By contrast with Modest Mouse, I'm now listening to a Yo La Tengo album from 1993 and I feel like I'm back with my people and the world has relaxed to a pace I feel comfortable with. It's 1993 and I'm listening to bands with lots of Velvet Underground and Television albums in their collection.
Bands familiar with the mean streets of Manhattan who gravitate to the record shops and cafes of Greenwich Village. Who wish they'd been a little bit older than they were so they could have seen Blondie and The Ramones in 1975 at CBGB's who know they'll start getting into Jazz as they grow older. Who are comfortable in their uncomfortable skin.
Every day these days it seems. I wake up, look at my to do list. And there seems to be a Modest Mouse album for me to listen to and attempt to document my impressions of. I realise I'm actually not obliged in any respect. I could stop writing this blog any day I pleased and the world would keep turning but I've clearly formed a habit I'm unwilling to break. And I'm game for a challenge anyhow. So, The Moon & Antarctica.
The record came out in 2000, was the band's third and is 58 minutes long which dates it. The band and record company may have had CDs in mind rather than vinyl which we've since returned to like resurgent knights to the round table. Films seem to be getting longer nowadays.Albums shorter. This is's a hokey, mishappen and occasionally poigant record. But I find its poignancy slightly offputting.It's not really written with my needs in mind.
The Moon & Antarctica. sets out its stall as Modest Mouse continued. By drawing the listeners attention to the bands angularity and reluctance to conform or be put in a box. This is not unprecedented. That's what The Rolling Stones did. What Nirvana did. But here the drive is inward rather than outward and frankly awkward.
There aren't conventional verses and choruses. There is rather a lot of self pity I'd say and not enough melody for my liking. Confusion it seems is the modern affliction and you have to at least credit Modern Mouse for being ahead of the curve in that respect.
The Bronx understand the essence of being in a Rock & Roll band . That it's a license and a liberty but also a responsibility and a duty to those who are chained to the Nine to Five. What bands like these provide is the opportinity. The idea. That you could be in a hardcore band called the Bronx one part of the evening. Then change into ponchos and loud tops and start fure eating and jugglingand do the full Mariachi thing later in the evening .
Mariachi El Bronx (IV) does exactly what you want it to do. The same thing. The thing that (i) (ii) and (iii) did. The corona and tequila are flowing. The burritos are as hot as the senoritas. The sun us always shining unless its setting, High Chaparal ! Vamos ! And other cultural cliches
Magic Box an Album by Play Time is pulsing from my TV set this morning. The first Saturday in July. It's a record by a percussive and synth trio based in the Hudson Valley in New York. New York seems to be a theme on It Starts With a Birthstone . 'Keep spreading the news.'
This reminded me of a Folk focused Can. Suicide having chosen Life. It's an elliptical, sinewy album. It speaks in tongues and set me off for the weekend across magical mountain paths.
Beck is a truly extraordinary artist. Of course his thing was feigned. But that was its glory. The best musical artist's work competes with novels, film auteurs and poetry.
A life on the open waves. Joe Glass Snakewards. Another tasty morsel proferred across the captain's table from Starbuck to Ahab as they gaze out the porthole at the watery swell. The rise and fall. The distant horizon The middle of January. It's surely all plain sailing from here until the flowers begin to sprout and bloomfor Spring.
Joe Glass meanwhile insists it seems that Punk's not dead and Snakewards. is chick a block with tasty new wave snacks. Don't start that talking I could talk all night!Thanks Darren. Every one's a winner!
It's almost seven in the evening and I'm finally at my desk after a long Friday of work. But this is wheree I feel most alive. A good album on my TV and my fingers tapping away to try to do some kind of justice to what I'm listening to.
London band Mary in the Junkyard are in the basement. Stirring up the cauldron. Mixing up the medicine. Role Model Hermit their debut album has just such a candidate, a spectral Michael Stipe type on the cover. The music is elusive and sinuous, reminiscent of the likes of Big Thief, Life Without Building, Hugo Largo and likeminded wastrels.
Role Model Hermit has legs I'll wager. In order to produce magic you need to cast a spell. Dreaming and poetry never go out of fashion. This is a wonderful act of arrival. Watch it fly !
'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.
The second Song of the Day album in as many days from New York musicians. Start spreading the news, again lads. Sophomore album Your Day Will Come sounds neat in my living room on a Thursday evening.Endorsed by big hitters like Lorde, Rosalia and Billie Eilish. The record is elusive and seductive.
I bought this album more than 35 years ago. I'm not sure I've ever listened to the whole thing until now beyond the mythical invocation to the barricades that kicks into Ramblin' Rose and Kick out the Jams which comes next. It strikes me as a record that's probably more owned than listened to.
I'm listening to the whole thing now and I already know that really I prefer second album Back In The USA, where the band saw some kind of sense went for some commercial payback chastened by the reaction to the full on revolutionary zeal, not to say lack of tunes of Kick Out The Jams.
This may have been an incredible spectacle. Gestural Rock & Roll .It wasn't much of a gig. It isn't really much of a record. More of a document of incredible and unrepeatable times. It picks up towards the end and strikes out for Sun Ra like inspired freak out. Then it's over and back on the shelf. For a while I imagine.
We've been quiet for a couple of days on here but let's pick things up a bit. We're coming up to the weekend . With that in mind, let's go fly some kites.
Melbourne's Paper Kites rock a familiar cosy, fireside folk sounds on latest record; 'If You Go There I Hope You Find It. It's something you know completely already. But will want to hear again.
England are labouring in Atlanta against. I have the TV on, but the volume down. I'm afraid I've seen this too many times and I have Francis of Delirium's Run Run Pure Beauty. on at my desk. Luxembourg's finest woe is me merchant. Some things never go out of fashion
Bands had good names when I was growing up. They still do but you can't help concluding that the well must run dry one day. Still 1979- 83 wasa goldmine. Scars, Josef K, Cravats, Heaven 17. People read stuff. Watched films. Weren't content. OK. Nothing's changed !
Scars is a magnificent jerky album with a fantastic sleeve and general package . The band are itemised and like Sister Sledge and Iggy Pop. And dislike running out of fags and Status Quo. They are ruined youth. And all the more seminal for it.
American is one of the magical dreams. It's all been given a rather shameful pallor by the imperialist ugliness of the conduct of the current administration but there's plenty of refuge in music to the nobility of its traditions, Take Zach Bryan's latest With Heaven On Top.
I gave church a miss this morning and luxuriated in this instead. It's full of the romance of the American Highway. Finding Jesus when the morning comes. The great American landscape. The dream that is never truly lost because we all still have a license to dream.
I have the first Sugarcubes album because it was pretty much obligatory to buy it when it came out in 1987. I had mixed feelings about it. I have a best of Bjork CD and was ridiculed by a veery good friend for buying it. I am now listening to Medulla on my TV. It came out in 22004. Just in case you are rather sad and taking notes.
You can't help but conclude that Bjork is a tad precious to say the least . She's Elfin, all the time, but this is not always an endearing thing to be. I'm quite sure if I behaved like Bjork all the time people would laugh their arses off and I might well be shunned from 'normal ' society.
'Start spreading the news....' Where shall we start with CS Cleaners. Art Punk New York ingenues and their debut album What's This? . So What's This? Is This It? I wonder . It may as well be . I've been driven back 25 years already today as my sister has been posting wonderful pictures of her Wedding Day on her 25th Wedding Anniversary and dragging me back to that day. Sometimes you need to be dragged back in order to be dragged into a new space . Life is funny like that.
What's This? may not be Is This It? . But it exists in a not disimilar, unapolagetic space. It's uncomfortable in its own skin and that's contagious. It has quite the worst / best album cover you'll see this year. A mangey, mishappen but deeply loveable panther that's highly artistically improbable but deeply desirable at one and the same time. The record makes you feel like you're back in CBGB's or the Knitting Factory having one of the best nights of your life. Apple Art ! Cor !!!!
Where you stand on this probably depends on where you stand on the whole Post Millennial Retro wave. You don't have much choice franky. We've all been obliged to ride it. Back to the Future Baby! This pretty much takes Madonna back to where she began for better or worse. As you'd expect she pulls it off with considerable panache.
Perth band Pond's eleventh album Terrestrials is superior Psychedelic product without ever really making a break from the pack or a case for delving further into their back catalogue. There are traces of the likes of Split Enz and the Perth Big Daddies. It sounds like an Australian record that's aware of its place in the scheme of things. I spent an enjoyable 40 minutes in its company.
So we start the week on It Starts With a Birthstone and power onward towards July with Olivia Rodrigo's latest album you seem pretty sad for a girl in love. I like it. It's full of simply constructed Pop Songs that make you feel pretty good and downright wholesome. People are stalked on the Internet but all seems fine by the time the chorus hits. There are lots of thoughts and builds towards euphoric and throwaway moments. It's Pop Music.
There is a song called The Cure which sounds like The Cure and is about err, The Cure. Everything is devoid of pretence. I could visualise my 91 year old father waking up in the morning, Going over to his radio. Switching this on, returning to bed and feeling perfectly content with this. I imagine there are millions of people who are absolutely living in this record and it strikes me as not the worst place in the world to live in for a few weeks.
I couldn't this album so listened to another of Paley's instead. It's charm epitomised. Home and community and simplicity itself. It takes you make to a magical place and rocks you gently to sleep.
I write blogs for moments like this. A hot day at the end of June. A hot flat. The wimdows thrown wide. Ready for Monday. A David Sylvian album to listen to. Nothing to do but envelop myself in art. I was incredibly sick in the summer of 1987. This record was out I should have bought it rather than watched so many indistinguishable football matches and soap operas.
Sylvian has an artistry that the rest of us can only dream of and admire. You get the sense that he has more in common with Jean Cocteau than he does with the Cocteau Twins. He made a choice that many of us would not have taken given his looks and talent. To walk the less travelled road.
Calexico take me to a place I'lll never bever. A porch swing in intense, airless heat. Arizona . A tinge of mariarchi.Occasionally their is the savage melodrama of Portishead or Towns Van Zandt where you realise that everything is at stake.
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.
The list of Great Rock & Roll band names yet untaken shortens once again. We've had The Shirts. We've had The Shoes and The Sneakers. Now we have The Sleeves . Jack Cooper is behind this and they have a debut album out which is glacial and cool. Made up of sparse minimal Post Rock tunes.
Great start to my Sunday morning. Low, Slint, Wire and Codeine spring to mined. Going back to the third Velvet Underground album. The well of this remarkable Spring.
'The wind blows over hillsides. The day greets the dawn.'
Let is dance down the road. A sensitive album. In a sensitive tradition. Beverley Glenn-Copeland' Laughter In Summer. An eighty two year old Candian singer songwriter who wrote for Sesame Street.
Not just that, He's had a long and distinguished musical career in Jazz and Folk and undergone gender tradition An artist who has been diagosed with demntia on the LGBT com with a female partner, if any of this stuff matters.
This is a fragrant beautiful record that celebrates the essential renewal of life and the peaceful valies which we should all share. That's the end of today's sermon. Just listen to the record. Peace will descend.
Perth band Pond's eleventh album Terrestrials is superior Psychedelic product without ever really making a break from the pack or a case for delving further into their back catalogue. There are traces of the likes of Split Enz and the Perth Big Daddies. It sounds like an Australian record that's aware of its place in the scheme of things. I spent an enjoyable 40 minutes in its company.
The overwhelming feeling with listening to Figure 8 this morning is did that really come out in 2000. Twenty six years ago. What had happened to my life? Covid, compressed life as have the events of the last ten years in people's lives an in the world.
Elliott Smith is a beautiful talent of a certain sort; Barrett, Drake, Curtis, Cobain, Buckley, Cornell, Linkous. I hear records all the time where I think someone has bended a knee to Elliot. He himself bent his head for Big Star and Beatles most obviously. This is a music which ultimately transcends depression and becomes craft .
'Smite, smote, smitten.' Hey I'm an English teacher. I know how this stuff goes. They're from Newcastle or thereabouts Smote. Newcastle is where I live and I wouldn't live anywhere else . Living here suits my soul and Smote suits my mood.
Latest album Songs From The Free House sounds rather 1972. Or like a deep dive with Gandalf into the Mines of Mordor. Orc and Hobbit alike plotting pathways in search of The True Ring to rule them all.Amite get medieval on all our asses. Donald Trump might be talking up his Board of Peace but I'm putting my money on Smote today. Beatiful molten, golden rec
Beth Orton's latest album The Ground Above, her ninth in all an first for four years is an immediately brave, wayward and headstrong record. These are times that need such artistic courage and it's a great record to listen to at the end of a long hot week of record temperatures across Europe when we seem to be well and truly entering the arena of the uncanny.
The Ground Above, doesn't much sound like the artist who put out Trailer Park thirty years back. She comes across as something of an old dame. A survivor of storms. Struggling at point in the fog she envelopes herself within. The record serves up reminders of Talk Talk and John Martyn and more mythic territory of Shakespearian tragedy and Arthurian dreamland. It's a record which genuinel y takes your breath away..
Den Der Hale are playing at The Cimberland Arms this evening.I probably won't go. I have an early start tomorrow and a few classes.to make my way through. But I would like to be there.Den Der Hale are a Swedish Post Psych quintet. What Post Psuch might be is anyone's guess. It's more Psychotic than The Sonics? Even darker.than Sunn O))).
I like their current album Larking About though the title is somewhat misleading. It's hardly a skip through sunlit meadows unless perhaps the meadow is heavily mined. It's an incredibly.monastic recird. Imbued with light and thoughtful repose. I probably won't venture out tonight bit I sense I'll be missing something..
Montreal janglers serve up a real treat with second album Softest Attack. Every song, but every song sets off like it's a Teenage Fanclub classic or near classic. The glass is always half full unless it's actually brimming over. The album is twelve songs long and just North of forty minutes. Perfect concision. Indie collision. Hooks ahoy.
The Strange Idols Pattern and Other Short Stories was probably the person I wanted to be and the album I should have owned but didn't when it came out in 1984. I was 18. I wanted to be literate, funny, suave and attractive. But I was holding something back and I'm glad I did. It's a medieval. intricate record which still sounds quite fabulous. Jewelled and understated. Forever young.
The song remains the same. Kurt Vile remains on his porch in Philadelphia churning out product. If ut was that easy folks, you'd be doing it His latest album is Philapelphia's been good to me. It sounds to me as if the man pays his dues.
Drive By Truckers are an Uncut Magazine which will never particulalrly be mine. The Mystique of the American South is one I share but less for tangled and wrangled Rock & Roll. I revere Carson McCullers not twisted and ungraceful guitar solos .
Where do you stand on the GOAT thing. Who is the GOAT. Joni, Bob or Len. The Beatles. The Stones or Wreckless Eric. Ronaldo. Messi, Cruyff. Pele or Di Stefano. Carlton Palmer? You may have surmised that I'm not talking about the kind of GOAT that produces cheese. But THE GREATEST OF ALL TIME !!? This kind of GOAT seems to be a peculiar preoccupation of this quite preposterous age.
The idea that people would seriously enter a discussion about whether Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen is better seems a slightly ridiculous activity in itself . What's wrong with any of them. They're all wonders aren't they? What's wrong with Wreckless Eric for that matter. I've enjoyed my ride down 50 Favourite Joni Song over the last month and a half..I've liked almost all of them and feel I have a better understanding of her and the times she emerged in. She's an extraordinary multifaceted artist. The times were extraordinary too.
But is Coyote her best? Ultimately, what does it matter. These kind of lists are only really an excersise in discussing art. To actually ruffle your brow about the specifics seems a trifle odd except as an opportunity to put forward options of your own which you feel might have been neglected. Oh well another day. I need to find myself another thing to slide down the morra I imagine.
Porland Oregon's Blackwater Holylight's Not Here Not Gone is a dark album straining upwards to the light, Like a distant young generational relative of Soundgarden's Superunknown or Amin Duul II's Yeti with dark angels harmonising at the mic to the rafters.
This is a dark mass but one that's drenched in melody . It draws on a heavy legacy Sabbath, Zep and Purple to to pleasingly light effect. Blackwater Holylight are coming to Newcastle in May and I'm tempted to book a pew in the congregation.Not Here Not Gone grows on me like moss on a rock.
Future Pilot A.K.A is the pseudonym of Sushil K. Dade. He's an 'Indie Ledge'. He's played with Soup Dragons, BMX Bandits and Telstar Ponies. Now he's done what artists naturally do therefter. Go the tasteful Soundtrack Pick & Mix way.
Missed Dunks at Summer League debut album Fared Well. The band hail from Greensboro North Caroline. They find a subdued groove somewhere between Built To Spill and Murray Street Sonic Youth. Then ride it round the block onto the highway and into the sunset.
This is a record that builds a fabulous atmosphere of its own drawing evidently on that Nineties sound but building its own nest. And it's a snug rug indeed. Highly more-ish !!!
I'm a great fan of Holland if you're after Autumnal Beach Boys. This is rather meh. A day when it rains far too much in October. by comparisong with their Grade A records.
Drop whatever you're doing. Run to a listening posr. Access an Internet connection. Put on ace. Winged Wheel, Desert So Green drift unto space. Let go.
Winged Wheel are seasoned Indie operators with great taste and forward moment. Krautrock and ambience. Exploration and innovation.
