Sunday, August 12, 2018
Song(s) of the Day # 1,666 The Plastic Shoelaces
We truly live in a strange time and place in 2018. One in which you can come across something like this, ostensibly a record by a bunch of middle-aged blokes from Sacramento, California that is in every real respect, actually a time machine back to Camden Town in 1986.
The Plastic Shoelaces sing in English accents, they do that C-86 thing to an absolute tee. They clearly revere The Television Personalities, Wreckless Eric, Patrick Fitzgerald, Buzzcocks and know intimately every record The Razorcuts and 14 Iced Bears ever released.
The Plastic Shoelaces. There they are. Somewhere in Sacramento, California in their trainers and scuffed jeans, eating sweets and drinking lemonade from bottles with a straw, living in a world where we're all forever seventeen wishing we were fourteen. They take me back to a time and place where I actually was. Or at least thereabouts. With our collection of fanzines and seven inch records. Where Jonathan Richman and Edwyn Collins are the role models and Bobby Gillespie is sure to be the star one day that he so obviously is already in his head right now.
'We were teenagers. Reading The Maker...' , they sing. By which they mean the Melody Maker, the long defunct weekly music paper for those who spurned The NME. I used to live here and that world is forever preserved in aspic on this record. And I for one am very glad that it is and grateful to The Plastic Shoelaces for doing it all so impeccably and with such incredible eye for detail. They got it on tape! Appropriately this is how the album is available. That and streaming.
Saturday, August 11, 2018
Songs About People # 673 Kurt Waldheim
Lou Reed in his mulleted prime goes funky over Kurt Waldheim, (he of the dubious past), and meanwhile conducts a related conversation with Jesse Jackson.
Song(s) of the Day # 1,665 Elza Soares
Now here's something quite phenomenal. Deus E Mulher the latest album from a genuinely legendary figure, Brazilian Elza Soares, born in a Rio favela, now in her eighties but making utterly startling and groundbreaking music that almost defies description. Soares has over sixty years in the music business, starting of as a samba and bossa nova singer and now over the decades has transmuted into something else entirely, a force of nature frankly.
Accompanied by a quite brilliant set of musicians, four decades junior to her, reinventing themselves from one track to the next at will, the record is one tumbling, carnival of rhythm and sound. Sometimes Jazz, sometimes Afrobeat, sometimes recognisably Brazilian, but then Hip Hop or Post Punk or Metal. It's a brutal and abrasive beast textured with metallic jagged surfaces, consistently in your face and consistently shedding its skin and moving onto fresh territory, reinventing its own wheel. Yes it really is that good! I don't have the words to do it justice really.
I don't speak Portuguese but have done sufficient, rudimentary research into what's going on to confirm what seems rudely apparent whether you understand the lyrics on Deus E Mulher or not. That this is a furious, raging record. Furious at a Brazilian society undergoing an epic, violent historical and cultural crisis where homicide and rapes are reaching record levels and gang crime is utterly rife. Here, it's all vividly represented. Life in the cauldron.
Soares rages against all of this, as she rages against the dying of her own light. The album's practically a manifesto for activism and revolt. A quite brilliant record that's surely as good as anything you're likely to hear this year. As I said, I don't fully understand all of the marginalised fury it articulates but listening to it is more than enough and whatever it is it's a mighty, heady brew.
Friday, August 10, 2018
Songs About People # 672 Julio Cortazar
The legendary Argentinian novelist, short story writer and essayist, best known perhaps for Hopscotch, gets an appropriately enigmatic tribute.
Say Sue Me - Just Joking
One of my very favourite discoveries of 2018, South Koreans Say Sue Me are back with a new and altogether suitably wonderful single Just Joking Around. Two utterly blazing guitar solos in tribute to the band's original drummer who fell ill before the recording of their last album. The song is as good an indication as any of just how good they are!
Song of the Day # 1,664 Jaromil Sabor
I can tell you little about Jaromil Sabor except that they're, (he's?) French, very Indie and have been putting out stuff like this for a number of years. This is the lead off track from their latest album Second Science.
Thursday, August 9, 2018
Things Found on My Local's Jukebox # 309 Womack & Womack
Not my selection but that of Davie Green, one of the finest of the regulars at Rosie's.
Song of the Day # 1,663 Night Shop
Lead song from album In the Break, out in mid-September. Very Kevin Morby-ish, appropriately from a former Morby collaborator in Babies.
Wednesday, August 8, 2018
Song(s) of the Day # 1,662 The Love-Birds
The Love-Birds, furry young freaks from San Francisco, draw their music from the well of fifty years of jingling jangling guitars, almost invariably played by laid back white men with messy hair wearing slightly scruffy clothing. Nothing wrong with that. I've been listening to this kind of thing for over thirty five years and it still works for me. At least for the most part!
Where The Love-Birds start from apparently is their undisguised hero worship of all-things Teenage Fanclub. Appropriately, debut album In the Lover's Corner, (which came out at the end of May), was mastered by that band's Norman Blake with production duties divided up between The Skygreen Leopards Glen Donaldson and Kelley Stoltz.
Given that kind of set of collaborators, it's not altogether a surprise the way In the Lover's Corner sounds the way it does. In fact it's all not so very far away from a dream Roger McGuinn might have had back in 1966. Love-Birds may be aware of things that have happened since; Flamin' Groovies, Big Star, R.E.M, Dinosaur. Jr, Teenage Fanclub and others, but fundamentally any song on here might have featured on Turn,Turn,Turn or Fifth Dimension with only the most minor stylistic tweaks and adjustments.
So though The Love-Birds see the world through a refracted lens where Punk and Grunge have happened as well as Folk Rock and have had at least some impact on the ingredients in their mix, fundamentally they veer towards the latter time and mindset rather than the former. It's not, after all a crime. Teenage Fanclub followed the same route after all fairly early on in their own careers, just as soon as they'd got all of that feedback out of their systems.
In the Lover's Corner will never stand your world on its head. It has exactly the opposite intention. It wants to offer you eleven melodic and heartfelt Indie guitar songs that are slightly lovelorn in terms of their sentiments but never exactly heartbroken. The Love-Birds. in the jingle jangle morning they'll come following you.
Tuesday, August 7, 2018
Song of the Day # 1,661 The Victims
Blazing early Punk Rock single from Australia's The Victims, and it sounds very Australian. Featuring Dave Faulkner, who went on to form The Hoodoo Gurus.
Monday, August 6, 2018
Loose Tooth - Keep Up
Keep Up, the first full album from Melbourne, Australia's Loose Tooth is an utterly fabulous pop confection. Released just last Friday, it's great fun from start to finish with shimmering guitars, thumping drums and hovering bass and joyous, layered vocals. Formerly a female duo, Etta Curry and Nellie Jackson have now been augmented by bassist Luc Dawson and it sounds to me like the final piece of a puzzle being slotted into place.
Another great record from Courtney Barnett and Jen Cloher's Milk! label, recorded in the Preston of Courtney's Depreston. B-52s are the obvious comparison point but I was also reminded at points of The Go Go's, Look Blue Go Purple and Let's Active, (non-coincidentally also a two girl one bloke three piece), but Loose Tooth aren't ever obvious and keep things moving and the harmonies glorious. Occasionally hinting at slightly deeper and darker sentiments, (the New Order-ish bass pushes things that way), but for the most part keeping thing light and frothy. It's a record that deserves to be described as lovely. That's no slight.
Song of the Day # 1,660 The Boys With The Perpetual Nervousness
Band named after Feelies song title release appropriate sounding song.
Sunday, August 5, 2018
Songs About People # 670 Lana Del Ray
Back to Walt, and the last track of Reminisce & Grill.
* This btw is my 8,000th post on here. Nothing if not determined!
* This btw is my 8,000th post on here. Nothing if not determined!
Song(s) of the Day # 1,659 Walter Martin
Walter Martin, once of Jonathan Fire*Eater and The Walkmen and now a solo act, has released one of the classiest albums you could want to hear this year in Reminisce Bar & Grill. It's full of the soft ache of middle age. So much behind and who knows what ahead.
So what's it about? You could do worse than make assumptions based on its sleeve. A collection of beer bottles, glasses and snacks on a table by the sea. Some kind of summer gathering of friends on a summer beach, to reminisce about times gone by, and life. A mixture of sweet happiness and ennui.
Me & McAlevey and I'm a Puppy in particular, bring tears to my eyes. Martin is a craftsman, both in terms of the music but particularly his lyrics. He has a novelist's eye for detail that can open you up to life's small wonders. Reminisce Bar & Grill is full of neat gems of songs that are never likely to get the attention they deserve.
Saturday, August 4, 2018
Songs About People # 669 Lady Macbeth
Another reason why the new Rock*A*Teens album, Sixth House, featured on here a couple of days back, is worth a listen. Full on melodramatic histrionics. Oh, and of course Lady Macbeth was a real person!
Things Found on My Local's Jukebox # 308 Mary Hopkins
A song with real personal childhood memories for me.
Song(s) of the Day # 1,658 Spider Bags
New jersey's Spider Bags have a new album out. Very much in the Reigning Sound way of doing things. Here are two songs from it.
Friday, August 3, 2018
Songs About People # 668 David Lynch
To tie up this Blue Velvet mini-series. Possibly not the most inspiring thing you'll hear all day, but you should have heard the Isabella Rossellini tracks I tracked down.
Song of the Day # 1,657 Versing
Clanging. Not dissimilar to prime time Sonic Youth in the best possible way. Seattle based Versing warm up for their second album with a three minute imagining of a hit and run incident. Short and bittersweet.
Thursday, August 2, 2018
Songs About People # 667 Dean Stockwell
Part Two of the mini Blue Velvet series. A waltz for Dean Stockwell.
Song(s) of the Day # 1,656 The Rock*A*Teens
Georgian band The Rock *A*Teens returned at the end of June with a new album, their sixth in all (and first for the best part of twenty years), appropriately entitled Sixth House, on Merge Records. It's a full on Gothic Mansion of a record in the proper Southern sense, occasionally veering rather too much to the Eddie Vedder mode of expression for my particular tastes but elsewhere more pleasingly setting off reminders of early R.E.M. and particularly Document. Also Sub Pop's Arbor Labor Union, whose I Hear You album wandered down similar tracks a couple of years back.
The three tracks here should give you a picture of where I feel it's at its best. Frayed, clanging and somehow holding itself together against the odds. Haunted, full-blown and defiantly out there.
Wednesday, August 1, 2018
Things Found on My Local's Jukebox # 307 James Brown
In the absence of Hot Pants, by own personal favourite James Brown song which still hasn't shown up on the jukebox at Rosie's. This worked very well in the meantime. Here he is on Soul Train.
Songs About People # 666 Dennis Hopper
Short three-part Blue Velvet feature on here starts with Hopper. And his sunblock.
Song(s) of the Day # 1,655 Cafe Racer
'Life in the hive puckered up by night...' I can find little trace of Chicago's Cafe Racer and their second album Famous Dust on Internet searches, though they do have a social media presence. It seems they're still something of a secret despite the tremendous qualities of their new record which I've been utterly thrilled with over the last couple of days of listening to it.
It actually came out in February but it seems it's made little more than local waves since. A great number of people are missing a trick in this case because it's a rare gem. The whole thing has that splendid wired qualities that are only too rare with independent records these days and is probably the best frenetic guitar album I've heard this year alongside The Lavender Flu's magnificent Mow The Glass which I reviewed on here a few weeks back.
While Mow The Glass is a record that draws inspiration from the Sixties particularly Famous Dust seems more obviously mired in the Punk ooze of the Seventies and Eighties. More specifically I'm minded of two bands, Television and The Jesus & Mary Chain. Television for the splendid clang and chime, the fluid intensity of the guitars, the Mary Chain for the muttered, sexually wired vocals.
It's a splendid combination, helping you imagine what might have come of things if Jim had ever teamed up with Tom and Richard. What it builds to here is a splendid, brittle intensity, a record that's truly an object of the night in the way that Marquee Moon and Psychocandy both brilliantly and definitively were back in their day.
So the guitars wonderfully echo the spells Television cast in '77 with traces of Venus, Guiding Light, Elevation and Friction popping up at various points in the mix, while band members Michael Santana and Adam Schubert, who also share guitar duties, trade turns at the mic recalling the likes of Some Candy Talking and Just Like Candy along the way. There are also some of the best spoken vocal contributions to a record I've heard since Dexys Searching For The Young Soul Rebels all those years ago. Altogether it's a winning formula.
All in all it's the frenetic intensity of the record that won me over. There's a real sense of a band taking risks here rather than trailing down a readily defined path which is so often the impression I get when listening to new records nowadays. Cafe Racer choose to spend the night in the woods instead and Famous Dust is all the better for it!
Tuesday, July 31, 2018
Cornershop - Double Denim
To bring down the curtain on It Starts With a Birthstone a July of absolute baking heat, that seems to have lasted forever, we have a new single from Cornershop. A band that have been consistently wonderful in their intermittent appearances over more than twenty years. Video's fab too!
Songs Heard on the Radio # 263 BC Camplight
Ahead of a forthcoming album called Deportation Blues.With a slightly alarming video to boot!
Song(s) of the Day # 1,654 Clearance
Chicago band Clearance lay down their cards fairly early on for their second album At Your Leisure. They're clearly fond of The Feelies and The Clean and in the modern scheme of things could be accurately pigeonholed midway between Omni and Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever, both bands they've supported.
Despite all this At Your Leisure does repay the listen. For a couple of reasons. Vocalist Mike Bellis's laconic presence, (like a less caustic Stephen Malkmus), and for the constant interplay of the twin guitars . Each track is fluid, clean adventuring. Not a record likely to rock any foundations but quietly commendable nonetheless.
Monday, July 30, 2018
Songs About People # 664 Norman Rockwell
A large part of America seems to be yearning for a Norman Rockwell world at the moment so this seems apt.
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