Audio Journal : 17/05/2010

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 : 05/04/2010

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 : 08/03/2010

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.