Felt hit a plateau and the realisatuion that Lawrence will never be a star. My Bloody Valentine gain rapid momentum.
Monday, October 23, 2023
Albums of the Year # 66 Naomi Yang - Never Be a Punchbag for Nobody
I'm always grateful for helpful tips of what to listen to next. This one comes from comedian Stewart Lee and his monthly music column in The Idler magazine, something which I've started buying recently. Stewart generally knows what he's talking about and he certainly does here.
In fact he's excelled himself with this particular selection. Naomi Yang was born in Beijing but grew up in Manchester. She became a founding member of Galaxie 500 in the late Eighties and started wearing cool black outfits and spangly earrings onstage while playing bass guitar for them. This would suffice to give her a lifetime's supply of credibility should she choose to do nothing ever again. But if that was still in doubt, she's just released a great new album which Stewart and I are both currently enjoying and you can too if you'd care to.
It's an instrumental soundtrack for a documentary about her local gym in Brooklyn called Never Be a Punchbag for Nobody which despite the slightly dubious syntax of its title is clearly a contender for original soundtrack of the year in my eyes.
It has space, and sadness. And poignancy. And great titles. How I Started Boxing, East Boston is not an Airport, Maverick Street Mothers. In fact it has the best titles you're likely to see on any record release this year. It has plenty of theremin on it I suspect. I like theremin. It's warmed me up nicely for my morning bath. I suspect it works for morning showers too. The documentary I suspect is probably worth hunting down,
* P.S. I think Stew's review is slightly more self-consciously pretentious than mine. You can buy this months Idler for £9.50 if you don't believe me and care to check it out. The magazine also has Irvine Welsh on the cover, wielding a large kitchen chopping knife. Personally, I think it's worth every penny..
Song(s) of the Day # 3,538 Bad Books
Bad Books latest, a revisit of their 2012 album II essentially had me from the off. A loping bass line that told the listener instantly that they were deeply versed in Northern English Indie folklore from Joy Division to Doves to Elbow,
Bad Books are a trio that have paid their dues. They've been putting out records since 2010 and they keep things simple. Giving their records Roman numerals rather than conventional titles. II: Revisited gives the earlier record greater light and space than it initially had.
These are thoughtful reworkings. The original record is not one I'm personally hugely familiar with it, but I'll correct that later today. Bad Books clearly know their Simon & Garfunkel and Vampire Weekend harmonising in addition to their early Factory B-Sides. There's much sheer loveliness on show here and I was very taken indeed.
Sunday, October 22, 2023
Things Found on My Local's Jukebox # 583 Bug Club
I really must get round to seeing Bug Club, one of the hardest working bands on the Indie circuit. Certainly if this is anything to go by.
My Magpie Eyes Are Hungry For The Prize # 13 My Bloody Valentine
For a whie House of Love keep Creation going while Chicago and Acid House rule the roost music wise. Then My Bloody Valentine emerge, transformed from the band they originally were with a song that wiped the slate clean in 1988.
Albums of the Year # 67 Altin Gun - Ask
Altin Gun, the Anatolian Pop sensation from Amsterdam roll out another splendid Turkish Seventies B Movie soundtrack in Ask.
This invites you to revel on te hotel dancefloor with your shirt buttons undone to the chest, your medallion showing, stackheels and flares on show.
Such good fun as all their records are, this is tacky romance and illicit dancefloor thrills. Not a record that attempts to be cool in the conventional sense but manages it effortlessly anyhow.
Song(s) of the Day # 3,537 Helena Deland
A good looking sleeve this one. An impressionistic landscape from a skilled painter with an eye for the way colours work. A less troubled Vincent VG. More invested in water than fire. I wonder whether it is the work of the msuician here, Helanda Deland. I suspect it probably is.
The record it houses is equally winning. Helanda Deland a Montreal artist with a voice that sounds on the verge of melting and a set of Folkish songs on latest record Goodnight Summerland that constantly elude easy recognition and are all the better for doing so.
A wonderful record from a musician with an artists instinct. Not a million miles from the Naima Bock and Katy J. Pearson albums that all but captured my heart last year in terms of tone. Goodnight Summerland is a record to put on and drift away to. Melancholic Folk songs with a timeless pulse and rhythm. Beaurt and Loveliness might as well be its middle names.
Saturday, October 21, 2023
Things Found on My Local's Jukebox # 582 Philine Sonny
Sometimes it's worth just taking a punt on a song you see. Philine Sonny apparently wants to take drugs. Well it's a natural human urge.
My Magpie Eyes Are Hungry For The Prize # 12 House of Love
House of Love deliver the album that neither The Weather Prophets or The Primal Scream are capable of.
Songs of the Year # 68 Lost Girls
In many ways the most conventional and Poppiest thing on the new Lost Girls which I wrote about earlier today. This is certainly deeply lovely. Almost The Sundays with slightly more artistic intent.
Albums of the Year # 68 Bike - Arte Bruta
They've got a Bike, you can ride it if you like. They hail from Sao Paolo, Brazil, so are phenomenally loose limbed. In the way that only Brazilian footballers and musicians can be.
As soon as I started listening to their latest album Arte Bruta, (their fourth by my reckoning), I locked into their groove. Can's Ege Bam Yasi, Os Mutantes, Barrett's Floyd, Sgt. Pepper Beatles a place of psychedelic wonder and aquatic colour.
The records as good as that. One to put your headphones on and go for a spin. It's far out. There's no substitute for a great record from Brazil sometimes.
Lost Girls - Selvuttsletter
Doing this on a daily basis for over ten tears now I tend to treat this blog as something of a job, I don't want to come across as po faced on any level here all 'Pitchfork', because that organisation is pretty much the antithesis of everything I try to do, but I wouldn't keep going on the ultimately quite thankless task of writing a blog, (not that I'm, after sympathy) if I wasn't in some respects 'serious' about what I'm doing here. I'm serious about music, its importance. Certainly its centrality to me.
So I trawl through the new record realeases each Friday with genuine intent. What am I going to write about in the coming week? Yesterday I decided early that I wasn't remotely interested in the album that the industry itself is primarily interested in at the moment. The return of The Rolling Stones after many years away as a recording proposition. I'm not frankly interested in new Rolling Stones records as they make their way into the Eighties. There's plenty left in their 'old' records to keep me going. I don't really see the point of what they do now.
There's plenty else that interests me more and I'm sure I'll experience more enjoyment and pleasure exploring. Selvutsletter, the latest from Jenny Hval and Havard Volden as Lost Girls, their nom de guerre for example. Its' a pretty serious venture immediately. Both Hval and Volden are Norwegian and come across as essentially serious in the way that much art from that part of the world does. Ingemar Bergman, Murder Mysteries. Even ABBA in their way. I don't like to apply regional stereotyping but sometimes it does serve a purpose and is valid.
Selvutsletter is certainly serious business. It comes across as an act of scientific investigation as much as a purely musical enterprise. Hval and Volden are just as much artists as musicians and what they achieve as Lost Girls is impressive in its scope and range and merits earnest discussion. Yes, the kind of thing Pitchfork was established to do.
I'm not going too do that fully here. It's the weekend, and anyway I've got other records I want to listen to and write about here. Anyhow, I'm enjoying my first spin of Selvutsletter very much ineed, early on Saturday and will be back for another play later on today. It definitely strikes me as an album that will reward investment royally.
Song(s) of the Day # 3,536 Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter
One of the altogether oddest records you'll hear this year. This year or any other frankly. Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter's Saved! is forty six minutes of unrepentant, old school, babbling in tongues, capital lettered, fire and brimstone, black frocked preacher in a pulpit hell and damnation with crazed congregation behaviour you're ever likely to witness. Sorry about that sentence. But I had to at least try to do what's going on here some kind of justice.
This may or not float your particular boat but this is what you're going to get with this record. Be very clear of that. It's completely, feverishly unrelenting and off its trolley, and once it establishes its momentum, (and that is instantly) it maintains it, come hell and highwater.
I listened to this yesterday morning, so you don't have to, and so frankly I don't have to again either. It's not the kind of record I immerse myself in generally. It's simply too mannered for words. Hey I love this stuff. Make no mistake. I read my fair share of Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Tennesse Williams,and Carson McCullers in my youth. But I was never particularly interested in Nick Cave's heroin addict meets preacher schtik in the Eighties, (I chose R.E.M., the Go Betweens and The Triffids instead because they had much better tunes), and I'm not going for this full throttle now either.
The artist behind this record is Kristin Hayter who formerly worked as Lingua Ignota, and she puts every inch of her considerable talent, know how, obsessive zeal and very being into Saved! . It's a quite remarkable record in many ways and many will clutch it obsessively to their chests and play it half to death. It certainly takes itself so seriously that on the first track here, it scratches and wobbles repeatedly like an old seventy eight distorting on the gramophone. This is quite deliberate dislocation of the listener's senses in the name of Dark Art. No stone is left unturned in its crazed pursuit of authenticity.
I'm not that way inclined frankly. Not to this degree. My mother always warned me to do everything in moderation and she was quite right. I have my Gun Club and Pixies records for when I want to dip my toes into this particular biblical gene pool. To take it to this degree is frankly a conceit and much as I enjoyed listening to the record in the early hours of the morning, I think I'll probably leave it there for the most part from now on. But many will just adore this and I commend it to them.
Friday, October 20, 2023
Songs About People # 1,374 Biddy Baxter
The amazing lady behind Blue Peter gets a song from Mighty Mighty, a C-86 band with an odd sound that was something of a marriage between jangle and Soweto.
My Magpie Eyes Are Hungry For The Prize # 11 The Weather Prophets
The Weather Prophet's debut album Mayflower comes out and stiffs horribly. Stalling McGee;s immediate plans for world domination.
Allah Las - Zuma 85
California's Allah La's remain one of my favourite bands and I'm always excited when a new record from them as an ensemble or from their individual members comes floating down the pike every once in a while.
They're a guitar band essentially, harking back to the Golden Dawn and Era of that particular artform '65 - '67, the West Coach Psychedelic branch - see Beau Brummels, Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, Love and Moby Grape.,
Not a bad place to set off from and set your compass by. Reconvening every tree or four years, they're defined by their laid back slackness, easy in the saddle, stoned cowboys, loping slowly across a Californian desert.
They're not a band that evolves in the conventional sense. Having met in record stores. they knew what they were after right from the start. What you get is better described as variations on a theme and I'm more than fine with that. I've never heard a record of theirs I haven't liked immediately and this one's no exception.
Zuma 85, their fifth album and first since 2019, (a longer pause than usual), takes up as if they hadn't been away at all. Swapping coasts initially to pilfer the Sweet Jane riff from the Velvets as the grounding for a couple of songs, they pass songwriting duties around to vary the pace like The Grape used to do at their peak, as if they're sat in a circle round a campfire passing a joint between old friends.
The record. apart from those initial riff heists is so definitely Californian it almost made me envious.There's an appocalyptic image on the cover of the record but no need to fear, it's business as usual. This is a band that are so comfortable within their own skins that it's a joy to behold. Job well done, as if anyone ever doubted it.
Song(s) of the Day # 3,534 Blue Ocean
One of the more intriguing guitar records I've heard of late. And I'm hearing a lot of stuff I really like right now. Fertile State, the latest band from Oakland, California a city that seems to be churning out one great Indie record after another at the moment. Anyhow. This is something else entirely.
This is one of the best. A huge throbbing slab of distorted guitar noise. Like many of my favourite Rock & Roll things it sounds like it's being played through blankets of cotton wool. I hope that's a description makes sme kind of sense, because it's the best decription of Fertile State I can come up with off the top of my head.
Blue Ocean, (and I'm afraid that's not the greatest band name I've come across), sound like lots of great things. Joy Division, My Bloody Valentine, Husker Du if Grant Hart's drums were the lead instrument and Bob Mould had just been sacked. Ride on valium and downers. The Cure on an inadvisable bender.
If that appeals then so might this. It's definitely one of the more impressive guitar records I've heard for a long time. What they're singing about is anybody's guess. Possibly nor about how happy they are if I had to hazard a guess. Anyhow the recor is inspired. Another great abum from Slumberland Records.
Albums of the Year # 69 The 1981
A few weeks ago, for reasons I needn't go into here, I was moved to think of 1981. I got my diary for the first six months of that year, (when I was 15) out of the bottom drawer and went through it, sharing some of the more ludicrous and touching moments with friends online.
I find you can only do this for so long at a stretch and then you have to put your diary back in the drawer again and carry on living in the here and now. 'The past is a foreign country' and so on. Strange that just as I've done so, an album should come to my attention by a duo from Oakland, California called The 1981 which has taken me back again. Spinning. Helpless..
I find their album 1981 a nice place to be. The band is well named. Move On, the record in question, reminds me of The Television Personalities, bands on Fiction Records, Cherry Red, Factory or Flying Nun. It has a black and white cover with a picture of a young woman in shadow, wearing a dress and leaning against a wall. An indistinct, dream like image, like memories or postcards from those times. The record too. Something you actually lived through and experienced but which are so distant now, so far back in time, that you can't quite be completely sure.
So come back to an earlier, simpler time. When it really seemed possible that Young Marble Giants or Eyeless in Gaza might conquer any opposition sent onto the field to take them on. When even U2 didn't seem like such a dreadful idea. This record has an innocence and naivete that is utterly winning.
Thursday, October 19, 2023
My Magpie Eyes Are Hungry For The Prize # 10 Jesus & Mary Chain
The Mary Chain have a bone fide hit with Some Candy Talking. Meanwhile Primal Scream and Weather Prophets try out their fortunes with Elevation a WEA offshoot.
Albums of the Year # 70 Billy Reeves - Nostalgia of the Future
During the Eighties, when she was at Sussex University, my sister briefly followed the fortunes of latest Creation Record signings Blow Up. They were pretty much the quintessential Indie also rans. Taking their name from the most Sixties film you could think of, they yearned back to that decade, probably wore hooped Breton style tops and definitely put out a few unremarkable records on Creation Records that only the hardest of hard line fanatics remember.
Fortunately, for those like my sister and I with memories of them, they didn't vanish entirely without trace. Their drummer Billy Reeves, who also formed Congregation and wrote songs for Sophie Ellis Bextor and The Audience, is having a strange and interesting second act afterlife, and has a new and rather splendid solo album out called Nostalgia of the Future.
Reeves is clearly something of a London journeyman. a jack of all trades who does occasional travel and football reports for London local radio.
Here he catalogues all the yesterdays of anyone who grew up in London and the South East. Afternoons spent in local parks. On the sidelines of football pitches or going for country walks or looking through the singles of second hand record shops trying to track down David McWilliams records and chatting to the shop owner behind the counter who knows what you're looking for and everything that you need to know about it.
This is an incredibly evocative record that those that follow the fortunes of Luke Haines and Pete Astor might enjoy. Rather reminiscent of some of the more interesting moments of Britpop actually. Reeves has that faux cockney talking, singing voice that reminds you of Terrence Stamp, Steve Marriot and Damon all at once. It seems appropriate for Autumn really, as the days grow shorter and we tend towards wistfulness. But I'm more than grateful for it now with Spring in full bloom.
Song(s) of the Day # 3,533 Mutual Benefit
Columbus, Ohio's Jordan Lee's in the guise of Mutual Benefit ushers in a wave of downcast Folk on latest album Growing at the Edges. In all honesty it's not so much a matter of 'growing' quite so much as gently curdling, petals folding in on one another sadly, deciding they're not quite ready for Spring after all. It's that kind of record.
This is highly efficient and occasionally quite beautiful stuff nevertheless. Lee martials his spring quartets and curlicues like a glass half empty conductor. It's baroque with a capital B. There isn't any laughter to be had here though. This all takes itself extremely seriously and occasionally slightly po faced, aiming its arrows at XO and Figure 8 or Michigan and Illinois but sadly falling just short of these objectives.
That's not to say there's not plenty to recommend. Much on show here for the slightly glumly inclined. This is music for Eeyores to take a Thursday off work to and watch the raindrops patter on the windows of their flats morosely as Lee casts autumnal spells.
Not an album I'm going to return to much though it's ot a bad one by any means. But I have Sufjan and Elliot when I want to experience these particular, slightly self-indulgent emotions. Growing at the Edges has its moments, but doesn't quite reach the peaks it aspires to. I'll give it seven.OK then. Seven and a half, Pitchfork fans.
A. Savage - Several Songs About Fire
Parquet Court. 'Like a bunch of smart asses picked up guitars.' Nicely put A Pessimist is Never Disappointed, the excellent blog that heads the alphabetically sorted list to the right side of this page. I couldn't have put it better myself.
They're a band I'd really like to dislike frankly. They're so unbearably full of themselves. All the time. I can vouch for that. I've seen them live. Possibly the most consistently conceited hipsters to stalk the alternative circuit stages since Sonic Youth disbanded.
The problem is they're so damned good at what they do. You have to hand it to them even if you half want to strangle and despise them.
Such is the case once more with nominal Courts leader A. Savage and his latest record Several Songs About Fire. The songs are so damned full of themselves but they're also so incredibly inventive. Brimming with such ideas, vibrancy and colour that you have to admire the man while secretly cursing him for his barely concealed pomposity and self-regard..
Veering more towards the acoustic and laidback this time around Several Songs About Fire is further testimony to Savage's talent, if such testimony is really necessary anymoreat this stage. This should keep PC fanboys, (and I imagine there is such a thing), sated until their next record.
Wednesday, October 18, 2023
My Magpie Eyes Are Hungry For The Prize # 9 Jesus & Mary Chain
Just Like Honey and Psychocandy make J&MC genuine chart prospects. Weather Prophets, Primal Scream and Felt make up the second Creation wave.
Song(s) of the Day # 3,532 L'Rain
An album I've fallen quite in love with over the last 24 hours of listening to it has been I Killed Your Dog the latest record by L'Rain. An almost uncontainable an uncategorisable record, which is quite a rare thing and the kind of record I try to seek out and write about here if I can.
L'Rain is the project of a Brooklyn multi-instrumentalist and art curator called Taja Cheek. I Killed Your Dog is her third album in this particular guise and it moves at an indefinable pace and attempts to do its own thing at every stride.
It's very soulful without being soul. Jazzy without being jazz. It channels Indie rhythms at various points and it's definitely not an indie record in any respect. It definitely has some of the elements of a clever art installation.
My best recommendation at this point is that you give it a try and see if it takes your fancy. I think the record is fantastic regardless of where you might choose to actually place it in a record shop. I'll be diving into it agani soon.
Albums of the Year # 71 Packs - Crispy, Crunchy Now,
Slacker. So slack it can't get out of bed and isn't even going to try. Turns over instead and digs deeper into the eiderdown intent on at least half an hour more shut eye.
This is Crispy, Crunchy Now, the latest from Madeline Link or PACKS who divides her time between Toronto, Ottawa and Mexico City. At least she did for the making of this one.
PACKS have been good before, but now they're getting better. They're hitting their stride and getting damned comfortable in their Slacker skin.
If they were a band they would be The Breeders. If they were a song they would be Spent The Day in Bed by Morrissey. But comparisons are spurious now. They, or rather Madeline, deserves respect. She has carved out her own space.
The cover is terrific. Everything about this package is. It's Madeline apparently cuddling a wrinkled, oversized apple. Like James setting forth on his oversized peach into The Home Counties. This is just made for a 15 year old boy or girl, struggling with puberty and in need of a record to embrace and devour.It feels like an artist and a record whose time is now.
Tuesday, October 17, 2023
My Magpie Eyes Are Hungry For The Prize # 8 R.E.M.
The arrival of R.E.M. and the other Paisley Underground bands on British shores, put The Creation bands momentarily in the shade.
Song(s) of the Day # 3,531 Sagittaire
What do you fancy listening to today, to take your mind off the weighty and often atrocious fare going on out there in the troubled world we live in? How about the latest record from Sagittaire - Lucian & Caroline by LA musician and visionary Ivan Mairesse.
What you're getting here is a 'Trip Hoppish / electro concept album about the affair between Lucian Freud and Lady Caroline Blackwood'. Thanks Darren Jones for the nail on the head description. Not perhaps the first thing you had on your mind when you got up this morning. As for me, before yesterday I didn't have the slightest idea who Lady Caroline Blackwood. even was, never mind the first thing about her dealings with Lucien Freud.
But before you absent yourself sharply. Listen to the record. There may be absolutely no apparent connection between its sound and its pertained subject matter, but the record itself is just inspired. Pure and simple. Beck in his Nineties pomp working with Luke Haines and the UNKLE or Leftfield people. And this is only a half-hearted attempt to contextualise and describe a record that is so out there it has to be heard to be believed. Put simply, it's fantastic.
I can't begin to even attempt to understand the relationship between this fabulous sounding record and what it claims to be about, but frankly I can't be bothered anyway. The fact that it exists and sounds like it does is more than enough. Thanks yet again Darren. You definitely deserve a co-piloting credit on It Starts by this point. Some of the records you've sent my way recently have been incredible. This is fantastic beyond description. May be top of the whole pile.
Albums of the Year # 72 Monde UFO - Vandalized Statue To Be Replaced by Shrine
Officially Darren Jones day on here. Another fantastic and fantastically odd record he directed me towards earlier on this year:
Now this is truly far out. One of the weirdest records I've listened to for some time, and I do pride myself on trying to push the boat out if I can with the stuff I recommend on here.
How to describe Monde UFO's Vandalized Statue To Be Replaced by Shrine ? Most immediately it should be mentioned straight away that this is a Californian outfit, which is a relevant detail. This seems to beam direct from either Hollywood itself, or else a space pad, in a similar way to some of Stereolab's fabulous recorded Nineties output, or that wonderful sixties cartoon Hanna Barbera The Jetsons.
To quote Monde UFO's bio, this is 'a resourceful analog of plush 60s pop captured through the modest means of a truly independent musical endeavour.' Canny prose. There's definitely something of the way the Sixties envisioned the future in films and on TV, this feels like the perfect soundtrack to Fantastic Voyage, that fabulous 1966 movie where a space age submarine is injected into the bloodstream of a living human body which it proceeds to navigate for the rest of the film. Again, something that could only be dreamed up in California.
Vandalized Statue To Be Replaced by Shrine, despite the reference points I've given, (in an attempt to give an idea of what it sounds like), remains defiantly alien first and foremost. There's an acute awareness of other musical genres and culture here. Literature music and film.. This makes it an incredibly enjoyable listen immediately, as you're constantly reminded of myriad cultural reference points as it plays.
Freeform Jazz, Bossa Nova, Short Stories by the likes of Ray Bradbury and John Cheever and Futuristic Utopias and Dystopias also came to my mind at various points . I could go on but it's another of those records that is best listened to and immersed in rather than read about. Many thanks to Darren Jones once more for recommending this record. You're definitely coming to deserve a co -credit here Darren. This, like much else you've recommended, is just terrific.
Monday, October 16, 2023
My Magpie Eyes Are Hungry For The Prize # 7 The Loft
The infamous J&MC riot at North London Poly. Meanwhile The Loft warm up their second single Up The Hill & Down The Slope but band relations are falling apart.
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