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.