Wednesday, November 6, 2024
500 Greatest Albums of the 1980s ... Ranked! # 197 The Undertones - Hypnotised
More of the same. Quite right too.
It Starts With a Birthstone - 200 Albums for 2024 # 49 John Grant - The Art Of The Lie
I listened to John Grant's latest album The Art Of The Lie three times yesterday. I'm listening to it again now. I'll listen to it later again today. Its great. I do like John Grant.
He's an honest man. A very Gay Man, And one that doesn't care about laying his emotions right on the line at all points. Perhaps the rest of us could learn something from him. Become a little bit more emotionlly honest about what's going on inside us.
The Art Of The Lie is his sixth straight studio record since 2010's Queen Of Denmark made such a splash back in 2010. They've all been on Bella Union records,
In some ways Grant is quite consistent. He's consistently passionate and emotional. Overwrought. Melodic. Melodramatic. He is what he is. We should be grateful really.
This one does what we've come to expect John Grant records to do. Vascillitae between The Carpenters, ABBA, Early 80s Synth Chart action. Hi Energy Disco. Wagner's Ring Cycle. Bless him
Song(s) of the Day # 3,908 Kacey Musgraves
Kacey Musgraves' Deeper Well; Deeper Into The Well, Folky ethereal stuff for woodlandpeople lovers. Folky pastoral stuff of a bucolic hue.
Tuesday, November 5, 2024
500 Greatest Albums of the 1980s ... Ranked! # 198 Royal Trux - Royal Trux
Just as with Sigur Ros you know exactly what you're getting with Royal Trux . Smack drenched Rock & Roll. Pussy Galore and Royal Trux as its sacred texts,
Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 - 1,759 Sigur Ros - Valtari
Not had your mindfulness this morning. There are worse places to do than go to a Sigur Ros album. Close your eyes. Drift.
It Starts With a Birthstone - 200 Albums for 2024 # 50 Jane Weaver - In Constant Spectacle
In the almost eleven years of my writing this blog there have been certain artists that have featured consistently and always come up with the goods. Courtney Barnett, Big Thief, Protomartyr, the Radiohead guys, came immediately to mind on an instant brainstorm. And Jane Weaver.
She's released five albums since she first came to my notice in 2015 with The Silver Globe. They've been consistently fascinating and multi faceted records. Almost Sci Fi. Using and melding strands from the likes of Stereolab, Broadcast, Nico, Krautrock, Eno, Bowie and Folk legacies for her own purposes. While reminders of other artists are sometimes an irritant with other musicians, I never find that to be the case with Weaver. In fact here they're quite delightful moments. Reference points.
If I were to make the most immediate comparison point that comes to my mind is actually with a writer. Science Fiction writer Ursula Le Guin. Like Le Guin, Weaver delights in constructing fabulous landscapes. Imaginary but recognisable worlds. Pleasurable ones. She has few contemporary challengers in these respects. Very few are working on her plain of invention.
In Constant Spectacle is more of the same in some ways but that is not a complaint or criticism. Quite the opposite. These are more dreams to immerse yourself in.
Song(s) of the Day # 3,907 Peter Perrett -The Cleansing
'Just another dead survivor.'
Doing the best work of your careet at the end of your life in Rock & Roll. An interesting article that's yet to be written. Johnny Cash. Can't think of too many others off the top of my head. Here comes Peter Perrett.
A man who didn't look as if he was going to make it out of the Only Ones is now heading into his eighth decade and may have made the best record of his lifetime.Well we've just had a fantastic Cure album. Wreckless Eric's last album was triff. Maybe the New Wavers cavalry is about to hit town. I must say I hope so. Who next Elvis Costello.
In the meantime the coolest and certainly the most wated wastrel ever to come out of Catford. Now a cool kitty in shades and raging against the dying of the life with a magnificent rwenty minute and hour long album of lessons in life and love. Stunningly articulate. Wonderful tunes lyrics and attitude.
Monday, November 4, 2024
Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 - 1,760 Jefferson Airplane - After Bathing At Baxter's
A wonderful offbeat, frantic, driven record.Very, very much of its time .One to listen to every six months. And it needs to be listened to in full to truly enjoy it's wackiness.
It Starts With a Birthstone - 200 Albums for 2024 # 51 Fontaines D.C - Romance
Fomtaines D.C. seem generally to be regarded as a band on the verge of breking out in a genuinely huge way. Mentioned in the same breath as Arctic Monkeys, Libertines, Pulp, Blur and, gasp Oasis. A trad-ish guitar, cigarettes and paperbacks proposition except that they have broader horizons than Oasis ever did. Didn't Liam mention The Lion The Witch & The Wardrobe as a formative influence.
I took a while with their latest, Romance. The first three tracks were distinctly unppealling. Indie gruel. Grian Chatten lyrics are generally much more to my liking than his vocals. As someone once put it, ' I know you and you cannit sing.' But then singing well is hardly a requisite for Rock & Roll approval. Bob Dylan, Lu Reed, Neil Young. Shane McGowan.
Eventually proceedings began to pick up. I have little doubt that this will continue to elevate Fontaines D.C.'s profile, prospects and bank balances though they're always likely be a proposition primarily for the estranged and apart.
In the latest issue if Uncut the band sing the praise s of Bladrynner, Rumble Fish, Micky Rourke in general, My Own Private Idaho as well as Joyce.They're still struggling with themselves.Embroiled in their Irishness and their identity
Anyhow, Romance is another good record. Chatten talks of dissonance in the Uncut article. An unease. It's more interesting I'd say than Bono plnating flags in an anplifier stack All power to their pointy disaffected elbows.
Song(s) of the Day # 3,906 The Declining Winter
The Declining Winter. A beautiful name for a band. And Last April, a beautiful album you listen to as the sun rises in the heavens in the skies outside my window and my bath runs.
They hail from Yorkshire. And specialuse in Pastoral and Lo Fi uf you need labels. Truly a lovely record to put headphones on and let a half hour of your life pass by,
Sunday, November 3, 2024
500 Greatest Albums of the 1980s ... Ranked! # 200 Fun Boy Three - Waiting
A marvellous album which I bought in 1983. And am listening to now in a Post Terry Hall world. He was an incredible artist. That goes for the other two Fun Boys and The Specials. The nest they flew from.
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Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 - 1,761 The Eagles - One Of These Nights
It's The Eagles. From 1975. What do you expect them to sound like/
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The Cure - Songs Of A Lost World
I'm staying in tonight. A jacket potato and The Cure at The BBC Two at eight o'clock on BBC 2. Then Match of the Day. My football team have won, But first. The Cure's Songs Of A Lost World. Their first for sixteen years. The first where everything is written by Robert Smith since 1985's Head on the Door.
On Fiction Records as you'd expect of The Cure. It clearly goes for Seventeen Seconds, Faith and Pornography as its touchstones and I'm more than happy with that..Not so much of the Poppy Happy Goth stuff that came in the late Eighties when they started bestriding Americn enormodomes.
The Cure of those early years describe the streets of suburban London better than any music that I know and grew up with. This is where we are here. It's an inspiring record. Going back to go forward. The child remains within.
I found it rousing, emotional but stirring, Undertowed by Simon Gallup's thunderous emotive bass and Robert Smith's grieving vocals, It's a beautiful impassioned occasionally mournful album that immediately makes me want to know it better. Clutch it to my heart,
This is not a collection o feelgood tunes and is all the better for that. . It will sell in shedloads and deserves to do so. It's as powerful a record as I can hope to hear all year. It strikes me as an utterly poignant and remarkable statement.It's Sunday I'm in love !
It Starts With a Birthstone - 200 Albums for 2024 # 52 Tara Jane O'Neill - The Cool Cloud of. Okayness
Tara Jane O'Neil has been plying her trade as an artistically inclined musician since she turned 20 in 1990 playing bass for Louisville, Kentucky Punks Rodan.
Thirty years and more on and with an incredibly varied and mutifaceted body of work to her name, she has a new record out, intriguingly entitled The Cool Cloud of. Okayness. It's one of the most blatantly abstracted and obscure album titles you're likely to come across ths year and the record itself lives up to the title and more.
I love chancing across records like this. Which plant themselves firmly in the quirky, bohemian traditon of the likes of Rickie Lee Jones and Laurie Anderson. Aristic, strange and completely unwilling to bend themselves and run with the herd.
It's an easy one to listen to though you may not be abe to grasp meaning so much as enjoy the abstraction, like a contemporary exhibition you wander around on a Sunday afternoon and take a fancy to without delving deeper.
The Cool Cloud of.Okayness floats on its own currents. It's the first record of this sort which has come my way since Cassandra Jenkins An Overview of Phenomenal Nature. A pleasuredome
Song(s) of the Day # 3,905 Anna McClellan
Rules are sometimes there to be broken. When I started this particular series. A song and songs. Focus on a particular band or artist a few months into the blog in 2014 I little realised I would still be working at the same seam on a daily basis ten years later.
But now, getting on for four tthousand days later it's time for a tweak. I'm going to repeat artists occasionally. Consciously. So here comes Anna McClellan. She previously registered at # 2,618 back in March 2021.when she put out I saw first light. Now she's back with Electric Bouquet
Thanks to It Starts first mate Darren Starbuck for another nudge. This is another good album. Worthy of recognition. McClellan is from New England. She has a barmy, vulnerable and slightly unhinged vision, Not a million miles away from Joanne Newsom. She dances in the light.Saturday, November 2, 2024
Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 - 1,763 The Cure - Boys Don't Cry
The Cure's new album seems to be confusing people by sounding like The Cure. Odd really. what would you expect a Cure album to sound ike. If there's one thing that band has done by now it's established their pitch.
Strangely their first record Boys Don't Cry didn't quite sound like The Cure yet. It took until 17 Seconds for tht to happen and they've worked on that seam ever since. This nevertheless marked them out s singular, jagged operators and ones worth watching.
Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 - 1,762 The Supremes - Where Did Our Love Go
Motown Records had some beautiful record sleeves and made some incredible statements.
It Starts With a Birthstone - 200 Albums for 2024 # 53 Kelli Scaeffer - Even Still
'Mirroring the expansive noise and incisive shadow of PJ Harvey, with the fearsome abandon of Nick Cave and vocal play of Bjork.' That's an attractive description and hints at a burning inrensity.
Kelli Schaefer's Even Still is a journey of glowing artistic longing. A great record to isten to in the early hours of a dark October Sunday morning. While the alarm of a shop across the road from me flashed in my window and a portly fire engine attives and uniformed men emerge to deal with the emergency.
This is an exceptional record. The songs are sprinkled with creative and originl drive. Chance discoveries like these exemplify why I love wruting this. No plans to give up any time soon. This one flies. The alarm has stopped across the road. In a while the light will gather.
Song(s) of the Day # 3,904 Flower Face
Intensity. Of the kind that the likes of Weyes Blood and Angel Olsen trade in. Primeval Indie heat. Flower Heat's Girl Prometheus.
A gentle and lovely record about the need to be loved and introversion. Some things never change.
Friday, November 1, 2024
500 Greatest Albums of the 1980s ... Ranked! # 202 Virgin Prunes - If I Die, I Die
Bono's arty mates. This is alright. In the gutter, looking at the stars, They sought and gained Cult mystique.
It Starts With a Birthstone - 200 Albums for 2024 # 54 Alexei Shishkin - Open Door Policy
Scrupolous and steadfast first mate Starbuck (aka Darren Jones) throws his captain another bone to chew on this Tuesday morning. And it's a juicy one.Portland based maker of ' bittersweet, lethargic indie-pop Alexei Shishkin. His latest Open Door Policy, amd second album of 2024. An instant, offbeat jewel.
Shishkin is not difficult to categorise in the record shop of your mind if that's what you're looking to do. .Dean Wareham, David Berman, Stephen Malkmus, Bradford Cox, Kurt Vile. The DIY section of the bleachers. Oddball, but with a fondness for a melody. Homely. Cosy.
Just my cup of sick in short. Time to run my bath and get going about my day. Another exceptionally winning record. Starbuck, I doff my cap to you. Morning has broken. Set the sails for a day of sailing.
Song(s) of the Day # 3,903 Jennifer Castle
'Camelot's a lot of rot!' My mother
November is here. It spawned a monster once upon a time according to Mozza. With November comes Camelot a spectral and deeply specia album from Jennifer Castle. An album that will keep you warm and snug for the whole month uf you care to ler it. Under your duvet. Under your skin.
It's Album of the Month in Uncut Magazine this month and those guys generally know.. It's Carole King's oddball Indie cousin who uses expressions like 'Pissin in the Wind.' with no little elan . Bit she has plenty of Carole's wordsmthery and way with melody.A way with madcap, punning poetry.
Arthurian legend is a useful touchstone for describing the album's urges and twitches. Camelot of course was a utopia. A heaven on earth. We all know there's actually no such thing. Heaven can wait. This record is pretty great in the meantime.One to learn and sing. Downhill to Christmas from here.
Thursday, October 31, 2024
500 Greatest Albums of the 1980s ... Ranked! # 203 The Go Betweens - 16 Lovers Lane
16 Lovers Lane is not always an easy record to listen to. It tells things how they are. That love is not always an easy road. That you have to persevere. Endure.That the heart is a lonely humter.
It Starts With a Birthstone - 200 Albums for 2024 # 55 Steven R. Smith - Olive
An interesting and different start to the week for me. Perched at the end of a hotel bed in Glasgow, preparing for my online lesson later this morning. Listening to an interesting and altogether charming new record too.
Steven R. Smith's Olive. An orchestral and baroque instrunebtal chamber piece. I found it strangely reminiscent of the music to the magical childhood TV programmes I used to watch open jawed back in my youth.Noggin The Nog came to mind. .
.Evocative winding instrumental pieces that allow your mind to explore the vistas the music plots. Verdant winding paths. Seas and valleys. A great start to the working week
Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 - 1,764 Amon Duul - Yeti
Back in the mists of time. Well 1970. But it feels a bit like it now, A scythe cutting through wheat, Mother's milk for a young Julain Cope gahering strength in Tamworth in the dark days of the early seventies. Classic,.
Song(s) of the Day # 3,902 Florence Clementine
Closing in on 2025. Isnt' today Halloween. I get confused sometimes. In the UK Halloween seems to stretch right the way through November. Drunken vampires, werewolves and zombies stagger across the streets outside my flat in search of the next pint of inroxication and solace,
Florence Clementine' One Mile Upstream have provided inroxication and solace for me in the early hours of this morning. As I prepare for the fitness centre and my online ten o'clock lesson with Dussledorf business students.
Florence is a poetic charmer. Wife of Benjamin and trading in similar artistic conceits, She uses every inch of her stage for half an hour. Prowlng the boards and shapeshifting projecting to the gods. Excellent stuff. Here comes November,
Wednesday, October 30, 2024
500 Greatest Albums of the 1980s ... Ranked! # 204 Laurie Anderson - Big Science
This was an album I bought when it came out because I was broadening my tasyes and interests. I maybe haven't listened to it very often. But I'm very glad I've got it. In some wats ut's not like any other record in my collection.
Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 - 1,765 Grizzly Bear - Painted Ruins
Grizzly Bear seem to navigate the seas of Rock & Roll with a different compass from other mariners. There's a space in their music tht harks back to many of the great American bands of the Sixties and Seventies. Steely Dan. Beach Boys.
It Starts With a Birthstone - 200 Albums for 2024 # 56 The BVs -Taking Pictures of Taking Pictures
Augsburg is a very pretty looking city in Bavaria. Chocolate Box. One of Germany's oldest, with everything you'd hope for judging by a rudimentary Google search. It looks like it merits a visit. History, tea shops, bars and walks. Mid table Bundesliga football team.
Today's Song(s) of the Day is dedicated to what may be Augsburg's finest indie band. If there's a better one I need to hear them. Taking Pictures of Taking Pictures The BV's third album is a rare pearl. A quite lovely guitar record underpinned by tried and tested values. I direct you there forewith,
As with all the best albums there's a story behind the record. Studying at university in Cornwall on exchange programmes. Falling in love with the likes of The Bodines, The Railway Children and mid Eighties New Order. Writing and perfecting songs guided by tried and tested Indie guitar values.This reminds me of why I loved The Go Betweens so back in the day. Listening to this is a gradual, discovery of accumulative beauty and craftsmanship. Just like listening to their records used to be back in the day.
On The BV's Spotify homepage the band have posted a number of quite lovely playlists of the kind of records that have inspired them on their journey. It's all there; the Chills, Crystal Stilts, The Mantles, Holiday Ghosts. Independent Rock's forgotten guitar seam, the kind of wonders I return to again and again on It Starts because I love it all so.
I loved Taking Pictures of Taking Pictures on first play and will return to it on a regular basis in the coming weeks and months. It's such a pleasure to chance upon a record with such an innate understanding for unknown pleasures and a gift of forging new pathways for it. Augsburg's finest doesn't do either the band or this fine record justice.
Song(s) of the Day # 3,901 Anna Butterss
Onwatd and upwards. Wednesday morning and I'm sitting at mu desk with a copy of Uncut Magazine open on my desk. Making my ways ahead, with my nine o'clock with business people in Leipzig on my mind.
This is helping me do so with a contrilled and relaxed manner Anna Butterss latest record Mighty Vertebrate, Busy but nt cluttered. Instrumental but expressive. Dreaming towers and stretching vistas..
Jazzy but with Afrobeat leanings. Thank you Uncut Magazine. Thank you Anna Butterss. A great start to the day, Heading towards 4,000. Ar some point in 2025.
Tuesday, October 29, 2024
500 Greatest Albums of the 1980s ... Ranked! # 205 The Wonderstuff - Eight Legged Groove Machine
Excellent Pop album. Often unfairly derided because some don't;like their haor or frontman or clothing or the scene they were associated with. I think it' a wonderful record.
Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 - 1,766 Spoon - Hot Thoughts
A facile and sloppy response. But generally I prefer forks.
It Starts With a Birthstone - 200 Albums for 2024 # 57 Ancient History - Dollar Consolation Prize
One of the great thrills of writing a blog like mine is coming upon records like this. Ones which will never so much as get a mention from Mojo, Uncut or The Guardian but strike me as every bit as special as the ones they cover. More often, because of what they come to mean to me.
This morning a Pittsburgh based musician named Don Ducote, who joins the dots between Lo-Fi and Experimental Indie practice on his magical latest record Dollar Consolation Prize.
A record that made me think of Beirut, Sufjan, Mercury Rev, Joanna Newsom, Dark Tea, The Shins and all those guys at different moments of its spin. Outsiders and dreamers, toiling away on seams of thought through guitars and more unworldly instruments in upstairs bedrooms and reaching for the stars they see twinkling in the night time sky as they stare into the night from behind their net curtains.
Not a record with memorable tunes exactly but certainly one which casts a spell that traces its roots back to The Fugs, The Merry Pranksters, Cassidy, Ginsburg and Kerouac and beyond.
I loved Dollar Consolation Prize almost immediately. It makes its own rules and drifts off from there into the starry night guided by the windpower of its dreams. An enchanting record and journey.
Song(s) of the Day # 3,900 The Clearwater Swimmers
I live rounding up. And I love The Clearwater Swimmers. How could you not with a name like that. Creedence Clearwater Revivals. The Swimming Pool Q's. A name that is steeped in American folk and musical lore that you know this is going to be good before you listen to a single note.
And the record itself. The Clearwater Swimmers epnymous debut album is evn better than that. It's the best record I've heard today. That good. Comparisons are rife. And the record rises and clears the bar at every challenge. A salmon making its way upstream in the Appalachian Mountains.
This is poignant, and moving stuff. Grandaddy's country cousins.This is a vision and chemistry that has been worked on with inbredible love and care. Magical in the way Marquee Moon, Reckoning, Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain and Software Slump were magical. High praise. I could wite an essay about this album but I'll leave it there. Alchemy
Monday, October 28, 2024
500 Greatest Albums of the 1980s ... Ranked! # 206 Pylon - Gyrate
My own year zero moment, (sorry to keep banging on about it, but it's true), was discovering R.E.M. on the release of their debut album Murmur in 1983 when I was eighteen. I always think of myself as a late developer music wise, and in other ways too, but that was the Road to Damascus moment for me musically, in many ways personally too.
It was not so much the record, (great though that was in itself), as the way that it led me almost immediately to other things. Almost as if I'd been waiting for it to come to me without knowing it. R.E.M. were always extraordinarily generous in interview, spending as much of their time as they could spreading the word about lesser known American fellow travellers, those they'd learned from and played with during the emergence over the previous three years.
Probably the name most frequently mentioned name was Athens, Georgia contemporaries Pylon. Pylon had made a small splash in British waters upon the release of their debut Gyrate in 1980, no more than that. The record certainly wasn't readily available only three years on. But, besotted with R.E.M. as I was, I was determined to track it down. When my girlfriend of the time went to The States in 1987, my only request was that she get me a copy. When I went myself four years further down the line I bought the band's other album Chomp.
I still play them both, particularly Gyrate, on a regular basis almost thirty years later. Within the confines of its innate primitivism, it's an almost flawless Post Punk statement. Utterly state of the art in terms of its raw wanton youth but also deeply smart. Frankly you could hang it on the wall as a model lesson to future generations as to how to go about creating Art, having learned first of all that technical proficiency is not all.
Pylon was a side project on the Athens college and music scene that took on a life of its own and eventually came to be the defining act of authorship of its four protagonists, vocalist Vanessa Briscoe, guitarist Randy Bewley, bassist Michael Lachowski and drummer Curtis Crowe. In Lachowski's words, 'art students assembling things with sound and instruments.'
Originally conceived as a youthful diversion from studies and career planning it soon became much more than that as Pylon quickly gathered attention on the American underground. A trip to New York to support Gang of Four was a significant bend in the road and they became the second biggest players on the humming Athens scene. R.E.M. were next.
Gyrate's essence and beauty is in its simplicity. Short snappy song titles, clinical, functional lyrics. They learn their lessons from Gang of Four, Wire and Talking Heads primarily but this is quite its own thing. Rhythm driven, taut but fun, something you can dance to but also think about. With all the time Vanessa Briscoe's urgent, strident vocal turns, acting almost as punctuation, a gear stick to speed things up or slow things down as the mood requires.
R.E.M. clearly learned plenty from them and did their best to pay back the favour. Probably a fair proportion of the records Pylon sold from 1983 onward had something to do with R.E.M's approbations. Robert Christgau, who very occasionally gets it just right, wrote this on the record's reissue.
'Where are the songs, some naive young people will cavil, thus permitting the beat-wise hipsters at DFA to riposte, 'What the fuck you think these are?' Plectrists Randy Bewlay and Michael Lachowski's simple lines display untoward rhythm and melody, respectively. Cameron Crowe bangs away so obdurately it's hard to understand why he didn't become rich. Vanessa Briscoe Hay barks and brays whatever incantatory phrases seemed called for. Timeless. Cool.'
Timeless. Cool. There's little more to add. Gyrate seems both spontaneous and utterly thought through. It's an altogether marvelous album an exemplary lesson to choosing and sticking to your road. Turn up the volume!
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