THE DEATH JAM

2008-12-03T21:52:00.001Z

2008-08-14T23:14:00.004+01:00

Youtube vids so good that they've stayed in my unsorted bookmarks folder for an age:

Early 80s French synth goodness:

Deux - Felicita

Deux - Paris Orly

Way more Stereolab Origins vids. There's even a Broadcast origins one there now too.

Monochrome Set - Eine Symphonie des Grauens live

Blank Dogs - Leaving The Light On

Blank Dogs - Scenes From A New Town

Factums - White Ghost (Version 2)

John Whitney - Catalog

2008-08-13T22:25:00.005+01:00

New blogs worth peeping:

Ich Lüge Bullets from Dom Passantino

Rocktimists from Sick Mouthy and the usual gang of idiots

2008-01-24T22:37:00.000Z

Reviews of:

Hefner - Breaking God's Heart (Expanded Edition)

Glass Candy - B/E/A/T/B/O/X

2008-01-24T22:23:00.000Z

Here's my ballot in the 2007 Idolator Pop poll:

ALBUMS:
01. Studio – West Coast
02. V/A – After Dark
03. A Mountain of One – Collected Works
04. Chromatics – Night Drive
05. V/A – Shut Up and Dance Updated
06. V/A – Soundboy Punishments (Skull Disco)
07. Witchcraft – The Alchemist
08. Dirty Projectors – Rise Above
09. Electric Wizard – Witchcult Today
10. Girls Aloud – Tangled Up

SINGLES:
01. Glass Candy – Miss Broadway
02. LCD Soundsystem – Freak Out/Starry Eyes
03. Ame - Fiori
04. Aly and AJ – The Potential Breakup Song
05. John Miles – Stranger in the City (Pilooski Edit)
06. Shackleton – Blood on my Hands (Villalobos Mix)
07. Dude N Nem – Watch My Feet
08. Farah – Law of Life
09. T2 ft Jodie – Heartbroken
10. Soko – I’ll Kill Her

REISSUES:
01. Dinosaur L – 24/24 Music
02. Hefner – Breaking God’s Heart
03. Daphne Oram – Oramics
04. The Trees Community – The Christ Tree
05. Wingtip Sloat – Add This to Rhetoric

And Here's my ballot in the Villge Voice 2007 Pazz & Jop. I couldn't be bothered filling it out though so I got my friend Jerome Smith to:

ALBUMS:
01. Gravetemple – The Holy Down
02. Eyvind Kang – The Yelm Sessions
03. Akron/Family – Love is Simple
04. Birchville Cat Motel with Anla Courtis – Three
05. Rhys Chatham – A Crimson Grail
06. Om – Pilgrimage
07. Electric Wizard – Witchcraft Today
08. Studio – West Coast
09. Lords of Light – Energy
10. Blonde Redhead - 23

Lastly, here's Glenn McDonald's statistical analysis of the votes, and voters, in the two polls.

2008-01-04T17:39:00.000Z

Reviews of:

James Murphy & Pat Mahoney – FabricLive.36

The Teenagers live at The Amersham Arms

2007-12-05T17:30:00.000Z

Reviews of:

Chromatics - Night Drive

Daft Punk - Alive 2007

2007-11-19T23:24:00.000Z

Some pretty weird synths that resemble yr grannies furniture. Swarmatrons! Dual primate consoles!

YouTubery:

The plagiarythms of Stereolab parts five and six. I have no idea how I missed some of these. Abba! Yoko Ono!

I know everyones seen 'em now, but these ....shreds videos really are killer. My faves = Ozzy clapping, and the whole of the Santana one. And here's their real life equivalent, Van Halen fucking up "Jump" by a semi-tone.

2007-11-01T20:03:00.001Z

YouTubery:

The plagiarythms of Stereolab parts one, two, three and four (via this v elucidatory ILM thread.)

The Art Ensemble of Chicago

Ike and Tina Turner

Don - Yeh Mera Dil

Computer Music 1986 style from the BBCs Micro Live Programme

And I'll maybe not share you my results from searching for Minipops

2007-11-01T19:40:00.000Z

RIP Stylus.

Here's my final bit of writing for the Singles Jukebox:

Lillix – Sweet Temptation
Out of everything that the Singles Jukebox has introduced me to, what should I write about? Maybe something like Saul Williams’ “Black Stacey” which I would have been too reverse-snobbish to ever listen to, figuring it to be worthy anti-fun. Or perhaps “Snook, Svett och Tårar” by Snook; Euro-pop lounge-rap that I would never have imagined could exist without William bringing it to my attention. But I think the track that has stayed with me most, the one I’ve listened to loudest and longest and drunkest, is “Sweet Temptation” the one great track by a bunch’ve Canadians initially carelessly assembled as a girl-group cash in on the Avril Lavigne sound. I mean, is their name meant to be reminiscent of tampons? “Sweet Temptation” manages the perfect cheap trick of gluing together hissing disco four-to-the-floor drums, wavering sequencer blat, lumbering ‘rock bass’, power chords and alternately diffident and commanding chants into some of the stickiest, sweetest bubblegum since The Sweet or The Runaways or whoever your ugly-glam faves are. “Alright, alright, yeah I heard it before” they sing, and alright yeah I have, but never as addictively as this.

2007-09-11T21:22:00.001+01:00

YouTubery:

Laurie Spiegel Playing 1977 Bell Labs Hal Alles Synth ("No videos found for 'pauline oliverios'").

Klaus Schulze - For Barry Graves

Giorgio Moroder Promo Video

The Flirts - Passion

Sabrina - Boys

Animotion - Obsession

LFO - LFO

Sweet Exorcist - Testone

2007-09-04T19:45:00.000+01:00

YouTubery:

Tons of Latin Freestyle vids.

Will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas new eugenics-promoting solo track cops a hook from an Italo-disco classic. Maybe this is not so surprising as "My Humps" was based on Sexual Harassment's great electro-goof song "I need a Freak" (not a proper vid for that one, soz).

2007-08-14T19:56:00.000+01:00

YouTubery:

Here's an example of the sort of obsessive, oddball resource that YouTube makes possible; a collection of ITV Chart Show indie charts from 1989-1994. I'd like to see a similar selection of the dance charts as well but that might be too much 'trippy' computer graphics fx and chopped up and reversed b&w cartoons for anyone to stomach.

I know that this has been all over the internet now, but the sight of Alan McGee making as much of a fool of himself in person as he does in his Guardian blog is hard to resist. There's more if you follow to the users other videos. I didn't.

Flickry:

Miniature cardboard synthesisers. Super-cute.

The Laugh-Out-Loud Cats. Roffles.

2007-08-08T23:36:00.000+01:00

MERCURY PRIZE 2007 addendum:

A kindly reader points out that I am a sexist idiot for assuming that Arwa Haida is a man. She isn’t.

Alexia Loundras, a writer for the Independent newspaper, is the third person I have heard of to serve more than once.

Zoe Rahman is at least the second musician to sit on the panel. Courtney Pine has previously. This leads to the questions—do you have to have been nominated to sit? Or to be a jazz musician? Possibly both.

2007-08-05T19:39:00.000+01:00

MERCURY PRIZE 2007

I know I’m late off the blocks here as everyone has aired their thoughts on the albums nominated for the Mercury Prize (soz, Nationwide Mercury Prize) already, so since this year the make-up of the judging panel has leaked, I’m gonna judge them instead. I’ve always found it odd that they don’t reveal who is on the panel as you’d think they’d like to show off what TOP ROCK CRITS they’ve got in to choose the UK ALBUM OF THE YEAR, but maybe now I understand why they don’t. Let’s hope the longlist leaks this year as well, like it did in 2006.

Simon Frith - music author/Professor of Music at University of Edinburgh
Mercury Chair Simon doesn’t seem to be knocking out the books at the rate he once did, his last being a dull looking guide to music copyright for non-legal specialists, but I’d say we are all better off for it if his pronouncements about the chosen albums are anything to go by. He writes that the shortlist as a whole “celebrates a remarkable range of artists who use their albums to tell stories, shape moods, explore emotions and lift the spirits. The list marks the emergence of a wealth of eclectic talent making music with great energy, excitement and personality,” a quote that could apply to, oh, any random assemblage of albums from any year ever. And he used the word eclectic. I can’t link to his words directly as the prize site is the usual Flash-laden catastrophe. (Odds: 33/5)
Charles Hazlewood - conductor and broadcaster on Radio 2, Radio 3 and BBC 4
I assume that this feller—a Proms conductor and presenter of documentaries on Mozart and Tchaikovsky—wasn’t repping for New Young Pony Club during the meetings to decide the shortlist, but maybe that’s me being a stick-in-the-mud: we’re all populists now. I like to imagine the beads of sweat breaking out on his forehead whilst he tries to choose who’s greatest between Jamie T (“The new sound of the suburbs. Playful and witty, sharp-eyed and sharp-eared”) and Bat for Lashes (“…beautiful and intriguing. A hypnotic voice and irresistible music”). (Odds: 678/23)
Lauren Laverne - broadcaster, The Culture Show and Channel 4’s Transmission
Laverne was always good to discuss Motörhead or Marianne Faithfull with when I used to see her knocking around Newcastle in the Kenickie years so I’ll not slag her, but it’s worth noting that this is at least the second time that she has served on the panel. I know of one person who has served three times even though the UK is not short of pop crits. Maybe that’s another reason why they don’t release who gets to vote—they don’t want anyone to see it’s the same old timeservers on a merry-go-round. (Odds: 2/1)
Conor McNicholas - Editor of NME
Less of a magazine editor and more of a brand manager, what’s the chance of McNicholas choosing records he really likes over records that make the NME brand look like they know exactly what’s going on? Can there be any other explanation for The View appearing on the shortlist? I hope to god that the only answer can be “no”. McNicholas’s skill at the NME hasn’t been to achieve the traditional measure—raising circulation—but to extend the NME’s perceived cultural capital and influence. Now newspapers from The Sun to The Metro to the broadsheets write news articles on the NME’s tips and year-end polls as if they are gospel. And with good reason, as the newspapers’ll be featuring the exact same bands from, more importantly, the exact same PR companies at almost the same time. Curiously, the last issue of the NME had a letter of the week stating what a good range of albums the Mercury had picked this year, followed by three more saying more or less the same thing. The one negative letter received a “get with it it's 2007 granddad” response from the hack editing the page. He forgot to mention his boss was helping to judge this year though. Hopefully Conor will be bringing the kind of rigorous thinking that led him to say, on national TV, that 2005 winners Antony and the Johnsons were too weird for an NME cover but that they were also a victory for middle England. (Odds: 32423/43432)
George Ergatoudis - Head of Music, Radio 1
See McNicholas directly above, except more so. Also, copied from the Popbitch newsletter, with possibly dubious veracity; “Radio One's head of music has been telling record label A&Rs to consult him before signing any bands... because what would be the point without knowing if you were going to get any airplay on One.” (Odds: 3667/3772387)
Mark Findlay - Head of Music, GCAP’s The One Network
You may not have heard of The One Network but they are the company that owns your shitty local radio station, the one that is part of a simulcast of the same material as every other One Network radio station with exception of adverts and locally focussed idents. Bringing you "the best mix of the 80s, 90s and today." File this guy alongside Conor McNicholas and George Ergatoudis as someone with no place on a judging panel for a prize where it’s claimed, “all genres of music are eligible and all albums are treated equally.” (Odds: 364278/3)
Dean Jackson – Presenter, The Beat, BBC Nottingham
Dean Jackson’s Radio Nottingham homepage doesn’t direct one to any playlists from his shows but it does let you know that “Dean is keen for you to look after the birds and animals in your garden.” There are two hedgehog factsheets downloadable from the page. (Odds: 15/1)
Arwa Haider - Music Editor, Metro/Front Row contributor
Need anyone point out more than the fact that he’s music editor of The Metro? (Odds: 33/24)
Zoe Rahman - jazz musician
Promoted to the panel after her album Melting Pot was the token jazz entry last year. It may have not won the Mercury but it did win that rare honour, 'Jazz Album of the Year' at the 2006 Parliamentary Jazz Awards. (Odds: 6/4)
Jude Rogers - Reviews Editor, Word Magazine/New Statesman/The Guardian
Isn’t it a bit worrying that none of the critics here (and there’s a lot fewer of them than I would have thought, or liked) have ever written anything perceptive or memorable? OK, Jude Rogers has written some memorable pieces but only for the wrong reasons. (Odds: 3/345)

2007-07-22T22:54:00.000+01:00

Disco YouTubery:

Space - Magic Fly

Cerrone - Supernauture

Man 2 Man - Male Stripper

Dschinghis Khan - Moskau

Vijay - I Am a Disco Dancer

Silver Convention - Fly Robin Fly

Flash & The Pan - Midnightman

Escort - All Through The Night

2007-03-20T21:46:00.000Z

My Stylus Singles Jukebox piece on 1990s is quoted for truth in this entry in Paul Lester's Press Release of the Day (soz, New Band of the Day) section on the Guardian music blog. He says I'm "irritable." What the Fuck! Do I sound irritable? Really?

2007-03-14T23:06:00.000Z

For me only, merged album vote-count probability alignments of the Jackin Pop and Pazz and Jop vote counts.

2007-03-14T22:36:00.000Z

YouTubery:

Jonathan King indulges in the worst piece of special pleading ever with "The True Story of Harold Shipman". No prizes for spotting the hidden message. Note how King automatically assumes everyone does everything for publicity.

Fler is an apparently controversial German rapper whose Falco-jacking track "Neue Deutsche Welle" got to number nine in their pop charts. Despite having been accused of homophobia his song is, uh, aggressively camp to say the least. Is this the real video or a parody?

I never get sick of watching Fad Gadget (and Einstürzende Neubauten!) performing "Collapsing New People" on German TV. How can we live in a world where people think The Horrors are weird when stuff like this exists?

Adam Buxton says Help the Police.

I'm ashamed to say I find this pretty hot. I guess I never left that Apocalypse Culture paperback as far behind as I thought.

Posh 60s Girls on LSD are attractive too (here and here.)

Not YouTube, but Africa Hit Music TV, "The First Internet TV Playing Live African Music Videos 24/7" might be interesting if it ever worked on my computer.

2007-03-05T22:37:00.000Z

As a request I have uploaded an old mix of mine. It's rough and wonky but worth hearing and can be downloaded from here.

Death Jam 01 - The Little Black Cloud That Cried

Mark Lindsay - Lone Wolf's Theme
Gay Shingleton - In My Time of Sorrow
Bloc Party - Shes Hearing Voices (Erol Alkan Dub)
Christ Child - Star Whores
Ricardo Villalobos - Dexter
Chicago - 25 or 6 to 4
Zombi - Cetus
Annie - Heartbeat (Maurice Fulton Mix)
Ciara - Oh (Ghislain Poirier Mix)
Ciara - Oh
Osamu Kitajima - Benzaiten Repris
Absolute Body Control - Terminus
Can - Moonshake
Fad Gadget - Collapsing New People (Collapsing Westbam Mix)
Yellow Magic Orchestra - Computer Games
Tantra - Top Shot (Disconet Remix)
Goblin - Mad Puppet
Michael Bundt - The Brain of Oskar Panizza
The Human League - Do or Die (Dub)
Rich Boy - Get to Poppin' (Instrumental)
Brave New World - Alpha Beta Gamma Delta Epsilon
Acid Pauli - I See a Dark(er)ness
Pulp & The Swingle Singers - My Body May Die

2007-03-05T22:20:00.000Z

The estimable Stuart Argabright of Ike Yard, Dominatrix and Death Comet Crew disses my Ike Yard review:

"Hello Raw Patrick

I have rd your review of the Ike Yard rerelease a couple times now , and it just plain sucks man."

I feel oddly touched.

2007-03-05T22:05:00.000Z

Separated at birth:

Seb Rochford of Acoustic Ladyland

Charlie Chuck

2007-02-06T20:49:00.000Z

Separated at birth:

Hawkwind - Quark, Strangeness and Charm.

World of Twist - Sons of the Stage.

2007-02-05T23:33:00.000Z

Bloc Party – A Weekend in the City
Wichita Recordings

Bloc Party think that they are a smart and literate ‘autonomous unit’ but don’t realise that Modernism is over and that whilst East London may be a vampire, copping lyrics from 22 year old Bret Easton Ellis books is not the way to tell anyone—there’s no freeway on Shoreditch High Street. Ostensibly a snapshot of the state of London, A Weekend in the City is actually a disguised version of the most odious of things, the record complaining about how difficult it is to be a pop star. At least Mike Skinner waited till his third LP before fucking it all up. Kele, if you’re reading this try Fancy a Pint to find a pub more to your liking, because you don’t have to drink in the Old Blue Last if it causes you that much psychic distress.

2007-02-04T23:15:00.000Z

Various Artists - 4 Women No Cry Vol. 2
Monika Enterprises

The one place this second volume of the 4 Women No Cry compilation series of new female electronic artists scores is consistency, the tracks flowing together as if from one mind. This consistency also means that the failure of this music is obvious—it’s one thing for the various musicians to be sympathetic to each other, but to be almost indistinguishable? Well, no thanks, that shows that something’s wrong.

Across the 18 tracks there are whole forests of Rhodes and vibes curlicue, acres of melodically arid plug-in synth placeholder and endless, featureless highways of glitch drums where the idea of creating something from a mistake—the unexpected—has been entirely turned on it’s head. It’s like a competition to see who can be the most vaporous, effectless and unmemorable. Aside from Dorit Chrysler’s gorgeous “Spring Breeze”—a gossamer thin twist of fake-Italian film title music—the most interesting song is Mico’s “Signal Found,” and then only because it shamelessly steals the beat and melody of M.I.A.’s “Galang” to no useful end.

Monika label boss Gudrun Gut sez that the twisted Bob Marley quote that forms the title of this compilation is a radical redefinition—“Enough of all these tears. Let’s tear up preconceptions instead!”—but for a set compiled by a one-time member of radical Berlin groups Einstürzende Neubauten and Mania D this is a disappointingly, unaccountably timid collection that couldn’t tear up a piece of tissue paper. This is the laptop-generation equivalent of the sub-Joni Mitchell coffee shop singer-songwriters armed with an acoustic guitar and an aching desire to tell of nothing one hasn’t heard before—music that sounds ‘personal’ but also utterly characterless. I want to hear these women cry, or laugh, or convincingly show any emotion. Anything but this anaesthetised drift.

From Grooves.

2007-01-21T22:45:00.000Z

Black Devil Disco Club - 28 After
Lo Recordings

When Rephlex Records reissued Black Devil’s obscure 1978 LP Disco Club a few years back a lotta people said that it’s tape looped four-to-the-floor drums, witchy synth clonk and crepuscular vocoding was too good to be true. Some claimed that Black Devil was a collaboration between the Aphex Twin and Thom Yorke, others that it was cooked up by Luke Vibert and Thomas Dolby. Instead it had been the work of a couple of pseudonymous jobbing musicians, Jacky Giordano and Bernard Fevre (who was also responsible for heavy weight all-electronic library rarity “The Strange World of Bernard Fevre”) looking to cash in on the early days of what we would now call Italo Disco.

Twenty-eight years later and we have a follow up, logically titled 28 After, about which the Club, attempting to keep their mystique, refuse to say when or where the recordings originate. It’s clearly recent though; these tracks are Fevre solo, no one would act cagey unless they were new tracks and, most importantly, this music sounds digital, lacking the muzzy fidelity and tape compression of the original record. It’s no coincidence that Fevre’s recently been playing solo shows using a laptop.

When it sounds as irrepressibly full of personality and catchy as this though, who cares that Black Devil are now as much a tribute act to their own weird self as Morgan Geist’s Jersey Devil Social Club was—the surprise may be gone but everything else that made them such an insidious goth-disco creep-out is present and correct. The simple, fast disco drums ring with odd phases and flanges, the vocoded vocals still sound greasily close to Throbbing Gristle singing absurdist Boney M choruses, and the each track is crammed with ugly-enough-to-be-beautiful synth sounds. The one progression since the seventies is grubbily squirming arpeggiated basslines that’ve probably been lying in a trashcan since 1982. There’s no mirrorball shine or body heat here; this is disco with the lights turned off.

From Grooves

2007-01-09T23:06:00.000Z

Glenn MacDonald's 2005 Pazz & Jop critical alignment ratings showed who the most consensus-minded critics were in that poll. I was a bold iconoclast coming 719th out of 787 participants. The 2006 Jackin' Pop critical alignment ratings does a similar thing. In the intervening year however I have become a craven conformist coming 276 out of 476 critics. I should hang my head in shame.

McDonald does some more interesting number crunching here proving scientifically that if you like White Bread, Black Beer by Scritti Politti then you'll like DJ Drama & Lil Wayne's Dedication 2.

2007-01-08T22:09:00.000Z

Here's my ballot for Idolator's new Pazz & Jop competitor, the feebly named Jackin' Pop:

Ten Albums Ballot
01. The Long Blondes – Someone to Drive You Home
02. Junior Boys – So This Is Goodbye
03. Scritti Politti – White Bread Black Beer
04. Scott Walker – The Drift
05. Betty Botox – G4 Faggot
06. Clipse – Hell Hath No Fury
07. The Emperor Machine – Vertical Tones and Horizontal Noise
08. Matmos - The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of the Beast
09. Burial - Burial
10. Belbury Poly – The Owl’s Map

Ten Singles/Tracks Ballot
01. Nelly Furtado – Promiscuous
02. Junior Boys - In the Morning
03. Wild Beasts - Brave Bulging Buoyant Clairvoyants
04. Scritti Politti – The Boom Boom Bap
05. The Clipse – Wamp Wamp
06. Escort - Starlight
07. Sally Shapiro - I'll Be By Your Side (Club Mix)
08. Teddybears – Cobrastyle
09. Robyn - Cobrastyle
10. Lillix – Sweet Temptation

Top Five Reissues
01. International Harvester – Sov Gott Rose Marie
02. This Heat - Out from Cold Storage
03. Arthur Russell – Another Thought
04. Sonic Youth – Sonic Youth
05. Tortoise – A Lazarus Taxon

I didn't do a Pazz & Jop Ballot this year. Fuck 'em.

2007-01-03T18:18:00.000Z

Stylus reissues, collections, and compilations of 2006, inc. a snippet of my This Heat review.

2006-12-18T22:21:00.000Z

Here's my ballot for the Stylus Top 50 Albums of 2006:

01. The Long Blondes – Someone to Drive You Home
02. Junior Boys – So This Is Goodbye
03. Scritti Politti – White Bread Black Beer
04. Scott Walker – The Drift
05. Booka Shade – Movements
06. Betty Botox – G4 Faggot
07. Hefner – Catfight
08. Clipse – Hell Hath No Fury
09. AFX – Chosen Lords
10. The Emperor Machine – Vertical Tones and Horizontal Noise
11. Ghostface Killah – Fishscale
12. Matmos - The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of the Beast
13. Burial - Burial
14. Cat Power – The Greatest
15. Girl Talk - Night Ripper
16. Hot Chip – The Warning
17. Lindstrøm – It’s a Feedelity Affair
18. Zombi – Surface to Air
19. Belbury Poly – The Owl’s Map
20. Alden Tyrell – Times Like These (1999-2006)

This a piece I wrote for the round-up:

Burial - Burial
Dubstep was the sound of the future that wasn't, it's sonic turf already too worked over for there to be any real shock of the new. I know about the 'ardcore continuum but with dubstep there’s too much precedent for anyone but the inner circle to feel much real excitement. Then there's Burial, whose self-titled album turns these criticisms back on themselves, his compositions paying tribute to the pioneers of the 2step swung beat whilst also going somewhere emotionally new. Everything here is disturbingly murky at the edges, a hiss like heavy city rain masking the beats at the same time as making them more sensuous, whilst vocal slivers disconnected from their source and wrapped in layers of convolution reverb speak of ineffable loss.

2006-12-15T18:50:00.000Z

Here's my ballot for the Stylus Top 50 Singles of 2006:

01. Nelly Furtado – Promiscuous
02. Junior Boys - In the Morning
03. Wild Beasts - Brave Bulging Buoyant Clairvoyants
04. Lillix – Sweet Temptation
05. Belle Lawrence – I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor
06. The Long Blondes – Once and Never Again
07. Scritti Politti – The Boom Boom Bap
08. Windsurf – Windsurf EP
09. Escort - Starlight
10. Franz Ferdinand – The Fallen
11. Snook - Snook, Svett och Tårar
12. Basshunter - Anna
13. Johnny Dark - Can't Wait
14. LCD Soundsystem – 45:33
15. Sally Shapiro - I'll Be By Your Side
16. Nelly Furtado – Man Eater
17. Bertine Zetlitz – 500
18. Hot Chip – Boy from School
19. Booka Shade - Night Falls
20. Morning Musume - Sexy Boy

This a piece I wrote for the round-up:

Lillix - Sweet Temptation
"1-2-3-4, get yourself on the floor" order Lillix and if I could only hear this record anywhere other than my bedroom I couldn't deny them. A monumental, super compressed square wave block of sound, this should've been an anthem somewhere, anywhere, this year. Here Lillix, previously an attempt to girl-group the Avril Lavigne sound, chew up blood red bubble-gum pop, four-to-the-floor kicks, hissing hi-hat, heavy disco basslines and sequenced synths that could have come from a Lindstrøm cosmo-house epic. Then, power chords and group chants inflate the track to bursting point. Like the impossible staircases of an MC Escher etching "Sweet Temptation" seems to spiral endlessly and dizzyingly upwards leaving no option but to surrender.

2006-12-12T18:51:00.000Z

1990s - You're Supposed To Be My Friend
John (sorry 'Jackie') McKeown's former band, The Yummy Fur, were one of the UK’s best throughout the, well, 1990s, their obsessive word-spew and guitar-shards predating any post-punk revivals at the same time as making them unnecessary. Which makes the ironically lumpen classic rock of the 1990s a grave disappointment—“You're Supposed To Be My Friend” sounds like a tramp falling off a bus and comes complete with a fake-American accent and the type of guitar solo that only an ex-junkie could love.

Chris Cornell - You Know My Name
Cornell might have released the worst song of the year here, an utterly aneamic and flatulent anthem that even a collaboration between The Scorpions and Shirley Bassey couldn't out-kitsch. It’s the type of song that early Soundgarden would have parodied, except without the energy or wit. It's good news for X Factor's Ben though; he's got a new song to add to his set list.

Rihanna & Sean Paul - Break It Off
This track is surely precision engineered to be able to be included on both artists albums. If you morphed all of Sean Paul's many, many guest appearances into their average then it would sound like this, a track where the things that make it fun to hear when drunk in a club are the same as what makes it repetitive and unmemorable at any other time.

Lily Allen - Littlest Things
At the beginning of the year I listened obsessively to the Lily Allen demos and mixtape, a time that seems like a dream that I can't quite recapture now. The Emmanuelle beats still sound good but I just can't connect to the emotions of any of her songs any more, whether through overplaying or just from seeing her mug in the The Sun's Bizarre column everyday I'm not sure.

Cherine Anderson & Chuck Fender - Coming Over Tonight
The Rihanna & Sean Paul yer mum would like when she's tipsy.

Keith Urban - Stupid Boy
Here's an exceptionally ugly country track that tries to invest it's moronically cliched lyrics with meaning by stretching them out over six long, looong minutes. Does the story of a girl wild and innocent "like a flower" ever need to be heard again? Not with a minute-and-a-half guitar solo performed by someone evidently in love with Brian May's solo work, that's for sure. This record makes me hate America, which is a bit unfair coz Urban's from New Zealand.

Fall Out Boy - This Ain't A Scene, It's An Arms Race
If this is an arms race, fighting with sticks and stones is suicide.

From the Stylus Singles Jukebox.

2006-12-11T18:42:00.000Z

Marzuraan
The first time I saw Marzuraan live they were off-handedly blowing choogling blues borez Sunn O)))))) off the tiny stage of one of Newcastle's ugliest pubs. On that occasion they sounded like a hippy drum circle gone feral, hunched obsessively over their instruments and beating out a tattoo that was midway between corroded doom metal and Amon Düül I. The heaviest metal skronk trombone that I've ever heard wailed over the top.

I saw them again recently at a "radical social centre" in Leeds, playing in a bare shell of a room. This time they were a four piece, the sound streamlined into what may as well be classic rock compared to the last time I saw them. Bent at awkward angles they barely noticed the audience but this time instead of contemplation they were seemingly lost in the thick miasma of feedback that shrouded their songs. They would fuck a pig if they could and you should watch them do it.

From Stylus.

2006-12-04T18:41:00.000Z

Hot Snack
Their ugly and confused MySpace page points to Hot Snack being stoners with too much time on their hands and no coherent direction to their lives. That's a bad thing for them. Their music would seem to confirm this hypothesis but whilst that's still a bad thing for them it's good for us. They reside somewhere in the cruel ground 'twixt the bloody minded post-Postcard blocs of gtr scratch practiced by the semi-forgotten likes of the Dog Faced Hermans and The Stretchheads and the dressing-up box faux-ethnology of the Sun City Girls. The dead eyed creepiness and cold sweat they display live keeps them a hairs-breadth the right side of complacent wacksterism. In other words, exactly where they need to be.

Foals
Foals are an odd one. Their concussive attack, gawky, dorky demeanour, stop-start dynamics and technical proficiency mark them out as post-Fugazi math-rock kidz, but they're ones who've decided that playing to ten people (none of them girls) in a pub's upstairs room for beer money isn't for them. Instead they've swapped the red medicine for white powder, roped in a bloke on an inaudible Korg and so are now playing support slots to cringe inducing New Rave groups for twenty people (three girls) in Hoxton bars.

The music on their MySpace page takes the faltering first steps of the baby animal they're named after, but hitting their stride live their circular whump sounded like the Rodan-you-can-dance-to. Let's hope their hefty swing survives the cash they've had chucked their way by Warner.

From Stylus.

2006-11-20T18:42:00.000Z

Wild Beasts - Brave Bulging Buoyant Clairvoyants
Bad Sneakers

With a recent Bob Stanley curated compilation and an ICA retrospective celebrating the twentieth anniversary year of the NMEs C86 compilation—which fixed the sound and image of indie as sexually-arrested cardigan-wearing jangle-pop for the next fifteen years or so—it might at first seem the Wild Beasts are trying to jump the next bandwagon leaving the station. But get past the fact that they obviously rock with short guitar straps and the treble turned way up and out of the sweetness of their sound comes strength—these are boys who wanna get you out of your Miffy pyjamas no matter how cute you look in them.

On the A side of their debut single "Brave Bulging Bouyant Clairvoyants" guitar laps like waves, whilst Hayden Thorpe’s falsetto soars like a choir boy in the split second before his voice breaks or the Associates' Billy Mackenzie without the cabaret background. The B side, "The Old Dog," with it's slower pace, measured piano chords and slapback claps might purport to be the sound of world weary youth but it’s a lie; the vocal ululations still ring with a passion deeper than anything else that I've heard this year.

From Stylus.

2006-11-20T18:34:00.000Z

The Long Blondes - Someone to Drive You Home
Rough Trade

Whatever its definition is, I’m not a fan of indie music. So when, back in July 2003, I ended in a Sheffield pub where The Long Blondes were about to play their third show I wasn’t expecting much. Actually, I was expecting nothing cos I’d never heard of them, was only interested in getting pissed and didn’t much like how they looked, five angular clothes-hangers admiring each other in a corner of the room. I knew they were going to be just another set of goons hopping a short ride on the by then rickety New Rock Revolution bandwagon. When they played I was proved wrong, they may have been out of tune—probably unable to tune—but they were raw and alive; a rudimentary disco rhythm section meeting cackhanded upside down riffs like a Cramps vs. ESG face-off. A singer with a you’d-love-to-fuck-me-but-you-wouldn’t-dare-try sneer squealed-out tales of urban alienation and sexual paranoia on top. They were three-fifths female and sounded it, fresh compared to the stale lager and fag breath of those insisting that rock was back.

Three years later and, after their eventual signing to Rough Trade records, not a lot has changed. They’re still poseurs, if now feted for it with photoshoots for the Guardian Style Section and Pop magazine, and still making guitar pop that sounds like it could come apart at any second, even if they can now tune and use a hi-hat correctly. They also still stick out against the bands that are, at least in column inches generated, their contemporaries. Most of these groups seem to be living in The Libertines’ Albion, a return to the conservative certitude of being an angry-young-man in the last-gang–in-town, all-lads-together; a lie-dream utopia where The Clash took power after a bloodless coup in 1977 and where women keep their mouths shut, roll the joints and get fucked. Strummerville. You can find The Fratellis, The Automatic and Kasabian hanging out there.

The Long Blondes have their Albion, or counter-Albion, too; a just out of focus imaginary provincial life that’s defined by a longing for domestic bliss, and a dull hatred for those, usually love rivals, that get in the way of it. The Long Blondes have nostalgie de la boue, for the better bad times—tattoos of swallows rather than of the Tasmanian Devil in a Blades top—but that doesn’t stop their songs from cutting like a knife.

Over woozy vibrato guitar, “Giddy Stratospheres” tells of knowing that the man you want has been emasculated—drinking wine and eating chocolate in front of the TV—by a dull partner. The mockery of the shouted backing vocals drives the point home. In “You Could Have Both” lovers attempt to reconcile their differences but can’t even agree on pronunciation during the girl group via Pulp spoken word section. Impressionable girls write forum postings about how the message of “Once and Never Again”—that teenage girls don’t need a boyfriend—is empowering without realising the narrator is a perv up for some Sapphic grooming.

The majority of these songs are upbeat with howling vocals, scything guitar and, unusually for a current Brit group, a rhythm section that manages to be danceable without having to go out of their way to demonstrate it, but it’s the slower tracks that end each side (cos this is very definitely structured for vinyl) that turn the album into something cohesive. “Heaven Help the New Girl” is a seemingly wistful ballad with an ice-cold heart and a too short disco middle section, but it’s final song “A Knife for the Girls” that pierces deepest. This is the sound of pent up bile turning to rage; Siouxsie tom rolls, scrawled out man named Marco guitar lines and a keening wail heard all over Harehills (Leeds not Sheffield, fact fans.) Someone to Drive You Home is music about the unbearable times before and after the short moments that make life worthwhile that is as thrilling as the joy the lyrics pine for.

From Stylus.

2006-10-27T18:49:00.000+01:00

My Stylus review of Wolfmother gets a mention in the Sydney Morning Herald today as their one example of a critic that can't stand the groups tired hard rock schtick (and when it comes to tired hard rock I am v. easy to please.)

"A review in stylusmagazine.com cried conspiracy with the claim: 'Wolfmother would love you to compare them to '70s hard rock but wouldn't like you to know too much about it'" sez them, quoting me. "The most irritating to me are the ones who say we haven't tried to be original enough," sez the Wolfmother himself Andrew Stockdale. And a bit of a giveaway here, he also sez, "I don't even see much point in talking about the music, let alone defending it."

I think the reason they quoted me is that it's the only review listed by Metacritic as giving it a lousy review.

2006-10-21T22:20:00.000+01:00

Thanks to Grimey Simon Reynolds for citing me in his haunted audio piece in issue 273 of The Wire mag. I can prove to my mum I'm a 'critic' now.

2006-10-21T17:56:00.000+01:00

Hefner - Catfight
Darren Hayman Ltd

I’m not one for outtakes, expanded editions, special editions, archival collections and suchlike. Well, I’m certainly one for buying them—I’m a collector-scum geek if there ever was one—but I never bother listening to them, they’re strictly for feeding my neuroses, for the shelf, for filing. All the endless stuff that’s in lieu of a life. That’s my easiest way of telling you that this one is great, a whole two CDs of unreleased tracks by Hefner that I can’t stop listening to—well parts of em at least—and that tell me everything I need to know right now. A collection that’s as good as, and an ideal companion to, the recent Hefner Best of and solo album by group main man Darren Hayman.

For almost all their career Hefner were a one-note band but it was a good note worth hearing and one that’s still powerful; a productive rut of rutting, of endless tales of the insularity of the lovers discourse, of two people wrapped up together in defiance of the only thing that Hayman can bring himself to hate; the fascists, the Thatcherites, the Greedy, Ugly People. Even then he can only hate them when they’re in multiple, a shadowy mass entirely separate from himself and his love; the first line on this CD, sung over gently see-sawing harmonium, is “the night she got the swastika tattoo, her lips were cherry red, her eyes were sapphire blue.”

The best Hefner songs, and there are some of them here, are almost narratives and not quite finished heartbreaking stories—Hayman writes about joyous, dirty and surprising sex better than anyone this side of Missy Elliott but then becomes arrested at the post-coital stage, lazing blissed out, wrapped up in dirty sheets. These songs are masturbatory, incapable of reaching a conclusion,instead chasing down circular rabbit holes. Ideas are constantly rethought but endlessly the same. But that’s OK—that’s how my mind works too. The music is almost uniformly mid-paced, an ideal frame for the words but also satisfying in its undemonstrative balance and sense of space; it sounds simple until you wonder why other Angloid indie kids feel like they’re straining twice as hard for half as much effect. The disc of their earlier songs is early-Stereolab meets Canned Heat chug that provides impetus to the words; the later work expands their palette to include piano, synth and infinite washes of steel guitar.

I’d quote some of the best lyrics but, as with all those hip-hop reviews that try to do the same, they’d sound worse without context and grain of voice. Plus I could fill the whole of the review that way. It would be better if you discover them for yourself. Suffice it to say that Hefner know that it’s the imperfections make the perfect so much more so, whether it’s the cheating or chubbiness or whatever. They know that how you fuck someone manifests your politics as much as anything else. (That’s wrong, they know that it manifests politics so much more than anything else—and that’s what can make it so uncomfortable—because of what you learn about your lover, or much, much worse, yourself.) They know that girls really like to fuck and not just as some form of psychic commerce and, even in this age of hypersexualised R&B, how many bands show that they know that? Hefner’s is a world of tuff rock’n’roll girls who turn out to be shy in bed and librarians in cardigans who push your arm up behind yr back till it hurts a bit too much. (Girls, twist these archetypes to reflect your life as you wish; Hefner can do it convincingly, I can’t.)

It’s ironic that a double CD of offcuts with a track, “Gabriel in the Airport,” calling for rockstars to learn when to fucking shut up is one of the best things released this year even if it’s by no means perfect. There are tracks here that are included more because of a good title rather than a good song and in the fidelity wars between the two discs the later, mersh quality works win out almost every time, but whether I’m heartbroken or besotted Hefner can make me cry. And if I’m neither Hefner make me cry because I realise I am actually one or the other. Readers interested in random, unsatisfying sex can get in touch with me on the email address below.

From Stylus.

2006-10-21T17:53:00.000+01:00

Zombi - Surface to Air
Relapse Records

Zombi - Digitalis
Static Caravan

GOBLIN.

That’s the word that I don’t want to use, and, judging by their overly defensive website, the word that Zombi would be v fucking glad I didn’t use also. Almost every review of ‘em drops the ‘G’ word for the good reason that Zombi sound exactly like the 70s-to-early 80s Italian prog-to-disco giallo soundtrack kings. In fact, as they whittle down Goblin’s sound to it’s core components they often sound more like Goblin than Goblin do themselves; it’s the boiled down essence of Goblin, the Platonic ideal of Goblin—ominous analogue synth groans, lumbering hardware sequencer arpeggiations, proto-disco drums with sweatband roto-tom fills and funk basslines slowed to a coma patients heartbeat, revealing the anomie and dread that was always there, just not quite perceptibly. It’s fitting that they come from Pittsburgh, taking their name from the European title of local director George A Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, the soundtrack to which was provided by… well, you guessed it.

Zombi really do invite it—the only way anyone could listen to the airy monophonic melody of “Legacy” and not think of Italian horror flicks is if they had never seen one (and I do realise that this describes a large section of the population.) “Digitalis” stacks cube shaped breezeblocks of bass on top of evenly spaced steel girder drums. The title track single-mindedly riffs out the opening seconds of Rush’s “Tom Sawyer” to over seven and a half minutes. The whole LP sounds like it’s designed to be heard live at Pompeii. Despite the albums release on a metal label Zombi share a common ground with the Tangerine Dream (uncool period) redux of Delia Gonzalez & Gavin Russom and the disco-Kraut of The Emperor Machine, and like both of those bands the music can be (OK, is) overly mimetic, too in thrall to a tiny part of the past, whilst still retaining a powerful effect. Zombi’s irritation at the obviousness of the obviousness of their source material is them missing the point and doing themselves a disservice; it’d be far better to for them to cop to their Goblin emulation and move forward from there.

The Digitalis EP demonstrates one direction the group could head. As well as the titular album cut it includes “Siberia”, four and a half minutes of slowly unwinding icy creep and vocal formant synth choir sounds. It’s for the scene where the abandoned church is slowly surrounded by the armies of the undead. More pertinently there is also “Sapphire” which, taking it’s cue from the later career of Goblin main man Claudio Simonetti, is spaced out fake Italo disco; not that there’s anything too out of place about that currently—there’s one hundred times more people doing Italo impressions than horror soundtrack ones—but this is beautifully balanced and spacious, with spiralling chords and arpeggi-quack resting on the simplest of four-to-the-floor disco drums. The drifting fog just outweighs the dry ice.

From Stylus.

2006-10-21T17:51:00.000+01:00

Four Tet - DJ Kicks
!K7

Sonically this mix CD, Four Tet’s second, cuts a straighter swathe than his folky 2004 Late Night Tales disc, even if the track listing looks at first to be stupidly varied. Here French prog nestles next to Sheffield industrialism, New York hip-hop cosies up to IDM and glitch-house spoons freak-folk. But listen through, and though the track listing looks like a list of the last twenty songs spewed out of a well stocked iPod set to random play, it all flows neatly, everything connected by a post-hip-hop sensibility of finding a hot beat anywhere one can.

Well, that’s after the woozy sample-and-hold synth tone leaps and drifting horn section of David Behrman’s “Leapday Night (Scene 1)” fade into the schoolyard prog drum rolls, syrup thick analogue bassline and earthquake detector filter spikes of Syclops (aka Maurice Fulton.) Then it’s a shorter distance than three decades would suggest from there to Curtis Mayfield’s “If I Were Only a Child Again.” Gary Davis’ “The Professor’s Here” is “Rock the Casbah” if a casbah was a combination porno cinema and massage parlour.

Heldon and Gong bring the French prog; Heldon with tensely reined in drums and a thousand plateaus of grotty pulse, Gong with amazingly funky vibes and breaks action that totally belies their self-declared pothead pixie rep. It sounds so hip-hop that it’s a crying shame that the vox from the following track, Show and AG’s crunchy, low bit rate “Represent,” aren’t layered on top. At the end of it all, the insect marching band jeep beats of Autechre take us out; their electro lineage obvious in this context. Oh, there’s also an exclusive Four Tet track, “Pockets,” which not only blends nicely into its surroundings but is also his best track in years, all sideways tom batter and lapping waves of synth and glockenspiel.

Despite the press blurb claim that Four Tet is “as excited to play an Ibiza club” as he is doing a bunch of nerdy IDM shit, the mixing here is perfunctory at best, adding little to the experience of the music. But as a collection of (mostly) great and diverse tracks smushing up against each other and having scribbly little lines drawn connecting them, this CD is great fun—an unlikely middle ground where b-boys and greasily ‘tached longhairs can trade spit and shoes.

From Grooves.

2006-10-21T17:43:00.000+01:00

Sensational - Sensational Meets Kouhei
Wordsound

Even in a biz that often leads to bizarre hand-to-mouth careers, Sensational has had a weird trajectory. Under the name Torture he started out as a teenaged blink-and-you’ll-miss-him member of the Jungle Brothers, steering their hated by heads, Stooges sampling, baffling masterpiece J. Beez wit the Remedy deep into the mystic. The tracks that their record label wouldn’t let them include were even stranger—track down the totally wired “Rah Rah Kid” for a track that makes “Bombs Over Baghdad” sound stately and sedate in comparison.

Sensational must’ve got his Ritalin (or a much better weed connection) after that though, as when he returned solo under a new pseudonym on Brooklyn’s Wordsound Records he was throwing punches through molasses—mush mouthed and thick tongued enough to turn the most everyday known of hip-hops twenty years plus of received pronunciation into something unexpected, making strange like a Bowery bum speaking like yer father.

His collaborative record with the previously unknown to me “Japanese noise producer” Kouhei Matsunaga continues where those previous albums left off, with suicide notes written after the event and pro studio recordings that still make like tossed off 8-track cheap sampler and mono-synth gunk. It’s v. fucking hard to wrap your head around the intentionality here, Sensational absent-mindedly yelping “dance floor warmer” over a beat like a brittle boned Amen snapping legs on the stairs. Maybe if he keeps it up another twenty years he can be the Mark E Smith of hip-hop. “Lion of Sweaty Hand” smears beats like the dreams of an MPC that’s been trapped in a blunt smoke filled basement too long. “Intro” is surely the only rap track to chop English electro-acoustic composer Trevor Wishart into bits (fact fans write in to contradict and win a no-prize.)

It’s a measure of how fucked things are when the ping-pong bounce drums and churning n gurgling pads of the Autechre remix appended to the end are some of the easiest moves to digest, and that’s Sensational.

From Grooves.

2006-09-05T17:40:00.000+01:00

Here's a few words by me in the Stylus Mercury Music Prize round up.

2006-09-02T15:40:00.000+01:00

Windsurf - Windsurf EP
Sentrall

Windsurf is two shorts wearing Californian beardos doing what Californian beardos do. And that’s chopping a razored-out line that connects Fleetwood Mac at their most emotionally numb to krautrock just as it became consciously beautiful—and thus uncool—to falling leaf “You Got the Love” arpeggiations. Windsurf make yacht rock walk the plank and take Metro Area out of the city and onto the beach ‘til you can taste the salt in their greasy hair as you kiss them. The Windsurf EP is the Pacific Coast Highway if it stretched from California to Saturn, instead of, y’know, Washington. It’s blissed-out easy-glistening glide-by that’s unashamed to sprawl with a washed out Jan Hammer t-shirt riding up over a tanned, but slack, belly. It’s a headnod speed summery execution—but the executed get to eat bar-b-q first so that’s OK. It may help you through hard times because it has for me. I’d call it nu-balaeric if I didn’t hate people who like that shit.

From Stylus.

2006-08-31T01:13:00.000+01:00

Here's Jimmy Sommerville chinless, arseless, eating a sandwich and making me cry like a baby. How come I could hear this on the radio and watch the video on Saturday Fucking Superstore as a kid but now, in more enlightened times, its equivalent would never get shown anywhere even with ten thousand more channels. In fact, its equivalent would't even exist. Don't worry, I know the answer and it's not making me feel better.

2006-08-31T01:02:00.000+01:00

I wish I could believe in me but I believe in you.

2006-08-28T17:24:00.000+01:00

Ike Yard - 1980-82 Collected
Acute Records

Ike Yard emerged from the post-no wave sprawl of early eighties New York fired up on the ideas of English Factory Records post-punk and German krautrock and neue deutsche welle. They were even successful enough at adding their own spin to these foreign ideas that the two records released during their lifespan were on key European independent labels of the time, the Belgian Disques du Crepuscle and the short lived Factory America, an attempt to replicate the UK labels success in Ike Yard’s New York backyard (in characteristic Factory manner, Ike Yard were the labels first vinyl release but got the second catalogue number, the first going to a New Order concert.)

The groups earliest tracks, which became their Disques du Crepuscle EP Night After Night occupy the same psychogeographic space as early Sonic Youth; this is city music by a band that can only imagine, in the words of guitarist Michael Diekmann, “a harder, grimmer version of the future.” It’s ‘verbed out snare cracks, funkless revolving door basslines and cockroach guitar chitter. Even the vocals sound like subway hobo versions of Lee Renaldo’s ‘beat’ blather and, dispiritingly, throughout the whole of the CD seem to be there through obligation rather than inspiration—sure I can pick up alienation and anomie from them but I can get that better from the music. Not a song here wouldn’t be better instrumental.

The tracks from their Factory LP A Fact A Second evidence increasing use of synthesisers, analogue sequencers and machine rhythm used to contrast with treated real drums but the results are always stiff and slightly studio frozen, like gestures toward something that should sound amazing but which never quite reaches it—never quite noisy enough, never quite propulsive enough, never quite focussed enough and in particular, too grey, scared of beauty. The music of a band that took their name from A Clockwork Orange (as they did.) At times—in stray moments and fragments—the rejection of pleasure can sound invigorating in itself but this is a seventy-nine minute CD and over the course of that time the constant monochrome, the unchanging sound palette (where’s the high end?), sounds like a failure of nerve and imagination, a fear of communication beyond its most basic.

Compared to their Transatlantic peers—Cabaret Voltaire, D.A.F., Joy Division—Ike Yard come off badly. They’re a band with an exceptional sense of space, of slapback echoed alleys and speeding taxis, but with no pop nous whatsoever. For that we need to look to post-Ike Yard projects Death Comet Crew and Dominatrix because, unfortunately, Ike Yard make music on the verge of greatness that, in the end, barely even manages to be good.

From Stylus.

2006-08-11T17:31:00.000+01:00

Rub N Tug - Better With a Spoonful of Leather
aNYthing

Rub n Tug’s previous mixes were recorded live, complete with shitty mixing, fuzzed out sound and skull-fucking EQ—the good stuff—but this’n takes a different approach, possibly because a third disc of corny built-in mixer fx overuse would be too much. Instead we get a pristine and minimally mixed set of slowed to –16 electronic disco tracks—Gino Soccio, Soft Cell, King Crimson—(OK, you caught me, not really disco) that’re less chopped and screwed than edited and cosmified; this is bad pills not syrup. At its best, beats string loosely together like solar systems, reverb draped around them like rings; drawled out sax lines might as well be monophonic synth and guitars beached whales. At its worst I want to push the pitch control back to zero to speed up the vocal smear. This is one for those gross, sweaty nights post-clubbing where the only way to get through it is to make one’s-self feel worse. I’m sure we all have a lot of those.

From Stylus.

2006-08-05T22:35:00.000+01:00

Various Artists - Digital Penetration
Alt Delete

Digital Penetration is being touted in some places as the manifesto of a bold, dynamic movement, no, wait, a revolution: new rave. Admittedly, those making the loudest noise are the NME (“The album you have to hear” trumpets the cover) closely followed by the trend hungry but uncreative broadsheets, ever needing to fill gaping column inches. That new rave doesn’t really exist beyond this doesn’t bother me too much; I like a confidently spun yarn, and manifestos precede movements anyway—look at the Italian futurists, or the French nouvelle vague directors who initially set out their stall in Cahiers du Cinéma magazine. It is true that successful manifestos don’t usually need to come with a shocking pink sticker saying ‘bargain!’ on the front however (this CD retails for a fiver in the UK.)

But this isn’t a manifesto as that would signal that somewhere, even once, on this compilation there was someone making a stand or breaking with history or signalling a shift instead of a continuation of the past few years indie business as usual; a vague agglomeration of rote post-Franz Ferdinand and post-DFA and post-electroclash moves repackaged as an antithesis to James Blunt/Sandi Thom faux-for-realness. There’s none of the sweat and delirium of a rave here, it’s another night at the indie disco throwing a conscious pose that others don’t even need to think about; it’s, y’know, indie dance and barely even that. I don’t doubt that as soon as they get some label cash behind them these bands would commission Justice or Braxe & Falke or MSTRKRFT remixes but, well, so what—bands have been using remixes to make themselves look cooler and to provide what they’re incapable of for over a decade now.

The general pattern—These New Puritans, The Neon Plastix, New Young Pony Club—is naïve (i.e. inept) drum machine or disco drums, jagged guitars, a bit of synth, and vox that wants to sound (if female) sexy, and (if male) like Billie Mackenzie (but actually like the feller from The Bravery.) It’s like paunches busting out of tight shirts. None of it’s sexy. The female singer for Revl9n yelps “let her rip, one-two” like she’s going to let loose a huge fart. Bricolage bring insipid post-Postcard revivalism again. These bands are, crazily given the thesis here, missing both mid-range rock whump and dancefloor bass pressure.

The Klaxons stick out in this company—they at least have thickness and motion. They at least know how to detune the oscillators on their synth. But, divorced from their comedy covers of Kicks Like a Mule and Perfecto Allstars tracks it just sounds like something invented to fill the slot left empty by the split of the Test Icicles (with ’rave’ replacing ‘grime’ as a referent.) Crystal Castles bleep out some nice 8-bit funk and there’s a sweetly arranged Hot Chip remix of Architecture in Helsinki but it’s slim pickings otherwise.

Shit Disco boast of “disco feeling… in my blood” and drop Bobby Orlando and Dinosaur L references but don’t expect anything like their experimentalism or use of space or tunes or lushness or love or beauty or boldness or sweat or queerness or utopianism or cornyness or cum or blood or joy as these bands are too polite for any of that—at best this compilation is a boob-rub rather than the actual penetration promised.

From Stylus.

2006-07-28T20:16:00.000+01:00

Various Artists - Confuzed Disco
Mantra Vibes

From the sixties ‘til the eighties Italian cinema did well for itself swallowing up American genres and then regurgitating them just nastily enough to create something new in the process. From the mid-seventies onward their music industry, pushed on in part by soundtrack composers, did the same. Where the related compilation I-Robots tackled post-Moroder electronic disco, Confuzed Disco is, well, just what the title claims, covering more electroid new wave. But that’s new wave as might be understood by a cheap film producer looking to score a blue-neon lit nightclub scene in a sweaty French Connection knockoff. There’s lotsa second language crap raps (check N.O.I.A.’s date rape anthem “Do You Wanna Dance”) and stilted, uptight machine drum patterns. The second disc of contemporary remixes casts its net a bit wider into already compiled Italo classics with a gorgeous, relaxed Morgan Geist re-edit of Gaz Nevada’s “Special Agent Man” and a version of his “I.C. Love Affair” by Munk that struts with a bass-loaded staccato swing. Amongst the others remixing are Lindstrom and Prins-Thomas, Radio Slave, and Kiki who, no surprise, surgically extract the groove whilst leaving behind the grossest signifiers. Sometimes it’s their loss.

Map of Africa - Gonna Ride/Freaky Ways Instrumental
Whatever We Want

When does a record with a drum solo (and I don’t mean an intro of 4/4 kicks for eight bars) get reviewed in Beatz? When it’s by Thomas Bullock (Rub n Tug) and DJ Harvey. “Gonna Ride” is cowbell clonking cheap brew rock’n’roll—If you think you’re above listening to “Career of Evil” by Blue Öyster Cult then stay away. “Freaky Ways Instrumental,” which includes a ton of vox, leans out with some nu-balearic handclap, synth bass and flanged guitar beach party jam before keeling over into the afore mentioned Iron Butterfly on ‘ludes drumz. Oddly, by recreating the sounds of early disco, when it was a way of playing records rather than records themselves, Map of Africa have also recreated the pot bellied hard rock sounds favoured by the disco-burners of Kaminsky Park.

Quiet Village Project - Circus of Horrors/Free Rider
Whatever We Want

“Free Rider” by this recently Virgin signed duo sounds like early Ninja Tunes flipside fluff—just some lazily looped cocktail party spillage—which isn’t whatever I want from a label that charges about as much for one twelve as I set aside for a months food. Luckily, “Circus of Horrors” ups the heat considerably, recalling a time when budget record labels jammed out session band ‘tributes’ to Deep Purple and Anglo musicians of a certain type managed to make cash and experiment doing soundtracks for wiggly horror flicks—think Psychomania or The Abominable Dr Phibes. Solid drums stay rocksteady under fuzz guitar and almost as fuzzy flute. Top it off with screams and vocals that are macho, if by macho you mean a certain type of intrinsically camp performance. And therein lies the disco, I guess.

From Stylus.

2006-07-25T19:56:00.000+01:00

Slayer - Cult
This is the first Slayer song since the reformation of the original, best line-up and it sounds, well, clunky. The parts are badly bolted together, rattling alarmingly when it should be a sleek killing machine. The anti-religion lyrics—“religion is rape, religion’s obscene, religion’s a whore”—probably took about five minutes to write, but it’s kind’ve warming to hear Singer Tom Araya’s devotion to the metal cause; there surely aren’t many other born again Christians who would sing denying Christ’s crucufiction.

Lillix - Sweet Temptation
Who’da thunk that four jailbait looking Canadian girls could trounce Slayer? Well, everyone who reads this column probably but that’s by the by. This is as catchy as The Sweet or The Runaways or Cheap Trick and as rocking as, well, the three bands just named. If I don’t get to leap around to this drunk and sweaty by the end of the year then this year will have been wasted. A snot nosed, boot stomping triumph.

Ze Pequeno - Ze Phenomene
Whilst I’m grateful to the Singles Jukebox for constantly introducing me to all sorts of international music that I’d never get to hear otherwise I’m constantly surprised how many of the worlds non-English language records are accordion-hop. This particular one is lacking the killer instinct expected of a rapper named after one of the favela toughs in City of God.

Bertine Zetlitz - 500
Despite constant warnings to check out Bertine I never have but I’ve probably been missing out because this is very good. Wistful and regretful chiming synth pop that’s retro but not too much so. Something about the reticence in her voice really hits home. Totally dismal and excellent.

Juanes - A Dios Le Pido
Spanish restaurant music and nothing more (well, except that it’s from Colombia but I’ve never been to a Colombian restaurant.)

Calle 13 - Japon
Calle 13 might be from Puerto Rico and lyrically reference “Gasolina” but instead of reggaeton they, on this release at least, are sleepytime hip-hop, kotos lulling you like they’re the Japanese sandman. It’s kinda pleasant but who wants their hip-hop to be pleasant?

From the Stylus Singles Jukebox.

2006-07-21T22:26:00.000+01:00

These are my contributions to the Stylus Magazine Top 100 Music Videos of all Time feature:

Cat Power - Cross Bones Style
First up, fuck the five black clad dancing girls in this video. With their studiedly awkward movements and quasi-sensible hair-dos they could come out of some mid-period REM video. They’re no fun and surely only there to throw Chan Marshall into even starker relief. Really, this shouldn’t be any more than what it is, a brazen knock off of the video to Lucky Star by Madonna, but Marshall proves that if she, often, can’t perform live she sure can on film. One person and simple movements—goofy roller-walking, the clock, finger pointing, fake Chinese eyes, miming you’ve got a gun—that’s all it takes to make a great video. Well, that stuff plus yellow nail varnish.

Coil - Tainted Love
Soft Cell’s version of “Tainted Love” knocked about a quarter off the speed of the Gloria Jones original and Coil take it down another quarter on their honey thick crawl through. The video is a narrative piece, measured and as simple as the logic of disease. Watch as a young man, already too weak to walk, is wheeled into a spartan room in an aids hospice to die. The angel of death, played by Marc Almond, eats a grape and, chillingly, dismissively smirks as the patient’s ECG readout flatlines. Words are half swallowed, wanting to remain unsung. From that point there is only the morgue and the grave. Almost unique in its seriousness and the only pop video that has made me cry.

Fatlip - What's Up Fatlip
The obvious thing to say about this video is that it’s a refreshing change to watch a rapper goofing off and not bigging themselves up in a video. But that’s idiotic, the easy way out, as it’s easier to imagine a hip-hop artist acting like Fatlip does here than any of the other types of musician making videos. And this is all still braggadocio anyway; Fatlip’s just trying to take that particular dare one step further. No matter how dorky he tries to make himself look—bike jacked by kids, punched in the nuts by an eight year old whilst dressed as a clown—he still has total command of the camera. Even in the most uncomfortable scene, the one you don’t notice first time through, where, whilst sitting next to his mother in her pristine house, he raps about chopping up cocaine, it’s all smiles, if queasy ones.

Human League - Don’t You Want Me
“Don’t You Want Me” was an archetypal New Pop move, simultaneously strong narrative pop and a fictionalising of how the Human League got the girls in to sing and thus became popular. The video has a similar patterning as we watch a detective film being made, the behind the scenes romantic tensions of the leads, and the obsessive editing that will lead to a finished product. Nothing is spelt out, the emotion happens in hidden stares and unmet glances. Shots are repeated and rewound and replayed; it’s easier for the characters to watch each other on a screen than to face each other in real life. The viewer is the only person to be looked in the eye. It ends, of course, with the camera dollying away from the set and filming itself in the bright lights of a dressing room mirror. This is Godard’s Le Mépris for Saturday morning TV kids.

Judas Priest - Breaking the Law
“Breaking the Law” is the type of video that gets called “so bad it’s good,” but let’s not fall into that trap, as guilty pleasures have got no rhythm. Instead this is interesting for showing a band struggling to come to terms with a relatively new medium—this is 1980—and one that might’ve seemed antithetical to heavy metal beyond cock-thrusting live clips. Check out the tension between the fashions in the band; Rob Halford looking good, short haired in a new wave black skinny leg suit, like Marc Almond reincarnated as a provincial hairdresser, the rest of the group hairy, bearded and leathered. Observe the dismal prosaicness of the semi-detached houses and amusement arcades that they pass on their way to rob the bank. Look at how, like a lot of early videos, they self-consciously dramatise the process of being filmed by showing themselves being watched by close circuit cameras. And try to solve the biggest mystery of them all, why are they stealing their own gold discs?

This was my top ten:

01. Coil - Tainted Love
02. ...Fuzzbox - Love is the Slug
03. Pulp - This is Hardcore
04. Daft Punk - Around the World
05. Human League - Don't You Want Me
06. Chemical Brothers - Star Guitar
07. Cat Power - Cross Bones Style
08. The White Stripes - Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground
09. Fatlip - What's Up, Fatlip
10. Judas Priest - Breakin' the Law

But if I'd seen it in time I would have voted for the also amazing Soft Cell version of Tainted Love. Why had I never seen that before? Actually, I think I know why.

2006-07-19T22:38:00.000+01:00

Jamie Lidell - Multiply Additions
Warp

Multiply multiplies into one of the remixes and extras packages that post-Maximo Park Warp is increasingly fond of. This one compiles most of the b-side remixes from the album (but not all—where’s the Hot Chip mix?), some exclusives and a couple of live tracks. The live songs are proficient but pointless—but when is that ever not true.

Half of the mixes come from Lidell’s regular collaborators and compadres—those you’d expect to be messing about with his songs. Gonzales strips the Otis-style backing from “Multiply,” substituting handclaps and cocktail-drunk piano. The fake party noises in the background simultaneously annoy and convey an authentic fake-sixties-live-album feel that’s relevant to the needlessness of Additions. Mocky, who co-produced about half of Multiply, adds his own rapping but little else to “What’s the Use,” retaining Lidell for the chorus.

Luke Vibert’s “A Little Bit More” is sluggish, enervated ‘ardcore—when Lidell pleads “so tired, so tired, so tired, so tired…” this is not what he is getting at—that includes uninspired electronica standby Dr Who (OK, Tom Baker) vocal samples. Four Tet lashes Lidell’s Pop Group impersonation “The City” to muddy and muddled oscillator flare and descending synth-bass. In common with the worst of these versions, Lidell’s voice, the USP here, is left stranded by unsympathetic production. The effort behind the effect, the dirty feet and thuds to the floor of the acrobatics, can be heard too clearly.

Freeform Five’s reform wraps agile and mobile bass skirls around the vocal pleading. Eighties digi-synth glass-blowing is balanced perfectly with non-boffin forward-motion glitchiness. I’m sweating as I listen even if it’s just summer heat and not dancefloor muss. Herbert gets two good tracks, the best of which rejigs the standout track from the original album, “Multiply,” into a wiggly 3D flat beat. When the guitar, the only element not chopped and shorn, cuts through, it’s bliss. The only pity is that just the instrumental version is featured (and why are Herbert’s contributions called bonus tracks?)

From Grooves.

2006-06-30T16:53:00.000+01:00

Johnny Dark - Can’t Wait
Kin

Kin might have lost the Junior Boys to Domino Records but they’ve retained Johnny Dark, the rhythmic irritant whose programming on the Last Exit album helped keep Jeremy Greenspan’s confused loverman persona the right side of emo passive-aggressiveness. Greenspan appears here on a remix of the Junior Boys “High Come Down,” his plaintive vocals sliced into spastic tics that contrast with the mosaic spit spatter of sampled MC vocalisation. The echolocation hand-percussion and ghostly 80s digital keyboards sound like Nelly Furtado’s “Maneater” if it couldn’t keep a meal down. Like all the best 2-step, the beat in(ter)ventions of “Can’t Wait” are like a summer’s day, but this is one where even at it’s hottest you can feel the tingle of electricity on your bare forearms, the warning of the sudden darkness of a coming lightning storm. “Never Happened” and “It’s Too Close” pitch up exultant female voices ‘til they’re plastic smooth—grainless—then balances them unsteadily on waves of bass; like the whole EP it’s vertiginous and exhilarating.

Smash TV - Yellow Asteroids
Bpitch Control

Smash TV drop some of their earlier hard-goofisms for Eugene Jarvis style robotronic electro. There’s nothing to get metaphorical about here cuz there’s barely more than a parade of drums and pulses and swoops, like travelling back to party in 2084. Bingo. The B-side “Star Like Mix” (not, as I read it every single time, “Sitar Like Mix”) extrudes the bloops like molten ore and pretzels ‘em so that through the mesh you can hear tiny, sharp breath intakes on the dancefloor. It’s a little deeper and for a little later in the night but in the prettying up it loses the motivic crassness makes the main mix so immediately appealing.

From Stylus.

2006-06-29T21:01:00.000+01:00

This Heat - Out of Cold Storage
ReR Megacorp

This Heat have got a discography more compact and approachable than might be expected of an unpopular post-punk band with both a formidable, forbidding reputation and a six CD boxset sprawl. Pull the CDs out of the card slipcase and, as well as a thick booklet, you’ll be looking at two LPs (neither with any extra tracks,) two singles, a compilation of their John Peel sessions and a disc of unreleased live material, all of which begs to be fitted together to create a narrative.

First out the box is the 1979 debut album, which is either titled Blue and Yellow or eponymously depending on whose history you’re reading. It’s a curious, baffling rats nest at first—track one, “Testcard,” is forty-seven seconds of computer cassette loading spuff, mastered low so that the totally necro proto-black metal grind at the beginning of “Horizontal Hold” blasts out unexpectedly loud. Charles Hayward’s drums are the horizontal hold, a mini-to-maximalist spectrum of almost swing holding the track steady as it swerves between precisely tweezered funk and hair dryer guitar blast. It’s Gareth Evans’ organ ‘solo’ that is the heart of the piece though, a convulsively shaken primitivist Sun Ra shockwave. Whereas Hayward and guitarist Charles Bullen were both accomplished musicians—Hayward having even played non-more-prog drums in Quiet Sun alongside Roxy Music’s Phil Manzanera—Evans was a non-musician (something which in pop only means something when that person is in a band with virtuosos) who proved fearless behind bass guitar, keyboards and cheap tape recorders.

If “Horizontal Hold” shows This Heat as a ‘live rock unit’ paying attention to room tone and of-the-moment dynamics, even if only chimerically, then “24 Track Loop” demonstrates their other side most ably; at core it’s a loop of a drum break, a randomly hit woodblock and a drawn out chord dubbed in at multiple speeds but this is just raw material to be echoed out, slapped back, viciously EQed and fed through a harmoniser pedal. It’s raw and writhing and alive. Hayward says, “We played it as we mixed it.” This could be the beginning of jungle or ‘ardcore or the more rhythmically commited parts of the Mo’ Wax discography, or it could be the logical terminus of “Tomorrow Never Knows” (but it isn’t any of these things.) Other points on the map are “Rainforest,” recorded at This Heat’s first show, which sounds like night-time insect chatter pitched against trees being uprooted, and “Water,” processed gamelan-like improvisation.

This Heat’s second album Deceit, originally released in 1981, is leaner, song focussed, less interested in experiment and continues from where the vocal tracks on the first album—“not Waving,” “The Fall of Saigon”—finished. Despite the concentration on songs, Deceit may be more difficult. It’s a measured, sombre listen, the work of a band in asymmetric warfare against themselves. The group often sing in an English folk influenced harmony, but as well as suggesting unity, that this could be anyone and everyone, it sounds like a loss of the individual voice, that in the end there would be, was, no-one singing. Even as This Heat protest you can feel the inevitability of Thatcherite destruction of community—in Brixton where their studio was located (riots began on April 11, 1981) and of the band itself. Gareth Evans would leave the band around the time that the LP was released.

Despite the second albums shift to songwriting, This Heat’s greatest song—their “Ace of Spades,” their “Crazy In Love”—was released between the two albums. “Health and Efficiency” begins as a tightly marshalled and triumphant two-chord swing “about the sunshine” before shifting to tectonic plate lock groove under which Hayward, for once, and appositely for a song celebrating the body, cuts loose with hyper-kinetic, blazing fills. Bottles smash on the floor. It speaks of the times that Hayward can say, “it seemed to be quite a radical idea to be happy, healthy, acknowledging the sun.” (This is why New Pop had to happen.) Even here This Heat shield themselves with irony—Health and Efficiency is the name of a British nudist magazine, notorious as one of the only places that British men could sneak a peak at tits and arse in the repressive atmosphere of the fifties and early sixties. On the flip is “Graphic/Varispeed”, the nonrhythmic components of “24 Track Loop” stretched into a tidal ebb and flow of dronework. Originally pressed to play at any speed it is presented here twice, as it would sound at 33 and 45rpm.

“24 Track Loop” also reappears as “Repeat,” a reworking released in 1992 that almost quadruples the length and removes a lot of the effects, from the drums in particular. It’s straighter and also more physical; the spacious downbeat heavy reworking that latter-day b-boys may have imagined if they heard the original. It scoffs at mind/body difference and stands as my favourite track by the band. Some fairly ho-hum chopped and screwed metal bashing backs it.

Made Available collects two Peel Sessions that the band recorded before their first album was released. It feels cruel to say of a band that paid a high price emotionally, physically and financially to work autonomously and at their own pace, but the versions of their songs from the first session—recorded at speed and with outside engineers—are maybe even better than their LP equivalents. Stripped of overdubs, tapecuts and processing they’re possessed of a brutal forward motion. They are sometimes very guitar heavy; parts of “Rimp Romp Ramp” don’t sound that different to the music Venom would be creating at the other end of England a few years later.

And as with almost all box sets there’s a live CD. It doesn’t bode well for the promised further live CDs that this one is to-be-listened-to-once disposable. Even the one great recording, the controlled explosion of “Health & Efficiency,” sounding massive for the work of three people, fades out before the end.

This Heat, stupidly, were sure that they were going to be huge, but they embodied the social and political landscape of their Britain too well to ever be successful in their lifespan and (unfortunately) they seem to fit with our times increasingly well too. This is music made by people slowly reaching the point where they can’t take any more, people who were making themselves ill whilst trying to get away from what Hayward calls an “ill health aesthetic,” but this is simultaneously music of joy and energy, some of the most energising and exciting and beautiful ever recorded.

From Stylus.

Advanced subscribers to the boxset also got a numbered-out-of-1200 3” CD featuring the track “Nivelles” which originally appeard in the Re Records Quarterly volume two, number one in 1987. It’s five and a half minutes worth of minimal and repetitive percussion and gtr chk chk chk, over which Gareth Williams smears Dictaphone grot, random word spatter and guard dog rewind squeal. Really, it’s ridiculous that it’s not included in every copy of the box as it was an official release and is much better than any of the excavated live material.

2006-06-27T20:37:00.000+01:00

AFX - Chosen Lords
Rephlex

During 2005 the Aphex Twin released a series of eleven back to basics 12”s—music created on analogue equipment released on an analogue format. This would have seemed a retro move if the post-junglist, post-IDM drill-and-bass scene he had become associated with wasn’t exhausted and delimited, and the Aphex Twin’s own micro-edited rhythms and hyper-programmed textures hadn’t curdled and congealed. A Special Olympics with no races left to run. The excessive packaging on the Aphex Twin’s last LP, 2001s Drukqs, was just big enough to make it look like a headstone, and it’s epitaph could be taken from Richard D. James hubristic contemporaneous interviews. In these he claimed to have recorded scads of mindblowingly original music, which no one other than himself and Tom ‘Squarepusher’ Jenkinson was going to get to hear, as a defence against it being ripped off and watered down. The public got his cast offs and, beyond the always faithful, acted as with as much enthusiasm as that warranted. Not a lot.

The music on the Analords twelves was an escape, a simplifying of tools and a closing off of the almost wearyingly infinite possibilities of software and hard disc recording. Chosen Lords does some paring down of it’s own, culling the forty-one tracks of the original vinyl releases to a more manageable ten; less than an hours worth. Opening track “Fenix Funk 5” stays closest to the modern Aphex model, possibly why it is one of two tracks here credited to the Aphex Twin name (the rest are all AFX.) Skittery machine breakbeats hiss under energetic bass driven funk, but stripped of obsessive, tortuous digital chops and folds, the beats recall James’ pseudonymous 1992 toytown ‘ardkore cash-in, “Pac Man” by Power-Pill, as much as any Richard D. James Album glitch-out. “Crying in Your Face” and “Pwsteal.Ldpinch.D” are some of James’ straightest, and straightest faced, dance tracks ever with electro and house drum and arpeggio patterns reminiscent of the queasy meeting between trance and trip-hop found on the Border Community label.

Elsewhere, tracks recall a tuffer, no-nonsense Selected Ambient Works; icicle drip synths fall through reverberant caverns as bleary eyed, just woken up pads shift uneasily in the background. Knots of not-quite-melody unfurl unexpectedly, stopping the music becoming a frictionless drift. This is the Aphex Twin rediscovering the emotional power of space after obsessively packing his music to bursting for so long.

If you’ve got the full run of twelves, you might quibble with the selection here, as it avoids both the tracks that sound most like what people think the Aphex Twin sounds like and the tracks that obviously reference the history of dance music. But then if you’re in a position to complain, you don’t need this compilation (and no-one can agree on what should be the correct selection anyway.) For anyone else it provides an hour of sometimes goofy, often haunting and always beautiful techno which is all the better for, just this once, being underplayed.

from Grooves.

2006-06-21T20:47:00.000+01:00

Beast In View by Margaret Millar is a good, weird book. It’s an absurdist and nihilistic post-hardboiled crime novel written in 1962 (so still the fifties.) Like the early work of Charles Willeford, or much of Philip K Dick’s writing, it examines the psychotic and mentally unhealthy as a logical response to society, in this case to cut through dbl talk and mealy mouths and repressed desire. Some of her other novels have great titles that make me want to read them: The Invisible Worm, The Weak Eyed Bat, Wall of Eyes, Fire Will Freeze, Experiment in Springtime, It’s All in the Family.

2006-06-10T20:08:00.000+01:00

Top Ten Animals:
01. Cat
02. Bird (of general variety)
03. Manatee
04. Capybara
05. Red Panda
06. Goose
07. Owl
08. Ant
09. Balleen whale
10. Any animal as yet undiscovered

2006-05-19T18:18:00.000+01:00

Alan Braxe at ISSST, The Key, London, May 2006

Alan Braxe has sold over two million records that are aimed straight for the heart of the dancefloor, most of them copies of “Music Sounds Better With You,” one of the best ever tracks about dancing and a giant crossover record that even the people I know who despise dance music grudgingly admit to liking (it was no.2 in the UK back in Aug 1998.) Almost unbelievably, before the beginning of this month Alan Braxe had never played a DJ set in public, apparently preferring to be known for his production work.

His doing so deserves an in-depth report. Unfortunately this ain’t it but I’ll endeavour to get as many details down as possible. It’s not that I wasn’t paying attention, more that I was paying attention in the wrong way, with every sinew and fibre of my body but not many braincells. Also, I was drunk. If I could just write “I danced and had a lot of fun” I would.

The Key, in Kings Cross, is a club that I’d had an awful experience of previously when it, along with other clubs in the same complex, was part of a hellishly overcrowded, incompetently organised and hateful in all ways Soulwax “warehouse party,” but on it’s own it was fine with friendly barstaff, a honeycomb dancefloor that made me worry when the giant bees would be returning and so much dry ice that I felt I was in a dream sequence from some 80s flick like Manhunter or Risky Business. The sound was crisp and clear and bumping but not so loud that I had no voice the next day from YELLING.

Here’s how things end up being in London—Justice and the Ed Banger Records crew along with Mr Oizo were playing on the same night. In the club next door! And they got a bigger turnout, which is a shame but to be expected in the real or imagined constant NOW of dance music, but on the plus side—for me if not Braxe—it meant that there weren’t any boggly-eyed pill casualties except for one mullethead who’d travelled all the way from Scotland to get mashed and forget everything by the next day. Even he was friendly enough in an I-am-gonna-give-you-a-high-five way.

What made Braxe decide that now was the time to play out, and in London rather than his homebase of Paris, I don’t know. Presumably it couldn’t have been cash. Maybe it was the chance to DJ with Vulture label mate Kris Menace, who did the heavy lifting, manning the decks for most of the evening whilst Braxe cued up re-edits on his laptop. Not that division of labour mattered because as a force they were hands in the air exciting all night, starting as they meant to go on—hi-impact—with a pitched up “LFO,” “Body Language” and some Chicken Lips before moving into filter-disco. There was surprisingly little I knew except for Lifelike and Kris Menace’s “Discopolis” and a vocal-less, recut and stripped-to-the-bone “Music Sounds Better With You” that removed the anthemic whilst keeping the disco propulsion. It was like a suite of variations on the first three seconds of the track, ever spawning and replicating. Near the end, three hours later, there was a baffling mindwarp of an edit of “O Superman” by Laurie Anderson (was it chosen because it also reached a highest chart position of no.2 in the UK?) I emailed my brother to find out what I’d forgotten but all he could add was that Braxe “looks like a typical man from the Tricolour French textbooks from school... i.e. like a sex criminal.”

Then Cagedbaby stepped up and killed the vibe as easily as Braxe had killed EQs with a set of ‘roided-out Bloc Party remixes and tracks that instruct you to have fun just a little too emphatically and the second room was a bust as it seemed to consist of a single giant podium that was mostly taken up with a fat girl, but it didn’t really matter as the best was over with and I managed to get chucked out by the bouncers anyway. I stood in the cool morning light, ears still ringing, loose limbed and sweaty because I hadn’t stopped moving all night.

Rekid – Made in Menorca
Soul Jazz

Depending on where you’re coming from, Rekid’s Matt Edwards will probably be better known for his big-room house remixes of Elton John, Tiga and uh, Jentina or for his bearded disco as Quiet Village Project. Rekid catches him making slo-mo frozen-in-the-strobe-light discoid house. “85 Space” and “Tranzit” sound like Edwards has slowed them down in an audio editor until echo and spring reverb swirls like thick cream poured slowly into black coffee, and that’s probably what they are—screwed but not chopped. Sometimes I listen to this record and nothing happens, it’s disco with its blood drained and cold lips, but sometimes—like right now!—the degraded cowbell and resonant white noise creep of tracks like “Lost Star6” or “Arp” is as voluptuous and overwhelming as any woman in a Fellini movie.

From Stylus.

2006-05-12T17:15:00.000+01:00

Lily Allen - LDN / Knock ‘Em Out 7”
Regal

Here’s the pat descriptions for Lily Allen—Mike Skinner with boobs; Lady Sovereign with boobs (cuz Sov’s got none); M.I.A. who doesn’t need help to make a mixtape; Martina Topley-Bird who met Edison Lighthouse walking down the lane instead of Tricky; proof that Keith Allen isn’t a biblical punishment. And maybe someone that we’ll be filing next to Corrine Bailey Rae and Jem in six months time. “LDN” finds her riding her bike through the city streets to looped ska, sounding as summery as a warm breeze. The details of what she’s seeing—“A feller looking dapper and he’s sitting with a slapper, but then I see it’s a pimp and his crack whore”—should be a contrast but it’s all so good natured that it’s as ghetto goofy as Slick Rick’s “Childrens Story.” On the flip, dodgy geezers try their best game on Lily only to get knocked out the box over pub piano and door-knock snare patterns. Neither track is as woozily heartpiercing as some of her songs but this is still my single of the year so far.

From Stylus.

2006-05-10T22:51:00.000+01:00

Dream: Attend a personal lecture from Le Corbusier along with Jonathan Meades. Meades shows me a very nicely designed and bound hardback book on Corb that he has written, then plays me a 78 that prefigures "She's Got Everything" by The Kinks. A brilliant idea for a book strikes me but distracted by Israeli vs Palestinian rioting happening outside, I pick up a large stick and wander into the smoke and crowds and police. On my way to get changed for my running club I accidentally shoot and kill an eight year old boy.

2006-05-08T22:38:00.000+01:00

Psst, Psst, Psst, Psst

Random thought-spill on:

Scott Walker – The Drift
4AD

This is much less abstruse and hard to approach than this I Love Music thread made me think it would be… I thought maybe it'd be a chore to get through and after I'd managed I'd not like it and think that I was missing something or that it was my fault. It's comparatively POP compared to what I'd expected and an easier listen than Tilt.

It sounds like a horror film soundtrack (1976-1983) mixed with the more rocking end of post-rock and sometimes even bits of the first two Black Sabbath albums (I even thought I heard him mention black masses but I think that was wishful thinking as I can’t see it in the lyrics) (and obv. horror soundtracks and this both draw on modernist string composition.) I could even imagine some Relapse Records band or Norwegian black metallers gone ambient/folk ending up somewhere like this, but from a completely different direction. I mean Walker does like Nine Inch Nails and Mogwai…

It’s got a lot of forward motion and rock energy for a record titled “the Drift”.

I thought the lyric fragments that I’d read before release were, I dunno, corny but they're much funnier on record and, I'm guessing, deliberately so—no-one would really write a song about Elvis' twin or use "like what happened in America" as a refrain w/out tongue in cheek these days would they?

Also, “WHAT’S UP DOC?” And the donkey is FUCKING GREAT.

When Scott sings "A man came up toward the body/and poked it with a stick" I think of Crispin Glover in Rivers Edge.

There should be an instrumental version of this record.

I think that this might work as sex music. That’s probably why I’m getting none.

It’s really fucking good.

2006-05-06T16:36:00.000+01:00

Lily Allen, live at Notting Hill Arts Club, London, Thursday 4th May

This was Lily Allen’s first show, the start of a month-long residency at The Notting Hill Arts Club, whose website said to get down early and I took that seriously after my difficulties getting into Konono No1. I wasn’t that worried about it filling up with regular peeps—although her MySpace player has had a hammering—so much as the fact that the night might have been more of a promo piece for the industry and the broadsheets and suchlike and so half full by default even before the people willing to pay were considered. When I got there at opening time (six o’clock!) there was a sign on the door saying that there would be no guest list and there weren’t any queues so I had a walk around Notting Hill in the best sunshine of the year so far and then nursed a sorrily poured pint of Staropramen in the least trendy looking pub I could find. I went into the Arts Centre about seven (five pound in.) It's a good space; nothing too flash just the expected bad ‘photo exhibit’ on the walls and decent, clear, not overly loud sound outta the PA. The Yo Yo DJs played a bunch of popular and semi-popular hip-hop, funk and soul records whilst the place filled up. They also played “Werewolves of London” which sounded great and really danceable loud. All through this I was just feeling kinda awkward and knocking back two quid bottles of Brahma lager since I was there by myself.

By about nine the place had filled up about as full as it got, about two-hundred-and-fifty people. Amazingly they stopped letting people in before it became a hellish and unpleasant crush. There was a lot of girls there, probably out numbering the men, which I’m sure is a good sign of Lily’s mersh appeal. A funk band (whose name I’ve forgotten, sorry) played and they were OK except the male singer who was a bit like Jamiroquai with AIDS and was constantly exhorting people to dance. At one point he looked at me and said “you look like you want to dance” and I just shook my head. I didn’t get into rockunroll to take orders from you, pal. Then they finished and after about twenty minutes Lily Allen came on. She was backed by a bass player, a guy with a Nord Electro 2 and someone with an Apple laptop. The latter two were later described as “my producers.” There was only a need for the laptop feller as she was pretty much singing over backing tracks but I’m sure that she felt more comfortable with more people behind her. Lily was shorter than I thought she would be, but that’s always the way, and a little tuff looking, like she could smoke a pack of 20 Berkeley Menthol in 37 minutes. She announced that she was gonna do five songs as that was all she had ready and then she did them; “LDN”, “Nan You're a Window Shopper” (a comedy take on Fiddy), “Shame For You”, “Knock ‘Em Out” and “Smile” although that list might be wrong bcz I’d had a few and I’m trying to remember it two days later and I’m thick. She was great right from the start—nervously smiley and with phrasing very like her MP3s but that’s good bcz her phrasing is one of the best things them—but noticeably increased in confidence throughout, from worrying about vocal levels at the start to smoking tabs whilst singing by the end. For an encore she did “LDN” (which she pronounced “ell dee enn”) again with a bit more vocal extemporisation and without the Dizzee Rascal/Billy Squier drums that were dropped the first time she sang it (like on her mixtape.) The crowd knew all the songs from the first notes and were smiling and having fun. By the end of it I was sweating like a rapist. I went home pretty much straight after she’d played as I had work the next day so never saw if she did her promised DJ set. There were people queuing to get in as I left.

(Mixtape and MP3 links here.)

2006-05-05T17:58:00.000+01:00

Alden Tyrell - Times Like These (1999-2006)
Clone

As one of the first producers to return to the sounds that made up early Italo-disco Alden Tyrell was one of the few modern artists to feature on I-F’s influential Mixed Up in the Hague, the mix which sent diggers to the crates to scrabble for previously dismissed early-80s electronic disco and producers to their equipment to try to recreate it. Times Like These gathers on CD some of the best of his past work and a few new tracks. Tyrell’s post–house and techno take on Italo is trackier, more explicitly electro dance-floor functional than the trashy, wannabe commercial originals but still works best when it retains at least vestigial attachment to song form. On “Love Explosion 05”, a vocal rework of a track from ’99, old school Italoid Fred Ventura emotes soft-rock sweet nothings over filtered white-noise snares and hi-hats. It sounds as cheap as the sentiment. The other vocal guest, Nancy Fortune, brings the over-enunciated second language English to the motorik space dust of “La Voix.” “Knockers” compares and contrasts the ever-present synth arpeggios with cyclic tom tom rolls and fills. I ad-lib lyrics about being a sultry time-travelling space woman over the Liaisons Dangereuses percussion of “Phaze Me” but that’s only in the privacy of my own room. You might just want to dance instead; I strongly recommend it.

Justice - Waters of Nazareth
Ed Banger Records

Here’s a handy six track UK CD that combines one of the biggest records of 2005 with a brace of remixes (there’s also a 12” issue with just the new tracks.) I’m sure that most people reading this are aware of the original “Waters of Nazareth”—house music that’s been backspun then kaleidoscopically chopped, compressed and digitally distressed until it’s less le French touch, more le French punch. Justice and Feadz’ new take on it splits it into disassociative shards of crappy beat-box, bass drops and mobile phone siren, before becoming more four-to-the-floor than they’ve ever been for, oh, fifty seconds at least. Erol Alkan’s ‘remix and re-edit’ (choose one or the other, you can’t do both) adds some space, playing up drum hooks and cathedral organ. Except for the DJ Funk mix, standard booty biz that fucks the flow, this sounds like one long track, such is the homogenising power of the ever-present distortion.

Lotterboys - Animalia
Eskimo

Combine Terranova with Paris the Black Fu from the Detroit Grand Pubahs and what do you get? In their own words “electrofunkypunkrockband” (oh god) The Lotterboys. What else do you get? Tremolo-ed live guitar, punk funk bass, block party disco breaks, overdriven snare clatter and chopped trumpet samples—which at it’s worst sounds like the oft-threatened return of big beat or, when Paris’ vocals come in, outtakes from Fatboy Slim’s deeply unfunky Freakpower project. Occasionally it works; “Star Whores” pool hall crack and swagger and the Dirtbombs-like garage punk of “Wired and Tired” convince as does, most unexpectedly, the cover of Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” where lead-boot syncopation meets “It’s the Joint” drum rolls. Princess Superstar provides the “Death Valley 69” backing moans. But aside from everything else, how you get on with this album will be determined by your tolerance for Paris’ wobbly loverman pastiche baritone, his love for puns that don’t quite and scribbled on a napkin backstage clichés. Sometimes he replaces the word fuck with funk. It’s that type of album.

From Stylus.

2006-05-02T20:21:00.000+01:00

Wolfmother - Wolfmother
Modular

Wolfmother would love you to compare them to seventies hard rock and to think of them as swinging, gnarly dudes. Singer/guitarist Andrew Stockdale even looks authentic, if that means a Brundlefly mutation of Simon Amstell and Uncle Peter from The Smell of Reeves and Mortimer, and it probably does. The rhythm section aren’t as convincing—two lunks who look like they should be participating in a moonlit beachside circle-jerk with Jack Johnson.

Wolfmother would love you to compare them to seventies hard rock, but wouldn’t like you to know too much about it, as then you’d notice that they’re just riffing harmlessly on Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath with a little bit of Deep Purple organ quack thrown in, all refracted through the White Stripes, who are surely the real reason that the band exist. But it’s a pale copy, a straight to video sequel. You’ll find nothing here to match Zep’s immaculate session musician studio pop or Black Sabbath’s stringent critique of the failure of the 60s project. You’ll find nothing to match The White Stripes either, especially on “Apple Tree” a sloppy, soggy carbon paper Stripes grab that even tries to jack Meg’s drum patterns, proving that it’s not as easy as it sounds. “Witchcraft” is scrawnier than it should be and the rhythm section can’t cook up enough heat to make it funky, which it needs to be. It’s closer to Chris Evans period Ocean Colour Scene than anything else, even with the added jazz flute which doesn’t compare to the recent flute deployment by Swedish doom-heads Witchcraft, oh, wait a minute…

“She’s a woman you know what I mean” whinnies Stockdale on, uh, “Woman.” And I know only too well what he means as I’ve heard about two hundred unwittingly sexist seventies hard rock tracks that tell me, and I’ve sat through The Datsuns earlier ironic rehash “Lady” in 2002. Maybe it’s better that the sexism is unconvincing—like a game or a charade—but not when it’s as delibidinised as it is here. What’s lost is the creepiness and squirmy unsettling feeling that the best of the original stuff still provides and which is the only argument for it. It takes guts to be stupid but it can’t be someone else’s stupid, especially someone from thirty years ago.

For a band from a country with a disproportionate amount of tuff rock there’s not much—any—Australia present on this album. No “The Real Thing”, Coloured Balls, Rose Tattoo or AC/DC to be found.

It’s not that Wolfmother are even all that bad, it’s just that everything there is to say about them is best said by immediate reference to another band and Wolfmother always come up short in the comparison. It’s fun but no one should ever settle for second best.

From Stylus.

2006-05-02T20:03:00.000+01:00

Tim McGraw - When Stars Go Blue (USA)
Mainstream country meets up with, uh, alt-country maybe—I don’t fucking know—as some dude who’s up to his second greatest hits CD covers Ryan Adams and the worst of both worlds meets. What’s worse, Adams pitiful ‘classic rock lyrics’ or McGraw’s AOR whine? It would take a wiser man than me to say.

Forward, Russia - Nine (UK)
Bogged down in the Eastern Front

Sigur Ros - Hoppipolla (Iceland)
In the seventies and eighties tracks intended for use as television backing music were called library music and were available to broadcast professionals only. Thanks to the blessings of modern capitalism, Sigur Ros make theirs available to the general public as well.

LL Cool J - Control Myself (USA)
Missy Elliott released a song with “control” in the title that sampled electro a year ago and now LL has his. But despite the guaranteed all-fun-all-the-time recipe of looping Bambaataa’s "Looking for the Perfect Beat", propping it up on massive 808 kicks and revisiting his “Going Back to Cali” flow (or maybe that’f Tone Loc’s “Funky Cold Medina”) there’s something underwhelming about it. Maybe it doesn’t sound single minded enough—there’s no way that Jermaine Dupri’s constant lame interjections should be able to get in LL’s way without LL mowing him down but they do. If I hear this after four beers when I’m out and about I’ll be straight on the floor though.

Ashley Parker Angel - Let U Go (USA)
Down on his luck—well, except of the reality TV show—former O Town shit-head makes a second grab for the gold with an emo-ed up “Since You’ve Been Gone” knock off that sounds every bit as desperate as it is, but without that lending it any edge. As a special feature it’s got Autotune that’s unintentionally more prominent than that on “Believe” by Cher. If you see him in the gutter don’t kick him; it might give him more material.

Fort Minor - Where'd You Go (USA)
Mike Shinoda of Linkin Park is either so conceited, or so lacking in confidence that he’s added a Dictaphone tape of some mate of his saying, “when you made me that initial batch of songs I was like, that’s the shit right there” onto the end of his track. If he wants, he can quote me in his CD booklet saying that it’s bland triphop bollocks.

Stylus Singles Jukebox.

2006-04-29T22:09:00.000+01:00

I have added myself to MySpace. I don't know why.

2006-04-25T23:24:00.000+01:00

Karen Dalton - It’s So Hard to Tell Who’s Going to Love You the Best
Unveiled

The promo material for Corrine Bailey Rae’s self-titled album (number five in the UK album charts after seven weeks as I type this) must’ve had Billie Holiday written in large letters all over it because that’s what all the reviews had to say despite all evidence to the contrary (i.e. the record itself.) Despite signifiers, Corrine Bailey Rae doesn’t sound like Holiday and it’s inconceivable that she could come out with any leftfield “Strange Fruit” move anytime soon that might change my mind on this. She probably thinks that “Strange Fruit” is about a pomegranate. The only other explanation, and I’m sure that this can’t be true, would be that UK music writers and their editors are deaf/stupid/both and have to recycle the same reference points for each genre endlessly whether or not they fit.

So, to Karen Dalton. Another case where everyone, this time including me, will tell you that she sounds like Billie Holiday. She does, but the reason that she can withstand this comparison is because her voice is self possessed and of itself—Dalton can be compared to Holiday because she’s also utterly convincing as a singular thing totally unlike Holiday. Devendra Banhart copped his boy-man singing style from this disc as much as from Marc Bolan but his voice conveys the feeling that he has studied moves, that he could have, in a different time period, ended up sounding like, I dunno, Vince Neil. Dalton’s voice sounds like it could sound no other way than it does here (even though I’m sure that it could have), slipping always just beyond her control, like there’s a rupture between ‘her’ and her ‘voice.’ I want to say, “O Karen, why aren’t you singing in a normal, easily digestible voice that will make your record popular,” even knowing what the answer is—that that popular record would not be now making me feel queasy and seasick and lovelorn over thirty years after it’s recording—that even if she had somehow made a more popular record it would have ended up even more forgotten now, unable to reach through time, just like all those other dusty post-folk singer-songwriter records that today sound so inert in their confident expression.

Not that Dalton probably gave a fuck either way. The thick booklet that comes with this reissue is filled with six interviews each of which testifies that Karen was impossible to get to know, something echoed in her voice which seems unanchored from place and time. Despite moving from Oklahoma to New York’s East Village with a 12-string, a banjo and a kid in 1960 and hanging out and performing with all the scene notables she ended up recording her album way after the acoustic folk boom had ended, 1969, and only because her friend Fred Neil and his producer tricked her into it at the end of one of their recording sessions. It was recorded quickly and live, with few overdubs, catching Dalton’s voice up-close and tender. Sometimes it sounds like new snow underfoot. Her pianistic 12-string playing and Dan Hankin’s acoustic guitar are good and raw, weaving round each other like ivy on old brickwork, creating a diffident Morrison/Reed-esque ‘accidental’ beauty. None of the songs on this album are written by her, and they were made famous by people as diverse as Fred Neil, ‘Jelly Roll’ Morton and Otis Redding, but she makes them hers for the length of time that she plays them.

The ad-hoc nature of the album also means that it covers a very small area in terms of tone-colour, arrangement, pacing and emotion; it can be too one note even at the brief thirty-two minute running time. In short bursts however It’s So Hard… can be mesmerising, and in toto it’s sometimes, although hopefully not too often, one of the all-time great late night cry accompaniers.

From Stylus.

2006-04-23T23:16:00.000+01:00

Here are the pitches that I’ve had turned down by London’s top TV and movie producers since moving here at the end of January:

Inspector Horse—He’s only got an hour to solve the case but he’s getting the shakes and if he doesn’t get some skag soon there’ll be no way he can even think straight.

Little Miss Marple—The adventures of Marple as a precocious teen Bright Young Thing solving crimes in the 1860s (or whenever.) And why did she never get married? Bcz she’s also a cheeky lez getting off with chambermaids, princesses and music hall stars left, right, centre.

Commuter Virus—A horror film. I never worked out a plot but with that title people would rent it out no matter how shit it was.

White Power Challenge—Britain’s racists pit their top men against the best of British non-whites in a test of skill and stamina.

Gold, Frankincense and Murder—Before deciding to become the Son of God, Jesus tries his hand as a detective in Nazareth, much to the chagrin of the local, corrupt Roman police force. Guest appearances from Judas as a Huggy Bear type figure.

2006-04-16T22:20:00.000+01:00

In honour of Beckett’s centenary, here is a play of the type that he would write if he were alive today. This does presuppose that he would write about trying to find one’s friends at an oversold and frustratingly overcrowded Soulwax ‘warehouse party’ and that his plays would be in the format of txt mssgs and that he wouldn’t actually write them he’d just copy them off his phone the next day, but I don’t think that there’s a Beckett scholar on this earth that would disagree with these points.

From: Lisa 22:55
In some queue behind building. Txt you when I get in.

From: Patrick
Ok, likewise.

From: Lisa 23:37
Are you in?

From: Patrick
No its mayhem

From: Lisa 23:38
I’m in and it’s bedlam.

From: Lisa 23:50
Are you in? Dif to get signal.

From: Patrick
Not yet will let you know

From: Lisa 00:01
You won’t get much signal in side so i’ll wait on upper floor at back. I’m on a sofa by men’s loo. Live band playing in next room.

From: Lisa 01:36
Are you still in that same room?

From: Patrick
Yes

From: Lisa 01:54
Can’t see you and too difficult to get thru crowd. I’m at fire exit.

From: Patrick
Im weeing

From: Lisa 02:29
Just outside exit top left of stage. Will wait here till you wanna look downstairs

From: Lisa 02:29
I’m coming to find you

From: Patrick
In in outside bit

2006-04-14T23:02:00.000+01:00

Arthur Russell - First Thought Best Thought
Audika Records

Just about every review or article about Arthur Russell mentions his beginnings in music, the stuff that preceded his best-known disco music. That is, his start as a classically trained cellist who studied Indian music with Ali Akbar Khan and, after his move to New York, worked with minimal composers including Philip Glass and Rhys Chatham. Until First Thought Best Thought however, his experimental composition has been the hardest of his released music to actually get to hear. Even the similarly titled Another Thought consisted of vox and cello songs, despite being released on Philip Glass’ label, Point.

The first CD of this double disc set contains two untitled volumes of Instrumentals. Volume two of Instrumentals was released by Les Disques Du Crepuscle in 1984 and is the many peoples least favourite of the work released during Arthur’s lifetime, although part of the blame for that must rest with the fact that side two of the LP was mastered at half speed—an egregious fuck-up by any standards. Recorded live at New York performance space The Kitchen in 1978, sparse cello, trombone and clarinet lines hang in space like dust motes in winter light. The majority of it is conspicuously drum and percussion free, perhaps because the previous year Russell, under the name Dinosaur, had recorded his first disco track, the vertiginous and rhythmically intense “Kiss Me Again,” and so his love of rhythm and echo had been displaced toward popular music. Instrumentals two is uneventful in a fashion that is equally hard to get involved with or alienated by, like the constant sound of traffic outside a window which the ear soon learns to filter out. In his notes from the original release, Russell writes that it hints at “the popular radio sound of the future.” I have not one clue what he can mean by this, but can still say that he was wrong.

The earlier, 1975, recordings that make up Instrumentals Volume One were supposed to form a part of the same release but remained unreleased until now, which is unfortunate as they are the superior set; much more harmonically active and with a greater range of tone-colour. Beefed up with flute, bass, guitar and synth, this is purposeful music that has a point, a destination. The electric piano and sly, catchy percussion makes the biggest difference, pitching the sound somewhere between Moondog and some of Miles Davis’ seventies recordings. At it’s most stripped back and processional it resembles Dolly Collins arrangements for her sister Shirley’s Love, Death and the Lady. First Thought Best Thought may seem an odd title for a CD by someone who constantly returned to and reworked themes over and over, versioning tracks like “Is It All Over My Face” multiple times as well as handing them over to collaborators, but possibly refers to the fact that the musicians on the Instrumentals were allowed a certain degree of freedom and improvisation—sometimes due to their technical limitations—during the pieces.

Tower of Meaning which takes up the bulk of the second CD was recorded in 1981 and originally released in 1983 in an edition of only 320 copies. Horn lines develop like cello strokes, swinging back and forth like a bow drawn slowly across strings. Even the grain of the sound relates to the sound of Arthur’s cello on song-based releases like World of Echo. Sections of the composition begin and end so abruptly that you might think there was a fault with the tape machine that recorded the performance or the pressing of the CD if the sleeve notes didn’t reassure that “abrupt beginnings, endings and edits… are intentional.” Sounds pass by like a drowsy view from the window of a moving car.

In a 1987 interview with Frank Owen published in Melody Maker, Arthur talked about wanting to make music which would “have brass bands and orchestras playing outdoors in parks with those band-stands that project echo. I also want to have Casio keyboards on sailboats. Have you ever been on a sailboat? It's so quiet, all you hear is wind and sea." The last, unreleased, track here, “Sketch for the Face of Helen” incorporates some of these ideas in incunabular form. Random sounding cheap keyboard drifts like a boat at sea over a field recording of a tugboat journey (another echo of Moondog who released recordings of himself playing along with the lonely howl of tugboat horns.) Unlike the other music on this compilation it doesn’t sound worked on, and it should just be a slight ten minutes of ambient drift but has a beauty beyond that and is the piece I have been returning to most.

From Stylus

2006-04-11T19:36:00.000+01:00

Snook - Snook, Svett och Tårar (Sweden)
The breezy, relaxed horn fanfare at the start of this track sounds like some thing Belle and Sebastian would use for one of their sixties easy pastiches, “Legal Man” perhaps. So does the rest of the track, except for the vox, which are Euro-cadenced pop-rap! This is the kind of trick that whilst initially baffling should get old quickly—amazingly it doesn’t, staying beguiling and addictive.

Dr Krapula - La Fuerza del Amor (Colombia)
They’re called Dr Krapula. They play rousing yob-ska. With accordion. They’re what kids on Colombian youth football teams would consider punk. You don’t need to know more than that.

Shayne Ward - No Promises (UK)
The type of bland and over-autotuned pablum that you kick onto the market when you’re expecting Steve Brookstein-style diminishing financial returns rather than Girls Aloud or Will Young longevity. One good point: it would have been much worse if they had released either of the b-sides as the main track as they’re “Unchained Melody” and “A Million Love Songs.”

Kelis - Bossy (USA)
Kelis sings her CV over hypnotic, lazy bass rumbles and Casio harpsichord. Like Sion Jenkins she fakes it. “I’m the first girl to scream on a track” she sez ignoring several hundred women from the blues onward, and “I’m the girl you love to hate” only makes sense if you take ‘love to hate’ to mean ‘that American record buyers have generally been indifferent to.’ But she can tell all the lies all she wants, I’m hooked.

DMX - We In Here (USA)
I’ve never understood why Swizz Beatz would want to advertise in his name that his music is a rip-off, and, whilst not wanting to sound like some Campaign for Real Hip-Hop member from 2000, I’ve never understood the appeal of his beats either. “We In Here” is non-stop, constantly fanfaring keyboards, trying to pump up… well, not a lot really, just some cheeseburger beats and rhymes. Generic club banger pt. 996.

Louise Attaque - Depuis Toujours (France)
Not a woman but a French ‘folk-rock’ band except in France that must mean synthesised-pan-pipe-rock because that’s what “Depuis Toujours” is. I don’t think that I saw any buskers when I was in Paris but if I did I bet that they’d sound like this.

Stylus Singles Jukebox stuff.

2006-04-10T21:31:00.000+01:00

Motor - Klunk
Novamute

The CVs of the duo who comprise Motor, Mr. No (Olivier Grasset) and Bryan Black, includes programming for Prince at Paisley Park, multiple collaborations with Felix Da Housecat and membership of the City Rockers/International Deejay Gigolos associated band XLover. From this you might expect Motor’s LP to be splashy, trashy post-electroclash fun but the records appearance on Novamute should disabuse you of that notion. Motor is electroid techno stripped-to-the-bone and flayed-raw then pumped up with the cartoon machismo of EBM, especially on the vocal tracks, one of which goes so far as to feature Douglas McCarthy of Nitzer Ebb. “Sweatbox” is a bass heavy acid line, reverbed out biscuit tin snare tattoos, a kick drum and little else. The grubby arpeggios of “Black Powder” threaten to break under their own weight as they become increasingly distorted and twisted. On “Botox” programmed rock drums flange into infinity whilst bitcrushed guitar-substitute brings in pretty much the only high end on the album. A little too monotone, low-end obsessed and one-dimensionally sleazy to convince over the full hour (“Hey man, have you got any gak?” asks “Yak” like the punchline to a 2003 Popbitch mailout) but in small doses, and at high volume, this is invigorating.

From Stylus.

2006-04-06T23:05:00.000+01:00

Konono No. 1, live at Momo’s Bar, London, Wednesday 5th April

I’ve been a fan of Congolese Afrofreakbeat champs Konono No. 1 since those first enticingly lo-res Quicktime vids first started showing up on the internet. Watching the footage of them playing their jerry-rigged thumb pianos and reclaimed-metal percussion in the streets of Kinshasa, the idea that they’d ever be playing a free show in the 'fashionable' basement bar of a London restaurant seemed unlikely. So I was excited when, whilst doing my habitual work avoiding morning internet scan, I read that they were doing just that for their debut UK show. “We advise anyone attending to arrive early…” said the info, so I chucked a load of vile fast food down my face after work and arrived twenty-five minutes after the doors opened. Plenty of time considering that, at that point, there were only thirty-three people in a ninety capacity venue, except that the venue manager had been keeping an impromptu guest list of people who’d rang about the show and this list was already over capacity. He told me to come back in an hour and a half and I might be able to squeeze in. I went and sat in a crappy pub nearby—the type of place that’s full of transient post-work businessmen swilling a couple of pints back before getting the train home—and nursed a Fosters whilst composing on a piece of scrap paper an irritable weblog post about contradictory information. It was a miserable pint, sitting and waiting for what seemed an inevitable early train ride home. I wandered back to Momo’s and stood at the front of the twenty or so waiting outside and, amazingly, got let in. I looked at the doorman’s clicker, which said that I was the 103rd person to be heading downstairs.

The bar was decorated to try to look like Morocco, except that it didn’t really but then neither does most of Morocco anyway, so that was OK. The place was packed out like a rush hour underground train. You could have fallen asleep and stayed standing up. The crowd wasn’t like that at any other ‘world music’ event that I’d been to (reader: disregard that I haven’t been to any and concentrate on stereotypes), instead it was mainly young, well scrubbed and well dressed. Lotsa girls that looked like they’d probably had ponies when they were kids and no-one wearing any band t-shirts except me (Electric Wizard, motherfucker). I now know that there were a couple of the Dissensus posse there and it would have been good if I could have met up with them as I was on my own.

When Konono No 1 came on the crowd started hooting and clapping. There’d been reports from some of Konono’s initial US dates that they’d sounded too polite, unamped and undistorted, and if they’d come out with a sound like a wet fart it would have been really embarrassing but they blasted out loud and thick. The thumb pianos seemed to be going through tiny practice amps that were distorting to the point of break up; the dual male and female vocals were channelled through the bands lance-voix—reclaimed colonial-era megaphone speakers. Unlike in the US where these were just for show they really did seem to be miked up. It sounded pretty much exactly like the Congotronics CD, except for the drummer who was extremely high in the mix and constantly flamming away on a single snare drum giving the proceedings Stars on 45/Jive Bunny feel but that was good because I like Stars on 45 (fuck that scab Jive Bunny.) Songs played endlessly, super-tight and ever forward in perpetual motion with seemingly no effort from the band. They were like a train rolling down a hill. I’d lose track of time and wouldn’t know whether a song had been twisting and writhing for eight minutes or sixteen minutes or twenty-four minutes. During the encore (“Konono, you must play and never stop,” shouted one young colonialist) there was a welcome rhythm change to a slightly more relaxed kinda-claves rhythm before it built up again.

As should be expected for a band that have been playing together for over twenty years they were total pro’s—as good live at their thing as The Ramones or Status Quo. They knew how to get people moving and to get sweat in the air (it got pretty stinky—I surreptitiously checked my pits and it wasn’t me.) I think that they might have even played their songs in the same order as the album.

On the way back I almost got into a fight with two young bankers who didn’t understand tube escalator etiquette. That’s how a night seeing Konono should end.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^

And I may as well link to my review of the Congotronics 2 CD again.

2006-04-04T17:50:00.000+01:00

Three 6 Mafia - Poppin' My Collar (USA)
They pop their collars? Like oafish rugby playing students who barrel around the bar like everyone else is a skittle to be knocked over? That’s not exactly something to brag about. And neither is the rest of the single which buffs up the surface sheen too much and loses all that was appealingly, genuinely weird about the Three 6 in favour of generic pimp talk.

Wigwam - Wigwam (UK)
I usually have an anti-Alex James rule—after Fat Les and Me Me Me and those shocking wannabe country squire columns in The Independent it should be three strikes and he’s out but I’m prepared to make an exception as Betty Boo is involved. On the first time through it sounded like nothing was happening but second time around and everything’s happening, the song is overloaded in detail; tube-amp reverb splashes, black metal backing vox, dumb faux-reggay and drum machines that sound simultaneously addictive and like the first preset out the box. And Betty Boo of course. The best single of the year so far.

The Fray - Over My Head (USA)
Horrible, horrible American passive-aggressive wimp-rock with a built-in timeless feel—which is surely one of the main enemies of great pop. Designed, like all this shit, to fit straight into an emotional decision making scene in some bland American drama (let’s check, yep, one of their songs has been featured in One Tree Hill, whatever that is.) Let’s hope the only thing over their heads is a river of snot and bloody pus.

Mish Mash - Speechless (UK)
Like cheap Ikea shelves—functional but nothing to get excited about. It could be fun hearing it at a stuck-in-the-past provincial gay club whilst getting propositioned by a crummy pissed puff but listening to it anywhere that doesn’t stink of stale poppers, like I am right now, makes no sense.

Gnarls Barkley - Crazy (USA)
Every couple of years, jazz labels with a certain type of back catalogue, Blue Note and Verve being good examples, release compilations where their funkier or more DJ friendly material is ‘brought up to date’ by being remixed by high-mid ranking producers like, well, Cee-Lo and Dangermouse. The results are invariably indifferent at best. “Crazy” cuts out the middleman by being an original song that sounds like some clunky, modernised version of an old song. The Jack Johnson loving South African at work said that the first time he heard this he thought that it was Moby until the chorus came in. He meant it as a compliment; I took it as a warning from history.

Belle & Sebastian - The Blues Are Still Blue (UK)
A weird combo of Hefner plus Scientology-period Incredible String Band. Like a lot of Belle & Sebastian singles this is irritatingly close to something that I could get into, but just, somehow, falls short of the finish line. I think it’s that they always sound too polite, too held back, too wound up, and I think that that may be the point for some people, the thing that they can relate to. Not me though.

Bodies Without Organs - Temple Of Love (Sweden)
Missing organs include heart and brain and balls.

The Mount Raskil Preservation Society ft. Hollie Smith - Bathe In The River (New Zealand)
By the yard soulful wallpaper of the type that you’d find in a “feel-good film that makes you want to get in contact with your long lost cousins and reminisce about days gone by.” Which it is, according to IMDb. Features that most hideous signifier—an unnecessary gospel choir used as a prop to prove to add unearned soul and gravitas.

Toby Keith - Get Drunk & Be Somebody (USA)
I am training an inch tall man to fly a tiny jet aircraft of my own construction on a suicide mission into the side of Toby’s head.

Stylus Singles Jukebox blurt.

2006-03-29T19:20:00.000+01:00

Because a couple of people, to my amazement, have requested it after listening to volume two, here is...

Death Jam 01 - The Little Black Cloud That Cried
Mark Lindsay - Lone Wolf's Theme
Gay Shingleton - In My Time of Sorrow
Bloc Party - Shes Hearing Voices (Erol Alkan Dub)
Christ Child - Star Whores
Ricardo Villalobos - Dexter
Chicago - 25 or 6 to 4
Zombi - Cetus
Annie - Heartbeat (Maurice Fulton Mix)
Ciara - Oh (Ghislain Poirier Mix)
Ciara - Oh
Osamu Kitajima - Benzaiten Repris
Absolute Body Control - Terminus
Can - Moonshake
Fad Gadget - Collapsing New People (Collapsing Westbam Mix)
Yellow Magic Orchestra - Computer Games
Tantra - Top Shot (Disconet Remix)
Goblin - Mad Puppet
Michael Bundt - The Brain of Oskar Panizza
The Human League - Do or Die (Dub)
Rich Boy - Get to Poppin' (Instrumental)
Brave New World - Alpha Beta Gamma Delta Epsilon
Acid Pauli - I See a Dark(er)ness
Pulp & The Swingle Singers - My Body May Die

The second volume can still be downloaded here.

2006-03-27T21:58:00.000+01:00

Me (under a pseudonym bcz I was more punk rock then) on The Long Blondes in July 2003:

As soon as I saw the The Long Blondes standing in the corner of the venue, discreetly crying out for attention, I knew that they they had ‘it’, that je ne sai quoi, that special something that marks people out. As assholes. Plainly they were preeners and poseurs, more neo-mod dullards attempting to pass themselves off, in the prevailing cultural climate, as rockers. And no Anglo clotheshangers have ever really rocked, Bowie maybe being the closest anybody has got and that’s hardly that close. But, and you know from the way that this is being written that there is going to be a but, I was very wrong, not about The Long Blondes being poseurs — they plainly are — but they can rock also.

They amble stageward, plainly unconcerned about (lack of) tuning and sound balance and strike up. Dorian’s gtr playing is rudimentary but expressive - skewed Brit blues boom riffs sounding like a chewed up TDK cassette that’s been flattened back out and slid back into the ghetto blaster. The lack of polish lending a certain balance and precision to what is being communicated. In contrast the rhythm section plays it like a disco record, or sort’ve. The drummer doesn’t use his hi-hat and so there is none of the tsstsstsst push-pull sibilance of disco but instead, in combination with the bass, a strange Cramps meets ESG loopback that plays off neatly against the simple garage structures of their songs. There’s also a keys player but I can only tell she’s plugged in when she hits horrendously wrong notes. No matter, cuz contextually they sound right, like early Eno as Geordie faux-cowgirl. The singer, all ripped stockings and you’d-love-to-fuck-me-but-you-wouldn’t-dare-try sneer, yelps and barks tales of urban alienation and sexual paranoia. At the end of the set they even twist Del Shannon’s "Runaway" to fit their agenda, revealing the simple emotional power of a song obscured by it’s usage as nostalgic place setter in Heartbeat backing music and suchlike. And all of this takes place quick; quick enough that the competing pieces of the sound(s) and attitude are only put together later, semi-drunk on the last train home. Whilst watching it’s hard to apprehend everything happening and that’s what makes it exciting and surprising. That’s what makes The Long Blondes the best British band-as-band that I’ve seen this year.

Cold Hans, Stand Up and Be Counted! Issue 2

2006-03-27T20:36:00.000+01:00

Shirley Collins & Davy Graham - Folk Routes, New Routes
Fledg’ling Records

The cover of Folk roots, New Routes, which is a simple studio portrait of Shirley Collins and Davy Graham sitting, isn’t the type that would ever win a design award and it’s hard to imagine it attracting the attention of a casual record shop browser even in its original 12” format, but in its quiet way it’s one of the most beguilingly weird album sleeves in existence. The two figures appear to have come from parallel worlds that should never meet. Shirley Collins looks like a well to do 1950s country mother ready for her regular Sunday visit to church—she looks directly at the viewer with an easy, if slightly studio frozen, smile on her face. Except for his guitar, Davy Graham looks like someone who’d glass you in a Glasgow pub—he stares with a slight frown, or perhaps just a look of concentration, out of the picture frame, past the viewer and almost, but not quite, at Collins who is seated in front of him.

Despite both being involved in the folk scene, these were people from different worlds. Collins was a left wing folk devotee who moved to London and after a meeting Alan Lomax at a party travelled with him to the American south where they gathered field recordings for the Southern Folk Heritage LP series. By the time of her recording with Graham, Collins had released a couple of LPs and was married with small children. Davy Graham had been inspired to play guitar by the skiffle boom and had since lived itinerantly, busking in Paris and Greece and travelling in North Africa. By the 1964 dates for the LP he had also managed to pick up a smack addiction.

Davy Graham was of mixed Scots and Guyanese parentage and says that he had to “think like a mongrel. Like a hybrid.” This was the perfect mindset to spawn an unprecedented magpie, omnivorous guitar technique that mixed folk and jazz fingerpicking with a raga-derived modal harmonic style that was inspired by music heard on his travels; this was the perfect mindset to muddy up a folk scene that often produced anaemic work because of ill-conceived and undigested fixed ideas about purity, tradition and heritage. Perhaps unexpectedly, and if just for one record, Graham’s ideas would dovetail perfectly with those of Collins, who had seen in practice during her time in the USA how songforms could travel in space and time and how they could change and mutate whilst still remaining undiluted. She had even converted some of these songs ‘back’ into southern English dialect.

Responding to the rhythmic push-and-pull and improvisatory curlicues of the guitar, Shirley Collins’ singing is warmer than on her other recordings, more open and inviting—she actually swings on tracks like “Nottamun Town” and “Hares on the Mountain.” (Diversion: the people I know who dislike Collins voice are folkies, and the people who love it aren’t. I am currently unable to draw any conclusions from this.) These are possibly her least austere recordings, both in their sound and in the variety of the material; if you disregard the ten thousand “drowned that never was born” in “Nottamun Town”, this also has one of the lowest body counts on a Shirley Collins LP. As well as beautiful versions of British folk songs like “Reynardine” and “Bad Girl,” there is the bizarre sound of the American blues, “Boll Weevil, Holler”—“Doggone the boll weevil” sings Collins charmingly if unconvincingly.

Collins and Graham also get some solo turns. Collins version of “Lord Greggory” is so confident that you may not notice that it is sung unaccompanied. On “The Cherry Tree Carol,” as eerie and strange as any piece of music, she plays five string banjo and sings of “Lord Jesus from in his mother’s womb” telling of how when he is born “the stars and the heavens shall all bow down to me.” This is followed by a jaunty jazz cover, as Graham convincingly adds his own shambolic swagger to the strut of Thelonious Monk’s “Blue Monk.” He also belts through some dizzyingly clangourous sideways motion on the Moroccan-inspired “Rif Mountain.”

In a time when stylistic polyphony is so expected that ‘eclectic’ is an (usually deserved) insult it may be easier to hear the folk roots of these songs, but as they sink in after repeated listening the new routes that they took, and that they opened up for others, become impossible not to hear. Voice and guitar are in perfect balance, supporting each other. Folk Roots, New Routes is folk as a living, breathing, thinking music, full of energy and possibility, not something cast in amber.

From Stylus

2006-03-22T21:40:00.000Z

Since my last post, a long time ago, I've moved from York to Brockley, London. Here's what I've written in the meantime:

Various Artists - Never the Same
Honest Jons

Never the Same is an excellent compilation of music from Trailer, one of a pair of interrelated seventies folk labels run by Bill Leader, who in the sixties had worked as a producer for the UK’s leading folk imprints Topic and Transatlantic. His other concurrent label, Leader, was to be ethnomusicological, dealing with “roots music, performed by the people for whom it is part of their being and life,” that is, the type of records that come with exhaustive sleevenotes even on first issue. Trailer was to be, as Leader’s amusingly non-reverential booklet interview has it, “the revival stuff, the entertainment stuff… bleeding folkies, bastardised versions.” Despite this, the contents of Never the Same will seem like the real deal to all but the most ardent – the artists here were not making compromises to invite outsiders.

In the seventies, British folk was in a bind. From Donovan onwards, singer-songwriters had taken the most attractive elements of folk style—guitar tunings and techniques, vocal styles, methods of arrangement—to the pop charts but had flipped the content of the music inside out. The ostensibly communal voice of the people, the multitudinous speech of Britain’s history was replaced by a voice of biography and personal expression. One authenticity was traded for its negative, which signified the authentic also. Even folk-rock bands that had emerged from within the scene, like the Incredible String Band, were releasing records that were increasingly filled with me-generation mysticism. Except for one off hits like Steeleye Span’s Mike Batt produced ‘All Around my Hat” (no. 5, Nov. 1975) this meant that folk crossing over as a pop music (a term folkies would no doubt have hated) was as dead as any doomed young lass in a murder ballad. Trailer’s LPs were initially distributed mail-order, direct from the label, in order to maximise profits on small runs. Ironically, the label would go bust in 1977 just as the small, agile independent label was coming to be a viable part of British music practice.

Whilst the first LP released on Trailer featured Barbara Dickson the label soon built a strong roster of musicians, a lot of whom continue to be active and important. There is a broad range of approaches and styles here, including a lot of unaccompanied music—Dorothy Elliott sings ‘Adieu to Judges and Juries’ in a steady, measured voice that says more than almost any amount of melisma can, and Dave Burland also sings his two tracks solo, telling in a rich creamy voice of the horrors of a country boy forced to work in Leeds and Hull. Alistair Anderson plays solo concertina and Aly Bain draws out a beautiful fiddle version of “Neil Gow’s Lament for his Second Wife”, a track title verging on parody and more powerful for it.

Although the two Nic Jones guitar and vocal tracks are long, over six minutes, they demonstrate the emphasis on clarity and economy of gesture and language that unites the music on this compilation. This is something that many modern nu-wyrd-folk artistes (or whatever embarrassing title we’re appending) could learn from. One of the Nic Jones tracks is taken from Noah’s Ark Trap a 1977 LP which is continuously mixed, the outro of one track becoming the intro of the next. This must be one of the earliest examples of this approach and is a rare example of overt studio manipulation on these records as UK folk (unlike American folk, blues and country) barely recognized the transformative powers of the studio; that recording always recodes. Tony Rose provides a beautiful missionary harmonium and vocal reading of “Blackwaterside”, better known as Led Zeppelin’s retitled Bert Jansch cop “Black Mountain Side.” This is delicate and compassionate music. (Are these words that will help sell a record in 2006? If not, why not?) Lal Waterson’s tracks are the only non-trad material here, although her album for Trailer was the only self penned music she recorded, and also, perhaps not coincidentally, the fullest sounding with Richard Thompson and Martin Carthy both playing guitar. Lal’s vocals are astringent, but as a way to serve the material not as an affectation. Her voice is as severe and penetrating as any on a no-wave recording.

Although a lot of this music is almost unknown it is absolutely confident without being strident—tunes are played with the minimum of fuss but with maximum return, so it seems churlish that beyond the interview with Bill Leader the packaging doesn’t include a Trailer discography or even any details of which album each track originates from. Nevertheless this is a welcome spotlight on an unheralded, transitionary period of UK music making, which is currently under-represented in the reissue racks.

From Stylus

Various Artists - Camping 2
Bpitch Control

The first tent bpitched in the Camping series cherrypicked from the Bpitch Control labels first five years, a period where their cheekily diverse, but electro-house centred, tracks found increasing favour and fervour on the dancefloor. This second volume mostly chooses tracks from after the initial volumes January 2005 release date, concentrating on the year that Bpitch really made an impact on the mainstream of dance music—latest hits rather than greatest hits. 2005 was the year when even the big UK dance mags, DJ and Mixmag, which are like supertankers in their inability to react swiftly, could no longer ignore the popularity of the loosely defined minimal/electro/tech/house scene and put the Bpitch and its releases on their year-end charts.

It was the core electro-house releases that won plaudits on and off the floor and primary amongst these was Tomas Andersson’s “Washing Up” 12” which, at the time of writing, is still top five in the juno.co.uk bestseller list eight months after initial release. Included here is the reason for that popularity, the trashy Tiga Remix which hits straight at the pleasure centres with thick, strutting bass, squirming synth lines that suddenly spiral up and up, and spurts of a sped-up “Drop it Like its Hot” beat. “Happy Happy” is Andersson in non-remixed form, coasting along on skippy hi-hats and beachball bass, his keyboard ululating joyously over imitation electric piano sonar. Paul Kalkbrenner keeps it tracky on his “Deep” which flows as inexorably as the tides and then yokes a trance undercarriage to vocals reminiscent of classic hip-hop sample source “Heaven & Hell is on Earth" (by the 20th Century Steel Band) on “Gebrünn Gebrünn.” The MFA’s “Disco 2 Break” mixes ominous Escape from New York churn with machine beats crisp as a knife-edge and faux-tuff Germanic vox.

But it’s not all big, wide-eyed riffs. Miss Kittin’s remix of label boss Ellen Allien’s “Alles Sehen” mixes gossamer techno-pop with glitches like Mille Plateaux never went bust, and with a title like “Beautiful Belonious Bits” you know that Mochipet are going to be bringing the IDM. Sascha Funke’s two tracks are as glossy and attractive as the casing of an m&m. “My Computer Eats an Acid Trip” by Sylvie Marks & Hal9000 sounds like, well, Sylvie’s computer eating an acid trip (on acid, etc.) Feadz’ “2Kind4u” wraps redlined vocal clips in endlessly circling and reiterative organ lines. It’s low key but one of the best tracks present and one which, like quite a few here, has a thin, murky seam of hip-hop running through it.

Although unmixed, Camping 2 is chopped for pop appeal, with 12” running times edited right down. There’s no track here that’s longer than 4:13; an eternity to Phil Spector but barely time for an intro from some dance producers. These tracks may not often be subtle but they are, by turns silly, noisy, diverse and fun.

From Stylus

Kiki - Boogybytes Volume One
Bpitch Control

If you’re only after the Bpitch hits, then you need the simultaneously released Camping 2, as Boogybytes is a CD that, aside from Kiki’s own contributions and a few other digitally sliced and looped snippets, includes virtually no music from the label that releases it. In fact this isn’t the place to come if you’re looking for a simple mix of any kind as, as the title suggests, the tracks are chopped into hard-disk sound-dust and algorithm fodder then smeared across each other. To begin with the mix is too polite and breezy, little more than music for sped-up cloud footage. Geez, it’s electronica. Then, a third of the way through, about the time that the vox from Kiki’s own “So Easy to Forget” ride the elephant-noise trance of Michael Forzza’s “Kahana” there’s the realisation that one has got caught in the upswell and from then on Kiki cranks up the pace and the rush. The end section, with tracks from Bedrock Records Guy Gerber, and Digital Excitation makes euphorically explicit the electro-house scenes current swing toward the once disparaged sounds of trance. Roll on May/June, for the Sascha Funke mixed second volume.

From Stylus

Singles Jukebox blurts:

Sean Paul - Temperature (USA)
The Applause riddim does it’s thing, which is nothing fancy, just a head nodding swap between propulsive thumping noises for grinding to and trebly clacks for getting yr breath back. Sean Paul does his thing, which is nothing fancy, just what he did on ‘We Be Burnin’ but a little less melodic and catchy. But that’s sometimes all you need.

Mr Vegas ft. Lexxus - Taxi Fare (Jamaica)
Is it just the people that I hang around with or does no one talk about dancehall anymore? Perhaps it’s because the bits of Jamaican music that hip-hop bit have now been chewed so much that they’ve lost their flavour or maybe it’s just records like this - boring remixed Baddis riddim inaction with no sly hooks or crazy paving beats. Shit, there’s not even anything here to hate – at least slag the gays off to keep our interest.

Conjure One - Extraordinary Way (Israel)
Rhys Fulber, aka Conjure One, is possibly the only person to have worked with Fear Factory and Sarah Brightman. He’s also from clunky and stupid 80s industrial rock ‘pioneers’ Frontline Assembly so it’s maybe not too much of a surprise to find him in the 05 wanting to make “ambient, epic music… without the constraints of a specific genre." Or bad pop trance, as you and I call it.

Kapanga - Rock (Argentina)
The Pogues write a comedy rock musical. It closes on the first night.

Billy Currington - Must Be Doin' Somethin' Right (USA)
In a week that The Ordinary Boys tell us that boys will be boys, Billy brings us more unnecessary common sense, “a woman is a mystery a man just can’t understand.” Check out his album for some great tracks about how they also can’t get the tops off jars and can’t reverse park.

The Source ft. Candi Staton - You Got The Love (UK)
It seems a long time ago now. Check the clunky, chunky 8-bit breakbeat, muddy and compressed as a whole instead of the pin point, automated EQ and compression of today. Check the ricocheting phased cymbals, the ‘Unfinished Sympathy’ key washes and digi-piano. It still sounds great. (But why is it back?)

Kubb - Grow (UK)
There’s nothing worse in pop than something that sounds like a safe bet, and a triangulation of Blunt, Keane and Powter might be said to be one. If a year ago I was told that there’d be groups that made Coldplay seem streamlined and acute I wouldn’t have believed them. This year I plan on believing everything anyone tells me, except good news.

The Ordinary Boys - Boys Will Be Boys (UK)
“I’ve had nights I will never forget, I’ve had nights that I’ll always regret” - it’s almost too tempting to read it in light of Preston’s Celeb Big Bro appearance now, even if Pete Burns has hopefully taught him that boys won’t always exactly be boys. But no, it’s still an unresonant song, pretending that the status quo is cheeky and cheery and all those other horrible words, aimed at those who read both NME and Nuts. In the ideal world only ordinary boys will be boys.

Tiffany Foxx ft. Snoop Dogg - Shake That (USA)
US hip-hop is more into scat than the German porn industry and here’s a track about watching a girl have a crap. “Shake that shit” – yeah you don’t want it half out yer arse, that’d be unseemly. Snoop gets in a guest verse so poor that he phoned it in on two tin cans connected with string.

("In other news, P. MCNALLY GAVE A TRACK A GOOD SCORE!" sez some dude in the comments)

Lastly, there's some ill-informed and snarky blather from me in this article on some US award that I know nowt about.

2006-02-02T17:16:00.000Z

Glenn MacDonald's 2005 Pazz & Jop critical alignment ratings shows who the most consensus-minded critics are. Or aren't in my case, as I come 719th out of 787. Tom Ewing comes second last, which is ironic for the man with the Popular weblog.

2006-02-01T23:14:00.000Z

[Death Jam] Why've I been banned?
(23:16) [dj_bulla] u files no good
[Death Jam] No good how? Because they're things that you don't like?
(23:17) [dj_bulla] yes
[Death Jam] Shouldn't it just be that I'm sharing that matters? Maybe if you'd left that Beenie Man track the 45 seconds longer it needed I would have been re-educated and got into dancehall big time but now my mind is closed forever. (And I've got some really good dancehall mixes in there anyway.)
[Death Jam] Big up man like Tatchell.

2006-01-31T22:47:00.000Z

My Village Voice Pazz and Jop ballot is online here.

I can get behind the Gold Digger single win but how did the DULL album win though?

2006-01-30T19:25:00.000Z

Stylus Singles Jukebox reviews:

Mogwai - Friend Of The Night
Epic hill walking theme.

Son Of A Plumber - Jo-Anna Says
The one out of Roxette who wasn’t Roxette (Even though, I know, she wasn’t called that) returns with a solo project so poorly named that even Dave Stewart couldn’t do worse. Check it out – he’s an international pop star but he’s also sort of normal guy. Here he whacks out a song with the type of perky but unassertive rhythm that signifies the type of adult oriented pop that could only be of interest to the adult that actually made it. It sounds like a something that Neil Innes would write for a CBeebies programme.

T-Pain - I'm N Luv (Wit A Stripper)
Call me a sap but I don’t find stripclubs and lapdances fun but creepy, and I don’t much like songs about them either. The dynamic usually goes that the male protagonist has such a special relationship with the stripper that he gets for free what other people have to pay for, but this doesn’t imply any sort of relationship beyond an American Dream - that it’s to cool own and possess without effort or effect. Of course if the beats or rhymes are good or weird or chilling enough the song can still have an impact but this is just another generic claphands slowjam (say yeah).

Atreyu - Her Portrait In Black
Pitch perfect for inclusion on the soundtrack to Underworld Evolution, this makes me imagine bloodied goth girls in corsets being chased through snowstorms by, uh, well, me.

Utada Hikaru - Passion Elena
Hikaru was called “a young and charming Japanese singer" by Lenny Kravitz, but in fact this is impossible to remember despite having backward vox in it. I hope he scored with her anyway though.

Elena Paparizou - Mambo!
Full stops in song titles scare me, as does the word ‘mambo’ - always a sign of enforced jollity. This song will appear on a freebie CD attached to the cover of Bella, or in an advert for Reef within three months, I’m sure.

2006-01-28T12:02:00.000Z

Rub’n’Tug - Present Campfire
Eskimo

As time has passed and house and disco have aged there has been a tendency, as with any form which has amazing riches worth celebrating and preserving, to form a canon. Rules about what can be played and how to play it have become rigid in a way that they never were when, in their initial stages, these genres were ways of playing records rather than recorded styles in their own right. These days, away from the neo-electro brain-fryers, house can get prissy, with records being played with ‘respect’ like they’re Mylar bagged museum artefacts. But forget that, because none of it applies to Rub’n’Tug’s Campfire mix which sounds almost implausibly fucked throughout. It may not be conscious but this mix contains everything guaranteed to irritate True Believers in Professional DJing. Recorded live at Campfire, New York City, tracks are played way in the red, mixes are repeatedly fluffed and there are volume surges and EQ jumps throughout. If you were aiming to DJ at a club you wouldn’t send a mix like this out as a showcase of your abilities because it would be in the bin before the third track. It’s a macho display of power, albeit a camp one, and it’s great – energising and exciting.

The mix begins, well, it begins with Rub (or Tug) whispering “time to make a move, time to make a move” but after that it really starts with two minutes of heavy quasi-tribal drumming amped until there’s no clear distinction between the beats, like a quantised Amon Duul I. Then it’s straight into some kaftan wearing Euro-prog from Aphrodite’s Child, the band that was the launching pad for Vangelis and Demis Roussos. Circular Who guitars meet Sergeant Pepper horns on top of the type of tom tom heavy undertow that was one of the starting points of disco. After that we get to some early acid house with the molten steel bassline of Charles B’s Adonis produced “Lack of Love.”

“Lady Bug” by Bumblebee Unlimited is now better known for being featured on Annie’s DJ Kicks but Rub’n’Tug play it cutting between two copies of the record, losing the cutesy dialogue between the bees and emphasising grinding forward motion piano magic. Unheralded tracks like Hot Chocolate’s “Don’t Turn It Off” and the AC/DC-gone-even-more-homo disco of Flash and the Pan’s “Midnight Man” are played like they’re classics. It suits them.

Rub 'n' Tug’s DJing feels like old block party hip hop tapes rather than contemporary dance DJing, something signposted by the inclusion of a Bronx Dogs track that mashes up parts from Afrika Bambaataa's Death Mix semi-bootleg. Hear Cozy Powell’s “Dance with the Devil,” a corny, Hendrix biting novelty from the Rainbow and Whitesnake drummer, get over amped, echoed out, fed back and recut until it sounds like sweat soaked dancefloor fever was always the aim. This would be seat of the pants DJing if Rub’n’Tug didn’t sound like they’re wearing assless chaps.

From Stylus.

2006-01-23T21:29:00.000Z

Stylus Singles Jukebox reviews:

Bodies Without Organs - Voodoo Magic
When Deleuze and Guattari delineated the concept of the ‘body without organs’ I don’t think that they had some lumpen dance pop by the ones without the cleavage from Army of Lovers in mind as one of the results. This is so desperate that it thinks mentioning iPods and email (email!) will make it seem modern. It doesn’t.

Party Squad ft Gio & Ambush - I'm Sorry
How unimaginative do you need to be to name your group Party Squad? Maybe about as creative as you need to be to call yourself Rmx Crew, who also appear on this track. Kids Party Squad would have been closer to the mark. Perhaps this is unfair as English is their second language, but the generic-and–proud-of-it contents of the record say otherwise. M.C. Miker 'G' & Deejay Sven remain the undefeated champs of Dutch rapping.

Cascada - Everytime We Touch
Look up whatever I said about Dancing DJs vs. Roxette ‘Fading Like A Flower’ in the archives if you care. I don’t. I don’t think Cascada cared very much when they made this record either.

Remioromen – Konayuki
So determined to be epically yearning that it’s stomach churning. I’m sure that if there is a Japanese equivalent of The O.C. that this track will soundtrack a floppy haired boy running tearfully through the rain in slow motion or something but as I’m not a fifteen year old Japanese girl that doesn’t do me much good.

A-Ha - Analogue (All I Want)
Screwed and chopped ‘Smalltown Boy’ ‘til the chorus, then, ugh.

Pharrell Williams – Angel
Now we know for sure what Chad does in the Neptunes – slaps Pharrell’s plastic face in order to bring him to his senses when he thinks of releasing something as cheesy as this under their own name. Despite Pharrell’s coasting on his reputation for sonic invention this is as by the book and charmless as any clunking filter-house take on an eighties soft rock track. On the new Clipse mixtape there’s a skit where Pusha T denies that he ghostwrites Pharrell’s raps for him and if you were being credited with coming up with lines like “she’s got an ass like a loaf of bread, you want a slice” you’d deny it at every opportunity too.

Morningwood - Nth Degree
I really hate it when people say that they like a song despite themselves or that it’s a guilty pleasure but I like this song despite myself and it’s a guilty pleasure. The cynical, all bases covered approach is far too obvious and even as it plays, the rollover puppy dog eager-to-pleaseness bugs me. And that bit where the dude hollers out “heavy metal late show,” it makes me shudder. But I’m still powerless to resist.

2006-01-21T20:20:00.000Z

Outside of memoradelia/hauntology, the best recent genre types are bearded house and yacht rock (with a tracklisting of the tunes used in the Yacht Rock shows here.)

2006-01-18T18:48:00.000Z

I was thinking on the way to work this morning that one of the reasons for the Ghostbox/UK memoradelia sound is bcz the UK never had a real avant-garde/academic/contemporary classical scene that was both dealing with new technologies and was financially supported by the government/corporate finance. Instead of UK equivalents of IRCAM or Darmstadt we get the Radiophonic Workshop who are working with similar techniques but in the service of doing TV themes and incidental music. After leaving the Radiophonic Workshop, it's founder Daphne Oram releases Listen, Move and Dance, a seven inch designed for primary school kids to do free movement to. Other people with interest in tape techniques, like Basil Kirchin, end up on prog rock labels or doing horror film soundtracks. (Even people like Trevor Wishart who do work in universities have a daft space-age quality to their work that makes them closer to Joe Meek than Stockhausen.) That these people's work ended up in places where kids would have to hear it (schools science programmes etc.) or would actively seek it out (horror flicks) means that the UK has a weird, queasy relationship to this type of sound that is profitable to work with.

2006-01-17T19:54:00.000Z

Brief shoutout for me on Simon Reynolds' always indispensible Blissblog for my coining of the term memoradelia as a counter to his hauntology in reference to musicians like those on the Ghostbox label.

Here's a Dissensus thread that attempts a canon.

2006-01-17T19:51:00.000Z

Here's the first Singles Jukebox of the year on the newly and nicely redesigned Stylus site.

Mark Owen - Hail Mary
I doubt Starsailor divided by Pavement is what anyone wants from Mark Owen.

The Arctic Monkeys - When The Sun Goes Down
The “most influential band of their generation” (© Conor McNicholas) bring more bathetic sub-Libertines cheese vaguely livened up by the fact that on the rocking bits they sound like school kids that have been allowed to play in assembly. The singer does his one vocal melody and they talk about the tough life on the streets, which is always praiseworthy when an indie band tries it but some how depressing or of concern when UK hip-hop or grime does.

And just think of it – you share in this success just by using the internet. It’s exciting!

Belle & Sebastian - Funny Little Frog
Where Cat Power grabs for some Southern charm with Hi Records musicians and “Moon River” references, Belle & Sebastian keep it Brit by seemingly jacking the theme from The Sweeney. Whilst it’s still their best single since that Hair pastiche and efficient in the latterday B&S manner it never quite reaches the escape velocity needed to take it somewhere special or unexpected.

I would like to see the Funny Little Frog team up with the Crazy Frog though. I love frogs.

Beyonce- Check On It
Super-random and not in a ‘it’s the 21st century and everything’s up for grabs’ manner. No part of the song seems to have any real relationship to any another part of the song either horizontally or vertically. And no part of the song really seems to be a chorus either. Or not shit. It’s still notable however, for seemingly being the first single to feature a guest rap mumbled by someone in a coma state.

Richard Ashcroft - Break The Night With Colour
A.O.Arse of the worst kind. Never has there walked upon this earth a man with a greater gap between his view of himself and the brute, pitiful reality. Ashcroft is almost infinitely layable into, but what’s the point because no-one, not even the staunchest Verve fanboy believes in him anymore, although I’m sure that this just steels his resolve and seemingly limitless self-belief. I could never have anything less than contempt for anyone who has been on as many records as he has but has never even thought about cracking a joke or trying to be witty.

Will Young - All Time Love
After “Switch It On”, which proved that he was a proper artist or maybe an improper artist or something (and I’m not being snarky here, I never heard it so I’m not quite sure what it was), Young balances the scales by releasing a classic ballad or an approximation there-of and it’s not actually too bad. I mean you know the score – tasteful strings, grand piano, tender close-miked voice and all that schmutter but it still beats Blunt or Ashcroft or Kubb with a Hulk sized fist. If that’s an achievement.

2006-01-17T19:48:00.000Z

I was in Tesco and I saw possibly the most unappetising snack ever - Walkers Cheese Heads. Now I'm sure that they've market researched them to death but when I want to pop something in my mouth I don't want it to be redolent of unwashed cock.

2006-01-17T19:41:00.000Z

With Boris Johnson leaving The Spectator is he now angling to turn the NME around?

"It was like being drowned in molasses. It was like being hosed in treacle. I was lying in a state of after-lunch torpor while the eight-year-old was playing and replaying her favourite track, and through the door it stole, and up the bed and into my ear until it filled the fjords of my brain with such glutinous aspartame-flavoured schmaltz that at last I could take it no more and cried: "Enough!" James Blunt, I thought, it's time to get a grip! Come on, man: stop being so indescribably wet. If she's so beautiful, stop standing there in your T-shirt and floppy fringe, and hush your hopeless falsetto crooning.

Go out and get her, is my advice, and if James Blunt seems drippy next to the rock stars of the good old days, he is positively macho by comparison with the Kaiser Chiefs. These are the weeds from Leeds whose hit single was I predict a riot, a tale about the bourgeois apprehension of a chap who tries to get a taxi on a Saturday night in the centre of town.

"Watching the people get lairy/It's not very pretty I tell thee./ Walking through town is quite scary/And not very sensible either," sing these epic softies. Then the chap meets another chap in a tracksuit, who looks as though he might offer violence, but doesn't, and that's about it. It's pathetic!

When I was a nipper it was standard practice for a rock star to start the evening by biting the head off a pigeon and throwing the television out of the window before electrocuting his girlfriend in the bath and almost drowning in a cocktail of whisky, heroin and his own vomit. The self-respecting British punk rockers didn't get up on stage and start whimpering about how they predicted a riot. They incited riots. "White riot, I want a riot, white riot, a riot of my own," they sang, if my memory serves me correctly.

Let's face it, the rock star role models of yesterday were far more thuggish, brutal and in-yer-face than the rock stars of today, most of whom are almost embarrassing in their niceness; and if one thinks back to the 1970s and 1980s, it is clear that the riots were nastier, too. I make this elementary observation, because we are once again being invited to have hysterics about the yoof of today, and yob culture, and once again Tony Blair presents himself to us as the father of the nation, pater patriae, the man who is figuratively going to put the offending yobbos over his knee and give them a damn good hiding on behalf of us all."

2006-01-13T20:12:00.000Z

Various Artists - Congotronics 2
Crammed Discs

The first volume of this series, solely devoted to the group Konono No1, found a much bigger audience than anyone could have expected. Since it’s release late last year Konono have toured the US and been nominated for a best newcomer award in the BBC Radio 3 Awards for World Music, which is not bad for a band that’s been going for 25 years without getting too much worldwide exposure. It will be interesting to see if the second volume of Congotronics, this time a six group compilation, keeps up the momentum. It deserves to, as it’s even better than the first.

It was easy to hear why Konono No1 crossed over to an audience that wouldn’t normally listen to African music. The homejob pickups and amplification used on the group’s likembe (thumb pianos) and vocals created an overdriven, distorted sound that emphasised the same overtones as rock music whilst drowning out a lot of the signifiers that make some associate African music with right-on coffee shops and dull dinner parties. The Konono sound could be linked, almost embarrassingly easily, to a whole load of Western music, from the music box melodies of the Aphex Twin, to the slow harmonic changes of systems and minimal music, to the forward drive of Can and Neu! And krautrock, to the faux-tribal unity of latterday Boredoms. Sometimes it even sounds like Mike Oldfield but let’s stop there, eh. From a certain viewpoint Konono music seems like the living embodiment of the “psychedelic Africa” that …Bush of Ghosts era Eno proclaimed.

Congotronics 2 sticks closely to the sonics of the first volume, possibly because the bands do actually sound similar, or possibly because the bands have been recorded in similar fashion – outdoors and straight to the hard-disc of a Powerbook G4. As with Konono there’s plenty of endlessly turbulent likembe arpeggios, twisting like ornate iron railings covered in rust and peeling paint or gnarled moss covered tree branches, but there’s also the Kasai Allstars collective dropping down to two hypnotically looped notes with sparkling percussion underneath or, on another of their three songs, mixing melodic percussion with prominent undistorted vocals that flow by without the expected density. And there’s Bolia We Ndenge’s “Bosamba Ndeke” with its joyous, fractured spirals of shuffling, staccato percussion and accordion. Basokin even remove thumb pianos from the equation entirely, instead featuring three singers, three percussionists and two guitarists, who entwine single note fuzz blasts with muzzy but single-minded cat’s cradle plucking. At the end of it all, of course, is Konono No1 bringing more noise and heft than most of the bands featured and, in a way, making us realise the diversity of what we have heard.

Also included is a DVD with live footage of the bands. This includes the footage that, downloaded from the internet, served to introduce many to Konono. Watching it as it came from the video camera, rather than as a motion-blurred compressed Quicktime file, is a slightly spooky experience. The video footage on offer brings home the differences in the line-ups and technology levels of the bands, and just as importantly the differences in manner of presentation, dress and movement. It also serves to remind that behind all the cheap amps and distortion this isn’t some Congo equivalent of, say, Black Dice but social music, music to dance to instead of what it is to me, thousands of miles away - head(phone) music. That’s to say, there’s some ass-shaking in these vids that’s as fun, joyful and life affirming as the music itself.

From Stylus.

2006-01-13T20:03:00.000Z

From this ILM thread:

No way should Polmo have to open for Khonnor! He did the worst show I saw in 2005!

-- Raw Patrick (rawsweater@gmail.com), November 27th, 2005 12:00 AM. (Raw Patrick)

----

sorry for not providing a worthwhile show. I'm working on it.

-- connor long (ho7m41l@hotmail.com), December 9th, 2005 3:49 AM.

2006-01-12T23:31:00.000Z

Long Blondes - Separated by Motorways 7"
“Separated by Motorways” finds The Long Blondes, the only new British guitar band worth caring about, in denser than normal form, spitting an indie Tatu tale of “two lonely girls on the run” with the type of cocky self-assurance that comes over as vigour rather than a sense of entitlement. Disco hi-hats attempt to hiss out from underneath strident imitation-sexy vox, choppy guitar and echo. Flip it for “Big Infatuation” which demonstrates their other side, mining 60s girl group pop signifiers for their brittle, confused emotional appeal instead of as kitsch pandering.

Moondog and his Honking Geese - Moondog’s Music 10"
One of a pair of 10"s released by Honest Jons as a spin off from their recent, great CD compilation of blind street musician Louis Hardin, this is a beautifully presented facsimile of a 1955 EP originally issued by Moondog himself. The titular Honking Geese are figurative rather than literal (for real geese vs. sax attack you'll have to stick to Basil Kirchin's Quantum) but these jazz based recordings build up to a fair honk anyway, closer to Las Vegas Grind than Moondog’s usual Reich by way of Bird melodicism. Underneath the raw recording and splattered drum fills though, you can still hear Moondog working through his obsession with form and interlocking parts.

From the Stylus Rubber Room

2006-01-09T00:24:00.001Z

Google video goodness:

Jenny Wilson and Robyn Carlsson cover Saul Williams' "List Of Demands" live on a Swedish TV show.

(The original version of this makes me think of the White Stripes.)

(Via Dom Passatino.)

The Eames' Powers of Ten. (IMdB).

(Via some porn site.)

2006-01-08T17:42:00.000Z

And so it begins... I've just seen a German 'funky' house record that claims to revive the 90s. It's even called I Love 90s.

2006-01-03T23:24:00.000Z

Had a great All Tomorrow's Parties meets Cthulu dream: windswept brutalist architecure, cavernous venues where I watched the creamy whiteness of exposed indie girl breast and thigh, ghosts, endlessy recombinant primeval Fleischer Bros. monsters fighting in the sky.

2006-01-02T22:19:00.000Z

My Rachel Stevens haiku turns up here.

And this here's a short write-up of the Get Physical label for the Stylus Top 10 Labels of 2005 feature:

Get Physical
At the beginning of the year some commentators were saying that the whole nexus between click and minimal and electro, shit, the whole blurring between house and techno might have run it’s course. And it might have been had a whole lot of people outside the usual 12” fiends not become entranced by the sound, and if labels, Get Physical in particular, hadn’t kept up the pressure. In 2005 they released a mix, Body Language, that may as well be the official greatest hits of the year and the two best tracks on it - the joyously popping title track by M.A.N.D.Y vs. Booka Shade, and Booka Shade’s own “Mandarine Girl” the see-saw organ of which sounds like a woozy just-woken-up memory of the perfect club track until you realise how hard the bass is jabbing you in the solar plexus.

2005-12-23T01:28:00.000Z

Here is a quick and messy mix that I made to give to my friends at xmas - and that includes you! Here's the tracklist:

Death Jam Mix 02 - Gutbucket Disco
Mick Jagger - Invocation of my Demon Brother
Scorpions - Coast to Coast
Aphrodite's Child - Funky Mary
Sandy Shaw - Your Time is Gonna Come
Funkadelic - I'll Stay
Erotic Drum Band - Jerky Rhythm
The It - Donnie (Dub Mix)
Fancy - Wild Thing
Paul Nicholas - Run Shaker Life
The Move - Do Ya
Aphrodite's Child - Magic Mirror
Goblin - Lavia Della Droga (Seq. 2)
Egg - A Visit to Newport Hospital
Erotic Drum Band - Plug Me to Death
Laid Back - White Horse
INXS - Need You Tonight (Mendelsohn Mix)
Tori Alamaze - Don't Cha (Full Pupp Edit)
Sexual Harassment - I Need a Freak
Christopher Just - Popper
Spirit - Fresh Garbage
Scorpions - Steamrock Fever

2005-12-22T16:17:00.000Z

Here is a brief single review for Stylus:

Sharon Jones - I Just Dropped in to See What Condition My Condition Was In
After her temporally anomalous heavy funk version of “What Have You Done for Me Lately” which made the original Janet Jackson version sound like the cover, and her awesome slow burn anti-Republican take on Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land,” here’s another killer to add to Sharon Jones’ growing list of unlikely covers. It’s not as throat rippingly out of control as one would hope, but it’s got enough slink to make returning the needle to the start of the record not seem like such a chore for a good fifteen times. Flip it and you get the instrumental by The Daptones. Now I’ve just gotta track down that Jerry Lee Lewis version…