale destruction of promising careers, these are pop music’s most dramatic falls from grace.

10. House Of Love

House Of Love could have had it all. In Guy Chadwick, they had a damaged vocalist with the ability to imbue even his most vacuous lyrics with a sensual and dangerous depth of feeling. In Terry Bickers they had indie pop’s first post-Johnny Marr guitar hero. In 1989, with The Smiths and Felt both out the way, and The Fall temporarily faltering for the first time in their career, the door was open. They could have been the next Great Band; hell, they WERE the next Great Band, with their stunning first album and the accompanying Creation singles achieving effortless brilliance. Then, they blew it in the most spectacularly stupid way possible. A combination of deplorable behaviour, bickering and shameless money-chasing meant that their major-label second album was delayed for years, coming out only after Chadwick had chucked Bickers simultaneously out of his band and his moving tour van, a blow from which the band never recovered. House Of Love had missed their chance, allowing the infinitely inferior likes of The Stone Roses and The La’s to take their place as the next big thing. Thus did the world loose its prime contenders for the next Felt. Well done guys.

9. Roxy Music

Roxy started life as everyone’s favourite retro-futurists and ended up as high-grade elevator music. The first four Roxy albums refuse to date. They are perhaps the ultimate fusion of pop and art – smart without being pretentious, as fun as they were clever, gloriously original yet instantly poppy and approachable. The first two Eno-assisted albums are still the best, yet Stranded and Country Life proved that RM could assuredly function without him, adapting to become leaner and slicker, yet still retaining their sense of adventure and individuality. Sadly, the same cannot be said for the abominable Siren. By this stage, Brian Ferry had lost interest in the band, launching his solo career as the king of supermarket pop, resulting in a dreary and uninspiring record. By the time of Avalon and Flesh and Blood, all aesthetic ties with early Roxy Music had been severed, leaving a highly efficient but soulless unit shifter. As the first four Roxy albums became increasingly cooler, influencing generation after generation of art-poppers, the band itself became less and less cool, an airbrushed and emasculated version of what had gone before. Your granny probably finds Avalon a bit too MOR.

8. Manic Street Preachers

There was something special about the Manics. Bursting on a lackluster music scene in a whirlwind of glam-rock decadence and confused rhetoric, they were an inspiring mix of brash arrogance, intelligence and dumb naivety. Spouting nonsense about cultural alienation, boredom and despair over anthemic rock, they managed to make people really believe in them, inspiring a rare devotion in their fans that makes them almost unbareable to be in the same room as. They then made the mistake of believing too much in their own hype, and as their personal lives spiraled out of control in the wreckage of Richey Edward’s messy demise, their music just got better and better. The Holy Bible is a great album because you sense that it was an utterly necessary act of catharsis for the group, and it’s made all the more poignant by the fact that it wasn’t enough to save Richey from himself. Whatever you said about the Manics, and whatever ill-informed, dangerous or just plain daft nonsense the Manics said themselves, you could bet your bottom dollar that they believed it. However, it couldn’t last; that kind of intensity never does. And, having experienced first hand how it burned up Richey Edwards from the inside, how could you blame the band for taking a couple of steps back? Everything Must Go and the best bits of This Is My Truth… are still deeply personal and cathartic, but the result of an older, sadder and wiser band. But then, the Manics stopped believing in themselves, and were thus robbed of their raison d’etre. The horrific mess that is Know Your Enemy reveals a band that has lost its muse, desperately trying on everything for size and failing miserably. The band that once inspired a generation of daft young people can now no longer inspire itself. Sadly, it appears that the Manics are perfectly content to go through the motions, something you imagine that four snotty youths from Wales who once claimed they were going to outsell Guns N Roses with their debut and then split up would have quite rightly had nothing but contempt for.

7. Sonic Youth

Sonic Youth used to be a force of nature; wild, untamable, indestructible. Spawned from New York’s No Wave scene, for over 25 years they have been scrawling their mark in huge letters on the face of modern music. Ragged and unpredictable, often inconsistent yet almost always worth hearing, they have mutated, changed and evolved, playing to nobody’s rules but their own. Like The Fall, they eschewed nostalgia, living in the present and continuously moving one ahead of the times. However, now that they have been recognised as an important and influential group by Rock and Roll Incorporated, they are perfectly happy to put their Daydream Nation album on a pedestal in a museum and sell records through Starbucks. I thought you guys were better then that.

6. David Bowie

You’d think that maybe David Bowie would fall into the category of people whose recent albums are simply uninspiring rather then dramatically awful, but this really is the problem. Bowie was really on a roll from 1971 to 1980, there can be few runs of albums more impressive then Hunky Dory to Scary Monsters, and if they exist, they are probably less original and less bewilderingly stylistically diverse. Each of Bowie’s albums from this classic period spawned a genre’s worth of imitators. From the glam-pop perfection of Ziggy Stardust to the icy soundscapes of Low, Bowie never stayed still for more then one album, constantly challenging himself and his audience, and having hit records at the same time. That’s why the man’s post-Scary Monsters work is so utterly disappointing: who would have thought that Bowie could become boring?

5. Ride

There was a clause in the standard Creation Record’s contract that all the bands had to sign, which stated that if your career looked like it might be taking off, then you agreed to screw it up in the most horrific and destructive way you could possibly think of. Well, there may as well have been, judging from what happened to most of Creation’s bright young hopes. But Ride surely went above and beyond the call of duty, having as they do one of the most depressing career trajectories in the whole of pop music. When they were first signed to Creation, they were tipped to be the next big thing. A couple of brilliant EPs and the all-time classic Nowhere LP and it looked like Creation had finally found a band that would make it. Their comeback single, ‘Leave Them All Behind’, despite being an eight minute prog rock epic, was Creation’s first ever top ten single. However, Ride’s second album, the under-rated Going Blank Again, came out at a bad time. My Bloody Valentine had effectively destroyed the whole shoegazing scene by releasing the era-defining Loveless, and Creation were devoting much of their time and money to their newest signing, an unknown cocky Manchester band with big eyebrows. Before you could say ‘Britpop’, shoegazing was suddenly irredeemably pretentious and uncool, and Ride were out of critical and public favour. They would spend the rest of the decade becoming more and more uninspiring as they attempted to sound more and more like Oasis. Ride’s third album, Carnival Of Light, is less-then-affectionately known as Carnival Of Shite by the band themselves. Hard feelings and fraying tempers resulted in vocalist and second guitarist Mark Gardener walking out of the band at this stage, and guitarist Andy Bell is so ashamed of their universally panned final album that he never collected the royalties from it. The public apparently concurred, as it was deleted after only a week in the shops. This would be an undignified enough ending, but, sadly it wasn’t the end. Andy Bell went on to form Hurricane #1, who spent their mercifully brief career being slagged off for being a crap Oasis, and, then in a final cruel twist of fate for a band that once promised so much, Andy Bell now plays bass for Oasis themselves. These days, you rarely if ever hear about Ride, and you never hear their songs on the radio. The decline and fall of what was briefly one of the 90s’ finest bands is tragically complete.

4. R.E.M.

Remember the good old days when R.E.M. were good? From 1983 to 1987, for a run of five fantastic albums, they were America’s answer to The Smiths, only less whiney. Their five albums for IRS still sound fresh, mysterious and inspiring today. However, then they signed to a major label and got big. Not a problem in itself you realize, but R.E.M. fell victim to quite a common major label disease, where you go ‘Hey, you know, I’m suddenly selling an awful lot of records; there are an awful lot of fans out there who want to hear my music. I have a responsibility to these fans, therefore I will make sure that my music a) says something important and inspiring to these young people and b) is liked by these people’. Big mistake. Never ever do this, because it means that the music you make will suck. R.E.M. stopped making music that was oblique, individual and magical and started making big, anthemic songs that would sound good in stadiums when the fans got their lighters out. They lost the air of mystery from their lyrics, exchanging Stipe’s oblique-speak for bland sentiment, and replacing earlier eloquent political protest songs such as ‘Exhuming McCarthy’ with much more blunt, straightforward sloganeering. This was doubly disappointing, as you’d always thought that R.E.M. would be a group intelligent enough and blessed with enough integrity not to make this amateur’s mistake. Then, after selling loads and loads of records with Automatic For The People, they stopped bothering to write tunes as well. Thus did one of America’s most original, alluring and mysterious of bands in recent times become dull, gauche and predictable.

3. Morrissey

Being a British indie band between 1984 and 1987 really would have sucked, because however good you were, you were always going to come in second. The Smiths stole the hearts of the nation’s students, loners and outcasts for a period of four years and as many albums and, while they continue to polarize opinion today, they remain one of the most loved bands of all time. Johnny Marr’s sparkling guitar work provided the stunning music, but it was Morrissey’s tragicomic lyrics that often won the youth’s hearts and minds. With his dour wit, unique singing voice and canny talent for self-promotion, Morrissey was the face of indie music for years. After The Smiths split, Mozza went off on his solo career, and has today just as many hopelessly devoted followers. Except the problem is, Morrissey is no musician. Not playing an instrument, he is forced into the role of eternal collaborator, and, since his separation from Marr, he has never found anyone else whose artistic vision fits so well with his own. Marr’s music seemed to complement the eccentric flow of the Moz’s lyrics and every twist and turn, but these days, his collaborators are unable to offer him anything as magical or as sympathetic to his work. As a result, all of Morrissey’s solo albums are unable to hold a candle to his work with The Smiths, the last couple in particular being particularly turgid pub-rock affairs. But also, if you just look at the man’s lyrics, Morrissey got less funny and less touching after he left The Smiths. His Smiths lyrics always had a sharp sense of humour which belied his reputation as king of the mope, and a deep-felt sensitivity that buoyed the music at its very bleakest. However, Mozza is now pettier, nastier and less amusing. I reckon that he basically got trapped playing this miserable wallflower persona. He did it so well in The Smiths because songs like ‘Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now’ are done with a sense of irony and humour, but there days, as Morrissey goes through middle age still playing the miserable teenager, the irony has drained away and all that’s left is a man who has become a shallow and nasty parody of himself.

2. Genesis

Stop laughing. Genesis used to be one of Britain’s finest bands. Between 1970 and 1976, during their progressive rock years, they were one of the most original and forward thinking bands around. The classic line-up of Peter Gabriel (vocals, flute), Steve Hackett (guitar), Tony Banks (keyboards), Mike Rutherford (bass) and (sighs, yes) Phil Collins (drums) made some of the most intoxicatingly brilliant progressive rock, from the sinister whimsy of Nursery Cryme to the surreal concept album The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway. Driven by stunning musicianship and innovative songwriting, they explored a peculiarly English form of psychedelic rock music. Even after Peter Gabriel left for his own (excellent) solo career, the remaining members continued for two more albums of proggy goodness. Then Steve Hackett left, and it all went to pot. I really wish they’d changed their name at this point. Genesis, now led by Phil Collins, became one of the wankiest pop groups ever to stalk the earth for far too long, with diabolical hit singles like ‘Invisible Touch’ bringing out the very worst in pop music and selling it to your mum. Then came Phil Collins’ fetid solo career, making him one of the most notorious villains in pop music (and sadly obscuring the fact that he is a talented drummer who has drummed on numerous worthwhile albums by the likes of Brian Eno and John Martyn). And that’s not to mention the damage Mr. Rutherford did with Mike and the Mechanics. It’s no wonder you can’t mention Genesis without howls of derision. I prefer to remember them as the great band they used to be, but it’s hard when the radio keeps their dreadful MOR stuff on frequent rotation. Fun fact: in BBC’s recent and somewhat incredibly uninspiring ‘Seven Ages of Rock’ series, for the prog section they interviewed everyone in the classic line-up of Genesis apart from Steve Hackett. Poor show.

1. Paul McCartney

After so many years, poor old Macca is still one of pop music’s most ridiculed characters. You’d think that it would be time for us to give him a break. Or maybe those crazy historical revisionists will run out of stuff to listen to and start claiming that he’s cool for a change. But no such luck. It was footage of this man at a recent festival performing the execrable ‘Jet’ that inspired this entire article. Unfortunately, this is just one of the cases where received wisdom is spot on. The Beatles are still one of the greatest and most important pop groups ever, despite what you sniveling hipsters say. Bold, original and fun, their music stands the dual tests of time and of everyone ripping them off for approaching fifty years now. And poor old Paul often gets a short shrift in the Beatles, with everyone saying John had the talent, so let it be said: Paul’s Beatles stuff is awesome. Songs like ‘Penny Lane’ and ‘For No One’ are beautifully melodic, innovative, original, and richly emotional without descending into trite sentiment. So how did it all go so wrong? For some reason, once left to his own devices, Macca just wasn’t able to hack it. Bland sentimentality was the order of the day, and someone who was once one of the four coolest people on the planet became irredeemably naff forever more. Today, it’s hard not to feel sorry for the poor old guy. Until you hear something by Wings.

Novelty

2007-07-10T17:31:00.001Z

I think I have a reasonable amount of loyalty to the bands I like. I’m not a raving completist, but I do like to have all of a band’s worthwhile albums, and will generally give overlooked or underrated albums at least a couple of spins. I have rushed down to the record shop the day an album has been released, and have counted the days to various release dates. I generally give albums multiple listens before passing ultimate judgement, (I have even done this with bands I do not like just because I feel I ought to have given their music a chance), and I enjoy coming back to records and hearing them in a new light. In short, I think I have reasonable grounds for saying that I’m an open-minded music fan with a fair degree of loyalty to bands I like. Hell, due to (perhaps foolish) undying devotion to certain pop groups, I have listened to Tales From Topographic Oceans, Earthbound and Cerebral Caustic on numerous occasions just in case I was missing something (the short answer is, I wasn’t). So, it is with a heavy heart that I write this article about two bands whose recent dreadful albums have caused my love for them to cool to the point of apathy. And yes, I am talking about indie-pop’s most universally adored heroes, The Arcade Fire and Interpol.
There are similarities. When Interpol’s Turn On The Bright Lights appeared in 2002, it felt like a genuine breath of fresh air and a rebirth of potential for a tired and hackneyed genre, as did The Arcade Fire’s Funeral in 2004. Although neither band could claim to be original, both drew from familiar sources to produce music that stood out from the glut of contemporary indie releases by the same two virtues – songwriting talent and emotional impact. The records initially caught your ear because of the (then) novelty of their reference points – Interpol drew on post-punk heroes such as Joy Division and Echo and The Bunnymen and then brought it up to date with a vaguely post-rock sheen, The Arcade Fire mixed up the more standard Bowie and Roxy Music fixations with a love of Neutral Milk Hotel – but the more you listened to them, the more you realized that both albums were very much a product of modern times, each dealing gracefully and touchingly with the angst and confusion of the modern world without slipping into the glib sentimentality and gauche generalizations characteristic of the many post-Radiohead bands who have tried the same thing. Both album’s stark emotional honesty and fresh musical approach reaffirmed faith in a genre that was drowning in its own slick ennui and dearth of ideas. Turn On The Bright Lights and Funeral are, ultimately, great albums that this decade will be remembered for and judged by.
All this, of course, puts huge and unreasonable pressure on the band for the follow up. Both bands took a long time with their next album, during which time expectations soared and musical landscapes changed. When Interpol returned with Antics in 2004, a horde of bands had sprung up drawing from similar musical influences, and their thunder as the biggest post-punk revivalists had been stolen by Franz Ferdinand’s meteoric rise. By the time The Arcade Fire released Neon Bible in 2007, The Arctic Monkeys had become the biggest thing since sliced Oasis thanks to the internet, and The Arcade Fire’s
similar word-of-mouth success had risen to the point where they were greeted as returning heroes in the press, with wide-scale media coverage that would have been unthinkable for Funeral. Interpol return this month to the same environment with their third album, Our Love To Admire. It is a truism that this leads to an unfavourable environment for the second album to be released into, and often results in the album being unable to live up to the expectations of the first, causing a backlash amongst the press and hardcore fans. Indeed, greater bands then The Arcade Fire and Interpol have fallen victim to Second Album Syndrome, and these albums are often slated unfairly for being unable to live up to the promise of the debut. Interestingly enough, in both The Arcade Fire’s and Interpol’s cases, there has been no such backlash – in fact both bands’ stock in trade has increased recently if anything. But it is my personal and ever so humble opinion that Neon Bible and Antics and Our Love To Admire are awful awful albums. And, as usual, I’m right.
Before I start on the warpath, I would like to stress again that TOTBL and Funeral are fantastic albums which I will always love greatly, and anyone who disagrees is wrong. Again, there are a number of interesting similarities in Interpol’s and Arcade Fire’s flawed follow-ups. Both of the groups’ debut albums were individual and mysterious. Neither band is perfect, but on their first album they played their flaws to their advantage. On their sophomore albums, the groups both opt for a more direct approach, and the brilliant shroud of illusion that made their debuts so special is roughly pulled away to reveal both groups as considerably less compelling then they at first seemed. It didn’t matter that both groups’ lyrics were not up to much – on the first albums they were delivered with a conviction, desperation and simple honesty that imbued them with a real emotional punch that belied their clumsiness. However, on Neon Bible, Win Butler suddenly realizes that loads of disaffected teenagers are listening to him, and decides he has to earnestly deal with Big Issues, to which his sledgehammer-like subtlety is not best suited. The end result is that, before you can say U2, his simple directness which allowed him to deal so well with emotional situations is grossly misused, resulting in an overbearing and preachy record. I don’t really need to remind anyone of how dreadful Interpol’s lyrics always are, but on Antics Paul Banks’ vocals are put right up to the top of the mix, so instead of nervously mumbling his clumsy non-sequitors, which gave the songs an endearing emotional openness, he bellows them over the top of the music, directing attention to Interpol’s weakest aspect.
However, shoddy lyrics are not the only problem on these albums. Antics reveals that Interpol have also been taking unnecessary cues from U2, as their music becomes more overbearing and anthemic, and at the same time, less interesting. One of the things that made TOTBL a great record and bucked the Joy Division rip-off claims of Interpol’s detractors is the rhythm section of Carlos D and Sam Fogarino. The complex interplay of the bass and drums led the songs, providing an exciting and unconventional contrast to the mumbled lyrics and atmospheric guitars. On Antics, the rhythm section are pushed more and more to the background, allowing Daniel Kessler’s increasingly mundane guitar lines and Paul Banks’ week vocals centre stage, which makes for much duller listening. Another side effect of this is that the songs become more conventional, no longer taking the eccentric twists and turn that made ‘Obstacle 1’ and ‘Leif Erikson’ so compelling. The music suffers, and Antics’ two standout moments appear on Evil, where some of the old bass-and-drums interplay is allowed to return, and Take You On A Cruise, where Kessler actually bothers to write an interesting guitar line and the band deviate slightly from standard verse-chorus-verse song structure. Sadly, Antics has not made Interpol aware of their strengths and weaknesses, and Our Love To Admire sees their continued descent into blandness and irrelevance, replete with anthemic choruses and extended guitar solos. Ironically, although Interpol’s initial musical strengths and oblique songwriting made them much more then the talentless post-punk rip-offs they are so often derided for being, their attempts to court mainstream popularity have turned them into a poor man’s version of early U2.
Neon Bible presents a similar case of a band ironically becoming everything they were initially wrongly accused of being. Those not held in thrall to Funeral accused The Arcade Fire of being overbearing and unnecessarily bombastic, with limited harmonic range and poor vocals. However, Funeral contrasted its moments of bombast and orchestral overkill with moments of quiet tenderness, and the limitations of the band’s musical and vocal ability were used to their best advantage to produce adventurously written and intensely performed songs. Neon Bible is a different beast. In an interview with Mojo magazine last year, Win Butler admitted to suffering from writer’s block before being able to write the album, which, combined with the fact that a song from one of the band’s early EPs is used to flesh out the record, does not bode well. The simple fact here is that the songs are just not as good. Thoroughly prosaic and unimaginative chord sequences and song structures replace the imaginative writing of the debut – whereas Funeral’s wide palette was able to produce such exotic songs as ‘Une année sans lumière’’s reimagining of French chanson and ‘In The Backseat’’s outBjorking of Bjork, Neon Bible sounds like Arcade Fire by numbers. The album in general suffers from what I like to call Be Here Now Syndrome, where a band tries to compensate for a lack of musical ideas by overlaying songs with unneccesary instrumental parts that do not add anything musically different to the song. Neon Bible features loads of organs, string quartets, you name it, all of which enter the song to play the same line as the main melody, which itself is confined to blindly following the lead notes of the chords. This is in stark contrast to Funeral’s imaginitive yet simple arrangements and strong individual melodies. Hard as it may be to believe, Neon Bible sounds like The Arcade Fire have run out of musical ideas.
And yet despite this, Neon Bible and Our Love To Admire seem poised to send Interpol and The Arcade Fire further into full-blown mainstream success. Both groups are merely a shadow of the revolutionary force they once were, reduced to vicious and satirical caricatures of their former selves. I will always love both bands’ first albums, but I cannot bring myself to listen to Neon Bible, Antics or Our Love To Admire. And, coming from someone who has put up with bands through thick and thin in the vain hope that they might recapture some of their former glory, that’s saying something. I await with a mixture of trepidation and blind hope both groups’ next album, longing for them to realize all they have lost and somehow manage to recapture it. But I’m not holding my breath.

Screaming Down The Hall: The Curious Case of Subtonix

2007-06-24T23:53:00.000Z

There are some things that man is clearly not meant to wot of. Subtonix were clearly one such thing. Jessie Panic (vocals, bass, drums) met fellow miscreant Cookie (vocals, drums) at the Arkham convent, an all-girls institution that specialized in adolescents with ‘difficult’ behaviour, shortly before both were kicked out by the puritanical staff on suspicion of dark occult practices. Headstrong and with scant respect for authority, the girls rasied money through petty thievery and drug dealing to fund their escape to San Fransisco, picking up Jessie Trashed (vocals, saxophone, bass) on the way, solely because she was tall enough to drive the beaten-up hearse they had stolen from the local undertaker. Arriving in San Francisco in 1999, the girls found themselves penniless. Rather then take up prostitution, they decided to pay their way by forming a band and playing in the local nightclubs. Thus the Subtonix were formed, the guitar-free line up due to the fact that, the girls claim, it is far easier to steal bass guitars and saxophones then it is guitars. None of them had ever so much as touched a musical instrument before, but with the group’s wild stage show, a truly brutal mess of heavy makeup, leather miniskirts, fake blood, alcohol and bizarre antics, the band built up a local following. After months of being heckled by rough and sexist SF audiences and not being taken seriously by anyone, the band decided to expand their lineup to include keyboard player Brandy Oblivious (came with her own keyboards), who bonded with Panic over a shared fascination with Aleister Crowley. In early 2000 they finally found a guitarist in Jenny Hoyston, and this line-up was musically together enough to venture for the first time into a studio and, in a rainy afternoon, record Subtonix’s first single, Trophy b/w Today’s Modern Women. Sounding like X Ray Spex having a violent premonition of The Horrors, Panic out-Banshees Siouxsie herself over deranged saxophone and dirty guitar. The lyrics were a mixture of Hammer horror and savvy post-riot grrrrl politics, and it sounded like nothing else around at the time. The single received enthusiastic praise from the NME, although many were confused by the contrast between the band’s overtly gothic image and their post punk/garage band sound. Local indie label Troubleman Unlimited were impressed enough to offer the group the funding for an album, but the band jeopardized the deal by insisting that it be signed in their own blood under a full moon on the evening of Halloween. Fortunately the confused label concurred, but by the designated date the band was back to a three-piece, Hoyston having left to spend more time with her other band, Erase Errata, who had just been offered support dates for Le Tigre, and Brandy disappearing under mysterious circumstances which were to dog the band throughout the rest of their short career. On the 5th of June 2000, Brandy retired to her room alone, never to be seen again. The press went into overload, fuelled by the band’s flirtations with black magick and with numerous bizarre rumours surrounding the disappearance. Band friend Adrienne was quickly recruited for keyboard duties. Jessie Panic appeared more and more agitated in interviews and gigs became even more intense, with as much real blood spilt as fake.
Nevertheless, in August 2001 the band managed to take time out from their exhausting touring regime to record their only album. Recorded in only 3 weeks, ‘Tarantism’ is dark, disturbing and intense. Panic was, by this stage, too exhausted and strung out to sing on all the songs, so Trashed and Cookie took up the lead vocal duties on some of the songs they had written. The whole record is suffused with a dank darkness, sounding as if the band were trapped in the bottom of a well. The cartoon horror of the band’s songs are twisted into caricatures of adolescent trauma, from the portrait of the bled and spent ‘Ashtray Girl’ to ‘X Rated’’s sardonic look at post-feminist sexual politics. The band sound like they are playing for their lives, songs sprinting for the safety of silence and often collapsing violently in on themselves, only to re-emerge in a deathly crawl. All the girls’ vocal performances are shrill and harsh, sounding both haunted and hunted. However the intensity is offset by the band’s cartoonish sense of humour. It was great, it was a breath of fresh air, it was the end.
Hype around the band had reached fever pitch, with rumours of occult rituals being carried out by the band prior to going onstage, linked by the press to the unfortunate disappearance of goats in every town the band toured in. Subtonix soon found it impossible to tour in the south due to church groups picketing the venues they were scheduled to play at. The release of ‘Tarantism’ was delayed to May 2002 due to a large number of large chain stores refusing to stock it. All this, combined with a disastrous February European tour during which Panic was hospitalized twice, caused internal pressures in the band to combust. Jessie Trashed quit the band to form goth-punks The Vanishing, followed by Adrienne, who complained of being unable to sleep at night anymore due to an ‘unholy presence’ that followed her from hotel room to hotel room, and to which she attributed the curious scratches that had started appearing on her back. Panic and Cookie tried a number of dates with various roadies and friends, but none would play for more then one show, deserting the next morning. They continued as a two-piece for two more gigs before Panic had a nervous breakdown and fled back to Arkham. Subtonix were over and their only album had yet to be released.
Troubleman Unlimited finally released ‘Tarantism’ in May, and the album received a warm response, especially from the British music press, but, without a touring band to promote it, the album quickly sank. A second single, Too Cool For School b/w Rich Boys, recorded during the album sessions, was released in 2002 by the Italian label Vida Loca later in 2002, but, despite being vintage Subtonix material, unsurprisingly failed to chart. Sadly, that was it. All of Subtonix’s material quickly went out of print, and, as quickly as they had appeared, they were gone, to be largely forgotten by the press and public alike. However, Subtonix should be remembered fondly: they helped kick-start the post punk revival by sonically referencing the goth-punk music of that era, they added a much-needed sense of fun, darkness and diversity to a po-faced and derivative indie scene, and they left behind them a legacy of a couple of singles and one fantastic album, plus some of the wildest live shows and one of the most curious stories in pop history.

By the way, none of the above is remotely true, apart from the fact that the records exist and are marvelous. I have tried as much as possible to keep the chronological details of releases and line-up changes correct, but, names aside, any resemblances between characters in the above review and persons living, dead or undead is purely coincidental and probably extremely unlikely.

Reformation! (Arbeit Mit Uns)

2007-06-12T23:49:00.000Z

What do Van Halen, The Jesus and Mary Chain, The Smashing Pumpkins, The House of Love, The Police, Gang Of Four and Slint have in common? (If you said they all suck apart from the Mary Chain, The House Of Love, Gang Of Four and Slint, have a banana.) The answer is, or course, that recently, all of the above bands have put aside their differences, ideological objections and last remaining shreds of integrity for the sake of the money and reformed. Mere years ago, the idea of the disparate personalities in these bands getting together again seemed utterly laughable – as we all know, pop music survives on a diet of daft overblown legends. The greatest hates, like the greatest loves, are meant to last forever, and no one ever expected to see the Reid brothers reunited after years of not speaking to each other, or Guy Chadwick and Terry Bickers in the same room as each other after the former chucked the latter out of his band – literally, out the back of the tour bus. There is inevitably something anticlimactic to the modern ending to these stories – instead of living unhappily ever after or resulting in bloody murder, the main characters have settled into a marriage of convenience in order to make a living on the nostalgia circuit. Not the stuff legends are made of. Perhaps more heartbreakingly, Gang Of Four, one-time Marxists who not only critiqued capitalist consumer society on 1979’s awesome Entertainment! album but refused to censor their lyrics in order to appear on Top Of The Pops, now have no problem with reforming not to create more music but to play Entertainment! note for note to festival goers in exchange for filthy lucre whilst gig promoters and record company execs rub their hands with glee. “Sell out, maintain the interest” indeed. Even experimental rock titans Sonic Youth have joined in on the act, taking a break from producing new music to play the whole of Daydream Nation to packed auditoriums.
Why is the music industry so entrenched in nostalgia? From band reunions to the ever expanding reissues market, so much of the music we listen to day is part of the past, preserved in aspic. Bands make careers out of mining sounds from a particular era of popular music. Part of it must be that pop music, while being by nature entrenched in the here and now, increasingly in these iPod days serves also as an escapist fantasy away from the here and now, taking the listener somewhere familiar, warm and fuzzy. Also, as the internet makes more music from every era immediately available to the curious, more and more interesting and overlooked records from the past are exhumed to be rediscovered and reevaluated. The past has never been a more busy or exciting time.
Still, it’s hard not to feel that something’s gone wrong. Reforming used to be the ultimate sign of selling out – when the Sex Pistols reformed in 1996, Siouxsie and the Banshees split in protest. However, The Pixies’ recent reunion saw the band welcomed as returning heroes rather then has-beens milking the last few dollars from their back catalogue. Admittedly, the Pixies reformation gave a generation of fans a chance to see their favourite band live, making it a bit more then a bunch of middle-aged hipsters reliving their youth. But surely the point is that young people these days should be listening to something else. Popular music has become complacent, largely I think because of an overly reverent attitude to the past. Bands seem unafraid to mangle up or distort their influences into something original. Placing Daydream Nation and Surfa Rosa on pedestals is unhealthy on two accounts – firstly, you have generations of artists struggling in thrall to these records when they should be aiming to produce something so amazing that it utterly destroys both records, and secondly, by making records ‘canon’ you immediately detract from their revolutionary and iconoclastic nature: they simply become one in a list of ‘worthy’ records that people really ‘ought’ to have listened to, alongside Revolver and Highway 61, and hence part of what must be kicked against in order for pop music to stay alive, protean and relevant. This is a process which happens naturally and is indeed the healthy natural order of things, but it doesn’t stop it being disheartening to see Daydream Nation’s fire and brimstone tamed not 20 years after its release. More disheartening still is to see an adventurous group like Sonic Youth consign themselves to the Irrelevant Old Farts scrapheap years ahead of their time by actively taking part in the process. Sadly, however, we live in a world where the music business is big bucks, and with the amounts of money involved, it must be harder and harder to resist for the sake of integrity.
What can be done about this? It is tempting to call for a punk-style, year zero, scorched earth policy, but in the information age this is not really possible and, with the past admittedly still having much to offer, it is perhaps cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face. There needs to be a change in attitude to the past – there is a wealth of musical ideas, but they should not be approached with such reverence – assuming that you can never better it means you never will. Nostalgia as a whole should be abolished – ‘Balti and Vimto and Spangles were always crap, regardless of the look back bores’. Once bands reach the stage where they have nothing new or relevant to say, they should retire with grace and dignity, and if you never got a chance to see them live, well, tough. Far better to remember them this way, minus the bald patches, paunches and session musicians. And if you really like Daydream Nation, go out there and make something even better.

Liam Is A Parasite: 10 Artists With the Most Malign Influence in Pop Music

2007-06-07T11:45:00.000Z

The problem with producing an awe-inspiring masterpiece is that, in inspiring awe and reverence in a generation of music fans, you get a rash of musicians who are either unable or unwilling to creatively step out of your pervading influence. The problem with producing a dreadful piece of crap that so happens to come along at the right time and place in people’s lives is that you have a generation of musicians whose idea of a great record is the appalling rubbish that you put out. If you’re really unlucky, could wind up influencing multiple generations of music. Gross simplification as this is, I feel it makes a valid point. Influence is always a tricky area, for both those influencing and influenced – witness Mark E Smith’s belligerence towards all the modern bands who have claimed to be influenced by The Fall. And in this day and age of casual musical plagiarism, the line between ‘influenced by’ and ‘blatantly ripping off’ becomes further and further removed. However, that’s another story. The point of this article is to look at bands that I feel have had a malign influence over pop music in recent years. There are several easy shots that I have decided not to take because they should really go without saying – no one needs another band ripping off The Beatles, The Stones and Dylan. Also, as this is my list, I’m sticking mainly to indie rock, because I think this is where the focus is most needed – I could whine about the way the gangster rap has wrecked the original political ideals of, say, Public Enemy, but I feel this is a widely enough acknowledged point. Also, I could sit here and blame Black Sabbath or Led Zep for inventing heavy metal, but I don’t really think that would be very constructive. Plus I have my own axes to grind. I’m not saying that everyone who has been influenced by these records are rubbish, or that these bands are necessarily rubbish, but it does bother me when a band I like says, ‘Nirvana really influenced me, they changed my life, maaaan’. In this day and age, it’s not hard to find decent, interesting and different music to listen to or draw fuel from. Let’s give these records a rest.

10. Queen

An admittedly odd choice to start off with. I certainly wouldn’t have thought that Queen would really have had any lasting influence over the music scene. I hate them and everyone else loves them, but I didn’t realistically think that any band whose main contribution to musical innovation was extreme bombast and daft genre exercises would wind up being musically referenced by anyone at all much. Unfortunately I was wrong. In a strange way, Queen are more influential then they have ever been. The first stirrings were the novelty rock horror that was The Darkness, who basically replayed Queen’s daft costumes and airbrushed rock shtick but with far less charm and infinitely less talent. Then Muse decided that their silly Radiohead-lite act just wasn’t silly enough, and so went even further into the land of ever-increasing overdubs and screeching operatics that, I suppose, had already been their stock in trade. Now, My Chemical Romance have mined Queen’s overblown sonic armoury and coupled it with loathsome self-pity and have managed to delight a generation of teenagers who must have something seriously wrong with their ears. But the biggest tragedy here is that, post-Darkness, Queen seem to have become a novelty rock text, with increasingly diminishing returns, the most dramatic of which has been the deplorable Mika, who has taken Queen’s template and combined it with dreadful songwriting, a sickeningly narcissistic desperation to be liked and a horrifically overblown ego, sucking anything resembling fun out of the proceedings in the process. Indeed, the irony is that none of Queen’s bastard progeny have that quality for which the band were originally, justly or not, known for – fun.

9. Coldplay

A no-brainer really. We all have to live in a world in which Coldplay are huge, which is bad enough. But even more depressing is the fact that a lot of people in bands have been hugely influenced by them. Coldplay have done a huge disservice to music in a number of ways. Their mind-numbingly bland sound is hugely popular, creating legions of bands trading in the same unadventurous whiny indie rock, from Snow Patrol to Athlete to Keane and onwards – the list is endless and still growing. For a band famed for alleged ‘songwriting’, Coldplay’s music is curiously unmusical. All their songs use very similar hackneyed chord sequences, layers of instruments come in only to play exactly the same parts as other instruments, their over-compressed recordings leave no room for dynamics, and all their lyrics are trite clichés that a 13 year old would be ashamed of. And whilst pop music doesn’t have to be raucous guitar rock to be exciting, Coldplay’s incredibly dull and unexciting music is surely the polar opposite of what pop music should be about. But not only have Coldplay caused blandness, poor songwriting and trite empty sentimentality to spread through modern music like a cancer, they have perpetuated a stereotype of ‘miserable music’ that is incredibly unrepresentative. Coldplay, like Emo (hold your horses, we’re getting there), is whiny music made by boring middle class wimps with absolutely nothing to say. As a result, all miserable music gets tarred with the same brush by people who like and dislike Coldplay/Emo, meaning that many people will never get a chance to appreciate the icy bleakness of The Marble Index or the drugged-out visions of hell that surface on Closer, nor the cleansing catharsis they bring to the listener. Miserable music and piano-led songs can be exciting and deeply affecting; Coldplay are not.

8. Blur

First thing first – I hated Britpop. Lazy retro guitar music, gratuitous plagiarism and brainless lad-ism. The great bands of the era either ha nothing to do with it (Stereolab, Current 93, Massive Attack, The Fall), or set themselves apart from the pack by possessing intelligence and wit, as well as actually owning more then three records to rip off (Denim, The Auteurs, Pulp, Elastica). Blur’s smarmy, happy-chappy lad-ism grated enough by itself, without the music to go with it. Yes, I have also listened to the Beatles and The Kinks, do you want a meddle? As well as not paying attention to any musical advancement after 1969 unless it was to mindlessly plagiarise XTC or Talking Heads in a vain attempt to achieve sonic variety, Blur were one of the original proponents of what I like to call lumpy songwriting. Put on Modern Life Is Rubbish and listen to the clumsiness of the melodies, the misjudged leaps into the chorus, the utter lack of melodic grace – this is what I’m talking about. Now, I will be the first to say that you don’t necessarily need great tunes to have a great record, but if you’re trying to be the Beatles of the Kinks, it helps to be able to write a melody as sublime as Waterloo Sunset. Also, if you’re aiming for Ray Davies’ witty social commentary, it helps if you can write lyrics that don’t make you sound like a complete retard, and are possessed of more wit then one of those ‘You Don’t Have To Be Mad To Work Here, But It Helps!!!!!’ signs. Also, signing in provincial accents is fine, as long as it actually is your accent. Pretending to be a cockney geezer shouldn’t make anyone like you. Unfortunately, none of this stopped Blur becoming huge, and now a generation of young musicians write music whilst thinking that Parklife is the best thing since sliced bread. The result: The Kaiser Chiefs. I don’t think I need to say anymore.

7. Green Day

Punk is a classic example of what I’m talking about with influence. People who formed bands after seeing the Sex Pistols include Magazine, Subway Sect, Joy Division, The Slits, The Fall… and it also includes Sham 69 and Simply Red. People get all idealistic about punk, but these days it mostly seems to be some berk with pink hair and daft tattoos getting incredibly inarticulate when asked what Black Flag mean to him. Musically it was played out by 1978 at the very latest, and that’s me being generous. Nevertheless, Never Mind The Bollocks and Damaged provide much artistic fuel to inarticulate youths the world over, including this lot, who I blame for the resurgence of not just ‘punk’ and therefore loads of lame punk bands, but that loathsome hybrid ‘pop punk’. Blink 182 owe far more to Green Day’s obnoxious vocals, immature posturing and daft clothes then anything else. ‘But Blink 182 aren’t real punks!’ cries a voice from the back. Well done. Neither are Green Day. More recently, Green Day’s poor music and self-centred whining have provided the template for all the horrendous Emo bands that we are now saddled with. Don’t believe me? Take Green Day’s ‘Basketcase’ – with its themes of ‘misunderstood’ adolescence, daft flirtation with ‘edgy’ themes like madness (remember the incredibly silly video with the band as mental patients?) and its oh-so-self-deprecating opening couplet. ‘Do you have the time / To listen to me whine’, if the song was released today, it would be classified as Emo. Billy Joe Armstrong even wears eyeliner these days. Thanks guys.

6. The Libertines

I was tempted to put The Strokes here instead, seeing as it’s thanks to them that we have The Libs, but I decided against it, if only because The Libertines are so dramatically worse then The Strokes. More retro guitar pop mixed with blatantly sexist lad-ism, but this time played by people who can’t even play their instruments properly. And in the Libertines’ case, this isn’t a case of inventive non-musicians bravely pushing the boundaries of popular music, or even cute C86-style incompetence, it’s a case of a bunch of morons failing to play their instruments, and not even in an interesting and endearing way. Hell, the Strokes were no Television, despite what press releases may have told you, but at least they could play better then the Libs. But worst of all, the Libertines showed a generation that you can get by on tabloid hysteria and a shrewd press campaign and music need have nothing to do with it. Pete Docherty may have failed to kill himself at the most opportune time to guarantee true immortality, but the sickening press circus that tore the band apart was truly disturbing to watch. The NME journalists circled the band like vultures, and you got the feeling that no one could have cared less about the safety of the people involved as long as it would generate more column inches. But the truly disturbing thing about it was the controversy whipped up simply due to the fact that Pete Docherty was doing heroin. Pop Star Takes Drugs Shock. Pop stars have been taking drugs since there were drugs for pop stars to take, why this should be a surprise or a noteworthy subject in this day and age is a complete mystery, which makes the whole thing leave quite an unpleasant aftertaste. The Libertines and the associated hysteria was nothing more then a very cynical hype campaign – one listen to their very mediocre records should tell you all you need to know. The press comparisons to Sid Vicious were, for once, quite accurate – both Vicious and Docherty were ultimately expendable individuals whose main purpose was to whip up public interest by any means possible. And yet there are people who genuinely think that Pete Docherty is a talented individual – see The View, The Kooks and dozens more who have sprung up in the band’s wake. What this all calls into question is, how far are you prepared to go in order to become a legend? Disturbing.

5. David Gray

I really think it’s a bit unfair that David Gray and his hordes of followers get labeled singer-songwriters. This immediately puts them in the same genre as incredibly talented individuals such as Joni Mitchell and Nick Drake, whose complex, innovative yet deeply soul-searching music is miles and miles away from the chart-friendly dross put out by Mr Gray and his ilk. David Gray has been largely responsible, in my eyes, for dragging this respected genre through the dirt. Gray’s simple, bland songs hold an obvious appeal for a market that snapped up Coldplay and made them superstars, and indeed he shares much of Coldplay’s unimaginative musical approach and ‘serious young man’ image. His breakthrough into the charts opened up the floodgates for many imitators, culminating in the truly odious James Blunt, one of modern music’s most cynical and unpleasant creations. Though nowhere near as disturbingly exploitative as James Blunt, the main ingredients are all in Gray’s music, from the shamelessly exploitative ‘emotional’ chord changes upwards. The sooner the Great British Record Buying Public snaps out of it the better, then hopefully all these idiots will be out of a job.

4. The Streets

Another no-brainer really. Mike Skinner’s blokey tales of everyday working-class British life were largely responsible for bringing back social realism to British pop music. But not even the man himself could have realized how influential this would have been. Although British indie rock had been revitalized (read: found something slightly different to rip off) by the appearance of the Strokes and the White Stripes, lyrically it was still running around like a headless chicken. In the post-Britpop, post-Radiohead landscape, Coldplay and Travis-style lyrical emptiness was the style of the day. The genre greedily hopped on the social realism bandwagon, giving rise to the likes of Hard-Fi, the Arctic Monkeys, Lilly Allen and so forth. Suddenly, everyone was singing in thick provincial accents about how crappy 9-to-5 jobs are. Now, the main problem with social realism is that, if you write about how boring and mundane modern life is, there’s a limited amount of time that you can go without your lyrics becoming, well, boring and mundane. As a lyrical slant, it has a very limited half life. No one cares about Kate Nash’s boyfriend being sick on her trainers, it’s just not very interesting. Also, there is a tendency for the lyricists to be unable to make any interesting comments about their chosen subjects because they are simply too involved themselves to be able to see the larger picture. This results in a very self-centred lyrical approach, dove-tailing with Emo-style self-pity – both are unable to see past their own nose, making for an almost autistic lyrical world that isn’t very inviting to the listener, nor, ironically for the social realists, having much to do with reality. And of course, there’s the fact that with ‘Dry Your Eyes’, Skinner managed to combine social realism, hip hip-lie and the power ballad, paving the way for such despicable entities as Jamie T and Just Jack. Unforgivable.

3. Nirvana

There have been few bands in recent memory capable of inspiring such undying devotion and worship as Nirvana. Everyone likes Nirvana, they were a huge influence on just about every band who followed in their wake. All this despite a very slim legacy – Nevermind is pretty much Bon Jovi with more street cred, their early thrashings are something of a joke to all but the most desperate of wanna-be hipsters and In Utero is very patchy despite the Steve Albini production credits. But the really perplexing thing it that Nirvana regularly get let off the hook for all the dreadful bands they inspired. I realize that Silverchair and Nickleback would have horrified dear old Kurt, but they exist because he left them Nevermind as a template. Plus, already Nirvana have aged horribly – play them next to Kurt’s heroes The Pixies and Husker Du, and Nirvana sound very poor indeed. Yet for some reason, everyone still falls over themselves to tell people how much Nevermind meant to them as a kid. Get over it and go and listen to something else.

2. U2

There are an awful lot of U2 fans making music out there at the moment, but surely few will ever achieve such stellar levels of self-importance and pomposity as U2 themselves. From Bono’s deranged messianic posturing to their music’s sexless bombast, there are many reasons to hate U2, and indeed, many do, but I’m not going to let them off the hook just for that. U2 have always strived for passion and meaning, but you get the feeling that it is just that – an overwhelming desire to be passionate about some sort of meaning or other which the band, bless their cotton socks, have never been quite bright enough to figure out. However, from day one they were certain that they were An Important Band who made Important Albums, and everything they have done has been stuffed with this bizarre self-importance, from the overbearingly earnest early records to their 90s output where they overbearingly and earnestly discovered irony. There music is completely devoid of subtlety, always going for the grand gesture before figuring out what the grand gesture is for, or even thinking whether it might or might not be appropriate. Equally missing is any sense of sexuality or humour that might leaven the heavy-handed moral tone. Their shows are excruciatingly staged to the last detail, sucking out any form of spontaneity or humanity. Their influence is everywhere, a direct musical influence on Coldplay and their soft-rock following, but also felt wherever bands decide that they must make a Grand Statement, sacrificing humour and humanity in the process, a sadly common disease in modern indie rock.

1. Oasis

I was originally going to be somewhat glib about this, but I feel I have to tread carefully here as I think this is a point that needs making. Oasis were unashamedly careerist, and are I think largely responsible for the way that, in the eyes of the music press, the public and musicians themselves, ‘ambition’ refers to your career rather then to your art. You may love Oasis and argue back that this is not a sin in itself, especially as you feel that they wrote some great tunes, but I’d like to point out the huge musical debt that all of their songs owe to previously written material. You already know that Cigarettes and Alcohol is Bang A Gong, that Hello steals directly from Garry Glitter and Don’t Look Back In Anger is Imagine via Felt’s New Day Dawning, and so on and so on, so I won’t labour the point. You could also point out that Oasis are not the first band, or indeed musician, to directly plagiarise tunes, but the combination of Oasis’ blind arrogance and lust for fame leaves an unpleasant aftertaste. Certainly, in their wake there are legions of bands that opt simply to cop ideas rather then innovate, leading us to the paltry state that much of indie rock is in today. Basically, the message is, you can get by on swagger and bluster alone, which just isn’t healthy. And, interestingly enough, the crushing lack of subtlety and bland clichés that characterize Oasis’ ballads helped to pave the way for the worst excesses of Coldplay and their ilk. Though they would surely balk at the suggestion, Oasis and Coldplay share much in common: Oasis prioritise popularity over innovation, which again I admit isn’t a sin in itself but ultimately leads to musical stagnation. I don’t have a problem with Oasis existing – I loathe them but I can ignore them – I have a problem with Oasis being such a musical touchstone for a generation of music fans. Best record since Definitely Maybe doesn’t cut it for me – to aspire to follow that record is to create a record free of innovation, daring and originality, some of the qualities that drive my passion for music. Piss off and get a job.

Gig Review: The Pastels / Electrelane / The Royal We 29.04.07 The Bongo Club

2007-05-02T19:06:00.000Z

What brings a gig up from merely good to being truly great, a near transcendental experience? The motto for this year’s Triptych festival is, “If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn,” a quote from the great jazz musician Charlie Parker. It is an appropriate banner under which to hold a festival whose main priorities have always been musical diversity, innovation and passion over coherence and commerciality. It certainly fits the bill tonight, when two of Britain’s most underappreciated bands are given a chance to shine in front of a small but dedicated audience, resulting in a triumph of passion over reason, logic and expectation. And it’s always nice to find out that you are not as cynical or as jaded as you think you are.
It is a pleasure to see The Royal We again, who have written a few more songs since I last saw them and have tightened up a bit around the edges, though not enough to loose their amateurish charm. But they are not why the audience is here tonight.
The British music press is renowned for its fickleness, but surely none have suffered more undeservedly from its poor attention span then Electrelane. Hyped up and shot down as the new Stereolab before they ever had a chance to be cool, they have become stereotyped in the press as po-faced feminists with questionable musical ability churning out stodgy clever-clever post-rock. As it turns out, nothing could be further from the truth. Working to indifference from the record buying public and sniffy hacks alike, Electrelane have just got on with becoming Britain’s greatest pop group. It is a truly astounding thing to see a band at the peak of their powers, but that is what is on show tonight. Electrelane’s individual members may still be untutored and not conventionally adept musicians, but on record and on stage they play with a sense of power and dynamics that puts all of their more conventionally “talented” peers to shame. More intuitive then intellectual, their music has a rough and ready sense of fun missing from the post-rock scene, which combines with a love of gritty noise to rudely cut them off from the tasteful politeness that marred Stereolab’s later albums. The rhythm section of Ros Murray and Emma Gaze joyously chase through thunderous peaks and quiet valleys, whilst Mia Clarke, who must be one of this generation’s most under-rated guitarists, melds delicate arpeggios to post-Sonic Youth squall. Verity Susman’s voice is capable of both crystal-like clarity and Moe Tucker-ish fragility, and she is just as at home singing about lost love as she is quoting Nietzsche of Tennyson. In spite of their reputation for knotty instrumentals, their songs, which are very much songs, are rich in both melody and emotional openness; even their instrumentals possess a striking lyricism. ‘This Deed’ is a thing of sparkling, elegant beauty; new single ‘To The East’ is a touching song of love and loss. And instrumental closer ‘Long Dark’ veers across canyons of raw feedback. Bursting with joy, hope, love and longing, and possessed with a playful sensuality without having to conform to any sonic clichés the worst kind of male sexist music hack would associate with that word, Electrelane are a truly magical and wondrous band.
Having to follow Electrelane wasn’t going to be easy, but any band with the pedigree of The Pastels would, you think, not be likely to worry. But The Pastels didn’t get where they are today by macho displays of confidence. Despite being the leader of one of the most passionately adored cult bands in the world, Stephen Pastel still keeps up his day job of working in a record shop in Glasgow. Live appearances have been rare of late, and despite a 25-odd year career, The Pastels look decidedly awkward on stage, something not helped by Stephen’s amp breaking down whilst the band set up, resulting in an extra 20 minutes of waiting for the audience before the band get going, testing the patience of the audience. Technical glitches eventually overcome, once the band start – opening with two songs written in collaboration with Japanese band Teniscoats – it is immediately apparent what is so special about this band – not that the gathered faithful didn’t know already. Despite their still limited musical ability, The Pastels are gifted with a very natural sense of melody. Stephen Pastel stands in the left corner of the stage, looking both awkward and embarrassed, his atonal vocals quiet and restrained. There is no visual focus on the stage, and the band struggle to keep in time together. But then, something magical happens: through sheer belief in not themselves but their music, through passion and through the strength and beauty of Stephen’s tunes, what should be a shambling wreck assembles itself and the song builds to a dramatic and emotional peak. And so The Pastels’ belief in the power of music is transformed into reality – the end effect is both awe-inspiring and moving. The Pastels have long been stereotyped as a twee C86 band, but they were always something beyond that, something which is apparent here tonight. Though often sited as the archetypal indie band, The Pastels are possessed with a joy de vivre and humour together with a complete lack of egoism or smugness, making them very much the opposite of what too often characterizes indie music. The Pastels are often compared unfavourably to The Smiths, but it’s impossible to imagine Morrissey singing something as emotionally honest and affecting as ‘Thru’ Your Heart’, or being able to achieve the shimmering technicolour joy of ‘Nothing To Be Done’. Not only has disaster been averted, a great gig has been played, perhaps as much a surprise to the band themselves as anyone else. Not that we really doubted them for a second.

Bad Cover Versions: Mark Ronson: Stop Me

2007-04-12T12:05:00.000Z

Apparently, saddling us with Lilly Allen and Amy Winehouse wasn't enough for producer Mark Ronson. He now wants to unleash a solo album of covers on us, leading off with a downright daft sort-of-cover of The Smiths' 'Stop Me If You Think That You've Heard This One Before', snappily retitled 'Stop Me'. Perhaps the most irritating thing about this is that, on paper, it's not a bad idea at all. 'Stop Me...' is the standout track off The Smiths' somewhat lacklustre swansong album. Being both sub-par by the band's standards yet not without considerable merit makes it an ideal choice for a Smiths cover version, especially as it lacks the musical complexity of earlier Smiths songs, making it easier to create an interesting arrangement for. The song's pub brawl lyrics put it nicely in line with the strain of tired and hackneyed social realism plaguing the indie scene currently. Also, a soul cover of a Smiths song will really piss off Morrissey fans, which is always funny. Unfortunately, the end result is dire. The original band arrangement, which, whilst nothing special, did at least have dynamic playing by a great band, is replaced by horribly pro-tooled strings and brass, together with an incongruous trip-hop drum line which does nothing but upset the song's natural rhythm. Vocals are provided by Daniel Merriweather, who replaces what was one of Morrissey’s most engagingly humorous vocals with a disinterested and clichéd reading, totally lacking in passion and missing out on the song's droll humour. A couple of verses from Diana Ross' 'Hanging Out' are tacked on to the end, which only serves to mangle the meaning of the two completely unrelated songs. And there you have it: a minor Smiths classic bludgeoned into a bland, safe, sure-fire hit that doesn't sound out of place when it comes on the radio - something that unfortunately, seems to be happening a lot.
I'm not sure really what Mark Ronson was trying to do here. Perhaps 20 or 30 years ago, rewiring an indie hit into a smooth, RnB soul hit might have been subversive, as there was a large period in indie's history when it simply wasn't talking to the charts. But these days, indie bands sell millions. The Arctic Monkeys' debut is the fastest selling debut album of all time, The Arcade Fire sell out concerts within half an hour of tickets going on sale, and even American indie faves The Shins went straight in at number 2 on the charts. Girls Aloud recently covered the Monkey's anthem 'I Bet That You Look Good In The Dole Cue' or whatever it's called, and the video for the Monkey's new single features as many scantily clad dancing girls as the latest Pussy Cat Dolls video. Most modern indie bands come ready made with slick, poppy tunes that are custom made for the charts, and all of them claim to be influenced by the Smiths. None of them need awakening to pop music, nor does any snobbery against the charts exist in the indie scene anymore. Not only does this cover version suck, there seems to be no reason for it to even exist.

Frozen Warnings: Bleak Music

2007-03-12T15:01:00.000Z

"The blues isn't about feeling better; it's about making other people feel worse." 'Bleeding Gums' Murphy

I was in the local indie club last night, showing my disapproval of the dreadful music being played in the usual hipster fashion – frowning, arms folded, standing stock still at the side of the dance floor – when I was approached on two separate occasions by girls I had never met before enticing me to “smile, you’re in a club!” or some similar sentiment. Standard miserable-gittishness aside, it struck me that much ‘happy’ music leaves me completely cold. There is a certain level of gauche jauntiness that just makes me want to kick the speakers in – one of many things I have against Britpop, but that’s another story. Some of pop music’s most engaging music has been made by those driven to explore the darkest depths of their own psyche, often at a huge personal cost. Suicide chic is crass, stupid and unhelpful, but it often becomes hard to disentangle the artist’s own personal decline from these records. With emo becoming a sterilised, stylised short-hand for misery that is justly ridiculed, it’s worth mentioning that it is possible to express sadness, misery and regret in pop music without descending into effete whining and meaningless cliché. Indeed, the basis of modern popular music was the blues, which was very much a raw expression of pain and misery. Blues music, and indeed much music made by those who have lead troubled and painful lives and use it as artistic fuel, remains incredibly popular today. It is worth asking, what is the appeal of such horrendously bleak music? Why does suicide and personal tragedy shift units? Of the people who made these records, some lived to tell the tale, whilst others did not, but all paid a price for digging this deep into the well of human suffering. Sit back, preferably in a cold, damp, dimly lit room, hide all the knives and abandon all hope: here are some of popular music’s bleakest moments.

Billie Holiday – “Gloomy Sunday”

Any study of bleakness in popular music necessarily starts with Gloomy Sunday, the infamous Hungarian Suicide Song, because, present at the birth of popular music as we now know it, it was an early indicator in the ability of pop music to express grief and sorrow extremely powerfully but also an early indicator of the commercial potential of misery and suicide chic. Written by Hungarian Rezso Seress, the song was popularised by the English-version cover by Billie Holiday, but its notoriety preceded it – allegedly the song caused a spate of suicides, its lyrics and tune so miserable that it inspired numerous young lovers who heard the song to throw themselves off buildings immediately on hearing it. Realising that this would only add to the ghoulish appeal of a song that features line as bleak as “Gloomy is Sunday, with shadows I spend it all / My heart and I have decided to end it all’, the rumours were spread and Billie Holliday’s version, albeit with a third verse that softens the blow, became a hit. Certainly, the song’s austere chords combined with Holiday’s stunning voice and morbid lyrics of love cut short by death created a piece of music so terminally tragic that you can only too easily imagine soundtracking the desperate suicide of star-crossed lovers. The song has been covered by numerous artists with an unhealthy obsession with death, and the suicides of Seress and Billie MacKenzie – the Associates frontman who also covered the song – have only helped to increase the bizarre legend of the song.

Public Image Limited – “Theme” / Metal Box / Flowers of Romance

John Lydon was a volatile and troubled character from an early age, so it’s not surprising that the grotesque media carnival of the Sex Pistols only brought his feelings of alienation, paranoia and self disgust to the fore. Aligning himself with two fantastic musicians who were able of creating a worthy soundtrack to his inner turmoil but who were unfortunately equally damaged in their own special ways, he formed Public Image Limited. “Theme”, from their self-titled first album, is played in mental hospitals to show patients that they are not alone in what they are feeling. All atonal guitar noise, throbbing bass and primal screaming, it’s utterly harrowing. Lydon howls “AAND I WISH I COOULD DIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAH!” for 9 punishing minutes, forcing you to share in his world of self-hatred and paranoia. If the first album lost the plot after that, then Metal Box certainly doesn’t. “Death Disco” is Lydon’s pained farewell to his dying mother, and that’s probably the album’s emotional high point. “I could be wrong / It could be hate”spits “Memories”, whilst “Chant” almost chokes on its own misanthropic mantra before dissolving into the undead muzak of “Radio 4”. Levene’s scaping guitar and coruscating synthesizers scream blue murder in the hollow caverns of Jah Wobble’s subsonic bass playing. The follow up, Flowers of Romance, was bleaker still – all clattering tribal drums and harsh synthesiser squawks over Lydon’s atonal ranting, the zenith – or nadir, depending on how you look at it – of his raging hatred expressed on “Track 8”’s repulsion: ‘A bulbous heap / Batting her eyelids.. Erupting in fat”. From this harrowing pit of hatred there was clearly nowhere to go, so Lydon stopped making proper music, reclaimed his Rotten pseudonym and started making really crappy pop music. It’s funny how things turn out.

Pink Floyd – Animals

By 1973, Pink Floyd had misery sussed, making Dark Side of the Moon the party album you could slit your wrists to. Wish You Were Here, despite the generous sentiment of the title track, saw them sinking further into Roger Water’s misanthropy. Animals came out in 1977, and then there was no turning back. The Floyd entered punk’s year zero with what is possibly the bleakest, most angry album released the entire year. The Floyd’s previous albums dealt with Water’s favourite themes – madness, alienation, loss of innocence, the emptiness of the modern world – but Animals sees him lyrically begin to shut himself off from humanity altogether, leading to the warped self-absorbed self-hatred and misanthropy that fills The Wall and extends to The Final Cut. Wish… may have seen Waters lamenting lost youth and longing for the return of his lost friends, but Animals sees him taking swipes at humanity itself. From his position as Rock God, Waters weighs humanity’s collective heart and finds it grossly lacking, caricaturing his fellow man as grotesque beasts with no saving graces. “Dogs” portrays conniving businessmen driven by selfishness and greed, ultimately dying by their own sword – a frighteningly accurate portrayal of Thatcherite industry, whilst “Sheep” portrays the masses as braying idiots brutalised by their leaders and unable to fend for themselves. Throughout the album, Pink Floyd back Waters every inch of the way, with a sharp musical focus they would soon lose for good – David Gilmour in particular is at his best, especially on the sharp soloing and nasty riffing that give “Dogs” its teeth. The Wall and The Final Cut may compete with Animals for bleakness, but they cannot compete in its violently focused musical attack. This is a powerful, nasty and utterly engrossing monument to humanity’s moral failings, pointed out by degenerate squabbling pop stars at the peak of their powers.

Syd Barrett – “Jugband Blues”/ “Vegetable Man” / “Dark Globe”

And what of the Floyd’s errant drug-addled genius? Fewer artists must have suffered more in the comedown after the Summer of Love. Syd’s drug use had left him a worn out shell of a man, and whilst he disappeared into obscurity to live in Cambridge with his mum, his band went on to sell millions of records by writing songs inspired by his descent into madness. If Piper At The Gates Of Dawn captured the highs of the psychedelic experience, his latter day stuff captured the tortuous descent into psychosis latent at the heart of it. “Jugband Blues” is Syd’s harrowing resignation speech, the last song he recorded with the Floyd. Essentially, by this stage, excessive drug use had lead to his mental collapse. “Jugband Blues” is miles away from the psychedelic wonderment of Piper , the dream long since having turned into a nightmare. Opening with ‘It’s awfully considerate of you to think of me here /And I’m most obliged to you for making it clear that I’m not here’, the song lurches haphazardly through a number of seemingly unrelated musical sections, giving a fairly accurate picture of Syd’s fractured mind. Barrett’s creative inventiveness now appears to have been turned into destructiveness; whereas before his eccentric arrangements and musical ideas made a song, here they fight to bring the song to its knees before it’s even got off the ground. “Vegetable Man”, never officially released on account of being too disturbing but often bootlegged, is even more frightening. Similarly wayward in structure, the song builds up to violent peaks only to collapse into a pathetic heap. Syd managed to get his act together enough to record the charmingly shambolic The Madcap Laughs. Songs like “Octopus” hint at the psychedelic whimsy of old, but have a very audible undercurrent of damaged darkness, with songs often collapsing mid take, or dangerously hanging together for grim life. “Dark Globe” is perhaps the album’s most harrowing moment, melodically halting and awkward, with Syd’s voice strained and cracking as he hollers, ‘Wont’ you miss me / Wouldn’t you miss me at all?’ Kids, just say no.

Joy Division – Closer

In reality, too much has probably been said already about Closer, and more will continue to be said. Ian Curtis is perhaps the ultimate Dead Pop Star – he had talent, keen intelligence and genuine wasted potential to go along with the obligatory good looks and ready-made legend (Closer was released after Ian Curtis committed suicide). However, the reason Joy Division, and especially Closer, continue to draw such attention is down to the power of their music and the way it seems to fit perfectly with our image of Curtis’ troubled mental state. Listening to Closer, it is easy to see why. Curtis’ doomed poetics had evolved from Unknown Pleasure’s dark angst to something much more disturbing, in the same way that Joy Division’s music had grown more sophisticated and darkly textured. The opening side, with “Atrocity Exhibition” appropriately setting the scene for grim voyeurism, is harsh and unforgiving stuff, but it’s really with the second side that things get scary. The music slows down to a spectral crawl, and Curtis sounds as if he has stopped struggling and surrendered to the darkness that swallowed him. In “The Eternal”, Curtis even has a premonition of his own funeral. But perhaps it is “Isolation” on the first side that really gets to the heart of the record. The song features the infamous “I’m ashamed of the things I’ve been put through / I’m ashamed of the person I am” couplet, but in the final verse, Curtis is given his first glimpse of what lies beyond: “But if you could just see the beauty / These things I could never describe… This is my one broken prize”. These lines some up both the harsh cold beauty of Joy Division’s vision, but also give a chilling picture of a man poised upon the abyss, drawn fatally down towards the darkness.

Manic Street Preachers - The Holy Bible

There are many reasons to hate the Manics, one of the most obvious being for the sickening ‘Cult of Richey’ that to this day surrounds the band – the way Richey Edwards’ self-absorption, self-harm and ultimate self-destruction has been turned into a heroic act by some of the band’s most devoted followers is a sad post-script to their career. I come to The Holy Bible not wanting to add to the ridiculous legend in any way, but it is nonetheless their most musically exciting and engaging album by a long way. Lyrically, the pretensions of the Manics’ patchy earlier albums – all confused rhetoric and misread Nietzsche - are chewed up, shredded up and spat out, amidst flotsam and jetsam from Richey’s disintegrating mind. For the first time the band managed to wrest their confused lyrical threads into something at once very personal and engaging, if utterly harrowing. But, crucially, the music is right behind the lyrics – the band’s former hammy punk-metal tempered with a harsh, Spartan post-punk derived sound. Thus Richey’s anorexia tale ‘4st7’ is given extra nastiness via its scratchy guitars and odd time-signature changes, giving way to a chillingly serene coda. ‘Yes’ examines prostitution of the soul with real bile, whilst ‘She Is Suffering’ has a crawling evil ambience clearly designed to echo Joy Division’s ‘She’s Lost Control’. The Holy Bible lends itself to legend so easily because whilst Richey was disintegrating is the only time MSP managed to sound completely sincere – if still typically confused. They had become slave to their ‘cultural alienation, boredom and despair’ rhetoric, and had unwittingly sent themselves down a path to destruction. This happened to fortuitously coincide with the band throwing off their musical shackles and embracing their tortured muse head on. The Manics finally burned with the passion and conviction they had always wanted to, but at a high human price. Never again would they achieve such heights of passion or musical excellence, and their subsequent career has seen them almost afraid to approach those attributes which gives them to this day one of the most passionate – and obnoxious – fan bases around.

Throwing Muses - Throwing Muses

It’s a sad truism in popular music that, if you want to be a mad tortured artist, it helps if you a) are male and b) kill yourself at an early age. Kristen Hersh of Throwing Muses conformed to neither of these simple rules, and, as a result, is not a rock ‘n’ roll martyr like Richey Edwards or *spits* Kurt Cobain. Hersh had a troubled upbringing and suffers from manic depression. Few artists in the history of popular music have approached her courage and intensity – her art is highly personal and cathartic. Yet because being a mad woman in pop music is for some reason less ‘cool’ or marketable then being a mad man, her music remains neglected outside a narrow cult following. Also, it has often lead to her not-insignificant talent all too often being patronised as the outpourings of a lunatic in a way that has never happened to, say, Richey Edwards. Hersh has been described as a female Morrissey, which is a horrendous insult to Hersh – she is no effete whiner, but an artist who confronts her difficulties through her music. Throwing Muses first album is unbearably intense. Opener ‘Call Me’ opens with driving, knotty guitar lines and Hersh howling like a banshee ‘Something’s gone/ Something’s oveeeeeeeeeerrraaaaa…’ before sinking into a deceptively mellow coda – ‘Here I am / What a looser / Waiting for the years to go by’. Songs violently switch mood, from melancholy to vitriolic and back again, the surreal lyrics eloquently expressing Hersh’s angst – listening to the record is like being lost in someone’s very disturbing inner space. ‘America (She Can’t Say No)’ rails against a nation’s lack of values, but most of the pain here is internal. The music is as engaging and unique as the lyrics – swirling, baroque guitars give way to deranged rockabilly worthy of a female menopausal Fall, back to acoustic folk. Most disturbing of all is ‘Delicate Cutters’, a tale of finding catharsis through self-harm. Miles away from emo posturing, the song is just Hersh’s acoustic guitar and icy voice, hard and grim – she means every word of it. Like ‘Closer’, the record is possessed of an eerie beauty and a chilling serenity. The fact that Hersh did not take the easy way out and to this day makes intense and extremely personal records makes it all the more impressive.

Felt - Me And A Monkey On The Moon

Me And A Monkey On The Moon was Lawrence’s tenth album with Felt, and although his music had always been melancholy and he had often expressed a feeling of isolation from people in general – see ‘All The People I Like Are Those That Are Dead’ – it was only with this, Felt’s final album, that he dropped the beautiful oblique poetry of his lyrics to make an intensely personal album. MAAMOTM is, lyrically, brutally honest, from the break up tales of ‘I Can’t Make Love To You Anymore’ and ‘Never Let You Go’, to the tales of Lawrence’s troubled childhood, full of loneliness, despair and worse. But the odd thing about Monkey is how open, joyous and liberated the music sounds – this was Felt at their most musically approachable. ‘Budgie Jacket’ hides its disturbing subject matter behind mumbled vocals and a shimmering guitar solo, whilst ‘I Can’t Make Love’ even includes slide guitars. ‘New Day Dawning’ is at the heart of the album. Lawrence essentially writes himself out of the story – ‘I’ve chickened out of things in the past, but now I know / When death calls I’ll be ready to go’. He is a man whose dreams of pop stardom came to nothing, and now he’s lost absolutely everything and just ‘wants to blend right into the walls of the world / And not be seen’. But then the song’s sunny chorus proclaims ‘It’s a new day dawning, Oh good morning to you’, before crashing into a coda that sounds not unlike Oasis’ ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’, complete with a elegiac guitar solo. Felt had never been so openly rock, nor expressed such open goodwill to the rest of humanity. Ultimately, Monkey is Lawrence’s good-bye note, but, instead of trying to drag down the listener with him, Lawrence realises that he has to make this journey on his own. The album takes on an oddly prescient quality in light of what happened next: Lawrence resurfaced with Denim, only to sink into his current twilight existence as a homeless registered mental patient. Many have tried marrying downbeat lyrics with upbeat music, but Monkey is unique in the contrast between the goodwill bestowed upon the listener and the utter despair awaiting its writer. It’s not that there isn’t hope on this album, it’s just that there’s none whatsoever for its creator.

Big Star - Third/Sister Lovers

Big Star’s third album is so far removed from the glorious power pop of their first two releases that at times it’s hard to believe that this is the work of the same band. Deemed to be too uncommercial for release, and shelved for years due to bickering between guitarist/vocalist Alex Chilton and the producer and record company, Third hit the shelves in 1978, years after Big Star had dissolved to unsurprisingly pitiful sales. Whereas it’s hard to see why Big Star’s first two records failed to sell in hindsight, Third did not sell for obvious reasons, being muddy, perverse and just plain nasty from the offset. Opener ‘Kizza Me’ starts off like the power pop perfection of before, albeit harsher and more ragged, before collapsing at the bridge as Chilton whispers ‘I want to white out’ over cavernous piano and a single jarring chord. The song hops gamely into the chorus, but the damage is done: Chilton has let the mask slip, and his half-hearted grin over the chorus isn’t fooling anyone. This tension runs through the record, alternately making for great music and bloody messes. It becomes abundantly clear that Chilton’s head wasn’t in a great place, as drunken covers and shambolic sketches of songs jostle for space alongside more fruitful offerings. Ultimately, this is the sound of a man wrestling with his muse, only to give up the struggle and run away. At places it feels like Alex Chilton just doesn’t care anymore – upon being told that ‘Downs’ had potential to be a hit, he subjected it to gross sabotage, spitefully hiding the melody under drunkenly dissonant piano, poor arrangement and what sounds like chairs falling over, until the song is reduced to a mangled shell of its former self. Unfortunately this doesn’t do his art any favours. However, occasionally this wilful perversity pays off, as on the fantastic surreal mess that is ‘Kangaroo’. ‘Holocaust’, the album’s most infamous song and its most engaging moment, is one of the most miserable songs ever recorded – over cycling minor chords on an echoing piano, Chilton sings ‘You’re eyes are almost dead / Can’t get out of bed…’. Essentially a grim self portrait and fair indicator of what he was going through at the time, Chilton laments that ‘Everybody goes / Leaving those that fall behind’ before looking at himself and proclaiming, ‘You’re a wasted face… you’re a holocaust’. Bleak doesn’t cover it. Images of loss and confusion are scattered throughout the record’s more together moments, with Chilton pleading ‘I hate it here / Get me out of here’ on ‘Blue Moon’, whilst on ‘Big Black Car’ he sounds as if he’s barely there, merely a ghostly presence behind the music. Fuelled by feelings of bitterness and anger, Alex Chilton’s muse had lead him down a twisted and tortuous path, and Chilton decided he wanted no more of it – Third is the final record that he made that even comes close to reflecting his talent as a songwriter. Few people have come so close to looking greatness in the face, only to throw it all away for nothing.

This Heat - Deceit

This Heat were a product of desperate times: mass unemployment, the Cold War, the rise of Thatcherism… you’ve heard it all before when people talk about the late 70s so I’ll not reel out all the old clichés. But rather then driving them to play three chords and shout rather silly slogans, This Heat were inspired to create a new, radical musical language, built on invention and with a rare, often frightening intensity. Their first album contained its fair share of bleakness, from the portrayal of watery death in ‘Not Waving But Drowning’ to the political turmoil reflected in ‘The Fall Of Saigon’, but ‘Deceit’, released at the height of the Cold War, was even bleaker and more intense. Recorded under the threat of nuclear fallout, the record is infused with paranoia and doubt. Opening with ‘Sleep’, both an incantation to start the album’s dream-like sequence of ideas and a call to awake from apathy and blind acceptance, ‘Deceit’ allows no compromise. ‘S.P.Q.R.’ harks back to the days of the Empire, declaring ‘We are all Romans / We live to regret it’, whilst ‘Makeshift Swahili’ is about lack of communication and the breakdown of understanding, on both a personal and global level. ‘Independence’ rereads the American Declaration of Independence in order to hold up the hypocrisies of the Thatcher/Reagan junta. However, the record is not simply finger pointing – This Heat’s questioning intelligence lies beyond soapbox sloganeering, whilst the band are as ready to admit to their guilt as anyone else’s. The music provides the perfect counterpoint for the lyrics, ranging from knotty tension, shrapnel and violence to periods of odd beauty and calm within the storm. The band’s musical invention was years ahead of its time, especially in its use of tape loops – different recordings are spliced together and overlaid across one another to give a harsh and alien ambience, and pieces of music are spliced in from earlier songs to add to the sense of dream-like continuity. The record is not without a human heart – in places, the group’s vocals combine over pastoral arrangements to give an almost folky feel. But then songs are wracked, torn, collapse and turn about on themselves, adding to the feeling of chaos and confusion. The overall effect is both alluring and terrifying, especially on ‘Hi Baku Shyo’, a field recording from a dead, post-nuclear world. ‘Deceit’ is a beautiful and haunting lament for the downfall of humanity, and, with global warming and volatile international relations rising constantly, all leading to a sense that perhaps we are about to reap as we have sown, this record sounds more and more powerful and pertinent with each listen.

Nico - The Marble Index / Desertshore

A recent issue of The Wire music magazine (www.thewire.co.uk) pointed out that you could draw a history of the latter half of the 20th century with Nico in the centre – from Nazi Germany to washed-out junkie via Warhol and the Velvets. The Marble Index and Desertshore stand in the middle of all of this as the definitive artistic achievements of Ms Christa Pafgen and one of the most extraordinary works to emerge from that period of history. These two records have lost none of their power, and sound just as harsh, alien and singular as they did on their release in 1969 and 1970. Both albums are song cycles with Nico’s legendary Teutonic voice standing at the centre, in all its tragic, doomed glory, accompanied by harmonium and John Cale’s oblique and inventive arrangements. Both records straddle the popular/classical music divide uniquely successfully, being both highly respected and influential in both but belonging to neither. Nico’s surreal poetry reflects her withdrawal from the human race and the world of human feeling, echoed in the powerful bleakness of the music. This is music at its most red-raw and visceral, suffused with a deep, aching hurt, the only escape from which is the numbness of narcotic oblivion. They are set in a metaphysical land of deserts and oceans – vast, empty and uninviting, swept by harsh winds and violent storms, older then humanity itself. The song’s modal scales and images of weather and storms appeal to the most primal of our instincts, but the sheer oddness of the arrangements and the subversion of the natural images from the comforting to the openly hostile turn them into an inverted nightmare. Nico follows her muse unflinchingly, sparing neither herself nor the listener :‘Julius Caesar (Memento Hodie)’, with its themes of an empire corrupted at the heart, thematically harks back to Nico’s childhood under Nazi Germany and her father’s death in the gas chambers, even if they are unmentioned in the song’s oblique poetry. However, The Marble Index and Desertshore’s musical achievements put it far from the cheap holiday in other people’s misery that some of the other albums on the list might be guilty of, and, in dealing with these themes, Nico takes on the pain and angst of the whole of the late 20th century. There is a sharp, brutal honesty to these records, but it is delivered in beautifully concise poetry. The Marble Index and Desertshore are easily the most bleak albums ever recorded, but they are also two of my favourites. This is not (only) down to bloody-minded perversity, but to the unique power, guaranteed emotional impact and sheer beauty of these records. Harsh and unforgiving as they may be, both albums are almost unbearably beautiful and moving. From the cycling chimes of ‘Evening Of Light’ to the dark incantations of ‘All That Is My Own’, these records have a crystalline purity and sharp, fragile beauty that is quite unlike anything I have ever heard. Indeed, it is about time that Nico is recognised as a hugely talented artist rather then a doomed junkie. The first time I heard them, these records moved me beyond anything I’d heard before, and they continue to haunt me still.

Post Script

“This is a song for the sunshine / Dedicated to the sunshine” This Heat, “Health and Efficiency”

This list is by no means conclusive – for start, there’s no Nick Drake or Cabaret Voltaire, Leonard Cohen or Neil Young, Neutral Milk Hotel or Nick Cave. Maybe I’ll write about those later if I feel like it. However, after this article in praise of (and in thrall to) the bleakest side of popular music, I’d like to point out that today I have been listening to You Can’t Hide Your Love Forever by Orange Juice, a bright ray of sunshine of an album that always makes me feel happy, and which is also one of my favourites. I don’t know if it’s healthy or not to immerse yourself in miserable music all the time, but I would guess not. Certainly, popular music’s fascination with the morbid and the miserable is a subject that probably deserves a book all to itself, and I have no idea what this says about the people who listen to such music, if anything at all. It’s probably worth pointing out that as long as there has been music, there has been miserable music. There is a Requiem for every Ode To Joy, a murder ballad for every declaration of love. Human emotions are rarely as simple or as clear cut as just ‘happy’ or ‘sad’, and listening to ‘happy’ or ‘sad’ music does not mean that you are either, even if music does often have the power to affect our emotions. I have enjoyed The Marble Index many times whilst being happy, and conversely have listened to You Can’t Hide… whilst feeling utterly miserable. For most of us, the range of emotions is al part of life’s rich tapestry (or insert other favourite cliché here), but I still think there is something fascinating about the extremes, even if you wouldn’t really want to live there. Incidentally, this could lead on to the whole ‘Do you have to suffer for your art?’ debate, as I do believe it’s linked, but I’m not going to go into that today. Today, the sun is out, and I feel positive and inclined to settle for joyous escapism rather then the bleakness of the human condition. But I’m glad these records are here for when I feel differently.

Bad Cover Versions: Rod Stewart: Downtown Train

2007-02-23T19:16:00.000Z

Tom Waits is a great songwriter, a talented performer and one of pop music's most gifted lyricists, up there with Bob Dylan and Mark E. Smith. Over a period of over 30 years, Tom Waits has been developing musically over a diverse yet remarkably consistent recording career. He has never been afraid to take risks, puts his muse first and almost always comes out on top, musically anyway. Rod Stewart is a pratt. So guess whose version of Waits' classic 'Downtown Train' became a Top Ten hit. You might have guessed it; due to the sacrifices he has made for his art, Tom Waits does not sell records, whereas due to his crass lowest common denominator pub rock cum balladeer shtick, Rod Stewart does. In fact, that they both did versions of this song might be the only thing the guys have in common. It's certainly hard to tell from Rod Stewart's horrific mauling of it that 'Downtown Train' is, in its original form, an excellent song. The gorgeous emotional climax of 1985's 'Rain Dogs' album, 'Downtown Train' is a song about alienation in the big city, made special through Waits' beat poetry and way with a tune. Opening with the striking 'Outside the yellow moon /Has punched a hole in the nighttime, yes', to his description of the downtown girls ('They're just thorns without the rose'), 'Downtown Train' is Waits at his most romantic, set in stark contrast the song's squalid setting. With just bass, guitar and keyboards, the song rises from a controlled, quiet beginning to a storm of passion by the chorus. He sings the chorus with controlled passion, full of yearning and longing, the girl of his desire painfully out of his reach. Delivered in Waits' trademark growl, the effect is incredibly moving.
Now for Rod Stewart's version. The song's original tasteful arrangement is replaced with over-ripe, schmaltzy orchestration, and as he starts singing, it becomes woefully clear that Stewart just isn't up to the task. His voice is lacking in the rich and weather-beaten quality that Waits effortlessly possesses, and he replaces Waits' original heartfelt delivery with horrifically misjudged melodrama, especially when he lets rip on the chorus. The combination of Rod's over-the-top yodelling and the sweeping orchestration are genuinely cringe-worthy. As the song goes hurtling towards its over-orchestrated climax, you can hardly bear to listen as something special is desecrated into horrendously formulaic and unimaginative soft-rock sludge. And to make matters worse there's a pointless meandering piano outro just when you think that the pain is finally over. The poor song is hardly recognisable after Rod Stewart has had his evil way with it. The only possible good that could have come from the song is that the royalties must have kept Tom Waits off the street for a couple of years. I just hope to God he didn't have to hear what monstrous atrocities had been wrought with his song.

You Just Haven’t Earned It Yet, Baby, or, The Smiths: Over-rated?

2007-02-09T15:11:00.000Z

The Smiths have always polarised people. There are few bands so capable of inducing such deathless worship or such splenetic vitriol within normally sane and reasonable people. Ever since I first heard the Smiths I have been a big fan, but even I will admit to being unreasonably wound up by numerous things about the band. First of all, Morrissey’s ineffable smugness and glib arrogance has always irritated me, which is only made worse by the sickening cult of personality the man has built around himself. I have never forgiven the man for firing Johnny Marr, one of the greatest guitarists pop music has ever seen, or ruining perfectly decent Vini Reilly backing tracks on his lack-lustre first solo album. I also take issue with the fact that many people seem to see The Smiths as the only 80’s indie band that really mattered, the only musically worthwhile band in a sea of twee effete anorak music with no ambition. “The Smiths saved music in the 80’s. They were the first band to really do that kind of thing.” Well, no and no. It’s my personal opinion that Felt, Orange Juice and The Go-Betweens for starters beat The Smiths at their own game musically and lyrically, the main difference being that these other bands eventually had the courage to confront their insecurities rather then making a career by dancing around them. Nevertheless, The Smiths’ music means an awful lot to me. The fact that The Smiths create such strong emotions in people means that it is impossible to listen to them without context, but this is exactly what I have tried to do: to put aside my prejudices and preconceptions, listen to all of The Smiths’ music with fresh ears, and try to figure out exactly how good Everyone’s Favourite Indie Band ™ is. Unfortunately, I was never able to see The Smiths live, so I am going to have to go on their four studio albums, along with the legendary radio sessions and singles compilation ‘Hatful Of Hollow’ and loose ends compilation ‘Louder Than Bombs’, which between them capture all the important stray singles and B-sides. This perhaps gives a flawed view of the band, as many people claim that The Smiths never captured on record fully the power they were capable of generating as a live act, but unfortunately the recorded albums are all that is left to history. I haven’t taken into account the flawed live document ‘Rank’, as it is said not to do the live band justice. Plus I’m not made of time and money. So, her we go. Are The Smiths over-rated, or am I just an obscurist snob with an unreasonable axe to grind? Read on….

The Smiths

This has always been my favourite Smiths album, and I still think it’s great. People often complain about the muddy production, but I like it, the instruments actually sound like real instruments, instead of having that 80’s sheen that their later work was often plagued by. It also includes most of my favourite Smiths songs. ‘Suffer Little Children’ manages to be both menacing and sympathetic; ‘Hand That Rocks The Cradle’ is just plain nasty. The dream-like guitar coda to ‘Pretty Girls Make Graves’ is my favourite part of any Smiths song ever. ‘Reel Around The Fountain’ and ‘This Charming Man’ and others are all deservedly Smiths classics, and the version of ‘Still Ill’, one of their finest songs, is leaps and bounds ahead of the ‘Hatful’ version. On the downside, it does have ‘Miserable Lie’, which mutates from a pretty introduction into one of the WORST songs EVER. Seriously, I have to skip this song every time I listen to the album, and I can’t even be bothered to skip ‘Yellow Submarine’. Other than that unfortunate song, a deathless classic, deserving of its status.

Hatful of Hollow

It’s hard to deny that this is pretty amazing, even though I’d quite like to. This album marks the beginning of the poor production that dogged the Smiths throughout their career, noticeable especially on a weaker ‘Still Ill’. However, most of the songs here are excellent. ‘William, It Was Really Nothing’ is one of my favourite Smiths songs, it is so beautifully concise and elegant, and the guitar playing really is Marr at his stellar best. ‘Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now’, ‘Handsome Devil’ and ‘Girl Afraid’ are all deserving of their reputation in The Smiths cannon. And of course, there is the legendary ‘How Soon Is Now?’. Many people rate this as the Smiths’ best song, and it’s very nice, but I can’t understand the esteem in which it’s held. Morrissey’s lyrics have always been a large part of The Smiths, and, with his ability to write witty and literate lyrics that operate in the context of a normal pop song, it’s easy to see why. But ‘How Soon Is Now?’ is Morrissey at his most direct, and as a result the song lacks the lyrical complexity that makes, say, ‘This Charming Man’ so great. The song is musically reasonably impressive, with The Smiths’ under-rated rhythm section showing great versatility, and Johnny Marr’s Bo-Diddley-in-space guitar playing is pretty cool, but I just don’t like it as much as the fluid arpeggios of, say, ‘Still Ill’. People also swear by ‘Please Please Please, Let Me Get What I Want’, but I’ve never liked it. Listening to it anew, however, I am impressed by its fluid tunefulness and Morrissey’s self-deprecating wit, which is something I never thought I’d say. But ‘Back To The Old House’ is just boring. Still, though, mostly classics despite the iffy production. Another really good album.

Meat Is Murder

A mixed bag, this. ‘The Headmaster Ritual’ is Smiths at their glorious best, driving rhythms and fantastic playing from Marr, with genuinely humorous lyrics. ‘What She Said’ is another favourite of mine, and a fine example of what made this band so great – Mozza’s gleefully morbid witticisms set against Marr’s fantastically unconventional guitar playing. ‘That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore’ is perhaps the band’s finest song, with it’s jangling chords, backwards guitar coda and more playful morbidity from Moz at his bleak best. ‘Well I Wonder’ is a beautiful, delicate ballad with Morrissey’s improved falsetto stealing the show on a genuinely affecting song. These songs rank among the group’s best and most under-rated work. However, the best thing about the otherwise average ‘Rusholme Ruffians’ is its fantastic title, and ‘I Want The One I Can’t Have’ is kind of cute but isn’t going anywhere special. I almost feel guilty about liking the decidedly silly ‘Nowhere Fast’, but it does contain the line ‘The poor and the needy / Are selfish and greedy’. ‘Barbarism Begins At Home’ is an ambitious attempt at funk that nearly works but doesn’t quite, and the infamous title track comes over as melodramatic and daft, which is a shame as it is nearly saved by Marr’s dark arrangements. Nearly. The CD reissue and the original American release contain ‘How Soon Is Now?’ stuck randomly in the middle of the album, where it kind of disrupts the flow, making for an odd and disjointed listen. A flawed album, but one with many gems to recommend it.

The Queen Is Dead

The ‘masterpiece’. I still prefer the debut, but this is a brilliant album nonetheless. The title track is a jagged, powerful monster with Morrissey at the peak of his powers, dripping both wit and vitriol aplenty. You really shouldn’t like ‘Frankly Mr Shankly’, but, daft as it is, it’s almost impossible not to be charmed by it. ‘There Is A Light That Never Goes Out’ and ‘I Know It’s Over’ are genuinely moving and affecting, perfect examples of the music’s emotional content backing up Morrissey’s posturing. ‘Bigmouth Strikes Again’ is fantastic, with fine instrumental work by Marr in the break. ‘Some Girls Are Bigger Then Others’ is magical, with Marr’s nocturnal guitar riffs seeing the album out in style. However, the stalker anthem ‘Never Had No One Ever’, whilst good, is not up there with the rest of the album’s classics, and ‘The Boy With The Thorn In His Side’ changes from being charming to being annoying depending on your mood. ‘Vicar In A Tutu’ is absolutely dreadful, though. Morrissey’s lyrics are amusing enough but for some reason Marr opts for a skinny rockabilly strut that doesn’t come off at all. And the production has gotten worse, too, with the gated reverb on the drums annoyingly prominent and Marr’s guitar sounding very plastic-y and not at all life-like. Still, a great album that, for the most part, deserves its reputation.

Strangeways, Here We Come

Oh dear. I really don’t like this album, so it was interesting listening to it all the way through, something I hadn’t done in years. This is The Smiths’ worst-produced album, with Marr’s guitar sapped of much of its life and over-fussy orchestration drowning most of the songs. ‘A Rush And A Push’ and ‘Stop Me If You Think That You’ve Heard This One Before’ are up there with The Smiths’ best – well, apart from the lousy guitar solo at the end of ‘Stop Me..’ – but elsewhere, this album has some of the worst songs the band ever committed to tape. Title aside, ‘I Started Something I Couldn’t Finish’ wouldn’t have been up to much anyway, but the dreadful synthesised brass stabs make it something of a disaster. ‘Death of a Disco Dancer’ is musically and lyrically shockingly uninspired. They really suffered when they fired Andy Rouke – you can hardly hear the bass lines on this album at all, compare them to ‘This Charming Man’ and the way the bass riff drives the song. ‘Unhappy Birthday’, ‘Paint A Vulgar Picture’ and ‘Death At One’s Elbow’ are absolutely awful, the latter rivalling ‘Miserable Lie’ for title of worst ever Smiths track. Which leads us to the two most iconic – and problematic – tracks on the album, ‘Girlfriend In A Coma’ and ‘Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me’. ‘Girlfriend In A Coma’ is a tasteless little song about wife-beating. The Smiths had always intentionally courted controversy, from the days of ‘Suffer Little Children’ on, but, whereas ‘Suffer Little Children’, ‘Hand That Rocks The Cradle’ or even ‘There Is A Light That Never Goes Out’ all deal with tasteless issues, they subtly broke taboos in order to look at morally complex and dubious issues from an interesting view point. ‘Girlfriend In A Coma’, by comparison, is both blunt and smug, and has very little to say. Perhaps even more worrying is the prosaic and simple chords that Marr uses, worlds away from his trademark jazzy complexity. ‘Last Night…’ is meant to be a bleak and emotionally affecting song in he vein of ‘I Know It’s Over’ or ‘That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore’, but, unlike those songs, ‘Last Night…’ is musically and lyrically insipid, lacking the exciting arrangements and cutting wit that made the other songs so thrilling, with Mozza reduced to singing about his own repetition. In fact, for ‘Strangeways’, the Smiths had accidentally become the repetitive dealers in stereotyped adolescent misery that their detractors had always made them out to be, increasingly frustrating for the fact that that is precisely what they had never been. Marr is increasingly off form, succumbing to playing horrifically clichéd rock guitar solos on ‘Paint A Vulgar Picture’ and opening ‘I Started Something’ with blasé crunching rock chords. In many ways, ‘Strangeways’ sets the template for Morrissey’s later solo albums, with the Moz crooning increasingly clichéd lyrics that stray ever closer to self parody over insipid pub-rock backings. To all intents and purposes, The Smiths were finished. ‘Strangeways’ really does sound like the end.

Louder Than Bombs

A compilation of singles and B-sides, and therefore by its nature somewhat erratic. Much is made of The Smiths’ ability to write great non-album tracks, and indeed there is much to love here, from the glam-stomp of ‘Panic’ to ‘You Just Haven’t Earned It Yet Baby’ and the twinkling guitar arpeggios on ‘Half A Person’. Any song that starts ‘Call me morbid, call me pale / I’ve spent six years on your trail’ is going in the right direction. I’ve always liked ‘Shop Lifters Of The World Unite’, despite its horrible Queen-aping guitar solo; it’s probably the closest the band ever came to following up in the style of ‘How Soon Is Now?’, But I’ve always really hated ‘Ask’. The punk guitar of ‘London’ sounds very un-Smiths-like, almost closer to early Wedding Present, and I’m not sure it really works. ‘Sheila Take A Bow’, ‘Rubber Ring’ and ‘Shakespeare’s Sister’ are all good solid Smiths singles, but no one really needs to listen to ‘Oscillate Wildly’ or ‘Golden Lights’. ‘Unloveable’ is pretty good though, especially the unexpected guitar riffing at the end, and ‘Asleep’ is quite tragically beautiful. There is a frustrating overlap with ‘Hatful of Hollow’, and as a listening experience, it doesn’t flow very well at all. But there is still an indecent amount of magic on display here amongst the filler.

Conclusion, or, What Difference Does It Make?

So, what have I learned from this experience? The Smiths produced two great albums, one very good album, a great compilation, a pretty good compilation and one pretty poor album. It is of course impossible to remove the context from the listening experience, and I was kind of surprised by the strength of the emotional connection I have with this music, especially ‘The Smiths’ and ‘Hatful’ material. And I have to say I was impressed once more, for the most part, on the incredible quality of the Morrissey-Marr song-writing partnership. Are The Smiths over-rated? A little, yes. Their output is certainly flawed, but when the band were on form – which, ‘Strangeways’ aside, I think they were more often then not – they certainly had something special. Much of the resentment I feel towards them comes, of course, from the betrayal I felt at listening to Morrissey’s solo material and finding it so lacking, but of course, it is worth remembering that our heroes are but human, something Mozza himself would do well to remember from time to time. The Smiths were not as original or groundbreaking as people like to pretend, and I still feel they owe a debt to Orange Juice – compare the lyrics of ‘Pretty Girls Make Graves’ with those of OJ’s ‘Simply Thrilled Honey’ for starters – and Felt, perhaps most of all to Lawrence’s inability to sell records and hence pose a threat to them. And unfortunately for the perpetual outsider in me, The Smiths’ influence has been co-opted by generations of indie-rockers from Oasis to The Libertines, whose gauche ladism and retro pub-rock bears no resemblance to The Smiths’ musical and lyrical vision. I started this article with the intention to bury The Smiths rather than to praise them. But despite the grudges I bear them, I cannot deny my love for The Smiths. And here, I think, we come to the rub, why some people have a deathless love for this band and others hate them. If you discovered them at the right time, these songs became the songs that made you cry, the songs that saved your life, and as Morrissey points out, we cannot forget them. Such cultish adulation is, of course, utterly sickening and off-putting when viewed from the outside. Removing the context becomes, at the end of the day, utterly impossible. The Smiths have been the soundtrack to some of the best and worst times of my life, and I can’t really take that away from them.

Nico: The Marble Index (1969)

2007-02-06T20:32:00.000Z

'It kind of made us want to slit our wrists. "The Marble Index" isn't a record you listen to. It's a hole you fall into.' Frazier Mowhawk, producer

The legacy of 'The Velvet Underground & Nico' is long and enduring; from the generations of musicians it has inspired to rock and roll's default setting of rebellious destruction. The album also marked the beginning of the musical careers of a group of musicians ever ready to push the boundaries of music. The Velvets themselves travelled from the numb violence of 'White Light / White Heat' to the lilting pop of 'Loaded', Lou Reed has careered between the glam-pop of 'Transformer' to 'Metal Machine Music' (does what it says on the tin), whilst John Cale has tried everything from the orchestral pop of 'Paris 1919' to minimalist classical and experiments in electronica. Over the 40 odd years since 'The Velvet Underground & Nico' came out, the album's key players have released a bewildering array of seemingly contradictory musical experiments. But perhaps the single oddest piece of work recorded by anyone who worked on that album is 'The Marble Index'.
Nico was an ex-model who had grown up in a war-torn Germany. Inspired by ex-lover Jim Morrison, she decided to become a singer-songwriter. After an album of covers scuppered by daft production, she bought a harmonium and began work on 'The Marble Index'. Fellow Velvets refugee John Cale was brought in to help with the arrangements, but the songs themselves are Nico's work. It's interesting to compare 'The Marble Index' to the current Velvets album, the restrained and relatively conventional self-titled third LP. Brilliant though 'The Velvet Underground' was, it was arguably the first time that the Velvets sounded of their time. 'The Marble Index', to this day, sounds like nothing else on earth. Fuelled by her troubled childhood and her increasing heroin addiction, it must rank as one of the bleakest records ever created. Songs are based around one or two droning chords on Nico's harmonium and her cold, Teutonic voice. The melodies are reminiscent of German folk music, drawing as they do on modal scales rather then traditional western classical scales. On many of the tracks, the harmonium is removed, leaving only her voice and John Cale's arrangements. The record is sparse, cold and alien. It demands your full attention. If you let it, it slowly sucks you into its icy twilight world. I have been stuck in this record for about a week now. 'Lawns of Dawns' juxtaposes Nico's voice with Cale's harsh viola, as she sings 'Can you follow me / Can you follow my distress / My caresses / Fiery guesses', a challenge to the listener. Nico's world may be cold, harsh and bleak, but there is beauty to be found here. 'Ari's Song' is a fragile lullaby to Nico's child, as she implores her son to 'Sail away my little boy / Let the wind fill your heart with love and joy'. It almost feels like she is telling him to move on without her as she fades away, perhaps it is a premonition of her own early death. 'Facing The Wind' sees Nico helpless at the mercy of the winds of fate: 'It's holding me against my will / And doesn't leave me still', as the music builds around her in intensity, with John Cale hammering mercilessly at the piano. 'Frozen Warnings' is unremittingly bleak and intense, icy and unforgiving, with Nico at the peak of her powers. The record then closes with the twinkling twilight beauty of 'Evening of Light', in which Nico moans 'Midnight winds are landing at the end of time,' over Cale's cyclical celeste. Utterly devastating, it really feels like the end of the world.
'The Marble Index' ends at 30 minutes, as the producer thought the record was just to bleak to go on for any longer. But despite this, it is a fantastically complete work. It exists purely in its own sound world, nothing before or since comes close. In places, the mood and atmosphere, if not the music itself, reminds me of the terrifying second side of Joy Division's 'Closer', in which a numb Ian Curtis sounds like he had already passed on to the next world when they were recording the vocals. Following up such a perfect work was always going to be hard, but Nico's next album, 'Desertshores', is a great record that in places almost equals the power of its predecessor, and its follow-up, 'The End', has its moments too. Nico's work stands on its own, almost having more in common with minimalism or folk music then pop music. It may be bleak, harsh, unremitting and unforgiving, but it is utterly unique and possessed with a rare beauty that is all its own. In fact, out of all the albums released after 'The Velvet Undergound & Nico' by those responsible for it, 'The Marble Index' may be the best.

Album of the Month: Joanna Newsom: Ys (2006)

2007-01-31T10:14:00.000Z

(OK I know this came out towards the end of last year rather then this year, but I’m on a limited budget and I don’t get given these things for free, you know. And, for the record, had I heard this album before doing my end of year chart, it would certainly be on it.)

Writing about ‘Ys’ seems like an almost pointless task, due to the immediate and incredibly strong reaction she causes in most people on almost first listen. Such is the nature of the record that it inspires in the listener either vitriolic hatred or undying love within the first 20 seconds of hearing it. And there are understandable reasons for being suspicious of Joanna Newsom. Her public image of a twee harp player who sings proggy epics about fairies in a child’s voice does her music no end of harm, smacking a it does of daft gimmickry. But fortunately there is no gimmickry here; the harp just happens to be Newsom’s instrument of choice, an instrument which she plays with the skill of a virtuoso. The ultra-hip collaborators do their bit to boost the record’s cool factor, and the album is indeed recorded beautifully and sensitively by Steve Albini, and provided with a tasteful and complementary orchestral backing by Van Dyke Parks. These collaborators’ contribution is important, but there is no doubt that ‘Ys’ is Joanna’s work through and through. The album is a five song suite that is built around the musical centre of her harp playing and singing. Studying both classical harp and classical composition has provided Newsom with the tools to make this kind of music, but it the strength of her musical vision allows her not to be constrained by them. The music draws from both classical harp music, but also the cosmic folk music of, say, the Incredible String Band and beyond. The individual songs are long and winding, with development through contrasting musical sections, but always with a strong sense of melody and purpose, to the extent that by the second or third listen one finds the album’s many melodies hard to dislodge from one’s head. Just as wide-ranging and expressive are Newsom’s voice and lyrics. Her much maligned voice, once you get past its initial oddness, reveals itself to be a thing of beauty, melodic and full of passion and expression, ranging from soft whispers and gentle coos to the point where it cracks underneath the strain of the emotion behind it. Newsom’s lyrics are full of references to literature and nature, often taking the form of bizarre and cryptic parables. ‘Monkey & Bear’, for instance, is a tale of exploitation and escape, and ‘Emily’ is named after Newsom’s sister. Lines like ‘I wasn’t born of a whistle, or milked from a thistle at twilight / No; I was all horns and thorns, sprung out fully formed, knock-kneed and upright’ will have the faithful guessing for years at their meaning and will irritate and put off further the doubters. But Newsom’s delicate prose and wordiness are not the products of pretension. All her songs are imbued, lyrically and musically, with a deep emotional core. The detail and precision of her music are borne out of an emotional honesty; these are complex emotions, and Newsom refuses to simplify them into pat clichés or bland generalizations; she refuses to sell her music short. The album’s centerpiece, ‘Only Skin’, is an epic with shades of Kate Bush about, among other things, the joys of ‘being a woman’ which covers a staggering amount of musical and emotional ground. Newsom is capable of directness when it is required, too – it doesn’t get much more direct then ‘Stay with me for a while / That’s an awfully real gun’. In fact, ‘Ys’ flies in the face of Joanna’s child-like waif shtick by being very mature music. In today’s musical climate of braindead macho indie rock posturing and emo whining, where glib ‘social realism’ passes for intelligence and apathetic self pity passes for emotion, one would expect the worst type of lazy, misogynistic second rate hacks to start waxing lyrical about women in music as a breath of fresh air, bringing ‘oceanic’ and ‘sensual’ qualities to a hard and masculine music scene. Newsom is able to transcend such lazy clichés by both the strength and boldness of her musical ambition and her determination to realize it. Despite its charming joie de vivre and sense of playful wandering, not a second of ‘Ys’ feels unnecessary or out of place. Joanna’s music seems to pour out of her, creating ‘a moment of almost-unbearable vision / Doubled over with the hunger of lions’. ‘Ys’ is visual, hallucinatory, intoxicating, and, yes, sensual. It makes demands off you that few modern records do: you will have to sit down with it, maybe with the lyric sheet, and listen intently for the full hour. But, in providing a fully realized, utterly engrossing musical and emotional world, it will pay back your attention so much more then most other modern records.

Track of the Week:

2007-01-28T15:34:00.000Z

I'm feeling like crap today so I'm listening to The Wedding Present's 'George Best' album on my headphones, partly as a treat because it's a favourite of mine and partly because it pretty much sums up how I feel today. I trudge along the street singing along, probably looking and sounding like a psycho but like I care. Because I'm in a bad mood, I decide to stop off in my local independent record shop and flick through the records, as that usually calms me down a bit. Maybe the price of that Fall B-sides compilation will have gone down. As I look around the shop, I am confronted with the new issue of Mojo, which , surprise surprise, features the Fab Four, in all their psychedelic glory, beaming down from the cover with a mix of stoned benevolence and matter-of-fact arrogance. 40 years since Sergeant Peppers. Does anyone really care? As I flick through the magazine, a wave of nausea wells up inside me. Elvis - boring. The Sex Pistols - boring. The Beatles - for Christ's sake. The media constantly bombards us with the same messages, the same images, the same music. Recently, I was able to go back to Revolver and Rubber Soul and almost - almost - hear them without the weight of context, cultural relevance and lazy nostalgia. For a moment, I was able to hear them as I heard them as a kid and fall in love with them all over again, for nothing more then the melodies, the songs themselves. This magazine has set me back years; it'll be ages before I'm able to listen to the Beatles again. The problem with living in the information age is that almost nothing is able to retain mystique - how magical is Revolver when you know what John Lennon had for breakfast the day he wrote 'Tomorrow Never Knows'? The song is shorn of all its unknowable magic and becomes the obvious and inevitable result of what happened before it. This is not helped at all by the mass marketing industry constantly releasing extraneous compilations, remixes etc in time for the Christmas market every year. Or by music's constant presence in adverts, films, TV programmes, pubs, clubs - by linking the magical to the mundane, more often then not you make the magical more mundane. You're almost forced to seek out the obscure in order to find some form of music that is able to hold some personal meaning to you that isn't tarnished by over-exposure. I went to the record fair yesterday and bought Eyeless In Gaza's first LP. I have never seen an article on Eyeless In Gaza, and have no idea what Martyn Bates or Peter Becker look like. The guy behind the counter actually gave me a discount on the record because I didn't ask him some horrifically obscure question - 'Do you have the Fire Engines' first 45?' ect etc. Even record geeks think I'm a record geek. Great. I have a pile of CDs in my flat that I've just not found the time to listen to yet, and still more that I need to get round to listening to as much as they deserve. I now have this terror of music I like becoming over-familiar, so I actually ration my favourite albums. I've not listened to Hex Enduction Hour for over a month, I might give it a spin some time soon. It almost borders on obsession - I'll be trying to pay attention to whatever task in my mundane daily existence preys on my time, and my mind will wonder. Joanna Newsom is going to have a hard time following Ys because it comes so close to perfection. New Fall album out soon. Should Josef K have stuck around for a second album? Should Husker Du reform? I've always had a thing about bands reforming, isn't that just what sad old gits do when they've run out of money and integrity? Still it was good to get a chance to see the Fire Engines live... And there's always something playing in my head, even if it's just a half-remembered guitar hook circling in the background; like the ringing in my ears, it never really goes away. So much noise... it gets to the stage where it's like having the same thoughts circling in your head like old clothes stuck in a washing machine, going round, round, round... The new year will bring with it even more new music, some of it great, some of it terrible. The NME are already hyping up a load of terrible chancers with bad hair, borrowed clothes and no talent as the Next Big Thing, a shed load of reissues are scheduled, and there will of course be the chance discoveries listened to on a whim... I've not gone off music. I'm not sick, tired or drunk (The June Brides have started singing 'Sick, Tired and Drunk' in my head.. shut up! Screw you Phil Wilson, you and your amazing songs). I could write about how great The Wedding Present are, or maybe how the Young Marble Giants' stark, quiet, minimal pop sounds all the more striking in these days of over-cluttering and excess volume, or maybe about how much I like Ys. But I just don't feel up to it. There is no Track of the Week this week. Listen to what you like.

Track of the Week: Big Star: September Gurls (1974)

2007-01-21T15:38:00.000Z

That Big Star weren't huge is perhaps one of pop music's greatest injustices. Hampered by poor distribution, record company squabbling and the fact that Alex Chilton is probably a bit nuts, their music never reached the audience it should have. 'September Gurls' is a perfect example of what made the band so brilliant. Normally, the musical label 'power pop', the fact that the record came out in the early seventies and an inability to spell simple words might send you understandably running for the hills, but it shouldn't do in this case. Like most of their songs, the influences are plain to see: Beatles-esque melody, the chiming folk-rock of the Byrds, the muscular drive of the Who. But Big Star were always more than the sum of their influences. Songwriters Alex Chilton and Chris Bell had an excellent ear for stunning melodies. Chris Bell had, to all intents and purposes, been kicked out of the band by 1974, causing the band's slow and painful collapse. You can hear the signs of desperation taking hold in the slightly frenzied edge that the band had developed by this stage: despite its sugar-sweet melody, 'September Gurls' is raw and rough, sounding like it is only barely holding itself together, and Chilton sings as if his life depends on it, betraying the loss and bitterness at the heart of the song. The lyrics are touchingly simple, without an ounce of excess - lines like 'I loved you, well, never mind' don't really need explaining. A gorgeous, frayed solo follows, the band providing a powerful and competent backing to Chilton's slightly unhinged playing. Right down to the drum break, nothing feels out of place or excessive, a rare asset in that era. Perhaps it was just too good to last. Without Chris Bell, Chilton became increasingly frustrated at exploitative record companies and the band's general lack of success, going on to create Big Star's brilliantly deranged but utterly uncommercial third album as his band and career fell apart around him. And that was that. Although Big Star were finished, their influence grew in their absence. American acts such as R.E.M. drew on their marriage of inventive folk melodicism and rock power, and Teenage Fanclub based their entire career on rewriting 'September Gurls', not to mention the hoards of 80s indie bands in thrall to Big Star's charms. Like the Velvets, Big Star's influence far outweighs their actual record sales. But their real legacy lies in their music - three albums worth of inventive melodic pop music that ranks up there with the best of the genre.

2006 Year In Review

2007-01-11T16:22:00.000Z

Now that 2006 is actually over, it is time for the End of Year Review. Hooray. So, what musical joys did 2006 bring us? The slow, painful death of the post-punk revival (see: The Rapture's second album. Or rather, don't), the Great Pub Rock Revival and the return of macho idiocy in mainstream indie rock - thanks Arctic Monkeys, Fratellis etc etc. It wasn't all bad though.

Top 10 Albums of 2006

1. Burial - Burial

I was going to make this album of the month a while back, but recoiled from writing about it simply because I thought it was too much out of my normal field. It doesn't matter though, because the album speaks for itself. Muffled noise and fragments of conversation drift over lopsided beats to create an album that is immediately bold and adventurous yet with instant and clear emotional impact. I've never heard anything like it, which means it easily deserves the number 1 spot.

2. The Knife - Silent Shout

Everyone's favourite Swedish electro-pop duo return, but darker and nastier. 'Silent Shout' is the sound of the sinister undercurrents to 'Deep Cuts' taking centre stage, as a nightmarish cast of ghoulish characters clamour to be heard. But remarkably, The Knife keep their pop instincts intact, never once faltering. Dark, sensuous and terrifying, this record is at least as good as its excellent predecessor.

3. Scritti Politti - White Bread Black Beer

I always thought the odds on Scritti returning were pretty low, so it was great just to have them back. But to have them produce an album this good, and then return to touring and give some of the best gigs of the year, was truly special indeed. 'White Bread Black Beer' finds Green Gartside with some of his most personal and gorgeous songs to date.

4. The Organ - Grab That Gun

Maybe The Organ were always doomed to failure, but their only album is still magical. The all-girl quintet from Canada took on The Smiths and, perhaps inevitably, lost. There are moments on this album where they come so close, but that makes their heroic failure all the more bitter-sweet, which is probably how Katie Sketch wants it.

5. Wolf Eyes - Human Animal

Wolf Eyes have succeeded in making noise music fun and bringing it to a surprisingly large audience. Fortunately, they refuse to rest o their laurels, making possibly their best and most forward-thinking album yet.

6. Erase Errata - Night Life

As the post-punk revival congeals into a collection of turgid cliches, Erase Errata fight valiantly on. Where the other revivalists ignore the sonic and political approaches that made the original records so enduring, EE have made yet another sonically adventurous and politically driven album. Compare this to The Rapture's second album for lessons in how and how not to do it.

7. Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Show Your Bones

"It's not as good as Fever To Tell!" Yeah whatever. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs still deliver, proving that , unlike many of their lesser peers (*cough*Strokes), they are able to change and develop, whilst still keeping everything that made them exciting in the first place.

8. Kode9 and The Spaceape - Memories of the Future

Bizarre, futuristic and engrossing, if again slightly outside my remit. This is a fantastic, challenging and truly forward thinking record.

9. Welcome - Sirs

This record sounds so out of place. It sounds like Syd Barret's shade kidnapped Sonic Youth and took them to his acid hell. Swirling sixties psychedelia clashes with atonal guitar noise and scratchy punk dissonance to produce a baffling but engrossing debut. The fact that it's sonically so hard to pin down probably earns it a mention here anyway.

10. The Long Blondes -Someone To Drive You Home

Blondie meets Pulp. But done very very well. This is the perfect antidote to the Arctic Monkey's pedestrian indie-rock by numbers. The Long Blondes steal from very obvious sources, but do so with real charm, wit and vitality. The tunes are fantastically catchy, the lyrics are sharp without being clever-clever. A well needed reminder that you need both style and substance to succeed

Bubbling under: Belle and Sebastian, Current 93, CSS and others.

Top 10 Reissues of 2006

1. This Heat - Out Of Cold Storage

These records are absolutely essential, and now you can get them without bankrupting yourself over ebay or wasting nights over file sharing networks.

2. Denim - Back In Denim

Felt failed to make Lawrence a star, so he quit, went to New York, and thought up Denim: a post-modern Glam Rock group who should have brought him the fame and fortune he desired. It didn't, but Back In Denim is fantastic: clever, fun, ironic. Pulp stole their sound whole-sale, and its meta-pop anthems are a clear influence on LCD Soundsystem's caustic world view. And 'I'm Against The Eighties' has never sounded more pertinent.

3. The Fall - The Infotainment Scan

The best Fall album of the nineties, with electro, glam, drum and bass, and swipes at everything and everyone from Bono and Suede to nostalgia and old age. Obviously a masterpiece.

4. The Au Pairs - Stepping Out Of Line

Seminal but sadly overlooked post punk group. I was hoping this would get them the respect they deserve, but press indifference and liner notes talking about Franz and Hard Fi would suggest not. Ho hum.

5. Josef K - Entomology

It has come to my attention that the excellent Josef K reissues on LTM, which included between two discs everything the band ever did, is criminally out of print, so this compilation will have to suffice for those of you not cool enough to have them already. Whatever. Great band, Franz owe obvious debt, etc etc etc. Just get it.

6. ESG - Come Away With ESG

New York dance-punk pioneers. Have been sampled uncountable times in rap music. This really could have come out yesterday, only if it had, it probably wouldn't be as good and as innovative.

7. The Triffids - Born Sandy Devotional

The great 80s aussie band that wasn't The Go-Betweens or The Bad Seeds. This is a much neglected classic.

8. The Cocteau Twins - Lullabies to Violane

Now you can have all the Cocteau Twins EPs without the bother of trawling the net and second hand record shops for beaten up vinyl. Rejoice

9. Ut - In Gut's House

Post No Wave noise classic. Still sounds singular, bizarre and powerful. Kind of like a clinically unhinged Sleater Kinney. Which is good.

10. Delta 5 - Singles and Sessions

Delta 5 should have released this instead of their patchy debut. Contains all the classic singles and superior versions of album tracks.

Musical Low Points
Hmm. Arctic Monkeys, deaths of Syd Barret, Grant McLennan, Arthur Lee, James Brown....

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

2006-12-18T18:29:00.000Z

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)

2006-12-11T19:13:00.000Z

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!

2006-12-08T14:01:00.000Z

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!

2006-12-07T20:40:00.000Z

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)

2006-12-04T15:10:00.000Z

'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.

Track of the Week: The Ramones: I Don't Care (1977)

2006-11-27T19:54:00.000Z

The Ramones: the denim-clad, leather jacketed saviours of Rock 'N' Roll, or a bunch of goons with barely an I.Q. point between them playing a limited repertoire of sped up surf songs long after they should have been old enough to know better? (Is there any difference?) For the most part, the bruvvers were simply too rock to subscribe fully to the bracing nihilism that defined much of the punk era. And on one hand, 'I Don't Care' is typical Ramones-patented cartoon rebellion, saying no simply because you want to. With their typical tongue-in-cheek humour, and a sound understanding of the mechanics of pop music, the lyrics start off as an anti-love song, but of course, as Joey sings 'I don't care about that girl,' we all know that he really does, and no amount of nihilistic posturing can get him out of it. But, are our heroes really so stoopid? There is something wilfully nasty about 'I Don't Care'. It only has three chords, like pretty much every other Ramones song, but it is somehow a far cry from the bubble-gum pop of 'Rockaway Beach', say. Dee Dee's bass and Johnny's guitar merge together to form a particularly thick, grungy wall of noise, and the agitated repetition of the song's chords, claustrophobically close together, sound particularly nagging and intense. Then, in the next verse (not quite the same as the first), Joey turns it all round again by dropping the line about the girl and sneering 'I don't care about these words' instead. Now that's nihilism - he doesn't even give a hoot about the song he's singing. Screw the music, we don't care. Now that's punk. But is he being 100% serious? As the bridge descends into endless repetition of 'I don't care / I don't care / I don't care / I DON'T CARE!', you wonder if you can imagine a slight smirk beneath Joey's fantastic sneer. By contrasting the reference to the girl with the line about the song itself, is he drawing a line between pent up teenage sexual repression and nihilism itself? Or is the song just good, clean, stoopid fun? But of course, you don't have time to think about this, do you, because the whole song is over in one minute and thirty-nine seconds, giving you only a split second of silence before the Ramones race through the perfect pop of 'Sheena Is A Punk Rocker'. Interestingly enough, 'I Don't Care' was one of the first songs The Ramones wrote. In just over 90 seconds in encapsulates everything that is great about the band, but also sums up quite neatly all their limitations. All of their classic songs are more or less variations on this theme, ranging from the anthemic straight rewrite 'I Wanna Be Sedated' to other cartoony-and-not-as-dumb-as-you-think classics such as 'Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue'. But unfortunately, The Ramones never managed to find a satisfactory way to expand their sound, and once they'd squeezed all they possibly could from their original formula - i.e.' half way through making 'Road To Ruin' if you want to be generous - they could only become hollow parodies of their former selves. From 'stoopid' to stupid in the space of two years, not bad. Still, this article was going to be far less complementary to the band then it has wound up being. It has been a while since I have felt the need to listen to The Ramones, and certainly I don't really feel like sitting through a whole album, but every now and then, nothing quite sums up the way I feel better then 'I Don't Care' or 'I'm Against It' - perhaps the shrewdest dissection of modern youth's attitude towards politics yet written. All together now: ONETWOTHREEFOUR!!!!!

Track of the Week: Teenage Fanclub: Sparky's Dream (1995)

2006-11-21T19:34:00.000Z

One of Glasgow's many great pop bands, Teenage Fanclub were borne out of the tail-end of the C86 movement, but showed the ambition and musical chops to move beyond the straight-jacket of that scene. Drawing on The Byrds, The Beach Boys and especially Big Star, the Fannies could easily be accused of being just another retro band grave-robbing the 60s if it weren't for the sheer strength of song-writing shown by Norman Blake, Gerard Love and Raymond McGinley. Few bands are lucky enough to be blessed with three such gifted song-writers. 'Grand Prix' came out in 1995 on Creation at the height of Britpop and showed up most other bands of the genre simply by virtue of its great songs. And Love's 'Sparky's Dream' is one of the best songs on this exceptional album. Kicking off with muted guitar and drums before the whole band come crashing in, it immediately shows a dynamic control at odds with many of their contemporaries. In many ways the song is typical Teenage Fanclub, drawing heavily from Big Star's power pop, but in these guys' hands this is no bad thing. The song is immediately catchy and memorable, with its strong melody and the boys' trademark Beach Boys harmonies over the soaring chorus, but its structure is more complex then it seems at first. The song is tied together quite neatly with an instrumental hook that appears between the first verse and first chorus, and again linking the last two choruses. Its irregular appearance gives the song an unusual shape, putting off the glorious sugar rush of the chorus at crucial points to drag out your expectations before hitting you in the face with exactly what you want to hear. The simple yet melodic guitar solo in the bridge adds to the fun without outstaying its welcome. Love's spaced out lyrics deal, as with so many great pop songs, with the girl who got away. They achieve a touching simplicity without sounding crass or stupid, or having to rely on the Bumper Gallagher Book Of Easy Rhymes (pain/rain, time/Sheeiiine etc.). Interestingly enough, and despite the occasionally erratic nature of some of their output, as the dust settles on the Britpop era, Teenage Fanclub are one of the few bands to have survived entirely on their own terms and with their artistic credibility in tact. It is a tribute to the Fannies that, although they are doing something that many have done many times before, much of their music still manages to sound fresh and vital to this day.

Track of the Week: McCarthy: Should The Bible Be Banned (1988)

2006-11-13T14:57:00.000Z

The 'C86' bands weren't renowned for their political dedication, but there's always an exception to the rule. A group of dedicated socialists led by lyricist and singer Malcolm Eden and guitarist Tim Gane, McCarthy - ironically named after the right-wing American politician - combined jangly indie pop with socialist politics. Malcolm Eden's lyrics are written from the point of view of various characters, and often seek to make a point of view look ridiculous by exposing the errors in the characters' thinking. Tim Gane's delicate guitar arpeggios often add another dimension of irony to these quite passionate songs. These elements give McCarthy's songs a subtlety that they would lack had Eden decided to merely fanatically espouse his own view points over storming punk rock. 'Should The Bible Be Banned' is an excellent song and a prime example of how McCarthy worked at their best. Rather then a direct attack on religion, the song is protesting about the religious right's censorship against freedom of expression on the grounds that songs, books or films that deal with violence are encouraging violence in children and are so corrupting our youth. The song opens with Eden assuming the persona of Dave, a young miscreant who has murdered his brother. In a neat rhetorical trick, as the song progresses it transpires that Dave was inspired to kill his hated brother not by violent video games or satanic death metal but by the story of Cain and Abel in the Bible. As a result, people start protesting in order to get the government to ban the Bible. The song closes with Dave revealing that the Home Secretary is investigating the possibilities of 'A copycat killer copying the Book of Genesis'. This obviously humorous image underlines the hypocrisy of religious groups seeking to ban violent forms of art - the Bible is full of violence, it is a natural part of human nature. And as the Christian fundamentalists' sacred text is on the receiving end of the banning, the song's target is doubly made the butt of the joke. The song also makes a more serious point - while Dave is inspired to kill his brother by the Bible, the real reason for his deranged hatred for his brother his revealed in the song to be due to the other son being the father's favourite - to the extent that Dave believes 'My father hated me'. By banning the Bible, the Home Secretary is taking the populist approach to blame a convenient scapegoat to keep voters happy rather then trying to deal with the real social conditions that caused the problem in the first place. The lyrics don't give you all of this on a plate though; Malcolm Eden wanted people to think for themselves about these issues rather then being force-fed other people's opinions.
Not that the song is merely a great set of lyrics; Tim Gane's shimmering guitars and Eden's pure, choirboy voice make the song instantly catchy and likeable. Upon McCarthy's 1990 split, Tim Gane would go on to form Stereolab and invent a truly individual melding of Krautrock motorik and 60s pop, and you can hear the germs of these experiments in McCarthy's songs, in the way that the guitar blurs into a heady rush. The rhythm section is endearingly shambolic though. After McCarthy's demise, Malcolm Eden would retire from music, claiming to be no longer interested. This is a shame, as he was a truly individual and perceptive lyricist who never patronised his audience. Fortunately though, Tim Gane formed Stereolab and became one of the greatest bands of the 90's, building on the promise of this sadly forgotten band.

Album of the Month: Wolf Eyes: Human Animal (2006)

2006-11-09T16:17:00.000Z

One of the biggest and most pleasant surprises of 2004 was Wolf Eyes, the wild, feral, beer-guzzling, frat-boy Beavis and Butthead of noise music, signing to Sub Pop and releasing one of the albums of the year to not only rapturous reception of the music press but to not inconsiderable sales. By combining the full-on, bleeding ears approach of Whitehouse and Merzbow but combining it with a goofy, good-times Spinal Tap-esque approach, Wolf Eyes managed the unthinkable: they made noise music fun, attracting disillusioned metalheads, adventurous indie kids and avant guarde enthusiasts in equal measure, without diluting the substance or ferocity of their music. As a result, the band brought the underground noise scene as close as it's likely to get to the mainstream, whilst simultaneously injecting life into it: witness the host of contempory noise acts whose profile has risen since 2004. The only question was, how could they possibly follow this? Like all noise groups, Wolf Eyes release a constant deluge of material, forever developing, exploring and expanding their sound across limited edition CDRs, tapes and vinyl. Thus keeping up with the band's releases is something of a Herculean struggle. However, whilst Wolf Eyes' constant release of material serves to negate the idea of an album release as a great event, there is a genuine sense of event for all their official Sub Pop releases. Essentially, the band get to have their cake and eat it: the never ending minor label releases allow them to perfect, experiment with and develop their sound with perfect freedom, which allows their Sub Pop albums to arrive as finished products: benefiting from all the time in the wilderness but without any of the inconsistencies that creep into their minor releases.
So, to the album. The cover of 'Human Animal' features a horrific corpse which bears an uncanny resemblance to the molten-faced zombie in Fulci's B-movie classic 'The Beyond'. In many ways this is appropriate: Wolf Eyes are no strangers to schlock horror, and their new album unfolds like a really good horror film. Opener 'A Million Years' is all sinister clanking, disembodied hollows of feedback and atonal improvised saw-skronk. But, like all good horror movies, there is something more then hair-raising terror going on here: the band are attempting to take noise music beyond mere ear-shredding. The first half of this album is all tension and no release, from the eerie hissing of 'Lake Of Roaches' to vocalist Nate Young's chilling monologue, spoken rather then shouted, on 'Rationed Rot'. The album moves into areas of free improvisation, with the band proving themselves deft controllers of dynamics and tone. Not that they've gone soft. When it comes, the dual attack of the title track and 'Rusted Mange' are among the most extreme sonic attacks the band have ever done, and 'The Driller' overtakes 'Burned Mind''s 'Black Vomit' as Wolf Eyes' most tinnitus-inducing audio gore-fest. These outbursts are all the more impressive and exhilarating coming next to the earlier, more subtle (well, relatively speaking) pieces. The album ends with a cover of 'Noise, Not Music', which Wolf Eyes turn into their own 'Living on a Prayer', a defining anthem and statement of intent. 'WE MAKE NOISE, NOT MUSIC!' you can just about hear Young bellowing before he gets finally swallowed by the feedback. Well, yes and no. Whatever you want to call it though, Wolf Eyes have once again exceeded all expectations and made one of the albums of the year. Look out behind you!

Track of the Week: Eyeless In Gaza: Lights of April (1982)

2006-11-05T13:49:00.000Z

"All our songs say one thing; say I want to understand, say I want to find reason to everything..." Martyn Bates

Often the price of being years ahead of your time is that you are ignored in your own time. Eyeless In Gaza sound absolutely stunning today, but they must have made very little sense when Martyn Bates and Peter Becker first got together in 1980. Consequently their record sales hardly set the world alight, and these days they are all but forgotten. Which is a shame, as if you have had the good fortune to stumble upon their music, you will find a startlingly original and emotionally rich musical world that seems to exist in its own little bubble, out of place and out of time. Certainly, peak period Eyeless In Gaza sounds like very little else in popular music, echoing choral and folk music whilst anticipating the glacial post rock of Sigur Ros and the icy electronica of Aphex Twin's ambient work. Somewhere along the line they picked up the label 'avant-folk', which may give you some idea of their sound, but doesn't quite capture the band's knack, at their best, of making music that is inventive, experimental but open and accessible.
'Lights of April' is one of the many highlights from their quietly wonderful 1982 album 'Drumming the Beating Heart'. The song is a beautiful, delicate soundscape, all sweeping organ and echoing bells, but with a determined starkness that only serves to highlight the song's beautiful melody. It is not unlike Sigur Ros, but with that band's epic aurora replaced with quiet introspection. Martyn Bates has an absolutely fantastic and very unusual voice, his thick accent giving his choir-boy singing an unusual twist. The melody is in a folky mode rather then your usual minor/major keys, giving the tune an archaic feel, harking back to something long-forgotten yet ultimately timeless that resides in us all. Which is appropriate, given the song's gorgeous lyrics - a simple yet poetic look at lost love and nostalgia, wrapped up with an indefinable longing. 'Idly tracing her face with her finger...' just beautiful. The song moves at a sedate pace, calm and dignified, but never degenerates into banal chillout. It is sad and reflective, but unlike many of their doom-mongering contempories, Eyeless In Gaza acknowledge life's brighter side: this is not an exercise in existential despair, but a fond remembrance of times past, and a reflection on the transient nature of our existence. The end result is starkly emotional and wonderfully uplifting. In today's post-rock climate, Eyeless In Gaza make fantastic sense, but back in 1982 they fitted contextually with very little else. Cruelly ignored by the public, they ploughed their own very individual furrow, constantly evolving and experimenting, and always open to new ideas. Perhaps, at some point, their music will be appreciated for how ahead of its time it truly was, but until then, all I can do is urge you to seek out this music; you'll be glad you did.

RIP Nancy Arlen 1942-2006

2006-11-02T20:50:00.000Z

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_(band)

Nancy Arlen, who was the drummer for No Wave pioneers Mars, has passed away following heart surgery in September. Very sad news, Sumner Crane (vocals, guitar) died in 2003. Basically, Mars were fantastic and you should rush out and buy, beg, borrow or steal a copy of '78+', which contains all their recorded work. Thoughts go out to her family and friends, and a huge thanks from someone whose very definition of music you guys shook to the core.

Halloween Special Track of the Week: The Birthday Party: King Ink (1981)

2006-10-29T16:26:00.000Z

Looking and sounding like they crawled out of a particularly nasty B-movie, The Birthday Party moved from Australia to Britain, only to find the post-punk scene cooling into New Romantic superficiality. So, spouting fire and brimstone, blasphemy, surrealism, dissonance and pure, red, raw screaming energy, they set about to correct the situation. Lead singer Nick Cave was equal parts Rimbaud and Iggy Pop, a ball of anarchic energy spouting forth appropriated Shakespeare quotes and deranged obscenities whilst attacking his audience. Guitarist Rowland S. Howard mixed up damaged garage rock and feral No Wave noise, aided by multi-instrumentalist Mick Harvey and chaotic drummer Phil Calvert, all anchored by Tracey Pew's repetitive, creepy bass lines. Thus The Birthday Party became one of the most striking bands of the era, making a truly terrifying din. That's a complement, of course.
'King Ink', like many Birthday Party songs, is a portrayal of a corrupt soul. The song starts off with just Tracey Pew's sinister bass line, sounding like something that crawled out of a swamp, and a continuous, slow, percussive thump. Nick Cave then introduces us to the bizarre eponymous character, a mess of depression, self-doubt, paranoia and mania. There is certainly a Kafka influence in the lyrics, with Cave telling us that 'King Ink feels like a bug / And he hates his rotten shell', an image that is frequently returned to throughout the song. The song is structured around Howard's guitar, which alternates between sparse dissonance, creaking like hinges on an old door and scraping like nails down a chalkboard, and the 'chorus', during which he plays a rickety and scratchy but quite catchy descending riff. The song's creepy atmosphere is accentuated every now and then by sudden and unexpected crack of the snare drum. But then the lyrics get more surreal. Cave manically implores King Ink to wake up, and the band freak out with him, guitar and drums getting faster and faster and more and more unhinged, until they wear themselves out, leaving just the unchanging bass line, over which Cave unleashes an unholy, blood-curdling scream worthy of Iggy Pop on 'Funhouse'. Pop music gets no more wild, sinister or deranged. But it isn't all doom and gloom - as the song winds to the end, bizarrely, we leave King Ink singing 'What a wonderful life' along with Fats Domino on the radio. For The Birthday Party, unlike many of the po-faced Goths who followed in their wake, had a sense of humour. They were a great band, but with the levels of intensity, mania and drug-taking being sky-high, it was never going to last forever. Nick Cave's ego got the better of him, and he split the band, taking Mick Harvey with him to forge a solo career that has produced much excellent music, oddly winding up as a respected singer-songwriter, some miles away from the anarchic punk he started out as. Roland S. Howard went on to solo projects and collaborations with Einsturzende Neubauten and Lydia Lunch, but tragically, Tracey Pew's excessive drink and drug intake lead to his early death as the band was splitting. As the post-punk revival trundles on, becoming more and more processed and safe, it is a shame there aren't more bands out there taking their cue from the passion and intensity of The Birthday Party.

2006-10-22T15:07:00.000Z

Track of the Week: The Teardrop Explodes: Reward (1981)

“If The Teardrops had not been composed of three (or more) certified screwball sociopaths, they might have been bigger than The Beatles.” Melody Maker

That The Teardrop Explodes actually managed to hold it together for as long as they did is something of a surprise; even more bizarre is the fact that they managed to create some great music and even have considerable success in the charts. Julian Cope, the band's leader, vocalist and bassist, was a student at Liverpool spending most of his time and money on records as diverse as The Seeds and The Doors through to Krautrock and the first tremors of post-punk. At least, when he wasn't generally causing anarchy with his mates. After hanging around in imaginary bands with various future members of Echo and The Bunnymen and The Wah!, Cope eventually got his act together with equally deranged characters, eventually settling on the line-up of Gary Dwyer on drums, Alan Gill on guitar and David Balfe on keyboards. They recorded the brilliant debut album 'Kilimanjaro' and a string of amazing singles before they started taking industrial quantities of pretty much any drug that came into their path, started behaving even more crazily and after the unfocused 'Wilder' album, split up. Julian Cope would go on to have an erratic yet compelling and often brilliant carrier, similarly defined by his musical eclecticism and his wayward behaviour. Seriously, it's worth tracking down a copy of 'Head-On', Cope's memoirs of the punk era and his time in the Teardrops, for the unbelievable lunacy that these guys got up to on a regular basis.
The Teardrop Explodes' music was a bizarre manic synthesis of all of Cope's musical influences, but this was often what made them brilliant, if also providing their Achilles Heel. The 1981 single 'Reward' is perhaps their finest moment. Driven by a Bond-theme bass line and punching brass, and filled out with psychedelic keyboards, it sounds like nothing else, and is certainly miles away from the monochrome austerity of the post-punk movement. It also contains perhaps the greatest opening line of any song ever, in Cope's cheekily sarcastic 'Bless my cotton socks I'm in the news!'. The lyrics continue in typically daft Teardrop fashion, but who cares when the music's this good? Julian Cope was never a strong singer, but by the this stage he had achieved a weird kind of charisma by almost willing himself to be a star, and his sheer force of personality manages to make up for his limited vocal range. The band's performance is excellent, with everyone but the rhythm section and spooky keyboards cutting back for the verses, until brass swells lead everyone into the rowdy chorus. The energy spills right over at the end, with a fantastically unhinged trumpet solo. The song's catchiness meant that it became a hit, and the band got to play it on Top of The Pops, turning this group of warped eccentrics briefly into huge stars. It couldn't last, of course, and the Teardrops story very quickly descended into madness from here on in, but at least Copey's solo career has provided consolation for the Teardrops' early demise - some 24 years after the band's dissolution, he has continued to make music as bizarre, indulgent, manic and often as brilliant as his first bands', whilst continuing to champion outsider music and pursuing an interest in megalithic history. He is one of pop music's true great eccentrics.

Gig Review: New Order 18.10.06 Carling Academy Glasgow

2006-10-19T13:31:00.000Z

After the day before's ecstatic Erase Errata gig, it is with some trepidation I stand waiting for New Order to take the stage in Glasgow's cavernous Carling Academy, (not aided by the fact that support band The Shores are one of the worst bands I have ever had the misfortune to see live). After all, Joy Division/New Order are one (two?) of my absolute favourite bands; I have a deep emotional connection to their songs. It has been 17 years since 'Technique', their last great album, and, to be honest, they're getting on a bit and last year's 'Waiting for the Siren's Call' was a hideously awful album; what if they simply can't cut it anymore and wind up embarrassing themselves? Plus I'm not sure how I feel about them playing Joy Division songs again; this could be an incredibly disillusioning experience. But the band take the stage (minus Gillian Gilbert, who is at home looking after her and drummer Stephen Morris' children) and launch into a fantastic version of 'True Faith', and my doubts are assuaged. Tonight they are brilliant; Bernard Sumner dances like your dad at a wedding after too many beers, but that's always been part of his charm - forced into the position of frontman by circumstance, his everyday-guy persona became part of the band's songs. Peter Hook's back gives out halfway through the performance, but he gamely plays on, encouraged by the crowd. The new songs, although less good and received accordingly, provide a necessary breather in a setlist packed with songs that are not just the band's greatest hits, but a good many people's favourite songs: 'Ceremony', 'Temptation', 'Bizarre Love Triangle', 'Blue Monday' and more, played with a passion and intensity that you'd think would be beyond guys this age. What's really striking is, in the live setting, songs like the beautifully tragic 'Temptation' become ecstatic and uplifting: New Order are all too keenly aware of the pain and suffering that everyday people face throughout their lives, but are convinced that there is love and happiness to be found also. Thus is Joy Division's existential angst converted to release on the dance floor. Stephen Morris is the beating heart of the band; his metronomic drumming and electronic programming fuelling the band, and this is wonderfully apparent tonight, with many songs starting simply with Morris' drumming and the synthesiser alone accompanying Sumner's vocals entire verses before the guitars enter. They also play Joy Division classics 'These Days', 'Transmission' and 'Love Will Tear Us Apart', and all three sound absolutely wonderful, the band slipping into Joy Division mode with an ease that belies the necessary emotional difficulty this must involve for them. The audience leaves the concert satisfied. New Order do their fantastic back catalogue proud, and if any band of the last 30 years deserves to sit back and bask in their own glory for a while, it's surely them. After their struggles and trials, not to mention 6 great albums and numerous fantastic singles, New Order have earnt it.

Gig Review: Erase Errata: 17.10.06 Nice 'N' Sleazy

2006-10-18T09:20:00.000Z

What, really, is the point of live music reviews? Surely there is even more subjectivity involved with live music then there is with music anyway, so what good can a review do? You can never catch the atmosphere of the crowd, the volume, the smells, the chaos that made the gig amazing for one person and absolutely awful for another with any real objectivity, so why bother? This attitude stopped me writing live reviews for a while, which in some way is a shame as it means that several amusing articles about local unsigned bands, the infamous Mac-heckling Bunnymen gig and Scritti Politti's triumphant return to the stage went undocumented. Plus, there's the fact that, generally speaking, as an amateur music journalist on a pitiful student income, I am hardly going to waste money going to see a band I don't already quite like, so they would have to screw up royally before I slag them off. Also, although many people see live music as the ultimate music experience, I never have: true, I have been to many very good, and some great, gigs, but the transcendent musical revelations have always come on record for me.
So why am I writing this? For starters, Erase Errata are the greatest band of our generation. Full stop. I have often toyed with this idea, but after this gig, I am convinced. It helps, of course, that Nice 'N Sleazy is a fantastic venue: a small club with an excellent sound system, it provides an intimate gig experience without the muddy sound usually associated with such places. Plus, Glasgow really has a scene. All the indie kids turned up dressed like extras from a Pulp music video or something, plus the jukebox has eveything on it from The Fall to a No Wave compilation; it's enough to make you quite jealous. It also helps that the support is pretty good; The Royal We stand a good chance of being quite famous quite soon despite the awful band name. But it's really down to the band themselves. Singer/guitarist Jenny Hoyston cuts an unprepossessing figure as she sets up her equipment and casually walks through the crowd to reach the stage, but once she starts playing, she transforms into a commanding and powerful figure. Despite the loss of guitarist Sara Jaffe, the band have loss none of their power or vitality. Bianca Sparta's derranged, jerky drumming provides the group's rhythmic bassis, whilst Ellie Errikson's bass playing is impressively inventive: at some points, the band become almost entiirely rhythmic, as Errikson scrapes her bass with a beer bottle, Hoyston's atonal guitar scratches along with the drums to produce propulsive tribal rhythms. There is a refreshing rawness to the band's performance: they flirt incessantly with chaos, yet they are always ultimately in control, bringing their collapsing songs back from the brink of anarchy. Hoyston's freeform guitar skronk has much in common with No Wave, but this is no mere revival: the band create their own vital creation from the buring embers of No Wave noise. Songs like 'A Thief Detests The Criminal Elements Of The Ruling Class' have an obviouc political agenda, but in their use of case scenarios and intelligent discussion, Erase Errata's lyrics have more in common with Gang Of Four's questioning intelligence then The Clash's soap-box sloganeering. The band are ridiculously good. During the encore, as the band have run out of material to play, the band invite members of the audience to join the onstage for a free-form noise jam, an action that removes the performer-auidience barrier in true post-punk form. I come away from the gig exhilarated an inspired. In short, I am writing this review because this was one of the most exceptional, exciting gig I have been to. Erase Errata stand as a sharp reminder of just how good pop music can be in the 21st century, would that there were more like them.

Track of the Week: Kate Bush: Breathing (1980)

2006-10-16T18:49:00.000Z

Seeing as the threat of nuclear fallout has raised its ugly head once more, it seems pertinent to revisit one of the most powerful visions of live after the bomb in pop music history. Before 1980, Kate Bush appeared to be something of a novelty; true, her idiosyncratic and adventurous song-writing style had given her one huge hit and several albums that sold pretty well, but despite the drama and emotional range hinted at in her music, no one seemed to be sure if she was in it for the long run. But by her third album, 1980's 'Never Forever', she had started experimenting with even more adventurous song structures, using her voice and the new technology of the Fairlight, and had started to produce her own work, revealing a new ambition and originality. Supported by three gloriously eccentric singles, it became her first album to go straight to number one, and hinted at the brilliance that lay ahead.
'Breathing' is perhaps an odd choice for a single, being as it is a five-and-a-half minute epic about giving birth during nuclear fallout. It still managed to reach number 5 in the singles chart, perhaps as a result of the genuine fear of the possibility of nuclear war breaking out during the Cold War. However, most of the single's success can be put down to its musical brilliance. 'Breathing' was Kate Bush's most ambitious song up to that point, its use of Fairlight effects and multi-part song writing paving the way for the bizarre experiments of 'The Dreaming' and the epic sensual romanticism of 'Hounds of Love'. Few artists would have the emotional ability or sheer audacity to tackle a song about a mother giving birth during nuclear fallout, but those qualities are part of what make Kate Bush so special. It helps that she is blessed with one of the most stunningly beautiful and expressive voices in the whole of pop music, but not only is she gifted, she also knows how best to use her talents. The song opens quietly and delicately, full of dread, with just Kate's vocals accompanied by piano, as she describes how 'Chips of plutonium / Are twinkling in every lung'. The fear is felt not just for the protagonist's own sake, but for her baby, whom she imagines 'Breathing the fall-out in' inside her during the chorus, and so also for the future of the human race. The dynamics rise during the chorus, as the mother thinks of her unborn baby with tenderness and fear for the future. At this point the rest of the band make themselves herd, with special mention for Del Palmer's beautiful, mournful fretless bass playing. Overlaid on top are Kate's multi-tracked vocals chiming 'In, out, in, out', mimicking the flow of air through the mother's lungs, and with a sensuality I probably don't need to explain to most heterosexual males. After the second chorus, there is a quiet piano interlude, over which various noises of panic and static can be heard, together with a sampled radio voice informing the listener how to recognise a nuclear explosion, all courtesy of the Fairlight sampler. This middle bit in particular is reminiscent of the art-rock of Pink Floyd, perhaps slightly fitting since Kate Bush was 'discovered' by Pink Floyd's guitarist, David Gilmour. Then, suddenly, the band enter back in, with the bass playing an ominous minor key ascending riff, as a chorus of voices sing, in increasingly desperate tones, 'What are we going to do without..../We are all going to die without...' whilst Kate Bush's voice rises to a dramatic peak over the top as she pleads ' Leave us something to breathe!'. We know that the protagonist's baby is being born into a world with little or no hope of survival. After reaching its climax, the song ends, leaving us alone with an eerie silence as the last crashing chords fade away, and the tension is left unresolved - we are not told the ultimate fate of the mother and her child. Thanks to its emotionally engaging music and its fearlessness to deal with such large issues, the song is a striking success. 'Breathing' is an emotional and harrowing picture of a possible future in which, as the Sex Pistols had sung three years earlier, there really IS no future, and the unforgettable images it conjures up remind us that we are still living in a world where nuclear fallout is a possibility, something it is easy to forget as we progress with day-to-day life.

Track of the Week: The Monochrome Set: I'll Scry Instead (1982)

2006-10-08T13:58:00.000Z

The Monochrome Set were a bunch of art students who formed when they left a prototype Adam and the Ants. This was a band who seemed set for stardom: lead by the charismatic Bid (vocals, guitar), who claimed to be descended from Indians, here was a band capable of writing witty, catchy and individual pop music. The Monochrome Set mixed jerky post-punk with music hall melodies reminiscent of the Kinks during their 'Village Green' era, all topped off with a fun but sometimes quite cutting sense of humour. Lester Square's guitar often harked back to the Shadows' gentle pop rather then the harsh distortion of punk, and one read through of the puns in their song titles should be enough to endear The Monochrome Set to you. 'Eligible Bachelors', their third album, is almost a concept album satirising the neurosis of the upper classes. 'I'll Scry Instead' deals, as you might be able to gather from the title, with a young man asking a fortune teller to reveal his fortune to him. Bid gleefully delivers line like 'Dear Madame be clear / Will I be rich next year?' and 'Up above, Venus is in my house / I'm in love with an Aquarius' before sighing 'I'd be richer if that cheque wasn't paid'. Bid sings it all in his magnificent silky croon, somewhat reminiscent of Noel Coward and an obvious influence on Alex Kapranos from Franz Ferdinand's singing style. Yet, while the song is obviously very sarcastic, Bid, like Ray Davies from the Kinks, is able to make you feel sympathy with the characters he mocks as well as laugh at them. The protagonist's naive desire to believe in the power of astrology to change his life despite knowing underneath it all that it's a load of nonsense makes it easy to empathise with him: the guy is simply looking for some sort of order and meaning to his life. All of which would be less impressive if the tune also wasn't so brilliant, but fortunately, with its effortless melody and delicate harmonies, the song is brilliant. It is an unorthodox mix of the post-punk and the arcane, drawing as much from the Kinks at their most pastoral and the Fairport Convention as Wire and XTC. 'I'll Scry Instead', like much of 'Eligible Bachelors', is slightly less eccentric and more soft and smooth then many of The Monochrome Set's earlier songs, but you could hardly accuse them of selling out on an album that includes a Latin invocation of the devil among its tracks. And when the music is this good, it seems simply churlish. 'Eligible Bachelors' should have been the sound of a band dramatically entering the mainstream, and indeed opening track 'Jet Set Junta' remains to this day the Set's highest charting single, but unfortunately most of the world just wasn't listening. The Monochrome Set remain to this day largely undiscovered and grossly underappreciated, but surely the recognition of true talent can only be a matter of time.