Launching into a full, superlative-laden, free associative ramble on the subject of Makoto Kawabata & J. Francois Pauvros’s duo set at Café Oto earlier this month would seem surplus to requirements really, so instead let’s just say, it was a hugely enjoyable performance that, whilst it offered nothing particularly surprising or unexpected, nonetheless served to forcibly remind me of how much I love sounds make using electric guitars, and of how exhilarating and just plain fun live improvised music can be under the right circumstances.

Helpfully, Satori took some videos on her magic telephone, which you can see here and here.

If that’s not good enough for you though, randomly numbered ruminations follow.

1. Kawabata-san and M. Pauvros make a great duo, just visually speaking. Very much a “hey, you are your country's version of me” sort of pairing. Whereas Kawabata is quite a stocky gent, Pauvros reaches gangling, Joey Ramone-like proportions, with a permanently drooping head that one imagines developed early in life after the first few dozen damaged door frames. Beyond that though, they’ve both got the same mass of distressed black / grey curls piling over their faces, the same all-in-black combo of loose silk shirt, tight jeans (Kawabata favours flares, Pauvros drainpipe) and pointy black shoes that seems to comprise the internationally recognised uniform of the damaged guitar-god. Kawabata seemed to have raided Café Oto’s cellars for a nice bottle of sake (presumably a rare treat for a touring Japanese musician), and pre-set could be seen strolling around the vicinity of the venue, bottle and glass in hand, in search of a quiet spot in which to enjoy a few sips. I didn’t notice Pauvros drinking anything. Internet research suggests the two of them have been playing and recording together since at least 2000, if yr interested.

2. It’s a guitar thing. I can’t stress that strongly enough. Though much of this set leaned heavily on noise and drone, it is the physical presence of the instrument that keeps it real for me. Much of the time, electronic noise generated from computers or keys or non-input mixers or whatever leaves me cold, unable to connect. But somehow, when I aware that this or that mass of sound is the result of direct human manipulation of this electrified thing made of wood and wire, channelling physical movement and energy-release into what we hear, drawing arcs through that magical space between the pick-up and the amp speaker, it makes me incredibly excited. Even on a noise record, where the sound is likely processed to such an extent that its origin is entirely obscure, it is the knowledge that there’s a guitar (or, I suppose, other stringed instrument) in the mix that gets me hopping. You’d be hard-pressed to identify yr average Skullflower or Sunroof! Record as “guitar playing”, I suppose, but I’d still take Matthew Bower over Merzbow any day, just because, you know – guitar.

And when you can see that guitar, and follow the player’s journey physically as well as sonically, well… all the better! The more noise-inclined segments of M. Pauvros and Kawabata-san’s set proved a great demonstration of this, and their performance proved far more of a *performance* than is often the case when two people sit on chairs to manipulate a bunch of noise-making equipment. For those close enough to the action, watching the pair scramble and wrestle with their gear and props whilst hearing the results of their exertions shrieking all around was a pleasure that went far beyond mere “oh, he turned that pedal off and that one on” type guitar nerdery. It was closer in fact to the kind of enjoyment you might get from watching a real out-to-lunch free jazz ensemble… you know, physical. Dancing on the spot with buttons and wires and strings. Just with a hell of a lot more wah and fuzz and feedback and loop-ery and all that other good stuff that the jazzers don’t really care for, but that keeps pulling us meatheads back to the eternal mysteries of those little sweatshop-built 9V boxes and brand name amplifiers.

3. I get the feeling that those coming to this set from a more serious avant background may have been far more dismissive than I, via a vis issues of predictability and use of gimmicks. And indeed, the duo’s sets was very much factored around demonstrations of the players’ favourite tricks, split into pre-ordained segments of a certain length in a manner liable to bum out the improv heads. “Ok, first we’ll do the thing where I have that bronze disc underneath the strings for about ten minutes, then we’ll do a big storm of noise thing, then I’ll do the drone thing with the screwdriver for a while. Then we can both get our bows out and do some bowed guitar until that gets boring, then we’ll build up slowly to some more noise, then hit some wild shredding for a bit and we’re done. What do you think?”

I appreciate how such pre-fab technique demonstrations may seem inherently corny to some listeners, but from my own point of view, it was the fact the players were approaching things from a more bawdy, rockist perspective than is usual in this music that helped make it so much fun. I always appreciate musicians who level with their audiences and keep their machinations transparent, and the unspoken “hey, you thought that last bit was good, check this out” dialogue of Pauvros and Kawabata’s set chimed with me perfectly.

4. I’d never heard of Pauvros before. Sadly, the linguistic chasm that renders much French culture inaccessible to us monolingual dolts seems to have kept his work pretty obscure, but he proves to be a really great player. He has big hands, his guitar has thick strings, but he plays very soft, winding nets of slow, gentle, clean-toned twangs through this set’s absolutely stellar opening section, before, cued in by a sudden rise in the level of racket Kawabata is kicking up, he grabs the twang bar and hits hard, setting off an apocalyptic blast of Spaghetti Western fuzz-twang that knocked my block off. Intermittent problems with his appropriately battered looking array of pedals added interest and randomness to the set, and his elegant reaction to such setbacks – relaxed, slightly miffed, gently kicking jack plugs back into place with his cowboy boots – was a joy to behold. (English speakers can attempt to find out a bit more about Pauvros here.)

5. Tension was maintained throughout the set by the players’ refusal to really ‘bust loose’ on what we know (or assume) is their mighty shred ability. ‘Wanted Dead or Alive: SPEED GURU’ proclaims Kawabata-san’s merch table t-shirts (sadly they didn’t have one left in my size), but sound over technique is the order of the day here, concentrating largely on tone and noise, with Kawabata often falling back on his screwdriver drones as Pauvros occasionally breaks out shaky, clean-toned note scrambles here and there, whilst the closest to conventional interplay the pair get is trading dreamy, post-rock-ish riffs in one of the drifty down-times between noise outbursts. Until that is, at the height of the set’s third or fourth apocalyptic noise meltdown, they heed some unseen signal and GO FOR IT, diving into an absolutely breath-taking thirty seconds of high velocity macho free-shred so staggering it almost has me literally staggering, backward into the side of Café Oto’s long-suffering piano. Whoa.

6. LAST WORD: This was a seventy minute set of improvised music performed by two seated men who didn’t look up or engage with the audience at any point, but to me it felt like twenty minutes max. They had me captivated throughout, never even thinking of looking at my watch or wondering whether I fancied another drink, and they left me feeling energised, flipped out, happy. I don’t know whether this is something you regularly experience with such music, dear reader, but for me it’s been a while. It’s good to be back.

Labels: J. Francois Pauvros, Kawabata Makoto, live reviews

Since it began creeping in on 2005’s ‘City Fallen Leaves’, the “wistful look back at sepia-tinted past” approach has become one of the dominant modes of Comet Gain’s song-writing.

On that album, this nostalgia (of the personal rather than cultural variety, you’ll note) came spiked with blind anger, loneliness and despair – a kind of late 30s rage against the dying of an unfulfilled youth, pushed toward a bleak and equally distraught middle age.

By the time we reach ‘Paperback Ghosts’ a decade later though, things have obviously changed a lot. The band has settled into a far more gentle and contented brand of contemplation, repeatedly reflecting on the need to pull beauty out of life in the here and now without forgetting the past, and so on and so forth. And like the doting relative sinking into a big armchair in a posh pub after dinner, they are disinclined to leave this particular spot without good reason.

Whereas ‘City Fallen Leaves’ saw David Feck channelling a battered and bruised night-bus refugee from some hellish weekend of spiteful London disaster, feedback of some shit club ringing in his ears as he staggered off into the night, now his songs feel more like the musings of a comfortably settled former hipster [hopefully I don't need to tell you that I mean the older, more positive useage of the word], relaxing in his flat on a leafy street of a Sunday afternoon, as his wife potters about in the garden. Pulling dusty paperbacks off reassuringly wooden shelves, re-reading the sleevenotes on the back of old LPs, endlessly cogitating on memories of the triumphs and nightmares that have brought him here - the character at the heart of these songs has made good, insofar as such characters ever can. But where the hell does that leave his rock band, that’s the question.

Well rest assured, the opening track here, ‘Long After Tonight’s Candles are Blown’, is magnificent – a song that works so well, capturing the overall mood and message of this album so beautifully, it makes much of what follows it feel pretty surplus to requirements. This is stately, grown up indie guitar music of a quite glorious vintage, each lyric drawn out just right as it falls against the gossamer backing of overlaid guitar-tangle, lonesome violin and brushed drum shuffle, hitting a level of affirmative poignancy that matches the band’s very best moments from the past, as it mixes up the universal and the personal carefully enough to really hit us hard; “..from Beverley Road to Junction Road / and on the stage tonight / the guitars break / we make mistakes / freeze-framed in our own dawn light / we are holding on to life / because heaven, is a lie”. It’s like a happy ending to all the strife that’s come before. A real knock-out.

After that, it’s hard to know where the record can go really. ‘Sad Love And Other Stories’ and ‘Behind The House She Lived In’ jangle away in pleasant enough fashion (those who liked ‘An Arcade..’ and ‘She Had Daydreams’ from the previous album will enjoy them), and ‘Wait til December’ provides some sketchy, heart of sleeve meandering that seems of-a-piece with the slow, less successful songs on ‘Howl of the Lonely Crowd’. But with the first song having set out the album’s stall so powerfully, it’s hard to escape an “our work here is done” sort of feeling, as side one absent-mindedly wanders on.

Indeed, the album is so settled into its reflective, low key kinda mood by this point that the group’s sporadic attempts to rouse it into action begin to feel a bit forced (like that aforementioned relative painfully extracting him/herself from the upholstery when the dogs are barking or the children are making a mess). As such, the LP’s more lively excursions begin to just feel like character studies - curious tangents lifted from random page openings of those prized Oxfam finds, too distant to really foster much emotional engagement.

For ‘Breaking Open The Head (part. 1)’, I assume our hero is flicking through some decadent chronicle of ‘60s counter-culture psychonautic daring-do, as this direct cousin of the previous LP’s Velvetised psyche-punk beatnik biog ‘Herbert Huncke’ swiftly stomps through references to Philip K. Dick and Brion Gysin, dream machines and invisible universes. It’s perfectly good, but more “gosh, that’s quite interesting” than something that’s really going to put a crack in your noggin (or even lead you to reassess your plans for the afternoon).

The chipper indie-pop of ‘Avenue Girls’ fares better, with David turning back to some of his beloved British New Wave – a Penguin edition of ‘A Kind of Loving’ or ‘Georgy Girl’ perhaps - full of lost girls with blonde bangs in their mothers’ borrowed overcoats, staring out to sea after an altercation at the fairground - all that kinda shit. We’ve been here before, far too many times, but the sweet whirl of the song pulls us in, at least for a minute or two, reminding us that, actually, this kind of music is quite nice sometimes, isn’t it? When it's done well, I mean.

Somewhere within that organ swirl and jangle, I can feel that particular cultural anchor, forever pulling me back (because yeah, I’ve got all these books on the shelf too, even if I’ve not read them for a while). In the same category, the chorus to ‘The Last Love Letter’ invites us to embrace “the first words, that I thought of”, in the spirit of which I'll just say: lovely. No other word needed. Shut off your twee-deflectors for a while, and enjoy a really good song, nicely done.

The spirit of random shelf browsing spills over into the more mellow numbers too, as Feck’s apparent increasing interest in esoteric subject matter and disinclination to give a fuck now that his cult songwriter cred is firmly re-established sees all kinds of weird allusions popping up in the midst of what would previously have been the strict social realism of his more introspective moments. Pirate ships, minotaurs, John Dee, The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band and a rather torturous metaphor built around Blake’s ‘The Ghost of a Flea’, all get a look in, whilst the scarlet shadow of Marjorie Cameron herself is apparently evoked at one point (or so says the press release). The elliptical ‘Sixteen Oh Four’ meanwhile concerns itself entirely with Rosicrucianism, insofar as I can tell. Let’s hope that all this succeeds in putting the wind up at least one or two blinkered indie-pop purists, but to be honest it often stands out as pretty bulbous and peculiar within the neat n’ shiny, string-enhanced shimmer of these songs’ somewhat overwrought, wedding cakey production.

Even the dogged punk grind of closing track ‘Confessions of a Daydream’ – a noble attempt to send us off on a defiant eterna-groove, ala the title track of ‘Realistes’ - doesn’t quite spit and snarl the way it should, as a few bracing minutes of impassioned stream of consciousness wordplay trail off into a murky cod-psychedelic disaster (including a spoken word guest slot from that bloke out of The Yummy Fur) that would have been hilarious if they’d blundered into it on stage, but feels a bit ‘off’ when closing an otherwise obsessively scrubbed up & mannered long-player.

Well, at least I suppose it leaves us staggering off into the dark again, reassuringly unsure of ourselves, even if you get the feeling that this time ‘round, David’s just taking out the bins before returning to his armchair, rather than marching off headfirst into a troubled and tormented night. And good for him, and good on the rest of the band too – like the past 20 years’ worth of Teenage Fanclub records, there is a happy feeling at the heart of ‘Paperback Ghosts’ that’s hard to begrudge its creators.

Taking my “long-standing Comet Gain fan” hat off for a moment, ‘Paperback Ghosts’ is a not record that I can objectively defend or recommend to any great extent. In terms of sound and song-writing it is almost certainly the band’s weakest LP to date (which admittedly makes it the weakest in a very strong field), and, one or two stand-out tracks aside, I’d probably advise those who aren’t diehard CG fans to approach with caution. If you’re not on the bus already, this isn’t the best place to buy a ticket.

For those of us in for the long haul though, to feel disappointed at the relative failings of an album as assuredly warm-hearted as ‘Paperback Ghosts’ seems churlish by this stage - like receiving a holiday postcard from an old friend and complaining about the hand-writing.

Labels: album reviews, Comet Gain

So you probably already heard about Tommy Ramone over the weekend, I suppose. It’s interesting to note that the stature of The Ramones has apparently increased in recent years to the point where even the squarest of mainstream news sources were compelled to cobble together a tribute. (And rightly so, of course.)

It’s not been a great year or so for The Best Bands of All Time, has it? No more Stooges left, even if it looks like Iggy is set to live through a nuclear winter, Lou Reed’s passing puts a big full-stop on the story of the VU, and now The (original) Ramones are 100% gone – the recording of that first album is now lost to living memory, secondary sources only, not much closer to us than the Boxer Rebellion or Napoleon’s exile. It’s almost eerie, the totality with which these four guys – of whom Tommy was the oldest, at 62 – have met their maker in untimely fashion.

Those scanning a canned obit in the Sunday papers and shrugging it off with “oh, drugs, rock stars blah blah blah” may wish to recall that DeeDee was the only Ramone to die from the results of drug abuse, and indeed the only one who ever suffered from such problems to a noteworthy extent. Tommy by contrast always seemed pretty healthy and sensible guy (I particularly like DeeDee's admiring comment in his autobiography, that Tommy was the only member of the band who was able to buy meat and potatoes and single-handedly cook himself dinner, as if that was some ability completely beyond the ken of the others), and he hadn’t even toured with the band since the late ‘70s. Bile duct cancer isn’t the kind of thing that zeroes in on bad boys in leather jackets – like the vast majority of cancer deaths, it’s just random, and sad, with no ill-informed talk of fate and lifestyle guilt needed.

Though he was only officially ‘Tommy Ramone’ for a few years, Thomas Erdelyi always seemed like a great guy. Here are but a few of the things he did, beyond setting the template for punk rock drumming for decades to come.

1. Like most truly great bands (I suppose?), each member of the original Ramones line-up was an integral part of the whole they created. Their contributions can be chopped up equally, more or less – 25% each – and I have no time for bickering arguments about who was the more or less important among their number. Remove any one of them and the entity we know as “The Ramones” would not have existed. Tommy, as those who even remotely care will no doubt be aware, was the *organiser* - the guy who did pretty much everything to make the band happen during their first few years together. Booking practice, getting equipment, convincing the others that their songs were actually good and that being in a band was worth doing, booking gigs, recording demos, recording the albums, random managerial duties… you name it. Seems likely the others would never have got past the ‘pissing about on a Saturday afternoon’ stage without his input.

2. He also wrote ‘I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend’, and provided the initial draft for ‘Blitzkrieg Bop’, so surely that alone makes his life worthy of celebration.

3. The production on the first album – what can you say in the face of such utilitarian rock n’ roll genius? Bass on the left, guitar on the right, drums in the middle – no worries. Back when I was a teenager and a friend first lent me a Ramones tape, he told me that they’d recorded it that way because that’s where the amps were placed in the studio, and they put all the mics in the middle. I don’t know whether or not that’s true, but it’s a good story. I seem to recall reading that, having hired this big, empty studio for the band to record in, Tommy and Craig Leon just figured it all out from scratch, doing whatever seemed to work. It’s definitely got that sound about it – a straight, functional document of the band playing, figured out piece by piece with no external meddling or extraneous sounds whatsoever, and the results will live forever.

Whereas other good ‘70s punk records tend to present a dense, mad racket or a riot of screeching blather (which is great, don't get me wrong), ‘Ramones’ has a pure minimalism to it that sometimes seems closer to ESG or Young Marble Giants, and that, at the time, must have sounded completely new in rock music – everything on show with zero flash, instantly understandable and copy-able to the kids back home. It is this sound, as much as the simplicity of the songs and the performances, that lent ‘70s punk its WE-CAN-DO-THIS-TOO, ‘levelling of the land’ effect. How many bands across all sub-genres in your record collection might never have been formed if teenagers across the world hadn’t put this on, and realised they could play along?

4. And, just a few years after he was scratching his head over where to put the mics, ‘Road To Ruin’, also recorded by Tommy, takes the complete opposite approach - a big, classic, professionally produced rock record that just sounds AMAZING. I have an original pressing of this one on vinyl, and I am consistently stunned at how brilliant it sounds compared to other records of its era – such a bright, bold, monolithic sound, exhilarating but also quite nuanced, with all these lovely touches on the slower songs. As much as I usually tend to fall on the side of the lo-fi in my listening preferences, this is a perfect example of a band taking a big step up in fidelity and totally winning. Purely from an emotionally neutral, audiophile POV, I think it totally buries the subsequent album they recorded with Phil Spector, which has got to tell you something.

5. By contrast, I continue to think that the albums Erdelyi later recorded for The Replacements (‘Tim’ and ‘Pleased to Meet Me’) sound absolutely *terrible*. In fairness, it’s difficult to gauge how much of this was his fault, as I can’t imagine that working on major label albums in the mid ‘80s for a notoriously unreliable and inebriated band was exactly the most conducive environment for quality music recording. At least he got his groove back for Redd Kross’s ‘Neurotica’ in 1987, which I seem to remember sounds pretty great.

So, there ya go. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you to raise a glass to Tommy Ramone, but maybe raise another one to Tommy Erdelyi whilst you’re at it, and ponder what we might have missed out on without his contribution to the past 40 years of rock n' roll.

Labels: deathblog, The Ramones, Thomas Erdelyi, Tommy Ramone

“With CHAIN & The GANG there are no excursions, no diversions… no trip to the moon, no jaunt to inner space… nothing original, no new system to integrate… just SIMPLE facts & BASIC math. Fewer WORDS, fewer BEATS, fewer NOTES… you’re tired of hearing them, we’re tired of making them…”

Bravely defying the long-standing convention that sees rock n’ roll groups beginning their LPs with a call toward energy and motion (y’know,‘Get Up’, ‘Raw Power’, something like that), Chain & The Gang instead open their latest vinyl missive by declaring their intent to ‘Devitalize’ - exhorting their listeners to shut up shop, to “just go home”, and, most scandalously for the dyed-in-the-wool rock n’ roller, to “keep it down”.

In an era in which we are urged by our suppliers of electronic equipment and accompanying media content to ‘think positive’, to ‘move forward’, whilst the geopolitical landscape around us slides ever-further into the dark ages, Chain & The Gang offer a welcome reaffirmation of negativity in rock n’ roll.

They are, as Ian Svenonious was keen to remind us during a recent performance at London’s Tufnell Park Dome, the only group of their kind. Beginning their career in 2010 with a cry of “down with liberty… up with chains!”, they are the only group who seek to impose a limit upon self-expression, who acknowledge that “originality is the enemy”. They are the only group (in the entire history of Western popular music, more likely than not) who proudly declare themselves to be pro-censorship. They recognise, no doubt, that censorship is always with us – no more opposable than gravity - and that the real question is: who censors who? Only by engaging, instead of blithely disowning, can we stand a chance of moving from the second ‘who’ to the first.

As Ian S. might well cop, the key to writing an effective political pop song is to appear extremely specific in your demands, whilst remaining extremely vague. The Chris Hillman/Gram Parsons-composed country-rock standard ‘Sin City’ (as performed by both The Flying Burrito Brothers and The Mekons within my own record collection) provides a good example. A spirited diatribe on the subject of civic corruption within an unnamed town that may or may not be intended as a microcosm of wider society, the song purports to communicate a great deal of information, praising some participants in the struggle, whilst condemning others to a storm of divine vengeance.

In spite of such apparently clear sentiments though, further analysis of the lyrics reveal the songwriters’ message to be ambiguous in the extreme. Depending on each listener’s personal understanding of such nebulous concepts as ‘sin’ and ‘clean[ing] up this town’, the song could be taken to represent either an extreme left wing or extreme right wing viewpoint, or alternatively could be adopted as an anthem for just about any single-issue pressure group you’d care to name.

The way the song succeeds however is by distracting our attention from this chronic lack of specificity simply by offering a composition so compelling and apparently heart-felt that it is nigh-on impossible for us not to get swept up in its ‘message’, and thus map its generalities over our own specific concerns. In fact, when performed well, the song generates such a weight of righteous indignation that even a listener wholly lacking in political conviction will find him or herself forced to affect an opinion for the duration of the song, thus to temporarily share in the emotions the performers are conveying. Like a successful politician, the song sells the idea of an outsider’s struggle for fairness and decency against a greedy, autocratic enemy so well that the actual details of the speaker’s platform become irrelevant.

Chain & The Gang do not perform ‘Sin City’, either on this record, or anywhere else to my knowledge. I’m sure they realise perfectly well that such material would not become them. Discussing the song at length as part of an assessment of their work is an unwarranted digression on my part, for which I apologise.

Nonetheless though, I feel that the lessons we can learn from examining the song provide a pertinent demonstration of the machinations common to socio-political songwriting - the same machinations that Chain & The Gang seek both to exploit and to deconstruct, allowing us to enjoy them whilst also exposing their workings to plain view.

Masterpieces of opaqueness, the songs performed by Chain & The Gang, particularly those found on ‘Minimum Rock n’ Roll’, are built from apparently innocent snatches of associative wordplay and playful mutations of common phraseology. ‘Mum’s The Word’, they sing. ‘Crime Don’t Pay’. ‘Got To Have It Every Day’. By further investigating the logic of these apparently banal pronouncements though, the group seek to create a base-level dialogue on the language of confinement and freedom, need and surplus, free will and determinism, power and lack thereof, that will (one hopes) prove applicable to most potential situations.

Just as Chain & The Gang strive to offer a convincing vision of implacable ‘cool’ (both musical & sartorial) that transcends temporal and geographical boundaries, so their songs aim at addressing questions common to all systems and power structures. “I got to have it every day”, Svenonious chants during the song of that name. “I don’t care how I get it / I could get it from a tree / I could get it from a stone / it doesn’t matter at all to me”. But WHAT must he get, the inquiring mind will demand to know, even as the poised musical delivery soothes and reassures. What ‘IT’ are we talking about here? Well, that’s for us to decide. What do YOU need every day? And how do you get it? Chain & The Gang, their dedication to aesthetic minimalism firmly in place, are not going to provide any pointers.

“What are you in here for?”, Ian asks his hypothetical fellow inmates in the song of that name. And, more pointedly, “why are THEY out THERE?” He is “in here”, he conjectures, for “loving too much”, for his “tender touch” . They are “out there” because “their blood runs cold”, because they “do what they’re told”. Upon what scale is the metaphorical construct here supposed to operate? The musical ‘underground’, as opposed to the ‘mainstream’? The poor and powerless of society, as opposed to the enabled rich? The existential ‘outsider’, as opposed to the socially integrated ‘insider’? An actual imagined correctional facility? It really doesn’t matter. Wherever there is an ‘inside’ and an ‘outside’ to contemplate, an ‘us’ and a ‘them’, the song is of use.

By leaving their statements so open to interpretation, wisely stripped of the didactic and retrospectively embarrassing specificity that so often limits the geographic & temporal worth of artistic expressions of discontent, Chain & The Gang are doing a great service to all of us who feel, or may in the future feel, disaffected from our society – maximizing the potential usefulness of their songs, whilst still appearing clear in their declaration of intent.

After experiencing a Chain & The Gang record or concert, the listener is apt to feel certain that the group is driven by strong guiding principles. S/he may even feel an immediate kinship with the gospel they are espousing. But, if questioned, the exact nature of their project remains elusive.

Like all successful producers of ideologically-inclined music, the group are manipulative. Like the writers of ‘Sin City’, they initially make us FEEL their argument, not consider it. BUT, there is a crucial difference at work here. As befits a combo led by a champion of “the responsible use of rock n’ roll”, Chain & The Gang’s manipulations are both transparent and benign. Beyond the ‘feel’ with which they hook us, we find not ill-advised generalities, but questions and challenges. By raising these questions whilst refusing to make so much as a scribble in the ‘answers’ column, the group encourages us to think for ourselves, to adapt the methodology of our own approach to life to the oppositional framework they provide. As quoted above, “SIMPLE facts and BASIC math” are the only building blocks they require.

Unlike many socially engaged musicians, Chain & The Gang are also generous when it comes to ensuring that their records and performances remain wholly entertaining, whether one wants to engage with their wider programme or not. Fervent refuseniks, or those who merely seek a good time - both are welcome, and both will leave satisfied.

In this regard, ‘Minimum Rock n Roll’ is arguably their strongest platter to date, the group’s new credo of minimalism allowing them to deliver tightly-wound, ecumenical doses of rock & funk elements, carefully selected to wring maximum effect from the barest of ingredients (that of course being the central aim of all progressively minded rock n’ roll, when you get down to it) – a perfect expression of Ian’s back cover manifesto.

Gently malevolent, the group’s self-defined “crime-rock” is menacing in much the same way that ‘50s Juvenile Delinquent literature or ‘60s ‘roughie’ sex dramas are menacing – a brew that consciously evokes the cynical yet romantic legends of outlaws and urban deviance in 20th century America, fashioned, of course, as a reflection of the alienation and confinement that the group feels in the 21st century.

Garage-punk churn, flick-knife funk rhythms, cyclical Link Wray/James Burton guitar figures and girl group call & response chants: all of these elements evoke a spirit wholly distinct from the Official Culture of the United States, and from those outside of that culture (beat poets, hippie artisans, indoor hat-wearers, indie bands) who would seek, consciously or otherwise, to be included within its comforting embrace. However much of a calculated fantasy it may be for the group’s membership, Chain & The Gang’s music presents a wholly working class conception of historical outsiderdom: noble, self-defined, growing from the bottom up and fighting its way to the top. Simplistic maybe, but EFFECTIVE. “Crime don’t pay,” they acknowledge, “but how can I live my life this way?” As ever, the question is left open. It will be your own answer that provides the next step.

Listen and buy digitally from Chain & The Gang on bandcamp, or get the vinyl from Fortuna Pop!.

Labels: album reviews, Chain and the Gang, Ian Svenonious

Time I think for yet another psychedelic mix-tape, and the general theme that emerged whilst I was putting this one together is a that of a kinda period spent in stasis (whether good or bad), a visit to limbo… y'know, that sort of thing; a journey across ‘the endless plain’. Interpret as you will.

The title comes from a John Cale song, and thus we finish with a selection from his damaged masterpiece ‘Music For a New Society’ (1983), a record that seems to sound more ominously relevant than ever today… if you’re in the mood, and I wouldn’t blame you if you’re not.

Labels: mixtapes, Psychedelia

Hey everybody, Satan’s Satyrs have a new album out, entitled ‘Die Screaming’. That's not the one I’m reviewing here. Instead today, I want to talk about their debut, ‘Wild Beyond Belief!’, which was recorded back in 2011, and got a UK release last year on Bad Omen Records.

I’ll confess that when I saw the band’s name and the cover artwork pop up on record shop update emails, I did an “oh-for-gods-sake” eyeroll and moved on. I mean, theoretically it’s the kind of stuff I love forever without question, but I dunno… hitching a ride on all this exploitation/biker movie imagery just seems so *obvious* in this day and age, and I guess I’ve just been burned too many times by all these second-rate, shlock horror-themed bands. (Anyone want an Acid Witch CD? – you pay the postage.) I mean, maybe it was campy surf music, maybe it was sloppy metal, but if they’re gonna put so little imagination into their visual presentation, so little weirdness or mystery, I really just don’t care. NEXT!

Bad move on my part. Because as it turns out, ‘Wild Beyond Belief!’ represents an absolute riot in the middle of a fire-storm of total, heartfelt rock n’ roll of a rare and beautiful kind. The sort of record that rocks so hard, when you put it on you start to worry that maybe it’s speeding up your heartrate and making you short of breath. Like it’s all just a bit too much, like maybe you’re too old and unfit to safely stand in the presence of this level of rocking-ness? It’s been a while since music made me feel like that (at least not in a good way), but the A side of this thing is like being forced to ride a rollercoaster against your will, and that’s usually an immediate sign of quality when it comes to rock music, right?

The album title and cover art, which I initially took to be the work of cynical grown ups taking the path of least resistance, takes on an entirely new complexion when you reconsider it as the home recorded debut of a nineteen year old kid from the town of Herdnon, Virginia, who, according to this interview with The Quietus, tracked all the instruments himself and then mixed the whole damn thing at home on headphones, because ‘if you want something done right..’ etc. His oft-repeated twin inspirations: Electric Wizard and Black Flag. His available resources: a ferocious, perfectionist talent, insane reserves of teenage energy and (one assumes) a head full of raging, twisted hormones.

The result: ‘Wild Beyond Belief!’. Forty something minutes of pure heavy metal nirvana. If you’re listening on the computer, you’ll probably have to turn it up real loud because it’s really badly recorded with loads of compression and stuff, but WHY WOULDN’T YOU HAVE TURNED IT UP REAL LOUD ANYWAY, FERCHRISSAKE? What kind of a loser are you… ahem.

Anyway. Wow, just wow. This shit sounds like… well… I dunno. Imagine Motorhead or High On Fire or a band like that, if, instead of seasoned professionals, they were just a bunch of delinquent teenagers living in the middle of nowhere making lo-fi punk. And imagine that they drank a bunch of beer one day, and got really psyched up talking about horror movies and stuff, then scampered into the practice room to record a tape solely for the purpose of sending it to the guy from Electric Wizard, in the hope that he’d really like it and invite them to tour with them. So they filled it with MASSIVE RIFFS, and growly, strangulated tough guy vocals, and motorbike noise, shouting about Satan, and sickly, wah-wah covered lead overdubs, laughing and shredding all the way until they collapsed in exhaustion. Well yeah, that’s kinda what this sounds like. And in case you haven’t got the point yet, it sounds AMAZING.

Often, when it gets too ‘professional’ and serious, metal just loses me. When it’s all technical, and ‘conceptual’, and endlessly pummelling; boring and headache-y. I much prefer it when it’s like this, stuck in its most “primitive” stage of development - a raging cacophony of teenage lunacy, bluntly filtered through the most obvious and stupid signifiers of ‘rebellion’ that come to hand.

Even with the all horror movie stuff, I mean… there’s a *very fine line* between bands who seem to pick up on this sort of thing just for a shtick, so they have a readymade fanbase and don’t have to think too hard about their lyrics and artwork, and those who really *get it* - those who sound like they understand the mad, intoxicating power of these movies and really want to try to capture it in their music. The sort of people who, if they could, would probably inject the pure, distilled essence of Werewolves on Wheels straight into their veins. You can probably guess which side of that line I feel that Satan’s Satyrs come down on, in spite of this album’s amateurish cover art. His Satanic Majesty Jus Osborn obviously agreed, as he has now actually drafted Satyrs main man Clayton Burgess in to play bass in Electric Wizard, no less! When the aforementioned Quietus interview was conducted, Mr. Burgess was happily hanging out in Dorset, enjoying “..movie marathons at the ‘Wizard house”. High five dude - that’s what I call a result.

‘Wild Beyond Belief!’ isn’t a perfect record. As mentioned, the murky recording quality will prove troublesome for some, and it’s a very front-loaded album too. Whilst each track on the first half is an absolute ripper, momentum and quality control tends to slip *slightly* through parts of the B-side. It still rules though… actually, forget this stupid, nit-picking paragraph – on reflection, every cut here except maybe the self-titled last one is just completely fantastic, and even that one’s *pretty good*. Actually, who am I kidding, it’s BRILLIANT. Fuck this ‘critical balance’ business, this IS a perfect album. There, I said it. Chances are you’ll know within the first five seconds of the first track whether you’re IN or OUT, and if the former, after that it’s all just gravy. If you still want to hear the spirit of white, suburban delinquent rock music alive and well in the 21st century, refined right down to its stupidest, most degraded, most invigorating form, well… this is it, right here. Bang your greasy locks and gorge yourself ‘til your brain is gone.

Listen on Youtube.

Buy from Bad Omen.

Visit Satan’s Satyrs on Bandcamp.

Also, check out their 'Lucifer Lives' EP - Venom-tastic!

Labels: album reviews, METAL, Satan's Satyrs

As far as my own peculiar interests go, the Finder Keepers label has been absolutely on fire over the past few years, both with a swathe of choice reissues and, more importantly, first-time-ever excavations of impossibly cultish film music that has never previously seen the light of day anywhere except within the reels of the films that contain it (and sometimes not even there).

Best not even get me started on FK’s current series of releases concentrating on my favourite ever Italian film composer Bruno Nicolai, or their single-handed attempt to salvage the reputation of Polish synth maestro Andrzej Korzyński (maybe those will be the subject of future posts here?), but for the moment, let’s simply say that if someone had told me back in the distant past of, say, 2011, that I would be soon able to obtain an almost complete collection of the music composed for French director Jean Rollin’s wonderful surrealist vampire movies, all pressed on vinyl and delivered to my door for fairly reasonable prices from a UK address, I would have dismissed their suggestion as the fanciful delusion of a disordered mind – the kind of impossible, acquisitive fantasy that someone like me would quite literally dream about. I mean, what kind of record label would possibly engage in such a foolish quest? From the Herculean task of tracking down the composers, the rights and the tapes, to eventually dealing with the fact that probably only a few hundred obsessives worldwide would actually have any interest in buying the results of your labours, the whole thing just sounds like madness. But now, somehow, it has ACTUALLY HAPPENED, and we have those bearded dream-weavers lurking somewhere in the general direction of Manchester to thank for it.

As such, it is high time I got around to discussing some of these records, even though it’s sort of verging onto the aesthetic territory covered by my other blog, and as it happens, 2014 has brought forth one of the most interesting releases yet in the Rollin series – namely, a whole LP of the music recorded by avant-jazz auteur Francois Tusques for Rollin’s astounding 1968 debut feature, ‘Le Viol de Vampire’.

You will of course have noted that the name on this LP, ‘La Reine Des Vampires’, is different from the name of the film in which bits of the music appeared, so in brief, and trying not to veer too much into Other Blog territory, the sequence of events goes a bit like this: ‘Le Viol de Vampire’, as it eventually appeared in 1968, was actually a combination of two films, the first a stand-alone short made under the ‘Le Viol..’ title, and the second a mass of additional footage that Rollin shot when the producer Sam Selsky asked him to expand it to feature length, in spite of the fact that he’d ended the first half by killing off most of the characters. So, whilst ‘Le Viol..’ (the first half of the finished film) was scored with a few well-chosen pieces of library music (including the rather lovely ‘Profoundeurs’ by Roger Roger, which Finder Keepers also put out as one side of a 7” on their Kreep imprint), the second half, entitled ‘Les Femmes Vampires, had a little bit more money behind it and thus featured specially commissioned music from Tusques. The working title of this second act though was apparently ‘La Reine Des Vampires’, and Tusques seems to prefer that name (or perhaps wants to use it to differentiate his music from its use in the film?), so et voila, the title of this LP. To further confuse matters, Rollin also reused some of the music, without Tusques’ permission, in his second film, ‘Le Vampire Nue’ (1970), but… well let’s not get too bogged down in all that, eh, since we’re here to discuss the music itself?

And verily, it is music that is well worth discussing, functioning very well as a standalone release that often sounds entirely unlike anything intended to score a horror film. Though far from a household name (unless you live in a REALLY hip household, I suppose), Francois Tusques was and is quite a big figure in the sphere of European jazz and free improv, with a CV that includes oft-mentioned collaborations with such luminaries as Don Cherry and Archie Shepp, suggesting that our man was a regular on the welcoming committees whenever America’s finest undertook one of their “fuck this, I’m going to Europe” relocation plans during the ‘60s and ‘70s. Tusques recently played a solo piano gig at London’s Café Oto, priced at £15 a ticket on the door, so for those in the know, he’s far from an unknown, that’s what I’m sayin’. And, outside of ‘the know’ as I may be in this particular instance, I can only assume that the music on this LP represents an important addition of his legacy, irrespective of its cinematic connections.

As far removed as much of it may be from anyone’s idea of a ‘horror score’ however, neither is ‘Le Reine Des Vampires’ a feast of the kind of honking, free jazz blowouts that the big names on Tusques’ resume might lead one to expect. As to what it IS, with these possibilities removed, well… I’m not sure where you might best file it really, but it certainly makes for engaging listening.

At a blind-taste-test guess, you could maybe say that it most closely resembles the kind of high-minded Free Improv that European jazz would involve into during the ‘70s and ‘80s, but it is slightly more “lyrical” and conventionally musical, less technique-heavy, than much of that music tends to be, despite the presence of a great deal of abrasive, skittering and clattering hoo-hah. In part it even occasionally reminds me of the bass and string playing on some of Albert Ayler’s recordings, if you can imagine such a thing existing in isolation from both sax and drums.

In the main then, this is largely string-based music, alternately doleful and impatiently energised, that seems to distantly grasp at the ghosts of melody and composition, but otherwise has broken away entirely from notions of classical scoring, leaving a weight of absence and uncertainty in its wake – like some insane string quartet in an darkened theatre, fumbling blindly into the unknown.

The origin of this unusual feeling lies in the unconventional methods Tusques used to put this music together, as outlined in the sleevenotes to the FK release. Apparently, his first step was to record a series of piano themes he had composed for the film. He then played these themes back to his musicians - Barney Wilen (tenor sax), Eddie Gaumont (violin), Jean-François Jenny-Clark & Bernard Guerin (basses) - via headphones, and had them improvise over the top whilst the tapes rolled. He then presented these recordings to Rollin (and by extension, to the world) WITHOUT the initial piano tracks, lending the remaining music a unique sense of emptiness and uncertainty, with the central structure around which the other musicians were building rendered invisible.

As a result, I suppose you could even question Tusques’ authorship of this record, given that neither his compositions nor his playing eventually appear on it, but maybe that’s a dilemma best left to music theory students with a lot of time on their hands; the ‘Le Reine Des Vampires’ pieces very much feel like music driven by a sort of unseen guiding hand, and in this capacity I’m more than happy to give Tusques his due.

The complete lack of drums or percussion, usually an essential inclusion on even the most far-out examples of jazz and improv from this period, further emphasizes the music’s sense of absence and otherness, leaving brief patches of silence scattered throughout. The overall impression is that of a figure dancing with an invisible partner (a Rollin-esque image if ever there was one), rising and falling with a strange, mad kind of theatricality at the whim of an invisible, unheard beat.

Deep cello-like tones and mournful, muted horn reminds me a bit of Mile Davis’s classic soundtrack to Louis Malle’s ‘Ascenseur Pour l'Échafaud’, and in particular, I wouldn’t be surprised if Miles in this mode was a big reference point for Wilen on the sax, as he repeatedly launches into these conventionally beautiful passages of moody reflection that are largely responsible for lending the music it’s more ‘lyrical’/melodic flavour. By contrast, Gaumont on the violin keeps knocking out these snatches of sorta jagged, Eastern European flavoured almost folk-ish kind of themes that add a great uneasiness to proceedings, meaning that, if I had to guess what kind of a horror movie this music belonged to, I’d probably be more apt to imagine some ‘Repulsion’-esque Polanski sort of business.

The unused and rejected themes on side two of the LP are particularly good in this regard, less tetchy and scratchy than those on the A, and more inclined toward extended work-outs of pure atmosphere. Church-like reverb and slight variations in volume are used by the musicians to send tones careening off through space, and, despite the sudden shocks, unsignposted left turns and collapses into nothingness that inevitably characterise this sort of improv, the music’s consistent abrasiveness after a while becomes quite comforting; for such a wild and avant project, it makes for surprisingly good ‘relaxing in the evening with a whisky’ type music. Muchly recommended, if this all sounds even remotely like your cup of… something a bit stronger than tea.

Listen & buy from Finders Keepers.

Labels: album reviews, Finders Keepers, Francois Tusques, soundtracks

I’d never been out to see any bands play in Japan before, so April 18th proved an exciting Friday night for me, regardless of how much of a same-old, same-old it may have proved for other attendees and participants.

Pointedly named after ‘60s London’s legendary psychedelic scene HQ, Tokyo’s UFO Club is a venue I have mixed feelings about. Perhaps you know The 100 Club, on Oxford Street in London? If so, you’ll know how the entrance lurks behind what looks like (and indeed is) the glass-doored foyer of a conventional office building, complete with lift, listing of offices occupying the different floors and so forth? Well The UFO Club has a similar set-up, common to many Tokyo bars/shops/miscellaneous places, only much, much smaller. Downstairs, and it really is a tiny bloody place, just a single square room, maximum capacity well under 100 I woulda thought, plus a bonus smoke-filled stairwell . Very much going for that ‘60s basement club vibe, we’re talking black on red psychedelic swirls on the walls, DJ in the corner blasting his Nuggets collection, smoky air drifting around with zero ventilation. I like it! I dunno why, but I always feel very much at home in these contrived ‘60s style basement joints… somehow they seem to have an appeal that goes beyond mere retro-ness, I hope. It’s like The Buffalo Bar in London; ostensibly, there’s nothing particularly good about it, but it just feels like a comfortable place to be; a suitable environment for music to happen. Just like the singer in some Brazilian Who covers band the DJ is probably rocking somewhere at this very moment, I can’t explain.

There are a few people milling about at The UFO club when we arrive early-ish. We meet an enthusiastic label owner / promoter guy who tells us excitedly of gigs and such that are going down. Nice one man, good to meet you! The DJ has brought some friends, and they’re having smoke, comparing records. In the seats on the other side of the room, several girls are decked out in their mod/punk finery, sitting silently and frowning, apparently alone. Well it must be difficult to interact when you’re wearing sunglasses in a darkened basement. Cue The Cramps! We don’t really get many of those absolutely determined, THIS-IS-MY-STYLE, I-AM-MAKING-THE-SCENE-TONIGHT type people (Fowley-Children?) back in the UK, so it’s kinda lovely to see, in a way.

The UFO Club serves beer in big cardboard cups, like you might get at an amusement park. And why not! I can get with that. Generic Japanese lager might not exactly be the best brew in the world, but nonetheless it has a certain kinda.. clean?.. feel to it that serves well for music venue drinking – it lacks that sorta nasty, greasy feel you get with your plastic pint at most of the UK’s shittier cattle-pen entertainment establishments. So that’s nice.

The absolute best thing about the UFO Club though is that it has a set of red velvet curtains in front of the stage, which are closed between acts, meaning that instead of going through the tedious ritual of watching groups setting up – scrutinising and pre-judging them before they’ve hit a note – you simply have a few anonymous amp clicks, tuning up noises and snare rolls to alert you to the fact that things are afoot, before the curtains part, and BAM, the visual and musical totality of the band hits you all in one go. A simple change to yr standard gig-going routine, but a very fun and effective one, I think.


On first, shortly after 7pm, Mule Team seem a bit out of place at The UFO Club, I think. A new-ish band comprising both members of fantastic blues-punk duo D/i/s/c/o /s (whose one recorded track to date was one of the absolute best things I heard last year) alongside a couple of guys whose past credits include the band Blotto (whose totally killer cuts you may recall finding on the flipside of that Hard Skin 7” I reviewed on here a few years back), Mule Team seem atypical within Tokyo’s garage/whatever scene, in that they are modest and easy-going, as well as being extremely good at what they do. Offering no Big Style, no ‘performance’ moves, no big headlines to make what themselves stand out, they’re just four likeable guys playing some fun, non-denominational rock n’ roll, with a solid groove and fair bit of fuzz and clatter. And lo and behold, it’s great.

The older I get I think, the more fed up I get of all these bands trying desperately to be a “one listen will BLOW YOUR MIND” type proposition. I’d far rather listen to some group like this, just quietly knocking out some good shit, any day of the week. Toes are tapping, and I’m just starting to think “y’know, these guys kinda remind me a bit of Creedence”, when right on cue they launch into a cover of ‘Bad Moon Rising’. Nice one! It feels good to be momentarily on the same wave length of these guys – they are A1 in my book. They seem very proud that their set was only 13 minutes long, but I could’ve listened to them wailing away all night.

(No recordings or web presence yet, but you can watch a video of Mule Team performing back in January here.)

Tellingly, the members of Mule Team swiftly disappear post-set to have a drink elsewhere, and the next time the curtains part, I can very much understand why. It would be an overstatement to say I ‘hated’ the redundantly named Vivian Boys – they were perfectly alright, really – but they do very much represent the polar opposite of everything I liked so much about Mule Team. A contrived and slightly toxic-seeming style-over-substance type outfit, the group’s Big Style moves seem somewhat confused (the guitar guy has Beatles haircut, a mod suit & tie outfit and a Charles Manson sticker on his guitar, the bass player is a leather-trousers rockabilly), and their music is a sloppy, one dimensional mess of distortion and repetitive shouting.

I hope I will never be one to bag on people for poor musicianship, especially given that I’ve put in some hours playing terrible, cack-handed bass in public myself, but I’m afraid it is impossible to move on here before we discuss the bass player, who… well, he needs discussing, let’s put it like that. Sometimes he does manage to perk himself up to what you might call a Sid Vicious level of proficiency, but for long sections of the band’s set, he acts like a man who has never even seen a picture of someone playing bass before, randomly running a finger up and down the fretboard completely out of time with the beat, whilst strumming across the strings like he’s playing a chord. Astonishing. Dude, I don’t mind that you’re mainly up there to pose, but please stop doing that, or at least turn your volume down - it makes an awful, stupid noise, and just makes your band seem ridiculous.

So that’s Vivian Boys. They play far, far longer than a band operating in this style really should, especially when appearing fourth on the bill, and the most memorable moment besides the bassist’s chronic Walk-the-Walk failure is a cover of the Velvets’ ‘There She Goes’, which they render in totally flat, identikit punk style, but… it’s a good tune, y’know? I know I shouldn’t be too harsh on these guys - after all it’s just a load of crappy old punk fun at the end of the day and people seem to enjoy it, but this sorta snotty, narcissistic, dress up attitude is really not very appealing to me right now.

With than in mind then, it’s just as well we choose this juncture to pop out and get some noodles, because when we return…. well, you know when you open the door to a room and just involuntarily exclaim, JESUS CHRIST, what is going ON in here? Well, an outfit called Young Parisians is apparently what was going on in this one. A “glam band” quite evidently, these fellows seem to have got together according to the logic that, hey, Roxy Music were a bunch of mismatched weirdos, and things seemed to work out ok for them, right? Bad move. In brief then: the singer is a large gentleman (as in, tall and kinda bulky, not fat) who very much wants to be Ziggy Stardust. He has home-made silver-plated cycling gloves, looking rather like the woman with the silver hand in ‘Repo Man’, which is quite sweet. The drummer looks pretty Roxy (quiff and Elvis shades matched with a fur coat (who the hell plays drums in a fur coat?!)), and the bassist looks like he could’ve been in Rocket From The Tombs or something. My favourite member is the rhythm guitarist, who is playing a 50% scale guitar, has a face that suggests a hard life poorly lived, and wears a small straw hat and scuffed red motorcycle leathers. I think I’d like to hear that guy’s band.

I don’t wanna seem like I’m writing them off out of hand, but Young Parisians’ music is a bit of a turgid mess unfortunately, and I fear their main drawback is the lead guitarist, who seems to have spent twenty years locked in his bedroom learning to play Jimmy Page solos note for note, and now he’s out in the wild, he’s damn well going to make sure we feel every minute of it, regardless of the needs of whatever song his colleagues are trying to do something with. Their closing number has a passable ‘Rock n Roll Suicide’ kinda vibe to it, but all the bloody bombast and pastiche is making my teeth hurt.


After all that, it’s a happy moment when gig organisers The Fadeaways emerge from behind the curtains next. Still heavy on the pastiche, but this time round we’re looking at a no nonsense boilerplate retro-garage band of the kind that I often wish could be installed on every street corner, in locales where they are not present already. These guys have the matching striped t-shirts, the Vox guitars and about 148 songs that all sound like slightly rewritten Standells numbers played at double tempo. But within these strictly defined limitations, they know their shit and they OWN it, allowing no hint of so-called ‘originality’ to sully their dream. They play hard, with much capital letters ENTHUSIASM, and when the time comes for synchronised jumping, even the drummer leaps off his stool as if it were fitted with an ejector seat. Fun for all the family.

After such a brisk demonstration of cheery rock n’ roll professionalism, it’s a bit of a jarring tonal shift that brings us to tonight’s headliners, who are – who’da thought it? – a band from London! Billed as a kinda spin-off from considerably-better-than-the-name-would-suggest outfit Mean Bikini, whom I’ve seen a few times back home, it’s difficult to really know what to make of Bikini Bandits, such is the aesthetic disjuncture between the slick rock n’ roll fun that tonight’s Japanese bands have by-and-large been offering, and the ragged, cynical, post-punkoid mess these cats appear to be bringing to the table. Comprising three blokes and two ladies, their performance was an utter, ale-ravaged shambles that briefly made me feel a bit homesick.

Stretched across a dusty skeleton of early Fall, ‘Flies on Sherbet’ era Chilton and disjointed Prolapse grue, songs seem to ramble on to no very clear intent as instruments and vocal lines rise and fall in the mix apparently at random, and basically the group seem to be having a fairly dreadful time of things, ala Comet Gain on one of their blurrier evenings. A grim business and no mistake, but I kinda like it despite myself. God knows what the assembled crowd make of all this, but, if only my language skills were up to it, I felt a bit like turning to people and saying; “yeah guys, this is the way we roll back in London! We got fed up with GOOD bands - now we all listen to this kinda shit!” The whole thing is kinda perversely funny, really – a very obscure cross-cultural car crash for the ages.

Upon chatting to some of the band members afterwards – they all seem like very nice people, btw -certain facts were revealed that very much helped me to put Bikini Bandits’ somewhat mystifying performance into its proper context. To wit: 1. Following an apparent melt-down in the line-up of Mean Bikini, this new band was thrown together with only a few weeks’ notice in order to fulfil these pre-booked Japanese tour dates. Perhaps this was even their first public appearance? I’m not sure. 2. The band members had arrived at the airport only a few hours beforehand, visiting Japan for the first time, and were totally jet-lagged. 3. They were borrowing other bands’ equipment, and were largely unable to communicate with the soundman. 4. As you’ll appreciate, they REALLY, REALLY did not want to be headlining. 5. And as you might expect from British people faced with such trying circumstances, a substantial amount of drink had been taken.

Taking all of these issues into account, I think Bikini Bandits got through their set extremely well. In fact I think their conduct was positively heroic. I very much hope that the rest of their Japanese tour went well, and that, following such a baptism of fire for a new band, they’ve been able to keep on playing and fuse their musical vision into something of lasting substance – for the promise was definitely there, even on this crazy evening.

And so, I guess that brings us to the end of my first experience of live music in the Eastern hemisphere. Late night drinks at a peaceful, back-street izakaya with the wonderfully friendly and generous guys from Mule Team followed. A pretty strange night all in all, but one that I very much enjoyed. Here’s hoping for more such antics the next time I’m over in Tokyo.

Labels: Bikini Bandits, Japan, live reviews, Mule Team, The Fadeaways, Vivian Boys

On the 23rd of April each year, the people of Vernon, Texas celebrate Roy Orbison Day. Or at least, I assume they do. They certainly did back in 1989 when my badge was manufactured, and I see no reason why they should have stopped in the interim.

I know I am exactly one week late in drawing your attention to Roy Orbison Day, and as such I apologise as usual for my recent tardiness in trying to uphold my self-imposed one-post-per-week schedule. Same reason as ever - I've been busy. However, this time I'm happy to report that I've at least been busy with something tangible... and as a result, I'm unlikely to forget Roy Orbison Day quite so easily in future.

Labels: good news, Roy Orbison

Probably the most successful band to emerge from Japan’s '60s ‘group sounds’ industry, The Tigers are a fairly central presence in the country’s rock/pop landscape, with members Kenji Sawada, Osami Kishibe and Shiro Kishibe all remaining in the public eye via solo records, tabloid gossip and film & TV appearances. In fact, lead vocalist Sawada (who often performed under the nickname “Julie”, a moniker he apparently earned through his admiration for Julie Andrews!) actually went on to totally eclipse the success of his previous band, becoming one of the most ubiquitous solo stars of the ‘70s, his handsome features still looming large over the racks of many of Tokyo’s record shops. Even as his record sales eventually began to wane, Sawada continued to make good as an actor, putting in an excellent against-type lead performance in the Leonard Schrader-scripted film ‘The Man Who Stole The Sun’ in 1979, amongst many other thespian achievements.

Returning to The Tigers though, it doesn’t exactly take long figure where the group’s main inspiration lay. Unsurprisingly, it’s Beatles, Beatles, Beatles all the way. And so, with their idols taking the decision to pack it in in 1970, it is perhaps less than a coincidence that The Tigers decided to follow suit. Insofar as I can tell from English language googling, the double A-side ‘Promise for Future’ / ‘Nothing But Departure’ was the band’s last single, appearing in November 1970, with both song titles and cover-art clearly signalling their intention to end their career in style. A month later, both cuts were included on their final studio LP, the pleasantly titled ‘Freedom, Hope and Friendship’, and after a posthumous live album (‘Finale’) in ‘71, that was all she wrote for The Tigers.

Moving beyond the Beatles influence, ‘Promise for Future’ is a lovely bit of energetic, up-with-people flower-pop, complete with flute, harp, horns, strings, ethereal vocal harmonies, bongos – everything but the kitchen sink really - but it never sounds over-busy, and is kept grounded throughout by a swinging, r’n’b backbeat and tough acoustic strumming. Sounding only marginally like the Beatles, it’s a lovely bit of breezy summer-time fun, a perfect accompaniment for smokin’ it up in the park, dancing barefoot round some beach bonfire as the sun sets - who knows, maybe even a ride in the ol’ dune buggy? – and is easily a match for the numerous American groups who were peddling this sorta chart-orientated hippy-dippy business a year or two earlier. I would definitely be liable to DJ this if I were ever, say, playing records between bands at an outdoor festival or something.

Over on the flip, ‘Nothing But Departure’ also presents a slightly more interesting take on things that the band’s earlier, more overtly imitative work. Sure, the swoonsome, piano chord bashing melody on the song’s verses may scream McCARTNEY in block capitals, perhaps marking this out as The Tigers’ answer to ‘Let It Be’, and the closing (and thankfully rather brief) ‘da da, da da da’ coda seems like a pretty cynical attempt to pull a ‘Hey Jude’, but somehow these rips are neither as obnoxious nor as obvious as they sound on paper and, coupled with a few interesting production decisions and distinctly Japanese additions to the formula, the tune eventually makes for a quite likeable slice of international Beatle-sploitation. For one thing, the song begins with a lengthy and dramatic spoken word recitation that I can only assume concerns the band’s decision to split up (my sub-rudimentary Japanese gives me a few words such as ‘why?’, ‘friends’, ‘alright’ etc.), whilst the chorus melody takes off in a distinctly non-Western, melancholic sort of direction, and, as with the a-side, the backing track’s emphasis on overlapping percussion and choppy strumming gives things a *slight* Hispanic / Tropicalia sort of feel that also muddies up the Beatles influence a bit. Whilst I’d be unlikely to ever DJ this side of the single anywhere, I don’t dislike it, and it’s nice to imagine the band’s legions of fans sticking this one on the turntable back in November 1970, weeping a quiet tear at this positively-minded farewell from their heroes.

(Apologies for the slightly rough quality of the ripped-from-vinyl tracks uploaded below by the way – this single isn’t exactly in A+ condition.)

Labels: Japanese Record of the Month, The Tigers

With legions of career-minded, pedal-board bothering prannys (or their publicists at least) busy abusing the ‘psych’ label everywhere you turn just at the moment, City Yelps’ triumphantly self-deprecating manifesto of PSYCH ON THE CHEAP hopefully speaks for itself. Not that their music is much more than marginally psych-y, to be honest, but I like the concept so much, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. Like their most immediately recognisable ancestors (The Clean, Swell Maps, The Prats, The Index), our heroes aim to prove that you don’t need snazzy equipment and retreats in woodland cabins to blow minds – cramped urban spaces, determined awkwardness and the cheapest crap in the shop is what really gets the damage done (and appearing to be the kind of people who could reduce press & PR representatives to ash merely by breathing in their direction probably helps).

‘On The Cheap’ these recordings may be, but by god, they sound magnificent – drums n gtr really ‘popping’ in bright analogue splendour. They may have joked about sounding like “the shitty Go-Betweens”, but for the first minute or so of ‘Psych on the Cheap’ they’re not so far from the real thing, guitars ringing out violin-like as the melody soars and dives.

In fact, dealing with the constituent components on this music, it’s difficult to put your finger on what makes City Yelps so pointedly removed from all the other nostalgia-nourishing jangly guitar types doing the rounds. From the 10th generation Byrds-y rattle to the strummy bass lines to the Hamish Kilgour type homemade-motorik drumming with that little ‘catch-up beat’ every four bars, it’s all here present and correct, all stuff you feel you’ll never, ever get sick of again when it’s banged out this splendidly. The playing is excellent & varied (the instrumental section of ‘Awful Prizes’ almost seems to be stumbling off into proggy realms for goodnesssake), the recording is bright and the songs are simple and appealing, leaving only Shaun A’s parent-proof slurred bark (“thass not singing, I’m telling ya”, quoth some who should know better) and a strange, indefinable blanket of smudged, smothered otherness to explain why City Yelps sound so inherently separate from the mainstream, so alien to the streets of large population centres, so utterly and gloriously removed from anyone who deals in ego or money or music, so much of a potential OUR BAND (NOT THEIRS) moment for any/all scruffy, over-smart kids lucky enough to hear them.

Why, why, why – I don't know, and I’m sure they don’t care (except that they so obviously do), which is perhaps the secret. You know sometimes when you're walking down the street, and you see a complete stranger and just think, 'hey, I like that guy, he's got style', even though he betrays no sign of concern about his appearance and is just taking the bins out or walking to catch a bus or something? Same thing. No reason. It’s just spirit I guess, or auras, or leylines or something. City Yelps must live on a big fucking leyline. I feel like they could walk on stage, do pretty much anything, and I'd enjoy it. No idea. Maybe it all just stems from how much I like their photocopied sleevenotes and 'newsletters' and stuff. I dunno. I'll just shut up  now and enjoy the music they do do when they walk on stage, which conveniently is very good.

Listen and buy from City Yelps.

Labels: album reviews, City Yelps

As the Vernal Equinox stomps on by and the signifiers of ‘Spring’ seem to come and go on an hourly basis, I realise that we’re about one quarter of the way through the year already, and, contrary to impression you might have acquired from reading this blog recently, I’ve not spent the past three months wholly occupied by esoteric soundtrack reissues, random second-hand vinyl and weird old acid rock shit either.

In fact there have been a spiriting number of NEW THINGS that have attracted my attention, and here to prove the point is a quick run-down of them, thus clearing the deck of all this stuff that deserves your attention / support, but that I haven’t quite had the time or impetus to write a full-length-blog post on.

 
Habibi – self-titled LP (Burger)

A really solid LP of catchy, non-clichéd guitar-pop from these Brooklynites, delivered in deliberate, straight-faced fashion and sitting a good notch or two up from the swamp of sloppy, indeterminate, indiefied gack that the majority of young people’s guitar music has devolved into over the past few years. To various extents, Habibi recall assorted alumni of the 2009-11 golden years – Grass Widow, Yellow Fever, Fungi Girls, Vivian Girls - but never for quite long enough for me to really get a bead on ‘em. Even within these tightly patrolled waters, they’ve managed to stake out their own little corner, which they inhabit with confidence and panache, groovy and self-sufficient mermaids just daring the music industry to come and bother them. Exactly the kind of quietly perfect, unremarkably remarkable band that could have grown up out of New Zealand 1982 or, well, North America 2010, and you’ll want to get on this quick if you miss those halcyon days.

‘Detroit Baby’ is the best neo-girl group tune you’re liable to hear this year, and it’s not the best song here by any means. I really like it when they go all-out on the reverb and twang and throw in some longer instrumental passages (‘Persepolis’, ‘Sweetest Talk’). There’s a slower, indie-er number at one point that’s kind of a bummer, and a few songs towards the end that don’t appeal to me much, but you can’t have everything. I just did the maths and this is 80% gold. Check it out.

(Listen on Soundcloud & buy from Burger.)



Sapphire Slows – Allegoria LP (Not Not Fun)

I very much liked Sapphire Slows’ ‘True Breath’ EP from a little while back, and now the first proper full length from this mysterious Tokyo dweller proves an absolute joy, fully delivering on the promise of those earlier tracks, as Ms Slows (if I may) barely puts a foot wrong from beginning to end, drawing heavily from the foundations laid by former label-mates Peaking Lights (nothing wrong with that!), but also often investing her ragged, homemade dub-pop with an absolutely luminous dose of hyper-melodic pop optimism, like the gigantic vocal chorus / breakdown bit of some cheesy, long-forgotten house anthem distantly reflected back to us in dreams, through veils of glass-fronted, urbanite dreamland.... just a lovely, lovely, undemanding little trip. A fucking HAPPY album, if you can believe such a thing legitimately existing in 2014, this one’s still making me contentedly smile n’ nod after a ton of repeat spins. Perfect comfort music.

(Listen on Soundcloud, buy via Boomkat.)





The Love Triangle – Clever Clever LP (Static Shock)

Some certifiable Good Punk here, from a trio led, somewhat inevitably, by the bloke who used to sing in The Shitty Limits. Fully energised approach reminds me slightly of my still-beloved Royal Headache, but with a more downbeat, British feel always in evidence. They probably won’t much thank me for invoking The Jam alongside Eater, Buzzcocks and The Lurkers, but that’s where my thoughts keep heading here – well-composed, content-packed songs blasted through fast and sloppy and angry and smirking and don’t-give-me-that-shit-mate-let’s-just-get-it-recorded. Spirited, that’s the word.

As the eye-rolling reference-points thrown out above might suggest, this resembles the compressed residue of all the good ’77 UK punk bands and none of the shit ones, whilst also somehow ducking the accompanying nostalgia bear-trap - and as such I like it a lot.

(Listen & buy from Static Shock.)





Irkallian Oracle – Grave Ekstasis tape/LP (Nuclear War Now!)

It was Neil Kulkarni’s (consistently wonderful) blog that hipped me to this one (none more KVLT!), and of course he sings the praises of Irkallian Oracle a lot more eloquently than I could attempt to, so instead I’ll just give in to this record’s function as a hyperbole magnet and just say: holy fucking shit. This is the most purely devastating, world-swallowing thing I’ve heard from the realm of black metal in years. The sort of music that’s so overwhelming it just… make.. all… words.. stop, like the stuttering, ellipsis-filled end of a Lovecraft story, as ill-judged metaphors flail hopelessly, aware of their inability to ever really capture the totality of.. this.. goddamn… thing. The bone-shattering, practice room brutality of ‘80s Napalm Death, the gravesoil-caked pagan tape-hiss of the most funereal BM, the cosmic/hypnotic maximalist wipeout of The Boredoms or Oneida in their prime – all of these things are here, sublimated into something new and staggering.

For a long time now, many metal bands of a more forward-thinking variety seem to have been lost in bombast, endlessly trying to recreate that uncomfortable, tummy-churning Surround Sound OOF that comes from watching a giant monster lay waste to a city in some epic 3D folly. Irkallian Oracle are no exception, but where most contenders just end up creating the sonic equivalent of a Michael Bay Transformers headache, these guys actually walk the walk, conjuring the sound of the stars aligning as Cthulhu himself breaks the waves. And they do it themselves on fucking TAPES. None of this bloody drivel really does it justice, but… just… [speechless].

(Listen and buy from Nuclear War Now!)



Slum of Legs – demo tape (Tuff Enuff)

Definitely one of the most interesting/exciting bands I’ve caught live so far this year (not that that’s saying much, I’ve only been leaving New Cross Gate about once a month), this Brighton six piece are one of those bands that seem to function as a kind of volatile, open-ended brain-trust rather than as a pre-planned “this is what we’re gonna do” type venture, with each member seemingly bringing in a quite different approach & set of influences, mixing it all up into a pleasantly dissonant brew that could head off in any number of directions at any moment. From a basis in artfully self-taught Raincoatsy guitar/viola skree and Mo Tucker thud drumming, we are apt to experience unsignposted diversions into anguished punk yelling, atmospheric soundscaping and totally-out-of-leftfield burbling analogue synth business, never quite cohering into a verifiable ‘THAT’S THEIR SOUND’ sound, but then why should it? I mean, who wants to go around listening to bands that “cohere” all day long, y’know what I mean? And since I already seem to be digging myself into a hole re: the whole only-comparing-women-to-other-women trap, might as well go whole hog and also throw in passing reference to ‘80s feminist oddballs like Androids of Mu and The Fates, whilst concluding that they also often end up sounding a bit like a far rougher, gnarlier version of token Flying Nun lady-band Look Blue, Go Purple… and that can only be a good thing, right?

(As a ‘Big Sigh’ type aside, this is the problem after so many years of intensive music-listening: however hard a new white-ish, guitar-ish group might try to do something a bit different, it is now scientifically impossible for me to hear them without going “oh yeah, that’s pretty cool, but you know it basically sounds a bit like [insert obscure old bands A, B, C and D here], right?” It’s a dreadful affliction that makes me feel like one of those hand gesturing, arsehole celebrity wine-tasters whom we all used to laugh at before middle class consensus rendered them normal - please make it stop.)

Anyway, despite the fact that it has been distributed and sold for money by a third party label, it’s worth noting that the three tracks on this Slum of Legs 'demo tape' do function VERY MUCH as a demo (yes, it’s that same semantic query I had with previous Tuff Enuff releases). Giving only a fleeting, muffled impression of the kind of rampant creativity this unit is capable of, this is a real chunk of old fashioned “wow, I can’t wait to hear what they’ll come up with next” type demo tape excitement, exactly the kind of thing you could imagine John Peel tearing up his schedule for and jamming straight on the airwaves, back in ye olde halcyon pre-internet days. The best thing you will be able to buy for 50p (!) in the whole of the rest of your life, in other words.

(Listen and buy from Tuff Enuff.)

Labels: Habibi, Irkallian Oracle, Sapphire Slows, Slum of Legs, The Love Triangle