For anyone missing my irregular horror movie round-ups, my excuse is; blame TV for not showing any! For whatever reason, weird late night movies seem to have disappeared from our terrestrial screens in recent months, leaving me even more sad and lonely than I normally am at the weekend.

Nevertheless though, where there’s a will there’s a way, and I’ve been saving up a few reviews. It’s pretty rum stuff I’m afraid, so accusations of barrel-scraping to the usual address.

So in honour of Halloween (or possibly not), here we go;

The Black Cat (Lucio Fulci, 1981)

This is not under any circumstances to be confused with the Edgar Ulmer’s classic 1934 Lugosi / Karloff loon-fest – let’s get that clear right off the bat. This is a particularly half-arsed and under-funded Italian / English co-production that would have looked pretty crappy even at the height of Euro-horror mass production, and which must have been an embarrassment to all concerned in 1981. Fulci has made some films which are almost good, but this certainly isn’t one of them. Expanding on the Edgar Allen Poe story with all the subtlety you’d expect from the director of Zombie Flesh Eaters, this is – and I wish I was making this crap up – a film about an evil, serial killing cat. Yes, that’s right; picture dimly lit shots of the hapless moggie wandering around, overlaid with menacing Psycho-esque music, interspersed with extreme close-ups of his victims going “nooooo!”, and you’ve got some idea of the level of hilarity we’re dealing with here. Patrick “Would you like some WINE?!?!?” Magee reprises the same OTT acting style he used in A Clockwork Orange to play the cat’s mad scientist owner, who hangs around the graveyard at night recording the voices of the dead on tape recorders. The oddly named Mimsy Farmer delivers her lines and waits for the pay cheque as the sassy reporter who has a dreadful suspicion she knows who might have crawled through the ventilation grille to kill that honeymooning couple in the locked boathouse. In short, Magee and the cat are brilliant. Everything else is rubbish. Best line: “If he were human, he’d be HANGED!”

Horror Hospital (Anthony Balch, 1973)

By god, this film is horrible. Not horrible in the way horror movies are supposed to be horrible, but just stupid, distasteful, baffling and wrong. It’s a British effort staring Robin Asquith from the ‘Confessions of..’ movies, and given the goofiness of the acting and the astonishing crapness of the story, I think it was intended to be a comedy, except that they seem to have forgotten to include anything even remotely amusing. The plot, such as it is, involves a wheelchair-bound evil doctor (Michael Gough) who uses his detox centre / country retreat as a front for his hobby of turning young people into zombies and making them morbidly dance around in their pants while he goes “look at them, they are under my power, ha ha ha” and so on and so forth. So naturally Robin and has lady-friend check in and are subjected to an hour or so of sub-Scooby Doo running around type bollocks. More worrying than the inherent rubbishness of the whole venture though is the extent to which an atmosphere of inexplicable and nasty sadism seems to work its way into every scene. Long sections of this film seem to dwell with leering and repetitive glee on scantily clad teenagers being restrained, beaten, drugged and generally mistreated by faceless men in leather and motorcycle helmets. There’s a LOT of syringes, leather gloves, punching, screaming and cold, dead-looking flesh – all of this creeping latently through the cracks of a lame, cringe-worthy ‘70s British comedy. The aura of general NOT RIGHTness surrounding this film is massive, and, combined with it’s utter z-rate banality, I feel somewhat ashamed to have been born and raised in a country whose national consciousness decreed this film should be made and people should pay money to see it. On the plus side though, there’s quite a fun gory beheading, the evil doctor turns into some kind of slime monster at the end and – I can’t help but be touched by the tragedy of this – a comedy dwarf who looks a bit like Bill Bailey totally steals the show, putting his heart and soul into a fantastic, dignified and charming performance that outclasses everybody else present by a factor of ten. Were he of regular height he’d no doubt have been concerned with far better things, but, being a ‘comedy dwarf’, he finds himself relegated to supporting roles in god-awful films like this. A damn shame.

Mesa of The Lost Women (Herbert Tevos / Ron Ormond, 1952)

My god, where to start... A mad scientist who lives on a haunted mesa in the ‘Muerto Desert’ and is creating an army of invincible super-women with the minds of insects! And giant spiders!! And he’s played by Uncle Fester from the Addams Family! There’s a thunderous voiceover delivering dire warnings! A vampiric Mexican femme fatale performs a fantastic erotic dance in a cantina, gets shot at the climax, and then comes back to life! Crazed mariarchi music plays THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE FILM! A plane journey is represented using a model on a string, some cotton wool and a mocked up cockpit! There’s an escaped lunatic who talks like Kenneth Williams! There’s the laziest attempt to apprehend an escaped lunatic in cinematic history! For some reason the invincible women hang around with a bunch of dwarves who look like Lon Chaney! There’s a stereotypical Chinese man-servant who dispenses cryptic ancient wisdom and is secretly in league with the bad guy! There’s an even more embarrassing stereotypical Mexican who looks like Speedy Gonzales and is called “Pepe”! There’s an alpha-male lead whose response to insane terror and imminent death is “let’s try and get some sleep and we’ll deal with it in the morning”! There’s a thoroughly lame-brained romantic sub-plot! There’s even a weirdly plausible psuedo-scientific explanation! And it’s all neatly wrapped up in under 70 minutes! Basically, this is complete B-movie heaven.

VASHTI BUNYAN!

So I’m sitting at my desk at work the other day, and a passing co-worker asks me “hey, you know about music, d’you know what the song on the new Orange advert is?”, and I say “um, no sorry, I don’t really watch many adverts, er…”. It’s a familiar scenario, and a good demonstration of why I tend not to really trumpet my musical obsessions when not in the company of personal friends. So she moves on to somebody else, asking the same question, and this time she comes up with some of the lyrics from the song. At which point I say, “gosh, actually I do know that one! That’s a Joanna Newsom song that is!”

(I can’t be bothered to go through all the hoo-ha about music I like ending up in adverts again. Ad people tend to be quite young and sharp and like trendy, magazine-approved music. Sometimes trendy, magazine-approved music is quite good and I like it too. And often the people who make it are not adverse to a bit of cash and some wider exposure. Thus it ends up on adverts. Shrug. The end.)

So anyway, the next day the same co-worker lady comes in and says “thanks for identifying that music for me, I ordered the CD last night. And guess what, I was listening to Radio 2, and they were interviewing Joanna Newsom! And she was talking about this woman Vashti Bunyan who sounded ever so good, so I ordered her CD too!”.

Blimey. So via the strange machinations of media, advertising and word of mouth, this lady whose musical taste (no elitest sneering intended here) usually runs the gamut from The Best of the ‘70s to the Lighthouse Family now gets a crash course in the luminaries of the acid-folk scene. My initial thought is that I hope she doesn’t hate them and blame me. Thankfully though, she seems quite pleased with her purchases, and graciously offered to lend me the Vashti Bunyan album.

So then – a short history for the uninitiated (by which I basically mean those who’ve missed all the recent indie-media blah blah): Vashti Bunyan is a British folk singer who released a sole album – ‘Another Diamond Day’ - in 1971 and subsequently gave up music and disappeared off the map. In the intervening years her record has become something of a collector’s holy grail and built up a killer rep as a classic of British psychedelic folk, finally getting a CD reissue a couple of years ago. Fast forward to the present day and Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom have made weirdy folk albums, gotten unaccountably famous and enthusiastically talked up Vashti as their favouritest person in the whole world. Heartened by this, she’s emerged from the wilderness (or rather, from her idyllic sounding family life in rural Scotland), collaborated with Banhart and the Animal Collective, and recorded a new album.

And here it is in my hands. It’s called ‘Lookaftering’ and it has a rather lovely picture of a rabbit on the front. Aesthetically speaking, you can’t really go wrong with folk music + rabbits, can you? Gives things a good Watership Down kinda feel. It’s a bit like heavy metal and goats. But anyway, let’s give the damn thing a listen shall we?

Having not heard anything from Vashti’s ‘classic’ album, I’m unsure of what to expect here really, and I’m a little apprehensive. Given the Devendra connection, could I be walking into a big load of squeaky voiced children’s hour whimsy or hippy kitsch overload? Or on the other hand, over 30 years since her hippie-folk bubble burst, could we be in for little more than some nice but unremarkable middle-aged singer-songwritering?

Well as it turns out I’m forced to eat my apprehensive hat and offer Mr. Banhart a profound apology within the first minute – this is fucking astonishing stuff.

Vashti’s voice, guitar arrangements and sense of melody are so wordlessly beautiful that... well, I don’t think I have any words for it. If her older album is half as good as this, I can completely understand its exalted position amongst younger folkie types. I feel like I’ve just stumbled upon the motherlode.

Sounding like it could have been recorded any time in the past four decades, ‘Lookaftering’ is a pure-hearted and evocative British folk record in the classic tradition. A universe away from the jarring quirkiness of her aforementioned American disciples, Vashti sounds as if she’s broadcasting from the kind of beautiful, utilitarian, nature-worshipping paradise dreamt of by William Morris, hermetically sealed away from the mire of human failings and the soul destroying shit of modernity. At different moments, she puts me in mind of Sandy Denny on Fairport’s ‘Fotheringay’, Shirley Collins (inevitably), the dream-pop utopia of Mazzy Star (that’ll be courtesy of Max Richter’s lavish production job) and the quiet stoner majesty of Cat Power’s ‘Covers Record’. Not to mention gentle lashings of that elusive ‘Wicker Man’ vibe.

It’s difficult to discuss what I love about this kind of folk music without resorting to cliché (see above paragraph), but what it basically comes down to is... the strange, fleeting imagery and indefinable feelings it evokes in me, funny nameless sensations the origin of which I don’t really know, and which I can rarely access any other way. And Vashti’s album gives me such a direct line to that stuff it makes me shiver. Sorry to go all ‘Pseud’s Corner’ on you there, but that’s the only way I can explain it. Maybe it’s because I’m basically English and grew up in the countryside with all that that entails, or maybe it’s even some weird folk memory yearning, but whatever – in a subtle, subliminal sort of way, this music gives me glimpses of things I’ve forgotten, or never knew in the first place, and takes me to a very good place indeed.

For Vashti Bunyan to have suddenly returned with a record this strong and assured after spending three decades not playing any music is an absolutely staggering achievement, and testament to the reality and uniqueness of her talent, which clearly goes a lot deeper than mere record collector hype and trendy folk-revivalism.

My life has been considerably brightened this week by a couple of parallel musical discoveries, which I will hopefully tell you about one at a time. First up;

JAWBONE!

Jawbone is a primitive punk-blues one man band from Detroit. His joyous, demented racket first came to my attention when John Peel championed his record ‘Dang Blues’ (on Loose records) a couple of years ago. Unable to affordably locate said album, he promptly faded from my consciousness, only to return last week when I noticed he was playing a show in this very town.

Jawbone live in the flesh was an odd experience – judging by the music I was expecting some sort of desperate Hasil Adkins type character, or at least a workable facsimile of one – wild eyes, broken teeth, flailing limbs, you name it. Thus it’s something of a surprise to discover that the man behind Jawbone is a skinny, reserved, slightly geeky guy who wisely avoids any obvious ‘bloooz’ affectations and generally looks like the last person on earth you’d expect to lead a double life as a whiskey-soaked, blues hollerin’ wildman.

But wind him up and watch him go and this dude does not disappoint! Sat behind his foot-operated bass drum and hi-hat, with his insanely overdriven guitar on his knee, harmonica ‘round his neck, he just blasts into action, tearing through his addictively psychotic caveman odes to frustration and low-rent good times, thrashing out knuckleheadedly simple blues rhythms with the feverish intensity rarely seen elsewhere. His slide guitar crescendos rarely venture beyond three notes and his songs basically all just go ‘THUMP THUMP THUMP’, but you’d be hard-pressed to find a more life-affirming storm of racket this side of black metal. And his lyrics – when audible - are hilarious, riffing on absurdist suburban trivia in a way that puts me in mind of early Beck. Haven’t got a clue what he’s on about most of the time, but I dare you not to crack an idiot grin every time he yelps a chorus of “DADDY GOT A HAIRCUT, MAMMA GONNA MOW THE LAWN!” on signature tune ‘What’s Goin’ On’.

Quite how all this teeth-grinding madness has ended up exploding out of a guy who resembles Steve Albini’s shy younger brother, I’ve got no idea, but it’s truly raw, fantastic stuff, and ‘Dang Blues’ stands as an essential purchase for all fans of fucked up blues and primitive rock n’ roll.

( It’s also worth mentioning that Jawbone was playing on the same bill as another under-rated Peel favourite, Louisiana-via-Hamburg everyday fella DM Bob, who embodies the strange contradiction of being a jovial, upbeat bluesman as well as anyone. Imagine the best drinking buddy in the world and you’re probably imagining Bob. He’s currently playing in partnership with a bloke called Jem Finer, who I’m told used to be in the Pogues, and together they have a whale of a time, stumbling through a selection of idiotically lovable blues/pop/rock n’ roll/country ditties and working out some serious musical mojo on a mixture of guitar, banjo, sax and lap steel while they’re at it, though it is my duty to note that self-explanatory DM Bob rave-ups like ‘BBQ Bob’ and ‘Two-Headed Woman’ hit the spot a lot more thoroughly than Jem’s slightly flat ‘clever lyric’ based comedy numbers. )

RETURN OF THE SHIVERING KING…

Hurrah! I’ve just discovered that the unspeakably mighty Dead Meadow are touring next month, along with the superbly named Black Mountain, whom I am hopeful will also muster a respectable level of might.

(I would throw in some links, but I’m thinking the names probably tell you all you need to know in this case.)

They’re playing Nottingham on November 24th, and come hell or high water, I wanna be there.

My main reason for mentioning this is as a transparent ploy to try and convince any Nottingham residents who happen to be reading to let this poor true believer sleep on their floor for a few hours so that I won’t be reduced to shivering in the station or wandering the streets all night or whatever. (My email’s on the right.) I’ll be eternally grateful and can repay you in music, alcohol, tedious conversation and perhaps even money.

I was reading this thing somewhere on the internet a while ago written by some guy who has complaining that the feral DIY spirit of ‘80s underground music has died out ‘cos these days everybody’s too affluent and bourgeois, and transport is cheap and vast quantities of music and information are easy to get hold of at the touch of a button, so everybody’s jaded blah blah blah. Well fear not grumbling internet dude, Midland Mainline and their infernally inadequate train schedules are ensuring we keep things real in this neck of the woods.

FLAGRANT SELF-PROMOTION;

Not a great deal of time ago, Richard Peel commisioned me to do a comic for his website. The brief was that it was to be about wizards and set "a long time ago".

Thus, 'Long Time Ago Wizard Comix' was born, and you can see it by going here and clicking on my name*. It's not really all that great, but whatareyougonnado?

While you're over there, you should buy a copy of Richard Peel's comic 'Wizard Wars', which is marvellous.

(This post probably contains more useage of the word 'wizard' than any previous one on this weblog. But it's still only three uses. C'mon kids, give me reasons to break that record!)

*(my name is Ben Haggar by the way, in case you're some weirdo trespasser who has never otherwise had any contact with me - in which case, hello, welcome to my website! I hope you like it, and I'm sorry I called you a weirdo trespasser.)

Here are reports on some sounds I have recently been subjecting myself to. All except the Mountain Goats were bought at a record fair for £1 or something similarly reasonable.

The Mountain Goats – the Sunset Tree (4AD)

I’ve been trying work up a review of this since I got it a couple of months ago, but the task is akin to climbing Everest. I could plough through a 4000 word review and still not give voice to everything that needs to be said here. And I won’t do that, because such is my admiration for John Darnielle’s songs that I’ve always found it difficult to write about the Mountain Goats without immediately descending into gushing superlatives and declarations that he’s the greatest currently active songwriter in the world. And this album – perhaps his best yet – is even more of a challenge to write about, seeing as how it’s an autobiographical song cycle dealing primarily with domestic abuse suffered during his teenage years. Now, needless to say, I’d rather hack my own ears off than be subjected to what would happen if most of today’s breed of indie ‘troubadours’ decided to tackle such subject matter at length, but honest to god, there’s not an inch of fat on this record. Here is a list of things this album is NOT: self-pitying, overwrought, cringeworthy, dull, depressing, sanctimonious or emo. Darnielle is a master songwriter, and even when dealing with this evidently painful and personal stuff he maintains his essentially punk sensibility, and his narrative drive; he jams econo. Rarely exceeding four minutes and rarely utilising more than his voice and two instruments, the songs go straight for the jugular – they set up their story, make their point and end, leaving you feeling like you’ve just finished a climatic chapter in a great novel or watched a pivotal scene in a classic movie. Here is a list of things this album IS: gripping, dramatic, triumphant, beautiful and moving. It’s one of those records that it’s pointless trying to write about, I just need to play it to you – then you’d get what I mean. Album of the year contender for sure.

The Icky Boyfriends – A Love Obscene (Menlo Park)

The name and cover art instantly sold me on this one. A 2 CD retrospective of a band who, I would imagine, alienated and frightened everyone they came in contact with whilst active in San Francisco in the early/mid-90s. They seem to have styled themselves as the ultimate talentless, fucked up loser band and rather resemble the Electric Eels – less in deliberate homage one suspects, and more just because fucked minds think alike. The sleeve notes tell great tales of disastrous gigs and general freak-flag flying, and inform us that the band’s favourite song was one called ‘Pigs’ which they’d play at every practice and up to five times at each gig. So I cue it up on the CD – it’s 18 seconds long and consists of a thunderous two note bass riff and free-from drumming over which the singer yells “I WANT TO TAKE SOME PCP AND WASTE SOME FUCKING PIGS!”, and then it ends. They’re that kind of band. The Icky Boyfriends’ working method appears to have been similar to that of the Fall, only far more ramshackle and without Mark E. Smith’s purity of vision – basically the guitarist and drummer wait until they hit some kind of horrible, caveman groove and then the singer yells whatever’s on his mind over the top of it. Lots of their songs seem to be about menstruation, or travelling on buses. There are 57 songs on here. About one song in every ten is a quiet, weirdly affecting love song, and they seem to have had a strange obsession with John Lennon – they cover his ‘Love is Real’, and their own number ‘Nervous Guy’ would be a beautiful song, except that it’s blatantly just ‘Jealous Guy’ with the lyrics changed slightly. How these weirdoes lucked themselves into a CD retrospective I’ve got no idea, but do I really need to tell you what an essential addition to your music library this will be?

Whiteout with William Winnant & Jim O’Rourke – china is near (ATP)

Whiteout are a New York drums / electric organ duo. I don’t have the recording info, but from listening to this I’m assuming they’re aided here by Winnant on percussion and O’Rourke on laptop / electronics. The sound of this album is bloody-mindedly cold, distant and inaccessible but still has a lot more in the way of guts and substance than some of the more unappealing avant-abstraction on the market. There’s a distinctly unsettling air to proceedings – nothing you could drift off to sleep to here. The drumming is interesting – harsh, fast and crazy, but understated and quite low in the mix, keeping us looking over our shoulder. There’s a lot of scraping and shuffling, like somebody dragging a robot carcass down a back alley. The electronics by contrast lean heavily on rich analogue textures, and are thus weirdly comforting and familiar, giving Whiteout’s long, dark improv workouts the air of long-suppressed satanic BBC Radiophonic Workshop experiments. Whiteout are hard work in places, but this is an intriguing and evocative listen nonetheless. It makes me think of drunken Cybermen staggering across the surface of the Tenth Planet and the ghost of William Hartnell, exhausted from fleeing down endless black and white corridors. Moonbases, syringes in the garbage and black skies.

Gravenhurst – fires in distant buildings (Warp)

What the hell happened? Gravenhurst’s ‘Blackholes in the Sand’ mini-album was very good indeed – menacingly pretty Wicker Man / Six Organs.. styled folk gear from sick at heart English boys. This full length effort on the other hand sounds like dreary Joy Division worshipping sixth form indie rock. Fucking dreadful… what’s the deal??

The Research (The Charlotte, Thursday)

9:00PM:
Enter venue.

‘STREET TEAM’ LADY: Excuse me, do you want to sign the mailing list? We’ll give you a free badge!

ME (snottily): No thanks, the band haven’t played, and I don’t know whether or not I like them yet.

(THINKS:I hate this pushy mailing list crap so much… are they on a major label or something??)

11:03PM:
The band have just left the stage.

ME: Excuse me, have you still got that mailing list? I’d like to sign it.

NEXT DAY:
I write an email;

“The Research are totally, utterly amazing!! It’s just as well for your own sake that you didn’t stick around to see them, cos I’m sure they’d instantly become your new favourite band and you’d be forced to stay in the country and follow them around. They’re sort of like a teenage cutie-pop version of Oneida if you can imagine that…. They sing amazingly simple, joyous boy/girl sad love songs with funny lyrics and swear words and totally thrash the hell out of them on drums, bass and toy keyboard – I jumped up and down all the way through their set. Their new single is called “I love you (but I’m scared I’ll fuck it up)”, and it’s 2 minutes long and it’s great. They’re just too perfect to be real! I love them!!”