Tuesday, October 2, 2018
Things Found on My Local's Jukebox # 323 Scott McKenzie
This has been going round my head for a number of days. No idea why really. It's as kitsch as anything, and probably marks the moment everything that was going on in San Francisco went overground and became as much about commerce and cliche as ideals. Still it's got a great a great melody and utterly captures a moment. 'People in motion...'
Monday, October 1, 2018
Songs About People # 710 Michael Nesmith
The Minus 5 made a whole album in 2016 dedicated to the joys of the Monkees. Here's their very long tribute to 'the enigmatic one'.
Song(s) of the Day # 1,716 Hater
Malmo, Sweden band Hater do not sound remotely like you would expect a band called Hater to sound. Metal they certainly aren't. The cover of their latest album Fiesta, a picture of vocalist Caroline Landahl on horseback, is much more indicative of their sensibility. in many respects they are an update on the kind of thing compatriots The Cardigans were doing back in the Nineties. Dutch band Bettie Serveert, from the same decade are another obvious reference point.
Nothing on Fiesta is very surprising but a lot of it is very good. Glacial crafted and occasionally emotive indie pop music. Perhaps a little overlong at fourteen tracks, but rather lovely nonetheless. So I'll just give you three that I personally liked.
Sunday, September 30, 2018
Song(s) of the Day # 1,715 Vital Idles
From the first moments of listening to A Premise, the opening track of Glasgow Indie merchants Vital Idles June album Left Hand, I was thrilled. It's kitchen sink stuff and deeply familiar, certainly to anyone who ever listened to John Peel in the Eighties. That ragged, jagged but utterly determined momentum of so many angular Post and Post Punk groups of that decade.
Vital Idles keep heading doggedly forward while seemingly looking backwards for the course of Left Hand as you know very well that they will. It's the sound of sweaty grimy indie clubs in small towns and large cities the length and breadth of Britain going back almost forty years now with a band on a poorly lit stage with a dodgy sound system on a dreary drizzly winters evening. Doing it because it's the thing that they love and the sound that's best to articulate their ideas. My youth, long gone. Someone else's youth, right now.
This is a highly impressive reinvention, reminiscent of what Life Without Buildings, (also, probably non-coincidentally Glaswegians), did with their still remarkable debut Any Other City almost twenty years ago. Nothing on here is totally new. But it all seems fresh.
A couple of times the band raise the bar and allow the songs to stretch and meander beyond four minutes but for the most part they keep things short and sweet. There's actually an admirable discipline about doing this stuff as well as and as precisely as they do. If not, everyone would be doing it. But something as good as this in this medium is rare.
Spawned from Underground DIY Culture, the band clearly take what they do very seriously. Various members help run and work in publishers and art related shops and have served their apprenticeships in various local bands going back several years. But Left Hand, the band's debut album definitely seems like a point of arrival.
Vital Idles cross the 't''s and dot the 'i's, Highly likely to be my indie-retro album of the year, even pipping the marvellous Say Sue Me record. John.P, Raincoats, Au Pairs, Young Marble Giants, Delta 5, Girls At Their Best, Flying Nun and Pylon - your legacy is safe. Magnificent!
Saturday, September 29, 2018
Songs Heard on the Radio # 272 Charles Watson
A fabulous song from a fabulous album which came out this year which I've omitted to write about. Coming out the radio it sounds like a wondrous early Seventies minor hit you've never heard before.
Song of the Day # 1,714 Frokedal
Norwegian artist Frokedal's new album How We Made It, is a very fine record, but really it sets itself an almost impossible task. Because midway through comes a track David, which acted as a forerunner for the album which is as fine a song as anything I've heard this year. Frokedal has been called Norway's Joni, but this to me is much more reminiscent of Nico or Judy Collins, spectral and hit the spots that very few songs can find their way to. So listen to How We Made It it's really, really good, but make damned sure you listen to David.
Friday, September 28, 2018
Song of the Day # 1,713 Danielson
A new discovery for me. Leftfield eccentricity, from a man formerly part of a family tribe and something altogether wonderful from a forthcoming album.
Thursday, September 27, 2018
Song of the Day # 1,712 Pat Ament
From an album of simple, heartfelt songs aptly entitled Songs released earlier this year.
Wednesday, September 26, 2018
Song of the Day # 1,711 FEWS
Swedish band with one of the more interesting Independent guitar sounds of recent years are back. This goes ahead of a forthcoming album.
Tuesday, September 25, 2018
Song of the Day # 1,710 Papercuts
New from Papercuts on Slumberland Records ahead of their new album Parallel
Universe Blues. Slightly repetitive in terms of its overall guiding memory perhaps but still holds promise for that parent record.
Monday, September 24, 2018
Song of the Day # 1,709 The Last Detail
From the wonderful Elefant Records ahead of an eponymous debut album.
Sunday, September 23, 2018
The Chills - Snow Bound
New Zealand's The Chills have one of the most distinctive sounds of any band. Within ten seconds of the start of Bad Sugar the opening track on their new record Snow Bound, it's perfectly clear it can only be them. Rolling, swirling melodicists with songs that sound like nursery rhymes recast as Pop songs and all the while leader Martin Phillips' comforting voice navigating the crossing.
For a band that have had such a scarred personal journey, Chills songs are consistently warm with consolation. Snow Bound seems to tell the story of hard won survival. As I say it will all be immediately familiar to anyone who knows the band's work, and while there's nothing here quite the equal of the band's Eighties classics, Pink Frost, Rolling Moon, Doledrums or This is the Way, (that would be too much to ask perhaps), this is solid stuff. It's a record that only adds to their considerable legacy and frankly it's good just to still have them here.
Song(s) of the Day # 1,708 Picturebox
The ever masterful Gare Du Nord have just put out yet another great record. They're a truly wonderful record label. Specialising in a marvellous, definitively English sensibility. By English I mean in the good sense of the word, not the essentially bogus peddled by Brexit merchants, but an England of wet Saturday afternoons pottering around second hand record and bookshops or playing pitch and putt before retiring to the local for a pint and then home for tea.
Picturebox, (who I suspect take their name from a classic Seventies British children's programme), fit the Gare Du Nord sensibility perfectly. Think Blur, with Graham Coxon singing, XTC, Syd Barrett, Bevis Frond or a nicer non-bitter Luke Haines. Gently, sensitive and beautifully crafted Pop songs the way they used to write them.
Setting off with two of the best songs you'll hear this month in Grumble, ('mustn't grumble' the English catchphrase, we still do believe me) and Divvy Cabs, (a divvy is a slightly unpolitically correct term for something stupid for those not from these shores). 'Oh divvy cabs, divvy divvy, divvy cabs. Where do they go? Can I get one.' perfect.
The album centrepiece is I Got the Pox a six minute thing of glory and corny AABB rhyming patterns building to a splendid Krautrock guitar freakout. Then onto The Vicar's Dog about the vicar's dog and closing time. pop music for middle aged folk. Altogether recommended!
Saturday, September 22, 2018
Things Found on My Local's Jukebox # 322 The Zombies
The Duncan Hannah painting I posted on here a few days back brought me here. Wonderful song!
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