I'm not sure that bands have good names anymore! Future Islands and War On Drugs seem set to sweep album and song of the year awards and don't think that's right given their respective names. Here is my idea of good names for bands.
1. 13th Floor Elevators
A fine name. Summed up the psychedelic state. Also worthy of mention, Country Joe & the Fish. Jefferson Airplane. Moby Grape. Buffalo Springfield.
2. Mott the Hoople
The best of the Glam names. Also worthy of mention. Sparks. Chicory Tip. Roxy Music.
3. Led Zeppelin
The unrelated, two name, slightly heavy thing. Also, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath and slightly lesser bands, Wishbone Ash, Humble Pie and Uriah Heap.
4. Joy Division
Post-Punk. Confused, angry and slightly aggressive. PiL, the Pop Group, Gang of Four, Scritti Politti.
5. Love
.
For a band that might have been called Hate. They stand alone on this respect.
6. The Triffids
Birthday Party, Triffids. Go Betweens. All named after books or plays. A Southern, literary revolt.
7. R.E.M.
So many well named early 80's American bands. Violent Femmes The Dream Syndicate, Mission Of Burma, Minutemen, Rain Parade, Husker Du, Long Ryders.
8. Television
Suicide, The Ramones, Richard Hell & the Voidoids, Pere Ubu. The greatest scene of all.
9. The Smiths
Once again they stand alone in this respect.
10. Jesus & Mary Chain
Weather Prophets. Primal Scream. June Brides. Shop Assistants. Pretty good names for a small, indie scene.
11. The Slits
Plus Hole and The Breeders.
12. New York Dolls
Proto-Punks, New York Dolls, Stooges, MC5, Modern Lovers and The Velvet Underground were all well named.
13. Echo & the Bunnymen
This band and The Teardrop Explodes had quite the right idea!
14. Neu!
Pretty much all the Krautrock bands had great names. Can. Kraftwerk. Faust. Amon Duul. What more do you want!
15. God Speed You Black Emperor
The only truly great modern band name I can think of!
J.Mascis' birthday so here's the whole of Dinosaur. Jr's exceptional second album. There's a great account of the band's early days on the road and their complete dysfunctionality in Michael Azerad's Our Band Could Be Your Life.
Now here's a revelation. Ought are a Montreal band who put out their debut album this year. It must be difficult naming a band nowadays given that most of the great ones have already been taken and Ought have plumped on a semi-modal verb for their own moniker and somehow it works given their earnestness. At points they sound like Talking Heads, most of all but also Pere Ubu, Gang of Four, Pylon, all kinds of Post Punk and enough like themselves to make them seem very promising indeed. They must be a cracking experience live. There's personal and political politics there and lots and lots of feeling. Highly recommended.
Very Talking Heads this one. Would slot right in on Fear of Music.
'I sang, “Roll away the stone”.Set up a trembling in my bones.I sat there all alone.Just cried and cried.I saw the moonlight’s mirrored glow.On that old dirty city’s snow.I sat there feeling low.O my, O my.'
I woke up with a Phophorescent song spinning in my head this morning and took a while to identify it so am revisiting this album which I reviewed on Sunday here. There's definitely a strongly religious element to that record which I really didn't go into there. Here's Roll Away The Stone by Mott The Hoople which it namechecks. Strangely, this has never seemed remotely religious to me but Phosphorescent use it for their own purposes.
I'm thinking quite a bit of Tom Waits and his great body of work since he just turned 65. Here's a great interview with him from The Guardian a few years back.
Tom Waits: 'I look like hell but I'm going to see where it gets me'
It's decades since Tom Waits had a drink and his music has just got weirder and better. With his 17th album out, he heads for his local roadhouse (for coffee) and talks about songwriting, hard living and his fear of phones
Tom Waits, photographed this summer near his home in Sonoma County, California. Photograph: Jesse Dylan
"I used to think that all great recordings happened at about 3am," Tom Waits is telling me, in the conspiratorial, wasted and wounded voice that still seems made for those early hours. "So my first studio experiences, I wanted to be recording after the bars closed. I just thought that's when it all happened. And it worked for me for a while, I guess. But I don't believe that so much any more. I realise now there's more than one way to sneak up on a herd of cattle…"
Waits is sitting in the back room of a roadhouse near his home town of Santa Rosa, where the industrialised farmscape north of San Francisco starts becoming wine country. Like him, the Washoe House is something of a revered and ramshackle institution. Just about every visitor since Ulysses S Grant – who reportedly made a speech from the balcony in a state of undress after an amorous encounter on the way upstairs – has pinned a dollar bill to the ceiling, and no one has ever been desperate enough to take one down. Country music is playing on a jukebox to which Waits, ever alert, has one ear cocked, like a dog in front of a fire. A couple of times he will break off from talking to grunt a snatch of some cowboy melody.
On the table in front of him is the book he is reading, Crow Planet, about how corvids are "very much smarter than you might imagine", a cup of black coffee (he gave up booze a long while ago, having got his share in early) and a notebook in which he keeps his ideas for songs (He occasionally reads from it at random: "Here's one: 'It's good to be 40 feet tall on a billboard or something but not when your wife's dying of cancer and you just knocked up the babysitter.' Another 'I wish I was a component of water and I could go off in the sun and just dry out…'). He gives the impression of being in a state both of constant startled awareness, and vague puzzlement at the world. Some of this has to do with his hair, which seems to have led a long and interesting life of its own. Unusually, he is not wearing a hat.
We are talking about his latest record, Bad As Me, his 17th, and his newfangled habit, at 61, of getting to the studio early in the morning. "These days I want to be there before anyone has had a musical thought," he says. "If you are making a record you are the one saying 'action', and you are the one saying 'cut' and you have to be sure that the most interesting thing is not going on outside the frame. I try to pay attention to what people are doing the moment they come into the room. If they are just goofing around before we begin that may be the best thing they do all day. I have to be waiting."
Since the musicians on Bad As Me include such legends as Keith Richards, the bass player Flea (of the Red Hot Chili Peppers), and the extravagantly gifted Marc Ribot you can see why Waits might want to be on his toes. One of the tracks on the album finds him duetting with Richards. "I'm the last leaf on the tree" they croak fabulously in unison and you are half convinced that the end times might be upon us.
In this sense you could be tempted to think that this is a glimpse of late-period Tom Waits, the home straight. The fact is, though, he has always liked the idea of being last man standing. If there has been a constant theme of his career – which has taken in two Grammy awards, scene-stealing acting roles for the likes of Robert Altman and Terry Gilliam, an Oscar nomination and a unique gift for performance that made his rare live shows just about the hottest ticket in any town – it is the constant sense of imminent dereliction. His first album, Closing Time, made when he was 24, already saw him adopting the broken-down voice of a survivor of all that life and love might throw at him. The hats he has taken on and off since as a performer, late-night barfly, all American hobo, fairground huckster, have all suggested several lifetimes of hard-won experience. Now he is finally approaching the age he has always imagined himself to be, I wonder if it feels like he hoped it would?
He gives his guttural half-laugh. "It's the usual story. When I was younger I wanted to be older," he says, "now I am older I am not quite so sure."
The album is the latest in his heroic one-man attempt to include the whole history of American song in his own voice – now bellowing like a deranged Louis Armstrong, now essaying a Marvin Gaye falsetto, now groaning like Lead Belly, always very much himself. Waits likes to divide his repertoire into "grand weepers and grim reapers" or "bawlers and brawlers"; Bad As Me is no exception to this. It starts with the most convincing runaway train you've ever heard, Waits shovelling coal insanely, and then shifts gears between desperate, defeated ballads and the kind of "rumpus" you imagine from the party scene of Where the Wild Things Are. ("Anyone who has ever played a piano," Waits likes to say, "would really like to hear how it sounds when dropped from a 12th-floor window." His music satisfies that curiosity.) The band are required to do more than keep up. "It's like Charlemagne or one of those old guys said," he notes. "You want soldiers who, when they get to a river after a long march, don't start rooting for their canteen in their pack, but just dive right in." It seems beside the point to ask Waits whether he feels a keener sense of mortality. Death has never been far from his thoughts as a songwriter ("I guess it's a pretty popular subject among those of us still breathing," he says.) But he signs off Bad As Me with a chilling little coda – "What's it like when you die?" – imagining the eternal hangover in increasingly baroque similes. Is that the kind of thing that keeps him awake at nights?
"Well, I guess," he says. "But that song started out just as a riff, taking triple rhymes, batting them back and forth. 'Like a jail door closing, like a male whore dozing…' And so on." The free association lets him access some strange truths he believes. The other place that Waits has always gone to look for those surprises is in his own voice. Does its scalded range still shock even him from time to time? "I'd like to think so," he says. "Jimmy Stewart said he stopped making movies because he didn't like the way he looked on screen anymore. I'm more the guy who says I look like hell but I'm going to see where it gets me."
What started out for Waits as a stage act – the ultimate raddled crooner – became a compulsive caricature and is now a kind of larger-than-life persona that he can slip in and out of as he likes. Looking back though, I wonder why, as a kid growing up in southern California, he was so keen to advance his years?
"Probably because I knew I was going to have to be my own father," he says. "There was a need for maturity and guidance from somewhere and I was going to have to provide it for myself – even if it meant putting on an overcoat and a hat and looking in a mirror and squinting a bit. It's pretty usual for a kid from a broken home."
That latter fact has always seemed the most salient scrap of knowledge about Tom Waits's much mythologised background ("I was conceived one night in April 1949 at the Crossroads Motel in La Verne, amidst the broken bottle of Four Roses, the smouldering Lucky Strike, half a tuna salad sandwich…" and so on). When he was 10 or 11, his father – a Spanish teacher who used to drive his son from suburban Los Angeles over the Mexican border for haircuts and to listen to mariachi bands – walked out and didn't come back. Waits became, he told one interviewer, immediately fixated with dads. He would go around to his friends' houses not to see them but so he could hang out with their old man. At 12, he carried his grandfather's walking stick and wore a trilby (the hats have never gone away) and he would clear his throat and ask his friends' fathers stuff like: "So how long you been at Aetna, Bob?"
It was a natural progression to extend his search for adult wisdom to music, he suggests. I recall how he once described his childhood as "kneeling by a jukebox, praying to Ray Charles". Did they ever meet? "I never got to know Ray, no," he says. "But I did shake his hand at an airport once, which was a very profound moment for me. He was surrounded by a cadre of very scary-looking people. It was like a president was in town, everyone on walkie-talkies, but for some reason I just walked though and grabbed Ray's hand. It felt like the biggest thing I ever held, just this huge hand. And I squeezed it and just said, 'Thanks, Ray, thanks for everything.'" He pauses, looks aslant. "It wasn't so profound for him, I guess, but it wasn't meant to be."
Though Waits has never been a mainstream star like Charles, few performers attract more ardent disciples. Do people come up and grab his hand for the same reason now?
"There are a few people who want to let you know," he says. "And that's maybe profound for them, I guess. But the odd thing about this life is always that you spend half your time trying to get people to listen to you and the rest of the time trying to get them to leave you the fuck alone."
Over the years, Waits has developed more effective strategies for deflecting invasive attention than most. His attitude to autobiography is summed up in the lines from "Tango Till They're Sore" on his seminal album Rain Dogs: "I'll tell you all my secrets but I lie about my past…" He has always appeared to work on the basis that if you make the yarns entertaining enough, why would anyone want to know the truth? There have been a couple of attempts at biography, notably Barney Hoskyns's indefatigable Lowside of the Road, but Waits guards his privacy with his life. Interviewers seeking facts have occasionally crashed and burned. In response to the bland questions of an Australian TV host, Don Lane, Waits infamously spent the first few minutes of live TV distractedly looking for an ashtray. When he looked up he noted the interviewer's discomfort. "What's up, Don, you are starting to sweat?"
There are one or two moments in our conversation when my attempts at cod psychology are greeted with an amused sneer. "Ah I get it, you're observing me, you're the Observer," but they don't last too long. (I also work for the Guardian, I point out. "Ah, so you're looking out for me, that's OK then.") Waits's original stage persona was born out of a similar sense of self-protective mythology. He suggests he feels a kinship with clowns, citing the Mexican hero Cantinflas as the performer he feels most sympathy with. Though he is capable of great pathos, nothing is ever quite in earnest in his music. Even his love songs carry the gruff awareness of their mechanics with them; he was compared with Kurt Weill before he knew Weill's music or Brecht's philosophy, but he had stumbled into the same theatrical territory.
To begin with, Waits had set about living the life his songs tended to describe. While performing in clubs, he dossed for a long while in cheap motels and flop houses in LA and occasionally lived out of the back of his '55 Buick. In some of this, he acknowledges, he was again trying on his dad's wayward life for size. He exorcised that ghost pretty much in his two-act musical Franks Wild Years in 1987 in which the eponymous hero torches the family home (Waits's dad was named Jesse Frank Waits, after the outlaw James brothers). The hard-living had reached its inevitable dead end. "There ain't nothing funny about being a drunk," he observed, looking back. "You know, I was really starting to believe there was something amusing and wonderfully American about a drunk. I ended up telling myself to cut that shit out."
The opportunity to do so came when he met his wife, Kathleen Brennan, in 1980 on the set of Francis Ford Coppola's One from the Heart. He was writing the music, she was helping to edit the script. They were married at 1am a couple of months later at the 24-hour Always Forever Yours Wedding Chapel in LA. His life was immediately transformed. They moved out up to the farm in Santa Rosa; he changed record labels in order to protect his musical freedom and to avoid the pressure to have hits; they began writing songs together and they raised three children.
Brennan is even more private than her husband, but he leaves you with little doubt she has been his soulmate as well as his muse. "My wife doesn't want me to say how long we've been married," he suggests. "Or, better, she likes me to say that she was basically a child bride. You know, 'They said it was wrong, but we didn't listen'; 'I told her I'd wait until she was old enough', that kind of thing." Brennan encouraged Waits to express the more dislocated sound he had wanted and which has given his career its adventurous longevity. "I think everyone has irreconcilable musical differences," he says. "You know when you throw a party, you think people will show up and no one will like each other. It's like that with music – parts of your musical psyche have never met other parts. You wonder if you should get them together. I used to think it was good to keep them apart. Now I kind of throw them in and see what happens."
The first collaboration with his wife, the critically acclaimed, triumphantly discordant, Swordfishtrombones, was Waits's turning point and he has never stopped reinventing. To begin with, on a very basic level, Brennan opened him up to new influences, he suggests.
"Her record collection and her library were both impressive compared to mine. When I met her most of my records were kind of stuck together with cheese and hair and oil and stuff. She had hers not only still in the cases but still in the little paper sleeve too. That in itself was something of a revelation."
Since then, they have shared pretty much everything, ("She washes, I dry," is how Waits describes their songwriting technique). The family firm has been extended by the presence of their middle son, Casey, playing drums on the last couple of albums. In one maudlin lament on the new record, Waits sings in time-honoured fashion: "I gave it all up for the stage." The great thing about this heartfelt sob, though, is that it is delivered in the full knowledge that he successfully avoided the fate he describes. Has contentment ever felt an enemy to his creativity?
He pauses, laughs. "Right when you asked that the jukebox played 'I'd like to settle down but they won't let me.' Merle Haggard. It's always a bit like that. People don't want you to be satisfied if you are a musician. And the scope for songs isn't that great. Most songs that aren't jump-rope songs, or lullabies, are cautionary tales or goodbye songs and road songs…"
Given the insistently improvised and homemade texture of his music, it is tempting to think Waits spends a good deal of his time out here in the sticks tinkering with farm machinery in his yard or fixing his truck. One inspiration for his music is Harry Partch, an American pioneer of the 40s and 50s, who not only invented his own instruments but created his own notation too. Waits's music still allows the possibility of "hitting a cabinet hard with a two by four" just for the hell of it. He distrusts digitalisation.
"Music has generally involved a lot of awkward contraptions, a certain amount of heavy lifting," he says. "The idea that it will just be a sort of vapour that you listen to out of speakers the size of a dime alarms me. It's like injecting yourself. Or eating alone."
He is, he says, equally wary of the ease of search and shuffle. "They have removed the struggle to find anything. And therefore there is no genuine sense of discovery. Struggle is the first thing we know getting along the birth canal, out in the world. It's pretty basic. Book store owners and record store owners used to be oracles, in that way; you'd go in this dusty old place and they might point you toward something that would change your life. All that's gone."
Does he ever stray online?
"No," he says. "But then I'm one of those guys that is still a bit afraid of the telephone, its implications for conversation. I still wonder if the jukebox might be the death of live music." If he feels out of kilter, he says, it's maybe in his genes. He was leafing through a musical dictionary the other day and he came across a definition for "waits" – "They were these guys who went door to door, carolling, bringing you the news, telling you the time. I was strangely reassured by that." He takes comfort, too, in the fact that the future is not uniformly distributed. "If I want to walk out in the desert and heat up a can of beans on a fire, I still can. In those movies like Gattaca or whatever, the space age stuff is always all there is. But in the world there is never just one way of living. It's more like a big junkyard. Put it this way: I'm not afraid I'm going to end up on a space station in aluminium-foil underwear."
Music itself is the closest he gets to time travel. He gestures toward the jukebox: "The studio is torn down, all the people who played on it are dead, the instruments have been sold off. But you are listening to a moment that happened in time 60 years ago and you are hearing it just as sharp as when it was made. That remains an amazing thing to me."
Photographs have the same ghostly quality for him. He pulls out a little camera to prove the point. "You used to be able to see the pictures of America's 10 most wanted men in the post office, but they stopped that. I keep them on here, instead." He flips the pictures of fugitive murderers and terrorists. "Just in case, you know."
Does he wake up paranoid or grateful?
He gathers up his crow book, finishes his coffee, pockets his song ideas. "I don't know. As Bob Dylan says, 'Fear and Hope: always sounds like a comedy team to me…'"
Ex Hex seem to inhabit a place where it's always somewhere between 1978 and 1979. Not a bad place to be alongside the other great moments in Pop history 1966 to 1967 and 1972 to 1973. Sorry to be so reactionary but nowhere else has come close. Oh all right, perhaps the Fifties! 1980 to '81? Anyway, their debut album, Rips, released earlier this year, sounds like a blast!
This third selection judiciously rips off Sweet Jane, Crimson & Clover and My Sharona during the course of its three minutes. Well why not!
My copy of Never Mind the Bollocks rarely, if ever gets played. Too familiar I suppose. This on the other hand, the b side of Anarchy in the UK, still sounds fresh.
Crackerjack was a British childrens' television programme in the Seventies that would herald the weekend, scheduled as it was at Five o'clock on a Friday evening. They did some of the oddest musical sketches imaginable, not least this skit on XTC's first big UK hit.
Jim would have been Seventy One today. Some fruits suggest he is alive and may be celebrating that fact as we speak. They are wrong. Morrison is much mocked, (there's certainly enough evidence in this video of his overbearing arrogance and pomposity), but say what you will The Doors left a great body of work behind them. This is perhaps their finest moment. I have been known to bellow this at the top of my lungs in Eastern European bars when it turns up on the music system. I suspect though that these days are behind me.
'Robert Vickers had left in a fit of pique, ''tired of working with three maniacs." Stuck in New York, we found this guy, who said he wanted to join. Turns out, he didn't play bass but the piano. He had some songs of his own that weren't bad, and when we were rehearsing "Bachelor Kisses", he mumbled to us (he did talk in a funny way) that the song was good enough for Roy Orbison. The rehearsals over a weekend didn't work out and Vickers came back. All that's left is one shot snapped by a stranger, on our way to a Bowery practice room.
Anyhow, happy birthday to "Tom", wherever you may be.'
'licorice tattoo turned a gun metal blue scrawled across the shoulders of a dying town the one eyed jacks across the railroad tracks and the scar on its belly pulled a stranger passing through he was a juvenile delinquent never learned how to behave but the cops would never think to look in burma shave
and the road was like a ribbon and the moon was like a bone he didn't seem to be like any guy she'd ever known he kinda looked like farley granger with his hair slicked back she says i'm a sucker for a fella in a cowboy hat how far are you going he said depends on what you mean he says i'm going thataway just as long as it's paved i guess you'd say i'm on my way to burma shave
and her knees up on the glove compartment took out her barrettes and her hair spilled out like rootbeer and she popped her gum and arched her back hell marysville ain't nothing but a wide spot in the road some night my heart pounds just like thunder i don't know why it don't explode cause everyone in this stinking town has got one foot in the grave and i'd rather take my chances out in burma shave
presley's what i go by why don't you change the station count the grain elevators in the rearview mirror mister anywhere you point this thing has got to beat the hell out of the sting of going to bed with every dream that dies here every mornin and so drill me a hole with a barber pole i'm jumping my parole just like a fugitive tonight why don't you have another swig and pass that car if you're so brave i wanna get there before the sun comes up in burma shave
and the spider web crack and the mustang screamed smoke from the tires and the twisted machine just a nickel's worth of dreams and every wishbone that they saved lie swindled from them on the way to burma shave
and the sun hit the derrick and cast a bat wing shadow up against the car door on the shot gun side and when they pulled her from the wreck you know she still had on her shades they say that dreams are growing wild just this side of burma shave .'
I've only taken two records back to the shop for a refund. Both times in the Eighties. One was the 12 inch record for Clock DVA called Resistance. The other was the second album from The Cowboy Junkies called Caution Horses. I regretted it both times. I've just bought the Clock DVA album that Resistance came from down at the Quayside for six quid and it's a fine if slightly crackling record. Cowboy Junkies next!
The latest Courtney and crew picture as my own personal find of the year finishes her European tour and heads home. Album to come next year with some luck!
The Captain's on the jukebox at Rosie's! Just the one song but it's a cracker. Possibly the most commercial thing he ever did. First track, second side on his first album. The marvellous Safe As Milk !
'
'Around the corner the wind blew back follow the yellow brick road It ended up in black on black I was taught the gift of love Smiling children painted joy sunshine bright girl and boy bag of trick s and candy sticks peppermint kite for my toy Yellow brick black on black Keep on walking and don't look back
I walked along happy and them came back I follow the yellow brick road Lost and found I saw you down on the bound off the bound Taught against the love yellow brick road took my load Sunshine girl sunshine girl come to my abode 1-2-3-4-5 miles long Oh I can't ever (so) go wrong Clouds were gray yesterday down on my shoulder it's time to play Yellow brick black on black Keep on walking and don't look back.'
'So I lost the place, lost the girl, and lost my mind.'
As we shift into December, the likes of me, trainspotter type boys, start thinking in terms of lists. Album of the year and such-like. I'm not entirely sure what brings this on. I guess it's a way of measuring the time. For me personally I feel it might be connected somehow with Christmas coming up and trying to recover the thrill of how excited I felt when I was really young on Christmas morning. Or else perhaps that a part of me always felt I should have become a music journalist, hence this blog.
Anyway, in terms of this years list, I'm probably going to struggle. Most of the records listed on websites and music magazines, don't do an enormous amount for me. My own favourite album is not listed on any of them, I'll come to that later in December. But this year has shifted me forwards to some extent in that writing this blog on a daily basis has encouraged me to listen to a broader range of music and dragged me somewhere towards the current day leading me to fall very heavily this year for a number of albums from 2013 if not 2014 . Including this one. So I'm going to buck a trend and write about my favourite record of last year. Next year I'll be fifty and promise to endeavour to step in line with everybody else before it's too late and I drift irretrievably towards carpet slippers and Trad Jazz.
This is just a remarkable, yearning, love-lorn, redemptive record. Almost entirely the work of singer-songwriter Matthew Houck who has been putting out records for over ten years now. This is the only one I know right now. I'll probably investigate further but this album in itself is more than enough. It's a mighty statement.
From the album sleeve onwards. This shows a cowboy hatted Houck tipping his peak and smiling broadly while a similar be-capped girl grins on the bed behind him. There seems to be another woman reclining on the bed between them and both appear to be in a vague state of undress. I immediately assumed it was a motel room though I might be wrong. In any case it effortlessly conveys the mythic sense of drifting, rootless, American experience. A life spent on the road, in rented rooms, bars and stores in a state of unhinged intoxication seeking a life of permanence. The love and reason that will ground you into fixed existence.
It's clear that Houck hasn't quite found that yet, or if he thought he has, he's just lost it again. This is life as viewed from the bottom of the glass and not wholly happily. It's a record inspired and set in motion by a series of traumatic events in his own life Losing his record space in New York City and losing a relationship as a result.
"The last time I was on the road, I thought, 'Just a few more months, and then I’ll go home and tend to everything.' But when I got back, everything was too far gone to fix, so there was fallout. Losing my place [in the Navy Yards] was a big deal. It’s a big space, and over the years I acquired a decent amount of gear. New York is a beast, man, it’s hard to find a place to do music unless you’re going to soundproof it. Relationships are tough when you're on the road, too - my girlfriend would come on some of the tours, but it wasn't easy. Drugs and booze were involved. So I lost the place, lost the girl, and lost my mind."
Muchacho soundtracks that. It's a document of pain and drift across a landscape that could be nowhere else but America. It makes me think of Gram Parsons, of Johnny Cash, of David Lynch, of Tarantino of Five Easy Pieces and The Last Picture Show of Paris, Texas, The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity and the Mythic West. It's rooted in all of that but also is a very modern sounding record. It's spiritual quest.
It sounds a little like Fleet Foxes and Midlake on occasion too. But it outlasts both of those contemporaries because it feels utterly grounded and bloodied in personal experience in a way their records simply aren't for me. Houck seems to be face down in the dirt for much of the record. To illustrate what I'm getting at I could probably do worse than quote second track and probably the album centrepiece Song For Zula.
'Some say love is a burning thing That it makes a fiery ring Oh but I know love as a fading thing Just as fickle as a feather in a stream See, honey, I saw love, You see it came to me It puts its face up to my face so I could see Yeah then I saw love disfigure me Into something I am not recognizing
See the cage, it called. I said, come on in I will not open myself up this way again Nor lay my face to the soil, nor my teeth to the sand I will not lay like this for days now upon end You will not see me fall, nor see me struggle to stand To be acknowledged by some touch from his gnarled hands You see the cage it called. I said, come on in I will not open myself this way again.
You see the moon is bright in that treetop night I see the shadows that we cast in the cold clean light I might fear I go and my heart is white And we race right out on the desert plains all night So honey I am now, some broken thing I do not lay in the dark waiting for day here Now my heart is gold, my feet are right And I'm racing out on the desert plains all night
So some say love is a burning thing That it makes a fiery ring All that I know love as a caging thing Just a killer come to call from some awful dream And all you folks, you come to see You just to stand there in the glass looking at me But my heart is wild, and my bones are steel And I could kill you with my bare hands if I was free.'
That's a remarkable level of writing right there. And the record as a whole rarely, if ever dips much below the mark it sets.
The album itself is a generous package. Gatefold sleeve, lyric sheet and various pictures of Houck, in his rhinestone hat, surrounded by adoring, wasted looking and again vaguely undressed young women. There's a seam of intoxicant fuelled bliss running across the record which for me is what keeps it contemporary. This is not a record that could have been made in 1973. But it's informed by the real-ness of those times in a way that much modern music isn't which is why it works so well for me.
'Give me ten long limbs I'll hold
Lazy rolling things of gold
Dress me down in a New York crowd
Lay me down and bawl me out.'
Like another contemporary Kurt Vile, Houck is quite willing to extend his songs to seven or eight minutes if the mood he's wishing to get across justifies it. And on this album it invariably does. I don't notice the passing of time when listening to Muchacho which is a remarkable tribute in itself. The mood is consistently spiritual, an individual on a vast enveloping landscape, seeking redemption, seeking rest.
'I sang 'Roll away the stone'
Set up trembling in my bones
I sat there all alone.
Just cried and cried.'
There's mariachi brass there when required. There's steel pedal. The ghost of Gram haunts the record more than anything else. I can hear him somewhere in virtually every track. Difficult to live up to, to say the least, but I imagine Gram would have liked the record.
The album is bookended by two pieces entitled Sun Arise! and Sun's Arising, largely acoustic and entirely Houck which seem to say the range of emotions and experience expressed across the album are those of a single day. I suppose this is how we measure or rationalise our lives and make sense of the emotions contained therein. Just another day on the planet. Then we wake up and start again.
So Muchacho is a document of pain, but also I think one of redemption as I guess the only conclusion you can come to and the one I suspect that Houck draws in the end is that this is all we've got. It's a beautiful record, as I say my record of last year if not this and one I'll play for many years to come. It's a keeper! I've barely begun to do it justice and perhaps need to revisit this at a later date again to attempt to do so. If you haven't heard it, endeavour to!
One of the slight disappointments of this year was the release of Warpaint's second, self-titled album. From all I've heard it doesn't quite match up to the enormous promise of their first The Fool, four years back now when I also saw them perform magnificently at The Academy down the road from me. Still, it gives an excuse to go back to that record and maybe the new one will grow on me.
Last Friday I went to see John Grant and quite wonderful it was too. I've already written to this effect on here. Coincidentally, the same evening Erasure were playing across town just round the corner from my gaff at the Academy. Coincidentally because Vince Clarke and his former group Yazoo in particular were a great influence on the sound of Grant's most recent album Pale Green Ghosts. Amongst the records he recommends this year is this, the soundtrack for I Dream of Wires, which he claims is 'Kraftwerk for the modern age'. The video for this pictures Clarke throughout and is six minutes well spent with headphones on.
“You know me I’m acting dumb dumb, you know this scene is very humdrum, and my favourite song’s entitled “Boredom””
And from The Go Betweens to Orange Juice. A natural leap. Both bands put out records on Postcard Records. The label was put together mainly for Orange Juice's benefit and then developed a roster to support them. I'm currently listening to You Can't Hide Your Love Forever, their first album, a brilliantly eclectic record. Virtually the definition of sunshine. This comes from their second album and was their lone OK chart hit. They'd jumped ship to major label by this point. The lyrics reference Boredom by Buzzcocks who were clearly an inspiration. It was the lead track from their first release Spiral Scratch which has a claim to be the first British independent record and the sole record they made with Howard Devoto in the band before he left them to form Magazine.
