7.
Cheap Girls - Stop Now

A year or two ago, my friend Pete and I went to see this group, headlining a bill with a buncha random punk bands or something. We drank a lot of beer, and we jumped around at the front and declared that this band was frrrkin’ awesome, and I bought their CD.

Played it a few days later, but it didn’t grab me at all. It kinda feel down the back of the hi-fi, and I didn’t find it until this evening when I was tidying up prior to moving house.

Guess what: it’s pretty good! I’m still not sure what kind of thought process would lead three men to decide that ‘cheap girls’ is the perfect name for their band (maybe it’s a sorta oblique tribute to Cheap Trick’s ‘Southern Girls’?), but that aside it’s a marginally more punkoid throwback to that quintessentially ’90s sorta Gigolo Aunts/Posies/late period Dinosaur Jr power-pop sound with big, boomin’ production, and some nights that’s plenty good enough for me. This track in particular is a pretty definitive example of the form. The hazy intro/verse/pre-chorus bit is ON. I wish I had some more beer.

Labels: Cheap Girls, song reviews

6.
Solid Space – Tenth Planet.

“Ever wondered what The Chills might have sounded like if they'd grown up locked in a windowless bedroom in a London suburb with only fuzzy videos of Gerry Anderson shows and old Dr. Who episodes to keep them company?

Me neither, but I'm delighted to have an answer all the same.”

- That's a reductive and deeply unsatisfactory summation I recently made of ‘Space Museum’ by Solid Space – an extraordinarily good album, apparently self-released on cassette in the year I was born and subsequently lost to history, until it started turning up on some of the more interesting music-sharing blogs recently.

Seriously, the more I listen to this, the better it gets. I’m at a loss trying to say anything about that wouldn’t just sound stupid.

Startlingly good song-writing and a sparse, incredibly evocative sound; mystic communion with the flickering mythos of low budget British sci-fi; hazy legacies of gentle suburban bedroom psychedelia and post-punk experimentation hanging heavy, all set off with a real emotive/narrative kick. An instant favourite – one of the most gloriously affecting things I’ve heard in ages.

Not gonna link directly, but I’m sure you know where to look.

Labels: Solid Space, song reviews

5.
Eddy Current Suppression Ring –
Get Up Morning

A consistently great band and no mistake.

There’s something really.. PRACTICAL.. about ‘em that I really appreciate. Like, they convey the idea that they know how to do things properly. Purely based on listening to their records, I get the feeling that if you were friends with Eddy Current Suppression Ring and invited them round to your house, they’d fix your TV, and train your dog, and show you how to rewire your hi-fi so that it sounded *just so*, and cook up an amazing curry out of whatever you’ve got lying around in the fridge, and then be great company whilst relaxing w/ a couple of beers - but only a couple mind, they’ve got to cycle 20 miles to a six hour practice, or something.

Also, on a more basic level - the guitarist. Every song, he’s just got something really simple and unexpected and awesome on the go, just quietly getting on with it. PRACTICAL.

I’ve said all that before on here, haven’t I? Well it merits saying again.

Labels: Eddy Current Suppression Ring, song reviews

4.
Dum Dum Girls – Bedroom Eyes

On 08/09/11 I said:

“Currently having a listen to the new Dum Dum Girls record.

Compleeeetely different sound & recording technique from anything she/they’ve done in the past… even her voice sounds really different. Very ’90s BIG SOUND going on, but not necessarily in a bad way.

It sounds like a more pop-orientated Throwing Muses in places, maybe even a touch of Fleetwood Mac-gone-punk or something…? Those can’t possibly be bad things, right..!?

Second albums have proved disastrous for a lot of new-ish bands this year, so here’s hoping this one stays the course.”

grant observed that this tune sounded like he’d always hoped The Pretenders would sound, and I thought OF COURSE, *that’s* where I’ve heard that particular tone of voice that DeeDee is doing throughout this album before!

On further listens, the record’s a curate’s egg deal really: some bits (like this tune) are thrilling, big budget guitar pop that manages to hit you just right and fool you into feelin’ something. Other times, textures and song lengths get totally out of control, but without an ounce of the kind of writing or emotional chops needed to wrangle such bombast (“the Oasis effect”, as we in the trade like to call it), making the second side in particular into a vapid, pummelling sprawl. That I don’t like it as much as the early one-woman stuff is a no-brainer, but still, what can ya say – people gotta move on, and it’s a more valid progression than many manage.

Labels: Dum Dum Girls, song reviews, the difficult second album

3.
Life Partners - Music is Hard

One day, when a combination of laziness, cynicism and endless PR emails from try-hard indie bands causes me to give up doing a music blog, I think I might take everything down and just leave a blank page with a link to this song in the middle of it. It’s pretty cathartic.

(Hopefully that won’t happen soon though.)

(And hopefully you’ll conveniently forget I posted this when I get ‘round to plugging my own stuff again.)

(Oh, and, you can download all this band’s stuff for free here if you like.)

Added later, elsewhere:

The genius thing about this song is it cuts both ways – there are people in whose faces I’d dearly love to yell it, but at the same time I know there are probably legions who'd want to yell it right back at every musical thing I've ever played in, liked or been associated with. Kind of a universal cycle of cleansing music-sceney anger.

Ironic that I think the great thing about pop music is that it's really easy, but... I get what he means I s'pose. Not urging bands to “improve” in a technical sense (I hope), but just to please, please try to be, y'know... better?

Labels: Life Partners, song reviews

2.
Sonny Sharrock - Many Mansions.

Amen, Irving (b. 1918)
In My Father's House There Are Many Mansions
color woodcut, 407 x 533 mm.

Heresy in some circles I realise, but in truth I never really ‘got’ all Sharrock’s high-end skronky stuff on ‘Black woman’ etc. Randomly found myself listening to this one a few weeks back though, and the hypnotic doom-style riff that he and the drummer (Elvin Jones, guys!) are laying down under the sax player (Pharoah Sanders no less!) through the first half just completely bad-ass… (the riff has a modal ‘Kind of Blue’ kinda quality to it too, like ‘60s Miles goes metal or something).

I particularly love it when Jones eventually goes off on some shit for a while, but the guitar just keeps hammering away those same few notes… then when Sharrock veers off into soloing too towards the end, the groove’s been so well established that it just sorta *continues*, even though no one’s really playing it anymore.

I’m not really much for writing about jazz, but yeah, this is great. From * 1991 * too if ya can believe that. Last album Sharrock recorded before his death, and a right fucking piece of work it is too – incredible stuff.

Labels: jazz, song reviews, Sonny Sharrock

1.
The Nashville Ramblers – The Trains.

“I can hear the trains underground
When I’m alone
I can feel the sun going down
How can I explain all the reasons
She frightens me so?”

What an incredible tune.

I suppose that, living as I do in London, I frequently DO hear the trains underground – hell, I travel on them on a regular basis. But still, for some reason the idea of underground trains always really excites me when it pops up in songs, or books, or whatever. When thrown out of context, it just seems such a mysterious, fantastical idea. I’ve always loved that weird conspiracy theorist notion (marginal and old fashioned, even within the realm of conspiracy theories) that there is a network of secret, underground railroads crossing the USA, transporting, well… who knows what? Nuclear waste? Alien carcasses? Moleman infantry? Shining balls of pure energy? Strange, caged god-monsters of an unimaginable nature?

I even love the idea just as a metaphor – like Elvis’s ‘Mystery Train’, taking him down into the dark; like a giant pre-internet highway transferring information and resources and personnel between the world’s extended networks of weirdos, dissidents, rock n’ rollers.

Whatever your interpretation, I imagine you would have to find your way to an eerie, special place to hear these ‘trains underground’.

So when I heard that amazing bit in this song for the first time, I didn’t think of a guy in London or New York or some other big city hearing ACTUAL trains underground. Instead I pictured this forlorn dude, in a huge open field with the big sky above him, listening to the mysterious, distant rumbling and clanking beneath his feet, reflecting on how this strange woman in his life “frightens him so”…

Thrown seemingly casually into this otherwise standard-issue yearning, insecure love song, these few lyrical oddities open the whole thing up into a kind of sprawling psychedelic grandeur…. and the fact it’s an absolutely barnstorming imitation Del Shannon-via-The Byrds ‘60s jangle-wonder of the highest order certainly helps. Wowza.

Labels: song reviews, The Nashville Ramblers

7 Songs / 7 Days.

So, this blog’s been getting a tad stagnant in the past few weeks. Business as usual for the summer time perhaps, but September is a month I’d earmarked as a good time to get a load of writing done, goddamnit. Work hassles, moving house, recording some new songs etc have seen to that, needless to say.

Plenty of music stuff I could write about, but I just haven’t had the time or enthusiasm to crack my knuckles and get on with it. Still, you can’t stop the rock, so I thought it might be a good idea to compile and expand a bunch of bits of rock-write I’ve accidentally splurged out in other places recently (tumblr mostly), and present them here, with accompanying tune links.

Seven songs / seven days – pretty self explanatory. Beginning tomorrow.

This isn’t one of them, but any old excuse;

Boom bip-bip, boom bip-bip, YEAH!

Labels: lameness, Love

Mystery Train#ing# - Part the Sixth

Yet another addition to my ongoing set of widest-possible-definition psychedelia compendiums, and again, there’s no fixed theme here, although I detect a strain of warped memories, distorted time and eerie futuristic travel running through this one… kind of a sense of ‘Solaris’-like haunted serenity maybe, if that’s not way too much of a pretentious claim to make with regard to yr own damn mixtape?

As usual, no additional info about these tracks enclosed (gotta maintain the whole MYSTERY conceit), but if you wanna find out where any of these came from, google away and exciting discoveries may or may not await.

Oh, and appropriately enough perhaps, I don’t know where the artwork for this one originated. I just found the image knocking about on my hard drive the other day and thought “damn, that would make a great album cover”. Possibly someone else already thought that and it already IS an album cover – if that’s the case, please let me know and I’ll replace it with something else before I embarrass myself further.

Anyway, enjoy.

1. Katie Paterson – Ice Record
2. Grouper – Alien Observer
3. Maquiladora – So Far Away
4. Maria Minerva – Sad Serenade (Bedroom Rock n’ Roll)
5. The Litter – Codine
6. Motion Sickness of Time Travel – Mental Projection
7. Solid Space – Tenth Planet
8. Schizo – Telstar
9. Bruno Nicolai – Funeral Striptease
10. Pocahaunted – The Weight
11. Bobbi Humphrey – Chicago, Damn
12. Metal Boys – Tokio Airport
13. Hexenjagd – Twin Peaks theme
14. Michael Yonkers – Don’t Wait Until Tomorrow
15. Music de Wolfe – Forgotten Memories
16. Rameses III – No Water, No Moon
17. Morita Doji - 今日は奇蹟の朝です (Today is the Miracle Morning)
18. Joel Mathis – Time Machine

Download.


Previous editions:

Volume # 1 (originally written up here)
Volume # 2 (originally written up here)
Volume # 3 (originally written up here)
Volume # 4 (originally written up here)
Volume # 5 (originally written up here)

Labels: mixtapes, Psychedelia

Support Finder Keepers.

I’ve been a bit slow in getting ‘round to posting about this, but better late than never.

In brief, it seems that Finders Keepers, one of my favourite record labels, got well and truly clobbered by the recent PIAS warehouse fire. To try to raise some cash to keep themselves afloat, they’ve invited the great and the good from the groovier end of the British music world to compile a bunch of CD/mp3 compilations from the label’s back catalogue, available for just a few quid each from the label’s website.

You know that the label does lots and lots of fantastic stuff, and if you don’t, well this is a good opportunity to find out.

Don’t necessarily want to go all-out into treating record labels like charities, but let’s just say that if they were charities, Finders Keepers would certainly be in my monthly direct debits – just have a quick scan through their recent releases for an insight into why. And if all these setbacks delay their programme of Jean Rollin soundtrack releases even slightly, I’m gonna hold the whole world responsible.

Labels: appeals, Finders Keepers

Dancing Days Are Over.

What a bummer – one of the absolute best, rockingest pop groups of the past few years, killed by Disappointing Second Album syndrome and going-for-the-big-push tour burn-out.

Still, their goodbye message is so characteristically upbeat, it’s hard to feel too down about it;

“We have decided that we will be putting Those Dancing Days to bed for a while. We have been together as a band for almost six years now and have had such an amazing time - we have grown up together, created together, seen the world together. We have been so incredibly lucky and feel so honoured that so many have appreciated our music. As a young band we have had the pleasure of being role models for other young musicians - something we have found incredibly fulfilling and important - and especially to young female musicians like ourselves. Go girls - never doubt yourselves and never stop dreaming! After we played the Popaganda festival this last weekend we felt it was the perfect ending to the summer and a good time for us to say good bye for a while. We want to explore things on our own for a change; some of us will go back to school, some of us will be taking jobs - and without a doubt all of us will explore new musical settings. To all our fans - thank you for being wonderful! We hope to see you again in the future and until we do - live and love!

xxxx

TDD”

Let’s remember the good times, etc:








For a special treat, if you go here, you can see a music-industry-type podcast thingy with them being interviewed and playing some tunes at my place of work. It was a fantastic gig.

Here's wishing them all the best with those new musical settings.

Labels: bad news, Those Dancing Days