Songs About People # 997 Oswald Mosley

More from Arthur Kitchener. This one for one of the most regrettable men in Brutish history.

Things Found on My Local's Jukebox # 437 Stereolab

Sleek, modernist and utterly clinical. Along with French Disko, the Stereolab hit that never was.

Albums of the Year # 36 Rustin' Man - Drift Code

First posted way back in February.

When Paul Webb started making Drift Code, the second album by Rustin Man, he had a newborn daughter. She's now seventeen and the record is finally out. It would be a shame or worse if the result of such extended labour were not worth hearing. Fortunately it very much is. Certainly one of the most eccentric and doggedly leftfield records anybody is likely to release in 2019 but one that still fits within recognisable categories and gives much to the listener in return for the attention it demands.

Webb originally came to public notice during the Eighties as bassist of English band Talk Talk, a group who first came out with a clutch of pretty conventional New Romantic singles but then took flight with two of the most adventurous albums in the whole of Pop history, Whether you personally take to Spirit of Eden or Laughing Stock, the two landmark albums that utterly recast their narrative is a matter of personal taste. Despite their moods of intense and sustained atmospheric beauty which won over countless critics and fans, (who have stayed with the records ever since), they certainly left themselves open to the charge of preciousness. Probably if you find yourself in the second camp of thought, you may struggle with Drift Code.

I certainly approached the record, produced over almost two decades in Webb's barn, with a certain amount of reserve. I'm always slightly wary about records that project themselves as art, but in this case a couple of plays have worn down my defences. Drift Code is an album that slots nicely next to records like Robert Wyatt's Rock Bottom, Bowie's Low, Scott Walker's Tilt and Kate Bush's Aerial on record shelves and remarkably is not shamed by such lofty comparisons, even though I wouldn't necessarily say that it's as good a record as any of these four.

What I would say about Drift Code is that it's pretty good company with no little eccentric pop charm to bring to the table. Listen to fourth track, Our Tomorrows for example. It's got one hell of a tune, albeit a wonky, unorthodox one which points to another possible reference point. Berthold Brecht and Kurt Weil laid down some of the most significant lyrical and melodic flagstones for Rock music to eventually take a more adventurous route through the forest and Webb seems to have taken notes, like Morrison, Bowie, Walker and Iggy Pop before him. 

Webb and Rustin Man have chosen a potentially rocky artistic road, fraught with obvious pitfalls. I'm pleased to report that for me personally they succeed for the most part and their sheer ambition is certainly to be applauded. Drift Code seems to me a record that will reward repeated listening greatly. Best listened to in its entirety when you have a good hour on your hands and can give it your full, undivided attention.

Songs of the Year # 36 Pixies

Pixies returned this year with a more than solid album, Beneath The Eyrie, Here was what I thought the standout song. And what I wrote about it in August:

Following Iggy yesterday, here's something new from another one of the grandees of all Rock and Roll. Pixies with a song called Catfish Kate ahead of a new album. Deeply familiar, essentially it could easily have been on Doolittle or Bossanova, when first I heard it I thought it was a bit limp. Since then I've listened to it continually, each time finding its familiarity progressively more moving. The way Pixies can make chord changes so effectively, impacting on the emotional mood of the listener. the way Charles Thompson's lyrical world is so refined and specifically his. The way they're middle aged but still just so damned good! Not conquering new territory, just reclaiming theirs. Somehow no-one can do what they do. They know it.

Song of the Day # 2,129 W.H. Lung

Mancunians fuse Metronomy and Suicide to telling effect. This is just one track from their new album Incidental Music. It's enough for now. I'll investigate further.

Songs About People # 996 Derek Bentley

Another in a mini-series of three, this time from The Hobo Manifesto an album of songs by Arthur Kitchener. The first for Derek Bentley whose hanging in the early Fifties in one of the great injustices of the legal system certainly played a not inconsiderable part in leading to the end of Capital Punishment in the UK.

Albums of the Year # 37 Program - Show Me

One of my 'new band discoveries' of the year. From October.

My new favourite band Part blah, blah, blah. For anyone taking notes, the Australian and more specifically the Melbourne music scene is in ridiculously rude health right now. Every couple of weeks it seems a new, apparently fully formed band or artist leaps into view. Almost every one of them armed with a gripping new take on familiar pop thrills.

Latest suspects are Program, a young five-piece, whose debut album Show Me dropped just last Friday. Program are reminiscent of other bands on the scene, most  immediately Possible Humans and Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever but present their own and highly exciting fresh slant on things.

Show Me hits the ground running with opening track Another Day and then never lets up. Full of moments that relive and revivify the guitar spirit of the years between 1978 and 1984 underlining exactly why that was such a golden pop era, it's an altogether brilliant set.

Essentially the record plays out like a love affair with how good twin guitars can sound together. Offering up reminders of Wire, The Only Ones, Television, The Cars, The Passions, Pylon, The Clean, The Chills  and The Go-Betweens but at the same time sounding effortlessly contemporary, the eleven songs here are prosaic, brilliantly plotted (ad)ventures.

Clipped matter of fact one or two word titles clinically demonstrate Program's no thrills, no nonsense approach to things. Fronted by a couple of singers taking turns at the mic, one slightly ingenue the other more worldly wise, the songs concerns are fascinating if oblique.

Definitely ones to watch, it will be really interesting to see where they go next. Out now on Anti-Fade Records, home of co-conspirators, Parsnip, Primo and Bananagun, these guys are definite contenders. Get with their Program!

Songs of the Year # 37 Maps

Song of the Day # 2,128 Swamp Dogg

Referenced in the introduction to It Gets Me Home This Curving Track, the collection of essays by Ian Penman, which I got yesterday and will more than likely be my music related book of the year. Swamp Dogg was an R &B singer, musician, songwriter and producer. This song is merely an introduction to his charms.

Things Found on My Local's Jukebox # 436 The Left Banke

Belle & Sebastian came from here.

Songs About People # 995 Claude Debussy

From the strange but compelling The Undivided Five by A Winged Victory for the Sullen.

Albums of the Year # 38 Neutrals - Kebab Disco

Written in July:

My favourite new band, Part blah, blah, blah.. Yes, I know I say this a lot, but Bay Area trio Neutrals are quite definitely my favourite new band this week. And one of the reasons for that, apart from their obvious musical charms. are the fact that they are truly a  Bay Area band with a difference.

And that difference is that singer and main songwriter Alan McNaughton actually hails from Lanarkshire, Glasgow and, as the band's debut album Kebab Disco readily attests, you can take the boy out of Lanarkshire and move him to San Francisco but you cannot take Lanarkshire...oh you do the rest.

Kebab Disco is something of a concept, but trust me, it's not likely to be a concept album that you've heard before. Because it's a DIY Punk / New Wave concept in the best traditions of Television Personalities, Wire, Wreckless Eric, Patrick Fitzgerald, The Jam and Billy Bragg. With the added attraction of Scottish accents.

The concept in question is McNaughton's own story. So what we get is tales of smalltown Scottish life in the early Nineties moving on to McNaughton's shift across the pond after meeting his future wife at Glasgow's King Tut's Wah Wah Hut where he goes on to document San Francisco's growing corporatisation and remaining an indie punk as you experience middle age.

The man has a short story writer's eye for detail. Each song is a self-contained capsule of time and place, the journey from youth to experience. I could document it in greater detail but the tale is all told in this interview with The Sunderland Echo and by the record itself. Just splendid!

Songs of the Year # 38 Drawing Boards

Song of the Day # 2,127 SPELLLING

Songs Heard on the Radio # 331 Justin Hinds & the Dominoes

Old School Ska. Sunday morning.

Songs About People # 994 Vince Taylor

Golden Earring do one for the partial inspiration for Ziggy Stardust. 

Albums of the Year # 39 Boogarins - Sombrou Duvida

From May.

Brazilian band Boogarins are back with a new album Sombre Duvida and it's one long pleasurable dive into aquatic sensation, like the rare occasions when you get to take an exotic holiday and take a morning dip into the pool. Boogarins have access to a whole range of moods and ambiences that aren't immediately available to American and British bands and they exploit the cultural gift of their upbringing to construct a multi-textured and layered record that consistently seems to resist the forces of gravity as well as easy categorisation.

Of course as they sing in Portuguese, a whole seam of what they are doing here is obscured to this reviewer at least but it matters not one whit. What is instantly apparent is the sheer richness of the palette they work from. Sombre Duvida is one vast psych exploration of colour and dissonance. Drawing on the magical Tropicalia sound that artists like Os Mutantes and Caetano Veloso crafted in their homeland in the late sixties, it's a joy to experience a reinvention of that ambience recast in contemporary surroundings.

Psychedelic in the absolutely specific Brazilian sense, the album eschews standard verse chorus structures to explore a sea of infinite possibilities and positivity. The band take their name from a jasmine flower which translates as 'pure love' and it's fantastically apt. Boogarins are the one current Brazilian band of their kind, (there are umpteen others for those wishing to unearth them) making genuine inroads into European and American markets. There's ample evidence here as to why. 

Sombre Duvida is not the first document of their appeal, they've been putting out records of a similar stripe for over half a decade but it does find them experimenting courageously with their forms. Constructing and reconstructing, breaking down and forging onward, a journey of discovery, wonder and unknown pleasures. An album I look forward to becoming more and more familiar with over the coming months.

Songs of the Year # 39 Working Men's Club

Song of the Day # 2,126 Chali 2na & Kraft Cuts

Confessions of a Reluctant Superhero, another record the end of year list from Rough Trade has brought to my attention. An old school Rap / Hip Hop  concept album about, well exactly what its name says. Here is, no my ears, the choice cut from it.

The Mystery Lights

Songs About People # 993 Ann Peebles

Albums of the Year # 40 Penelope Isles - Until The Tide Creeps In

From July:

Until The Tide Creeps In, is the charming and noteworthy debut album from Brighton four-piece Penelope Isles released last Friday. Driven by brother and sister songwriting combination Jack and Lily Wolter, it's a highly aquatic sounding album, appropriate given the band's place of residence and the record sleeve picture of some hairy bloke, (possibly the Wolter dad),  gesticulating triumphantly over the full on sandcastle he's just created.

What this is is definitely Indie in the definitive sense. It reminded me at first of Shoegaze most particularly and took me back to a spectacular gig I saw in 1990 where Pale Saints and Lush played together at a spectacular gig at Norwich Art Centre during my last few months at university. From a cursory look at interviews with Penelope Isles it seems highly unlikely that they've taken notes from those two bands. Radiohead and Tame Impala seem to be the most prominent mentions. Anyhow, Until The Tide Creeps In is a good enough record to merit consideration on its own assets alone, which are appreciable. 

At first listening I preferred the Lily fronted songs to the Jack fronted ones but on repeat plays found his were creeping up on me too. Anyhow, it's like with Big Star, you don't have to choose between Chilton and Bell, and the variety of moods and slants of subtle attack on the album is one of its greatest drawing points. It's tuneful, it's breezy, it's thoughtful and it's a record that should be one the discerning listener will keep coming back to over the coming months.

Songs of the Year # 40 DIIV

Song of the Day # 2,125 Do Nothing

Great song and video from young, Nottingham band. Haunted by Mark E. Smith in the laconic, offbeat delivery but there's something sprightly and fresh about the whole affair that makes me highly curious as to what else they can do.

Things Found on My Local's Jukebox # 435 Echo & the Bunnymen

Fancied hearing With a Hip, the second track from The Bunnymen's masterpiece Heaven Up Here in The Newcastle Arms. So I requested it on the jukebox. When it arrived I got a live version from 2015 instead of the original. Played it and it sounds fine anyhow. A reminder of what a very fine live band they are.

Songs About People # 992 Ray Liotta

Appreciation for Ray Liotta. In French.

Albums of the Year # 41 Parsnip - When the Tree Bears Fruit

From August.

A couple of years back, Parsnip, a Melbourne four-piece, first reared their collective heads on here with their debut single which I posted on Christmas Day. Since then, they've returned intermittently with fine, whimsical, songs and EPs as they made their way towards their debut album. Here it is, a great work of pop confection, eleven track When the Tree Bears Fruit, released yesterday.

 

The question with this outfit was always going to be whether their particular brand of childlike poesy would stretch to merit a thirty minute listening experience. I'm delighted to be able to report that it does. I've just spent the required half hour in its company to check it out and will be back for more. I'm sure of that.

What Parsnip do is soft harmonised kitsch psychedelia of the kind first peddled by The Strawberry Alarm Clock and their sort way back in the day. The other obvious seeds of their inspiration are Flying Nun records of the early to mid Eighties, most particularly The Chills and Look Blue Go Purple. Even occasionally early Orange Juice.

As with many of these three bands best records, When the Tree Bears Fruit is a retreat to the Arcadian idyll of happy childhood. A series of lush, melodic neatly but deliberately loosely constructed tunes that celebrate the moments in life when the universe felt infinite and anything seemed possible.

Discover the record's charms for yourself. It's regressive tendencies remarkably never grate because the intentions are genuinely sincere and wiser than they might appear at first glance. The profundity of the nursery rhyme. Parsnip are much sweeter than their name might suggest and this is one of the rough and ready Rough Trade friendly DIY  treats of the year. A record whose appeal I feel sure will endure.

Songs of the Year # 41 The Wellington

Song(s) of the Day # 2,124 BCUC

The Rough Trade Album of the Year List gives me a chance to catch up on records like this. The Healing by BCUC, (Bantu Continua Uhuru Consciousness), a Soweto septet that blow up one hell of a proper storm.

Just the three tracks but a multitude of consciousness. Dive in and enjoy!

Songs About People # 991 Lino Ventura

Song for the rugged Italian-French movie star.

Albums of the Year # 42 James Yorkston - The Route to the Harmonium

First posted back in March.

James Yorkston has become over his fifteen years of making records, something of a British Folk legend. For this is what his music is. Folk at its most reflective and ruminative with an inbuilt awareness of lives that have been lived and the delicate and transient of the lives that we ourselves are experiencing.

His new record, The Route to the Harmonium, ( and that is one terrific album title), is another brick in his wall, a record to slide onto a shelf of an excellent body of work. Best listened to early in the morning as the world renews itself in light outside your window, like all good records it's best absorbed in sequence and in its entirety. I did this yesterday morning and it's an experience I'll never quite forget. Like all the best journeys.

The Route to the Harmonium breathes in the air it was written and recorded in and breathes or occasionally spits it back out. It's what you, (or at least I), want from music, an unexpected invitation into a thinker, writer and artisan's universe.

Some time back in 2014 Irishman Adrian Crowley's Some Blue Morning was my favourite album of that particular year. The Route to the Harmonium plays a similar trick to that wonderful record. It summons something quite magical up for the listener. Makes the silence speak.

Songs of the Year # 42 Worn-Tin

Highlight from Worn-Tin's wonderful Cycles album which could easily have made my End of Year Album list.

Song of the Day # 2,123 Shooby Taylor

Remarkable free-form Jazz scatting from the Songs in the Key of Z compilation.

Modern Nature & Olden Yolk

Things Found on My Local's Jukebox # 434 Conway Twitty

One from James. At Rosie's.

Songs About People # 990 Zsa Zsa Gabor

Not Erasure's finest single. Zsa Zsa played Minerva in Batman. The last of this particular series within a series.

Albums of the Year # 43 Kit Sebastian - Mantra Moderne

First posted in July.

Mantra Moderne, the debut album from London based duo Kit Sebastian, (out today) is a hipster's pipedream. Appearing as if assimilated from the record collections of the cooler than thou set, you can do little better than quote from their press release to sum up what's going on here: 'a stunning contemporary masterpiece that fuses Anatolian Psychedelia , Brazilian Tropicalia, 60s European pop and American jazz. A must for fans of Khruangbin, Portishead, Arthur Verocai, Goat, Caetana Veloso, Tom Ze, Os Mutantes, Cortes and co.'

So, that lot. It seems there's not a box on the hipper than hip checklist that's not ticked. The blurb above serves well anyhow to describe what the record itself sounds like. The soundtrack for an exclusive party thrown by Stereolab and Charlotte Gainsbourg for their cool mates. Mantra Moderne positively floats with upwardly mobile aspiration, and will doubtless be on the player at Rough Trade Shops up and down the land for weeks.

It's quite immaculately done, groovy global cherry picking of the most tasteful kind imaginable. The Kit Sebastian pair, Kit Martin and Merve Erdem shed and slip on outfits from track to track and as if by magic the listener finds themselves by turn on dancefloors in Rio, New York, London, Paris, Istanbul and Mumbai. It's all just seamless.

Frankly, Kit Sebastian never put a foot wrong. Taken on its own terms, Mantra Moderne is pretty much a perfect record. In some respects it feels like a companion piece to Vanishing Twin's wonderful The Age of Immunology, released a few weeks back, which mines similar terrain. If anything this a more cerebral operation than that one, you'll do well to detect much human heart in operation but it's certainly clinical, and very, very cool.

Songs of the Year # 43 Injury Reserve

The whole of the Injury Reserve album was worth a listen. This was the song I liked best.

Song(s) of the Day # 2,122 The Bardots

In my second year at university I shared a house with a couple of Post Grad science students for a couple of terms. In addition to their studies, they made up half of a gigging band named, (I kid you not), The Legendary Gazelles. I saw them a couple of times, they played sprightly, no frills New Wave music. Essentially unpretentious and likeable, like the two themselves.

They shared Norwich stages and equipment occasionally with a young band called The Bardots who were altogether of a different stamp. Decked in paisley, coiffured and slightly preening, if only in a Norfolk sense, in contrast with The Gazelles where pretty much everything was throwaway, you got the feeling there was a lot more career ambition and drive at work here, though always in a strictly provincial sense. 

After the Gazelles and I parted company with them, The Bardots went on to gain a certain amount of national attention, music press and evening radio play over the next few years without ever really threatening to break big. They released an album in 1992 called Eye-Baby, which still stands up reasonably well at the same time as sounding utterly of its time. Like flies in aspic. Taking me back to watching them brooding onstage in dank Indie clubs the first time round with Andy, my gig going mate of the time. 

Listening to the record the other day for the first time was a strange experience, transporting me back to my younger self. The Bardots are almost but not fully formed. Clearly small town unrealised youth, reminiscent of contemporaries The House of Love and The Telescopes but most obviously of Suede, the band who were emerging at the same time and would come to encapsulate all of this brooding suburban tension and frustration and fly it to the stars.

The Legendary Gazelles used to scoff at The Bardots and their pretensions. You can hear why. Their songs never quite break through to the sunlit meadow that they are aiming for. Still. I wouldn't wish to be uncharitable. Like I said, they remind me of my gauche younger self. At least they got it sufficiently together to give us this.

Songs About People # 989 Ida Lupino

Ida Lupino was a trailblazer in many respects. An English-American actress, singer and producer, she was one of the few female film-makers working within the 1950's Hollywood system. She played the imperiously named Dr. Cassandra Spellcraft in Batman.

Albums of the Year # 44 Modern Nature - How to Live

Bands don't seem to split now, the way they did in the old days. Not like The Beatles and The Smiths did for example, way back when. Through irredeemable personal and musical differences. Going their separate ways once and for all. Instead they seem to splinter or scatter, move off to separate projects before coming back together.

There was at least one proper old school group sundering in 2019. Ultimate Painting, one of my favourite bands of recent years, a collaboration between  James Hoare and Jack Cooper which had produced three excellent albums together, went their separate ways due to some personal rancour apparently. A fourth album they had recorded together which was clearly a factor in their split was left unreleased.

A shame, but as it transpired not a disaster. Both Hoare and Cooper moved onto new or pre-existing projects and both produced fine records during 2019. Hoare with The Proper Ornaments and Cooper with Modern Nature. The Proper Ornaments Six Lenins was a neat, understated Indie guitar album the way they used to make them back in the late Eighties and early Nineties. Modern Nature's How To Live was a more layered, nuanced affair. A more considered record. And ultimately, a better one.

Cooper has been a considerable talent for some time and with How to Live which he worked on with Will Young also of Beak among others, he proved it once more. It's a wonderful blend of influence almost suggesting what might have transpired should Fairport Convention, Cluster and Roxy had chosen to work together in the early Seventies. A fascinating proposition and a record that more than lived up to its billing.

Songs of the Year # 44 Proper Ornaments

Song(s) of the Day # 2,121 Big Supermarket

An absolutely fabulous record that's been brought to my attention of late. 1800 by the plain as plainly named  could be Big Supermarket, which seems to have come out at some point last year. The name is plain but the record isn't, distilling the essence and beauty of the Flying Nun Record Label's finest moments of the Eighties over its 35 minute playing span.

One of the things that was most appealing about The Clean, The Chills, The Bats, The Verlaines, Look Blue Go Purple and the other main players of that Dunedin scene was how the minimalism and simplicity of their musical approach was channelled so creatively through ingenuity and drive to forge records of marvellous warmth, mystery and unfathomable depths. 

Big Supermarket harness a similar modus operandi. The early Fall records were a particular spiritual influence on that scene, particularly The Clean, and you can trace the surly Mancs centrifugal pull here too on the abstract chug of tracks like Personal Pronouns and SuoerHwy.

It's that version of The Fall that I still like the most, before Martin Bramah, Una Baines and Marc Riley gave up knocking heads with Mark E. Smith and surrendered the reins to him in the early Eighties. Big Supermarket have plenty of their shambling charm and though 1800 is by no means a coherent record it's certainly a highly compelling one.

There's very little information available about who exactly Big Supermarket are except that they appear to hail from Australia. No band photos or social media presence seem to be available at all. Which leads you to suppose they're a collaboration of some kind. Really it matters little. 1800 is happy to stand on its own merits and they're quite considerable.

The number of Australian bands putting out superior product these days is frankly beyond comprehension. Big Supermarket stand shoulder to shoulder with the very best of them, even though we don't really even know who they are. Many thanks to Darren, supporter and occasional poster on this blog for bringing these to my notice. Something of an instant, if obscure, classic.

Songs Heard on the Radio # 330 The Districts

It's gratifying to see a young bad hit their stride a few years into their career. Such seems the case here with Pennsylvania's The Districts as they make their way to their fourth album You Know I'm Not Going Anywhere. This, Hey Jo the outlier for that has a sad lonely grandeur they had hinted at before. Something of The National, something of Sharon Van E and something all their own.

Things Found on My Local's Jukebox # 433 Space Lady

Space Lady's Greatest Hits is on the jukebox at The Newcastle Arms thanks to me requesting it. This sounded suitably spooky yesterday. A great deal of plundering this wonderful record's considerable riches is probably on the cards.