You’re just my summer listening but I’ll remember you when winter comes

My top ten for 2013 so far was way way back at the start of March so it must be fine to do another compilation post. What have I been loving over the summer? What happy party tunes have been providing my personal soundtrack to the surprisingly fine rays that have even graced the Glasgwegian skyline this year? Dethscalator, Black Sun Roof! anyone?

The Pastels – Slow Summits

So before this gets ridiculously off theme lets start with The Pastels who put out a new album this year called Slow Summits which at least includes a track called Summer Rain. The Pastels are relentless. Not like a tire iron or the Terminator or indeed Dethscalator or Black Sun Roof! More like the slow-mo beauty of a glacier or the gentle passing of the seasons. You can run you can hide but in my experience their unique handmade world of seductive pop will catch you. I’m the right age of John Peel listener to have dug The Pastels from the start and I loved the Marychain and the Shop Assistants at the time but it never happened. *Whisper it* I sometimes even skipped past Truck Train Tractor on my well worn Festive 50 cassette. But then in the 90s I heard the dark romanticism of Flightpaths to Each Other on a long windswept rain lashed car journey by night and that was it. I was ensnared. Sometimes context and the moment a tune soundtracks are critical. I’m pleased to say that some of that Flightpaths dark romanticism shows up on Slow Summits, especially on Night Time Made Us and also the title track. The Pastels sometimes get lumped in with notions of childish indie pop amateurism and sure there’s a rough edge to their early stuff but the other way The Pastels are relentless is in the obvious care and attention they take on their records to make sure every note, every sound counts. Not to say that they are blandly professional or artisan like in their approach but they are practiced masters of the unique musical world they create.

I’m pretty sure my street is in this video.

Hookworms – Pearl Mystic
This is one of those bands that remind me why I love rock music and why I don’t give up on hearing new rock music that will delight me and why I don’t just disappear into searches for new sounds in genres less familiar to me or else declare a day zero armageddon whereby only the most out there experimental music will do. A lot of the components of Hookworms’ sound seem well trod. Gargage punk meets krautrock would be the reductionist label. And there have been more lauded acts in that vein recently which haven’t really grabbed me. I think I love this band because they don’t really sound ‘cool’ and the whole Neu motorik thang so lends itself to off handed insouciance. They sound more like they are late for the start of their lives and want to rush to their grandest moments.

Funny how watching the video of a tune on Youtube can alter perception. I had no idea the intro to this was so long until I saw the seconds perfectly measured out on the progress bar. I usually just love the slow build up but thought it was less than 30 seconds.

Sun City Girls – Eye Mohini: Sun City Girls Singles Vol. 3
This is a bit of a cheat in that Sun City Girls no longer exist due to the untimely death of member Charles Gocher. If I am honest they are a band I’ve been aware of for years but not spent a lot of time listening to. I know their guitarist Richard Bishop’s stuff better but I’ve so loved his records I’ve been meaning to go back and sample properly from Sun City Girls insanely lengthy discography. So I recently picked this new compilation of singles from late 80 to early 90s (I think). They were three American dudes but sounded about as far away as you can get from the ‘power trio’. They don’t really have an identifiable sound. They seem to take a lot from different folk musics from around the world but how much they are playing versions of existing tunes in languages other than English or just making stuff up I’ve no idea. It doesn’t matter when you hear a tune like this. There are loads of brilliant moments on this record but if you only listen to one thing from this post make it Borungku Si Derita and play it loud and feel yourself swept up in the righteous joy of it. You are an extra in a foreign language film of uncertain origin and you and the other villagers have just freed yourselves from the evil overlord.

Kid Congo & The Pink Monkey Birds – Haunted Head

Kid Congo makes me wish I could look good with a pencil moustache. The Cramps, The Gun Club, The Bad Seeds – all sartorially cool groups, all at the apotheosis of their coolness with Kid Congo in their ranks. But you know he always played great guitar for them too. Even with the odd solo record he seemed like the eternal sidekick but now he gives hope to all sidekicks with three albums and loads of shows with his band The Pink Monkey Birds. The ghost of Link Wray screaming through your hall.  Scuzzy creepy garage gumbo rock. Yum.

Thee Faction – Good Politics: Your Role As An Active Citizen In Civil Society

You know how it goes when one of your mates puts a record out. Your supposed to buy it and be polite about it. You don’t have to love it and find it challenging your preconceptions about simple in your face R’n’B. Thee Faction are also the only music I have heard this year coherently and consistently taking the coalition to task but to do it with humour and killer tunes. Every listen I hear another brilliant moment like the one below. Go get it here .

“Your grandad and your grandma knew they’d won the war/When the working folks said they wouldn’t take it no more/The establishment caved they thought it was going to get rough/Now we’ve got the NHS cos they were scared of us”

Pony Time – Go Find Your Own

I haven’t noticed any other instruments on this other than bass and drums (vocals aside) but wow it’s all they need. I’ve either become a terrible dancer in middle age or else time and wisdom have revealed what everyone else could see and point and laugh at but were too polite to disabuse me of in my youth. But this record makes me not want to care and to leap about and dad dance my way to a slipped disc. The drums are so huge and splashily insistent that you will tune in and obey their beat. The bass comes up alongside and blocks your exit. The fantastically narky vocals provide hooks as extra sauce if you need it but really it’s the bass and it’s the drums. They also makes the greatest videos. Here’s two of them. Geordie is also worth a look.

Kim Deal – Are You Mine?

Kim Deal gets into my second compilation post too. The Breeders show earlier this year was the first time I’ve ever been to one of those album resurrection things where a band reforms a line-up from a certain point in time and play their ‘classic’ album all the way through. I wouldn’t go to one of these for just anyone. It was marvelous. Then she goes and puts out this to remind you that she can also still write beautiful heart worn songs every bit as good as Do You Love Me Know?

Ok you’ve had your fun – on into the unpleasant corner.

Black Sun Roof! –  4 Black Suns & A Sinister Rainbow (Disc 1: Truffled Abyss, Disc 2: Werewolf Universe)

I can’t pretend I’m an expert on the output of Matthew Bower – couple of Skullflower things and now this. The earliest thing I’ve got is a collaboration with Richard Youngs. Consistently it’s all a big bag of scary noise. He might have made some quiet gentle stuff but I can’t imagine it. This isn’t pondersome approachable noise improvised with breaths and space for moments of contemplation. It’s fill every space in the canvas and assault all frequencies at once noise. But it isn’t featureless. The pummelling comes in waves at different levels and if you listen in you hear ghosts of dead records pass through the aural TV static. I can only envy someone like Bower’s total dedication to such a singular vision. This double CD is well over 80 minutes – there’s no piano ballad to provide ‘pacing’. Sometimes I think if I could fix on one approach like this I could make a grand body of musical work of my own but you know that you don’t choose a path like this it chooses you.

Dethscalator – Racial Golf Course No Bitches/Hey Colossus – Cuckoo Live Life Like Cuckoo

It is enormously unfair to lump these two in together as they are both fantastic records in their own right but they once made a split single together and they do share a nasty smelly sickly take on metal. Dethscalator on opening track Black Percy come on a bit more like the second coming of NWOBHM except this time it actually rocks with added Blue Cheer. Anyone remember those earlier Blue Cheer worshippers The Walking Seeds? The vocalist in Dethscalator could so rule The Walking Seeds genius moment Blathering Out.  You will feel hungover after this record or like you’ve caught something. That is a recommendation.

Dethscalator of course win the prize for best bandname. How did nobody else beat them to it?

Over the course Hey Colossus prove they are a bit more sophisticated but not before they’ve dropped the daftest baadest baaad ass tune you will hear all year in Hot Grave. “I got a hot grave cos of the things that I did/so throw your dust down and help me bang on the lid.” It’s got a snaky riff bit, a stomping riff bit and disconcerting clashing swathes of synth coming in over the top. You also think it’s a bit lost halfway through but you end up loving it even more for not letting that single thumping chord go and then hawling itself back up for one last rattle. With no break your into the queasy circular bass riff of Oktave Dokkter and you realise this album is not just going to be a horns aloft fist pumping dumbass metal trip. This is one of the best sequenced albums I’ve heard this year. The stomping riff in Hot Grave works well into the insistent circularity of the fuzzed bass in Oktave Doctor which in turn rolls you into the clean looping patterns of Telling Time With Jesus. You don’t need to be listening on vinyl to know that the gigantonormous Sabbath riff of Leather Lake is the start of Side 2. English Flesh is a nightmare motorik journey which crashes into a feedback haze halfway through then Pit and Hope appears through the haze with the prettiest guitar figure all year wrapped around with elegiac synth melodies. But you don’t get off that easy the demented Damo Suzuki vocals ground it all into the pervasive murk. They’re not making Dark Side of the Moon here you know. Hey Colossus also easily win the prize for best combined album title and artwork. That’s it below the video.

Title for this post is a nod to Royal Trux. Still miss them.

Inadvertently effective Neil Young show loo break.

I’d heard about the extended noisy section in Walk Like A Giant in recent shows before I went to see Neil Young & Crazy Horse earlier this year and was really looking forward to it. Unfortunately the song was well underway just as me and my wife both realised we each needed to go for a pee (cut it a bit fine for the start of the show after the pre-gig beer up in Finnieston). By the time I came out of the SECC toilets Neil and Crazy Horse had hunkered down for the extended feedback. As I waited for my wife who also decided she wanted to buy a t-shirt (one for me too! yay!) I was forced to listen to it in the space behind the temporary arena seating.  There’s something really weird about that space during a gig. Narrow, empty and tall with the partly muffled music music reverbing about. The Walk Like A Giant noise section sounded amazing back there. Like someone was crashing the Titanic into an iceberg all over again just the other side of the scaffolding and banked seating. Added bonus was I didn’t need to share the experience with people shouting “just play a fucking tune”.

The rest of the show was amazing too. So much better than when I saw him play the same venue with Booker T and The MGs as his backing band in the same venue years ago.

Here’s the view I missed:

Rush and the concept gig

Am I projecting my original introduction to Rush as a nipper at the end of the 70s onto how they operate now or does the setlist for their 2013 tour check out as a concept gig? A reasonable approach for the last prog group standing to still put new music out regularly that their fans don’t mind hearing as the best part of their show. It would be in keeping I suppose with their most recent album Clockwork Angels being a concept album. The themes of that album are old concerns of lyricist Neil Peart: freedom of the individual within an oppressive society with a side order of oppressive  religious orthodoxy. These themes seem to reflect back through the apparently obtuse choices of obscure 80s album tracks that grace the first set of the night and suggest that yes this is a concept gig. How prog is that? None more prog, etc.

Some folk enjoy labeling Rush as fascists which understandably is upsetting for bass player Geddy Lee given his mum survived Belsen while his dad survived Dachau. I don’t really hear fascism in their writing. Neil Peart, who writes their lyrics, comes across to me as more of an old fashioned North American libertarian mistrustful of  government involvement in citizens’ lives. I’m probably misreprenting him even at that but anyway I hear common ground with the right in his love individualism but not fascism. Their politics, whether intentionally or not, come across in the ‘comedy’ short that plays in the interval. A feature which is a bit of a Rush tradition now. The current one casts them as taxing avoiding gnome industrialists who enjoy the company of women a third their age and triple their height. I guess it’s meant to come across as mischievous and ‘sticking it to the (tax) man’ but it makes me think of them more as a cross between Amazon, Google, etc and if the three stooges were all Silvio Berlusconi.

You’d think I didn’t enjoy the gig but I did cos they totally rocked in their own inimitable fiddly high pitched voice way. The new album has loads more riffs and hooks on it than anything they’ve done since the 70s. They know how to play a big venue like the SECC with giant moving video screens, explosions and a headbanging string section. And they played Spirit of the Radio and Tom Sawyer. I loved it despite the silly interval video and the recent transformation of old prog warhorse 2112 into a beery shoutalong. They should play their overblown uber proggy old stuff with a straighter face I think. As I said I was introduced to Rush at a very young age. I don’t actually have much critical faculty when it comes to their music. I tried ignoring it in my tasteful 20s but it’s in my bones.

Search: “The Fall Remit review”

People who know me know how much I love The Fall so I thought rather than review their recent album Remit which predictably I love so the review wouldn’t be much of a surprise I thought I’d write something about the first five reviews that came up in a search “the fall remit review”. Given I’m a half arsed music blogger this is probably an act of utter churlishness but here goes.

First up: The Independent, Andy Gill

Two out of five stars. The reviewer wants The Fall to play nice. Wants to be able to hear the vocals above the keyboards and demands “propulsive grooves” “to get one over the marsh-like longueurs of noise and abstract verbiage”. He might want to watch his own tendrilled longueurs of flowery verbiage. He berates the group’s primitivism. I think he just doesn’t like riffs or noise and feels a need to apply his art history knowledge to justify his role as a critic in a ‘quality’ newspaper. Fair enough. He only likes the bits of The Fall when they are more like a pop group. I suppose just saying that wouldn’t get him published. Anyway, I hate the use of the term ‘primitivism’ in relation to rock music. I always suspect that the reviewer just doesn’t dig primitive music. What has rock music got if it isn’t primitive on some level? It rarely seems to be applied as a criticism of an act putting on or impersonating a primitive approach, hearkening back to a simpler age – not a criticism I think you can apply to The Fall. The Strypes maybe.

HiFi Wigwam, JAMPAL

Slightly unexpected combination being a fan style review on a hifi website. Alongside the no frills “I love it/my kids cover their ears” we get some technical notes on the sound quality of the vinyl copy the reviewer received. I confess I’m not really a hifi nut. I’ve always ended up spending my spare cash on more music rather than better gear to play it through. Ignorance of the hifi enthusiasts’ world confessed I’m still surprised and a bit amused at the idea of reviewing The Fall on one of these sites. But I like the idea even if I feel the reviewer has missed an opportunity to describe the 3D depth of quality afforded MES’s phlegm gargling by the vinyl edition when played through an expensive turntable and a set of really good speakers.

Anyway two reviews in and in terms of style we have two from opposite ends of a spectrum. As I write I think about how impossible and silly writing about music can seem (especially my own). But onwards.

Rocksucker, Jonny Abrams

I quite like this review. Notes the fun to be handed from mishearing Fall lyrics. An endless debate has raged since 1988 as to what exactly the chant is on Guest Informant. “Buzz that stink cog analyst” is my bet.

Virgin.com, Jack Preston

This one’s ok too but for Fall trainspotters commits one of the top two Fall review/article cliches. That of starting with the “”If it’s me and your granny on bongos, then it’s The Fall,” quote. It’s a good quote right enough just a bit overused. The other one is numbering the ex-members of the group. Weirdly this review notes a funk influence in the album. Wouldn’t necessarily be unwelcome to me but I’m not hearing it. Maybe it’s time for an MES/George Clinton hook up?

NME.com, Kevin EG Perry

Gosh I haven’t been on the NME website in a long time. It doesn’t look any prettier. They don’t go for in depth analysis do they? 7/10 and less than 170 words. Playful is the watchword on this one. There’s always a bit of that with The Fall. You can’t really take his sly digs at contemporaries very seriously – the bloke from LCD Soundsystem this time.  If you weren’t around for the 80s and paying very close attention to shortlived stints in the charts you wouldn’t have a clue what the fuss was about The Kane Gang being thickies on Gut of the Quantifier.  I won’t say anything else so’s not to risk making my review of this review longer than the review.

Here’s the single from the album:

Peter Brotzmann at the Glad Cafe

What can I say about Peter Brötzman?

Factual: I most recently saw PB play at The Glad Cafe on Sunday 7th April 2013 with Paal Nilssen-Love as part of the Counterflows festival. According to his Wikipedia page he is a 72 year old German artist and free jazz saxophonist and clarinetist.

Emotional:  Brötzmann’s music makes you want to laugh, cry, sigh,  exhort, pacify, giggle, scream, etc all at once. I love it.

Oppositional: It’s just noise.

Economic: How does Brötzmann pay the bills? He might be the last giant standing from the free music explosion of the late 60s with an unimpeachable international reputation for still raising the roof and going further out than younger peers but this is free jazz. It’s a minority pursuit. He’s playing the perfectly formed but still small Glad Cafe. How does that work? This is a bit of mundane concern but I don’t believe artists should suffer financially for their art.

Descriptive: Brötzmann inhales air into his lungs and exhales it vibrationally  through a mouthpiece which incorporates a reed into a length of metal  which is shortened and lengthened by a system of valves deployed by keys which Brötzmann presses with his fingers. A combination of these actions  transforms the exhaled air into a series of soundwaves which exit the instrument from the wide conical opening at one end. The soundwaves travel through the surrounding air entering the ears of those in attendance producing various effects. See Emotional, Oppositional, etc.

Anecdotal: I was there when Brötzmann expressed his confusion at a pub in Stirling which had no name above its door just a luminous sign for its best selling drink. “What is this big red T? What does it mean?” he asked or something similar. I’ve always wondered about the pub’s name. Fallen off? Removed as a prank? Act of vandalism by a barred punter or competitor? Deemed an unnecessary frippery for yuppy places by the landlord? Self conscious act of minimalism in tribute to the Le Weekend festival Brötzmann was playing at a few doors up the road? I may never know I may never care to know.

Right I’ve run out steam. I clearly can’t say much about Peter Brötzmann other than I have seen him twice and both performances were among the most intense and beautiful shows I’ve seen.

Friday night at Counterflows 2013 – 5th April

For various reasons I had to pick my shows carefully at this year’s Counterflows festival which is at least an improvement on last year when I couldn’t make any of it and missed Grouper. If you don’t know, Counterflows is a festival of experimental music and art run by Alasdair Campbell who was a mainstay behind the excellent Le Weekend festival which used to run out of the Tolbooth in Stirling.

On Friday night I saw Loren Connors and Suzanne Langille, and Kan Mikami (accompanied by Alex Neilson and Jandek). I guess you would describe both acts as experimental but both also set out from familiar territory – the creaking witchcraft of early blues (Connors and Langille) and the wild eyed energy burst of early Rock and Roll (Mikami).

Loren Connors started out almost like a straight ahead solo blues guitarist but over time and in partnership with Langille the creaking sound and spectral noise of witchcraft and hauntings has taken over. Tonight in particular they conjure up an immense creeping dread that casts its spell perfectly in the vaulted ceiling of former church St Andrews in the Square. But the blues remain too and we also get a beautiful torturous desolate version of Motherless Child.

Langille is great at unnerving an audience fixing us with a steely eye and claiming she knows things about you that you don’t even know yourself.  Speaking of fixing the audience with a steely eye – Connors impressively quietened the restless audience at the start of their show with just a mere lowering of his glasses onto the bridge of his nose and a searchlight glower – not a single word spoken. As well as being adept at making a group of noisy hipsters feel like they’re late for class, Connors is also one of my most favourite guitar players. Right from his earlier bluesier solo stuff he has always had an amazing ability to make a few sparse notes speak clearly of the heart. Tonight we also get some great use of noise through gently pummelled strings and pickups to create a soundtrack to the creeped out horrors Langille narrates. All the way from Robert Johnson  at the crossroads horror and the blues have always gone together. What’s a ghost but some poor soul impelled to wail the blues to eternity?

They also let some light in too when they have a mild spat over whether it’s time to stop and Langille chastises Connors for blasting her ears with some uncontrolled snarls of guitar. And in the end after the horror and the blues there is nothing more awe shucks heart warming than this great musical partnership stealing a kiss and taking their bow arm in arm.

Kan Mikami is quite a different proposition with his red semi-acoustic, sparkly top and prowling intensity he is like a throwback to the great Rock and Roll performers of the 50s. Think Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis. Harmonically Mikami paints from a limited palette on that big red guitar. He seems to cycle the same few chords and erupting lead licks through each song. But this is in keeping with those 50s guys too who used the same 12 bar progression on just about every tune. Watch an old tape of Little Richard or Jerry Lee and you get that a bedrock musical constant through their set is just the solid jump off point for all the psychotic energy of the performance, the force of their crazed Pied Piper personality surfing on a looping surge of simple changes elevated by moments of attack.

But this isn’t the 50s and Mikami is taking you somewhere a bit further out in a different direction. When he unleashes one of his trademark screams it is like someone is skinning Little Richard alive down there in his larynx.

After a couple of numbers Alex Neilson joins on drums in free playing mode complete with some of the most impressive gurning north of Yorkshire. I’ve gushed my admiration of Alex plenty in my post on Trembling Bells but I’ll just note that like many improvised sets the momentum of Alex’s matching of Mikami’s Rock and Roll freedom train takes time to build and synch. But this is as it should be. Music of this type is like a storm that takes time to reach full force. When Jandek joins on bass it acts as the tipping point for the storm to fully take off and blow your house down. He deploys some bass rumble under Mikami’s whirling twanging guitar but at other points he provides a percussive sound too making me think of the gentle clacking rhythm under Elvis’s Blue Moon come back with evil intent.

I leave with a daft grin on my face having probably seen the best Rock and Roll show I’ll see all year.

My Bloody Valentine at Glasgow Barrowland 9.3.13

Pic courtesy of scunnered via Flickr

A few quick words on this. I really enjoyed it. Yes, they were loud but not that loud – it seems that’s what everyone wants to know about an MBV show. But then you’ll know appreciation of volume is relative especially if you’ve ever seen Jazkamer.

Most pleasant surprise was that they played three tunes off the new album including a gloriously messy ‘looking-at-each-other-like-they-were-barely-holding-it-together’ wonder 2 at the end after You Made Me Realise which must count as some kind of MBV setlist sacrilege. Wonder 2 even came complete with a blinking in the lights Colm Ó Cíosóig on guitar up front and centre.

The new ones were among my favourites on the night which surprised me a bit. I like the new album but I’m not proclaiming it the best thing ever… yet (see last post). I especially loved the way ‘new you’ locked down into a sort of dream like stasis in its closing section that I could have listened to for another twenty minutes at least.

As I think often happens with bands that are eulogised for their skill with the studio as an instrument if they can cut it live it is because the ones who aren’t the ‘lauded studio wizard recluse’ are getting their moment to make the music something that lives and breathes and tries to shake the stars off the Barrowland ceiling. You could say Colm Ó Cíosóig is a little bit fettered on the post-Isn’t Anything material but he does also perfectly lock into its metronomic requirements and his live playing is central to creating that stasis as bliss feeling that worked best on ‘new you’ but was there plenty of other times too. But the real heroine for me of MBV as a live group is Debbie Googe. Yes she provides the dutiful bass end to the splurge of noise from the guitars. But she also provides a lot of the subtle dynamic that creates the floating stasis while keeping it human and engaging. And aside from that she can also push up the intensity on the heavy riff stuff.

My only minor gripe was the extent to which Kevin Shields’ vocals were mostly and almost comically inaudible. I totally expected that just maybe not to that degree. I half expected him start tapping his mic and mouthing ‘is thing on?’ My major gripe had nothing to do with the group  and everything to do with the audience and my descent into old fartdom (again see previous post). We were stood near a couple of groups of people who were incapable of not chatting to each other for more than ten seconds – I am not exaggerating. The only time they were all quiet was during You Made Me Realise. At that point they reminded me of the people that stampede past you in the Louvre to gawp at the Mona Lisa for five minutes and ignore the journey there and back out. Harrumph. Anyway it’s not like they ruined the night or anything and I guess they paid their ticket price too.

New finds and old dreams – top ten 2013 so far

Marnie Stern / Photo by Jolie Ruben Taken from Spin.com article click to read

Never let originality get in the way of a post. The Quietus have done a best albums and tracks so far this year so I thought I’d see if I could do a top ten tracks. So here it is. Much as I like these tunes as a list it does make me feel like a bit of an old fart given how many are ‘comebacks’ or ongoing stuff from people I was listening to in my 20s and um one is a remix but there’s a good reason for that.. honest. Links provided where available.

David Bowie – Where Are We Now?
I’ve already written about this so I’ll just add that I keep expecting the hype around its release to wear off and to find that I don’t like it that much but actually the opposite is happening. I love its world weary delicate thin old duke grandeur more and more. I’m slightly worried that the reviews of the album say that this track is a bit misleading as a trailer and it is actually full of ‘rockers’ and Bowie in full throated voice. Hmm, we’ll see.

Prince – Screwdriver
At the opposite end of the gravitas spectrum as a ‘comeback’ and isn’t every Prince release called a comeback ? I must admit I usually don’t pay much attention these days but I can’t resist the dippit non entendre (that means it is even more blunt than a single entendre in my head) silliness of this and the fact that he is using riffs, vocal harmonies, dual guitar melodies and asides that hark back to his 80s golden era.

My Bloody Valentine – is this and yes

My Bloody Valentine have been a very long term grower for me right from when they first appeared and everyone was raving about them. I’m not really sure why but I do remember foolishly turning my nose up at them in the late 80s as a too clever smash up of Cocteau Twins and Jesus and Marychain like that was a bad thing. The new album is proving the same. I didn’t dislike it on first listen but I did wonder if some of the glowing things said about it came as much from sheer wonderment at its very existence as they did from what people were hearing. But I’ve caught up a bit now and I especially like this track for its lack of urgency and offhanded prettiness.

Well that’s the comebacks on to the rest of the auld yins.

Kim Deal – Walking With A Killer

Sort of comeback related cos The Breeders are doing a Last Splash anniversary tour. I like that Kim Deal has also announced she is putting out a string of solo singles all year. Makes it clear, were it needed, that she is no heritage cabaret rock musician. I commented to a friend on Facebook this week that she is effortless in her genius. I take this back on second thoughts. I remember I saw her on some Youtube doc explaining how she consciously chose to paddle (her word) her way through the bass line in Gigantic – that flat understated way that it goes. She also demonstrated how a lot of other rawk musicians might have hammed it up a bit to try and make the simple six notes feel more interesting and of course demonstrated how wrong they would have been. She also pointed out how hard it is to find musicians capable of just ‘paddling’ . So it’s not effortless it’s precise, considered, done with love and care.

Yo La Tengo – Before We Run

Again I have already written about this or at least the album it is from. I could have picked anything from this gorgeous album but went for this as the obvious big album closer with the fantastic string section.

Eno, Moebius & Roedelius – Broken Head (Automat Rework) – link to the original can’t find the remix

Cheating a bit here cos this is a remix of a track first released in 1978 but it is from the new mostly excellent Conny Plank tribute boxset Who’s That Man. One of the four discs is a set of new remixes of stuff Plank was involved in recording. Normally I find these remix projects a bit pointless, even more pointless than those tribute records of cover versions by people you’ve never heard of. Often when it is a tribute to a genuine pioneer like Plank you feel as though the remixers are trying and generally failing to extend their heroes pioneering spirit with spurious cut ups and charmless combinations of sound – the aural equivalent of chefs who want to convince you that squid works with blueberry compote. On this track they’ve taken the safer but more effective option of retaining the overall intent of the original while giving it a bit of modern oomph and sparkle. Still sort of pointless but divertingly so and if it prompts a few DJs to introduce Eno’s grim deadpan vocals to a dancefloor near you then that’s alright.

On to the people who started releasing music this millenium.

tUnE-yArDs as YOKO – We Are All Water

Cheating again really as this is a reworking of an old Yoko tune with updated lyrics. Merrill Garbus (who is tUnE-yArDs essentially) is a perfect fit though for doing this, with her home made African rhythm loops and voice like an engaging and enjoyable foghorn. There is a fun and playful but serious edge to everything Garbus does that matches well with Yoko’s own approach to music art life everything. “Someday we’ll evaporate together”

Powell – Rider

I got this off a free compilation with The Wire. I’ve picked it cos I almost certainly wouldn’t have otherwise discovered it and I suppose that’s what The Wire is really for… not just for confirming why you love Keiji Haino (whaddyameanyathinkheisahorriblenoisyshoutymanslashneverheardofhim). Anyway this is a big thumping rotating bass hungry beast with odd short tangential and surprisingly likeable splashes of slapfunk bass on top. There’s even a daft sample of someone saying they walk with a Zombie which ought to be irritating but I find myself grinning at in an indulgent old fart sort of way.

Keeping two current contrasting ultimate favourites to last.

Grouper – The Man Who Died In His Boat

I could have picked anything from this album but out of sheer laziness have gone with the title track. Grouper/Liz Harris is one of my favourite musicians at the moment. She’s been on an incredible run of releases since Way Their Crept in 2005. She is big on reverb – everything she does is sunk in it, smothered in it, stumbling through the fog of it. She ranges from lose yourself collections of almost indiscernible but enchanting songs to lose yourself entirely totemic slabs of drone. In lesser hands swathes of  reverb can seem like a cheap tactic, a shortcut to out there. And I can imagine some might be sniffy about Grouper’s devotion to her cavernous aesthetic but it would be like being sniffy about Hendrix and distortion.

Marnie Stern – Year Of The Glad

Marnie Stern’s hyperactive intensely gleeful approach couldn’t be more different from Grouper but is as much of an obsession for me at the moment. One last cheat here as I think this single off her new album The Chronicles of Marnia was out very tail end of last year. As most who know me know I’m actually not that big on cheery happy music. But this I love and perhaps cos I don’t know if cheery or happy are the correct adjectives for it. It’s more on the edge of warped than that for me – yeah gleeful, almost collapsing into hysteria. There’s a bit where I swear she sounds like she’s singing like a demented chimpanzee.

Marnie Stern is often rightfully commended for her extraordinary guitar playing – not so much on this tune but overall she reclaims the Van Halen aesthetic from the hackneyed boyswiththeirtoystweentheirlegs spandex era. But I think she also does amazing never thought of that things with vocals. Aside from the demented chimpanzee (believe me it works) there is a bit on this record that breaks down to multitracked Marnie vocals that use harmonies nobody else would have the audacity to attempt. I also love the way at the end it sounds like she meant to try and write a whole other song to go with this one but decides just to rush and squeeze it into the last 30 seconds.

Title of this post comes from a lyric from this tune.

Right I’m off to see My Bloody Valentine at the Barrowland Ballroom!

Psychedelic…. man…? Part Two

So I promised to write about some newer groups and artists that you might describe as psychedelic. One album that I can’t say enough good things about is Photos of Photos by Carlton Melton. I don’t know too much about them but apparently they record their improvised music inside a geodesic dome. That’s about as psyche as you can get. They are younger than Neil Young but possibly by not that much.

If your expectations of improvised music is aimless jamming or ‘challenging’ noise these guys will fail to meet them. There’s plenty of space and long very long builds but there is also a persistent spinning out of simple riffs and melodies that you can either sink your whole attention into or can act as aural cues for a bit of mind-drift. In particular the interplay between the guitars is impressive in the way it sounds free and improvised but manages to remain locked into the same musical sphere (pun intended). They are definitely at the heavier end of psyche on this record- no harmony vocals, no arpeggiating 12 string Rickenbackers. The shape of the melodies and the way that they build them reminds me of Ash Ra Tempel – more volume though, more distortion, more power.

That’s it for now I might come back to this theme…

Psychedelic…. man…? Part One

Psychedelic is a tricky word to use in relation to music. Does it describe the sounds being made or the effect they have on the listener? Is it a time bound 60s genre (with all that that counter intuitively implies about defined rules and instrumentation) or is it a lazy catch-all adjective for music that is long, probably a bit indistinct, possibly a bit heavy, uses stereo panning, is a bit ‘trippy’, etc, add your own cliche….? Do you have to wear Paisley pattern to play it?

Anyway as you may know Neil Young & Crazy Horses’ last album was called Psychedelic Pill and features a Crazy Horse stamped pharmaceutical on the cover to apparently hammer home the title. This isn’t a criticism but it doesn’t actually feel all that psychedelic to me, however you want to warp your definition of the word. There are a few superficial trappings beyond the title and the artwork to get you thinking along those lines. It’s a Neil Young album – for many he is still the archetypal uber hippy – the spiritual father of Neil (from the) Young (ones). It’s a double album, there’s some really really long songs and one of the two versions of the title track deploys a vintage phase effect (you’d recognise it if you heard it). But it wasn’t until I abandoned my expectations of what I thought a late period proper stab at psychedelia might be from Neil Young that I started to love this record.

The first track is called ‘Driftin’ Back’, it’s 27 minutes long, starts with a pretty acoustic section that cross fades into a rumbling Crazy Horse ramble that seems to only periodically lift its head up from the table when Neil blast it with some electrifying guitar squall. Sounds like it ought to provide a pretty good template for what you might mean by ‘psychedelic’. But of course Neil Young has always been too angry to really conform to stereotypical notions of blissed out hippiedom or psychedelia. It all starts out with references to dreamin’ and meditation but over the course Neil can’t stop from working himself into a spittle flecked rage about tech giants and the unsatisfactory listening experience offered by mp3s. You get the feeling he’d be a nightmare at transcendental meditation class. Somehow I don’t think the phrase ‘bastard ipods commodification of art genius’ would work as a mantra. But I like that his inner peace never gets a moment’s from him his inner rage.

The ultimate bummer on the album is the gloriously poignant Ramada Inn. There is intoxication in it but very much of the ‘been doing this too long’ variety. The close to 17 minutes rolling Crazy Horse progression provides a widescreen cinemascope setting for a small domestic tale of a couple locked together into old age still in love but not  communicating. As a piece of story telling it feels like a slow paced low budget gritty independent American  movie. I like this relatively new style of Crazy Horse song. Greendale was like a whole album of these. It possibly works better throwing just the one into a record. On disc 2 She’s Always Dancing sounds like classic late 60s west coast psyche rock but again has a feeling of pushing it too far, just about to tip over into a downer. Walk Like A Giant remembers the hippie dream but rages on its unfulfilled promise and an encroaching loss of power (relevance?) that comes with age. I suppose none of this should be in the least bit surprising. Songs like Ohio and Southern Man weren’t exactly spaced out and disconnected. And Tonight’s The Night  is always spoken of as the ultimate 70s downer album and combines personal and political dissatisfaction in a manner that Neil Young has constantly revisited ever since. More fool me really for coming to the album expecting some kind of almost wordless melange of Crazy Horse guitar overdrive stretched into unfamiliar musical territory.

I was going to write about a couple of new acts in this post that I’ve been listening to that might fit the term ‘psychedelic’ but time marches on. So, there will be a Part Two.