Friday, January 31, 2025
Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 - 1,674 The Dandy Warhols - Thirteen Tales From Urban Bohemia
1985 Singles # 21 The Loft
Song(s) of the Day # 3,990 L.S.Dunes
The last day of January. The sun coming up as my bath runs and I make my way towards my half seven esson with incredible busy medical salespeople and professionals. Always one of my most interesting classes of the week.
I find myself listening to L.S.Dunes new album Violet. On the front cover a skeletal figure stares out from a small wooden boat beset by tempestuous waves. It seems like an apt metaphor for these times.
As for the record. It's not entirely to my liking.L.S.Dunes are a modern band. And they genre hop at will. There are guitar solos that we have not heard since Brian May was in his mid seventies pomp. The band flirt with metal and there are sounds whuch would alarm a mother for the wellbeing of her dearly beloved offspring if she heard them coming out of their bedroom late on a weeknight.
The singer meanwhile howls at the moon like a gelded calf. I gave this my undivided attention for 15 minutes. But now it's time for my bath. I'll pass on this one.
Thursday, January 30, 2025
1985 Singles # 22 Prefab Sprout
500 Greatest Albums of the 1980s ... Ranked! # 113 Virginia Astley- From Gardens Where We Feel Secure
If you have hlf an hour minutes, listen to this. It's an independent record from 1983 that garnered quite a bit of attention at the time of its release and has continued to do so ever since. A collection of impressions and sounds from a day in the British countryside, it's an honest, courageous and moving expression of the feelings we all share just through being alive and experiencing the sensations of nature and time around us. An object of still but thrilling beauty.
Song(s) of the Day # 3,989 The Gentle Spring
The Gentle Spring. 'Let's be 'aving you...' As a slightly paralytic Delia Smith berated the Norwich City crowd at half time on Sky Sports some years back. Precisely Delia. Come on Gentle Spring, 'Let's be 'aving you...' So while waiting for that, and I have to say, as I'm writing it's dark outside and rather cold in here. The Gentle Spring's Looking Back at The World is indeed 'gentle,' unpretenious, and quietly winning product.
The Gentle Spring do what they say they will on the The Gentle Spring tin, This is wistful, sensitive nostalgia from Indie stalwarts. Generic but heartfelt strummed songs. Featuring Michael Hiscock who was a cofounder of Field Mice those much loved Sarah Records dreamers. This is lovely, unpretentious, meaningful product about the passage of time and trying to maintain the 18 year old self.
Wednesday, January 29, 2025
Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 - 1,676 Johnny Cash - American III : Solitary Man
1985 Singles # 23 The Replacements
The Replacements were travelling fast and giving little care to their lungs and their livers. Such was their way. They never stood on ceremony. Unapologetic and they made a fine row. Tim came out in 1985. It was frequently raggedbut always engaging. Kiss them on the bus,
500 Greatest Albums of the 1980s ... Ranked! # 112 The Triffids - Born Sandy Devotional
"When we finished Born Sandy Devotional I knew it was the best thing we’d ever done, there was no question about it. The writing was much more autobiographical than anything I’d done before, I felt quite close to the subject matter. I found myself almost following the idea of fidelity as a complete all-consuming faith, to give you some sort of direction or something. And ‘Born Sandy Devotional’? It was the name of a song which didn’t make it onto the record which is about someone called Sandy… I like titles like those, they’re just a law unto themselves and they have a feeling unto themselves. Born Sandy Devotional is the culmination of our efforts trying to capture our more considered lyrical approach with a physical intensity… well not really, but that will have to do." David McComb .
This album is one of the most literary records in my collection and I've got quite a few. Many of them date back to the early to mid-eighties when there seemed to be quite a demand for this kind of thing. A lot of talented people were choosing music at this point as a medium for literary exploration. Morrissey, Robert Forster, Grant McLennan, Michael Stipe, Lloyd Cole, Paddy Macaloon, Nick Cave, Roddy Frame, Mike Scott. And David McComb who stands comparison with the best of them.
He wrote every track on here. Each song could be considered a short story or a synopsis or fragment of a novel. They're also self contained. But they're not exercises in style. They're incredibly deeply felt and realised. Not all of them are in the first person but they are all inhabited. All of life's strongest emotions are heightened on here to almost intensely painful degrees; wonder, pain itself, obsession, madness, grief, hope, love, happiness and loss.
There are times on the record when virtually everything seems to be at stake. This is a difficult trick to pull off. It could easily tip over into cheap melodrama. I was never a huge fan of the records Nick Cave released at around about the same time for example because I thought he made this mistake all the time . I felt he got too close to his songs. McComb and The Triffids knew to keep some distance. The main way I think they managed this is because the accompanying music here is so essentially beautiful and full of the light of the landscape they grew up in that the individual songs and the album as a whole never collapse into maudlin introspection or self pity. They know exactly how to sugar their pill by lacing some intensely tough subject matter with sweetness and grace.
The record cover is an aerial photograph of a beachal coastline in Mandurah, Western Australia where the band hail from. It was taken in 1961. McComb was born the following year. This is not either insignificant or inconsequential as the group and McComb in particular are immersing themselves in their past and their landscape here. His comment above about the autobiographical nature of these songs and his own closeness to their subject matter was really helpful to me in getting a fuller handle on understanding what happens on the record. His statement about the focus on fidelity as an all consuming faith is even more revealing as on closer investigation of the songs and their lyrics it can be identified as the driving obsession of the protagonists on every track on Born Sandy Devotional.
The Triffids had taken a long time to get to this point as a group, releasing countless singles, EPs and a solitary album Treeless Plain released in 1983. And all the time touring relentlessly across the breadth and depth of Australia, learning their craft and developing their vision. In order to make their great leap forward they chose to uproot themselves and move to England in 1984, following in the footsteps of fellow Australian friends and mentors The Saints, The Birthday Party and The Go Betweens. By this point they had become a sturdy, confident set of musicians, the slightly amateurish, ramshackle nature of their early records had broadened into a confident wide screen sound that few of the British bands of the time could live with either on record or live.
For opening song The Seabirds I can't improve on quoting the whole lyric because it shows better than anything else exactly what level The Triffids and McComb would be playing at here:
will ever shield you from
the light that pierces your eyelids,
the screaming of the gulls
feeding off the bodies of the fish
thrashing up the bay till it was red
turning the sky a cold dark colour
as they circled overhead.
He swam out to the edge of the reef
there were cuts across his skin
saltwater on his eyes and arms,
but he could not feel the sting
there was no one left to hold him back
no one to call out his name
dress him feed him drive him home
say "Little boy it doesn't have to end this way"
He announced their trial separation
and spent the night in a Park Beach Motel bed
a total stranger lying next to him
rain hitting the roof hard over his head
she said "What's the matter now lover boy
has the cat run off with your tongue?
Are you drinking to get maudlin
or drinking to get numb?"
He called out to the seabirds "Take me now,
I'm no longer afraid to die"
but they pretended not to hear him
and just watched him with their hard and bright black eyes
they could pick the eye from any dying thing
that lay within their reach
but they would not touch the solitary figure
lying tossed up on the beach.
So, where were you? "
It's about the journey within and how the elemental landscape you find yourself in, (and there can't be a landscape much more elemental and enveloping than the one McComb and The Triffids understood so well) can turn pitiless, rip you apart and devour you. McComb knew his literature. This reminds me of Camus' The Outsider, Paul and Jane Bowles' writing about Northern Africa (particularly The Sheltering Sky) and what I imagine Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano to be like (haven't read it, should do one day).
The 'little boy it doesn't have to end this way' line is resonant because the second track, Estuary Bed, takes us back to where it started or thereabouts. 'The children are walking back from the beach'. It's about the blessed realm of childhood. How the weeks of a summer spent on the beach on the sand and in the sea can stretch out into an eternal, golden, sensory state. 'Wasting away for hours and hours and hours.' McComb is really strong on the physical sensations of being adolescent.The sun, salt and silt but the song as far as I can understand it is about the inevitable transition from that false eternity and the vain striving afterwards in the narrator's consciousness to recover what's gone forever. 'Come on, climb over your father's back fence. For the very last time take a short cut across his lawn.' Breaking the father's law not for the very last time on this album by any means. McComb studied divinity, literature and journalism and he puts it all to good use here . It's not entirely clear what occurs but we are left to draw our own conclusions 'Silt returns across the passage of flesh...I bear the stain. It won't wash off.' The landscape remains, endures and renews itself. What's human is recovered by the elements. 'What use memory covered in estuary silt?'
(I've done my best to interpret things here but much of it is beyond me. Still. This track is something truly special.Trust me. Great use of vibraphone!)
How often do we listen to our favourite records over a lifetime? Born Sandy Devotional must be among my top twenty most played albums. Possibly top ten. I've had it for almost thirty years. But I've never really heard its third song Chicken Killer before I listened to it in order to write this a few days ago. I've been thinking about it ever since
I always thought it was one of The Triffids joke songs. They certainly produced a few. McComb was so prolific that he would dash them off and the band would spit them out and they would race on to the next. This strength was eventually their downfall in my opinion as they finally lost quality control and coughed up some real duds which fatally overtipped their final album. But that's another story.
My younger sister, and I would laugh about this track together. 'Here it comes Chicken Killeragain' just as Jill Birt, The Triffids second vocalist and McComb would rip into the chorus together, 'Here he comes the killer again. Here he comes the chicken killer again.' It was slight. And slightly ridiculous. So I thought. I've now discovered it's not!
The problem lies in the lack of lyric sheet. This album really deserves and would be complemented by one. The words to Chicken Killer are just superb! It's a tale of madness in the Australian outback. Flannery O'Connor or Faulkner would be proud. The protagonist is the bewildered hen slayer of the song's title. He runs through the corn fields where he first courted his dead love, grief stricken, ribs poking through his yellow skin. Blasting the birds on the telephone line, scaring the local children, He's delirious in pain; driven mad by the scalding rural sun and the loss of his love. The locals gather round and try to calm him, indicating the heavens where she is now. But the chicken killer can't hear them. He makes reference to a man on a cross on a hill but knows that he himself is damned. And afterwards, destined to become the stuff of local folklore
Here he comes the chicken killer again"
My ears were filled with that joyful ringing
My ears were filled with that happy singing'
For Tarrilup Bridge McComb hands the stage over more fully to Jill Burt. She's generally given every fifth or sixth song throughout The Triffids career. It would probably be accurate to say she doesn't have an operatic vocal range and would be more fairly placed in the Mo Tucker school of singing than in Edith Piaf's but this can be really effective in short doses. It provides relief here from McComb's much more intense style. Tarrilup Bridge is a suicide note. The body count is really beginning to mount up by now and I'm not just referring to unfortunate chickens.
Left a note on the fridge
And I drove off the end of the Tarrilup Bridge.
Now you read about me in the papers
They say I'm going to be a big star
They're making a movie about my life
And you're going to play the starring part."
No distinguishing feature in any direction"
Without another living soul in sight."
I hit a lonely stretch
Rock my soul in the bosom of Abraham
Guide me back to the bosom of Abraham
So high can't get over it, so low can't get under it,
So wide can't get around it, I took a wrong turn,'
Wide Open Road has been called the Australian Born to Run a few times. I've got some time for Springsteen but this is not on. It does the track, McComb and The Triffids an enormous injustice. This song stands alone. It's one of my very favourites and my favourite in one respect in that it's the song that best describes life to me. Life as an open road is not a particularly difficult idea to understand or identify with or take on as an expression of your existence and it's been used by novelists, painters, poets and musicians and people who are none of those things as an expression of theirs. The Triffids do it best for me.
The sounds of the organ which we hear first always sound to me like dawn breaking. I play it a lot in the morning as a result. Though come to think of it, I play it a lot at midday, in the afternoon, early evening and at night time too. McComb's whispered '2,3,4' set the tapes rolling, the drumbeat starts pulsing and it's not at all fanciful to describe this as life beginning. There. I've done so! It's with the opening lyrics and the responding drum cracks though that the whole thing really kicks off.
"Well the drums rolled off in my forehead
and the guns went off in my chest
Remember carrying the baby for you
Crying in the wilderness"
As a postscript it's worth pointing out that this got to Number 26 in the UK Pop Chart in 1985. As far as I know The Triffids weren't granted a Top of the Pops appearance. Meanwhile, it reached Number 64 in Australia.
After these two incredible moments all The Triffids need to do is maintain the pace. To me this is exactly what the second song on this side, Life of Crime, does. It a high quality track in itself exploring further the territory and themes that McComb has laid out previously. It's describes country love gone to the bad and reminds me most of Terrence Mallick's remarkable film Badlands which shows a couple of killers on the road in the Depression era Southern states..As Mueller suggests it veers into Nick Cave territory which is perhaps why it's not such a firm favourite of mine. It's all getting a bit intense for me under the sun. The air out here is pretty thick. I think I'll go inside.
Because of Born Sandy Devotional's incredibly clear sense of time, place and mood it always seems apparent to me where and when each song is set. In the morning, in the middle of the day, in the evening or at night, by the sea, in the fields, in the outback. Personal Things, the following track, seems to be the only song here that takes place indoors. As with allowing Jill Burt to sing Tarrilup Bridge, this provides needed relief for me.
The theme is still intense. The narrator is rooting endlessly through the personal possessions and trinkets of his lost, loved one. Where she is now remains unclear. Has she left him or is she dead? Has he killed her and found himself a new place of residence? I'm not sure if he's even of this world himself anymore. The place where he is seems to be purgatory wherever it is geographically.
some that you take to your grave. Well I took mine
to a new address, where I took my rest, at the end
of the day.
In terms of major influences on his writing I'd suggest Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen perhaps Johnny Cash. Dylan, for example is all over the naming of the album. He's also here in this track in the sustained accusatory condemnation, I assume directed towards a woman (maybe someone who's spurned him), of somebody who sees themselves as a player, as worldly, but who for McComb isn't really engaged with what he sees as the essence of life. Somebody who is not going forward or in fact going anywhere at all. Someone with no place to go. The greatest crime of all. A life unlived. Again, I'm going to have to quote at length to try to fully show what I'm getting at here:
'You just lie around waiting on a signal from heaven
Never had to heal any deep incisions
Darling you are not moving any mountain
You are not seeing any vision
You are not freeing any people from prison
Just an aphorism for every occasion
As if the only thing that ever matters
is your place at the table
You never read the writing on the label
when you drank from the bottle
It said Keep Away From Children'
First night tickets, ermine, pearls upon a string
And disappeared in all the pestilence
that sudden pleasure brings
He never asks after her anymore
He made a point of losing her address
And every trinket that she ever touched
he keeps locked away
And just burns up In the furnace of his chest'
Much of the group sloped off to nine to fives. Fair enough. I do nine to five myself. Less than ten years later though McComb himself was dead. The circumstances of his decline and death were deeply upsetting and depressing whichever way you choose to scrutinise them. I don't want to go into it here. Like Cobain and Curtis he clearly meant it. The Triffids have recently reformed and continue to tour with guest singers but this is something that's beyond my understanding because The Triffids without McComb upfront makes no earthly sense to me. Good as they were as a collective McComb was their guiding rudder and reason for being. They won't and this won't be forgotten!
Song(s) of the Day # 3,988 Brown Dog
Brown Dog in the ring. La, la, la, la, la. Hardly in this case. Brown Dog are glummer , more introverted and contradicted than that. A record called I Thought I Was Gonna Dance with a road to nowhere on the picture on the sleeve and songs of melancholy and guarded hope on the record.
I can't tell you much more about the record or the band. I have a location. Berkely, California That wlll do. We're all citizens of the world regardless of how we might like to construct walls .I Thought I Was Gonna Dance doesn't choose to do so. Instead it heads oof on the road. Guitar strumming. Gentle backdrop. Invoherent mumbled lyrical sentiments.
Another fine album suggested by Darren Jones and enjoyed by me and forwarded to you on It Starts. There's sadness here. But also pride. Determination. Put that in your pope and smoke it this Wednesday. Thanks Darren.
* Not on YouTube, So no clips.
Tuesday, January 28, 2025
Songs About People # 1,411 Rebecca Latimer Felton
Writing this blog on a daily basis is by turns a spur and a hindrance. I'm constantly on the trail of the next but also unable to play records I really like and come across as much as I would like. Benjamin Booker's magnificent, spare LOWER is a case in point. Here's another song from it, apparently concerned with Rebecca Latimer Felton a campaiger for progressive reform but also it needs stating, a slave owner.
Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 - 1,677 Blondie - Eat To The Beat
500 Greatest Albums of the 1980s ... Ranked! # 113 R.E.M. - Document
'Fire on the hemisphere below...'
I've been listening to this a bot recently. Particularly Finest Worksong which sounds more and more monumental and other worldly every time I hear it. Bruce Springsteen or U2 never did anything like this.It's an Art statement. It shows you how extraordinary R.E.M. could be. Even as their star rose. There are any number of fantastic, magical moments elsewhere. They stuck to their principles and I still find them incredibly inspiring and think of them as 'my band'.
1985 Singles # 24 The Fall
Song(s) of the Day # 3,987 Geowolf
Geowolf''s The Child. An album with a young lady with a dreaming, elsewhere expression lying on a backdrop of party balloons. A record of tunes that woudn't have seemed completely out of place on a David Lynch soundtrackaimed at disaffected teens .
The work of an Australian artist Star Kendrick with a frizzy mop of hair and astyle that seems to place itself at a mindway point between Hope Sandoval and Kylie. This is a curious record that it strikes me would make a good soundtrack for a roadtrip into the outback to sit under the stars and enjoy one of the legendary barbies. Not an unappealing thought if you're sat in a dark Newcastle flat at the end of January waiting for the sun to rise in the heavens of the darkened street outside.
Utimately this opts for Pop rather than making its wayOutside of Society and lost me slightly, But it made a nice diversion as my bath ran and I made my way towards my 8.30 with Dussledirf Insurance People.
Monday, January 27, 2025
Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 - 1,678 Led Zeppelin - In Through The Out Door
500 Greatest Albums of the 1980s ... Ranked! # 116 Scritti Politti - Songs To Remember
1985 Singles # 25 New Order
Song(s) of the Day # 3,986 The Lavender Flu
What d'you mean the Lavender Who? Get with the beat baggy. I've written about these guys on here before. Back in 2018 when the world was young. Before CoVid came along and confused us. Possibly terminally. They seemed cool back them. Like some kind of cross between The Thirteenth Floor Elevators, The Flamin Lips and Sonic Youth. Brian Jonestown Massacre if they didn't have that irritating, deadbeat front guy.
The Lavender Flu's frontman Chris Gunn seems like a much more amiable type. The songs on latest album Tracing The Sand By the People is insnpired. The parts are great, the whole stipendous. As if Hunter S. Thomspon, Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon and Rick Moody formed a band. After sitting in the Californian desert for a while doing mescaline. Howling at the moon. I know this is all rather far fetched. Or else just awful writing! I'm just trying to give you an idea of what this soinds like. In fact I'm not sure I'm not doing it justice. This is great stuff.
This has always been what America has been best at, No I don't mean starting or inciting cospiracy theories. Or taking liberties with the English language I mean Rock & Roll the great American invention and its related codes. Genuinely liberated thinking and behaviour. The Lavender Flu point the way forwards. And I don't mean to February. Thanks to Starbuck (Darren Jones) for this latest suggestion. Help yourself at the grog barrel lad. But it might be an idea to steer clear of The Lavender Flu's stash. As good as.The Sand By the People sounds. Their diet seems slightly inadvisable.
Sunday, January 26, 2025
Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 - 1,679 Run The Jewels
500 Greatest Albums of the 1980s ... Ranked! # 117 The Replacements - Let It Be