Y’know What? I Don’t Think I Will Mess with Texas.

Josh T. Pearson is an amazing guy – a real legend in his own lunchtime, for whom I feel a huge fondness.

At the same time though, I’m almost frightened to listen to his first recorded statement in twelve years, for precisely the reasons set out by Doug Mosurock in this excellent review. I just don’t wanna have to take what it seems like he’s laying down here, y’know? Hopefully he’d get what I mean.

Anyway, a few weeks ago I heard the weirdest thing, as Radio 4’s daily arts programme ‘Front Row’ suddenly played a burst of Pearson’s album, using it as the hook for an almost unbelievably simple-minded item about long songs. I mean, if they wanted to do some promo for the record, you’d think Pearson himself would provide ample material for a good story, but no…

“That was an extract from the new album by Texan singer-songwriter Josh T. Pearson, which features a number of songs that last nearly TEN MINUTES. Hello, Mr. Writer-from-The-Guardian, could you tell us whether any people have written long pop songs in the past?”

“Why yes, ‘Hey Jude’ and ‘Macarthur Park’ were quite long, and since then people have often recorded long songs. In the ‘80s, bands like New Order put long songs on 12” singles.”

“Ha ha, yes, I remember those. I suppose you could put them on a CD now and make them as long as you like. Have there ever been any long rap songs, I wonder?”

“Why yes, since you ask, rap music has always had long songs. Here’s a bit from ‘White Lines’ by Grandmaster Flash – that’s pretty long..”

“Well, thanks for that Mr. Writer from The Guardian. Josh T. Pearson’s album is out now..”

And people wonder why we prefer to read about music on the internet these days.

Labels: BBC, Josh T Pearson, stupidity, Texas

New Favourite Band.



Morgan & The Organ Donors.

From Olympia WA, presumably.

Thrown my way by afogofideas tumblr.

No more info at present, but hopefully won't stay that way for long.

Look! Here they are doing a quiet number:

Labels: I like, Morgan and the Organ Donors, videos

Poster Art.

I didn’t take a camera with me on yesterday’s jaunt around town (I don’t own a working camera at the time of writing), but I can at least report on my favourite placards;

1. STOP THESE CUNTS
(a universally applicable slogan, hopefully stored under the bed and dusted off every couple of years)

2. CLEGG IS A CUNT
(the last word here was overwritten in biro on a professionally printed placard reading “Clegg is a Chopper”, a message the carrier obviously found a bit too subtle)

3. (via www.thisisnotagoodsign.com)

4. Every Child Counts? NOT IN HULL!
(This was a simple, printed one in black on white Times New Roman – it’s the underlining that does it I think. Makes me wants to reply to every rhetorical question henceforth with “NOT IN HULL!”)

5. FUCK OFF TORY CUNTS
(If it ain’t broke..)

6. Fuck the Tories! Fuck the Tories! Fuck the Tories! Fuck the Tories! Fuck the Tories!
(Increasingly desperate biro scrawl on box cardboard, natch.)

I guess I just like my expressions of proletariat fury simple, obnoxious and preferably rendered in red poster paint, biro or permanent marker. ‘Clever’ slogans are inevitably a smug waste of time. Contrived contemporary pop culture references can fuck off too. So crushingly unfunny. Swearing is fun. Insanely incoherent ones are good, but I didn’t see many of those, sadly. Go for the visceral, always.

Labels: impotent rage, political shit, posters

Great Garage-Rock Ranting Song of the Week # 2



The Knaves – Leave Me Alone

“I put down my fork and I said… LEAVE ME ALONE.”

This record is the Citizen Kane of garage rock ranting songs. In fact it’s such a tour de force of pure, unadulterated rantage, I think it dooms this series from the outset by putting all other contenders in the shade.

Available on:

What A Way To Die: 15 Forgotten Losers From the Mid 60's

Labels: Great Garage Rock Ranting Songs, The Knaves

R.I.P. Arthur Magazine

Sad to hear this week that Jay Babcock has called time on the online incarnation of what once was the print-based Arthur Magazine.

I guess Arthur pushed the neo-hippy self-parody buttons a bit hard at times, but whilst I’ve rarely felt the urge to sit in a teepee drinking organic hemp-wine listening to Bright Back Morning Light or whatever*, it was a mag that always walked the walk re: excellent writing and compelling, well-researched, *long* articles on a wide range of topics, along with a consistent commitment to DIY culture and humanist ideals that is applaudable indeed.

The post-print industry apocalypse online edition of the mag was, in effect, a real good weblog/nerve-centre for the kinda stuff the paper version championed, and I’ll be sad to see it go.

Admittedly, I don’t really see why a dedicated stream of cash-moneys is necessary to post some links to cool shit on a weblog once every couple of days, but Babcock sounds pretty bummed on the whole deal re: not being able to do a print edition really, so I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt if he wants to cut his losses and move on.

I guess we can take solace in the fact that decent/principled periodicals are rarely afforded much of a shelf-life at the best of times. It’s not like there was ever much of a window in which you could pop down the newsagents and pick up Zap! Comix or International Times or Who Put The Bomp? or Punk or Roller Derby or Careless Talk Costs Lives or whatever right, and the kind of obstacles they faced count doubly for the situation in the past few years, triply so when yr trying to put the damn thing out for free.

Still though, the fact that Arthur has hit such a shoulder-shrug of a dead-end while Vice is still roaring on as a record label, TV station, venue proprietor etc speaks of a massive FAIL in regard to this generation’s culture war. Not our fault I guess, just further depressing proof that if you want a media venture to have legs these days, you’ve gotta get some cash behind it. And we all know who’s got the $$$ and what you’ve got to do to get it.

*Actually, screw that, I think I’d probably love some organic hemp-wine, if anyone’s got any..?

Labels: Arthur magazine, bad news, deathblog

Great Garage-Rock Ranting Song of the Week # 1



The La-De-Das – How Is The Air Up There?

“Your father is a VIP, thinks he’s always right
Your mother watches her TV, won’t talk to you all night
Couldn’t help sitting up so high, you got a bloody nose
You never seen a flower or a tree or anything that small”

Available on:

Wild Things: Wyld Kiwi Garage ’66-‘69
Nuggets II box set

Labels: Great Garage Rock Ranting Songs, New Zealand, The La De Das

Lisa Bouvier & Allt Ar Musik – Indian Ar Dod CS
Horowitz – The Knitwear Generation CS
(Fika Tapes)

Two items here from a new London-based / Scandicentric micro-label, both of them zipping effortlessly past my twee-defences and making me smile and get all ‘yay-for-handcrafted-objects-and-DIY-culture’ and so on, however much of a filthy anachronism starting a tape label in 2011 may be.

To address the Lisa Bouvier / Allt Ar Musik one first, if someone described the music herein to me before I heard it, my cynical grown-up self would hiss like a wounded snake and go hide in the airing cupboard until it was over. So it’s a good job that I saw Lisa B. play a real nice solo set prior to purchase, giving me the courage to press play and roll with whatever transpired. And what transpired is TOTALLY AWESOME, whisking me back to the innocent days before I had really clocked the existence of any “indie-pop scene”, when I would still meet any manifestation of polite, well-dressed kids ‘doing it for themselves’ with a hearty thumbs up and when I would still welcome the presence in my life of records on which white people play poorly recorded trumpets.

So let’s put the question right out there: how does the idea of mannered, bedroom-fi Swedish language covers of Mary Lou Lord’s “His Indie World” and Sebadoh’s “Gimme Indie Rock” grab you? Not so good? Well take a second look, because only an inveterate grouch would deny that these particular ones are a ton o’ fun. There’s a really great feeling of after-school four-track fun about these recordings that bypasses any/all reservations, and indeed sleevenotes from Lisa B. reveal how these are quite old recordings, dating from when she and the dude who is ‘Allt Ar Musik’ teamed up at college and just started goofing around with some music, expressing their joy at the joint discovery of the kind of up-with-people DIY/indie culture that us British or American kids are drenched in from an early age and basically sick of by the time we crawl into our mid/late ‘20s.

Cover art depicting the two of them sitting happily on some bedroom floor surrounded by cheap equipment is emblematic of the whole affair. Oh, to be a youngster again, to sit on that floor; drink tea, giggle, make songs. Good times.

Horowitz are a band who I’d imagine would be apt to share these wistful sentiments of badges-n’-Converse nostalgia, and whilst I’ve probably run out of original things to say about them by this point, their bleary-eyed fuzz-pop remains a thing of grandeur on this here Fika tape. In fact, it sounds better than ever busting out of a tape. Well, not really ‘better’ as such because my tape player turns everything into underwater sludge, but… aesthetically correct? Yes, definitely. I could describe Horowitz’s three songs here and tell you what they sound like, how they fit into the band’s oeuvre and such, but really all I want to say is goddamnit, there’s something about everything Horowitz record that just hits me right here y’know? Their home-taped drum machines and bubblegum Boyracer fuzz, their drifty, elegiac melodies and the big bearhug of lonely/star-gazing indie-boy emotion that goes into each one of their songs… it just makes me want to salute and wipe a tear from my eye, y’know? “This is why we fight”, all that kinda stuff (god help us if there’s a war).

Much as I shake my fist at the retro-tape craze (largely on the practical grounds that the tapedeck on my mini hi-fi grinds away so painfully I might as well have dropped it in a fishtank on the night John Peel died and left it there ‘til last summer), there’s no denying that these Fika tapes are real lovely pieces of work – brightly-coloured cassettes in hand-folded cardboard packets, each stuffed to bursting with a download card, a ramblin’ photocopied insert, a fruit teabag and a recipe for cake. The whole lovin’ package! Horowitz give us a recipe for beer-cake, and all is right with the world.

Each tape limited to 100, so if any of this sounds like the kind of culture you might feel a connection to, check ‘em out.

http://fikarecordings.com/
http://www.myspace.com/horowitzband
http://lisabouvier.se/

Labels: Horowitz, Lisa Bouvier, singles reviews, tapes

Sweet People et les Oieseaux Chantaient
(Polydor Records, 1978)

So I’ve got a huge stack of new singles to review, swiftly becoming old, plus a few really great records that people have been nice enough to send me recently… and yet here we go with a write-up of this nifty little number my friend Pete bought in Greenwich /music & Video Exchange for 10p, cross-posted with Pete’s bird-watching blog;

I’m no expert on vintage easy listening music, but in purely practical terms this gem of a charity shop disc gets my vote as the ‘best easy listening record ever’. I wish I had a USB turntable so that we could share it with you.

Both sides sound exactly like the music that would play in a sun-dazed, California set ‘70s movie, during a scene in which a dude hangs out with his girl on the beach as the sun sets, and they have a special time together that he will think back on fondly when he’s stuck in a foxhole in Vietnam, or is busted smuggling cocaine across the Mexican border, or shot in the back by Warren Oates, or whatever.

One side is accompanied by birdsong, whilst the other is built around the sound of waves crashing against the shore. Each track consists of a few simple, pleasing musical phrases, which are established at the outset and repeated continuously with only slight developments and changes in instrumentation along the way. The ‘Ocean side’ features some marvellously subtle, miraculously un-irritating harmonica playing, a strummy guitar sound and a distantly evocative melody, all faintly reminiscent of something off Neil Young’s ‘Harvest’, perhaps? The ‘Bird side’ is a touch more jazzy, in a hazy sort of way, gentle electric organ tones perhaps seeking communication with our avian friends.

Both sides boast a rich, deep, relaxing mixture of tones, tailor-made by experts to make human ears happy. An archetypal senile old grandmother could nod her head along with this, and remark how nice and relaxing it is. And no archetypal sneering punk-ass record nerds would dare to tell her otherwise, because SHE IS RIGHT. It is very nice and relaxing, and that’s all there is to it.

Remarkably, the instrument tones and other sounds on this record sound equally natural whether played at 33 or 45 rpm, and the overall pace and feeling of the compositions doesn’t seem to change much either way. Given the choice, I’d probably play it at 33 so that it’s a bit longer and more tripped out, but granny may prefer to stick to 45, as the label recommends.

It is no exaggeration to say that 10p has never been better spent.

Labels: birds, charity shop finds, easy listening, singles reviews, Sweet People

Hard Skin / Blotto –
These Are My People split 7”
(Snuffy Smiles)

South London Oi-revival heroes Hard Skin are a band who are hard not to love, working in a field that’s all too easy to hate. I’ll admit that at first I was slightly apprehensive when my flat-mate brought home one of their LPs last year. I mean, there’s THAT name for one thing, and whilst I recognise that a healthy bit of absurd, violent blather is the bread & butter of good punk rock, the band’s vision of a cop-baiting, student-punching, Millwall-supporting white working class idyll did not seem to be one I could comfortably hang with, however invigorating their riotous street punk thud may be.

Further listens though began to win me over to the abrasive, fuck-you humour of the band’s approach – a sort of good-humoured variation on blind rage that seems on some level to admit the ridiculousness of its protestations, at the same time as taking it’s dedication to it’s stated way of life very seriously indeed, if that makes any sense – and after seeing them at the 100 Club as part of a Damaged Goods showcase gig just before xmas, you can count me a fan for life.

It’s a difficult thing to explain to anyone who’s not witnessed it firsthand, the way that Hard Skin can take the most exaggerated, boorish clichés of early ‘80s British aggro-punk and reshape them into a fantastically good-humoured roar of self-affirmation, completely devoid of the kind of small-minded, paranoid exclusivity that makes oi/skinhead punk a no-go area for so many music fans. However much bile might emanate from the stage, in both the songs and bassist Fat Bob’s constant, hilarious patter, there’s a feeling that, much like the hypothetical comedian who doesn’t-discriminate-because-he-hates-everyone-equally, a Hard Skin gig is an inclusive space in which everyone, even those specifically targeted, can enjoy their incessant taunts directed at cops, tories, indie bedwetters, support bands, record labels, North Londoners, vegetarians, hippies - their basic disgust with everything in the world outside of the perfect state of being embodied by the red-blooded, South London working class male in short - freely and without obligation.

Unsavoury beliefs are often assumed to follow close behind bands like this, especially when they’re so outspoken in their oft reactionary complaints. But for all their on-stage antagonism, the strains of misogyny/racism/homophobia courted by some of Hard Skin’s more regrettable stylistic predecessors never rear their ugly heads here, and no encouragement of ‘aggro’ is ever offered without an accompanying cartoon-ish chuckle. At heart they seem like profoundly decent fellas, insofar as I’m able to judge.

Like I say, it’s hard to explain. It’s a fine line, and it all comes down to the band’s attitude really. I’m not really a big fan of the word ‘cunt’, but prior to my inaugural Hard Skin show, I’d yet to experience the true beauty of its gratuitous application. And likewise, I’m generally of the belief that in spite of endless poor management/strategy decisions on the part of their superiors, the necessity of upholding sometimes stupid legislation, and the presence of a few devious brutes within their ranks, police officers by and large attempt to do good work in very difficult circumstances and should only be given shit by the public when their individual actions demand it, etc, etc.

But nonetheless, I’d be lying if I tried to deny the sheer cathartic joy of hearing Hard Skin barrel through a call-and-response chorus of “Copper? CUNT! Copper? CUNT! Nee-nah, nee-nah – FUCKING CUNT!”

It’s the ‘nee-nah nee-nah’ bit that did it to me I think – the sheer, maniacal, steam-from-the-ears rage, but never without a laugh alongside it. It’s the sort of thing even a copper could probably appreciate (if he wasn’t too much of a cunt).

Again – it’s hard to explain. I dunno, what can I say. I fucking loved it. Listening to punk and metal, I think it can be important to remember that what people sing about doing in songs isn’t necessarily what they do in real life; rock n’ roll songs by their very nature are amped up, exaggerated, aggressive things that express a monomaniacal, hysterical point of view and well… you know where I’m going with this; Rolling Stones, Angry Samoans, Dwarves, Cannibal Corpse… blah fucking blah, you get the point.

And of course, the fact that musically speaking Hard Skin fucking demolish the place helps, knocking out a sorta precision, battle-hardened, no bullshit melodic punk rock, all three members yelling alone to every line at the top of their voices like they’re trying to break a record for how much noise three men on a stage with regular rock band equipment can possibly make. No doubt they’d laugh in the fucking face of anyone who started using words like ‘musicality’ or ‘groove’ in their presence (and rightly so), but let’s just say that Hard Skin play with a solid command of their particular art and an innate understanding of what sounds good that puts ‘em a fair few notches up the foodchain from a lot of gutbucket punk scene slop.

A prime example of all this can be found on (FINALLY, HE GETS TO THE POINT) “Deborah Services Ltd”, which opens Hard Skin’s side of this split 7”. It is surely one of their finest tracks, eulogising life in the construction industry with enough enthusiasm to almost make me head down the ‘site tomorrow morning, and calling out ‘Croydon Scaffolding’ for their apparently unfair business practices. “Six days a week / twelve hour days / working like a fucker / just to get paid / simple life – beans on toast / simple life – Sunday roast!”

It’s not big and it’s not clever, but hearing the ad-libbed yell of “YOU FUCKIN’ WANT SOME?!?” just before the chorus riff kicks in like a drunken maniac in a white van ploughing through a well-kept flower-bed really gets me through the day.

God knows, Hard Skin must feel like the end of the world is nigh when floppy-haired middle-class indie twats like me start listening to their tunes. On the other side of this record meanwhile, Japanese punks Blotto sound like they think the world is gonna end as soon as the noise from their amps fizzles out.

I know I’ve just dedicated a lot of words to writing about Hard Skin, but fuck me if Blotto’s side of this 45 isn’t EVEN BETTER. Honestly, I don’t know *anything* about these guys, but their two songs here near knocked me off my seat. Judging from their lyrical concerns (as set out on the enclosed lyrics sheet) and the fact they’re sharing vinyl with Hard Skin, I’m assuming Blotto must be punk scene stalwarts of some description, but really the sound they’ve got going here doesn’t match my go-to indicators for oi or hardcore or anarcho-punk or anything else really. Thankfully though, it ticks all the right boxes for brilliant, breathless rock n’ roll, so who cares what else we call it?

Intricate, almost classic rock/rockabilly lead guitar lets rip against bottle-rocket hyper-caffinated punk racket, every instrumentalist going straight for the cup as the vocalist chips in with a sixty-a-day, ‘microphone, what fucking microphone?’ roar… good grief. I guess it sounds kinda like the Replacements might have sounded in 1984 if they’d practiced six hours a day and never touched a drop. Add soaring, stage-dive worthy chord riffs and impassioned, ‘I live this 24-fucking-7’ vocal performance and this really is, well… a blast. The sound of a great band singing for their supper and hoping they get steak.

One of their songs seems to be bitching about right wing tendencies in the Frankfurt punk scene (fair enough, I dunno, whatever..), whilst the other is a chest-beating punk break-up song in the J. Church/Jawbreaker tradition that gets bonus points for opening with the line “you have a shabby front door”. Like the man said, when the music’s this strong, they could be singing about trimming their nasal hair and I’d still buy it.

Pound for pound, this is probably one of the strongest 7”s I’ve heard in recent memory. I dunno what availability is like outside of the bands’ respective merch tables, but if you find a copy somewhere, I recommend buying it.

Neither of these bands have a web presence as such, and neither does the record label.

Other Snuffy Smiles releases can be bought from Bombed Out distro here.

Out of date info on Blotto can be found here.

Hard Skin’s lyric sheet says “If you want to get in touch with Hard Skin – don’t bother. If we want anything we’ll get in touch with you”. If you insist though, their last.fm is here.

Labels: Blotto, Hard Skin, punk, singles reviews