Audio Journal by MJA Smith

Simon Fisher Turner / Espen J. Jörgensen 'Soundescapes'

2011-11-29T12:49:00.000-08:00

A new Documentary Evidence review.

Simon Fisher Turner / Espen J. Jörgensen 'Soundescapes' - http://bit.ly/tkeOVJ

Can 'Tago Mago' / Inspiral Carpets 'You're So Good For Me'

2011-11-24T14:28:00.000-08:00

Two new Documentary Evidence reviews.

Can 'Tago Mago' (1971) 40th anniversary edition - http://bit.ly/uJeaR1

Inspiral Carpets 'You're So Good For Me' (2011) - http://bit.ly/t60XTH

Simon Fisher Turner / Espen J. Jörgensen

2011-11-18T15:12:00.000-08:00

To confirm that I am, musically at least, still alive here is an interview I just completed with Simon Fisher Turner and Espen J. Jörgensen on 'Soundescapes', their collaboration which is released by Mute Records on Monday: http://bit.ly/vWi5xK

The Last Post

2011-07-25T09:13:00.000-07:00

Dear readers,

I have decided, after two years and nearly one hundred posts, to terminate my Audio Journal blog. Thank you for your support, comments, challenges, disagreements and general levels of encouragement since I started this weekly (and more recently sporadic) survey of what I've been listening to.

Going forward I'll be concentrating on composing short stories and my Documentary Evidence music website. Anyone interested in following my writings there should point themselves to the following links.

Documentary Evidence (RSS feed / updates available by email through Feedburner link below)

http://feeds.feedburner.com/DocumentaryEvidence-AnUnofficialMuteRecordsWebsite

My Other Blog (use 'subscribe by email' button on the right)

http://mjasmith3.blogspot.com

Thanks again for reading and supporting my naïve writings.

MJA Smith, 25.07.2011

- fin

Audio Journal : 17/06/2011 - 27.06.2011

2011-06-29T14:37:00.000-07:00

17.06.2011

In the post: Komputer 'Valentina' 12” (1998) – in advance of an interview with Dave Baker from the band, I thought I'd better gen up on their back catalogue; Perplexer 'Acid Folk' CD (1994) which is a weird way-too-fast bagpipes-meets-acid-house track from 1994 possibly transcending stoopidity by the fact that Ramon Zengler from second-wave acid pioneers Hardfloor was an occasional member; field research for Documentary Evidence as it was released via Mute; Moby and Orde Meikle (from Slam) mix CD from Mixmag in 1992; again field research for Doc.Ev. I had the Moby mix on cassette but can't find it. It includes 'C3 Bells', an exclusive Moby track which I don't think has ever seen the light of day.

18.06.2011

Listened to Cry by Simple Minds while ferrying Daughter2 to ballet. Cry came out in 2002, I think. I hadn't really taken an interest in Simple Minds during the Eighties, and I only got this since Erasure's Vince Clarke wrote a track for the album. I always stuck them in with U2 as 'rock' bands that I'd never learn to love. I hadn't by then watched The Breakfast Club and so I had no particular warmth to something like 'Alive And Kicking', but when I did finally watch that film a few years ago, it made me appreciate Simple Minds for the first time. Cry has some really good electronically-enhanced pop / rock tracks, although in places its 'cleverness' hasn't lasted the passage of time well. I think its release was generally overlooked at the time, which strikes me as a shame. I spent a week in Corfu in 2002 listening to this over and over whilst sunbathing.

Prepared some interview questions for Moby at night (though doubtful this will actually happen) and recorded old vinyl from Bomb The Bass ('Say A Little Prayer') and (Die) Krupps ('Wahre Arbeit – Wahrer Lohn').

19.06.2011

We were off out for a visit to Stowe Gardens for father's day and I took my two lovely daughters to the shops to pick up some lunch for a picnic before collecting Mrs S and heading off. Just lately Daughter1 has started requesting the Glee songs that Mrs S has on her iPhone while they drive to school. One of the songs she and her sister love is a cover of 'Don't You Want Me' by The Human League. The version by 'Rachel' and 'Blane' (I've probably spelled those wrong, but I can't be bothered to check IMDB) is, I have to say, pretty good, though it does re-cast the song as a dancey, Europop track; a bit like a Lady GaGa track, I guess. Having been subjected to this track a few times over the last few weeks, I decided it was high time that I played them the original Human League version from 1981's Dare. Daughter1 loved it as soon as the electropop beat kicked in. It is, and always will be, a fantastic track, and I don't mind if it appearing on Glee brings it to a whole new audience. Daughter1 is the same age that I was when 'Don't You Want Me' was released, so her being into the Glee version has a neat symmetry.

Mrs S played me a couple of tracks that she'd downloaded last week. For someone who describes electronic music as 'plinky plonky' music, she seems to alight upon tracks with an electronic edge surprisingly frequently. One was a track from Battles' new album Gloss Drop ('Inchworm') which has a processed funk sound not unlike a remix of Talking Heads' 'Houses In Motion'. The other was 'Now That I'm Real (How Does It Feel)' by Chad Valley, which is languid, hazy electronic pop in the style of Toro Y Moi. There's a lot of this type of dreamy, unabashed synth stuff kicking about at present, all trading under the banner of 'hypnogogic pop' and it's all – mostly – very good.

In the evening Mrs S and I took ourselves off to the Barbican Centre to watch an acoustic performance from Ryan Adams. I've been listening to Adams's music for no more than a couple of years. It started with 'New York, New York' from Gold, back when I was trying to create a playlist of songs exclusively concerned with New York (I started one for London too). My immersion into his music proper when Mrs S bought Love Is Hell after reading about how good it was, and my interest in his music just sort of grew from there. I never thought I'd ever get to see him perform live, especially since he effectively quit music two years ago because of annoying audience members and hearing problems. Although, it seems, healthy, Adams had a reasonably chequered past and an interview I saw with him showed him to be a pretty troubled soul.

Live, he turned out to be far more light-hearted and self-deprecating than I had expected, despite his history of on-stage volatility, and in spite of his guitar refusing to stay in tune. It felt like a complete privilege to have seen him perform his songs so utterly stripped back, in spite of the vastness of the Barbican's main auditorium. And he only lost his temper – mildly – once.

20.06.2011

Continued the Ryan Adams mood by listening to his punky Rock 'n Roll album whilst driving to and from a meeting. I could have listened to some of the more fragile, acoustic type songs he played the night before, but you can't drive to those. And besides, I wanted to try and preserve my memory of his performance as long as possible. Alas, it's too late and I've forgotten most of it.

21.06.2011

Finished off two reviews for Documentary Evidence today; a piece I pulled together six years ago on Modey Lemon's fantastically acid-fried 'Sleepwalkers' EP but never posted, and the review of Perplexer's 'Acid Folk'. I thought acid-house-meets-bagpipe-folk-music would sound naff, and it really does. Listened some more Ryan Adams.

22.06.2011

Mrs S and I went to London today, ostensibly for yet another Kings Of Leon concert at Hyde Park, but the best part of today was buying records in Rough Trade East (me: Bush Tetras double A-side 7”, 1979 New York 'no wave' CD; Mrs S: Bon Iver) and Fopp (me: Yeasayer; Mrs S: PJ Harvey, Tom Petty, Queens Of The Stone Age).

Maybe it was the mud. Maybe it was the audience. Maybe it was going to Ryan Adams on Sunday and the fact that most other concerts after that would have been rubbish anyway. Maybe it was the support slot from Paul Weller, who I don't really like (the Brendan Lynch dub mixes of some of his tracks notwithstanding). Whatever it was, Kings Of Leon completely bored me, and we left after about seven songs, though they were mercifully the old ones, the ones before the abysmal 'Sex On Fire'.

23.06.2011

Wrote a review of Bomb The Bass' 'Say A Little Prayer' which I'd bought as a 7” from CD Buttek beim Palais in Luxembourg last month. Listened to more Ryan Adams.

24.06.2011

Watched the film adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis's The Informers. It opens with 'New Gold Dream (81 - 82 - 83 - 84)' by Simple Minds played at a party and it made me want to find my greatest hits CD, or buy the movie soundtrack, or both.

It turns out that it's not actually on Glittering Prize (though it clearly should be), and the soundtrack CD is ridiculously overpriced. Another great song on the soundtrack is Devo's 'Freedom Of Choice', a really perfect New Wave tracks; in the movie Chris Isaak plays a drunk dad trying to engage with his disinterested son. He puts on the radio in the back of the limo they're sharing and on comes this Devo track. He starts tapping along and says the track's 'cool', which of course renders it totally not cool.

Post-film, I decided not to consume more TV and stuck on Pop by U2, probably because I was aware on some subconscious level that they were just about to take the stage down at Glastonbury. Pop was released in 1997, the same year as Depeche Mode comeback, post-heroin album, Ultra. At the time I was sharing a house in King Stephen Road, Colchester with Neil, Barry and Craig. Neil was a U2 fan; I was a Depeche Mode fan. There was a bit of media-fuelled competition as to whether U2's 'Discotheque' or Depeche's 'Barrel Of A Gun' would get to number one in the ye olde UK singles charts. As if there was actually a competition – Depeche would never, ever score a number one in Blighty, whereas U2 had a slick, Flood-produced electro-rock single and a video that had the band ripping off the Village People. Was I annoyed that Neil's band won the 'competition'? Not at all. Was I disappointed when U2 remixed Flood's intricate synth-augmented originals for their second best of compilation? Absolutely. I thought it was an act of extreme cowardice. Neil told me later that they didn't play any songs from Pop at Glasto. Cowards.

25.06.2011

A few weekends ago we watched a Foo Fighters documentary. After, I tweeted words to the effect that I still found proper rock music intimidating, that Dave Grohl came across as a really nice guy, but that I ultimately didn't like the Foo Fighters. Mrs S subjected me to their best of album today, which reinforced just how little I like their songs.

It's funny how you alight upon certain things, musically or otherwise. We came upon a CD of early Lonnie Donegan tracks whilst wandering around a French market at Waddesdon Manor on mother's day. The sound I heard coming out of the tannoy CD player at the music stall was a sort of big-band be-bop, which to me sounded like the sort of jazz that appears consistently in Woody Allen movies.

I had a fixed impression of Lonnie Donegan as a banjo or ukele player, which is true. I also thought that he only played cheesy, humorous songs such as 'My Old Man's A Dustman', and that's probably also true, but he first cut his teeth as part of a jazz group led by Chris Barber and often featuring the vocals of Ottilie Patterson. Hence the unexpected big band sound. On most of the tracks you can barely hear Donegan's banjo (and what's a banjo doing in a jazz band anyway?), although there are a handful of tracks where they are his own, non-Chris Barber recordings, such as 'Rock Island Line' (a track I only know as a Johnny Cash song) or the blues track 'Diggin' My Potatoes'.

The point is, I would never have even looked at this CD if it wasn't for having heard it playing, and because of its branding – as a Lonnie Donegan CD – I'd have completely ignored it. As it happens, that old-fashioned, big band standards sound has been played a lot in our house since we bought this.

26.06.2011

More Glee songs in the car.

27.06.2011

Stayed overnight at the Novotel in Edinburgh. The nice, simple touch in this hotel is that you can connect your iPod to the TV in your room and listen to songs through the TV. The TV in my room was obviously broken somehow and the screen filled with static as soon as I stuck a song on; the static lines would change their pattern when the beat of the music changed. It was quite cool, if a little reminiscent of Poltergeist.

The songs I was listening to were recorded from the double 12” single of Underworld's 'Born Slippy', released in 1995. Everyone knows the version of 'Born Slippy' which Danny Boyle included on the soundtrack to Trainspotting. That wasn't the original version, and no-one seems to remember that at all. It was an instrumental drum 'n' bass track, a world away from the euphoric 'Lager! Lager! Lager!' stomp of the NUXX version used in Trainspotting.

I remember getting pretty excited about 'Born Slippy', and I recall going into the Music Junction in Stratford-upon-Avon on the Saturday before it came out, just to check if they were going to be stocking the single. The two guys who worked there were your archetypal Nick Hornby High Fidelity record shop workers and they knew how much I wanted that single. They told me that not only were they going to be stocking it, but that it was tucked away in the store room already; not only that but that they'd been listening to it. It really wound me up, and since I've always revelled in smug satisfaction when I've received a promo in the post, or received something before it's officially released.

Audio Journal : 16/06/2011

2011-06-16T11:31:00.000-07:00

It seems that my last post about BBC4's Primal Scream documentary on the making of Screamadelica generated a mixed response.

Martyn wrote 'Love it. Best blog yet.' Thanks Martyn. The cheque's in the post.

Alistair, who has released a slew of self-released CD-Rs, commented 'You seem to have similar feelnigs to me about Screamadelica – it's a remix album from which we were mercifully spared the originals (mostly). The only album I had any real time for was XTRMNTR which has a lot to do with [My Bloody Valentine's] Kevin Shields's production on the relevant tracks.'

But the best comments came from Ian, with whom I clearly hit a bit of a nerve. Here's his views, warts and all.

'How can anyone who likes non-mainstream music hate The Stone Roses? And resist Nirvana? But love Erasure? Why do I read anything you write?'

And on Screamadelica: 'Lucky that they were in the right place at the right time to release this album? How many psych indie bands were scratching about at the same time lacking the vision to make the zeitgeistian leap Bobby and his boys did?

'I don't recall anyone else taking the same chance in giving so much control to a producer and thus creating what will remain a classic album. I saw them play it six months ago at Earl's Court and having seen a few of these ATP classic album replays, this was without a doubt the most enthusiastic and reverential crowd I've ever seen for any album re-hash. This album for me and many others judging by that crowd, was the catalyst for a leap from rock to “druggy” musical tastes and therefore massively important for changing many previously closed attitudes to various musical genres. Not many albums soundtrack a period for so many people as Screamadelica clearly did, and shouldn't be sniffed at for doing so.

'Weatherall is obviously massively influential on the album but afterwards look at XTRMNTR (their best album by far) to see that they weren't spaced out so far as not to learn and develop from their time with a techno producer like Weatherall. Forget the Stones tribute album afterwards [Give Out But Don't Give Up], biggest pile of shite they ever did but an intentional effort to lose transitory fans.

'I love Primal Scream and I'll see you round the back of the building 5pm Friday to sort this out.'

Gulp.

Vinyl Corner

A couple of recent 7" purchases that have finally found their way into my shiny new iPod.

The first is '23' by the brilliantly-named Death Dub, which appears to date from 2006 but looked like a new release in Rough Trade East. The helpful Rough Trade notes identified it as the project of Touch Recording artist BJ Nilsen and Joachim Nordwall, and '23' was described as an exploration of their interests in dub and industrial noise. Meanwhile the label stuck this squarely into the Rough Trade 'Industrial / free jazz' category.

The industrial connection I get. The artwork, such as it's simple one-sided sleeve insert is, has a design reminiscent of Throbbing Gristle and the usage of the number 23 sticks this work in with the William S. Burroughs-influenced fraternity that dominated industrial music in the late Seventies. The dub connection I don't get. I was expecting some sort of heavyweight Godflesh-style abrasive dub style, and not the murky, impenetrable bass-heavy swamp that this track represents. Even the 'version' on the B-side carries nary a whiff of anything I'd associate with dub. Well, as for free jazz, I don't hear that here at all.

Still, I like the edgy, dark sonic immersiveness that this represents, and listening on headphones reveals lots going on within both the original track and the version. And also, in John Peel style, it sounds great at the wrong speed too.

I mentioned '3 A.M. Eternal' by The KLF in my last post, and I recently happened upon a 7" version in a tiny Luxembourg treasure trove of a record shop that I've mentioned before. '3 A.M. Eternal' was The KLF's first really successful single, but the version presented here isn't the original; that was released in 1989 as a proper dance music 12" and is supposedly not a pop track like this ultimately was. I don't have the means / inclination to track that original down, but all reports suggest that it's a brilliant track.

Looking back, I never really liked this track as much as 'What Time Is Love?' and 'Last Train To Trancentral', the singles that appeared either side of this. This seemed something of a novelty with all that fake Mu-Mu mythology sprinkled all over it. Listening to the main single version today feels pretty nostalgic and it has a deep quality to it, like 808 State's seminal 'Pacific State' thanks to the inclusion of some frozen-in-time saxophone. The B-side, the Guns Of Mu-Mu edit, has an early house feel, with a proper 4/4 beat and a liquid bassline that predates the derivative garage low-end by a good few years.

Audio Journal : 24/05/2011

2011-05-23T21:33:00.000-07:00

Once again, it is to BBC4 that I turn to bring you this post, specifically two programmes broadcast back-to-back a few Fridays ago. The first was one of those Classic Album documentaries on Primal Scream's Screamadelica and the other collected Top Of The Pops performances from bands in 1991, particularly those who were part of the fertile rock / dance crossover scene that seemed to flourish that year.

Watching the second programme made me incredibly nostalgic for a year that my music tastes started to develop properly. Just being reminded of 808 State's 'In Yer Face', which I bought (and still have, somewhere) on cassette single made the hairs stand up on my arms. Likewise '3AM Eternal' by The KLF (I have a German 12", bought several years later, and a 7” picked up in Luxembourg last week). Likewise 'Move Any Mountain' by The Shamen, which I had on the album En-Tact (the programme has hastened my need to have KLF's The White Room and En-Tact on CD rather than the over-played tapes sitting in my loft). Incidentally, 'Move Any Mountain' is a classic track, though much maligned because of Mr C's dodgy rap. What's often overlooked is that Mr C was a fantastic techno DJ. He couldn't rap for toffee (see 'Ebeneezer Goode'), but as a DJ he was pretty unequalled. I saw him play once; he gave me a flyer after his set. Anyone who has heard the dodgy hippy stuff The Shamen knocked out before Mr C arrived will also appreciate just how much he improved this otherwise unimpressive band.

What I found, to my surprise, was that I remembered most of the songs that were played, and indeed have most of them now, but hardly any were purchases at the time. I'm not revisionistic enough to try and claim that I had bought every single track at the time: 'Feel Every Beat' by Electronic (the album was borrowed from my friend Steve and my own copy purchased years later); 'X, Y And Zee' by Pop Will Eay Itself (borrowed from my friend Jon and a 7" copy bought years after); 'Human Nature' by Gary Clail (never even heard this at the time and yet bought a 7" of it from a charity shop some five years later); 'Sit Down' by James (I hated this when it came out but have since become enamoured of its oft-overlook lyrical depth, and now own most of the James back catalogue); 'I Wanna Be Adored' by The Stone Roses (ditto 'Sit Down'; hated this band at the time and mostly still do, but I think this track has an understated self-deprecating quality); 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' by Nirvana (I resisted Nirvana actively for years until I met Mrs S; I concede that even when Kurt fucked up his voice deliberately to sabotage the TOTP performance, he still sounded amazing); 'Loose Fit' by Happy Mondays (thanks go to Neil for getting me into the Mondays at University; I hated the entire 'baggy' scene at the time).

Partly this paucity of purchases was logical - I was still living off pocket money and a 2p-per-paper free newspaper round at the time, so disposable income for record purchases was slim. The only other record I actually bought of those played was 'Dizzy' by Vic Reeves and The Wonderstuff. This was again bought on cassette single, but even by the time I left Music Junction in Stratford-upon-Avon I regretted it. So I gave it to my friend Rob that afternoon; his brother, Chris, who would later influence my love for all things electronica, took offence at Rob having this single in the house and threw it out of a first floor window, whereupon it shattered.

So, happy 20th birthday to Primal Scream's Screamadelica. As with most of the music above, I didn't buy this when it came out. I bought it three years later, by which time I was absorbed in all things dance music and kept reading about how important Screamadelica was, how influential blah blah blah. Up to then I'd considered them a bit too 'rock' and more than a bit druggy. The programme confirmed both those old prejudices, although on the latter front Andrew Innes seems to have weathered pretty well, unlike Robert 'Throb' Young and Bobby Gillespie.

I bought Screamadelica on a date with a girl from school called Claire. I think she was a little bemused when I took her into Our Price in Stratford and started raving about how important this album was, how I was amazed she'd never heard of it etc. Christ, I must have sounded like such a geeky trainspotter, especially as I hadn't heard it myself until later that afternoon. I also bought a shirt from Principles while I was with her. It is no surprise to me that there was no second date.

When I first heard Screamadelica, it was filtered through all the pure dance music that came after, all of which felt more authentic; consequently I felt a little cold toward the hybrid nature of the songs and the whole thing felt a little scattergun. This was explained during the programme - initially, Screamadelica wasn't intended as an album, but a series of singles, mostly produced by Andy 'Sabres Of Paradise' Weatherall and Hugo Nicholson. Finally, Alan McGee, boss of Creation Records, suggested that they couldn't keep churning out hastily-recorded singles and remixes, and that an album proper was required. Accordingly it hangs together with little coherence, despite Weatherall's attempt to sequence it into a uniform trip, from the euphoric 'Moving On Up' to the comedown epic 'Shine Like Stars'.

Don't even get me started on 'Moving On Up' and 'Damaged', two good but straight rock tracks linking the band back to their previous eponymous album and Screamadelica's Stones-esque follow-up Give Out But Don't Give Up. These two tracks sadly reinforce the view that Primal Scream were a rock band first and foremost who happened to dabble fortuitously in dance music to further their otherwise slight reputation; without the guiding hands of Weatherall and Nicholson, the Scream were just a rock-by-numbers band with little going for them.

Don't get me wrong, 'Don't Fight It, Feel It' and the cover of 13th Floor Elevators' 'Slip Inside This House' are superb. The Orb's production of 'Higher Than The Sun' is one of the best (and druggiest) things The Orb ever recorded; the gnomic Alex Patterson from The Orb was one of the talking heads on the programme and spoke glowingly of the track, believing it a worthy successor to their own 'Little Fluffy Clouds'.

Overall, the documentary left me thinking that the trio of Gillespie / Innes / Young don't recall much of the making of Screamadelica, thanks to the E and also because - call me cynical - they don't seem to have been that involved. Screamadelica is, to me, Weatherall's baby and it sounds far better when listened to as a remix album. Bassist Henry Olsen (formerly of Nico's backing band The Faction), later usurped by The Stone Roses's Mani, came across as a thoroughly decent individual, as did 'Don't Fight It, Feel It' vocalist Denise Johnson, mainly because they actually remember what happened; that said, listen to Olsen smugly eulogise his performance of the main riff on 'Damaged' and it again reinforces the notion of a rock band that lucked out with a hip dance producer. (Olsen, incidentally, is the son of my first primary school teacher.)

Perhaps that's one sacred cow too many?

Audio Journal : 27/04/2011

2011-04-27T13:37:00.000-07:00

Mrs S confiscated my iPod on the night before we set off for our week-long holiday in Portugal. Therefore there's 'officially' no blog this week since I haven't really listened to anything. Unless you count the chilled-out Parisian house music played by the pool, which, whilst very trendy and absorbing, isn't something I'm terribly equipped to write at length about, though it does make me want to drink cocktails.

We have been listening to The Beatles' 'red' and 'blue' albums in our hire car. Once again, prolonged exposure to the Fab Four reminds me that a) with only a solitary exception of the tracks included ('Back In The USSR'), I don't like the Paul McCartney songs at all and have been making judicious use of the buttons on the steering wheel to move past his tracks; b) the singles the band released are generally irritating thanks to familiarity (even Mrs S, an avowed, long-standing Beatles fan from her teenage years, agrees); and c) 'Yellow Submarine' is a brilliant song for kids.

I knew this already, well before I heard my girls asking for it repeatedly and then singing rapturously along in the back of the hire car. I knew this because I was taught it as a children's song in primary school (this was about 1982; much later I began to suspect that my teachers were all LSD-dropping, pot-smoking ex-hippies made good; we didn't, as far as I can recall, ever learn any Grateful Dead songs). What is it that John Hannah says to Gwyneth Paltrow in Peter Howitt's Sliding Doors? Something about us learning Beatles songs in the womb? Well, in my case, not quite; I was about six, or thereabouts. My parents had a solitary Beatles EP (Magical Mystery Tour), which is probably more responsible than anything else for turning me on to fetishising collecting records, and for making me think that The Beatles were plain weird thanks to the oddball gatefold sleeve. (I used to collect postcards and keep them in that sleeve; my nerdish tendencies began early.)

'Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds' is another song that I was taught at school, in about 1986 (Christ, what were my teachers on?). We created a mural for the back of that teacher's classroom, with each of us given a phrase in the song to create an image. I had two - 'newspaper taxis' and 'marmalade skies' - and created an oblong car with then-current headlines scribbled on it, as well as orange cloud with thick lines dotted around it; we were a strictly Robinsons, orange peel-in family. It was a literal depcition of a song that made no sense at all to me and my fellow ten-year-old classmates. And why would it?

By way of padding, here are some things I've written for Documentary Evidence lately: a review of Junip's Fields (http://bit.ly/hYN9dr) and an interview with Espen J. Jörgensen on his collaboration with Simon Fisher Turner as SOUNDESCAPES (http://bit.ly/g9s2cx).

Audio Journal : 22/04/2011

2011-04-21T22:53:00.000-07:00

This week I've been catching up with the work of David Fleet, aka M075, 75 Surveillance and Laica. For some fairly logical reason, when I saw the various aliases and the reference to 'surveillance', and titles like 'Cosy Funk' and 'Audio Out' I was reminded of the work of Cabaret Voltaire co-founder Richard H. Kirk. Kirk, whose music began as harsh industrial noise with the Cabs slowly and deliberately evolved into something more purist, much more electronic. His solo work alongside the Cabs releases was initially as harsh as his dayjob, a far cry from the multi-cultural dub ambience of his later Nineties work for Warp, or the early rave of Sweet Exorcist. There are many other aliases that Kirk has used, including Electronic Eye, whose LPs were adorned with grainy images of nascent CCTV technology, hellish signals of that word I picked out, 'surveillance'.

Fleet's Bandcamp page contains a number of tracks which I've been enjoying since I downloaded them about a month ago. Apart from making me feel nostalgic about Richard H Kirk and Cabaret Voltaire, I've also found Fleet's music reminding me of many great electronica artists from the Nineties, where artists like Plastikman (Richie Hawtin), Luke Slater, and Photek, as well as the likes of Autechre, dragged me away from listening to electronic pop.

That's not to say that Fleet's music isn't original; far from it. The major boon here is the eclectic restlessness of Fleet's music, with tracks moving from skeletal Hawtin-esque beats ('Riddime' from MO75's Suppress), to post-industrial electronic body music in the vein of Nine Inch Nails or Nitzer Ebb ('Hell Machine' from MO75's Surrender), to frozen ambience (Laica's Kos tracks), to electro that sounds like it's being played through shattered glass ('Anderson's Ground' from 75 Surveillance's Honed), as perfected by Link, Plaid and Aphex Twin.

'Audio Out' (from Surrender) has a pattern of scarce beats that sounds like dropping a pingpong ball on a glass-topped table, while 'Cosy Funk' (from Honed) has a fidgety, ricocheting electronic dub rhythm and deep bassy sounds; it's like an otherworldly electro funk, hence the name. The longform 'Puls (Complete)' by Laica is a 19-minute ambient epic, much like Global Communication soundtracking a Clive Barker movie. Dark industrial sounds evolve out of clouds of noxious ambience while uptight dub beats drift in and out. It's engaging, absorbing and all those sorts of words.

Fleet kindly sent me an instrumental demo version of his take on Depeche Mode's 'See You', highlighting his ability to turn in electronic pop as well as the array of styles mentioned above.

It seems vaguely odd to be writing about downloads in the wake of Record Store Day 2011. That's mainly because I didn't participate in supporting independent record shops on 16 April, though I would have liked to. There were a number of highly limited items from artists that I like being made available, but instead I elected to spend my morning ferrying my two girls to various Saturday activities and parties. In the trade-off between records and my kids, my kids won the day. I couldn't be bothered with the queuing on the day, nor the sixteen mile drive to my nearest record shop, to be honest.

Does that make me a traitor to the cause?

Audio Journal : 12/04/2011

2011-04-12T14:03:00.000-07:00

This isn't a post about The Strokes' new album, Angles, though it perhaps should be. I bought the album a couple of weeks back, have their previous three, but am not terribly struck on 'Under Cover Of Darkness', the first single from Angles; so I can't bring myself to listen to it properly. I've had it on in the background in the car, Mrs S has digested it properly, says it's okay, but I just can't be bothered.

The Strokes first came into my awareness one Friday evening. Mrs S (then Miss G) and I were eating dinner and watching Top Of The Pops. On came The Strokes with 'New York City Cops', the first single from their début album Is This It. Miss G said 'This is the type of song that my dad would mute when it came on the TV'. At the time the musical diet of our house was a blend of pop and R&B (it's not a period we're proud of) and The Strokes sounded like they came from another time, somewhere deeply unfashionable and clunky.

'Last Night' changed all that for me, and by the sound of things a lot of other people as well. It arrived like an urgent wake-up call from musical staleness, and I loved it. At the time my research into all things punk had been constrained to the UK post-punk duo of Magazine and Wire, and I'd yet to delve into NYC punk. Whether 'Last Night' encouraged that exploration or not, I forget. I know I bought Patti Smith's Horses and Televsion's Marquee Moon around this time, but I don't believe I was inspired to do so by The Strokes.

'Last Night', to me, at the time, was a refreshing slap in the face away from the dreary post-Oasis drudgery sound of Coldplay and Travis. I didn't get the album straight away and only came to own it a few years later and if I'm honest I still couldn't tell you much about the first two albums. The third album, First Impressions Of Earth I'm much more familiar with, and it's a very different proposition to the first two – more polished, cleaner, less angular; more commercial or more experimental with its sounds, or maybe both at the same time.

Having spent the last few years avidly delving into NYC punk and its antecedents, what now is evident to me is that The Strokes weren't original in the slightest, however necessary and fresh they felt at the time. I now see that 'Last Night' shamelessly borrows its uptight guitars from the New York Dolls' lurid pre-punk emission 'Trash'. This realisation only came to me relatively recently thanks to a compilation CD given away with Mojo years ago. I have several CDs that survey the CBGBs / Max's Kansas City scenes of Manhattan in the second half of the Seventies, but the one that came free with that edition of Mojo remains my favourite. So much so that I had to buy it again recently from eBay after getting rid of my original copy by mistake.

I Heart NY Punk is a good survey of the NYC punk scene, and highlights just how much more diverse the Stateside scene was in comparison with the UK scene. You have lewd bar-room blues courtesy of Wayne (aka Jayne) County & The Electric Chairs' 'Fuck Off', a live version of James Chance's 10-minute demonic skronking sax 'n soul desperation epic 'King Heroin', the gritty electronic work of Suicide, Mink Deville's pre-Huey Lewis soul scratchings on 'She's So Tough' and a live rendition of Television's guitar precision on 'See No Evil'. Plus of course the New York Dolls glam-punk stomp mentioned earlier. The point is that punk, US style, was much more diverse than UK punk; where US punk was an uncompromising, alternative, artistic attitude, UK punk was more or less just a sound and a corresponding image. Mohawks and safety pins couldn't be further from David Byrne performing at CBGBs with Talking Heads in tucked-in shirts and a tidy college boy haircut.

The closest the two siblings came was in The Ramones. It may have been the nearest US punk ever came to our Sex Pistols, but The Ramones' sound was more or less just an amplified, fuzzed-up strain of joyous rock 'n roll and teenage rebellion. Phil Spector's later work with them thus makes complete sense. Dee Dee Ramone's heroin opus, 'Chinese Rocks' is included on I Heart NY Punk in the form of a cover by the doomed Johnny Thunders & The Heartbreakers. The chorus to this song is just about the most perfectly pure punk lyric ever – 'I'm living on Chinese rock / All my friends they are in hock / I'm living on Chinese rock / All my things are in the pawn shop'. As much as anything this acts as an allegory for the commitment-addiction of many of US punksters to the scene they were part of.

I have thus far resisted the bleak notion which I first heard espoused by a drummer school friend who said that there was 'no new music any more'. Yet now when I hear The Strokes and contrast it with punk, NY stylee, I see that they may have felt new and essential at the time, but they were really just shameless plagiarists.

I wonder if we'll feel the same about The Vaccines in a few years. Part of me hopes not. What Did You Expect From The Vaccines? was released the week before Angles and has attracted much hype. I listened to it for the first time a week or so ago and was initially absolutely floored, sufficiently so to post on Facebook and Twitter that it was totally worthy of the hype – and I normally have a real hatred herd following.

Two weeks after buying it, I'd say I still feel an excitement at songs like 'Wrecking Bar (Ra-Ra-Ra)', 'Blow It Up' and 'Norgaard', but apart from that there is a vague sense of having heard this all before. Vocalist Justin Young sounds like Tom Greenhalgh from Mekons crossed with Tom Hingley from Inspiral Carpets; 'Blow It Up' sounds like Jesus And Mary Chain covering Wreckless Eric; 'Wetsuit' sounds like Vampire Weekend produced by Phil Spector on day release; the NME described 'Wrecking Bar (Ra-Ra-Ra)' as the exhumed skeleton of Joey Ramone, still in his trademark leather jacket; and so on.

There is also the vaguest sensation of feeling that I'm a little too old for this album, concerned as it is with teenage models ('Norgaard'), adolescent relationship tensions, revenge sex ('Post Break-Up Sex') and the like, feeling 'smart' by dropping in references to F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Times pondered whether the album would be 'a soundtrack for a generation of students').

Last year I raved, along with just about everyone else, about The Drums' début album, and What Did You Expect From The Vaccines? has similarities in its instant-ness ('Norgaard' even has a Beach Boys-style vocal harmony reminiscent of The Drums). Repeated listening starts to make you feel queasy, like eating too many cream cakes. The Drums seemed to have more of an enduring appeal somehow.

Don't get me wrong, it's a great album. It just feels at times like an album of covers, even though I know it isn't.

At least Silicon Teens' Music For Parties from 1980 set out to be (mostly) an album of covers. A collection of synth pop versions of old rock 'n roll hits, like 'Do Wah Diddy', 'Memphis Tennessee', 'Sweet Little Sixteen' and 'You Really Got Me', it punkishly slaughtered some holy cows and somehow bypassed kitsch. My full review of this early synth gem can be found here.

Audio Journal : 07/04/2011

2011-04-07T11:00:00.000-07:00

A text conversation from earlier today.

Mrs S : 'Runaround Sue' by Dion is such a great song x

Me : But wouldn't it be better performed by [ex-Red Hot Chili Pepper guitarist John Frusciante]? x

Mrs S : No that's 'Runaway'. Have just gone from 'Runaround Sue' to 'Runaway' by [him] and now 'Runaway' by Nuyorican Soul. Taking a tour of my iPod while mopping x

Me : 'Run Run Run' by VU x

Mrs S : Now done Velvets and 'Run For Your Life' by The Beatles. Tired of running and moving on to something else x

Me : 'Walk Like An Egyptian' x

Mrs S : I tell a lie. Quick blast of 'Run Rudolph Run' by Chuck Berry before moving on. Could have had 'Run' by Snow Patrol, New Order, Vampire Weekend and 'Runaway' by The National or Kasabian. Also 'Run With The Boys' by Carl Barat but getting pretty close to 'Rusty The Cowboy' by The Wiggles. PS I will sell you the rights to my sonic adventure as a starting piece for your next blog x

Audio Journal : 23/03/2011

2011-03-24T01:00:00.000-07:00

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

2011-03-16T13:22:00.000-07:00

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

2011-03-04T13:28:00.000-08:00

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

2011-03-01T13:07:00.000-08:00

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

Audio Journal : 24/02/2011

2011-02-24T13:00:00.000-08:00

Depeche Mode are a band that I first heard around the time of Violator; a girl in my class at school, Sarah, had plastered pictures of the band all over her English folder and I assumed they were some sort of New Kids On The Block boyband, though their music didn't exactly sound like 'The Right Stuff'. At the time, 1990, the songs off Violator that graced the charts were annoying to me, 'Personal Jesus' in particular.

Fast-forward a years: by 1991 I'd settled upon Erasure as my favourite band. Finding a brochure from the record label called Documentary Evidence in the 12" single of that band's hit 'Chorus', I discovered that Vince Clarke from Erasure had started his musical career in Depeche Mode, before moving on to found Yazoo, The Assembly and finally Erasure. All of a sudden I didn't know what to think – I almost felt obligated to revise my opinion of Depeche Mode and so began tentatively running through their back catalogue. Knowing that Vince had only been with the band for their first album, 1981's Speak & Spell, I figured I'd only want to listen to that. Instead I borrowed their first singles collection from my local library in Stratford-upon-Avon and promptly fell in love not just with the Vince-era singles ('Dreaming Of Me', 'New Life' and 'Just Can't Get Enough'), but the whole lot.

This blog is supposed to be a personal record of what I have been listening to and, accordingly, I don't make any apology for the occasional emotional content or degree of recollection of the text below. It doesn't have the word journal in the title for nothing. However, I surprised myself at just how important these songs – which were compiled for Mrs S as an introduction to the band many years ago – are in my personal history. Those looking for less of an autobiographical post should tune in next week for a return to business as usual.

Nodisco (Speak & Spell, 1981)

I bought a CD copy of Speak & Spell in 1992 and found its distinctive, pure analogue electronic sound highly captivating. Many years before I'd been exposed to 1981's contemporaneous Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret by Soft Cell and Human League's Dare. Speak & Spell sounded utterly different to those other records. Aside from the singles mentioned above, the track that I liked best was 'Nodisco', an arch and vaguely sleazy track whose percussion noises sounded just like Erasure's version of ABBA's 'Lay All Your Love On Me'.

I spent that summer in love with a girl who roundly spurned me.

My Secret Garden (A Broken Frame, 1982)
Pipeline (Construction Time Again, 1983)

I got both of these albums on cassette for my sixteenth birthday. It was something of a Depeche Mode-dominated birthday that year; I got a black Violator t-shirt (long since lost and finally replaced when I went to see them at the O2 Arena in 2009) as well, and possibly a poster. Oh, and I also got a Phillishave electric razor.

'My Secret Garden' remains my favourite track on the mostly fey A Broken Frame, recorded hastily after Vince's swift exit from the band. The track is ethereal and mysterious, developing out of an extended, laconic instrumental section before breaking out into a serene, wry take on synth-pop.

By 1983's Construction Time Again, things had begun to darken in the Mode camp. Martin Gore had developed a new, more complex writing style and new boy Alan Wilder added a new inventiveness to the band's sonic palette. The key track was 'Pipeline', a six-minute track sung by Gore which roundly dumped the confines of electropop in favour of sampled industrial sounds culled from a visit to an East London railway yard; the lyrical theme was the anguish of hard labour, an effective counterpoint to the album's huge single 'Everything Counts' with its cynical Eighties Yuppie greed Gecko-isms. Engineer Gareth Jones, who began working with the band on this album, told me it was an absolute pleasure recording this. You can read more comments from Jones in my Documentary Evidence review of Construction Time Again.

Lie To Me
Somebody (Some Great Reward, 1984)

Sticking with my sixteenth birthday, I bought this the Saturday after, from a record shop in Stratford-upon-Avon called Music Junction, a place sadly no longer in existence where I bought a lot of music during my teenage years. I was on a date with a girlfriend; she didn't like Depeche Mode. No-one I knew did. She dumped me within a fortnight.

'Lie To Me', Some Great Reward's opener was a stand-out song for me from the moment I listened to it. It is one of Gore's most darkly humorous songs in my opinion, Dave Gahan singing about putting someone's leather dress on. That wasn't the reason I liked it, mind. Don't get any ideas. It just felt weirdly nihilistic and savagely dark and I loved it.

'Somebody' is the most perfect ballad Martin Gore has ever recorded; a plaintive love song sung by himself with Alan Wilder on piano, whose lyrics detailed a wish list of all the emotional qualities that he wanted in a partner. I first heard this song on The Singles 1981 - 1985 and loved it immensely. I would wait another eight years to find someone for whom the opening lines applied to: 'I want somebody to share / Share the rest of my life'.

A Question Of Lust (Black Celebration, 1986)

Each successive Depeche Mode became that little bit darker, and by Black Celebration it was hard to see anything at all. Yet in amongst this was another stand-out Martin Gore-sung track, the tender 'A Question Of Lust', a counterpoint to the urgent, harrowing 'A Question Of Time'. Gore really has a handle on writing emotional ballads, and 'A Question Of Lust' is another perfect example. The drums and percussion sound like something Phil Spector may have fashioned from his wall of sound; big, reveberating sounds, dramatic tension and all those sorts of words and phrases.

One day at work many years later I was talking to a guy called John in the lift lobby of our office building. To date, he's only the second similarly ardent Depeche Mode fan I've ever met. I thought I was a pretty solid fan at that point, and in a second John roundly shattered that illusion. 'Life in the so-called space age,' he said. 'What's that from?' I racked my brain trying to find that lyric somewhere in a Depeche song, and seeing my blank expression he decided to put me out of my misery.

'Black Celebration, back cover, right at the very bottom.' He's right of course, and I realised in that moment where he described the placement of the nondescript white text on the rear of that sleeve that obsessive fans can be a bit, well, nerdy, can't they?

The Things You Said (Music For The Masses, 1987)

The year was 1994. It was summer. A girl had just dumped me earlier that day. (There's possibly a theme emerging here.) I listened to this on repeat all afternoon until it got dark. It seemed to suit my mood of disappointment, detailed perfectly a sense of betrayal at learning you'd been led a merry old dance and been made a complete fool of by someone you thought you were in love with. Sixteen years on and it's still what I think of whenever I hear this song, though I have naturally stopped caring about that day and that girl.

Enjoy The Silence (Violator, 1990)

Buying Violator, knowing that I'd detested 'Personal Jesus', almost felt fraudulent somehow. I bought this album on a trip to Coventry with the girl who I was seeing at the time of my sixteenth birthday. Admitting to myself that the sleek, polished sounds of the album were appealing was an uncomfortable move, but I'm glad I did. Violator has now become probably my favourite Depeche Mode album and it's the one I listen to the most overall. I played it to my then-girlfriend who just found it boring.

Violator was a progression again from Music For The Masses. Where Music For The Masses used occasional guitars, Violator sprayed them over the songs liberally. 'Personal Jesus' remains the biggest surprise, what with its overtly religious leanings and ominous blues riffs. Johnny Cash would later record the song with assistance from Depeche fan John Frusciante (ex-RHCP and future Dave Gahan collaborator) on guitar. For me my favourite track here remains 'Enjoy The Silence', a shimmering, upbeat track with a strange and captivating chorus. It is a towering moment in the band's catalogue.

I Feel You (Songs Of Faith And Devotion, 1993)

By 1993's Songs Of Faith And Devotion, I was a Depeche Mode fan proper. I had all their albums and had started collecting their singles back catalogue. When Radio 1 announced a 'Depeche Mode Day' and the premiering of their new single 'I Feel You', I woke up early to make sure I could hear the song before I went to school. I was dumbfounded when I heard the song. There was not a trace of anything the band had done previously at all; no electronics and no reference points to their back catalogue. It was almost like Dave Gahan fronting another band, a band who played heavy rock. It was a million miles (yet only twelve years) from Speak & Spell. I learned to love the song, loved the album and saw them live for the first time during that tour, a tour which saw the culmination of Gahan's drug taking, Andy Fletcher leaving the band temporarily with stress, Alan Wilder almost losing his life when an RAF jet crashed near his car and Gore drinking way too much.

'I Feel You' is a song I always equate with tragedy; the single was released a few days after we learned of the death of a school friend, initially thought to be a suicide bid after getting dumped by a girl but later found to be because of an unknown heart defect; consequently it's hard to separate the song from that event. In complete contrast, the orchestral 'One Caress', a beautiful if black ballad, reminds me of Stephen King's It, which I was reading at the time. That book terrified me and this song still raises the hairs on my arms.

Useless (Ultra, 1997)

Post-heroin, post-near-death, post-Alan Wilder, Depeche Mode returned in 1997 with a much more Violator-esque album – much more electronic and less out-of-character than Songs Of Faith And Devotion.

By 1997 I was at university and it wasn't a great year overall. This song soundtracked my personal disenchantment at not being able to save a certain person from themselves and their troubled thoughts, and the line containing 'All my useless advice' has a definite poignancy. Elsewhere that year Nick Cave And The Bads Seeds' 'Into My Arms' soundtracked the rare moments of optimism. On the positive, the girl that I'm referring to didn't dump me, but two years later we would mutually call it quits. 'Useless' could well be an apt description for three pointless, uniformly wasted years, come to think of it.

Dream On (Exciter, 2001)

'Dream On' was the first single from 2001's Exciter. Arriving on waves of almost Latin guitars and a conspiratorially-delivered vocal from Gahan, it was an unusual song which would later be overshadowed by the much more upbeat, dance-floor friendly 'I Feel Loved' which received a sterling remix from Armand van Helden.

I promised there would be no more heavily autobiographical episodes after this post, so here are my final words: I chiefly remember listening to this singer whilst preparing for my wedding to Mrs S. It's not my favourite track from Exciter, but I find it hard to separate the song from those positive days.

She hasn't dumped me. Yet.

Audio Journal : 15/02/2011

2011-02-15T14:18:00.000-08:00

Tom Tom Club's début album was released in 1981. The band consisted of Tina Weymouth (the sexiest bass player the music industry has produced) and husband Chris Frantz (a drummer by trade) with assorted other musicians and singers, including two of Tina's sisters. Weymouth and Frantz's day-jobs were in Talking Heads, producing the funk rhythms over which guitarist Jerry Harrison and de facto leader David Byrne would add their own similarly vital ingredients. Recorded in downtime after Remain In Light, Talking Heads' fourth album, Tom Tom Club's success outstripped Talking Heads significantly.

In some ways it's not hard to see why Tom Tom Club were successful. The lengthy 'Wordy Rappinghood' and 'Genius Of Love' are big pop tracks, but to me feel like novelty pieces. The rapping on the first piece is frankly cringe-worthy at times, though I really like the hip-hop groove. 'Genius Of Love' was performed as an intermission by Tom Tom Club during Talking Heads' Stop Making Sense and I've removed it from that album's playlist as I really don't like it.

The remainder of the album – with the exception of the dreadful cover of 'Under The Boardwalk', which sounds like a bad pairing of Bananarama and August Darnell – is better, principally because the band stop trying to sound like they're aping Grandmaster Flash. 'L'Elephant' is my stand out favourite, but with good reason. When I first heard this solid funk groove I thought it sounded familiar, then it struck me that the main elements of the backing track cropped up on Talking Heads' Remain In Light CD/DVD reissue as an unfinished demo. Then again, reading This Must Be The Place – The Adventures Of Talking Heads In The Twentieth Century by David Bowman, most of that track was written by sometime Bowie / Talking Heads / Zappa / King Crimson guitarist Adrian Belew anyway. 'As Above So Below', which Belew also claims he wrote whilst recording with the Club, though he didn't receive so much as a mention, is my other favourite song here.

Iggy Pop's Lust For Life is an enigma of an album. Produced by David Bowie and released in 1977 sometimes it feels like a confusing amalgam of some of the releases Bowie himself would release – the closing track 'Fall In Love With Me', for example, has a disco-funk stomp, a more clarified take on the sound the Thin White Duke would make (but not remember making) on Station To Station; 'Tonight', with its watery keyboard melody has all the grace and poise of Bowie's '"Heroes"' and his own distinctive backing vocals give the track a melancholy depth. In many ways Iggy doesn't seem to know where he fits into all of this, a malleable, jerking puppet for his master to direct as he sits fit. Iggy's plight was proven by 'China Girl', a track written for him by Bowie (admittedly not on this album), which Bowie released later himself and had a lot more success with. Perhaps the vilification Iggy has faced since he took the insurance advert gig isn't fair after all. It's hard to be hard on the youthful, beaming Iggy on the front cover.

I don't listen to this album very often, and consequently every time I do it feels like I'm hearing it for the first time. Aside from the obvious songs (the glam-tastic rumble of 'Lust For Life', whose profile received a shot in the arm thanks to Trainspotting, the wry 'Passengers'), the rest never sound familiar at all. Sometimes it reminds me of a less goofy take on the first New York Dolls album, and its themes are clearly pretty dark and decadent ('Sixteen' is just plain lewd), but sometimes those guitars do sound a bit ELO (as on the louche 'Success').

When Antony Heggarty and his Johnsons won the Mercury prize a few years ago, there were sighs of consternation that he wasn't British enough; he was born British, true, but he'd lived in the States for years. Possessing a voice that evoked the depth and colour of Nina Simone with the theatricality of a Brecht / Weil composition, people were quietly in awe of this figure, and that voice, which had come up from the murkiest Manhattan depths thanks to patronage from the likes of Lou Reed, and was now receiving critical public acclaim.

His is not a voice I can listen to too often; it's not that I don't like it, it's more to do with the songs themselves. One could argue that his songs are plaintive, almost euphoric in their transcendence, but they are also very dark; if I wanted music to be depressed by, an Antony & The Johnsons album would be my first port of call.

The reason for mentioning Antony is because of an album by a band called Hello Lovers entitled Gone With The Wind. I didn't buy this; it was mistakenly packaged in with something else I'd bought. I know nothing about them and I've tried to listen to the album a few times but kept giving up – because of the singer's voice. His voice is like Antony's but bigger, less subtle, more prone to jazzy switches in key, from baritone to soprano, and it's hard to warm to. It's a shame, because the music itself, a fusion of Satie-esque piano motifs, mournful violins and café jazz styles, is really beautiful. Mercifully there are a couple of good instrumental tracks which offer relief from that voice.

Audio Journal : 07/02/2011

2011-02-07T14:43:00.000-08:00

Wire are a band best described as 'post-punk', although I think there's an argument that UK punk was so brief, and the bands that became successful in its wake have endured so much longer, that the term can no longer apply.

I wasn't aware of Wire's legacy when I first heard them; I just knew them as a band that were on my favourite independent record label, Mute. I bought a compilation called International Compilation Mute in Southend-on-Sea in 1993 and on it was a Wire track, a version of the track 'Drill' which came to define their Eighties-period sound. To say I hated the buzzing, quirky sound of that song would be too strong, but suffice to say it was always the one track I'd never listen to all the way through. I then read about the band in magazines, understood their importance and how they stretched back to 1977, but I just figured that they weren't a band I was ever going to be into.

By the time I arrived at University a couple of years later, I'd built up a collection of electronic music, latterly focussing on edgy yet listenable dance music. In the first term of my first year you would regularly hear Daft Punk's 'Da Funk' blasting out loudly along the corridors from my room, much to the irritation of my neighbours. I found dance music's focus and drive appealing; while my fellow students were falling over themselves for every indie band that seemed to be the feted successor to either Blur or Oasis, I was happiest listening to repetitive beats.

Wire changed that, abruptly. Specifically their debut album Pink Flag, released in 1977 in the slipstream of UK punk's rude arrival. I was shopping with a friend, Kit, in Colchester one day. Kit had been subtly warning me for a while that I was spending too much money on music; I had become a vegetarian that term in order to spend the money I'd have earmarked for meat on records. I didn't listen to him and, scratching around for something to buy in Our Price, came upon Pink Flag, ignored my reservations about the song of theirs I'd heard before, ignored my reservations about guitar music in general, and just went ahead and bought it.

In the space of about two days you were as likely to hear Pink Flag blaring out of my student room as regularly as the likes of 'Da Funk'. Pink Flag has a sound which is very much influenced by punk, and I found some resonance in the repetitive guitar riffs and urgent drums, something which reminded me very much of the minimal progressions of dance music. It helped that Pink Flag didn't contain solos, that the lyrics were so strange and that the pace occasionally dropped into punk-baiting slowness. I also felt smug that while my friends fawned over Menswear's 'Daydreamer' and Elastica's 'Connection', I had the songs that directly influenced those tracks, almost to the point of plagiarism (something our lecturers were always banging on about). I am certainly not alone in having found 'punk' via dance music; a guy I exchanged emails with at Uni did exactly the same, and Wire had been his stepping-on point as well. Wire's de facto frontman, Colin Newman, who I also exchanged emails with at Uni, and who I've since interviewed a couple of times, went the other direction, from art punk to techno and back, repeatedly.

So I fell for Pink Flag in a big way, and over the next few months soaked up their Seventies trilogy of albums – Chairs Missing then 154, both of which were artier than the one preceding it – before moving on to their Mute period and their sundry offshoots and solo projects. It helped that they approached 'punk' from an art-school perspective, rapidly moving from punk's simple lump-headedness into slower, more calculated territories; somehow I found that more appealing than anything current in the indie Nineties, and any guitar-based music I'd ever heard up to that point.

The reason for waffling on about Wire is that I went to see them at The Scala last week. For those interested in reading my review of that gig, my review of the excellent Red Barked Tree (released but a week or so into 2011 and already my album of the year) or my short biography of the band, follow the links below.

Wire - Start To Move - A Short History Of Wire

Wire - Red Barked Tree

Wire - The Scala, 2 February 2011

Audio Journal : 01/02/2011

2011-02-01T11:50:00.000-08:00

Vinyl Corner

Richard Youngs Atlas Of Hearts (Apollolaan Recordings LP, 2010)

The Dorset-based Apollolaan label issued their first vinyl release in December 2010, on the day of the Solstice. Previous Apollolaan releases have been made available as highly limited CD-Rs in hand-made packaging, and Richard Youngs' Atlas Of Hearts marks something of a departure, though the hallmarks are still there – an oil painting by Matthew Shaw adorns the sleeve, which was designed by Brian Lavelle, whose collaboration with Alistair Crosbie and Andrew Paine as Space Weather I covered a few weeks back. Lavelle has also collaborated with Youngs in the past.

Youngs is a looming presence on the Glasgow experimental music scene, with output ranging from acoustic guitar work through to the abstract electronic hinterlands, often created with other figures in the fertile territories in which he operates. One such collaborator, some of whose work provides a good reference point to Atlas Of Hearts, is the outsider songsmith Jandek, upon whom a similar level of underground cult mystique can be assigned.

Releasing this on the Solstice seems appropriate given the seven Youngs songs on this LP. There is a firm, simple spirituality and delicate references to nature crop up consistently in the lyrics and titles. I want to call this 'folk' music but somehow that doesn't seem enough. All I know is that its layers of guitar – mostly gently strummed or plucked but occasionally delivered backwards ('What Day Is This Day') or with stuttering, restrained distortion ('Heart In Open Space') – and overlapping vocal interweavings are absorbing and uplifting by turns. Sporadic use of subtle electronics, such as on the hypnotically sparse 'Joy Ride', augment the atmosphere perfectly.

Tracks like the opener 'Haze I' further highlight the blending together of guitar, unfathomable vocals and lightly-deployed electronics; the guitars have a detuned quality, a wobbly sound with the odd mistake left in. One of the most captivating songs is also the shortest – 'Sussex Pond' clocks in at just a minute but with its introspective guitar and mysterious vocal the song is a useful distillation of the rest of the album.

This was my first Richard Youngs album and, despite having read about him a fair bit over the years, I still didn't know what to expect. I also still have no idea if this is indicative of his usual style; further investigation is therefore clearly necessary.

Audio Journal : 24/01/2011

2011-01-24T13:58:00.000-08:00

SixtyFiveMiles released a new EP on the Cherry Red label last week. I loved their Finnish Tango album and have quietly become a fan of their mature indie pop sound (it's evidently not hard to be a fan when they only have two releases so far on iTunes). 'Mary' is a smart, radio-friendly dispatch with a neat American sound – not a bad trick from a band from the Midlands. The rest of the songs on the EP are good as well, but it's 'Mary' that steals the show here. Ideal uplifting stuff for grey, cold January days. Finnish Tango was an accomplished debut; on the strength of the Mary EP, we can expect yet greater things from album number two.

I've had Monaco's Music For Pleasure on cassette since it was released in 1997. For the life of me I don't know why I was buying anything on cassette back then, but for some reason I did. I think I bought it from John Menzies on Colchester High Street. I mean, how uncool is that? A cassette bought from a crap generalist retailer?

New Order called it quits acrimoniously after the release of 1993's Republic. Themes of disenchantment and disappointment riddled that album, most notably on the delicate 'Ruined In A Day', a bitter song directed squarely at the late Manchester music impresario Tony Wilson, who sold the Factory Records dream – and with it New Order's independence – to the big, evil London Records. New Order promptly split up and went off in different directions – Bernard Sumner hooked up with Johnny Marr and ex-Kraftwerk robot Karl Bartos for a second Electronic album, Peter Hook recorded two Monaco albums and the other two – Gillian Gilbert and Stephen Morris – became The Other Two.

The pleasant thing for any New Order fan was that it didn't matter which spin-off you followed, they still sounded like New Order. Music For Pleasure is a case in point. Songs like the first single 'What Do You Want From Me?' – where vocalist David Potts, from Hooky's first side project, Revenge, delivers his very best pastiche of Bernard Sumner – could have appeared on a New Order album proper, and of course Hooky's bass melodies ensure that the references are constant. As a stop-gap between Republic and New Order's unexpected 2001 reformation for Get Ready, Music For Pleasure works fine; it has a bunch of good songs like the disco-y 'Sweet Lips' (definitely from the early Mike Pickering / M People school of Manchester dance music) or the dance-epic 'Junk', but on other tracks the duo seem to lean into the whole Oasis side of Manchester music which I've never appreciated.

I want to learn yoga. I made this decision some time ago and like most things fitness-related, I haven't done a thing about it. Mrs S does yoga; Daughters #1 and #2 have a book called Itsy Bitsy Yoga (it's for kids) which they enjoy from time to time. The reasons for wanting to learn are thus: first, it's healthy, but that's a boring reason; second, and the reason for mentioning it here, is because Lou Reed is an ardent yoga enthusiast. Or maybe it's Tai Chi – either way, I think if the cantankerous curmudgeon can find solace through meditative stretching, there's hope for me yet.

In 2007, Reed released an album principally designed for his own use while running through his Tai Chi routine. For a man who once sang about the euphoric rush of speed and heroin, that may sound incomprehensibly mild, but suspend any thoughts of incongruity and Hudson River Wind Meditations is quite a beautiful album. Designed to evoke the sound of the breeze along the Hudson outside Reed's Manhattan home, the album is fundamentally intended to be connected to nature; without knowledge of that inspiration it would simply be a really good ambient album, as good as any similar sound work by Brian Eno. (Eno, incidentally, during the David Byrne film Ride, Rise, Roar that I saw last week, said that he felt listeners created too many inadvertent impressions of the 'messages' of songs because of titles and words – the listener's approach to Reed's album is here almost totally informed by the purpose of the music and the title, without even listening to it.)

I happen to think it's a brilliant, if slightly unexpected, inclusion in the Reed back catalogue. I'll place it alongside Stephen Vitiello's recordings from the top of the World Trade Center, which, along with sirens and other city sounds from far, far below, also captured the actual environmental sound of the Hudson air currents buffeting the buildings; which isn't that serene when you think about it.

Audio Journal : 21/01/2011

2011-01-20T23:49:00.000-08:00

There is a moment during the the David Byrne film Ride, Rise, Roar, documenting his 2008/9 tour, where his occasional collaborator Brian Eno describes the music they made on the album Everything That Happens Will Happen Today. 'Dread and promise,' says Eno sagely, and it is an apt description of that album's music. Earlier this week I was listening to this album and was struck by a peculiar quality to the title track; it simultaneously has an elegiac quality but also a sadness, a reflectiveness that somehow takes the edge of the euphoria. Hearing Eno offering his thoughts on the album's unique quality suddenly made the music make complete sense. Less charitably, Eno further went on to say that words are less important to a song than the atmosphere, something that Byrne seems to bristle visibly at stood next to Eno in the NYC offices of his Todo Mundo business. 'I put a lot of effort into those songs!' he laughed in the simulcast interview from Brixton with Paul Morley broadcast after the screening of Ride, Rise, Roar.

I think I have what can only be described as an 'artistic crush' on Byrne, which as a resolutely hetrosexual person possibly requires some explaining. Over the past few years I have become totally obsessed with Byrne's myriad outputs; his work with Talking Heads (of course), his solo work, his books, instrumental soundtracks, the Playing The Building installation at The Roundhouse and his artwork. For Christmas I received a signed print of his Roots Of War In Popular Song (Forest Of No Return), which has pride of place on my office wall. There isn't a thing that Byrne does that doesn't interest me. When I read Bicycle Diaries I wanted to buy a bike again. This blog partly came about because I liked the open-minded way that his is written.

I was supposed to go and see Byrne at the Royal Festival Hall as part of this tour, but I sold the ticket. It's a funny thing, regret; there are many, many things from years gone by – pivotal moments, opportunities lost and foregone – of far greater significance that I should regret more, but selling that ticket ranks as one of the biggest. Ride, Rise, Roar – though not a straight documentary account of something as mundane as a single concert date from that tour – is probably the nearest thing to a simulacrum of seeing that show I stupidly decided to sell my ticket for. By combining concert footage with behind-the-scenes footage you get to see the process of creating the performances live; it's a more studied approach to the notion, which I admit you wouldn't necessarily consider were this to be a concert film proper.

'Boredom is the great motivator,' said Byrne to Morley after, half jokingly trying to explain why the tour to accompany Everything That Happens Will Happen Today included three individual choreographers, unusual dance routines for what he still describes as a 'pop' show and the whole gang wearing tutus for the incendiary rendition of 'Burning Down The House'; attempting to explain why the shows couldn't be a straight pop concert; explaining why the Hillman Curtis film was a blend of concert footage interspersed with black and white footage of rehearsals, interviews with the three choreographers, dancers, his manager ('I hope this works,' he said nervously of the tour), Byrne himself and others.

In the following interview Byrne refused to draw too many comparisons with his other artistic 'concert' film, the Jonathan Demme-directed Stop Making Sense, though Morley felt it an obvious reference point. The awkward, geeky Byrne of the Eighties is undoubtedly still there – the jerky movements, the jogging to the infectious 'Life During Wartime', the vaguely detached delivery - but the focus of the shows appeared to be as much on the unusual choreography as this nominal front-man role. Everyone wore white. Everyone had to learn the moves. When the various talking heads (pun intended) described the dancers, backing vocalists and musicians on the stage as the 'chorus' you could see what sort of contemporary theatricality Byrne was after; not the over-the-top drama of, say, a Rufus Wainwright, but the distilled interpretation of the music and lyrics. That was best illustrated by hearing one chorographer explain how she built a whole sequence from the line 'The world moves on a woman's hips' from Remain In Light's 'The Great Curve'. I once saw the Michael Clark company do something similarly interpretative with Wire at the Royal Festival Hall in 2000.

Of course it's no substitute for seeing the show I sold my ticket for; hell, it wasn't even a substitute for watching Byrne and Morley speak in person at the Brixton cinema from where they broadcast the interview to cinemas across the country, but I suspect watching Ride, Rise, Roar on a tiny cinema screen in Leicester Square with about ten other people is as close as I'll get for now.

Audio Journal : 17/01/2011

2011-01-17T14:19:00.000-08:00

A lot of the music I've listened to the past week has been what I'd describe as 'situational', or 'mood specific'. I think we all tend to put on music to either suit a particular mood or to provide a backdrop to a certain activity, either consciously or subconsciously. Some decidedly conscious examples from this week follow.

On a flight to Edinburgh this week I needed to work on some work for a course I'm doing. Two middle-aged women decided to sit next to me and proceeded to talk and talk and talk as soon as soon as they sat down. I swear they were the only people on the whole flight talking. To block them out but still focus on my studies, I put on Hotel : Ambient by Moby, a collection of absorbing, laid-back tracks released as a bonus disc with his 2005 album that wouldn't have gone amiss as the soundtrack to Sofia Coppola's detached Lost In Translation (maybe I say that because that film was mainly set in a Tokyo hotel); instead she chose My Bloody Valentine's Kevin Shields. So it goes. The Moby album seemed to work: I could still hear the women droning on, but the music adequately sharpened my attention for the course materials.

The next night, turning down the temptation of a second night out with colleagues in Edinburgh, I returned to my hotel room to check on the day's emails. For this I chose LCD Soundsystem's This Is Happening, just because it had a fairly upbeat edge. I often find that if I'm trying to focus on getting a lot of stuff done quickly, listening to something quite fast-paced will generally help. The warped, elastic not-quite-acid-house motorik electro of 'One Touch' and the inimitable ersatz post-punk of 'Drunk Girls' seemed to provide the perfect soundtrack to sorting through the day's messages.

Returning to my studies that night, I first stuck on a collaboration EP between LA Vampires and Zola Jesus. LA Vampires evoke the casual nihilism and violence of the shady blood-suckers depicted in the second half of Bret Easton Ellis's The Informers. The work of Amanda Brown, LA Vampires have no website, eschew Facebook and Twitter and are about as mysterious as the vampires of the book that inspired this music, the sound being a heavily processed dub reggae, augmented here with the mostly wordless vocals of Zola Jesus (Nika Rosa Danilova). I've had this for a while and it suits a particular mood; I'm not sure that was studying, but I used to revise to King Tubby at Uni, so it was a (dub) echo of those days that prompted the choice.

After that, I stuck on Luke Slater's 7th Plain's My Wise Yellow Rug, a collection of extraterrestrial electronica released in 1994. I was attracted to this album when I read a review in the NME that described one of the tracks as being like Vangelis's theme for Blade Runner as covered by Vince Clarke, and being a long-standing fan of the latter, I was down the shops like a shot to get a copy. It came in a cardboard packet with a Magic Eye picture on the front. I'm colour blind and so struggle to make out what it is, but the main thing that night was that it proved conducive to studying. I wound down to sleep that night with Nico's Chelsea Girls, until her Marmite voice began to grate.

Vinyl Corner

Steve 'Silk' Hurley 'Jack Your Body' (7", London Records, 1986)

The thing I most remember about this song was the video, and not in a good way. I seem to recall that there was a tendency to match early dance music tracks with goofy videos almost entirely derived from clips from old black and white movies, cartoons etc - fragments clipped from other sources recontextualised alongside other bits of filmic detritus. A bit like sampling really, just with film. Whilst quite clever and arty and a load of other highbrow adjectives, to me it was just cheesy.

I'm not sure I necessarily liked the song at the time either. That said, I was ten in '86 when this got its UK release, and dance music interested me pretty much from the time such radio-friendly transmissions began to appear in the charts. Picking this up many years later I found the 'Jack-jack-jack your body' sample torridly dated but the Chicago house groove quite appealing. There is something enduringly interesting about the simplicity of early dance music – something which got forgotten about somewhere along the lines with a switch to density and high gloss production; a style which the Berlin school distilled back to its minimal pulse almost in parallel. There isn't a lot to this song at all – a simple bassline, a simple melody, an 808 rhythm and the odd sampled vocal refrain.

It's still a good track even if for nostalgia purposes alone, though I'd have preferred it if the dub on the B-side had dispensed with the vocal riffs completely. But let us not forget that as it was released in 1985 it's just about one of the oldest house records there is. A reminder once again that dance music didn't start in the fabled acid-soaked summer of love, 1988.

Audio Journal : 07/01/2011

2011-01-07T13:05:00.000-08:00

The holiday was spent, as usual, with me hardly listening to any of my music, although I did spend some time with a Depeche Mode playlist I made a few years ago. I got some new music for Christmas which will probably get covered here in coming weeks – History by Loudon Wainwright III, Hudson River Wind Meditations by Lou Reed, The McGarrigle Hour from Kate and Anna McGarrigle and their various talented relatives and friends (Loudon, Martha, Rufus etc), Station To Station by Bowie, and one album which I'll come to further down this page. Mrs S, on the other hand, rediscovered her love of the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

The Chili Peppers are a band that she was into as a teenager at the time that Blood Sugar Sex Magik was released, and then promptly forgot about them. That interest was rekindled at the time of By The Way (her joint favourite album with Blood Sugar...) and started a passionate love affair that lasted until just after the birth of Daughter#1 and the simultaneous release of the bloated, patchy and horrendously-titled Stadium Arcadium double album. The single 'Snow (Hey Oh)' from that album is the one Mrs S always think of as the soundtrack to Daughter#1's first few weeks and it still evokes fond memories and emotions whenever we listen to it now, nearly five years on.

Daughter#1 was relatively well-exposed to the Chili Peppers (and the parallel solo albums of the band's now second time ex-guitarist, John Frusciante) quite a lot during her time in the womb. The track 'I Would Die For You' from By The Way was the one song Mrs S would play over and over while pregnant and a few days after we found out we were going to be parents Mrs S and I went to the Borgata hotel and casino in Atlantic City to watch an intimate performance by the band along with around five hundred other people, an event that totally ruined seeing them at Earl's Court the following year. Once you've seen a big band play a small venue you can't go back.

A book that Mrs S got for Christmas re-ignited her interest in the band, who are scheduled to release a new album this year, ably assisted by Frusciante's replacement, Josh Klinghoffer (who was brought into the band by his predecessor to add extra guitar to the Stadium Arcadium tracks on that album's tour, and who has been a long-standing musical partner of Frusciante). Consequently we spent a good chunk of New Year's Eve watching old RHCP performances instead of the garbage on TV. Since then the band have rarely been off the house iPod, and it's nice to see Mrs S falling back in love with them all over again. She even played some of their old videos to the impressionable Daughter#1. 'What did you think of the Chili Peppers then?' Mrs S asked. 'They were....really....noisy,' she replied, proof, if required, that familiarity with songs developed in the womb doesn't change a child's fundamental insouciance. She just wants to listen to Rufus Wainwright, which is okay by me.

The album I found myself listening to often during the holiday was Angelo Badalamenti's soundtrack to David Lynch's Twin Peaks. For reasons that I still don't understand – possibly my long-standing aversion to hype – I didn't watch Twin Peaks when it was first on; school friends discussed it avidly the day after an episode and yet the whole thing would just go completely over my head. Later I became something of a David Lynch fan after exposure to the twisted Eraserhead, but still for some reason I never watched Twin Peaks.

When the Horror channel started showing every episode late last year I figured it was about time I finally checked this out, and at last I understand what the fuss was all about; I was totally hooked. The mystery, intrigue, the faint whiff of Dynasty / Dallas piss-taking and the brilliantly loopy FBI agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) all add up to something pretty addictive and I'm vaguely reluctant to get around to watching the final three episodes, simply because I know then it's over.

The soundtrack grabbed me from the first episode. The electronic strings of Badalamenti's 'Laura Palmer's Theme' were familiar to me from Moby's 'Go', which sampled those strings and set them to a thudding 4/4 beat, never for one second losing the drama and lingering darkness of Badalamenti's piece. My favourite piece on the soundtrack is called 'Audrey Dancing', a wonky ersatz jazz number dominated by an off-kilter vibraphone riff and some skronking synthetic sax, used in the programme whenever something amusing or plain mysterious is happening (i.e. it gets used a lot each episode). The Julee Cruise songs I could live without (I'll stick with A.C. Marias for my ethereal female vocalist thanks), but do they effectively compliment the slightly surreal atmosphere of the programme.

Vinyl Corner

Sharks In Italy 'Time (Is Ours)' b/w 'Dancing' (7", 1984, Clay Records)

A Google search on the Eighties band Sharks In Italy produces one discogs.com entry for the Canadian release of their solitary album, and nothing else apart from some images of pontiffs and sharp-toothed and menacing great whites. I'm not terribly surprised; Sharks In Italy's 'Time (Is Ours)' found its way into my parents' collection thanks to a loose extended family connection to the singer, Sandy Reid, and consequently I figured that this was a 7" that only existed in the collections of random Stratford-upon-Avon friends of the band. I've had to scan the sleeve myself and everything, for Heaven's sakes. I'm not sure my parents ever played it while I was around, buying it more out of local duty rather than musical interest, but its existence has taken on an almost mythical importance to me; an importance which I fully expected to be shattered when I finally listened to this after New Year as part of a process of recording my parents' vinyl collection.

It's brilliant. If the recently-departed John Hughes had wanted another fey English band in the mould of Psychedelic Furs to populate more soundtracks to films of teenage classroom emotion and angst, he would have been well-advised to include 'Time (Is Ours)' or its equally excellent B-side 'Dancing'. Nice synthetic-sounding drums, shimmering, watery guitars, subtle keyboards and a euphoric Andy 'OMD' Humphries-esque vocal from Reid makes this overlooked gem suddenly one of my favourite Eighties-songs-I-didn't-actually-hear-in-the-Eighties.

You'd agree, if you could actually get your hands on a copy.

Audio Journal : 22/12/2010

2010-12-22T11:22:00.000-08:00

Saint Etienne, the trio of Sarah Cracknell, Pete Wiggs and Bob Stanley released a song with Tim Burgess from The Charlatans called 'I Was Born On Christmas Day' in 1993. Its title alone assured the song of a modicum of airplay during the festive season that year, and I know it's popped up on several Christmas compilation albums since. The song is an upbeat piece of pop majesty, but apart from the line in the chorus about being born on Christmas Day (being a reference to Bob's birthday), it isn't really a Christmas song; it's just a song with Christmas in the title, released at Christmas.

It would appear that Saint Etienne, who I didn't even realise were still operating, have released a festive fan-club only album called – fnarr, fnarr – A Glimpse Of Stocking. My days of being into the band roundly stopped after the best of album Too Young To Die, which I still listen to from time to time. I didn't intend to try and get a copy of A Glimpse Of Stocking (which collects every Christmas song recorded by the band) and after hearing the new track 'No Cure For The Common Christmas', I am even less likely to do so. Sonically, it sounds like 'I Was Born On Christmas Day', has the same euphoric (if jaded) Euro-disco edge, but like a pissed relative on Christmas Day, it falls down somewhere along the lines. I was quite looking forward to rekindling my love for Saint Etienne, but sadly not after this song.

This being my final blog of 2010, it seems appropriate anyway to talk about Christmas songs. This year, more than any, the magazine list writers have been attempting to persuade us punters to shell out on alternative Christmas albums – i.e. not the usual derivative compilations of Elton John's 'Step Into Christmas', John 'n Yoko's 'Merry Christmas (War Is Over)', Chris Rea's 'Driving Home For Christmas' etc – with Johnny Cash's overlooked Christmas album seeming to top the 'must have' lists.

But what makes a Christmas song 'good' anyway?' Is it a religious re-telling of the Nativity, messages of love and goodwill, glam rock anthems with choirs of out-of-tune Brummie kids or just a nice pop track adorned with tinkly bells? If there is no prescribed formula as such for a Christmas song, why can't a song like Pulp's 'Disco 2000' become established as a Christmas song?

'Disco 2000' was released way back in November 1995 and its chorus foretold the millennium fever that enveloped pretty much everyone who uses the Anno Domini calendar as 1999 passed into 2000. Getting released a shade too early for the Christmas top-spot that year ensured it was probably all but forgotten by the year end charts; later the band would prevent the song from being used in TV and radio adverts in 1999 / 2000, effectively scuppering many an ad man's wet dream of carelessly and lucratively tacking the song onto any product during that time.

Can 'Disco 2000' be held up as a Christmas song? Undoubtedly. It is an accessible pop song with a Slade / Wizzard-esque glam guitar introduction and a huge chorus ideally suited to Christmas / New Year parties of the time. Plus, by not being a Christmas song in the truest sense of the word (no Nativity, no religious undertones, no tinkly bells) it lasts all year, unlike Christmas trees, Bailey's and festive goodwill. Even at fifteen years old it hasn't lost any of its lustre and unexpected festive sparkle.

Have a great Christmas and New Year, thanks for following, and expect more weekly musical witterings next year.

'Disco 2000' is featured in my second annual Christmas short story, Josh & Laura, as the soundtrack for a scene set in a student end-of-term Christmas party (see, it works perfectly!). Josh & Laura can be downloaded as a PDF here.

Audio Journal : 19/12/2010

2010-12-18T09:54:00.000-08:00

What's not to like? Take five compositions by John Carpenter for his quintet of cult psychological horror films – Escape From New York, Escape From LA, Assault On Precinct 13, Halloween and The Thing – and let two French electronic music wizards (Étienne Jaumet and Cosmic Neman, aka Zombie Zombie, named after a 1984 ZX Spectrum game) re-record the tracks with a contemporary edge. Well, I say 'contemporary'. Electronic music has had a tendency to always try and sound like the golden age of analogue synthesis, and this EP has a tendency to sound simultaneously retro and bang up to date as a consequence.

The point is that these soundtracks were good to start with. Carpenter wrote and performed most of his scores himself, or with collaborators – The Thing was a collaboration between him and no less a luminary than Ennio Morricone. Zombie Zombie add beats and other signal flourishes that simply add to the drama of the originals. The main theme from Halloween still makes you hold your breath in anxious fear-induced excitement, but a track like 'The Bank Robbery' (from Escape From New York) is given an urgent beat and frantic synth breakdown at the very end, making it ideal for minimalist dance floors; like a remix of the Airwolf theme tune, only with more drama. The Escape From LA main theme becomes an hard-edged, industrial jack-booted synth-fest, not unlike Deutsch Amerikanisch Freundschaft circa 'Sex Unter Wasser' or Nitzer Ebb circa 'Let Your Body Learn', a sort of cinematic Electronic Body Music as that genre became known. Fans of Carpenter and electronic music generally should definitely look out for this.

Two highly limited edition CD-Rs, in hand-made packaging, from the Apollolaan label fell on my doorstep in the last week. The first, a 3", single-track CD-R from Space Weather (Alistair Crosbie, who has graced this blog before, on electric guitar; Brian Lavelle on electronics and Andrew Paine on bass) is entitled The Weather's Maiden. It was an edition of 100 and is now all sold out. This is a release that sounds markedly different at different volumes; at low volumes it sounds like a bleak, distant sonic landscape of hissing radio waves and transmissions from some frozen, desolate, abandoned world. For some reason it sounded to me like a soundtrack to the film Hardware, a British film from 1990 that painted a very bleak picture of the future, wherein savage death robots were unleashed on the populace to control the population growth. Listened to at louder volumes reveals other aspects of this sonic stew; heavily-processed, looped guitars (I think) dominate the background and deep bass tones and drones offset the spiralling, whining electronics. It is something constantly shifting, rarely static, and could have extended far longer than the fifteen minutes we have been gifted here.

The other Apollolaan release was Peter Delaney's live set from Amsterdam's VPRO festival in May 2009. This 5" CD-R is again an edition of 100 and comes in a cardboard Muji CD sleeve adorned with the white outlines of houses. I had never heard of Delaney before being sent this. He is an Irish singer-songwriter whose songs are frankly a delight for the ears. These are delicately-rendered acoustic folk ballads, occasionally dark and mysterious and evoking the vastness of the sea; but mostly these songs are uplifting affirming in nature. Delaney's perfect live set proves him to be an accomplished lyricist and his guitar playing is intricate and finely-wrought, gentle and enveloping, his voice having remarkable range and a subtle emotional intensity.

There is much that I could say about this, but to write further wouldn't ever come close to doing these songs justice. So I will just say that I honestly don't think I've ever heard a more beguiling record in my life. Higher praise than that I honestly can't find. There are a few copies left at apollolaan.co.uk; you would be wise to buy one quick.

Audio Journal : 04/12/2010

2010-12-04T08:56:00.000-08:00

Reading The Times magazine a weekend or so ago, I alighted upon a series of photos by Kevin Cummins of Joy Division. Cummins' black and white shots have become as synonymous with the imagery of this band as Peter Saville's iconic sleeve for Unknown Pleasures – monochrome, dark, misanthropic. It's an image that a film like Twenty-Four Hour Party People tried to redress, in part, though it's difficult to totally move away from the notion of the band being a bunch of misery guts when there's the unavoidable fact of front man Ian Curtis's suicide (hence Anton Corbijn's Control, based on Curtis's widow Deborah's book Touching From A Distance); Cummins, in the brief blurb attached to the photos, said he regrets not capturing more photos of Curtis smiling.

So I thought I'd listen to the Joy Division back catalogue and look for clues to a happier, less grumpy world view. I failed, so instead here's a playlist I came up with for Mrs S a few years ago, highlighting my ten favourite Joy Division tracks. Note that 'Love Will Tear Us Apart' doesn't feature; I love that song, but it's a bit 'obvious'.

Unknown Pleasures

1. New Dawn Fades
2. She's Lost Control
3. Interzone

I recall buying Unknown Pleasures after saying farewell to my then-girlfriend as she set off on a train back to her home; something about the goodbye must have made me think 'Right, now's the time to finally buy Unknown Pleasures', for that's exactly what I did.

'New Dawn Fades' was a song I first heard covered by Moby. Whereas his version was angry, buzzing with a distorted aggression, Joy Division's version is far sparser, lots of reverb masking the gaps. It's certainly heartfelt, tragic and almost disturbingly negative. 'She's Lost Control' has some of the most inventive drum processing by Martin Hannett or any other producer, creating a sound not dissimilar to spraying aerosols (instead of using cymbals) and banging pipes (instead of using snares). Hooky's muted bassline dominates until reedy, inchoate guitars ascend. Curtis's lyrics detail flashes of madness from the female subject of the song. This was punk turned inside out – all the traces are there, yet none of them are.

Joy Division referenced William S Burroughs on 'Interzone', this being the disturbing parallel nightmare world of his Naked Lunch novel. This is just about the most straightahead punk track Joy Division ever produced, all snarling overdriven guitars and urgent drums; but the lyrics – two parallel sets in the left and right channels. Even when passed through Hannett's unique, and occasionally overbearing, filter this punchy little track never loses its raw appeal. To hear this in an even rawer state (without the double vocals), check out the Stooges-esque demo version that emerged from when the band were still called Warsaw.

Closer

4. A Means To An End
5. Decades

I bought my Joy Division collection in the wrong order, starting with their second (and technically final) album, Closer. Having been a New Order fan by then for some time, the album was initially confusing – delicately maudlin and introspective. Not quite ready for that degree of misery, I gravitated toward these two tracks: 'A Means To An End' for its buzzing guitars and earnest pulse, a definitive take on punk's spirit delivered in a more controlled manner; and 'Decades' for its fragile keyboards and slow build, its plaintive vocal refrains and its captivating grandeur (the keyboards on the live version I also have do tend to get a bit wonky and out of tune).

Still

6. The Sound Of Music
7. Dead Souls

The Still compilation chiefly reminds me of the first term of my university third year, and arriving back feeling miserable and lost. Still became the soundtrack to those first few weeks. Still was a posthumous collection of tracks not properly recorded, plus live songs (including the band's seminal take on Velvet Underground's 'Sister Ray' and most of their last ever concert in Birmingham), all polished into decent shape by Martin Hannett. 'The Sound Of Music' has a trudging, slightly phased beat and scratchy, restrained guitars that wouldn't have gone amiss on a Wire album c. 1978.

I first heard 'Dead Souls' when it was covered by Nine Inch Nails for The Crow soundtrack. The steady drum patterns here are again gently phased, giving Stephen Morris's kit the sound of a drum machine. Unlike most Joy Division tracks, the intro has an extended instrumental interplay between Bernard Sumner's guitar cascades and Peter Hook's elastic bass. If it wasn't slowed down to a sludgy, dystopian pace, it would almost have a punk-funk sound a la Gang Of Four. It is a wondrously bleak track.

Substance

8. Digital
9. Transmission
10. Atmosphere

Substance, like the 2CD New Order album of the same name, gathers together singles and other odds and ends not featured on other albums. 'Transmission' was the band's début Factory Records single. It sounds like post-Devoto Buzzcocks and comes across as reasonably upbeat – at first – but includes quotes from self-styled Satanic guru Aleister Crowley; as the track progresses what at first sounded euphoric becomes more dark. 'Dance, dance, dance, dance, dance to the radio,' implores Curtis, ever more urgently. Deborah Curtis' book was titled after a line in this song. 'Digital' is far too joyous to fit the mood of their two LPs; it has one of the most infectious basslines I've ever heard, plus an urgent motorik beat and some fine staccato guitar. The track was recorded in their very first sessions and included on the first Factory Records sampler double 7" EP. (I have had this song in my head all week.)

'Atmosphere' is a towering work of genius, relying heavily on Hannett's skills as a producer to create one of the best torch songs of the era. Curtis gives his best attempt at an impassioned Scott Walker vocal, drums pound in the distance, bass notes float in and out and the origin of New Order's distinctive keyboard sound rise up from the depths. It never fails to send a chill. There is hope somewhere in this song, but it's elusive. Definitely elusive.

Audio Journal : 23/11/2010

2010-11-23T11:45:00.000-08:00

I was watching MTV on Sunday night. Alexa Chung was presenting some collection of old videos, all loosely connected by her arch / ironic / disinterested / banal commentary. It was somehow concrete affirmation of why music television bores me to death. She introduced 'I Don't Like Mondays' by The Boomtown Rats and my first reaction was 'Did Johnny Borrell from Razorlight base his look and sound on Boomtown-era Geldof?' The similarities – in Geldof's appearance and in the sound – were uncannily like the stuff that Borrell has produced on pretty much everything but the first Razorlight album.

The second thought that went through my head was a recollection of an evening many moons ago in Colchester. My house-mates Barry and Neil and I descended upon a pub around the corner from our house to play pool. It felt like we were three cowboys walking through the doors of a dusty saloon (an analogy that has been reinforced over time by something elsewhere in the story); the assembled old goats and regulars all turned around as we walked in, and if it wasn't for their general lack of interest it would have felt threatening. Even the big dog sat under one of the wooden chairs couldn't really be bothered to growl. Instead we bought drinks and were just heading to the pool table out back when I spotted a box on the windowsill containing – unexpectedly – a load of old records. If one thing has become apparent through my frequent eulogising of my student days, it's that I spent a lot of money on music, and quite a lot of it from charity shops. Buying vinyl from a pub was, however, definitely a one-off.

While Barry went off to set up the pool table, shaking his head disapprovingly as he went, Neil and I began raking through the cardboard box of records. I came across a perfect condition LP of Ennio Morricone's soundtrack to The Good, The Bad And The Ugly (now the Western analogy makes sense, you see) and Neil found a battered copy of 'I Don't Like Mondays'. I still have the LP; Neil discovered later that the 7" was basically snapped in half and certainly unplayable.

I'd love to say that I'd listened to The Good, The Bad And The Ugly soundtrack this week, but I didn't. So we shall move on from this elaborate and undoubtedly pointless anecdote and focus on what I've been listening to these past few days.

Mostly it's been the new Brian Eno album, Small Craft On A Milk Sea, released on Warp in the last fortnight. I've become used to Eno albums sounding like ethereal stasis – The Shutov Assembly is one of the most delicate, beautiful albums I own, and I sometimes put it on to help me fall asleep on the train to work (hopefully Eno wouldn't take this the wrong way). I know that this isn't the only aspect to Eno, and many times I've listened to albums showcasing a different side to his sound and found myself thinking 'What was that all about?' Nerve Net, for example. I remember borrowing that from Stratford-upon-Avon public library and trying three or four times to get my head around it before giving up, perplexed.

I wouldn't say Small Craft is like that, and, besides, I'd probably find that Nerve Net makes complete sense to me now. But it is different. Perhaps the release of this album on Warp has some significance here; Eno albums have tended to be released on his All Saints label, or self-released as downloads. Warp was initially exclusively a techno label but has since fragmented to focus on an infinite number of musical shards, including electronically-supported rock and lots of other micro-genres too. Small Craft has lots of drifting electronic introspection ('Emerald And Lime'), but it also features spindly beats ('Horse'), juddering rhythms ('Flint March'), distorted guitars and even a blissfully motorik punk freakout that wouldn't go amiss on a Neu! covers compilation ('2 Forms Of Anger'). It is utterly Eno and a perfectly-timed reminder of why he remains so essential, covering as it does so many of the facets that have featured in his work over the past four decades.

Vinyl Corner

'My Definition Of House Music' by DJ Hell (Helmut Geier) was released on the Belgian R&S label and I picked up this repressing in the late Nineties. First released in 1992, the original version features sampled strings and what we used to call Italian house piano riffs as well as squelchy synths. Taking a look at the always useful Discogs website, I found out that the strings were sampled from a David Byrne song. No wonder I like 'My Definition Of House Music'. This is one of those classic 12" singles from dance music's crucial first flushes and it still sounds excellent today.

Not, however, as excellent as the B-side remix by Resistance D (Maik Maurice and Pascal Dardoufas). This mix reminds me chiefly of the simplicity of 'Lush'-era Orbital mixed with the prog-house tendencies of early Spooky. It has a denseness and urgency that the original lacks and a neat suite of 303 bubbles for the quintessential acid house freak out, something that (at least to me) sounds every bit as thrilling as it did in the late Eighties.

Audio Journal : 19/11/2010

2010-11-19T14:57:00.000-08:00

I had one of those mornings this week where I flicked through the album playlists restlessly in my iPod and couldn't settle on anything. Scrolling down the list, nothing appealed. It's at times like this where I tend to employ the 'playlist roulette' game I've mentioned here before: I close my eyes, drag my finger around the circular wheel a couple of times, then open my eyes again and whatever I've landed on I have to play. Well, today, even that didn't do the trick. I really wasn't in the mood for Ryan Adams, Jesus And Mary Chain and most definitely not The Hives. So I listened to Sparks' 'I Can't Believe You Would Fall For All The Crap In This Song', turned back to Justin Halpern's book Shit My Dad Says, and staved off the decision for a few more minutes.

Finally, a few minutes outside Euston, I settled on Sabresonic by The Sabres Of Paradise (Warp, 1993). The Sabres Of Paradise were a trio, consisting of esteemed producer Andrew Weatherall (he of Screamadelica fame) and two engineers, Jagz Kooner and Gary Burns, who also worked as part of Warp contemporaries The Aloof. This album was one I bought from Time Records in Colchester, a shop where I blew most of my limited student income (clearly I would not be able to do this if the proposed increases to tuition fees had been delivered in the period 1995 - 1998), but for some reason I bought Sabresonic II (1995) first. Consequently, at the time, Sabresonic felt a little light compared to the more expansive follow-up. I've changed my mind on that front now, finding it immersive and eclectic.

The key track for me is 'Ano Electro (Andante)' which is a delicate piece of classic Warp label electronica, lots of deep bass tones and icy melodies. Those icy melodies are something I still find appealing in electronic music, and they remind me, in order, of a) Degrassi Junior High (to this day, I don't know why; I didn't even like that programme when I was a kid and I don't know whether spindly upper-octave keyboard melodies were a feature of its soundtrack or not) and b) Teen Wolf. Teen Wolf was, for the duration of the Eighties, my favourite movie and I watched it most recently before Daughter#2 was born; unlike most things from the time (such as, say, luminous socks and needless saxophone solos), it's still pretty good. The Teen Wolf soundtrack does feature some edgy, minimalist tones in the vein of 'Ano Electro', so at least that comparison makes a degree of sense; elsewhere on the soundtrack, at the very start of the film and over the opening credits, is a fantastic piece of sonic alchemy – the sound of no-hoper Michael J. Fox's basketball bouncing between his hand and the floor of the court, only processed to sound otherworldly and as if heard through water. Perhaps exposure to that sort of sound as a kid is the reason why listening to the likes of The Hafler Trio in my teens was so easy.

So where were we? Sabresonic completed, I alighted upon David Bowie's The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust. Initially, my exposure to Bowie was purposefully confined to the trio of albums produced with Brian Eno in Berlin during the mid-Seventies, but I've since found myself working backwards through Aladdin Sane and Ziggy Stardust. I don't feel terribly qualified to comment on Bowie, mostly as I still feel like I'm only just dipping my toe into his catalogue, but I will say that 'Five Years' is just about the most un-Glam track from the genre, a fragile and Brechtian take on end-of-the-world themes.

I've had La Monte Young's (deep breath) The Second Dream Of The High Tension Line Stepdown Transformer From The Four Dreams Of China sat on my hard-drive for months and have never dropped it onto my iPod. The reason is quite simple: I've only ever read about La Monte Young's music (in The Wire) and when you never actually listen to something you've read about, you form all sorts of impressions about how it might sound, and I didn't want to have those preconceptions proven to be unfounded.

Young is a survivor of the infamous New York art scene in the Sixties, producing drone-based music from a loft with the likes of John Cale from The Velvet Underground and Tony Conrad (also, briefly, a member of the first iteration of the VU); Cale, a classically-schooled violinist first and foremost, would employ the drone methodology on Velvet Underground And Nico on tracks like 'Venus In Furs'. However, while on those tracks it was part of a wider musical template, with Young's music it is all about the drone, his pieces being long-form affairs (The Second Dream is single track lasting 80 minutes) with variations only discernible by intense concentration. It's not dissimilar to staring at a Rothko painting - initially you just see the colour, and then you see the tone and depth of expression.

Scored in 1962 for eight trumpets, The Second Dream isn't just a single solid drone; it starts and stops frequently but the individual sections themselves are lengthy, each consisting of overlapping, naturally phasing tones, that envelop and cut across one another. Far from sounding dull and cloying, I found this piece of music absorbing and almost relaxing. 'Almost' because very occasionally this can sound sinister, but on the whole it is what one of Young's peers, accordionist Pauline Oliveros, described as 'deep listening'.

Vinyl Corner

For some time now I've been weeding out my old dance vinyl collection, though not, it seems, for profit. In the last few weeks I sold a few 10" and 12" singles to Music & Video Exchange on Berwick Street for a paltry £6.00. It doesn't necessarily feel worth doing, especially since before selling them I'll generally record the songs to MP3 first, which can be time consuming. Also, my kids didn't exactly enjoy walking across London a few Saturdays ago to get to the shop, and I didn't exactly like them walking round the more colourful parts of Soho either.

One of the 10" singles I sold was 'Legend Of The Golden Snake (Version 2)' by Depth Charge, also known as DJ J Saul Kane. (Suffice to say, the rear sleeve has an image on the sleeve which wouldn't have been out of place at the seedier end of Berwick Street.) I first got into Depth Charge when I heard 'Shaolin Buddha Finger' on a mix compilation by The Chemical Brothers, back when the NME still gave away tapes on the cover, and back when The Chemical Brothers were still called The Dust Brothers.

'Legend Of The Golden Snake (Version 2)' is a heavy slab of what used to be called trip-hop, with an infectious speaker-warping dub bassline and lots of odd noises and kung-fu soundtrack melody snatches dropped in over the top. B-side, 'Sex, Sluts & Heaven (Bordello Mix)' is dense and atmospheric, phased in yelps and such like overlaying the bass-heavy groove. Funny, for all my musical taste changes over the years, I've never gone off Depth Charge. I perhaps regret flogging the vinyl copy, so I won't dwell on that too much.

Audio Journal : 11/11/2010

2010-11-11T13:00:00.000-08:00

I wrote about Underworld's 2009 mix compilation Athens a few weeks ago. I first got into Underworld in 1994 with Dubnobasswithmyheadman, their third album, an album which saw them becoming courted by the indie music press, presenting as they did an amalgam of trendy dance music with sporadic deployment of treated guitars. It seems that, musically, 1994 was something of a pivotal year for me, looking back, and Dubnobasswithmyheadman was at the forefront of my developing eclectic musical pallette.

Second Toughest In The Infants, the eagerly-anticipated 1996 follow-up and 1999's Beaucoup Fish continued the bleeding-edge appeal of the Karl Hyde / Rick Smith / Darren Emerson unit. Emerson departed soon after Beaucoup Fish and the duo forged ahead without him, releasing 100 Days Off (2002) and Oblivion With Bells (2007), as well as a best-of and a live album, living proof if required that dance music artists also need to follow the well-worn path of miscellaneous albums of non-new material to pad out the sales. In fairness, they also released a load of online-only material too.

Having moved my gaze away from Underworld after Beaucoup Fish, I became quite excited about their new album, Barking. This album, their eighth, was named after the frequent appearance of dogs in their lyrics / imagery ('Dogman Go Woof' being an early, non-album single, plus they named tracks like Second Toughest's 'Sappy's Curry' after greyhounds raced at Essex dog tracks), and also the fact that Barking, Essex is Hyde's adopted home. In getting enthusiastic about the new album from two of my 1994 heroes, I overlooked the sticker on the front which advised that this album included a number of collaborations with other producers – über-cool names that didn't mean anything to me, with the exception of long-standing collaborator Darren Price, who remixed a couple of their singles, and whose releases on NovaMute are still lurking in one of my record boxes, somewhere.

Collaborations at this juncture in a band's career, whatever the genre, can be interpreted as either rejuvenating or an indication that the band have run out of creative steam. I honestly don't know which category Barking falls into. There are some excellent tracks here, the junglist 'Scribble' and 'Between Stars', the collaboration with Price. Opener 'Bird 1' has a minimal pulse and dynamic forward motion and providers a real, if updated, reminder of why Underworld were always so essential.

Some of the other tracks are harder to digest. 'Always Loved A Film' has a 'hands in the air' euphoric chorus, lots of 'Heaven's and 'Can you feel it?'s, and whilst it's joyously upbeat, it doesn't sound like Underworld to me, at least not the Underworld I remember. It sounds like the sort of pop-trance issued by Perfecto in the mid 1990s, the sort of music that Underworld provided the effective antidote to back then, while 'Diamond Jigsaw' sounds like 'Swamp Thing'-era Grid, or the most recent Goldfrapp album, Head First. I love that album, and it's pop-dance credentials are beautiful in their brazen-ness. But Underworld were always more sophisticated than that. And don't even get me started on the final track, 'Louisiana'. Depeche Mode fans will be used to the sections of their concerts where Martin Gore delivers a couple of songs, usually just with a piano accompaniment; it's what we expect from Gore – it's not what we expect from Underworld, tender and fragile though this song might be.

Vinyl Corner

A trawl through the sale racks in Brick Lane's Rough Trade East yielded 'For The Love Of Others' by Piney Gir, released in 2009 on Damaged Goods. Piney – real name Angela Penhaligon – first came onto my radar as part of electropop duo Vic Twenty and I did an interview with her back in the day, just as she was releasing her superb Peekahokahoo solo album. Since those electronic days, Piney's gone off and moved into more countrified territory and I haven't listened to her for a while.

'For The Love Of Others' is delicate Bacharach-tinged country pop. It's sweet, flavoured with Piney's honey-coated tones and beautiful, soulful vocal harmonies, with layers of horn accompaniment. It reminds me of the tracks by Kimya Dawson on the wonderful Juno soundtrack, with just a bit more knowing maturity.

On the flip, Piney tackles the Jungle Book standard 'I Wanna Be Like You', approaching one of Paulo Nutini's best-loved covers with an easy listening / jazz club vibe. There's also the miniscule 'Brady's Bluff', featuring lots of delicate vocal harmonies and gentle acoustic guitars and a neat little chord change right at the very end.

Audio Journal : 03/11/2010

2010-11-03T12:42:00.000-07:00

At the weekend we watched Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist, a teen romance flick based around two indie kids' love of music. Set in Manhattan / Brooklyn, the film tells the tale of one solitary night in the city – imagine Scorsese's seminal After Hours without the mystery – and Nick's quest to get over the heartbreak from his on-off relationship with a girl (Tris; that's right, Tris), for whom the hapless lovestruck romantic would produce mix CDs. These CDs were routinely binned by the girl, falling inconceivably into the hands of Norah, who, after watching Nick's band The Jerk Offs (himself on bass, his two gay mates on vocals and guitar and a child's drum machine) performing at a club somewhere Downtown, falls in love with him. The plot then follows their on-off attempts to get together while the back story sees them trying to track down the appallingly-named (and hopefully imaginary) cult band Where's Fluffy who are performing a guerrilla gig somewhere in the city.

Okay, so far, so teen flick. Aside from shots on NYC's trendier locations, the key differentiator is the knowing musical backdrop, from the offbeat 8-bit electronic score supplied by Devo's Mark Mothersbaugh (imagine his work for Rugrats, but all grown up), to the soundtrack which features stalwarts of the US current alternative scene like Band Of Horses, We Are Scientists and Vampire Weekend (who turn in the exclusive track 'Ottoman'). Devendra Banhart, making a brief cameo in one scene of the film, delivers a typically oddball funk-folk-unclassifiable song in 'Lover' and the rest on the soundtrack are mostly from bands I've never heard of.

Where the film became fairly cloying with its continual namedropping and attempts to look musically cool (doesn't that just grate? I mean, who would do that?), the soundtrack album is eminently listenable, with lots of interesting and introspective ear-friendly songs perfectly evoking the subtle, heart aching mood of the movie. It has a Richard Hawley track, for example. That said, my favourite track overall is still the urgent dirge-y NYC punk of The Jerk Off's 'Screw The Man' (sentiment of the lyrics most definitely to one side); so what if they're a prefab, made-up-for-this-film band and this is a pisstake, it's a great track which reminds me of The Runaways 'Cherry Bomb' mixed with The Gun Club's 'Sex Beat', two classics from the CBGB era.

Those Brave Airmen are a four-piece band from Stratford-upon-Avon consisting of Dave Johnson (vocals, rhythm guitar), Neil Edden (bass), Gavin Skinner (drums) and Mark Rehling (guitars) who released their debut single on iTunes last week. Entitled 'Pure Evil', the track has an unmistakeable grungey atmosphere and raw production edge, Johnson delivering the lyrics in a style which Eddie Vedder would be proud of and a grinding middle eight interplay between guitar and bass which could last a whole lot longer and never become tiring.

'I guess our influences are far ranging although the 90's grunge sound is definitely one we've all grown up with and enjoy,' Edden told me by email. 'It's not really a conscious decision, it's just the way that we sound together on that song.' Other Those Brave Airmen tracks cover different territories - slower, faster, harder, softer. Describing their eclectic live sound, Edden says 'I like to think that seeing us is a bit of a mixed bag – almost like seeing a covers band, but with originals – there's something in there for everyone.' What's not to like?

Download 'Pure Evil' from iTunes here.

Audio Journal : 27/10/2010

2010-10-28T23:49:00.000-07:00

On Saturday my colleague Ian and I found ourselves in a dirty corner of Shoreditch to watch the legendary industrial pioneers Throbbing Gristle at the cavernous Village Underground, more of an art space than a gig venue. The fourpiece band – Chris Carter, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Peter 'Sleazy' Christopherson and Genesis Breyer P’Orridge – delivered almost two hours of ear-shredding noise, electronic experimentation and even a naked stagediver during the encore. Those intrigued by the event and wishing to read me compare their sound to a Jubilee Line train at full speed can head over to Documentary Evidence where you'll find my review proper.

Tonight though Mrs S and I went to the Scala in Kings Cross to watch the infinitely more hearing-friendly ex-Libertine Carl Barat. Mrs S swoons whenever said singer is mentioned and has been gushing about his Brechtian debut solo album since it was released earlier this month. And it is indeed a good album; it's not The Libertines, and thankfully it's a world away from the coke-fuelled disaster of Dirty Pretty Things' sloppy second album. More theatrical and ambitious than any of the songs written for either of his previous two bands, Carl Barat is a work of some confidence from indie rock's mumbling troubadour. (I couldn't understand anything he said on stage tonight; I gave up trying after a while; even Mrs S, doe-eyed and smitten though she was, said we needed subtitles.)

Barat and his band were supported by Swimming and Heartbreaks. The former were probably only about 17 (which made me feel really old) and they looked like an after-school band practice, featuring a guitarist who had all the poise and clumsy gracelessness of the lanky kid in class who started shaving before anyone else. A blend of guitar fury and electronics, they didn't really move me, in much the same way as Delphic don't move me, and their keyboard / laptop kid bore an unnerving resemblance to Chesney Hawkes. Heartbreaks were better – frantic thrash indie-pop euphoria with a vocalist whose style aped vintage Costello. They also featured the most stylised Mod drummer avec obligatory Weller haircut, and the quiff count was unseasonably high. I liked them. The only dud song, bizarrely, was their first single.

Barat, on the other hand, proved that he doesn't need Pete Doherty at all. The Libertines festival reunion shows at Reading and Leeds, just ahead of Barat's debut album, looked set to overshadow his first solo release. There is no denying the deep love and affection shared by Barat and Doherty, and it's a theme that runs throughout his simultaneously-published Threepenny Memoir. Freed from the conflicting personalities of Dirty Pretty Things and Pete's bumbling 'is he a poet or a singer? An artist or a sad, washed-up mess?' meanderings, Barat proved himself tonight to be an accomplished and confident frontman (until he spoke and you couldn't fathom a word he said).

Tracks which initially don't make sense on the album like 'The Magus' and 'What Have I Done' shone tonight with a circus-like mysteriousness, while the album's clear highlight, 'So Long My Lover' – easily the most beautiful, emotional song I've heard outside of a Rufus Wainwright album – was rendered even more plaintive live, his girlfriend / mother-of-their-unborn-child Edie Langley and her two sisters sprinkling McGarrigle-like folksy harmonies behind the song's world-weary acquiescence. I damn near sobbed my heart out; always a sucker for a moving chord change and a theme of unrequited love, me.

Then there were tracks from The Libertines' and Dirty Pretty Things' quartet of albums, all of which – predictably – prompted the most enthusiastic and raucous crowd response. 'Up The Bracket' was probably the best track of the lot, the only disappointment being the absence of Gary Powell's intricate yet powerful drum work. But though they were always half his anyway, performing the songs without Doherty found him owning the songs completely, and it left you wondering why Pete's contribution was as highly regarded as it was.

Audio Journal : 04/10/2010

2010-10-08T13:12:00.000-07:00

Take a four-piece band, take away the singer after a supposedly acrimonious split, cleverly change the band's name so it both references the absence of the singer and yet remains broadly identifiable as the same band, add a load of guest singers and the passing of about five years after the 'split' and release a new album. That's the formulae in theory. In practice they're 1) Talking Heads - David Byrne = The Heads; 2) (1996 - 1991) + (Michael Hutchence + Shaun Ryder + Richard Hell + Debbie Harry etc) = No Talking Just Head.

I've had this album on my Amazon wish list for ages, and always saw it as a low priority item in my trawl through the Talking Heads / David Byrne back catalogue; plus I've never been that struck on Tom Tom Club, the band that Talking Heads bassist Tina Weymouth and drummer Chris Frantz formed whilst still in Talking Heads, and whose success far outstripped the parent band; plus it never stays in stock for long.

There are undoubtedly elements reminiscent of Talking Heads – the funk edge and the distinct 'alternative' / 'college radio' sound; but in other ways it's a little like watching Rock Star: INXS, with various singers trying to fill David Byrne's shoes; only that doesn't work as an analogy since Michael Hutchence actually appears on 'The King Is Gone'. Considering the main reason for buying this would be because you're probably a Talking Heads fan, the best tracks are those which don't attempt to ape former glories. The opener 'Damage I've Done' (with Concrete Blonde's Johnette Napolitano) sounds like Wir's 'So And Slow It Grows' with a distorted, urgent chorus that creates something both fragile and tense simultaneously. 'Never Mind' (featuring original NYC punk Richard Hell) may sample the drums from the Eno-produced cover of Al Green's 'Take Me To The River', but the track positively swings under Hell's slightly creepy poetry. Another good track is the collaboration with Happy Mondays / Black Grape's Shaun Ryder which sounds to me like Dos Dedos Mis Amigos-era PWEI. Overall, this album works best when you try not to compare it too much to early Talking Heads glories, leaving you content to acknowledge the odd discernible echo of the elements that made that band so vital.

Happy Mondays turn up on the compilation Zero, which is a collection of tracks produced by auteur Manchester producer Martin Hannett; anyone who's seen his portrayal by Andy Serkis in Michael Winterbottom's Twenty-Four Hour Party People will recall Hannett as an odd mix of madcap scientist and musical rebel, ordering Joy Division drummer Stephen Morris to 'play faster, but slower' when creating the band's seminal 'She's Lost Control'. His unique treatment of drums and grinding bass appears throughout Zero, cropping up on tracks from Wasted Youth through The Psychedelic Furs and on to the starkly minimal 'In A Lonely Place' by New Order. This compilation is an essential purchase even if just for Jilted John's self-titled single and its 'Gordon is a moron' refrain. In 'Eleven O'Clock Tick Tock' there's also a brief reminder that U2 could have mined the post-punk sound successfully without turning into stadia dinosaurs.

Clearly forever to be associated with the punk of Buzzcocks (their first, self-financed single 'Boredom' is included here) and the post-punk of Basement Five, Joy Division and Magazine, Zero nevertheless highlights that Hannett worked just as successfully with leftfield indie pop bands like The Only Ones and Kitchens Of Distinction, while work with VU chanteuse Nico and her Invisible Girls on 'All Tomorrow's Parties' highlights a softer, more austerely-layered style. Happy Mondays' joyous 'Wrote For Luck' points to the producer's relevance right into the baggy / Madchester scene of the late Eighties and early Nineties, sadly coinciding with his death in 1991 from heart failure, induced by spiralling drug and alcohol use.

Underworld have come a long way from their early Eighties electronic pop work as Freur (their 'Doot Doot' single is totally of its time, but as relevant for the New Wave period as 'Rez' would be for the early Nineties dance scene), and Athens, a compilation released on !K7 last year highlights a totally different side to the duo of Karl Hyde and Rick Smith. For many, its the urgent strains of 'Born Slippy (Nuxx)' that they see (wrongly) as synonymous with the Underworld sound, and so Athens will disappoint anyone expecting an hour of shouted 'Lager! Lager! Lager!' laddishness, highlighting as it does Hyde / Smith's interest in, wait for it, jazz.

And not just any old jazz, but the interstellar strains of Alice Coltrane and Mahavishnu Orchestra; the out-there sounds of Sun Ra are sadly absent but would've dropped in just as well. There is a liberal sprinkling of jazz-funk-disco fusion and jazzy techno, all of which makes little sense in the context of the well-established Underworld sound until the segues into their own 'Oh' and the Eno / Hyde collaboration 'Beebop Shuffle', whereupon you start to appreciate that there really is a jazz looseness to their sound, whether that be in the sounds that float in and out of their tracks or the stream-of-consciousness (improvised?) vocal riffing from Hyde. All that said, this compilation works best – like No Talking Just Head – when you suspend any attempts at comparison with other reference points in the Underworld back catalogue.

Audio Journal : 27/09/2010

2010-09-30T14:28:00.000-07:00

Fans of electronic music / dance music read on; those not that bothered can skip to the end (if you want some tracks by me) or hit delete. Your choice.

I go through phases of eschewing and then returning to electronic music. I have a wide interest in electronica of all hues and variations – from Eighties synth-pop to often erratic, deconstructed soundscapes. Two recent purchases in the latter field were ANBB's Ret Marut Handshake (Raster-Noton, 2010) and Iconicity by Incite/ (Electroton, 2010).

The former is a collaboration between Alva Noto (an alias for electronic musician and artist Carsten Nicolai who runs Raster-Noton) and Blixa Bargeld. Bargeld is the stimmung of cult Berlin noise-merchants Einstürzende Neubauten who has more recently developed processed spoken-word performances ('rede') into his repetoire alongside his day job fashioning unexpected sounds from guitars and detritus in Neubaten. Nicolai on the other hand is the poster boy for lowercase glitch-based electronics, notable for early works based on the error sounds made by skipping CDs. The combination of two mavericks on Ret Marut Handshake finds Bargeld's voice surprisingly suited to Nicolai's cracked electronics, leaving you feeling slightly cheated that they only crafted five short tracks. The album is named after Ret Marut, a shady, chameleon figure that Bargeld found intriguing. One can only hope for more from this unlikely pairing.

Iconicity by Incite/ (the back-slash is not a typo, such keystrokes being pretty commonplace in the outer reaches of electronica) is also a short-form release; a 3" CD-R in a tiny transparent DVD case with the typography appearing to float over the box, an image doesn't really do this justice. Iconicity is interesting, absorbing electronica in a similar vein to the ANBB release above, though sharing much more in common with the sort of warped, distorted beats and odd time signatures of Autechre.

If skeletal beats and broken electronics aren't your bag, Jarl & Fotmeijer's Lifesigns (Innertrax, 2010) might be more your thing. Lifesigns captures the essence of the minimal, arpeggiating Detroit techno of the early Nineties laced with grid patterns of upbeat 4/4 beat alongside stasis-dominated ambient passages. The most insane thing of all is that the duo / Innertrax have elected to release this album free. I almost feel guilty downloading it it's so good. Those who don't share my sentiment can locate it here.

And so, finding myself once again enthused by these music forms as I frequently am, I'm making available three of my own electronica compositions, via my revived Nominal Musics label. You can get the Elliptic Paraboloid EP by Sketching Venus here.

Audio Journal : 20/09/2010

2010-09-23T11:50:00.000-07:00

Two albums that I was particularly looking forward to were released last week. The first was Grinderman's Grinderman 2. Grinderman is a four-piece band comprising Nick Cave, Warren Ellis, Martyn P Casey and Jim Sclavunos. Grinderman is designed to be an alternative to the band members' day jobs in Nick Cave's main band The Bad Seeds, and also allows Cave and Ellis a departure from their relatively high brow soundtrack work.

Grinderman, for those familiar with Cave's work with his earliest band The Boys Next Door / The Birthday Party and, from 1984, The Bad Seeds, is intended to be more raw, less refined, less planned. Cave describes it himself as more 'fun'. I got into Nick Cave in 1993 when I saw him perform the seminal 'Red Right Hand' on Jools Holland; I'd been aware of him already through the NME's continual praise, but also because he was (and still is) signed to my favourite label, Mute. Up to that point I'd only heard a unrepresentative B-side on the Mute compilation International, and hearing 'Red Right Hand' encouraged me into his back catalogue. My good friend Neill and I saw The Bad Seeds live at Brixton in 2004 and it cemented my belief that Cave is indeed one of the best performers in the business. More reviews of The Bad Seeds, The Birthday Party etc can be found over at my Documentary Evidence site; the full review of Grinderman 2 can also be found there too. If you can't be bothered to read that, it would appeal to anyone with half an interest in loud, rough rock with a fuzzy edge.

The other album was Interpol, by Interpol. Yeah, yeah, how many times have I mentioned that band here? The recording of their fourth album saw the departure of bassist Carlos Dengler, a key member of the group and throwing doubt on whether this was the end of the line for the band. Recruiting ex-Slint bassist Dave Pajo for live duties, the band appeared to have shrugged off any scepticism and refocussed.

Interpol is probably the band's most polished album yet. There's still the melancholy edge but there are brighter spots too, marking a progression of sorts. Some of the best tracks are the ones that start quietly and build toward epic crescendos – 'Lights' and 'Always Malaise' are the two critical cases in point, both consisting of layered elements which coalesce during the course of the song. Drummer Sam Fogarino makes his kit sound like a drum machine set to 'Krautrock motorik' setting and the piano sprinkles that crept into singer Paul Banks' solo album (as Julian Plenti) are liberally applied across the album. The brilliant single 'Barricades' is about as upbeat as this band is going to get, while other tracks court a punky ska vibe. I love it, but you'd have probably guessed as much.

Vinyl corner

A business trip to Luxembourg City and a degree of free time meant I found my way to CD Buttek Beim Palais, a treasure trove of vinyl and CDs spread haphazardly across a scattergun array of genres. I bought a second-hand 7" of Pete Shelley's 'Homosapien II'.

A late-night conversation a few weeks ago with Steve, a colleague, reminded me of this track. I only had a Simple Minds version of this (remixed by Erasure's Vince Clarke), and that conversation reminded me I should try and track the original down.

Well, this isn't actually the original. 'Homosapien' was released in 1981 from the album of the same name by the Buzzcocks frontman. The BBC banned it for the same reason that Frankie was silenced a couple of years later (thus ensuring the single cult and popular success). This 1989 re-recorded second version is credited to Pete Shelley and Power, Wonder And Love and recasts the electronic original as a floor-filling dance track with decent techno sounds. It doesn't knit together terribly well on first listen, and initially I thought it was a Stock, Aitken and Waterman record (the fact that the initials of the collaborators forms PWL didn't help). The B-side, an instrumental version, is better and would have dropped neatly into DJ sets, though it is definitely of its time.

Then again, it's hard to get too disappointed when you've only spent €0.50.

Audio Journal : 11/09/2010

2010-09-11T03:43:00.000-07:00

Going to see Muse was always going to be a rather unusual experience because I'm neither a fan nor terribly well-acquainted with more than one album in their back catalogue. That said, we spent an evening at home watching their Glastonbury performance with barely concealed awe at its sonic precision and theatrical stage spectacle, and found ourselves tracking down the last God-awful seats available for one of two dates at Wembley Stadium.

Since we booked those tickets, my enthusiasm has waned and despite my principal stipulation was that we must make a concerted effort to gen up on their back catalogue, we wound up there only really knowing 2006's Black Holes And Revelations which we bought when it was released; a good album, granted, but one I've only really listened to a few times and which never got added back into my iPod after I lost all my songs.

My interest was piqued, however, when I saw White Rabbits on the line-up. White Rabbits are a band hailing from Brooklyn whose 'Percussion Gun' single from last year featured a dense barrage of burundi drumming and some of the most impassioned vocals I've ever heard. The intensity of their performance was nothing short of thrilling. And the crowd seemed pretty appreciative too – not bad for the first band on the bill.

White Rabbits were followed by The Big Pink, whose first song sounded like the groove from 'Supermassive Black Hole', only like it had got stuck. I'd describe The Big Pink as a potentially interesting Muse-lite electronically-infused doom-prog. The singer looked like Ralph, the teddy-boy rocker from Dear John. There was absolute no justification for the dreary a capella cover version of 'These Arms Of Mine' by Otis Redding, which made you realise what sort of Johnny Borrell-sized ego their singer must have. 'Dominoes' was probably the highlight. 'Ohhhh,' said the woman behind. 'So, that's who they are.'

I can't bring myself to write about Lily Allen, I just can't. I don't have anything bad to say about her, and I also don't think there was anything wrong with her performance (apart from a weird junglist breakdown), but I just don't think she really fit the bill.

As for Muse; well, after watching the Glastonbury footage, they were everything we thought they'd be. The performance was ludicrously, ridiculously and fabulously over the top. During one song they ejaculated streamers over the crowd; they rode out into the crowd on a revolving, ascending stage to perform 'Undisclosed Desires'; during an encore a giant UFO was floated out above the crowd and a Cirque De Soleil-esque acrobat burst from the bottom to perform acrobatics while hanging from the bottom of the spaceship. That sort of thing. You get the picture. Totally Spinal Tap.

Add to the enormous stage set and unabashed pomposity a performance that was delivered with the band's trademarked flawlessness, and I think I began to understand just why Muse are regarded as such a vital stadium act, and also why our side of the stadium seemed to be dominated by hordes of loyal European fans who obviously schlepp around the globe watching them. For three unassuming guys from Devon (Matt Bellamy's silver suit aside), their stage presence and enormous progtastic sound way exceeds their relatively diminutive stature.

Having an appreciation of their wider catalogue would have stopped me feeling like a fraud – I normally hate those people at concerts who only know the hits – but my highlights were probably 'Starlight' and the glam-prog 'Personal Jesus'-meets-'Doctorin' The Tardis' strains of 'Uprising'.

Audio Journal : 06/09/2010

2010-09-03T13:38:00.000-07:00

Over the past year or so, I've focussed this blog on things I like. Now it's the turn of the things I don't; specifically, albums that I've decided to delete from my iPod.

The first is Hot Fuss by The Killers. I bought this album to scratch an itch, and itch duly scratched I realised I didn't like it very much and that quite honestly I preferred the itch. Growing up listening to Eighties synth-pop and hearing some of that electro / New Romantic sound evoked in the singles taken from Hot Fuss made The Killers appealing as a concept, and I listened to the album repeatedly when I bought it. Then I just went off it; Sam's Town killed turned me off them completely and now it's time to say farewell to Hot Fuss. CD sold on eBay and deleted from my iPod.

After my wife played me 'Slow Hands' I fell for New York's Interpol in a major way around the time of their second album, Antics. In New York in 2005 I caught up with their back catalogue and bought Turn On The Bright Lights from Other Music in the Lower East Side. However, I was frustrated by the paucity of their back catalogue. And then along came Editors, rising from the somewhat less glamorous Midlands, with The Back Room, which seemed almost to be a carbon copy of Interpol. I loved it. And then Interpol released Our Love To Admire and suddenly I had no need of Editors. Plus since then they've become altogether Killers-esque in their leanings. See above. CD sold on eBay, deleted songs from my iPod.

We all liked Keane when their début Hopes And Fears came out didn't we? The album was released at a time when introspective, emotional music was in focus – Snow Patrol, Elbow etc – and for a while Keane were leading the dour pack. And to think they didn't even have guitars. I had a couple of their songs pegged for inclusion on my hypothetical soundtrack to the film adaptation of the book I haven't finished writing yet, but finding the album again and giving it a listen I've decided they're just boring. Deleted.

Bloc Party's A Weekend In The City was a major disappointment for me. I liked Silent Alarm, their 2005 debut, and I figured I'd like the follow-up. The sleeve – with its slightly eerie shots of the Westway – is weirdly moving; opener 'Song For Clay (Disappear Here)' is named after Clay, the main protagonist of Bret Easton Ellis's seminal Less Than Zero, with the parenthesised section being a phrase that has appeared in every one of Easton Ellis's novels. Sadly, given Less Than Zero's air of casual detachment from the events unfolding around Clay and the sonic possibilities that could be created using that reference point, the Bloc Party track is hugely disappointing. As is the rest of the album. The closest the band get to that vibe of chilly aloofness is on the thinly-veiled 'On'. Sold / deleted.

Vinyl corner

I used to buy a lot of records from charity shops. Back in the days of my first website / blog (Red Elvis Central), most weeks I would just write about 7" singles I'd bought that week in Colchester's many charity stores.

Occasionally I'll still go into such shops and look for things, but it's without the enthusiasm of my early twenties. I'll flick through vinyl absentmindedly, smile at 7" singles I own and ruminate on how it's generally Eighties pop tracks that you find there these days. Back in the mid-Nineties it was Eighties stuff that I'd buy, feeling excited when I chanced upon a Human League or Tears For Fears record, if only because they were unusual in amongst the vast swathes of dumped Jim Reeves records. Now I can't be bothered.

However, a couple of weeks back I found a copy of Owen Paul's 'My Favourite Waste Of Time' from 1986, a song I saw performed on children's TV at the time and have had buzzing round my head at various points ever since. With maturity I began to think of the song as a bit of a guilty pleasures and that's exactly how I felt when I finally bought it for 25p a few weeks back.

I haven't heard 'My Favourite Waste Of Time' since it was released, and I'm impressed that I had even remembered how it went after 24 years, but that wasn't the most surprising thing - the surprise was the fact that I may have remembered this as a cheesy pop track, but it's actually a reasonably mature example of proper pop, in the same way that Nik Kershaw or Talk Talk transcended chart-bothering naffness. Sure it's anthemic, soulful, joyous, whatever, but it's not naff at all. It has a pleasant acoustic guitar running throughout the track, and true to this point in the Eighties, it has a sax solo; I wonder whatever happened to sax solos.

B-side 'Just Another Day' is a delicate, laid-back mixture of skipping percussion, Michael Karoli-esque Krautrock* guitar atmospheres tucked away in the distance and a heartfelt vocal.

According to his Wikipedia entry, Owen Paul McGee to give him his full name, 'is now back on the road as the lead vocalist for Ex-Simple Minds', a fact that I only mention because he was never a member of Simple Minds.

* Ian - you might be disappointed to know that Krautrock comes up as 'geriatric' on my BlackBerry spellcheck.

Audio Journal : 30/08/2010

2010-08-28T10:02:00.000-07:00

With the summer all but over, this is the third and final of my summer albums, and I promised it would be divisive.

Perhaps that was overstating it. This is just an album from my favourite band, Erasure, my fandom of said band having garnered much derision over the years. You know the sort - 'Oh, you like them? Really? Them?' or 'So you like Erasure... Are you gay?' That sort of rubbish. I've said it before, here and elsewhere, and I'll say it again. Erasure – the duo of singer Andy Bell and ex-Yazoo, ex-Depeche Mode electronic music guru Vince Clarke – are, and always will be, my favourite band. And for the record, I'm not.

The Innocents occupies a special place in my musical collection, as it was the first Erasure album I heard. I'd seen them on Going Live, loved the massive hit 'Sometimes', but was just at the cusp of starting to spend my pocket money on music; until Erasure my record buying was scattergun at best (Fat Boys? Really?). After hearing The Innocents I said with absolute conviction that they were my favourite band. When they released the follow-up, Wild!, I began collecting their back catalogue, first tentatively and then obsessively. By the time of the last single from Chorus in 1992 I owned every single and all but one limited edition release.

I'm not sure that would have happened if it wasn't for my dad coming home from work one day brandishing a tape of The Innocents a colleague had made for him. I seem to recall it was just prior to our annual Whitsun trip to Southend, and I spent the majority of that holiday on the beach listening to this on my Walkman over and over, while wearing cheap sunglasses (so I could stare at older girls in bikinis; I was 11. The most remarkable part of that is that the weather was actually good enough in May for girls to even weak bikinis). Hence why I always associate it with the warmer months.

Considering their repute as a pop band, it's not a particularly upbeat album. Songs like 'Chains Of Love', 'Weight Of The World', the Motown-esque 'Heart Of Stone' and my personal favourite 'Phantom Bride' are optimistic on the face of it but are laced with a sense of defeat, sadness and world-weariness. Only the gospel sounds of 'Yahoo!' could conceivably count as 'upbeat'. Sometime Pet Shop Boys producer Stephen Hague produced the album, which explains why the album has a less prominent electronic angle, more of an organic feel.

The album spawned three much-loved singles, the aforementioned 'Chains Of Love', plus 'Ship Of Fools' and 'A Little Respect'. The latter's defiant stance in the face of adversity was covered, improbably, by Wheatus as a teen-rock anthem.

Read more about The Innocents at my Documentary Evidence site.

Audio Journal : 23/08/2010

2010-08-26T12:37:00.000-07:00

So, I love Twitter. Probably a little too much, but as a music fan I think it's an incredible source of music I frankly haven't got the time to source out for myself.

Tweets from the likes of Gap My Mind and Morning After Pills (two New York-based blogs obsessed with disseminating new music) offering free mp3s have swelled my collection of miscellaneous tracks to new levels; tweets from rcrdlbl consist of multiple daily free mp3s and are always a good source of interesting new bands, plus the odd track from established bands / artists. The point is that I could just go to these sites and search endlessly; time-stretched as we all are, the regular tweets from these three sites prompt me to download things I just wouldn't get around to it, which would leave this blog to focus on my usual fall-back subjects – Interpol, Rufus Wainwright, Sonic Youth / Thurston Moore, David Byrne etc.

Ubuweb is another; their collection of Fluxus, modern / post-modern composition and Downtown experimentation keeps my intellectually inquisitive music radar sated. Daily tweets from them range from random Warhol quotes to links to 20CD compilations of early electronica.

Then there's the more interesting aspect, to me, which is bands / musicians / artists who just start following your tweets as a result of something you post - people using Twitter tend to search out people who post things that they're also interested in; you recipocate; everyone's peripheral network of followers is thus mutually swelled. This first happened early in my Twitter experience, late last year. I don't know what it was, but something I posted must have attracted the attention of the band SixtyFiveMiles, I got into a dialogue with the person responsible for updating their Twitter status, I listened to their MySpace tracks, then downloaded their debut album, Finnish Tango, which I reviewed here; further, because of the relatively easy access Twitter affords to musicians themselves, I secured a brief interview with Simon from the band, which I also posted on this blog.

The most recent occasion has been similarly rewarding. A New York musician, Ignacio Uriarte, began following my tweets and we struck up a dialogue centred around music (me saying how much I liked bands from NYC; him saying how much good music was coming out of the UK).

The five tracks he emailed me are what I would describe as anthemic alternative guitar pop. I found myself humming the strident, uplifting harmonies of 'Thugs And Thieves (You Can Have It All)' for days after the mail arrived; the urgent Brit Pop-meets-Eighties New Wave 'What It Takes', with its Beatles-y middle eight, is similarly instantly catchy, but the effect doesn't wear after a while as it does with some songs in the genre.

My personal favourite was 'Miles Away', sounding like it could have sat comfortably on The Virgins' debut album from last year; starting with some very Cars-esque spindly guitar, the subject matter – separation, mostly metaphorical – is hardly optimistic but the effect is to create a glossy, quality pop.

I only hope someone signs this talented songwriter and takes his songs to a wider audience. Meantime, navigate your browser to the links below and enjoy the songs for yourself.

Ignacio artist page

Audio Journal : 16/08/2010

2010-08-20T13:29:00.000-07:00

Source: MySpace / (c) Ali Tollervey

It is an increasing trend that when I go to gigs, it's the support that are often way more interesting than the band you've actually paid to see. For example, all three support acts at the recent Kings Of Leon Hyde Park stadium-histrionic extravaganza knocked socks off the Followills.

So too did Dark Horses, opening for Kasabian at Brixton Academy. A warm-up show for an upcoming V Festival slot, it is always a big thing to see a band that have become stadium monsters in a comparatively small venue. Despite the energy of the crowd, it failed to move me. Much. Well, unless you count making me move not just to the back of the standing area but all the way to back of the balcony upstairs. Yeah, I know, I'm a wuss. I'm really too old for that crushing and pushing.

Moronic crowd aside, the set failed to impress me. As bands become larger, the opportunity to surprise diminishes, unless you count a Bonham-lite vignette drum solo (replete with a gong) from the band's Leo Sayer-lookalike sticksman; or the way one of the songs suddenly tacked on Giorgio Moroder's arpeggiating bassline and Serge began singing 'I Feel Love' (it's the laziest trick in the book when a song has a 4/4 rhythm; yawn). Consequently the set was literally no different to when we saw them at Wembley last winter – nothing wrong with that per se, but I just think seeing them do it once (venue aside) was probably enough. The best track was the motorik B-side 'Julie And The Moth-Man' (here strangely mixed up with lyrics from Salt 'n Pepa's 'Push It'), just like it was last time.

Dark Horses were excellent. They arrived on-stage to a tape of one of the Hell's Angel security guards from Altamont bemoaning the crowd touching his precious Harley, while an insistent drone burned harshly underneath. After a couple of tracks I began to detect some healthy Jesus And Mary Chain references in the fuzzy, distorted vibe (I'd like to believe this translates to their studio recordings, but I suspect it won't). I couldn't fathom what the caped female lead was singing, but that also adds to the JAMC allure. Tom from Kasabian joined her for part of one song, singing some laddish 'ooh-ooh' sounds, and dancing like King Louie. She returned the favour later with Kasabian. The cape I could have done without; a bit too Florence Welch for me, but it did have the name of the band on the back, which helped in that part of the set where they haven't introduced themselves and you're wondering who they are. It also broke up the shades and leather of the five guys behind her.

Most songs were tense, edgy affairs. There was one that harnessed the throbbing muted groove of the Reid brothers doing their best Velvets / Modern Lovers thing; they played electric mandolin; a guy looking like Sid Vicious played percussion – tambourine on some tracks, while on others he smashed a drum with a (Mary) chain. (The latter point reminded me of a gig in Colchester in 1997 where Navigator and Stars Of The Lid supported Labradford; a guy in Navigator repeatedly thrashed a chain across the stage). Synth, deep bass resonance and fuzzy guitars all made Dark Horses a compelling proposition.

Dark Horses @ MySpace

Download 'Rose' / 'Rose Unconcious'

Audio Journal : 02/08/2010

2010-08-04T12:40:00.000-07:00

A while back I said I'd do a series of 'summer albums', the first being New Order's Technique. The début Fleet Foxes album is the second, and probably the most recent album I'd put into the hypothetical 'summer albums' playlist.

Fleet Foxes is a captivating slice of lo-fi, folksy Americana. So lo-fi in fact that there are apparently all sorts of off-timings across the record, indicating an eschewing of ProTools perfection in favour of genuine warmth and realism. (In fairness, it would take a producer, engineer or professional musician to notice this; being none of these, I'll just take Q's word for it.)

The album is brief, and sometimes when I listen to it I tune out of the individual tracks completely, just absorbing the pastoral warmth of the delicate, ethereal atmospheres it generates. Clearly then, it's not an album that I'd consider listening to when driving; but it is, I find, the ideal soundtrack to chilled-out summer Sunday family breakfasts with the kids (regrettably the only day of the week we're altogether to have breakfast), the gentle sounds from the music adequately matching the slight hangover haze from the Saturday night before whilst having a simultaneously calming influence over two ordinarily wilful children.

If I were forced to pick favourite tracks here, it would probably be as follows: 'White Winter Hymnal', whose name doesn't sound at all summery (though its verses do conclude with the words 'summer time') but which includes some beautiful, delicate and uplifting vocal harmonies; 'He Doesn't Know Why', whose emotional rises and falls are just as riveting after repeated listens, progressing, seemingly chorus-less, to a final section of almost Phil Spector-esque grandeur; finally, 'Your Protector', which has similar characteristics to the two songs above, with a strident, elegiac tone, as well as an hint of Celtic mysticism.

I find it hard to separate this album from M Night Shyamalan's The Village, since I watched that movie at around the same time as we bought this. But more than anything it just perfectly suits the slightly erratic summers we are cursed with in this country.

As for the third, and final, 'summer album' in the playlist, expect it to be divisive; then again, this is supposed to be a relatively personal blog...

Audio Journal : 26/07/2010

2010-07-30T15:28:00.000-07:00

Okay, things have become a little safe around here. I do this with music. When I feel like I've strayed too far into what I'd describe as 'polite' music, I feel the need to listen to something more adventurous to reset things.

So I listened to a rip someone blogged of the 1993 Harry Pussy 12" 'In An Emergency You Can Shit On A Puerto Rican Whore' (well, writing that will flush out whether my parents are still reading this). Listening to eight of these nine tracks feel like flossing your ears with barbed wire – it's chaotic, messy with over-distorted guitars bludgeoning all else into submission; words can be heard but not deciphered; frantic not-quite-riffs dominate. Then there's the final track; in anyone else's mitts the unlikely punk-fuzz cover of Kraftwerk's 'Showroom Dummies' would sound nightmarish, but compared to the other tracks it sounds positively gentle. In the lyrics to 'Showroom Dummies', the plastic models in the shop window come alive and break the glass in order to escape; Harry Pussy's version is the sound of them grinding the glass under their feet as they step onto the pavement, leaving shards and deep scratches embedded in their plastic feet.

Duly reset, 'In An Emergency...' was followed up with a CD I bought in Falmouth's excellent Jam by Loren Connors (formerly Loren Mazzacane Connors) and Jim O'Rourke. Two Nice Catholic Boys captures duo performances by the two guitarists from European dates in 1997, and consists of three vaguely-monikered tracks ('Paris', 'Or Maybe Koln', 'Definitely Not Koln'). Connors and O'Rourke are titans of the experimental music field (both composed and improvised) and the interplay between them here is quite special. Judicious use of feedback and reverb prevents this from becoming some sort of axe-wielding standoff, and there are brief flashes of staccato rhythm. This was released on the excellent Family Vineyard label from New York. Somewhere in a record box I have a solo guitar album by sometime contributor to The Wire magazine Alan Licht (YMCA), also released on the label; one for another week.

Sticking with the distorted guitar / noise theme, Lou Reed's Metal Machine Trio (or MM3) released a double CD of live dates in LA two years ago and I totally missed it. The trio is intended to draw out the 'spirit' of Reed's Metal Machine Music, released in 1975. Metal Machine Music is a love-it-or-hate-it album consisting of electronically-processed guitar and synth and is mostly ear-shredding noise of the extremest order. At the time of its release Reed was quoted as saying that it was recorded to honour a final album contract obligation.

Since then its reputation has grown among the experimental music fraternity, during which renaissance Reed appears to have changed his stance, claiming it was a calculated piece of sonic artistry all along. He has subsequently performed the piece with Berlin chamber orchestra Zeitkratzer, and MM3 is an extension of the relatively free jazz / improvised atmosphere the original Metal Machine Music evokes. The Creation Of The Universe, despite its slightly over-confident title, is subtle improvisation, mostly; occasional brooding distorted guitar rises up menacingly from the more low-key sections, often heralding passages of fuzzy noise and skronking sounds reminiscent of James Chance from Ulrich Krieger (who also forms part of the Text Of Light trio with Alan Licht and Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo). There are chord changes in some sections that had me scratching my head wondering where I recognised them from and then I sussed it – they're the same as final section of The Velvet Underground's 'I'm Sticking With You'. The third member of this free rock trio is Seth Calhoun, billed as providing 'live processing and continuum fingerboard'. Nice.

Others: Sleigh Bells 'Infinity Guitars' (big distorted beats and loud , stuttering, guitar interruptions with shouty female vocals; me like); Screaming Females 'I Don't Mind It' (New Jersey trio do girl-fronted melodic Buzzcocks-esque punk - only marred by needless riffing at the end); The Silver Pesos 'Regresando' (free single from this LA band – dreamy ambient electro-pop with latin flourishes, plus an excellent Youth-esque remix); Best Coast 'Boyfriend' (hazy, Spector-esque boy-girl duo pop; beguiling); Anamanaguchi 'Airbrushed' (zany Yo-Gabba-Gabba-style synth goofiness from New York).

Audio Journal : 17/07/2010

2010-07-20T14:05:00.000-07:00

Back at the end of June, Bret Easton Ellis posted on Twitter thus: 'High Violet by The National is the best record I've heard in a year. It's the only thing I've listened to on the Imperial Bedrooms tour.' Consequently, since reading that I haven't been able to disassociate the album from the latest novel by the former literature enfant terrible with this, the fifth LP from Brooklyn five-piece The National.

The mood of High Violet has been likened to the grey, rain-soaked tones of Joy Division. While their music does have an undeniably dense, dark-hued atmosphere, High Violet's aspirations are far wider than Ian Curtis's (ultimately terminal) negativity; a wider sonic palette also broadens the mood. It's closest cousin, to these ears, appears to be the Interpol of third album Our Love To Admire. My favourite tracks are the appropriately-named 'Sorrow' and the motorik 'Afraid Of Everyone', but the whole affair is gloriously bleak.

I've listened to this album repeatedly over the past month; I know it's not healthy to do so, as I found to my detriment with the aforementioned Our Love To Admire. 'Introspection must be sampled in small doses' should be the health warning on such albums. But it does also seem to suit the trademarked air of paranoid detachment of Imperial Bedrooms.

Throughout our holiday in Cornwall, one album that we kept falling back on – especially when the sun came out – was the self-titled début by The Drums; its shimmery surf-pop seemed the logical soundtrack, but I've already waxed lyrical about that LP and don't plan to do so again. The other recent purchase that got heavily played while we were away was the self-titled album by San Diego's The Soft Pack. The Californian four-piece were previously known as The Muslims, and not unsurprisingly were encouraged to change their name.

I'm not sure where to place this LP. No single style seems to prevail, but there is more than a passing resemblance to some of the punky archness of Jonathan Richman and his Modern Lovers, especially in the trio of faster-paced tracks – 'Pull Out', 'Parasite' and 'Faithman'. Those tracks also have a whiff of lo-fi producer Steve 'Big Black' Albini circa his derided (and band-separating) work with Rosa Mota. So, art-punk-grunge anyone? Well worth checking out.

For the journey down to Cornwall we bought some audio books for the kids rather than have them sat in front of DVDs. One of these was the Theodore Geisel – Dr. Seuss – classic Green Eggs And Ham, ably read by Adrian Edmondson, which had us all in stitches thanks to his comic voices and Seuss's rhymes. There's a line in an old Lunachicks song about that book, so I'll be heading loftward to dig that album out in due course.

Others: Kid Savant 'Drawn And Quartered' (electro-infused shoegazer pop, not unlike The XX); The XX 'Islands' (electro-infused shoegazer pop, not unlike Kid Savant); The Foals 'Miami' (like an Avalanches remix of Robert Smith jamming with Happy Mondays); Danger Mouse & Sparklehorse featuring Julian Casablancas 'Little Girl' (in which The Strokes front-man sings over a jangly imaginary soundtrack to a kidnap chase through smoky Parisian pavement cafés); Male Bonding 'Weird Feelings' (shouty grunge pop with Sixties flashes on Sub Pop); Crystal Fighters 'In The Summer' (imagine PWEI soundtracking Manga classic Akira).

It's good to be back.

Audio Journal : 28.06.2010

2010-06-30T15:32:00.000-07:00

This was going to be about the Kings Of Leon concert we just went to at Hyde Park, but all I can say is the following, and I apologise for the lack of descriptive adjectives. Oh, and everyone was wearing a tedious uniform of either Bench or A&F / Hollister t-shirts and Ray Ban's.

The Features were great, and that band should be far more successful than they've been.

The Whigs were also great and we'll definitely be investigating their back catalogue.

The Drums, whose album I wrote about last week, were also great. I especially liked the way singer Jonathan Pierce disdainfully left the stage, flinging his mic away as he did so.

The Black Keys were, you guessed it, great. Effortlessly cool, the anguished drummer in this heavy fuzzed-up blues duo looks like he's in pain every time he hits a drum. He also looks a little like Philip Glass.

And Kings Of Leon were great too. The new songs were great. The Pixies cover was great. The old songs were great. 'Sex On Fire' was horrible, but the A&F / Hollister t-shirts and Ray Ban's-wearing fourth-album fans loved it.

So, in summary, it was great.

Audio Journal : 21/06/2010

2010-06-22T13:03:00.000-07:00

I didn't want to like The Drums, I really didn't. The band, residents of trendy Brooklyn and forming part of the rich, unending seam of bands emerging thence, sounded to me like a pick 'n mix blend of the Eighties bands I remember. On the first two songs I heard – 'I Felt Stupid' and 'Best Friend' – I thought I heard a vocalist, Jonathan Pierce, doing a sterling Marc Almond impression while duetting with New Order's backing tapes. The prevalence of high bass melodies just made the New Order comparisons even more obvious. Why, I thought to myself, would I want to listen to this, when I could just dust down my Soft Cell and New Order CDs instead?

Then I saw them performing a version of 'Best Friend' on the insipid Friday Night With Jonathan Ross show, and they were all big quiffs, turn-ups and irony, Pierce's vocal setting being notched up to 'camp', and I thought they were taking the piss. Even the line 'You're my best friend / But then you died' seemed to lose some of its Morrissey-esque drama. And the band name? Surely a joke given that drums are the one element hardly prominent in their sound.

But the 'idea', or the concept of The Drums as a great band remained, not least because I tend to be a sucker for most NY-area bands. And so, when I found out they'd be supporting Kings Of Leon when we see them at Hyde Park next week, and with their début album just released, I thought I'd give them a second chance. I'm glad I did.

The Drums is a polished début (but then again, these days, all débuts are pretty well polished) and the poppy New Wave style is carried well across the album's thirteen tracks. Ignoring 'Best Friend', which, although a good song, is a bit too instant, the album is uniformly perfect; a perfect, summery vibe which can only come from the States – our dour British electro and post-punk indie bands rarely sound this joyous – and the mood only drops with the curiously Killers-esque ballad 'Down By The Water' (by way of a reminder, I don't like The Killers; sorry). 'We Tried' has a bassline just a few notes short of Joy Division's motorik 'Digital'. There's a song about surfing (ahem, 'Let's Go Surfing') which appears to include the lines 'Obama / I wanna go surfing' complete with Beach Boys-style harmonies, natch. There's songs about walking round New York ('I Need Fun In My Life') which will always get a thumbs up from me, and a plaintive, poppy, piece about mismatched expectations ('Book Of Stories'). As débuts go, its remarkably self-assured, straddling a sonic rawness with confident yet subtly-deployed electronic embellishments. And it may sound it, but it's not throwaway; beneath a sheen of apparent optimism, most songs seem to contain disappointment, self-doubt and negativity in spades.

Comparisons are the lowest form of review, and I should know because I do it all the time, but if you contrast The Drums with say, The Bravery – who also purportedly wore the Brit / synth influence with pride until they were rumbled as pretenders – they do seem a whole lot more authentic and earnest than some of the other bands emerging today. I stand wholly corrected.

Audio Journal : 14/06/2010

2010-06-18T15:30:00.000-07:00

This is the first in a series of reviews of what I like to call 'summer albums', albums which evoke – for me at least – the warmth and optimism of the summer months.

New Order's Technique is one such album. Generally regarded as being among the seminal Manchester band's best albums, Technique was recorded in the acid haze of the nascent Balearic sound; always comfortable with hedonism, the eclectic Balearic mix of pre-baggy indie, electro-infused rock and early acid house which was played in Ibizan nightclubs provided the inspiration for Technique.

Not that you'd know it. Aside from a general sunny vibe (mostly) evident across the album, Technique is actually one of New Order's most 'rock' albums since Movement, their confused post-Ian Curtis debut. One exception is the opener, 'Fine Time', which nicks a jacking acid house rhythm and throws the sonic kitchen sink at it – computerised voices, Hooky's bass melodies, tinkly xylophone riffs and even bleating sheep noises right at the end; it has Hooky intoning scarily that the object of the song is 'too young' and that said person has 'love technique'. It's positively pervy if you ask me, and overall the track - like many at the time - has too many disparate ideas running through it. I sometimes skip it to be honest. Far better is the late-Eighties club-friendly sound and endearing melancholia of 'Mr Disco' (so long as you can stomach Pet Shop Boys-style orchestral stabs).

Elsewhere, jangly guitar riffs, classic Hooky bass melodies and some of Bernard Sumner's best heartfelt lyrics abound. The best tracks, for me, would be the guitar pop of 'All The Way', 'Love Less' and 'Run'. For many years my personal favourite was 'Vanishing Point', an austere electronic pop gem infused with a thudding 4/4 beat.

Technique brings to mind some strong memories for me – listening to the album in my friend Steve's red Polo with another friend, Jon, on the way to work social events during the particularly sticky summer of 1993; sticking the CD on ahead of going to Clacton for a boozy day with Neil after we'd finished the slog of our second year exams at Essex University in 1996. It's just one of those albums, and it will always get heavy play by me during the summer months.

Audio Journal : 07/06/2010

2010-06-12T14:36:00.000-07:00

Last year I offered a brief review of Alistair Crosbie's The Last Days Of Summer, describing it as being '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.' High praise indeed.

This week I completed a major interview with Crosbie, an experimental musician based in Glasgow, whose works are released as CD-Rs in beautiful, hand-made sleeves, via his own Lefthand Pressings imprint.

In April, Crosbie released no less than four new albums – musicforawakening, Scarlett Dies, All Suns Must Set (Prelude To Wanderlight Falls) and a collection of previously unreleased works melded together across two discs, Cinders. The music contained in these four hand-crafted and beautifully-packaged releases range from the ethereal and uplifting processed guitar of Scarlett Dies, the deep bass tones of All Suns Must Set, to the eclectic Cinders, containing fragments of everything from icy piano works to spoken word passages to poetry to pulsing electronica.

The interview can be found over at my Documentary Evidence website. Some excerpts of Crosbie's work, as well as some exclusive downloads can be found at his Bandcamp page.

Audio Journal : 31/05/2010

2010-06-02T14:04:00.000-07:00

Work from home playlist

Two unusual things about today – one, I worked from home and two, I had the house to myself. Here was today's work from home playlist, three albums selected at random to help me concentrate and be more productive.

The Orb Live '93

I first got into The Orb about a year after they released U.F.Orb. Before that I didn't really get the point of ambient music and I also thought The Orb in particular were just a huge joke. Their 'performance' of a hugely compressed single version of 'Blue Room' on Top Of The Pops saw the duo of Dr. Alex Paterson and Kris 'Thrash' Weston sitting either side of a chess board bathed in blue light, and I just didn't get it. Later I realised that there was humour inherent in their chill out music – that's what happens when you work with Jimmy Cauty from The KLF – but it wasn't meant to be a joke.

By 1993 however, I'd just finished my GCSEs, a lot of family stuff was kicking off, mild teenage angst was developing and I needed to find some way of calming down. U.F.Orb was the antidote. I bought it on cassette the day before my father went into hospital for an operation, and spent the entire length of his op sat in the family car listening to the album. It spawned an ongoing love of textural ambient music, but nothing – even some of The Orb's later output – ever came close to hearing that album for the first time.

The only thing that topped that album was seeing The Orb live at Warwick Arts Centre in 1995 with a school friend. It was an incredible evening, though possibly not as incredible as the people stoned out of their nuts found it. I genuinely regarded that concert as my musical coming of age, much more affecting in many ways than any of the usual landmark life events that ensued.

The problem is that I don't remember much about that night beyond the fact that in the post-concert DJ set I shook Dr. Alex Paterson's hand and gave him a massive thumbs up. The closest I can get is this 1993 live compilation which draws together tracks from various performances, including a seminal 'Tower Of Dub' – ex-PiL bassist Jah Wobble's low-slung dub rhythm pushed to levels that I recollect when played 'live' (by way of a sampled loop) back at Warwick Arts Centre made me think my chest was going to cave in.

Aphex Twin Selected Ambient Works 85 – 92

Hooked on ambient music as I became in 1993 after purchasing U.F.Orb, it didn't take long before this album fell into my mits. Aphex Twin, by the time of this collection on the Belgian R&S label, was already established as a electronica enigma, a musical auteur who claimed not to have heard any of the music that his music was compared to; he made music in his shed, in Cornwall which at the time wasn't exactly regarded as a techno centre.

Richard D James, Aphex's given name, had a particularly unique take on the ambient genre. In few cases on Selected Ambient Works do you find the wispy, pulsing electronica which characterised vast swathes of this particular substrata of electronic music. Instead you get heavily reverb-ed slowed-down 'ardcore beats, icy synth lines and Willy Wonka samples. It prefaces the Warp label's fascination with clanging distorted beats and provides the bridge between the likes of Autechre with the industrial music of Cabaret Voltaire; not that James would have claimed to have consciously known this.

Warp released Selected Ambient Works II a few years later; it had no track names, just images reflecting each of the tracks. I borrowed it from the library the same day as I borrowed Brian Eno's The Shutov Assembly. I remember thinking that both albums sounded pretty much the same.

David Bowie Christiane F. - Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo

I had never considered buying Bowie until I read Christopher Sandford's Loving The Alien biography at University in the mid-Nineties. I don't think I've ever elected to read about an artist before actually having any of their music, but something about the book in the campus's branch of Waterstone's caught my eye and I decided I'd give it a go.

What emerged was an attraction to Bowie's 'Berlin' period – the trio of albums Low, Heroes and Lodger – which were produced by Bowie and Eno while the erstwhile David Jones was a resident in the city. I think it was an interest in Berlin as a cultural influence, and the influence of Low on Joy Division, more so than Eno's engagement, that hooked me in to that trio of albums. I bought the trio of albums over a period of a couple of years after reading that book and initially found them confusing, challenging listening experiences. In a bizarre way I didn't feel like I was entitled to listen to Bowie; I didn't understand his vernacular.

Since then I've moved either side of the Berlin period, specifically the Velvets-influenced Ziggy albums, but it's to the Berlin albums that I always return. This soundtrack album effectively works as a greatest hits of the period, drawing together album tracks and sundry oddities; the best of these is '“Helden”', a German version of the mighty '”Heroes”', in my opinion one of the most uplifting songs ever recorded.

Audio Journal : 24/05/2010

2010-05-28T14:30:00.000-07:00

Okay, okay. So I said that this week I'd be posting my interview with Glasgow-based experimental musician Alistair Crosbie. I lied.

Instead, I've completed an interview with Phil Costello, vocalist and guitarist in metal band Diamondsnake. Diamondsnake is the brainchild of electronic musician Moby and the aforementioned Costello, and I've been an ardent Moby fan since he released the 'Move' EP in 1993.

If you've bought the 2006 Moby compilation Go - The Very Best Of Moby, you'll know that Moby is an artist fond of jumping musical genres at will. Most people are familiar with his work on the hugely successul album Play, which blended gospel samples with hip-hop beats, but few will remember the thrash-punk album that came before, Animal Rights. Although best known as an Christian-vegan electronic musician, Moby has also produced material for Guns n' Roses and Ozzy Osborne, and first dabbled in music with the hardcore band Vatican Commandos.

Anyway, enough of the preamble. I was lucky enough to secure this interview with Costello for my Documentary Evidence website. Click here to read it. And to download free Diamondsnake tracks from Facebook, click here.

Audio Journal : 19/05/2010

2010-05-19T12:11:00.000-07:00

Pulp's Jarvis Cocker has produced an album for The National Trust, the UK charity responsible for the ongoing ownership and upkeep of a number of properties, areas of conservation land and sites of significant historical importance.

The album consists of 'environmental sounds' recorded at NT properties and sequenced together into a single, seamless atmospheric work. With the exception of a few – clocks at Bickling Hall, a strap press at Patterson's Spade Mill, an old music box at Lanhydrock – there are few opportunities to directly tie the sounds recorded to the locations and properties specified, even if you were a frequent visitor there. Instead you just need to trust that they are genuine recordings, not sounds lifted off the albums of sound FX and environmental atmospheres the BBC and others used to release in more antediluvian times.

Whilst it's a very serene, very English album, with the exception of 'Quarry Bank Mill - Murmurs Of Children In School House', you'd be mistaken for thinking that all NT properties are always so quiet and serene – clearly the atmospheres would have been very different if they'd recorded the clamour that can be frequently heard in NT cafés or gift shops. You'd be very lucky indeed to be able to experience some of these locations without the near complete intrusion of people.

Personally, I found the collection cloying rather than calming; perhaps this is the danger of listening to this on a busy commuter train into London. I found the almost industrial sounding clamour of the strap press (whatever that is; part of me doesn't want to know) generally more appealing, reminding me of an organic Neubauten.

As for Cocker's involvement, that's debatable. Apparently he selected the sounds. I would never, ever go so far as to say that it was, by attaching a well known personality to this project, a cynical ploy to drive people from outside the NT's core demographic to their website. Or have I just done that? Cynicism aside, I'm a National Trust member and am supportive of pretty much anything they do to protect significant aspects of the British national heritage.

Download the album and listen to individual atmospheres here.

All images (c) National Trust

Audio Journal : 17/05/2010

2010-05-17T13:25:00.000-07:00

I have spent most of the last week listening to the four beautiful new releases by Glaswegian experimental musician Alistair Crosbie. Alistair and I have been trading emails this week as part of an interview to accompany my reviews next week.

Where I haven't been listening to ethereal guitar works, I've been catching up on downloaded (legally) odds and ends that have been sat on my hard-drive for a while but just haven't made it into my iPod. Here's ten.

Interpol 'Lights' - stellar new track from the NYC's band upcoming fourth album. Expect more maudlin, Joy Division-esque tracks on the new LP.

Nels Cline 'Floored' - excellent jazz guitar track from the esteemed solo artist and sometime Wilco guitarist Cline, taken from new album Initiate.

LCD Soundsystem 'Drunk Girls (Holy Ghost! Remix)' - inappropriately, James Murphy's new single is one of my four-year-old Daughter#1's favourite songs of the moment, here given a shiny electronic respray by the consistently excellent Holy Ghost!

Cold Cave 'Life Magazine (Arthur Baker Remix)' - electro pioneer Arthur Baker gives band-du-jour Cold Cave an extended fuzzy dance workout, occasionally reminding you of his classic work with Freeez and New Order.

The Ponys 'Check The Door' - from Deathbed + 4, this is a gloomy piece of stentorian bluesy shoegazer rock, with some neat, slow-motion Fifties rock 'n roll riffery toward the end and a vocalist who pays a debt to Blancmange's Neil Arthur.

Goldfrapp 'Rocket (Richard X One Zero Remix)' - for a limited time sometime Sugababes producer Richard X's mix was available as a free Amazon download. The original track was sublime electronic disco-pop, which is given an inoffensive dancefloor reboot here.

Martin Küchen / Keith Rowe / Seymour Wright 'Leeds Extract' - a ten-minute extract from a trio improvisation recorded in Leeds, centred around reductive electronics and an inventive plethora of scratchy sounds. Check the Another Timbre website for more improv extracts from their back catalogue.

Andy Weatherall 'Walk Of Shame' - taken from A Pox On The Pioneers, legendary producer Weatherall's first album under his own name, this blends pleasant tinkly electronics with a subtle dub bass line and guitar reminiscent of the late Michael Karoli from Can.

Conor Oberst And The Mystic Valley Band 'Nikorette' - the new post-Bright Eyes country-rock band from Oberst evidences a more mainstream sound not a million miles from Ryan Adams And The Cardinals.

MGMT 'Destrokk' - an early cut from the Brooklyn duo taken from the Time To Dream EP which owes a debt to Suicide with its harsh motorik synth grind sound; a style which couldn't be further from their recent 'space opera', Congratulations.

Vinyl Corner

Secret Knowledge '2 Much Of Nuttin'' (Heavenly 7", 1994)

I never really liked this track when it was released, principally because I never found Kris Needs' approach to remixing (for the likes of Primal Scream or Nitzer Ebb) terribly thrilling. I'm honestly not sure why I even bought this.

This is an attempt to produce a sort of pop digital heavy dub, but sadly lacks any of the sonic depth of either original Jamaican dub a la King Tubby, or other digital protagonists like Mad Professor. The instrumental version on the B-side loses the annoying female vocals, and is mildly diverting.

Audio Journal : 10/05/2010

2010-05-09T14:28:00.000-07:00

There is something maddeningly anthemic about the songs of James; even when Tim Booth is singing about some perplexing metaphor such as porcupines (as he does on the band's new EP, The Night Before) or something really mundane, the result is the kind of song it's difficult not to feel an emotional connection to. I've had it explained to me before, and I've probably misquoted it here before and so I won't attempt to do so again, but there is an undeniable quality to the James catalogue – consistently so – sufficient to imagine yourself singing along loudly and rapturously at their concerts almost unprompted. Well, that's what I think anyway.

Consequently, it's quite hard to find anything new to say about The Night Before, beyond the fact that it's eight tracks of the usual high quality James fare. That shouldn't be read as 'more of the same', but it's meant that despite middle-age, break-ups and a complete redefinition of the 'indie' world they grew from (check the song 'All My Letters' for a neat backwards look), James's quality remains undiminished. And I can only thank them for that. Download it now at iTunes.

Television's Marquee Moon is one of those NYC watershed albums from a band that defined the nascent CBGBs / US punk scene. However, even CBGB head honcho Hilly Kristal didn't really consider Television to be 'punk'. Marquee Moon isn't the snarling, amphetamine-driven speed-rock that its labelling as a punk album would have you believe; it's undeniably 'alternative' to much of the Seventies rock dross, but couldn't be compared to say, The Ramones, who fit more neatly into what we think punk should sound like. US punk was, however, about a way of thinking, an attitude, and much more artistic than its drooling, seething UK sibling. For a start, Marquee Moon has riffs (and often long ones at that), something that UK punk had eschewed in the wake of Prog excess. Television were thus dubbed 'art rock'.

Adventure (1978) is harder to slot into the art rock strand of US punk; in contrast to the more edgy, nervous elements of Marquee Moon, Adventure is positively MOR in its leanings. There is also a strong strain of country in some of the sliding guitar passages. (Perversely this would have probably been more appealing to Hilly Kristal, who originally set up CBGBs for country and bluegrass acts.) That's not to say it's a bad or even dull album; it just takes a few listens to understand it in the wake of exposure to Marquee Moon.

I've been watching the new BBC series, I'm In A Rock 'N Roll Band, whose first episode featured the magnetic role of the band's singer. The programme was actually pretty good, compared to those turgid Channel 4 chart-format rundowns; you know the drill, 50 Greatest Albums or 50 Greatest Boybands (are there 50? Are any deserving of the adjective 'great'?) The talking heads interviewed also weren't your usual fare – no David Quantick or Paul Morley here – and a very likeable Iggy Pop spoke at length about his almost compulsive need to crowd-surf. His recent gigs with The Stooges, performing the Bowie-produced Raw Power, have met with considerable acclaim, and the combination of the two – the programme and the gig reports – have made me think that it's high time I reappraised Iggy.

So this week I took a listen to The Stooges, their debut album from 1969 which was produced by ex-Velvet Underground man John Cale. I've listened to it many, many times but generally get bored after 'I Wanna Be Your Dog' and consequently I don't really know half of the album. I appreciate this might sound like heresy, especially as The Stooges were an important step in the genesis of NYC punk and a big influence on its UK sibling also. All I'll say is that I'm sorry I ever stopped listening to it. It's a work of considerable, assured genius, especially 'We Will Fall' – a song I detested before – which has a classic Cale viola drone, and almost raga vibe. It's also reminded me that it's high time I got round to buying The Idiot and the aforementioned Raw Power.

Vinyl Corner

Human League '(Keep Feeling) Fascination' (Virgin 7", 1983)

I've said here before that I like early, pre-Dare Human League; I also have Dare (doesn't everyone?) and one of their more recent albums, the brilliant Secrets. However I don't have the album from which this cheerful, soulful, Fairlight horn-deploying track was taken, as it wasn't actually on an album. If I had to rank my favourite League tracks, suffice to say it wouldn't be anywhere close to the top. It doesn't help that my copy of this was rather warped, making those horns sound queasy and unpleasant to listen to.

The B-side, 'Total Panic', once again wins the day. It's an instrumental, which side-steps any issues I have with the Oakey / Catherall / Sulley vocal trio, and contains some nice phased synths. I'm not sure necessarily that it lives up to the scenes evoked in the title, but as a small synth-pop vignette it's actually quite good.

As for the absolutely awful sleeve...

Audio Journal : 03/05/2010

2010-05-05T10:53:00.000-07:00

Two albums in one week from two of your favourite artists is a rare treat, but so it was in April with Rufus Wainwright's All Days Are Nights: Songs For Lulu and David Byrne's collaboration with Fatboy Slim (and just about every female vocalist under the sun) on Here Lies Love.

Both albums, coincidentally, are 'tributes' of sorts to women. In Wainwright's case that woman is a character played by actress Louise Brooks in the 1929 movie Pandora's Box, but also serves as a tribute of sorts to his mother, the late Kate McGarrigle, who passed away at the start of this year; whereas Byrne's album depicts the life of shoe-addicted dictator's wife, Imelda Marcos and juxtaposes that with the life of Estrella Cumpas, the woman who raised her.

Both also have their origins in theatre. Byrne's project with Fatboy Slim was originally conceived as a performance (albeit in nightclubs), while Wainwright's recent opera success with Prima Donna and love of all things Wagner has informed much of his work; the live performance of All Days Are Nights I went to on 13 April at Sadler's Wells saw Wainwright performing the entire album, almost faultlessly, in a 17ft ball-gown as a song cycle with the express request to the audience not to applaud until he had left the stage; theatrical indeed. As an album, All Days Are Nights sits neatly into Wainwright's opera-inspired oeuvre, and despite being just the man and a piano, is his most dramatic album to date. Mrs S says it's dreary, and at times it is certainly more plaintive and reflective than previous albums (check out the takes on three Shakespeare sonnets), but it is also by subtle shades uplifting and humorous (as on the most upbeat piece 'Give Me What I Want And Give It To Me Now' or the positively euphoric start to 'The Dream'). My personal favourites are the opener, 'Who Are You New York?', a ruminative long song to the City itself, and 'Martha', a song whose lyrics comprise the answer machine messages left by Rufus to his sister while their mother's illness worsened; it also signals the recent tentative reconciliation, through grief, of Rufus and his father Loudon.

Perhaps not as instantly, and bombastically accessible as previous Wainwright fare, All Days Are Nights is probably the most authentic, personal album Wainwright has produced thus far. Previous albums have always featured pieces for piano only, and in the live setting are always firm favourites with the audience (especially when Wainwright messes up, plays the wrong section or ad libs theatrically – think of an extremely camp Les Dawson); in an odd sense, the scaling back of the instruments to just a solitary piano ties in neatly with the reconciliation with his father, who has made it his business to produce album after album of music consisting of just his voice and a guitar.

David Byrne and Rufus Wainwright have worked together once before on a song, and that song was also theatrical in origin. 'Au Fond Du Temple Saint' appeared on Byrne's 2004 album Grown Backwards. The former Talking Heads front man's voice may have not been perfectly matched to Wainwright's dexterity on this piece from Bizet's Les Pêcheurs de Perles but all I wanted was a segue in this blog from one album to the other, and that seemed to work. Plus, more earnestly, the idea of Byrne tackling an opera track would – when watching the videos for 'Road To Nowhere' or 'Once In A Lifetime' – have seemed nonsensical; however, Byrne was an art student before starting Talking Heads and his interest in all manner of art forms is manifest (check his blog for the proof). And so I stand by my segue. The other possible one would have been Martha Wainwright, who is one of the female vocalists employed by Byrne on this project.

Of this album, critics have dubbed it the most accessible David Byrne album he's produced since the Talking Heads days, thanks to the input of Fatboy Slim, but I'd disagree; yes, it's more obviously 'pop' than other Byrne albums, but with the exception of albums like My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts (with Eno) or Big Love: Hymnal, Byrne is no stranger to traditional song structures, albeit conceived with his typical vision and the odd Brazilian flavour here and there. Plus Talking Heads weren't exactly what I'd describe as 'pop' anyway.

It certainly sounds more like a Byrne album that a Fatboy Slim one, but it serves to remind that Norman Cook is a brilliant producer as well as a purveyor of daft chart-bothering fare. The sound leans to a glossy funky disco blend, which apparently has something to do with Marcos' fondness for Manhattan nightclubs, although I don't know anything about her so can't say if I just made that up or not. I opted for the limited edition version – two CDs, a DVD and a 120 page book detailing the background to each song (which, hands up, I haven't read completely yet therefore this review isn't as well informed as it could have been). The lyrics for each, according to Byrne's typically exhaustive introduction notes, were centred around actual Marcos quotes (so shouldn't she have a writing credit?).

Byrne adds backing vocals to a number of tracks and delivers the superb 'American Troglodyte' himself, but in truth this is a vehicle for the assembled ranks of female vocalists, each hand-picked to provide a depiction of Marcos / Cumpas according to the theme of the song. So you get the likes of Tori Amos, Santigold, Cyndi Lauper, St. Vincent and Florence Welch (who, sans Machine, delivers the gorgeous title track). At 22 tracks it requires quite a commitment on the part of the listener, but it makes most sense when heard in a single sitting. I was really excited about this release, and suffice to say I wasn't disappointed.

Vinyl Corner

LFO 'Tied Up Remixes' (Warp Records 12”, 1994)

Some people know the Warp label as the home of leftfield bands like Grizzly Bear, Battles and Broadcast; others remember when it was the principal go-to label for the leftfield electronica of Aphex Twin, Autechre, Sweet Exorcist and the duo of Mark Bell and Gez Varley – LFO – whose Steve Wright-bothering sub-bass anthem 'LFO' kicked the Sheffield label into existence.

From humble origins as a behind-the-counter indie label at a Sheffield record store, Warp has become a well-respected, broad-minded label that's also branched out successfully into film, examples including the new Chris Morris movie Three Lions and the excellent documentary A Complete History Of My Sexual Failings.

Label owner Steve Beckett mentioned in a recent Esquire interview that after a while he began to find the slew of acts producing electronica in the Aphex template – which could be summarised crudely as distorted beats and glacial synths – wearying. He began to turn his ears towards the kind of alternative rock music being produced by the likes of Jason Pierce's Spiritualized; as such, this out-of-print Warp 12", remixed by Pierce, could well represent the point the label began to think more eclectically.

Pierce's nine-minute mix is a beautiful thing, a phasing and shifting drone work that has little or nothing to do with the harshness of the original. I'd call it 'ambient', and it does share much with Eno's brand of 'discreet' music, but it also has a depth best observed by listening on headphones.

The B-side, a remix by LFO of their 'Nurture' is more dancefloor-focussed.

I sold my copy of this recently to someone who, coincidentally, works at Warp.

Audio Journal : 26/04/2010

2010-04-29T13:15:00.000-07:00

This isn't the piece I was intending to publish this week; that piece – on the new albums from David Byrne / Fatboy Slim and Rufus Wainwright – will have to wait.

Instead, here are some selections from Mrs S's iPhone which formed the soundtrack to our driving around the UK last week following the cancellation of our Portugal holiday. I have no control over the contents of her iPhone, just for the record, and, as you will see, increasingly neither does she.

Noah And The Whale The First Days Of Spring

'What's this?' I barked, on the way down the M1 to London, frustrated at the plodding, quiet songs I was hearing and which were affecting my concentration at the wheel. Three dreary songs in, with the added sound of two toddlers hollering at one another in the back, it had been turned off. I hope that's all I get to hear of it.

Devendra Banhart What Will We Be

More than anything else – apart from the collection of downloaded odds and ends in the playlist called The A List – this was the soundtrack to the second leg of our staycation. A breezy collection of whimsical folksy / oddball songs with Latin embellishments, this album continues in the vein of earlier Banhart albums, bound together by his unique vocal style. Paul Rees, Q's editor, says this is the first album where you don't want to punch Banhart in the face; I find this amusing, as, despite being a pacifist, I'd be quite up for punching Paul Rees in the chops.

Lawrence Arabia Chant Darling

When I saw this getting purchased from iTunes, I figured it would be some turgid indie garbage on the name of the band alone. It smacked of barrel-scraping in the 'what shall we call ourselves?' stakes, and of course I was proven wrong. We didn't listen to it often enough for it to leave a lasting impression on me, but the track 'Apple Pie Bed' could well become my personal soundtrack to the summer of '10. Judging by how my almost-four-year old eldest daughter would spontaneously burst into a rendition of the unbelievably chipper chorus ('Apple pie bed / When my body's made of lead') during quiet points on the holiday, it passes the toddler test for catchiness too.

Mrs S's A-List

Listening to albums in the car is something we rarely do apart from on holidays or long journeys. Usually we'll listen to whatever odd tracks Mrs S has read about or heard on 6 Music, usually until she buys something new or just goes off the songs. The A-List, as she named it years ago, at least this time around, included the aforementioned Lawrence Arabia song, some stuff by The Cars, Chew Lips, The Knife, The Crookes, Sunshine Underground (too Killers for me), MGMT's sublime 'Flash Delirium', a newly-discovered Hendrix track and others.

Whilst I find listening to a bunch of songs I don't know by artists I've never heard of pretty enjoyable, I usually don't have much of a say over what goes into the playlist (The Knife's 'Heartbeats' and the two Cars songs were squirrelled in by me), and as I alluded at the start of this, neither does Mrs S these days.

The reason is that almost-four-year-old Daughter#1 who has developed an early passion for upbeat, electronic-y poppy tracks which would never have graced Mrs S's iPhone in a million years. Thus we found ourselves smiling to ourselves as she and her little sister sang along to the likes of 'Just Dance' and 'Poker Face' by Lady Gaga and 'The Boy Does Nothing' by Alesha Dixon. Parentally heart-melting stuff indeed, but from this seed of compromise will grow a tree that can only lead to that A-List getting more and more poptastic over the next few years.

Vinyl Corner

'Daddy, what are records?'

Nuff said.

Audio Journal : 05/04/2010

2010-04-07T11:26:00.000-07:00

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

Two albums have dominated my listening this past fortnight. The first is Goldfrapp's Head First, which was released a couple of Mondays ago. A neat antidote to the already bland synth-pop-with-girls of La Roux, Little Boots et al, Head First finds the duo of Alison Goldfrapp and Will Gregory kicking the younger upstarts into touch with a shimmering collection of mostly upbeat pop tracks eschewing the early Eighties leanings of most retro popsters in favour of the late decade digital-analogue blend as perfected by the likes of Erasure. A full review can be found here.

The other album is Complete Greatest Hits by The Cars. Until about a month ago my knowledge of this Boston, MA band was limited to the track 'Drive', used heavily by Bob Geldoff during Live Aid clips; it's not a bad song, but it suffers from over-exposure, plus it provides few clues to the much better material elsewhere in their back catalogue.

The Cars were described as being a blend of punk's minimalism, art rock and Fifties rockabilly riffery; for me, it's the big Eighties keyboard sound and the clipped, funk-esque guitar riffs both of which bring to mind the work of their fellow alternative / college radio luminaries Talking Heads. Tracks such as 'Best Friend's Girl', 'Let's Go' and 'Good Times Roll' are stand-out songs on this twenty-track compilation, and I'll definitely be delving into their albums proper soon.

Let it be known that I am not a fan of The Beatles. I bought The Beatles (aka The White Album) for its avant-gardist leanings and wasn't disappointed, but apart from the odd poppy song here and there, I'm just not a fan. Mrs S, introduced to their music by her father, is a fan and has – time after time – scolded me for my repeated question 'So, is this John singing or Paul?'. I do, however, enjoy their music on a Sunday. Don't ask me why.

Imagine this: listening to every Beatles album, sequentially, in one sitting. Nothing would send me insane quicker, but there is a solution. Avant garde soundsmith Steve McLaughlin, for his piece Run For Your Life, sped up every song by 800% and combined them together into one hour-long track. What's surprising is how, even at this speed, you're able to identify recognisable sections of tracks. 'A Day In The Life', for example, retains much of its drama despite losing any sense of subtlety. The early tracks, all speed and rock 'n roll energy, zip by in a messy amphetamine blur, while the more interesting stuff (from Revolver onwards) – where speed was sacrificed in favour of a more considered sonic template – make for interesting listening at this high velocity. Strangely enough, it's still the McCartney tracks that grate. As with the plunderphonic work of John Oswald, it's not exactly easy listening (but to me, listening to The Beatles at the regular speed isn't either). Judge for yourself by downloading the track from the Ubuweb archive here.

Vinyl Corner

More Eighties pop this week, this time from Howard Jones; Jones was famous for using 'keytars' and for having enormous hair, even by Eighties standards – as evidenced on the sleeve to 'What Is Love?'.

'What Is Love?' was arguably Jones's biggest hit in a career which spanned both sides of the Atlantic. Wikipedia states that his sound was an appealing mix of New Wave and Sixties hippiness – I don't hear that on this track; instead you get some ruminative psychological musings on the meaning of love (a popular theme among New Romantics, naturally) and a big Eighties sound dominated by Fairlight horns and springy bass synths. In one of my earlier websites, during one of my 'charity shop round-ups' of records I'd bought from local Colchester thrift stores that week, I remember being quite disparaging of this song and Jones generally. Looking back I don't honestly know why, as I think this is a really good track.

The B-side on the other hand ('It Just Doesn't Matter'), is rubbish.

Audio Journal : 22/03/2010

2010-03-26T14:13:00.000-07:00

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

Julian Plenti's Julian Plenti Is ... Skyscraper has sat in my iTunes Wish-List since it was released last year, and I finally got around to buying it over the weekend. This was mostly prompted by listening to Interpol's Antics in the car all last week; from the paucity of Interpol music I thought it was high time to get Plenti's album; Plenti is a pseudonym for Interpol's vocalist Paul Banks. Given that one of the things that has always appealed about Interpol is Banks' Ian Curtis-esque delivery, expectations were pretty high for his first solo album under the Julian Plenti alias.

As is so often the case, approaching something with heightened expectations often leads to disappointment, and that's exactly how ... Skyscraper is. I truly hope that it will grow with repeated listening, but so far – three listens in – my conclusion is that it's a good album, but it's just nowhere close to Interpol at all. For one, it's far too optimistic; I've become used to the negativity and world-weary disenchantment across their three albums, and, well, this just isn't grumpy enough for my tastes. Secondly, like the good, but un-Strokes-y output of Albert Hammond Jr and Julian Casablancas, Banks's album has a totally different sound to anything his parent band have produced; I've never understood this. Does this imply a dissatisfaction on the part of a group member about the personal direction he or she wants to go in? Pondering aside, like I said, not a bad album, just not an Interpol album.

An album that I haven't listened for a good few years is Set Yourself On Fire (2004), the third album by Canadian band Stars. We bought this after Mrs S had heard the tracks 'Your Ex-Lover Is Dead' (how Morrissey is that?) and 'Reunion' on BBC 6 Music, but the album was a disappointment. The orchestral grandeur of 'Your Ex-Lover Is Dead' seemed to be a one-off, the rest of the album struggling to know what it wanted to be; there are tinkly keyboards, fey indie rock songs and the occasional burst of wistful violin. So I tend to avoid it when I'm scrolling through my playlists. But this week I was in one of those restless moods where I couldn't settle on anything in my iPod and decided to give it a listen. I was pleasantly surprised to see that it had grown on me, and whereas previously I'd got annoyed at the chopping and changing of styles, now it simply has a pleasing variety.

Talented family patriarch Loudon Wainwright III released a new album this month. Songs For The New Depression is a collection of songs for guitar and ukele, the common theme of which is the poor state of the post-Lehman, post-Madoff, post-Bush US economy. So you get songs about the difficulties in the real estate market ('House'), cynical pieces about their car scrappage scheme ('Cash For Clunkers') and the track which neatly summarises the whole sorry affair, 'Times Is Hard'. It's a good, cynical album with Wainwright III's trademark wry humour, but it would have been nice to hear some of the songs delivered as full band pieces (as on Strange Weirdos or Recovery), but if you're a fan of solo folksy performances this won't disappoint.

Vinyl corner

Okay, let's start with the sleeve of Bill Sharpe & Gary Numan's 'No More Lies' (1988) – it's awful, even by Eighties standards. Attempts at futuristic bleakness come across more like two leather-clad Village People in a gay bar than the look I suspect they were trying to cultivate. If it wasn't for the 'computer'-y font around the edge, you'd be mistaken for thinking this was some sort of hair-Metal record.

It's not. It's actually one of the better tracks in the entire, patchy Gary Numan back catalogue. Numan is someone who for me went off the boil after 'Cars' and the earlier work as Tubeway Army and I rid myself of my greatest hits CD many moons ago. The record box was spared, leaving the blue vinyl limited edition 7" and another track 'Your Fascination' (1985); in keeping with the 'weeding' I'm doing at present with my music collection, 'Your Fascination' (actually another good song come to think of it) was slung at a charity shop (the sleeve still bearing the price tag of the charity shop I bought it from years ago) and 'No More Lies' is on eBay.

'No More Lies' is a defiant, soulful Eighties pop track that could've been recorded just as well by Human League or even any of the Stock, Aitken & Waterman crop of singers. It's certainly not like any of the robotic synth pop Numan produced in his earlier years, nor does it provide any clues to his later, doom-laden electro-rock output. It's just a piece of breezy, polite pop music. The B-side, 'Voices' has a more muscular synth bass-line but mines a similar vein. As seems to be happening a lot lately, I found myself preferring the B-side to the lead track.

Audio Journal : 15/03/2010

2010-03-19T14:03:00.000-07:00

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

Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark, or OMD as they are more easily abbreviated to, are one of those bands that I remember distinctly from my childhood. Two of their tracks, 'Joan Of Arc' and the companion 'Maid Of Orleans' were on a cassette my dad had that we used to listen to in the car on Saturdays. Between those two tracks, seeing Gary Numan on the Old Grey Whistle Test driving a Sinclair C5, and watching a Soft Cell video (Non-Stop Exotic Video Show) you have probably the three biggest influences on my early musical tastes; no surprise that it would coalesce into a love for electronic music that endures to this very day.

Those two tracks were taken from Architecture And Morality, OMD's 1981 album. I finally bought that album from RS McColl in Colchester while I was at University there in the mid Nineties along with some of the pre-Dare Human League albums. I love Architecture And Morality, especially the dystopian post-punk opener 'New Stone Age', but – sacrilegious though this must sound to 1981 purists – it doesn't do as much for me as their 1991 'comeback' album Sugar Tax. Again, my principal love for this album was from my dad playing the cassettes while we drove around Stratford-upon-Avon's boroughs and neighbouring villages on Saturday mornings. It's a glossy album that manages to deliver the stellar pop of 'Sailing On The Seven Seas', 'Pandora's Box' and 'Speed Of Light' but it also sees Andy McCluskey pay homage to his musical heroes Kraftwerk on the cover of 'Neon Lights' (Kraftwerk alleged quite happily that McCluskey nicked the melody for 'Electricity' from their 'Radio-Activity' but I don't hear it myself). Like the Pet Shop Boys with the orchestral stabs that dominated their early work, so too does the sampled choral harmonies that became an OMD staple dominate the sound of Sugar Tax.

I'm not too proud to admit that one of my favourite slushy films is Serendipity (2001), a 'rom com' about fate set in Manhattan starring Kate Beckinsale and John Cusack. In it, Beckinsale's fiance, the always annoying John Corbett (Lars) makes music effectively comprising his clarinet, drum 'n bass beats and sitars to create what jazzists would describe as 'fusion' but that I just call 'naff'; it goes without saying that his irritating character and the risible faux ethnology of the music is of course a convenient directorial vehicle for making the musician appear inferior to Cusack's own figure.

The reason for mentioning this is because this week I stuck on Loop Guru's Amrita...All These And The Japanese Soup Warriors and was struck by the similarity to the music made by Corbett's character in Serendipity, and it was a comparison that I couldn't get out of my head whilst listening to Amrita... and which ultimately prompted me to turn it off. I loved the album at the time, Loop Guru being part of one of the infinite substrata of 1990s 'dance' music genres, and I saw them live in Colchester at a very memorable concert at the Arts Centre in 1995; but something now seems so horribly dated and inauthentic about the sound. 'Yayli' – the track which least tries to orient itself into this ethnic-techno genre – still sounds good, but the rest may find themselves in the deleted items folder fairly soon. I hate it when you go back through your music collection and feel dissatisfied with albums you haven't heard for ages.

Vinyl corner

In the world of music, Pavement are regarded (along with, say, Sonic Youth or Dinosaur Jr.) as principal architects of an alternative sound which has influenced countless bands over the years. Even the musical magpie that is Damon Albarn cited the band as an influence for the patchy Blur album Blur (though I fail to hear anything but Blur therein). With a new compilation of their material just released, it's fair to assume that more people and bands will begin to be influenced by the band.

I own only one Pavement record, 1999's UK-only 'Carrot Rope' 7", which I've listened to more since recording it this week than I ever have since I bought it upon its release. It's a brilliant track, but – and I know this sounds superficial – I never want to put on the record because of the sleeve. Something about the peeling orange rope makes me feel nauseous, thus causing me to avoid it when I scour the box. Having overcome that reaction this week, I've been reminded of how much I love the jaunty, upbeat 'Carrot Rope', but also how much better the grandiose B-side ('And Then') is. I recall that at the time this came out I'd intended it to be the start of a proper immersion into the music of Pavement, which clearly never happened. Though I don't normally buy artist compilations, preferring instead to work my way through the albums sequentially, perhaps I should get that new 'best of'.

Audio Journal : 08/03/2010

2010-03-12T13:03:00.000-08:00

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

This week I've mostly been listening to Goldfrapp's 'Rocket', the first single to be taken from their new album Head First. A return to electronic pop after an experiment with Wicker Man-esque folksy mysticism on their last album (Seventh Tree), 'Rocket' takes the Eighties preset keyboard sound of Van Halen's 'Jump' and hitches it to a high-energy beat and a singalong chorus to create a perfect pop track which could easily grate after a few weeks of repeated listening.

To stop that from happening I've also been listening to Wild Palms' '...Over...Time...' a single that was released on the Popular Music label last year. Wild Palms are a four-piece London band producing clipped, funky rock tracks with a whiff of Durutti Column, Devo or Talking Heads. A stellar cover of Bjork's 'Human Behaviour' is available for free download here.

At the weekend I watched the BBC Arena documentary on Brian Eno. Eno's 'Another Green World' is the title music for the BBC's long-running occasional high-brow arts documentary series, so it seems fitting that they would finally turn their attention to the enigmatic Eno and his wide-ranging interests. During the hour-long programme he spoke about his love of gospel music, choral music, Darwinism, art and science. I didn't get most of it, but it was fascinating to see Eno conjuring improvised ambient tracks effortlessly from his Mac.

I have an enduring love for Eno's music, but actually own depressingly little of it. However, I do have a number of records produced by Eno for other artists – the aforementioned Devo and Talking Heads, plus Bowie, U2, the last Coldplay album and James. James are still most famous for their massive hit 'Sit Down'. At school, when 'Sit Down' arrived in the depths of the Madchester / Baggy scene, I couldn't have hated it more. Everyone was wearing those ubiquitous James 'flower' T-shirts and it all seemed so irritating. Perhaps it was just because I wasn't in with the cool kids.

A few years later, my friend Rachael played me Laid when it was released. The jangly, semi-acoustic Laid was produced by Eno, and I really loved it. I was, in truth, most attracted by the production credit, having spent the previous couple of years borrowing CDs from Stratford-upon-Avon Library's seemingly limitless collection of Eno albums. The follow-up to Laid, the now rare-as-hen's teeth Wah-Wah was even more up my street. Essentially a loose collection of jams recorded during the Laid sessions and re-processed into complete tracks by Eno, Wah-Wah was a departure for James but utterly in keeping with the Eno spirit. Whiplash, which followed also saw Eno helping out on curiously electronic-embracing James (the track 'Go To The Bank' is one of my favourite, out-of-character James tracks), while Millionaires (another Eno production) was a return to the stately Eno rock productions of The Joshua Tree and "Heroes".

I really only fell for James big-style when I saw them perform three songs on Jools Holland to promote their Best Of compilation in 1999. They played 'She's A Star' and 'Runaground', both of which were overshadowed by the towering grandiosity of 'Sit Down', and after almost a decade of detesting that track I finally fell in love with it thanks in the most part to Tim Booth's vocals. This week I've listened to Gold Mother, which birthed 'Sit Down' to remind myself of just how good that song really is. A musician acquaintance once said to me that James tracks always have a plaintive, emotional quality because of the way their choruses use minor chords; I don't know if that's true, but 'Sit Down' now stands (or sits?) as one of my favourite tracks of all time to sing along badly to at high volume.

Vinyl corner

Space were a three-piece band from Marseille whose biggest hit was the instrumental 'Magic Fly' (1977), which I appropriated from my parents' music collection when I left home. Not to be confused with the band of Scouse reprobates who had hits in the Nineties with songs like 'Female Of The Species', this Space were exponents of a short-lived 'space disco' scene.

Led by the upper-octave monophonic synth melodies of Didier Marouani (also known as Ecama), along with bandmates Roland Romanelli and Jannick Top, 'Magic Fly' is essentially a Giorgio Moroder-esque high-energy disco track propelled by a thudding proto-techno beat. Sure, it's more Käse than Kraftwerk, but it's difficult not to like it. The B-side 'Ballad For Space Lovers' is more sedate and altogether more Prog-tastic.

Audio Journal : 01/03/2010

2010-03-05T13:30:00.000-08:00

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

Mrs S and I were sat in a hotel room a few weekends ago; she'd just bought an iPhone and was keen to show off what it could do. I initially held the iPhone with the same disregard as I did for the iPod, but I rapidly came round to appreciating that device and will no doubt feel the same way about her iPhone – in time – also.

We decided to watch some music TV, but the options on the hotel TV were limited to one (it was some trashy pop-only channel; these channels seem to spring up then die with alarming regularity, so even if I could remember what it was called, it probably wouldn't be there now). So we sat there, slack-jawed at just how crass modern pop music is and bemused at Craig David's comeback. And then came Jedward's cover of 'Under Pressure', replete with interjections from Vanilla Ice reprising his 'Ice Ice Baby' (which of course famously 'borrowed' the intro from the Queen / Bowie track). Awful though it clearly was, Jedward do thus have the dubious accolade of making Vanilla Ice, a terminally-derided white rapper from the early Nineties, look cool for perhaps the first time in his career.

So Mrs S and I got to talking about To The Extreme, Ice's 1990 album which we both owned on cassette. Such wistful recollections of our respective musical yesteryears are fairly commonplace between us. As an impressionable (yet tasteless) teenager I thought To The Extreme was brilliant and it was rarely out of my tapedeck, and in my head I thought I was as cool as my mate Rob's brother Chris, who was into Public Enemy. At the time I hadn't started reading the music press, nor had I started listening to 'underground' (i.e. credible) music, so I wasn't really able to see just how lame Ice was, and how mistaken I was.

Still, during the course of our chat about To The Extreme, we both said how – at the time – we thought the song 'Stop That Train' was infinitely better than 'Ice Ice Baby' (but then, it wouldn't have taken much). Before I knew it or could protest, Mrs S had launched iTunes and had purchased and seconds later was playing that song, and then in short order the Keith & Tex version of the song as well. No good can come from having portable access to near-instant music purchasing, I fear. Not only does it create the conditions for the inevitable capacity to overspend wantonly on ill-considered song purchases, but also it destroys any of that sense of anticipation that you used to get between buying a record and getting home to play it. However, without it we wouldn't have known about the Keith & Tex track, which is an outstanding piece of early, skanking Sixties rocksteady reggae. The Vanilla Ice song, on the other hand, was obviously always rubbish. Delete. Now.

From music TV to radio, specifically to the plight faced by BBC 6Music, which may face closure as part of a wave of proposed cuts at the national broadcaster. 6Music remains the only non-commercial station to broadcast music which can be broadly classified as 'alternative'. Imagine the sorely-missed John Peel presenting his eclectic mix of old, new, archive performances / sessions, the forgotten and the 'classic', twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and you get the picture as to what this specialist broadcaster is all about.

Some of the things I've written about in this blog have reached my ears because of the exposure that non-pop music receives on 6Music. Without the station, there really is little alternative for anyone truly passionate about the music that is not acknowledged by Radios 1 and 2, leaving us with little more than Zane Lowe's brief weekday slot filled in the wake of Peel to satisfy curious ears. To lose 6Music from the BBC portfolio would be an absolute travesty for music fans. To act, do one or better still all of the following:

1. Take a listen at:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/playlive/bbc_6music/

1. Join the Facebook group at:

http://bit.ly/bbc6music

2. Sign the online consultation at:

http://bit.ly/srconsultation

3. Tweet with the hashtag #savebbc6music

Vinyl corner

Last week I said I'd resurrect my practice of digging out an old record from one of the boxes hidden away in the darkest corners of my house.

This week's slice of vinyl comes from The JAMs, aka The Justified Ancients Of Mu-Mu, aka The KLF. The anarcho-techno duo of Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty of course produced some brilliant dancefloor records with the trio of 'What Time Is Love?', '3AM Eternal' and a remixed 'Last Train To Trancentral', perfect club hits interspersed with faux cult mythology. They also appeared on Top Of The Pops with Gary Glitter back when they went under the name The Timelords, performing an early example of the mash-up genre with their blending of their 'Doctorin' The Tardis' with the now-deposed Glitter's 'Rock N' Roll'. The KLF quickly descended into artistic dubiousness – machine guns and dead sheep at The Brits, heavy metal re-versions of their biggest hits, burning a million quid on the Isle of Jura, not to mention a questionable duet with Tammy Wynette – but we should never forget that one of their earliest 'releases' as The KLF was a book, published in the wake of 'Doctorin' The Tardis' hitting the top spot of the UK charts, called The Manual: How To Have A Number One The Easy Way, a book whose opening fragment of advice to budding popstars is 'Firstly, you must be skint and on the dole'.

So, not a band to be taken especially seriously then and on one hand 'It's Grim Up North' continues the theme. Basically a list of Northern English towns and cities spoken through a megaphone over a thudding 'What Time Is Love?' acid house track, occasionally punctured by the distorted 'chorus' of 'It's grim up north', it's classic KLF and pointed to a future where they'd ditched some of their more wayward tendencies in favour of a return to the dancefloor; the album that this was purportedly taken from (The Black Room) has become the stuff of legend and has never, and probably will never, see the light of day.

If the A-side ('It's Grim Up North (Part 1)') is still a bit pranksterish for you, or you don't like the grandiose orchestral conclusion, a straightahead techno dub can be found lurking menacingly on the B-side.

Audio Journal by MJA Smith : 22/02/2010

2010-02-25T13:26:00.000-08:00

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

We watched the movie Once (2006) at the weekend. A modern-day musical set in Dublin, it presents a week in the lives of the un-named lead guy (Glen Hansard from Irish band The Frames) and girl (Marketa Irglova). Hansard is a hoover repair man writing folksy songs and busking in his spare time while trying to get over a break-up. Irglova is an Eastern European immigrant who happens to be an exceptional pianist. After a chance encounter and over the course of the ensuing week she instils a level of faith and confidence in Hansard's songs, adding piano and direction to his songs, and ultimately encouraging him to recruit a band of fellow street musicians and to take a small loan to finance a weekend recording session. It's a simple, yet highly effective film; more of a documentary or extended music video, and is principally a vehicle for Hansard's emotionally fraught songs which are somewhere between the frailty of Damien Rice, the depth of Talk Talk's Mark Hollis and the rapturous peaks of Arcade Fire's Win Butler. Irglova on the other hand has a fragile, delicate voice best heard on the classically-informed ballads she performs here.

I don't think I've ever downloaded the soundtrack to a movie while I've still been watching it, but such is the pull of songs like 'When Your Mind's Made Up' and 'Lies', songs filled with disappointment, negativity and an emotional depth that's hard not to warm to absolutely. Hansard also lightens the mood with the wry Loudon Wainwright III-esque 'Broken Hearted Hoover Fixer Sucker Guy' and the lo-fi synth pop piece 'Fallen From The Sky'. Great movie, great soundtrack.

While our two daughters were eating dinner at the weekend, and desperate for a break from The Wiggles on constant repeat, I grabbed the only iPod which was handy, which happened to be Mrs S's. Doing this always fills me with dread as it's in major need of a tidy-up, and also my music collection is significantly under-represented therein. So I stuck on Phil Spector's Sounds Spectacular (1974) compilation, which I recorded from my parents' vinyl copy. The songs are obviously familiar from any other Wall Of Sound compilation, as is the distinctive Spector sound, but we noticed that the transfer from vinyl gave the songs a much richer warmth and authenticity more befitting the songs than the comparatively clinical re-masters on the infinitely more expensive Back To Mono boxset. An obvious point to vinyl aficionados, I know, but one which struck me unexpectedly in that moment. And that reminded me that time was when I used to mine the Smith record boxes each week to turn up some long forgotten vinyl purchase to write about in this blog; I must start doing that again.

On a rare tentative visit to my least favourite music shop, HMV, at the weekend, I was suckered into one of their periodic 'two for a tenner' deals on CDs, and walked away with Bad Lieutenant's Never Cry Another Tear. Bad Lieutenant is a three-piece band consisting of sometime New Order guitarist Phil Cunningham, Jake Evans and New Order / Joy Division / Electronic front-man Bernard Sumner.

A sticker attached to the shrinkwrap proclaimed that 'this sounds more vital than anything New Order have done since 'Crystal'', which irked me somewhat. 'Crystal', undeniably a great track, was on New Order's penultimate album so in terms of making out that this is a return to some sort of classic period New Order sound the scope seems torridly short-sighted in its range. Typical NME.

Still, what is correct is that Never Cry Another Tear is brilliant. More akin to the second two Electronic albums (Raise The Pressure and Twisted Tenderness), with plenty of acoustic guitars and genteel lyrics, the album also finds time to throw in Power, Corruption And Lies-era synths on a few of the faster-paced songs. Sumner shares vocal duties with Evans while Stephen Morris adds drums to a couple of tracks, and Blur's Alex James drops in on bass duties occasionally. The album was released back in October of last year, and I'm annoyed with myself for not buying it sooner, especially since it's reminded me just how much I love Sumner's voice.

Audio Journal by MJA Smith : 15/02/2010

2010-02-19T13:58:00.000-08:00

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

While tidying up the office, I came across a single by a band called Nemo from 2003 entitled 'Piccadilly In Sepia'. Nemo, which does sadly rank (in a post-Disney sense) as among the worst band names of all time, developed out of another band (Spectacle), some of whose members Mrs S went to school with. The lead track is a precise slice of authentic electronic pop that could have been released anytime between now and 1984, its chorus of 'Piccadilly in sepia / We are naked on the underground' containing the sort of Nitzschean attempts at seriousness that littered a number of classic 80s tracks, although the idea of us all being starkers on the Tube is somewhat disturbing. For all its lyrical faults, 'Piccadilly In Sepia' is a brilliant, brilliant and sadly overlooked synth pop gem.

I caught the DLR into the City at the weekend. The driver-less trains always remind me of the track by Komputer 'Looking Down On London'. Komputer, a duo of Simon Leonard and David Baker were formed out of the anarchic electronica act Fortran 5, ditching the amusing Orb-esque samples in favour of Kraftwerk synth purity. In doing so they headed back to their roots as synth duo I Start Counting, whose two albums (Fused and My Translucent Hands) were underground classics. If you sign up to Komputer's mailing list, you get a free mini-LP to download (Intercom), containing five tracks of icy, retro electronica.

If Komputer, in adopting Kraftwerk's electronic template, are retro in their aspirations, Raymond Scott's music could be described as pre-retro and authentically pioneering. Scott, who was variously a classical and jazz musician, moved into electronic composition and synth module development with his Manhattan Research, Inc. enterprise in 1946. In the process he developed new instruments which would go on to inspire the likes of Bob Moog to develop their own, genre-defining synth kits.

Arriving at a time when electronic composition was primarily the domain of scientist egg-heads and Hollywood sound effects departments, Scott's diverse synthetic palette found an ideal home as the backdrop for futuristic TV and radio spots in the 1950s and 60s; a compilation of some of these commercials and other Scott pieces was released as Manhattan Research, Inc. by Basta in 2000. Scrape your way past any kitsch connotations from the use of spoken sales pitches for bygone products and visions of a wonky future from the likes of the Bendix Corporation, and what you're left with is sixty-nine tracks of elaborate electronica that directly prefaces today's pop flirtation with synthetic sounds.

Audio Journal by MJA Smith : 08/02/2010

2010-02-04T14:21:00.000-08:00

Go to: My Other Blog :: Documentary Evidence :: twitter.com/MJASmith

Earlier this week I took a listen to Poppy Nogood And The Phantom Band, a 1968 piece by esteemed and influential minimalist composer Terry Riley. Riley, a member of La Monte Young's Theatre Of Eternal Music, along with Marian Zazeela, Tony Conrad and a pre-Velvet Underground John Cale, left the dronescapes of the Theater in 1965 and carved out his own niche as a composer.

Poppy Nogood And The Phantom Band consists of five pieces, all segued together seamlessly into a single, evolving piece. Layers of arpeggiating horns and fat synth tones add colour to what is a shifting, deep soundscape that has similarities with In C (1964), Riley's most famous composition, but with perhaps less of that piece's abundant euphoria. Poppy Nogood And The Phantom Band is an altogether more atmospheric and menacing composition, occasionally brooding but intensely fast-paced in its shifting sounds.

From the minimalism of Riley to the dub-inflected sampleadelica of Renegade Soundwave. Renegade Soundwave first emerged from the dark depths of South London in the late 1980s, releasing tracks such as 'Biting My Nails' and 'Probably A Robbery', songs which were based heavily on borrowed sounds with a gritty, knowing savvy and occasional bursts of urban humour. Their first album, Soundclash dropped neatly into the late 80s love affair with the dancefloor; it was followed by a companion dub album which dumped some of the pop elements in favour of a raw edginess otherwise hidden under the surface of the parent album.

The latecoming follow-up, 1994's Howyoudoin? took the Soundclash ethic and added seriousness and guitars, producing the strummed guitar-dub classic 'Renegade Soundwave' as well as one of the most malevolent bad-trip tracks in 'Blast 'Em Out'. Howyoudoin? was also followed up with a dub companion, which again pared the tracks back and added new dimensions. After that, nada. Renegade Soundwave famously fell out with their label and despite a valedictory 2CD compilation, all but bit the dust. Gary Asquith from the band co-runs the label Le Coq Musique, and I'm hoping to interview him for Documentary Evidence soon.

McCoy Tyner's Tender Moments was released in 1967 on the Blue Note label, still the coolest jazz label in the world. Tyner is best known as the pianist in tenor saxophone legend John Coltrane's classic quartet (alongside Elvin Jones on drums, and Jimmy Garrison on bass), recording the watershed album A Love Supreme and Coltrane's sublime take on 'My Favourite Things'. Tender Moments might sound like a collection of mushy piano tinklings perfectly suited to the run-up to Valentine's Day, but it's anything but. This album is a fine collection of intense but accessible jazz workouts, interspersed with sprinklings of ruminative piano. 'Utopia', for example, has an cinematic grandeur that wouldn't sound out of place on Bernard Herrman's final work for the movie Taxi Driver. This album would serve as a suitable entry point for anyone looking to get into Sixties jazz but not yet patient enough to go all-out improv.

Audio Journal by MJA Smith : 01/02/2010

2010-01-29T11:59:00.000-08:00

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

I find myself struggling to think what to write about this time around.

I suppose I could write about the new Nitzer Ebb compilation, In Order, which was released a couple of weeks back as an iTunes exclusive. Nitzer Ebb were exponents of a type of music which was often described as 'industrial' but was more accurately described as 'electronic body music'; effectively, it was a very aggressive form of synth pop as espoused by the likes of Front 242, Cubanate and early Die Krupps; Nitzer Ebb, from Chelmsford in Essex, were lumped into the same bracket, though they derived more influence from their more successful Essex brethren, Depeche Mode, whose Alan Wilder produced their seminal 1991 album Ebbhead. They released one more album (Big Hit), before imploding, finally getting back together last year for a tour and a new album, Industrial Complex. In Order was an attempt by their former label (Mute) to compile a huge chunk of their B-sides and remixes into one mammoth 60-track download-only compilation.

Listening to that this week is one of the principal reasons for not knowing what to write. With 60 tracks to digest, it took me pretty much the whole of the week just to get through it. Suffice to say, it's brilliant, but I was a fan already and so was inevitably very biased. I'll spare you a track-by-track account of its highlights, but few tracks have – for me – come close to the incandescent rage of the live version of 'Getting Closer' from the 'Godhead' single.

I could also mention the new single from New York's White Rabbits, 'Percussion Gun'. This is a track that needs to be heard to be believed, and I've attempted to describe why this song and this band are so exciting in my small Documentary Evidence review. Cick here to go there. Once again, it highlights the seemingly infinite number of bands to emerge from the New York / Brooklyn / Jersey area. As someone said, go to Brooklyn Heights and throw a stone in the air, and chances are it'll hit someone in a sleek and essential band from the area.

Both of these things aside, probably the best thing to grace these ears in the last week or so was equally the most unexpected. My friend and colleague Martyn found ourselves in Heidelberg, Germany on a work trip, and decided to head out for dinner in the town. We chanced upon an excellent little traditional pub, wherein, over beers and authentically rustic German fare we enjoyed pianist Rudi's versions of German standards and the odd Broadway show tune to appease we tourists, all delivered with pomp and aplomb at the pub's old upright Joanna. Of course, you had to be there, and the music is almost entirely indivisible from the setting and the experience, but take it from me, it was brilliant. Read more about Roter Ochse here.

Audio Journal by MJA Smith : 18/01/2010

2010-01-16T13:02:00.000-08:00

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

I was originally going to write about the CDs I was given for Christmas, but someone told me that they were fed up with me writing about David Byrne, Ryan Adams and Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore. Plus I'm keeping the comments on the excellent new Githead album (Landing) and the compilation of Nick Cave and Warren Ellis film scores (White Lunar) I was given by Santa for the Documentary Evidence website.

Instead I'll write about Contra, the follow up to Vampire Weekend's eponymously-titled album. The teaser track 'Horchata', which was given away free last year and which opens the album, provides a clue to the overall sound of Contra – odd little rhythms, elliptical lyrics, African percussion sounds deftly-deployed synths and sweeping strings. It's certainly a positive progression on Vampire Weekend, and certainly avoids any of the second-album hang-ups that beleaguer lots of heavily-hyped bands. Lead vocalist Ezra Koenig masterfully delivers his David Byrne-esque (whoops) lyrics with an occasional lilting edge that comes close to Paul Simon.

My personal favourite track is 'Giving Up The Gun', which has a shimmery, luminescent summery feel to its bold pop strokes; but it also embodies my only criticism of this album. It's not its genre-defying musical skittishness; after all their New York musical contemporaries like MGMT and Dirty Projectors, and forebears like Talking Heads (whoops again), have made it their sound business to restlessly hop around the musical landscape like they own the entire sonic spectrum. No, it's more the fact that this album is far, far too optimistic and fuzzily warm for this time of year. As criticisms go, I guess that's not bad. On the strength of Contra, 2010 is going to be a vintage year for music.

Back in the summer I mentioned a New Jersey band called Real Estate, whose 'Fake Blues' single was on heavy rotation for a good few weeks on my iPod. Real Estate's debut album was released by the low-key Woodsist toward the back end of the year, and was perhaps a couple of months late in coming since, like Contra, Real Estate is way too cheerful for the bleak weather we're having here in the UK.

Best described as a more lo-fi Fleet Foxes, Real Estate combine brushed cymbal-heavy percussion with delicate filigree guitar sections and the sort of dreamy melodic hooks that makes the whole alt. folk axis so appealing right now. Martin Courtney's vocals are delivered with an air of cursory, otherworldly detachment on songs like the opener 'Beach Comber', while instrumental tracks like 'Atlantic City' propel themselves forward with some of the most innocently beguiling guitar sections you'll probably ever hear.

The same can not be said for Pat Metheny's ominously-named Zero Tolerance For Silence, an album whose title probably passes the fabled Ronseal test in saying all you really need to know about what's contained on the five tracks here. For me, this out-of-print 1994 album has a near-mythical status. I first borrowed the CD from my local library, and was initially attracted neither by Metheny's guitar dexterity nor his vast and prolific back catalogue. It was two things – the photograph of a neon striplight on the sleeve (don't ask me why; it just appealed) and a typically enthusiastic display of gushing praise by Thurston Moore (whoops; I swear that wasn't planned) on a sticker afixed to the case.

Zero Tolerance For Silence is a challenging listen from the off. Metheny, a jazz guitarist by trade, here delivers five tracks that have much in common with Sonic Youthers Moore (that just keeps happening!) and Lee Ranaldo's excursions into free improv the world over. When I first heard it in 1994, I wasn't ready for the ear-shredding sonic onslaught that Metheny conjures from his electric guitars, and so I never made a recording. Since then my musical tastes have broadened ('worsened'?) and I have tried to track this down for the best part of a decade. Essential music for anyone interested in the locus between total punk anarchy and free jazz.

And look Neil, I didn't mention Ryan Adams once. Oh, actually...

Audio Journal by Patrick O'Donnell : Ned's Atomic Dustbin, 02 Shepherd's Bush Empire, 20.12.2009

2009-12-21T13:37:00.000-08:00

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

This week's blog comes to you from Patrick O'Donnell, with a review from the Ned's Atomic Dustbin concert at the O2 Shepherd's Bush Empire last Saturday.

"Dan Dan the fast drumming man, Alex plays one bass, Mat the other, Rat does the guitar, and Jonn sings". As it was in the beginning so it was on Saturday night at the 02 Shepherd's Bush Empire. The recently restored original line-up of Ned's Atomic Dustbin took to the stage to celebrate their 1991 début album God Fodder.

"Kill... your... television," Jonn spits at a decidedly older, balder and fatter crowd than the song was originally aired to as the band rip into their most famous track and album opener with trademark energy. The crowd responds in kind as the 'Lunatic Magnets' (Ned's Fans' moniker) roll back the years and a surging mosh pit ebbs and flows across the packed venue.

Having your 'crowd pleaser' as your opening track could be bad planning in other circumstances but Ned's stay true to the original listing and a knowing audience loves them for it. They tear into 'Less Than Useful' and 'Selfish' before a typically reticent Jonn pays a customary "cheers" to his adoring fans.

Ned's had in recent years played reunion gigs and even recorded new tracks with a new guitarist and second bassist but the return of Rat and Mat makes the occasion even more special. Mat was always the voice of the band and the most energetic and was clearly enjoying reliving happy days. The crowd seems to jump with him as fan favourite 'Grey Cell Green' kicks in and when he tells the audience he didn't "expect to be playing these songs at forty" a nostalgic note hovers in the air as the fans and band unite in a sense of history and belonging.

Next up is 'Cut Up', followed by 'Throwing Things' (surprisingly no one does) and 'Capital Letters'. The youngest of the late Eighties / early Nineties trio of 'Stourbridge Scene' grebo bands, Ned's always led contemporaries The Wonder Stuff and Pop Will Eat Itself in the t-shirt stakes and the Lunatic Magnets had squeezed into their faded favourites for the occasion. And by this point in proceedings, t-shirt after t-shirt moves through the air as IT consultants re-learn how to crowd-surf.

The excitement peaks with best song of the evening, 'Happy'. Aptly named and expertly executed.
Ned's finish off with 'Your Complex', 'Nothing Like', 'Until You Find Out', 'You' and 'What Gives My Son?' before heading off the stage with a big "thank you" from Jonn. The album track-list blitzed through in 35 minutes flat. Inevitable chants of "you fat bastard" ring out (maybe invoked by Les "Carter USM" Carter's support slot) as the crowd tries to coax the Fantastic Five back.

They duly oblige and Mat takes to the mic again, explaining that we are to be treated to "some other songs that would have been toured with God Fodder, hope you enjoy them". No fear. This is like a 20-year sober heroin addict enjoying another hit.

'Terminally Groovy' is first and gloriously energetically out of the blocks, followed by other B-sides and associated tracks 'Aim', 'Plug Me In', 'Bite', 'Flexible Head', 'Faceless' and 'Trust', and neither the band nor crowd relents. Which is why it seems poignant as they slow things down to end with usual curtain-closer 'Titch'. It gives the band and their fans a moment to reflect on what just happened and revel in a mutual respect.

Having been to see The Wonder Stuff flawlessly air their 1989 album HUP to 4,000 fans at the 02 Birmingham Academy on Thursday, followed by this early Christmas present from Ned's, it's easy to see why the bands from that rich pre-Brit Pop era are cashing in on the reunion circuit. There is a deeply-held affection for bands that give their all, have personality and are an antidote to the waves of manufactured and conformist rubbish that has followed.

In a disposable age when bands seem to come and go too easily, today's young Turks could do worse than take a look at Ned's, one of the Nineties' most underrated bands, who, thanks to years of touring and learning their craft, are, twenty years later able to enjoy a sold-out gig with adoring fans. Somehow I doubt Scouting For Girls will find themselves in the same position. Kill your television? I would gladly if I could go to gigs like this every night of the week.

Setlist
Kill Your Television
Less Than Useful
Selfish
Grey Cell Green
Cut Up
Throwing Things
Capital Letters
Happy
Your Complex
Nothing Like
Until You Find Out
You
What Gives My Son?
---------
Terminally Groovy
Aim
Plug Me In
Bite
Flexible Head
Faceless
Trust
Titch