Laura Cantrell (The Musician, Wednesday)

Before this gig we were discussing the idea that it could become a law of nature that the musical careers of Hank Williams’ descendants will be alternately good and bad until the end of time. Obviously you know the low-down on this one already; Hank (good!), Hank II (bad!), Hank III (good!). Well tonight’s support act, Holly Williams, is the latest progeny of the family to strap on a guitar and... well sad to say she proves our theory pretty nicely. It would seem mean-spirited to let rip with a litany of critical spleen against a young lady who is, we shall generously assume, well meaning and kind-hearted, but needless to say by lunch time the next day “a bit Holly Williams” has cemented itself in my vocabulary to sum up all that is lamentable in the idiom of joyless, conventional, self-pitying acoustic emo MOR fodder.

Well at least we can hope that Laura Cantrell might be able to teach her a thing or two about the RIGHT way to do business in the world of country music. Despite her indie credibility, Laura totally sticks to the old fashioned c n’ w formulas (none of this ‘alt’ crap!), and is all the stronger for it. Throughout her set we know exactly what’s coming next, but it’s still always brilliant. She has such a classic voice, really powerful but still with a beautiful subtlety, and, man, her songs are so swoonsome and real realised – it’s the full package of everything this music can and should be. Also important for a geek like me, her band is SHIT HOT! The mandolin player and (acoustic) lead guitarist duelling and swapping solos and ripping through killer bluegrass licks all the way through…man, it was awesome! She dedicated about four or five heart-rending ballads to people who’d recently died, and sang a song about drinking whiskey and one about a ‘freight train rollin’ down the line’ and.. did I mention it was awesome?

I went to three gigs last week. I will tell you about them one by one.

Josh T. Pearson / The Archie Bronson Outfit (The Charlotte, Monday)

Josh T. Pearson’s (I'm insisting on keeping that T in there!) performance was weird - he's a very different guy when not backed by a thunderous rock n' roll band. It was a bit like a Cat Power show - he was poleaxed through the first few songs by typical Charlotte muddy sound and feedback, and he spent ages goofing around and seemed really nervous and humble, and really self-sabotaging. Back when he was in Lift To Experience he seemed like a really kinda intimidating and driven guy, now he seems to have a crippling inferiority complex going on - he kept asking the audience how he was doing, and we in the front row had to say “yes, you're doing fine” cos otherwise he might've gotten upset. He acts like something really, really bad has happened to him and he hasn’t got over it yet. But when he finally got going, he ran through three or four songs which were absolutely STUNNING.... real ragged, soulful apocalyptic stuff like LTE used to do - amazing. Unfortunately most of the audience had buggered off by this point, and word on the street will probably be that he was off his nut and rubbish, but I thought he was the man. I mean, sure you could go see other boring people run through their songs perfectly and put on a good show, but JTP's got, i dunno, SPIRIT - he really connects with something. He’s an amazing guy and he needs to get it together and record those songs, so that we can hear them without the shit sound and ambivalent audience.

And a quick word on the supports; Archie Bronson Outfit managed somehow to get a great overdriven guitar sound going on, and their drummer has a good way of hitting drums, but aside from that they’re a surly, monotonous mediocrity – grim, one-dimensional hunks of ‘song’ that suggest the tale of a man thinking he’s being really macho by not shaving and drinking whisky and then getting bored and wandering home when nobody wants to fight him. Dragon or Emperor put in one of the tightest and rockingest sets I’ve seen them play. It seems like they play at every gig I go to, so I must have written about them a couple of times here in the past, right? They’re good, basically. I’ve always assumed that the Dirty Backbeats - another local act - would be shit. I was wrong, it turns out. They’re totally great. (In my eyes anyway.) They have a singer who really wants to be Tom Waits and a cool girl drummer and a crazy hippie organ player laying down some classic Fender Rhodes moves and some surly rock dude player guitar… a recipe for success? Leicester’s gig-going cognoscenti don’t seem very impressed – maybe it's all a bit too affected and ‘60s (as in, pre-punk) influenced for this crowd, but they do it for me.

EVERY HIT SONG AMAERICA EVER HAD

A very good friend of mine left town this weekend to go to Australia. Being an old fashioned chap who rejects the sterile world of MP3s and CD-burners in favour of the humble but noble values of the walkman and the C90, he asked if I'd do a new mix tape to accompany him on his travels. It's ages since I sat down for an intense mix-taping session, but the old ninja reflexes came back to me straight away, and if I do say so myself the result is one of my best ones to date. I even did a cool limited-edition-of-one watercolour cover.

There's a general theme of thunderous live tracks and immortal "hits" that would sound good blasting across the Australian outback running through it, with an overall idea of being kinda.. life-affirming I guess. Triumph over adversity kinda stuff. Obviously the tracklisting relies heavily on shared musical jokes and things-my-friend-hasn't-heard-which-I-think-he'd-like, but nevertheless, here for your geeky, list-fixated enjoyment (if it's good enough for Thurston Moore it's good enough for me) is the tracklisting;

EVERY HIT SONG AMERICA EVER HAD:

Side One:

1.The Shaggs – philosophy of the world
2.Led Zeppelin – immigrant song (BBC session version)
3.Yo La Tengo – lewis
4.The Band – the weight (live)
5.Oneida – doin’ business in japan
6.Shonen Knife – expo ’90
7.The Beat Happening – you turn me on
8.Gloria Jones – tainted love
9.The Rolling Stones – jigsaw puzzle
10.Iron & Wine – promising light
11.Townes Van Zandt – to live is to fly
12.The Grateful Dead – casey jones
13.God is my Co-Pilot – smooch

Side two:

1.Cheap Trick – I want you to want me (live at Budokan)
2.Shirley Collins – the moon shines bright
3.Yo La Tengo – Yellow Sarong
4.Gil Scott Heron – the revolution will not be televised
5.John Coltrane – a love supreme part one: acknowledgement
6.Low – death of a salesman
7.The Mountain Goats – this year
8.Herman Dune – you could be a model, goodbye
9.God is My Co-Pilot – invisible rocket
10.Vitaminsforyou - it’s only snow, it’s only sunshine
11.Jonathan Richman – the morning of our lives (live)
12.The 5678s – green onions

“SOMEBODY CALLED ME ON THE PHONE…”

I spent a hefty chunk of this last rainy and potentially miserable weekend lying in bed, drinking wine, listening to a selection of jazz and brain-melting psyche and breaking my embargo on pointless music books to enjoy Dee Dee Ramone’s autobiography, Poison Heart.

Having faithfully devoured Everett True’s excellent Ramones book and the recent movie, I think I’ve got enough info on the story of the Ramones to let it slide, but Dee Dee’s book isn’t really so much about all that as it’s about, well, the weird world of Dee Dee.... and it’s fucking incredible!

It immediately becomes clear that Dee Dee is completely off his nut, and the book reads likes he’s hammered it out in one sitting, Kerouac style. He vaguely tells the story of his dysfunctional, violent and drug-addled life, rambling and raving and going off on bizarre digressions about movies he went to see when he was eight years old, what kind of amplifiers he likes the best, the best ways to cop dope in post-war Germany, why the Stooges were so cool and so on. He tells endless sensational anecdotes about ugly New York sleaze, dysfunctional junkie relationships (it doesn’t seem like he ever had a functional one with anybody), rancid apartments, feral drag queens and that sort of thing. His writing has tons of weird passion invested in it and he picks out the strangest, most unexpected details of things, presumably just throwing down every half-remembered, trivial bit of information he can dig up. Clearly historical accuracy wasn’t exactly a priority here, and he seems to get a lot of fairly basic facts about his own band wrong, but that just adds to the charm.

The effect is akin to a remedial school drug-punk Bukowski letting rip on all cylinders, and the results are moving and hilarious in equal measure.

I highly commend this book to everybody - it’s less the second-rate rock biog one might reasonably expect, more a lost and unheralded literary classic by a uniquely twisted modern primitive thinker.

Dee Dee, if you’re up there somewhere, you are the king.

Well three days out of five isn't bad. This week's gone by with all the speed of a slow-mo ice age wrecking ball.

Pitched this one to Plan B but think I missed the boat;

Fursaxa – Lepidoptera (ATP)

I moment I realised there was something strange and amazing going on could have been at All Tomorrow’s Parties a couple of years ago. A friend was trying in vain to get my attention as I stood there entranced by a woman in beads and a kaftan, alone on stage shortly after midday, playing an accordion very slowly. Hungover indie-kids stare at their feet and think; we’re not in Kansas anymore.

I could tell you, in case you don’t already know, that Fursaxa is Tara Burke, and that she makes inscrutable, minimalist psychedelic songs by feeding a variety of acoustic instruments and her own remarkable voice through a few old effects boxes, mostly on her own time, but on this occasion recorded professionally with the assistance from Michael Gibbons of psyche-rock heavyweights Bardo Pond.

But that’s boring, and a waste of words. What’s remarkable about Fursaxa is the way that Ms Burke can sit in her living room (or whatever) with a few bits of cheap gear, and record short, song-based compositions that tap, effortlessly and magnificently, into the same hallowed Eternal Now that people like Terry Riley, Tangerine Dream and Birchville Cat Motel have spent their working lives chasing via truckloads of esoteric equipment, concert hall acoustics and portentous four hour drone-rituals.

None of the avant-cacophony of the ‘sub-underground’ is to be found here. Fursaxa’s music is just as primal and weird, but it is also natural, and reserved, and honest. Members of Wolf Eyes and Double Leopards can jerk off onto limited edition CD-Rs until they’re blue in the face, but Tara Burke will still be here long after they’ve got bored and moved on, crafting her careful, egoless epiphanies out of whatever comes to hand, just because... why? Because they’re there already, because it’s her gift to channel them onto little round discs to share with us.

When I were a lad, I used to get stoned and listen to Cat Power, getting lost in the spaces between the notes and wishing I could stay there forever. Nowadays a couple of glasses of gin and some Fursaxa has much the same effect. There aren’t any spaces between the notes, because most of the time there’s only one note, and it’s a perfect note. I think maybe we ARE in Kansas, but we just don’t recognise it because we’ve never been here before.

The 5678s – Teenage Mojo Workout (Sweet Nothing)

As the Japanese girl garage band featured in Kill Bill, the western emergence of this group’s records is sadly timed to see them catching the tail-end of a few passing trends and disappearing quietly into the realm of dusty pop cultural detritus. Which is a shame, cos whichever way you cut the cake after giving this outing a spin, the 5678s fucking rock big-time!

Above and beyond the basic idea of cute Japanese ladies playing retro-styled r’n’b / punk n’roll – which I gather is still considered something of a novelty in more moronic circles despite the vast wealth of female-led Japanese rock music on offer to the discerning listener – this is hands down one of the finest non-Billy Childish affiliated platters of joyful, ragged-ass garage gear that’s hit my ears in recent memory. I can assure all readers fearing that this might be some kind patronising “ah, how cute, listen to these little foreign chicks trying to play rock n roll” culture clash garbage that that is totally, utterly not the case here – these ladies know their shit and swing out like demons. Sure, it’s a bit chaotic in places, but that’s the raw, over-energised ‘first take/best take’ kinda chaos you’re hearing, not incompetence. The drummer is shit hot, the bass is foot-stomping good and they’ve got absolutely the BEST ‘60s-style fuzz-tone / reverb guitar sound heard anywhere since, well, the ‘60s. Topped off with some totally nifty rock n roll piano / organ moves and plenty of knee-quivering yelling and lovely vocal harmonies on the slower numbers, and… shit, this is heaven!!

In particular, their take on ‘Green Onions’ is gonna be blasting out of the Stereo Sanctity Soundsystem every time I get drunk and wanna jump up and down from now until eternity. As Jimmy Masuko says in his delightfully translated sleeve-notes; “No wonder countless youngsters excitedly dance with this just like the Pogo dance or Moshing. The 5678’s version is also such a hard dance number that I put down my pen and was dancing with it.” Amen, brother!

To make up for my recent weblogging slackness I'm gonna vainly try to post a record review every day this week. Here goes;

ASVA – Futurists Against the Ocean (Web of Mimicary)

Aficionados of noise will have a good idea what to expect from this disc, featuring former members of Burning Witch and produced with the assistance of Billy Anderson and Stephen O’Malley. And indeed, the relentless doom guitar drone is present and correct. Initially though, the sound here seems disappointing – Asva’s axelords summon up neither the bowel-churning, primordial depths of Sunn 0))) nor the transcendent bliss-out of Boris, and charges of self-indulgence could well be levelled as they trudge monotonously toward the 15 minute mark, endlessly in love with the sound of their own decaying power-chords. But what they lack in brute force, they soon make up for in sonic variety, augmenting their sound with thunderous percussion echoing like a subterranean rockslide, some superbly ritualistic hammond organ drone and Jessika Kenney’s startling and operatic high priestess-style vocalising. The sounds mesh and the pulse rises as the album progresses, building an atmosphere that’s almost theatrical in its portentous bombast, evoking the suffocating hysteria of vintage ‘70s horror. It’s as if someone ordered an avant-metal soundtrack to pivotal sequences from ‘The Devil Rides Out’ and ‘Blood on Satan’s Claw’. Via the Trojan Horse of a drab title and sombre post-rock sleeve-art, Asva have lured us slowly into something far more wild-eyed and evil – their own orgiastic midnight sabbat, where the dark rites are celebrated, and the Goat of Mendes himself begins to take form. Cool.