Friday, December 21, 2018
Albums of the Year # 5 Elza Soares - Deus E Mulher
From August:
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.
Song(s) of the Day # 1,797 Amy Rigby
An album that could easily have landed up in my end of year Top 50, but it came to my attention too late; Amy Rigby's The Old Guys, a ruminative but rocking set of songs that deserves greater attention all round than it's probably likely to get. Rigby, who hails from Pittsburgh has some pedigree. The former wife of dB's drummer Will Rigby and making records in various guises since she was a member of The Last Roundup and The Shams in the Eighties, The Old Guys surely ranks among the best things she's ever done.
With a set of songs that vacillate between Country, Stiff Records New Wave, Power Pop and late Sixties and early Seventies Singer Songwriting, it's a sparkling set. At once sadly nostalgic but also wry with all the wisdom that middle age bestows. The Stiff Records comparison is almost inevitable given that Rigby is the long time partner of Wreckless Eric, one of the leading lights of that label's early days. The Old Guys has echoes of his best stuff but also minded me of Elvis Costello and Kirsty McColl of the same school. She very much belongs in this fine company.
Opening up with some of the best song lyrics you're likely to hear this year imagining a letter from Philip Roth to Bob Dylan upon the latter winning the Nobel Prize, each track brings something new to the party. Musing on her heroes' inspirational spark as Patti Smith has always done as they add fuel and fan her own creative fire. Lyrically, her songs are constantly interesting, by turns funny and sweet and Rigby has a melodic gift to match her way with words. Altogether wonderful!
Thursday, December 20, 2018
Albums of the Year # 6 Lawn - Blood On The Tracks
From May. The most leftfield of my choices. I doubt it will be on any other list this year. Only available on cassette or digital format. Nevertheless, a quite superb album:
This is surely destined to be one of my favourite records of the year. Blood On The Tracks, the debut album from New Orleans duo Lawn released a couple of weeks back. I'm sorry that I can only post one track here, opener 2000 Boy, because given a chance I assure you I'd post the whole damned thing.
It's full of instant pop inspiration and small moments of genius. Taking The Kinks as a starting point, then leaping forward fifteen years to bands like Wire, Gang of Four, Pylon, Minutemen, The Clean and The Bats, on from there to Fugazi and Deerhunter and fast forward to the present to like-minded contemporaries Hoops, Warehouse and Omni.
But Lawn deserve a lawn or even perhaps a small field all to themselves because Blood On The Tracks is a remarkably accomplished record. Nothing to do with the Dylan classic as far as I can tell. Lawn's, two partners Mac Folger and Rui De Magalahes trade songs back and forth and the mood shifts magically from track to track. Each song wrestles to tear your love away from the last. It's melodic, concise, considered and cool, reminiscent of things you love but carving its own space in the scheme of things. And that's no mean feat!
Twelve songs of restless vigour and invention, just like my favourite album of all, R.E.M's Murmur which changed my life way back in 1983, Lawn's Blood On The Tracks deserves a sizeable, appreciative audience because it's an altogether wonderful statement. Discover its glorious thirty eight minute burst for yourselves and I hope to return to it in my end of year Album List, be able to post more from it for you, and where it seems utterly sure to figure very high in the Top Ten.
Song(s) of the Day # 1,796 Black Belt Eagle Scout
Mother of my Children, the splendid and very distinctive debut album from earlier on this year from Portland, Oregon based Katherine Paul a Native American from the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community who channels the rich cultural tradition she grew up in with her own personal concerns towards an affecting and atmospheric set of songs.
Wednesday, December 19, 2018
Songs About People # 762 Marvin Kaplan
A song from Damien Jurado's latest record for Marvin Kaplan, screenwriter, playwright and actor in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and voice of several of the cats in Tom Cat among many other things.
Albums of the Year # 7 Low - Double Negative
From September:
The Goon Sax's album is not the only fine record that comes out today. There's also Double Negative, the twelfth album from Low. The two records couldn't be more different really, apart from the basic fact that they're both made by trios composed of two men and a woman. Otherwise they sound like albums made from the opposite end of life's experiential spectrum, We're Not Talking a record made by teenagers reluctant to give up on adolescent feeling and wrestling with the prospect of breaking through to adulthood while Double Negative is their middle-aged parents response, full of static and unease and awareness of death, not something that intrudes on the Goon Sax record for a moment.
Low are a band who've always determinedly trodden their own path. I don't know all of their records but I've liked every single one that I've ever heard. And I very much like this one. A few years back I saw them play at an All Tomorrow's Parties festival in Minehead and they exuded a calm but spectral presence throughout their set. There was humour there, particularly in frontman Alan Sparhawk's between song patter but there was also gravitas. He mentioned Syria, which was then in the early stages of violent war throes. That's seven years or more back and the spectre of Syria is still with us.
Double Negative is a fraught album, streaked with the contradictions of modern existence. There's beauty there, the songs are artfully constructed, but there's also a continual crackle, a dark undertow. Their may also be humour too in the title of the record perhaps a reference to America's current 'idiot in chief' and comments he made a few months ago about Russia. In every way it's a very modern record, trying to take the basic backdrop of guitar, drums, bass and vocals somewhere else through the wonderful medium of studio technology. It's highly successful in that respect, at least to my ears,. I wasn't entirely clear of what its concerns might be, whatever they are don't really matter, the record expresses them powerfully. Perhaps The Guardian's glowing review might give some clues. Anyhow, it held me totally captivated on listening through it in its entirety at my desk with my headphones on this morning, midway through September as Autumn falls.
I'm not sure which record I'll listen more to over the coming months, The Goon Sax one or the Low one. They're both excellent visions in incredibly different ways. The Goon Sax one deals in simpler emotions while Low wrestles with the complexity. I recommend them both highly for different moods. Who says the best music has already been made?
Tuesday, December 18, 2018
Vinyl Purchases # 27 Play School & Play Away
£6.00. RPM Records, Newcastle. 18th December 2018.
A long discontinued series. Largely because I haven't been buying records. But today, coming up to Christmas I treated myself. A BBC children's record from 1976, with musical value in addition to nostalgia kitsch.
Albums of the Year # 8 Phosphorescent - C'est La Vie
From October:
Phosphorescent, (the stage name for Matthew Houck), originally from Huntsville, Alabama, is back with his ninth album C'est La Vie. It's his seventh album in all, and though I'm not familiar with the whole of that back back catalogue, I did fall under the spell of his last studio album Muchacho, which came out in 2013.
Six years on and not an enormous amount has changed in Houck's world sonically. Though much has changed apparently in his life. He's found contented relationship, started a family, moved from New York to Nashville, built his own studio and almost died from meningitis, and made C'est La Vie. It's a haunting, dazzling record and is well worth the wait.
Houck gazes out from its cover, looking something like a leaner Demis Roussos, in awe, wonder and apparent pain. It's a striking image and it fits well to the narrative of the record which comes on like a spiritual quest. I heard the album playing yesterday when I walked into Fopp the splendid record chain on Rose Street in Edinburgh and it sounded terrific, the kind of album made to be played in record shops so curious customers can ask who it is.
The record has one song that sounds like a hit, though these things are probably never actual hits nowadays. That song is New Birth in New England where Houck is sat in a bar drinking a beer and considering another when he chances upon a stranger who he feels he knows. It's a rare carefree moment, reminded me a bit of today's Heart of Rock & Soul song Girls Just Want To Have Fun melodically. I can't hold it against the guy. He deserves happiness however momentary.
Elsewhere there's much of the spiritual melancholic swirl we expect from Phosphorescent. Cosmic Music. On the nine minute centrepiece Around The Horn, he goes all motorik on us and it's a joy to behold. Neu! backing Gram. Houck may have found contentment, we have to hope he has. He may not know where he's going but he hasn't forgotten where he's come from. As he said when interviewed in this month's Mojo:
'This life is sad, for all its gorgeousness. The overriding thing at any point if you give it a second of reflective thought is just, it's such a sad deal (laughs). So that's always at the forefront, y'know?'
Song of the Day # 1,794 State Champion
'Punked up country gunk' from long running Chicago band State Champion's fourth album from earlier this year.
Monday, December 17, 2018
Albums of the Year # 9 Emily Fairlight - Mother of Gloom
From August:
Simple rural folk arrangements and Fairlight's swirling, mordant vocals. There's little unecessary embroidery here. It all sounds as if it was recorded utterly authentically with musician and their enchanted leader grouped in a close circle in a shack thick in some forest in a wild and precarious location. Mother of Gloom is a heady trip, all atmosphere, and the witches spell it casts is deep and unnerving.
Sometimes you find yourself in need of what music offers. Sometimes it can be a gift to share with and experience with others and sometimes it's something you crave utterly selfishly, to drown absolutely everything out and immerse yourself in. Some kind of refuge. Yesterday was a day when I inclined towards the latter inclination. I was low. And I came upon Wellington, New Zealand's Emily Fairlight and her splendidly titled second album Mother of Gloom which came out earlier on this year. And I'm just glad that I did.
It's altogether a beautiful, glacial trip. Not entirely a happy one mind. In fact far from it. In many respects it's a very dark and gloomy record. Yet, let's face it, life is never a wholly happy experience either, and we need music that reflects that ambiguity and depth. That darkness sometimes. And this is such a record. Fairlight is clearly a troubled soul, or else chooses a persona that appears to be and the album has a trance-like intensity that will surely draw you into its depths.
Simple rural folk arrangements and Fairlight's swirling, mordant vocals. There's little unecessary embroidery here. It all sounds as if it was recorded utterly authentically with musician and their enchanted leader grouped in a close circle in a shack thick in some forest in a wild and precarious location. Mother of Gloom is a heady trip, all atmosphere, and the witches spell it casts is deep and unnerving.
Sometimes you know instinctively that a record is not going to let you down as you move from one track to the next, so sure is the trust you're building with the artists shaping its flow. Such was the case yesterday with myself and the relationship I established with Mother of Gloom, (apparently a Martha Wainwright lyric). It never once let me down from first track to last. A seamless, shining path.
Fairlight has something in common with Wainwright in terms of her art and tone. She also shares some gifts and mannerisms with Patti, with PJ, Natalie Merchant, Karen Dalton, and Cowboy Junkies, Margo Timmins. But this record is so assured and powerful a statement that she earns every right to be considered in her own light. She's a wonderful talent, and this is as a good a record of its kind as I expect to hear this year. It surely merits awards of some description, but even if it doesn't get the ones it deserves, it is destined for garlands of some sort from It Starts With a Birthstone at least come December. That's the least I owe it to be frank. It pulled me up just when I needed it yesterday after all. Cheers Emily!
Song(s) of the Day # 1,793 Pearl & the Oysters
Gainesville, Florida based Parisians Pearl & the Oysters cook up a wonderfully kitsch pop concoction on their latest album, Canned Music. Almost like some lurid technicolour re-imagining of early Seventies suburban American life; it's all The Brady Bunch, The Jackson 5, Hanna Barbera, The Partridge Family, The Chipmunks and Bubblegum Pop singles with Giorgio Moroder popping over from next door with his synthesiser to provide a slightly incongruous backdrop to the non-stop barbecue.
Whether this idealised suburbia ever existed is bedsides the point, Pearl & the Oysters make a damn good case for it, though much of Canned Music might endanger your teeth, so concentrated are its saccharine levels, four or five track listening sessions could prove highly addictive should you like to fly in their beautiful balloon.
Sunday, December 16, 2018
Things Found on My Local's Jukebox # 350 Tim Buckley
I put this on early Friday evening for a very good friend, one of the most important of my lifetime who had been cremated near Leiden, Holland, earlier on in the day. He had died a week before after several years of incredibly cruel illness. It made sense that I played a Tim Buckley as he was an artist that Matt loved more than almost any other and we had listened to on no end of occasions together. Listen to him howl!
Songs Heard on the Radio # 283 Jane Birkin
A bit of breathy Birkin on the radio on a Sunday a couple of days after her 72nd birthday.
Songs About People # 761 Kitty Winn
Another Advance Base song. This time from 2016's Nephew in the Wind. For Kitty Winn of The Exorcist and Panic in Needle Park.
Albums of the Year # 10 Gwenno - Le Kov
From March:
What I find particularly admirable about Le Kov is its pure power as artistic statement in a historical and political moment when we are most in need of them. Just singing in this dying language (sadly a conclusion that must be drawn), Gwenno potentially limits the audience for a record that in terms of its sound is more accessible to a greater audience than the one it might actually reach, but is determined to stick to its own resolve, and that determination should be respected. So a record that could easily take the path of Jane Weaver's highly successful and lauded Modern Kosmology which featured highly in virtually every end of year chart in 2017 probably won't, because of its own unshakeable principle.
March sets off in splendid style with the cracking second album from Gwenno, Le Kov. A sparkling and highly original record, sung entirely in Cornish, a language which now has less than a thousand living speakers one of whom is the artist herself. Just this fact alone would make it worthy of attention, the added bonus being that it's also an incredibly distinguished and accessible album, despite the fact that the listener may not have the slightest idea what is actually being sung about, (translations are available and have been discussed in reviews), make it even more praiseworthy.
Gwenno, (Saunders), previously in Pipettes, has been putting out records for a number of years but Le Kov is definitely a step into a new space, even from her fine solo debut Y Dydd Olaf, released in 2015. That was sung in Welsh, Saunders was brought up by a Cornish speaking father and Welsh speaking mother. Le Kov, (which translates as Place of Memory) is a defiant and determined sounding record, touching on Brexit, displacement and struggle to express identity in an increasingly uniform and often oppressive mainstream culture. But there's still much opposition and resistance. evident in the margins as this album attests
In terms of its musical palette the record melds Krautrock, Folk, artists like Stereolab, Broadcast, Super Furry Animals and Serge Gainsbourg into fascinating, captured woven textures that are the stuff of dream. Cornish is such an evocative, mythic sounding language that the sense of spell that results from all this is quite captivating, and can't help but mind me of the rich and ancient historical and cultural legacy of Arthurian legend.
What I find particularly admirable about Le Kov is its pure power as artistic statement in a historical and political moment when we are most in need of them. Just singing in this dying language (sadly a conclusion that must be drawn), Gwenno potentially limits the audience for a record that in terms of its sound is more accessible to a greater audience than the one it might actually reach, but is determined to stick to its own resolve, and that determination should be respected. So a record that could easily take the path of Jane Weaver's highly successful and lauded Modern Kosmology which featured highly in virtually every end of year chart in 2017 probably won't, because of its own unshakeable principle.
Le Kov may not ultimately achieve such success and acclaim in 2018 as Modern Kosmology did last year but this would be a shame because its an equally, and possibly (based on my initial listenings to it), an even more accomplished record. Myth, memory and melody come together to conjure up what will surely be one of my very favourite albums of this year.
Song of the Day # 1,792 Advance Base
Hey, my new favourite artist Part blah, blah, blah.... Advance Base, essentially the one man project of Owen Ashworth, not a million miles away from Phosphorescent, it's smart, literate leftfield stuff. Aptly described on their Bandcamp page as 'depressed nostalgia obsessed lo-fi pop' , this, Dolores & Kimberley is the pick from this year's album Animal Companionship. A pocket gem, almost a classic Raymond Carver short story put to song. About a guy who moves to Indiana, leaving his previous life to start anew. It all has a sad, lived-in reality.
Saturday, December 15, 2018
Songs About People # 760 Sam & Dave
Quite why Sam & Dave are getting this clarinet treatment is slightly beyond me but there you are.
Albums of the Year # 11 Bill Ryder-Jones - Yawn
Back at the end of 2015, I was very taken with West Kirby County Priory, Bill Ryder-Jones third album. It seemed to capture wonderfully a certain British ennui, of winter weather of dead-end towns, of a semi-permanent depressed state, laced with sensitivity in a noble tradition stretching back to Nick Drake, (except Nick Drake fronting an Indie band who'd listened to Pavement a lot).
Three years on and he's back with Yawn. And nothing's really changed at all. In many respects Yawn is West Kirby County Priory Part 2 and I'm not complaining. But if anything the shadows have lengthened and Ryder-Jones finds himself even more cut adrift and alone.
I respect him greatly for choosing to mine this particular dark seam. Before going solo Ryder-Jones was guitarist in the original incarnation of The Coral but chose to depart a relatively stable nine to five existence to do something that's more demanding but ultimately far more rewarding. Ryder-Jones marks his card here as one of the great British pop depressives in the tradition of Morrissey, Robert Smith and Ian Curtis. We should be very grateful to have him among us.
Song of the Day # 1,791 Ignace De Souza & the Melody Aces
From a wonderful record of tracks from Benin in the Seventies, African Scream Contest 2.
Friday, December 14, 2018
Songs About People # 759 Elton John
Elton John is big this Christmas, (if he isn't every Christmas), due to his appearance in the seasonal John Lewis Christmas advert. So here's a song for him.
Albums of the Year # 12 Cat Power - Wanderer
From October:
The story of Cat Power, (Chan Marshall), is as remarkable one as any in modern Rock and Roll. An 'outsider' artist who for many years made her way through the alternative scene of small venues, underground gigs and DIY culture and with a reputation for being on the edge in every way possible. She has, bit by bit over the intervening two decades of her musical career, made inroads into mainstream American culture to the point where her last record 2012's Sun, made the Top Ten Billboard Album chart.
Now she's back with Wanderer and it's a mesmerising listen. A marginalised woman and artist who has journeyed to a place where she demands attention through the sheer, undeniable power of her talent alone. Wanderer is as sparse and spartan as any of her previous records, it's just Cat's voice really plus the most minimal of instrumentation but there's so much soul, passion, heartbreak and feeling here.. In many ways she's a Folk or Blues artist, in the purest sense of those traditions (in a line from Robert Johnson and Leadbelly), and here the production has the clearest, state of the art sheen imaginable.
You get Woman, a duet with Lana Del Ray. You get Stay, a cover of the Rihanna song. You get auto-tune.You get Black, one of the best songs I've heard this year, which I hope I'll be able to post on here in my end of year rundown. The whole album's a treasure, eleven tracks to slot upon a back catalogue that's already crammed with classics. We should be grateful we have her.
Song(s) of the Day # 1,790 Gia Margaret
Two rather beautiful, glowing objects from Chicago-based Gia Margaret's first album There's Always Glimmer, a lyric that turns up in the first song here. The whole record is well worth a listen.
Thursday, December 13, 2018
Covers # 98 - Mercury Rev & Hope Sandoval
One of the more interesting projects coming up early in 2019 is Mercury Rev's loving recreation of Bobbie Gentry's classic 1968 album The Delta Sweete, each song in collaboration with a different female singer. Looking at the people they're working with, it should be a rare treat. Here's a taster, their take on today's Song of the Day with Hope Sandoval guesting.
Songs About People # 758 Alexander Solzhenitsyn
My Welsh isn't good enough to confirm that this is about Alexander. But I imagine it is.
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