For my young nephew Felix who's busy getting into The Beatles. The Help soundtrack is a great mid-career record full of almost cast away pop songs hinting at something deeper. Help, Ticket to Ride, You've Got To Hide Your Love Away, You're Going To Lose That Girl and more. And if you have the American version, snippets of the film soundtrack and this, a sitar based instrumental takes on A Hard Day's Night, Can't Buy Me Love and I Should Have Known Better by the George Martin Orchestra.
Friday, January 29, 2016
The Perfect Collection: Ninety-Nine Essential Pop Singles # 35 Hello
Another of Hibbert's more off the wall selections but I can get behind this one. Minor-league British Glam band, this went Top Ten in the UK in 1975.
Song(s) of the Day # 740 Ultimate Spinach
Yesterday I became aware of Ultimate Spinach, a late sixties Boston band with perhaps the ultimate, sub-Spinal Tap, psychedelic name of all. Dismissed by critics of the time as bandwagon jumpers of the west coast sound, you can hear the influence of The Doors, Jefferson Airplane, Country Joe & the Fish and others all over their songs. Their first, self-titled album, from 1968 has to be heard to be believed and deserves a post all of its own as a quite remarkable period document from a different age and time which I hope to get round to on here at some point.
These two songs meanwhile, from a live performance from '67 recently re-released on CD, are slightly less addled by the demented hippie speak which is all over that record and come across as well crafted, melodic love and peace pop songs from the east coast and what came to be known as The Bosstown Sound, Boston's answer to Haight Ashbury and LA. Most obviously indebted to Ray Manzarek and that distinctive Doors organ sound they come from a time when girls' eyes were really 'as gentle as morning rain' and 'skin is pale as moonbeams'. Always a good idea to find out the girl's name before making such declarations of undying love. They're undeniably second division operators, a minor pleasure, but there is fun to be had here.
Thursday, January 28, 2016
Songs About People # 158 Vaughan Williams
The lead song off Richard Thompson's 1972 record Henry the Human Fly.
Songs Heard on the Radio # 120 Teleman
Teleman a British band who emerged from the ashes of Peter & the Pirates a few years back, can be slightly variable in terms of the quality of their output, but this, their latest single falls into the very good category, at least for me. They have a little bit of the instinctive pop nous of The Teardrop Explodes about them.
Album Review # 49 The Mystic Braves - Desert Island
LA based band Mystic Braves have a song on their 2014 album Desert Island called In The Past (*) where the lyrics indicate that it might not be a good idea to live there. This is a supreme irony because it's difficult to think of an example of a group that does that so utterly for almost every single moment of their recorded ouput and every time they choose to get dressed or get a new haircut. A land that time forgot. A place where the sixties never succumb to the seventies or more precisely where 1967 never turns to 1968. Perhaps the solitary week where Incense & Peppermints by The Strawberry Alarm Clock rested in the American Billboard Singles Number One slot. Where almost everything seemed possible to those who believed or alternatively, depending on how you choose to look at it, the moment where the dream curdled and began to die as opportunists and bandwagon jumpers gatecrashed the party.
Closest in spirit to California contemporaries the Allah Las or The Growlers both of whom I've written about on here, but there are lots and lots of American bands on this particular trip at the moment. If you were feeling damning you could write off Mystic Braves utterly as period fetishists but it has to be said that they do what they choose to do very well indeed and are clearly loving every moment and that matters. Although their album from last year Days of Yesteryear is perhaps a touch too polished, and is such a eulogy to the bands and records that came out from that state in that particular year that it verges on the comic at some points.
Desert Island though is a little more frayed and a little more obviously under the particular spell of Texas based legends The13th Floor Elevators which gives the album an edge its successor rather lacks. It seems a little harsh to discount them entirely because if you like this stuff, and I definitely do, their records are a distinctly pleasurable experience to listen to. They're at their best when they allow themselves to get loose, Desert Island utilises some mariachi brass that gives the songs it appears on the required sense of abandon to take them off the rails and somewhere else. There's definitely an argument to be made that they do what they do so well on occasion that they almost transcend criticism:
'The Mystic Braves are a five-piece out of Los Angeles who are so thoroughly in love with the twangy, farfisa-inflected, hippie-trippy music of the 1960s that they play it a hell of a lot better than many of the bands who were actually there at the time. To put it another way: they don’t play psychedelic 1960s rock the way it was, so much as the way we remember it being.'
As another song appears and you're become momentarily convinced it's heading into a full throttled cover of The House of the Rising Sun, You're Gonna Miss Me or Pushin' Too Hard, and then pulls back at the last minute to show itself as another of the bands own compositions, though never quite entirely their own, you have to entertain the idea that perhaps some other ingredients in the mix might be an idea. The Rain Parade were trying to pull off a similar trick way back in 1983 and were mocked by many in the UK at least as sheer pastiche but Mystery Braves are a slightly sleeker, though less inspired proposition. It can get a bit samey on occasion but when they get it right, as I think they do on the songs posted here, you have to doff your cap to them. As I said, I'd recommend Desert Island over Days of Yesteryear if you choose to opt for either. Far out! Though not so far out that you won't be able to find your way back home again!
* Since writing this I've discovered that In The Past is a cover of a Chocolate Watchband song.
Wednesday, January 27, 2016
Album Review # 48 Tenniscoats - Papa's Ear
Ladies and gentlemen, we are all floating in space! Never more so than in my own case this afternoon, sitting at my computer screen at work listening to Papa's Ear the 2012 album by Japanese Avant Indie duo, (no, I'm not sure that's a valid term either), Tenniscoats. Quite why a Japanese group should be called Tenniscoats is beyond my ability to explain, but what they do is very fine and are worthy of greater attention than it probably gets.
With a gently surreal album sleeve which seems to me to depict a bedroom carpeted in grass, the album itself has a similarly, otherworldly feel to it, though it's at once calming and strangely domesticated. Acoustic guitar, keyboards, bass, drums and horns float through the mix, and float seems quite the right word because that's what the whole album is in utter suspension from beginning to end.
Tenniscoats are well established in their own specialist circles, having put out records on a regular basis since their debut album in 2000. They're probably best known for their collaborations over the years with a range of indie maverick savants from The Pastels to Jad Fair and The BMX Bandits. I have no way of telling you if this is their best and as it's the first thing of theirs I've listened to but its a fine piece of work. Recorded in Stockholm in 2012 it creates and sustains a mood of contemplation. It's akin to spending an hour in a floatation tank without the need of getting wet.
Sometimes, as with opening track Higa Nobaru it feels like a futuristic western. Elsewhere it just seems like a series of ambient lullabies, elsewhere still as if it was designed as the best imaginable soundtrack to send you towards deep contented sleep. It worked for me this afternoon though I didn't drop off.
The Perfect Collection: Ninety-Nine Essential Pop Singles # 33 Richard Harris
Written by Jimmy Webb of course. this was a Song of the Day of mine almost two years back. Here's what I wrote about it then:
'One of the most irredeemably romantic, if ludicrous and overblown, songs ever recorded. Of course it's written by the indisputable genius Jimmy Webb, responsible for Wichita Lineman, By the Time I Get To Phoenix, Galveston, Up Up and Away and uncountable others. This is the song that the jury remains out on. Harris is clearly not a great singer but carries it all off somehow on the basis of sheer theatrical know-how and gall. Apparently he promised Webb his brown Rolls Royce if the song was a hit and then never delivered. The lyric is florid emotive passion.
'Spring was never waiting for us, girl
It ran one step ahead
As we followed in the dance'
It ran one step ahead
As we followed in the dance'
'I recall the yellow cotton dress
foaming like a wave
on the ground around your knees
The birds, like tender babies in your hands
and the old men playing checkers by the trees'
foaming like a wave
on the ground around your knees
The birds, like tender babies in your hands
and the old men playing checkers by the trees'
And of course that much mocked stuff about the cake left out in the rain. It all makes sense to me and would probably do so to many people who've been deeply in love. Not the greatest fan of the epic orchestral overkill section but the song is overblown from the start and has a certain hammy integrity that prevails I think. Webb's account of the story behind it makes it more evocative.
MacArthur Park in L.A. Now the scene of much gang warfare.
_____________________________________________________________________________
How we made MacArthur Park
Songwriter Jimmy Webb recalls recording the somewhat infuriating suite with actor Richard Harris, and the real story behind leaving that cake out in the rain.
The lyrics to MacArthur Park infuriate some people. "Someone left the cake out in the rain/ I don't think that I can take it/ 'Cause it took so long to bake it/ And I'll never have that recipe again." They think it's a psychedelic trip. But everything in the song is real. There is a MacArthur Park in Los Angeles, near where my girlfriend worked selling life insurance. We'd meet there for lunch, and there would be old men playing checkers by the trees, like in the lyrics.
I've been asked a million times: "What is the cake left out in the rain?" It's something I saw – we would eat cake and leave it in the rain. But as a metaphor for a losing a chapter of your life, it seemed too good to be true. When she broke up with me, I poured the hurt into the song. It was always around seven minutes long – not 22 as has been written.
Bones Howe, a fellow producer, had asked me to create a pop song with classical elements, different movements and changing time signatures. MacArthur Park, more of a suite than a song, was everything he wanted, but when we presented it to his new act, the Association, they refused to record it. It was the late 1960s and I was doing music for an anti-war pageant with some Hollywood stars, including Mia Farrow and Edgar G Robinson. Richard Harris and I started hanging out after rehearsals and drinking Black Velvets: 50% Guinness, 50% champagne. One night after a few, I said: "We ought to make a record." He'd starred in the movie Camelot and sang every song in it beautifully. A few weeks later, I received a telegram: "Dear Jimmy Webb. Come to London. Make this record. Love, Richard." He always called me Jimmy Webb.
I got a flight and stayed with Richard in Belgravia. Over the course of two days, we tore through 30 or 40 of my songs. I was playing the piano and singing. He was standing there in his kaftan, waving his arms and expressing excitement at some songs, not so crazy about others. The best went into his debut album, A Tramp Shining. MacArthur Park was at the bottom of my pile. By the time I played it, we had moved on to straight brandy, but Richard slapped the piano. "Oh Jimmy Webb. I love that! I'll make a hit out of that, I will."
I recorded the basic track back in Hollywood, with myself on harpsichord accompanied by session musicians the Wrecking Crew. We rehearsed it a few times, then played it right through, using the first take and adding the orchestra painstakingly later. When Richard did the vocals at a London studio, he had a pitcher of Pimm's by the microphone. We knew the session was over when the Pimm's was gone. I never could get him to sing the title correctly. He'd say: "Jimmy Webb, I've got it!" Then he'd sing: "MacArthur's Park ..." It was wonderful to hear him growing in confidence. At one point, he said: "I think the vocals are a little loud. We need more orchestra." A few months later, he was saying: "Jimmy Webb! The damn orchestra's too loud!" He'd gone from wanting to hide his voice to wanting people to hear it.
At first, we felt like the guys who'd created the A-bomb: we were a bit afraid of what we'd done. I didn't know I could write something like that. We had doubts about releasing it as a single, but when radio stations began playing it from the album in its entirety, I was asked to do a shorter version as a single. I refused, so eventually they put out the full seven minutes 20 seconds. George Martin once told me the Beatles let Hey Jude run to over seven minutes because of MacArthur Park.
It was a surprise when the song went to No 2 in America and No 4 in the UK. It's since been recorded by everyone from Frank Sinatra to Aretha Franklin. Donna Summer's disco version is my only American No 1, which was quite a thrill. I always knew the girl who inspired the song would hear it and know what it meant. A long time after I had written it, I found out she had moved to Lake Tahoe and become a dancer. When I came into some significant money, I hired a Lear jet, flew up there, and said: "I'm not going back without you." We lived together for three years. Then it turned into a soap opera.
I've been asked a million times: "What is the cake left out in the rain?" It's something I saw – we would eat cake and leave it in the rain. But as a metaphor for a losing a chapter of your life, it seemed too good to be true. When she broke up with me, I poured the hurt into the song. It was always around seven minutes long – not 22 as has been written.
Bones Howe, a fellow producer, had asked me to create a pop song with classical elements, different movements and changing time signatures. MacArthur Park, more of a suite than a song, was everything he wanted, but when we presented it to his new act, the Association, they refused to record it. It was the late 1960s and I was doing music for an anti-war pageant with some Hollywood stars, including Mia Farrow and Edgar G Robinson. Richard Harris and I started hanging out after rehearsals and drinking Black Velvets: 50% Guinness, 50% champagne. One night after a few, I said: "We ought to make a record." He'd starred in the movie Camelot and sang every song in it beautifully. A few weeks later, I received a telegram: "Dear Jimmy Webb. Come to London. Make this record. Love, Richard." He always called me Jimmy Webb.
I got a flight and stayed with Richard in Belgravia. Over the course of two days, we tore through 30 or 40 of my songs. I was playing the piano and singing. He was standing there in his kaftan, waving his arms and expressing excitement at some songs, not so crazy about others. The best went into his debut album, A Tramp Shining. MacArthur Park was at the bottom of my pile. By the time I played it, we had moved on to straight brandy, but Richard slapped the piano. "Oh Jimmy Webb. I love that! I'll make a hit out of that, I will."
I recorded the basic track back in Hollywood, with myself on harpsichord accompanied by session musicians the Wrecking Crew. We rehearsed it a few times, then played it right through, using the first take and adding the orchestra painstakingly later. When Richard did the vocals at a London studio, he had a pitcher of Pimm's by the microphone. We knew the session was over when the Pimm's was gone. I never could get him to sing the title correctly. He'd say: "Jimmy Webb, I've got it!" Then he'd sing: "MacArthur's Park ..." It was wonderful to hear him growing in confidence. At one point, he said: "I think the vocals are a little loud. We need more orchestra." A few months later, he was saying: "Jimmy Webb! The damn orchestra's too loud!" He'd gone from wanting to hide his voice to wanting people to hear it.
At first, we felt like the guys who'd created the A-bomb: we were a bit afraid of what we'd done. I didn't know I could write something like that. We had doubts about releasing it as a single, but when radio stations began playing it from the album in its entirety, I was asked to do a shorter version as a single. I refused, so eventually they put out the full seven minutes 20 seconds. George Martin once told me the Beatles let Hey Jude run to over seven minutes because of MacArthur Park.
It was a surprise when the song went to No 2 in America and No 4 in the UK. It's since been recorded by everyone from Frank Sinatra to Aretha Franklin. Donna Summer's disco version is my only American No 1, which was quite a thrill. I always knew the girl who inspired the song would hear it and know what it meant. A long time after I had written it, I found out she had moved to Lake Tahoe and become a dancer. When I came into some significant money, I hired a Lear jet, flew up there, and said: "I'm not going back without you." We lived together for three years. Then it turned into a soap opera.
Song of the Day # 738 Bonnie Dobson
Folk musician and songwriter probably best known for penning Morning Dew a post-appocalyptic protest song. This comes from her 1969 self-titled album.
Tuesday, January 26, 2016
Songs Heard on the Radio # 118 The Violent Femmes
Well, well, well! To turn on the radio and hear the new Violent Femmes and it sounds refreshingly like the old Violent Femmes from back in 1983 when they released their self-titled debut, one of the greatest teenage angst records ever made.
The Four Seasons - The Genuine Imitation Life Gazette
I'm posting this clip again because I've just picked up my own second-hand vinyl copy, (which is complete with all inserts), of this from the post office and it's got quite the best packaging of any album I've ever seen. The records not at all bad itself. Here's a true record fan talking knowledgeably and extremely enthusiastically about it. Only us sad record collectors truly appreciate this stuff!
The Perfect Collection: Ninety-Nine Essential Pop Singles # 32 The Glitter Band
Unlike most of Tom Hibbert's selections, I don't really see the appeal of this. But here it is anyway!
Song of the Day # 737 McCarthy
'I've been sound asleep for twenty years...'
Tim Gane turned up on here yesterday and here he is again with his first band McCarthy. British, eighties indie and they had the core generic sound of that scene but were more than that too. A main source of inspiration to Nicky Wire and the Manic Street Preachers, a pop band built to project ideas, I'll write more about them at some point but for the time being this should suffice. Their second single and pretty much perfection.
Monday, January 25, 2016
Songs Heard on the Radio # 117 The Brogues
B-side to I Ain't No Miracle Worker and just as good as the flip!
Things Found on my Local's Jukebox # 97 Blind Faith
A song that sounded very good at Rosie's tonight from a very good album, Blind Faith's only one, with a deeply offensive album sleeve picture which I've avoided posting here. Different times I suppose. Still, the song is great and here it is!
January 25th 1949 John Cooper Clarke
His debut. The Innocents EP, a beautiful, eerie record, released in 1977.
Instrumentals # 46 Cavern of Anti-Matter
The Krautrock Plains if any such things really exist are pretty endlessly fertile. Ask Tim McCarthy, once of McCarthy and Stereolab and now of Cavern of Anti-Matter. Yes, you've heard it all before but you liked it, and let's face it, he's very, very, good at it, so why not?
Song of the Day # 736 Lhasa De Sela
Start the week with one of the great voices. Mexican-American singer who died tragically young a few years back.
Sunday, January 24, 2016
Nick Kent - Soundtrack to the Seventies 1978-79
From Charles Shaar Murray to his NME sparring partner.Finally getting round to closing off this series which dates back a couple of years. It's drawn from the appendix to Nick Kent's fine, if somewhat erratic memoir of his times in the seventies Apathy For The Devil in which he chooses his favourite tunes from those times. He truncates 1978 and 1979 together into one selection as they weren't the happiest of times for him personally.
1. Bruce Springsteen - Candy's Room
From Darkness on the Edge of Town which Kent selects.
2.Tom Waits - Romeo is Bleeding
Again he chooses this song's parent album Blue Valentine
3. The Bee Gees - Too Much Heaven
4.Captain Beefheart - Tropical Hot Dog Night
5. Warren Zevon - Accidentally Like a Martyr
Kent picks the whole Excitable Boy album
6.Bob Dylan - Senor
7. The Cramps - Domino
For some reason I can't find a direct link to this but here you go.
8. Neil Young - Powderfinger
Kent selects the whole live record Rust Never Sleeps
9. The Pretenders - Kid
10. The Clash
Charles Shaar Murray Reviews The Police's Ghost in the Machine - NME 1981
Or more accurately, assassinates it. I listened to the record for the first time for a while the other day and though it's an album that holds a really good personal memory for me of a friend bringing it round at the time of its release and listening to Invisible Sun booming through the walls while Seb Coe ran in an athletics championship on the TV in the next room, aside from that, thirty five years on I think Murray for the most part is right. It's an unrealised album with an awful lot of filler. Also deeply pretentious of course, but that's Sting for you. Intelligent granted, but not a very giving intelligence and genrally outrageously smug. Strange move of the band to front the album with all three of the records hit singles. The heavy layers of synths that wash all over the record certainly do Andy Summers in particular no real favours and though there are four or five pop gems, Murray's relish at taking it apart is not unwarranted.
'O Sting, where is thy depth? And whoever suggested that it was necessary or desirable to plumb it?
The Police have run a fair old racket since 1977, when their collective stock was so low that the idea of The Police ever becoming massively popular was only fractionally less ludicrous than the notion that Adam And The Ants could do likewise. Through deafening storms of approbation in every country in the world where Coca Cola is sold, three well-padded albums and enough decent singles to fill most of one side of a greatest hits album, Sting - The Most Beautiful Man In The World - steps forward to answer your question 'Who's your favourite philosopher?'
Well, Lynn Hanna gave the game away last week, and the answer must come as a one hell of a shock to the Watsonian Behaviourists in the Police's audience. One imagines a contest somewhat akin to a cross between the Deputy Leadership and the Oscars: Bette Midler rips open an envelope and announces, "The winner is... Arthur Koestler!" as B.F. Skinner, lips trembling, complexion ashen, does his best to applaud like a good loser should while choking on the fact that the new Police album will not be entitled 'Beyond Freedom And Dignity'.
To support the weight of their current subject-matter, The Police have come up with A New Sound: they've ditched the sharp, cool interlocking fragments of texture and rhythm with which they pioneered New Wave in America and created a sonic blancmange involving hundreds of guitar-synthed, effects-ridden Andy Summers overdubs, a lot of saxophones and several harmonising Stings. They now sound like a cross between The Bee Gees and a reggaefied Yes which I'm sure everybody will agree is one hell of an advance. Only Stewart Copeland's clattering, bustling drums - as audaciously busy and showy as ever - hew to the original blueprint, and Copeland is consistently the most interesting player throughout.
The album's best moment comes halfway through the second side with 'One World', a swaggering upful call for unity which almost certainly meets with Miles Copeland's full approval. Even there, Summers guitar sound is muffled and spongy, but the song's feel and sentiment carry a genuine warmth which is unambiguously appealing.
Its worst arrives at the end of the first side: The Police unveil their version of 'Demolition Man', the song that Sting wrote for Grace Jones. This rendition of the song pretty much is a 'walking disaster': Summers plays an extended Heavy Metal solo all the way through the song, and well. I thought my razor was dull until I heard the bass line.
Everywhere else is blancmange (maybe a better title for the album would have been 'Blancmango De Trop', which would have at least preserved conceptual continuity with their first three efforts): whether Sting's being "sexual" on 'Hungry For You', metaphysical on 'Spirits In The Material World' or concerned and aware on 'Invisible Sun', he and his colleagues combine a woolly sound with woolly thinking to minimum effect. Even when they briefly return (via a song for which Stewart Copeland wrote the music) to the punky-trash vein which they mined before the Big Skank hit them, 'Rehumanise Yourself' - the album's second-best track, as it happens - is still weighed down by too much paraphernalia.
It's all good humanistic stuff and if rock bands are going to push their favourite philosophers I'd rather take a reggae-ish pop band promoting Arthur Koestler over a pomp(ous)-HM group pimping for Ayn Rand any day of the decade. The fact remains that - as far as this particular listener is concerned - 'The Ghost In The Machine is AMAAAAAAAAAZINGLY DULL. Sting is obviously a decent, intelligent chap and if we were debating politics and philosophy I'd probably find large areas of agreement with him, but dull music with worthy sentiments attached is, ultimately, no more rewarding an aesthetic experience than dull music with foul sentiments.
Koestler's book is available in a Picador edition for considerably less than the cost of The Police's album.'
Great Lost Band Members # 15 Peter Laughner
Peter Laughner, founder member and guiding light of Rocket From The Tombs and Pere Ubu was a self-consciously dark character. He chose darkness, as Lester Bangs lamented in his eulogy essay about him 'Peter Laughner is Dead'. Laughner was an early casualty of the New York Punk scene, dying before Pere Ubu made the massive statement of their first album release The Modern Dance though his imprints are certainly on that record. Life Stinks, first song, second side, is his. His influence of course is everywhere. Allen Ravenstein, the bands synth player, wrote a great short story fictionalising the band's early days and Laughner features strongly in it. A self-destructive, brooding presence. here's the first paragraph. Laughner is Billy.
'In those days we'd play wherever they let us. We were in our early twenties, still alert keyboards for the devilish fingers of adolescent heart warp, and we thought it was not true that we were untested. We had piloted ourselves through the mazes of failed love and the temptations of the material world. We knew the realm of the spirit. We had chosen our poisons. We had learned to speak and we were certain that our voices were endowed with something to say. We lacked only opportunity but its arrival was foretold. There was a certain current that ran through the air around us, something that seemed to be in the light that fell everywhere we went, a vibration that ran though all our conversations; our antennae were up and singing. It was like putting your ear to the rail, and we could hear the rumble of that train any time we bothered to listen; our time had come. It was as tangible as the modern noise we made. When it arrived we would board with a giddiness that it felt unmanly to express, so we rode smugly in those windows with an unstated arrogance that fuelled all of our bad decisions. There would be a trail of goodbyes mottled with the kind of smiles that come with the departure of a train headed for trouble, one in which the passengers are ignorant of their destination and certain of it at the same time. Those who remained on the platform were glad to be left behind. We were the lover you have to say goodbye to, the one you can't live with. And while they no doubt felt a hole opening up at the parting, one that in some cases would be a long time filling, they were glad the fighting was over. I too, would stand waving one day, having found that the empty places in me would have to be filled elsewhere. But all of that was still a few years away, these were still the days before the record contracts and the European tours, the days when Billy was alive.'
Eleanor Friedberger - New View
Eleanor Friedberger's third album is the first new long playing record I've really fallen for this year, with the exception of Bowie's Blackstar which as events transpired seemed less a new record than an enormously loaded cultural statement of shared experience. New View, of course is a lesser record but it's still a very fine one, full of lovely moments and observations.
It seems to me to be a quite grown up album. Appropriately, as she is turning forty. Her work over many years with Fiery Furnaces was the very definition of the adjective 'quirky', with every song firing off in twenty directions at once. Some of it worked, some of course didn't. Her first two solo records were similarly offbeat and this one is too but it's also much more mature and considered and self-consciously so.
'Sweet girl with the broken heart. Stop crying so I don't start..'
The album reflects changes in Friedberger's own life. She's recently left her long time base in Brooklyn for a more suburban home upstate and its telling that the songs she's made for this record seem stiller and less frantic. There are still great lines thrown into the mix, 'Why would you want to take it slow....treat me like a tennis pro?' 'Why would you want to tell the truth? Or furnish me with mathematical proof. Or jump with me off of the roof?' from very wonderful fifth track Because I Asked You. But this time it seems that these moments all contribute towards a larger purpose rather than being thrown out without any greater intent. Towards the end of the song she drops the line 'Because I love you...' and it carries genuine weight because she's held back for so long before delivering it. She sings it just the once. It doesn't need to be repeated.She'll never be Carole King but this record seems an inspired move in that general direction. By letting more conventional song-craft into her writing the wackiness that once seemed slightly forced or at least overplayed now comes across as a beautiful and genuine expression of individuality.
Each song has a character of its own that unfolds and surprises and makes you want to know it better. Friedberger is backed by a band of young musicians who thicken out her sound considerably. There's the warm autumnal hum of an organ throughout, so reminiscent of Al Kooper's playing on Dylan's sixties records. There are occasionally forays of gently wailing guitars the kind of thing that you thought might actually have been outlawed at some time in the seventies but here sound just right.
As I write this I'm listening through to New View in full for the second time and just like the first, as it winds to its end I'm struck by just how very good it is. It feels like a record made the way that records used to be. Lovingly, and without an accountant peering over your shoulder. Friedberger in interviews recently has talked about the danger that she's becoming boring as if the very act of moving from the city to the suburbs makes your worldview less relevant or exciting. I think this is a long way from the truth. It's the best record of hers that I've heard. I've just spent an hour in its company and its calmed me, made me forget my worries and long to hear it again all at once. It does what music is supposed to do. It's a small but beautifully realised work of art.
Song of the Day # 735 Car Seat Headrest
I try not to make hard and fast judgments but I do feel quite strongly that bands shouldn't put themselves out there with names like Car Seat Headrest like this young Seattle band have. But at least they have put themselves out there and this single is just fine. Building for the course of the song, pure teenage petulance and a fair dose of melodic invention along the way. A good modern recreation of Beach Boy harmonies too. Top stuff!
Saturday, January 23, 2016
Album Reviews # 47 The Stars of Heaven - Sacred Heart Hotel
Isaiah 13:10 The stars of heaven and their constellations will not show their light. The rising sun will be darkened and the moon will not give its light.
A small, but beautifully formed object, pretty much lost in the mists of time, the first side of Stars of Heaven's Sacred Heart Hotel EP is still something I return to occasionally thirty years after it was first released in 1986. Formed in 1983 in Dublin, their independently financed debut single Clothes of Pride brought them to the attention of the Rough Trade Record Label and this was the first fruit of that union.
A quietly assured band, their influences were clear. The Byrds, Dylan and Gram Parsons, Country and Western and also The Velvet Underground, Television, the early R.E.M.albums and the Paisley Underground bands. But they also had a clear individualistic literary Irish imprint to their songs. A breathy folkiness, that gave their songs a warm glow, and made you feel that you were listening to them in a warm pub in Ireland with a roaring open fire and a whisky glinting back at you on the bar in front of you.
'Falling to pieces. In a suburb from hell. The residents bar at the Sacred Heart Hotel.'
Their best songs were finely honed, with each instrument weaving in and out of the mix each note planned to fit. I'd number the first two songs on their EP among these. Sacred Heart Hotel itself where the guitars chime and lock like Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd warming up for a show. The vocals are intoned and there's a specific intense but beautifully felt, Catholic grip and introspection to the lyrics of lead singer Stephen Ryan.
'See the crystal dissolve...fall like the wave on the sea...'
Talk About it Now maintains and deepens the effect. It's full of that deeply felt emotion and earnestness that is somehow particular to young men in their early twenties. If the band had just stopped here they would have made their statement. Sadly the rest of the songs on the record don't reach this high water mark. Moonstruck shimmers nicely and rolls off into a jig but is slightly throwaway in comparison with the two tracks that have gone before.
There's a yearning rush though to So You Know which is reminiscent of The Dream Syndicate and Rain Parade as the guitars rush into psychedelic duelling and Ryan has a distinctive, earnest presence, an Irish Michael Stipe. These four songs made up the band's first John Peel session and were really what they had to offer at this point in time.
The second side is of negligible value and suddenly the band are earthbound and sound like a rather poorly produced indie band like countless others of the time and the spell cast by the first few songs is broken. It's a shame, because there's a definite quiet creativity to their sound but a sense that they had an original spark that they never fully realised.
Later in the same year the band released the Holyhead EP which had a couple of songs which did achieve some of the understated majesty of the first side of Sacred Heart Hotel. Never Saw You, has a quiet, calm confidence that glows again and Widow's Walk (no link - you'll need to go to Spotify) is just thrilling in every way its lyrics beautifully crafted and conveying a quiet, sad poetic edge that seems beyond the band's tender years.
'Out in the harbour,
On the Widow's Walk,
The wind bites our lips,
As we try to talk,
And the sea is as blue,
As a country drunk,
Trying to sing,
The Tennessee Waltz.
Watching the mail boats,
And the Harbour Madonna glow,
I thought of the times,
I was glad to go,
Now there's something to hold me,
There's something I want to know,
Why do you get what you want,
When you don't want it anymore..
In the tin town of Visie(?),
Making a crown,
For the high king of nowhere,
His time's come around.
But here in the shadow,
Of the Mariner's Church,
An immigrant's prayer,
Is the only sound.
Now there's something to hold me,
There's something I want to know,
Why do you get what you want,
When you don't want it anymore..'
So, The Stars of Heaven. They released a full album Speak Slowly in 1988 which apparently label boss Geoff Travis didn't like and he was right because it's generic and polished but also hollow and charmless and lacking in the character that had made them so promising. Little on it speaks like the band's best 1986 songs. For these I'm grateful! They went their separate ways two years later.
The Perfect Collection: Ninety-Nine Essential Pop Singles # 29 Fleetwood Mac
One of the scariest, most deranged singles ever to reach the UK Top Ten where it sat in the Number Ten slot for a month.
Friday, January 22, 2016
Things Found on my Local's Jukebox # 96 Smashing Pumpkins
Smashing Pumpkins were a truly great, world-beating band for a couple of years in the early nineties. I bought this record, went round to a friend's in Dortmund, Germany with Siamese Dream. Listened to it, quite astonished and went to see them a few days later in Cologne. Still one of the best bands I've ever seen!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)