LCD Soundsystem, the ultimate hipster ironists. Are Daft Punk actually playing at their house? We'll probably never know.
Monday, March 20, 2017
30 Days of Songs Dean Wareham Covered # 20 Jacky
An instantly recognisable theme tune from a children's TV programme to anyone who grew up in Britain in the sixties and seventies. Covered by Dean & Britta.
Song of the Day # 1,156 Spiral Stairs
'I'm going to Aberdeen. That's where they set the scene...'
Scott Kannberg, formerly of Pavement, has a new album out shortly, called Doris & the Daggers. Kannberg moved a few years back to Brisbane, Australia and according to Keith Cameron, who wrote the review in a recent copy of Mojo, the change has impacted positively on his work, with elements of the sensibility of The Go-Betweens and Flying Nun popping up in his sound. That's good news to me. Here's the outlier of the album, a song called Dundee Man a wonderfully crafted sunny pop indie thing, with typical nonsense Pavement lyrics, (Kannberg is certainly no Dundee man, apparently it's about a fishing holiday he took in Scotland, but what do specific details really matter here!), and a beautiful ringing riff. that's reminiscent of The Chills at their peak. I look forward to hearing its parent record.
Sunday, March 19, 2017
Things Found on My Local's Jukebox # 196 Chuck Berry
A song for Chuck Berry. It has to be said, his songs sounded wonderful coming out of the jukebox tonight! Just watch this clip of him playing Back in the USA on the Dick Clark Show. It tells such a story of times gone by.
Songs About People # 325 Stendahl
While we're talking contemporary British punk bands, here's another IDLES. Their new record gets a bit samey in its relentless thrashing after a bit but one track at a time it's fine. French novelist Stendahl described encountering Giotto's frescoes for the first time as follows:
'
'I was in a sort of ecstasy, from the idea of being in France, close to the great men whose tombs I had seen. Absorbed in the contemplation of sublime beauty... I reached the point where one encounters celestial sensations... Everything spoke so vividly to my soul. I had palpitations of the heart, what in Berlin they call'nerves'. Life was drained from me. I walked with the fear of falling.'
Hence Stendahl Syndrome, which was given a name in Florence again in 1979 after a doctor noticed similar physical and emotional reaction among any number of tourists to exposure to the city's artworks. IDLES sing about a rather less positive, but equally overpowering response to Modern Art.
Cabbage - Gibraltar Ape
'I wanna be as free as a Gibraltar ape...'
Cabbage, one of the more interesting new young British bands around and their new song and video which pretty much stands as a state of the nation address.
30 Days of Songs Dean Wareham Covered # 19 Adam Green
Formerly of the Moldy Peaches, Adam Green's solo albums are a bit of a treasure trove though you have to sort your way through some nonsense to unearth the gems. Here's one!
Song of the Day # 1,155 Curse of Lono
Haunted by the ghost of late sixties voodoo Stones, Curse of Lobo are a London band setting off, who take their name from a Hunter S. Thompson book. It's literary and tells of good record and book collections, and thinking through what they're doing, some of it is a bit mannered for my taste, but this, Five Miles, from the band's debut EP from last year ticks all the boxes.
Saturday, March 18, 2017
Songs About People # 324 Klaus Kinski
More Rough Trade artistes, New York's The Prettiots, from their rather lovely album Funs Cool which came out last year. Here they pay tribute to one of the most distinctive screen presences of all.
Benjamin Booker
Benjamin Booker is back soon with an album called Witness, with here the title track as its trailer featuring Mavis Staples. It's more widescreen, explicitly soulful and ambitious sounding than his eponymous debut album from two years back, less garagey too but my experience of listening to it for the first time a few minutes back was that it certainly stays in your head and echoes back to you once it's done.
30 Days of Songs Dean Wareham Covered # 18 Kraftwerk
Luna do a rather beautiful version of this classic from Man Machine, which is available on the cover version disc of their Best Of CD.
Song of the Day # 1,154 Pulled Apart By Horses
Leeds Pulled Apart by Horses don't do anything new. This is unreconstituted, loud Grunge guitar music for people to throw themselves about to with abandon at rock gigs. They do what they do well however and with obvious relish. Here's the opening and title track from their new record.
Friday, March 17, 2017
Real Estate - In Mind
In the late nineties I went with my sister to one of the better bills of bands I've witnessed at the Brixton Academy; Gorky's Zygotic Mynci, Cornershop with Teenage Fanclub in their middle of the road pomp headlining. It was a great evening and all three bands put on a good show. But as we left my sister said concerning the headliners, 'I wish they'd go a bit Pixies sometimes. A bit grrrrrr!'.
Well that's what you get with Teenage Fanclub, and that's what you get with Real Estate two decades on. They're the band that refuses to go grrrrrr! New album, In Time, (just out), is actually incredibly reminiscent of Teenage Fanclub, not just in terms of its general template, (Byrdsy chiming is at the base core of everything that's going on here), but also in the basic sentiment it conveys, the idea that life is ok and it's going to remain ok.
That's fine, and we all need records that sound a bit like this sometimes, little happy pills. That said, it hardly makes In Time much of a soundtrack for 2017 except perhaps as a soundtrack for those quiet millions who never have any intention of ever voting. While other contemporary musicians are making albums more specifically for these troubled times, Hurray for the Riff Raff, Rhiannon Giddens and Priests, (who I'll get back to soon), Real Estate, (that name really, is that what they'd have done with their lives otherwise?), are staring at the sky and watching cloud formations.
It would be surly to cut them down merely for this response to life, certainly as it's important to state that they do it all very well. Re-grouping and coping with the loss of founding member Matt Mondanile who has decided to concentrate on his project Ducktails instead, they're managing fine. There's a defining sameness about their music but it's a highly comforting sameness. The ringing riffs they build many of their songs around are reliably sturdy in that Byrds tradition that Big Star, R.E.M and the Fanclub built on. Now I really love that stuff, but even for me at points of listening through to this for the first time I did think, 'Oh come on, cut loose a bit' particularly when they do divert off that beaten track into brief early seventies guitar heroics. Eagles territory. I'm with the Dude on that one!
I have a colleague at work whose favourite expression is, 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it!' Which she repeats as if it's a mantra. Real Estate are quite definitely of this mind. In their universe, life is to be wondered at if not entirely engaged with in all its messy contingency. Everything is going to be alright. I hope they're right. In Mind, is a fine, melodic album to wile away the best part of an hour with. It breaks no moulds. Personally, I think it holds its ace up its sleeve til last with Saturday, the final track, which I think is the best song on the record. The moment where the sun breaks through the clouds and you get your transcendental moment. Epiphany! I recommend the record with the minor caveats listed above. For the most part it's a box of chocolates, like its sleeve, and we all like chocolates don't we? Real Estate are craftsmen of solid aural furniture. For once I think I'll grade the album, something I generally avoid on here but it seems apt in this case. A seven out of ten record. Clever boys, but could try harder!
Songs About People # 323 Sean Connery
Very nice jingly-jangly thing in a Smiths vein from the James Dean Driving Experience and 1990 in honour of the best Bond.
30 Days of Songs Dean Wareham Covered # 17 Donovan
The B Side to Hurdy Gurdy Man. Covered by Dean & Britta. Somehow Donovan is a natural source for Wareham.
The Heart of Rock and Soul # 667 Etta James
'Etta made her excursion to Muscle Shoals during a brief intermission from heroin addiction, and turned out one of the best two-sided female soul singles of all time. The hit was Tell Mama but the unforgettable side was I'd Rather Go Blind, a more languorous version of the Southern soul groove. Although she came from California by way of Chess in Chicago, Etta sang those Muscle Shoal blues like she'd been born to them. Of course, the fact that the song provides a great metaphor for her drug addiction intensifies the story, even if lyrical discretion requires replacing smack with booze. But what you're here for is just as much Jimmy Johnson's great guitar and the grand Bowlegs Miller-led horn section.'
Song of the Day 1,153 Freddi Henchi & the Soulsetters
An explosive riff that wouldn't put the Rolling Stones of this period to shame and then Freddi Henchi does his thing. Good times to be had in Denver in 1973! In other news, it's almost the weekend!
Thursday, March 16, 2017
Songs About People # 322 John Foxx
From The Magnetic Fields new record 50 Song Memoir a year by year recovery of his life. This is 1983, and a tribute to John Foxx. Certainly one of the more bizarre albums you're likely to hear this year!
30 Days of Songs Dean Wareham Covered # 16 Beat Happening
Luna kept playing this wonderful song from Beat Happening all through their career as their end of gig song. Much to be said about it, but in the meantime, you get the R.E.M cover instead!
Wednesday, March 15, 2017
Things Found on My Local's Jukebox # 195 U2
A good friend of mine and a big supporter of this blog posted a message to me on social media about The Sound and The Comsat Angels and their early records. They're bands who historically got caught in the slipstream of the Bunnymen, The Teardrop Explodes, Simple Minds, New Order and everyone else in that scrum of groups who gathered, and rushed past them towards their moment in the pop sun. And most of all U2, who soaked it all in and eventually hit the payload for all this sound had to offer while inadvertently selling it out at the same time. I don't care for this band, but I do care for their first album, Boy a lot, which I think is a still remarkable document of the painful and unique journey of adolescence. It will never be really cool, probably because of the later exploits of the band, but it's always there! Back to The Sound and Comsat Angels when I've had time to re-listen to their records. I'm fairly sure the friend I refer to earlier would heartily disapprove of even the slightest endorsement of this particular band I imagine!
Songs About People # 321 Andrew Eldritch
Perhaps we all need to go back home eventually. Andrew Eldritch evidentally thinks so. He's moving back to Leeds, according to the taster song from Mountain Goats, Goths which is out in May. According to the writer of the song John Darnielle:
'I imagine one of my teenage heroes, Andrew Eldritch, returning to the town where the band worked and played when they were young. His friends give him a hard time about ending up back where he started, but not because they're mad: it's good to see an old friend wearing the marks of time on his hands and face like well-loved tattoos. So shall it be in these times: your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions, and Andrew Eldritch whose music has reached spirits in every corner of the globe, will move back to Leeds.'
30 Days of Songs Dean Wareham Covered # 15 The Rutles
From The Rutles Yellow Submarine Sandwich, Galaxie 500's version is well worth posting too, so here you go!
Song of the Day 1,151 The Pretenders
'Yeah. I like it!'
From Debbie Harry it feels fairly natural to move on to Chrissie Hynde. Alone, the opening track from The Pretenders album of the same name from last year. The song has a downward sliding riff that sounds like a close cousin of Werewolves of London. Chrissie does her best Lou / Iggy spoken drawl, (that was always the tradition she drew on most), and speaks/ sings of the pleasures of solitary life. It's good so see a song in honour of this for a change. The song itself is pure old school street poetry and all the better for that. Also here, an added Pretenders related bonus, from Lost in Translation.
Tuesday, March 14, 2017
Album Reviews # 65 Blondie - Blondie
And to complete the set, a review I wrote last June...
And to complete the set, a review I wrote last June. Blondie sound forty years down the line entirely the most spontaneous, best fun and least pre-meditated of all the first wave of CBGB's bands. Their first album is still a thrill! Released just as '76 turned to '77, it's melodic and amped, with a poetic, caustic edge but not a note of pretension. Influenced by Warhol of course but not noticeably by The Velvet Underground, more informed by Surf, Spector, British Mod, Girl groups, and Pop with a capital 'P' and fronted by the most attractive woman ever to lead a band of any kind, and also one strangely devoid, even to this day, of egotistical posturing, despite her natural, arresting beauty.
'I saw you standing on the corner. You looked so big and fine. I really wanted to go out with you. So when you asked to go out with me. I laid my heart on the line.'
Twisted yet pure urban romanticism has never been nailed to the mast quite so definitively as by the opening lines of this record. With the initial Be My Baby drumroll and then Debbie Harry's voice cutting in a brief but devastating way. 'You watched my heart burst then. You'd step in...' We've all had these moments and won't forget them. X Offender is unsettling, given its subject matter, but that's what early Blondie were about, and in the promo for the song, (posted above), you can witness the unmistakable tension within the band itself that was smoothed out shortly after the album's release by the exit of Gary Valentine, who co-wrote the song. He and Stein vie for attention on the camera lens throughout the clip and it seems that one of them had to go and of course it was always bound to be Valentine, leaving the stage to Harry and the rest of the band's gradual relegation to becoming her backing group with all the inevitable tensions that would ensue from that point on.
'She loves you right now. So don't close your eyes. She'll be talking and laughing with six other guys.'
Little Girl Lies is more conventional and less tart. A classic if safe choice for second song on the record. Chorused by cheesy sixties handclaps and Jimmy Destri's Farfisa organ coming to the fore at its most Wooly Bully and 96 Tears. It's conspicuously throwaway and asexual. Nobody's favourite Blondie song but disliked by few either I imagine and paving the way for the gradual assertion of Harry's persona over the course of the rest of the record. This, naturally was always Blondie's trump card.
'We're walking one day. On the Lower East Side...'
This assertion begins to set in with third track In the Flesh, Blondie's first real hit of any kind, if only in Australia, but it set the bandwagon rolling. This is definitely Spector, though more explicitly seventies, and it laid down the blueprint which the band would go to work on and improve and subsequently storm the global pop charts over the next few years. But it's really all here. With the sign off line, 'Warm and soft. Close and hot...' Harry signaled her intent to be direct but alluring, distanced herself from the band's obvious sixties roots and set themselves forward as a different and more immediate and highly sexual proposition. It would take a while for the message to truly hit home.
'You look good in blue. It matches your skin. Your eyes dripping with pain...'
Look Good in Blue is back to more comforting territory. Not a 'get together' or 'break up' song. Just maintaining the relationship with the listener with a string of compliments. The band laying back and immersing themselves in the joys of their record collections. Learning their craft in a way that again would serve them well further down the line.
'New York is covered by grey. Concrete piles. Blues play my way...'
In the Sun is back on the attack. Blondie understood the joys of the beach and surf sound in a way that none of the bands apart from them, save The Ramones, did. Perhaps that was the bond between the two of those groups. This stuff was deliberately throwaway. An understanding of a certain core of American Pop Culture that Patti Smith, Television and Richard Hell never really touched on, so keen were they to tap into the European poetic literary culture and a point of removed cool. Blondie didn't aspire to this at any point of their careers. Never straying for a moment from the street, the bar, the sun or the dancefloor. From the directly accessible and immediate.
'We're meeting in a neutral zone: the last car on the train.'
A Shark in Jet's Clothing lays down their schtick explicitly with its obvious West Side Story borrowings, finger clicks and whistling. So much of early Blondie is unashamed pastiche. Lifts from New York culture but with an emphatically light and poppy touch. Three minute melodramas which make you understand why they were never taken entirely seriously by their CBGB contemporaries with more serious pretensions but also giving you an insight as to why they outlasted them all commercially, so broad and well-versed were the sources of their initial inspiration and what they chose to do with them.
'Yeah, I've been sailing the sea of love. Experiencing romance. With what I know, he never stood a chance...'
So to Side 2. They're not hanging around here. Harry is backed on first track Man Overboard as on In the Flesh by Ellie Greenwich, Micki and Hilda Harris veterans of the classic sixties girl group sound the whole record is so deeply versed in. Here she takes the femme fatale role she was frankly born to play. She'd been in girl group territory before of course with previous bands Wind in the Willows and The Stilletoes, Blondie with time would refine the inspiration and make it their own. There's the briefest hint of reggae in the guitars here which would also feed into the original version of Heart of Glass. Also the vaguest hint of Prog stylings with Destri's synth breaks. But it's all highly efficient, chopped and minimal. They're virtually inventing New Wave, at least two years before its proper arrival.
'She looks like the Sunday comics. She thinks she's Brenda Starr. Her nose job is real atomic. All she needs is an old knife scar.'
To Rip Her to Shreds, probably as close to Punk in the conventional sense as the band ever came. But it's no thrash, Blondie were always too tasteful, not to say able for that. It's an acid, catty putdown of a female rival and it's great to see Harry flexing her claws. Backed by the mass slurred boy backing vocals that would become another of their trademarks, the lyrics are wonderful in documenting the CBGBs scene that Blondie grew from. The nicer but not altogether nice little sister of I Wanna Be Your Dog.
'If I lose my head, we'll be certainly dead. With visions of acid. How I wish they bled.'
Rifle Range is one of the record's finest tunes played out to probably it's sloppiest, least coherent lyrics. Never mind, you can't really hear them anyway and it works fine as a piece of music. Blondie jumped in terms of content from tales of romance, to espionage, to life on the mean streets. All pulp paperbacks, B-Movie features and trash TV, they were a less surly and better groomed Ramones. And ultimately, much to that group and particularly Johnny's chagrin they had an altogether better understanding of the Pop world they sought entry into and how to force that entrance. Blondie is very much an apprenticeship for what came next. Although it took them a while to distance themselves from the slight disdain some of their contemporaries at CBGB's viewed them with, (Patti Smith and Television particularly, both bands pilfered early Blondie band members), everything they achieved with third album Parallel Lines is rooted here, just waiting for the guiding input and touch that Mike Chapman provided there.
'Down in Chinatown, (the year of the cock). He sold the silver belt, put it in hock.'
Kung Fu Girls is almost a scene from Tarantino. He didn't get here first by any means. Blondie, in their appreciation of Trash Culture, knowing exactly just how throwaway and disposable it all is and just as importantly what rich source material it offers for truly great pop music, were way ahead of the pack though they've never really got the credit they deserve for it in the eyes of the 'serious' rock critic. Both Charles Shaar Murray and Nick Kent, the dons at The NME at the time, remained slightly sniffy about them. But they were wrong. No-one had ever done this in quite the way they were doing it. Lester Bangs to his credit did fully appreciate them and lionised them for it. It's Pop Art in the truest sense, Blondie, more than any of those great seventies New York bands understood where Warhol was coming from and packaged themselves and their songs accordingly to appeal to a broader audience than the literati and the rock snobs. The cleverness of this trick is to pull it off and retain a central, keen intelligence. They would never lose it.
'Giant ants from space. Snuff the human race. Then they eat your face. Never leave a trace.'
Blondie would refine and revisit these same themes and melodic tricks over the coming years as they ascended to the fame their leaders looks and sheer charisma always offered as a prospect but which they would never have achieved without the required team ability, looks of their own and no little drive. They would never be as purely Pulp as here though ever again. This is one for their fanclub. Blondie is thirty three minutes long, plays at thirty three and is a better guitar and synth driven pop album than any young band is likely to put out in 2016. That's rather sad but also probably rather true!
Songs About People # 320 Debbie Harry
So, while we're here, Post Punk band Family Fodder make a big deal about Debbie. A single from 1980.
March 14th 1978 Blondie
The next year on this day they were # 2 in the UK. Kept off the # 1 spot by Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights.
30 Days of Songs Dean Wareham Covered # 14 Blondie
Blondie's first big hit single in any territory. It made # 2 in Australia in 1977. Covered later by Luna.
Song(s) of the Day 1,150 Davy Graham
Two songs from guitar legend Davy Graham's 1969 album Hat, on the cover of which he wears the inadvisable hat you see before you.
Monday, March 13, 2017
Things Found on My Local's Jukebox # 194 The Jam
Monday night. Football on. Obscure, but very good song from Sound Affects on the jukebox. Called Monday.
Songs About People # 319 Geronimo
From Cowboys to Indians. Yesterday General Custer, today Geronimo. Reached number 37 in the US Billboard charts when released as a single in 1972. In Murphey's words, (he wrote as well as singing the song):
'the two images together, Geronimo and a Cadillac just struck me as a song title. It was every irony I could ever think of about our culture in two words. Their attempt to make of him what we would define as a civilized person. That was a reason they put him in a Cadillac in the first place. He was actually in jail at the time.'
Song of the Day 1,149 Kitty Wells
A pioneering figure. Her 1952 single 'It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels' made her the fiirst female singer to top the US Country & Western charts and paved the way for June Cash, Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton, Tammy Wynette, Bobbie Gentry, oh and Gram Parsons too!
Sunday, March 12, 2017
Songs Heard on the Radio # 191 Peter, Bjorn & John
Whistling and strummed acoustic guitars and shuffling drums are never a bad idea on a Sunday morning.
30 Days of Songs Dean Wareham Covered # 12 Modern Lovers
The original of Don't Let Our Youth Go To Waste by Modern Lovers, is not much of a song really. A two minute unaccompanied slice of Jonathan Richman half-talking, half singing, voice wobbling, pledging his attachment to an ideal as much as another human being, an anthem for everything he stood for somehow. The core of it is its emotional essence and its wonderful title. Galaxie 500 take both and turn it into one of the greatest, transformational cover versions ever recorded. A heart of darkness for the sensitive!
'I need a walk by the flowers, with someone who can share my face And it looks like no one can take your place And I could bleed in sympathy with you On those days And I could drink up everything you have Don't let it go to waste I could give you memories To rival Berlin in the '30s And I really understand your dating-bar ways And I could bleed in sympathy with you On those days And I could drink up everything you have Don't let it go to waste Say something warm, say something bright' Cause I can't stand to see you when you're cold Nor can I stand being out of your life(Meanwhile)And I could bleed in sympathy with you On those days And I could drink up everything you have(And don't let our youth go to waste)'
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