Appropriate folky reel for Laurie Lee.
Friday, May 17, 2019
Olden Yolk - Living Theatre
It's wonderful to see New Yorkers Olden Yolk back so soon with their beautifully textured second album Living Theatre. (out today) Their eponymous record, released just a year ago, was a great favourite of mine but this is something else still. A definite thickening and enrichment of the sound and vision they formulated there.
The band, essentially a duo, work from a palette of familiar colours and textures. What they've always made me think of most is the New York of the Sixties, Greenwich Village Folk Cafes, people playing chess on Washington Square, Autumnal hues, a landscape populated by literary urbanites.
Though their sound is steeped in cultural memory it's not in thrall to any one particular sound or artist because Olden Yolk are eclectic magpies and reset all they collect into a record that sounds very much relevant to the here and now. There are a number of musical artists working incredibly creatively in this mode at the minute, Weyes Blood and Aldous Harding, to name but two, have put out records that had a similar unnerving effect on me in recent weeks and on first listening it's immediately apparent that Living Theatre will offer up measureless further listening delights. An opportunity to wallow in an undefined nostalgia.
One of the qualities that I'm more and more struck by with Olden Yolk is their evident but unforced cleverness. Interviews with Shane Butler and Caity Shaffer, the partnership that formulates the band, evidences a rich and varied seam of cultural inspirations from which they forge their sound. Indie in the loosest sense but far more diverse and evocative than the obvious and derivative product that you often get served up from bands operating under that umbrella which so often results in lazy plundering the gifts of the past. This by contrast, is anything but lazy.
I've been watching favourite films again in recent days. The Last Picture Show, Vertigo, West Side Story.Things that I recognise immediately but need to re-experience every once in a while to remind me of their beauty and permanence. Listening to Living Theatre, (in itself a wonderful name for a record), has had a similar impact upon me this morning. This time a nostalgia that I hadn't experienced before. It's an album that's a marked step forward from the debut record that preceded it, fine though that was in its own right. A record you'll want to listen to all day. Or at least one that I certainly do and will.
Song(s) of the Day # 1,943 Ona
Calmness and ease are much underrated. So I'm grateful when I fall upon a new album which just oozes those emotions even if it's housed in a singularly inadvisable sleeve which recalls the greatest excesses of the early Seventies.
The record concerned is Full Moon, Heavy Light, the second album from Ona, out of Huntingdon, West Virginia. It's all creamy melodies and good vibe emotions. Ona are a group of friends and it shows because they emanate a ready and easy happiness almost entirely devoid of cynicism. You'll be fortunate to hear an album more contented with life than this one.
The achilles heel of this approach is to succumb to blandness. As my sister said to me as we came out together from a Teenage Fanclub gig twenty years back, (and they're a band who take a similar, 'the glass is always completely full' approach), 'I wish they'd just go 'grrrrrrrr' like The Pixies once in a while'. Ona are a band who clearly don't know how to go 'grrrrrrrr'. More to the point, they simply don't want to.
So does the record begin to grate? Does it become so laid back that it ends up falling over? Fortunately not, because Ona know all too well exactly what they're doing. They keep their gentle but focused and fleshy Country-ish Indie Rock on the Wilco side of the highway, rarely if ever veering into The Eagles lane. It will be curious to see what will happen to this record as it seems to me to have enormous commercial appeal if the right people hear it and start to play and push it.
The Wilco influence sounds blatantly apparent to me on first listen though Ona lack Tweedy's acid tongue or Wilco's occasional electric charge. As the record draws to its close though it shakes off any remaining residue of debt and its emotional draw swells and swells. Able to evoke and sustain a mood the way Midlake and Fleet Foxes have both done in the recent past but without those two's tendency to over egg the pudding rather too much, Ona are a band to watch and Full Moon, Heavy Light an album to cherish.
Thursday, May 16, 2019
Kevin Morby - Oh My God
One of the most wildly ambitious albums you'll hear all year, Kevin Morby's gargantuan new record Oh My God came out a few weeks back. Morby has long been one of my favourite artists since a friend tipped me off to Singing Saw three years ago. Morby had been plying his skills as a musician for many years previously, as a solo act, and prior to that as a member of Woods.
He's damned prolific, as so many of the best musicians are. If you've got the wind in your sails, why stay in dock. So this is a double, and though I'm generally resistant to that particular format, (see my review of the latest from Vampire Weekend a couple of weeks back), in Oh My God's case it certainly makes sense that it takes that shape, given the vast scope of the enterprise.
Because Morby seems here to be setting out to attempt to make some sense of the very question of being alive, particularly in terms of inhabiting the fallen world we are occupying right now. If this doesn't always make Oh My God very easy to listen to, any more than The Old Testament is an easy read, he certainly constructs a mightily impressive if troubled edifice.
The touchstone artist for Morby seems to generally be Dylan although interviews show that he has an equally strong affinity for Patti Smith. But Dylan to my ears always seems to be his spiritual mentor. Time and time again a turn of phrase, a chord change, the rambling time worn, funereal yet jubilant swing of the arrangements recall the original song and dance man. It's a joy to hear someone sufficiently talented to be able to pull this off as well as he does. If Morby is the best Dylan we have right now, (apart from the man himself of course), then perhaps we're not so badly off after all.
I've put off listening properly to Oh My God since it came out just as you resist reading Moby Dick or Anna Karenina simply because they're such mammoth exercises and you're not sure you'll be equal to them. But as anyone who picks up Melville or Tolstoy will tell you, once you embark on your journey the richness of the experience is sheer delight.
I've also delayed listening to it and now writing about it because the friend I mentioned earlier who introduced me to Morby in the first place has written a vast and hugely comprehensive review of it for Pop Matters which I commend to you strongly and which Morby himself 'hearted' on Twitter.
Rod said something which echoes my own take on Oh My God. That it was Morby's best record but probably not his favourite. That hits the nail squarely on the head. Oh My God strangely is not a record that seems to want you to love it so long as it gets your respect. And boy, does it deserve respect.
Frankly by the end of my listen through to Oh My God I wanted to go and have a good lie down but couldn't because I was at work.Hear it, make sure you hear it. It's a great record, But goodness knows after making it how Morby has the strength to take these songs out on the road and punch them out night after night because just as he's pictured on the sleeve seeming to have risen from his slumbers, there's an inescapable weariness about the whole thing despite how good it is. That he managed to endure that weariness and just release this is triumph enough.
Songs About People # 847 Jeanne Moreau
And another from a couple of years back from the same band. For an icon of French New Wave cinema.
Song(s) of the Day # 1,942 Souvenir Driver
Portland, Oregon quartet who skate the lakes between Jim Morrison, Lou Reed and Ian Curtis's. Their new album A Dangerous Crossing which came out a couple of weeks back, has plenty of glacial moments that occupy this territory almost as if this stuff has never been done before. Though of course it has.
No one trick ponies, they have plenty to bring to this particular table, mainly because the songs are just great in that time honoured tradition.They're quite upfront about the debt they owe, their Spotify playlist is full of Mary Chain, Bunnymen, Stones, Can and 13th Floor Elevators. You know. That lot! The ones who prefer the darkness to the light. Souvenir Driver are fluent in this particular demotic.
A Dangerous Crossing is a strangely schizophrenic cultural product in terms of its design in that if you weren't already clued in, it might be difficult to work out if it was made by an American or an English band. Of course, as with so many Rock and Roll sub genres, this stuff has been a Transatlantic discusion between North America and our own shores which has been going on for over fifty years. Joy Division taking notes from the Velvets and the Doors, American bands going on to take notes from them and back and forth. Morrison and Reed of course originally took a whole raft of their formative inspiration from European film and literature and then re-cast it in American experience. Souvenir Driver meanwhile sound as if they could just as easily be living in Oxford or Manchester as in Portland, Oregon even given the occasional lyrical mention of the prairies.
Anyhow, they pull it off, it's a good though not great record, even though it's really been made many, many times before. But Souvenir Driver understand its DNA better than other contemporaries operating in the same field like Crocodiles or Vacant Lots, in that they know that while imitation may be the greatest form of flattery it ultimately amounts to very little unless the songs are infused with a fresh sense of wonder. They do just that with no little skill in the dark melodies of A Dangerous Crossing,
Wednesday, May 15, 2019
Song(s) of the Day # 1,941 The Pearlfishers
Sensitive, crafted pop songs from Love & Other Hopeless Things the latest album by The Pearlfishers, the way that Roddy Frame and Paddy McAloon used to write them. It's a beautiful warm spring day in Newcastle, the best conditions in which to listen to this altogether lovely record.
The young Frame's fingerprints in particular are all over these songs but I for one am not complaining. David Scott, the singer and songwriter who fronts The Pearlfishers, (and has done for over twenty years), knows perfectly well that this stuff never ever goes out of fashion, any more than love and romance do. That a song penned by Bacharach and David will always mean much, much more than one penned by Gallagher and we all need to remember always just how we felt when we were seventeen.
Somehow this stuff always sounds best coming from a Scot and here we have one actually called Scott. The songs variously project memories, sunshine, dreams and relentless and admirable positivity. The accompanying soundtrack is all Eighties understated Indie and backing 'ba ba bas,' as they couldn't afford the Motown orchestra, as if that matters a jot
'Magic that springs from the gutter, beauty that rings...' a line from One for the Bairns which could act as a manifesto for this whole glorious exercise, Scott is the friend you always wish you had, the one who unfailingly pulls you out of your deepest darkest moods. He understands only too well how the deepest beauty resides in the smallest things. Love & Other Hopeless Things is the best 'nephew of Roddy and Edwyn album' you'll hear this year.
Tuesday, May 14, 2019
Song(s) of the Day # 1,940 Monnone Alone
Ex-Lucksmith Mark Mannone, not quite alone, but with his supporting, bearded band, releases his first album for six years and it's all sunny jangling Power Pop. Nothing remarkable going on here and the songs generally stick to fairly formulaic rails. Ones that don't like The Dystopian Days of Yore and Tumble Down which allow a streak of melancholy and lassitude to creep into proceedings add some welcome light and shade.
Bands have been doing this stuff for several decades now. The Power Pop groups of the Seventies, Lemonheads, Buffalo Tom, Travis, The Lucksmiths themselves and now Monnone Alone. The songs here never cross the line into the outstanding category, the timeless poetic realm that Big Star and The Go Betweens operated in but its all more than serviceable. A good record to listen to as summer approaches rather than when it's drawing to a close.
Monday, May 13, 2019
Things Found on My Local's Jukebox # 390 Grateful Dead
Grateful Dead. One of the most difficult of bands to warm to. American Beauty is probably the album to listen to.
Songs About People # 843 Jon Voight
More Von Spar, and again distinctly Underworld territory here. From 2012.
Song(s) of the Day # 1,939 Von Spar
Cologne band Von Spar establish early on on the first track of new record Under Pressure that they're equipped with a kinetic fleet footed deftness and touch to ensure a smooth ride to their given destination. This is their fifth album in all and it's immediately apparent that they know exactly what they're doing.
Choosing to work with a series of guest singers though Chris Cummings is the main vocalist on the record, the textures of their songs alternates between a light AOR sound that recalls Chicago, Steely Dan and the Yes of Owner of a Lonely Heart and sleek Krautrock.
I have to say I'm more prone to the latter than the former so when Laetitia Sadler comes on board for Extend the Song things perk up to an enormous degree. It's a jaunty, gorgeous tune, the kind of thing that should be high in singles charts and on the radio all the time but somehow never is.
The band's musical frameworks are never less than inventive, taking someone like me who may not be an enormous devotee of some of their sources of inspiration out of my comfort zone. It's often leads to strange juxtapositions. On Not to Forget for example, musically things veer off into distinct Underworld territory while Cummings meanwhile sounds like Gabriel working his way through the third side of The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. It has to be said Cummings delivery isn't really my favourite ingredient in the mix but the whole album is eminently listenable.
Vivien Goldman music journalist, academic and sometime musician, (note to Uncut Magazine, she wasn't in The Flying Lizards), turns up on Boyfriend and the track is a frothy treat of pure electro sunshine, like a collaboration between Tom Tom Club and Propaganda. Altogether magical.
Falsetto Giuseppe which follows on and features oddball R.Stevie Moore is another cracker, producing a fine leftfield musical mesh that you imagine Laurie Anderson would relish. Final track Mont Vedoux rejects the need for guest vocals altogether opting instead for a muscular marriage of Neu, Kraftwerk and regrettably occasionally screaming guitars as we career towards our final destination. Altogether, Under Pressure is a highly impressive record and though not all of its ports of call chime with my personal tastes, there's more than enough here to maintain engagement throughout the course of a diverse but strangely cohesive musical and lyrical journey.
Sunday, May 12, 2019
Songs About People # 842 Tostao
Following the Boogarins review it feels appropriate to post a clutch of songs from the soundtrack to 1970's 'Tostao a Fera de Ouro' made in honour of an emblem of that year's World Cup winning team including its theme from Milton Nascimento.
Songs Heard on the Radio # 312 & 313 Petula Clark & Graham Parker & the Rumour
Author Brett Easton Ellis being fantastically odd on early Sunday afternoon BBC 6 Music radio. You get two from the show. Petula Clark from the soundtrack of 1968 Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway film The Thomas Crown Affair, notable here for Ellis's fabulous pronunciation of the adjective 'baroque' in his introduction. Also Graham Parker's Discovering Japan. Ellis wrote a short story with the same title.
Boogarins - Sombre Duvida
Brazilian band Boogarins are back with a new album Sombre Duvida and it's one long pleasurable dive into aquatic sound, like the rare occasions when you get to take an exotic holiday and take a morning dip into the pool. Boogarins have access to a whole range of moods and ambiences that aren't immediately available to American and British bands and they exploit the cultural gift of their upbringing to construct a multi-textured and layered record that consistently seems to resist the forces of gravity as well as easy categorisation.
Of course as they sing in Portuguese, a whole seam of what they are doing here is obscured to this reviewer at least but it matters not one whit. What is instantly apparent is the sheer richness of the palette they work from. Sombre Duvida is one vast psych exploration of colour and dissonance. Drawing on the magical Tropicalia sound that artists like Os Mutantes and Caetano Veloso crafted in their homeland in the late sixties, it's a joy to experience a reinvention of that ambience recast in contemporary surroundings.
Psychedelic in the absolutely specific Brazilian sense, the album eschews standard verse chorus structures to craft a sea of infinite possibilities and positivity. The band take their name from a jasmine flower which translates as 'pure love' and it's fantastically apt. Boogarins are the one current Brazilian band of their kind, (there are umpteen others for those wishing to unearth them) making genuine inroads into European and American markets. There's ample evidence here as to why.
Sombre Duvida is not the first document of their appeal, they've been putting out records of a similar stripe for over half a decade but it does find them experimenting courageously with their forms. Constructing and reconstructing, breaking down and forging onward, a journey of discovery, wonder and unknown pleasures. An album I look forward to becoming more and more familiar with over the coming months.
Song(s) of the Day # 1,938 Olivia Neutron-John
The delightfully named Olivia Neutron-John has a new eponymous five track EP out. It's not all to my taste but when it hits, it hits hard. The tracks posted here are a thrilling update of the templates first minted by acts like Cabaret Voltaire and The Normal back in the late Seventies. Relentlessly modern, metallic and cool in a slightly scary way. Olivia Neutron-John is a stagename for Anna Nasty, (surely not the name she was christened with either). She certainly hits the electro jackpot here.
Saturday, May 11, 2019
The Turtles - Turtle Soup
Lazy Saturday morning listening to the wonderful Turtle Soup last album by The Turtles. I was introduced to this record by a recommendation from the late, great music critic Tom Hibbert in The Perfect Collection for which I had a long running series on here a couple of years back. So here's a picture of the record by my record player just now and the review I wrote about it a while back...
Song(s) of the Day # 701 The Turtles
The Turtles' 1969 album Turtle Soup is a fascinating period piece as well as being a very fine record to boot. Though the chances are you haven't heard of it. I hadn't until yesterday, but now I've found it and it feels like chancing upon buried treasure. That's only slight overstatement! The band's last studio LP, produced by The Kinks Ray Davies, the first time he had taken the helm for any but his own records. It was also the first time the group had put out a record solely restricted to songs they'd written themselves. As a swansong, it's a remarkably happy one.
I'm not sure how The Turtles are perceived, if at all in the UK nowadays. They're certainly not much revered. I suppose they're probably best remembered for their 1967 smash, Happy Together, a marvelous record of course, but by no means the only thing of note they recorded. Critically lauded by pop connoisseurs like Tom Hibbert and Bob Stanley who don't follow the standard critical path in terms of their tastes and obsessions, listening to the band's back catalogue offers an almost hidden history, an alternative route to appreciating American music of the late sixties away from the beaten track of the established canon of album bands, The Byrds, The Doors, Love and The Velvet Underground.Where it's all about Pop rather than Rock, and taking yourself too seriously is viewed as something of a crime.
The Turtles were incredibly prolific between their peak years 1965 and 1968, most specifically in terms of singles, achieving nine American Top 40 hits in all over this period. By 1969 their commercial star was beginning to wane, perhaps as their consistently jovial, poppy approach began to be seen as out of step with the mood of the times as the world turned increasingly serious. Turtle Soup was a conscious attempt to address this and make an album statement, bringing in Davies to provide a ministering guide at the wheel, inspired as the band had been by 1968's The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society.
Turtle Soup is by no means as coherent as that record which qualifies pretty well as a unified concept album and is among the very best records released in the era. By contrast, this is a diverse collection of sun-drenched, lovingly constructed pop songs, some slightly better than others, but all worthy of inclusion and the experience of listening to it is like spending some time browsing at a Pick and Mix sweet counter assembling a cone.
Davies' thoughtful touch at the mixing desk appears to work dividends as it's a quite beautiful record to listen to. Each instrument and vocal bobs and weaves in the mix throughout. No one song sounds quite the same as the next. A truly democratic, team effort. The Turtles came closer to The Beach Boys vision of harmonised joy than perhaps any other American band in terms of their layered vocals and there are also passages of brief instrumental beauty in their songs where the band suddenly come across almost as a chamber quartet.
But they don't dwell in these moments. They know that their job is ultimately to be a pop band and understand fully that this is no sleight. Indeed, it's a compliment. You Don't Have to Walk in the Rain,for example, the album's final track is the most joyous way imaginable to bring down the curtain on a successful pop career. While so many of their peers were embarked on the road to apparent profundity and drug fueled excess at this point in time and put out shambling, incoherent and self-indulgent records as a consequence, Turtle Soup is a model of pop concision, maintaining a remarkable amount of the innocent blast of the band's early singles. It certainly doesn't sound like a record made in 1969. To its cost, ultimately. It obviously didn't at the time either, reaching a meagre
# 115 in the American Billboard chart. A travesty, but ultimately what does this matter? Almost fifty years on, the quality of the album speaks for itself. 2016, meanwhile will surely find me ordering a vinyl copy of this at some point, for my own collection. And it will get played. A lot!
Mac DeMarco - Here Comes the Cowboy
I have a friend called Sean who was a barman at my local Rosie's in Newcastle and who I still see there as we're both still regulars. We share some things in terms of musical taste; Courtney, Rolling Blackouts, Beatles, Blur. We differ in some respects. He never succumbed to the charms of Wall of Voodoo's Mexican Radio when I put it on the jukebox again and again and again. Or appreciated it when I stuck Sister Ray on when I was at my drunkest. Meanwhile he's always trying to persuade me to play Foals, Tame Impala and Pond. I'm still not sure I'm inclined.
Then there's Mac DeMarco. Sean's a fan while I've always been a bit 'meh' on the subject. One of my immediate associations with DeMarco is when I went to see the altogether hipper Parquet Courts at the Wylam Brewery in Newcastle a couple of years ago. They were clearly very much 'too cool for school' in terms of their onstage banter and boy didn't they let you know exactly how cool they thought they were. It was a bit trying frankly. Austin Brown, one of the band's guitarists and frontmen made an altogether snide remark at one point about DeMarco who was playing The Academy the same night. Essentially the underlying message of his remark was 'you made the right decision being here tonight rather than being there. You're part of the hip elite.'
So here I am on a Saturday morning giving DeMarco's new album Here Comes the Cowboy a listen. And I like it. I certainly like specific songs a whole lot. In the middle of the record DeMarco hits a winning streak with one great track after another recalling much of the early Seventies singer songwriting golden era. Particularly reminding me of Harry Nilsson, one of that period's most underrated artists, in terms of the languid charm they both share.
I'm less drawn by DeMarco's gapped toothed wackiness, which is perhaps why I haven't given him a fair listen up to now. There are a few songs on the record I wasn't particularly sold on on first listening but I'll be back to Here Comes the Cowboy so perhaps they'll win me around. This is a fine record. I imagine DeMarco doesn't give a fig about being dissed by Parquet Courts anyhow. Why on earth should he?
Songs About People # 841 Warren Zevon
Memphis veterans Lucero honour Zevon and everything he came to represent...
Clinic - Wheeltappers & Shunters
Coming from a similar angle to things as Mystery Lights except that there's is a distinctly English take on the Voodoo Punk paradox. This is the first Clinic album for six years but it's plain from the opening notes that it's business as usual in their particular operating theatre. Wheeltappers & Shunters, the title of their eighth album is a clue to where they're coming from here, a reference to a mid Seventies British TV variety programme that only those versed in an upbringing from that decade on these shores would be clued into.
The cast list of the show reads like a Who's Who of music hall showbiz from its golden age. Alvin Stardust, Jim Bowen, The Dubliners, The Three Degrees, Lonnie Donegan, The Krankies, George Melly, Nana Mouskori, Roy Orbison, The Dooleys. That Clinic should be choosing to honour these fallen heroes now is an indication of their project. For Wheeltappers & Shunters is a guided tour of the spooked funfair that is Brexit Britain in 2019.
Ade Blackburn is your host for all this. Though I made a comparison in terms of its musical DNA with Mystery Lights, as Clinic pick the meat from Punk and Garage bones in a similar manner, Wheeltappers & Shunters also claims spiritual kinship with The Good, The Bad & The Queen's magnificent Merrie Land from last year. For what better way to understand British ghoulish present but through a trawl through its haunted past.
The record commences with the familiar clang of the pub bell announcing last orders but it's clear we're all invited to the lock in. From this point on it's very much Clinic as usual. There are no fresh avenues explored here, the band carved out their particular spooked and cavernous sonic territory a long time ago.
Clinic have probably done better albums than this but it's perfectly serviceable and anyhow it's great just to have them back. In many ways they've become a British alternative cult institution all these years down the line. Wheeltappers & Shunters is a more than welcome diversion from turning on the TV and being obliged to endure the news again. Respect.
Song(s) of the Day # 1,937 The Mystery Lights
Too Much Tension! is right. The Mystery Lights, once of Salinas, California but now of New York certainly know what they like. They like the original mid-Sixties American Garage Rock scene. The Standells, 13th Floor Elevators, The Seeds, Love, Chocolate Watch Band and their ilk. They also honour what came after, ultimately Seventies New York Punk, Television, Dead Boys, Stooges, The Cramps and their ghoulish brethren. In Mystery Lights world it's always closing in on midnight and the cadillac is always just about to putter out of the graveyard.
So far, so familiar. But what do they choose to do with this golden legacy. How can something which has been reheated so often over the last fifty years have anything else to offer? As it happens, plenty. Too Much Tension! (what Americans would call the band's sophomore effort), is surely the best punk retread you'll hear, not just this year but in many a year. If Mystery Lights add not one single new ingredient to the potion, they contrive to make it all sound every bit as good as the original classic records that are their lifeblood. Because the tension they draw on is still existent and in 2019 beginning to curdle into an all consuming dread.
The songs here are thrillingly wired. Sure, plenty of bands have tried for the same prize over the last twenty years but precious few have done so with such elan. Mystery Lights know that they must keep their shades on at all times and keep their delivery taut and their tunes stretched to the max. Fortunately for the listener they've learned their lines and aren't about to lose the plot.
The album is full of sonic effects that underline and thicken the band's design and impact. You can hear cauldrons boiling, chains rattling, the pitched screetch of approaching sirens, the church bells chime. If this comes across as hammy then that's exactly how its intended . The Mystery Lights pitch their Rock and Roll tent between those of the Elevators, Television and The Cramps and while never remotely original like all three of these bands were, that doesn't mean there's not plenty of fun to be had while the ride lasts.
In order to pull off the trick they're attempting here, you really have to do your homework. Worm your way into the heart of the beast you are wishing to inhabit and really claim ownership. Mystery Lights do just that here. They truly wear Sixties and Seventies skin. Vocalist Mick Brandon leads from the front. A chilled composite of Roky, Iggy and Stiv, he understands intimately the pitched desperation that stokes the flames of this particular fire.
The band are coming to a small venue in my home town in Autumn and I'll be there, because judging by the evidence Too Much Tension! proffers they should be a wonderful live proposition. Generally I don't mind a band whose inspirations are as blatantly apparent as this so long as they take it somewhere new. In Mystery Lights case I'll make an exception. They cross the 't''s and dot the 'i's here with such brazen panache that I can't but doff my cap to them. Excellent.
Friday, May 10, 2019
Song(s) of the Day # 1,936 International Teachers of Pop
International Teachers of Pop released their eponymous album a few months back and I've been negligent not to listen through it right the way through because it's a small treat. Very, very British and to be more precise, English, it's emblematic of the kind of record that shows up every few years from one band or another and represents an ongoing faith in smalltown high street eccentricity and self-expression.
So where exactly did this tradition start? probably with the first Roxy Music album which first foregrounded this kind of weird, assembled futurism. Then fast forward to the Human League, any number of early Eighties synth duos, then Pulp and the cultish but fondly remembered World of Twist.
And now to International Teachers of Pop. Their's is a Woolworth's pick and mix selection, stirring up low and high culture to a frothy mix; sci-fi synths and harmonised vocals, Kraftwerk rhythms, Jane Weaver pulses and B52's oddity. Not intended to be taken remotely seriously but to forge out a series of funfair rollercoaster rides you'll want to get on again as soon as you've got off.
It wasn't altogether a surprise to discover that members of Moonlandingz and Whyte Horses have combined forces in the line up of International Teachers of Pop or that Jarvis Cocker and Moloko's Roisin Murphy have become fans. As I say, they're working in an altogether English tradition that it's heartening to see still has legs. Pop concoction of the year thus far...
Thursday, May 9, 2019
Songs About People # 839 Roky Erickson
Spanish Garage Band Zodiacs make a fine and appropriate tribute to Roky. From ten years back.
Song of the Day # 1,935 Julia Shapiro
Julia Shapiro of Chastity Belt is making solo records but doing so very much in the existential spirit of her band. This has a wonderful pained grace that's augers well if it's the forerunner of a long player.
Wednesday, May 8, 2019
Songs About People # 833 Rainer Maria Rilke
A second classical piece in a row in this particular series.
Song(s) of the Day # 1,934 John Southworth
'There are ancient societies that value the dreaming world on an equal level as the waking world. I've always had one foot in the dreaming world.' So speaks John Southworth an English-Canadian singer-songwriter who's been putting out musical product over twelve albums in all on a regular basis since the late Nineties, His latest record Miracle in the Night is just out.
It's a revelation at least to me, as I've been unaware of Southworth's work until ... well just now. His voice is not a particularly outstanding one but it is noteworthy in terms of the warmth and depth of feeling, the sheer atmosphere he gets across.Miracle in the Night is choc a bloc with crafted, slightly mournful songs played on traditional, generally acoustic instruments with moods that chip away at the listener until they're lulled into admiring silence.
Southworth is working again with his long term band the South Seas, the musicians he feels most understanding to his vision. It certainly works here to an almost magical degree. Miracle in the Night is very much a waking dream.
Each song adds new ingredients to the spell being cast. The songs are slowly, jazzily paced, and Southworth's gentle, intoned vocals are at the heart of the mix. It's altogether wonderfully done, a set of musicians who know implicitly exactly what they're at and after. At times, things get quite heady, as on Red Velvet Curtains, which occurs midway through the record, one of several standout tracks .
But really this an album that never puts a foot out of place. I get the impression that Southworth has taken notes from the likes of Dylan, Cohen, Robert Wyatt and Robbie Robertson but his voice is still very much his own. This is a fine, fine album that has already encouraged me to investigate his back catalogue in depth because here is a man with a quiet but beautiful skill who should be recognised as an artist to a much greater degree than he is.
There's a tangible sadness to much of what's on show here. Life, after all, is ingrained with sadness, even in its happiest moments. But also a hard earned, palpable awareness of its moments of tender beauty. Because most of all this album is beautiful. In the words of one of the song titles here, Southworth is halfway up the mountain. There's much behind him but much still ahead and he knows that he needs to keep pushing onwards.
The album reaches its summit with Just Before Dawn and you might be tempted to reel back and listen to the whole record through again start to finish. One of the softest spoken but most persuasive records I've heard of this type for many a year. Not dissimilar in tone to Adrian Crowley's wonderful Some Blue Morning which was my Album of the Year way back in 2014, near to the beginning of this blog. Both records appreciate the value of silence and the hushed whisper. Sometimes less is more.
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