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.
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