Albums of The Year # 19 Arbor Labor Union - New Petal Instincts

 

'Arbor Labor Union was born from a peach tree in Georgia in the American south. They play psychedelic, repetitious and joyful Rock and Roll music. In 2014 they released the album Sings For You Now under the name Pinecones. In 2016 they decided to change their name in order to form a more perfect union. A union of sound and vision. With this, they had a new album, a masterpiece of modern guitar music entitled simply I Hear You. I Hear You was crafted through the ancient process of collaboration. All four members brought their love to one another and turned it into song. The album plays like a freedom chant. You can hear laughter in their music. You can see the joy among them. All that is left to do is listen. Listen to this album dedicated to listeners And should your response also be, 'I hear you the band replies, 'affirmative loud and clear,'

Arbor Labor Union press release (2016).

I was mightily impressed when I first heard I Hear You, a couple of years after its release. It seemed the work of a band who utterly refused to comply to the modern set of rules laid down over how to go about making and marketing your music. Theirs was a deeply refreshing approach. They seemed much more organically rooted than other contemporary bands, in their case in the cultural, literary and musical traditions of the region that spawned them. Namely, Georgia and the American South. Since then I wondered sometimes what happened to them but honestly thought little more of them until I was pleased to hear a few weeks back that they were returning with their first album for four years at the beginning of February. This time on Arrowhead rather than Sub Pop Records.

And here it is. New Petal Instants a declamatory and utterly joyous beast that marches determinedly to the beat of its own drum for the course of the best part of forty five minutes and ten songs of hedonistic, thrillingly disciplined Rock and Roll that reach and sustain wonderful peaks of hypnotic majesty.

How to describe the formula they work from. Because it is a formula. The band have come up with a process that each track here conforms to to lesser or greater degrees without actually repeating themselves, simply because the spell they cast is so inspired and evidently works. Firstly, the songs are forged on spiralling, duelling guitar patterns, reminiscent of Television, Lynyrd Skynrd, The Allman Brothers and Creedence. That in itself should be enough to excite your interest. It sounded good on I Hear You but on New Petal Instants the band have forged a new ecstatic intensity that you'll do well do hear the equal of anywhere else at this point in time.

So far so good, but what elevates the record further and towards genuine greatness is the dreamlike Southern sensibility and consciousness that flows incessantly like lifeblood on  New Petal Instants. Vocalist Bo Orr spouts a stream of conscious found, raving poetry throughout, utterly nonsensical yet making perfect sense at one and the same time. Quite fluent in the rhythms and folklore of the mythic Deep South. So you have the American Civil War, Brer Rabbit, Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, Flannery O'Connor, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, In The Heat of The Night, Deliverance, Hap and Leonard. 

You also have the aforementioned Lynyrds and Allmans. Doug Sahm, The Creedence of Ramble Tamble and Born on The Bayou, the R.E.M. of Fables, Dream Syndicate, Butthole Surfers, Black Lips and more. I've been a sucker for this stuff since I first read The Heart is a Lonely Hunter when I was fifteen. It's great to see it all so thrillingly realised here in 2020.

The band are clearly having a wail of a time, but there's also a fierce discipline at work. Everything on show is drenched with a clanging, messianic fervour. Most songs restrict themselves to three to five minute running times when they could easily spiral out to two or three times that length. But on both sides of the record Arbor Labor Union are working their way doggedly up a slope to the crescendos they arrive at with each sides crowning final epics Riddle Snake Blues and Highway Loop.

It's here that the band express their vision to its fullest degree. Both songs are minor classics, capturing a certain awestruck, stoned wonder to an astonishing degree. 'Get your motor running. Get out on the highway,' as Orr intones on the latter. They cap New Petal Instants' quite astonishing achievement. I can't quite believe how good this record is. It's Arbor Labor Union's masterpiece. At one with both nature and nurture. As good a guitar record as I hope to hear all year.

Fear of Music - The 261 Greatest Albums Since Punk & Disco # 121 Lloyd Cole & The Commotions - Rattlesnakes

 

A very important record to a great many people. You had to be there. At the right age.

This is Uncool - The 500 Greatest Singles Since Punk & Disco # 124 Funky 4 + 1

 

Song(s) of the Day # 2,512 Alex Maas

 

At this point in the calendar over the recent past, I've generally been preoccupied on here with mapping the slow countdown of my favourite albums of each particular twelve months. Invariably and also inevitably, some records come to my notice during that time, either new releases or something I hadn't particularly picked up on earlier in the year. Things that really deserve to be in the chart I'm laying out day by day but there's just no room on the ark for them.

Luca,the first solo album from Alex Maas, seems destined for that particular category in 2021. It's a radiant record, quite different from anything I've heard from Maas's band Black Angels who have been putting out mindfuck, shaded psych punk records drawing on the legacy of The Velvet Underground, The 13th Floor Elevators amd Suicide for the best part of fifteen years now.

Nothing wrong with that at all. I've loved many of the records that they've put out. But I'd say that Luca charts altogether different and probably more interesting and original territory from anything I've heard previously from this particular quarter. Because Luca is an altogether compelling and haunting record, something which would certainly have featured in my Top Twenty had I heard it earlier in 2020 rather than it being released last Friday, clearly too late in the year for the general acclaim it deserves.

It slows the mood appreciably from the Angels usual stoned, propulsive drone.  Luca is possibly best described as perfect seance music. Orienting itself as a liquid window between the known and the unknown (if you'll forgive my conceit),. it sustains the mood it establishes early quite impeccably over the course of its brief ten track run. Nothing outstays its welcome. 

Comparison points are immediate. Broadcast, Portishead, Big Star's Sister Lovers, Jim Sullivan's incomparable underground classic UFO. Black Angels standpoints Doors and Velvets hover somehwere in the background but Maas is moving into a fresh realm here and you can't but applaud his bravura.

It may not be quite there. It certainly doesn't compare to UFO which I've just listened to again and should really be in every collection. Difficult to say how good Luca is after a couple of good listens but it definitely has a slow, distinctive drag and trust me it's better than Dylan's new one. Why would you put yourself through that, when you could enjoy this instead. 

Album Reviews # 81 Madness - The Rise & Fall

 

I was never hugely enamoured with Madness when I was young. Even though their peak years coincided with my own passage from childhood, through uneasy adolesence to slightly more composed late teenage times. Madness made as good a soundtrack to these years as any for they matured as a nation of British boys did - I'd maintain they were primarily a boys band - got older, wiser, more reflective and in some ways slightly sadder.

Perhaps it was because I thought them a bit childish at their peak and was looking for something slightly more grown up, whether it were The Bunnymen, XTC or Associates. They were also very Laandon, and although I spent those years in London too, or at least at the edges of it, in Richmond and then Teddington, I was never really a Londoner,

 I was perhaps more suburban in essence, and The Cure and The Banshees made more sense to me in the leafy, trimmed hedged avenues I grew up in rather than the cockney knees up round the old joanna sensibility that Madness embodied. They reeked of ''pubs and Wormwood Scrubs' as another fellow traveller put it, and I was slightly scared of all that.

I'm long, long since past all that now and can really appreciate just how remarkable they were. They were barely out of baggy trousers themselves, yet put out a set of singles and albums that rank with anything any British band put out before or since. So, on a bleak December day in Newcastle yesterday, masked and gloved in RPM, my favourite record shop in town  I came across a copy of The Rise & Fall for four quid and didn't hesitate. I've been listening to it on repeat since.

 The Rise & Fall may mark Madness' commercial, critical and artistic peak. It's probably when they started the shift from being 45' to 33' artists, although they had a couple of years hanging on as regular Top Ten single specialists before their top placings began to drop from single figures.

 In terms of quality, they never beat the two culled from this particular album, Our House and Tomorrow's (Just Another Day). There  are plenty of others on the record that would have graced single status too. The band didn't need to stoop to a third single. They were in excelsis. Living their imperial dream.

The album is brimming with their mordant wit and swagger. Madness were masters of gallows humour like few others before or since. The Kinks their obvious forefathers, The Specials their sole contemporaries. Ten years on we got Blur. But their credentials for this kind of working class flair were far from impeccable. They owed Madness more than is generally acknowledged. This album particularly seems a virtual prototype for Modern Life is Rubbish and Parklife. I don't think either is as good.

Madness were wise beyond their years from the start but they never quite pulled off the 'Sunday joint of bread and honey,' card trick with such panache as here, They were versed in Hancock's Half Hour, Steptoe & Son, Michael Caine's peak period Sixties films, Oliver!, the England 1966 World Cup win, Tales of the Raj and the realisation that dawned on many in London at that point of time that there was no better soundtrack than Motown, Soul and Ska and nothing better than having West Indian friends. They had older brothers and they learned from them.

The album is possibly slightly too long, but the band were blessed with riches at this point in time and there's little immediate fat that needs trimming. New Delhi perhaps, with its It Ain't Half Hot Mum mockery of Indian accents might not be missed much. There's black face on the cover which probably wouldn't even be countenanced now.  It's not quite racism, is very much of its time, it was a fine line between being a good old lad and turning nasty back in those days, opting for the Right and threatening and beating up black and asian kids who you'd been friends in the playground with just a few years earlier. . You generally feel you're in safe hands with Madness, they lay their own cards on the table a few years later with (Waiting For) The Ghost Train, which lamented the tight dead grip of Apartheid. All the same there's a definite sense throughout that some of us might not end up on the right side of the fence. 

Madness themselves did. They're still here, forty years on. Chas Smash is taking a break from the band as we speak but you can't help but think he'll be back in the fold at some point. They're a British institution now, really they were right from the off . Eastenders before Eastenders. The band played Our House at the closing ceremony of the 2012 Olympics. Then again on the roof of Buckingham Palace for the Queens Silver Jubilee. Their legacy is a long and distinguished one. There are worse places to start than here. Within twenty four hours it's already become one of my favourite records.

Songs of the Year # 20 Saint Saviour

 

Great British B Sides # 20 Magazine

 

B Side to Shot by Both Sides.

Albums of The Year # 20 Ora Cogan - Bells in the Ruins

 

A new album that came out a couple of weeks back but which passed me by until I saw a review of it in the current edition of Uncut Magazine, which I bought yesterday.

Anyhow, better late than never, because this is an immediately arresting record. Bells In The Ruins,Victoria B.C.Ora Cogan's seventh album in all. She's a new artist to me, but once again, better later than never, because I'll certainly be listening out for her from now.

So how to describe what's going on? It's the music that dreams are made of, somehwere between Jane Weaver, Broadcast and Mazzy Star, which should give you some idea of the texture and mood of this. Much of it has a strong electronic pulse to it, but Cogan's voice takes it elsewhere, into a mythic dimension.

As the record unwraps, the spell gets stronger. There are elements of Psych and elements of Folk here aligned with the pulse but really categories don't matter, it's just a gorgeous record.

An album that received little fanfare and perhaps will not get the attention it deserves from others. At least that's my perspective.This is so often the case, in music, as in life, but that means little to me. I was drawn in by the first song, fascinated by the third, utterly sold by the fifth and transfixed from there on. 

Eight songs that go for one word titles. One that adds the definite article. Songs that flit between two and five minutes. Not one of them puts a foot out of place. One of my favourite albums of the year. And there have been some damned good ones already. It finished too soon for my liking. Like the very best books. Hear it if you can. Now, if only we can find some way to get her off that rock!

Fear of Music - The 261 Greatest Albums Since Punk & Disco # 120 Violent Femmes - Hallowed Ground

 

'The Eighties weren't all bad.'

This is Uncool - The 500 Greatest Singles Since Punk & Disco # 123 The Cramps

 

'Much as Hong Kong Garden invented goth. Garbageman invented psychobilly.'

Song of the Day # 2,511 Larry Gatlin & the Gatlin Brothers Band

 

If you have time this Christmas you could do worse than check out Arkansas, a made for TV film on Netflix. It's a finely honed, thriller in the Tarantino and Coen Brothers mode featuring a wondrous C&W tinged soundtrack played by the Flaming Lips. Their version of this is heavily featured.

Kate Bush

 

Songs of the Year # 21 Wire - Humming

 

More Wire.

Great British B Sides # 21 Happy Mondays

 

B Side to 24 Hour Party People.

Albums of The Year # 21 Wire - Mind Hive

 

The band Wire are truly inspirational. The only ones of the original London Punk pack still standing as a creative concern forty five years on and still putting out remarkable music. Their sheer longevity is appropriate really, as they were never just punks in the first place. Way ahead of their time even way back then.

So here they are in 2020 with Mind Hive, their seventeenth album. Seventeen albums! That's some work ethic. I'm ashamed to say that I foolishly thought that it might be a bit of a chore to listen all the way through to this but something I should do out of the respect I hold for them. How wrong I was. This is no museum piece. Mind Hive doesn't tread water for a moment. They're still very much a working project and sound very much alive. Vital even.

This sounds like Wire. Of course it does. They were always a band who pushed onward tirelessly, never remotely interested in trading on or re-living former glories. Nevertheless, there are songs here that wouldn't sound out of place on Chairs Missing or 154.

That's no slur, just a huge compliment. The songs here are that good. Still celebral, deeply thoughtful, slightly pissed off I suspect but also full of wonder for life and pulsing with vigour.

When critics look for recipients to acclaim as National Treasures and end up hanging wreaths around the scrawny necks of obvious and often undeserving recipients, they should really be looking to the likes of Wire, those who have just kept their heads down and gone about their jobs, not for fame or adulation, focused, concentrated on the work at hand. All the while sculpting wonders.

What the specific concerns of the record might be I can't really say. Wire have always been too oblique, not to say too smart for me on that score though I consider myself to be reasonably smart. The title Mind Hive alone suggests, if that ever needed to be be doubted, that their concerns remain deeply contemporary as this is such a contemporary idea. They seem to be pretty disappointed at the way things have turned out, the way we've all turned out and frankly I don't blame them. This is an album that exists as much in the here and now as any record being made by people more than half their age.

Mind Hive is truly a wonder, as good a record as any British guitar band will put out this year. Or perhaps anyone else for that matter.  In many ways it even sounds to me as if it might be as good a record as even they have ever made. How extraordinary that statement is! Not groundbreaking perhaps in the way that their first three albums, Pink Flag, Chairs Missing and 154 certainly were. It's difficult to imagine anyone putting out something truly groundbreaking now. Mind Hive is just a very, very good record like those three were. Wire remain out in front. Their exploring spirit remains an example to all. An example that only the select few will both heed and understand. Quiet, meditative genius.

Fear of Music - The 261 Greatest Albums Since Punk & Disco # 119 Prince & the Revolution - Purple Rain

 

''The first of a Stevie Wonder -like string of classic albums from the lhe Minneapolis Mini-Maestro.'

This is Uncool - The 500 Greatest Singles Since Punk & Disco # 122 Earth, Wind & Stone

 

Song of the Day # 2,510 The Hit Parade

 

Included on a complilation cassette sent to me thirty years ago by a university friend.

Songs of the Year # 22 Frances Quinlan

 

Great British B Sides # 22 The La's

 

Down the road to Liverpool. B Side to There She Goes.

Great British B Sides # 23 The Stone Roses

 

B Side to She Bangs The Drums. Forgot to post this so we have a couple in a row on this series.

Albums of The Year # 22 Isobel Campbell - There Is No Other

 

There is No Other, the new album from Isobel Campbell, (just out), has apparently been waiting for a couple of years for release for one reason or another for release, before finally seeing the light of day. This must be very frustrating for any artist, but particularly given that the record concerned here is a quite immaculate piece of work, slotting seamlessly into a particular canon as if it has always existed.

Campbell of course, first came to public notice as a member of Belle & Sebastian over twenty years back. Her choice to leave that particular roost was a brave one, given that by the time she upped sticks they were a definite going concern. Ultimately the records she's put out since, both as a solo artist and with Mark Lanegan,  more than justify that, probably difficult, decision. Because she's allowed herself a choice of a whole new set of colours that would probably not have been readily available under the B&S umbrella.

With Lanegan, the immediate and unavoidable touchstone inspiration point was Sinatra and Hazlewood, with she as Nancy, he as Lee. That's still here on occasions but she's also allowed herself to indulge in a whole range of late Sixties and early Seventies artists and records that help make this a rich feast indeed.

This Age of Aquarius period of history is a great grounding point for the lyrical concerns at play on here, because this is primarily a record concerned with a planet in immediate and pressing ecological peril. The original era that first voiced this issue with any sense of urgency produced no end of fabulous records of course and Campbell cherry picks its legacy with meticulous skill to help her make her point.

As a result the record manages to both wear its heart on its sleeve and keep its cool with consummate ease. There is No Other flirts with ersatz Soul, Eastern Mysticism and all kinds of other ingredients that music lovers would immediately recognise from that original Golden Age. Nancy is still there in the mix but so are Dusty, Melanie, Mama Cass, Jackie De Shannon and any number of other cool sirens from that period.

This is a quite wonderful feat of artistic gymnastics, managing both to be of that age and this at one and the same time. Campbell manages both to show off her taste and touch. Hers is a common artistic approach nowadays, people like Lana Del Rey and Weyes Blood to give two immediate examples, accessing the past for their own devices, pulling off a modern retro cool that manages to appeal both to the young and those older who might have experienced the real thing first time round. There is No Other probably won't get the same attention as those two have recently but certainly deserves it. Given the parameters it sets itself, it's a near flawless record.

Fear of Music - The 261 Greatest Albums Since Punk & Disco # 118 Run D.M.C.

 

'It's hard to articulate how utterly weird this record sounded in 1984.'

This is Uncool - The 500 Greatest Singles Since Punk & Disco # 121 Magazine

 

'The lyric - 'I am angry, I am ill and I'm as ugly as sin probably explains why this wasn''t toppermost of the poppermost down at Radio One.'

Song of the Day # 2,509 Heavenly

 

Blast from the past.

Songs of the Year # 23 Iceage

 

Albums of The Year # 23 The Homesick - The Big Exercise

 Great surprise, record and band:

From one band who used to be on Sub Pop Records to another who find themselves there now. Dokkum, Holland's The Homesick hardly sound like typical Sub Pop fodder on their latest album The Big Exercise, an indication of how far the label has travelled since its formative days.

The Homesick are definitely a prepossessing trio. Working up obscure, propulsive leftfield Pop melodies that are diverting if never completely clear in their intent. Quietly experimental and innovative, their songs never stand in one place which will infuriate many but intrigue the select few.

I certainly found myself  pretty absorbed on listening through to the album for the first time. The Homesick are clever, clever. Boffins in laboratories to some extent. Easy comparisons aren't readily available though you suspect they might rate freethinkers like Wire, Kevin Ayers, Monochrome Set, The Nits or the more off the wall Blur. Songs don't follow prescribed patterns or set progressions while remaining melodic and diverting.

Whimsical and inventive, you might get to the end of The Big Exercise and wonder whether you want to listen to it again, because tracks tend to meander to and fro without necessarily leaving a lasting impression except for of their oddness.The album really hits its stride in its final few numbers where its identity finally coalesces to winning effect. I'm not sure everything worked but I think I'll probably return as it seems to be a record you need to get to know in order to come to a truly informed judgement. Interesting at the very least. 

P.S. Listening through to the record for the second time this morning and I suspect it's one I'm going to grow to love.

Fear of Music - The 261 Greatest Albums Since Punk & Disco # 117 Bruce Springsteen

 

'This tough, this compassionate, this comfortable with the entire notion of rock 'n' roll masculinity.'

This is Uncool - The 500 Greatest Singles Since Punk & Disco # 120 Blondie

 

'Giorgio Moroder meets surf instrumental in this epic hit.'

Song of the Day # 2,508 Corey Hanson

 

First promo I've seen with Santa in it this year. A rather frantic one. Seems appropriate this year.

Songs About People # 1,210 Paddy McAloon

 

It's clearly Paddy McAloon day on It Starts today.

Covers # 135 Nina Simone

 

Groovy, end of Sixties take on Suzanne from Nina. All rather excellent.

Songs of the Year # 24 Sun Araw

 

Great British B Sides # 24 Prefab Sprout

 

B Side to Lions in My Own Garden.

Albums of The Year # 24 Daniel Romano - How Ill Thy World Is Ordered

  

Reports tell me that Ontario's Daniel Romano has already released nine records this year and apparently there are more in the pipeline. I'll leave you to investigate the specifics of this if you wish to but in the meantime I'm going to focus on this, How Ill Thy World Is Ordered, the quite extraordinary album he put out last Friday.

It's a quite marvellous old school record, something of a marriage of nasal Dylan and spiritual Harrison circa 1972. With that swirling organ Wild Mercury Sound from the former's time with The Band a few years prior to that. But those descriptions are not enough to do justice to just what a great record we've got on our hands here. If this isn't a career best record from Romano than I probably need to hear the one that is.

Each song melts into the next and surpasses its predecessor. It is a constant and deliberate echo of the first five years of the Seventies but as with recent albums from the likes of Weyes Blood and Kevin Morby, that's no slur because Romano and his band have such a handle on what made that such a glorious time to be alive.

Occasionally I caught echoes of early Springsteen and The E Street Band changing gear, classic Cosmic Country, Celtic Van, Lost Weekend Lennon. But for the most part it was mystical George and biblical Bob. In short, some record. Another for my end of year list. September is proving to be a bumper month record wise.

Fear of Music - The 261 Greatest Albums Since Punk & Disco # 116 Prefab Sprout - Swoon

 

'Swoon breaks a cardinal rule of the mediocraty meritocracy  - it's not a record that would appeal to everybody.' 

This is Uncool - The 500 Greatest Singles Since Punk & Disco # 119 The Whispers

 

Song of the Day # 2,507 Beach Riot

 

Time travel. Back to the Nineties.

Songs of the Year # 25 Grimm Grimm

 

Great British B Sides # 25 The Charlatans

 

B Side to the wondrous North Country Boy.

Albums of The Year # 25 Jeremy Tuplin - Violent Waves

 One of only two gigs I went to this year. Way back in February. A fine and memorable night. A fine and memorable album came later: 

Way back in February, only six months ago but it seems like a lifetime away, I went to see Jeremy Tuplin and his band playing at the Cobalt Studios in Newcastle. I'd been incredibly impressed by his second album Pink Mirror from last year and written a glowing review which I'd send to Jeremy. He in turn had liked it and posted it on his Facebook page.

When I saw they were playing my hometown I send him a message asking whether he'd have time for a chat before they played. Very graciously he agreed and on the evening of the gig I spent a good hour talking with him and his band. Mostly about music obviously. I was very aware of not coming across as a starstuck, imposing fan but they never gave me that impression and were simply very chatty and accommodating bunch of people. The gig was terrific too.

That was the last time I've been to a concert in close company of others. Three weeks later the Lockdown curtain fell and we were all herded into this alternative reality that we've been in ever since. A few weeks ago Jeremy's (sorry for the familiarity, but I have met the guy), latest album Violet Waves came out.

It's a companion piece to Pink Mirror, not vastly dissimilar to its predecessor either in terms of its sound or its lyrical concerns. But it's no mere retread either. Put simply its just bloody good work. What struck me most about Pink Mirror is that a persona is adopted in the great  English Pop tradition, going back to Ray Davies and including and encompassing Marc Bolan, Kevin Ayers, David Bowie,Bryan Ferry,  Morrissey, Jarvis Cocker, Brett Anderson and Luke Haines.

Noble tradition for sure, but there aren't many who attempt it nowadays. Nor is it a conceit that's particularly easy to pull off. But Tuplin, (OK, perhaps I am being over familiar, I only met him for a couple of hours), does so quite effortlessly over the course of Violet Waves. He's louche, he's detached, his eyebrow is permanently arched. He's ironic but you know he'd deadly serious at the same time. This is English outsider Pop at it's very best and its great to see it achieved with such flair and aplomb.

Tuplin's a solo artist, but he's ably supported by a sympathetic band who clearly know their Velvet Underground from their Roxy Music. Violet Waves is another outstanding album and I can only hope that they're allowed out soon to play it to appreciative audiences soon. Hope they get the chance to come to Newcastle again so I can pester them once more, though I realise that might be pushing it!

Song of the Day # 2,506 Old Sea Brigade

 

Atlanta songwriter delivers neat, introspective, Sufjan, Cass, Elliot moment.

Fear of Music - The 261 Greatest Albums Since Punk & Disco # 115 The Smiths - The Smiths

 

,

'In thisManchester monsters corrupt the innocent on rainy, cobbled streets that haven't changed since the early Sixties.'

This is Uncool - The 500 Greatest Singles Since Punk & Disco # 119 Funkadelic

 

December