The languid tones of Al Stewart. Not just Year of the Cat you know.
Wednesday, June 7, 2023
Things Found on My Local's Jukebox # 568 The Golden Dregs
The arrival of The Golden Dregs latest record brings some much needed gravitas to The Telegraph.
Ben Harper - Wide Open Light
'Every day I look more like my father. Every day look less like me...'
About twenty five years ago I had a Ben Harper CD which I treasured. I got a lot of wear and tear out of it, if that's the right term to apply to a CD that you play a lot. Ben seemed to know what was going on. He had a lot of wisdom. A lot of soul. He seemed a lot older in actual years than he really was.
He's back, with a new album. It's his seventeenth and it's called Wide Open Light. To my knowledge it's had little fanfare, which is a darned shame as it's certainly up there with the best new records you could possibly listen to today.
Ben can sound like other artists. He's well versed. Sometimes here he can sound a bit like Cat Stevens. At other times he can sound a bit like Bill Withers. On one song, Randy Newman even. Listen to Wide Open Light and see who he reminds you of. Really of course by now he deserves his own space. His own respect and consideration.
He has a lilting, yearning voice with bucket loads of soul. He knows life is difficult sometimes but has plenty of consolation and joy to offer. I'm not quite sure why he's not more widely feted but I imagine he has a constituency that are fiercely loyal to him. He certainly deserves one.
Anyhow, this is another mighty and distinguished record. Mostly it's just Ben, his guitar and his voice though there are embellishments. He's someone who doesn't really need much more. His songs and talent speak for themselves.
Song(s) of the Day # 3,412 Mandy, Indiana
A record that I listened to a couple of weeks ago and took a while to get back to. It's getting a bit like this these days. So much quality product. Not enough hours in the day.
So anyway, better late than never. Mandy, Indiana, (and that's a great name for a band for starters), are a fourpiece from Manchester, England. They genre hop in remarkable fashion on latest album, i've seen a way.
They kick the record off as if they're really, really into Leftfield, Circling rhythms, mounting atmosphere. So far OK. Things start to get really interesting though when vocalist Valentine Caulfield joins the fray. She sings in French and her voice is muffled and stricken. She sounds like an announcer at Gare De L'Est in the middle of either a terrorist of panic attack.
It's a novel approach anyhow. The band create a fascinating patchwork of beats and rhythms for Valentine to blurt free form associations across. I was slightly bemused by the end of the record but bowled along by the experience anyhow. Most of all it was a lot of fun.
Tuesday, June 6, 2023
Song(s) of the Day # 3,411 Levyosn
I graduated in 1990, and running away from fear of a job in an office, motored off to Czechoslovakia with my brother and sister in law in Autumn 1990. We drove through fairytale Prague and grim Bratislava, and successively grimmer Slovakian fields, towns and villages, to a couple of teaching jobs in a town in Southern Czechoslovakia, namely Komarno, a bordertown on the Danube, between Slovakia and Hungary.
I was made very welcome there by my teaching colleagues and students but it was a strange year of personal experience. The Berlin Wall had fallen and the Soviet soldiers departed, having sold their guns to the local gypsies, leaving a momentary political void. The Gypsies seem to have rushed to fill the economic vacuum that existed there too. I had my name spray painted on a wall. There wasn't much to do there.
Nobody would come to the Gypsy bars with me after work. The best entertainment, and food that Komarno seemed to offer was at The Europa Hotel, in the heart of town, near to the bridge over the Danube to Hungary. I'd go to the hotel for my cigarettes, sold in the kiosk in the front foyer by a middle aged woman with blue hair and a mouth full of gold fillings. The gypsies hung around everywhere in the hotel, opening wallets crammed with banknotes whenever they got the opportunity.
The meals served in the Europa's restaurant were pretty damned good. Chicken stews, schnitzel and goulash. A glass of red wine. There was always an excellent Gypsy band playing there and the violinist would prowl the carpet floor to lean over your table and play solos for you. Thirty years and more on, it remains a vivid memory.
Listening to the Levyosn album Levyosn's Lullaby yesterday morning shook these memories loose. It's a fabulous evocation of Eastern European history and memory. The record is actually a product of Boston's Yiddish music scene. But the thoughts of appalling historical experience listening to it are inevitable. It's a wonderful if rather painful spin. I must go back to Komarno . The Europa Hotel, looking at it now on Google has been seriously upgraded and is barely recognisable from what it once was. I imagine that goes for the whole town.
RVG - Brain Worms
RVG have long been a Melbourne band of a slightly different stripe and accumulating repute. They're onto their third album now, Brain Worms. It's a record that should only see their star ascend further because it resonates immediately, even though its themes are not always what everyone seeks out for listening pleasure.
They map the trials and tribulations, the failings of the human heart. RVG have been compared to The Go-Betweens plenty since they first appeared, but it's Grant McLennan's soul at its most tortured they resemble rather than Robert Forster's quirky but as things turned out, slightly more robust worldview.
The other artist I was constantly reminded of by Brain Worms was Mike Scott of The Waterboys. Band leader Romy Vager's voice is strong. But it's also strained and unmistakably pained, as was and is the case with much of McLennan and Scott's work. Everything it seems is at stake in every second of every song.
On first play on Saturday, this was rather too intense and anguished for me. Maybe I wasn't in the mood to have my nerve-ends dragged over human coals. Listening again on Sunday evening I was obliged to acknowledge how highly accomplished the record is. How damned good these songs are. This may not be everybody's go to record, as it demands engagement from the listener, but it's a rather formidable and admirable one. Certainly in terms of its bravery. And its tunes hold up too.
Monday, June 5, 2023
Baxter Dury - I Thought I Was Better Than You
Baxter Dury's new album, I Thought I Was Better Than You, kicks off in bizarre if touching manner. 'Hey Mommy. Hey Daddy! Who am I...' drones Baxter to the void. 'America's Kubla Khan...' 'The son of Ghenghis Khan...' 'Business Class Villains...'
In less than a minute, the album has established its themes. Its tone and voice. In the words of a friend I was chatting to yesterday, (who already has his own signed copy), it's 'sardonic London lyrics and Eurotrash pop.' Ray Winston in Sexy Beast meets Serge Gainsbourg at the Boxing next to the ring in Paris lighting up cigars, ordering bubbly.
I Thought I Was Better Than You is the realisation of a calibration of persona that Baxter has been engaged in diligently for the twenty years of his recording career it seems, since first stepping up as a young grown up 2002 with his first offering Len Parrot's Memorial Lift on Rough Trade Records.
Baxter's come a long way since. Utterly comfortable in his skin by now. He's method. Laandon Method. Danny Dwyer's got nothing on him. Baxter is class. He could have been cast in Quadrophenia. Not afraid to be foolish. He's in touch with his inner child. He knows, just like Adam Ant did, that ridicule is nothing to be scared of. But he channels that ridiculousness that childishness to make increasingly adult statements. He's the Guvnor. I'd say he's getting better with every record and he was pretty good right from the start.
An enlarged photo of Baxter graces the sleeve of I Thought. It's wonderful and apt. A man of Laandon, making his way in the world, still haunted by his past. A childhood of being passed from household to household, a vagrant and underloved tag along child, while his Daddy sought fame and fortune in the Pop World.
Baxter is still the small man who stared out at us from the sleeve of Ian's New Boots & Panties, pretending to be a big man. This is half an hour on the therapist's couch. It's a brilliant and sustained concept. Throughout it foregrounds the female backing vocalists who acts as his chorus in every tune. A Greek Chorus via Balham Fruit & Veg Market.
Musically, he casts his net wide. There's Serge. His Dad. His Dad is always there. Baxter will always be 'the son of a famous working class poet,'. He knows he comes with a heavy legacy and doesn't wish to shed it, or hide from it, quite the opposite in fact. But he wants to do his own thing. He has a magpie's ear, a mimic's gift and there's Kendrick and Tyler in addition to Nancy & Lee, and Aldous Harding in the grooves here..
In short it's a wonderful, realised concept character sturdy of flawed machismo. Vulnerable. Unhinged. Bob Hoskyns in Long Good Friday. Daniel Craig in Layer Cake. .Baxter Dury in I Thought I Was Better Than You. Tremendous record. Geezer.
Song(s) of the Day # 3,410 Tigercub
Tigercub always was and remains an interesting place that will continue to attract creative artistic people. The latest to come to my attention are Tigercub, a power trio who've just released. their latest album, the grandiosely titled The Power of Decay.
You will immediately think of Queens of the Stone Age and continue to think of that. Maybe that will come to be a drawback, but QOTSA are hardly the worst band to draw comparisons to.
They're signed to Loosegrove Records, the Seattle based label that Pearl Jam's Stone Gossard founded way back. You should have a pretty good idea of what this will sound like by now and whether Tigercub are for you or not
Sunday, June 4, 2023
Things Found on My Local's Jukebox # 567 Arlo Parks
The second Arlo Parks album is getting a fair bit of play on daytime 6 Music. It's sometimes a bit precocious, new sensitive for my tastes, but it has its moments.
Super Bad - 24 Original Hits - 24 Original Stars # 1 Joe Simon
The other day I picked up a random compilation from my shelf and put it on. This one is K-Tel, so many of the best ones were, and focuses on those incredible Pop Soul numbers that you probably once thought were rather daft or rather wet but eventually realised were just super in every imaginable way. Here goes. This should be fun.
Beach Fossils - Bunny
'Sometimes. I'm in love with thinking I'm in love.' Beach Fossils, Numb
Beach Fossils are back with a new record. This will be significant news to some. Those with a certain sensibility and record collections. It seems a long time ago now when this particular journey started. Way back in 2010, the original fresh faced quartet emerged from Brooklyn, New York and released their eponymous record.
It was at once a journey. into the past, and as it turned out, into the future. At least as far as a particular seam of American Independent guitar music was concerned. An exercise in intense delicacy, and sensitivity. It called out to many.
Twee, intensely twee. The record harked back to The Byrds, most all, the sound of guitars ringing, chiming. But also onwards from The Byrds into the Eighties. To R.E.M and The Smiths, New Order, C-86, Sarah Records, other aspects of Factory, Railway Children. And most of all a specific moment in life. Teenage awakenings. Holding someone's hand for the first time, first kisses, the brief period in your life when your heart first awakens.
Like I said it was treasured by many, and was a partial inspiration for any number of American bands and a movement of sorts over the years that followed. Real Estate DIIV, Alvvays. Arrested development, stasis. The best summer of your youth. The one which never ended.
Beach Fossils sixth Bunny, is hardly an evolution of this sensibility, It's an attempt to realise it fully. Distil it. Capture first love in a bottle. It's Bobby Gillespie's decision to stay in love with his initial vision, The Byrds, Love, and not to listen to those nasty Rolling Stones and wander off the woodland path to Grandma's House. It's a sweet delightful record that sticks with admirable determination to the bearings it plots for itself. The secret of eternal youth.
Song(s) of the Day # 3,409 Cathedral Bells
Out of Orlando, Florida, which immediately endears them to me, Cathedral Bells sound like you'd expect them to. if you think about their name for a bit. They are Shoegaze. That scene that was so monstrously reviled at its actually time but now seems to be everywhere.
Cathedral Bells go for the more obvious legacy of the movement. They head for the light on latest album . They go for all that was Poppy and radiant, rather than exploring the considerable undertow that was also there, the influence of The Cure and Joy Division which was definitely there.
That's all to the good. There's much here that's melodically drenched. It does perhaps become a bit unremarkable and disposable a few tracks in. But it will more than do as a Song and Album for the day even if it's not destined for one of my end of year lists.
Saturday, June 3, 2023
Protomartyr - Formal Growth in the Desert
I go back some way with Protomartyr. That fierce, defiant and quite unique Detroit band. They've always been good to me, and others, and it's immediately apparent, listening to the opening moments of Formal Growth in the Desert, (remarkably their sixth), they remain last knights standing, or else sitting, (at their Round Table probably), still resolute, devoted to the cause.
They were such a find for me, when I first came across them, just before they released Relatives in Descent , (still possibly their masterpiece, although I'll come back to that), in 2017. That was a difficult time for me. An older brother died in awful circumstances and in terms of work it felt like I was living through an actual nightmare.
Protomartyr at once seemed like a band to hang on to, because although their themes, mapped out with incredible personal honesty and courage by singer and guiding visionary Joe Casey, seemed relentlessly bleak, they stared them down with grim courage and belief that they would prevail and bring us with them. It was wonderful to realise that bands like this still existed. Could still exist. Like the ones in my youth. The Bunnymen, R.E.M. and The Smiths. Noble quests, crusades that you could sign up for. Something worth fighting for.
I saw them shortly after Relatives came out and they didn't disappoint for a moment. Casey was formidable that evening. A method actor of the old school. Brando, Di Niro, Pacino. An intense, scarred two hundred yard stare war veteran. Bottles in his jacket pocket. Like grenades waiting for their pins to be pulled and for they themselves to be chucked into the fray, into the heart of the enemy bunker nests to explode, and take everyone inside with them. Casey was furious in the true sense of the word, and his band were valiant.
They've been back at three year intervals since and it doesn't take long in the company of Formal Growth to know that they're battle hardened as ever. A crack troop. Theirs is a sound that needs to evolve if they're to endure. Relatives was a record that , remarkable as it was), was still build on unmistakably recognisable tropes of classic Joy Division and Pere Ubu. The band realised this and now their sound is much more malleable and fluid, difficult to pin down.
Greg Aheen their guitarist has in the intervening years emerged as a particularly notable player, a Starbuck to Casey's Ahab. Formal Growth is immediately a ravenous beast that needs to be caged if it's going to be contained in civilised company. It's not one to be played at dinner parties unless you wish to find yourself feasting at one another's throats before the main course is served. Sorry Aunties - it's fucking fantastic and seems destined to become better and better with every play. It might by the end of the year be set to stand shoulder to shoulder with Relatives. Something I thought I'd never say. Protomartyr meanwhile are one for the ages. True forces of nature.
Song(s) of the Day # 3,408 maya ongaku
Japanese band maya ongaku's debut album Approach to Anima is a waking dream which I've been experiencing with intense pleasure since I chanced upon it in early evening yesterday. It's incredible realised and fully fledged as an opening statement, and I suspect something of an instant classic.
The band hail from Enoshima, a small, populated island located 50km southwest from Tokyo. The best way of experiencing it, apart perhaps from visiting the place, is probably spending forty minutes with headphones on in the company of the record.
It's an incredibly evocative, pastoral immersion. Throughout the record has a background track of lapping, flowing water. The album at points reminded me of other records in my collection; Can's Ege Bamyasi and Faust IV specifically. But there's abundant evidence here that it really just deserves consideration on its own merits.
It's a true labour and act of love. An album assembled of delicacy. Guitar, bass, woodwind, percussion, ticking clocks and floating vocals. Intense reflection and instrumentation. Another utterly delightful find. For more on this remarkable record, click here..
Friday, June 2, 2023
What I Did Yesterday - Pram at The Cobalt Studios
Towards the end of the Seventies my younger sister fell under the spell of a rather unusual but frankly pretty fantastic children' magazine named Misty. Its whole existence only lasted a couple of years when she was 9 or 10 but it's still fondly remembered by many including both of us. It's name was Misty and really I'm not sure there's been another magazine for the very young quite like it before it or since.
Its themes were essentially Horror and the Supernatural and it could get pretty dark, I think my sister had a pretty strong stomach because it dealt mainly in ghosties, ghoulies, the dead feeding on the living and such forth and might easily have been the stuff of nightmares. My parents didn't seem to mind. We had a very progressive and enlightened upbringing looking back. I watched I Claudius, that quite remarkable historical BBC drama, when I was still at primary school. It had incest, beastiality, violent and vicious murder of the most disturbing sort as key plot components and was my own personal initiation into the adult, possibly slightly before I was ready for it.
My own reading taste tended to Tiger and Roy of the Rovers but frankly looking back Alison trumped me effortlessly in terms choosing Misty. It was an of artistic apprenticeship of incredible resonance and emotional depth. Wonderful stuff to feed the young imaginative mind and well worth tracking down. I think a lot of it would still stand up.
I thought about Misty last night when I got home from my latest night on the town. Once I went to pubs and watched football matches, now I go to music venues. This seems to be hiw my year is shaping up. As some defiant vanguard action against my relentless march through my late fifties towards the inevitable. Yup, sixty.
A slightly unexpected day yesterday, I rose slowly and late-ish not thinking I would be needed in the office. But then after leisurely ablutions I got a hurried message from work saying I'd be required to teach cover. This is what I've been doing for thirty years plus now so I don't mind. It's what I'm obliged to do and I still enjoy it remarkably. At least the teaching part.
It was a rewarding couple of lessons anyhow with engaged and able students; from Saudi, Iraq, China, Japan and remarkably Peru. I wondered, though wasn't sure whether he was my first Peruvian student. We had some fun, established some rapport, learned something. I felt fulfilled as I generally do when I step into a classroom. I'm good at it I'd say. It brings me pleasure and satisfaction.
Still, it put me out of synch. I'd been expecting a slower day and time to prepare myself in a more leisurely and relaxed way for the gig. A quick cider in The Telegraph with young Tom and a sweet young Indian barmaid whose name I don't know yet. Some jukebox songs that put me in mid of Pram, the band I was going to see; Stereolab, Broadcast. Spooky, Nineties Independent music that still seems ahead of its time.
Then what seemed like a slightly dashed walk across the Quayside promenade towards the Ouesburn Valley. It was cold, nastily so considering it was now June and I hadn't had my daily circuit of the Swimming Fitness centre in the early afternoon so I was feeling out of sorts. Ill prepared. One more drink at The Free Trade. I'd been hoping to bump into Billy or Chris, regulars there but was disappointed. I felt a bit lonely and friendless. It didn't auger well. Perhaps my wonderful unbroken run of gig nights in Toon was under threat and I was heading towards disappointed. I'm a superstitious soul in essence and I doubt if I'm alone by any means.
Still, I shouldn't have fretted. Newcastle, as always I find, had my back. I sought directions from The Free Trade's rather lovely and very friendly barmaid. She gave me directions to The Cobalt Studios where I was heading and I crossed the Ouseburne Valley, through The Cluny complex where I've been such a regular in recent weeks, and guided by my Google Maps app on my phone into fresh territory for me, past Ernests Cafe Bar at the high end of Ouseburn and to the door of the Cobalt
.I feel like I've been exploring areas of town I thought I knew but haven't really this year as Spring becomes Summer. Experiencing my home town anew and charting new territory and this was turning into another fresh and rewarding evening. For most of my fifteen years in Newcastle I've stuck mostly to home ground, the comforts of NE1, but recent weeks have led me to realise that the artistic and cultural heartland of Newcastle is not really here.
It's in the Ouseburn Valley and the square mile that surrounds it. Starting from the Free Trade, and the road outside it like the lampost that signals the gateway to Narnia, The short walk from there to The Cluny venues and its bars, restaurants and workshops. Its magical and artistic territory now since its regeneration in the Nineties following the destruction of the working class Byker Housing Terraces and their rough and ready Industrial height and decline .
I added a couple of streets to my mental A-Z last night. Instead of heading up the hill to The Tanners Arms where I start and now end many of my Cluny or Cumberland Arms nights out I took a right under the railway bridge. I haven't been to The Cobalt Studios since the very start of Lockdown. The bleak, early Spring days before we headed into a mental tunnel from which we weren't sure when and how we might emerge.We may not be wholly out even yet.
That night in 2020 I saw Jeremy Tuplin and his band at The Cobalt, and chatted to them all at length. They were incredibly generous with their time and we talked at length about their music, their inspirations and aspirations, music in general. They also played a blinding set. Curiously Jeremy has got back in touch with me recently as he has a new album and a new tour to promote it. He's only playing Carlisle this time round. A bit too far for me to go. But I'll go and see him next time he plays here and I hope pick up the conversation.
Now behind the flapping, plastic strips that serve as the doorways to Cobalt Studios there's a young lad. He seems to me to be in his early teens but it gets more difficult to judge the older you yourself get. His teens are probably actually late ones. He's very friendly anyhow.. He tells me when the sets will be and that dinner is thrown in with the ticket price. I'm not sure how an offer like this is financially viable but I've never been one to mess with gift horses so say nothing.
Inside it's immediately apparent that I'm in the company of the cool. It's a youngish crowd considering Pram are a band with a thirty year history. They're unaffected and happy to be here. Sat in benched rows or around tables. I ask if I can sit next to an immediately friendly young couple and we chat away about this and that. They're here for the first time and all three of us intrigued by the prospect of a free dinner.
A couple of women of about my age ask if they can sit on our row too and I shift my bum so they can squeeze in too. We start to chat away as well. Newcastle is like this as I've said before. We talk about the Smashing Pumpkins initially who I overhear them name dropping. I tell them about the time I saw the band play in Cologne, just after Siamese Dream was released with one of the best friends of my life. How astonishing they were that night. How it still lives on as one of the best gigs I've ever seen.
We talk about The Fall, The Nightingales and Stewart Lee. About Birmingham where one of them is from. Then our dinners our served and they're excellent. Rice, salad and curry served in recyclable, practical boxes. It's an excellent and rather remarkable moment in the night. Something they do every Thursday apparently. It's enough in itself to make me vow to return in itself.
There's a screech of feedback from the stage. The support, Brad Field is kicking off. There's a flickering lurid technicolor film projected on the backscreen of a Seventies workout video with American women in floppy tops and trainer bottoms, sweaters and sneakers stretching and bending. Brad is a baldish, bearded man sat an eagle's perch of seating area above the stage, sitting on a drum kit he's pounding away at in almost Hip Hop fashion and spraying repetitive and shrill electronic noise all over us. I find it almost immediately unbearable and long for it to end.
The first track finally does. The woman to my right from Birmingham voices her approval to her friend and mentions Steve Reich. I'm vaguely aware of what that means musically but am not a fan of that any more than I am of Brad Field and think 'Steve Reich in the afternoon?' . Steve Wright is an appalling Radio One DJ who attracted Morrissey' ire in the mid-eighties, (inspiring him to write the lyrics to Panic and encourage the thinking UK youth to actually hang him in a fully justified response, or so he thought, to Wright's playlists and tiresome banter).
I'm wishing similar murderous intent on Brad Field. The next twenty minutes of so are an unprovoked attack on my ears, nervous system andartistic sensibilities. It's like a morning bombing raid on Baghdad during The Gulf War by Allied Planes, (OK I exaggerate, but only just.). I won't bother you with the details. Just be glad and grateful that I experienced it so you don't have to. It was Art for Art's Sake. I'd rather listen to 10CC than have to endure that again. Everyone else apparently loves it.
Twenty minutes wait. I get a drink and the six members of Pram, (if memory serve,) gather on stage) and begin to limber up for their performance. I've been looking forward to htis for a couple of weeks. Pram have a name that I remember from the Melody Makers I used to read in the Nineties. They were invariably bracketed with Stereolab and Broadcast and invariably last on the list, least likely to but worthy of respect.
Once they get started they prove their abiding credentials within thirty seconds. They're dimly lit silhouettes on a dark stage. Shadow players doing their part of the midnight shift. Forgive the cliches. They're required in this case.
Pram are strictly art school. they've done their research. Over a lifetime They open their set with one of the most extraordinary scenes in all of Hollywood noir history flickering on their backscreen. The astonishing extended glide downstream of the poor orphans in the boat during Night of the Hunter. Meanwhile the players bring the atmosphere to the boil. It's at once Weimar, Dada, witching hour. Seance on a Wet Afternoon. Night in the hive puckered up by night. It's masterfully done. One of the best opening numbers I've seen to a set. Ever frankly.
Once they've established the mood all they need to do is keep the cauldron bubbling. They do so effortlessly for the next fifty minutes. The black and white film track continues with snippets from arty black and white classics. A perfect running backdrop. The band don't speak between numbers. This is a performance, an artistic vision realised, rather than a gig. This is The Banshees and The Cure if they'd stayed faithful to their aesthetic instincts rather than setting their controls to the heart of Top of the Pops and the covers of NME and Smash Hits. It's a triumph frankly. I don't stay right to the end, I'm satisfied with what I've seen, so bid adieu to the people I've met, who've been a memorable part of the evening and its success and head for the bus.
It Starts With a Birthstone - Another Drop in the Ocean - Ten Years of Writing a Blog
It Starts With a Birthstone is ten years old today. I haven't baked a cake. It is, as McCulloch sang in The Cutter, (one of the most inspiring songs, still of my lifetime),' not just another drop in the ocean'. or it tries not to be. I'm quite proud of it actually.
I started this with the intention of writing about the albums that had meant so much to me when I first started buying records in the Eighties; Murmur, High Land, Hard Rain, Sulk, Rattlesnakes, Born Sandy Devotional. Those became sprawling, and I suspect largely incoherent epic written journeys, written often over the course of a week ir mire. There didn't seem to be much of a future in this modus operandi, though I enjoyed the writing experience from the start.
I chanced upon a new way of going about this on January 19th 2014, when I started my Song or Songs for the Day series which I've maintained ever since. For the record the first in this journey was The Andrew Oldham Orchestra. The most recent Radiator Hospital, This was a real personal incentive, a spur. I've written something on here every day since and almost ten years on we're up to 3,400 days and counting. I've never missed a day and don't plan to start now. I've covered a broad ocean of musical testimony.
Heavy Rock and thrashy genres are probably the only things I neglect, or rather avoid. I just don't care for that kind of stuff and why would I want to spend too much time thinking and writing about something I don't care for. Otherwise I feel I have an open mind and fairly catholic tastes. I'm curious. I think .Every day in this series has had me writing about a different band or artists though no doubt I've stumbled in that respect somewhere and inadvertently duplicated.
What are the objectives of blogs? To bring attention to things for others that the writer thinks worthy of notice, in my case music I love or at least like. To attest to lived experience. To try to become a better writer. To give me something to reflect on, to gather and focus my energy. All of these for me and more.
I don't really care about how many hits my blog attracts. I've come to be a bit cynical about this element of things. One day I get thousands of hits from Russia. The next day it slows to a trickle. Much of it is electronic traffic I suspect and nothing to get to elated or deflated about either way. I know I could probably get more hits and attention by seeking out and adding advertising, but it's against my basic principles and reason for doing this and you should try to stick with your principles I reckon.
Basically I have one very loyal reader who often recommends great stuff and other people tell me that individual pieces are good. That's enough for me. I know that not everything is great. I write on here every day after all and sometimes I'm short of time so I don't proof read or fact check as thoroughly as I might. So sue me. Write your own.
The way I do this is fairly consistent. I write in one go if I can, then post. Then if I think whatever I've written is good I go back and proofread. Then if I still think it's good I go back and proofread some more. A decent length piece needs a fair bit of proofreading I've found. I know it's annoying for a reader to see spelling mistakes, or incorrect facts, or a paragraph that doesn't flow well. The same adjective used too many times, but hey, there are only so many hours in the day and anyway I've got another review that needs working on. I like to watch the ones I've written recede in the rear view mirror too.
The Internet Age has allowed us all to kid ourselves that we are all creative artists of one kind or other. Possessed of remarkable critical or cultural insight and sensitivity. We all are of course, or have the potential for being so, whether we fully realise it, (in both meanings of the word), or not. This is an age of creation, but everybody is so busy creating they don't always have the time to encourage others efforts. People won't tell you something's good generally I find. Even though they know in their hearts that something is. Get used to it. Persevere.
What I'm most pleased about with It Starts With a Birthstone is that over the course of its evolution it has encouraged me to focus primarily on music that has just been released or will be released imminently. There was a time, about twenty years ago when I barely listened to new stuff, believing as many do that the best music of my lifetime was released during the years when I was 15 to when I turned 25.Or else in the Sixties probably. I don't think this is the case anymore and never will again. I try to live in the now. That's the most rewarding approach to life I'd say.
I have a rundown of favourite albums towards the end of every year now. It makes no attempt to be definitive, just the records I like in some rough order of my liking. . I started this round about in 2016 with a list of 10. This grew to 50, then 100. This year I'm tempted to do 150. We'll see. It certainly won't be hard for me to find 150 records I'd say were worth listening to. Onwards and upwards..
Song(s) of the Day # 3,407 Radiator Hospital
Today's a rather special day for me emotionally. Ten years ago I started this writing and musical endeavor and today I'm in double digits, 19,504 posts later. No time, (or only a moment), to pause and smell the coffee. Onward we go. I've come across another good one.
What on earth is a Radiator Hospital. A hospital where radiators convalesce? Search me. In this case they're a band. driven by Michigan born and bred songwriter, Sam Cook-Parrott. They've been around for at least a decade now and now find themselves in Philly mostly. That's all the backgound information you're getting. If you want more, seek out The Internet.
They're as good a band as any to celebrate the tenth anniversary of It Starts With a Birthstone because they've got plenty of what I appreciate about guitar based music, (the loose genre I probably appreciate most). This, as I've testified many, many times on here, kicked into gear when I first bought Murmur in late 1983 and began to fall in love with it and a whole way of listening to music.
Radiator Hospital have plenty of mystery and guile. The same DNA as R.E.M. back then. Give their latest album, Can't Make any Promises a listen, if you don't believe me. It has everything that makes this odd pursuit, so incredibly special. Namely, a group of people who feel they've got something in common, gathering together to make a noise and almost by accident producing a work of art instead.
I loved Can't Make any Promises on first play. At some point in 2023 I'll put it on a list. Really you could ask for nothing more. Its spiritual twins are Teenage Fanclub and Dinosaur Jr. Oh and early R.E.M. You couldn't ask or better adopted kin. I get the impression that Peter Buck would appreciate this too. It brims with ramshackle, melodic joy.
It Starts With a Birthstone - First Ever Post - Sunday June 2nd 2013
* Post Script (added a few months later). I've broken my pledge and will make other posts not solely reviews of my record collection. Always music related and generally inspired by the reviews I'll write.
Thursday, June 1, 2023
Song(s) of the Day # 3,406 Jeffrey Silverstein
More Darren Jones approved merchandise. In his word's 'woozy Country' and that description hits the bullseye.. Lee Hazelwood after one too many shots, David Berman slightly worse for wear. Portlander, Jefferey Silverstein and his second album Western Sky Music.
It's as good as those descriptions sound. Gram, if he'd plumped in '69 for the Velvets rather than The Stones, this is liquid, blissed out guitar music, Silverstein drawls at the heart of what's going on in an utterly spaced fashion. Kurt Vile's Arizona cousin.
Brownie points once more Darren. This is gorgeous stuff. Silverstein barely stretches a muscle for the course of the records thirty minutes stretch. He knows that's exactly the right thing to do. Stoned. Immaculate.
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