Jeff Tweedy does a particular thing and he does it very well. Nothing on his new record WARM will be unfamiliar to anybody who has enjoyed his work with Wilco and Uncle Tupelo over the last thirty years but much of it will be 'warmly' welcomed.
There's plenty of understated, crafted, melody here, plenty of wry self-depreciating humour in the lyricism. While not an album of my year, because of that familiarity, Tweedy has been here before, in fact he played a considerable part in marking out this punk country territory in the first place, it's still a nice record to have in December as the new releases dry up.
Pete Shelley's premature passing, just a couple of days back is a sad one for many of my generation. A clever and talented soul, he was a distinctive and impressive figure on Top of the Pops shows in the late seventies, signalling a specific and proudly individualistic voice on the landscape of pop, punk and new wave.
Of course Buzzcocks were a wonderful, sparkling pop band but Shelley made them much more than that because of his particular obsessions with love and romance and a sharp but determined honesty which placed them apart and above so much of their competition. His sexual projection, so odd for a thirteen year old like myself who had no inkling of that side of life, was one reason. But more than this he put across a wry, but acute sensitivity that made space for Edwyn Collins, Morrissey and so much that followed. They were also the first banner wavers for all that wonderful music that came out of Manchester over the coming decades. Buzzcocks came first and paved the way.
Ultimately, his passing seems sad because he takes a part of many peoples' youths with him. Singles Going Steady, the compilation of Buzzcocks A and B sides is an ultimate glowing epitaph to him and the band he led. But more than that, they also produced some fine albums, (Love Bites and Another Music in a DifferentKitchen particularly), which showed how you could channel a love of the avant gard and outre into pop classicism. They had the tunes, the lyrics and the attitude, decked out in outfits that seemed irrepressibly and brazenly Burtons. Shelley is owed a definite, unresolvable debt.
Young Fathers, who won the Mercury Prize with DEAD back in 2014 returned with Cocoa Sugar in 2018. And it was another winner. Breathy, intense and rhythmic. Like a feral Massive Attack, they're a definite force.
This is not easy listening. It's dense and claustrophobic, crammed full of voices jostling for attention. But it has a cumulative power that's undeniable.
Papercuts sixth album Parallel Universe Blues is an indie record in the most spectacular sense of the word. It's an amalgam of so many features of the genre, incredibly sensitively played, a set of ten gossamer delicate alternative pop songs.
The opening two tracks Mattress On The Floor and Laughing Man are as good an opening pair of songs as I've heard this year on any record. Aping the classic melodic trajectory of Wire's wondrous Outdoor Miner they set the bar high, but the songs that follow, maintain an impeccable poise and beauty.
The reference points are quite clear; listing Velvet Underground, Wire, Spacemen 3, Velocity Girl Primal Scream, Spector, early Cure and Jesus & Mary Chain will probably paint as good a picture as possible of what's being splashed on the canvas here. Priceless teenage emotion and moments, cast in aspic. The fact that this is Jason Quever, (the man behind Papercuts), sixth record is not insignificant. He's utterly mastered the sound and sensibility he's been working towards. It's craftsmanship.
A whiter than white sound. Bleached almost, hooped top and fringe, Chelsea boots, Quever shows a mastery of the sound and attitude that's quite impeccable. The album never lets up. It's a small classic. October has been the richest month of the year in terms of records that have grabbed my interest and Parallel Universe Blues sparkles as remarkably as any among them.
Store Front, a new band out of Brooklyn featuring The Pain's of Being Pure at Heart's Peggy Wang, set off with promising vim reminiscent of 10,000 Maniacs and The Swimming Pool Q's.
Natalie Prass came very good indeed with her second album The Future & the Past. Something of an elfin Janet Jackson, her record was clipped and sweet and Jam and Lewis would have been proud to helm it. Graced with possibly the oddest album cover of the year with Prass as pale as alabaster and sporting a jarring, clashing jacket, shirt and bow tie, the album by contrast was tastefully smooth as silk.
I preferred this to the Christine & the Queens record which gets much more support in the big end of year polls. The two records try to pull off similar conceits, both deeply grounded in Eighties surfaces, production values and attitude. The Future & the Past gets my nod between the two as Retro-Soul Album of the Year.
It's spiriting to hear a band embarking on a musical journey with as much vim and vigour as Bristol's Neurotic Fiction on their recently released debut album Pulp Music. It's a record that could easily have made my Top 50 countdown save for coming to my notice just too late.
What's evident is that the band are clearly having an absolute ball here. Vim and vigour drawn from the fire of early Eighties Independent records, like Johnny Marr of Hatful of Hollow guesting for The B-52's. Personally I'd take Neurotic Fiction over London's more greatly hyped Goat Girl or Shame. Ones to watch.
One of the highlights of the early part of 2018. From February:
The really rather lovely, self-titled debut album from New York band Olden Yolk is just out. Full of textured, melodic, vaguely narcotic songs which touch on Indie, dip their toes in Folk and soft focused Psychedelia and are consistently left of the mainstream but also instantly approachable. It'll mind you of other things, they work within a clearly established tradition, but the record creates its own pleasures and is well worth a listen. Shane Butler, (also of Quilt), and Caity Shaffer take turns with vocals and the album is a rich and nuanced autumnal record.
In some respects this is a very Sixties sounding album, making me think at various points of Pentangle, Great Society, The United States of America and the gentler moments of the Velvet Underground. Occasionally precious, in the best Beatnik sense and very, very New York, the songs and promos posted here evoke the sights, sounds and smells of the coffee shops, tenement buildings and squares of Greenwich Village and Chelsea . As I've said, the sixties act as source inspiration, but it's all filtered through the prism of succeeding decades. I was reminded of the way that Ultra Vivid Scene, Felt and Dean Wareham in Galaxie 500 and Luna drew on similar traditions but created songs that never sounded like pastiche and had their own carefully crafted glowing hearts and sounded just right for their times. Such is the case here too.
My own instinct on listening through to a record for the first time is whether I want to hear it again and in the case of Olden Yolk, my reaction a few songs in was already a definitive 'yes'. By the end of it, I was smitten. I'll be coming back to this album again and again over the coming months until I feel I own it. In the meantime I commend it to you in the highest possible terms.
Quite effortlessly charming indie melodies from Katy Davidson and her band from Twentynine Palms, California. The mood of these three tracks from their latest record Skull Example are enough to convince you that everything might be alright after all, despite the doomsayers.
With something of the minimalist, homespun sincerity of The Roches about them, Dear Nora are a beautiful secret you might be yet to discover. A surefire cure for gloomy moods. Well it worked for me anyhow!
One of my favourite leftfield records from 2017 was the wondrous eponymous debut album from Falmouth's guitar heroes Holiday Ghosts. Now they're back with a new song ahead of their second, West Bay Playroom, which is due in February 2019.This augers well!
I listened to Sarah-Beth Tomberlin's debut album, At Weddings, pretty much on a loop at work yesterday. It's simplicity itself. Just Tomberlin's emotive but affectingly toneless voice, accompanied by her acoustic guitar and otherwise the most minimal of musical support imaginable . Each and every track follows the same basic template. I guess if it was really that easy however, everyone would be doing it. And frankly they're not. Singer-songwriter confessional albums as good as this only come down the pike every once in a while.
That much became readily apparent to me as early as the third track Tornado. This. I believe, was pretty much the first complete song Tomberlin ever wrote, at 19 on her parent's piano in Illinois. It's all sparse economy in musical and lyrical terms. At Weddings is a model lesson in how little you need in terms of musical artillery to make a truly great record. .
Virtually every review of the record, (which came out a week ago), has made much of Tomberlin's own biographical background. The daughter of a Baptist pastor and subject of by all accounts a pretty strict Christian upbringing, which this record i,s to a greater or lesser degree, a reaction to. The album can be seen as an artist mapping out their own path at just the moment in life when such things need to be done if there is something you want and something you need to make a break from. Whether this would have been readily apparent from its lyrics alone isn't immediately clear. However, the poignancy and deeply felt nature of the songs is abundantly plain.
Although Tomberlin's playlists on Spotify are crammed with songs from contemporary artists, (Courtney Barnett, Snail Mail, Laura Marling, Lorde and U.S.Girls), the antecedents for what I hear on the record go back much further. To Judee Sills, Joni Mitchell and the Laurel Canyon singer-songwriters of the early Seventies. There's a lucid clarity here that you assume even Laughing Len might have appreciated.
Most of all, you get the sense that here is an artist undergoing that peculiar and specific anguish that we all, (or at least I assume so), experience so uniquely in late adolescence, our at once blossoming yet declining late-teenage years. When every kiss and every setback has a particular sweet pain and clarity, amid all the intense confusion. It's no wonder that the best 'Coming of Age' films, literature and music resonate so deeply.
I was seventeen once, though believe me it feels a mighty long time ago. Frankly, because it was. But I remember distinctly buying Aztec Camera's High Land, Hard Rain when it came out at about that time and how I felt it was the best record ever made about being a boy of that age. Perhaps thirty five years down the line, Tomberlin has just released the female equivalent. There's even a song called Seventeen on it. What more could you possibly want?
Just like Aztec Camera's Roddy Frame, Sarah-Beth Tomberlin has wisdom beyond her years, the key circumstance required to make art of this kind resonate beyond its 'just a phase they're going through' constraints. Because whatever else is here, there's not a note of self-pity. There's also no little clarity and poise. Tomberlin and At Weddings join the back of the ever-swelling 'coming of age' queue behind Carson McCullers, J.D.Salinger, Benjamin Braddock, Nick Drake, Judee Sills and Roddy himself.
What this record clearly evidences is that art of this kind will never stop being made. How could it? There will always after all be a generation that's 'coming of age'. And each and every one will imagine that it's going through a set of emotions that no generation that's gone before has. And after all they're pretty much correct in that respect. Hence the need for fresh expressions of that particular crucible of experience.
At Weddings seems set to get my rosette come December for Record of the Year in this particular category. It will also be incredibly interesting to see where Tomberlin goes next. Some artists struggle through their whole careers aiming to make a statement as resonant and powerful as this one. She's achieved it, apparently effortlessly, (though I'm sure that's not the case), with her first shy at the coconuts. Watch her go!
Portland, Oregon's Shadowgraph's new record Another Time carves out a new psychedelia which has it's traces roots back to records from the poppier end of 1967's trip, Barrett's Floyd, Strawberry Alarm Clock and Question Mark & the Mysterians.
There are also echoes of The Paisley Underground, the early Eighties LA Scene. 3 O'clock and Rain Parade come to mind at various points during Another Time. The young Bobby Gillespie might have shaken his tambourine and exhaled 'Woo!' to much of this too. It's the soundtrack to a trip that doesn't involve taking any actual drugs and it's all rather enjoyable for all that.
Television's second album Adventure, released in 1978, is generally unfairly maligned. And why? For one reason alone. It was the follow up to their debut Marquee Moon, a pretty much flawless record, in fact one of the best Rock and Roll records ever made. It's fixed status in the top rungs of Greatest Album Ever lists attests to that. Adventure almost inevitably pales by comparison. But it's still a mighty fine record.
The band's star was probably on the wane by the time they came to record Adventure. Despite the almost universal critical acclaim Marquee Moon was greeted with, it didn't sell, save for making a dent in the lower reaches of the UK album chart. Tom Verlaine's increasingly authoritarian instincts were diluting the weedy arty gang mystique of the band and Verlaine's foil Richard Lloyd was beginning to wilt after years of drug and alcohol dependency.
Still, there's much to admire here. In many ways Adventure comesacross asthe day following Marquee's Moon's night. Opener Glory comes tearing out of the traps, another instant twin guitar classic. Days meanwhile is one of the band's finest songs. Almost a template for The Go Betweens who were surely taking notes in Brisbane.
In many respects the songs on the second album could be matched with equivalents on Marquee Moon. Glory is See No Evil, Days is Venus, and both songs stand up fine although there would have been no sense of shock of the new to those who waited in fevered anticipation for the second record following the massive impact Moon had on critics and discerning fans in '77.
However it's at this point that things begin to go awry. Foxhole is wired and frenzied in the same way as Friction had been but while Friction was magisterial and utterly taut, Foxhole is shrill and grating. It's frankly almost impossible to listen to. A band that never had to try are suddenly trying too hard. After Careful, which is slight and poppy in the way Prove It had played a similar trick the year before Side One ends and Side 2 commences with a pair of similar drawn out pieces of atmospherics in Carried Away and The Fire. Likeable enough but hardly enough to set the hairs on the back of your neck a bristle as every single song on the band's debut had done. Television's moment, it seemed had come and gone.
Still, the band had two more cards to play before letting the curtain drop on one of the most intriguing careers in Rock history. Penultimate track Ain't That Nothing is a final reminder of the band's astonishing guitar interplay pyrotechnics. At their peak they gave The Stones a run for their money. It's just phenomenal from start to finish.
And then there's A Dream's Dream which always strikes me as one of the saddest yet most elegant codas to any recording career. With barely a verse of words before subsiding into trademark guitar duelling which brinks the seven minute mark. It has a quite pristine beauty to it that anybody who ever loved the sound of electric guitars is sure to thrill to.
A few months later, after touring the record, the band split. So, Adventure. It's no Marquee Moon, that's for sure. There's a lethargy to it of a band who sense the sands in their timeglass are almost spent. A band that have lost their anger and hunger, their tension and some of their mystery too. Still I'm very grateful for five of its eight songs, and I still play it all the time. For all it's sadness and sense of opportunity lost it has to be admitted that their debut was never something that was ever going to be topped. Some mountains are only meant to be scaled once. Adventure marks a much lower peak in the same range, but there's are still some seriously beautiful views to be had.
And while we're here... Say Sue Me were incredibly prolific during 2018. They clearly had the sense that they'd caught their wave. An EP of wonderful covers of Dreaming, I'm Beginning to See the Light, Do You Wanna Dance, Rockaway Beach. And this. One of the singles of the year. Listen out for the absolutely blistering guitar solo.
'The best pure indie-pop record of 2018 (so far) is not from Brooklyn or Glasgow or Melbourne or Olympia but Busan, South Korea. The album, Where we Were Together from the band Say Sue Me, is a perfectly paced fusion of jangling guitars, bouncing bass and sighed melody...' In this year's World Cup Finals, coming up in a couple of months, South Korea will be fronted by probably the best footballer currently from Asia, Heung Min Son who plies his wares in North London playing for Tottenham Hotspur. It will be interesting to see what he can do. In the same way if Indie Pop hosted a World Cup, South Korea would be able to supply more interesting dark horses, in the shape of Say Sue Me, a fine band, who have just released their second album Where We Were Together.
Unsurprisingly, given the quality of last year's eponymous debut, it's a rattlingly good record. The traditions of this stuff are firmly established by now, rooted in C-86 and bolstered by any number of bands from many countries who have been more than happy to chip away at the same stoneface in the three decades since. Say Sue Me have no plans to kick over any statues, but why should they? There will be plenty who will be more than happy with what they've done here.
Yet within the confines of this sound it's actually quite a varied record. Sometimes surfy and meditative, sometimes chirpy and energetic. Songs sung in Korean, songs sungs in English, short tracks and one stretching to almost eight minutes. All with one thing in common. That of being uniformly excellent. A sparkling record!
The first release from Thurston Moore's new label Daydream Library and it's a cracker. Sistahs, the debut album from London trio Big Joanie an alternative record the way they used to make 'em. Nirvana, Riot Grrrl, X Ray Spex, Ronettes, PJ Harvey, Breeders and Shop Assistants are all somewhere in the mix. They're clearly having a wail of a time!
'Alela Diane might be disparaged by some as a 'worthy' artist in the negative sense. Her songs, particularly on new album Cusp are spare and unembroidered and focus on the most basic issues of existence. The sheer realisation of being alive and its transience, motherhood, family, love, hearth and home, nature, the world around us and how it inspires, informs and shapes us. It's an approach that could easily grate or irritate in the hands of an inferior artist but Diane is such a considered and talented one that the effect is actually the opposite. It's utterly inspiring. A spell cast!
Focusing in turn on migration, what it feels like carrying a child in your womb, the world seen through a babies eyes, the Syrian toddler and the image that went around the world of him washed up on a Turkish beach, Sandy Denny and her own orphaned child and elsewhere on similar, recurrent themes. Nothing seems out of place or overstated Thoughts of familial love and the dreadful imagining of loss. Very much an album on what it feels like to be a mother, on the record's sleeve Diane sits in an elegant almost Edwardian dress, her hair set in a bob, sat in profile on a kitchen chair as if for a family portrait which will adorn the wall of that self-same kitchen for the course of a lifetime before being passed down to future generations. A beautiful idea and this is a truly beautiful album that ticks like an old mantelpiece clock towards its inevitable conclusions of love and consolation.'
Robert Wace, (then manager of The Kinks), and producer Mike Leander, produce a single which sums up the strange kitsch class nostalgia of 1967. The Changing of the Guard indeed.
