I swear, one year I’ll get these damn things finished before January 1st. Happy New Year, everybody.


15. The Girls At Dawn – Call the Doctor (Norton)

Finally acquiring a copy of the Girls At Dawn’s debut LP, my reaction was mixed – immediate confirmation that this is strange and instinctive music that I am duty bound to love, combined with the sad realisation that it is inevitably going to be pretty misunderstood.

I’ve not actually read any reviews of “Call The Doctor” yet, positive or negative, but given the inelegant toings and froings of modern day music crit discourse, I’ve got a feeling it’s gonna be a holocaust. I think that for a lot of people out there who’ve been fuming over the deductive hype accorded to Vivian Girls, Waaves and so on, the very existence of a band like this could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

And unfortunately, the fact that Girls At Dawn are really, really good in their own quiet way is liable to be lost as soon as reviewers have grokked their publicity photos and list of the groups they’ve shared bills with, and as soon as they’ve heard the thin, shaky reverb-heavy sound of this record’s first side ring out, flagrantly lacking in the kind of ‘ideas’ and ‘hooks’ by which impatient listeners are understandably want to judge such product.

Would I be listening to this lazy-ass crap if these guys weren’t pretty girls from Brooklyn recording on a bunch of trendy labels…? I dunno man. Would we be listening to Black Sabbath if they were a group of Mexican women recording in the 1930s? Enough with the meaningless cultural-context choked sneers already.

Fact is, I find a stirring strangeness and subtlety to Girls At Dawns music that may not be immediately obvious; something that may take a receptive listener to appreciate, and something that I’ve avoided trying to talk about thus far cos I don’t know quite how to get at it. To me, there’s something lost and mystical in GAD’s essentialist take on garage/pop dogmas – their ‘Back From The Grave’ guitar, stand-up drummer thud and nervous schoolgirl chorusing – it’s like The Juju’s singing “D’You Understand Me?”, if they’d been raised in a woodlands shack, poring over medieval manuscripts.

They may be a band that lives in the city, but spiritually speaking everything on this record seems to dwell deep in the woods. I dunno which woods – maybe just the adolescent creepo woods that anxious teenagers go for walks in when left alone in their bedrooms, maybe the woods where ‘Sabbath went to do that weird, frowning poster insert for “Master of Reality”, maybe werewolf-haunted woods of Roky Erickson, obliquely hymned here on “The Evil One”.

Whilst there’s nothing here quite as spine-shivering as their amazing “Every Night” single, this album is a definite step up from the Captured Tracks 12”. The songs are simple, strong and knocked out with a stubborn, heads-down determination. The production is also simple, strong and real cool, with some nice underplayed psychedelic flourishes. At different points, Girls At Dawn take a shot at ‘60s girl group naiveté, at mutant Nuggets garage and at chiming ‘00s reverb-pop – but wherever they go, they just can’t shake those woods – and I like bands that leave me lost in the woods.

Mp3> Reach Me (Don’t Forget)


14. Purling Hiss – Hissteria / Public Service Announcement (Ritchie Records / Woodsist)


Oh man, is it time to write about Purling Hiss? Fuckin’ A! I love this guy!

I know Ron Asheton wisely kept off the smack during his time in The Stooges, but if we imagine what a perfect Ron opium reverie might have sounded like circa “Funhouse”, that’s what “Hissteria” delivers – flying fingers of fuzz-wah flame spazzing out endlessly across a sea of primeval delinquent stomp whilst some dude yelps stuff like “shake, c’mon” and “UGH” through a ceiling fan in the distance. The ambience may be strictly stoner/psyche 4-track overdub-land rather than a true live-band beatdown, but basically this stuff is pure distilled rock n’ roll, delivered in absurd, elephant-killing doses. And hopefully I don’t need to tell you that it’s fucking brilliant. I’m sure we’ve all got plenty of examples in our record collections of lead guitarists blundering around interminably for ten minutes, so to find a guy who can lay it down for that duration over a locked groove two chord boogie and have us floating to the ceiling throughout is surely an event worthy of celebration. A wager for any Hawkwind/Razilles/Allman Bros devotees out there: “Down On The Delaware River” for the most ass-ripping fourteen minutes of cosmic, eternal-now choogle you’ve heard this year, or your money back.

“Public Service Announcement” meanwhile is somewhat of a different proposition, but perhaps one of wider appeal. Opener “Run From The City” is a short-form cosmic hard rock masterpiece, with a central guitar hook to die for. It is painstakingly assembled and period appropriate, but recorded at what sounds like mono 4-track quality. If someone had told me it was some long-lost acetate from 1973 dug up from the vaults of a derelict studio, not only would I have believed you, I’d still have put it on just about every mix CD I make for the next eighteen months. It occurred to me for the first time today that maybe, just maybe, that riff gets a bit monotonous and he should have varied it a bit more. Apparently that was on my sixteenth listen.

The rest of the album regrettably does not follow suit, but it does at least sound like a highly creditable demos/odds n’ sods collection from a very talented guy, mixing instrumental noise sketches with a handful of dazzlingly groovy ascousitc-ish psyche rockers, gaining Purling Hiss a bonus merit award for song-writing alongside his peerless achievements in the fields of fuzz guitar mastery and all-purpose noise oblivion, as “Dpm” and “Beautiful Earth Creature” in particular fly by blissfully, distant kin to Gary Higgins’ “Red Hash”, The ‘Elevators “Splash # 1” / “Tried To Hide” soul stirring, or maybe even some particularly blitzed Posies/Lemonheads power-pop.

Mp3> Run From The City


13. Modern Witch – CDR (Disaro)

From June 2010:

“Creepy and lifeless as it may initially sound, I think that a hell of a lot of attention and imagination has been invested in this Modern Witch record, and a wealth of effective and chilling moments are the result… if you’re ready/able to pick up on ‘em.

Why has “In Your Eyes” – a hypnotic disco blissout that could have been pulled from a Larry Levan DJ set – been deliberately muffled to the extent that we could be listening to it through a brick wall in the alleyway next to the club? And what are we to say to the dot matrix printer that rampages in far higher fidelity over the end of the track? What dark secrets lie behind “Not The Only One”, in which an emotionless narrative of “buying food items” with a unnamed an co-conspirator is paired with an impossibly sinister Zombie Flesh Eaters backing track, while the singsong chorus states “I was not the only one / who believed what you said to me”?

“I Can’t Live In A Living Room” is the ‘hit’, swaying closer to punkoid reality by way of sounding like Niagara from Destroy All Monsters fronting a New York claustrophobia-wracked version of The Screamers, but even here they’re very knowingly playing to a crowd for whom descriptions like that actually make sense, almost DARING you to mute your enjoyment long enough to call foul on such internet-era retro-plagiarism. I don’t wanna do that though, cos the song f-ing rules.

And if the more jarring, fragmentary blurts of sound here sound like they could have been pulled straight off the soundtrack to “Liquid Sky”, then similarly, one is dared to recall how that film’s producers had to queue up for the chance to wrestle with a gigantic, public access synthesizer to realise their impossible dream of a twisted fashionista future, whereas Modern Witch presumably had a pretty chilled out time plugging some cool bits of old gear she/he/they/it got off ebay straight into the laptop and letting rip.

Perhaps *because* of such easy availability, the idea of some untarnished progression and innovation in pop music has seemed pretty dumb to me ever since people got bored of listening to exploding-harddrive post-Aphex Twin music a few years back. What else have you got in the future box? Atari Teenage Riot are getting back together to do nostalgia shows – it’s hilarious. Thirty three years after “no future”, is it any wonder that the most fun way to approach the future is to reimagine a new past and project it forward? Will I break some sort of record if I pose any more rhetorical questions?

And furthermore, the early ‘80s seem a particularly effective battleground for such shenanigans – a period in which the scary proclamations of the original Italian futurists seemed to finally trickle down into popular culture, as people started consciously making their music and movies rich with FUTURE. Even today, bands essentially playing Joy Division-style post-punk get lauded by The Guardian for their bleak, futurist vision, even as their reliance on before-we-were-born nostalgia means they might as well be doing a set of Hollies covers. By contrast, Modern Witch represents a prime vehicle for some more worthwhile re-enactment. Like the British hauntology records, all the jumping off points for a complete sensory experience are right there in the sound. Close your eyes and the visuals will come.”

Mp3>Boyz


12. LA Vampires Meets Zola Jesus 12” (Not Not Fun)

From July 2010:

“Consciously modelled on one of those classic “so-and-so meets so-and-so” dub platters from the ‘70s, what we essentially have here is the sound of two spooky, stoned 21st century rich girls making a kinda temporally disconnected, neon-midnight stab at a dub record.

I don’t mean that to sound dismissive; after long years in which the thoughts and doings of spooky, stoned rich girls in the USA were nowt but a cruel mystery to me, I feel happy and privileged to live in a world where awesome things like this can exist and filter their way into culture so casually.

[…]

[LA Vampires] does the stabbing synth-bass riffs, sliced up ‘80s electro rhythm tracks and cosmic horror echo webs here, while [Zola Jesus] gets to hear some of her distinctive vocal melodies and operatic reveries stretched and laced up across the music, left to float alone in distant wells of mega-delay. Songs are present, and they are cool, but structure swiftly fades in favour of, well, y’know… dubbing it up. Imagine if, god… I don’t know; imagine if Scientist had done a score to ‘The Hunger’ or something. Sounds good? Hop in!

LA and Zola’s reinvention of Dawn Penn’s “No No No” is playing right now, and it’s as sweet and terrifying as you’d expect. You don’t love me, yes I know now (creeping up, knife in teeth.)

It’s easy to wax lyrical on a record like this, but let’s put it plainly – these ladies are so fucking talented they’re making GOTH-DUB sound like a brilliant idea. Think on that for a minute, and then pay whatever Rough Trade are asking for a copy of this.”

Mp3> Bone is Bloodstone


11. Cinema Red & Blue – s/t (What’s Yr Rupture?)

Hard to tell quite what the Cinema Red & Blue project represents in terms of the David Feck songbook – sudden burst of communal inspiration or warehouse clearance exercise? Either way, this collaboration between Feck and assorted NYC acolytes is sterling stuff, and if there’re a few cringeworthy, first thought/best thought numbers that I’d be happy never to hear again, and a few pleasantly obscurist cover versions to make up the numbers (The Chills, Vic Goddard and, er, Julian Cope), the lion’s share of this set is still strong enough to render it at about 50% as exciting as a new Comet Gain record. Which, needless to say, is plenty exciting.

It’s funny that whilst I still find the music of Crystal Stilts simply intolerable (I heard their new single on the radio last month and nearly hurled the set through the window, before I had a clue who the offending band were), their members do a perfectly creditable job here backing up Mr. Feck, emerging with a sound somewhat like a wussier CG who are worried about waking up the neighbours. Which, needless to say, is plenty fine.

Feck for his part is sticking strongly here to the kind of storm-chasing indie nostalgia and morbid self-examination that has predominated in his work of recent years, but as ever, he can invest power, defiance and roaring self-definition into these questionable preoccupations, knocking at least four or five of these fuckers straight into the can marked ‘greatest hits’.

And as usual, I feel like he must be channelling my sub-conscious mind on “Far Out Isn’t Far Enough” (YES) and the astounding “Ballad of a Vision Pure” (next in a long lineage of perfect, self-mythologisin’ Feck/Gain classics), such do their respective sentiments stir my dusty loins. I wish he’d stop, it’s getting embarrassing. Elsewhere, “All Night Worker” is a storming, organ-led floor-filler, taking a tip from The Downliner’s Sect, expanding it via a quick sweepstakes of night shift employment woes into one of the most swinging, rambunctious cuts I’ve heard this year. Certainly sounds like everybody’s having a great time anyway, neighbours temporarily forgotten. "Ghost Confessions is the best meandering, self-pitying number about wasting one's life and leaving yr best years behind you etc I've heard this year, and "Jesse Lee Kincaid" with a spoken word coda from Hamish Kilgour is pretty damn special. Of course, every Comet Gain-related record needs one pristine jangle-pop classic so accidentally perfect that every indie-pop chancer around will be kicking themselves they didn’t record it first, and “Melanie Down”, exquisitely rendered tale of the “queen of the feedback crowd” awaiting her downfall on “the back streets of Kentish Town”, delivers.

Face it: most of you fuckers could toil for a lifetime and not come up with an example of the form to match that one. Feck knocks it out in-between beers to fill track # 6 on a side-project album when he can’t think of another meandering, self-pitying number about how he’s wasted his life and his best years are behind him. You do the math, then buy all his records and cry.

Mp3> Ballad of a Vision Pure

Labels: best of 2010, Cinema Red and Blue, Comet Gain, LA Vampires, Modern Witch, Purling Hiss, The Girls At Dawn, Zola Jesus