One of the great football names. From the wonderful Dutch team of the seventies.
Wednesday, July 19, 2017
Song(s) of the Day # 1,277 Palm
Twisting familiar sounding influences into unfamiliar shapes. That's what American band Palm do on their latest six track EP Shadow Expert. What you'll here, nominally stems from Post Punk and Math Rock but you couldn't quite nail it down to individual bands as is so often the case. Or at least I can't. Maybe I'm not well enough versed. It certainly sounds fairly fresh to me.
Palm, like other contemporary American guitar bands such as Omni, Warehouse, Sunflower Bean, Hoops and Cende are definitely setting off somewhere new within familiar pop and rock parameters and that's always good to hear. Rather than just apishly recreating the glory of long gone records or copying their contemporaries, they're heading for different horizons, and even though this asks more of the listener, ultimately the effort is well-rewarded.
Formed by undergraduates at an upstate New York university, the band have been together as a four-piece ever since, relocating to Pennsylvania in the meantime. The latest Pitchfork review says that Shadow Expert is their best effort so far and though I'm not familiar with their previous stuff I can definitely recommend this. It's melodic but unpredictable and the six songs on the EP strike off in different directions rather than sticking to a single template.
None of the six songs on here so much as reach the four minute mark but it doesn't seem so because Palm are such a busy, intricate band. There's nothing on here that's verse/chorus either in the traditional sense but there are repeating signatures and defining patterns in each track, each of which has an internal, ticking logic.The centre always holds.
All in all an intriguing listen. Less than twenty minutes very well spent with Kasra Kurt, Eve Alpert, Hugo Stanley, and Gerasimos Livitsanos, (I also appreciate a band with a good set of names), or Palm.
Tuesday, July 18, 2017
Procol Harum - A Salty Dog
Speaking of Procol Hraum, a re-post from a couple of years back:
Album Review # 39 Procol Harum - A Salty Dog
'The songs have titles that read like paperback novels... Gary Brooker is extremely fond of descending chord structures and slow tempos and an atmosphere of resignation, and sadness, combined with a certain strength pervades their work. Melody Maker July 1969
I must be getting on. With the passing of time I've found myself becoming amenable in turn to Jazz, Folk, Country and now it seems I'm dipping my toe in Prog which this record and band seem to be generally labelled as. Originally I wanted this album primarily for its cover which is a wonderful example of the artistic power of the medium. It also took me back to my childhood where it had caught my attention on carefree afternoons leafing through a book of album sleeves as a ten year old in Richmond Junior Library. However, a couple of plays on headphones at work recently while I debated ordering it warmed me to it and now I have it, it goes on every couple of weeks and always works its spell.
The band itself of course will always be chiefly known for their debut single A Whiter Shade of Pale, a high water mark for Psychedelia which is with Sgt. Pepper pretty much the definitive sound of The Summer of Love. It arrived at Number One in the UK in June 1967 and stayed there for the course of that summer.
'Famous in the pop world for taking portentious meaningless to rococo lengths (a fact which did not prevent it justly delighting the British public enough to keep it at Number 1 for six weeks).'
The song must be hard-wired to the brains of millions of people from that time. Lennon apparently had it on repeat play in the back of his Rolls throughout the Summer of '67. It's soundtracked umpteen documentaries and nostalgia fuelled movies ever since. It's one of the most utterly ubiquitous records ever made. I appreciate it myself, and will stick it on my pub jukebox once in a while, though saying this is slightly at odds with my inherent musical snobbery because over the intervening 50 years it's been played and played and played again to the point of utter cliché. At this remove it's almost impossible to hear it and make a rational judgement on its quality and imagine how remarkable it must have sounded when it first came out. It's a record forever laden down with the weight of its own cultural importance.
For most people Procol Harum's story began and ended with that record. They only had one more Top Ten single, follow up Homburg. They did however, proceed to a relatively successful career as an albums band, their natural medium going on to record ten albums and limp on to 1977 when lack of interest finally led them to split. This, their third, is generally considered their best. I think it's a beautiful album,. A concept of sorts on the theme of sea-faring as the cover suggests a theme they happily keep returning to though many of the tracks barely fit within that remit.
It is consistent though in terms of a general sense of nostalgia, regret and melancholy, and most of all deeply ingrained Britishness. It draws on Folk and Blues, Rock and Classical music and remains diverse and spirited throughout. It features marimbas, recorders, tablas and bosun's whistles. Three songwriters contribute so the mood and tempo shifts. Robin Trower, Gary Brooker and Matthew Fisher divide the tracks between them fairly democratically and the resultant diversity keeps the record buoyant. There are moments, particularly on Brooker's songs where the Prog label makes some kind of sense but I think as a whole it's too good a record to reduce to that term.
And I think it's a very good record. Anchored in solid songwriting and thoughtful lyrics by non-band member Keith Reid who supplied them with their words throughout the band's career. It verges on pretentious at times sure, but never ceases to have warm lifeblood flowing through it and is nothing in comparison with the pretension that lay ahead proceeding to run amok in the early Seventies when the mantle of Prog settled on the band from which they never quite recovered. They're almost forgotten now but it's telling that Nick Kent mentions them in his NME review of Marquee Moon, in 1977 of all years.
‘Guiding Light’ is reflective, stridently poetic – a hymn for aesthetes – which, complete with piano, reminds me slightly of Procol Harum in excelsis.'
The band have lost any cultural weight they might have had since then. Perhaps they made their greatest mistake by refusing a slot at Woodstock because it clashed with Brooker's summer holiday plans. In any case in the intervening years they've sloped off to the margins of rock history. Nevertheless for me at least this statement endures.
There's an innate songwriting talent running through each of the ten songs to keep the listener engaged. The longest track here just breaks the five minute mark. There's also a beauty in it that remains and stands the test of nearly half a century. At the beginning of Side 2 with Juicy John Pink they wander off into the blues as every British band of the period tended to at some point but generally the mood is a great deal more pastoral, resigned, less urgent.
Part of the appeal of the record to me is that it conveys it's time so effortlessly. A time that's clearly gone. Over the introductory credits of landmark eighties film Withnail and I, the I character smokes a joint and stares into space sound tracked by King Curtis's version of A Whiter Shade. It puts us straight away into an unmistakeable place, time and mood. It's a film that focuses amongst many other things on the turn of the decades from the Sixties to the Seventies and everything that will be lost in that moment of turning. There's a moment towards the end of The Wreck of The Hesperuswhere the guitarist breaks in to a solo that's eerily reminiscent of the ones Brian May went on to plague the Seventies with during his time with Queen. This being a band that leaves me utterly cold, it's my least favourite moment of the whole album. It's a sign of what's to come. The empty pomp and grandeur of so much Rock music during the Seventies. But then it's overtaken by the sound effect of an enormous ship breaking through waves and the record's back on course.
Procol Harum, as much as any band I can think of are preserved in aspic in the time when they made their first and defining records. They themselves were looking back even in their early days. The record cover is a pastiche of the Players Navy Cigarette pack, the lyrics hark back continually to Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century shipwrecks. The band name translates approximately from Latin as "of these far off things". Their songs are drenched throughout with deep nostalgia.
There's a moment in penultimate track Crucifiction Lane where Robin Trower slips into minor key melancholia that Eric Clapton and George Harrison would have approved of. Generally the mood is more introspective and resigned. Perhaps the band didn't really have the stomach for the fight with the era's major players. Fisher's instantly recognisable organ sound continually drifts into the mix reminding the listener that their defining moment is already almost a couple of years behind them.
For the last couple of months I've set myself a target of writing up one of these album reviews on Sunday morning giving myself a twelve o'clock deadline. I'm running out of time on this one. I struggled with it, probably wrestling with the word Prog, a genre of music I'll always be wary of. How could I like such a record so much. Where were my NME Eighties generated boundaries? I shouldn't have worried as the album I've focussed on defies such narrow categorisation. It's a record that has more than sufficient songwriting craft, warmth, emotion, melody and lyricism for me to be able to recommend it wholeheartedly. Procol Harum, you Flower Power Hippies, you Salty Dogs! I salute you!
Song of the Day # 1,276 Jack Ladder
The all pervading influence of Nick Cave on fellow Australian Jack Ladder is too encompassing to ignore for a moment, but here with his new single he drags Nick onto the disco floor which is always a good place for him to be.
Monday, July 17, 2017
Song(s) of the Day # 1,275 Jake La Botz
'Jake La Botz hit the road at fifteen. He found employment as a roofer, boilermaker, factory worker, and obituary writer. In the midst of this he learned how to play guitar. He played on the streets and in the juke joints of New Orleans, Chicago, and the Mississippi Delta, finding kinship with some of the last of the pre-war era bluesmen: David “Honeyboy” Edwards, “Homesick” James, and “Maxwell Street” Jimmy Davis.' from Jake La Botz's website.
Jake La Botz has got a face that seems quite out of time. Born in 1968, but he has the features instead of the Great American Depression, weatherworn, seasoned and ever so slightly world-weary. His records meanwhile, Sunnyside, the latest is just out, capture the spirit of the early Twentieth Century blues better than anyone bar Tom Waits and C.W.Stoneking. La Botz plays his hand straighter than either these two but has songs worthy of both.
Sunday, July 16, 2017
The Feelies - In Between
And to follow that, a re-post of my review of In Between, still pretty much top of my own tree of favourite records for 2017:
The Feelies - In Between
2017 seems already like a potentially great year for the return of middle-aged indie veterans. Following my post about Grandaddy's new record, Last Place, and with The Shins new album coming up the pike, here are The Feelies, who pre-date both those bands by the best part of a couple of decades and are back on their fortieth anniversary with the sixth album of their musical career, In Between.
The statistics above suggest that they're a band who know how to take their time, and everything on In Between gives credence to that idea. It all unwinds with the calm, ticking rationale of a grandfather clock in your parent's hall. It's all definitely about mortality, as the line of tall trees lining an avenue stretching into the distance on the sleeve suggests, there's a clinical simplicity about it all which is admirable. Almost as if the passing years, (and The Feelies must be pushing their sixties now, if they're not already there), mean there's less to say rather than more and it's just a matter of shifting gear occasionally and chugging on down that open road.
Track titles are brief and interchangeable, Turn Back Time, Stay The Course, Pass The Time, Time To Go, all about mortality as I've suggested and dealing with what you leave behind you on the road as you head onwards, as much as concern for what lies ahead, but it's all handled with an almost Buddhist, calm, acceptance. The songs for the most part are built on the bedrock of cool easy strumming that we know from Feelies records, going back to 1984's The Good Earth. Occasionally they switch gear towards the more fevered anxious gear of their 1980 debut record Crazy Rhythms and these moments hint at troubled emotions churning beneath the still surface and it's here when In Between moves into another dimension and signals itself as one of the best that The Feelies have made and also one of the best albums we're likely to hear in 2017.
This stuff exists in a noble tradition, a lineage; Heading back to The Velvet Underground most obviously and on from there past The Modern Lovers, Television, Talking Heads, R.E.M, The Go-Betweens, The Chills, (and the other Flying Nun bands), Galaxie 500 and Luna and onwards to the here and now to Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever, Chook Race and umpteen others. it seems this is a well that will never run dry.
I'm not sure how this record would sound to a sixteen year old, not so versed in this stuff as some of us oldsters. When I was sixteen I wasn't particularly interested in the idea of listening to records by rock bands in their late fifties. There actually weren't many if any at that point in time but now of course there are plenty, the sentiments behind The Who's 'Hope I die before I get old...' line seem almost redundant and thoughts turn instead while listening here to The Feelies to that Modern Lovers song 'Dignified and Old.'
In Between fits snugly into both descriptions. The Feelies were always the most nondescript of bands in terms of the way they presented themselves and the way the looked. They rarely attempted to impose a perspective, personality or worldview on you and this is essentially their guiding strength but also goes somewhere towards explaining why they always remained a cult concern for those who knew about and loved this kind of stuff.
It's difficult to know where they might go from here really because In Between is a definitive statement in many respects. 'Another day slips away...' they sing at one point and this is what the record is very much about. Taking a trek into the woods, the album opens with the sounds of birds chirping, a running stream and twigs snapping underfoot and this is the sense that I take from the record, 'like a dream, in between'. Look around you and continue to wonder. Never mordant or morbid in the way they deal with these preoccupations. 'It just is', the album seems to say. 'Get on with it!' An excellent record to say the very least!
Song(s) of the Day # 1,274 Zebra Hunt
It's a good year when you get two good Feelies albums and it seems that 2017 is such a year. The first, (from that band themselves), In Between, their sixth, is better than good, it's something of a middle-aged masterpiece. The second, In Phrases, from Seattle band Zebra Hunt is just good, so cast in stone and inescapable is the Feelies influence, but nevertheless it's a fine listen capturing as it does that pure open-road strumming vibe that that band and fellow travellers like Flying Nun pathfinders The Clean, Chills and Bats identified so definitively in the eighties. Zebra Hunt never once step off that path but they do show an excellent understanding for its simple exquisite beauty.
Saturday, July 15, 2017
Songs About People # 424 Willie Mays
Chuck Prophet does his wry blues thing for an all-American icon.
Song(s) of the Day # 1,273 Laure Briard
One thing that I've got to know since I got going in earnest with this blog, and listening out for new music on a regular basis, is that you can have pretty much anything you want in terms of the contemporary. If for example you fancy some softly spoken Francoise Hardy inclined French female singer with a twist of Stereolab about her on occasion then it's almost certainly out there somewhere for you if only you can track it down.
That's clearly not an example snatched entirely out of the air. In this respect Laure Briard definitely ticks all the required boxes for me. Her album from last year, Sur Le Piste De Danse, is evocative of the wonderful imprints of these artists but the songs themselves are so exquisitely crafted and delivered that she effortlessly crafts her own spot in the scheme of things. A wonderful summer record, even if it actually came out last summer and not this!
Friday, July 14, 2017
Things Found on My Local's Jukebox # 227 Velvet Underground
New Velvet Underground at Rosie's, which is always a good thing!
Songs About People # 423 Douglas Mawson
Douglas Mawson was an Australian explorer in the Golden Age for such things at the beginning of the last century who famously was forced to consume his own sled dogs, (which he also fed to the dogs' fellows), in order to survive the return journey of his 1912 Arctic expedition.
Song of the Day # 1,272 Walter Etc.
A classy old school fey, indie tune, but from 2017. Appropriately from a bloke called Walter and his band. From the West Coast.
Thursday, July 13, 2017
Songs About People # 422 Judy Garland
Craig Cardiff performs an appropriately elegiac tune for one of the great tragic figures of Twentieth Century music.
Song(s) of the Day # 1,271 French Vanilla
Utterly ludicrous. And all the better for it. Los Angeles French Vanilla have just released their debut, self-titled album and its a wonderful throwback to the moment in Punk and New Wave when the Seventies tipped over into the Eighties. Not unmusical at the same time, there's a lot going on here that may make you think in turn of Nina Hagen, Slits, Lene Lovich, Romeo Void, Raincoats, X, Pylon, Mo-Dettes, X Ray Spex and all kinds of other off the wall female generated oddness and inspiration. Method in their madness.
There's a spontaneity and simplicity about the artists I mentioned above and the scenes that spawned them that makes it a seam of music still much worthy of mining. French Vanilla are clearly having incredible fun most of all, playing for themselves first and foremost as all the best bands do. Their record is just nine brief tracks, all of them wonderful in their own way and is over far too soon. New New Wave record of the year!
Wednesday, July 12, 2017
Song of the Day # 1,270 St. Vincent
St. Vincent back with a single you'd imagine preceding an album at some point. A paene to New York.The song doesn't outstay its welcome at less than two and a half minutes and still somehow manages to be an exceptionally grand statement that does that most wonderful of all cities.justice.She's definitely a talent.
Tuesday, July 11, 2017
Songs Heard on the Radio # 215 The Luxembourg Signal
The Luxembourg Signal preempt their second album Blue Field, out this Autumn with this utterly stately single Laura Palmer on Shelflife.
Covers # 84 R.E.M.
And while we're here. The band were always masters at claiming songs that fitted with their sensibility, tweaking them and making them their own. Have You Ever Seen the Rain, All I Have to do is Dream and here California Dreaming as an encore at a gig at the Paradise Theatre in Boston in 1983.
Songs About People # 420 Lightnin' Hopkins
So a bit of an R.E.M. day on here. I always keep returning to that band as they were my first love. Not perhaps the finest song on Document but still. Their tribute to the blues man.
R.E.M.- Fables of the Reconstruction
A reprint for this review, merely because it's such an important record to me and the memory of such an important time of my life:
Album Reviews # 68 R.E.M. - Fables of the Reconstruction
'I have a relationship with R.E.M. as with no other band. I wouldn't claim for a moment that they were the best that's ever been by any means. Or even that they were more important than other groups who were also putting out great work in the early to mid-eighties, (The Smiths and The Go Betweens come immediately to mind), the period where they put out their first records, the ones that still mean the most to me and the ones I keep coming back to and always will. They're just my band, the one I constructed much of my personal identity and perspective of the world from, in my late teens and early twenties when you do these important, unrepeatable things.
'When the light is mine. I felt gravity's pull...'
Fables of the Reconstruction was their third album and was recorded and released in 1985 when they were undergoing a lot of personal change, as was I. I was in the middle of my gap year and then went on from there to university where of course so many of the important things begin to happen. As for R.E.M., they meanwhile found themselves in London, away from their former production team of Mitch Easter and Don Dixon for the first time, recording the album instead with Joe Boyd, producer of Fairport Convention and Nick Drake among numerous other notables.
'He's not to be reached. He's to be reached...'
R.E.M had a famously and well-documented terrible time during the recording of the record. It was cold, they were poor, and existing apparently on a dreadful diet consisting mostly of potatoes in addition to having to become acquainted with the dubious pleasures of the London Underground of the mid-eighties in winter on the way to and from their recording studio. The turmoil they underwent during this period is reported to have brought them to the verge of splitting, though the strong nature of their personal friendships and shared mission, (a notable feature of the band), stopped this from taking place.
'Way to shield the hated heat. Way to put myself to sleep...'
The record they came out with is notoriously muddy. Whereas the production of Murmur and Reckoning is thoughtful and layered and different instruments can be clearly differentiated in the mix, allowing the listener to follow different things each time, Fables still sounds like thick soup, even thirty years on. Boyd has been repeatedly blamed for this, much to his irritation.The muddiness though for me is part of its attraction and ongoing appeal.
'Two doors to go between. The wall was raised today...'
I bought and heard the record in the autumn of '85, just after returning from Switzerland where I'd been working for six months and where I'd fallen tentatively in love for the first time. I was already in love with R.E.M., however, their mystery and melody chiming with an idea I was developing of myself. I bought the album in Richmond in the company of a friend and went back to his parent's flat to listen.
'Joe, Bill and Ted, stand on your head, (that's my folly)...'
My first listening reaction was an almost total blank. It was nothing like I'd expected, nothing like either Murmur or Reckoning to my ears. It took me a while. There are of course clear continuations between the three albums, as I came to discover on repeated listens, the melodies, the vocal harmonies, the evocation of the American South and Michael Stipe's lyrical concerns, found poetry and thick vocal burr, almost as incomprehensible as previously in terms of the actual words or coherent sense of individual songs but slowly coming into focus in terms of what he was saying and where all this was going.
'Can't get there from here. (I've been there, I know the way)'
It does take some work however. I'm still working on it and thinking about it thirty years on but the album is worth it and things are beginning to fall into place. Fables is crammed full with duality. An album of eleven songs, each of them to some degree a narrative about the Deep South and the consciousness and troubled eccentricity it generates and shapes. Knowing your Faulkner, McCullers and O'Connor is helpful in this respect because the band feed on these forbears in their early work particularly.
'Green grow the rushes go. The compass points the workers home...'
Life is a great deal about narratives. Which R.E.M knew. They were grounded in narratives. Communal, happy living in Athens, Georgia and a shared experience which is where this record comes from. Listening to their early albums you can hear The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, Creedence, The Band coming out of the mix but also the way that veers off into the road into the New York Dolls, Patti Smith, Television, and on towards the arty side of UK Punk with Wire and the Gang of Four.
'Fever built a bridge. Reason tore it down.'
But the narrative here is actually a lot deeper. This is a confused, conflicted record.Ill at ease with itself. And in the tension, the awareness of their potential and the idea of where they might be going is pretty much what makes this the quintessential R.E.M. album along with Murmur and Automatic For the People. Knowing their talent, sure of themselves. Over the next few records they burrowed into the idea of being the biggest band in America and then from there to the world, slimmed down their songwriting craft, first through Fall on Me, then The One I Love and finally Losing My Religion which showed them the way back home to Automatic for the People which is probably their lasting statement and their best record and testament. How they found their way home.
'We never wrote the reasons that I need explained. Some things are givens and others get away.'
Pretty much all of the songs on Fables are unfinished. They're open ended and lonely. Orphans all. They speak of a certain kind of unhappiness and disorientation that never really knows satisfaction. But not one that doesn't know the way back onto the main road. When I went to see the band play in Hamersmith Palais in the autumn of 1985 with my older brother and younger sister they put on one of the great Rock and Roll shows I'll ever see. As they kicked into the opening bars of Feeling Gravity's Pull, the clean cut American college kids at the front of the venue felt the surge of the London crowd pushing behind them and melted in genuine but slightly unjustified terror toward the back of the venue. From that point on the night was all melody and tension. They were quite remarkable!
'I'd like it here if I could leave and see you from a long way away.'
I haven't told the whole story about Fables here. I can't. Nobody can. It's one of the best open-ended, inexplicable records ever made. You can talk and write about other R.E.M. albums but this one remains elusive. Even to the people who made it I imagine. It's like a fish out of water, flip flopping on planks. It's crammed full of great songs, some of the best this band ever wrote, but none of them done full justice.
'He had a dream one night. That the tree had lost its middle...'
As I write, Peter Buck, the guitarist of R.E.M. and one of the guiding visionaries of this great band has turned sixty and is heading on to sixty one. I wonder what he thinks of this album. I think I read a quote from him today that said that nobody else could have made this particular record. In that respect he's entirely right.'
Things Found on My Local's Jukebox # 225 Mac DeMarco
And here's another. A song on the jukebox last night, partly for Sean, who works behind the bar, likes this album, and was in Rosie's with his family for his graduation do.
Song(s) of the Day # 1,269 Mac DeMarco
From the new Mac DeMarco. I'm not crazy about the whole thing, it does seem to follow this 'mellow fellow' vibe all the way through, but a couple of songs at a time it is pretty effective.
Monday, July 10, 2017
Songs About People # 419 Casey Jones
Almost mythical American railroader and hero inspires Mississippi John Hurt.
Song of the Day # 1,268 Autoclave
Washington D.C. band of the Nineties. Seeds of Sleater Kinney, bit of Television. Sprinkling of Dr. Seuss.
Sunday, July 9, 2017
Songs About People # 418 Myla Goldberg
The Decemberists sing about novelist and musician Myla Goldberg on their 2003 record Her Majesty The Decemberists which makes a number of references to her 2000 debut Bee Season.
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