IF MY HEAD WERE A RADIO STATION...

This week’s, er, ‘essential tunes’;

Pussy Galore – rip this joint
Laura Cantrell – roll truck roll
The Brian Jonestown Massacre – sailor
Swell Maps – let’s buy a bridge
Swell Maps – cake shop
Swell Maps – collision with a frogman…
Edgar Broughton Band – why can’t somebody love me?
Spot 1019 – surf machines
Alice Coltrane – shiva loka
The Shangri-Las – dressed in black
Alexander Spence – diana
Warren Zevon – werewolves of london
Mirah – a million miles
Moondog – why spend the dark night with you
The Brain Jonestown Massacre – open-heart surgery
Spirit Caravan – cosmic artifact
The Attack – mr pinnodmy’s dilemma
Pentagram – much too young to know
Carla Bozulich – the red headed stranger
The Allman Bros Band – in memory of Elizabeth Reed (live at Atlanta Pop Festival 1970)
Jonathan Richman – dancing in the lesbian bar
The Beatles – I want to hold your hand
The Lyrics – so what?
The Mountain Goats – no children
Jad Fair & Yo La Tengo – helpful monkey wallpapers entire home
Corsano / Flaherty duo – cut one
Birchville Cat Motel – trembling frost spires / speck fears
Carla Bozulich & Willie Nelson – hands on the wheel
Jonathan Richman – that summer feeling
The Research - classifieds

Gosh, eccentric musical outsider heroes really are dropping like flies this season..

DEATHBLOG



NIKKI SUDDEN

Gentleman Rock n' Roller, late of Swell Maps and the Jacobites.

1957 - 2006

This is stupidly and depressingly uncanny.

LAST FUCKING NIGHT, I stuck on Swell Maps second album 'Swell Maps in Jane from Occupied Europe', which I've owned for a while and never really listened to much, and thought "goddamn, this is incredible! I feel a gignatic Swell Maps revival coming on!"

I confess I'm not as familiar with Mr. Sudden's subsequent career as I perhaps should be, I've always felt that Swell Maps short, storming punky numbers are absolute ramshackle genius of the highest order, to say nothing of their obtuse sense of humour and failure to give a fuck about recording quality, coherence, or much else for that matter.. I have on numerous occasions in the past held up their spirit as a perfect example of everything I'd want my own music to represent.

'Let's Build a Car', 'Let's Buy a Bridge', 'Read about Seymour', 'Cake Shop', 'International Rescue', 'Border Country'.... where would Guided by Voices, Pavement - not to mention Blur - be at without the example of these stunningly demented, geeky little ditties?

So, yeah, R.I.P.

I'd commend you to download a few of the above tracks and get down.

Or read this eulogy, which is informative and, er, good.

Up-Tight & Makoto Kawabata (Galactic Zoo Discs)

Up-Tight are a Japanese trio who keep one foot within the post-Velvet Underground / Spacemen 3 axis of sunglasses-after-dark narcotic drone-rock, and the other firmly planted in the whacked out hinterland of amplifier worship, FX overload and extreme volume favoured by such fellow countrymen as High Rise, Mainliner, Boris, LSD March et al. Makoto Kawabata is Makoto Kawabata, and long may he remain so. And together they have created... well I guess I don’t really have to tell you what a humungous blow-out of formless, mind-raping cosmic goo this album’s 6 tracks and 75-odd minutes add up to, right?

Kawabata is all over the shop in terms of both playing and production, burying the bare bones of Up-Tight’s already maxed out feedback trance-rock under a gratuitous additional serving of his patented motor-psycho guitar, fuzz-drone and UFO space echo, as also heard on every Acid Mother’s Temple record ever. In places it sounds as if he’s on a quest to obliterate the poor band and turn this into a solo noise album through sheer force of will – a feat of which this unstoppable psychedelic warlord is more than capable, so it’s an act of mercy when he eases off to let Up-Tight make their presence felt, resulting in the album’s best moments.

‘Where Does She Go?’ begins with menacing sub-bass, some freaked out distant fluting reminiscent of the heralds of Lovecraft’s Outer Gods and a desperate, echoing vocal chant that sounds like one of Damo Suzuki’s deepest trips into the void, building up via sinister modal guitar and an insistent ‘Venus in Furs’ beat into a stunning piece of pitch black psychedelia before being righteously obliterated within Makoto’s ever-rising wall of pink noise fury. It’s an awe-inspiring track, recalling some of the more cultish and hairy denizens of the original Krautrock fraternity powered through the kind of amp stacks and esoteric rack-mounted shit you’d imagine they probably needed a crane to get into the studio, pushing a level of overload that seriously fucks with the speakers on my cheap hi-fi, regardless of volume.

This segues straight into the other highlight, ‘Born to Fly’, a fast-paced, heavy rocking juggernaut of a Hawkwind tribute that sees the two guitarists circling each other like X-Wings, trading thrilling blasts of post-Hendrix fire and post-Agata insanity before coalescing into a spiralling narwhale horn of skronk rising above the sea of noise... it’s the speed demon motorik epic Comets on Fire have never had the guts to make and, man, you’d better believe it ROCKS.

Unfortunately though, song structure is the inevitable victim of all this carnage, with even the rudimentary pounding of Up-Tight’s rhythm section getting swiftly lost within a sea of pure stoner sludge, the drummer too often resorting to some half-hearted cymbal swishing and the bass lost entirely beneath the waves of feedback. By the end of each track the noise is thick, malevolent, egoless, jaw-dropping... but for Up-Tight to have just kicked back into a crushing Iommi riff or a Sleep-style thunder groove at the right moment – man, that would have really pushed it over the edge!

But they don’t – they just let it slide, and let the noise machines do their work. There’s nothing going on here that those familiar with the Japanese underground won’t have heard many times before, but hungry fans of AMT, Mainliner’s ‘Mellow Out’ and Boris’s original druggy blueprint are still pointed this way for an impressive new mountain of the chaos they know and love.

Normal people on the other hand are advised that this is rather akin to spending an hour wading through a dark lake of psychoactive alien death treacle, and caution is very much advised.

(Also worthy of a mention in the album’s favour is the totally neat VU and Nico parody cover, and the fact that this is released on the record label of psychedelic true believer and Galactic Zoo Dossier main man, Mr Plastic Crimewave, who is very much deserving of some of your money.)

QUOTE TIME AGAIN;

“Some artists see an infinite number of movies. Hutchinson, for instance, instead of going to the country to study nature, will go to see a movie on 42nd Street, like "Horror at Party Beach" two or three times and contemplate it for weeks on end. The movies give a ritual pattern to the lives of many artists, and this induces a kind of "low-budget" mysticism, which keeps them in a perpetual trance. The "blood and guts" of horror movies provides for their "organic needs." Serious movies are too heavy on "values," and so are dismissed by the more perceptive artists. Such artists have X-ray eyes, and can see through all of that cloddish substance that passes for "the deep and profound" these days.”

- Robert Smithson, 'Entropy and the New Monuments'

My brother sent me a link to the above essay, and skim-reading it I wondered why, as, being the two-fisted pop culture mystic I like to pretend I am when it comes to discussion of art and philosophy, Smithson’s chilly brew of obtuse conceptual art, modern architecture and speculative science conveys about as much to me as a cat learning to tap out morse code in Russian.

Reaching the above paragraph though, my brain sparks and my nerves jangle – fuckin’ A!

I’ve been trying to come up with a decent explanation recently of why on a basic level I consistently get more enjoyment and meaning out of weird horror and cultish kitsch movies than I do out of the majority of more high-minded, artistic cinematic fare, despite being smart enough to appreciate the latter, and not having any particular appetite for the gore, sex, sadism and unintentional laughs that horror fans are assumed to get their kicks out of (well, ok, the unintentional laughs are quite good..).

And it’s a hard one to argue, I’ll admit. WHY precisely do I get more jollies out of Jean Rollin than I do out of Bergman..? I dunno man, I just do! Yes, perhaps the fact that the former favours 80 minute concoctions of sexy vampires and surrealist antics with a freak-beat soundtrack over 3 hour investigations of existential dread probably plays SOME part in my thinking, and yes, there’s a certain punk rock spirit to low budget, "low culture" film-making that always appeals to me, but..... somehow there’s MORE to it than that, you know what I mean?

My (entirely fictitious) high culture supporting aggressor in this argument would not know what I mean, and would scoff at me, dismissing my love of horror and exploitation as the result of laziness, lecherous thrill-seeking, shallowness and a lack of intellectual enegagement.

This is the point in proceedings at which I would hurl the above quote at him or her – "Robert Smithson, 'Entropy and the New Monuments', motherfucker! I, the MORE PERCEPTIVE artist, have no use for the CLODDISH SUBSTANCE that passes for 'the deep and profound' these days! You can keep your value-choked 'serious'movies! For what I need is a fix of primal imagery! Of pure LOW-BUDGET MYSTICISM!" – mm, yeah, words to conjure with.

I get the feeling Robert Smithson is generally not a person with whom I would have much in common, but nonetheless I’ll raise a glass to him tonight for putting this important concept into words for me.

Possibly this post can be considered a primer for the bumper addition of my Horror Movie Journal I shall hopefully be posting within the next week or two.. watch this space.

(DISCLAIMER: It should be noted that I do not seek to align myself entirely against the world of 'art cinema', much of which is of course genuinely superb and staggeringly effective in every respect. But as Theodore Sturgeon sagely reminds us, "90% of everything is crap", and on an aesthetic level much of it fails to engage me where certain less celebrated forms of cinema succeed.)

Thoughts on another album long lost to hipster folk memory which has finally caught my attention...

Coco-Rosie – Noah’s Ark (Touch & Go)

I always get a slightly cynical, hipster-ish vibe off Coco-Rosie that I don’t particularly care for. I’m not sure why. Somehow they always sound cold where they should be warm, nasty whilst they’re pretending to be nice. No, I don’t really know what I mean either, but I’m a strange, hung-up boy, and the atmosphere I want to get out of records can sometimes be worryingly precise.

Well anyway, all that hasn’t stopped me listening to their new (well, it WAS new) album. So, hmm... What do we think? The first track here sounds a bit like Joanna Newsom doing a rap, much in the style of Beck. How can that possibly be a bad thing?? The second song, ‘Beautiful Boys’, is a tribute to Jean Genet sung in collaboration with that Anthony character who won that big prize last year. It’s a really good song, quite aching and poignant and stuff. I recently finished reading ‘Our Lady of the Flowers’ and thoroughly enjoyed it, so I guess my appreciation of the subject matter gives me a way into it. It does sound a bit too much like a song from a surprise hit off-Broadway musical about a dying drag queen, but I guess that’s pretty inevitable under the circumstances.

The rest of the album rather blurs into one and doesn’t really put out any hooks to drag me further into it – see initial paragraph. My main observation is that it’s surprising how quickly all of this semi-genre of popular freaky folky type stuff seems to be merging into an instantly identifiable ‘sound’, despite the initial diversity of its protagonists. Unnecessarily squeaky voices?, plucked stringed instruments that aren’t guitars? Four-Tet style skittering, reversed beats and phased, buzzy textures hovering in the background? A reverence for both whimsical ‘60s folk and Kate Bush / Tori Amos style drama school musical theatricality? – Noah’s Ark has all the relevant boxes ticked.

There’s plenty of other stuff going on too of course, and they’re trying their hardest to forge their own path, and are to be applauded for that. A lot of people who aren’t me (no lesser personage than the great John Darnielle amongst them) will doubtless find a lot of meaning and beauty in this album, and good for them, I’m not criticisin’ nothing. But I still find it interesting that most of the central THINGS on this album are exactly the same central things that have turned up on other albums by the various other people in this loosely defined circle of folky folks.

I have just learned via Grant's weblog that the veteran counter-culture publishing company Loompanics is closing down operations.

Sad news to be sure, but the good news is that they're subsequently selling off their remaining warehouse stock at 50% off list-price.

An alphabetical list of their startling range of titles can be found here, and really, can you honestly tell me your life isn't going to be improved through ownership of such essential volumes as "The Construction and Operation of Clandestine Drug Laboratories", "How to Build Your Own Log Home for less than $15,000", "Waging War from Canada", "Pirate Radio Operations" and "How to Screw the Post Office"?

Abbie Hoffman would be proud.

Mind you, so would the Uni-Bomber.

Either way though, sticking-it-to-The-Man related glory surely awaits.

GETTING BACK TO WHAT WE DO BEST…

..which in my case is giving you some out of date thoughts on a few fairly successful albums which most of the people who give a damn heard about six months ago;

The Animal Collective – Feels (FatCat)

I have a real love / hate kinda thing with the music of the Animal Collective. Sometimes, when in the right mood, I can put on one of their records and silently mouth "genius…" as I lie back eyes closed, letting their world wash over me. Other times, their insufferable "wheeeee... Let’s pretend we’re little kiddies and sing in squeaky voices and run around in circles" type shenanigans makes me want to punch their fucking lights out within seconds of exposure.

In either mood though, I think I would be inclined to agree that 'Feels' is the best thing they’ve done since 'Spirit They’ve Gone / Spirit They’ve Vanished', their staggeringly good debut album from way back when.

Pulling away from both the incontinent racket of 'Danse Manatee' and the teeth-grinding sub-Incredible String Band whimsy of 'Sung Tongs', they’re back to doing what they do best. And what they do best is something that is simple to define, but that few very contemporary bands really have the power to make a reality: crafting genuinely experimental music which sounds like nothing else, but at the same time endowing it with the form, beauty and emotion needed to tug at our hearts and touch our lives.

Sonically speaking, it’s a very, well, BUSY record, with all four collective members throwing down sounds on every track for what I gather is the first time, leading to an initial feeling of being strapped into some disorientating fairground ride of ever-shifting dementia. But pretty soon you come to realise that alla this hyperactive fizz is meticulously anchored around Avey Tare and Panda Bear’s wondrous and unique song-writing. Panda’s joyfully off-kilter approach to drumming establishes a jumpy, jazz-like rhythm to proceedings, and the pair’s high-pitched voices squawk, trill, talk and just plain sing, harmonising and chasing each other through the songs with a subtlety and depth of feeling that makes me completely forget the number of times they’ve irritated the hell out of me on previous releases. Over organically layered fields of mysterious, shimmering sounds which are sometimes recognisable as pianos or guitars but could often have just as easily emerged from rotor blades or recordings of bears falling out of trees, they tell fragmented tales of childhood wonder, grown-up yearning, day-dreaming adventures and all points in between, exploding at the seams with gorgeously dazed poetics and networks of bafflingly evocative personal imagery.

Childhood memory remains their constant theme, but they’ve developed and expanded their approach, becoming less infantile and twee, and bravely casting lines out into the big, sub-conscious sea that connects perplexing kiddie memories with the anguish of over-sensitive grown-up life, hitting on the kind of vague, nameless feelings that we normally tend to stumble upon in dreams, not pop records.

'Banshee Beat' throws us into a vibe of weirdly innocent woodlands menace, like that feeling when you were 8 years old and a schoolmate who you didn’t really like very much told you the plot of a horror movie he’d seen, and it built up in your head into something far scarier than it actually was, and then you went for a walk somewhere on your own and it all came flooding out.

'Bees' is like charging around in circles on a summer day with nothing to do, yelling for a UFO to come down and abduct you. I’m still into that.

'The Purple Bottle' is, like, the best love song in years.... if you’re weird. And I’m weird. "I’d really like to kiss you, but I think that I would vomit!!" they shriek hysterically. Man, we all know how that one goes. What a great song. It makes me mindlessly happy, just like Bruce Springsteen’s 'Glory Days'. I put the two side by side on a mix CD actually, and it works very nicely.

So there we go. Out of all the Animal Collective discography thus far, I reckon ‘Feels’ is gonna be the keeper. Wheeee!

Jack Nitzsche – “The Lonely Surfer”

Track down this little tune any way you possibly can – it’s tremendous. It’s like the soundtrack to the best non-existent television series of all time. I can see it all in my head; the show would also be called ‘The Lonely Surfer’, and it would be about a surfer who continually travels the coastlines of the world, chasing the elusive big wave. He would have a furrowed brow, a fine ’70s moustache and big, sad eyes. Every week he would arrive at a new location and help people out, solve problems and dispense gentle yet heartfelt wisdom to those in need of it. But he’d also be lonely; he’d never be able to stick around long enough to make friends or to feel at home – he’d always have to move on to the next beach, the next wave.

At the heart of the show would be three essential concerns; melancholy, human dignity.. and surfing. All of these are perfectly encapsulated by Jack Nitzsche’s beautifully evocative composition.

When I listen to it, I am The Lonely Surfer.

You are too.

For in our own way, we are ALL The Lonely Surfer.

(Drawings of the Lonely Surfer, plot ideas etc. are all welcomed at the usual address.)

DEATHBLOG;



IVOR CUTLER, 1923 – 2006. R.I.P.

Very sad.

I've been listening to Ivor Cutler's records a lot over the past year or so. What can I say, except that he was a very funny, wise and unconventional man whose work and way of life I respect a lot.

"I'm Going in a Field" is one of most simple, beautiful songs ever recorded.

For those wishing to find out more, The Guardian have an excellent obituary / tribute up ; link.

"A Dreamer of Pictures, I Run in the Night.."

I just discovered that 'Cinnamon Girl' by Neil Young was Philip K. Dick's favourite rock song.

Isn't it a brilliant feeling when two previous unconnected pieces of your personal cultural pantheon come together like a solar eclipse?

Good choice Phil.

The Vichy Government – Carrion Camping (Filthy Little Angels records)

“The Vichy Government”. It’s an odd thing to call your band, isn’t it? What exactly are they trying to convey here; ironically aligning themselves with the machinations of fascist puppet regimes? The symbolic power of Bogart throwing that water bottle in the trash in ‘Casablanca’? Or, like a whole swathe of other current bands who seem to be naming themselves after the less glorious episodes in recent European history (Franz Ferdinand et al..), is this simply a case of kids staring out of the window in history class, dreaming of pop glory with half an ear open for a catchy phrase?

Well after even a cursory listen to this disc, I think it’s abundantly clear that whatever was on these guys minds in history class, pop glory wasn’t it. A welcome kick to the teeth of my half-formed expectations is swiftly delivered, as it becomes clear the Vichy Government are no book smarts yelping post-punk chancers, but instead a Suicide-esque duo featuring an extremely embittered young man of Northern Irish extraction venting his spleen in no uncertain terms over some minimal casio backing.

And spleen-venting is clearly something our boy excels at, taking up the baton from the distinguished lineage of arch-haranguers such as Bill Hicks, Jello Biafra and Lydia Lunch and holding on to the essentials that made those artists so vital – a dedication to dealing with difficult issues at a level of extremity several degrees beyond the comfortable, a mixture of poetry and crudity, wit and intellect and above all an overwhelming expression of disgust and rage directed mercilessly against the whole of human society.

As you might expect, the excruciating business of Irish sectarian politics is first in the firing line, with the VG bravely pulling no punches as they lay into the into the whole wretched, over-sensitive mess on tracks like ‘The Protestant Work Ethic’ and ‘Portmeirion’, the latter a straight up personal attack on a certain politician, bizarrely meshed into a tribute to The Prisoner. Jamie Manners does an excellent job of conveying the suffocating frustration of an intelligent, sensible young person raised amid the prejudice, economic hardship, ridiculous political catch-22s and constant threats of violence found amid those grim housing estates and menacing murals we’re so used to seeing on the evening news. I suppose we should give thanks that the situation across the channel has cooled down to a grey stalemate of mutual dissatisfaction of recent, because I get feeling the Vichy Government would have found themselves the recipients of bullets and beatings all round had they put sentiments as vehement as these on record 15 years ago.

Putting all that aside though, the strongest moments emerge when the VG open up their assault to a wider context, throwing themselves time and again against the bloodless status quo of apathy and creeping social conservatism, mixing enraged litanies of bruised idealism with a venomous sarcasm worthy of the Dead Kennedys. "You can put a three time rapist in a second hand suit, but you can’t make him rape right, or think.." begins anti-tabloid/New Labour tirade ‘Rivers of Blood’; "faggots have no place in this land, except for lesbians, they’re ok..". "So just lock them away with their ‘life partner’, give them free abortions to keep them happy, it’ll keep them off the street – now that’s an intelligent approach!" advises the self-explanatory ‘Arranged Marriages’. This stuff just pours out.

What the Vichy Government do is applaudable and necessary all round, but unfortunately ‘Carrion Camping’ still kinda falls short of the cleansing, blood-letting listening experience it needs to be. The problem lies not with the ideas, but with their execution. I haven’t witnessed them on stage, but on record at least, Mr. Manners’ voice lacks the strength or charisma to really do his words justice or to force them into the listener’s consciousness, often lapsing back into the unappealing tones of a common room politics bore. And whilst the other guy’s instrumental conceptions are more than competent, capturing the strange swing and melodic repetition of early Suicide nicely, the reliance on tinny Argos keyboard pre-sets will start to grate on even the most dedicated lo-fi warrior after a while, and the sound lacks the throbbing menace of Martin Rev’s more esoteric homemade creations.

The Vichy Government are definitely a band to be listened to, and the perfect musical expression of that feeling when you open up a newspaper and feel there's just no rational response left except to choke yourself to death with it. It’s just a shame that with this particular recording they lack the means to really push their agenda forward with an appropriate level of sonic force – I gather they’ve recorded another LP since this one, so here’s hoping that builds on the abundant strengths in evidence here and kicks some ass.