Wednesday, August 10, 2022
Song(s) of the Day # 3,115 Sansyou
A rather nice, instrumental EP entitled True North Coast from Washington D.C. band Sansyou. As the ever perceptive A Pessimist Is Never Disappointed site, listed to the right hand side of this blog points out, it 'imagines Durrutti Column covering a Clientele cover.' Lovely stuff.
Tuesday, August 9, 2022
Grant & I by Robert Forster # 8 The June Brides
The Go Betweens hang out on the Indie London scene of the Mid-Eighties and find themselves appreciated and slightly revered.
Song(s) of the Day # 3,114 Dust Star
Spirit debut from California's Dust Star called Open Upon That Heart. It's mission statement seems to be exactly that. A throwback Seventies affair that sets to pitch itself between Power Pop and Punk.
I was reminded of something with each passing track. #1 Record, Dwight Twilley Band, dB's, occasionally, (with the guitars, not the vocals), of early Undertones.
There's not a dull moment. It takes you back to 15. A point in life when I felt not much more than confusion and hormones frankly. This is a nice reminder of it.
Monday, August 8, 2022
Songs Heard on the Radio # 421 Blue Orchids
Must get round to listening to their latest, Angus Tempus Memoir. Here's something from it.
Grant & I by Robert Forster # 7 The Go Betweens
The GBs produce perhaps their greatest album, Liberty Belle & The Black Diamond Express and find a whole new scene opening up on London's independent circuit.
Song of the Day # 3,113 King Ropes
A bar band from Bozeman, Montana. That's what you need for a Monday morning. All the sleazy, laid back strut of Lou's Sweet Jane on this, the opening song from their latest album Super Natural. Te rest of the record is worth a listen to as well.
Sunday, August 7, 2022
The Northern Portrait - The Swiss Army
From The Smiths to Copenhagen's Smiths. Danish band The Northern Portrait return with their second album and it's a proper throwback to the decade that formed me. Most obviously in terms of the reminders it throws up of The Smiths, above all, both in terms of singer Michael Larsen's melancholic lyrical twists and turns but also guitarist Rune Reolt's Marr flourishes.
The Smith's are not always the best influence if fandom becomes mimicry. Northern Portrait avoid indictment because their songs are so consistently good. Although it may not be a record I go back to, hey I've got Meat is Murder and The Queen is Dead on my shelves, this is all rather lovely.
The band's press release is slightly disingenous, listing a whole series of other reference points. Pulp, Suede, The Stone Roses. No, not really. This is pure and simply a record that could not have come into place without Morrissey, Marr, Rourke and Joyce. You might as well come out and say it. Still as far as tributes come this is a pretty sparkling one.
Grant & I by Robert Forster # 6 The Smiths
Rough Trade favours The Smiths and The Go Betweens move to Sire and record Spring Hill Fair. Bachelor Kisses is not a hit single. How can that not be even decades later. The Go Betweens remain in between.
The Mojo Collection - The Ultimate Music Companion # 78 The Beatles - Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club
'reeks of confidence and the desire to set new standards...'
Song(s) of the Day # 3,112 Mouse
Second band from Brisbane to ger Song on the Day for a few days. But Mouse sound absolutely nothing like The Go Betweens. Within a minute or so of the start of their debut album Here Was There, they break into a squally Sonic Youth tangle of noice that announces their intent is a lot messier.
The record proceeds like this. Teenage angst. Placebo, My Bloody Valentine, Dinosaue Jr. While never breaking sufficiently free of their influences to get truly interesting, this does a good job for those a lot younger than me who might be going through these emotions for the first time.
Saturday, August 6, 2022
Grant & I by Robert Forster # 5 The Go Betweens
The GBs sign to Rough Trade and record a classic album, Before Hollywood and single Cattle and Cane.
Song(s) of the Day # 3,111 DC Gore
An unusual album just out on Domino Records from DC Gore, previously of Little Cub. All These Things is unusual in that it sounds so old school. Jarvis Cocker, The Divine Comedy and Pet Shop Boys came immediately to mind on first play. Smart, arty but approachable pop, the kind of thing that seemed a thing of the past.
You can't do this kind of thing if your songs don't have a bit of flesh and substance to your songs and Gore certainly has those. It's slightly disconcerting to get reminders of the kind of romantically tinted pop music that used to be relatively commonplace yet also quite mainstream despite its bohemian impulses. I'm not sure I'll listen again but I found this quite engaging this morning.
Friday, August 5, 2022
Neglected Records In My Collection # 6 The Icicle Works - The Icicle Works
We were all seventeen once. It's best not to forget this fact. When I was seventeen, I had Aztec Camera's High Land, Hard Rain so I was happy. But I was hungry too, making my way towards R.E.M., The Smiths, The Go-Betweens, The Triffids and Lloyd Cole & Commotion, university and what lay beyond.
Mostly I was drawn to, frankly literate white, guitar bands I confess, but that's what made most sense to me at the time and I don't have the slightest regrets about any of the records I bought around that point in time. Well The Fixx's Shuttered Room was perhaps a bit of a duffer but I don't have that anymore strangely.I think it left because it knew that it didn't really belong with the tecords around it in my collection.
In the wake of these fabulous, life changing records, came some lesser ones including the debut album by Liverpool band The Icicle Works. Coming in the wake of The Teardrop Explodes and Echo & the Bunnymen, it's clearly heavily indebted, in fact could not exist without them.
It's no Crocodiles or Wilder. It feels like a younger brother in many respects. It has the kind of lyrics that I might have attempted in those days, fully flushed with the joy of coming of age. Falling in love for the first time, making fudamental life-changing discoverues in music, film and literature. Not fully formed yet. In the process of becoming.
I enjoyed it thoroughly, more than I had expected to, listening to it yesterday. It's highly anthemic, in fact it's composed of little else but anthems. But not in the naff way that The Alarm were anthemic at the same point in time. Arms aloft, fists, clenched, trying to be The Clash. The Icicle Works want to be themselves, despite the evident influence of the two bands mentioned and the fact that they sound very very Liverpudlian.
They have all the power, the dynamics of a great three piece band. They capture a moment in life really well. A passage in time. They're brash and ridiculously florid at points but overall enthusism wins the day.
Grant & I by Robert Forster # 4 Orange Juice
Robert sees Orange Juice and realises Go Betweens have competition.
Song(s) of the Day # 3,110 Flyying Colours
Melbourne, Australia's Flyying Colors, fancy anyone make it out of that backwater, specialise in that sound first minted by Ride and The Verve most of all way back in the Nineties. That head in the clouds and in a spin, Psychedelic guitar driven sound that started out in small Indie clubs but always really had larger arenas, or stadiums, on its mind.
Their eponymous, debut album is hardly full of surprises for anyone who experienced that thing first time, almost three decades back. Still, it's a sound I always liked and I like this time.
They've definitely done their research and have the sound down pat. I lagged a few songs in because it was pretty much that Ride and Verve formula with no real variation. Bur there will be plenty, much younger than me, who will be in complete thrall to this.
Thursday, August 4, 2022
Grant & I by Robert Forster # 3 Modern Lovers
Go Betweens get going. Robert realises they need realistic musical role models to reflect where they come from and chooses Modern Lovers and Talking Heads.
Song(s) of the Day # 3,109 Seasoning
Seasoning hail from Brisbane, a city destined inevitably to be remembered as the birthplace as the birthplace of the legendary, if legendarily unsuccessful commercially, Go Betweens.
They sound very much like them too. Certainly on latest EP The Condensation.The songs herein sound incredibly similar to that band's signature Wild Mercury Sound. It's clear that GBs are their primary formative influence.
Not that it really matters, this is an incredibly good record. If the fact that its evident debt necessarily takes the edge off the listening pleasure slightly, it's still well worth hearing and appreciating on its own merits.
Wednesday, August 3, 2022
Grant & I by Robert Forster # 2 Bob Dylan
The romantic passage of college experience and Robert has his eye on Grant as his model for Bohemian artistic flight. Most of all, they look to Dylan.
Song(s) of the Day # 3,108 Rusty Santos
I was slightly wary before listening to Rusty Santos' debut album High Reality. Santos' most notable post on his CV is probably as producer of Animal Collective and they're a band I certainly have mixed emotions about. He's also work with Dirty Projectors, Born Ruffians and Beach House so probably my trepidation would not be justified.
But no, High Reality certainly sounds like a record made by someone with Animal Collective connections. It's arty and verges on the irritating and self-indulgent on occasion. There are beeps and indulgences that strike me as self-indulgent. It's not a record I'll listen to in its entirity again.
But there are immense compensations. Opener Dream in Stereo is one of the best alternative pop songs I've heard this. It reminds me of peak period R.E.M. where Michael Stipe really began to open out and emote from Document to Automatic.
Stipe could verge on the annoying during these years and High Reality is certainly irritating in patches. Santos though on occasion locates the moments where Stipe, as well as the Elephant 6 collective bands, Flaming Lips, They Might Be Giants and others made the outre completely accessible.
Tuesday, August 2, 2022
Songs Heard on the Radio # 420 Joan Shelley (feat Bill Callahan)
From the latest Jan Shelley, which I haven't listened to yet but should.
Grant & I by Robert Forster # 1 Creedence Clearwater Revival
A second read of this impeccable memorir. Robert Forster writes like a dream as you imagine he will. He starts with a dash through a happy untroubled childhood and gets on to his clear, ambititious drive early. Creedence, his first, important musical find: 'John Fogerty's powerful raspthe first voice to grab me and tell me that some men roared like lions at the world.'
Neglected Records In My Collection # 5 The Ventures - Super Psychedelics
Not a 'necessary' record but the kind of album you'll find in the collection of any music obsessive with more money than sense. Err me. Bought who knows whe,n but almost certainly from a charity shop or at an extremely low price in a second hand record shop.
Tacoma Washington's The Ventures might be described as an American Shadows, both bands pretty much did the same thing on their respective sides of the Atlantic in the Sixties. Best known for their first hit single Walk Don't Run which reached Number 2 in the Billboard charts in 1960 and still sounds completely fantastic.
They never reached such giddy heights again, and became largely an albums band after this churning out one LP after another, generally pillaging whatever was in the charts at the time for undemanding instrumentals which they interspersed with compositions of their earth.
Super Psychedelics finds them in 1967, donning kaftans and trying to make their guitars sound like sitars. It's groovy I suppose, but only if you're a father of teenage kids who you embarass at every turn with your efforts to be down with the new sounds. They try their hand at Strawberry Fields Forever and A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You, and Happy Together, which understandably stand a level above their own stuff which makes up the rest of the record and is often slightly pedestrian
Nevertheless, it's an undemanding listen and a good one for first thing in the morning. The Ventures meanwhile went on to have a not inconsiderable influence on Television who lie perhaps at the opposite end of the hip spectrum music wise but were perfectly happy to namedrop them in interviews when journalists were expecting them to bang on about The Velvet Underground and The Byrds.
U.S.Girls - So Typically Now
Meghan Remy or U.S.Girls, (she doesn't do this alone but is essentially its guiding force) is an extraordinary artist. She makes music that always seems very, very now in a way that few artists can claim to do in this fractured age. Take latest song So Typically Now for the latest example. It sounds like and is a dance song first and foremost. But it also has much of the essential unease and anxiety that seems to epitomise our age. It's a winner certainly and I only hope a new album will acompany it soon.
The Mojo Collection - The Ultimate Music Companion # 73 The Velvet Underground & Nico - The Velvet Underground & Nico
Probably the most poorly recorded album that's still a masterpiece.
Song(s) of the Day # 3,107 Sam Prekop & Sam McEntire
Two stalwarts of the Nineties Chicago Math scene, or whatever you want to call it, for an album of space, Sons Of.
Monday, August 1, 2022
Pies & Prejudice - In Search of the North by Stuart Maconie # 14 Prefab Sprout
Altogether a wonderful read.
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