Audio Journal by MJA Smith : 21/12/2009

Go to: My Other Blog / twitter.com/mjasmith

I have two other music-related projects aside from this here blog, one of which – my Nominal Musics label – sits in a state of permanent hiatus. The other, Documentary Evidence, my unofficial Mute Records tribute site just sit there, waiting for me to get around to turning some much-needed attention toward it.

This post will, eventually be about the Depeche Mode concert I attended at the O2 Arena this Wednesday; but before we get there I'm going to spend a bit of time telling you about Documentary Evidence.



Documentary Evidence grew out of a simple passion, that passion being for collecting records; specifically, those releases on a label called Mute Records. Following a particular artist, or genre, is fairly commonplace; following an entire record label's output is the exclusive reserve of a particular niche of train-spotting record collectors, yours truly included.

Mute Records was started by Daniel Miller in the late 1970s, quickly establishing itself in the post-punk anti-corporate, independent musical landscape as the place to go to get your fix of leftfield electronic pop and more challenging, noisy music. Miller himself released several records in the early days of Mute, including the very first release as electro-punks The Normal with the JG Ballard-referencing 7” single of 'Warm Leatherette' and 'T.V.O.D' (see my review here); he also hinted at one of his ambitions by recording quirky synth pop as Silicon Teens, a fake group consisting of Miller and an array of analogue synths covering Fifties rock n' roll numbers.



Mute's future was assured when Miller signed Depeche Mode to the nascent label, securing Miller's first hits with their second and third singles, 'New Life' and 'Just Can't Get Enough'. No sooner had Mute established itself than Depeche Mode's core songwriter, Vince Clarke, quit the band just as they were gearing up for a lucrative US tour. Just as things looked to turn sour for Miller, Clarke formed Yazoo with Alison Moyet and, after a few abortive side projects, Erasure with Andy Bell, while Depeche Mode continued to develop a dedicated fan base in the UK and abroad, and Mute went from strength to strength.

The success of bands like Depeche Mode and Erasure allowed Miller to recycle the label's profits into developing artists from other, more esoteric areas, such as Nick Cave – a cult figure who has only comparatively recently has gained more universal recognition – or Laibach, or Nitzer Ebb and countless other examples of bands operating just underneath the collective consciousness of the charts (see here for a less-than-complete list). The label reached a new level of success with Moby, whose Play was arguably the biggest success the label had scored (with the exception of Depeche Mode's albums), quickly leading to Miller's label getting snapped up by EMI and ending that particular stage of one of the UK's longest-running indie labels.



I had a resolutely pop music upbringing; the first band I really, really liked was Erasure. I've said it before, and I'll say it again that I still think the duo of Vince and Andy are still the best synth pop duo there has ever been, knocking spots off those irksome Pet Shop Boys, but I'm biased. Less logically, I also have Erasure entirely to thank for getting me into the wider Mute roster, and sub-pop music generally.

I bought my first 12” single, 'Chorus' by Erasure in the summer of 1991, from Woolworth's in Stratford-upon-Avon. As I took the black vinyl disc from its sleeve, a square pamphlet fell out. That pamphlet was titled 'Documentary Evidence' and something about it fascinated me; it was basically a brief biography of Mute Records by The Wire's Chris Bohn (writing as Biba Kopf) with a full list of all the releases that the label had put out up to that point. With the exception of Depeche Mode, who up to then I didn't really like, and Renegade Soundwave I hadn't heard of any of the bands listed in the booklet; I had no idea at all that music was made that didn't appear in the charts; I thought I must have just missed them or not taken any notice.



So from that point on I began avidly collecting releases from Mute, both new and old, and I'd say conservatively that 75% of my entire record collection is made up of bands and artists connected to the label. It got me into punk (both US and UK), noise, techno and rock and has cost me an absolute fortune over the years. So it was in 2003 that I decided to set up a website specifically as a tribute to the label, and I decided to call it Documentary Evidence.

Documentary Evidence contains biographies of Mute's artists, reviews of releases and live performances and occasional interviews with artists or people connected to the label, including Barry Adamson, ex Human League / Heaven 17 member and Vince Clarke collaborator Martyn Ware and Wire / Githead front man Colin Newman. I've barely touched it in the last eighteen months, but that will change in 2010 with a new interview and plenty of new reviews and biographies.



To kick things off I've added a review of the Depeche Mode concert at the O2 Arena last Wednesday, which if I remember correctly was what I said the point of this blog post actually was. You can find it here. Feel free to look around the rest of the Documentary Evidence site.

Next week's blog will be written by my good friend Neil Cullimore. Audio Journal by Neil Cullimore will feature a review of Ned's Atomic Dustbin's gig at the O2 in Shepherd's Bush as well as an interview with Jonn from the band. I'll return with more musical ramblings in 2010, as well as news of a new and totally gratis Nominal Musics release.

Audio Journal by MJA Smith : A Not So Silent Night Review

Go to: My Other Blog / twitter.com/mjasmith

Now that we are some way along on the runway to Christmas, seasonal songs have begun to pervade the airwaves in ever greater quantity; in our house it's no different. Our two favourite albums for the Christmas season are Phil Spector's A Christmas Gift For You and a compilation album given away years ago with Mojo magazine called Blue Christmas. The former is dominated by the joyously murky sound of the youthful Sixties pop groups that Spector produced, while the latter consists of a bunch of miserable songs by artists prone to introspection and cynicism. One such artist is Rufus Wainwright, whose 'Spotlight On Christmas' from an album recorded with his wider family is a folksy number with lots of festive tinkly bells and whatnot.



The Wainwright-McGarrigle clan, a family so talented they really shouldn't be allowed to have children just so other people can have a chance, descended upon the Royal Albert Hall on Wednesday for an event called A Not So Silent Night, a charity event for matriarch Kate McGarrigle's cancer foundation. This on-stage family get-together usually takes place at New York's Carnegie Hall, and this is the first time they've taken the festive jamboree off Manhattan Island and all the way to London. They were joined by a cast that included Boy George, various members of the Thompson family, including Linda Thompson and various grandsons and daughters, family friend Ed Harcourt, Elbow's Guy Garvey and Jenni Muldaur (also from a famous musical family – enough already).

Somewhat needlessly, the event was kicked off by Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders, which I could have done without, though they did make amusing reference to the apparent complexity of the family affair about to take to the stage. In essence, here's the score (as I understand it): Kate McGarrigle and Anna McGarrigle are sisters who have recorded many albums of American folk music over several decades; Kate married Loudon Wainwright III and produced two children, Martha and Rufus; Loudon's sister Sloan Wainwright is also a singer; Loudon worked with and became good friends with Fairport Convention guitarist Richard Thompson, who, with ex wife Linda produced a number of offspring (including Teddy Thompson, absent from tonight's proceedings), all of whom are talented musicians as evidenced at A Not So Silent Night. One can imagine that the stage performance is simply a public version of the family and extended-family get togethers this esteemed bunch of individuals would have had each Christmas. Imagine the impromptu sing-alongs that might occur at that party.

Highlights were many, and often from the most unexpected quarters. Ed Harcourt, for example, came a close second to Rufus as most impressive male vocalist here. His duet with Martha on The Pogues's Christmas hit 'A Fairytale Of New York' was probably the finest, most louche cover of the song I've ever heard, with both singers acting like the seasonal drunks in the song; later, his version of 'Merry Christmas Baby' descended into jazz nihilism and was arguably the most impassioned performance of the entire night. Imagine a more credible Jamie Cullum to the power of ten and you'd get somewhere close.



Far from being an uplifting pre-Christmas spectacle, the evening had a maudlin tone only leavened by more uplifting performances such as Boy George's take on 'White Christmas', here rendered as a cod-reggae song; working with Antony Heggarty has clearly emboldened the troubled former Culture Club vocalist, his voice now able to resonate with a new, treacly depth. His duet with Rufus on 'What Are You Doing New Year's Eve' was as camp as you'd expect from these two individuals combined, but again provided one of the most joyous sections of the show. Guy Garvey leading off all the singers in a version of the Lennon / Ono staple 'Happy Xmas (War Is Over)' was another, only bettered by Sloan Wainwright belting out a gutsy, bluesy take on Queen's 'Thank God It's Christmas'. Earlier in the show, two performances from members of the Thompson clan – the Chuck Berry song 'Run Run Rudolph' by Thompson grandson Zac Hobbs and another by Kami Thompson (who Rufus described somewhat unfairly as a 'Dickensian slut') – served as rock 'n roll interludes, both displaying a brilliant rawness that the Royal Albert Hall didn't seem to know how to respond to.

In spite of the stellar talents on stage, it was clear from the audience reaction that the main draws here were Rufus and Martha. Mic-less performances from the former have become standard feature of his concerts, and here he decided to test how good the Royal Albert Hall was for acoustics with 'Minuit Chrétien', which was as breathtaking as ever. His duet with partner Jorn Weisbrodt on 'Silent Night' – two thirds of which was actually in German, so we should perhaps more appropriately label it 'Stille Nacht' – closed out the first half of the show, Jorn's lumpen tone somehow perfectly complemented by his partner's range. Martha, who became a mother just three weeks ago seemed to have adopted a maternal air in the proceedings, shepherding her tiny mother around with evident concern. The song 'Mary Had A Baby' was dedicated to the son she delivered less than a month before with the band's bassist Brad Albetta. Consequently, the quartet performance of the Wainwright siblings, their mother and Brad on bass on 'In The Bleak Midwinter' was appropriately sweet in a 'let's have a sing along round the piano' post-Christmas-lunch fashion, in spite of just how damn depressing that song is.

Rufus's début opera, Prima Donna, whose female lead Janice Kelly performed a duet with Rufus at A Not So Silent Night arrives on UK shores in April 2010 at the Sadlers Wells Theatre in Islington – tickets can be bought from here.

Audio Journal by MJA Smith : 07/12/2009

Go to: My Other Blog / twitter.com/mjasmith

A Chance To Cut Is A Chance To Cure by San Francisco electronica purveyors Matmos was, upon its release, a new yardstick in the electronica genre. Along with Matthew Herbert with the sounds he culled from his kitchen, Matmos took the notion of sampling to a new level. In the not-too-distant past sampling was merely the art of stealing a section from a song or snatching movie dialogue and then re-contextualising those snatches of sound together in another song. With A Chance To Cut Is A Chance To Cure, Matmos took the bulk of their samples from a non-traditional, and potentially macabre, area – operating theatres and cosmetic surgeries – and then turned those sounds into rhythms over which other, more derivative electronic passages were laid.

The concept makes for queasy listening if you imagine the kinds of things they feasibly could have captured (there was some talk of a bone saw being recorded, as well as a liposuction procedure); on record it's mercifully impossible to deduce the sources of most of the sounds within the palette of the clattering electronica beats and skittish percussion that has informed this genre of music since Autechre, Aphex Twin and all those other early Warp acts deprogrammed their drum machines in the early 1990s. That and the prevalence of detailed 'real life' surgical programmes on TV these days somewhat inures you to Matmos's ideas. That said, if you ignore the fabled source of some of the sounds, A Chance To Cut Is A Chance To Cure remains as good an introduction to leftfield electronica as there is.

Matmos subsequently collaborated with Björk, an artist who has done more than most to bring the outer reaches of music into her and her fans' orbit. For those who believe the Björk phenomenon started with oh-so-irritating 'It's Oh So Quiet' and ended with a punch up in an airport, Medúlla will have come and gone without a trace. It is an album where vocals, or more precisely vocal sounds, achieve a prominence thanks to much sampling of Björk's voice and the conversion of those sounds into beats and otherworldly percussion. It's a genuinely inventive album, highlighting just how comfortable Björk is taking her music way out there, but it can occasionally become cloying and over-long. If you can't stand Björk's unique singing, this is not an album for you.

Over-long is a charge that could never be levied at Alistair Crosbie's one-track The Last Days Of Summer, which even at twelve minutes is far, far too brief. Crosbie self-releases music on his own Lefthand Pressings label, and in the case of The Last Days Of Summer this was released as a 3” CD-R in a handmade sleeve back in the summer of this year. The track is quite honestly one of the most serenely beautiful pieces of music I've ever heard. Constructed entirely of heavily-processed layers of guitars recalling Robert Fripp's Soundscapes series or Stars Of The Lid, the track approaches a kind of icy classicism whilst maintaining an air of ethereal stasis. Anyone interested in hearing how guitars can be made to sound is urged to get their ears around this release. Copies can be obtained from Alistair's blog.

In 2002 my mothballed Nominal Musics label released – in similar lo-fi style – Songs From The Shelley, the complete recorded output of Fungal Noise, a band of school-friends centred around Haywards Heath and the song writing axis of vocalist Patrick 'Pod' O'Donnell and guitarist Neil Cullimore. Their songs had a youthful exuberance informed by bands from the Stourbridge scene like The Wonderstuff and Ned's Atomic Dustbin and often the archness of Blur. Fungal Noise recorded several strong demos between 1993 and 1996 and I thought their songs were really good, blessed with the sorts of spiky guitars and wry, cynical and often highly abstract lyrics that only a bunch of hip school kids could have conceived of. I came across the tracks on my hard drive last week, and they haven't lost any of their adolescent kick. Nominal Musics is on the back-burner until 2010, but you can email me at info at nominalmusics dot co dot uk for details on how to get a copy – go here for a comprehensive biography of the band and more information on Songs From The Shelley. To find out more about the Nominal Musics project, point yourself here.



Interview with Simon Nelson (SixtyFiveMiles)

Last week I caught up with Simon Nelson, whose band SixtyFiveMiles released their début mini-album Finnish Tango via Cherry Red earlier this year. Check out their MySpace and my review of the mini-album.

MJASmith : So why the name SixtyFiveMiles?

Simon Nelson : It's the distance between Elton in Cambridgeshire and Atherstone in Warwickshire. I live in Elton, and the other guys live in Atherstone. We rehearse there too.

MJAS : What's a Finnish Tango?

SN : I've travelled regularly to Helsinki in the last three years. Between work commitments I ended up writing the lyrics to a few of the tunes. I was also very much inspired by the ballroom dancing clubs in the city where women ask men to dance on Tuesday evenings – if you dance three times you have to wed.

MJAS : How did SixtyFiveMiles come about?

SN : Ash Woodward, who plays guitar, and Neil Gordon, who plays bass, have been in bands for years – I joined them in May 2008. We got to know Ryan Vann, who plays drums, through the musical grapevine in the West Midlands.

MJAS : Who do you see as your biggest influences?

SN : My personal influences include The Byrds, The Who, The Beatles, Dylan, Television, The Undertones, The Pistols, The Waterboys, The Las – your usual guitary stuff basically.

MJAS : How did you come to release Finnish Tango through Cherry Red?

SN : Cherry Red approached us in June – they also they put out The Best Of The Milltown Brothers [Simon was the guitarist and song writer in the band] but I also feel proud to be associated with a venerable British indie like this.

MJAS : Where can fans see you live?

SN : We've got gigs coming up at the Derby Arms in Colne (Lancashire) on 12th December, the Dublin Castle in Camden on 21st January, and the Kasbah in Coventry on 22nd January.

MJAS : How do your songs tend to come about?

SN : I tend to write songs on the acoustic guitar before taking them to the band for orchestration. I pick up a lot of my lyrical ideas from travel experiences and personal relationship dramas.

MJAS : What's next for the band?

SN : We are aiming to release a three-track EP in the New Year. We've just shot a video to support this.

Audio Journal by MJA Smith : 30/11/2009

Go to: My Other Blog / twitter.com/mjasmith

One of the albums I've returned my attention to this week is the seminal Yankee Hotel Foxtrot by Wilco, which my good friend Martyn gave me a few years ago. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is in many ways the yardstick by which all subsequent alt. country albums should be judged, deploying all manner of effects and sounds ordinarily restricted to the more esoteric reaches of modern electronica and sampleadelica. The opener, 'I Am Trying To Break Your Heart' is a case in point – a fragmented, clipped ballad that hangs together for almost as long as it threatens to fall to pieces (which it ultimately does), whereas 'Heavy Metal Drummer' is a blissfully straight up slice of lo-fi folk rockery. Other strong tracks are 'Kamera', a cheerful Sixties-esque upbeat track, and 'War On War' which has an unexpected middle eight almost entirely comprised of buzzing synth firework chaos.

Further out, Ubuweb delivered an obscure Yoko Ono piece in the last fortnight or so. 'Coughing Piece' was recorded in Tokyo in 1961 and comprises a bed of rich background environmental sounds – traffic noise, subtle feedback, muffled conversation – over which someone (possibly Ono) occasionally delivers various coughing sounds. The overall effect is one of considerable sonic depth but claustrophobic edginess. Over the length of the track the sporadic coughing becomes more pronounced, and as a listener you can't help but feel short of breath yourself; a bit like contagious yawning, I found myself coughing along at one point. At just over thirty minutes in length, it may appear excessive but as a piece of avant garde sonic art it is nevertheless thoroughly absorbing.

Wire's IBTABA – shorthand for It's Beginning To And Back Again, a line from the song 'German Shepherds' – was an album I bought on vinyl from Andy's Records in Colchester on a 1996 summer's day after finishing my first year of degree exams. Of all the band's material from their second coming, IBTABA is perhaps the most comprehensive. The electronics which first emerged on The Ideal Copy and the spindly, frantic 'dugga-dugga-dugga' guitars of 'Drill' – a track which would, when performed live, take on an entirely amorphous dimension and length – are all present, as are some of their most obviously elliptical lyrics. Principally containing new versions of tracks taken from the earlier album A Bell Is A Cup Until It Is Struck, the album was conceived as a way of presenting the tracks in the studio the way they were realised in a live setting. Accordingly, the superior slow-building version of 'Boiling Boy' is probably my favourite track from Wire's entire 1980s / 1990s period, inspiring me to use the title as a moniker for a single electronic pop track I wrote a few years later.

Earlier this year I found myself at Piccadilly Underground station one balmy summer evening after a client event at the Royal Academy. Descending the steps from street level I saw a large poster containing the words 'Pop Will Eat Itself' and my pulse momentarily quickened – was this the return of the Stourbridge band that I listened to almost constantly throughout my A-levels? Sadly not; it was some sort of Art On The Underground installation. My friend Jon got me into PWEI, recording me tapes of the band's samples-and-punk-meets-Brummie-hip-hop albums, sizeable chunks of which I wound up sampling for my own tracks. The swansong album Dos Dedos Mis Amigos ('Two Fingers My Friends'), with its characteristic Designers Republic sleeve, found the band straddling the wry, cynically humorous elements of their sound with more robust, serious material – the single 'Ich Bin Ein Auslander' is an anti-Nazism rant while 'Familus Horribilis' (a play on the Queen's apocryphal 'annus horribilis' speech) casts the Royal Family as a Simpsons-style dysfunctional family. It shouldn't work, but it does. The bleak 'Everything's Cool' remains my anthem of choice for a hypothetical post-apocalyptic world.

Midlands band SixtyFiveMiles released a seven-track mini download album via the usual sites on the frequently pleasing Cherry Red label, one of the UK's most enduring independents. Finnish Tango is a small slither of indie-rock brilliance from the fourpiece band, key tracks being the Foil-esque opener 'Found Out' and the arid negativity of 'Don't Want You Hanging Around' which reaches the same depths of weary dystopia as Interpol, and knocks spots off the NYC band's hopeless copyists – and fellow Midlanders – Editors. 'Butterflies' and 'Manhattan' are, in contrast, upbeat and gleefully optimistic pieces. Definitely a band to check out. An interview with Simon from the band should appear here next week, but in the meantime check out SixtyFiveMiles's tracks on their MySpace.

Audio Journal by MJA Smith : 23/11/2009

Go to: My Other Blog / twitter.com/mjasmith

Many Christmases ago, my younger sister received a copy of the Oasis video Live By The Sea, recorded at Southend’s Cliffs Pavilion. As was often the case in a one video household, in the days between Christmas and going back to school, we’d frequently squabble over whose new video was going get put on.

Feeling especially spiteful when my sister won this particular fight and Live By The Sea went into the video recorder, I immediately adopted a critical stance; I’d already made it pretty clear by that early stage in the brothers Gallagher’s career that I couldn’t stand them, and so I spent the first few minutes of their performance throwing insults at the screen, mocking their accents and so on. Childish, I know.

My biggest, and I think most well-founded, criticism was that they were just boring. They didn’t move about, they didn’t really engage with the audience, and overall – despite their growing reputation as one of the most important of the Britpop bands – they just left me feeling like they couldn’t be bothered to put on a show.

That notion of a big band being boring came to the front of my thinking when we went to see the Arctic Monkeys at Wembley Arena this week. Here’s one of the most popular bands in the UK at present, with three (mostly) critically acclaimed albums under their belt, and yet they failed to excite me at all.

Even songs which I really like of theirs, such as the relentless, urgent onslaught of the single ‘Brian Storm’ or Humbug’s ‘Crying Lightning’, were unimpressive and failed to stop me actually yawning. During one of the plodding slow numbers or tedious album filler tracks, I know I briefly nodded off. Of the two concerts we went to this week – Kasabian and this – this was the one I was looking forward to. I was broadly indifferent toward Kasabian and their elaborate big venue pretension, but came away mostly thinking they were excellent. With Arctic Monkeys I came away feeling drained of any enthusiasm whatsoever.

Reading their fans’ comments on the concert, it’s fair to say that I’m in the minority with this view. For me they’re just not a stadium rock band, and to see them trying to fill a big stage and a big stadium is just painful. Their only concession to the standard gestures of the stadium band appeared to be the deployment of bigger lighting systems than could feasibly fill a small venue, video screens (more on those in a moment) and occasional meek requests to the audience to see how they were feeling. As for those screens, which were mostly coloured in artistically edgy red tones, they were split so that they statically focussed in on one band member – something that was uniquely possible with Arctic Monkeys since they never bloody move. Even the confetti-firing canon went off like it couldn’t be bothered.

Apparently, much of Alex Turner’s reticence toward crowd engagement, or indeed anything that appears to suggest that he actually wants to be on stage at all, comes down to confidence. I struggle to see how. Turner and co have had three albums – four if you include his side-project The Last Shadow Puppets – and many, many concerts in which to hone their craft. All of which tells me it’s sheer lack of charisma that is manifesting itself on stage.

When I edge into popular music and feel disappointed, I have found that my only antidote is to head further out into experimental territories. So it is in reaction to the Arctic Monkeys that I find myself bathing my ears in the harsh free jazz sounds of saxophonists Jim Sauter and Don Dietrich and guitarist Don Miller, aka Borbetomagus; specifically I’m listening to two performances delivered in New York and DC in 1988 and ‘89 respectively downloaded from the always resourceful Ubuweb site. These free improv pieces are not for the feint-hearted, comprising harsh blasts of distorted noise from Sauter and Dietrich’s saxes and Miller’s guitar.

Audio Journal by MJA Smith : 16/11/2009

Go to: My Other Blog / twitter.com/mjasmith

M and I went to see Kasabian at Wembley Arena on Sunday night. Wembley is quite possibly my least favourite venue, a feeling that was enhanced on Sunday by public transport issues and further compounded by not being especially bothered about seeing the band. M’s a fan, whereas I can’t seem to get past front man Tom Meighan’s laddish persona or Serge Pizzorno’s adoption of every rock pose in the Spinal Tap rulebook.

All that said, the most recent Kasabian album, West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum is a great album, as are their previous two come to think of it. As a live band, they’ve obviously more than mastered the dark art of stadium histrionics, which I often find irritating, but you have to concede they do it very well. So it’s fair to say, once I’d got past Wembley’s consistently terrible sound and the band’s onstage aloofness, I was really, really impressed… eventually.



The band arrived on their ephemera-cluttered and asylum-themed stage with the ‘Underdog’ B-side ‘Julie & The Moth-Man’, an upbeat crowd-pleaser which betters a number of tracks on West Ryder. The trouble was that the song packed such an instant sonic punch and required so much energy from the band that it took them several songs to get anywhere close to that song’s impact again. Consequently the single ‘Underdog’ fell flat, as did ‘Where Did All The Love Go’, one of my favourite tracks from the album. All was well by the crowd-sung coda of the anthemic encore track ‘L.S.F. (Lost Souls Forever)’, which carried on out of the stadium, into the Underground station and probably all the way to Baker Street. Even The Mighty Boosh’s Noel Fielding put in a typically creepy, elastic-limbed performance to a rapturous audience reception.

That reception was rightfully not extended to the second support act, Reverend & The Makers, a band who seem to rely on their front man’s aggressive, crowd-baiting arrogance and drunk-bloke-on-a-night-out posturing in the absence of a clear sonic identity. I wouldn’t say that their songs were necessarily bad, and they certainly seem keen to mine the same cocky electro-rock seam as Kasabian, but in comparison they are undoubtedly a much more mediocre offering. That, combined with the front man’s sub-Gallagher attitude and the skinny girl who seemed to be performing some sort of trite exercise routine behind her keyboards, and you get a band that will always be second on the bill.

On the train this past week I’ve listened to Grinderman’s eponymous debut. Grinderman is essentially a Nick Cave side-project, featuring a slimmed-down Bad Seeds and Cave himself on guitar for the first time. Described by Esquire magazine as ‘one of [the] five best mid-life crisis albums‘, the sound of Grinderman is the closest the latter-day Cave has managed to get to reclaiming the ur-punk nihilism of his earlier band The Birthday Party, the overall sound being one of atonal thrashing and noisy blues. My favourite track is the wild garage rock assault of ‘Honey Bee (Let’s Fly To Mars)’ with insectoid sibilant rasps from Cave in the style of The Cramps’s sadly-departed Lux Interior on the similarly bugtastic ‘Human Fly’.



Tom Waits’s Asylum Years was a weekend purchase, and provides my first immersion into the barrel-aged jazz torch songs of Waits’s seventies output on Asylum Records. Tom’s vocal sound is one that initially made for uncomfortable listening until I finally cottoned on to his Louis Armstrong-esque depth and tone. It is truly for artists like Waits that the oft-misused term noir was designed for, his emotionally-wrought songs clashing effortlessly with nocturnal tales of schlepping round New York’s seediest neighbourhoods, while all along you feel that a glass of bourbon was never far from Tom’s microphone stand. Next stop, Swordfishtrombones.

Magazine cover CDs are usually put together with a slapdash, unit-shifting mentality, but not The Velvets Revolution compilation given away with this month’s Uncut. The CD consists of fifteen artists supposedly influenced by The Velvet Underground and for once – with probably one exception from Espers – the tracks really do capture the spirit of the band Uncut are trying to draw comparisons with. It’s worth buying the magazine anyway for the profile and focus on the band, but the CD’s tracks from the likes of Suicide, Loop and the Brian Eno / Phil Manzanera project 801 all evidence the wide-ranging impact the Velvets have had on modern music, whether that be dirge-like scrapings (Fursaxa), motorik ‘Sister Ray’-inspired punk (Thee Oh Sees) or genteel Nico / Moe Tucker balladry (Hope Sandoval & The Warm Intentions).

Audio Journal by MJA Smith : 09/11/2009

Go to: My Other Blog / twitter.com/mjasmith

So where were we?

Ah yes. The last album I wrote about two weeks ago was Love Is Hell by Ryan Adams. This album has remained on relatively constant play during my week off, but has been joined by other Adams albums, namely 2003’s Rock N’ Roll (purchased on a late evening shopping spree at Sister Ray on Soho’s Berwick Street) and Gold (2001). The former is, as its name suggests, a pretty intense and rocky album in a post-Strokes sense, whereas the latter is much more country, like an MOR Bright Eyes. Like much of Adams’ work, evocative images of New York pervade the songs, though few are as overtly joyous about the city as Gold’s ‘New York, New York’.

The trip to Sister Ray also yielded David Byrne’s Live From Austin, Texas album, a live set from Byrne in 2001 wherein he sings plenty tracks from the Talking Heads days as well as songs from Rei Momo and Look Into The Eyeball. He even manages to throw in a surprisingly good cover version of Whitney’s ‘I Wanna Dance With Somebody’ whose strings lend the track a golden-days-of-disco feel. On later tours he’d go on to tackle Beyonce’s ‘Crazy In Love’, most notably accompanied by San Francisco’s Extra Action Marching Band at the Hollywood Bowl. The vibe here moves from the Latin rhythms that Byrne has embraced for many years to string-soaked pieces like ‘The Great Intoxication’. Good though it is, it does make me rue selling my ticket to his Royal Festival Hall performance earlier in the year.



Way back in my teenage days, I owned the first two Nine Inch Nails albums – Pretty Hate Machine and The Downward Spiral. It was a logical next step into darker musical territory from bands that I still listen to, specifically Depeche Mode and Nitzer Ebb. Typically, I’d only really ever listen to those two albums when I was in a negative state of mind, and so when life turned broadly more optimistic I gave them away. I downloaded a couple of tracks from The Downward Spiral a few weeks ago and was surprised at how very tame, and to my mind camp, the NIN sound actually was. Positing that view on Twitter, one of my followers told me to check out Ghosts, the instrumental collection put out by Trent Reznor a couple of years back.

I wasn’t prepared to commit myself to buying the $250 box set, and anyway, the thought of two and a half hours of bleak instrumental music wasn’t terribly appealing, so I opted for the free nine-track download and have been pleasantly surprised. The sound veers from basic instrumental tracks which, were they to have vocals, wouldn’t have sounded out of place on The Downward Spiral to more esoteric ambient tracks sprinkled with some nice Satie-esque piano. It’s totally recognisable as a Nine Inch Nails album, without the despair-inducing lyrics. So thanks @shreenas for recommending that to me.

Cezary Gapik started following me on Twitter in the last fortnight. Gapik is a Polish electronic music composer, much of whose material is available gratis via his MySpace. I downloaded The Limestone EP, a collection of six short tracks containing lots of sonic adventure using synths, found sounds and field recordings. I’ve been inching back into this sort of music lately, and Gapik’s music has a particular sonic depth which perfectly suits where my ears are at just now. Fans of textural ambient noise will not be disappointed.

Disappointed you should expect to be, however, if you decide to visit the British Music Experience at the O2. If you want a condensed, anodyne history of British popular music from the 1950s to the present day, I have no doubt that you’ll enjoy it. The exhibition is short-sighted in its ambition, focussing only on the most successful artists of the day and more or less casting the more influential, but marginal players to the sidelines as it tries unsuccessfully to present half a century‘s worth of music in a single exhibition.

So it is that the Pet Shop Boys dominate the 1980s display but the litany of other – and better – synth bands get overlooked. The only things I found of any major interest were Bernard ‘New Order’ Sumner’s lyrics to ‘Blue Monday’ and a selection of Bowie’s scribbled verses, both of which showed the two songwriters to have terribly childlike handwriting. There are lots of interactive displays, but overall I was just bored. Even the punk section, focussing principally on – you guessed it – the Sex Pistols felt diluted and sanitised, bereft of any of the bile and venom with which UK punk arrived in the seventies hinterlands. Definitely one to avoid.