40. Myelin Sheaths – Get On Your Nerves (South-Paw)

Half an hour’s worth of impossible row from these Canadian ne’erdowells, and it does me does me just fine thanks. Earlier this year I said of one of their singles:

“Myelin Sheaths’ guitars have a certain Sonic Youth quality to them – a thick, dissonant, mid-heavy blurt - and their bass rumbles like a rockslide. Maybe think ‘Eliminator Jr’ or something, stripped of any art world pretensions, reinvented for a beer-sozzled provincial punk scene. With most conventional, album-orientated “indie-rock” in such a moribund state at the moment, it’s always a thrill it is to hear stuff this beserk and fun, happy just to be itself. Any old punkers/grungers still not sold on the new world order of inarticulate kids making no-fi noise-pop on overpriced boutique 7” labels are advised to take a listen to this and try to write me some reasons why it’s not totally great.”

And much the same applies here, stretched across a longer duration. Sloppy, practice room recording quality is pushed through compression and EQ until it emerges bulbous and misshapen. Song-writing mopes across an axis garage-dumb and Ramonoid, but with a nuanced execution betrays background in canonical indie-rock and jangle, however much off-hand slobbishness they might try to obliterate it with.
Endearingly, an inexplicable obsession with medical/scientific themes seems to run through this groups work, and hits here include “What’s Your Diagnosis?”, “Everything is Contagious”, “Gloves”, “Blood Loss” and “Large Hadron Collider”. They are all pop songs, and many feature the title being yelled on the chorus. Lazy, noisy, excitable, pointless, scary, happy: kids will be kids, and I’m damn glad of that.

Mp3> What’s Your Diagnosis?


39. Cheap Time – Fantastic Explanations (and Similar Situations) (In The Red)

Ah, poor old Cheap Time. Their debut album found itself lurking about in the low 30s of my 2008 end-of-year list, but in retrospect I shoulda put it a LOT higher, cos it’s great! Now here they come with album #2 then, and whatayouknow, they’re still in the low ‘30s. Go figure. Just one of those pesky situations where a second album sees a group ‘developing’ too fast and in a not entirely painless direction, sprouting questionable new bits as their nascent audience (eg, me) looks on appalled.

As Jeffrey Novak and co have started to spread out and claim a bit of leg room beyond the realm of tightly-wound punk-pop, their song-writing has started to reveal a strong anglophile bent that would seem pretty peculiar for a group from Tennessee, were it not for the British Invasion-addled legacy of Big Star and their various satellites. Not that there’s much Beatles/Stones sugar to be found in Cheap time’s muse mind you – they’re pulling heavily toward a slightly darker, weirder strain of Britishness here, specifically the kind of stompy, sing-songy, cynical, working class pop that formed the flip-side of the late ‘60s/early ‘70s psyche-into-prog trajectory. Y’know what I mean – we’re talking The Faces, The Move, Victoria-era Kinks, early Slade, Hammersmith Gorillas, that whole deal.

Nothing wrong with that of course – it’s a strange and slightly audacious change of pace for a modern American band to say the least, and indeed there’s a lot of good stuff on this LP – the winning melody and bizarre processed guitar freakout on “Showboat”, the vengeful Crimson King stomp of “Miss Apparent”, “June Child” doing the business like an early Dave Davies solo tune – all great fun. But there’s also something distinctly unappealing about the record as a whole that stops me getting into it much despite its abundant musical strengths; some spiteful, fuck-you feeling running through the whole thing. Chilton without the charm, maybe.

As on their first record, the lyrics seem to take a default position of vague, sneering attacks against persons unknown, but while that approach worked great for ninety second punk blasts, it can’t help but sit uneasily in combination with the more jovial, more complex music found here. Novak’s leery, nasal delivery scarcely helps matters either, often making it sound as if the group worked for a week on each tune, then bleated out a buncha vocal tracks in a drunken one hour session and called it a day.

Weirdly, “Fantastic Explanations..” reminds me more than anything of what Supergrass might have sounded like on their first album, if they’d been a buncha really nasty guys who didn’t give a shit whether anyone liked them or not. Which is ironic, cos thinking about it I reckon it was a excess of easy-going niceness that put a pretty swift end to the creative shalf-life of Gaz and the boys. Maybe Cheap Time know something we don’t, but there’s gotta be a happy medium, surely. Hopefully on their next outing they might find it…

Mp3> June Child


38. Fursaxa – Mycorrhizae Realm (ATP)

Tara Burke’s umpteenth album as Fursaxa, and I dunno if anyone else is still interested, but personally I reckon this is one of her best. Largely dispensing with the wheezing harmonium drones and medievalist pretension that sometimes made her stuff a bit gruelling in the past, “Mycorrhizae..” takes a somewhat prettier, more easy-going route through the Fursaxa homeland, with fine and thoroughly psychedelic results, somewhat akin to the cosmic sprawl of her Kawabata Makoto-produced “Mandrake” from way back when.

Almost every track here begins by matching a slow, distantly familiar folk melody to a background of shimmering, insect swarm drone, adds some Burke’s most comfortable and conventionally pleasant singing to date, and gradually bulks up through such familiar devices as hippie bell tinkling, creepo organ sustain, sinister low-end vocals chants and miscellaneous owl clatter, together with some really nice cello, proceeding with admirable clarity of purpose toward a great, big, enveloping blanket of a sound.

“Poplar Moon” and “Wall of Tuhala” in particular seem to carry heavy echoes of Lubos Fiser’s soundtrack for the classic Czech mystic-vampire-fairytale movie “Valerie & Her Week of Wonders”, perhaps reflecting Burke’s involvement in the ‘Valerie Project’ (a recent endeavour that saw a who’s-who of Philly/Baltimore psyche/folk types recording new music inspired by said film), and aesthetically speaking that should give you a pretty good idea of where this record is looking to take you.

A ruined chapel or standing stone, alone in a shallow valley with hills rising the horizon; mid-summer heat and bright sun shining through brambles. Long, long grass, weeds, unseasonable berries and nature running wild. Fuzzy technicolor making everything look dreamy. Heavy dragonflies bobbing around in the haze as a shining stream gurgles by. Or, alternatively: mystical plant-god interlude from a Studio Ghibli film. If that’s where you’re heading at the moment, this is the bus to catch! There has been an awful lot of shitty “psychedelic folk” music recorded in the past few years, but this one is a keeper, I feel.

Mp3> Poplar Moon


37. The Human Race – Duality 3” CD
(Savoury Days)

"CAGE FIGHTER, FRANKENSTEIN! CAGE FIGHTER, FRANKENSTEIN!” Ah, yeah. I knew as soon as I hit play on their myspace that embittered dole queue thugs with a heavy dose of Swell Maps in their DNA were the band for me, even if about half of their songs are completely terrible. Scrappy and eccentric and off-the-freakin’-wall enough to fit perfectly onto one of those Messthetics compilations, except that their track would probably turn up drunk and try to punch a Door & The Window b-side in the face, this is the kind of smart/stupid, junk/genius homemade punk rock that will always get the red carpet treatment round here. Trends may come and go, but you can’t keep a bunch of angry men with no money, too much spare time and a sense of despairing, comedic confusion from doing what they do best. “Bruises on your face/ bruise on your chin / bruises on your arm / pint of gin!” Exactly.

Mp3> Cage Fighter









36. The Moonhearts – s/t (Tic Tac Totally)

When particularly bored cultural historians come to look back on the lo-fi/garage/blah boom of the late ‘00s, they could do worse than point interested parties in the direction of this platter for a nigh-on definitive example of the form.

A punk rock rhythm section thunders away competently enough, almost eclipsed by obnoxiously-high-in-the-mix guitar, sounding like it’s being slopped through about ten Danelectro mini-pedals into a cheap, one-piece Marshall amp. There are surfy twang bits, and garage poundy bits and hardcore riffy bits, all fused into a sorta all-purpose basement/house party goo. There are vocals in there somewhere as tradition demands, even some inevitable shots at Beach Boys-y harmonies, helping to formalise some vague sense of ‘pop’ that would otherwise be lost in the blare, but the guy might as well be singing ingredients lists off beer cans for all the impression these songs make. Every two or three minutes, they stop, and start again with some slightly different chords. Reverb is ridiculous throughout.

Many people will consider this pretty bad music – dumb, head-ache inducing thunk, devoid of finesse, character or purpose. But that’s why I love it, y’know. It’s senselessly loud and chaotic and it’s got a real violent kick to it, the way this stuff has in various reiterations in 1957, 1967, 1977, 1987, 1997. And it’s alright now, in fact it’s a gas. It holds the centre and soundtracks walks across town and drunken, undistinguished evenings while some other asshole is off trying to make “Forever Changes” and failing. Rock n’ roll, no more no less. It’ll do nicely. The instrumental cut “Death Star Pt.I” and the Monkees rippin’ “Love Is Gone” are my favourites, and I like the nod to The Gun Club’s “Miami” on the cover art too.

Mp3> I Said

Labels: best of 2010, Cheap Time, Fursaxa, Moonhearts, Myelin Sheaths, The Human Race