It's perfectly clear where Brooklyn trio Nation of Language are coming from in the opening notes of Tournament, the first track on their debut album Introduction, Presence. Their singer Ian Devaney is an absolute spit for The National's Matt Berninger's manly baritone.
Their sound is all New Wave glacial cool. Bubbling synth. Squaring the equation between Joy Division, OMD and Human League. They rarely, no to be honest, they never stray from this formula for the course of the album.
While it's a perfectly likable record, it's not a remotely adventurous one. Not one I'm likely to be coming back to but it might be worth a listen.
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.
There are some moments when you start listening to a new album and realise within seconds that it is purpose built for you and your constituency. That it was made by someone who grew up listening to the scriptures and essential texts of Lou Reed, Jonathan Richman, Vic Godard and Edwyn Collins. Who sees the world in that way and is absolutely not about to stray from that path for the course of the record whatever happens.
Such is the case with It Will Come Easier, the debut solo album, as far as I can see, from Emma Krupa, who has also featured previously in Mammoth Penguins and Standard Fare. This is a record that runs on indie oil. Taking that slightly askew way of looking at the world that refuses to conform to mainstream dictates and will never straighten its tie or tuck in its shirt. That prefers the wonky tooth in its mouth wonky, and is not planning to visit the orthodentist and get it fixed.
This is either a record that you will cast aside or else take to your heart instantly. It plays by certain rules and is aimed at certain hearts. The hearts of those that attend gigs in the small upstairs rooms of pubs or similar venues. For the kind of people who are not waiting for The Killers to turn up at the local enormo-arena. For those that still listen to Belle & Sebastian and Felt.
Kupa has worked often with Darren Hayman, most obviously during their time together in The Haynab Kupa. Hayman is another who considers Who Loves The Sun, Hospital, Ambition and Felicity to be among the highest forms of art ever made. Well, they're not wrong are they. Every note of It Will Come Easier testifies to their ambling grace. It's sheer joy for true believers.
This time last year I was listening to Penelope Isles wonderful Until The Tide Creeps In and seeing them play one memorable evening. A year on as this strangest of all years draws towards its close along comes Emma Kupa to occupy the place in my heart that the Isles did then. Another timely record and one for the end of year list.A record of small but specific charms.
I've documented the wonders of Native Harrow before. Just recently. Just loved their album of last year, Happier Now. They're back already with another, Closeness. I'm pleased to report it's another winner.
Mired in Hippy Dippy loveliness of the early Seventies, the record takes its times to unwrap its charms . Devin Tuel, whose quite lovely, spectral voice fronts the Native Harrow experience is a siren in the tradition of Joni and Laurel Canyon. She has a calm, confident stillness in terms of her delivery that quite casts a spell.
Just once a song dips into time travel cliche, with Carry On, but apart from this Tuel and her partner in crime Stephen Harms, have the songs to back up the vision. This should do much to raise the profile of the band as masters of this particular nostalgic sub-genre, alongside similarly minded types like Weyes Blood and Natalie Prass.
A proper balm of an album. A warm bath to lower yourself into and luxuriate in, Closeness barely misses a beat. Treat yourself.
Brisbanite Peter Milton Welsh formed The Apartments in the late Seventies. Shortly afterwards he was asked to, and joined The Go Betweens. Whatever the reason, it didn't work out and he went back to The Apartments. They've been releasing records intermittently ever since.
In and Out of the Light, their latest and first in five years is just out. To call it elegiac is not doing the description justice. Look up the word in a dictionary and you will more than likely find a picture of the album sleeve next to the word. It's the kind of record you might expect a gifted songwriter who knows his craft to put out in his sixties. It's veined throughout with the knowledge that there's more behind than ahead than there is to come.
Unmistakably reminiscent of late Go Betweens, many of the songs here sound like the kind of gifts we'd be getting from Grant McLennan if he hadn't been so cruelly taken from us. Probably a deciding factor on how you relate to this is Milton Welsh's voice. It's wobbly and vulnerable and that occasionally makes listening to the tracks here slightly painful. The fact that the songs and the arrangements here are so damned good may ease the distress of the listening experience.
In and Out of the Light is an album that's comfortable in its easy chair. It's a record to relish and learn from and will encourage me to explore the band's back catalogue over the coming weeks. For now, this will more than do.
You can't help wondering what the be-whiskered playwright might have thought about this odd tribute from fellow Scandinavian Indigo Jeff. Sadly we'll never know.
Of course it's up for debate whether this is Glam. I consider it so. But not enough to argue the case and list it Top Five. A song that divides people. I actually like it. Partly because I have strong memories of its seeming endless run at Number One in 1975.
Certainly a first for this blog. A rave review for the kind of record I don't generally document here but one that I loved instantly and utterly on first hearing last night.
I know next to nothing about Drum'n'bass and Grime two genres this, Prole Art Threat the second album from East Man, (released a couple of months back) seems to draw on. But I know energy, invention and excitement when I hear it and this record has all three in spades.
Anthoney Hart is the man behind this, and he has a rep and track record going back to his work in pirate radios in the 1990s. He's an autodidact and a highly accomplished one. This album is a detailed and vivid description of working class street, high rise and council estate life that's as rich and evocative of that existence of anything you'll hear this year. Beats are great too.
As I said I'm no authority on this stuff, I just know the record sounds wonderful to me. For the back story, I'd refer you to this fabulous article about Hart and his way of working, on the Loud and Quiet blog listed on the right hand side of this page. It's a fascinating read.
If the thought of doing actual research doesn't appeal then just listen to Prole Art Threat, a record that takes its name from a Fall song title. Plenty of depth here but first and foremost a record that works on surface level. Never lets up for a minute. Loud, proud and incredibly English.
The Pop Libblog listed to the right hand side of this page get it right in describing this crunchy beast as Danielle Dax fronting Jesus & Mary Chain. Bristol based duo make initial single bow and it's promising.
On my mind for a couple of reasons posted away. My favourite Cure album. Re-posting this.It's almost October again. Originally from 2014.
It's almost October. The weather's turning and the light's failing. At this point you start to feel the dampness gather all about you, whether you're at home or on the street the air around you telling you that Winter and darkness are closing in and you're going to have to brace yourself for the long weeks ahead. Five months before the Sun starts its recovery. All things considered, perhaps not the best time to listen to The Cure's 17 Seconds on repeat, in a darkened flat, on your own and try to write something worth saying about it. Particularly when you've got worries and concerns of your own. It seems like the kind of masochism that human beings become prone to once they find themselves away from work. Yet, somehow, 17 Seconds isworth it. It's a particular record.
Thisis the best Cure album. This claim is not made from a position of authority or knowledge. I haven't heard an LP of theirs from beginning to end since Pornography was released. Since they became hairy spiders in pullovers that looked set to unravel if you gave a loose end a tug. And donned pancake mix make up and set forth to conquer The States in the late eighties.
So I'm no dyed in the wool fanatic., My interest stopped around 1985 when they decided they preferred New Order to themselves, just before they chanced upon their own winning formula. It all became a bit Alice in Wonderland for the masses for me. I thought they were more honest and interesting here. This was the sound of the place where they came from. The London hinterlands. They surely soundtracked them better than anyone else, before or since. Smith wrote the songs in 1979 and 1980 in his parents' house in Crawley. The band then recorded the album in 7 days, apparently without demos over daily 16 hour studio sessions to minimise production costs on a tight budget. This, regardless of what anyone else might tell you was the sound of the suburbs.
The opening song is an instrumental. Always a brave move. Called Reflections, it's the sound of very little happening very atmospherically. It sets the tone for what's to come. It's aptly named. Much of the album sounds like it's observed from behind glass, by vaguely disaffected teenagers who despite their mutterings will still come downstairs to table when called and eat supper when it's ready. Just another rainy, overcast day in the suburbs, deep into Autumn.
17 Seconds sounds different depending on the time of the day you listen to it. In the afternoon it's all dripping taps and ticking clocks and rain on the window pane. Time refusing to pass. In the morning it's more sparky, the irony and skilled songwriting comes through more clearly. For me today, at the end of a long hard day at my desk, it didn't work. It seemed petulant when I needed something adult. It's an album of mood and frankly you have to be in the right one. Of course it helps if it's raining.
Play For Today is next and it shows how far The Cure have travelled and how many literary books and artistic films have been devoured. since Boys Don't Cry.Play For Today was a BBC programme of the 70s, one off heightened melodramas of the kind Robert Smith, (always The Cure's mouthpiece and puppeteer), indulges in here. It's a display of petty, unpleasantness to make a statement of who he is. 'I take what I require...' the Punk refusal to be nice, drawing a line in the sand to demark them from the Hippies. No love out here in the suburbs.
Secrets may as well be another instrumental, as what lyrics there are Smith mutters deep in the mix. It all adds to the sense of this being a soundtrack without a film. In Your House keeps the pace up, though in this case it's quite consciously that of a metronome ticking on the shelf. Uncommunicative teenagers gather in gloomy rooms to pass time together. Slowly.
'I play at night in your house I live another life Pretending to swim In your house I change the time in your house The hours I take Go so slow ...'
And then Three, another instrumental to close off the side. If I'm making the record sound humdrum I'm not doing it justice because I think it's a minor masterpiece. It describes a certain outlook, perspective and response to existence perfectly. It's Harold's life before he meets Maud. Terry's before he met June.
'The girl was never there. It's always the same. We're running towards nothing. Again and again and again and again and again and again and again...'
Flip the record andafter yet another brief instrumental A Final Sound which I never realised existed until just now, A Forest kicks the second side into gear. It's an absolute landmark moment for the band and somehow should jar in some way. A great song among very good ones. But it slots in perfectly here as it's cut from the same cloth as everything around it. Existential gloom. The vague sense that something awful might be about to happen but also the possibility that it equally well may not. That you just have to wait. Smith himself has been resistant when asked about the song's content. Having originally indicated that it was inspired by a childhood dream he later changed his tune and said it was a song about a forest. Personally I don't blame him. It stopped people asking the question. If it's an albatross for him it's one he wears lightly. A Forest has been played live by the band an estimated 800 times.
Listening to 17 Seconds at 48 when you first heard it at 16 is rather similar to looking back at Hamlet if you first read that at the same age. You understand the subject matter a lot more than you did at the time but are still struggling to work out what either are really talking about because you never really will. They're both deliberately, hanging question marks. Which is better? Received wisdom tells us Hamlet and I'd probably agree, (I'm being ironic here but refuse to type a winking face), but A Forest focuses on similar themes. Quite consciously talking about what it feels like to be young but feel old, to be alive but unsure of whether we actually are, to wonder whether it's worth remaining so and ponder on the nature of unknowable. All the big themes kids! Listen to it. It really does all these things. It didn't make such a big splash just because it has a good tune. It reached Number 31 in the UK Singles Chart in 1980. It should have been Number 1.It made its mark nevertheless.
People are now writing PhDs about The Cure and getting taken perfectly seriously so I'd better stop here. I won't encroach on their territory. All I'll say is if you've ever had a dream and felt it was real and it's disturbed you by what it intimates about yourself and life, go listen to A Forest. It describes the uncanny as well as any song I know.
From A Forest to M, another quite masterful and beautiful, strummed gloom-fest pop song. 'You'll fall in love with somebody else again tonight...' Smith is very good at conveying the powerless of us all within the scheme of things and the way we all go along with life's dictates. He's read his Modernists.
'Take a step You move in time But it's always back ... The reasons are clear Your face is drawn And ready for the next attack.'
'At night. I hear the darkness breathe. I sense the quiet despair Listen to the silence . At night'
The album's winding down. At Night which follows is almost generic, so well have the band established their sound by now. It points forward to the more portentous sound of Faith an album which is played out almost in darkness while 17 Seconds is all fading light and all the better for it. It's probably the weakest of the fully developed songs on the record but frankly the standard is not dropping much.
'Time slips away. And the light fades away. And everything is quiet now.'
And so to the final track 17 Seconds itself . In many ways its three minutes encapsulates the record itself. A completely clean, assured and identifiable sound, quite distinguished by now from the early influences Wire, Magazine, Buzzcocks, Banshees and the like. They've made suburbia their own. Light fades away on the quiet tree lined avenues and there they are, behind glass, watching the shadows gather, musing on whether any of all this really matters.
As I said earlier, a minor masterpiece. Having had it on repeat play for the last few days I'm happy to stack it midway back on one of my racks for a while and let it sink back into its gloom But it's a record with very much its own statement and mood and I'll come back to it.
From here the band descended into depression and then full on, certifiable mania with Faith and Pornography Others prefer these. I'd plump for this instead. Partly for nostalgic reasons and partly because I think it stands up better now. A constant reminder for me of when I was seventeen, sitting in my attic room in my parents house, listening to my gradually growing record collection, making my way through Penguin classics, thinking about girls and trying to make head or tail of where I was going and what it was all about. Like countless others. Still not quite there yet.
Browsing round an HMV in Canterbury yesterday with The Cure's 17 Seconds wafting over the shop system it occurred to me how ubiquitous this particular sound of my youth is now. Young friends talk about Robert Smith in venerated tones as if he were Charlton Heston descending from Mount Sinai with The Ten Commandments.
This brittle gloominess is all over Wiltshire Archie Shepp's debut Happy New Year. Of course there are other modern precedents for this sound. Beach Fossils, DIIV, Wild Nothing. Anyhow the record is utterly mired in this sound. A decorative but inessential listen.
A song with particular emotional resonance for me as it's probably the first Pop song I ever liked. Aged about seven, Here's what I wrote about it ... about seven years back:
In 1972 one group scalped their guitars, torched the drumkit and left the moog to drive alone, not just placing it centre stage but making it the heart of their sound, the reason for their existence. The name of the group? Chicory Tip
My parents moved back from Zimbabwe, (then Rhodesia) in 1972. It was slap bang in the middle of glam. This is the first thing I heard I can remember liking. I was 6. I'm now 48 but it still does it for me. Chicory Tip were, probably deservedly, much derided as bandwagon jumpers. They got themselves togged up in utterly bizarre glam clobber on occasions. Best known for their Giorgio Moroder moog driven Number One, Son of my Father, this was the follow up I think and reached the UK Top Twenty. Morrissey and Marr apparently chased halfway across the country together trying to track down a copy of another of their singles Good Grief Christina, (a very Morrissey title that). Here they are in their pomp.
'His (David Bowie's) chameleon changes were mimicked on a more prosaic level by Chicory Tip who went from denim rockers to full Martian costume overnight.'
'The Fall's debut album is probably their best, if only because Mark E. Smith's bitterness is leavened by the thrill of being here... as an example of intellectualised working-class anger , it's nigh on unbeatable.''
It's not just Boy and Girl bands that can sound as if they've been put together like Airfix kits for public consumption. Listen to Sea Girls debut album Open Up Your Head. Hear The Killers, Arctic Monkeys, Razorlight, Vaccines, Sam Fender, 1975. If you opened your dictionary and turned to Generic, it would probably have a picture of the boys / girls next to it. I listened to a few songs then went to The Killers latest album which it hadn't listened to yet. It seemed more streamlined.
Lo Tom, made up of four players from Pedro The Lion, The Soft Drugs and Starflyer 69 keep things simple on second album LP2. They peddle a hard-ish Rock sound that occasionally blurs the line between Soundgarden, Screaming Trees and stale old Rainbow riffs. This permanently depressed perspective became a bit tired for me a few tracks in but fans of this genre might reap greater reward than I.
Another quite unnecessary series to keep me occupied. Accessing the Best Ever Albumssite which is a quite incredible resource. It catalogues every album countdown you could imagine, all organised from the votes from site users. So I'm going to list their Top Ten from each year starting from the year of my own birth in 1965, then my own Top Ten from the same year, the proviso being that I need to own the records concerned myself. On vinyl.
1965 is a good place to start. That's when the album really set off as a meaningful form of expression in Rock Music. It began to take over from the single in the next few years but 1965 was the cusp. Here is the Best Ever Albums Top Ten.
1. Bob Dylan - Highway 61 Revisited
2. The Beatles - Rubber Soul
3. John Coltrane - A Love Supreme
4. Bob Dylan - Bringing it all Back Home
5. The Beatles - Help
6. Otis Redding - Otis Blue
7. The Who - My Generation
8. Nina Simone - Pastel Blues
9. The Beach Boys - The Beach Boys Today!
10. The Byrds - Mr. Tambourine Man
After this it becomes predominantly a Jazz list. It was in 1966 when this balance started to be redirected to Rock. Here is my own Top Ten list of albums I own from this year. I struggled a bit to make it to ten but these are all fine records in their different ways. Should be easier from now on.
1. The Beatles - Rubber Soul
2. John Coltrane - A Love Supreme
I feel I need to qualify this. Great as this record is, (and it's actually a very important life record to me), it felt a bit fussy for my tastes listening to it right now. Easier to admire and be in awe of than to love sometimes. So Rubber Soul pips it.
Derek Jarman, the visionary English director, tended a famous garden on the shingle shore close to the Dungeness Nuclear Power Station. A bold and poetic statement. Here, Nicky Wire, from his only set of solo recordings in 2006, pays tribute.
About twenty years ago, in my mid-thirties, I spent a year working and living in Catania, Sicily, looking to find myself and some new direction and impetus in my life. I did so eventually, but as so often is the way with these things, not quite in the way I was expecting to.
While I was there, I heard about and bought Lost Souls, the debut album from Manchester trio Doves. It was a record that chimed with me quite a bit at the time. Made by guys who were a similar age to myself who seemed to be coming upon a similar realisation as I was that life may not be ready to yield everything that you had once expected it to. I listened to it a lot through the second half of that important year.
I've kept my eye on Doves since. Not with incredible focus but just because they clearly had a little bit more to them them most guitar, bass, drums outfits of their type. An intelligence. An introspection. I saw them about ten years back in Newcastle where I now live. They were quite good. I left before the end.
Now they have a new album out, entitled the Universal Want, their fifth in all and rather astonishingly their first for eleven years. The band came back together to do some gigs in 2019 and they went well, including a sell out at The Royal Albert Hall. Now they've completed and put out a record.
It's good. It sounds thought through and is sure to satisfy devotees of the band because it has all of the Doves' defining characteristics. Glum anthems, soaring but earthbound. Grounded in reality. A certain, and very English, slight but manageable depression. But constantly trying to say something. Vastly preferable to my ears to bands of a similar sensibility, Stereophonics or Elbow for example.
But that's as far as I'd go, because despite chronicling what it feels like to be in their fifties rather than in their thirties with great acuity, there are few actual risks taken here. So while I tip my hat to Doves, I'm not sure I'll be back to this one much.I'll give it 7.
