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.
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