I was never much one for Nineties dancefloor culture. The drugs don't work for me and I never fancied the idea of dancing in strobe lights with a bunch of strangers didn't really strike me as my idea of a great night out, But Underworld always dragged me in and I found them utterly compelling. There was a literary undertow to their albums and they seemed like natural pre-millennial heirs in some ways to Suicide,
I like a record that takes you somewhere . This one carries me to New Orleans Union Passenger Terminal. Imagine yourself there in the 1950's. Blanche Dubois getting off a train to meet Stella. Akk if that life, And in the background The Black Saint And The Sinner Lady chugs like pistons pumping. An album of inexpressible desire and wonder. A bruised peach.
It's Thursday. So naturally it's Wednesday Knudsen. His album Atrium. A wad of atmospheric ambient space. Like the orchestra warming up for Benjamin Britten's Young Person's Guide to The Orchestra. Like the new day dawning and us retreating to the shower or our morning bath to prepare ourselves for the coming day.
This is a beautiful record and I've returned to it all morning as I plan my classes and do my paperwork. Dot the 't's' and cross the 'i's' . Slip into gear like an athlete warming up and stretching their muscles taut before a cross country run or the Olympic 800 Meter Semi Final starting gum fires.
There's great beauty in music like this. Space. The important frontier. It takes its time and allows you to interpret it as you wish. But most of all it encourages positivity. The record is housed in a sleeve bedecked on an image of variegated light. The new day has dawned. Listen to this and start out right.
'We are rough around the edges.Almost finished prototypes.'
Miles Davis famously didn't like the term Jazz as a descsiption for the area of activity which he was involved and engaged in all of his adult life.He preferred Social Music. Labels are notoriously slippery. In music and and generally just as lists of preferences ot sexual or mental mindset descriptions can be.
Ryan Adams is no longer the bright young thing, It's a long time since Gold when he appeared to be Gram, Bryan Adams and Elton reborn. He's been cancelled for seriously questionable behaviour. His music, though constantly issuing reminders of other, earlier artists, is bewilderingly labyrinthine.
The pubs and the bars will be open soon. But I'm so happy here.'
Great records have a Soul. Of course they do.This one certainly does. If it requires an adjective that adjective is sad. The forecast is for rain. We experience so many emotions in a single day. They're just happy and sad road bums we need to weather.
Bill Ryder Jones is frim Liverpool but he could have been in The Beach Boys. A melancholic Wilson. And god knows they were melancholic enough. .He's touched by genius. That scouse moroseness and humour. The wisdom. Let's have a cup of tea. Should we go out fir a pint.
Michelle Zanner of Japanese Breakfast is the consumate modern artist. Bestselling author and social commentator. Friend of the stars. Brought up in Eugene, Oregon and setting off with modest objectives and aspirations she's beem moving in from the margins for years. For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) is her latest record.
No surprise. It's worth listening to. Zanner is a creative artist first and foremost. Someone who focuses in the artwork. The market is not the prime consideration. Even though for anybody looking to communicate with as broad an audience as possible, it's always a factor, That's not a sell out. It's consideration.
She lives in Brooklyn now and has written a memoir about food, Koren American identity and her late mother. Her music is nuanced and expressive. For Melancholy Brunettes is less celebratory than 2021's Jubilee. She's East Coast. But it's another fine record to get to know and treasure, She's aware of mortality and in a hurry.
Geese from New York City, There work has been recommended to me twice in recent days by sources I trust and now I'm enjoying their latest album Getting Killed as I make my way to my eight o'clock in Dussledorf with Compliance Professionals.
Geese take unconventional paths to known destinations. This us a rather nice start to the day.. They sing of mental imbalance and instability but that's what we expect of Rock & Roll. Sauce for the Geese
Primordial Chaos. Too much cheap cider. I loves me a record that's willing to take a punt. The New Eves are barking but certainly willing to take a punt. Out of Brighton naturally. They fuse the various strands of their record collection; Velvets drone; Hippy Anarcho Punk Folk, Barmy, dance round the fire Wicker Man pagan energy into a fine head of steam and fire and brimstone.on debut album The New Eve is Rising .
There is indeed a New Eve on the rise. This energy will never date or dissipate, People will always fight for their right to be silly or free. To dance round a maypole or a blazing inferno. To gather together and let their hair down and dance a jig. On the sleeve of this record the band gather together in white sacrificial dresses around the battle banner emblazoned with their battle cry, A great time is had by all..
This record has a particular personal emotional resonance for me. Forty years ago was my first year at university, That year is and always will be a hallowed glade within my memory banks. Yeah my soul. I do believe in the soul. This one takes me back to the impossible and unsurpassable experience of youth. Spending time with friends you've become fast with immediately. And just happen to be rooming in the same corridor together .In four adjoining rooms. Listening to music. Talking about life in the quiet glow of the night. It only happens once.
Rod had this record. And Rod, Ben, James and I used to listen to it in his room the first and second terms of our first year at Fifer's Lane Student Residence in Norwich. We were probably back from the Fifer's Lane Bar full at the end of the evening of pints of snakebite and black.
Hands clasped around steaming mugs of coffee. Minds aglow with the events if the day. As close as human beings are ever likely to get in some ways. before events eased us apart like a spider's web being brushed aside in morning dewlight on a forest walk.
I'm listening to What Goes On now that glorious rollercoaster mesh of guitars, organ , bass and drums at the heart of the record speeding inti the everlasting night and the moment is aglow again. Lou Reed and his gang beckoning us into the night to whatever lay ahead. We had no idea. That's the inescapable mystery of life. We're fools if we imagine we know what it's all about and where the road is going to take us.. 'It's the beginning of a new age...' .
Bullying is Back ! Haven'r you heard. Big time !. I've just listened to Salman Rushdie talking about going into Act Five of the Play and his thoughts on Nigel Farage and recent accusations of schoolyard antisemitism racism and general grubbiness.. I have parents who are thirty years down the line from me. I can't imagine what this is like for them.
Rushdie says we never forget our youthful moments of being bullied. That they stay within us waiting for the right moment for them to unfold like pockets of immediately identifiable and familiar pain. That the urgency of life and examining the significance and implications of these increases with time. I'm with Salman.
That political and personal outrage and violence what seemed exceptional back in the Eighties has become more frequent, if not normalised. .
Which brings us to Tears For Fears. My record player sends me spinning back in space and time once more . To my first ever gig. At The Hammersmith Palais. Late '83. In Support of Thompson Twins.
I watch my 17 year old self a few rows from the lip of the stage with his steel rimmed Lennon glasses and aloof, mournful air. While my 60 year old self lets the cartridge descend on The Hurting, the opening track on, erm The Hurting surely one of the best singles never released.
Lionel Bart meets New Romanticism on a green in Bath. Curt and Roland Excellent teeth and stellar haircuts. Arthur Janov paperbacks perched in their long coat pockets. Primal Scream ? Eat yer heart out ! .Pavlov's dog fetch the bone rover. Let Tears For Fears take over !
There's a lot of misery and gloom on The Hurting. But it's immaculately packaged. Like Milk Tray ! chocolate supposititorries for the teen scene born just too late ... for Joy Division. Bit never fear. Pale Shelter is nearly here!
I still like this record. It's cool and bristles with inchoate rage and commendable ambition. Suspicion and pretension and chunky jumpers. Lots of hits ! You can change !
I'm at the Sven Wunder Wunder Bar at day break. Listening to Daybreak. Wunder is actually Swedish musician Joel Daniel This is his fifth album. This record feeds in to the idea of daily renwal, the idea that we start again every morning as the sun rises. Get to our boulder and put our shoulders to the rock and begin our push upward; toward the light. It's easy listening Wunder ! Marvelous.
My universe increasingly resembles a screensaver of vanishing icecaps. The world receding before my eyes.Yesterday an old school friend wrote letting me know she'd had enough of the Zuckerberg Empire and was deleting her facebook account but we could send letters. I can't say I blame her. We will send letters..
Never mind . I've got Joan Shelley's Real Warmth playing on my TV. Isn't technology wonderful . I'll let you know. Frankly the jury's out. But the album has real warmth. A slightly ghastly cover perhaps. But I'll do my ablutions. It's a Saturday. So I have all the time I want. I'll bathe and shave and make breakfast and share my thoughts wuth you on It Starts With a Birthstone.
Joan Shelley has basic artillery. An accoustic guitar and minimal instrumentation. Simple fare. I can't see Donald Trump warming to it. Does that man or any of his inner circle actially listen to music. Do they listen to anyone. Only the march of the drum. This it strikes me is beyond their ken.
I just had a bath. I ran the water hot. Joan and her band hummed on in the background. I tried not to think about the cogs ticking and the preposterous energy bill being automated. I got out of the bath and boiled my egg. More ludicrous cogs ticking and automation. I sighed at the Spotify ads coming from my TV set. about monetising my passion. I don't want to monetise my passion. I want to listen to Joan.
Back she came as the water rose to a boil and my egg went in. Perhaps I'll have soilders. Bread ones. Not Elon Musk's'Bramy Android Army' .Real Warmth. Joan's got it. It's good. Better than Suede's latest. Trust me !
New Order always make me think of a stately family house. Just off the Sheen Road in Richmond. An a garden with overhanging elms and oaks which seemed somehow bent forward in silent grief. Like morning sleepwalkers gathered around an open grave. I was with a friend who had bought Power, Corruption & Lies and we we'd gone back to his family home to listen to it. Hus parents weren't hime. We might as well have neem listening to Movement.
Eighteen, which is probably about how old we were is too young to grab hold of music like this too earnestly. How can you lay pretense to such solemnity. You might read Musil or Baudelaire or Joyce or Thomas Mann. .That's what you aim to do at that age. Impress. Encourage others to long for you. To bed you and wed you and share the same dreams. New Oder like Joy Division who they essentially still were, minus Curtis.
It's December and we're closing in in the inevitable with MF Tomlinson's Die To Wake Up From a Dream a languid album in the slipstream of Divine Comedy, Ed Harcourt and the like.
The kind of record that employs half the percussion section. of the local junior orchestra. Straining for Pet Sounds but staying in Dorking. It's slightly wirkaday byt charming nevertheless.
'There's a heat in the pavement... my mercury's raising...... don't know if it's love or if it's ovulation..the mist from the fountain is kissibg my neck. The liquid crystal is in my grip. Some days I'm a woman. some days I'm a man....' And on it rolls. I likes me a bit of intensity
It's Friday Morning and I'm listening to Lorde's new album Virgin. I don't feel myself a natural constituent perhaps. But hey I like pop music. I've got Martha & The Vandellas, Supremes and Shangri La and Nancy Sinatra records. Madonna.
I remember the first time I saw Britney Spears. On Winter Language Teaching Tour in Austria in 1998. Sitting on a hotel bed wih Beth Stavely. The Audrey Hepburn of EFL. She lent me her sunglasses when I had a dose of conjuinctivitis when we finally made it to Vienna a week or so later. In between cigarettes.We both smoked a lot of cigarettes. No romance. Just nicotine breaks.
Beth . Beth Stavely. I salute you. Wherever you are. Watching the Hit Me Baby video on MTV, I mean I like R.E.M. But I've got time in my life for that too. You have to. . Otherwise you've forgotten that you were ever young. That you're alive
Virgin is crammed choc a bloc wuth these Pop bursts.Tiny Explosions. That's what Pop Music'sfor after all. Literary and Filmic moments. Lorde does cerebral.You could write a thesis on this if you wanted to . But why bother when you can listen to it with your breakfast instead. Realisations that it's time to break free and hit the highway. Go with that girl. Go with that guy. Go out on your own. Break loose.
This reminded me of similar spirits. Ezra Furman, Sharon Van Etten. This will inspire teenagers. Sound great on radios in old age homes. Put a spring in steps as we go into our own new days. Great record !
Desire On Ice, Tav Falco. The kind of album the likes of Bobby Gillespie would bust a gut to make a gest appearance on and compare their cuban heels or cufflinks between studios takes. It ain't easy being seminal and legendary kids.
They're all here; Bobby, Kid Congos, Jon Spencer, Jim Sclavunos.. Baz Boorer.?!? The ghosts no doubt of Johnny Thunders, Link Wray. Jim Jarmusch doubtless behind the lens..Nails sharpened to a point. Like talons.
Desire On Ice is a record that celebrates the way they and we were. One last shot at midnight in New Orleans . Shades and leather. at the Copacabana befire we return to our rooms and coffons. A steak and fries. A stake thrygh the heart. Great fun is had by one and all.
'We are cocooned and protected by the silence. Find ourselves marooned. Not in islands but in houses.'.
Saturday's the day for fun apparently and I 'm up early to harvest it. I'm in my desk with my mug of tea. Looking out of my high Georgian double glazed windows in Clayton Street West at the equally majestic Georgian windows of the Clarendon building across the road from me. It's a grey day in Newcastle but no immediate sign of rain. .I might go to Jesmond Dene.
My bath has run. I'll boil an egg and listen to Emma Pollock's Begging The Night To Take Hold and decide what to do with my day .It's a literate, thoughtful record. Nuanced. Pretty much my favourite word. Nuanced. Like people. Like the lines on a face of a loved one..
What this compares to most readily to me are cultural comparisons rather than musical ones. A Picador novel or a Radio 4 discussion about pottery or furnishing or films. Aimed squarely at the Indie set. At those who care. The musical reference point seems to be Elvis Costello.. People who read books and watch films...
It's not an album that I.imagine will break loose and make a commercial splash though I'd say that it probably deserves to do so. It deserves Mercury Prizes, Nobel Prizes probably. It's a wonderful listen that concerns itself most immediately with affairs of the heart. The Progress of Love.
It rises and falls. Ebbs and flows. It's rather majestic actually. There are whole lives in every song. Poetry and heartbreak and back for afternoon tea and cake. Give it a listen. .
'Walking down the street. Kicking cans....' This is a record that immediately makes you feel cooler than you will ever actually be. I put this on and went upstairs to get dressed. Put on my Miles Davis t shirt and a pair of day old socks, came down and dragged the needle back to the start of Walking In The Rain. Then I came over to my keyboard and started typing like bilio. As if I were Raymond Chandler at his desk on a classic Remington. Second chapter of The Little Sister.. Marlowe in peril.
'Got to blow your horn.' More double entendre than Classic Carry On. Nut actually so upfront and blatant that perhaps they're not actually entendres but rather invitations to go back upstairs and get down on it. This is just completely state of the art. Sly and Robbie. Top pperators wherever you look. Recorded at Compass Point, on Nassau, Bahamas.and you can feel the needle rising from the record. Bespoke tailoring from choice cuts. The taste and delivery are just impeccable
I rather enjoyed this. Iyr of Vancouver. Sheer. Dylan, Reed J, Mascis and Jim Carroll delivery. Krautrock and Hard Rock in addition to New York '67 and '7, Seattle '92 and plenty of Pavement. You can practically smell the trailed, discarded cigarette. Insouciance ! Well aware of their cool and youth their close proximity to truth. Rock & Roll classicists. Shameless narcissists.
We approach December I have the year Review Issue of Uncut Magazine n front of me, Their album of the month is an Argentinian record by Juana Molina called DOGA. It is indeed 'maravilloso.' Vamos !
This is an album for which apparently Molina had accumulated over 60 hours of recorded ideas. She's pared them down to just under an hour here and the results are staggering. Fragments of sui generis studio trickery that made me think of Beck and Bjork most obviously as reference points.. Put whatever you're doing right now down and listen to this.
Molina has a long and distinguished track record as a creative, artistic mover and shaker. She works in folktronica and ambient indie stuff if you want any number of labels that fail to do DOGA justice. This is dancing on the ceiling inspiration. Joyous. 'Es hora de mi bano.' .
Back from a holiday weekend in Dublin with an important, irreplaceable friend of my lifetime. The Westmoreland album I Got The Feeling In Bakersfield is spinning. It answers my needs. Another fishie on a little dishie from a blogs best friend Darren Jones.
The album deals with the passing of his father and Westmoreland alter ego Zach Alva. Also reflections on grief, loss and being a Latino artist creating in what aree predominantly whute musicaal spaces.This is a folk rock record esswsntially if you need a label. Hey we need somehwere to hang your ideas on..
Nothing changes. This is a record which could easily have come out un the early Sixties. The early Eightues or the eatly Noughties. Or I ssspect the 1460s. Nothing changes, everything changes. Dogwood is in the front yard. You are waking from a good dream and the pool tables are free.
One of the great Rock & Roll band names and one of the great Rock & Roll records, Five band members, five songwriters. A finger on a washboard to signal intent. Every song sounding quite different from the last. A narrative which flows like a novel or a film, Or erm. Alright a river. After different rainbow's ends. Full of open ended questions, .This is quite thrilling in terms of its open endined duelling and questing. This is a precedent for Marquee Moon.
It's Friday evening, I have jacket potatoes warming up in the oven. I couldn't thnk of anything much better to do than listen to The Delgados and drift somewhere else. Across space and time. That after all is what it's there for. The Delgados understand nuance which is not just one of my favourite words but one of my favourite things,.
Hate is a strangely named record because it doesn't feel like the currency they trade in. But at a certain point they declare that Hate is all you need. That's what Rock & Roll is there for, Any number of people got outraged when Dylan was awarded but really it's outrageous that no Rock & Roll figures had been awarded it before. Rock & Roll has pushed on human discourse.
Hate is a great noel that now doesn't need to be written or read. The record rises and swells magically like a wonderful evening with friends or family. .The Delgados ynderstand beauty and poetry,
Songs For Nothing by Olan Monk . Just what you need on a grim Friday afternoon in November. With the rain and winds buffeting my windows as I look out at the grimness of the day. Never fear.. As they say I'm going in.
Well if it's the end of the world you might as well have an appropriate soundtrack. And this is pretty much that. It's pretty much a dirge. If Shoegaze and miserablility are what the physician ordered then this is your apple a day.
Adrian Crowley. An Irish singer songwriter in the vein of Leonard Cohen. Scott Walker. Jacques Brel. Old school. Chamber songs with lots of space and poetry. Observations of a gentle, loving and thoughtful kind. I'll listen to it as I prepare for my half eight in Dussledorf.
Crowley is a craftsman. Measure Of Joy is his tenth album. Since 1999. He has a body of work. He's not as well known as he ought to be. But those who are aware of him treasure him. I certainly do. He's one for those who appreciate the finer things in life. A glass of red wine occasionally.
The songs of Measure Of Joy are not sad exactly so much as reflective. There's genuine space. Space is used so well. Words and melody too. This is some record. I urge you to hear it !
Starbuck, AKA Darren Jones is back on the deck of the Peqod, AKA It Starts With a Birthstone. Scouring the waves as the porpoises skip and schools of fish dance beneath the ocean waves. Meanwhile Starbuck has brought more tasty scran to the captain's table.
In the form of Micgrographia by Bug Teeth, Serpentine and sleek Indie Pop Fare from a Leeds combo with a penchant for dressing up in fancy costumes and dancing under the stars. This is a remarkable record that lit my fire. A tasty treat for those mourning the sad loss of Tapir! perhaps, Cheers Darren ! Much appreciated.
'The time to rise has been engaged'. Yeah I know it's an old R.E.M. lyric but they're much on my mind lately. Hey I'm coming towards 60 at the end of the month. The days are getting shorter And it's time - to listen to the latest Hand Habits album, Blue Reminder.
It's a spectral record, just the kind of thing I'm looking for right now. Meg Duffy is the artist behind Hand Habits and she walks a crooked path jist as the most inspired artists do. Doesn't join the dots in the way that, err R.E.M.among others didn't do.
Many ideas explore the ideas of Blue-mess. Joni Mitchell. Tim Buckley. Len. Here's another. Blue. Is an interesting idea. It's not necessarily exclusive to sadness so much as nuanc. And escape.
I shook Peter Buck's hand on Friday and it's making me think about what I want from music right now and this record certainly delivers on all kinds of levels. I like records that make you unsure about how they make you feel but make you want to listen to them again anyway. Spooky Gospel was the way Bick referred to what R.E.M. tried to do. Only the bravest artists walk roads like these.
I'm listening to the first two songs of Waiting For the Sun Hello I Love You and Love Street again and again. I like The Doors. They seem to encourage engagement with life. Jim gets a bad press from superior would be music critics, (yes I guess I'm one myself). Bit he encourages the listening to question the given which surely is the purpose of life.
Waiting For The Sun admittedly is a bit of a car crash in some ways. The sequencing is all over the shop. It doesn't flow. The two sides of the record are bookended by two of the band's least likeable moments. Unknown Soldier and Five to One. The grand centerpiece Celebration of The Lizard didn't cohere. Other records are better. But hey it had drama, colour and engagement.
Only Dust Remains the new Blackxwash record is a caude for great celebration. A deeply intense and angst full album like a great episode of The Wire. Intensuty and claustrophobia mounting with every stanza to a point of dreadgul clarity and tension.
I listened to the record as the sun set yesterday evening. It fely like the natural culminatuin to a day well spent. Scripted, tight and wuth a narrative both complex but ummediately grupping. Appocalypric in terms of pitch and intensity. This is a reminder of classuc texts; Cypress Hell and Wu Tang Clan, Graveniggaz and Eminem. Thus us wrutten un stine. Winderful stuff.
The key to your relationship with The Darkness probably depended on how you felt about the musical genre they aped and whether you found them funny, I find them funny and they're clearly gifted but I've never really chosen to listen to stuff like this.
I have woken up. It's a bright day outside, I should have four online classes today but one of them has already been cancelled fear not dear reader. I get paid. I'm glad I'm not going into work and I can sit and listen to Elvis Costello & The Attractions Armed Forces all day while I wait to teach the other three.
This was a record that made a bit of a splash when it was released and also um ruffled a few feathers. It's full of anger and vitriol and no little bile. The N word in Oliver 's Army a song about mercenaries and the British and owing something to ABBA. I wonder whether Costello regrets it. It's a fine song. No wonder it didn't reach number one. That's for novelty sings. Rarely for social comment.'We could be in Palestine' !!!
Elsewhere EC cock a snook at pretty much all and sundry. Down all the spirits behind the bar smoke all their tabs and generally behave as they bloody well want to and a good time is had by one and all. It's now 2025 and I suspect Facebook is dead. RiP. Social media is for interaction. Not surveillance and control.
Elvis had a few things to say about that. 'You shine all the buttons on your green shirt.' Apparently about Angela Rippon and thought control . The President of the United States is now threatening to sue the BBC for a billion dollars. 'Don't start your talking. I could talk all night !'. I think I'll turn the record over again. I've got an hour before my first class. Time for the Metro crossword.
'Aren't you glad you didn't kill yourself.'
A name that looked appealling in the new realeases schedules and is now easing me into my Saturday morning routones. Gram Parsons meet Wednesday. Case Oates Last Missouri Exit. Does what it says on the tin. Moonshine magic.
It's a sweet set of songs. It makes me want to listen toThe Replacements, Guadalcanal Diary, Rank & File and have a brewski, I'll resist the temptation of the brewski. Sail into the new day.' Diane, Diane.... It's a lovely record.
There are times when music is required. To provide the space and the solace. The calm and the peace, Kara Lis Coverdale'Changes In Air is one such record. A picture of a woman sat at the window. The sound of devotion and material curiosity.
Bon Iver's latest album the curiously titles album SABLE fABLE seems a return to familiar territory. Deep voiced emotive yelps across a snowy prairie for couples who met and bonded over For Emma all those years ago to stare into each other's eyes as the little ones drift into slumber
There's an interview in last month's Uncut where this, Justin Vernon's fifth album under the Bon Iver moniker is described as upbeat. Frankly it doesn't particularly sound so to me. It sounds like same old, same old, but in an impressive way.It's a powerful record.
Mournful, melancholy, miserable and other synonyms beginning with m. It's never a bad idea to stuck to what you're good at frankly. Vernon's very good at this. Cheer up mate ! It might never happen !
Paul McCartney. You know. That bloke in the Beatles. Yellow Submarine. All that stuff. After the Beatles went their separate ways he didn't hang around. Imagine the pain. But he didn't well on that. He knew this is what he did.
Paul McCartney is sparse. And pure. And recognisably Macca. It howls at the moon and looks into the darkness and whispers sweet nothings, It's rather pure.
Whole notions of Albums of the Year arerendered immediately preposterous as soon as you put on Salif Keita's So Kono. How long is The River Nile ? How long is a piece of string . Where does So Kono stand in Keita's overall body of work, Is it as good or even better than 2002's Moffou which is listed as the sixth thousandth and ninth best album on the Best Ever Albums site. So not as good as Forever Changes then .
It still sounds pretty good to me. The rain is falling in Newcastle but this carries me to Mali which my rational mind tells me does exist and where people are enjoying the pleasures and pain and joy and sorrow that I experience on a daily basis. And I know that.those emotions are just as important as mine. You may not understand everything you hear on So Kono. But you can sense its wonder.
Panda Bear. Not just a heavily threatened species that now seems to be making a heartening recovery. Also a musical project for a member of Animal Collective who has a new album, (and a heavily marketed one), of his own just out. Sinister Grift, which I found myself listening to for a siazable part of Tuesday.
It's a marvellous record. Let's face it, marvellous is a marvellous word, but it struggles to do justice to Sinister Grift. I must say A nostalgic album, but the 21st Century seems to have been a largely nostalgic exercise for good and bad. I'm not choosing to dwell on the downside this morning. This is a 'no news day I've decided. I've got lessons to teach. But this focuses on nostalgia that's something to celebrate.
Sinister Grift seems to be nostalgic primarily for The Beach Boys and most obviously Pet Sounds. Like much of Grizzly Bear and some of Vampire Weekend. There are also the occasional peeks from behind the door from the lihes of Paul Simon, The Byrds and Mamas & The Papas. Hi guys!
It's all fed through a 21st Century prism.It knows where it's. situated. It's not, like some records, The La's and Ty Segall for instance, an attempt to replicate a sound and sensibility that has gone. All in all a delightful album though this kind of record that can become rather a construction line activity exercise when you hear too many of these records.
Canned happiness. I shouldn't complain really. There are worse things in life than canned happiness. This album is that ! It made me want to be in California, not a sensation I feel too often.
Mani Mountfueld, the bassist of Stone Rises, Primal Scream and others died on Thursday. Only 63. It was a big moment for a lot of people. They would have listened through this album and found themselves awash with waves of memory like I was.
I imagined Mark at my local ploughing songs into the jukebox round the corner from the flat I live in in the centre of Newcastle. People elsewhere listening ti the music Mountfield played and thinking through their own yesterdays,.I've had a whole career in teaching and training since and have now made it to my own sixties. I hope I'll never go into an office again. I can't help but think the Stone Roses would approve. They advocate escape.
. I texted a lot of friends. My sister who had been listening to the first Stone Roses album just as I was. The university friend I was due to go to see the band with at a small arts centre in Norwich just before the band broke huge with The Happy Mondays in that incredible Top of the Pops performance on a show where Happy Mondays featured too and in retrospect ushered in the Nineties.I had a cold and didn't go. It's long been a joke between us. Andy should have gone without me.
It was the album of my last year at university. I bought it and played it a lot. It ushered a whole new thing in. Though I wasn't sure if the outfits and never went for the accompanying lifestyle the record itself is undeniable. Attitude, youth, melody and when it wants to be damned danceable. Not least because of Mountfeld's basslines. Some rhythm section. This was unprecedented. Indie bands didn't swing like this.
'Citrus, sucking sunshine.' R.I.P.
It's a sad and beautiful world.. Ain't that the truth, Never mind. We plough in into the gathering headwind. Mavis Staples new album is clenched and durable and up to the task. She's 86 and frankly has seen it all. She's a Gospel Singer and Civil Rights activist and her voice still holds good and true. It's an record to listen and learn from
This is a Soul album in the richest sense. Mavis is pictured on the album sleeve with at her dining room table with her hands folded and her eyes closed. It's an album of inspiring purity and stillness..
David Gray made a splash with Babylon. Here's the album that came from. It was music that sounded good coming out of the radio. Leonard Cohen lite
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.
Space. The final frontier. Adrian Sherwood's The Collapse of Everything. An apt reflection of the current condition. Still, never fear this will take you to the next whisky bar and beyond. A beautiful record
I always liked The Charlatans. They seemed to have an angle of their own. Their own direction and their own way of shifting their weight to nonplus the opposition. Giving a body swerve to wrong foot the clumsy central defender leaving him on his and backside closing in on goal.
David Byrne's latest album 'Who Is The Sky' is playing where I am. It's sunny where David is. Not where I am . I woke to snow outside and snow on the streets. It felt like Christmas. I've been through a busy and eventful day. Taught my classes.
Now in darkness I'm listening to 'Who Is The Sky' again while my supper warms, I rather like it. It's everyman stuff, the kind of thing Byrne and his Talking Heads compadres have long specialised in. Truisms that set them apart, But essentially glass half thinking and positivity. And tunes and rhythms that invite you to get up and dance and then sit down and think.
'You can surrender to happiness, anger and frustration but that doesn't help anything,' said Byrne in Mojo recently 'You have to persevere, believe that things can be changed.' l'll go with that. The man who wrote ir at least co-wrote Psycho Killer, The Big Country Heaven, Cities and Once In a Lifetime and This Must Be the Place is still in the ring and punching above his weight. 'Same as it ever was,;
Thursday's Bells. The first track from Which Direction Goes The Beam the second album from Index For Working Music. It's wired and weird. Velvety, (I'm talking Velvet Underground) We're off I wonder whether we're moving into a new phase now. Everywhere you look there are dystopic, twisted visions. This is only the latest down the pike. The water is swimming with nightmares.
Only Ones, Magazine, The Cure, Pere Ubu. 13th Floor Elevators, Televisuin, Wire. Bookshelves of worn and greying Penguin Classic Paperback. Opiated dreams. Symbolists, Modernists, Post Modernists, Satirists, Surrealists. Vorticists. Marxists, Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, Anarchists, Nihilists. Pampleteers. Woodwork squeaks and out come the freaks. Index For Working Music are out on tour next week. Catch them. In the meantime hear this . It's a fantabulous album. There are insects twitching under its skin.
An album that resonates like Astral Weeks, Trailer Park or The Dreaming and that always lures draw me in. Dominie Hooper's debut album on Lost Map, In This Body Lives is really rather triumphant,
Hold the front page folks! It's the weekend. The sun, albeit a sickly one, has risen in the Newcastle heavens and I'm giving the latest Benjamin Booker album LOWER a second listen. It's an occasionally bleak but consistent and compelling record.
This is something of a comeback I imagine. Booker made a splash of some kind in Indie circles some time back. But as far as I can tcan tell, this is his first studio album since 2017. That's almost ten years and that's a long time in the world we inhabit now. The world seemed a relatively rational. place in 2017.
LOWER reflects a slightly darker mood than I remember from Booker previously. Also more eclectic, playful and deft in terms of genre. This is not purely Blues. It flirts restlessly with Trip Hop. Garage. Soul, The man says that he's spent his hiatus working on a new identity. Its realised here. This is a record that deserves to be listened to.
Literate,evocative song titles. Black Opps, LWA in the Trailer Park, Pompiei Statues, Slow Dance in a Gay Bar, Speaking With The Dead. .An indistinct but resiliant new identity and sound for the new year and the new American hinterland. This is a terrific record. I hope it's noticed.
It's a bleak winter's afternoon in Newcastle and I'm listening to Quiet Life. Because it takes me back and carries me away. Big band at my secondary school. We were heading out into the world without any real idea about where the tides of life would carry us and where we were heading. Japan sang here about 'refugees' and we had little idea of what the word actually meant but would probably find out between then and now.
Japan meanwhile seemed to know s much. They'd been ridiculed broadly as New York Dolls wannabes initially. Then as third hand Bowie / Roxy clones. But both band's records have aged well and make classy and sophisticated listening fare still. Youth clearly is not always wasted on the young.
I'm immediately amicable to any album that starts with a song called London 1757 as Gwenn's latest Utopia does. Heaven? A place where nothing ever happens.But Utopia is certainly heavenly. A wonderful record. Focusing on the past to say something about the present and the future.
Lyrics sung in Cornish and English. Melodies that sound like Confectionary Pop Folk.. It's all rather creamy. Like a Cornish Scone Tea with steam rising from the kettle. Cherries on the plate and the sun shining through the glass. You'll meet the devil in Brighton apparently. According to Gwenno anyhow. Well it can be a rum place on occasion.
This is loveliness on wax. A fine, fine album to drive us from July to August and beyond. Resist the mundane. Embrace the imaginative alternative. This is a great place to start.
Music can do something for me that nothing else can do. Drag me back from a place. Into a better place. Moonflowers did that for me yesterday evening. Drew me into a forest glade and bathed me in the moment showed me in the wonder.
This is internally born ambient pop apparently. I give up on labels, It's a trek in the forest. A walk on the gentle side. This feels like an album that deserves a song on The Eternal Sunshine soundtrack. That's enough for me,
