'Calling out in transit...' Lia Kohl's new album is called In Transit and like the most interesting music it caries you. Makes you feel you're in motion and that you're being transported across space and time . From one place to another, From one state of mind to the next.
If you're feeling trapped, stop whatever you're doing, go to a computer screen and put some headphones on. This will take you somewhere else. Lia Kohl is a cellist, composer and multidisciplinary artist based in Chicago. In Transit is enough.
It has taken me from nine o'clock to half nine on a Wednesday morning and my first online lesson in Amsterdam. I wish I were in Amsterdam but if not, teaching a student there is the next best thing. If I weren't in Amsterdam I'd like to be in Chicago. Taking Lia Kohl out to breakfast, For a pot of tea and a cream cheese bagel. This is fine work. Ambient. Clipped.
'Here's a penny for your thoughts. Incidentally, you may keep the change.'
A great artist. Preparing himself to hang up his spurs. And his plectrum. Edwyn Collins. He of Orange Juice of course. I always think most of my younger sister when I think about Orange Juice. She had a good friend called Kirsty at secondary school who lived on the large estate opposite the school we both went to in Petersham. They used to bunk off school and go round to Kirsty's house when her parents were out at work. Listen to Orange Juice. Jesus & Mary Chain.
Edwyn has a new album out. Every Nation Shall Speak Unto Nation. Edwyn is no stranger to ambition. Mixing in the profound with the purely corny. That's always been his essential gift and charm. Age has withered him somewhat and taken some of the edge off him. He had a certain cocky cruelty about him in his youth. This has dulled and there's a certain wan sentimentality in its stead all over Every Nation. It was always there, but over the years it has matured into fine wine as we can only hope will happen to us all.
Here it seems he has retired to Rosewood & Sandy. Something more homespun and comfortable and ultimately rather touching..The quality of Every Nation that's most immediately evident is its romantic quality. Charm. Rustic deft. Poise.
You can almost picture the old ham wandering the Highland paths having tethered his horse to an oak. Strumming on his telecaster. Grace, his guardian angel, by his side.The album has a wise and touching resonance and poignance. Amazing Grace
Ace by Madison Cunningham. An incredibly assured old school record reminiscent of Carly Simon, Carole King, Helen Redding. Enjoyed late on Saturday evening. Once again on Sunday morning with the clocks back and the sun bright in the heavens,.
This is a rich break- feast. As with Weyes Blood. Looking backwards to forge forward, The modern condition. Sunday morning is the best. It makes you wish for the Sunday supplements. To savor this at leisure. In pleasure. Lyrical twists, melodic flourishes. A realisation that life is good. Post a reminder to self. Listen to Randy Newman or Joni later today..
Do I want to watch the Political Digest. Would that spoil my still mood. In any respect I'll keep listening to this. Stretch out my good feeling, Madison the best possible company Old school. Generations change. Expression of fundamental emotions doesn't . This is classy.
The time has come the walrus said to talk about the new Rosalia album LUX. Several people have contacted me separately to talk about how spectacularly wonderful it is. So what can a poor boy do. 'Cept to listen to the blessed thing.
Yes, it's pretty damned magnificent I must say. Watch its wave rise and sustain its spell. It's bruised with all the drama, desire and romance you could ask from music. Or indeed life. Clasp a rose between your teeth and throw your arm wide to embrace this wonderful record,
This morning when I rose I put on a copy of Back's Brandenberg Concertoes which a neighbour gave me a few days ago rather than dropping them off at Amnesty International. I'm listening again now. Will dress and breakfast and allow the music to rise and swell, to ebb and flow and prepare me for my day.
Classical Music exists outside he space of most of the other records in my collection. There's no anxiety of influence or context. I don't think have these guys been listening to Wire ir The Byrds, Curtis Mayfield or The Fall. I don't think so much of Johan Sebastian. He's no Mozart He was yoo easily influenced. His debt to Dietrich Buxtehude is palpable. If course
Here you're free of such piffle. Being carried downstream by a powerful river, by the tide of history. By forces that you don't understand. I went to Berlin once. The Brandenberg Gate us pictured in the sleeve of the Bach record I'm playing. There's almost too much history. Too much to process for mere mortals so I won't even bother. I'll boil up some water for an egg.
There's a story behind this. I went out one Saturday morning in the Spring of 1986 with two of my three best friends in my first year at university, We were young though we didn't really know it. We didn't know any better. We caught a bus into Norwich. Walked together through the pedestrianised streets of the old city To Backs Records. The independent record shop. We were to old for the sweet shop. We'd moved on from comics to pints and records It was what boys like us were born to do at that time on the planet. I realise now looking back. It was only right,
. There was a copy of Smokey Robinson & The Miracles The Anthology/ Ben and I wanted it. But money was at a premium in those days. Buying a record meant a sacrifice elsewhere. We decided to get it together and flip a coin for it.
Rod the third friend recalled the incident decades later. I'd certainly never forgotten it, It felt like an episode. Something memorable and somehow significant Rod was anxiety prone and didn't like what was happening,
This felt like Sophie's Choice moment for sad 20 year old boys. Something out of Nick Hornby or Julian Barnes. I was confident. I always won tossed coins. Ben was not. He always lost them, Ben won the toss. He got Smokey Robinson & The Miracles - Anthology, I was left with a gap in my life.
I moved onto a girl the next term. Smokey and the Miracles would have nodded sagely in approval and flowed to the chorus. The three of us kind of fell out, drifted apart the next year, I had to take a year out of university because I fell horribly ill. .The whole story feels dramatic, intense and worthy of a novel. The true story of the Eighties. I won't be the one to write it. This is just a page in the draft. James the fourth friend was not there that day. I imagine he could supply footnotes.
It now seems like a different lifetime frankly. I've bought my own copy of the record. It feels like the ultimate soundtrack to falling in and out of love. In and out of friendship. In and out of life, Side One has jut come to an end. I think I'll put on Side Two
The Cars have a frothy, approachable New Wave way about them that was always likely to appeal to the slightly more adventurous kids in the High School classroom, After their breakthrough on their eponymous debit they cruised in the centre lane to their houses in the Hollywood Hills and you could hardly begrudge them their swimming pools.
I felt this song. For many years. About someone who was incredibly important to me. I felt the emotions as I lost her. As we lost each other. Sometimes something that burns into you intensely takes years to work it's way out of your psyche. This is a woman who the first time we went somewhere together we went to Hampton Court Maze. Then we went out together. Then we had to work our way out of the emotional maze we found ourselves. You can make it. You do make it. This song brings back the wilderness I got lost in better than any other for me.
Italian retro rockers channel Syd Barrett and Ray Davies to powerful effect.. New to me and very much to my liking. There's an eccentricity here which is never forced. This feels like a loving feather dusting curation of the oddball moments your record collection.
Hey there. I'm a weirdo baby. So why don't you spend some time with me. Emma- Jean Thackray beckons her finger and the reclines into a long hot bubble bath in he video for the album of the same name.
It's all hot slinky Soulful stuff of the kind that ticks Giles Peterson's boxes. Loose, spruce and reflective music on the passing of Thackray's partner Matthew Gordon.
There's a lot going on here emotionally and lyrically. But really it's just an easeful and rather impressive record.
A British Peruvian singer whose second album Experience feels comfotungly old school. Indie of the kind that Badly Drawn Boy used to specialise in and its pleasing to see still being dabbled in.
All in all the album is an interesting listen though perhaps it never completely coheres and feels something like gravity failing in a space motes circling in space. But this is all in all quite a nice aural sensation frankly.
This is a wonderful devil and the angel went dancing record. Thick with dread and atmospherics.
A friend has told me we may already be a war . Another friend has told me decluttering is good in chaotic times so I am scrubbing surfaces and craving order over my own space and this seems to work well as an OST to impending dread.
S.G, Goodman's third album Signs is tense gritty stuff. Out of Kentucky and the Mississippi Delta, This kept me engaged as the sky outside darkened and the evening closed in snug and cosy.
It's Remembrance Sunday today, I went to church, To St Andrews the oldest Church in Newcastle City Centre. High roof, tall pillars, bold arches strong walls. A location to give you a sense of history. A sense of life's drama and scope. That there is more to this existence than just you.
The sermon felt dramatic and emotional. The minister has a sharp sense of history and drama . And this is an important Sunday to him as it should be to us all because given the tenor of the times, There seems and more at stake with every passing newscast . War is everywhere. Bad people are on the rise.
The sermon took no prisoners. What was the sacrifice that was made and was it worth it if we are frittering it away. Not learning the lessons we should have learned once and for all. 'They shall not grow old.' Age shall not wither them.' But turn on your televisions. War is everywhere. And what are we doing about it. What questions are we asking of our so called leaders.
What am I doing about it? I'm home and I'm listening to The Skids. Into The Valley. A song that sounds like a football chart building on the terraces and climaxing with an invasion on the pitch. But watch the video read the lyrics. 'Betrothed and Divine, From Victor to Stone, Land Sea and Sky. Boy Man and Soldier'. It's much more than a Pop Song.
It's about the eternal sacrifice that is always asked. From Marathon. To Agincourt. To Waterloo. To The Somme. And on and on and on, It's a lesson that we still haven't learned and apparently never will. It also of course sounds completely fantastic
Sunday morning and I'm starting late. But better late than never. I have a fine record in Cass McCombs Interior Live Oak to fasten myself to its mast and sail into the new day. Ella is namedropped within the first thirty seconds and we journey on from there.
McCombs has an admirable track record. Approaching fifty he has thirteen albums of wonder under his belt and like Kevin Morby he's essentially a questor. A learner at the table. A rider on the highway. Speed on wheels. .These songs are objects that come from a process of research and its resultant journey
Interior Live Oak spins on imparting rare wisdom. There's plenty of vision here. It's cool. Mysterious. In the best senses of both words.
My parents didn't have much disposable income when I was growing up. They had a brood of five and my household was a place of toweled nappies and toys scattered across living room floors. But we were raised in a world of firm foundations. In a House of Love, Being called to the dinner table. Clear the plates. Do the washing up. Pack things away. Bed time stories. Night night. Sleep tight.
And a few records. My mother had the Seekers and The Carpenters. .My father Louis Armstrong and The Dutch Swing College Band. . So I'm listening to A World Of Our Own on a Sunday morning and flying on a magic carpet across time and space as music allows you to do to a hallowed space. Of hearth and home and my mother smiling and tucking her legs beneath her on the sofa in one of the beautiful patterned dresses she wore in the sixties. .My dad snapping the picture. One for the photo albums. Occasionally she took one. So he'd be remembered too.
I'm not sure I believe in the modern world. It strikes me as rather confused. As it's had its senses dulled I think I prefer the old one. When we had less distraction. And we didn't spend our whole time looking at a screen Lots of screens in 1984. But who is watching who.
'This land is your land. This land was made for you and me' That makes more sense to me. I'll take off The Seekers now and put on a Stereolab or Kraftwerk record. I do believe in the future too. .Must show willing.
Just what the doctor ordered. Old School harmonising sass, sex and soul from Annie & The Caldwells on latest album Can't Lose My Soul. Annie Caldwell has been round all of the Soul blocks that count in 50 years on the circuit. Perhaps too late to shoehorn into the It Starts With a Birthstone platters that matter but it's there in spirit and can dry its tears with the news that it's made the Mojo Top 10 anyway.
When I was about 12 my parents sent my sister and I off for a summer camp to Swanage. They probably needed a break. I liked it. My sister didn't to put it lightly. She didn't forgive my mother for years.
I thought it was alright. It didn't rain all the time we had some cool night time stories and activities, I can't really remember much about it.
But I do remember the weeks disco for one reason. It was the first time I ever heard I Feel Love. The hall's doors were wide open and I Feel Love was blaring at full volume as I went in.
I've never heard anything like it. It was quite clearly something completely new. Jaws, Star Wars and skateboarding from the same time meant little or nothing to me. But that was a moment that's stuck with me ever since. It felt like you were being dragged into something against your will,
When I was 19 on my gap year I went and worked in a hotel in Switzerland for six months. There was a copy of Lord of the Rings in my room. I hadn't read it before. I picked it up with no particular expectations and started reading . I simply devoured in. It was one of the truly extraordinary narrative journeys of my lifetime. I didn't put the book down until I finished a number of days later in between my work shifts . It was one of the most magical experiences of my life.
I'll never read it again. I went to see the films at the cinema and they were alright . But I feel I've had the Tolkien experience of my lifetime and it was unsurpassable. Tolkien of course make me think of Led Zep because Robert Plant was rather Prone to Lord of the Rings borrowings whenever he was short of inspiration . I have the essential Led Zep albums on vinyl in my flat when I feel like a gear change . My older brother's lent them to me and not asked for them back as of yet.
. I just put Led Zep II. It's not necessarily the one I'd play of choice but I gave it a go and for the last half hour I've been enthralled. It takes you back. To the Seventies, but frankly to the longboats and the mythic tug it drew on. As for me. I feel like I'm nine again. This surely is the purpose of truly great music. .
Sit down on the carpet in front of teacher boys and girls. Weyes Blood is going to tell you a story. About the Modern Condition . About being a stranger to your self. About not understanding your own emotions. The modern loneliness. Don't be frightened. It's only a story.
Perhaps it was ever thus. It was all there after all in Thomas Pynchon. Watch One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. Listen to The Carpenters, the obvious musical precedent where Weyes Blood draws from the well. Read The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Tender is the Night. Read John Keats. Say Goodbye To Love.
Marie and Donnie Osmond claimed to be; a little bit country and a little bit Rock & Roll. Sean O'Hagen is a little bit Pet Sounds, a little bit Stereolab, a little but of Exotica and a little but more Pet Sounds. I'm not complaining,
At the beginning of his cricketing test careeer in the mid Seventies, Graham Gooch was not an opening batsman. He came in a couple of wickets down at 4 or 5 with responsibiliries for holding the middle order together . England, as England often does, were shaking. Gooch invariably fumbled around for fifteen minutes, flashing at the ball outside the offstump nervously before edging to the slips. Heading back to to the pavilion head down. Caught and despatched in single figures. He was Essex boy. In white. And leg pads.
This is little remembered now. Graham Gooch is a cricketing legend. But it's how I think of him. I used to sit in front of the TV set watching The Ashes with my Dad. Sport was so exciting when I was young. Now I don't bother much. I haven't sat and watched Test Cricket for years.Anyway I digress. We're talking Lucy Gooch not Graham here .I imagine they are not related.
I am sitting on my sofa litening to Lucy's latest album Desert Window. It has an arresting cover and the album itself is equally strikking. 'Spectral' it says on the stickers on the record and when you listen to the record you realise the description applies. Like much music these days it seems to arrive in the slipstream of Kate Bush. It gasps and sighs in wonder.It's rather magnificent really In cricketing terms it carries its bat back to the pavilion aloft having despatched a winning boundary. Graham would be proud.
I'm up and at my desk. I've been awake for a while. Sending texts to friends and family in bed. This is how I occupy my early mornings . It's 2025. We have to struggle to communicate as we make our ways up our various hills pushing our various boulders. Parsley, Sage Rosemary & Thyme is on its third play. I'll have my breakfast. Run my bath. Get dressed. Breakfast further. It's a sturdy album. Durable.
What do you mean? Call that a review? What kind of loser are you. Where does it stand? Is it better than Sound of Silence. How does it compare to Bridge Over Troubled Water. Where does Paul Simon stand among the pantheon of greats. Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen. Aristotle. Stand up while I'm talking to you? Look at me? Pay attention !
Oh I can't be bothered with the obsessions of the Statistical Age we're all stumbling blindly through. It's just a great record. Paul and Art are singing Silent Night while the news headlines from long ago play behind them There are much more interesting things to ponder than where Parsley, Sage Rosemary & Thyme hangs in the scheme of things. Why did Paul Simon just address a lampost? Why haven't I read Robert Frost. Is the theatre really dead? These are questions for another day. My bath is run.
Midlake have a new album out Oh Frajious Day ! Callooh Callay! A Folk frolic in verdant meadows. It's called A Bridge Too Far, Does it live up to it's billing. Listeners. There's only one way to find out . Let's 'Deep Dive'.
It sounds pretty much as you'd expect it to sound. Middle aged men in snug beards and clipped fingernails sigh and exhale longingly and a good time is had by one and all. Of course Gerry Rafferty came here first a long time ago but it's a nice spot. It sounds a bit like music for a care home frankly to me. But there are worse ways to spend forty minutes.
'Is love an illusion?' Your guess is as good as mine pal. Hectorine certainly has her doubts and makes them clear on latest LP Arrow Of Love. According to her Spotify bio Sarah Gagnon the woman behind the Hectorine thing summons up the spirit of the ancient Sumerian warrior goddess Inana as her muse for this one.
I'm not sure where to go with that one really. Frankly it sounds rather far fetched to my mind. But the album has a splendid glacial tread that's really rather endearing and splendid. I sat yesterday in an Arhuis hotel room and allowed the record to cast its spell. .It surely did.
And the spell thickens as the record spins. There's an answer song to Cohen's Hallelujah which stopped me in my tracks frankly. The record is frequently stunning. Make of it what you will but you may find it as endearing as I did yesterday afternoon. The whole thing has a lustrous quality
This sounded uncannily strange as a thirteen year old who knew next to nothing watching this on Top of the Pops in 1978, The message was was way beyond me at the time but it's incredible in its poignancy almost fifty years on. Punk. In the true sense of the word. I can't think of another song like it,
'My baby takes the morning train. He works from nine til five again He takes another home again. To find me waiting for him.' And the course of feminism set back 250 years and Mary Wollstencraft and Emily Pankhurst spinning in their graves.
Ah Sheena Easton. What a super trouper. How little she knew that when she shot to fame in 1981 on the back of this innocent little ditty. Innocent. Have you seen the video. Write an essay on it. It's got more phallic symbolism than a Jacques Lacan wet dream. More sexual innuendo than The Best of Sigmund Freud !
Lots of trains going into tunnels . Prince obviously saw the video and wrote a song for her called Sugar Wallsabout Sheena's vagina apparently which shot her to even greater fame. I imagine you can picture the scene. I wonder what her mum thought.
HORSES ! HORSES ! HORSES ! HORSES ! Coming in in all directions. My new favourite band. Blah ! Blah ! Blah! HORSEBATH Canadian rootster's new album Another Farewell comes out of the traps like The Band reborn wuth a pince of Lovin' Spoonful and gathers pace from there.
Smokey and dreamy by turns. A band that know their heritage. Their Three Dig Night, Guess Who and Sir Douglas Quintet. This is an enchanting trup back to a land that time forgot. Like Slow Morion Cowboys in warm embrace with Grandaddy. Enough comparisons already. Here's an album that walks its own shoes. Into Mittwoch !!!!
It's rather difficult to follow completely what's going on on Lily Allen's latest West End Girl if you haven't followed her life's recent narrative. I'm notably out if the loop . It's certainly candid and claws out at full fathom five at exes infidelity and brutality. .
It's her first album for seven years and she's clearly got a few things she'd like to get off her chest.. This is very tabloid and soapy in terms of its content. It's all rather relentless, Perhaps best directed at Eastenders junkies. All the news that's fit to print.
The sun is coming up in Newcastle. Foot Ox's A Lighthouse With Silver Dog Eyes is playing in my headphimes. I feel good. You knew that I would.
The cover is extraordinary.A middel aged lady stands in an old school dreaa, like a Movie Queen, (Joan Crawfird type), in front of a Joshua Tree in the sun. It's the kind of painting that people unwisely hang on their living room wall and freak out houseguests.'Did you see that picture on the wall?' in the car on the rude home.
Meanwhie the record spins on. Pedal steel. Now based in Portland, Oregon but reared and launched in Tempe, Arizona. Songs inspired by ' dreams, deals with love death adventure, heartbreak and fear.' . Loveliness and charm. Care and attentiion.
My day doesn't really gather traction these days until I get a record on and set the scene and then we begin to slip into the lane, and gather speed and I find myself carried back to a time and place. This morning Dortmund, Germany 1992 - 1994/ The time of Grunge. I was still buying records though I had no player of my own. I recorded the records I bought at a friends and listened to them in the basic tape recorder in my room.
I was living in a very basic bedsit ten minutes from the language school I worked at. Around the corner from a launderette. A trink halle in a hole in the wall across the road from me. A place to buy beer, cigarettes and basic provisions. With a BVB fanatic called Werner who didn't know my name so called me Bob. I had a great set of friends. I was young though I didn't really realise it. I struggled with young emotions.
I listened to Saturation a lot. It adhered to old school values, was very, very Seventies while slotting into Grunge susceptibilities . But they knew their Cheap Trick. Their Foghat,. They sailed away on a crystal ship. Like a bottle of fur. Missing the smell of her. Those were the times.
There were so many songs about working nine to five in the early Eighties. It almost made it sound like fun. Working Nine to five. 'What a way to make a living'. 'My baby rakes the morning train' 'It takes a great amount of strain about getting on a train. every day and every night,' That no excuse for Haircut 100. The poor man's Orange Juice .
I suspect I chose my natural constituency between seventeen and eighteen. I'd discovered the cut of my jib. The size that fitted. Young men that toted telecasters and rickenbackers and read poetry and listened to The Velvet Underground, The Byrds and Al Green. And bought the NME. And loved deeply. And felt deeply. And preferred the stuff that didn't get into the charts to the stuff that did. It's all served me very well since.
Reminded me of the sadly departed Tapir! who split up earlier this year. A slightly timid Vampire weekend. Slightly cosy perhaps but there's percussive fire in their bellies.
Last night after a day teaching hard and getting the necessary paperwork done in in a humid flat I fell asleep on my bed listening to an Al Green album playing on the turntable in the living room. I woke at eight and made my way downstairs to my desk in a slightly bemused state. I'm never at my best when I sleep during the day. At my desk I switched on my desk lamp found a new album at random and started listening. Found myself charmed and transfixed.
I fixed muself a basic supper and came to the desk and listened on as night fell. The album in question was Cancionera by Natalia Lafourcade. It drowned out the half hearted efforts from the lads outside my window to get football chants going on a Friday evenimg in Newcastle and spun its spell old school and flew me across the world down Mehico way.
Jazz can carry you away. Beyond your cares and woes. To a place where only the moment matters. And the muse. This is a record from what I would consider Jazz's golden age. It's a collaboration where great players come together to achieve more than they could alone. On Something Else the results are laid down forever. The rest you can leave to statisticians and fact checkers. Ultimately this is enough !
The sun rises and we tread the dawn's ocean, Ana Von Hausswolf's ICONOCLASTS on the headphones as we break the waves. It's a heady storm bracing and we surge into the remorseless gale our faces set to the storm.
This is essentially a positive blog. A voyage. Like the Voyage of the Dawn Treader to try to find the positive. The new. The hope. The joy, But sometimes you have to deal with inescapable facts. Gil Scott Heron had few parallels when it came to inescapable facts
