2. THE EVIL ONE RETURNS!

On June 18th this year, an event that I for one never expected to see took place, as one of the greatest, weirdest and wildest rock n’ rollers who ever lived took the stage at the Royal Festival Hall for his first ever public appearance on British soil.

He’s walked with a zombie, he’s worked in the Kremlin with a two-headed dog, he’s a demon and he loves rock n’ roll, he’s gonna miss you baby: yes, it’s Roky Erickson! He’s alive, he’s healthy, he’s happy and he’s gonna rock for us tonight! And given the circumstances of his life history (which I won’t bother summarising here – the recently released documentary You’re Gonna Miss Me, or a google search, will fill you in on the details), that alone is a triumph worthy of a standing ovation.

Which is exactly what he gets, following a brief introduction from Jarvis Cocker (“the word legend is bandied about a lot these days..”, “I’ll keep my gob shut..” etc. – thanks for that JC).

If you’re familiar with Roky Erickson, you’ll no doubt be apt to picture him as he appears in the scattered, mysterious images which have adorned record sleeves, fan websites and the homemade t-shirts of some of the more dedicated dudes in the audience at the RFH; crazed, menacing eyes staring through masses of greasy, unkempt hair, Rasputin-like beard, grey skin, hobo dress sense, busted teeth – the all-round avatar of drug-fucked, madness-celebrating cult rock n’ roll culture.

Well, nowadays Roky looks rather more like this;



..and I guess that probably sums up all you need to know about Roky’s recent return to the world: lookin’ good man!

Frankly, Roky could have played a few numbers on an acoustic, goofed around a bit and gone home, and we in the audience would have been happy that he was just, y’know, THERE, such is the goodwill that inevitably gathers around such a lost / troubled outsider hero. But no, we’re treated tonight to a full scale rockin’ electric set with his backing band The Explosives, blasting through flawless renditions of the ‘horror rock’ songs that provide some of the highlights of Roky’s criminally underappreciated solo career, plus a few old Elevators numbers for good measure.

Yes, “Bloody Hammer”, “Cold Night For Alligators”, “The Interpreter”, “Bermuda”, “Night of the Vampire”, “I Think of Demons” – they’re all here, and if Roky can’t quite hit the wild high notes on the chorus of “Two-Headed Dog” anymore, who cares, he still perfectly busts through all the different voices on the b-movie dialogue middle section of “Creature With The Atom Brain”. Yeah!

Lead guitarist Duane Aslaksen, who has provided the soaring riffs and heroic solos throughout Roky’s solo career, is clearly the dynamo of the band, keeping an eye on the other guys and checking in with Roky between each song, as well as rockin’ out continuously, but that’s not to say that the Rok isn’t holding his own perfectly well on stage. Admittedly he’s not very talkative; “THANK YOU!” he yelps after every song, before following a ritual of looking around to see what’s going on, approaching the mic as if to say something, hesitating a moment… then deciding to play it safe with another “THANK YOU!”, and retreating. But during the songs themselves, he is completely at home, the roar of the guitars switching him instantly from the goofy, tongue-tied, loveable dude he seems between songs into the kind of commanding presence the music demands – the inspired, demonic rock n’ roller that his fans know of old. His voice is in fine form, and his thrashing barre chord rhythm guitar playing is appropriately ass-kicking; he even lets out a few ad-libbed shrieks and takes a few solos on brooding blues jams such as “The Beast”. And if his performance is perhaps lacking a touch of the harrowing darkness and violent intensity of his ‘70s and ‘80s recordings, well in view of his improved health and quality of life these days, losing that stuff was probably a worthy sacrifice.

So there we go: a full set, *three* encores, another standing ovation, and Roky is outta here, still not daring to say much, but looking on top of the world at the adulation he’s received from the crowd. Duane has to gently push him away from the edge of the stage and lead him out of sight after he stays on to shake hands with the fans in the front rows, looking like he’d be happy to stay there until everyone in the venue had received their turn for a holy handshake.

I guess I would have liked to have heard some of Roky’s beautiful acoustic ballads alongside the rock songs, but such complaints seem churlish after such an unexpectedly confident and magnificent return to form. I feel like thanking everyone who has helped to bring this about.

………………….

So that was the concert. If you’re unfamiliar with the guy, then I guess the above probably didn’t mean much to you, for which apologies, but if you’ll bear with me a bit longer, I’ve been thinking recently about just WHY I love Roky so much, and why the power and appeal of his work is so hard to communicate. So if it’s ok with you, I’m going to finish by throwing in a few rough thoughts about that.

In Thurston Moore’s inevitable appearance in the aforementioned documentary (jesus, is it POSSIBLE to make a music documentary without this dude butting in? – I mean, if you made one and didn’t invite him on, do you think he’d actually phone up and threaten you..?) , he talks briefly about the uncontrived nature of Roky’s songs, the way they just seem to “just burst out of him”, and that’s… spot on actually. Thanks Thurston. The ‘horror rock’ tag that’s often attached to Roky’s solo work really fails to do it justice, even if it is objectively accurate. It brings to mind people like Alice Cooper, or Screaming Lord Sutch, or Marilyn Manson or whover, who adopt the whole ‘horror’ thing as a somewhat tongue-in-cheek gesture, in the name of shock value, or of freak-power or good ol’ fashioned entertainment. But Roky isn’t like that at all; there are no corny gimmicks in his records or live shows – he wears his everyday clothes on stage and grins all the way through! His horror-songs are entirely earnest and genuine endeavours, reflecting a deep love of horror imagery and his own conception of occult weirdness, and the comfort and reassurance that they evidently bring him.

Comparing one artist troubled by mental illness to another is a bit of a cheap ploy, but nonetheless, the thought occurs to me that Roky should rightly be viewed not as some shock rocker or hippie burnout, but more as a kind of Daniel Johnston figure who, instead of eternally fearing and fleeing from the demons of his mind, managed to see the good side of them, made friends with them, cranked up the amps and invited them to party!

And as a result, he is SUCH a joyous and powerful performer, a really inspired individual in a way that’s hard to really qualify or explain. Take a song like ‘I Walked With A Zombie’ – so moronically simple, so mind-numbingly repetitive, and yet… what a great song! I mean, imagine if *I* sat down and recorded a song that consisted of an intro and chord progression lifted from a ‘50s girl group hit, over which I yelled the name of a Val Lawton movie again and again with no other lyrics, interspersed with guitar solos. Many things that recording might be, but the kind of thing you’d want to listen to everyday?, the kind of thing that would always make you smile? – probably not. What makes Roky different? – well that’s a big question, but at heart I guess it’s just the sheer SPIRIT of what he does.

(That said, maybe keep an eye out for my recording of "The Curse Of The Cat People" in future!)

But I think basically, on an instinctual level, I love rock n’ roll, I love horror movies and I love entirely honest, positive self-expression, and Roky’s music is a perfect combination of all three… and that’s all I can really say. When Roky is singing, I feel good, I feel like I know my place in the world, I feel comfortable. And presumptuous though it may be to say so, I think he probably feels the same when he’s singing. The fact that the vast majority of people are likely to feel the exact opposite when he lets rip is something we’re just gonna have to live with. Their loss.
……………..

A lot of Roky’s best material is still available, thanks to reissues from Rykodisc and Sympathy For the Record Industry, and as such, rather than posting mp3s from them, I will urge you to buy great albums like Gremlins Have Pictures and The Evil One.

But to whet your appetite, here are a few session tracks with added interview extracts taken from Roky’s appearance on San Francisco KSJO’s ‘Modern Humans’ radio show in August 1979. Enjoy!

Mp3s:

Night of the Vampire

White Faces

Bloody Hammer

In the past month, it has been my great privilege to see two very different American artists making their debut appearances on UK soil, and whilst this isn’t a ‘proper-proper’ review, I would be severely neglecting my duty if I didn’t at least mention them.

1. LIVING IN SIN IN THE USA

Oakley Hall played a modest headlining show in London a few weeks back, and sold just about enough tickets to make it worthwhile, or so I should imagine. The band is the brainchild of Pat Sullivan, formerly Papa Crazee, who left Oneida in 2001 to pursue a ‘country direction’, of which the six piece line-up of Oakley Hall is the eventual result. And goddamn almighty, are they ever an impressive band onstage, pulling out all the stops to create the kind of Cosmic American Music that even the more classic rock affiliated of today’s ‘indie’ bands scarcely dare aim at anymore, let alone achieve. They’ve got three guitarists on stage much of the time, ploughing fields of holy Big Star tone into a harvest of mighty ‘ragged glory’ rocking out, with the frequent addition of fiddle, organ and lapsteel and harmonious male and female vocals grappling their way across sky-scraping, country/folk rooted mountainsides of songs with an “all together now!” vibe straight out of prime-era Fairport. The rhythm section, it should be noted, sound decidedly more modern than the rest of the band, which is perhaps for the best, often veering into a forceful space-rock kinda hypnotic groove.

By the time they launch into their second song – and Oakley Hall songs tend to be the kind of top-heavy, ocean-going dreadnaughts that need to be launched with the aid of a dockside crane and a crowd of cheering peasants – my jaw has hit the floor. How can a band this good even EXIST in the modern era, let alone be playing for 50 people in some soulless Hoxton hellhole of a Monday evening? By the time they get going on their biggest, bestest and most memorable song – “If I Was In El-Dorado”, which sounds like the result of 10 years careful examination of everything The Eagles did wrong, and how it could be put gloriously RIGHT, I’m ready to sing along to songs I’ve never heard before, punch the air in sheer joy and even throw in some ‘halleluiahs’.

Of course, the high wears off after returning home, downloading some Oakley Hall mp3s (the ones offered for free on their website I should make clear) and thinking things through a bit more. With the immediacy of their live show fading, it becomes clear that for all the weighty SUBSTANCE and SOLIDITY of their music, Oakley Hall are just as much of a post-modern concern as the latest batch of hipster disco crap. This isn’t their fault of course, and unlike most others, the band are aiming so high that even when they miss the bullseye and don’t quite get to hang out in heaven with Gram and Jerry, following their travails is still a thoroughly rewarding experience, like watching Bogart go through hell and back in search of gold in “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” or something.

Like contemporaries such as Espers or Dead Meadow, Oakley Hall’s quest is essentially to take the most enticing and powerful elements from their most fetishised ‘60s and ‘70s LPs and bring them back to life, transforming them via modern hindsight, equipment and expertise into the kind of mighty, fully-realised music that was sometimes only hinted at within previous generations’ treasures. To fully succeed, this process should happen organically (or should at least appear to). The band’s inspirations should fuse into a glorious whole, capturing the indefinable spirit of their source material without direct quotation from it, bypassing any fears of retrogressive plagiarism.

Sometimes, as in the aforementioned ‘..El-Dorado’ or the ecstatic ensemble-playing of the group’s live incarnation, Oakley Hall succeed brilliantly, but in a lot of their currently available recordings (as evidence I take last year’s ‘Gypsum Strings’, which I have subsequently bought for real, actual money), the alchemy doesn’t quite come off. You can identify the component parts too readily, and see the joins. Not that that makes it any less of a fucking great listening experience, as entire songs-worth of lovingly fashioned Zuma-era Crazy Horse rocking and wrecked Neil Young vocals are hammered, nailed and welded together with Flying Burrito Bros choruses, brooding passages of Richard Thompson lyricism, an epic dose of San Fran Ballroom scene psyche jamming, banjo n’ fiddle-led Pentangle trad-folk mutations, and occasional passages of distorted riffing more in keeping with the rest of the Brooklyn avant-rock fraternity, with the latter two strains in particular combining to form the most heavy-rocking rendition of ‘The House Carpenter’ you’re ever likely encounter. On a prosaic level: great stuff! No complaints whatsoever! But just not *quite* managing to skirt the synthesis of original genius you suspect this band should rightly embody.

Between them, I’m confident that the current members of Oakley Hall have enough talent to muddle together careers in a half-dozen moderately enjoyable indie bands, and their decision to come together as a group of fine musicians and deny their respective egos in order to put in the hours and hard graft needed to create something utterly honest, timeless and spectacular is definitely to be applauded. And, given the ambition of what they’re trying to achieve, to say that on their current form they’re NEARLY reaching where they want to be, and COULD WELL get there in the near future, isn’t so much a criticism as a vindication: keep marching Oakley Hall, and the glory shall be yours.



LINK >Oakley Hall’s website

Tony Conrad / Paavoharju / Richard Youngs / Islaja
St. Giles in the Field Church, June 1st 2007

I hit the church shortly after opening time, still muddleheaded from work, the sun only just beginning to slip it’s way behind central London’s monstrous office monoliths, and the place is already packed, a situation not helped by the decision to close off the balconies.

I succeed in grabbing a pew toward the back though, and bear happy witness to Islaja’s helplessly ineffable drone-pop as it soundtracks my fellow cultured punters politely pushing past each other, negotiating seating arrangements as if boarding a longhaul flight. All I can see in the direction the music’s coming from is the bobbing torso of a stern bass player who seems to be generating much of the gorgeous tonal rumbling, of which there is a whole lot goin’ on, whilst vocal stylings akin to Bjork auditioning “CONTENTMENT” for a demanding movie director and some so-so keyboard meandering emanate from somewhere to his left. Abandoning my attempt at viewing the proceedings, I concentrate instead upon the sunbeams flickering through stained glass and shadowed tree branches. About half an hour passes. I seem to recall that they cram a lot of overtly poppy and rocky elements into their psychey droniness, but nothing too jarring. Well… that was quite nice I suppose.

Glasgow’s Richard Youngs has quietly amassed an astonishingly varied body of work over the past decade or two, encompassing improv, noise and psychedelia, contemporary composition, folk-based singer-songwriter material and full-on technical prog-rock with his group Ilk, and is name-checked by many as one of the British avant garde’s….. yeah, yeah, blah blah blah, you know this, or else don’t care.

Richard stands before the altar this evening, alone save a microphone and music stand, and it seems he intends to present us with a solo vocal set. The couple of shots of complimentary aniseed vodka I picked up at the door are starting to feel like pretty inadequate preparation as he opens his lungs and lets rip.

But Mr. Youngs is a man who approaches his music with a rare spirit of humility, good humour and openness of both heart and mind, and doubts about the novelty of his chosen format are soon dispelled.

“That was an old one”, he says after wordlessly hollering at us for five straight minutes, understandably prompting some chuckles, and from thereon in, his set is a revelation. Appropriate to the location, he launches into a post-Blake/Ginsberg rhythmic declaration of everyday holiness, pounding his music-stand with some kinda metal beater(?), establishing a steel mama-heartbeat with caveman intensity. For his next piece, Youngs tries out a bit of audience participation in place of a broken ebow, instructing the congregation to hum a drone on a particular note. But the accompaniment is soon forgotten as his voice alone fills out the church, soaring high and lonesome on an awe-inspiring and endless ode to joy, a kaleidoscope of ever-shifting melodies, evoking fragments of distant FM pop as much as it does the Scottish balladic tradition of Shirley Collins et al and the vocal mantras of Indian raga, whilst his words speak of the bricks of tenement housing, of sunlight through the windscreen of a transit van, as much as they do the seashores and hills of yore. A brave and beautiful, genuinely challenging performance, and undoubtedly the best thing I took from this evening.

And if I thought I needed more vodka earlier on, by god, wait until Paavoharju take the stage in this house of the lord. Simultaneously convoluted and cack-handed, Paavoharju seem to resemble the kind of stoned music student jam band that helped give The Grateful Dead and their fans a bad name for so many years. Buried somewhere is maybe a hint of the kind of shimmering, psychedelic cacophony Sunburned Hand of Man routinely dish up, but I think that’s maybe just because their playing is really slack-assed rather than through any deliberate intention, and an excess of utterly unnecessary baroque electric piano wig-outs seal the deal for this lot I’m afraid, casting an unsavoury whiff of failed Eurovision Song Contest contenders over proceedings.

For the first few songs they have a female singer, whose purrs and shrieks are best things on offer at this particular sonic stall, but then she soon makes way for a middle-aged dude in a baseball cap and gigantic shades who strums a classical guitar and throws ‘new age’ dance moves to the band’s terminally unfunky grooves, looking for all the world like the Finnish Free-Folk Roy Orbison. What the HELL is going on here…? Who booked these guys? Maybe there are cultural differences at play or something, maybe they’re suffering from a bad sound-mix, I dunno, but whatever point it is Paavoharju are trying to make, it’s not coming across too well tonight.

Tony Conrad’s set begins with some impressive low budget dramatics; a bedsheet stretched across the church’s knave, electric fans and bright lights. A lone silhouette of our man, be-hatted, looms over us. He raises his violin, brutally scrapes out an open-stringed roar like a charging dinosaur, and the drone is awakened.

Conrad’s current music remains true to the intentions of that which he helped create as part of LaMonte Young’s Dream Syndicate / Theatre of Eternal Music back in the ‘60s, channeling a pure, unified sound which shifts and expands at a geological pace, exhibiting a crushing, pre/post-human density. In a similar spirit to H.P. Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones, this sound seems utterly ambivalent toward, or uncomprehending of, a human audience, drawing itself down from a whole other plain of being entirely. It’s a deathless cliché when approaching this kind of music to say that the sound has no beginning nor end, and that the musician seems to simply tap into it's frequency for a while and channel it for us, but that Is very definitely the feeling created by a performer such as Conrad.

So, the spirit of "Eternal Music" Is alive and well on one level, but any stargazers In the audience here In search of a good evening's celestial tripping have another thing coming, for something at the heart of Tony's drone has gone very wrong somewhere along the line. Utterly lacking in the kind of bodhisattva bliss embraced by contemporaries such as Young and Terry Riley as an aesthetic backdrop to their music, Conrad seems to have been drawn Instead to the opposite extreme, mapping out a space that is very, very dark indeed. A place more likely to draw admiration from, and comparisons with, the contemporary noise and power-electronics scenes than with anything a damn, life-loving hippy like me might be liable to enjoy in the comfort of my own home.

With a lot of the violin tone quickly submerged within a powerhouse of brutal, unseen noise machines, Conrad presents us tonight with an hour or so of unremitting, apocalyptic dread. Building from a starting point eerily reminiscent of the crumbling beauty channeled by Birchville Cat Motel, Tony wastes no time In taking things to the next level, whether we want to follow or not, the sheets of sound straight from his instrument bringing forth the majesty of towering infernos, collapsing skyscrapers, charred cityscapes with all the bombast of a Hollywood disaster epic, whilst a cacophony of electronic demons shriek and babble beneath.

Through the majority of Conrad's set there's a sound going on exactly like a skipping CD - whir, whir, whir, whir - that CAN'T be deliberate, can it? But if it isn't, surely he would have turned it off or fixed it by now? But on it goes, and after a few minutes I see the point - it provides a solid pulse to the sound, a fixed, hypnotic spine amid the deluge of looped overtones that nonetheless refuses to give in to the compromise of an organic/animalistic 'beat'. I'm getting quite into it.

Then the sky splits in two and all is lost beneath a storm of Merzbow-esque insectoid global death agony… which goes on, and on, and on.

Astonishingly powerful, astonishingly pure in it's inhuman tonal vastness, but, I mean… shit man… the clock is ticking down to a time when we're not going to need some geezer with a violin to make us feel like everything in the world is dying, assuming some of us don't feel that way already. And it's FRIDAY NIGHT, y'know? What am I doing here? What are YOU doing here? Put your head between your knees and wait until it's over.

Queuing for the toilet after the show, I watch Tony Conrad, still behind his curtain, packing up his gear. A grinning roadie hands him a couple of CD-Rs. "That's the last time I trust these damn things!" says Mr. Conrad good-naturedly.

Draw your own conclusions.

Help She Can’t Swim – The Death of Nightlife
(Fantastic Plastic)

Help She Can’t Swim’s debut album ‘Fashionista Super Dance Troupe’ knocked my block off when a friend who clearly knows my tastes well submitted it for my approval during the final days of 2004.

It was like a perfect band, fallen to earth like manna from heaven: a buncha cynical south coast teenagers with a homegrown mess of screamo punk, Bis/Le Tigre styled DIY dancefloor militancy and squalling Sonic Youth guitars, nailed together with perfecto, super-loud HULK SMASH production. Ten songs in 25 minutes or thereabouts, and every one a knockout. Fuckin’ A! Up there with ‘Mclusky Do Dallas’, Billy Childish’s recent output and very little else as some of the best punk rock made on British soil in recent years. Lyrical content was something else again, but we’ll get on to that later.

So yeah, you know the story, I liked it basically. We tried to go and see them play at some trendy club night in Nottingham, but their van broke down so they didn’t make it and we stayed up all night indulging in all kinda craziness and had to grab the first morning train home and get to work on time the next day. Yes you probably know that story by now too, let’s get to the point.

So it’s the middle of 2007, and here’s their second album. I just went to the shops and bought it. Let's go!

‘Consumer Guide’ review:

It’s pretty damn good! Not quite as good as the first album, but second albums never are, it’s the law or something. If you’re wavering over record purchases sometime this month though, and you don’t want to buy old stuff, you should go buy this one! Go straight to the counter and ask for it! It’s a blast!

‘Music’ review:

More of the same by and large, no drastic changes to report. Lead guitarist Tom Baker has left the band at some point, taking his Sonic Youth shredding with him (yes, I know, it’s a common name – nice mental image tho, no?). The resulting slack has been taken up by Leesey’s keyboards, cheapo casio tones now holding down the melodies and hooks of most of the songs whilst the remaining guitar thrashes away in riff/rhythm mode. The rhythm section are tight and punchy like an elastic band about to snap, though perhaps a bit too reliant on the over-familiar “punk-disco” beat. The drummer (Lewis Baker is his name - HELLO!) likes to go fast, and gets through the slower sections by pretending he's beating a cow to death on his snare drum. The sound here is even bigger, clearer and smashier than on the first record, obviously pretty professionally done, guitars compressed and bordering on slick just enough to give lo-fi warriors like me pause for thought; seems to be a common trait amongst decent contemporary punk bands with something to say – witness the Thermals last one for text-book example. Not a problem though when the band’s energy is still captured this well. I finally caught Help She Can’t Swim live a couple of months back, and they were GREAT, although predictably a lot more shambolic than on record. Basically ‘Death of Nightlife’ sounds like the live band kitted out in American football armour, charging in for a touch-down…. and they make it! Exciting stuff and no mistake.

‘Actual’ review:

(It’s a bit of an essay, so hold on.)

Help She Can’t Swim seem like an inherently neurotic band from the ‘waving not drowning’ name on downwards. The first album found them split between two lyrical modes: firstly, vitriolic (self?)hatred spat out Billy Liar machine gun style against the atrocities of nightclubs, music scenes, social situations in general. Secondly, an aching desire to shut out the world and get wasted in idyllic surroundings with the one you love. Yes! I approve! HSCS know the score: take no prisoners in nailing your easy-won cynicism to 90% of the confusion/alienation/distraction comprising the modern world, but learn to recognise the bits that matter, hold on to them, stay wide-eyed, keep the feeling alive.

Basic point perhaps, but one rarely expressed in such naked and genuine terms by a loud, flailing rock band. There’s a tone of hysteria running through all of their music, a certain violence in the dichotomy they’re putting across, but hell, this approach to life doesn’t seem neurotic to me, it seems NECESSARY.

Now, time for some history: poetry written by teenagers (and to a lesser extent, ANYONE, but let’s stick to the matter in hand) is bad medicine – this we know. It’s a shot in the dark at honest expression, sure, but a cripplingly self-conscious one, point and content always transformed and lost by the author’s self-regard and concern for an imagined audience, hir reliance on the easy dodge of abstraction, hir lack of the courage needed for full disclosure combined with some sick need to court authenticity by playing at being ‘confessional’, long after anything ‘real’ has left the building. Teenage poetry’s train-wreck meeting between pure self-expression and total fabrication is an aesthetic nightmare, so much so it makes me fucking queasy. It’s bullshit man, that’s why nobody reads it. But god only knows, they keep on writing it.

Now one of the greatest gifts rock n’ roll has bestowed on the world is the entirely magical, intangible ability of hammered guitar chords, martial drums and easy melody – the armour of racket, the immediacy of sound, strength in numbers – to TOTALLY bypass this depressing status quo, to give the stuck up, suburban kids of the world the keys to free, genuine expression from the straight-up heart rather than baffled, self-serving brain, enabling the possibility of direct communication / shared emotional response; rock n’ roll can take some mewling diary entry and turn it into something akin to being drop-kicked by William Blake for six seconds, almost entirely without effort or artifice. And the tunes are good too.

It’s these kinds of revelatory moments that I increasingly consider the highest achievement of what I look for in music, whether I find it in The Troggs or The Beach Boys, in Bikini Kill or The Modern Lovers, or all grown up and articulate in Comet Gain and The Replacements. Anyone can act smart and write a song about robots or William Burroughs, can play a riff and start a metal band, sing a ballad and start a folk band, spout some shit and honk on a horn and start a free jazz/poetry band, and that’s all fine and passes the time (that’s the sort of junk I do for one thing), but in the end they’ll get less respect from me than those people who have the courage to really put themselves on the line in the course of using pop music as a means to genuine self-expression; the romanticising and solidifying in no-bullshit terms of doubts and disasters, wishes and dreams.

Whilst they’re not always entirely successful at it (this too is part of the deal when you put yourself on show), Help She Can’t Swim are one of THOSE bands, and they give it their best fucking shot. That’s why I like them so much! Disappointingly though, Help She Can’t Swim aren’t actual teenagers. In fact they’re probably about the same age as me I’d imagine, maybe a year or two younger (as a side-note, I’ve always dreaded the day that I really get into a band who are significantly younger than me… I suspect that day is getting pretty close). But there’s no sign of them retreating behind the curtain of musical maturity or pretending they’re resigned to adulthood or whatever, so let’s go with the teenage thing.

As the title suggests, ‘The Death of Nightlife’ still cycles through plenty of HSCS’s trademark nightclub nightmares, skirting self-parody on celebrity culture hate-rant “All The Stars" ("you're less exciting than my ringtone / how can this life be making you happy?”). The previous album’s corresponding fun-with-my-lover songs seem to have been kicked out though, and I detect some hefty 'relationship worries' at work here instead, making ‘..Nightlife’ an even more anguished prospect. The band do step out of their (dis)comfort zone though on a couple of oddball lyrical experiments in the centre of the album, notably on the Secret Garden-inspired childhood fantasia ‘Midnight Garden’ (did you ever read that book at school? Hated it at the time, but in retrospect I'd imagine it's probably pretty awesome). Leesey's verses, with slower, faintly psychedelic keyboard backing, are the highlight of this song, but otherwise it's a bit muddled. Then there's the roll-call of simple, everyday pleasures on ‘Boxes of Delights’, which ends up recalling one of those slightly smug and disingenuous “hey, we can have fun too!” tracks off a Le Tigre album. Unfortunately, both of these songs are let down primarily by the failure of the music to adjust to the more upbeat lyrical concerns, remaining as violent and frenetic as ever for no apparent reason.

Low points aside, we’re left with about eight or nine songs of the gloriously familiar: the shrieking, the neuroses, the alienation, loner battle-cries and gallows humour, and man, these songs are fucking great. I very much doubt Help She Can't Swim would classify their music as "rock n' roll"; if pushed, they'd probably say that they're "punk rock" or "kinda indie-electro-pop" or "just, y'know, MUSIC" or something. But "rock n' roll" will do me nicely on my universal teenage freedom trip. The words are printed in the CD booklet, and I reckon at least two thirds of them might even be good enough to hit home WITHOUT the rock n’ roll: simple, guileless, furious, great. But it’s the rock n’ roll that allows them space to exist, and don’t you forget it.

I saw lightning bolts covering her eyes
I saw fingers touching her like knives
It's easy not to care about her
But it's hard to forget about her

- 'Dragged Under A Wave'

You wanna take yr clothes off?
You wanna liberate me?
you say you don't believe in love
while you fuck up her sanity
It's hard to breathe when you're always wearing a mask!

- 'I Think The Record's Stopped'

You thought it was wine, but you're drinking lead
and it weighs you down
and it makes you sick

so yr going to shows on yr own
to see some band you don't know
but nothing's exciting
everything's boring
don't see the reasons to be applauding

- 'Just Be Social'

while you were staring at my waistline
I was lost with cats in my head

- 'All The Stars'

Right, that’s about 1500 words from me, and a few from them. I feel this is gonna be one of those reviews I'm going to regret, but in the spirit of the band, let's go with it. Any questions?

Links >
------------------------
Help She Can't Swim info

The band's Myspace, with some songs to listen to.

And check it out, they've made some videos too:

Hospital Drama (real slick one for the new single with the band dressed as zombies, but it's a bit boring.)

I Don't Need You (Great lo-fi video for a song off the first album. Look - somebody's cool indie bedroom! Bass player in the tool shed! Crappy suburban living room! Genius! )