Thoroughly disgruntled punk racket from this Memphis crew, who initially sound a bit like a skinny, more wiry (and indeed Wire-y) take on circa ‘82 Black Flag (think if they lost most of their muscles and replaced all the distortion with small amp treble), but subsequently strike out in a more imaginative direction, attaining a sort of expansive, graveyard crawlin’ feel reminiscent of The Flesh Eaters, tempered with shots of obtuse venom and strangulated telecaster terror that come on like distant echoes of The Dicks’ ‘Kill From The Heart’ LP.

And speaking of distant echoes, there’s a bit of a contemporary, post-Oh Sees type element going on here too, with excessive reverb and barely controlled echo applied to just about everything, working well with some malignantly convoluted riffs and buried female back vocals to give things a pleasantly unearthly horror movie psyche feel at times.

I guess I don’t have much more to say about it right now, beyond dutifully noting that it turns out this is actually a late 2012 release that I didn’t hear until recently, so let’s just conclude by stating that, whilst it’s not really an immediate head-banging blast or anything, a few listens really cement this as one of the best punk records I’ve heard this year. Check it out.

Buy from Goner here.

Labels: best of 2013, Ex-Cult

I suppose you can’t blame an artist when his or her closely guarded style suddenly becomes the ‘in-thing’. With piles upon piles of haunted, isolationist downer dirge increasingly filling the record racks, the past few years have seen James Kirby aka The Caretaker aka V/VM aka Leyland Kirby move from being a marginal, faceless malcontent – purveyor of onimous noise-fogs and evil-minded remixes that used to spook unwitting John Peel listeners when they least expected it - to a position somewhat akin to a ringleader for a whole swathe of underground music practitioners.

From being an entirely anonymous, shadowy presence back in the early ‘00s (I was listening to both V/VM and The Caretaker for years before I realised they were the work of the same person), he’s moved on to become a fairly ubiquitous figure - an easy reference point, with a readymade set of expectations; “Oh yeah, it’s more of that Caretaker sort of stuff”, etc etc.

Like I say, it’s not his fault, but still - I confess that when I first saw the name and cover art of his new venture under the name The Stranger, I couldn’t help feeling that maybe he’d finally jumped the shark and succumbed to self-parody. “Watching Dead Empires In Decay”? You’ve gotta be kidding, right? Ooh, look, faded b&w portrait of a bleak, abandoned tower block… gimme a break. In fact this album’s aesthetic presentation, taken in and of itself, could make a pretty good case for all this dark, industrial electronica in 2013 occupying a similar position to that of post-rock in 2003 – eg, predictable, self-important, shit-boring, and of little use to anyone.

So I went in with low expectations, not feeling much in the mood for a bunch of contrived cyclopean gloom and suspecting that this might be where Kirby and I finally part company. But, of course, actually listening to the thing tossed all those foolish notions out the window straight away. Dash it all, why does he have to make everything he touches so damned good? That’s talent for you I suppose.

Taking a distinctly different approach from either the Alzheimer’s wracked ballroom memories of The Caretaker or the melancholic drones of Leyland Kirby, The Stranger introduces us to an entirely new landscape of musique concrète amplified machine-shop rumble, distant thudding reverberations of earthquakes or collapsing zombie nightclubs, detuned cellos and bassoons howling exhaustedly at the moon, and bright, skittering percussion spelling out warm, non-human rhythm patterns, like raindrops hitting tin shack roofs. Such woolly descriptions and glib comparisons don’t really do these compositions justice, but if you’re looking for a map reference, imagine David Lynch and Alan Splet’s ‘Eraserhead’ soundtrack filtered through the methodology and emotional undertow of Pierre Henry or Steve Reich and the musical language perfected by The Necks and you’ll get some idea of the general tone of this record. There’s some sinisterly cozy Boards of Canada-esque synth drift buried in there somewhere too (well, I mean, of course there is), and each track in turn brings out some welcome new twists and sound sources that ably succeed in fighting off the monotony often inherent in this kind of music, as does the presence of a subliminal melodic sensibility that occasionally emerges fully formed in staggeringly beautiful fashion (particularly on closing track ‘About To Enter a Strange New Period’, which must rank as one of Kirby’s best moments to date).

Easily surpassing the limitations imposed by its increasingly tired aesthetic signifiers, ‘Dead Empires..’ makes for compelling listening. As is so often the case from Mr. Kirby, it’s the kind of record so engrossing and atmospheric it can practically change the temperature in a room when played. The question of precisely WHY you’d want to change the  temperature is a trickier one to get to grips with, but if you’re dead set on languishing in the doldrums of late-capitalist pre-apocalyptic despair (and many contemporary listeners are, it seems), you’d be hard pressed to find a better way to go about it than this.

Listen & buy on bandcamp.

Labels: best of 2013, The Stranger

My intermittent fandom of Gorky’s Zygotic Mynki has been rather hindered over the years by the fact that their music only really makes sense to me when I’m in the countryside. And sadly, I am rarely in the countryside. Relocate their peculiarly loveable folk-rock rollicking to the world of concrete, deadlines, jobs, rent and clock-watching, and their appeal fades to dust in seconds.

So I guess it makes sense that this solo album of peculiarly loveable piano-rock rollicking from Euros Childs (the first work of his I’ve been driven to check out in some years) continues to concern itself with rural - or at least suburban - concerns, even as his expanded horizons as a song-writer allow him to put a somewhat darker and more tormented spin on the wine-sipping, bohemian idyll of his hero, the late Kevin Ayers.

So basically, ‘Situation Comedy’ is sort of rural, middle class counterpoint to The Kinks’ masterpiece ‘Muswell Hillbillies’- a vague, vignettes-from-life type concept album dealing with the joy, sadness and absurdity of a certain unfairly maligned corner of contemporary British life, complete with a song entitled ‘Second Home Blues’, acres of Viv Stanshall-esque whimsy and a verse about a middle-aged woman who bites into a frozen owl believing it to be a piece of cheese.

Like most actual sit-coms, there is a thread of vast, vicious unhappiness running through these songs that is not always immediately obvious, but lurks always. Even the delightful, grin-from-ear-to-ear goofiness of opening cut ‘Tete A Tete’ has Childs reflecting on the discovery of “corpses, beneath my ice rink”; whether metaphorical or literal, it’s an grim aside to find in the midst of a breezy little love song, pre-empting the more explicit miseries and upsets found later on the LP.

But, crucially, there is an equally strong sense of hope here that overcomes cynicism or class-based anger - a dream of a happiness always just around the corner, of dazzling, sun-blessed landscapes and conjugal bliss worthy of the poets. Like Lou Reed or Ray Davies at their best, Childs is able to realise this dream for us just as gracefully as the ugly reality, never sounding condescending or superior as he outlines the multi-faceted tragedies that befall his protagonists as they strive in vain to “do so much more, than just surviving”.

That this is a beautifully composed, arranged and recorded piece of work goes without saying, but y’know - it really is, and such pleasantness helps us glide through subject matter and musical decisions that would be nigh on intolerable in the hands of artists who don’t have quite so much… well, charm, I suppose. Of course there are self-indulgences here - mis-steps and bits that don’t quite work – but that’s exactly as it should be, and there are fewer than you might expect. So if you’ve ever spent quality time with the work of John Cale, or that of the aforementioned Messrs Ayers and Davies, and if you can overcome your kneejerk dismissal of whimsical, piano-led oom-pah for a few minutes, you will, I’m sure, find much nourishment in this rather superb LP. Just don’t try playing it in the city, for god’s sake.

Buy from the lad himself.

Labels: best of 2013, Euros Childs

So, first off: anyone hoping for a direct sequel to the herculean noise-rock edifice of Mainliner’s rightly revered ‘Mellow Out’ (1996) will be setting themselves up for an instant disappointment with this one. Not that ‘Revelation Space’ is a disappointing record in and of itself – far from it. But enjoyment of it hinges upon the realisation that Mainliner 2013 is a very different beast from Mainliner 199X… and an understanding that the fact it’s credited on the sleeve to “Kawabata Makoto’s Mainliner” is no accident.

Much as I love Kawabata (and I love him lots), I often get a bit frustrated with projects that see him collaborating with players outside his usual Acid Mothers Temple orbit, simply because of the extent to which his 24/7 maniac guitar skree and maximalist production aesthetic tends to completely dominate any given recording, burying the contribution of whoever’s gallantly trying to interact with him beneath a storm of mentalist cosmic goo.

One of the things that makes ‘Mellow Out’ such a classic within its field is the fact that bassist/bellower Nanjo Asahito and drummer Koizumi Hajime were tough enough bastards to compete with Kawabata’s maelstrom, leading to the creation of a more genuine (if admittedly insane) group dynamic. Such is sadly not the case with ‘Revelation Space’, as the replacement of Asahito with Bo Ningen frontman Kawabe Taigen shifts the power balance, allowing Kawabata to dominate completely, his never-ending mega-shred standing way out front in the mix, with bass & drums sounding distant and confused, only occasionally managing to hear each other well enough to lock down the kind of groove a band like this needs to properly raise its sails, whilst Taigen’s rather fey unearthly wailing often sounds more like a guy holding his hands over his ears than a mighty warrior screaming into the galactic void.

If we put expectations aside and accept ‘Revelation Space’ purely as a Kawabata Makoto album though, it’s actually pretty good - the best blast I’ve heard from the guy in an age, in fact. Imagine an AMT album with all of their kitschy psyche trappings, prog meanderings and wibbly-wobbly synths stripped away, zeroing straight-in on the bullseye of feedback-belching, diesel-huffing formless biker-rock delirium; Blue Cheer fed through an alien mincer-ray, magnified through moon-sized compound-eye mega-amps, and all that stuff we know Kawabata can knock out before breakfast. That’s what you get here, pretty much, only spiced up with some sequences of startlingly vicious free-improv playing that really push things beyond the stoner-rock comfort zone. I swear, some bits of this sound like Derek Bailey playing through Bardo Pond’s pedal boards, or Michael Karoli completely losing his shit during a heavily medicated Can session that they all decided they’d rather forget the next morning… and it would be pretty churlish of us freak-rock fans to complain when that sort of grub’s on the table, let’s face it.

Listen & buy via Riot Season’s Bandcamp.

Labels: best of 2013, Kawabata Makoto, Mainliner

Squeezing in just at the bottom, but definitely worth a nod pending further listening, is this nice little platter than I picked up only a week or two ago. Until recently, I’d largely ignored the doings of US/Canadian garage-rock mainstay King Khan, just because, well… I dunno really. The costumes, the goofy album covers, the general ‘shtick’ of the whole business… these things have a tendency to put me off. Maybe I read an interview with him once where he said some stuff I thought was stupid. I don’t know. I don’t even remember.

Anyway, long story short: apparently this was my own damn loss, because my girlfriend persuaded me to go see what is known as The King Khan & BBQ Show in London earlier this year, and verily, they kicked ass. Great rock n’ roll music (and I say that in hushed tones, etc). This here Shrines ensemble is a somewhat different kettle of fish, however. Far smoother and more well-mannered, it sees our main man backed by slick production, tasteful horns, Philly soul strings and the like, but it’s still very enjoyable, by and large, with some great guitar licks, a solid retro-soul type groove and moderate-to-good original song-writing. There’s a definite flavour of major label ‘60s psych hanging in the air that occasionally puts me in mind of The Animals, Chocolate Watch Band and perhaps one of those post-Forever Changes Love albums where Arthur Lee went off in a more straight-up rock band direction. Meanwhile, some of the mellower numbers in the middle of the record – ‘Darkness’, ‘Pray For Lil’ – are about the lushest re-enactments of ‘60s Southern soul you could hope to hear in these dark days. Highlights for sure.

So: not life-changing or anything, and it does sometimes veer a bit too far toward the kinda shallow ‘60s pop parody direction currently prevalent amongst other popular garage groups that I’ll refrain from naming, but mostly: THUMBS UP. There are some really fine bits of psyche-blues-rock and soul to enjoy here, with some genuine songwriterly feeling behind ‘em too, and listening to it makes me feel good. Definitely the best album you’ll hear in 2013 made by a man who insists on appearing in public in latex underwear and an Egyptian headdress, anyhow.

Stream & buy from Merge.

Labels: best of 2013, King Khan & The Shrines

…and yes, the best records of the year run-down begins imminently. I could waste time harping on about current trends and developments in the music world circa 2013 etc. etc., but instead I thought I’d best dedicate my energies to the central business of ploughing through the records I’ve liked, and whatever I have to say in a wider context will hopefully make itself clear along the way.

But in short: if you’d asked me in June, I would have said that there had been barely any music this year that I actually thought was any good. (I think I have high standards these days, and I’m increasingly quick to dismiss as I get older.) Thankfully though, things have turned around, and by the time I got around to scribbling them all down on a list, turns out there have been LOADS of records this year I’ve enjoyed.

Ok, maybe not exactly a banner year for many of my favourite scenes & genres, and maybe there’s a higher proportion of old geezers as opposed to young up-and-comers on the list than might be wished for, but never mind. Still more good stuff coming down the pipe than I actually have time to listen to, and that’s the main thing.

So: In an effort to make amends for the long stretches of 2013 during which this blog was on life support, I’m gonna take a deep breath and go for a top twenty – one post per day, beginning NOW.

Well, ok, actually beginning tomorrow. Gimme a chance. And maybe there’ll be some gaps. But basically that’s what I’m aiming for.

Usual rules apply: anything released during 2013 on any format that features either more than four tracks or more than 10 minutes of music is eligible; random items from 2012 than I didn’t hear until 2013 will be included at the editor’s discretion.

Labels: best of 2013

A little while back, I was struck by the realisation that I hated Kieran Hebden, aka Four Tet. Sure, I was receptive to his stuff once upon a time: I even bought his first album for my mum for Christmas. Probably copied a few of his CDs from the library and stuff. I’m pretty sure I even heard him play ‘live’ once, in a little festival tent crammed with pot-smoking head-nodders.

But no. Things change. I don’t remember what kind of circumstance I was in, when I found myself listening to Fourtet’s latest ‘platter’, maybe 5, 6, 7 years ago or something, but suddenly, I understood the nature of what I had unwittingly been participating in.

I mean, who DOES this bastard think he is? Tinkering with fragments of all these vital and exciting forms of music – techno, jazz, afro-beat, hip-hop and so on – then systematically proceeding to drain them of any HINT of anger or rebellion, normalising them to the extent that you probably did an eye-roll just hearing me mention their names in quick succession, drizzling dinky little bits of them around into these precious little confections of tasteless, background-y nothing. Just… fuck this guy, man. He’s Moby with A levels. ‘Party’ music for people who think putting on Motown Chartbusters would be beneath them. The sonic equivalent of Giles Peterson reading extracts from a book about living in a remote Peruvian village at the Barbican centre. A status quo reinforcing MURDERER of all the things that give popular music its lifesblood. Blinded with rage, I didn’t just want to cease listening to Mr. Four Tet, I wanted to smash his face into bloody pieces.

So, as you’ll appreciate it, I thought it would probably be for the best if we kept our distance after that. If Kieran stayed out of my way, I’d stay out of his... and so things have been, since then. So I don’t know what he’s been up to recently, or what progression his career has taken of late.

But, like I say, things change.

Fast forward to NOW, and the other week I heard a couple of cuts from the new Four Tet album on the radio. And I confess, I actually found them pretty compelling. Not what I was expecting at all.

Apparently the story vehind this one is that he’d been living in Woodstock in upstate New York for some reason, getting into a lot of the ‘70s hippie type New Age music that presumably accompanies life in such a locale, and he thought he’d try to make a record along those lines. A fairly trendy pursuit of recent, you might think, but the genius of it is that, for reasons equally vague and unfathomable, Hebden decided that his primary source material in this endeavour should be chopped up samples from ‘90s pirate radio recordings, Jungle-era DJ bootlegs, and that sort of thing.

The results are pretty interesting – often strange, sometimes flat-out mental, and occasionally verging on brilliance.

The rhythm tracks in particular here are assembled in a really rough, instinctive manner that seems completely antithetical to the carefully polished blandness of Four Tet’s earlier work, as tiny fragments of unidentifiable drum-beats are jammed together in monotonous, crudely chopped loops that sound like the result of some clueless kid manually splicing tapes in 1980s basement. Weird vocal fragments (“HE – HEY – HAY!”) jab in and out of the mix in a spirit of unhinged randomness, treated with cheesy reverse and digital echo effects that seem to almost push things into the realm of ‘outsider art’ – rave music made on the cheap by a teeth-grinding, arhythmic lunatic.

Such abrasive ingredients seem distinctly at odds with Hebden’s stated wish to create ‘new age’ music, but nonetheless, remainders of the record’s cosmic relaxation-based intent keep asserting themselves, with the disjuncture between form and intent leading to many bizarre and wondrous moments...

Tubular bells and random wind chime drift in over a dense mess of junglist fragments and a man repeatedly saying “good old broccoli, jus-“; R’n’B (modern definition) female cooing is reverbed up and used in the manner of a Tangerine Dream synth line; waves of ‘Journey in Satchidananda’ harp gently wash in across impenetrable pirate FM ranting; single snare hits loop like metronomic machine guns for minutes on end; Flat Eric distorted techno riffs bust into a degraded ten second loop of a DJ who appears to be having some kind of paranoid breakdown; creepy, tremoloed baby voices hum like swarming insects…

In short: I know Four Tet isn’t exactly the hippest name in inner-city, post-everything Hype Williams type electronica, but I defy you to get stuck into this one with the headphones on and tell me some of this shit is anything less than fucking NUTS.

Of course, I’ve very deliberately been concentrating on the most far-out bits of the album thus far; sad to say that at the end of the day it goes fall somewhat short of being a full scale work of mad genius that we could hail from the East London rooftops. The old conventions of smug smoothness and exploitative, chill-vibe sampling do rather reassert themselves on the second half of the album, smudging and smothering the craziness of what has come before. The two closing tracks in particular are quite dull – very much the sort of thing Peterson or someone could play without ringing many alarm bells – but on the whole, this record is so much more wild and invigorating than anything I ever expected to ever hear from Four Tet, I don’t really mind.

From what I gather, he went for the full ‘no press / sudden self-release / pay-what-you-like download’ approach to releasing this album, perhaps suggesting that he too is feeling a bit cheesed off with his overly comfortable position in the music world. I hope so! I gather many of his fans have been rather perturbed and blindsided by it. Good, I suppose.

In fact, maybe more than anything it is the expectations associated with the Four Tet name that will stop this album finding it’s real audience. Given the sheer weirdness of some of the stuff on the first half, he might have been better off inventing some maniac Lee Perry type alter-ego to attribute it all to. He could have written a suitably fruity press release full of bone-chilling hardships and fuzzy-headed, medicated goings-on, thrown these tunes out there as the legendary lost master tapes recovered from a skip behind blah, bah blah, got some deep-digging resissue label to put it out, and the cult that would have formed, ready to testify at a moment’s notice to its unearthy beauty and cracked imagination, would have assembled INSTANTLY. With rubes like me in the front line, most likely.

I’m SURE he could’ve got away with that. But in a way, I’m glad he was honest and came straight out with it – even giving the whole thing a cover design and title that couldn’t be more blandly Four Tet-like if it tried. It gives us all a real nice surprise. Reminds us that we should never write a guy off too easily (that being something I tend to do far too often in music). I’m still not entirely sure where he’s going with all this, but…. for the first time in history, I care, and that definitely marks some kind of success.

---

I won't bother linking, because you can probably get this any place.

Labels: album reviews, Four Tet

My girlfriend bought this suspiciously anonymous looking Italian Chuck Berry “best of” for £3 from Rat Records in Camberwell(1) a few months back, and let me tell you, it is a blast... if not entirely for the reasons a hopeful punter may have been anticipating.

Basically, after dropping the needles it takes about a second for one to realise that the “Golden Greats” presented herein are not the famed studio recordings that made Mr. Berry a star, but instead some really shonky, mud-covered live recordings emanating from a time and place unknown, but, judging from the sound of the backing and recording quality, I’d guess no earlier than the 1970s.

Now, ol’ Chuck understandably gets a lot of shit for spending the majority of the career travelling the world peddling cynical, increasingly half-assed reiterations of a bunch of novelty songs he wrote over 50 years ago, but from my own jaded POV, I’ve gotta say, I think this stuff is bloody brilliant, verging on some kinda cracked, Alex Chilton/Replacements-style anti-genius in places.

Initially, you don’t know whether to laugh or cry, hearing Berry lurch his way into a grinding, half-speed version of ‘Carol’, the backing group sounding like Stackwaddy being forced to play at gunpoint after a 24 hour marathon session whilst the man himself hollers like a belligerent megaphone-jerk in-between launching cack-handed, ‘is-he-actually-wearing-gloves?’ level guitar solos that certainly make me feel better about my own compromised abilities. (All that indie / underground “hey, you don’t need to learn to play guitar” stuff? Check it out - apparently Chuck’s booze-addled brain beat us all to it!)

In the end, you simply celebrate, for this is chaotic, ridiculous, beautiful stuff – pure, drunken rock n’roll slop, created for the none-more-rock n’ roll reasons of harvesting money, creating a bad atmosphere and fleecing stadiums full of white people.

“I’m CHUCK BERRY, and I couldn’t give a fuck!”, the recordings on this LP seem to announce, and the result is more punk rock than a pile of every Sex Pistols record in the entire world, and a hell of a lot more fun to listen to too.

I think we need a shiny, multi-disc remastered edition, complete with a bonus DVD so we can rejoice in the sight of the arthritic duck-walks that no doubt accompanied every one of these glorious abominations, and see the when-the-fuck-is-this-gonna-end looks on the faces of the gnarly pick up band guys that this particular night’s promoter had roped in. And an extra ‘behind the scenes’ feature in which we get to see Chuck sitting in a jacuzzi with a bottle of rye for ninety minutes, laughing his ass off.

Quick, get me the number of Deja Vu Records, based out of Italy, whom I’m sure are still legitimate international holders of the rights to these recordings, and…. oh, yeah, right, hang on a minute….

--

(1)A GREAT shop by the way – I mean, I wouldn’t say it’s a collector’s paradise or anything, but if you’re in the mood for buying some great, random old LPs, its shelves see the polarities of “pretty cool stuff” and “pretty reasonable prices” intersect in most pleasing fashion. Definitely a strong contender for South London’s finest record emporium: check ‘em out.

Labels: album reviews, Chuck Berry

So we’ll begin with another contradiction. All that cynicism and distance that surrounds the public perception of ‘Lou Reed’ like a block of ice, how do we match that up with the fact that so much of his music is so fucking achingly sentimental, so nostalgic, so fixated on some fleeting moment of zen-like universal comfort, in spite of all the sneering and street hassle and leather daddy hi-jinks? Because that’s the essence that keeps me coming back to him really.. the former I mean, not the latter.

Of course, I guess I still like all the shrieking dissonance and hair-raising guitar noise and decadent droning plenty too (yes, I had the “John Peel played ‘Heroin’ and everything changed forever” moment same as everyone else, even if mine was closer to 1998 than 1968… and it speaks volumes, I think, that it sounded just as ‘what the fuck is this’ jaw-dropping at the dawn of the 21st century as it did when copies of the banana album first started to sneak over to these shores). But that’s not what I feel like discussing today, I suppose.

Let’s talk about ‘Sweet Jane’ instead. I don’t know if it’s Lou Reed’s best song, or even my favourite one, but it’s the one, I think, where that moment of calm, basic-level happiness he always seemed to be striving for was first fully illuminated.

I remember ages and ages and ages ago, reading the booklet that accompanied the cheap ‘best of the Velvet Underground’ CD that I bought shortly after hearing ‘Heroin’ on the radio, the writer saying something about how Lou Reed’s lyrics always seem to reflect this obsession with the idea of things being “alright” - and indeed, that writer was really on to something I think. In song after song, it is a state of unspectacular ‘alright-ness’ that is sought out and celebrated: “..it was alright”, “it’s gonna work out right”, “..everything was alright”, “it’s gonna be alright”, on and on, like some endlessly repeating mantra. And it’s not some great, transcendent moment of happiness or revelation of love or anything that he’s after either, it’s just… things are alright. Sitting quietly at home, looking out of the window, coffee on the stove. Sitting next to your beloved over breakfast, walking out to get groceries – whatever. Things are alright. I can dig that.

At heart, this seems to be where most Lou Reed songs (all of his more upbeat numbers, anyway) are coming from. In fact, maybe this realisation even allows us to take a more sympathetic approach to his legendarily aggressive attitude toward journalists and interviewers. Imagine, the poor guy sitting there in his apartment, savouring his moment of perfect alright-ness in the morning, when suddenly there’s some whiny jerk on the phone wanting to interrogate him about his sexuality and his drug habits, and David Bowie and Iggy Pop, and why his latest album sounds like he recorded it in a dog kennel. Awful. No wonder he got a bit shirty with them. Who wouldn’t? Why couldn’t they all just leave him alone? He had nothing to say. He probably just wanted to take in the silence, or put the radio on, sit back and enjoy his breakfast.

Anyway, it is this holy ‘alright-ness’, this quiet contentment, that “Sweet Jane” is of course really about. I know that there’s an actual Jane in the lyrics (of most versions), but if you think it’s just her who’s being hymned during the chorus, well…. I hesitate to say ‘you got it wrong’, but suffice to say you have a very different understanding of the song from me. Sweet Jane, as yelled exultantly on the pre-‘Loaded’ demo version, hesitantly whispered on the ‘Live ‘69’ version, dutifully intoned on the album version, represents instead a state of mind; an ideal place to be; a totem of the kind of basic, everyday happiness and contentment that most men & women seek, most of the time. Quietness, and companionship, and the sun shining in in the morning.

Of course Reed recorded this song umpteen times during his lifetime, but, predictably enough, it is the three most prominent Velvet Underground-era recordings that keep me spellbound.

The first of these, chronologically speaking, is the ‘Live ‘69’ version, when the song was still in pretty embryonic form, before all that business with Jack and Jane had come into being, and in many ways this version is all the more perfect for its simplicity. As that indelible guitar riff rolls out slow and steady, the band sounding like they’ve just been taught it and they’re following the leader to establish the feel, Reed goes straight to the heart of the matter, softly intoning the verse that ended up being the big emotional crescendo of the completed version, repeating it several times, rolling the words around his mouth like their message is still in the process of filtering down through his heart/brain: “anyone who’s ever had a heart / they wouldn’t turn around and break it”; “anyone who’s ever had a dream / anyone who’s ever played a part”.

If we were to listen to this version without the context provided by subsequent recordings, it could perhaps be read as a pretty sad song. Could the Sweet Jane he’s addressing in the chorus have ditched him? Did SHE turn around and break it? Well if she did, Reed doesn’t sound too upset about things. It sounds like the nostalgic warmth of the happy memories are enough to keep him going, resigned to his fate as the totemic Jane of the chorus (like the verses, elucidated quietly, carefully and somewhat hesitantly here) assumes her wider, cosmic significance: Sweet Jane.


So here then, on the demo version, we have Jane and Jack, though they’re a little different from the ones you may know if you’ve only listened to the eventual album version. There’s no rock n’ roll band (HUH!) here, but instead it opens with what is possibly my favourite line in any version of this song, and one that just suits Lou Reed’s voice so well:

“Standing on the corner / thinking of the best..”.

He could have just left it there really. This song, his whole career. Just so, so, just… y’know. Says it all really. But nonetheless, the show must go on. This time round, Jane is in her corset, and Jack is in his vest – which, with no hetero-normative-ness intended, I much prefer to be honest. The brief intrusion of ‘Transformer’-era gender-bending when Lou reverses the garments on the album version strikes a bit of an odd note, I’ve always thought, in the middle of a set of verses that otherwise go out of their way to celebrate a very conventional, straight-laced kind of domestic contentment.

(In a way, the verses of this song seem like Reed’s attempt to remind his audience, “hey, normal people have feelings too” – a very humane and somewhat brave gesture in the midst of all the late ‘60s ‘squares vs. hipsters’ type palaver, especially from the man who’d soon reinvent himself as the “king of the underground street freaks” or whatever.)

So, thus far then, probably my favourite version of the song’s opening verse, but sadly I think he drops the ball a little as the demo version moves on to the second verse (the only drawback of this otherwise brilliant recording). Whereas the album version introduces ‘children’ and ‘villains’ into proceedings, here Reed just assigns all of his various rose-tinted, old worldy activities (blinking eyes, studying rules of verse, fainting, blushing etc.) simply to ‘women’ and 'ladies', rather giving the impression that he’s going off on some tirade about the decline of old fashioned femininity or something. I doubt that was the intent; In actuality I think he probably just hadn’t filled out this bit of the lyrics much yet and was just filling the gaps etc., but still – could be better.

What REALLY elevates the demo version though is the gloriously raw, uproariously sloppy nature of the band’s playing here, which at a push you could even see as prefiguring the work of such paragons of DIY earnestness as The Television Personalities or Half Japanese, complete with percussion provided by what sounds like someone with zero sense of rhythm banging two saucepans together (I think we can safely assume Mo Tucker was on maternity leave by this point). All of this serves to lend things a kind of strained, raggedly emotive genius that completely overwhelms any lyrical reservations as soon as the song hits the chorus and the band bellows together, out of key and barely in time with each other: SWEEET JAAAANE!

God, it’s just so beautiful, their inhibitions seeming to vanish as the song goes on, each chorus repeat adding more gusto, more chaos until the final ones, following the big “wouldn’t turn about and break it” crescendo and the peculiar baroque bridge section (Reed did a lot of these, but they rarely worked as well as this one), just fly free, really nailing the sheer joyfulness of the song’s message. NA NA NA NA, NA NA NA.

In this version, ‘Sweet Jane’ isn’t just a chorus, or a song title, it’s a universal exclamation, something to shout from the hilltops whenever you feel that everything is alright. It’s just it man, it’s right there. With this song as a vessel, and that whoever-the-hell-it-is banging those saucepan lids, this bunch of uptight white guys really rouse the spirits and raise the soul to new heights.

Often of recent, I’ve felt like turning to my own beloved and shouting, SWEEEET JANE!! She’s not much into the Velvets though, so it would probably just freak her out. If you’ve read up to this point though, I guess you must be into the Velvets. You know what I’m saying. You know it’s not all about heroin and sneering and Andy Warhol. We can do the secret handshake, and can leave this post right here because what else is there to say about music you love this much.

---

(1) The demo version is available on CD 2 of the “Fully Loaded” special edition of ‘Loaded’ – an absolutely essential document for all Velvets fans, by the way. I mean, I love the original album too, but I think about 75% of the demo tracks are so, so much better than their album equivalents, and there’s a bunch of other great stuff too, and, and...

Labels: deathblog, Lou Reed, rambling, The Velvet Underground

Come on in, pour yourself a drink!

Let us assume that you’re a guest in my wood-panelled Victorian study, and that I have already helped myself to much refreshment from the crystal decanter. After an initial show of friendship, I’m basically going to talk at you indefinitely in a semi-aggressive fashion whilst you sit there uncomfortably and try to find a non-rude way to make an exit. Is that acceptable? Well afraid it’ll have to be. If you don’t like it you, can start your own weblog.

(I will, by the way, be speaking in the voice of Andre Morell, if that helps you make your mind up either way.)

Ahem.

----

I know I’ll be upsetting any solo Lou partisans who happen to be reading right off the bat here, but for me, The Velvet Underground is all.

And even if Lou took all the songwriting money, I definitely prefer to see the band’s achievements as a group effort. As such, I think it's notable that ALL of the VU recordings sound spontaneous and passionate, whereas pretty much all solo Lou Reed stuff sounds like carefully groomed moments of "rock n' roll" spontaneity being performed by actors under laboratory conditions. I could never really get into that. Lots of "oh, well, theoretically I suppose this is quite a good song, but..." moments whenever I've tried, in between the frequent bouts of “by god, I’m turning this off right now”.

That said though, recent adventures in learning to love the collected works of such contrary buggers as Alex Chilton and John Cale have reminded me that, when you’re in it for the long game, there’s more to the appreciation of a record than immediate aural pleasure and basic emotional connection. And surely, no one more so than Lou Reed managed to exemplify that (very ‘70s) idea of using whole decades’ worth of mass-produced vinyl and fan-produced cash to sketch out some kind of grand, conflicted, ever-changing statement about something that nobody ever quite seemed to ‘get’, but that keeps the die-hards fascinated & guessing, and the detractors shrugging and suffering, to this day.

So yes, a proper excavation of the Reed back catalogue has long been on my ‘long-list’ of things to get around to, now that I’ve reached that point in life where I can buy 2nd hand LPs with impunity and sit around laughing at the drum sound and so on, free from concerns of contemporary relevance or financial stability. But I haven’t done it yet. Which is pretty damned inconvenient for the purposes of writing a conventional obituary.

It’s funny actually - when the news filtered through last Sunday night, perhaps my third or fourth thought was “well that's one tough fucking obit that a few hundred journalists are going have to file by the morning”.

For years the whole “Lou Reed is an arsehole” meme has been a running joke in the music world, and it is an idea that I very much abided by through my (ahem) youth, maintaining a strict “Velvets = BRILLIANT / Solo Lou = GHASTLY” policy with a stubbornness that precluded any hope of flexibility. I once even drew a cartoon (subsequently lost) of Sterling Morrison and Moe Tucker trapping Lou’s soul in a magic crystal on the night that he left the VU.

But these days, now that I find myself feeling rather more sympathetic toward the intentions of these – how you say? – “grumpy old bastards who waste our time making difficult, unlovable records”, I don’t know if the “Lou’s an asshole” approach holds much water to be honest. Certainly, it’s at the very least an uncharitable simplification of his character: for every anecdote you read about him being a dick to someone or making a really bad decision, there's another story about him being incredibly kind and eloquent, and so on.

And I’m certainly not here to try to whitewash him for all the occasions on which he undoubtedly did act like a prime arsehole, but…I dunno… I guess on reflection I tend to see him more as someone who was always pushing awkwardly towards some kind of... *something* that nobody except him ever quite managed to see, both in terms of his music and his personal conduct. Kind of tragic in a sense, I suppose. Millionaire rock star who never managed to make anyone 'understand' – boo hoo hoo, etc.

(And whilst we’re on the subject, how did he even manage to become a millionaire rock star in the first place? I mean, I suppose the singles off ‘Transformer’ must have done fairly brisk business, and sales of the VU albums must have snowballed since their reissue in the ‘80s, but nonetheless - he’s never really been a big unit shifter, has he? He’s never had a ‘hit’, outside of college radio / indie land. In fact, can you think of ANYONE who’s managed to assume the position of an “I can do whatever the hell I like” major label-backed legacy artist on the basis of such little quantifiable commercial success..? That in itself must count as some kind of an achievement… ‘fake it ‘till you make it’, perhaps?)



I guess he was just a bit of a complicated, mixed up guy really… as were all the members of the Velvet Underground, come to think of it.(1) In fact, read an interview with each of them in turn and it's amazing that they managed to work together for so long without killing each other. But then presumably that clash of personalities is what helped make their output so astonishingly bold and varied.

For, brace yourself for Ultimate Cliché here, but one of the things that makes the Velvet Underground so continuously fascinating is that they were a band built from the start upon a foundation of total, overlapping contradiction:

Often held up as progenitors of punk, in ‘White Light, White Heat’ they recorded the most certifiably PUNK album of all time. Yet they also represent the birth of the strain of self-aware, collegiate art-rock (later indie) music that by-passed the atavistic guts of ‘punk’ altogether when it began to take off via their disciples in the later ‘70s and ‘80s. (In stark contrast to just about every other mid’60s rock group, three quarters of the classic VU line-up had a background in post-grad academic study, a fact that showed through in their aesthetic presentation as well as their lyrical & musical pretentions – “kinda faraway / kinda dignified”, quoth Jonathan Richman).

Frequently pigeonholed by lazy copywriters as a band defined by their cynicism, ‘coldness’ and embrace of decadent, taboo subject matter (an instant cliché aided by the shades, turtlenecks and grim demeanour of their Warhol-era publicity), The Velvet Underground simultaneously produced some of the most off-handedly honest, humane and open-hearted music of their era - not to mention the most conventionally melodically beautiful. And this isn’t the Cale-era / Yule-era dichotomy it’s often assumed to be either: it’s right there from the word go with ‘Sunday Morning’ and ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’, whilst the departure of Cale and his supposed avant garde tendencies led straight on to the band laying down some of the most extended droning and shrieking of their career (cf: circa ’69 live versions of ‘Run Run Run’ and ‘What Goes On’, not to mention total weirdness like ‘The Murder Mystery’), whilst Cale himself went straight on to make a really boring country-rock album! (Post-Warhol, the Velvets also spent quite a long time wearing flares and floral-patterned shirts, growing unruly hair and grinning at the camera, if anyone bothered to notice.)

Sometimes pegged (justifiably) as marking the point at which rock music shook off the stigma of merely imitating black music and became an identifiably ‘white’ form for the first time (remember the stories about Lou keeping a dollar jar to fine anyone who played a blues lick in rehearsal?), Lou and Sterling Morrison both still somehow managed to talk up their background in dirty, no-good r’n’b clubs, unashamedly playing choppy, urban 12-bar boogie during the height of psychedelia, and pledging eternal allegiance to Bo Diddley and John Lee Hooker whilst sneering at Bob Dylan and Frank Zappa.

I mean, how the hell did that work, even on a practical level..?! Who knows, but you certainly can’t argue with the results.

And I guess it was this spirit of beautiful, explanation-defying contradiction – which seemed so effortless and instinctive when the Velvets did it – that Lou tried to cling to through his solo career, with what I think we can safely classify as “mixed results”.

I was joking earlier with the magic crystal / soul extraction thing, but nonetheless, I think some big part of Reed’s world definitely changed forever after that night at Max’s Kansa City in 1970, when he threw in the VU towel. And as ever with Lou Reed and The Velvet Underground, there’s mystery hovering around the whole issue, never quite giving us an answer. Sterl recalled that he knew something was up, because Lou suddenly wanted to introduce everyone to his parents - they being strict and straight-laced upstate New York upper-middle-class types from whom he had been long estranged.(2) As I recall, the rumour goes that after that, Reed spent a year or so keeping a low profile back at the family home, as mom and pop tried to medicate him back to ‘normality’, to the extent that he was on the verge of packing it in and getting a job in a lawyer’s office.


I’m unsure of the ins and outs that followed as he decided to return to a music career (and it’s not really our business anyway), but by the time his self-titled ‘Lou Reed’ LP appeared in 1972, I think it should have been clear to most observers that something had gone seriously awry: a tepid collection of re-recorded Velvets tunes, captured in a sterile, “keep the levels low, folks” studio environment by a session band featuring members of Yes (of all the god-damned things!), and topped by this freaking bizarre cover painting of a big, like, dodo or something, surrounded by D&D rulebook-style treasure!(3)

We can laugh about it now maybe, but for any original fans keeping the faith at the time, this plus ‘Squeeze’ must have signalled a rather depressing march into the wilderness. Bowie stepped in with a guiding hand, and the rest is history that we don’t need to plough through here I suppose….

But in its own way, that weird, thoroughly forgotten first album already highlights everything that Lou had lost and (according to my current opinion at least) never really regained.

I know I was going on about it earlier, but what was really lacking was the sense of spontaneity. Lou Reed was, intermittently, one of the most sublime rock/pop lyricists who ever lived. But his gift always worked best when encountered in an elusive, unpredictable context. And whilst sadly it took no time at all for Solo Lou to become the kind of guy who liked to see his words dried in ink, preserved forever as nuggets of rather underwhelming ‘genius’ for the faithful to pore over, VU Lou was a very different dude. Wonderful things seem to pour from his croaking gob throughout the duration of the Velvets recording career, floating off into the ether never to be heard again, and if there are bits on the studio albums where he sounds like he’s making this shit up as he goes along, that’s because he probably WAS.

One of the great joys of excavating the VU’s demos and live recordings is in hearing the way that the content and delivery of his songs developed and changed and changed again, never really reaching any ‘complete’ version as he went from irreverence to piety and back again at the flip of a coin, his capacity for lyrical improvisation often bordering on the extraordinary.(4)

As a more earnest young fellow, I used to get a bit pissed off with various 'placeholder' lyrics that seem to survive on many of the VU’s not-released-at-the-time recordings – my assumption always being that these were just some nonsense and bad taste joke stuff that Lou knocked out as a guide track, meaning to replace them with something more refined at a later date. But now I think I understand that such improvisation was the basis of his whole approach to song-writing (or at least, the best, least preppy parts of his songwriting) – an approach in which the actual content of the verses very much came last, in which the song’s title and emotional ‘feel’ were instead very much the key component, slowly subliminating the accompanying verbiage over a matter of months or even years.

True, the undercurrent of cheery sexual violence that mars the otherwise incomparably brilliant ‘Foggy Notion’ still grates (presumably the work of the same heeeelarious Lou Reed who deadpanned through ‘I Wanna Be Black’ many years later), but whatever, I can live with it. And I certainly don’t have to force a grin for the nonsense verses on ‘She’s My Best Friend’, which provide a black horse pick for one of my favourite Reed lyrics ever:

“Here’s to Newspaper Joe / knocked his teeth on the floor / caught his hand in the door / I guess that’s the way the news goes”.

 Edward Lear eat your heart out. Cracks me up every time.

The thing about stuff like this though is that it only works once – do it today, and then throw it away. I was quite depressed when I once listened to an (extremely bad) version of ‘..Best Friend’ that Reed re-recorded in 1976-ish, to hear all that silly old rubbish still there, in exactly the same place, as if Lou had listened back to the old recording, scratched his chin and thought “hmm, yes, that is rather amusing”, grimly carving it for all time into the Official Lou Reed Book of Beautiful Poetry (I bet they keep a copy in a glass case at the ‘Rock N Roll Hall Of Fame’), the rancid icing on the lumbering, digital funk hash that his band of the day were busy making of the breezy, strummin’ bubblegum of the Velvets original.

I want to stay positive though, so let’s back straight back to the ‘60s and slam the door.

I was meaning to continue with an emotional trawl through the various extant versions of one of my favourite Reed numbers, ‘Sweet Jane’, but it is now the weekend. And I promised myself I’d post this at the weekend, so… you’ll have to excuse me gentlemen, I’m not quite feeling myself this evening, and, I….

…..

..

Nurse! Nurse! Come quickly!





(1) Well except Doug Yule I suppose. He just seems like a nice bloke who wanted to play some tunes.

(2) And enough with that “bard of Manhattan” jive by the way – like just about all the most successful New York art/glam/punk types, Lou moved in from elsewhere, moneyed and educated in advance.

(3) I think it’s kind of a great cover actually, but total WTF in the context of a Lou Reed album.

(4) Although we’re obviously just talking Reed here, you can of course check out ‘Temptation Inside Your Heart’ for a demonstration of how brilliantly the VU’s collective spontaneity and irreverence toward their own work functioned – hopefully it speaks for itself.

Labels: deathblog, Lou Reed, rambling, The Velvet Underground

Presenting for your listening pleasure, the sixth annual Stereo Sanctity / Breakfast In The Ruins Halloween Mix!

I fear this year’s comp may prove a slightly more gruelling listen that previous years, for the simple reason that, after six years, I’m running pretty low on good, horror-themed rock n’roll songs, necessitating a move toward a greater proportion of soundtrack stuff, random instrumental creepery and general noise. Of course, there’s still old Halloween comp perennials like The Cramps, The Misfits, The Flesh Eaters and Electric Wizard to keep you grounded amid the charnel atmos, and I’ve also dug up some old favourites from my archive of old movie samples, so… approach with open ears and a singularly weird and unsettling journey awaits (I hope).

Probably available for a limited time only, due to the near-impossibility of keeping downloadable files up for long on the increasingly locked down corporate internet, but as ever, if you miss it, just give me a shout.

Labels: halloween, mixtapes

By now you’ve no doubt heard the sad news about Lou Reed.

I was actually all ready to go with my annual Halloween compilation this evening, but in honour of this, I’ll leave it a few days and post it mid-week.

Obviously it’s difficult to come up with a proper tribute to a figure as multi-faceted and divisive as Lou Reed at the drop of a hat, but during this week I’ll try to come up with some stuff to do him justice, maybe post next weekend.

Normally that would be a case of busting out an artists’ back catalogue and having a good ol’ session of remembrance, but there’s no point doing that this time, because very little time goes by when I’m not listening to, or thinking about, some aspect of The Velvet Underground’s work.

Just this morning, the original album version of ‘Waiting For The Man’ popped up on my mp3 player as I walked out to do some grocery shopping, reminding me for the first time in a while of how great and unusual the recoding and arrangement is on that track, making me wonder about the fuzzy edge on the guitar, and about how radical the relentless droniness of it still sounds, and about who was playing that one note piano bit when all sources say that track was probably a live take with no overdubs. Just under two weeks ago, I was riding back from the airport with ‘Live ‘69’ on my headphones, making me cry and then cheering me up again and making me cry in a happy way. Various times recently, I could have been found striding around the place lost in the incredible demo versions and ‘Sweet Jane’ and ‘Rock n’ Roll’, feeling right jubilant and nudging them up my “songs I’d probably like played at my funeral” list.

That’s the space of about a month. I’ve been listening to the VU since I was about eighteen. I’m not sick of hearing anything that they recorded yet. Hell, if they’d only ever recorded one song, I probably wouldn’t be sick of it yet. Some kindsa love, the possibilities are endless, and for me to miss one…. etc etc.

So there ya go.

We’ll return to all this later anyway. In the meantime, don’t let it spoil your Halloween.

Labels: deathblog, Lou Reed, The Velvet Underground

Before they played a note, I knew that City Yelps from Leeds were my kind of band.

How did I know? I dunno. Just a feeling. The kind of spider sense that comes from nearly fifteen years of doing this rubbish I suppose. I liked the way they seem to have shunned any kind of self-publicity or web presence, instead distributing paper-based ‘newsletters’ of in-jokes and photocopied scrawl. I liked the matter-of-fact semi-nervousness with which they plugged themselves in on-stage. And when they actually got going, verily I was content that I’d picked a winner. The kind of group who presumably do not aspire to generate exultant write-ups or over-eager fans, content as they are to keep their heads down, define their own parameters and concentrate on the basic business of being good within them.

I liked the way that their only concession to doing anything other than plugging in cheap instruments and playing them was a Danelectro echo pedal connected up to guitarist/singer Shaun’s microphone. This appeared to be quite a daring new addition to their chosen aesthetic, and indeed he got a bit miffed when the batteries ran out halfway through the set, disconnecting it with some muttering about what a bloody waste of time that was, etc.

Thus far, I seem to have defined my liking for City Yelps in terms of what they are not and what they do not do, but I really don’t think that should be taken as a negative stance. Presumably steadfast devotees of the spirit of Swell Maps, early Fall and 4-track era Flying Nun (but not in such a way that anyone would waste time shouting about it in a press release of course), City Yelps sound like, when all the bullshit started happened to the music they liked (cf: industry, ‘influence’, hype, PR and hassle), they simply went away and locked the doors. Good for them. By refusing to participate in what repels us, we all grow stronger.

The gig I referred to above took place ages ago (April? May?), so perhaps my memory isn’t all that, but I remember the band saying something vaguely self-deprecating on stage about the their attempt to make ‘poverty stricken psychedelia’, and that is indeed what they head for on the title track of this brief CD EP – straight-to-practice-amp trebly guitar tone, water-treading rhythm section and mumbled, low register vox rumbling around to create five minutes of the kind of eerie immersion that all those boys with their silver cases full of boutique gear currently trading under increasingly abused ‘psyche’ banner would have trouble matching. I couldn’t really tell you quite why I like it, but I do. (A few little bits of dissonant piano floundering thrown into the mix work very well – none-more-Swell Maps, natch.)

The two other tracks here – ‘Lawns’ and ‘Citizen Yelps’ - are much shorter, and stick to a faster, more ostensibly punk approach whose wrecked/miffed tone pleases me greatly, putting me in mind of both of The Real Numbers, and of that great Crawling Age CD-R from (christ, was it really) a few years back. (No surprise perhaps, given that the aforementioned Shaun was one of the individuals responsible for the latter, and I’m pretty sure I saw him drumming for the former when they played in London.)

Though these songs have nice, loud, serviceable recordings, those who wish things to sound normal will initially be perturbed by the near-invisibility of the vocals, which hover at the bottom of the mix sounding more like slurred background commentary than a primary element in proceedings. Now, I for one generally favour low, semi-comprehensible singing these days, but even I was a bit like, “seriously fellas, what happened to the vocals?” on first listen. Pretty quickly though, I began to dig it, and furthermore realised that, despite Mr. Shaun’s apparent reticence as a vocalist, I can still actually hear most of what he’s going on about quite clearly. And what he is going on about sounds kind of interesting too. Like a listener to any good weirdo punk song, I am confused, and intrigued.

I realise that thus far this must all sound like yr standard sort of 21st century low-effort, lo-fi business, but I would nonetheless contend that this EP, despite (or perhaps even because of) the casual-listener-harvesting challenges it provides, is extremely good, nay timeless, stuff. Rather than using a lo-fi aesthetic to mask sloppiness and self-indulgence, City Yelps sound like a very dedicated band masquerading as a “we couldn’t give a monkeys, we’re just having a laugh” band (always a welcome combination), trying very hard to produce good music in a context that they feel is honest, comfortable and cheap. And they succeed very well, if I’m any judge. The guitar playing is excellent, the melodies and lyrics are unconventional and somewhat interesting, the bass and drums bang away with an appropriately off-kilter groove (as opposed to the increasingly popular option of ‘entirely lacking a groove’), and the ‘feel’ is right there.

It’s very good, go listen to it.

---

When I bought this CD from Trev back in April or May or whenever, he told me that I’d bagged one of the last independently circulating copies, so I dunno if you stand much chance of finding a physical copy anymore. I think you might still be able to get one if you subscribe to the current Oddbox singles club (EP club?) thingy (try your luck!) or failing that I suppose you could go to Leeds and bother the band until they burn you a copy or something.

Little additional City Yelps info is forthcoming on this confangled ‘internet’, but here are some scans of their newsletters to aid the curious.

Labels: City Yelps, singles reviews

Lee Hazlewood’s first LP under his own name, ‘Trouble is a Lonesome Town’ in a sense functions as a chronologically incompatible bridge between the (ineffably wonderful) International Submarine Band sessions he oversaw a few years later and the far more louche / urban MGM albums that established his recording persona for good towards the end of the decade.

Lee’s eccentricities were already getting the better of him here though, and, for reasons best known to himself, he decided to corral his songs together into a sort of proto-concept album, with each track preceded by a ramblin’ spoken word introduction concerning the simple-minded populace of an isolated town named ‘Trouble’ (allegedly based on Hazlewood's own birthplace in Mannford, Oklahoma).

Unfortunately, these introductions – sometimes almost as long as the flawlessly concise songs they’re introducing – are fairly tedious, containing little of the dry wit and off-hand pessimism evidenced in the compositions themselves, and instead hewing toward a kind of cloying Lake-Wobegon-Days coziness. They’re good for one listen at best, and if subsequently scanning through them to get to the good bits on my mp3 player proves a bit of a pain, getting up every two and a half minutes to jog the needle on the original LP must have been absolutely infuriating - one good reason perhaps why ‘Trouble..’ faded into obscurity and Lee exited his deal with Mercury post-haste.

This, needless to say, is a shame, because when you do get to the songs on ‘Trouble..’, they are almost all excellent – disarmingly simple, two minute / three chord country songs that sound so instantly catchy and familiar, you’re amazed no one had written them before. Performed with tight, minimal backing and just enough off-kilter strangeness to keep you on your toes, the breeziness of the tunes and the cartoonish simplicity of the lyrics as ever plays trojan horse to the weird darkness beneath.

As an opener, ‘Long Black Train’verily owns the concept of writing a song entitled ‘Long Black Train’, Hazlewood’s voice crawling snake-like across the title just as beautifully as you might hope as the rhythm section walks the dog behind him; “ninety-nine years, is what he’ll get / I bet it feels like a hundred to Jim”. Yes, one track in on his debut album and I’m already far-gone in thrall to Hazlewoodism.

‘Son of a Gun’, ‘Run, Boy, Run’ and ‘Six Feet of Chain’ are all just as good – happy, laidback sketches of death and sex, imprisonment and criminality that see no reason to break the rhyme scheme or outstay their welcome. Hopefully I’m not just saying this due to the synchronicitous song title, but it’s easy to imagine The Vaselines playing this one a lot as they threw together the off-hand magic of tunes like ‘Ride Me Rory’; a similarly timeless, unhurried feel is very much in evidence.

I suppose it stands to reason that Johnny Cash was a big influence on the kind of style Hazlewood was gunning for here, and, given the Man in Black’s penchant for scooping up catchy, novelty country songs by the dozen during the ‘60s, it’s surprising that his people weren’t on the phone to Hazlewood’s publishers PDQ after this album’s release. (Hell, this stuff’s even in the right key, ferchrissake.) In a different world, I’d bet Cash could have ridden any of these numbers to the top of the charts, perhaps sending Lee’s career off on a rather different path in the process. As it is though, maybe JC, like most everyone else, just couldn’t be bothered to get through the spoken word bits. He was a busy man, after all. Pills to take, prisons to visit and all that.

Well, c’est la vie. Maybe in that world we’d never have gotten ‘Cowboy in Sweden’, or Nancy &  Lee, or ‘Requiem for an Almost Lady’. By plotting his own course straight to the land of the strange, Lee remained his own man, and… that’s the only it could be, I’m sure he’d agree, even if his bank balance didn’t.


I hear that at some point this year, there’s a sorta ‘cover album’ emerging on which various tedious indie-rock types re-record ‘Trouble is a Lonesome Town’ – a good idea actually I think, as these songs have tons of mileage left in ‘em (frankly, every band in the world could benefit from covering one). Details yonder.

Meanwhile, a resissue of the original with a ton of bonus tracks can currently be gotten from Light In The Attic.

Labels: album reviews, country, Lee Hazlewood

Right. Let’s get this this thing back on track, with some words on my favourite LP of the year thus far (ok, so it was released late 2012, but I doubt many copies crossed the pond prior to the new year, so let’s not split hairs).

I’ve long been meaning to find the time / words / impetus to write a big overview on Cheater Slicks, a band whose work has crept up on me slowly over the past few years, making a bit of a dent in my heart & soul in the process.

Never the “FIRST LISTEN = AWESOME” proposition their ‘90s record companies may have wished for, Cheater Slicks is more the kind of thing you need to let sink in gradually. Impatient listeners, hitting up early albums like ‘Destination Lonely’ (’92) or ‘Don’t Like You (’95), may have written them off as just a competent garage-punk band, lurking somewhere between Mudhoney and Jon Spencer, and moved on. But keep listening, delve deeper, plough forward through the discography, and one grey day when your spirits hit the same Venn diagram as theirs, you’ll get it.

Having doggedly stuck it out for decades in the face of general critical and audience indifference, the group’s siege mentality has (in purely musical terms at least) done them a world of good, allowing them to hone their craft and bolster their defenses with a general spirit of non-damn-giving that seems to make their output stronger and more immovable as time goes on, to the extent that ‘..Grape’ strikes me as about the best record they’ve ever made (well, best one I've HEARD anyway - still some gaps to cover in my collection).

What they do is blues essentially – not in form, but in feeling; the blues of a frustrated, unremarkable middle-aged man, stuck in the rain in some shithole city. It’s a tough gig, but it’s an honest one, and Cheater Slicks have been covering their chosen beat for so long, they can pull you along for the ride with a rare mixture of monolithic brute force and great subtlety that makes for truly affecting rock music.

Since I’ve evoked the “frustrated ugly man” demographic, let us please stress that Cheater Slicks are coming at it from a rather different angle, and those understandably wary of such conjurations should not be unduly put off. Not for them the belligerent, self-conscious machismo of a group like Pissed Jeans, nor the try-hard hurdy-gurdying of your nearest plague of Birthday Party disciples. In fact, even to mention this stuff in the same breath as our heroes seems a horribly crass misstep, just as a few spins of ‘Reality is a Grape’ tends to make any music betraying even the slightest hint of artifice sound like a bad joke in comparison. But we’ve got to clear the air.

So let’s start again. Dana Hatch’s usually rather strident drumming takes a back seat on ‘..Grape’, perhaps a reflection of the long-term health problems that put the band on hold for a few years prior to this album (a circumstance that also perhaps contributes to the hefty emotional whack these songs carry). Whilst he keeps time though, Tom & David Shannon’s guitars achieve what I think veteran rock/noise listeners should be able to recognise as singular heights of unlikely beauty. Long-time dons of low key / non-showy axe magic, these guys have a better understanding of what makes an electric guitar ring true and hit the right synapses than, well… you or I, for a start. Straight out of the gate, this is one of the heaviest Slicks records I’ve heard to date. The familiar Velvets/Crazy Horse strum-drifts and cracked tremolo leads of their best late ‘90s work, though still present amid the foundations, are swiftly overtaken by an arms race of successive pedal-drops, building up a palette of tummy-rumbling low-end, nasty thug/trash low-mid compression and ear damaging treble that creates a mighty wall of knotty speaker-blare, occasionally even pushing toward Les Rallizes Denudes levels of full-spectrum blow-out.

Within this racket though, thought and tenderness is ever in evidence. What these guys are working with here is over two decades of musical interplay, twenty-something years of learning to express themselves through the means of heavily processed strings and wood, of learning to carry us with them rather than simply assaulting us, of channeling all excess back into the song.

It may seem odd to wax so lyrical about lumbering temper tantrums like ‘Love Ordeal’ and ‘Psychic Toll’, but just listen to those riffs hammer down and point me toward a new band who can bring guts like this to the party, who can wring the neck of good taste with quite so much impassioned discontent. And moving on from everyday frustrations, there is at points a nigh-on apocalyptic feel going on here too, with Hatch and Tom S. bellowing through ‘Jesus Christ’ and, uh, ‘Apocalypse’ like grizzled sergeants calling their men to safety under heavy fire, polluted rivers parting as the band attain a kind of urban white man’s gospel.

And standing dead centre toward the end of side one, ‘Hold On to Your Soul’, where all this comes together, the kind of track it’s difficult to even consider approaching with words. Let’s just say that when things are looking black in the near future, when I’m walking to some supermarket in the dark wondering if I can be bothered to put one foot in front of the other, I know what I’ll be reaching for on my mp3 player. If I hear any piece of music this year that better reminds me of the reasons why I became so fixated on the strange magic of men manipulating guitars and speaker cabinets in the first place, that better reaffirms for me of the reasons why I should still make the effort, I’ll be very surprised.

In short: Cheater Slicks exposes fake-ass bullshit in seconds. If you are a person who likes rock music, and if you find yourself somewhat alienated by the state much of it has been reduced to since the turn of the century, be bold and grab the affirming flames where you can.

---

Buy the LP (in the USA) from Columbus Discount here.

Get the mp3s from UK Amazon (like I did) here.

Visit Cheater Slicks on Tumblr here.

Labels: album reviews, Cheater Slicks