A Norwegian group named for the state between wakefulness and sleep. This is all very calming. In fact a rather triumphant discovery of a whole new kingdom.
'Isabel ringing in my head?' . Well seeing as you ask, in fact it is.. Isabel Pine's new album Fables to be precise. An album of serenity and calm where the music sounds as the album sleeve suggests it might. Like an early morning slalom through pines of a different kind.
Pine is a classically trained violinist and artist frim British Columbia. Fables finds her working on variations of a theme of mindfulness and repose. A fabulous exercise in escape.
In my first year at university it was much more common for people to come up to university accommodation with a record player than a television set. We had our heads screwed on in 1985. There was a communal TV set where you could go and catch I Claudius reruns or Citizen Kane if it was showing on one of the terrestrial channels. For the most part you didn't really bother because there was so much else going on.
There was a mature student in our block who had a colour set where you could go and watch a football match. The Home Internationals. The cup Final and such like. But from memory football wasn't a particular priority to us. There were more interesting things. More important things. Like being young,
I got into an important relationship in my second term with a beautiful Chinese Malaysian girl. She had a Singaporean friend with a colour TV in his room on the ground floor on campus. When he was out he'd let us borrow his room .It was the World Cup in Mexico in the Summer term,. The Hand of God, Mundial.
Min and I snuggled down under the duvet and watched games. But we both far more interested in the snuggling than the outcome of the match. People forget. Life makes you forget. When you settle down to the 9 to 5 and start to chip away at your mortgage and the binge watch and the next ninety minutes takes over and somehow stretches out to actually mean more than The Bronte Sisters and Scorsese and Astral Weeks.
What means more than these things. A legalised war on a field of grass? Not to me it doesn't. I can watch a match of football and enjoy it as much as the next person but essentially these days for me mostly it boils down to jumping up and down when your team scores. . .
Back fiert tears again. In my home block one of the girls upstairs had a record player. She lent me her copies of Hoodoo Gurus, Stoneage Romeos and Long Ryders Native Sons. Both debut albums, both slightly retro tecords in different ways but entres. Signposts to all kinds of great music . Nuggets, CBGBs, Australian pioneers from Stoneage Romeos a; Buffalo Springsteen, Byrds and Gram from Native Sons.
I saw Long Ryders in my first year. They were supported by That Petrol Emotion who had come from the ashes of The Undertones and seemed a natural broadening of that palate. Both bands seemed like primer courses. Different modules on a music appreciation degree
The steps to follow; Get out of the venue get a bus into town. Go to a record shop. Find out where they came from . Form a band or write a book. Listening to Native Sons now is easeful bliss.Let the inner cynic in you go and relax. It thinks Punk is a great thing. It thinks C & W is a great thing. It thinks the British Invasion was a great thing. It's forty years old and it's a pretty great thing too. Form that band. Write that book.
It's Monday . We steam into Spring, What have I got for you. Well?!? Nothing,.A Philadelphia band. Their fifth album A Short History of Decay. Trust me. Sweet things sometimes come in unprepossessing packages. This is Shoegaze, meets Grunge meets Sufjan Stevens it would seem. And it's frequently lovely in many respects.
This record drifts into the sombre, desolate places that late Beatles, My Bloody Valentine, Smashing Pumpkins and Elliott Smith records do, It's a sensational record and covers a lot of ground.
This song means a lot to me. It says a lot about life and how to live it if you can. If you dare,. About the desolation that exists within us all potentially The wildness hat beats in our chest and can lead us off the path onto the wildnerness and the darkness if we don't keep an eye on our compass and the stars and the track ahead of you.
It's by the Triffids, a band who walked their own path with a determined and loping tread. Who I discovered on 1985 and aligned myself to in 1985, the ear when they released their great album Born Sandy Devotional and when I saw them. In Northern London (Islington I suspect), towards the end of a glorious summer. As glorious a summer as I've lived,
I was in love and Wide Open Road is the song I associate mostly with the feeling of the love curdling and dying in the ears which followed. My impotence, jealousy and rage. How love and jealousy can burn in your chest and consume you with rage, confusion and anguish. This is what great songs do and in my lifetime songs will never come much finer or have greater meaning to me..
Tom Waits is a bit like a London double decker bus in some respects. You wait around for a couple of hours for one and three of them come along at once. And they all look and soud and smell the same. And splutter off gasping and coughing. And you wonder if they'll ever going to get to their destination. This one sounds alright. But I'll get off when I get to my stop . And leave Blood Money to it.
I didn't really recognise a really good song. A really good singer. Ot really good musicianship. When I was 13. That's something you need years for. I have them now.
Everybody they say, wants to be a cat. Certainly Mitski it appears judging by the cover of Nothing's About To Happen To Me her latest album which charmed the socks off me;yesterday afternoon and is soing the same this morniing as I rise on Sunday;
It's her eighth album. Sober reflections on loneliness and delusion, And trying to find your phone.First workd problems and means of escape. Finding spaces of ease and rest on between the noise and disturbance.
This feels like a country cousin to Weyes Blood's recent excursions. Respite from the onslaught from the ceaseless storm in easeful nostalgia.
It does so. Explains the anger and finds resolution and humour . It's another marvellous record in a year where they're popping up like meerkats in the silken desert sand,
A Donovan album from 1966 with a wonderful cover and a lush texture. It's a lustrous record frankly. It takes you there. Donovan is making like a turtle and diving fot your pearls in the sea. Then he's bringing gold apples. A veritable feast unfurls.
Plenty mock Donovan . Dylan mocked hum brutally at the time. But this is one of those 'How beautiful to be young and alive for that golden dawn records.
Like anyone who went to unoversity in the Mid Eighties Yhe Smiths furnish me with enough memories to write a book. To furnish a mansion. There has been no band like them. Before or since. They say something about the human condition and spirit at its best and also sometimes at its worst. . This song chimes with me particularly.
I'm rising on Satirday mornong and taking to a Tibetan mountain top to listen to... erm... The Mountain ... the latest album by Gorillaz. They've been around for 25 years now And this feels like it. A relax into late middle age record. A set of comfy cushions..
Damon Albarn... It's hard to knock the man. He's spread his wings since his Parklife years, headed off for the Global Horizon. This album is haunted by the past. Most notably here, loss of Albarn and Jamie Hewlett's fathers. The ultimate loss of innocence.
This record sounds like what it need to. A celebration of all the contradictions and conflicts of life . The reluctance to let go of youth and the inevtable drift into the void. It's a marvellous record frankly. Give it a listen. Embrace Spring !
I generally bristle slightly before listening to a record that's related in any way to Jack White/ I don't particulalrly like him I confess and am not particularly grounded in the tradition he draws on or the scenarios he dabbles in, In this case what if Free or Led Zep had formed thirty years.on, If that's your bag, This is your album.
I liked Big Country well eniugh at the time as a 17 and 18 when The Crossing and the initial singles came out. I liked the tunes, the shirts, the guitars the genuine sentiments.It just seemed like positive, admirable stuff TBH. Big Country fitted in with the construction of identity that was going on within myself. Taking place in books, films and records. A construction of identity.The person I wanted to be. I still want to be that person.
Big Countryfitted in wuth R.E.M., The Smiths, The Go Betweens, Triffids, Lloyd Cole & The Commotions, Prefab Sprout and so on. And the reworking back to the Velvet Underground, Doors, Byrds and so forth that was going on within me from there. I didn't actually buy The Crossing until relatively recently.
But I listened to the record last night after listening through to a podcast about the sad story of Stuart Adamson the band's guiding light. And I realisde exactly what a vision the album is. How good it is. It's almost a mythic record tol isten to now. Young men placing themselves in a huge landscape and exploring and nailing exactly what that means an dhow others can relate and identify with that, How the album was clearly a fundamental statement to Adamson as a differentiating declaration from The Skids and Richard Jobson his foil and the fronttwo of The Skids, the Dunfermline Punk band he'd first come to prominence in.,
The Crossing is a set of songs that stand very much within theur tume and place. The messianic and inspiring lighters aloft wave of guitar bands that was rising at thet point in time; U2, Simple Minds, Bunnymen, Psychedelic Furs. But there's something incredibly stirring about The Crossing and one that's also underpinned with sadness that's actually recognisable within the melodies,massed vocals guitars, drums and lyrics of the record itself that brackets Adamson and his sad, eventual destiny as a Caledonian cousin of Ian Curtis, Adruan Borland and Bily McKenzie.A depressed celebrant.
It's coming up to the end of February . Spring is on its way. Bill Callahan is 'driving through the dark. Arriving in the rain.' To sing hs songs again and again,
Why Do Men Sing? Why indeed. Bill is here to tell us om latest record and I imagine this will keep me engaged with new album Days of 58 as I make my way across the morning.
Bill Callahan is a droll troubadour and he sticks to his script as the clock ticks. 'He laughs in the face of death'. Just as it should be. This will syrely tick the boxes for those for whom previous Smog and Callahan excursions have ticked boxes. It's important to not treat your lifeboat like a yacht. Well done Bill. I'm aboard!
From a Vegas Water Taxi to a Death Cab For Cutie one. We all have to make our way through life. To pay the bills. Death Cab For Cutie make it sound like a rather bland passage for the most part although sometimes the sun peeks from behind the clouds.. Monochrome Shins.
Long time Caller, First Time Listener. Vegas Water Taxi ..An album that immediately heralds itself as coming from a familiar place and goes out to a designated audience. For people with Teenage Fanclub, Belle & Sebastian and Big Star albums in their record collection.
They concern themselves with Thirty Something Concerns. Which seem to be the same as Thirty Something Concerns always have been.
Vegas Water Taxi are East Country slackers who don't wish to surprise, disappoint or innovate frankly. This is an instantly familiar album that feels like you're being beckoned onto a marshmallow sofa.
Waking Up with Annabelle Chairlegs. Well actually it's getting on to three in the afternoon and I've already done half a days work but it's a charming experience nonetheless. I can recommend it highly if you ever have the opportunity,
The lady in question works out of Austin , Texas in a vein which would be familiar to those prone to Kim Deal. I.e. anyone with an ounce of sense. Fabulous stuff !!!
