Audio Journal: 15/11/2013 - Avatism, Colo, Color Film, Hologram

As I mentioned last time, I have only really listened to Lou Reed and The Velvet Underground in the last fortnight, but a couple of other things arrived in my inbox recently which have provided a distraction from focusing exclusively on Reed's passing.

Colo 'Holidays'

The first is an upcoming single from Colo, which is due out in December on Ki Records. 'Holidays' is a simple, understated track somewhere between dreamy instrumental synth-pop and ambient dub, complete with a soulful vocal texture that sticks with you long after the song's finished. It's got a lovely, gauzy, Café Del Mar-at-sunset vibe and it's far too warm for this time of year. Colo's album is due out in March.

Avatism's 'Adamant' hit my inbox a few weeks ago. Avatism is the alias of Italian producer Thomas Feriero and contains thirteen tracks of slick, inventive electronica infused with crisp techno and house beats, clipped and stirring guitar loops (think Morricone in a techno setting), dreamy synths and a warm ambient atmosphere. For those of us who grew up with Nineties dance music it's a dream come true in the context of micro genres we old guys don't understand; one might even describe it as mind-expanding in the right circumstances. A remix EP of tracks from the album has also been released but for the optimal trip pick up the album and eschew that annoying habit of course picking favourite tracks (although, if my life depended on it, I'd say get the monstrous 'Mastodon').

Color Film 'Until You Turn Blue'

Color Film released 'Until You Turn Blue' recently ahead of an LP slated to arrive in March next year. Without knowing it had just been released you'd have sworn that 'Until You Turn Blue' had been released in about 1983, being constructed of jerky guitars, plinky synths and orchestral stabs, fantastic slap bass and the sort of anguished but soulful vocal that seemed to die out in the Eighties (it reminds me a lot of Tears For Fears' 'Broken' from Songs From The Big Chair). 'Until You Turn Blue' was mixed by Gareth Jones, someone who brings excellence to everything he's ever done.

So if all of this was intended to serve as a distraction from listening to Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, two nice little tracks served to pull me back in that direction. The first was 'Lou Reed Lou Reed' by The Auteurs' Luke Haines, a reverential bit of glam-infused synth-pop complete with Reed-style guitar riffery and lyrics that trawl Reed's life and image. The second was a haunting version of 'Pale Blue Eyes' by French duo Hologram (Carla Luciani and Maxime Sokolinski). Hologram released their debut EP earlier this year and it was one of the things I listened to most during the warmer months, so hearing their fragile voices, subtle drum machines, gentle guitars and shimmering synths tackling one of my favourite Reed ballads was a lovely moment of serendipity.

Listen to 'Pale Blue Eyes' here or below.

Audio Journal: 08/11/2013 - Lou Reed

Lou Reed, self-portrait from Facebook

My listening habits in the last two weeks centred exclusively on the music of one artist - Lou Reed. In the days following his untimely death it seemed the most fitting thing to do.

I admit that I came to Reed's music relatively late in life; I was aware of his influence, just like I was aware of Bowie, punk, The Ramones and so on, but as with all of those things I just figured it wasn't for me. Until university I only really listened to electronic music - pop, techno, ambient and so on - but after a while I found my tastes becoming more eclectic. A key turning point came toward the end of my second year when I decided to buy a biography of David Bowie called Loving The Alien by Christopher Sandford from the campus branch of Waterstone's. I don't know why, but I suspect it was chiefly to read more about Bowie's Berlin period, whose starkness had a direct influence on the electronic music I was familiar with.

I surprised myself with enjoying the passages on how Bowie's love of The Velvet Underground and its frontman Lou Reed had directly inspired his Ziggy Stardust alter ego. The sections recounting the speed anthem 'White Light / White Heat' from the Velvets' second album were especially vivid, I recall, as was the description of 'I'm Waiting For The Man'. In my head it sounded wild. Raw. Decadent. Gritty. I wasn't then in love with New York like I am today but the idea of Reed singing about buying drugs from a dealer up in Harlem seemed just about the most thrilling thing I'd heard about in my early twenties. It sounded a lot more interesting than the song 'Perfect Day' that I'd first heard the year before on the Trainspotting soundtrack, and which by then had been butchered into an unlikely star-encrusted advert for the BBC. I knew that track was about a heroin comedown and so in its own way it was still 'punk' but 'I'm Waiting For The Man' sounded infinitely more appealing. In my head.

It took over a year before I bought The Velvet Underground And Nico, the album that included that song. I'd travelled from my girlfriend's parents' house in rural Norfolk to North London for an interview with a big pharmaceuticals firm, part of that painful cycle of third year soul-selling, and this one had gone really badly. Back at Liverpool Street station I had hours to kill before a train back to Norwich so I wandered out of the station and found a branch of Our Price (it's now a Specsavers) and came out with a copy of The Velvet Underground And Nico. I studied the sleeve the entire journey back to my girlfriend's house. It felt like I'd taken a leap into a completely unknown world, one that was appealing but one that barely made any sense in amongst the music I'd been consuming up to that point.

At her house I remember putting it on, realising that I knew 'Sunday Morning' from the OMD album Liberator and was blown away by 'I'm Waiting For The Man'; it was better than it had ever sounded in my head. My girlfriend hated it. I think that made me like it all the more. Last week I was given the chance to contribute to a piece on Lou Reed's best moments for a Clash piece; I instinctively chose that track that had first gripped me. Unfortunately someone else got the honour of writing that one and so my piece didn't get used (I wrote about Metal Machine Music instead). Here's what I wrote anyway.

“Like Hubert Selby Jr, Lou Reed always had a penchant for subjects that were completely taboo. This song joyously documented scoring drugs from a Harlem dealer, and would provide the obvious reference point for punk and glam.”

I rented a room in a house in Colchester that year with a couple in their forties. Dave was the muso of the couple. I remember coming home raving about having bought the first Velvets album and, from his pile of cassettes in the kitchen, he retrieved a copy of Berlin. He told me that if I loved that album I'd love Reed's solo output. I didn't believe him, much like I didn't believe that the Velvets post-John Cale would be any good, and so I approached it cynically, just as I had with 'Perfect Day'. I concede now that he was right, and I absolutely love those Lou Reed solo records that I own.

In the summer that followed I bought a tiny CD-sized book that was effectively a track-by-track description of every track the Velvets ever recorded. I think I bought it from Athena. I consumed it avidly and it became a sort of buyer's guide for the Velvets' music over the coming years. Better and more comprehensive books have been about the Velvets and Lou Reed, but I still refer to that tiny book from time to time. Right now it's on top of a pile of reading material next to my bed, the product of showing my two daughters pictures of the band after subjecting them to a cheap Velvets compilation I've been listening to in the car since I first saw that Reed had died.

The Complete Guide To The Music Of
The Velvet Underground
by Peter Hogan (1997)

So the past week has seen me listening to more or less everything of Reed's that I have in my collection (including listening to Metal Machine Music as the backdrop to various Tube journeys; it works surprisingly well for that). I genuinely thought Reed would live forever, as I suppose he will through his music and reputation. He had long ago sorted the addictions that had informed his early lyrics and found solace in daily meditations and tai chi (if you think Metal Machine Music is the most unusual album in his back catalogue, try Hudson River Wind Meditation, an ambient album designed to accompany tai chi and meditation). I saw him as the role model for a life I guess I want - namely one of being creative, being centred, living healthily and having a reputation for being monumentally grouchy.

Rest in peace Lou.

- MJAS, London, November 2013

Audio Journal : 24/01/2011

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 : 26/07/2010

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 by MJA Smith : 26/10/2009

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

I have a habit of repeating myself throughout this blog, so apologies for that. One such thing I often find myself saying is how much Robert Fripp redefined the way I listen to guitar music. His Love Cannot Bear: Soundscapes – Live In The USA is a good example of this. Fripp, the backbone of the band King Crimson has, over time, developed techniques that allow his guitar to trigger electronic sounds – often dubbed Frippertronics – from a bank of equipment which fully disguises the fact that a guitar prompted the sound that emerges. The result is a serene suite of electronic atmospherics which allowed me in the past to bridge the gap between the apparently limitless possibilities of the synth and the enduring versatility of the humble electric guitar.

Fripp frequently played on records produced by Brian Eno, and the two have collaborated on a number of influential duo albums. Eno’s Desert Island Selection, a companion CD album to the vinyl More Blank Than Frank comprises tracks culled from his back catalogue and sees Eno’s progression from post-Roxy glam oddness on Here Come The Warm Jets to the pioneering ambience of Music For Airports. I already own More Blank Than Frank on vinyl, which I bought many years ago in Barcelona. I’d like to say that I was in the city on some sort of Hemingway-inspired bohemian backpacking expedition, but I wasn’t. Regrettably, whilst there’s a bit of cross-over between the two albums, the best track on More Blank Than Frank – ‘King’s Lead Hat’, an anagram of Talking Heads, who Eno produced – is absent here. ‘I’ll Come Running (To Tie Your Shoe)’ and ‘Here He Comes’, close second and third are here however.

One of the defining artistic collaborations Eno developed was with David Bowie, who began working with the producer when he uprooted to Berlin in the mid-1970s. Low is an album which found Bowie in introspective mode, Eno and others (including Robert Fripp) adding texture and colour on what has become an influential piece in the more experimental territories of Bowie’s back catalogue. Low has a reputation for being bleak and dark (it was a major influence on Joy Division, a band who made the words ‘bleak’ and ‘dark’ very much their own), but I don’t really hear that. The first half is made up of electronically-augmented leftfield pop while the second half is broadly instrumental and more like what you‘d expect from Eno.

David Bowie once had a very public spat in a New York restaurant with the imperious erstwhile Velvet Underground singer / guitarist Lou Reed which is well documented in Christopher Sandford’s Loving The Alien biography. Lou Reed and his former Velvets song writing partner John Cale reconciled some of their personal and artistic differences to record Songs For Drella in 1990. ‘Drella’ was a nickname adopted by Andy Warhol, who was by 1990 three years departed of this earth. Warhol, the sui generis poster boy for pop art, was responsible for launching the Velvets into the art and rock world’s conscience, ‘producing’ their debut album in the only way he knew how – by letting the tapes run and just recording whatever racket the band wanted to make, much as with the lo-fi hands-off way in which he produced his videos. The Velvet Underground And Nico was derided at the time by the establishment as being under-produced and, like much of the mainstream art world perception of Warhol’s work at the time, lazily crafted.

That backlash to someone who’s influence has been rewritten and made large over time is a theme that emerges in Songs For Drella. The album is basically a mini-operetta by the two musicians biographically detailing Warhol’s life from his upbringing in blue-collar Pittsburgh, his early employment as an illustrator for a shoe firm, through the speed- and heroin-addled craziness of the Factory, the development of Warhol’s signature repetitive style, his near-fatal shooting by Valerie Solanis, the creative void after and his ultimate corporeal decline. Cale and Reed take it in turns to deliver the songs, including one piece where Cale perfectly apes Warhol’s introspective and scattershot tonality on a piece which sees him read from the artist’s journals, a piece in which he mourns the loss of Factory stalwarts like Billy Name and curses those who he feels have disappointed him, such as Ondine and Reed. Reed responds on the final track ‘Hello It’s Me’ wherein he finally offers a heartfelt apology for neglecting their friendship, reaffirms his love for Warhol’s work, and sticks the boot in with a few feelings that he won’t let lie.

Reed and Cale both collaborated with Factory girl and Warhol muse Nico on her album Chelsea Girl. Nico possessed a leaden Teutonic intonation which can make listening to her singing somewhat uncomfortable. Me, I’ve gone from detesting the intrusion of her voice on the Velvets’ debut to finding new depths in her style, and so it was with the latter view that I approached Chelsea Girl, the title track of which explores the madness of the Hotel Chelsea wherein she reels off accounts of morally reprehensible behaviour by the Factory cast and crew. (I should at this juncture point out that another album I’ve been listening to over and over this week is Love Is Hell by Ryan Adams, which also includes a song about the Chelsea; more on that album below.) The entire feel of the album has a low-key Greenwich-Village-café-on-a-Sixties-Sunday-afternoon sort of vibe, with lots of flute and strummed acoustic guitars. Occasional strings colour the atmosphere tenderly.

Andy Warhol designed the homoerotic sleeve to The Rolling Stones’s Sticky Fingers, from which the hits ‘Brown Sugar’ and ‘Wild Horses’ were culled. Growing up at a time when the Stones were well past their peak and already on the mega-tour circuit which positioned them as greedy old dudes on a tour bus, I completely overlooked the powerful and sometimes challenging sound they perfected earlier on in their career; so I‘ll readily admit to being late to the party when it comes to albums like Sticky Fingers, where my favourite tracks are those – like the best Velvet Underground tracks – that deal with the darker side of life – ‘Sister Morphine’ is one long homage to chemical dependency while ’Can’t You Hear Me Knocking’ lurches perfectly from bluesy soul-rock to honky-tonk jazz via some Bitches Brew-esque percussion.



‘Sister Morphine’ was co-written with Marianne Faithfull, who also provided backing vocals on Ryan Adams’s Love Is Hell. All I will say about Love Is Hell is that very occasionally an album comes along which makes you think to yourself ‘You know what? If I never listened to another album again after this I wouldn’t mind.’ Love Is Hell is one of those albums. It’s moving, uplifting, bleak, disturbing all at once and I can honestly say I’ve heard nothing else like it. I must have listened to it a dozen times and counting and I’ve only owned it for a week.

There will be no Audio Journal next week as I need a break from turning this out each week. Instead I’ll be putting the finishing touches to a piece for My Other Blog about – I kid you not – teenage girls eating Pot Noodles on the train at 8.50 in the morning. Oh, and probably listening to Love Is Hell over and over.

Audio Journal by MJA Smith : 17/08/2009

Though often broad-minded, this blog has generally been about that which can be described, however loosely, as music. But what is music? Is music art? Is music played without regular instruments actually something that can be adequately described as ‘music’?

Such are the questions that go through your mind if you should find yourself at Playing The Building, the installation by elastic-limbed ex-Talking Heads front man David Byrne at the Roundhouse in Camden until the end of the month. Playing The Building finds an old pump organ, fully gutted and kitted out with various electric switches in the centre of the historic venue, those switches in turn being connected by coloured wires to various hammers and compressors attached to the beams, hollow pipes and girders of the building. People visiting the installation are allowed to sit at the keyboard of the organ and play the keys, causing drones, clicks and whistles to fill the circular structure. In short, visitors are literally able to play the actual structure of the building.



In 1979 the Roundhouse, after incarnations as a turning shed for locomotives heading in and out of Kings Cross, a gin warehouse, a radical hippy hangout and a theatre, found itself a mecca for punk bands, especially those visiting from the CBGB scene in New York. One such band was Byrne’s Talking Heads, who played the venue that year. Thirty years on, Byrne’s art school tendencies and music have come together in this installation, which was first created at Färgfabriken in Sweden and most recently the Battery Maritime Building in Manhattan.

Time pressures meant that I only stayed for about twenty minutes when I visited last Monday, which effectively precluded me from joining the lengthening queue of people looking to play the Roundhouse. But I did grab a photo and three minutes of audio from two teenagers playing together at the organ. Apologies for the sound quality, but I only had an old Nokia with me. Better clips from earlier incarnations of the installation can be found here.

Download : two teenagers Playing The Building (10/09/2009) / .mp3 / 1.4mb

Incidentally, New York punk lost one of its pioneers last week. Willy Deville, who in the incandescent scene that burst forth in Manhattan’s Lower East Side recorded rockabilly-inspired punk with Mink Deville passed away last week. His ‘Spanish Stroll’ from his 1977 debut Cabretta has been in the eardrums a lot since died, as has his urgent, intense ‘Soul Twist’.

Is it punk? Is it art? Is it music? I found myself listening an album that I know, categorically, only around four people have ever listened to. Jason Gets His Fingers Burned was recorded by my good friend Matt Handfield and myself one evening in 2001 under the name Handfield / Smith. Matt played guitar while I processed his riffs and strumming in real time using various effects.

The result is a 45 minute jam with discernible melodies contrasted with lots of feedback. It was my vision to create something like how I thought the album Metal Machine Music by Lou Reed (this must be New York week, sorry) might sound; having listened to MMM since, I can confirm that it sounds nothing like it, but even though I’m normally extremely self-deprecating about any music I’ve ever made, it still sounds good to me. We planned a follow-up, which in my head was called Grow Beards. Handfield has now actually grown that beard, whereas I’ve stopped making music altogether in favour of listening instead. We coulda been huge in the alt.noise scene.

The second track on JGHFB was a noodling guitar passage that Matt created the same evening and which I then later remixed offline. You can find it by doing the right click / save as thing on the link below.

Download : Handfield / Smith 'Tsm / Dog Soup (Tsm)' / .mp3 / 4.1mb

Audio Journal by MJA Smith : 10/08/2009

‘You’ll love this,’ said my father, handing over a CD of At The Foot Of The Mountain by Eighties comeback kids a-ha. I looked at the front cover and thought to myself how odd it was to be receiving music recommendations from my parents. ‘It’s like Depeche Mode,’ he added. Though sceptical I thought I’d listen to it, you know, be charitable, and write here scathingly about how unbelievably naff it was and add it to the blogosphere.

Unfortunately, I can’t do that, much as I’d like to. Okay, so it’s not all to my taste – and some of the songs veer into Take That-style pompous balladry, while Morten Harket’s lyrics are occasionally horribly twee – but my dad was right in places about the Depeche similarities. More specifically, the 1981, Speak & Spell, Vince Clarke-era synth pop sound best evidenced on the track ‘Riding The Crest‘. So overall, I was pleasantly surprised, however, if you want a genuine modern take on the 1981 sound – as deployed on Soft Cell‘s Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret, Human League’s Dare and the aforementioned Mode LP – you are advised to check out Vic Twenty’s excellent Electrostalinist, described by Daniel Miller (producer of Speak & Spell and founder of Mute Records) as ‘too 1981’. And he’d know. (My interview with Adrian Morris of Vic Twenty is available here).

Elsewhere this past week I’ve been listening to In Sides by Orbital, the fourth album from the Hartnoll brothers. I’ve probably listened to it more in the past week than I have since it came out in 1996, as my cumbersome triple vinyl edition has been languishing in a record bag since pretty much the week it was released. Though not as good as their second album (colloquially known as The Brown Album), it’s a definite improvement on their third (Snivilisation), being six tracks of decent but not self-indulgent electronica.

The 7” box this week turned up something that I’d never listened to before, the single ‘Less Of Me’ from Guildford band Fourth Quartet, now sadly defunct. Released in 1998, it’s lo-fi post-rock with a slight tilt toward Radiohead introspection. Highlighting its indie credentials, the single comes in a handmade, stapled sleeve. They went on to record one album, which after finally listening to this after owning it for 11 years, I might attempt to track down.

Also defunct are the band Action Plan, who supported Razorlight and who had the potential to make it big; two singles in and the dream abruptly ended, leaving a few concert appearances and a smattering of recorded songs as their only legacy. After seeing them at The Garage – my favourite London venue by far – I downloaded their online demo, which was fantastic. Very Pixies-esque and reminiscent of Mute band Foil (also, it would appear, lost for good).

Other stuff in the eardrums this week includes a bunch of songs downloaded legitimately – the upbeat Low-life remix of Moby’s ‘Mistake’ being one (download it here), a new track by David Byrne and Dirty Projectors (get it here) being another – the debut single ‘Fake Blues’ by excellent New Jersey band Real Estate (some free demos, including an early version of the single are available at Stereogum), and the breakthrough album Sally Can’t Dance by Lou Reed.