THE BEST ALBUMS OF 2007:
Part Two

HELP SHE CAN’T SWIM – THE DEATH OF NIGHTLIFE (Fantastic Plastic)

I wrote pretty extensively, and not entirely coherently, about this album earlier in the year, and I’m a bit worn out on it to be honest. So let’s just say it’s a strong second album from a really great, furious post-riot grrl punk/pop band, and see what the cut up machine has to say about the rest:

“A bit muddled. Then there's the roll-call: take no prisoners cow to death of an essay, so hold on. Resigned to adulthood riff/rhythm mode. Clearer and smashier than on a free jazz/poetry band, love while you exist, and don’t you forget it. The same rock Liar machine gun style. Help She be a common trait amongst of the confusion; gloriously covering her eyes I saw fingers. That’s all fine and passes here even bigger. Any questions? Bolts covering her eyes.
We know. Shot down the melodies whilst the remaining guitar thrashes like an elastic band about to snap, and dreams. Boring; don't see on my universal teenage freedom trip. Pretending they’re let down primarily by the failure, getting pretty close.
Teenage best fucking shot. That’s why I like music as "rock n' roll"; if pushed, drums and easy melody – enough to give lo-fi warriors, like, up, recalling one running through all. Lost with cats the neuroses, musical maturity or breathe when you're always wearing they give it their best. But "rock n' roll" will to regret, but in charging in, I increasingly consider medicine – The words are taken up by keyboards - and total fabrication is an aesthetic part of good too.”

Any questions indeed.

Mp3 > I Think The Record’s Stopped


HERMAN DUNE – GIANT (Source Inc / EMI)

It's hard to find anything particularly objective or new to say about an album that seems to have soundtracked the whole year, getting spun in every living room, shop, gig, mp3 player or radio I’ve been near, whether I felt like listening or not. For better or worse, 2007 certainly turned out to be the year in which Herman Dune made the well-deserved leap from being long-standing cult heroes to being a major label signed, Broadsheet-approved breakthrough act. At first, I really didn’t like ‘Giant’ at all, for myriad irksome reasons. Obvious singles ‘I Wish That I Could See You Soon’ and ‘1-2-3 Apple Tree’ just seemed too obvious and cloying in their sentiment, their Jonathan Richman-derived charms wearing thin with repeated listens, whilst the rest of the album seemed to mount a slightly contrived attempt at ‘serious’ Cohen/Dylan styled song-writing, ditching the band’s perfect guitar/guitar/drums line-up in favour of an unconvincing world tour through indie-boy takes on brass and ‘ethnic’ percussion, making half the songs on what already seemed an overlong, unfocused record sound like ropey outtakes from ‘Graceland’.

That was back in January and February. Clearly, I was being a big idiot back in January and February. The real root of my displeasure was that, having established a pretty big emotional connection with the hot-off-the-press confessional sentiments of previous Dune albums, I was really not in the right frame of mind to dig ‘Giant’s 'pining-for-a-lover-across-the-ocean' vibe at all.

Well joke’s on me as it turns out, because looking back from the more objective perspective of the end of the year, ‘Giant’ is obviously a fine, fine album. Still possibly the ‘difficult’ entry in the Dune’s catalogue of recorded hits, it’s a little too long and has a couple of weak tracks, but nevertheless, it’s an inspired step forward for a band who had already pretty much perfected what they do, and an album of great emotional depth and open-hearted musical spontaneity. The subtleties of the full band arrangements are a slow-burning joy, and David-Ivar Herman Dune’s continuing transformation of his personal life into timeless, romantic pop is as epic and affecting an undertaking as those helmed by the aforementioned Mr. Richman and Mr. Cohen. Like Dylan at his best, every seemingly tossed off rhyme and guileless singalong chorus is handled with a master’s touch, and if their qualities are perhaps not always immediately apparent, it would take a heart of stone not to be eventually moved by songs such as 'Pure Heart' and 'When The Water Gets Cold'. And some of Andre’s more laidback, whisky-sipping musical travelogues are pretty great too (“Glory Of Old” especially), but ‘Giant’ is David’s show really.

And as to those hit singles... well, I’ve been lucky enough to see the new incarnation of the band play a few times this year, and as their record company continue to push them toward a segment of the music market in which legions of unshaven men write songs about nothing in particular by rote, invoking Beach Boys and Beatles and bulk-blocking studio time in pursuit of dread mid-afternoon festival slot tedium, let’s just say that seeing David up there with a crowd of thousands clapping along, singing “You say you dyed your hair black since you were seventeen / cos it goes well with your eyes so green / well I’m losing my hair and my eyes are blue / and you know how bad I like to be with you!”, and then leaning back to twist the knobs up on his amp for an off-the-cuff guitar solo, just like in the old days, equals… wow, just wow.

Let’s make Herman Dune pop stars in 2008.

Mp3 > When The Water Gets Cold


JESUS LICKS – TERRIBLE BEAUTY (Post Records)

You’ll recall that I wrote a little bit about Jesus Licks in my singles reviews post a few weeks back. What I said about them then still applies, so if you’ll allow me a gratuitous recap;

“The first time I saw [Jesus Licks] play, it struck me that they might have been formed in a remote Welsh valley by the four people in the local area who liked music. As it transpires, they were formed in entirely different circumstances and actually come from proper, big places, like London and so forth, but nonetheless, the feeling is there. I suppose ‘weird folk’ is an appropriate summation of what Jesus Licks do, but it’s a million miles away from the kind of ‘weird folk’ practiced and aspired to by [most of the rather pretentious types involved in such things]. To get a handle on Jesus Licks variety of weird folk, perhaps imagine The Marine Girls taking a holiday to some distant rural locale, and joining forces with their hippie uncles to sit by the riverside and sing odd, quiet songs about highwaymen and sharks and murdering people.”

This is their album, and I really dig it. It features gentle guitar strumming and banjo plucking and minimal percussion and sometimes other things, like violins and melodicas and choirs and echoing noises of uncertain origin, but mainly just high, shaky female voices singing really simple, strange, sinister-yet-comforting songs about stuff. Like Gorkys before them, there’s sometimes a danger of descent into unsavoury quirkiness, but also like Gorkys, they have enough charm and smarts and lovely sounds to win the race, and end up just being good instead. Thirty years from now, end of civilisation permitting, some record geek will be busily ploughing through dusty boxes of unwanted CDs by dodgy Beta Band spin-off groups, and he’ll find a copy of this, and he’ll think “hmm, this looks interesting”, and he’ll play it on his lovingly maintained vintage CD player, and he’ll be like “wow, this is great! What were these guys all about??” And he’ll reissue it on his boutique label, and all the other record geeks will love it too, so why not get in before the rush and buy yourself one now? If you don’t like it, you can sell it for loads of money in 2040.

Mp3 > If I Accidentally Murdered You


JEFFREY LEWIS – 12 CRASS SONGS (Rough Trade)

When I interviewed Jeffrey Lewis for Beard magazine in 2006 and he mentioned he was in the process of recording this album, I thought he was joking. Hearing him play a whole set of Crass covers for the first time at End Of The Road, it sounded like a joke taken too far, and I was not convinced that this was really a good move for anyone concerned. By the time I actually got hold of the album though, things had clicked; I’d seen Jeffrey and his band play an absolutely storming show at the Windmill, and as a bunch of privileged 21st century boho indie kids yelled along with the choruses of ‘I Ain’t Thick’ and ‘Big A, Little a’, the essential righteousness and universality of Crass’s songs, and Jeffrey’s determination to communicate them to an audience beyond aging anarcho-punk lifers hit home hard.

It helps that the album *sounds* so great. This is definitely the most successful and imaginative Lewis record to date in terms of recording and arrangements, from killer acoustic punk/hippie jams on ‘Banned From The Roxy’ and ‘Systematic Death’ to the sprawling, fully realised strings & electronics backing on ‘Where Next Columbus?’ and ‘Demoncrats’. Even if you can’t relate to the agit-prop lyrics and are wary of being lectured to in drowsy NY beatnik monotone for forty minutes, on a musical level this album is a blast, full of charm and energy and invention, and I'd defy anybody who is still uneasy about the concept to emerge from a cursory listen having not enjoyed it. But Crass deserve at least half the credit here for providing the source material, and, as was probably the original intention of the project, their song writing is a revelation. Admittedly, my personal politics tend to veer toward the extreme left already, but still, I’m blown away by the basic righteousness of the lines Crass were lying down here. Although still obviously polemic and somewhat paranoid in their approach, these songs rarely resort to the easy “fuck the system” banalities that I’d always kind of assumed bands like Crass would base their lyrics around. Instead they remain smart and engaging even at their most strident, and their nail-head-hitting ratio is pretty spot on, whilst songs like ‘..Thick’ and ‘..Columbus’ manage to punch home some universal profundity re: individual self-determination and free will vs. societal destiny/responsibility on a level that extends way beyond that of brute political struggle. For all of the ceaseless revolutionary rhetoric, Lewis’s interpretations of these songs make it clear that Crass were intelligent people, that they believed what they believed for a reason, and that they weren’t just pissing around.

As such, it’s interesting yo note that little of the abundant press or blogwrite about this album has really engaged with the politics of the songs. I mean, here’s one of the current generation’s most talented and entertaining songwriters going back to the darkest days of the 1980s to sing to us in no uncertain terms about totalitarian state control, government brainwashing, state-sponsored genocide, the political monopoly of the ‘privileged classes’, systematic police brutality and all the rest of it, and most people seem content to limit their discussion to observations about how ingeniously he bends the songs to his own performance style and emotional range, or to view the whole thing as a post-modern exercise ala The Dirty Projector’s baffling 'reimagining' of Black Flag’s ‘Damaged’..?

Well I don’t have time or space to fully articulate the things which could be said about the reasons behind this album’s existence or why it feels so refreshing and enjoyable, but maybe just pause to consider whether the sidestepping of the politics issue by most of the current musical community maybe says something about why Jeffrey decided it was worth risking his own career and putting in a year’s time, money and effort to bring this album into being.

But whatever. As ’12 Crass Songs’ shoots up a lot more best-of-year lists that any previous Jeff Lewis albums, and antifolk kids around the world sit in dorm rooms trying to work out tabs for ‘Do they Owe Us A Living?’, I think we can probably count this as a roaring success. If I were to pick one album of the year, this would probably be it.

Mp3s >
I Ain’t Thick, It’s Just a Trick
Punk Is Dead

Labels: album reviews, best of 2007, Help She Can't Swim, Herman Dune, Jeffrey Lewis, Jesus Licks