Albums Catch-Up:
The Dirtbombs – Party Store
(In The Red)

If there was one major stumbling-block for the groups that emerged from the late ‘90s/early ‘00s garage boom, it was probably song-writing. Not to say that there weren’t a ton of great songs and great songwriters to be found within that scene of course, but whereas internet era fuzz-punks can preserve their mystique by spreading themselves across limited edition 7”s, random junk tapes, one-off mp3 downloads, fucked up live recordings and the like, the era that gave birth to bands like The Dirtbombs was a little more prescriptive.

If you were a band that was ‘going places’ in 1998, the only place it was in your power to go to was the fucking studio, to lay down the requisite twelve or fourteen original compositions required by your label, to be pressed onto a little CD that would be your calling card to the world. And there’s nothing that kills the unhinged immediacy of great garage-rock quite like having to do that, as two chord tunes that no doubt rocked the shack when playing to a well-lubricated crowd at a basement gig reveal their plodding insufficiency in the face of multiple takes, boring production details, tedious mixing decisions.

For some reason, it was the Detroit bands who often seemed to suffer worst from this affliction. KO & The Knockouts, The Hentchmen, Bantam Rooster – sure, they must’ve been great live, they had their moments on record, but can you imagine regularly slugging your way through a whole album of 3 minute+ songs by them? Can you imagine listening to their second album, their fourth? That’s not a criticism of those bands – it’s just the nature of the kind of music they play. Not everyone has the strength of character to be a Billy Childish or a Fred Cole.

It’s a truism that all garage bands essentially want to be covers bands, and all too often this leads them to a mean damned-if-you-do situation: if a band’s got a couple of great originals, you’ll be pissed when they string out their record with eight redundant covers (see The Lyres, Flamin’ Groovies etc.). And if they don’t (see the clearout bin at your local used CD shop), you’ll have found something better to do long before they’ve finished grinding through their arse-aching forty minutes of we-wrote-this-in-the-studio-cos-we-needed-a-song chord-welding.

Hearing a great live rock band pushed into the latter situation can be absolutely soul-crushing, and it’s maybe no surprise that by far the best band from this scene (or, uh, my favourite at least) – The Detroit Cobras – was the one that took being a covers band really fucking seriously, whilst The Dirtbombs were at the top of their game when they did the same on 2001’s epic soul/funk tribute ‘Ultraglide in Black’. That their all-originals follow-up album ‘Dangerous Magical Noise’ fell straight into the trap outlined above – absolutely exhilarating for a few minutes but mind-numbing in its entirety – was probably inevitable, even if seeing the band touring it was one of the most astounding live shows I’ve ever witnessed.

Since then, it is to Mick Collins’ credit that he has done his best to steer his band in some rather more eccentric directions than was really necessary to maintain a base-level touring income, and if 2007’s ‘We Have You Surrounded’ was an insane mess of a record, mixing frenzied apocalyptic noise with Sparks covers, lyrics cribbed from Alan Moore and weird anti-consumerist rapping, it certainly wasn’t anything anyone saw coming, and that’s gotta count for something. Anyway, to finally get to the matter at hand, I’d happy to report that this year’s ‘Party Store’ finds The Dirtbombs back on track in a big way – on the one hand retreating to the safety of another covers album paying tribute to Detroit’s musical heritage, but at the same time also realising a concept that takes them far further outside their comfort zone than any previous release – namely, reconfiguring a selection of classic Detroit Techno cuts for a live rock band.

I’d love to be able to act smart here, but the sad truth is that I actually know very little about Detroit Techno. I’ve probably picked up a vague idea how it sounds just by osmosis, and finding out more about it has always been on my long-list of ‘things to do’, but Soul-Jazz have never obliged me with a white-boy friendly ‘beginners guide to..’ comp and nobody’s ever sent me a link to a .zip of their best-ever-Detroit-Techno-mix to check out or anything, so, uh… sorry guys, I’m afraid I’m coming to this one blind.

Maybe that’s for the best though in some ways. I feel like knowledge of the originals might blunt my enjoyment of ‘Party Store’ somewhat, exposing these instant-killer riffs and thunderous rhythms as merely the work of misguided rock-goons aping the sleeker, more perfect sounds of producers and musicians who dedicated their lives, rather than just a few months, to living inside this music. But for the moment I’ve gotta go with what I hear, and what I hear on ‘Party Store’ is bad-ass. Trying to second-guess what the originals might sound like whilst listening to The Dirtbombs hammer them out on kit drums and fuzz guitar is actually a very enjoyable process, and one that I’m glad I’m of the right level of ignorance to experience, whilst the music, in and of itself, is just a plain blast.

The idea of recreating techno on rock band instruments is always a notion I’ve kinda liked. I mean if the point of your band is energy and repetition, you might as well go the whole hog, right? Groups who have tried this sort of thing before, such as Oneida, have often done just that, steering straight toward an extreme noise-trance whiteout, so it’s cool to hear The Dirtbombs pulling back from that precipice and remembering to aim for the dancefloor instead, to mix a few metaphors. The album’s title is self-explanatory – far from a crazy experiment or punker in-joke, this is an honest attempt to fuse the rhythmic drive and atmospheric cool of early American electronic dance music with the sound and fury of rock n’ roll, and by and large, a successful one, I’d venture to suggest.

More than just banging through the skeletons of Derrick May and Juan Atkins compositions in garage-punk style, Collins and co have worked hard to meet their source material halfway here, incorporating percussion loops, hissing distorted synths, extreme echos and a relentless motorik pulse into their arsenal, and splitting the difference between punk rock brevity and club-friendly 12” track lengths by sticking largely to a 4-6 minute middleground.

Maybe I’m just saying this cos it’s so rare to hear a black voice on a rock record, but Mick Collins really does have one of the sweetest classic soul voices currently operating in any genre (I’d love to hear him to a ballads record or something), and hearing him stretch himself around the disco-chrome glossolia lyrics of sample-based songs that were never meant to be ‘sung’ as such, turning them into weird, irresistible call & response charts is a joy (“no more rainy day / the sun will chase the clouds away / good life, good life, good life”). Even his sly faux-Germanic monotone on ‘Sherevari’ is a hoot; “Smoking on his cigarette / listening to his car cassette / cruising with his hot playmate / in his Porche from 9 til 8” – I mean, basically you could port this shit into any supercharged, no-brainer garage-punk without much difficulty, right?

Having already ploughed through nearly a thousand words on the subject already, to actually launch into an in-depth description of the music herein at this point seems almost surplus to requirements. Let’s just say that ‘Cosmic Cars’ and ‘Alleys of Your Mind’ are your new favourite late night driving tunes, ‘Tear The Club Up’ will make perfect entrance music for your forthcoming wrestling career, and ‘Strings of Life’ and ‘Jaguar’ both sound like beautiful sunrise-insomnia trance-outs that could have been pulled straight off some newly unearthed Arthur Russell/Sleeping Bag session.

As just about every review of this album has noted, the beatless 22-minute fuckaround of ‘Bugs in the Bass Bin’ does stand as something of a stumbling block to overall enjoyment, but if you’ve got the patience to let it play through once or twice then even that starts to make a twisted kinda sense. Exactly WHAT kind of sense, who the hell knows, but I was certainly liking it a lot better by the end than I was at the start.

But basically, if the idea behind this album is one that appeals to you, rest assured The Dirtbombs do it about as well as it can be done, and you can go to the record shop with my blessing for the triple-LP set, just as I will hopefully do when I have a lot of money and have already bought enough Detroit techno records to assuage my aforementioned ignorance. Just like 'Ultraglide in Black' and 'Life, Love & Leaving' served to point me in the direction of a ton of soul compilations ten years ago, funnily enough... hmm, go figure. It'd be nice to think Mick Collins might be cooking up some new tribute album concept that will push me down some unexplored alley of American music in time for 2021, wouldn't it?




http://www.thedirtbombs.net/
http://www.intheredrecords.com/

Labels: album reviews, The Dirtbombs

Soup Studio / The Duke of Uke.

I heard some bad news yesterday concerning the uncertain future of what is almost certainly the best place in record music in London, Soup Studio.

In a textbook example of that horrible process whereby useful and creative ventures raise an area’s ‘appeal’ to the extent that those very ventures find themselves kicked out on their arse to make space for the same identikit commercial crap that people initially went there to avoid, the studio and it’s upstairs neighbour The Duke of Uke are being evicted from their E1 address by the landlord, who seemingly reckons he can now use the space to harvest more cash than mere rent can provide; exactly the same fate that befell The Spitz venue & restaurant down the road a few years back, and what apparently used to be a far more worthwhile incarnation of Spitalfields Market a few years before that.

Anyway, as mentioned, Soup is a brilliant place with a great, no-nonsense set up, and Simon Trought is both a skilled engineer and a lovely chap. To have a space in the middle of London where bands at any level of ability and notoriety can go to get quality recordings of their tunes done efficiently on a variety of nice equipment for reasonable rates, in a welcoming, relaxed environment in which no one is ever sneered at or made to feel dumb, is an absolute godsend.

The fact that I, an avowed hater of ukuleles, should essentially be campaigning to save a ukulele shop hopefully tells you something about the overall goodness of this place (and in fairness, it must be said that the staff and customers of the ukulele shop have always proved very friendly too, helping to dispel the unholy terror and rage that inevitably overwhelms me at the thought of having to traverse a room containing about five hundred ukuleles).

So yeah – I’m not quite sure what the likely future of Soup is at the moment, or how entwined it is liable to be with the future of the Duke of Uke, but… let’s just say that if in recent years you’ve enjoyed recordings by the likes of Comet Gain, Herman Dune, The Loves, The Wave Pictures, Darren Hayman, Veronica Falls or Let’s Wrestle, you could do worse than expressing your appreciation by donating some cash to help The Duke secure a new home. That is all.

Labels: announcements, appeals, bad news

Albums Catch-Up:
Yeh Deadlies –
The First Book of Lessons
(Popical Island)

Creators of one of my favourite singles of 2010, Dublin’s Yeh Deadlies have come to occupy a pretty unique space in my current listening habits. Just as I was completely excising from my life the possibility of enjoying earnest, painstakingly well-produced folksy indie featuring lots of harmony vocals, xylophones, proper middle eights, literate big-hearted lyrics and so on, along comes a band proffering earnest, painstakingly well-produced folksy indie featuring lots of harmony vocals, xylophones, proper middle eights, literate big-hearted lyrics and so on (EPSWPFIFLHVXPM8LBHLetc, if you will), that I really, really like.

And, I mean, I usually have a kneejerk hatred of this stuff these days, so it stands to reason that all you guys out there who still have a lot of time for EPSWPFIFLHVXPM8LBHLetc should REALLY dig Yeh Deadlies, and make them at least sorta-famous so that they can get booked by Ear Your Own Ears and come to London to do “ ‘ proper’ ” shows in big venues with security guards on the door and an awful, murky sound mix.

It may already be a totally played out comparison that I probably used the last time I wrote about Yeh Deadlies, but they give me a feeling similar to early Herman Dune, back when they were still real special. Not that there’s much similarity musically of course – “The First Book of Lessons” is full of keyboards and gentle fuzz guitar and lively chord changes and ‘80s pop influences and all sorts of other things far removed from the erstwhile ‘Dune playbook – but they share the same… I dunno - intent? atmosphere? whatever. Come on in and relax, these songs seem to say (without getting too happy-clappy about it), everybody’s welcome. Maybe life’s not perfect – in fact we are going to tell you in lyrical form about all manner of awkward situations and personal upsets - but the sun’s shining and it’s a quiet afternoon and we’re all on the same page here, so grab a pint and we’ll weave our merry tunes for ya.

And fucking merry they are too, full of great, interesting melodies and attention-grabbing little musical bits and pieces, and they tell us about a bunch of stuff that’s maybe taken from their lives or maybe just made up, and for once you actually care. As Yeh Deadlies have moved away from the more overtly folky approach of their earlier recordings and assumed the mantle of a full electric pop band, joint singers/writers Padraig and Annie have correspondingly developed a real knack for cramming odd and personal details into the songs whilst never letting them meander too far from their core function as strong, emotionally resonant pop songs. Most song lengths remain on the right side of three minutes, tempos remain upbeat, and collapses into diary entry banality are strenuously avoided, but each number still succeeds in communicating the essence of a situation, an idea, a feeling, whatever. So, uh, I’m no expert or anything, but I think that probably adds up to official Real Good Song-Writing. Well done everybody!

Although Dublin is a big city, this really sounds like a rural album to me. Or it really hit the spot when I put it on whilst barrelling through the countryside last month, at least. Maybe I’m just projecting, but the songs seem to pull together to create an agreeable picture of life in a small-ish provincial music scene, from the reflections of a DJ at a small town club night surveying the 3am carnage in “Disc Jockey Blues” to the tale of a kid growing up and joining a band in, er, “The Kid’s in the Band”, and so on.

If “The First Book of Lessons” was a movie, I think it would probably be one of those ‘90s British indie movies where young people in brightly coloured clothes live amid drab, dilapidated surroundings, and they go to transport cafes, and go surfing, and sit together on the cliffs and stuff like that. Hopefully it wouldn’t be shite (because most of those kind of movies were shite), but y’know what I mean.

In a field submerged ‘neath a flood of bilious careerists and terminal hat-wearers, Yeh Deadlies sound like good people playing good music, and that’s really something to be thankful for.

“No Rock n Roll Dreams (in Empty Beds)” and “The Present Perfect” are some of my favourite songs on the album, so here are Soundclouds of them;




The whole album can be streamed or purchased from http://yehdeadlies.bandcamp.com/, and you can learn all about Popical Island at http://popicalisland.tumblr.com/About.

Labels: album reviews, Yeh Deadlies

Happy 60th Birthday Jonathan Richman!



Aw, shucks.

Is it wrong that I probably care about this dude more than most people who I've actually met?

By perfect coincidence, here's a video I've never seen before of him doing perhaps my favourite song by him.

Hope he's having a good one, anyway.

Labels: birthday, Jonathan Richman

Apologies/Updates/Blah…

Agh, wouldn’t you know it. Just when I finally got some time to work out some new blogposts, blogger went down for 24 hours. Anyway, that’s no excuse, I haven’t posted for bloody weeks.

Needless to say: life since Easter has been pretty manic. Some of that has been good (hanging out with The Sock Puppets at Trev’s Oddbox weekender, seeing great sets from One Fathom Down and The Wendy Darlings and Horowtiz and discovering The Choo Choo Trains, who are a lot better than their name suggests, and playing records and dancing ‘til the venue politely asked us to get going – that was all brilliant), and some less good (job is bugging me, accommodation situation after next few months is still pretty uncertain), but, uh, yeah – net result is no action here. I had some posts queued up for my other blog, but no such luck with the music stuff I’m afraid.

This is particularly annoying, because one of my priorities over Easter was to try to find time to write about some of the many, many fine albums I’ve heard this year that deserve to be written about, some of which their makers were even nice enough to send me copies of after I expressed an interest. No time; didn’t happen. Urgh.

So anyway, that leads us to a couple of announcements:

1. The flyer above should be pretty self-explanatory. COME ONE, COME ALL. It’s the aforementioned Trev, and Carys from The Give It Ups and myself, and we’ll all be playing some fucking brilliant shit, if I do say so myself. No requests, unless a)I like it anyway and b)it’s good for dancing. (Pet peeve: you wouldn’t believe the number of tunes people usually play at indie-discos that have NO BEAT, just so that fans of the band in question can cheer cos they recognise it and then sorta shuffle round dolefully for four minutes trying to find the rhythm section – none of that in my set thanks, although maybe the others will be more flexible…). Er.. well anyway, half-finished website with a probably incomplete round-up of what he played last Sunday can be found here. The venue has a high ceiling, so pogoing is mandatory. As much Ramones and derivations thereof as is necessary will be deployed in aid of this.

2. ALBUM CATCH-UP: As mentioned above, I’m really gonna blitz it this weekend to try to pay tribute in words to some of the LP-length things that have been pleasing me of recent. Watch this space.

Labels: apologies, lameness, self promotion

Great Garage-Rock Ranting Song of the Week # 5

I’ve been pretty slack on keeping the series cooking over the past two weeks, so let’s get to it!



The Lyrics – They Can’t Hurt Me

"Don’t cry to me babe, about yourself,
For all I care, you can go somewhere else!
Go hang yourself up on a mouldy shelf – I DON’T CARE!"

The first of two bone-fide rant classics from San Diego wildmen The Lyrics – their other one is even better, so stay tuned.

Available on:

Back From The Grave, Vol # 1
Highs in the Mid-Sixties: Teenage Rebellion (L.A. ‘65)

Labels: Great Garage Rock Ranting Songs, The Lyrics