Audio Journal : 23/03/2011

Third time lucky: I have booked tickets to see Interpol three times; the first time was for a huge (for them) concert at Alexandra Palace in 2007; the second time was for a far smaller gig in Birmingham last year. I didn't go either time and both times sold the tickets. This disappoints me no end. I have said many times that Interpol are right up there among my favourite bands, the band that have soundtracked my darkest days like no other, and yet twice I bailed on going to see them after letting life get in the way. Third time lucky, since after being well and truly smitten by this New York band since the release of their second album, 2004's Antics, tonight I finally saw them live, albeit from a lofty perch at Shepherd's Bush Empire, ably supported by electronic punk-funk Brooklynite Matthew Dear and his band.

Mrs S is responsible for getting me into Interpol. It was she who first heard 'Slow Hands' and it was she who bought Antics at the old Fopp in Leamington Spa. I was hooked after one listen and they fast became 'my' band. Belatedly, I bought their debút (Turn On The Bright Lights) from Other Music in New York's Lower East Side; it was somehow important, somehow entirely logical to me, to buy this quintessentially New York album in Manhattan. Two days earlier, 'Obstacle 1' from that album was the song playing when Mrs S discovered we were expecting our first daughter, giving that song a perpetual frozen poignancy in our lives. When Our Love To Admire (ordered from Other Music instead of nipping down to my local HMV, natch) came out in 2007 it would come to fuel, drive, encourage – whatever – the most subdued period of anxiety, depression, misery – whatever – that I've ever experienced. Even now I sometimes shudder when I put that album on. I think I wrote here a while back that I'd started to hear levity in that album; after hearing the band perform that album's 'Rest My Chemistry' tonight, in all its devastating melancholy glory, I think I was probably tricking myself.

2010's Interpol marked the departure of bassist Carlos Dengler and a conscious decision by the band to move away from the big venue / stadium aspirations that seemed to be being foisted upon them. An NME review of a gig in a tiny NYC venue last year painted a picture of a band suddenly freed from record company pressures of conformity to the 'scale' befitting a band approaching their fourth album, much more at ease in their surroundings. Live, they are undoubtedly a weird proposition, shrouded in barely-there lighting and near-darkness. Singer Paul Banks barely moves; drummer Sam Fogarino – the only member of the band not to wear black – effortlessly replicates the tight yet complex drum patterns of their recorded work; guitarist Daniel Kessler has legs that seem to operate independently of his upper body, all elastic moves and spontaneous angularity, a bit like a court jester with a six-string. The stand-in bassist spent most of the set with his legs just about as far apart as is possible without falling over, Peter Hook stylee. They don't do reinterpretations of their songs, just play faithful versions of the album tracks. Only 'Evil' and 'C'mere' (both from Antics) were subtly changed, both delivered with a greater speed and urgency than on record. The epic 'Lights' from Interpol was, unfeasibly, more towering in its slow-building grandeur than on the LP and the textural 'NYC' (a song plagued by disenchantment and consequently one of my favourite songs from Turn On The Bright Lights) seemed to be rendered with heightened emotions, even if the ruminative backing vocal of 'Got to be some more change in my life', delivered by either Kessler or the keyboard player, was sadly lost somewhere in the mix.

So, third time lucky, as I said. I don't quite know how to feel in many ways – elated that I've finally gotten to see one of my favourite bands or miserable as fuck after the songs they played and the effect they continue to have on me. If nothing else, tonight reinforced that I have a very real dependency on this band and that doesn't show signs of abating any time soon.

Audio Journal : 16/03/2011

Mrs S and I spent most of Friday night and the early hours of Saturday morning watching music TV, which is something that we don't do very often.

The selections were remarkably parochial in focus, given how many more channels there were available than the last time we found ourselves channel hopping. Most of the 'rock' channels appeared to be showing endless Foo Fighters videos, while Nirvana's 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' seemed to pop up with alarming regularity. It also seems that whenever we flick on music TV, we always seem to come upon the video for Deniece William's 'Let's Hear It For The Boy', always appearing to be some worn-out, grainy, sub-YouTube quality copy of the video. Then there's the other channels showing endless Beyonce videos. Remarkably, Beyonce's Destiny's Child bandmate Kelly Rowlands with her dubious duet with Nelly – a song I thought I'd managed to forget about, at last – kept cropping up inescapably as well. Plus ça change and all that.

We came upon a few gems. Weezer's still-timeless video for 'Buddy Holly' being one, some early Green Day (which reminded that before they went all rock-opera on American Idiot they could still knock out quality punk-pop) and Offspring's 'Pretty Fly (For A White Guy)'. We also chanced upon Nirvana's 'Heart-Shaped Box', which, as an avowed non-Nirvana fan, is the only song of theirs – harrowing and maudlin though it is – that I really like. I was listening to electronic music while everyone around me fell in love with Kurt and co, though I did think their performances on the 1991 - The Year That Punk Broke video were inspiringly raw.

And then, as the divided attention disorder of flicking rapidly between channels in order to find something to watch became plain boring, we found the video for The Vapors' 'Turning Japanese'. This is a song I've always thought of as being fundamentally 'novelty', and there is a definite whiff of that, but hearing it that night made me realise it's a good song; sort of art-rock in the vein of The Cars. Sufficiently enthused, I dug out a compilation of tracks by the likes of Tom Robinson, Ian Dury, The Jam and the aforementioned track by The Vapors and listened to it as I was ferrying my girls around in the car the next day. Yeah, I think we all know what this song's title refers to, and that litle riff that heralds the chorus may enforce the novelty angle, but it's good all the same. Here's the video. Email readers should click here.



At some point during that same evening, I don't especially know why, I decided I really wanted to listen to De La Soul's De La Soul Is Dead. Hip hop is a style of music that is fairly alien to this blog, and my enthusiasm for the genre pretty much started and ended with this album. (Okay, I also had Vanilla Ice's To The Extreme; I'm not ashamed, and besides that was more of a 'pop' album than purist rap.) De La Soul Is Dead was released in 1991 and arrived at a point where I'd still broadly been consuming a pop diet, and I got on board with this album because of the hit single 'Ring Ring Ring (Ha Ha Hey)' with its ripped-off Curiosity Killed The Cat chorus. Me and a bunch of classmates (I was 14) used to know every word to this song and we'd occasionally break out into renditions of this at breaktime. Yep, very Glee.



No-one else from my class bought the album, though. I picked it up on cassette and initially found it confusing as hell, mostly because I wasn't au fait with hip hop's vernacular, but also because it was just so damn weird. Not hippyish, as was the label applied to De La Soul after their flower-power debut, but just odd; the series of playground 'skits' which attempt to humorously bookend the album I didn't understand. I also didn't understand some of the wackier Burger King / donut references. All that, and the fact that the album version of 'Ring Ring Ring' wasn't anywhere near as good as the single. After a few listens I began to 'get' the album and for that reason I've never binned it, unlike some of the other things I listened to back then.

Have I listened to this since, I don't know, 1992? Probably not. I haven't had an accessible cassette deck for years, so that night I bought a second hand CD copy from Oxfam via Amazon Marketplace and was amazed at how much I remembered nearly twenty years on. I love the memory aspect of music; those musical memories lay in your subconscious, undisturbed and unused for years yet come back instantly and vividly as soon as you hit play. I really enjoyed listening to this again, and even found myself smiling at the 'skits'. 'Let Me In', with its samples from a recording of The Three Little Pigs, and 'Fanatic Of The B-Word' (with one of the heaviest beats here; the 'B' word is baseball) are two of my favourite tracks.

Meanwhile, over at Documentary Evidence you can read reviews of German rock band Can's seminal Ege Bamyasi from 1972 and Josh T. Pearson's Last Of The Country Gentlemen, released in the UK on Monday.

Audio Journal : 04/03/2011

Last week I found myself at Koko with Mrs S to watch Cold War Kids, fresh from the release of their third album Mine Is Yours.

Cold War Kids were supported by Wye Oak and Wild Palms. Wye Oak are a Baltimore duo of Jenn Wasner on guitar and vocals and Andy Stack on drums / keyboards (he plays drums with one hand and his feet, and plays basslines on a keyboard with his other hand; go figure). Their music has been described as folk, but I don't hear it myself. In fact, I couldn't make out very much thanks to heavy distortion on Wasner's guitar which rendered everything fairly flat and uninteresting. I also wasn't really paying attention, so they may have been far better than I give them credit for. Blame a slew of out-of-hours work emails for that.

Wild Palms are a band I've been aware of for a while but have never seen live. Their début album, Until Spring, is just around the corner and I have a couple of their singles ('Over Time' and 'Deep Dive') kicking about on my iPod. Their début was recorded by Gareth Jones, whose work with Depeche Mode, Grizzly Bear, Interpol and others makes him one of my favourite producers (see my interview with him here). Live, the five-piece Wild Palms are a brilliant combination of angular guitars, odd drum patterns, distortion and squalling keyboards courtesy of their vocalist. Vocalists playing keyboards have been forever tainted by Brandon Flowers of The Killers, but Lou Hill manages to sidestep that image, though his Ian Brown-meets-Andy McCluskey dancing at Koko was a little baffling. Their spiky sound brings to mind the taught post-punk tension of Gang Of Four, who they are also supporting this year. An album review will feature here soon, I'm sure.

I haven't really listened to the new Cold War Kids album, which turned out not to be an inhibitor when it came to this concert as they seemed reluctant to play more than three of four tracks off Mine Is Yours (for a band only three albums into their career, this is a little worrying); a shame in many ways as having now heard it a few times since, there are some good tracks here. Gone admittedly is the sonic adventurousness of their début (Robbers And Cowards), replaced by a MOR musical maturity that Kings Of Leon seem to be aspiring toward, yet never quite achieving. (As an aside, David Keenan, writing in The Wire, accurately described bands maturing as 'shorthand for playing the game by someone else's rules'.)

As it happens, if I'd wanted to prep properly for this gig, it would have been their second album that I should have listened to, as the tracks from that release dominated the set. Stalwarts like 'Hospital Beds' and 'Hang Me Up To Dry' from Robbers And Cowards garnered the biggest crowd reaction, and I could just about hear them above the chattering inchworms stood next to us, making me wonder once again why people buy tickets to gigs and then natter away like they're in a pub.

I remember reading back when Cold War Kids arrived that on stage the guitarist, bassist and Woody Harrelson-meets-Charlie Brooker vocalist Nathan Willett would whirl about the stage like three out of control aircraft independently crashing, or words to that effect. That sense of clumsily working in three different orbits was in full effect last week and how the three musicians didn't get tangled in each other's cables and fall to the floor is beyond me. I came away more than a little impressed with Cold War Kids after this gig, and we're booked to see them again later in the year when they return to the UK.



Elsewhere this week I've been listening to Josh T. Pearson's first single from his début album Last Of The Country Gentlemen, 'Country Dumb.' Pearson's album has been anticipated for years and this Texas-born, preacher's son has a unique sense of countrified drama. 'Country Dumb' is a beautiful, beguiling track which actually brought tears to my eyes when I listened to it this week. As Last Of The Country Gentlemen is released by my beloved Mute Records, click here to read my review over at my Documentary Evidence website.

Audio Journal : 01/03/2011

The press release for début album by The Silver Pesos, Born At Midnight, is potentially misleading. The album is described as 'the result of a collaboration across several continents', going on to explain how the album was recorded by producer Peter Brambl in LA, Paris, Belize and Bali; the vocals are delivered by Chloe Conger in English and Spanish and several of the album's songs were tracked at co-producer Robert Weber's Indonesia studios with local rhythm sections augmenting the mixes.



All of which, whilst undoubtedly true and evident across the songs here, adds up to what sounds like a very 'global' album, working across cultures, continents and musical styles, but that's not necessarily how it sounds. This is much more of a lower-case globalism, an intelligent pop music with a pan-global approach. 'The multicultural nature of the music is a really interesting area to explore,' Brambl explains to me by email. 'We've tried to make an educated attempt at incorporating other influences. The odd thing is that although we've studied many of the traditions – like west African guitar music – whenever we introduce elements that sound too "authentic", we end up with something that sounds, to our ears, less interesting. Swirling around these influences seems to produce more artistically satisfying work, and it also gives us a lot more freedom. We find ourselves asking questions like "what would a mid 70s Fela Kuti song sound like if it were produced by King Tubby and remixed by Lindstrom?"' The output of that blend is the ballsy, confident disco-pop-meets-African-guitar of 'Remember The Land'.

Brambl adds that the multi-cultural element isn't just a case of deploying global instrumentation, but in the lyrical content of the songs themselves. 'One theme that emerges is how music is carried over borders, usually by people who are experiencing some kind of hardship. So we came up with a few stories for the songs along those lines. We've tried to make the lyrics somewhat opaque, but the meaning is there if you look for it.' The album's first single, 'Regresando' turns out to be about a refugee dreaming of home. The track 'No History', whose lyrics give the album its title, is about a person suffering the consequences of political violence; the track, one of my personal favourites, has a pop delicateness with an extended breakdown section at the end that swiftly moves into Tubby / Scientist dub territory. The bonus remix takes that several stages further into reverberating dub reggae authenticity, including what sounds like some Augustus Pablo-style melodica washes. Conger's ethereal vocal drifts in and about the mix, anchoring the song back to its more mainstream-leaning original version. 'Picture On The Wall' is downright beautiful philosophical pop, a shimmering opus that is wrought with all manner of emotional hooks and chord changes.

'Regresando' arrived in my inbox some time last year in the wake of the unexpected (and successful) return of shoegazer pop as fashioned by the likes of The XX. That inwardness and introspection, best championed by the 4AD and Factory labels back in the Eighties, is the other dominant sound on Born At Midnight, both in the reflective guitar melodies and Chloe Conger's quietly captivating vocals. Conger sounds like a less depressing Tracy Thorn at times, the same muted euphoria that made a Todd Terry-remixed Everything But The Girl such an oddly compelling blend, especially on the dancefloor-friendly remix of 'Regresando' included at the end of the album. If you imagine shoegazer pop suffused with a Mexican / Californian warmth, you might come close to the particular take on pop that The Silver Pesos have crafted for Born At Midnight.

I asked Brambl whether that strain of Eighties UK indie music was another influence on the sound of Born At Midnight. 'Definitely,' replies Brambl before going on to explain his other influences. 'I enjoy a lot of early New Wave, post-punk and ska, as well as Krautrock like Can and Neu! From a producer's point of view, the theme running through all of these influences is the evolution past blues-based rock. I love the blues, but I'm also interested in that period of time in the Eighties when people realized that many of the options had been exhausted and it was time to look for new forms.'

Born At Midnight is a brave, confident début enriched by multiple, layered influences, embellished by beautiful vocals and an absorbing sonic tapestry that the statements in the press release could undersell. This is globally-minded, yes, but first and foremost it is a perfect, intelligent and atmospheric pop album.

www.thesilverpesos.com